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Dark Space,
Black Box, Dream Body:
The Sense of Place in New Media Installation
*Christina McPhee
Interactivity, the hyped foreground of digital media installations, is
often carried out as a situation in which sensors pick up random user
movements and translate them via DSP coding into 3d animation dynamic
models, A virtual dynamic flux-space is built of recurrent randomized
image and sound iterations or topologies deliver an arbitrary , almost
casual disintegration of spatial and kinaesthetic conditions. You can
interact with these conditions but just in a slightly different configuration,
repeating itself.
In the Arcades Project, Benjamin wondered: “What is at issue is not
that ‘the same thing happens over and over’, and even less would
it be a question of eternal return. It is rather that precisely in that
which is newest the face of the world never alters the newest remains,
in every respect the same. —This constitutes the eternity of hell.
To determine the totality of traits by which the ‘modern’ is
defined would be to represent hell.
”City becomes “city”, building becomes “building”,
street becomes “street”. Can we go beyond the dystopia into
a design agenda that moves along the margins or edges of these endless
discursive loops, towards a program that does not impose, but rather is
generative of new paratopic spaces in which the desire for place and landscape
as a virtual construction may manifest as creative play and tactical disruption?
I am interested in the potential of a dark spatialization in architecture
against the ubiquitous video metaphor of the fluid media skin.. But first
we must ask, how can architectural theory query the sense of the loss
of the local in the condition of global culture? If in the urban situation
people are already completely conditioned to the presence of the viractual
and interact within it as a matter of course, can the sense of place in
architecture be conceptualized as a program for the realization of hybrid
immersive spaces cut, or stained, by multiple algorithmically –derived
edges or thresholds? What are the topologies of the hybrid space in terms
of the experience of the city? Might we model this hybrid as a translucent
descendent of the transparency of the modern? How can architecture survive
transparency?
Ubiquitous surveillance video in public spaces may enforce an erosion
of private space into a dissolving, or derivative, drama of voyeuristic
and per formative enactment. This pervasive and immersive spatialization
of timebased media has, as an immediate conse-quence, a condition of loss,
in which the human subject’s sensual perception loses its Cartesian
normative validity, and where the sense of place becomes the sense of
simultaneously layered series of no-places. In other words, the x/y/z
coordinates of the Cartesian subjective cognition of space, wherein the
human subject is equivalent to the location point zero from which and
into which is navigated the often right –angled world of linear perspective
(not-zero, e. g. the ‘one’), collapse inside the computer graphics
interface mediated, in the commonplace street level of public life, by
omnivorous surveillance.
Might designed dark space frustrate the technologies of transparency?
Is a generative design process adumbrated by interface patterns of user/computer
in cyberspace? Is there the possibility of design an interior topography
of immersive spaces? Might empirical observation of immersive spatialization
of time based media provide a generative program for tectonic morphologies?
Is architecture a situation or site of con-scious resistance to a dynamic
of neutralization and infinite multiplicity in the urban condition? Is
there archaeology of virtual spaces that can be analytically observed
through a subjective, or tactical, engagement in the situation of the
city? Can these observations translate into a syntax of immersive spatial
design? Can this design remix rhetoric of layering within conditions of
translucency?
We might think of code as speech, and virtual construction as spatialized
speech, or the ‘saying’ or ‘speaking’ of a sense of
place. Yet the sheer enormity of the disparity between the scale of content
expressible by code versus the scale of content experientially and cognitively
recognized through human contextual and analogic processing makes designers
and artists long for perfect code, that is to say, a complete unified
field deology and syntax. Beneath the nostalgia for coherence and developmental
controls one feels the cold winds of the totalitarian past, when in the
mid twentieth century obsession with comprehensive planning as the mode
through which architectonics, place, and human presence locate and are
determined led to much violence. Humans and their sense of the local and
particular themselves became the ‘sublime’ relative to machine
space and machine consciousness. A feed-back loop, the implication is
a “what you see is what you get” interprets humans as shocked-out,
burned-out receivers. Like a strange application of one of Kafka’s
uncanny and prescient scenarios, the encoded site can write over its past,
and virally infect, or write onto on a passive sensorium, the body of
our central nervous system of human experience, overwriting that site.
The computer graphics interface installation makes me think of the passive
dreaming woman-body.
The random effects of code as visual and sound ambience in a real time
context seem like fetishes of installation art in new media. If a fetish
is about the representation of presence, there might be a way to think
through this fetish as an expression of the desire to close the loop,
to make an ectopic pregnancy, attached to the exterior walls of architectural
spaces, as if to contain cyberpresence as an inimical object? - A black
box containing an unintelligible machine site and machine language? The
pregnancy is one of waiting for the artificial intelligence of the machine
to kick in as an affective, contextual strategic and emotional mind. Because
we can write code in the service of generating open algorithmic sequencing,
but still have not found ways to create shared contextual understanding
of place and space with the collaborative computer agency, we are left
with the dilemma of how to conceive of cyberspace as a place without being
able to read cyber-sentences, in other words, syntactical and contextualized
information, back from the machine: the machine consciousness is stillborn,
or at least, so damaged in the delivery that its cries are unintelligible.
©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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