ch.2 interface and animall

Interface and animall

I had decided to work on a competition project on the theme of Deadmalls for the Los Angeles Forum of Architects. I wasn’t an architect. I was an apology for one. The project was carried out by two of us, one in Fort Worth, the groundhog, the other, me – the apology for an architect - on the move, trawling around the world in Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto, Stockholm, Helsinki, Lahore, Karachi, Terezin and North Wales.
I began to think of some ideas and started by emailing these to the groundhog from any available Yahoo lounge in Narita, Nagoya or Arlanda, Stockholm. Porting anywhere and everywhere to exchange jpeg files, i-movie ideas, Flash sequences and Photoshop documents, the idea to re-animate a deadspace seemed like something out of a novel. A Richard Brautigan novel. The interface offered itself up.
Our assistant back at Ground Control was a young architect, one of those Generation Xers who was taking a break from detailing foyer partitioning for a high-rise office block in Dallas. He had been educated at the University of Zetaville and was one of those fondly referred to by the professors as a ‘glazed ham’. Particularly suited for this project he was specialised in skateboarding. Long legged, he looked like those wire toys you can buy at any merchandising outlet in any art museum. I bought mine at the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth. Wind it up and it proceeds to cross surfaces in small shudders. Like an ‘animall’, I suppose.