The Gambit is a work in progress to be completed in the summer of 2001. It's an interactive animation in the form of a site-specific performance/installation to take place in the lobby of the Westin-Bonaventure Hotel (John Portman, 1977). The medium of the project is a digital compass attached to a PDA ("personal digital assistant" or "Palm-Pilot") with a 2.25" by 3.33" color screen and headphones. This apparatus lets you "see through walls" to spaces that are around you but not visible to you. Your seeing through the walls has a shape (like Gordon Matta Clarke's cuts through buildings). What you see is a story in the form of an animation made up of still photos, words and sounds. The story is of a hotel flower arranger, and of a parallel world where flower arrangements have archival and narrative abilities.


The Gambit involves photographs, music, sound, story, performance and dance but most significantly functions like landscape architecture. Like landscape architecture, it orders a given terrain through a narrativized system, although in this case the terrain in question is the city instead of nature. As in certain kinds of landscape architecture, and architecture, narrative is transmitted to the viewer through projected geometry and movement. In this case the geometry is a virtual spiral (actually a cone/spiral - an idealized flower - if you consider that the establishing shot is the view cast down over the city from the hotel's revolving restaurant). The Gambit also plays with shifts in scale: The hotel lobby is a model for the city and of a "cosmic order", like a Renaissance garden that is an idealized model of the city that contains it. Viewers experience narrative in landscape architecture randomly and in a fragmentary way, as they move through gardens according to their own routes. In the Gambit, each viewer will experience the narrative according to her unique trajectory.