Jane Norris
The focus of my research is an exploration of visual and theoretical ways that a ‘Viatopia’ (Via - route / Topia – place) could be established as a third ground, an alternative to the binary nature of Foucault’s ‘Heterotopia / Utopia’ construct. This Viatopia would act as a place of travel, a continual fluid linking of spatial points or networks at many different levels, offering the process of passing, flowing, connecting as a value in itself, a knowledge based on changing tactile spatial interaction “not text but texture”[1]. A dynamic space, which demands an equivalent form of visual language, equipped to communicate and critique this shifting contemporary urban experience of constant communication/travelling.
The series of video works I have produced under the collective research title: Viatopias – Baroque Space, offer a fluid multidimensional, multitemporal sense of contemporary urban travel space, and are using Baroque-viewing strategies to telescope time and space in the manner of Walter Benjamin. The work explores techniques such as multi layering, folding, stretching, repetition and anamorphisms such as reflection and distortion. My aim, is to produce images that distort and view street space in a dynamic way developed through tools of perception constructed from contemporary spatial theory. I am attempting to work at the edges of stable digital imaging, at the place where the stretching and folding of moving image and sound produce a dynamic ambient space, and offer a fresh reading of the everyday travel routes – Viatopias.
‘The Baroque’ has developed as a many faceted overarching arena of
discourse for this research – entered sideways through Deleuze and the Fold[2].
Discovered like a richly ornate chapel through the side door of densely
camouflaged fake foliage.