PEIXUAN (OLIVIA) XU 2020-21 YEAR 2

Beyond the Visible

The Portfolio Prize

A cinema and media art centre for visual and acoustic experimentation, welcoming filmmakers, media artists, and the public. An ode to superstitious beliefs, the building explores how cinematic techniques can offer experiences of the phenomenological and supernatural.

Through a series of constructed illusions, the building examines superstitious beliefs and their metaphors asking how cinematic technologies can and might reconfigure these through the lens of the phenomenological and supernatural.

The building manipulates cinematic experience through optical architectures and virtual realities: the visitor enters an ambiguous borderland where cracks begin to appear in the (constructed) reality. A sequence of reflective elements trace the central atrium to construct an artificially sited new panorama of Westminster. The choreographed reflections of the cityscape beyond the visible immerse the spectators within a series of overlapping layers, shifting places, scales and times. Challenging the power of the image and the realities constructed illusions, the project questions notions of absolute trust in the visible, both physically and virtually.

Tutors: Greg Storrar, Farlie Reynolds