Paul Landon’s parctice and research focus on notions of wandering, architecture and urban transformation. He works with video, sound, photography, drawing and the relationships these media have with architecture and spatio-temporal perception.
Paul Landon lives and works in Montréal, where he is a professor of Media Arts at the École des arts visuels et médiatiques of UQAM, and sporadically in Helsinki, where he recently completed a Doctorate in Fine Arts at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts.
This work borrows from current trends in architectural research, but it also follows on from recent literary practices (the author referred to Georges Perec, but I also read the narrative spatial constructions of Paul Auster in the text) and relates to notions from film studies and cinema history. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window comes to mind when looking at this exposition. Common diegetic devices as ‘off-camera’ and ‘out of frame’ are evoked by the particular audio-visual properties of the apartment building’s architecture.
I like very much the figure of the ‘familiar stranger’ who also seems to lead the text towards a narrative formulation, introducing secondary characters into the ‘story’. The writing used to describe the space of the building brought to mind Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. The series of short essays about negotiations of domestic and public space that make up the main page of the exposition recall Walter Benjamin’s essay on Naples, on the porosity of architecture, of entrances, doorways, windows, etc.
It is quite a fresh and honest work, coming from the author’s day-to-day experiences. It is also an interesting exposition because, in it, research and practice are intertwined in a complex relationship based in a practice of daily life in an apartment building. There is an intricate exploring of space in the text that leads out from the author’s apartment into a rhizome like narrative that passes through the surrounding apartments and common spaces of the building and branches out into the street and into neighbouring apartments. I find the author has well mapped this structure in the layout of the text and images of the main page.
In writing about the sixteen 3D scans he made of the apartment, the author claims “this is not an absolute and finite number”, opening up the possibility for an ongoing interaction with social/private space of his apartment. I wonder if the numbering of the sections on the main page does a bit of a disservice to this ‘lived’ process, projecting a linear reading onto what would seem to be an array of experiences not constrained by conventional temporal, spatial (and numerical) structures.
The structure of the exposition is elegant and clear. The continuation of the red tape from the squash court into the web page layout functions well as a conducting element among the diverse readings of the performance and architecture explored. The play with the architecture of the squash court and the sports centre is engaging. The sports centre is inscribed with a shifting vocation symbolic of the uncertain history of its surrounding political geography. I think the use of the space in the performance for its acoustic properties underscored well the centre’s historic resonance, emphasized by having a brass band playing (symbolising a militaristic nationalism) I would have liked a better documentation of the performance included with the exposition (the included video trailer is a confusing element as it sees to announce an event that may or may not take place, and, like a film trailer, functions less as documentation and more as a teaser for the event). The performance, the event that was the catalyst for this exposition seems a little lost within the various reflections and interpretations made by the authors, reflections that are informative and insightful, yet that seem to obfuscate any description of the performance. The rigorous, focussed simplicity of the works of Krasinski and Lucier, referred to by the authors, seems to be lacking in their own multi-faceted performance that combined musical composition, live video and participatory elements. I would like to see the authors reconsider this approach to their practice and develop it more coherently in its form, while maintaining the necessary interdisciplinary nature (in this case crossing music with architecture) of the work. This is not an easy task I understand, but artistic research approach needs to be as demanding in the rigour of the artistic practice as it is in the research emanating from it.