The following is a little statement that I wrote for another purpose,but
perhaps I can use it to describe my relationship to Suspension. It is
only laziness and lack of time which causes me to quote myself.
"Within architecture culture, the most conventional view of site is still
largely held by even the intellectual elite, by those who hope to win an
international competition or be tapped by an elder architect in the
hierarchy. That view would propose that site is a single entity. Even in
urban planning, a collection of bounded properties is regarded as a single
entityQa single site within a broader frame. Curiously even those
interested in network architecture interpret these systems as having
qualities of continuity and unity. Ambitions regarding an almost
cybernetic view of architecture often assume a scientific or pataphysical
tone which becomes even more hilarious when exclusively reliant on the
ability of computational tools and software environments to "represent"
complexity. An alternative position might propose an understanding of
sites in discrete multiples. To truly exploit some of the intelligence
related to network thinking, perhaps the real power of many urban
organizations lies within the relationships between distributed sites
which are disconnected materially, which remotely affect each other, or
which are involved, not with fusion or holism, but with tactical
adjustment. The tactical adjusment, as a "switch" between segregated
environments or as "fitting" propagated within the generic protocols of
development and consumption may be an extremely effective way overwriting
a spatial context. It is, perhaps, ideologically closer, not the the
desire for predictability which often surrounds theories of chaos, but
rather the unpredictability and individual agency associated with anarchic
organizations."
I am very interested in treating the generic protocols which format spaces
i n our culture as an "architecture." Here, perhaps I am using the word
architecture like a technologist would use the word, to describe the
organizations and relationships between discrete multiple components.
Sites then, for me would be more interesting if they were like switches or
fittings to adjust those protocols. I don't think we are very good at
describing these formats of space or articulating and exploiting the way
they work in relational, spatial, architectural terms. I have tried, for
instance to borrow some of the terms of network architecture to begin to
describe changing relationships withing these active organizations.
Conventional architectural terms do not help me very much. The military
has a very good practice for describing events and relationships with time
components and exchanges. Many of the corporations which establish
protocols for manipulation consumption on a large scale also have good
terms for articulating adjustment of active organizations.
I think Jordan's project is very good at simply making evident the
coexistence of multiple formats of space, which are sometimes almost
invisible to us. I thought Jordan's project was quite interesting because
it was about being suspensed between formats or protocols. The
installation allows the visitor to experience the very space through which
he is passing in several different formats. There is the physical space,
a projected VRML representation of that very space as well as various
video projects of the space. I thought it might be like being suspended
between film and video or between different temperatures of light. The
installation physicalizes these larger organizations. We can describe
them, but perhaps we are not so good at characterizing them in a way which
also begins to give us the tools of their adjustment. The publication
like the project collected different spatial and virtual worlds as
captured in text, each of which coexisting on a single page. The stack of
pages can be shuffled and sampled. Each one is garni and sorbet to the
next.
But this is only a selective expansion on some of the ideas which Jordan
gathered in support of the Suspension piece.
Keller Easterling