The Real and The Rendered

Theroom

Image courtesy of Luiza de Souza

Here is the room. Its the room we’ve been assigned to and it is very ugly. In the ugly room, there is an installation, and in the installation, there is an image. The image is a view into an empty hotel room. It may or may not be the hotel room of the proposed site. It may just as likely consist of view into a hotel room in Nevada or any landscape of an American diaspora. The content of the view doesn’t matter, it is the construction that concerns us. The view of the room is in fact constructed. The project is an image of a room and an actual room composing the image. This technique borrows from 16th century Renaissance theater design and the use of false perspective scenes. French historian of scenography Denis Bablet once described 20th century scenography as a “battle with space,” while theater historian Arnold Aronson described the impulse as a “battle with image.” We find contemporary architecture to occupy a self-similar category, between an impetus for space-making and an impulse for image-making. We’ve adjusted these scenographic techniques in order to think about the hotel room: the ugly room, in which we are invited to insert an installation, in order to reflect on installations. Ours is a project about categories of viewing, but it is also a project about architectures many mediums, and the collapse of medium-specificities in architecture. The room, the installation, and the image try to align themselves into one easy view, but they don't cooperate. The image sneaks out of its frame, the perspective box reveals its edges, and the seams between the real and the rendered slip past one another.

Theimage

Image courtesy of Luiza de Souza

Installation

Image courtesy of Luiza de Souza

ONE NIGHT STAND 

The installation is a response to the Last Call for One Night Stand, a call put forward by the curators Jennifer Bonner, Kyle Miller, and Volkan Alkanoglu to question the efficacy of the architectural installation and to propose an “alternative manifestations of their experimentation.”  PROJECT TYPE Exhibition DATE May 10, 2017 LOCATION Pod Inn, 2025 W 3rd St. Los Angeles, CA 90057 TEAM Luiza de Souza, Nicholas Perseo and Brandon Kintzer