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Enjoy!
The Syncretic Temple
A strange structure under Primrose Hill is discovered. The protagonist explores the building, moving through a set of spaces which construct a narrative symbolic of the travels and experiences of the unknown builder, which culminate in the discovery of a strangely familiar form: a constructed landscape.
The protagonist, through activating the space with the printmaking press, is also left with artifacts from the builder – prints which describe a route and its territory, the content and meaning of which he is curious to explore further.
Full set here.
Plates and Prints
The Plate Overlays were composed of qualitative information from each of the sites.
Save the first, which was laser cut from a CAD file into engraving plastic, these were then drawn down to aluminium engraving metal and printed by the traditional intaglio method.
Full set here.
Printmaking Process
Thank you to Inky Cuttlefish Print Shop, where I was given a tutorial in the fascinating and beautiful process of intaglio printing. I learned that printmaking can be a focus of artistic intent which brings incredible richness beyond that available to the engraver armed with just the engraving tools.
View full set here.
Quantitative Landscapes
The information taken from the Chronological and Distance Based Graph of Walk 2 is displayed as a set of landscape plates laid-over the area of the system. By reinserting it into the territory in three dimensions and allowing the form of the landscape to be determined by the quantities taken at each point of measure, it generates a new systemwide landscape from these local quantitative measures.
View full set here.
Plate Overlays
Collage of information, images, and textures. taken from the locale of the waypoint. The framework of each plate is a diagram of the lines of headings from the location to the other points of the mandala. This is a representation of the context which incorporates both objective data such as plans and qualitative data, such as the textures, ephemera, and “flavor” of the locale to represent the place non-traditionally.
Reconstrucing Walk 2
Diagrams which reconstruct the second walk of the edge of the “Mandala” System with the aid of a GPS tracking device.
The GPS device allowed me to record my speed, heading, and location at set intervals. Thank you to the UCL School of Geography for use of their equipment.
A graph showing the quantities recorded on my walk. The data taken by hand was – the Openness of the Space around the waypoint, the level of Illumination, the level of human Activity, the relative “Anxiousness,”and the Loudness.
These waypoints were determined by stopping every five minutes. The distance between each waypoint is the distance traveled in that time.
So in reading the graph, the distance between each mark on the "x" axis is proportional to the geographic distance traversed, but the time between each "x" value is always five minutes.
The data taken electronically was the number of each waypoint, the distance traveled between, and the average speed.
This walk was undertaken with the aid of a GPS tracking device which allowed me to record my speed, heading, and location at set intervals. Thank you to the UCL School of Geography for use of their equipment.
Click here for the rest of the diagrams reconstructing this walk.
The Quantitative Scale
To chart both the qualitative and quantitative measures of my “mandala,” I walked the circuit between each of the landmarks with the aid of a GPS device to track my location. I stopped every five minutes to measure five pieces of quantitative information. After collating and organizing this information, I then rebuilt the graph in three dimensions across the city, the locations of each point on the graph matching the point at which that data was gathered.
I had initially done these in a less clear manner (which I will upload soon) but for clarity, I simplified the color palette so that the the materials and data they carry are easily differentiable.
Find the rest of these images here.
Stoppages
Geometry Selection Rubric with Stoppages
Having determined the system through the previous mapping, I then walked the system to understand it quantitatively and qualitatively as a route, not just as a series of points.
The final route is 19 km. This diagram registers the first walk of the system against the geometric “ideal” geometries laid across the city, similar to Marcel Duchamp’s concept of a “Stoppage.”
Diagramming the System
Previously I mapped “ley lines,” as popularized by Watkins and Street, and invented some of my own. I was interested in the dialogue between conspiracy and coincidence, similar to the consipratorial note / shopping list in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.*
While many ascribe to ley lines a spiritual significance, the idea that the alignment of the features and edifices of the city could be just coincidence is powerful by its own right. So, with irony in method, but trust in process, I diagrammed the spatial relationships between these sites, keeping in mind their symbolism and “meanings.”
The extent of the system was defined by starting in connecting points from the centre outward, and ending after the points stopped intersecting.
Diagram of All the Ley Lines
Diagram of Leys through Locations of Churches (as identified in source materials)
In addition to Primrose Hill, five other sites kept recurring through the operation. Clockwise from the top, they are St. Luke’s Church Old Street, Christ Church Spitalfields, the Swiss Re Tower, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the London Eye. Primrose Hill and St. Paul’s are both significant sites in William Blake’s cosmology, and Nicholas Hawksmoor was architect or part-designer of St. Luke’s and Christ Church. I saw each of the modern buildings as a symbol of each of these figures.
In addition to being a new addition to Watkins’s “Coronation Line,” the London Eye can be seen symbolically as an ouroboros: the snake eating its own tail, which is symbolic of eternal return – like Blake’s ever-turning dualities. The Swiss Re tower, is a modern symbol of Hawksmoor: an obelisk which echoes his design of the spire at St. Luke’s Old Street.
Blake and Hawksmoor Sites
This set of sites then constitutes a “mandala” and through quantitative and qualitative study, knowledge of the system is built.
*Foucault’s Pendulum was a work of fiction as commentary upon the earlier Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which rocketed to international fame by positing a conspiracy involving the Merovingian royal family without any scrutiny of the sources of the information, which turned out to be completely spurious.
Duane McLemore 