In Habit: Project Brief

This project focuses on the potentialities of the room. The room sits at a crossroad of various logics: a container for the daily rhythms and habits of its inhabitants, and a component within a larger structure - “A plan is a society of rooms” as Louis Kahn once stated. Historically, the intimacy of the room also exists as a profit-extracting instrument and with this contracted obligations exist between all parties involved. My exploration sits within the overlapping spaces of these various systems. Within the aforementioned frameworks, what are the various ways in which we are permitted to interact with objects and how do they influence the construction of habits? How do objects interact with each other within this ecosystem and finally, situating this practice within a history of performative documentation: what are the most appropriate forms of documenting movement and how does the work relate directly to the chosen form(s) of documentation?

My flat is both the apparatus and subject of study.

Movement

I am interested in habit: as a series of repeated actions, and how these actions relate to objects as a sensual experience (touch, sight, smell, sound). How does architecture assist or hinder the generation and enactment of habit. I am also interested in movement in relation to performance: actions as documentable. Performance artists, their methods of documentation and enacting will be a central touch point in order to discover a grammar and method of documenting movement. This relates directly to ‘Capture’ also.

Marks (Trace)

“[Walter Benjamin] observed how furniture and interior design were driven not by necessity but by the inhabitants’ urge to leave their own traces, that is to make the living space familiar, to claim it as their own”¹ - Pier Vittorio Aureli Aureli here claims that to leave a trace is to make a space familiar, to claim it as one's own. In doing so, the illusion of permanence and rootedness is generated within the 19th century Bourgeois home. I am interested in the various forms of trace (verb and noun) and how these marks are left at various scales.

Capture

Capturing relates to the viewer. The relationship between myself (as the actor), the objects and the viewer (the camera, reader or viewer. I am interested in exploring what are the relevant modes of documentation and new relationships with the viewer that are generated through specific documentation methods.

In relation to ‘Compiling’

The task of generating a form of notation as a method of documenting movement is one method of compiling actions of the everyday performed within time and space.