Wandering around building reuse warehouses or junk yards in search of some discarded treasure, I can look at any given item and know at least some of its origin story. I glance at a pile of wood framed, true divided light windows with flakes of sun-bleached paint crumbling where the awning sash once slid past the frame. I know that the window was likely manufactured in the 20th century, considering contemporary energy code disallows true divided light windows because their R value is too low. I know that the window is likely older than 1990, because the way the paint flakes suggests it is not latex based, and possibly even contains lead. I know which side of the window faced outward based on the location of hardware. I know that something broke one of the glass panes because the replacement glass is a different hue than the others. I know that the window was likely installed in a home, rather than an office or industrial space, because the frame has holes where curtain rods were once installed, and on account of an oil print in the shape of a child’s handprint on the lower sash has collected dust, as though the warehouse within which the window now sits is some sort of massive forensic kit.

But this information which I can gather from this abandoned artifact of a designed and lively world doesn’t show me everything. I only have access to information which makes itself apparent. Where was the building it was installed in? Was it ever moved to a second location? Did it frame a mountain vista, or the broad side of a brick wall? Were the people who beheld that view happy? What broke that single pane of glass? A baseball? A hailstone? A fist? What did the curtains look like? Did anyone ever sneak out of that window for a clandestine rendezvous with a lover under the cover of darkness? Were they able to sneak back in before sunrise?

We take the design of the world around us – all the entanglements of accumulated matter – for granted in our daily lives. Only in the context of forensics do we wish matter would become animate under an epistemological query of prying eyes. Where half the information of the window is embedded in its matter, I long to see the full origin story of the decontextualized building element, but alas I can only speculate. I once snuck out of a window at night to meet my first gay lover. I once took the drapes down to fashion a gown when my parents weren’t home. I once hid behind the window frame when the neighborhood bullies biked past my house. I once gazed from the street into my old room through the same window with excitement for the honest life toward which I was headed, and – at the same time – a contradictory longing to remain young in a home delineated by rules - the written and unspoken codebooks for compliant being.

We mostly notice our surroundings only incidentally. But the designed worlds we inherit stage our performances of daily life. They make the stories we live every day possible. So what if we used the tools at our disposal – particularly new ones made expressly for restaging spaces (projectors, game engines, animation software, and forms of reality-capture devices) – to stage the stories which we still long to live? What if the displaced stories of concretized spaces are able to make room for new visions, and point toward different – perhaps queer – ways of operating in the world? Conversely, what if we were skeptical about the stories for which the designed world is staged? Perhaps we may begin to see that the world is built on collections of stories no more ‘real’ than any other, and we may begin to discover new tools for making what have previously been mere stories into our new shared reality.

he/him

Richard is a mixed-reality installation (or spatial) artist whose work uses cutting edge, real-time tools to focus on finding touchpoints between building and art practices. Through projection mapping, animation and interactive environment design, his work uses teal-time tools to reframe the designed world as a collection of portrait backdrops, which have the capacity to move lithely with culture and identity. Richard has been recognized with thesis prizes for his work in both the Masters of Architecture and Master of Science in Design Theory and Pedagogy at SCI-Arc for his continuing curiosity in the representation of queerness and personal experience in shared designed environments.

He has a cumulative ten years of design experience in architecture and allied art practices, has served as a Fulbright research Fellow, has served as faculty at SCI-Arc, worked with the renowned artist Analia Saban on a winning proposal for a large scale public art installation in Century City (CA), and is the founder of his own experimental design practice called Brain Bath.

Richard is currently practicing in Denver Colorado and is exploring his art practice in the context of immersive and interactive installations, production design and animation in short films, and mixed reality stage design in theater. He has recently worked as an exhibition designer and curator with SCI-Arc as assistant to the Graduate Thesis Coordinator and organizer of the summer program “Space Lab,” an immersive media artist for theatrical productions with Inner City Arts in Los Angeles, and a projection and animation designer with the Denver Theater District.