Liminality opens this week at the Exploratorium, and my role as intern in these last few days continues to entail photo documentation of the art installations, grooming and troubleshooting the hands-on model building workshop that'll be offered the night of the opening, and in general, helping my supervisor, Julie, with the herculean number of tasks (actually, far more than a herculean twelve) that she's overseeing. My unofficial agenda--and probably one of the most personally rewarding aspects of this project--has been to sponge-ishly take in the amazing amounts of creative ideation and art/design/technology boundary-busting that occur on a daily basis at the Explo, but even more so when there are artists like Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo of Lead Pencil Studio in residence.

I hadn't been familiar with Lead Pencil Studio prior to this internship, and am only beginning to become acquainted with their body of work, but I'm already overwhelmed with awe... They're architects who are also artists, and whose collaborative work explores the concept of space, material, process and functionality in visionary ways. The boundary between architecture and site-specific art is fluid in their designs, making their work and vision highly relevant for Liminality. Currently, Annie and Dan are working on their installation at the museum, entitled "In Between," which will explore the liminal state between architectural conception and completion. The work will suggest a building site transitioning between degree zero and constructed space. In just a few days, Anne and Dan transformed the Seeing Gallery floor into a sloping dirt "field," by constructing and mounting a raised, wooden platform and shoveling immense amounts of dirt onto its surface. There is a network of parallel wires stretched across one end of the dirt expanse, which I think will interact in some way with the fluorescent lighting that will be suspended over the space; I'll know more tomorrow when I go in to take more pics... All my images from the first day of construction were lost in a heartbreaking memory card uploading mishap, so there are very few images of the artists at work so far, and only one that I'm fond of:



As I watch Annie and Dan toil away to create earthen terrain on the museum floor, I'm struck by the irony of the process -- the finished work will evoke a space-about-to-be-built-upon, but only via the days and nights of building and construction that Annie and Dan have invested. I guess this is the charm and fascination of built spaces and large- or small-scale dioramas and things of this sort: encountering a recognizable space that evokes nature's design or at least the absence of human intervention, but which continuously forefronts its own artificiality.

In addition to Lead Pencil Studios, my new heroes of visionary art and architecture are Archigram , a British architectural group that formed in London in the sixties with, it seems, the mission to generate an entirely radical approach to urban design and architectural imagining. They are part of the "paper architecture" tradition, a term I just learned from UC Berkeley professor of visionary architecture, Andrew Shanken, and which refers to architecture that exists only on paper or as models, due to a deliberate interest in experimentation without the physical, financial, functional, etc. parameters imposed by commissions. Like Lead Pencil Studio, Archigram transcends artistic boundaries, particularly in regards to style: they're informed by sixties pop and psychedelic sensibilities, which you can see in the illustrations, comics, and designs published in their magazine of the same name. I'm still reading up on their history, influences and impact on current architecture, but I'd never have (or maybe it would have taken me longer to) come across them had I not immersed myself in a short, spotty, but intensive independent study of contemporary conceptual architecture in support of the model building workshop we're designing. It has been one of the best serendipitous finds for me, ever -- totally inspiring and exciting to me.




And in re: to the building workshop, we've so far prototyped a few buildings of our own (Julie, fellow Explo Public Programs staffmember Rachel, and I were the initial guinea pigs) and have tested the exercise on a couple high school-age staff members. We've learned that the exercise is entirely engrossing -- we three grownups spent close to three hours designing, fussing with and grooming our little models, and the two high schoolers were given only an hour but wanted way more time. It's tremendous fun, and the diverse and beautiful pile of building materials we've amassed is really enticing -- and takes nearly an hour to set up, there's so much of it. Most of it came from SCRAP, but quite a bit of it came from scavenging from our own houses and other people's trash and recylcing bins.

The workshop's concept was inspired by Dadaist Tristan Tzara's technique of cutting up a finished text into its component parts -- words, phrases, sentence fragments -- and then combining these units at random to form poetry. Picking from two hats, participants create combinations of building types and emotional states of being, and are challenged to translate abstract experience -- happiness, inquisitiveness, randiness, mobility -- into concrete design elements. On my first pick, I ended up with "mosque" and "stubborn," which I promptly put back into the bowl; the second draw yielded "motel" and "lazy," which seemed far more doable. I was definitely shrinking from the more rich and challenging experience of having to concretize the state of being stubborn -- the idea of laziness was more immediately apparent to me via features you might translate into architecture: reclining lines, droopiness, drab colors, etc. There were also some easy-to-suggest signifiers of laziness that came to mind: tv's, beds. I had this moment of self-disovery, realizing how negatively I was construing laziness; someone else who hadn't been raised to fear laziness and the total ruin it brings might have created a really beautiful, lazy environment. I'm also appalled -- but not surprised -- by how literal my interpretation of laziness was; I think a really interesting execution of this exercise would result in a building that manages to convey the essence of the type without relying on real world examples, and which conveys the emotional state without any of the representative symbols, like my televisions and comfy beds. In any case, it's fascinating to watch other people build and interpret and evolve their designs, and I'm looking forward to the workshop's debut.



more pictures here: Liminality Photoset on Flickr