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Architecture of
the Invisible: Naxsmash
*Christina McPhee
http://www.naxsmash.net
To smash, to resist, to trace, and to remember place as memory —
these verbs of human cultural desire stake out the shifting borders of
the private and public in electronic and physical space. While an immanent
media-skin trolls throughout what can no longer be taken as visible structures
of cities, sprawl, buildings and their internal architectures of access,
borders, open and secret spaces, ubiquitous surveillance links zones of
control under the guise of media-controlled play. An aggressive electronic
image flood suggests a transport membrane, the shiny surface of media-skin.
Like Alice’s brave move through the mirror in Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking Glass, to cross over and back is to try to get through
a psychic barrier, from a tyranny of saturated surface appearance into
the depths of a layered reality. Still, as long as humans connect memory
and architecture, the sense of place and the experience of memoria, strata
of mixed memory and architecture, story, narrative, metaphor and allegory
will engage at the level of transaction between the two sides of the screen.
A tactical approach to spatial and temporal media/architectural design
may account for, even intensify, these multiple invisible ephemera, of
electronic and human memory.
Globalism has, as its subliminal remit, the obliteration, by means of
neglect, of local landscape and memory, or perhaps not even obliteration,
but simply, amnesia.
Neglecting mimesis, the media skin aesthetic wants a continuous image
flood without reference to any predicate, so that simulation, no longer
based on a presumptive real world, attempts to naturalize itself. This
is so because the media skin wants an undifferentiated field so that its
surfaces don’t just cover reality, they become hyper reality. Urban
spaces simplify into monadic nodes of operational image matrices for sensorial
input. The media skin wants a totalising strategy that precludes interruptions
of any kind. There is a loss of the sense of touch, or kinaesthesia. The
mimetic edge, a location between real experience, the embodied presence,
and its representations in media, disappears. Its replacement is a collective
hallucination, as Baudrillard has noticed—the third order of simulation.
The strategies of digital surveillance, like visage recognition software
deployment, rely on stereotypical imaging. The reliance on stereotype
reveals an anomaly in an otherwise undifferentiated condition of super-exposure
and opacity on the surface of the media skin.
Because images are inarticulate and pre-lingual, they resist fixed meanings.
Morphologies of category and chronology in the realm of language fail
to sustain as icons. To the extent that architecture can resist translation
of all its gestures from image, surface, and skin into fixed meanings,
it counters the terror of the digital and celebrates the persistence of
body and memory. If hyperreality has become naturalized, we may hazard
architectonic and performance tactics based on the biologic model of the
entropy cycle. Inside the demimonde of the electronic universe, digital
memory decays and disappears, as software replaces software, code upon
code in successive waves. Chaos theory predicts that in this entropy loop
are little ruptures, maybe some edges, scrappy, rough, surprising. If
architecture, on the level of the monumental, has often responded to the
exigencies of public power, it also has often functioned as the sine qua
non of interactive culture, since, on the vernacular level, built form
and spaces are productions of humans who will always rebel against drift
and anomie, who create, against entropy, the particular and strange, the
incommensurate and the revived.
The word “naxsmash”, a neologism, contains the idea of both
iconophilia and iconoclasm, and functions as an intermediate term connecting
the violence of image with, equally, na(scence), birth, and negation,
or aesthetic negativity, to borrow from Adorno. It is about both the iconoclastic
impulse — the violent desire to remove image — and that desire’s
negation, or renaissance, as a resurgence of digital memory in a shared
space or paratopia. In this context, paratopias may be imagined as sidereal
spaces that generate content as if from below, from a condition of anarchè,
or anarchitecture, into the dark side of the screen, inside the neural
net, out into physical space and back again, in a fugue-like flux of recursions
and propellant rhythm.
This active scenario creates the possibility of the nascence, or birth,
of a social transaction between the cyberintelligence and human emotional
intelligence, as a post-human mix.
Ambiguities of virtual scale, presence and interiorities in the architecture
of the net are prelude to an exploration of violence and desire in a transient,
impersonal zone at http://www.naxsmash.net,
where net art works imagine certain conditions of cyberspace and presencing.
Following Mendieta's blood-prints, through Piranesi's prisons, into the
passages of Louise Bourgeois, gestures of elegy influence slipstreamandromeda.
An invisible Andromeda’s voice streams laced texts from Kafka, Julien
Green and Hopkins like a lattice as interactive thought-place for the
contemplation of entrapment. “The cyborg is the cultural body par
excellence: multiple, “ahistorical,” fragmented, and fundamentally
unstable (is it alive or not? Is it emotional or algorithmic? Is it a
copy or the original?) The cyborg is the implosion of our former definition
of life.” (Ollivier Dyens, Metal and Flesh, MIT Press, 2001) In 47Reds,
the techno-body of the net based self is imagined as cyborg: her memory
stretches and slips, sets and resets elastically through a neurosensual
landscape of death and transformation, inside a world city whose eyes,
ropes, relays, snows, shifts, and smashes are transpersonal portals of
repression and desire. In the net world of Naxsmash, the cyborg’s
adumbrated presence signals a gesture of revulsion against the dissemination
of iconoclastic codes. If cities are net zones of the imagination, then
no one can take our cities from us. Like love in the time of cholera,
like speech in the time of the burning of books, the cyborg’s erotic
doorways signal an impulse towards coherence that survives entropy. Interactive
panoramas trigger themselves like elastic membranes, the radiant skin
of a net-Aphrodite, whose movements and gestures are subliminally felt
but remain off screen. In Sonicpersephone, cyberspace might project as
a series of carcieri - a Piranesian terrain. Might any visitor enter,
but never really leave? The nightmare of the panopticon, a visual trope,
is offset by the subliminal architectonics of interactive sound fugues
move you past the visual into an interactive random pattern of intense
distillations of electronic electroacoustical distortions left, like ruins
in the path. In a trio of spatial projects called Paratopias, cybperspace
is interpreted as a series of interactive gestures in virtual reality
modelling
[see http://www.christinamcphee.net/paratopias] transparent screens morph
into doors, walls, passages, and streets. The intent is a robotics of
sound and sight by which to explore recursive and progressive explosions.
