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Quondamopolis

a deliberate deterritorialization

17 May

2014.05.21 09:22

The first Tarantino film I saw was Pulp Fiction in 1994 and soon after that architecture started becoming very virtual. --2009.08.16

Started work on 5301c on the 17th and finally finished it last night.

Saw Tim's Vermeer late Monday afternoon--experimenting, learning and discovering via reenactment indeed. Exactly similar to the subject of (the forthcoming) 9020f:

After rereading some of Tafuri’s text on the Campo Marzio, for some reason it dawned on me that my redrawing of the Campo Marzio is an attempt to walk in Piranesi’s own footsteps, with the best of my ability, meaning, I am trying to learn how Piranesi’s imagination operated by doing the same thing that he did--literally redrawing the plan. I am trying to get as close to Piranesi’s own drawing/designing procedure.

I then thought of what Collingwood said about not being able to truly learn from history because we are not able to actually experience history. In this sense I am trying to re-experience a specific historic occurrence, albeit over 200 years later and with a radically different drawing technology. --1997.08.08

Chris, somewhere along the way you completely missed the point--it's not "reenacting is to be in that moment of Piranesi's act of creation." It's "experimenting, learning and discovering via reenactment."

No where did I ever refer to (or imply) reenactment as an art. You're the one that's doing that.

Sure you can ask, but you're not really asking, at least not without (falsely) implying that that's how I see and/or use reenactment. What you've really done is challenge the use of reenactment by fabricating the notion that I somehow want to say I've created art by redrawing the Ichnographia and thereby also that I'm now a reincarnation of Piranesi. Whereas, if you really wanted to challenge my use of reenactment, you would ask "How have you experimented?", "How/what have you learned?", and "How/what have you discovered?" But you're not asking those questions because then you'd see that I indeed used reenactment to the point of experimenting, learning and discovering.

If you really want to know whether "reenactment [can] be an art or is it a technique for creating art?", perhaps you should conduct your own reenactment/experiment.

I have to make one confession: When I started to redraw the Ichnographia (via CAD in 1987) I had no knowledge of the 'philosophy of history' notion of reenactment. Soon after learning about the 'philosophy of history' notion of reenactment (in 1997), I realized that my redrawing of the Ichnographia was a form of reenactment. It was exactly like learning about the workings of reenactment while unwitting performing a reenactment, where, thus, second-hand knowledge (of reenactment) quickly became first-hand knowledge (of reenactment).

Reenactment. Try it. You might just learn something.

And sometimes I work like an artist. Saw what you tried to do several times already. Experimentally found that the 'axis of life' within the Ichnographia matches the Benjamin Franklin Parkway of Philadelphia; learned that Piranesi was not arbitrary in his composition of the Ichnographia, rather that he delineated a narrative of the architectural history of Rome spanning from the altar of Mars (c. 750 BC) to the sarcophagus of Empress Maria (c. 400 AD); discovered that Piranesi printed two differing versions of the Ichnographia (1999.05.14). Enjoy Atlantic City, an almost, kinda-sorta reenactment of Las Vegas.

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