informal urban practices

Our Place is a traveling stall that invites you to take part in an interactive face-to-face and online investigation of space and its manifestations.

Keywords/Concepts:
• Space and Place
• Interaction
• Ownership
• Investigation
• Behaviour
• Community
• Temporality
• Commitment

Themes:

The ‘Our Place’ project will investigate how people engage and think about public space by encouraging people to interact and leave their mark in any way that they feel comfortable.

‘Our Place’ is interested in generating longer-term awareness about the spaces individuals inhabit commitments and documenting how the public reacts to this. It will encourage the public to engage and become active in the space, observing the transition of ‘space’ to ‘place’. They will be invited to take ownership of the project, and share its outcomes, thus learning something of their personal creative abilities that would have otherwise gone undiscovered.

‘Our Place’ is a dynamic and responsive project; the outcomes may vary depending on the site and engagement with individuals.

Methods:

‘Our Place’ will take the physical form of a nomadic stall, spending up to three days at each space. Interaction will take place face-to-face with the assistance of objects, consultation, swapping, conversation, documentation, sharing. Later, the communication, exploration and interaction will continue online, assisted by much documentation.

Regular updates in the form of text, photographs, videos and audio, as well as links to relevant websites will be employed to keep the public interested, informed and tempt them to participate. It will also make the experience more permanent and provide a source of ongoing inspiration

Group 5: Nicholas Rebstadt, Sophie Bain and Lucy Fraser

Marker trading

Major Project

With the developing of the city, people’s living tends to a fast-paced. The urban and life become much more heaviness than before. Why not just disburden yourself a moment, lie down (maybe hanging) your body, release your mind and bask in the sun?What I want to do is create a space for people to release themselves and re-inhabit this space of forgetting; infuse energy into the city. It can be a spider web, birder’s nest or net crossing two buildings.

What the location I’m interest in is the alleyway, actually I am considering not only the road, but also the whole space between two buildings; usually people use that space as a car park, garbage dump or just leave that. Why not utilize that space?

By  Jiazhen Ken Chen

My major project direction will be a collaboration of many interests within the group T.H. Individually I am interested in the structure of a gallery space and how people will interact with that structure. The structure itself would ‘grow and move’ as vistors interact with it. Sustainability and the use of recycled materials are an important part of this project. The structure would become the artwork itself, be self-constructing, and create a transient experience. The use of time lapse photography is also an integral part to show how the ‘urban creature’ moves as well as acting as a gauge of additions and interactions.