AN INVITATION TO THE PALACE

METHODOLOGY
They are invitations to the palace, dotted all across London and you will find them, like the unexpected letter in the hallway the one you almost stepped on on your way from here to there, from home to work, to your dinner appointment. In passing, while your thoughts are elsewhere, they will arrest your eyes: surprising, exciting, stimulating your curiosity1. They will want to make you stop and look, to examine them, to find out what they are about, where they are leading. And all they say in many different ways is: Step inside. You are a guest in the palace today. Picking up the dreams and imaginary worlds of past times, yet not providing a mere escapism2 in their carefree rejection of rationality, the invitations text and image are designed to construct meaning in the streets of London today. They are negating the dichotomy between real-life rationality and the dream-world once fought against by Surrealism3 and open up a realm which offers insight into the real world at the same time as it points towards utopian ideas and dreams. This realm is the Crystal Palace: A glass building, housing the whole world. A home for the nave belief in progress and magic alike. But once inside the Crystal Palace, the house does not cage you in and bar the view to the real world. Its transparent walls and ceiling allow the visitor to view the city from inside the magical realm, enabling views of the city previously overlooked and transformed by the wonders within. The invitations are flashlights of poetic explorations in and around the realm of the Crystal Palace and scatter the debris of their contextual origin on the floor around the site, to be washed away just like the palace itself, over time.

The invitations are a series of thought provoking posters in the tradition of Jenny Holzers Truisms, which use public space as a forum for [] messages, (and) use media to mark urban space and disrupt everyday life. {Makagon 2000 #1: 438} 2 It was Walter Benjamins fear that [] the city itself and the dream-like activity that occurs within the city [] are distractions that offer a temporary consumerist escape without actually threatening a system of production that helped facilitate the desire for escape and fulfill the escape itself. {Makagon 2000 #1: 433} 3 The Surrealists wanted to assess the ways in which the purity of the dream world could carry over into daily life. This purity of the dream was in direct conflict with a reliance on reason and a moral order that was foundational to the dominant rational paradigm. As the rationalist paradigm, grounded in logic and scientific method (often under the banner, "progress") [] {Makagon 2000 #1: 432}
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