LANDING
Imagine landing on a new planet. The morphology of the ground, air temperature, humidity, winds, radiations, and living beings are unknown. You first observe your surroundings in order to orient your body within this landscape, registering things like balance, direction, and comfort. You then develop tools to aide yourself in this perceptual exploration, leaving traces, marks, and inscriptions on the terrain as a result. The deeper your journey leads you, the more your experience begins to be shaped and mediated by these discoveries, altering your initial understanding. This generative process has the potential to either engage or remove you from your environment, depending on how you choose to situate yourself within it.
For this experimental camp, we investigated notions of context in order to discover new relations between ourselves and the environment. Through a diverse array of interdisciplinary on-site workshops, we developed our eyes and bodies in reading the physical and invisible landscapes of the high desert. A series of performative field-recordings and synthetic simulations were produced to help frame our environments in an instrumental way, constituting the foundations for our designs.
Each expedition developed new design tools and techniques that were iteratively applied to the next expedition, constantly refining the work through a process of real-time assessment. The final outcome on-site was a series of connected landscape structures that provide foundational benefits for the surrounding rural community. Off-site, we processed our collected environments and created a series of virtual narrative vignettes that transmited our worlds to a larger public.
PROJECTS
Projects ranged from large constructed base stations for observing the surrounding landscape, to artist-led installations focusing on aspects of geology, wind, and water. Additional lectures, tutorials, and performative field-recordings dealt with ephemeral aspects of place, such as sound, energy, and atmosphere.
Extent
Kyle May, Architect
Oscilloscape
Hello Wood
Ghost House
i/thee
Neal Lucas Hitch, Martin Hitch, Kristina Fisher
Humans Won’t Exist and Nature Won’t Notice
Kylie White
Shade Space
Willis Bigelow
What You Do When You’re Alone
Rebecca Looringh-van Beeck
CAMP
Through a series of curated workshops held in the high desert of Morongo Valley, California, students were trained in a combination of analog and digital surveying methods, environmental sensing technologies, hands-on building tools, and collaborative virtual design devices.
WORKSHOPS
Space Saloon would like to present the unique and diverse voices who led various classes at the LANDING camp. Below is a selection of stories on each workshop leader’s project and their individual interpretation of the word “place.”
Director, cinematographer, editor:
Lea Becker
Additional cinematography:
Daniel Schwartz
Lea Becker
Additional cinematography:
Daniel Schwartz
Hello Wood
Kylie White
Sean Gaffney & Christina Nguyen
i/thee
Kanchan Richardson
the 2vvo
Willis Bigelow
Rebecca Looringh-van Beeck
TEAM