Chongqing Rooftop Gardens, RISO print, edition of 80, 2017.
Drone Flight – Huangjueping, Chongqing, Video, 2017.
The Floor Is Lava, various interactive reconstructed virtual environments, 2017.
Exhibited at Medo Arts, Vienna, Austria.
“The floor is lava” (a children’s game to navigate the room as if the floor was molten lava) transforms the way the players think of space and how they practice it. It produces new modes of engagement through the reconstructed utility of objects in the environment: a form of role-play-research to discover a different world from the constituent parts of the old. The scenario is terrifying and fantastic, but in playing the game we take a precarious situation in our stride, and develop new tactics for negotiating it.
Harle’s research focusses on extending digital scanning technology beyond ‘capture’, exploring the potential for play in virtual space as experimental knowledge production. This exhibition is about dealing with the ethical crisis of ‘precarity’; showcasing rooftop gardens in the industrial city of Chongqing, China, an expansive photogrammetric reconstruction of the landscape of Yunnan, and an interactive Virtual Reality experience of digital heritage. It detaches VR from its Utopian revelry, re-appropriating it as a tool tactical research.
“The floor is lava // Der Boden ist Lava” (orig. ein Spiel für Kinder, bei dem sie mit Raum umgehen, als ob der Boden geschmolzene Lava wäre) verwandelt die Art und Weise, wie Spieler an Raum denken und wie sie mit ihm interagieren. So w e r d e n n e u e F o r m e n d e s E n g a g e m e n t s d u r c h r e k o n s t r u i e r t e Verwendungsmöglichkeiten von Objekten in ihrer Umwelt erzeugt: fast wie eine Form des Rollenspiels und doch gleichsam der Forschung, wird dabei eine andere Welt entdeckt, durch die Bestandteile der alten.
