The ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, vacuum packed.

Saturday 6th June 2011 saw the launch of the post-exhibition catalogue following up last December’s ‘Invisible Machines’ exhibition, held at Grand Parade in Brighton, which investigated the various relations between machines and architecture. Although the invocation of machines in architecture is well-trodden ground (dating back not just to modernism but to Book X of Vitruvius) the exhibition suggested that the many relations between architecture and machines have mostly been approached individually and proposed instead to attempt to discuss them in parallel.

To this end, curator Ben Sweeting assembled a group of exhibitors whose work relates to machines in quite different ways – from the physicality of Michael Wihart’s hydraulic devices and Tom Foulsham’s balancing installations to the abstract relationships of Tim Norman’s and Charlotte Raleigh’s drawings of the cosmos and bumblebees respectively.

The limited edition post-exhibition catalogue, which contained a selection of material from the exhibition, was assembled live at East London’s Redundant Architects Recreation Association and individually vacuum packed along with various small objects gleaned from the R.A.R.A. workshop. The event was accompanied by a BBQ as well as by the amplified sound of the vacuum packing machine. As R.A.R.A.’s Joe Swift points out, guests were left “with the conundrum of how to look at the fantastic images inside without disturbing the vacuum within this beautiful object”.

A pdf version of the catalogue will be made available next week, so be sure to check out http://invisiblemachines.wordpress.com/

Contributors: Michael Aling, Tom Foulsham, Ersi Ioannidou, Glenn Longden-Thurgood, Tim Norman, Charlotte Raleigh, Ben Sweeting, Michael Wihart

The RARA workshop in east London

Barking from Without was part of the 2010 Cities Methodologies exhibition and conference organised by the UCL Urban Lab. The exhibition took place at the Slade Research Centre on Woburn Square from 5 to 7 May 2010.

Barking from Without is an interactive installation presenting material from an ongoing case study of the new Barking Town Square in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. Part of a broader research project on design in the contemporary public realm, the case study is supported primarily by participant-observer methods that draw as much on ethnographic fieldwork as on Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. The research is presented in the form of an open dialogue which visitors are encouraged to join by leaving written comments.

All material from the installation is posted on barking-assemblage.org under the category Barking from Without. Comments are still very much welcome! Please participate by sending your comments to comment@barking-assemblage.org