About

This thesis aims to establish a new hybrid moving image practice and theory which draws together innovative 1960s and 70s avant-garde film-making practices with traditional, historic techniques of architectural representation as a means to explore, express and create architecture. In the process of forming this hybrid practice, artists’ film will used and appropriated as a technique for communicating the spatiotemporal qualities of architecture, and architecture used as a filter through which to interpret artists’ film.  This research emerges from my on-going critical practice of architecturally focussed artists’ film, and related theoretical writing, which responds to a dual disciplinary grounding in both fine art and architecture. As both artist and architect, architectural preoccupations have formed the core of the research, and central to this practice is a recognition of the film as mediating artefact, translating the mediating artefacts of architecture such as room, window, drawing. In its exploration of these concerns, the practice predominantly resides between artists’ film and architectural representation, but dips into and oscillates back and forth between these disciplines.  The proposed construction of this new hybrid practice, which I term “architectural moving drawing”, contextualises this on-going work, and opens it up as new territory for forms of spatial and temporal practice, in both parent disciplines. This experimental practice-based research seeks to exploit opportunities offered by contemporary, accessible digital moving image technology to allow modes of practice in a transdisciplinary space between the disciplines of artists’ film and architecture. It also aims to address a paucity of expression of the temporal within contemporary and historic architectural representation.    Through an integrated, reciprocal process of writing and making the architectural moving drawing will be tested both as a sui generis form, and one which stitches back into the home disciplines of artists’ film and architecture.