Jamie Allen /CA/CH/
Wherever You Go There You Are
The work I did, both a kind of research into the various towers in the Roja area and the building of a scale model of a ‘sector light’ for navigation of ships, was concerned with the ways in which ‘the tower’ has become a kind of dual orientation and information architecture, particularly in coastal regions like Roja.
The idea was inspired by the fact that there’s a few telecommunications towers in Roja that, despite their relatively ‘high tech’ orientation around microwave and shortwave telecomms, are still used as alignment orientations for boats (i.e.: they line up with other towers in order to establish a lay-line of some kind along the coast). The harbour master was rather proud of this ‘dual use’ of orientation and telecommunications purposes of the new BITE telcomms tower there and the older ‘sector lamp’ in the harbour.
The sector lamp I built is about 10:1 and is meant as a kind of reflection of the seeming arbitrary placement of these towers — its essentially a navigation tower, for people, on wheels, that can be moved anywhere, plugged in, and will help people who understand the concept of a ‘sector tower’ (three coloured lights delineating three sectors of angle in front of the tower) to find their way.
