x-posted by Carolyn Guertin:
Unfoldings: An Exhibition of Information Art and Architectures
The Arts District, the City of Edmonton, Canada
February 2003
Unfoldings are intrinsic dimensions that open indefinitely outward, potentially encompassing an infinite expansion of space. Like an inflating balloon, the computer interface is also a phenomenon whose infinite writing surface is situated in ever-present temporal and incremental space, perpetually dividing itself to reveal new moments of present-tense textual time, and whose spatial dimensions are performed via the instantaneity of mouse clicks and real time navigation. A temporal surface like the interface is a self-contained discourse network and an organic system; such a system is also familiar to us in the guise of the body, a system that is both frame and material for its own performative narratives. This expression of embodied presence is the world we navigate in an electronic text. Virtual architectures call for a reunion of the mind and body in space-time to heal the rift that has existed since René Descartes tore them asunder. The text like the body rejects Cartesian dualism because the text-as-body and the body-as-text write themselves and their archi-traces as fluid expressions of the experiential and aesthetic realms.
This kind of virtual architecture is an embodied fiction in both cyberspace and the new media arts that inhabits a metaphysical dimension, a dimension that allows us to insert ourselves — like we do into memories. Both Marcos Novak and Elisabeth Grosz call for an architecture of excess for virtual space, one not contained or confined by the physical laws of the real. Architecture of excess is a term that has traditionally been used to describe imaginary architectures like Giovanni Battista Piranesi's prisons, the Carceri d'Invenzione, or Hieronymous Bosch's visions of Hell. Alternatively, Paul Virilio believes that there can no longer be architectures of excess in a virtual age because we have moved into the realm of 'post-architecture.' Paul Lunenfeld uses the term 'hybrid architecture' to describe incursions of the virtual in real space, and Marcos Novak uses the terms 'liquid architecture' and 'TransArchitecture' to describe the new structures of and intrinsic to cyberspace. Once architecture ceases to be material, there is nowhere to go but into virtual
constructs. Media theorists Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen call the new virtuality 'electrotecture.' Electrotecture, they say, blurs the boundaries between building and builder, between programme and programmer, between time and space. This latter term is perhaps the most useful and descriptive terminology for constructs inhabiting the digital domain. Such an intense preoccupation with architectures demonstrate that structures have not been left behind as Virilio's term suggests, but instead have indeed been redefined as more fluid, flexible, multiple, hybrid and complex, in part through the interpolation of the dimension of time as a living system into their forms.
In virtual space, unlike Piranesi's Carceri, electrotectures are infinite. The fold or the click is the systemic in the expanding materiality of the somatic rooms of the interface. Unfoldings are dynamic acts, the process of navigation in information space, and traces of archi-writing contained therein. Unfoldings are both cartographic form and behavioural dynamic, active motion and embodied context. They are ultimately both the space of our interaction with the surface of the interface and our interactive engagement with the mnemonic gestures they represent and contain. Always operating within the framework of the visual, unfoldings are an irreducible element — gesture and membrane, link and rupture — between sensible codes.
You are invited to submit your own interactive new media unfoldings to a show in the Arts District of the city of Edmonton, Canada in February 2003. Preference will be given to original electronic works created specifically for this exhibit, but previously exhibited works will be considered. Submissions may be web-based or on CD-ROM or other portable media for on-site display in a public venue.
The deadline for electronic or snail mail submissions dated no later than 15 December 2002. Send the work and/or its link along with a 300-word abstract, biographical details, c.v. and/or website URL to
Carolyn Guertin, Curator
Department of English
University of Alberta
3-5 Humanities Centre
Edmonton AB T6G 2E5
Please do not send works as e-mail attachments.
Assemblage, The Online Women's New Media Gallery, at trAce
Posted by xian at October 16, 2002 09:48 PM | TrackBack