projekts:
the work.group is a decentralized collaborative community who have been working together for 4 years. our insistence on the appropriateness of responses to our context and the cultivation of a clearly conceived position in the world of cultural practice have insisted that we deal with no project so intensively as the design of our own practice. this is the tissue that binds all other works into a tree of goals and conscience of action. as a collaboration we work jointly, all members contributing to varying degrees to all projects forming a stew of intent and production. yet as a decentralized group with no physical space for convivium, we necessarily work apart on our contributions. we envision this as a relationship that emulates the constant yet scattered productive action of the city. the city is a grand practice of conciliation and action. actions at an individual scale necessitate responses from other citydwellers to either allow those foreign actions to propel their personal goals or to mitigate the negative impact they caused. we prefer not to focus on the individual productions of the city (this is a great building, this is a great space). although the city is certainly populated with works, the way we engage the city is as a continuous work. this is how the wrk.grp sees its work and its relationships.
the decentralization of the group, and perhaps our interest in delicately honed and crafted ripostes and discussions (writing and drawing in our own time insists upon the gravity of each move) has lead us to embrace a practice that exists in internet space. we have designed our website as a non-hierarchical clot of work. there are bodies within the clot that one can see in autonomous form but they are bound and cross-referenced as a large hypertext community. it is interesting to us to see the webpage as a vehicle for and an expression of our will to practice. it enables the type of collaboration we seek, yet, it also contains the work and propels the work as strangely concrete synchronization of practice and evidence. in the design world this type of clear relationship of mission, method, documentation, and dissemination is rare. many attempts to lay bare the creative process by designers have fallen short by maintaining the aura of mystic artistry. the work at sisyphean.com can be nothing but frank. this limitation is its goal.
we have crafted an interface on the webpage, exploiting the personal publishing system, wordpress. crafting its weblog-like structure into a dialogue which courses both linearly and tangentially allows completely open contribution to the space of the work from the entire internet community. the interface is easy and straightforward to use and texts, images, or any web-based media may be posited. we feel that this approach is as much a way to promote a community of work as it is a statement of disinterest in the ego of design.
we care for this mediated relationship also to stress working autonomously in order to cultivate exterior interests and skills that can pollute group work. working autonomously with vigour in individual pursuits is only possible when the friction of proposals returned to the group from other members is minimized. the web format allows all contributions to be part of an immediate body of work. every contribution may not have an explicit function but it remains in the project as either a blip, a provocative non-sequitur, or a cathartic catalyst. even something as errant as spam left in a comment field can become part of the narrative of a project.
our first work under the auspices of the work.group was a conceptual urban piece for a gallery in paris called e2, that called for an investigation of urban glitches. we saw these as being the manifestations of individual pursuits that proceed in the city through policy enabled miscommunication or lack of communication and end in a physical short-circuit or conflict in the individual pursuit of another. this work became a concrete way of playing out our practice in a piece of work. it was born through our growing understanding of the city as a matrix of relationships and our affinity for the individual expression that this distance from each other afforded. we acted out the cycle of the ‘glitch’ in a series of collages that were transmitted back and forth collecting content from parties who engaged the scenes with their own set of personal goals and underlying narratives. it was up to the other participants to make these developments useful or look for ways to circumvent them. this was a beginning not only of a series of investigations where the process and product were self reflexive and spoke to each other through a language of a world vision of individual empowerment.
this distance between us also has taught us to accept the things that happen beyond our sphere of influence, to learn to make them productive to our own ends, and that anything goes. but if all contributions are useful, if anything goes, then an understanding must be in place that allows anything to become something. the uses of things may be unclear in the context of a particular project even when they carry an unspoken appropriateness. by becoming useful they may annihilate their presence in the trajectory of the work, that is, they are transformed or translated through shades of representation. in terms of sequence, a movement forward from some catalyst could always be considered to have some representational relationship with the thing that engendered it. architecture and design are not free of the tethers of representation once they are concrete. even when a building is complete and the drawings are tucked away in a flat file or rolled up in a tube, they do not cease to be part of that work. the drawings, and in fact, all of the material, the ‘work’, is inseparably linked to the ‘final’ manifestation of the project. these things are implicit in our relationship with space and design. that is one thing that i find interesting about our internet documentation, it is shameless and it is sometimes embarrassingly complete.
