Proposal for communication center The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) in Oslo, Norway. In collaboration with Public Art Norway (KORO)
Idea and conceptual background:
We have taken as a starting point the given terms of architecture, namely the two “missing floor areas” as in project and re-inserted these in 1:1 scale at the bottom of “circular pillar room”. The top surface is completely centered in relation to the “circular pillar room” while the lower is placed slightly forward. A powerful video projector (light) throws a circulated picture above that fits precisely with the top circular surface and one can observe a projection of different landscapes with inserted circles.
The basic idea is that stakeholders in countries where NORAD is involved and operative are invited, literally in the production of content of the video projection, if they would like to materialize and install the equivalent of two perfect circles, as the Centre’s own “satellites”, a place in their neighborhood. These circles may be placed in the countryside, in urban areas, in the woods, by a river, but preferably related to a place where it connected to educational aspects, whether at primary level or higher education, preferably in a sort of schoolyard. The structures may be left to oblivion after implementation or could be appropriated as a sculpture in public space. The point is not to represent a small piece of Norway or NORAD via an abstract modern sculpture as an expanded exhibition area of the center, but they may be playing out more or less incognito, without conditional obligations or manual for use. Each participant stakeholder in this expanded public art project will even determine the relationship between the two surfaces and how to communicate the project in their own community. If the circles will stand side by side, standing vertically, close or touching, far from each other etc. Several thought variations are presented as examples, related to the video projection.
After construction of these sculptures, or circles, the work will be photographed and documented on film. These short films forms the basis for the video projection which will appear in the NORAD center in Oslo, projected “top-down” vertically. Essentially there is here a nearby theme of the Millennium Development Goals and the ethics they represent, but rather an effort approach of development aid basic ideas. As a goal, or intention, as poetic variables that form the basis for comparing and develop personal empathy, where metric aspects like halving, doubling, increase, reduction percentage or number down or up, taking in the circle urform. Rhetorical concepts of development debate terminology can with a little goodwill be read into the work’s structure. “The Aesthetic Dimension” is borrowed from the book with the same title, written by Herbert Marcuse in 1978.