A House for Hermes 05: Common Room

RESEARCH BACKGROUND: 'A House for Hermes 06' is an iteration of an ongoing project by Charles Anderson. It was installed at the curated group and travelling exhibition 'Neighbouring Effect' which examined the dynamics of communities emerging from technology and social media. The work engages with the borderless 'neighbouring effect' to propose a kind of un-homed geography and a house/home which spatialises a revitalised dynamic of habitation. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: This work creates a contemporary dwelling via an open-ended re-collection of spatial experience. Each of the participants in the exhibition was asked to draw from memory a floor plan of a house which had played a significant role in their lives. From these combined drawings a new collective 'house' was generated and configured within the exhibition space. As the project travelled from country to country, new floor plans drawn by the participants from each new city were added and the collective house was transformed and reconfigured. Over time an evolving morphology of global dwelling emerged from this ongoing conversation performed at a local level. Through this work, Anderson proposes a new type of neighbourhood which is made of multi-level accumulations of random encounters and exchange of trivial information. This work was shown, in a different context and iteration, at another exhibition, 'Always on my Mind', at the Museum of Art, Seoul National Gallery. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: Anderson was invited to show at the Neighbouring Effect exhibition at the Gallery Factory, an innovative art and design gallery in Seoul. Anderson's work was also exhibited at CU Space in Beijing as part of the traveling exhibition. The exhibition received funding from the Australia Korea Foundation ($8000) and the Victorian Endowment for Science, Knowledge and Innovation ($20,000 for four exhibitions). The exhibition was reviewed in two Korean design journals: 'SPACE' and 'bob: International Magazine of Space Design.'