[ISEA2011] Paper: Eugenia Fratzeskou – Mapping Uncertainty

Abstract

The issue of exactitude in ‘mapping’ the physical world has been debated extensively in science and has deeply influenced the formulation of scientific paradigms. As we pass from Modernist reduction and mathematical formalism to contemporary complexity, uncertainty and complementarity, our perception and understanding of the relationship between physical and virtual worlds are changing in the most unexpected manner. In particular, the developments in Quantum physics and scientific visualisation have revealed an emerging kind of multi-dimensionality that characterises the fuzzy boundaries between reality and virtuality and probes new relationships between part and whole. As a result, a new understanding of space and reality in general, as well as of the limitations of science, is developing.

In contemporary art, architecture and the related disciplines, the changing relationship of data flows and data matrices inspires new types of spatial research and practice. As a designed environment, built space can be perceived as a fragment of an excessive superimposition of dynamically interacting algorithmic, geometrical, topological and structural grids. A creative exploration of the data flows into, from and within the physical structures of the built environment, challenges our common assumptions about space and our experience of it.

Emerging types of site-specific digital art are developing, for creatively investigating the point of intersection between the various types of reality and their ‘exchanges’. This paper offers an investigation into the ways through which, potential in-between spaces can be creatively revealed, through new kinds of site-specific intervention. The emphasis is placed on how it is possible to ‘trace’ and interact with the half- and by- products of algorithmic flows that remain unbuilt, their meta-dimentionality and the emerging paradoxes, through different modes of innovative spatial intervention such as, mixed realities para-sites, ‘injections’, ‘cuts’, interruptive sites-specificity and others. Selected cases from the author’s own practice and research in digital site-specific art and other examples of spatial practices and research in art and architecture will be discussed in conjunction with the relevant scientific, cosmological and philosophical theories.

  • Dr. Eugenia Fratzeskou (b.1979, Athens, Greece) is a London, UK, based artist, researcher, writer, editor, critic and educator. Visiting Lecturer, University of Westminster, London.Editorial Board Member & author of Digimag. Member of Digicult Network.Editor of Journal of Fine & Studio Art (Academic Journals).School of ARCHitecture for All Associate. Project Review Committee & Educational Programmes Member at Urban Transcripts, and others. Pioneering types and processes of digital site-specific art and drawing have been the outcomes of her research leadership of highly successful international research projects with artists, architects and computer scientists since 2000. Eugenia has advanced a wider discourse on digital visualisation systems and virtual environments in site-specific, digital media art and architecture, through inventing methodologies for mapping the invisible inter-passages between virtual and actual architectural spaces within new types of site-specific virtual environments. She has created new relationships between art, architecture, philosophy, computer science and virtual reality. Her expertise expands into the relationship between symbolic logic, Boolean set operations, algebraic, geometrical processes, VR, built architecture and cosmology. Her qualifications include an AHRC-funded practice-based PhD in digital site-specific art (Oct. 2002 – Mar. 2006, University of Surrey/Wimbledon College of Art, London), an AHRC-funded MA Fine Art: Drawing (2002, WCA), a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting (2001, WCA) and a CLTAD certificate in Higher Education teaching.  digicult.it/digimag

Full text (PDF) p. 853-855