Pre-Space explores spatial design through the complexities of generated digital design and its transference to analogue construction techniques to achieve a seamless sense of motion to symbolically connect to the fluidity of film. Designed as an interactive public sculpture at Walsh Bay for 2014 Vivid Light Festival, the research focuses on formulating and developing multifaceted construction geometries by merging lines and points to an overall continuous form of protrusions, recesses, creases and folds. The innovation and complexity of the design required inventive solutions in the drawing and nesting of cut steel sheets for laser cutting, the multi-angled wooden frames and finally the assembly of the sculpture into an overall single and fluid form.

Pre-Space stands on the Walsh Bay foreshore – a landscape demarcated by a fine tidal strip that served as the threshold of 19th century Australia, vital for both incoming and outgoing transport and trade. In the new colony, this area functioned as a kind of ‘pre-space’ of trade and commerce between Australia and beyond. Involving site and context, the installation presents you with another kind of pre-space: a creased ‘silver screen’ as the projected representation of a cinema, where the public engages with 14 film works embedded in the recesses of sculpture. Overall the film works create a narrative of the cinema experience: the physical space of the cinema, the projected light and the mimetic motion of film and scene. Shot in and around Sydney, its cinemas and drive-ins, the fictitious worlds contained in Pre-Space offer both a curated moment within Sydney’s historical foreshore and choreographed film scenes of its present.

Design, construction and film works: Tom Cole, Felicia Huang, Daniele Homrek, Emily Drage, John Cabello