[LOT/EK is an architecture studio based in New York City. Their aim is
to blur the boundaries between art, architecture, entertainment and
information. Here, David Hunt reviews a recent LOT/EK exhibition called
"Mixer" installed at the Henry Urbach Architecture gallery.]
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LOT/EK
"Mixer"
Henry Urbach Architecture gallery
November 11 to December 22
Just before Jeff Goldblum gradually mutates into a sniveling mass of
acute psoriasis in Cronenberg's "The Fly," he says one truly beautiful
thing. In explaining to Geena Davis why meat transported in his Tele-Pod
lacks the Sizzler's char-broiled flavor, he slaps his forehead (a bug-
eyed Eureka!) and murmurs with mounting, genius-like astonishment that
his machine, "Doesn't understand the poetry of the steak." Goldblum's
nutty professor realizes that the computer operating his hive-like pods
must translate the flesh's intangible rhythms into a kind of Byronic
code; and not just hours of manually processed DNA strands. In other
words, output, or the successful teleportation from one modular
chrysalis to the other, will never equal manual input, unless that
intuitive melody is programmed into the blithely indifferent binary
system like so many lines of iambic pentameter.
Cronenberg's romantic metaphor, it becomes increasingly clear, exalts
the mythology of the reclusive research scientist (and film director),
here, living in a threadbare industrial loft no less, by exaggerating
this doomed fatalism, the elusiveness of ever capturing that
improvisational music in a test tube, or petri dish, or intuitive user
interface, while at the same time aesthetically raising the bar for
future techno-organic designs for optimal living (or, personal
biological evolution). It goes without saying then, that Andrea
Zittels's "A-Z Escape Vehicles" and "Travel Trailers" lacked "the poetry
of the steak" because their poor design was packaged in so much open
road Beat nostalgia and frontier manifest destiny that they began to
resemble the names of SUVs: Expedition, Explorer, Tracker, Wagoneer.
Utopias may be theoretical, dystopias actual, but their shelf-life as
fictions is virtually still-born.
In contrast, LOT/EK, the Italian artist and architectural duo of Ada
Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, have created a "media cocoon" 10 feet high
and 8 feet in diameter, that one enters like a stimuli-deprivation tank,
lunar module, or, for that matter, the plush interior of the 80s custom
van in "Corvette Summer." Their brand of industrial repurposing, which
often involves stripped down container and oil tanks, transforms the
dockyard utilitarian into the heavy contemplative. Emphasis on heavy.
All the LOT/EK designs bear a hard, thick carapace; indeed, their living
spaces are like sepulchral Cadbury, the soft technologies swirling like
toffee on the inside. Mixer then, as this piece is called, is a place we
escape to, rather than a nomadic vehicle we use to hasten our
deliverance to a baroquely imagined elsewhere (a farm upstate? Quaint
bed and breakfast on the coast?). Imagination, within the gel-like blue
foam of "Mixer"'s interior, is about as useful as a compass for a
paratrooper; the architects have done all the imagining for you. And
then some.
Sound systems, surveillance cameras, digital video, Play Station, and
satellite televisions all contribute to a kind of remote control nirvana
where imagination is nearly preempted by 100 different channels. Words
like encapsulation, uterine, and enveloping come to mind. Adjectives
like "total" and "complete" are handy. And if at times it feels like
you're in some Boston sports bar during the playoffs, with banks of
overhead monitors staring back at you in an RGB collage, consider for a
second that this aggressive media saturation, in such close quarters,
indeed, in quarters vacuum-sealed by Delorean-like Gull-Wing doors,
could be what the whole sculpture is about. That there is some kind of
blissfully bouyant dream state beyond heavy immersive environments, a
saturated sublime so to speak, where top of mind awareness becomes a
kind of Zen no-mind.
After all, the warm saline bath that William Hurt slips into in "Altered
States" prompts a subconscious state with all the windswept unreality of
Carlos Casteneda's "Journey to Ixtlan," or at least the campy primal
myth of Lynch's "Dune": "The worms. The spice. What is the connection?"
Kyle MacLachlan implores the heavens amidst the swirling dust. LOT/EK,
shows conversely, that the optimal meditative state may be achieved
through a constant flickering blue-phosphor bombardment. That the
streaming data washing across your companion's face while lounging in
the pod awakens a kind of anime ghost consciousness attuned to
fluctuations and tremors in the electronic grid. And besides, with all
the lip service payed to "mobilocity" and "web situations," their
impeccably designed yellow hull, rotating as seamlessly as the original
cement mixer it once was, has a magisterial static presence that allows
you to forget for a moment the prevailing "fun and funky" cross
demographic of the moment, in favor of the serious and idiosyncratic; a
fiction which lasts.
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[This article is forthcoming in artext #73.]
