Conceptualized for the 2007 iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik Croatia, the first in my series of Sentimental Constructions is a site-conditioned, publicly performed architectural structure made of rope. It is an ephemeral arrangement that, nonetheless, carves out space and frames its context; it is ‘sentimental’ in the tensions it creates between sadness and playfulness, nostalgia and possibility, construction and emergence, the pre-formed and the per-formed.

“The idea is to haul an Oldenburgized version of a 3-D computer drawing (what might be called “giant soft building outline”) out into the streets of Dubrovnik and photograph people erecting it in the style of an Amish barn-raising. Thus hard becomes soft, virtual becomes actual, private becomes public. The sculpture is not of itself interesting–it is activated through its contact with people (like certain objects by Franz West or Helio Oiticica that were meant to be carried or worn) and by being photographed. In the photos, the softened or molten outlines of the rope building become a classic surrealistically “problematized” image, re-envisioning something hard and artificial as pliable and organic. They also represent a regression or devolution of the CAD-generated modernist box by being juxtaposed against the cobbled streets of an older Mediterranean city, and by their handling by real live human beings.” — Tom Moody