Ms Trish Pringle

• AADip
• MArch RMIT
• Grad Dip Ed, RIBA
• PhD, RMIT (Current)

Trish is a research coordinator and teaches the final year Interior Design thesis program.

Research

Realigning the Attention: the spatial implications of stage magic

Trish’s research deals with the history of spatial amusements and their relation to today’s spatial disciplines. She suggests that the 19th century’s new empathy with space, both imaginative and visceral, was manifested not only in art and design but also in popular amusements and entertainments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Three threads run through her wider argument: first, that modernity finds spatial manipulation pleasurably fascinating; second, that spatial experience has a history that relates to the history of perception; and third, that the study of a society’s entertainments can offer insight into its underlying shifts and disturbances. The material she is studying is that of magical and transformative performances and entertainments, and her larger project is to identify their continued resonance in the spatial disciplines of today.

Trish’s research starts from the study of optical, mechanical and psychological principles in classic 19th century stage illusions. These appear to manipulate space in a way that is literally ’fascinating’. She uses the source material to identify both the practical mechanisms and also the inarticulate ideas, desires and uneasiness of a spatial nature which they evoke, and which continue to reveal themselves in our contemporary spatial attraction to ’impossible’ operations (such as dematerialising, defying gravity, changing form, being magically animated or becoming invisible).