we write a great deal about our work, and not necessarily for journalistic or documentary purposes. we see writing a-priori objective descriptions as productive, not just as descriptive devices. much like the building itself , the written word submits itself as an abstraction to the interpretive tendencies and personal narratives of its users. it is this productive thinking about the relationship of representation and physical engagement that excites us, but it requires a less immediate, slow twitch (if you will, pk) thought process. this process parallels our (your) immersion in an environment (text, built, internal). we, in a sense, look at our materials and experiences as open or accessible representations. we even see our seemingly final or closed products in this light. important in such a diaphanous collaboration is that even though they were produced by us, they do not always mean or bear what they depict upon revisitation. by the same token, buildings and designs, we would argue, like art, do not unequivocally present the intentions which the work behind them represents.
buildings and design are part of a continuous landscape of human experience. in this continuity there are personal or internal peaks, such as traumatic or uplifting emotional experiences, or personal revelations or accomplishments. but to the majority of people, those who are not sensitive or astute, the designed or if you will, even the constructed environment may not have a strong correlation with these experiences. for instance, if you get dumped by your lover in front of the taj mahal, or you are racing a fedex deadline in the equitable building downtown, the character of this instance in the memory will be more strongly rooted in the spike of your personal narrative than the integration of the setting into that experience. it is not that the designed world has no impact on experience, it is that the correlation of the environment to the experience is minimal in a mnemonic sense. there is a cultural frame of reference that beckons the same people (us/you) to engage a piece of art in this way, with a contemplation that rivals the focus one puts on internal matters. this contemplation is activated by a certain set of values and keys that indicate something is culturally recognized as art. why should this contemplation and registration be reserved for a work only when it is in a gallery or on a podium in a plaza? i dont think the spatial effect of breathing room, or the perception of an autonomous worldview that one often recognizes in art has the same effect in the designed world. this world exists in a continuity of use. it is because buildings and design are a part of a continuous human narrative that experience flows through them.
what caring design is capable of doing is jarring the mnemonic faculties out of dormancy and initializing a relationship in the memory that will strengthen it and inspire introspection and potentially, action. well designed things will behave then like art in focusing the experience through the environment. at the very least, design has the power of colouring the memory of particular events with a tone or sensibility.
some built environments contain this intersection of emotion or awareness and the character of the space in the base designation of their use. a museum functions culturally, as i mentioned, with the charge of activating people to engage its contents. the memorial, as a typology, activates people to engage it. this is the reason people have come to it; it beckons projection as a mode of engagement.
we approached the pentagon memorial design with these concerns in mind. we sought to produce an environment or a backdrop rather than a spectacle or crude object upon which the mourner would seek to fit their unfathomable narrative of grief. to present the mourner with a predetermined icon of their suffering would undervalue the depth of their pain. our pentagon memorial stood to be experienced while remembering; it made these acts inseparable.
echoing a building with a use, the memorial is structured around an empty narrative where the actions of visitors become the symbolic material they take away from the experience. Action verb phrases such as ascension of the knoll, manipulation of the golden spires, descent beneath the firmament, become strung together as the occupant seeks to link the experiences, to project a use that accompany their own meaning.
the transformation of the landform that becomes a hollowed out knoll, and perceptual calibration in the tendrils that run out to the saucers that conceal a subterranean sea behind walls at horizon level, are plays that underscore a sense of mystery. this mystery is a beckoning that accompanies the memorial like the beckoning of a piece of art. we aren’t calling it ‘art’, it is just a place, but its goals are similar to ‘art’. it also achieves its goals with poesy. the golden spires which run loosely through the knoll surface present an opportunity for engagement, giving the visitor the charge of manipulating the position of the array, of personalizing their ascent, of marking their trail. the intimate connection invokes the domestic calm of tactility and control. it also aids in the construction of a literary tone along with the use of water and light: the rods waver mysteriously in the grotto, manipulated from above, tinkle against the stone, echoing through the hollow, like reeds in the pond, a false firmament, dark, arcs overhead dappled by flickering light through the penetrations for the spires.