Piranesia is a scaleless littoral zone, an outback of black out and white
noise where the fluidity of forms maps live dreams. Anarchè builds
an experiential archive. Each visitor can trace a terrain as fresh ground.
In doing so, they leave evidence of their response trail. Each visitor
can opt to remain physically passive and ride along the forensic track
left by prior visitors. Additionally, a composite of all explorations
composite strips away the order of creation and reveals the shared and
divergent responses of visitors. As trails are generated, the traces emulate
neural synaptic response. Penelope sees the tectonics of media space in
a continuous process of decay and regeneration.
Naxsmash, as an ongoing series of live, physical interventions, develops
a generative series of tactics in zones in real and virtual space, between
the media-induced condition of hyperreality and the persistence of kinaesthesia,
neural memory and built form. Improvisations of electronic music and voices,
sounds, combined with digital visual montage in video and stills, build
layer upon layer, into a drawn topology that maps a virtual inscape, as
if to apply the poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins within the frame of the
electronic topography. Born out of amnesia’s threat and danger, our
design supports frisson, roughing of the digital as memoir, as a kind
of drawing through transparent layers. Contemplating the shared possibility
that a relation of memory to the electronic and physical phenomenology
of space and duration, we desire a dialectic between net based art works,
physical installations, and studio interventions with design students
and open source lab participants. Staging a live Naxsmash as a series
of tactical disruptions in the real spaces of museums, studios and schools,
places open to change and transformation, the installations demand at
least covert interactivity between user and space-form.
An installation of Naxsmash includes open improvisation with participants
whose contributions connect personal memory with collaboration in a site-specific
locale. In 2002, two staging of Naxsmash as an interactive improvisational
live space. Students par-ticipated in the spontaneous architectural installation
of scrims bearing several components of the Naxsmash digital translucent
prints, illuminated with readings from net-generated poetry as part of
the UNESCO sponsored Global Poetry Day, at the School of Architecture,
California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo.
The installation-event was one of a dozen or more worldwide, simultaneously
coordinated via net video and photography by the Italian net-art curator,
Caterina Davinip. [http://members.xoom.vir-gilio.it/kareninazoom/christine.htm]
The participatory installation prompted intuitive collaborative design
actions. At the Digital Studio/California Museum of Photography, University
of California-Riverside Naxsmash was staged as an open source memory lounge.
Hybrid collision of 'real and 'filmic' sound and image gives the lounge
an unpredictable dynamic. The lounge set up the aura of amygdala triggers
at a slow, contemplative pace, through an ambient, non-hierarchical, translucent
space; in effect, a safe zone. Naxsmash Lounge is an apparently casual
appeal to the free play of memory. Its seductive form belies a serious
content, that is, the assertion of the signal importance of individual
experience, even in the transpersonal landscape of terror. User defined
interaction traces a pathway through fear within a space of memory.
The lounge contains live performance, in which translucent prints are
scarred by smearing graphite through the digital image in a dark cloud,
like the sfumato of mannerist drawing. This action lets through the light
of projected video from behind the scrims of the digital print installation.
The prints are arrayed like doors in time or like the Egyptian false doors
at Saqqara in Old Kingdom tombs. Backlit projection of the video through
the digital prints with an LCD projector makes an interior around the
visitor and performance gestures.
Some have imagined the digital flux of hyperreality as a wired ruin whose
spaces are made of marginally functional errata and partially disabled
code, like land-mines in an abandoned battlefield (for example, Tim Murray,
Marilouise and Arthur Kroker, editors, Digital Terror and Wired Ruins,
at http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu ). Between real experience and
virtuality, the human impulse towards touch, live space, and metaphor
is an inveterate stream through the terrain of terror and war, the coordinates
of which are mapped within in the complex folds of human imagination and
its notorious predisposition towards the particular, the eclectic and
the disturbance - the bad dreams of the vision machine. Naxsmash adumbrates
a sustainable cultural memory within the digital matrix. Behind and in
front of the thresholds of the filmic screen, we design a paratopic space
where complex cascades of memory in layered chaotic sound and traumatic
images may release and dissipate, leaving a residue of truth within the
experience of the human participants. The paratopic design suggests an
aesthetic of erotic sublimity contrary to the paralysis of too much image,
too much information, too much surveillance, too much control, in the
social space of global electronic urbanity and mass culture. Paratopias
emit a colloidal mix of digital and physical relations to give birth to
something new, even if only in an instant: this moment is anagnoresis,
i. e. the moment of realization, of recognition within and through the
flux of the virtual, of the moment beyond loss. The hope is sustained
for a phenomenology of architecture as an anti-amnesia zone, where neither
the tendencies of surveillance nor iconoclasm can routinely sustain a
reign of terro
©Christina McPhee 2002
* Christina McPhee is a California based new media artist and writer working
on virtual
construction and media topologies relative to architecture and cities.
http://www.christinamcphee.net
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