Rebecca Jane Smith

DIRTBAG CATHEDRAL

The Dirtbag Cathedral is a speculative project, combining philosophical posthumanism, rock climbing and notation. In essence, the structure provides a space in which the posthuman subject can experience the extreme bodily experience of climbing; a posthuman climbing centre. The Dirtbag Cathedral is defined as an axiomatic structure - neither a building nor a landscape. Both a sculpture and architectural structure. A sculptural-architectural hybrid. The thesis highlights the challenges of representing phenomenological experiences of space through two-dimensional notational drawings and aims to speculate the posthuman means of communicating this experience; specifically within the world of climbing. The journey of the human species through the ‘Philosophical Cartography’ of the Posthuman state and what this has entailed for the human has had a direct impact on the state of the environment. In a world in which posthumans possess a collective consciousness, an advanced awareness that every object is equal, the Dirtbag Cathedral acts as a memoir of the human. A self-organising organic structure, a direct result of the conditions of its past.