FLAT

High-rise architecture, since its inception in the 1880s, has fundamentally altered our urban terrain, disrupted and reconfigured social systems as well as having a dramatic, lasting impact on our aesthetic understanding of human spaces and the ways in which we interact or live within them.

For generations, artists, musicians and filmmakers have been inspired by such landscapes where a fascination for brutalist and high-rise architecture has acted as a dynamic visual resource - a visceral playground of science, art, technology, commerce and humanity. For a medium such as animation the high-rise provides a particularly rich offering, with the rhythms and flows of space, time, history, politics and popular culture interweaving (or often collide) to form repetitions and structures for animators to work with.

FLAT (2020) uses the development of UK high-rise social housing from the 1960s as a motif to explore the creation, application and perception of space within 3D CGI. Here the emphasis is on perpetual regeneration of ‘good’ ideas born to serve idealistic humanitarian narratives, that are later perceived as ‘bad’ ideas resulting in constant flows of demolition and redevelopment.

FLAT, presented here as a projection installation observes high-rise architecture as a mechanised social machine, an environment of spatial disorientation and a source of visual symbolic interpretation – a modular, physical incarnation of the animated frame.