AUGMENTED SPATIALITY

RAP PAR’s Augmented Spatiality is a sound and light installation for Abercrombie Lane in Sydney, Australia, created for the City of Sydney’s 2012 Laneway Art and City Spaces program. The project was one of eight selected in an international competition, and the only one from outside Australia.

The multidisciplinary team RAP PAR explores the idea that, with the advent of digital media and growing environmental awareness, we are better able than at any other point in human history to access and experience the formal qualities of the urban environment around us. While social media and global commerce have transcended the confines of place, their impact on culture has made place-centred experiences and spatial awareness more important, not less.

Curator Pelin Dervis proposes to reveal the distinctive ambient qualities of Sydney and Istanbul as separate urban experiences, while also bringing these sampled qualities into dialogue with one another, in a form of cultural exchange. The result brings the two cities together in a shared experience for visitors to Abercrombie Lane. The dialogue between the two cities unfolds through a spatial narrative, using spatial equivalents to translate sounds sampled in Istanbul into a sequence of compression, gateway, and extension within the laneway experience.

Abercrombie Lane was specifically selected because, among the eight laneways presented to the competition participants, it was the only one that resembled the narrow streets of Istanbul. The architectural approach developed by SANAL uses “the line” as a means of creating volume, geometry, apertures, and form, both perceptually and physically. From George Street, a formal “gateway” will be created to arouse people’s curiosity, while from Tank Stream Way, an “entrance” will encourage the flow of everyday traffic. The installation can be experienced as a geometric intervention without passing through it; as visitors move through the laneway, however, the geometry expands and contracts, evoking the dynamism of Istanbul’s streets.

Artist Refik Anadol visualises the ambient sound data collected from the streets of Istanbul through sound and light compositions that give form to the geometry. The sequence of compositions reveals the work both as a whole and through its intricate spatial structure and progression. Visitors experience the work in its entirety by moving through the space.

RAP PAR, a team from Istanbul, was selected to create Augmented Spatiality for the 2012 Abercrombie Laneway program. It was the first advanced digital media installation created for the Laneways. The City of Sydney took a considerable risk in selecting the proposal, as the technology had never before been used outdoors at this scale or for such an extended period. Augmented Spatiality captured the City’s imagination with the prospect of creating a new experience for visitors, while also contributing to the Laneways project’s promotion of innovation in digital media culture. The use of more than 100 metres of EL wire arranged in geometric formations, each equipped with customised electronics to support Refik Anadol’s complex visualisations of urban sounds sampled and composed in Istanbul, was a first of its kind.