AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

Brave New Site

Elizabeth Sims

To enter the latest outdoor installation at Materials & Applications, one must trust one’s weight to a softly curving bamboo vortex which bows, creaks and gives as it spans a small terraced pool. This bridge glitters in dull greens and golds, shifting and resettling in constant response to its use and to its environment. Its construction is apparent and simple, involving what appear to be industrial-strength twist-ties. Sheltered and cooled by tall, live bamboo, the small pool is fed by a rooftop rain catchment, and is seeded with water plants. However, as the title of the work, Here there be Monsters, warns, unknowable things lurk in this emphatically comprehensible and calm space. These hi-tech enigmas, at first shy, become bolder throughout the development of the installation, expressing themselves as gestures of watery movement in direct response to certain actions of startled visitors. They evolve and mature like the settling bridge, the rustling live bamboo, and the creeping water plants, in response to the activity and conditions of the environment. However, the things alone remain invisible and obscure, endangering the more transparent elements of the piece, including even the visitors, with a sense of overexposure. These mysterious, elusive residents manifest an apprehension and anxiety within the otherwise accentuated comprehensiveness of the installation, undermining and problematizing its progressive thrust.

Still, themes of democracy and intimacy are formally inherent to most of the work, and not easily destabilized. Materials & Applications, comprised of Oliver Hess and Jenna Didier, is a “research and exhibition center dedicated to…increase[ing] public participation in the built environment” through lecture series, screenings and hands-on work shops that redistribute the knowledge and ideas of architecture, design and art technocrats among the willing populace. For the Here there be Monsters project, Didier and Hess, also known as the design team Infranatural, in conjunction with Bruce Danziger and Moritz Freund of LEVITAS, educated and conscripted volunteers from the community for the construction of the rainwater catchment system and the bamboo bridge structure. Inside the small Materials & Applications building, wall space is designated for descriptions of bamboo’s value as a building material, along with pictorial demonstrations of lashing techniques. This egalitarian imperative confronts what Lefebvre described as a “forgetfulness” resulting from industrial production that is a “mystification- that makes possible the fetishism of commodities: the fact that certain commodities imply certain social relationships whose misapprehension they also ensure. ” By decentering the artist/specialist from the artwork, Here there be Monsters challenges the existing civilized mode of production in which division of labor isolates and standardizes the individual within a socio-economic hierarchy, and alienates him or her from the material environment . Furthermore, while the ‘eco-friendly’ use of raw materials suggests a near neo-Luddist radicalism, the persisting affirmation of functionality in the piece interrogates the representational/abstracting prerogative of art as cultural practice.

In positing a conflation of art and design that determines a social practice, this work is in dialogue with certain projects of Modernism, especially with the Bauhaus school. The Bauhaus, working from the desire for a cohesive, encompassing aesthetic of utility, also sought to impart objects and environments with a transparent functionality. Interested in creating, rather than showing space, they sought to articulate relationships of symbiosis including the “production of spatial ensembles…corresponded to the capacity of productive forces .” What proceeded from their interchangeable and modular designs, however, was the hegemony of a fascistic aesthetic, manifesting as the “worldwide, homogenous and monotonous architecture of the state. ” The socio-spatial efficiency of our institutions, from the grid of the cubicle to the expansive purity of the museum wall, is testimony to this success. In response to this movement’s totalization of art as social practice, which caused that practice to thereby be subsumed under a fetishized aesthetic, Here there be Monsters seeks to reverse the strategy. The project’s comprehensive, democratic elements in fact seek to subsume art under a totalized social practice. Furthermore, the apparent contingency and permeability of social practice here, as described through its site-specificity and lack of defined membership, assert its refusal of representation, and of reproduction.

