Who Looks Outside Dreams; Who Looks Inside Awakens

It would be personally disatisfying and publicly shameful to allow the collected knowledge, research, history and observational data to be forever shelved atop a dusty microfiche cabinet in the academic tombs of UBC Library. This, my second attempt (the first attempt being a plea to Kathleen Bartell for representation and input on my Thesis Committee) at confronting the director of the Art Gallery, through a City of Vancouver design competition, with a proposal for a newly invigorated civic heart (space) in Vancouver. '21 Places' offered me a unique opportunity to 'publicize' the more than 18 months of academic study of what I truly believe to harbour the best potential for 'the' Civic Square of Vancouver. The following presentation panels are a hyphenated version of my Master Thesis, presented as pointed ideas, in an attempt to stimulate discourse, for a City that continues to look outward - ignoring that within.

TWO SIDES TO STAGING PUBLIC SPACE: Enhancing Civic Function and Establishing Symbolic Content to the Vancouver Art Gallery Landscape

The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) Square Plan proposes to integrate opportunities for artistic and cultural expression into the surrounding landscape. The primary goal is to bring an active and vibrant cultural life to the City’s centre now, and in the years to come - embodying the spirit, character, and cumulative history of the city.

In seeking to understand and distill the processes of museum culture and public space, themes emerge: museum-landscape analogs. These analogs are derived with the intention of their use as a framework for future design - an alternative way of interpreting site, as well as the greater landscape.

The infusion of art will animate the spaces, staging a dialogue between the gallery and the public, and the public with each other. Future expansion needs of the Gallery will provide opportunities for the enhancement of Vancouver’s civic centre. Beyond aesthetic enhancement, it is important that the space responds to the needs of its citizenry. Enrichment of the Vancouver Art Gallery Square will restore vibrancy and reverence to the center of our city, a center that shall ultimately invite people and reinvigorate public life.

Madfish.001.VANCOUVER LANscapes

This is the full text (condensed for leaf insert print) accompaniment to Madfish's debut CD Release 12.2006

Experiences and perceptions of landscape are being replaced by obsessive-compulsive tendencies of documentation and reproduction. The art of understanding and experiencing place – using our senses - has been rapidly replaced by the monopolistic, pictorial representation of landscape. Techno-media and pictorial representation have anaesthetized the individual response to our surroundings by reshaping our identities, and reinventing our notions of what ‘landscape’ is.

The authenticity of today’s landscape is questionable. What we see is not often true to its contextual origins. The environments we are creating as designers are a product of our increased consumption and exchange of ‘images’ as commode substitutes for ‘places’. The insatiable consumption of such imagery drastically alters our own response to places when we actually ‘see’ them - illuminating our complacency and ambivalence in acknowledging the ‘natural’ landscape that exists before us. ‘Places’ of ‘scenic beauty’ have become the focus of marketing, advertising, and tourism. Seduced with imagery that distils the experience of a particular place into a form that is palatable and attractive to the human psyche, our memories of, and notions about landscape are being rethought and reinvented.

With an accuracy that is both authoritative and enticing the images of landscape today are highly composed and frozen in time, illuminating their aesthetic qualities and implanting a preconceived notion of landscape within the human mind. Our impressions and expectations are equally as contrived resulting in obliviousness to the experiential qualities of place, instead provoking an inward search - the understanding of us in relation to it. Images have become our guide to perceiving the world around us. As we become further distanced from our contact with ‘nature’, we find ourselves passive gazers of an objectified scene.

The proliferation of imagery that is continually recycled and shared can only lead us to a separation from landscape as we have traditionally been exposed to it. As both an idea and a physical reality, the landscape is continually reinvented – its image preserved and modified for nostalgia and resale. In its gross (mis)representation the landscape procures estrangement (Corner, 11). The objectification of a world that is visually free from the rapacious pillage of resources, and inhumanity, elicits a newly formed enrichment of cultural imagination and connection to landscape. These values are deceptive, insidious and coercive.

A perceptual re-evolution of landscape is upon us. It is my hope that an audible infusion of sound to (land)scape will mitigate against the anaesthetising and deleterious effects of an image-conscious consumption of landscape, expanding the hegemony of vision that underlies landscapes pictorialization to include other senses – a new (sound)scape for the 21st Century.

An alter-persona of sorts, Madfish has seemed fated for this personal exploration of musical directions and sound compositions - acquiring a hybrid of skills essential for the creative evolution of the urban design professional. The narrative success of our landscapes will depend much on the evolution of their associated soundscapes, and the audio-visual-spatial-art-form which they embody.

For years, Madfish (aka gbg, aka Blair Guppy) has been inspired in everything he does simply by engaging each and every endeavour with a soundtrack of his own creation. A lover of all music, HOUSE has driven his predilection for seeking and ascending to the next level in everything he does. As a practicising Landscape Architect, Madfish has come to realize the ability of digital music to bridge the human experiences of space with the spatial and spiritual qualities of sound.

The tempos, rhythms, and repetitions of our urban spaces are producing visceral and corporeal responses that are non-fulfilling and un-memorable. Madfish seeks to re-define and re-design these analog experiences of our daily life, forging a new paradigm of soundscape for the human race - a heightened expression of architecture with a lasting patina of wear.

This album is the first of Madfish's personal experiments - a pilgrims process through the fundamentals of an artistic enterprise. May it touch you all and inspire you to awaken to a new human narrative for the 21st Century. Chillax . . . this is my album. You can make your own video.