Projective views

Suess's visual essay asks the research question of where the artwork and/or architecture resides in the artefacts and processes of reconstruction of art installations. The commissioning of the chapter prompted Suess's production of a piece of work which developed and extended her original expanded film piece for the FLOW exhibition at the Wunderlich Gallery, Melbourne. Her own lack of a primary experience of the installation, and the paucity of temporal documentation of the work, led Suess to produce a "reconstruction" of the original installation through the making of an architectural model, model photographs, and artists' film. The original Wunderlich installation explored the notion of the window as threshold between interior and exterior, employing film projections depicting a series of views of, and through windows from a number of locations worldwide. The projected window together with the interior space of the gallery, and the real window with a view to the local exterior of the gallery building, collectively formed a new spatial condition for the duration of the projection. The 1:33 scale paper and card reconstruction housed a miniature data projector. Made and photographed in Suess's London studio, the model's "real" exterior view is not that of the original gallery in Melbourne. From this model a series of photographs and an artists' film provide "secondary" documentation of the original installation, but also constitute new artwork. Suess uses this new work to explore the idea of "reconstruction" as a form of "construction", and positions this in parallel to the ideas of "construction" taking place in the reading of architectural drawing and structural film. The resultant artwork and text presented in the visual essay constitute part of Suess's continuing research agenda to establish a hybrid moving image practice - the "architectural moving drawing" - exploiting contemporary digital moving image technology for new transdisciplinary methodologies between architectural representation and artists' film