The subversion of representation within a discursive context of art in Here there be Monsters presents an interesting problematic, however, on which are hinged the disparate conceptual components of a democracy of reconciliation and a technology of alienation. Though the work seems to attempt a radical refusal of representation through its subsumation of art under a totalized social practice, it is still operating discursively within art as site. Because of this dynamic, this piece becomes an interesting interrogation of site-specificity. While formally engaged with the immediate materiality of its place, the work clearly remains conceptually engaged with socio-political ideas. In this way, place is inevitably abstracted as site, and the idealized realm of Art is indicted with the obstruction of potentially immediate phenomenological and communal engagement. Within this abstract space, the potentiality of fascistic narratives of progress still lurks. Furthermore, as the discussion leaders, the artists/designers reclaim their elevated positions within a mystified practice. Consequently, the “volunteers” are reduced to co-opted representations of community. Despite their interaction with the work, they remain ultimately as passive as the traditional art viewer. This uncomfortable paradox is a self-conscious rejection of the work’s status as an “automatic signifier of ‘criticality’ or ‘progressivity’ by artists, architects, dealers, curators, critics, arts administrators, and funding organizations,” and acknowledgment of how “vangaurdist, socially conscious and politically committed art practices always become domesticated by their assimilation into the dominant culture .”

Manifesting all the disembodiment, alienation and difficulty of this problematic, the monsters of the pool are our evidence of this self-reflexivity. Attuned to the actions of unwary visitors, these monsters express their presence only through a disruption of their watery environment that surprises the visitor. There appear to be about four of these instigators dwelling beneath the aquatic canopy of lily pads, each with its own territory and behavioral tendencies. Interestingly, it is the more vulnerable states of the visitors that arouse their attention. As a guest first trusts her weight to the creaking bamboo trestle, she may or may not sense a gentle disturbance of the water directly below which follows her progress quietly, sending tiny ripples across the pool. As another visitor crouches at the edge of the water, observing the system of water plants, he may find himself backing off as an accelerating swell of water surges to meet him. The sudden movement of a guest in a particular corner of the pool; a swift stoop to retrieve dropped keys, or a head thrown back in laughter, might induce an agitated and rapid leap of water directed at the movement. Furthermore, in a direct articulation of the anxiety of surveillance emerging from these interactions, a visitor who turns his or her back on the scene may experience a violent crash from behind- the convulsive displacement of the entire surface of the pool- and turn to see only a rocking wake. As the volunteer becomes the unwilling participant, and the viewer becomes the viewed, the omnipresent embrace of the “brave new institution,” Dave Hickey’s reincarnation of Foucault’s panopticon, is exposed .

This unequal encounter between human and machine also presents an ‘other’ with an ambiguous subjectivity that further destabilizes the utopian impulse towards a totalized subjectivity or social practice that is suggested throughout the piece. The question of the nature of the monsters; their authenticity, their experience, and their intelligence, challenges our very grasp of those ideas. The monsters are described by the artists as Artificial Intelligence machines, which are enabled by software to learn, choose and act in accordance with their environment. Their ‘awareness’ evolves in the context of their ‘experiences,’ and their actions, though systematic, are unpredictable. Despite these life-like attributes, however, they remain opaque, and appear here as somehow vastly and ominously more unknowable than any other ‘other.’ It can be argued that, as implemented by AI technology, intelligence has been equated with autonomy. Here as elsewhere, this is a purely ‘social’ and ‘intellectual’ autonomy that is in fact so radically liberated as to lack the capacity for the phenomenological intercourse that gives rise to biological sociability and intelligence. Possibly, it is this independence from what Barbara Becker describes as an “emergent interchange of bodysubject and environment” that forestalls intimate exchange as it synopsizes the perversely limited conception of social consciousness of its designers . As detached and idealized as most artistic progressivism, these technologies are cleanly designed systems implementing pattern processes, rather than incalculably responsive, random processes of interaction. As Here there be Monsters warns, until it can be accepted that subjectivity is immersed in a body “participating in the process of creating atmospheres and open spaces of meaning beyond explicit communication and cultural formations,” the industrial, technological and institutional desire for progress may slowly close the gap between the ‘fetishized commodity,’ the machine, the monster, and ourselves .