An operation is the means through which an image emerges, and therefore a way into and through the work. Each operation enables the co-presence in the photograph of things that don’t know each other, that belong to different dimensions. The operations cross categorical boundaries to engage simultaneously natural and constructed and building and ground. Operations include: layering, overlay, catching light, mercury, interference, emergence, trace, fragment, striation, 2d3d, shadowworld, overlayx2, and others. Each operation is grounded in and contributes to an ethos in which everything matters.
Each of the operations initiates an alternative way of looking. Each one leads in a different direction, away from circumscribed territories of city and nature in order to articulate and make visible under-conceptualized relationships of city nature.
The operations support interpretations of city ground in terms of active relationships –the how rather than the what of a photograph– rather than by fixing an aspect of either ground or buildings’ supposed intrinsic identity. This lack of a fixed identity allows the framework to resist becoming an instrument of classification, and to maintain its focus on the relationships between elements rather than on the elements themselves.
They present opportunities for understanding city nature outside the scope of conventional discourse and provide an alternative approach to the construction and representation of relationships between architecture, landscape and city.