Atlas of Distances Workshop

The Atlas of Distances Workshop, held from May 15 to 19, was conceived as a week-long immersive experience that alternated moments of observation and mapping with moments of organisation and design. Throughout this period, students developed individual projects through the multifaceted lens of ‘distance’, understood to encompass communities, infrastructures, weather and climate, resources, and technologies.

The very workshop space itself served as ‘the atlas’. Initially, it was a blank canvas, characterised by two primary axes: time and altitude. As each day unfolded, students evolved their projects through layering, expanding, visualising, materialising, manifesting, connecting, editing, and navigating. Various visualisation and materialisation techniques, including 2D, 3D, and time-based media, were used to bring these projects to life. By the workshop’s culmination, each project had found its place within ‘the atlas’, accompanied by a set of keywords.

The collection of posters presented here represents a redesigned three-dimensional publication of the atlas of individual projects. Each student’s work demonstrates a distinct exploration of ‘distance’, whether viewed as an objective or subjective facet of design and architecture. These projects are conveyed on posters through images, unaltered student notes, and keywords, which facilitate navigating the projects’ intentions.

The graphic design system developed for this purpose serves as an archival and indexing tool, maintaining a consistent framework for organising the projects. This system aligns with the conditions and atlas employed during the workshop. These conditions, in turn, categorise the projects in relation to design and architecture discourse relating to industrial cycles, weather phenomena, and resource extractions.