I think that an open shutter of Eisenman's building would produce something similar to Wesely's train platform. Sure, a few tectonic sight gags would be burned into the film, but otherwise there would be favored paths, places of repose, etc. It remains space that emerges from the motions of living that take place among an architecture that can be acted upon. I haven't been to Rem's Prada store, but maybe this is more like the MoMA photograph--space emergent and vanishing simultaneously because of construction, making and remaking of buildings (but still having some unchanging or slowly changing elements to act as a datum).
"Duration is not, through its continuity, homogeneous, smooth, or linear; rather it is a mode of 'hesitation,' bifurcation, unfolding, or emergence."
The Wesely photographs, which are memories, make compelling images because they are singular and within each, some parts endure more than others. The inertia (which could be called very slow, or arrested motion) of some of the architecture makes space, and the habitual motions of people make space, too, strengthening the memory. Being accessible in many present conditions makes possible the requisite detachment from the present that accompanies recollection. Thanks to Farzam for showing these in class. For me, these photos clarify the concept of simultaniety and how it is possible to exist in the present but still detach from it enough to connect to virtuality.
If you have a shoe box full of snapshots--not open shutter but many fast shutter--there may be some that you can't place in time or by location or subject because there is perhaps just one piece of information that is lacking, to connect it with what you know. Because they are snapshots, everything within the photo is of apparently equal and infinitesimal duration. When you can't place one in some order, does it really represent a memory? If the image did not exist as a photo, would it ever be remembered?
If some architecture is so alien (or undistinguished) that no one part holds your eye (or other sensor) more than another, then the whole thing will become a blur in recollection, and nothing remains to tie it to the present. I don't know if we have seen an example of this yet. I'm thinking of a building with no floor, or a building constructed entirely of programmed a/v media surfaces--walls, floor, ceiling--an environment that a person could not affect. These environments begin to approach some atectonic, immaterial, non-directional limit. Call it lost architecture--existing only in the present and never coming to pass. Self-referential and utterly forgettable. I wonder if I could learn in a white void, lit but from nowhere, with infinite extent. I guess that's not even a place, but surely we could build something like this. To be somewhere, a learning place (well, any place) must at least have locality. But must a place itself be learnable, before other learning can happen in that place? Do we need place to learn?
Sunday, October 7, 2007
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