SP09WORLD: PROJECTION MAIL: UNITING SYSTEMS IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE
[A $3 PROJECTION SYSTEM] www.projectionmail.com
In the summer of 2008, a forty-person team representing two countries, eight universities and six disciplines traveled to Mumbai, India to help develop new architectural strategies for an Indian non-profit that provides education and health programs for children living on the construction sites of Mumbai.
During this five-week project, this team of students, artists, architects and designers would forge a collaborative effort with a people who spoke a different language, had different customs, and carried different values to address the complex and fluid set of programs, sites, and communities offered by a migratory client existing on borrowed land. The resulting effort produced a not a single project, but an infrastructure through which many projects might be realized over time by a myriad of publics over a long period of time.
PUBLICS STIMULUS PACKAGES is an open-ended series of exhibitions (ACTS) and conversations (TALKS) designed to question and expand the relevance of this infrastructure to other sites, publics and spheres. ACT I of this series, PROJECTION MAIL: UNITING SYSTEMS IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE, will occur in and around the Center of Architecture in Philadelphia, on Friday, May 1 at 6:00 PM. Using hundreds of PROJECTION MAILboxes [SMALL], a $3 projection system with a range of over 10’-0”, this exhibit will offer patrons a myriad of perspectives on the aforementioned project, as offered by images created by the various publics involved in this work. The size and weight of these projectors, as well as the nature of the projected image, will allow patrons to cultivate new overlaps between these perspectives and their own, convergences which will both reflect and rearticulate the relationship between the work, those viewing it, and, invariably, those responsible for re-creating it. So that this movement might expand to include publics, spaces and time periods not offered by this exhibition, patrons to both the physical space of the gallery and a parallel online event will be invited to propose alternative venues for the work. As these suggestions accumulate, they will create heretofore unknown convergences, each of which will receive one or more of the PROJECTION MAILboxes [SMALL].
Once positioned on-site, the PROJECTION MAILbox [SMALL] will use simple graphic mechanisms to clearly communicate its intent to the now-expanded body of contributors, stimulating them to [re]position the work into unknown contexts, [re]project the image onto unanticipated surfaces, [re]purpose the box (through graffiti or the substitution of images) to new ends and [re]present their movements, insights and photos to an growing body of online contributors. The trans-personal experience thereby created will bring together acts of transition and alienation, fantasy and translation, compelling those engaging the work to trade the position of voyeur (gawking at another, exotic experience) for one that is more personal (building one’s awareness of ‘projecting’ onto a foreign culture offering), interactive (interaction between the given image and the creative potential of the spectator) and expressive (specifically related to their own experience as it relates to the Indian experience). The translation of the work thus becomes both relational to the original context and self-relational, creating a critical awareness of one’s own position vis-à-vis the site of the observed. In so doing, PROJECTION MAIL, like the work that proceeded it, offers not a project, but an infrastructure through which others might stimulate a new set of negotiations between the structures offered by our work in India and those inherent within new sites, programs, and publics.
This project was funded by the Provost’s Commission on the Arts/Office of the Provost, Temple University. Additional support for this work, and the work in India, was provided by the AIA, Temple University, Mumbai Mobile Creches (www.mumbaimobilecreches.org), and the International Design Clinic.