Static Gallery – Liverpool – Seoul X-Change8 – 14 October 2010, 11.00 – 18.00 daily
Liverpool-Seoul X-Change has been produced by Paul Sullivan and LJMU Architecture Students Steven Thorpe and Jonathan Woodland and could not have been done without the contributions of the Liverpool public and the Liverpool-Seoul X-Change facebook group who contributed to the project.
Project devised by Listen to the City, Seoul and Static Gallery, Liverpool. What do the people of Seoul, South Korea think of Liverpool, UK? What do the people of Liverpool, UK think of Seoul, South Korea? How do the answers to these questions develop into drawings, artchitechtural models, texts, novels, and future documentaries?
Liverpool
Stage 1: Public ideas
Between the 11 – 28 August 2010, Static Gallery invited the public in Liverpool to enter the gallery in order to submit either a text or a drawing (or both) on an A4 piece of paper, stating what their idea was of Seoul, South Korea.
Although simple in structure, the project questioned the perceptions of what people actually knew about the city and in what ways the media had formed those opinions. Without the aid of reference books, google, or wiki, the answers submitted by the public formed the raw data required to complete the project. Another set of raw data was submitted online on facebook.
As part of the project, free tea and coffee was provided and the possibility of winning a free trip to Korea.
Seoul Terrain
The problematic in Stage 2 was that in order to translate the content – or even the meaning in the public’s ideas of what Seoul was – into and architectural form, there needed to be a terrain with a scale (no matter how abstract). This became the main focus of activity and eventual resolution, otherwise there was only a collection of A4 snap-shots of information, fragments of an imagined city of Seoul.
Therefore, the resulting process was to scan each of the submitted A4 responses and develop a new terrain from the actual structure of the responses: Repetitive motifs, typology formations, text-sace/drawn-space/non-space. Using this process, drawing data was developed from each A4 which in turn was fed into the laser machines at Liverpool John Moores University Art and Design Academy, resulting in the fabrication of a new 3D terrain of Seoul.
Stage 3: A new Seoul
Having developed a new series of 3D terrain sections (70 in total) that directly corresponded to the original A4 sheets of information, the third element of the project was to go back to the original documents and develop ideas and architecture that relate to the possibilities in their content rather than their structure. This process (ongoing) allowed Static (Paul Sullivan and LJMU Architecture Students Steven Thorpe and Jonathan Woodward) to begin a new series of drawings and interventions into out newly formed Seoul landscape.
Walking Tour
As with the preliminary research period of the project in Seoul that was carried out 15-28 May 2010, a walking tour of key areas of Liverpool’s architectural fabric will be conducted by Paul Sullivan of Static Gallery during the exhibition.
Please email: paul@statictrading.com to enqure or book a place.
Project to also be presented 3rd November 2010 in Space Hamilton, Seoul: (http://www.podopodo.net/hamilton/list.asp)
