The body of work contained in this book has no agenda other than selfish fulfillment on my part. Many explanations and meanings can be attached to each phase of the body of work for the past two years. Why not leave that to the analysts and to do work. Reflection on past action leads to greater insight. This is not an apathetic or simplistic intention on my part. It is far more difficult to start from zero than to build upon preconceptions and habits. Some believe, (and it is common practice in Master’s thesis programs), that a grand vision is where one begins. Or that the artist/architect is an inspired creative genius. I have no desire to create such a manifesto. Manifesto’s are for egotists. It is my understanding that one of the primary aims at Cranbrook Academy of Art is to help and promote artists in “finding their voice”. To that I say there is no more “voice”. The notion that an artist in today’s environment one has a unique “voice” carries the baggage of the “Avant gard” or the artistic “genius”. There is no “Avant gard” anymore. Genius is moot and therefore not relevant to work produced. There is no Avant gard, there is nothing “original”, there is only the “move”. Most architectural design is prescriptive. Paradoxically architecture is the result of both prescriptive and random decision making. Generally speaking, I came to Cranbrook to explore transitional links in the design process and decision making. More specifically, however, I am interested in the transition between simulated environments and the act of making, the “Facticity” in the words of Architect Neil Denari. Denari also notes that “Architecture is interested in facts and telling you exactly what is going on without killing the mystery.” The work included in this book is divided into two parts. The first stage of my work addresses a simulated or virtual image based process focusing on representation, image and the object. The content of the image is less significant than the process and filters used to define the objects. I sought to provide programmatic design constraints via the fabrication process and the boundaries imposed in the tooling, programming and execution. I attempted to remove context from the object and observe the creation of form as a series of solution based moves that could result in an adjusted perception of object as simulacrum where its meaning is destabilized. The latter body of work or second part is a realization of the object as a performative device that becomes interactive. The project began by literally framing architectural space. By adding a pair frames, a field of operation is created via a physical armature that can be added to or subtracted from. The 360 degree field of operation becomes the program and an attempt to remove context. The result is a non-object space between and around the frames, free of prescriptive influences. Objects suspended in space appear to be light weight or they could be created from air as John Cage mentions in a 2007 interview. The work titled Sound Trap included in the second part of this book, developed out of an interest in John Cage’s ideas about music and sound. In the same interview, Cage refers to music or the collection of sound in this case, as a “space art” as opposed to a “time art” and goes on to say that [different sounds coming from different places can produce sculpture]. The project Sound Trap is meant to be an on-going test project exploring Cages notion of sound as sculpture by allowing for perception of space and time which can be both mediated by the object and/or created by the object.
Andrew P Matt Detroit 2013
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