we don’t see any human endeavour as being useless. a person exploring their abilities, cultivating their interests, making concrete their memories or perceptions, these are man making use of his time, and making ones self useful of ones own accord is beautiful. creating for ones self a memorable moment, a moment when one is engaged with ones self is more reward than any feting or use by another person. we advocate work! for us and you, adherence to this philosophy requires a certain detachment from the interests of others. we must appreciate the heartfelt endeavours of others even if we cant understand them, we must learn from them or learn to form a critical position toward them. the registration of labour is beautiful to us. if it can be said that ‘that drawing looks like it took one hundred hours’ or ‘it took him a lifetime to reach that point’ or ‘it looks like you ate pizza off of that’, if something looks lived through, it allows us to identify with our fellows, with their struggles, and their suffering.
we like to do things for ourselves, we were bred in a do-it-yourself environment where the goal was to create a self sufficient culture. i feel that we have attempted to translate this into our personal lives. Here it is not limited to ‘designing’, it affects all our choices in life, from travel to baking to politics. why ask someone to do anything if you have the chance to learn to do it on your own? we produce writings for one another (and ourselves) to read, we make furniture for our homes, we design better cat water bowls, we document our travels in transformative ways. it has become not about autonomy any longer but about making our experiences useful. it is the power of transformation which i discussed earlier regarding representation, yet here, the goal is engagement with ones self, and subsequently, making ones self useful and inspiring to others.
it is through all this that we still search for a practice. we look for a way to understand our place in the world of practice and the place of practice and public life in our own personal lives and our own interests. the last piece of work is perhaps a complete expression of all of these issues. it was born from the charge to exhibit our work here at the museum which we took as an opportunity to synthesize our work under what i will call ‘a charter of usefulness’. here we give purpose to things that may have become useless. in this case it arose from three losing competition entries. however, we chose to see these as inflections in the continuing narrative of the work.group, not individual goals whose value to ‘the work’ ceased when they were no longer financially advantageous.
being that they are moments in the life of the work, we crafted a life that was as fictional as they to house them. we hoped this realm would give a context to evaluate these works against the ‘project’ of the work.group and that it would accomplish some other things for us. this fiction, and the process of constructing it, became an opportunity to learn what our relationship meant, how it was productive, where it was situated, and what its limits were. as an allegorical realm, in which our projects were selected or realized, and we, the work.group were gone from, we were afforded the opportunity to explore the continuity of the built world we exist in (for instance, the pentagon memorial became public baths, a habitat for humanity prototype became a failed modular subdivision in north texas).
we freed ourselves to introduce new characters like the wary double agent clive, the berriers of pinelands, and the girl from vermilion, new settings like branson, mo, and new projects like the crop lookout towers in remington, in, whose roles would be more functional to us as constitutional amendments to our way of working and as augmentations to our personal mythology. having this world, this proving ground, allows us to test our thoughts against a meaning-laden reality whose operands were rooted in the intentions of the group to begin with.
but we also wanted it to engage people, to do what we hope good buildings do. we wanted the story, as a communicative device, to present our mission statement (all of this material i have waded through here) in a non-didactic way. as a textual world (the images being less reductive through their clear stance as fantasy), it is similar to the pentagon memorial in its literary openness. the space of fiction allows for engagement and allows the reader/viewer to construct a use for it in their own lives. the narrative serves both the work - in the framing of the projects in a consistent envelope for the viewer - and the practice - as the voices and actions of the characters reflect the policies and agenda of the work.group.
this duplicity pleases us, because what we have found in this work has been answers for us and propulsion for our endeavours, and what it presents to the viewer, both explicitly through the free spirited romp of the narrative and in the implicit beckoning of the allegorical structure, is the charge to find your own answers. we sought to share our enthusiasm for working, for transforming our interests and experiences through fiction, through tactility and the personal care of our objects, and through curiosity rooted in realism. this has always been our goal, to share our enthusiasm for working, for addressing your real interests, for making your life have value to you, for igniting moments with your own satisfaction. we know that these things may have little impact in the lives of others. the joy then should come in knowing that you are alive and you are making what you want of your life.
