When one idea led to another : re-inscribing and recombining thinking spaces using night-time projections at the Australian National University

Large-scale projections onto urban architecture are an increasingly established form of public art, dazzling audiences and re-narrating the places and structures they are projected onto. This article examines one such projection work, Thinking Spaces, a two-week installation on the campus of the Australian National University in 2013. The artists sought to use the indistinct, fleeting, and ghostly aspects of illumination to practice a non-representational poetics of affect, re-inscribing a documented archive of relationships and “thinking spaces” onto present-day facades of selected university buildings. The article explores the creation of this artwork through three distinct layers: its historical site-specificity, as it related to the documentary archive from which it drew; its focus on rendering temporal geographies as non-representational, affective spatial practices; and the atmospheres that the artworks co-constituted with visitors. In doing so, this article adopts a necessarily interdisciplinary approach to describing the practices through which place, time, and spatial experience might be investigated through projection and illumination.