Matteo Melioli

Research

Subject

Ghost Spaces

First and second supervisors 

Prof Philip Tabor & Dr Yeoryia Manolopoulou

Abstract

This research explores the concept of space as it evolves in response to perception and phenomenology, cutting across the fields of architecture, music and the visual arts. Space comes to be understood as an interaction between the environment and the subject who experiences its phenomenal properties such as sound and light reflections. Therefore, space is in a dimension between the Euclidean world-objective and deterministic-and the sensorial space conditioned by the observer's physicality and by those mechanisms governing perception.

Ghost Spaces will demonstrate how sensorial stimuli are able to turn architecture into an elastic medium, altering and slowing down the recognition of the real space, prompting a sort of transfer in the perceived image.

Referring to Durant, Bachelard and Virilio, the profiles of this aesthetic experience undergo alteration, and the phenomenon itself is transferred into an analogue that progressively acquires the role of a substitute.

In this 'aesthetic-ecstatic' shifting, space proceeds from an aggregate of permanent objects-connected by causal relations-to a new, almost virtual, condition where architectures are built up into a state of mobile and plastic images. In this scenario, as the causal constrictions falter, spaces appear as images always in flux, creating their dimensions without fixed boundaries.

Ghost Spaces is therefore an unpredictable and instable world, suspended between disappearance and reappearance, loss and resurfacing. This world corresponds to the fixity of the noumenal space, and another one revealed by the senses, by the creative power of the invisible, by the strength of absence and dream.

Biography

Matteo Melioli is a London based architect currently working for F&P on several art and performance spaces in London and New York. In 2001 he obtained a Diploma in History and Theory of Music Composition at the Conservatory of Venice, Italy. Subsequently, in 2004, he trained in Architecture and Design Theory in Venice. Matteo is currently working on a PhD supervised by Professor Philip Tabor and Dr Yeoryia Manolopoulou.

Matteo has recently shown his work at the Generative Art Conference, Milan 2005; the AMA International Conference, Toronto 2006; the XVII World Congress of Aesthetics, Ankara 2007; the XIX International Conference on Systems Research, Baden Baden 2007. His work has been published recently in The Architectural Review, 2007; In the Place of Sound: Architecture, Music, Acoustics, 2007; Opticon 1826, 2006; and Anfione Zeto 18, 2005. Major exhibitions include the forthcoming Hidden Ties, Harvard School of Design, and Research Projects, London, 2007.