suspension
documenta X
documenta-Halle Kassel and http://www.documenta.de
21 June - 28 September 1997
This installation looks at contemporary space as produced through the
mediations of networking technologies. It positions this space as a
dynamic combination of reality and virtuality, and explores its
alternate modes of access, navigation, and inhabitation. It figures
inhabitants whose bodily forms, capacities, and rhythms have been
adjusted to fit these new conditions. It explores the ways in which
viewing agencies, bodies, and inhabited spaces are cross- formatted and
"paced" through various protocols and vehicles. The locus of these
investigations is "home" as a figure of presence.
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Contemporary spaces are dynamic combinations of the real and the
virtual. They are accessed, ordered, and navigated under the conditions
of various online and offline protocols. These protocols include
computer formats and settings, social codes and customs, and structures
of agreement, arrangement, and formalization. These protocols serve to
initialize, configure, and normalize space, rendering it inhabitable and
infusing it with organization and procedure. Determined by larger
forces as well as local practices, they might configure as walls,
interfaces, and representations–"facings"–that mark out an
environment.
The space that results is simultaneously flat and deep, unitary and
dispersed, near and remote, miniature and gigantic, live and recorded,
reflective and immersive. To regard its structure is to block together
these incompatible aspects and to figure inhabitants whose bodily
constitutions and capacities have been adjusted to fit its diverse
requirements.
Suspension proposes four structuring principles for regarding this
hybrid environment. "Matrix" concerns the structure of signification,
its indissoluble links to material substrate, and its figuration of
recurrences; "vehicle" concerns body, signification, and technological
apparatus as constituted in motion, including the ways that this
apparatus converts, transports, and makes its users adequate to new
velocities; "phoropticality" concerns the augmentation of vision by
technological apparatus, its manufactured mistrust of the naked eye, and
its role in converting the body; and "pacing" regards navigational modes
that are adequate to the traversal of these conversional environments,
and which organize space according to patterns, rhythms, and routines.
[…]
Vehicles generate an interiority, a mobile bubble of immediate presence,
against a constructed exterior. They prompt and register a "here"
against a "there," or a "here-and-now" against a "later," between which
their user is transported. They transform spatial metaphors into those
of motion, movement, access, and frequency. Vehicles restrict and
discipline the body's range of movements through molded mainframe parts
and arrays of distributed components, which increasingly become social
actors. The semi-automatic and nearly imperceptible motions of their
users generate enormous changes in an outside world that is often but
not always interpolated through codes projected on a surface. At the
same time that the "window" of the vehicle is constituted by this
projection, it is also an internalization, an injection. Vehicles
materialize vast incommensurabilities, allowing enormously contradictory
relationships to be held together as their own materiality implodes.
Embodying both the promise of progress and the threat of obsolescence,
they are densely-packed condensations of time, space, and scale that
expand into controlled and regulated, or resistant and mutated,
operation-systems of practice. They transgress the reflective distances
upon which representation depends, identifying not in terms of
mirrorlike relationships or oppositions but in terms of mutational
interfoldings of inside and outside, small and colossal, near and far,
subject and object, active and passive. The material and discursive
objects that emerge within this space of active conversion are
systematizations of these logically incompatible elements. They cohere
not through visual or structural means but through patterns of
recurrences or rhythms. This matrix objectifies the rhythmic and locates
repetition pattern as form.
[…]
These vehicles operate as semi-autonomous but interdependent components
whose functions are to conduct (transfer), bind (connect and group),
calibrate (signify and orient), and adapt (acclimate). They are
p(l)acing mechanisms that shift and coordinate perspective, scale,
movement, signal, and transmission rate. The home setting, in flux
between the material and the figural, between rendering protocols, and
between embodied and disembodied viewpoints, shifts according to the
variable frequency coordination rhythms that uphold and animate the
facings. The rhythmic alignment mode competes with the visual alignment
mode in a complex of temporal and spatial rendering protocols. Embodied
patterns and competing trajectories are imposed onto the objective
visual fields, and the structures, rhythms, and conditions of the
facings impose patterns on the ways that the setting is navigated and
determined. In flux between are inhabitants.
