Resources

Le Journal Spéciale’Z can currently be found at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York with  Archizines (Elias Redstone/Architectural Association School of Architecture, London) and Arch-Art! Books, a double exhibition. Click here for details.The Journal explores architecture’s complex contemporary context. Each issue is structured around four thematic questions critical to current debate on the built environment, bringing together contributions by researchers and practitioners – artists, architects and urbanists. Le Journal mediates the wider cultural experiences that feed into the knowledge-culture of spatiality. Open calls for submissions ensure a dialogue between emerging and established voices with articles appearing in either English or French. Recent contributions include writing by Claude Parent, CJ Lim, Odile Decq and Andri Gerber; photographs by Matthieu Gafsou and Jing Quek; and projects by Palace, Angel Cubero and the Office for Subversive Architecture.

 

 

  • BOOKS written by Dr Eugenia Fratzeskou:

Interstitiality in Contemporary Art & Architecture: An Inter-passage from Delineating to Unfolding the Boundaries of Space, LAP – Lambert Academic Publishing, 2012, ISBN-13: 978-3-8383-7501-4.

The present study offers an investigation into the notion of interstitial space and its creative exploration in architecture and site-specific art, realized through digital technology. Based on cosmology, Quantum Physics and information theory, instead of being perceived as a ‘ground zero’, space is evolving and heterogeneous as it comprises of multiple interacting layers of virtuality and reality. Contemporary site-specific art is marked by a growing interest in exploring emerging interstitial spaces including transitional and unsettling in-between spaces, the emergence of which, deeply challenges spatial and disciplinary boundaries. Such an investigation includes a creative exploration of the possible inter-relationships between various types of reality and the dynamic and unsettling points of intersection enabling various kinds of exchange between those realities. The emphasis is placed on the ways in which, potential interstitial spaces can be creatively revealed through various modes of innovative spatial intervention such as mixed realities, parallel sites, inter-spaces, infra-spaces.

Visualising Boolean Set Operations: Real & Virtual Boundaries in Contemporary Site-specific Art, LAP – Lambert Academic Publishing, 2009, ISBN-13: 978-3-8383-3051-8.

The latest forms of site-specific and digital art have emerged from artists’ interest in new relationships between physical and virtual spaces, as inspired by the contemporary interdisciplinary understanding of space as an uncontrollably changing informational substance. Such developments necessitate new spatial research strategies for advancing site-specific art. The present study develops pioneering methodologies for enabling that advancement. The existing modes of digital visualisation, site-specificity, virtual and mixed realities in art, design and science are radically challenged, as the built boundaries of architecture ‘unfold’ to reveal a paradoxical hybrid space in a site-specific virtual environment. The digital boundaries of architecture are revealed to be highly inconsistent, undermining the solidity and continuity of built space and our perception of it. Such irregularity exposes the inherent abstraction and inconsistencies that occur in the interchanges between the binary, numerical and graphic levels of digital visualisation systems. This book is particularly useful to artists, architects and professionals who engage with digital visualisation and the related fields.

New Types of Drawing in Fine Art: The Role of Fluidity in the Creation Process, LAP – Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010, ISBN-13: 978-3-8383-4838-4.

The present study focuses on new types of drawing in fine art, as investigated in relation to their interdisciplinary context. The main aim is to reconsider the conventional idea of the process of creation, that is, one that proceeds from a concept to a preparatory drawing and concludes in a finished work. This investigation involves the questioning of the traditional role of drawing and the status of a ‘finished artwork’. The possibility that the stages of an artwork’s completion are not successive and separated will be explored through the acknowledgement and understanding of their ‘in-between workings’. These ‘workings’ show a wider ‘network’ of the co-ordinates that initially may be rejected as dead ends that lead to an entropic chaos. Exploring the key ideas of the Platonic “chora” and the architect Peter Eisenman’s ”interstitial space”, this book presents how the ‘in-between workings’ encourage the evaluation and development of the initial ideas we intended to follow. Therefore, the existence of an ‘interstitial space’ does not signify indeterminacy, but reveals the creatively interwoven activities of intention and outcome as well as theory and practice and their interaction

Operative Intersections: Between Site-Specific Drawing and Spatial Digital Diagramming, LAP – Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010, ISBN-13: 978-3-8383-5193-3.

Computers are considered to be highly ordered and overtly deterministic devices, offering predetermined outcomes. Nevertheless, the algorithmic paradoxes of an architectural software derive from the complexity of its infrastructure and cause non-linear processes of diagramming. According to the architect Bernard Tschumi, any “transformational sequence” (animation) is a kind of “operative drawing”: a “prescriptive” and thus, non-descriptive activity. Nevertheless, a “transformational sequence” is not, by definition, “operative”. Operative drawing emerges when the uncertainties of our reasoning, spatial perception and the paradoxes of digital diagramming, are creatively exposed. This can only happen through the superimposition, but not the material construction or cinematic projection, of a virtual spatial configuration onto its pre-existing actual referent. This inter-passage between a virtual (absolute, alienating) Cartesian space and an actual place is where the relationship between the digital and physical boundaries of built architecture can be delineated. Entering this inter-passage is entering a diagram itself: a destabilising, interpretative activity in progress.

The publications are available from  morebooks, Amazon and other major booksellers worldwide.

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