This thesis tests the theories of Porosity which are part of my ongoing investigation into the revision and extension of public space in the city. Porosity Research seeks to classify spaces which exist deep within the skin or fabric of privately owned city buildings. The primary vehicle for this interrogation is the use of public art in the form of a set of games called Porosity Games ??? Snakes and Ladders, Hide and Seek and Jenga. These games are played out or performed within the territory of my Australian Research Foundation Discovery Grant outcomes. Their aim is to prove the validity of the research and to provoke interrogation of that research. The marginality of public art makes it ideally suited to the task of commenting on or contradicting the main body of the text of public space in the city. This contradiction is central to the work of this thesis. One of the vital needs or reasons for this work lies in finding ways of preventing cities from being shut down as a result of rampant capitalism in the ???Age of Terror???. Porosity as a strategy attacks this trend. It seeks the dissolution of architecture through a type of mapping which dissolves existing boundaries associated with rights of access. Capitalism needs to be continually measured by mapping or defining what is public against what is private. It can be argued that the social construction of a city is as important as its physical manifestation as buildings. It can also then be argued that a city which allows public space to penetrate its private space enables a healthier social construction. Fundamental to this thesis is the idea that the survival of the Western city depends on an increased density of public space and multiple ground planes as opposed to one. This creates three dimensional public access and alleviates congestion at the level of the street both for cars and for pedestrians. The Porosity Games are a first step in the transformation of the city through their successful reinvention of internal circulation spaces as game space. Game 1: Snakes and Ladders and Game 2: Hide and Seek both operate without interruption by the propriety of the buildings. Game 3: Jenga then intentionally heightened the risk of capture and eviction of the players for transgression within the climate of fear. Both the framework of surveillance and the intention to claim private space for public use, make the performances and the Porosity Research a useful progression in the project of transformation and the city as a plastic medium for the artist to interrogate.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/257561 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Goodwin, Richard, School of Fine Arts, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Fine Arts |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Richard Goodwin, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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