Glass Bottom Floorboards

What if the floors of a gallery were transparent? The artworks on the walls look into a reflecting pond of their foundations. A transparent floor shows the substructure of creative making.

After my archive experiment, I wanted to make my entire studio floor a foundational archive. What I had were some wall frames in the hall and deep discount plexi, so I made one prototype. I sat on it while I filled out grant applications. The rendering above was taped to the surface of the glass bottom floorboard prototype. When you looked at it then looked up to the space around you, you saw the gallery space it depicted around you, but with the entire floor as glass.

photos by Perri Hoffman

I did a similar speculative proposal of doubling of reality in miniature by building a model of the space that you saw behind the model.

This version includes the floorboard sculpture in miniature in another superposition. In a separate invention, I extruded a pit as a pedestal/I made the pedestal a pit. What if the support surface is a chasm? How to show the excavation of a core sample below the floor above ground? Raising the ground’s horizon in miniature and making the pedestal a pit.

In this photo by Perri Hoffman the space sees the representation of itself inside the ground.

It was interesting to experiment with performing the same operation that the raising and lowering screen apparatus does, but in static sculpture left in a gallery without my facilitation.

The floor sculpture still had video, though. An animation of Mental Rotation test images rotating, and an animation of staircases interacting which each member of my cohort provided improvised voiceovers for.