How might we simulate a riverside experience through virtual collaboration?

Abstract

In this paper we explore convergences between personal experiences with water and film-making. Employing a cross-disciplinary collaborative dialogue, Latham and Ward create a virtual stream, that explores the language of each other’s praxis, in architecture and film. McLuhan’s notion that: “The reader is the content of any poem or of the language [s]he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, [s]he must put them on,” (McLuhan 1971, 520) provides a signpost for the immersive experience we seek in our understandings of river, and in our approaches to disciplinary practice.During lockdown in the UK, a displaced, virtual riparian conversation evolved. Through online exchanges of particular ways of seeing and using film as method, new flows in the space between film and architecture, making and experiencing, emerge as a site for experimentation and interrogation. Through remediation and overlay of individual and shared embodied water experience, a conflated flux of differences point towards a new river paradigm.