Architecture
of the Invisible: Naxsmash
ChristinaMcPhee
2002
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
hyperreality. Urban spaces simplify into monadic nodes of operational
image matrices for sensorial input. The media skin wants a totalizing
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 possibilitiy 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 voicestreams 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 algortihmic?
is it a copy or the original?) The cyborg is the implosion of our formerdefinition
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 neuro-sensual 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 modeling (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 stagings of Naxsmash as an interactive
improvisational live space. Students participated 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.virgilio.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, nonhierarchical,
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 landmines 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 terror.
© Christina McPhee 2002
Net Baroque:NAXSMASH and the Cyborg (Critical
Text)
Aphasia and Parrhesia: Code and Speech Abstract (Critical
text)
Digital Tempest:
immanence and transcendence in multimedia installation
