The project and the book
5445 de Gaspé Ave. / ground floor

March 31 to April 30, 2016
Opening and book launch
Thursday, March 31, 2016 – 5  PM
Artist talk – 6 PM

www.dssots.com
(Digital Sketch Series of Translational Spaces)

www.dssots.com is an interactive website full of animated GIFs, digital drawings, 3D animations, and sounds. This digital hyperlink journey takes users through architectural sketches, structures, and environments that are as dynamic as they are still. This looping maze parallels the participant’s own interaction and experience with the digital. Perhaps frantic, multiple, overlapped, and infinite, the level of interaction with the site is determined only by the time available and desire to be in it, with no beginning or end. This interactive website presents 53 webpages and pop-up windows of different Digital Architectural Environments, each with their unique virtual landscapes. The visual narrative of the website shows schematics of 3D drawing animations, models of virtual architectures, and drawings of structures in translation that explore the temporal and spatial motion of light and shadows. These digital architectures are animated spatial collages that repeat infinitely.

The publication on Translational Spaces, includes an essay on Digital Architectural Environments that introduces the perceptual state of being in a constant state of translation between real and virtual experiences. In the publication, short fictional texts are paired up with digital sketches that narrate places of memory, imagination, desire and dreams, as built recollections mixed with made up places and real physical structures. Translational Spaces present digital architectural environments where there is an infinite process of self-identification within the present digital culture we live in. The translation of the animated structures on the web showcase multiple spaces that are always in motion. These digital animated sketches present potential architectural environments that linger in our minds, that exist in the imagination and have been or could have been experienced within.

Santiago Tavera is an interdisciplinary digital artist born in Colombia. He migrated to Canada at a young age where he began his exploration of digital culture and its relation to the experience of a transmigrating body. Santiago uses digital media as a tool for experimentation that can simulate a state of disembodiment. His creative-research explores digital media and its capacity to alter visual and spatial perception. His work examines viewers’ sensory stimulation within the digital realm and the physical one, exploring the effects digital media has on social interactions, communicational skills, inhabitation of spaces and notions of time. Santiago’s digital drawings work as blueprints for potential immersive installations and interactive projects. He constructs digital architectural environments, where there is a constant translation between digital and physical lines, lights and colours.