Portfolio of Propositions

Connor A. Verteramo 2021 Portfolio

Connor Verteramo 2021 Portfolio

The following is a relevant sample of work, a collection that reflects the beginnings of a body of research. It is meant as a window into a visual catalogue, laying out a sensibility and scale of work to engage. From the ephemeral image to the landscape of the hyper-massive, it chases the elusive.

Table of Contents 001

Polytropos LA research studio 2018-19 critic, Neil Denari

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Null: Towards the Indiscernible winter 2019 critic, Jason Payne

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High Plains Tapestries On-going Research independent

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Fashion Images On-going Research independent

Polytropos LA research studio 2018-19 critic, Neil Denari partner, Tom Niu Los Angeles needs to densify, this is a given. As part of a culminating research studio at UCLA, the prompt addresses this inevitability. It proposes that the expo line running from downtown to Santa Monica could be conceived of as a new Arroy Seco highway. Along which a series of speculative 1 kilometer diameter cities would emerge centered around its stations.

As a proposition, this city for La Brea Station would contend that the city is impossible to reduce to a kind of master planning. That it should and could develop as a series of independent micro-narratives. Each of which would have its own political, cultural, economic, and conceptual forces acting on its urban logic - a total of 7 of these micro-narratives have been developed in this case.

What are the extents of each city? What are its boundaries? How do new strategies become sythetic with an existing? How self-reliant can a city be? What is a city of cities?

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Site plan A 1km diameter city, composed of 7 separate narratives and contexts that inform the organizational and formal logics of each. From politics to cultural norms to economies, all act as external urban forces which help propose various questions of the way cities will be made in the coming years.

4 examples of micro-narratives

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20 urban conditions

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Null winter 2019 critic, Jason Payne Null is at once a dialectic condition and process of equivalence. It treats specific characteristics as a flat ecology 1 of things, an unbiased point of departure, where all are viewed without hierarchical bias. Instead of understanding null as a typically negative condition, here it will be defined closer to its mathematic and scientific terms—as a zero(ing), a base reference point for a given set of measurements.

In this way, null(ification) is something in its blank nothingness. This is key to understanding the underlying mechanics of Owen’s Lake’s remediation.

Natural and manufactured phenomena are at once toxic and beautiful, as well as politics and ecology, attention and neglect. Owen’s Lake’s physical and digital information are compiled, presented, and projected as equal—blank but not empty, instead full. Aesthetic regimes, pragmatic solutions, neglected swatches, and idealized politics all operate at an equal degree of intensity inscribing both the actual landscape and virtual datascape of Owen’s Lake as null-scapes.

The nullification of Owen’s Lake is a possible aesthetic. It is not an end but a tendency towards the indiscernible, full of texturally ambiguous surface treatments, scaleless featuring, and narrow color ranges. This is the beginning of an anthropogenic sensibility.

1 “Flat ecology” as a term not dissimilar to Timothy Morton’s reference of flat ontologies within ‘OOO’ and its relation to nature. (Timothy Morton, Architecture without Nature)

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The book as an architectural format The format attempts to show a complexity of an irreducible landscape of Owen’s Lake in California. It compiles sub-formats of images, allowing a cross examination the subject matter through different lenses. It leads towards a sense of inevitably through repitition and self-consistancy.

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Landscape Tapestries on-going research

A survey, manipulation, and intensification of the visual surface of the High Plains territory. At first the ground can be read as a subdivision of unending landscape, farms demarcated initially by New Deal policies for homesteading, arrays of oil extraction, or discrete fields of modern civilization and technology.

All superimposed on an ancient topography morphed overtime by forces at the scale of nature.

These tapestries are studies to replicate the systems of organization present in this territory. It is a digital procedure intent on making indistinguishable the natural, physical, and digital manipulation of the current state of the land.

Resulting in new ad-mixtures, a re-presentation of the landscape as a new site that we can intervene.

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Fashion Images on-going research

The idea of intricacy comes from a preference towards things which have specific formal and material strategies, to make ambiguous the distinction between the two. That one is not enough for the development of a compelling object of production - something which is neither fully new and unrelatable nor one which is an expected and predictable sight. In this sense what these images attempt to replicate is the sensibility of the world of haute-couture fashion.

Specifically, haute-couture fashion has the ability to fine tune degrees of clarity between the body and its veil, between the shapeliness of a dress and the material biases assembled.

The intent is to develop a visual language with qualities of the ephemeral and elusive. To make things which are not fully comprehensible but have details which are recognizable. This is a point of departure for a formal set of objects and systems of production.

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A range of legibility, of layering methods to distance the result from an initial clean and recognizable object.

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Morphology of an object into its new hybrids.

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