BETA-REAL: The Materiality of Loss

The Other Place Seminar | Syracuse, NY

Spring 2018 | Linda Zhang, 2017/18 Boghosian Fellow

In Collaboration with the seminar class

Beta-Real offers itself as the in-between of what is remembered and what is forgotten. In these spaces between, are brief traces of memories, histories and identities. The Beta-Real aims to be the “beta-version” or still in development, always changing and never ready to be finished. This work was made using slipcasting as an iterative method, an alternative to conventional architectural preservation and reconstruction. In this project in particular, the focus was on the Erie Canal cutting through Syracuse. A seemingly banal site’s history is slowly revealed through the process of the slipcasting. The direct process of slipcasting adds an additional layer to the typical architectural design process. With the creation of molds, negatives, positives, material and immaterial, the Beta-Real begins to form.

Each layer of the installation created was designed by an individual, coming together to create a larger form. With my partner, we dealt with the physical and socio-economic factors of the larger scale of the canal. Multiple layers of both positive and negative effects show a constant intertwining of both the physical land as well as the ups and downs of human life. Additionally, the slipcasting process was interrupted physically with marbling and splattered clay to show this eruption of the normal. It is this constant paradox of real and un-real that this project aims to not figure out, but begin to understand.

[An additional aspect of this project was transporting it to McGill University for an exhibition. The installation was disassembled and fragmented, therefore only leaving fragments of the original copy we produced. This becomes a starting point for another iterative reproduction process, this time through images desaturated, pixelized, tiled and reassembled as atmospheres.]