Real Time : Features & reviews

Patamatic cinema. Thomas Wiesner in the Forum

A review of Thomas Wiesner’s lecture in the Forum, Tuesday 24 November 2009.

The human eye features two types of photoreceptors: at the centre of the retina approximately 4.5 million ‘cone’ cells are concentrated, good at distinguishing detail and colour, while distributed away from the centre there are roughly 90 million ‘rod’ cells, which aren’t. The rod cells are great for distinguishing movement in low light and are used in peripheral vision, helping us to avoid sabre-toothed tigers in the night.

Peripheral vision gives rise to an intriguing phenomenon of perception, whereby at times the best way to visually locate something is not to focus directly on it but to look for it ‘out of the corner of your eye’.

The video blogger Thomas Wiesner employs a strategy that could be described as a kind of ‘peripheral vision’ when he creates the short films for his ongoing web-based video project Spacetwo:Patalab. Wiesner screened some of these films as part of his lecture at Spring House recently. The three to four minute shorts capture abstract fragments of Wiesner’s daily life and travels and they reveal his abiding interest in the body in space, as enunciated by cinema and choreography. Over the last four years he has posted over seven hundred of these ‘voodles’, as he calls them, archiving them on a website that he describes ‘as a small, unassuming, experimental visual laboratory’.

Wiesner employs a range of techniques when filming, using both the constraints of a fixed camera position with a fixed time scale, as well as a less structured approach in which the camera is held at arms length, away from the eye. This last technique makes for an interesting pose that is simultaneously both nonchalant and inquisitive. As Wiesner says, this viewpoint is ‘difficult to place’ and is often more like that of ‘a dwarf or a child’. Operating in this peripheral location away from the normal centre of the gaze his camera captures life askance, resulting in surprising, amusing and frequently beautiful images. The films, particularly when viewed ‘en-filade’, as it were, merge to become more than a collection of subjective fragments – and begin to re-present the concrete spatial environment in which the human body finds itself, a world in which we are both an embedded object and an active, creative force.

Trained as an architect, Wiesner grew up in France and lived in the Middle East before settling in Copenhagen, where he now teaches at the Architecture School at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art. Operating as an outsider, on the periphery of the architectural mainstream, seems to be a self-conscious part of Wiesner’s modus operandi and further distance is created by his use of a pseudonym (Sam Rensiew) to post his films. Identity, like the camera, held at arms length. During the presentation Weisner alluded to the way that the deliberate engagement with distance helps him to illuminate his own view of his practice and he has described a multi-cultural upbringing as generating ‘oblique views’ from which to read reality.

Wiesner was talking at ASD as part of Daniel Serafimovski’s Cinema and Architecture course, which is one of the electives that run alongside the core modules of the undergraduate architecture program. In the light of Wiesner’s tactic of using the periphery as a vantage point, it’s tempting to describe the cinema elective as operating in a similar way within the broader syllabus. It can provide students with ways of perceiving their work and the world around them more clearly, via diversions and alternatives to the focus of studio work.

When design work is heavy going and inspiration seems in short supply, the use of peripheral vision can help to illuminate the gloom. A visit to Wiesner’s website at http://patalab02.blogspot.com is rewarding at any time however, whether or not inspiration is in short supply, and is highly recommended.