Critical Investigations

These investigations examine the structures of social, historical, ideological, or other cultural forces.

Human / Non-Human Subjects

We normally receive the city and the parks within it as constructed for human activity.  While we may be pre-occupied with our selves, there are an abundance of non-human beings superimposed and adjacent.  These non-human subjects interpret the same spaces differently.   This drawing process explores the superimposition of significance, effect space, perception and activity in the parks.

Instructions
Tracing over an aerial or plan of en existing park, imagine all the spaces and modes of inhabitation for a specific being.

It might be helpful to start with a non-human being for which you have some familiarity - for example, a dog.    Trace areas on the map that would support this creature’s activity.  Replace the presupposed activities or names for spaces on the plan, with a list of th eactual activities that a creature would perform there.

Once you’ve exhausted every possible space for that particular creature, save this drawing as a layer, and move to another.

Complete as many layers as you can,  You might collaborate with a colleague to exhaust every possibility you can imagine: toddler, child, teenager, adult, senior, dog, bird, fish, racoon, turtle, fox, beaver, etc.

Possible Tools:

Black technical pens on paper.
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Nodebox

Relevant Texts:

Donna Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Sigificant Otherness.

Jacob Von Uexkell, A Foray through the World of Humans and Animals.

Other Inspiration:

Quentin Deluermoz, Writing history with Animals  (link)

ChicagoParks to Reference:

Use any park as a constraint or reference, exhausting each environment.  (link)

Spatial Boundaries / Thresholds / Gradients

In North by Northwest, Cary Grant is attacked by a crop dusting airplane in an open field.  He manages to escape by stepping in front of a speeding truck, causing the plane to crash.   Considering the dramatic tension that emerges from machines and humans in proximity, we are inured to the bus passing us on the sidewalk, to the trucks passing the bicycle lane, to the cars adjacent to playgrounds.  Perhaps that’s because the landscape of the city is encoded with a social contract in the form of painted lines, material changes, curbs, fences, walls, buildings, and other regulating boundaries.   This materialization of bondaries allows us to cohabitate in a landscape with amazing density.

Instructions

Visit an existing park, or trace over an aerial or plan, exhuasting every boundary or threshold - whether expressed as a physical assembly, or implied - whether constructed by human beings, naturally formed, or accidental.

Develop a rigorous system of notation (e.g. linetype and lineweight) to visually classify different qualities of boundary: graphical systems (cross walk, parking lots), changes in material (blacktop to grass to wood) , shifts in surface elevation (height change, curbs), vertical surfaces (fences, storefront windows, walls), overhead (roof edges, tree canopies, or transition to different environments (the edge of pond, or a beach, etc.) 

Possible Tools:

Black technical pens on paper, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Nodebox

Relevant Texts:

Catalin Avramescu, A Country in Lines.
Allen Stan, From Object to Field. 
Allen Stan, Mapping the Unmappable: On Notation (link)

Other Inspiration:

SURFACE, a film from underneath (video)
Albert Pope, Ladders.

ChicagoParks to Reference:

Use any park as a constraint or reference, exhausting each environment.  (link)

Model X as if Y

This is an investigation in translation.  The goal is to use representational techniques typically associated with one point of view and apply them to another.  The investigation may help you expose common denominators for linking systems that may - at first - seem unrelated or distinct.

Examples

Draw or model landscapes as a series of spatial volumes using the standard materials and techniques for modeling architecture.

Draw or model landscapes as if they are a wunderkammer (cabinet of curiousities).

Draw or model architecture as if a three-dimensional folded surface that supports activity, using materials and techniques that one would use for modeling landscape.

Draw or model spatial volumes the way you would model time, model time the way you would model spatial volumes.

Draw a sequece of spaces as if its a template for a complex cardboard box, with folds and tabs.

Draw the city and its regions as sprawling park. Draw the park as a tiny city.  Expose the continuities and entanglements with the adjacent metropolitan infrastructure; model the metropolis to expose its structures as an expansive field of inhabitable landscape.

Draw or model  the city as if a field of climatically controlled environments, model the park as if a small city within that field.

Draw or model animal space the way you would human spaces and then find relationships between them.

Possible Tools:

Drawing on paper.
Drawing on paper, cut and folded.
Adobe Illustrator
Nodebox

Other Inspiration:

Vogt, Gunther, Landscape as a Cabinet of Curiosities.
Girot, Christophe, Vision in Motion, Representing Landscape in Time.

Chicago Parks to Reference:

Use any park as a constraint or reference, exhausting each environment.  (link)