A collection that explores evolving interdisciplinary rhetoric across spatial design disciplines.

Watch this Space examines key emerging and evolving practices, theories, and methodologies that operate in the blurred boundary between spatial design disciplines and moving image studies more broadly. The collection is premised on the argument that the understanding of “space” in these areas continues to expand, reaching the point in which it blurs with multiple other disciplines including media art, cultural studies, art practice, and more. The result of this evolving interdisciplinary understating of space in design disciplines and moving image studies is an expanded field of haptic-visual practice and theory that can be investigated as both a material and an image-based construct.

The work engages with an evolving set of ideas, underlining how each of its primary discipline areas now increasingly incorporates tools and methodologies from each other’s fields. For example, architects routinely engage with cinematic practice as a means of exploring space; cultural theorists inspect filmic space as a two-dimensional surrogate of the real; media artists incorporate knowledge of spatial design in video installations; and filmmakers create spaces on screen that are informed by architectural theory. This all follows what can be defined as a discursive turn in our view of spatial relationships across disciplines which, by definition, is complex, eclectic, occasionally contradictory, and at times characterized by surprising confluences.
 
The varied essays collected here explore the diversity of how we today define, understand, and engage with notions of the body in architectural–urban space. It does so through a triadic structure that progresses from haptic relationships of the body in architectural space, through film readings of represented space in mainstream cinema, to experimental spatial projects inspired by film and the moving image. This tripartite structure specifically encourages a look across disciplines, broadening architectural, urbanist, media, and cinematic concerns through insightful case studies.