About
Located within Melbourne Central, workSHOP was a six month teaching residency facilitated by the Department of Counter Culture in early 2010. workSHOP was a studio, library, exhibition, meeting and presentation space that challenged consumer behaviour through works, interventions, screenings and talks that confound use and exchange value. Above all, workSHOP was a place of production – of ideas and works – but these products are either free or useless.
The ongoing workSHOP and Counter Point project is supported by the RMIT Design Research Institute, Urban Liveability and is a partnership between Melbourne Central (the GPT Group), RMIT School of Architecture and Design, RMIT School of Art and Public Assembly.
IMAGE | Profiling Anthony McInneny
Designers and artists Lynda Roberts, Caroline Vains and Anthony McInneny lead this project as the Department of Counter Culture. They intend to produce works about, with and in retail space.
The Department of Counter Culture proposes an alternative economy: one that pivots around cultural and social capital. It aims to foster alternate modes if social relations and discourse within an environment ordinarily governed by the commercial imperative. It questions the role of the artist / designer within this context and how design practices might respond to such questions and others concerning social sustainability.
Anthony McInneny
Anthony is an artist, arts administrator and educator. He originally trained as a graphic designer, practiced as an exhibiting fine artist with installations and mixed media, has led a cultural services team in local government for the last 7 years and has been extensively involved in the development of the studio practice of RMIT Public Art.
He has lead numerous artist research projects over the last four years with interventions in public spaces through partnerships with inner city and outer metropolitan local governments.
IMAGES | Muy Bridges, Photo booth Anthony McInneny
Caroline Vains
Caroline has a wide range of professional experience in a number of design & art related fields; including interior architecture, theatre, film, and television design.She also has over ten years of design teaching experience at a tertiary level.
In addition, Caroline has been involved for many years in the production of art and studio based design, and in this capacity have been part of a number of exhibitions. Caroline has a Masters of Architecture degree from RMIT, for which she was examined in October 2002, and highly commended by the examining panel. Currently she is undertaking a PhD at Monash University’s School of Performance Studies and for which she has been awarded a scholarship for the duration.
IMAGES | Shopping Reverie, Brunswick Caroline Vains
Lynda Roberts
Lynda Roberts is a design and arts practitioner interested in the strategic development and creation of cultural and community spaces – especially those within the public realm.
Lynda’s current practice draws on a background of architecture, public art and design education, gathering experience from a diverse range of commercial and community projects from the past decade. This includes: Design Manager of retail projects nationally at Westfield, Artistic Director of the arts program at the Great Escape / Cockatoo Island Festivals and designer for FBi Radio and Metro Screen facilities in Sydney.
Lynda’s professional and academic work is underpinned by an artistic practice called Public Assembly. It explores new modes of learning within public spaces, via the creation temporary interventions as platforms for prompting conversation and establishing an empathetic awareness of one’s environment.
IMAGES | Public Assembly, Gertrude St Projection Festival, Winter Projection Dandenong
relationSCAPES* | Spaces of Encounter, Emotion and Exchange
RMIT Interior Design: Design Studio. Tuesday + Friday 2.30 -7pm Semester One 2010
This studio examines the relational and emotional context of Melbourne Central with the intention of designing and constructing a series of tactical interventions on site and at 1:1 scale.
We will begin by investigating how we encounter other people, places and things in this highly instrumental and surveilled retail environment? We will then design, perform and construct our interventions with a view to enabling face-to-face encounters and exchanges of a different sort – exchanges that are relational, emotional and empathic.
With the exception of the final project, all designs will be built, occupied and tested at full scale in the shopping centre itself. In order for imagination and innovation to be given maximum freedom, the final project need not be physically constructed.
*Relationscapes is taken from Erin Manning’s new publication
mapping MELBOURNE CENTRAL | Retail civic spaces as places of otherness
RMIT Art in Public Spaces : Graduate Certificate
In the Australia, the enclosed shopping centre is symbolic of the suburban and represents the antithesis of pedestrian orientated public space: privately owned, predictable and controlled, the enclosed shopping centre typically occupies decentralised allotments surrounded by carparks. The enclosed commercial centre in Japan called Depato represent a different urban relationship and political economy: a seamless transition of movement and ownership between urban public transport and commercial interiors surrounded by and within the city.
Unlike John McMorrough’s claim that enclosed shopping centre represents the city twice “humiliated by the suburbs”, Melbourne Central presents another form of social space that was orginally conceived in the late 1980’s. Situated above what was then Museum Station and under the name and auspice of the Japanese consortium Diamaru, it could be argued that Melbourne Central represents a hybrid space of the Depato and Victor Gruen’s enclosed Mall.
Three approaches will be applied to an analysis of the spatial practice of this space – landscape architecture, performance / public art and the urban interior – through three themes of exchange, flow, and temporal/spatial reality respectively.
Reflective practice will be employed as the principle method of inquiry.
writing ARCHITECTURE | Architecture+Philosophy
RMIT Program of Architecture: Architecture and Design Elective.
Thursday 9.30-11.30 Semester One 2010
This seminar group will engage in the practice of writing architecture by reading philosophical, theoretical and fictional texts and by undertaking and documenting a series of journeys both in motion and in place.
It is expected that in response to these fleeting journeys and texts a series of essays will be composed and the practice of writing architecture developed. The short format of the essay is understood here to be an attempt, or an experiment, and it can be undertaken with words, with images, or through discrete spatial installations.
The practice of writing architecture employs any material that is ready to hand from the written and spoken word, to images, to the precious objects and debris of everyday life: Composition relates as much to words and images as to things. On the way you will be required to explore processes of embodiment, encounter, subjectivation.
As the seminar will mostly take place off campus in Melbourne Central out of a shop front on the third floor, it will operate between public and private spheres and in collaboration with researchers from SARU (Social Aesthetics Research Unit) Monash University (http://arts.monash.edu.au/saru/) and also with design students from Interior Design, RMIT University.
The seminar will conclude with a two-day (12 hour) ‘site writing’ workshop with guest professor, Jane Rendell of the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.
The Writing Architecture seminar is part of Architecture+Philosophy which is an emerging research group as well as a public lecture series currently in its sixth year of existence.
http://architecture.testpattern.com.au/
Project leader: Dr Hélène Frichot, Senior Lecturer, Program of Architecture
