 Eglise de Saint Joseph, Photos by: Nima Navab “We live from our bodies: from because human perception and action extend outward from the materiality of the flesh and organ and bone to items and sources of sensation that exist outside the boundaries of the skin. From be- cause the body is the center of human experience... Our relationship to all else is structured from the position, location and attributes of our bodies.” - Franck, From the Body, in “Architecture from the Inside Out” 46 The Former ‘Eglise de Saint Joseph’ In collaboration with Concordia’s Topological Media Lab (TML) and McGill’s Facility for Architectural Research in Media & Mediation (FARMM) I began working on project Sinter at the beginning of this semester. It is through this connection that I have gained access to church Saint Joseph at the corner of Richmond and Notre-Dame in Little Burgundy. Upon my first visit it became very clear that this church, currently under construction, exposes a multitude of narratives, which makes it an ideal subject for exploration.  Eglise de Saint Joseph, Main Interior, Photo by: Nima Navab “The energetic effect of color affects our entire organism. It influences physical procedures. It also affects our psyche, our feelings, thought processes, and emotions. Through holistic associations and parallel sensations within our sensory organization, colors stimulate not only the sense of sight, but also other sensory organs. The intensity of color stimuli and the entire context in which they are perceived play a significant role... A certain color impression not only evokes a momentary visual sensation, but also involves our entire experience, memory, and thought processes.” - Mahnke, Meerwein, Rodeck, “Colour: Communication in Architectural Space” 23  Eglise de Saint Joseph, Side Room, Photo by: Nima Navab “Spatial construction expresses [the] desire in the projection of the body into space, in the enactment of the interac- tion of the body with structure, and in the dialectic within structure.” - Hendrix, “Architectural Forms and Philosophical Structures” 229 “The concept of kinesthesia refers to a body which is sentient and which moves and engages with the world through a form of corporeal consciousness. In other words, perception (of the world) is not cognitive, whereby thinking is separated from the body and located within the mind, but rather occurs through a ‘thinking’ body, which is seen to have particular kinds of intelligences and competences.” -Blackman, “The Key Concepts: The Body,” 84 Research Creation The intention behind this research creation is to first and foremost capture the intra-actions, the experience (for example the entanglement with light and colors) and be able to translate their significance (the story-so-far) into my creation piece. If the outcome can embody all the research within an audio/ visual sensory intervention then great, but if not, I will create a piece that will serve as a conceptual basis and as a ‘start’ to the final project, which I can lat- er implement with TML. For now I will continue exploring various entanglements based on my journal during various visits to site and begin to further narrow down my area of research. Ideally I would like to use non-intrusive sensing mechanisms, such as light sensors, pickup-mics and camera tracking to be able to track some phenomenological characteristics of space and the experience of it in users and get some usable data from this, that I can further animate it back into the space, through the medium of light, sound, projection etc. as to burn these experiences back into space like shadows leaving traces.  Eglise de Saint Joseph, Sinter, Image Source: http://farmmresearch.com The significance of the map: first of all it gives an understanding of the urban layout of church and its neighborhood closer to the time of its creation. Second, through color mapping we can get an overview sense of the materiality of site: Red: brick | Yellow: wood | Blue: stone, etc.  1912 Map of the church with legend, Fire Insurance Maps of Montreeal, Image Source: http://www.banq.qc.ca/ |
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