Another week, another project, another learning log entry.
our guest tutors for the Zeitgiest Heist are Adam Levene, Benjamin Reichen and Man Somerlink. also joining are the usual suspects, Tricia Austin, Kevin Flude and Sarah Featherstone.
- zeitgeist
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(n) : the spirit of the age; the taste, outlook, and spirit characteristic of a period; a phenomenon based on fate where something simultaneously happens everywhere at a certain time
(n) : a robbery or burglary, especially from an institution such as a bank or museum
the initial research conducted for this project included the selection of a location, place or space where an object was stolen, lost or missing and then to document that non-space or void space as a photograph. here is the location i chose:
In a workshop, all the students exposed there photographic work alongside three dimensional work which we had to make in one hour from foraged materials and found objects (read: garbage). tutors then tried to place the newly made object within the non-space depicted by the photograph.
using whatever we learned from this experimental exercise, we then preceded to part two of the brief, which involved using the “missing” approach or methodology to choose a building or public space based on the lack or deficiency of a story.
most of a buildings’ interior and exterior architecture is constructed to communicate definite themes. a police station for instance communicates to the visitor connotations that may include power, intimidation, functionality, confinement, etc.
after considering the identity/message/story of a handful of buildings and locations in London, my group choose the Greenwich Observatory where the Prime Meridian was established. this was an obvious choice for its socio-cultural associations and political symbolism. The very fact that the modern understanding of time is defined with the Prime Meridian as measure lead us to risk a reinterpretation of the brief in order to argue the Meridian as an architectural, imperialistic construct.
using the philosophies of the Long Now Foundation, we designed an intervention that included a campaign to enrich visitors of the observatory. mostly we wanted to see how people envisioned the future.
in the 21st century, most people envision it as a distopia ridden with disease, poverty and nuclear fallout barely held together by an ultra-police-state. this future is usually placed within the the confines of ones own lifetime and not beyond generations. imagine the implications and the goals that we collectively strive towards from this shortsightedness!
in order to free the minds of our audience from the heavy handed oppression of time in its current definition, our heist was to steal time itself. this proved to be far too difficult a campaign for only the four of us to achieve in one morning. oh well.
here is video documentation of the project:
villainous.biz 
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