Writer: Sayan Skandarajah

DMJ – Devices of Dream-Like Precision: Tracing the Streets of Kyoto using Photogrammetry and Layered Drawing

DMJ – Devices of Dream-Like Precision: Tracing the Streets of Kyoto using Photogrammetry and Layered Drawing

Sayan Skandarajah

There have been frequent attempts to represent the city of Kyoto as a coherent whole, from the cloud-swept panorama of the 17th-century Rakuchu Rakugai zu (Scenes In and Around Kyoto) folding screen paintings to the digital diorama of the GIS-driven Virtual Kyoto Project. Whilst these portraits of the city have relied on… Read More

Cartographies of the Imagination

Cartographies of the Imagination

Kirsty Badenoch and Sayan Skandarajah

Drawing place is illusory. Maps may begin as transcriptions of a worldly order – a semblance of truth and objectivity – but in doing so, become acts of world-building that both belong to and are entirely removed from their starting point. In 2019, we first visited Shatwell Farm in the… Read More

Imaginal Cloud Spaces

Imaginal Cloud Spaces

Sayan Skandarajah

Many hours can be spent on what art historian Mary Berry calls ‘the sheer act of looking’ at the Japanese folding-screen paintings titled Rakuchu Rakugai zu (Scenes in and around Kyoto). [1] Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such paintings captured a seemingly complete image of the capital city. Through the consistent use of… Read More