The Purple Lab

‘The Purple Lab’, a collaboration between Orla Kelly, Matthieu Henry and Giorgio Ye, explores the tension between everyday life in an urban area, and the development of urban spaces, within the area Katendrecht, Rotterdam. Using a rigid and harsh system of documentation on the site, we collected soft data to capture moments that represent the intangible fibres of an urban environment that has been transforming drastically over the past 100 years. We act as the vessels through which subjective information about the area can be documented and analysed, combining the physical elements and our perceptions of the space into a speculative interpretation of the social reality of this neighbourhood. ‘The Purple Lab’ looks at Katendrecht through a new lens, emphasising the multiple realities existing at once, and offering tools to visualise the intangible, nodding to the juxtapositions of the strategic urban changes and the spontaneous quotidianity. The colours Blue (perceived negativity) and Red (perceived positivity) subjectively rank the happenings of the area by each of the artists, and the colour purple represents overlaps in data collection.

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A rigid methodology of urban observation was carefully decided upon, with subjective potentiality within hard perameters, rules and limitations being the question. We designed and made three identical tool kits for examining the space. The toolkits consist of a x2 data collection books with meta data that such as place, time, weather, and co-ordinates. The small flipbook for quick observations, the big one for final representations of data that then got added to a 2x2 meter data collection board. A map of the area with co-ordinates to record and compare data collection points. A blue/red colouring pencil. An erasor. A shapener. Tups for collecting sharpening shavings. Stamps the same size as our grid. Blue and red stamp pads.

Objects within the lab

The lab consists of a 2x2 meter data collection board, and all the collected data on paper. A digital archive of collected data. An interactive map for data comparison. A lightbox for the overlapping of data with holes in the side for you to extract information from the data through drawing. Through the combined use of all the tools within the lab, accumulating in overlapping of information within the lightbox we create new speculative data combining subjectivities and large scale painting monumentalising the absurdity of the datas collected. Aiming to act as a critique on the erasure on subjectivitieses of human experience in areas that have undeergone fast and aggressive gentrification aboloshing the histories of the area in favour of urban development.

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Subjective Mapping: A Lab for Investigating the intangible

In designing this methodology for subjective speculation about urban spaces, we gathered many tools and prototypes to examine our growing data base. We wanted to test how these tools worked with the public, and so hosted a workshop in the area called 'Subjective Mapping: A lab for Investigating the Intangible' where we invited participants to use our methodology to create their own ways of colleting subjective data, but within our perameters of format, colour and medium.