the inside frame:
studying art and architecture through boundaries

The boundary language project offers workshops, studios, seminars, and lectures about a new interdisciplinary notation system that can describe and model spatial-temporal settings in terms of their fundamental cultural and psychological components. Drawing from the works of Vico, Lacan, Zizek, Spencer-Brown, and others as well as a range of examples from art, architecture, and the landscape, boundary language lays the ground for comparative studies as well as intensive artistic interventions.

WORKSHOPS. Thanks to a Nadine Carter Russell Chair appointment at the College of Art + Design, Louisiana State University, boundary language was extended to questions of the landscape in Spring 2008. This workshop series focused on the centrality of the 'uncanny' as an ordering strategy in perception, culture, travel, landscape use and design, and the special case of the garden. Go to the special LSU WORKSHOP PAGES for documentation of this workshop. This site is also available by clicking on the 'landscape' link on the left. Check out the early draft of the Crippled Cow Studio's project book.

COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS. The phenomenon of the boundary is intensely 'Lacanian' in its topological relationships to space anad time. Narratives both ancient and modern provide examples of this in the specialized narrative form known as 'the death narrative', what Lacan would call 'between the two deaths'. David Bertolini and Don Kunze are collaborating on a series of writings to bring the case of boundaries in literature, ethnography, philosophy, architecture, the arts, and landscape together under the heading of this interval.

SEMINARS. The Boundary Language Seminar is a Penn State Course, graduate and undergraduate, that combines readings, presentations, and film screenings to explore the potential roles of a 'boundary language' based on topological experience within the built environment. Seminar members are invited to personalize their 'briefs' in conjunction with on-going work or future proposals.

STUDIOS. Boundary language studios begin with a conventional program but develop along circuitous routes determined by individual interest. Allegory, materiality, and parallel programing are emphasized.

FUTURE PROJECT: A self-study workshop for IDP/AIA credits is being developed for release Spring 2008. This on-line offering will allow interns and professionals working anywhere to gain proficiency with boundary language notation that can be applied by a follow-up 3-6 day workshops in exotic locations, ready for Summer 2008. At Penn State, intensive two- or three-day sessions combine field trips, discussions, projects, and film study to introduce the main topics of boundary language within the frameworks of practical concerns.

Project development through a variety of media is encouraged, including Installations and performances, analogous drawings, maquettes, narratives, and videos. Structural, functional, esthetic, cultural, and technological issues must be considered simultaneously. "Study methods" are also open for discussion. The studio and seminar will use a "hopscotch" method to cris-cross unexpected topics and to hippity hop across categories, cultures, media, and time-zones.

Participants in studios, workshops, and seminars are encouraged to use film as a primary groundwork for projects that create frameworks for reflection and discussion.

This semester boundary language activity will focus on tutorials, independent study, a few workshops, and perhaps a few film screenings. Discussion will be linked to the critical theory group's film series for the core studio program and the possible symposia organized around Alan Stoekle's work on sustainability and Nadir Lahiji's architecture theory seminars. Members should design their own agenda in consultation with Don Kunze.

METHODOLOGIES. Boundary language is itself a topological notation system developed to combine psychological, philosophical, architectural, and esthetic concerns within a single graphic code. The basis of the code comes from such sources as Giambattista Vico, Jacques Lacan, Norman O. Brown, Slavoj Zizek (photo), Ernst Cassirer, George Kauffman, Jay Kappraff, and George Spencer Brown. Its main component parts center the human subject within the contrasting orders of the symbolic and the un-symbolizable imaginary.

Central to the inside frame studio and seminar is screen theory, a study of the role of framing, representation, and media. Tutorials for self-study and preparation include a series of puzzles using boundary language and screen theory. A diagram called the 'bolagram' is the template for thought, study, and discussion. Learn how to construct a bolagram, and see bolagrams created to date.

Boundary language, screen theory, and the inside frame are not esoteric abstractions. They are drawn from popular culture, critical theory, and the arts, where they are a part of strategies used for centuries to organize art works and the audience response to them. For a strikiing illustration of this, look at George Herriman's long-running comic strip, Krazy Kat, for a basic primer on boundary language ideas.

The ideas behind boundary language may be condensed into four meta-topics: iconicity (art's practice of self-reference), anamorphosis (point-of-view issues), idiotic symmetry (dialectic conditions arising within human thought, behavior, and settings), and the inside frame (themes of inversion, displacement, surplus, and collation).

Additional strategies include the generic practice of 'hopscotch' — a method of topical combination using a 'polythetic' logic that allows incompleteness and cross-categorical inclusiveness — and fictim design, a technique for assessing and controlling the function of the point of view in the construction and interpretation of works of art. The hopscotch method uses a grid/net requiring the linking of seven themes/sites: Vico, Babel, Alcestis (Euripides), labyrinth, a theater of universal memory, Mulholland Drive (Lynch), and Rear Window (Hitchcock). Participants explore links in terms of both metaphor or metonymy. The idea of a boundary language is supplemented and condensed by screen theory, a compact account of the perceptual zones of the process of artistic reception.

An index of most topics, papers, and resources might help in case you get lost.

potential maquette, camillo's theater of universal memory

WHO. The Inside Frame studios, workshops, and seminars are directed by Don Kunze, Prof. of Architecture and Integrative Arts at Penn State University.

WHEN? Versions of the seminar/studio have been taught at Penn State (under the guise of 'Sleuth Architecture'), the University of Pennsylvania, and Cleveland Urban Center. A semester-long studio and seminar at the University at Buffalo combined film, installation art, and critical readings to generate a series of projects on the subject of boundary crossing. Most recently, boundary language will be carried to Louisiana State University's Department of Landscape Architecture thanks to a grant from Nadine Carter Russell.

The Boundary Language Project was initially supported by the Vernon Shogren Foundation, Raleigh, NC. Seminars and workshops supported by the University of Pennsylvania, Penn State Alumni and Continuing Education Office, the Department of Architecture, PSU, and the Urban Center at Cincinnati.