Parallel Projections investigates two types of postindustrial site: the architectural and the agricultural; it conflates (projections of and into) spaces as means of making visceral our intellectual comprehension of the
relationships between materiality, surface, place and history. Parallel Projections is not meant for specific
places but for specific kinds of spaces: defunct industrial buildings, abandoned urban edifices, and mechanized
natural landscapes. The authors, living in places (Iowa and Ohio) that have both been radically altered by scalar
economic shifts, adapt alien (guest) project components to their native (host) contexts. Both types of spaces, host
and guest, as spaces of urban and rural abandonment, share surfaces that are compelling palimpsests. These
surfaces are encrusted with nearly-obliterated histories, emptied by changes in production methods and habits
of occupation and revealed by ghost texts. In opposition to the idea that these sites should be whitewashed and redrawn, the authors see them as grounds for new layers that can receive projections of phenomena from other postindustrial sites and as repositories for material evidence that deepens, rather than erases, the evidence of their
pasts.