Apartment


Viewers are confronted with a blinking cursor. As they type, rooms begin to take shape in the form of a two-dimensional plan, similar to a blueprint. The architecture is based on a semantic analysis of the viewer's words, reorganizing them to reflect the underlying themes they express. The apartments are then clustered into buildings and cities according to their linguistic relationships. Each apartment is translated into a navigable three-dimensional dwelling, so contrasting between abstract plans/texts and experiential images/sounds.
«Apartment» is inspired by the idea of the memory palace. In a mnemonic technique from a pre-Post-It era, Cicero imagined inscribing the themes of a speech on a suite of rooms in a villa, and then reciting that speech by mentally walking from space to space. Establishing an equivalence between language and space, Apartment connects the written word with different forms of spatial configurations.
Most of the origins of «Apartment» came from the French: Bachelard's «Poetics of Space,» who wrote about how certain books were located psychologically in the spaces of a house; Oulipo, the idea of a potential literature (we create the possibility of a type of writing) ; lastly Apollinaire's «Calligrammes,» who looks at how text sits on a page and formally includes that in his poetry. However the main idea came from Frances Yate's «Art of Memory,» a book about the mnemonic techniques of pre-paper eras and on.

Marek Walczak/Martin Wattenberg



_
E agora...?
Are there condominiums in data space?