Living Section 1.1

To be immersed is to look at the city in section, to be inside, to look at the inner workings of this body, as a kind of x-ray vision. The section drawing as we know it allows us to understand the adjacencies of interior spaces, their configurations and relative proportions, etceteras. While they are revealing of this static, and abstract characteristics of space, they do not provide us with the representation or the analysis of what is happening inside, how often it is happening, what are the variations, the rhythms and patterns, the ephemeral, what is the life of that which is being investigated. To be immersed is to be inside but it is also to look at the city moving, to look at the city in time, to look at the city changing.

I have been involved in a series of dissections of time/space studies which take the conventional section-cut drawing as we know it and combine it with video to create a new kind of document, a document which is immersed, picturesque, yet also abstract and analytical, a document, or rather a thinking tool which allows us to reveal, study and communicate both the qualitative and the quantitative, and the fixed and temporal aspects of place. These projects include a series of my studies of cities as well as a series of studies done by my students. These explorations, which merge the vocabularies of drawing and of moving image started with the idea of exploiting the readily available audio/video camera as an investigative tool in our practice and has evolved to include other readily available time based tools at our disposal.