In collaboration with Declan Dill
Mutating Memories and Entangled Visions aims to use 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez as a proxy for architectural thought by analyzing forces we would often find difficult to spatialize and materialize in a world where time is cyclical and oddity is commonplace. Our analytical drawing expands upon Márquez’s imagination by extending it into our “real” through the close inspection of insomnia and amnesia, which serve as the drivers of Macondo’s (the novel’s fictional town), collective memory and urban imaginary, or lack thereof. The drawing maps the movement of the two parameters while charting their obscure interactions with time, space, and human and non-human actors, which actively creates (not represents) a reality in which our object can then inhabit.
The analytical drawing is a product of precise data translation - every instance where insomnia and amnesia occurred was marked and categorized by character, geographic location, associated symptoms, size of the outbreak, method of transmission, peripheral results in the town, duration, and impact on memory.
The Data Object mediates trajectories of human experience and material relations. Each thickened line, field condition, conic surface, relief etc... builds upon each other, creating a cohesive mental and architectonic map of Márquez’s imagination.
The projection, which serves as the novel’s data environment, renders Marquez’s imagination in “active retrospective motion”, dematerializing the object all together while turning it into a host for geometric and optic sensation through transects of time. In a real way, site has become screen as traces and residues of insomnia and amnesia are unfolded and projected upon the object, which when recorded and flattened into a video for the internet, become a part of the post-medium condition that can live on in our digital subconscious just as 100 Years of Solitude lives on today.
