"With this
system you don't need to know a thing in advance about where you're going." So
states Dr. Roberta Klatzky, a psychologist at Carnegie-Mellon University who is
developing a "navigation system for the blind" along with Dr. Reginald College,
a geographer, and Dr. Jack Loomis, a perceptual psychologist, both at the
University of California, Santa Barbara. Wearing a set of stereo earphones
linked to a computer in a backpack, which links to the military's network of
global positioning satellites, blind persons are able to embark on a stroll,
however aimless, as places and impediments in their paths call out their names
"library here, library here," "bench here, bench here"" guiding them "through a
Disney-esque landscape of talking objects."[1] The system operates through the
computer's interpretation of a triangulation of signals from the Global
Positioning System satellites, integrated with the computer's stored maps of
immediate surroundings and calibrated to an electronic compass on the blind
person's head, telling the computer the exact position of the ears. The
information is then transmitted via sound to the ears with a precise timing and
volume to mimic the exact distance and position of the objects, as if the
objects themselves were suddenly able to speak their names. The blind person
then interprets this information and acts accordingly, his or her world suddenly
animated through strategic, surgically- precise intervention of sound pitch and
timing.
Difficulties are many, of course, such as the precise
phraseologies of the objects (if an object suddenly has agency and speaks to you
in order to identify itself, what does it say?), the points at which objects
should begin to announce themselves, and the number of objects that should talk
at a given time. A greater problem also presents itself, unwittingly indicated
by Dr. Michael Oberdorfer, a representative of the National Eye Institute in
Bethesda, Maryland, which is financing the research, in his statement that a
"blind person could walk down the street and know not just that he was at 80th
and Broadway, but what stores are around, and that Zabar's delicatessen was up
ahead"[2]-such a scenario prompts the disturbing image of ambulatory blind
persons being shuttled about from store to store in a play of competing market
interests (as accurate a vision of our own condition as this might be). On the
other hand, as walks with this navigating device may also be previewed,
rehearsed, or simulated from one's home, allowing an imaginary walk to be taken
from one's armchair, an earlier walk replayed, a backyard stroll to be taken in
place of an actual walk through the city, or a combination of all three, one
wonders if it would be necessary to leave home at all.
Indeed the
possibilities for the interweaving of these "real" and "virtual" situations
become endless, especially as such systems become part of interconnected
telecommunicational environments. In this regard, the navigation system for the
blind provides an interesting model for our increasingly networked society: it
speaks of the shape that this networking is assuming as communications
technology is increasingly dismantled from its mainframe and dispersed into the
space of daily life, and it prompts an exploration of how this in turn augments
and effects body and sensorium in this case allowing a kind of prosthetic sight,
not centralized in the brain but dispersed in space, prompting an alteration of
the contours of the body. Such an intermingling of the physical and the
telecommunicational is already quite visible when one considers television and
other media as sets of techniques of the body, which include strategies of
mobilization and immobilization, methods "for the production and disciplining of
attention, for the fixing and narrowing of the range of consciousness" one can
regard body and sociality as partially controlled through their interlocking
mechanisms and effects.[3] More obvious examples are provided in news
publications, where amidst the cyberspatial gold rush one can find tidbits such
as "The Long Arm of the Net," which announces that anthropologists and computer
scientists at USC have attached a robotic arm on campus to the World Wide Web,
allowing Internet users throughout the world to manipulate its
movements.[4]
While such systems, spaces, and phenomena are frequently
divided into "virtual" and "real," such binary classifications (along with
real/telecommunicational, or the old standby real/artificial) become
increasingly problematic. So, too, with the distinctions between movement and
simulation, or viewer and viewed, and the direct correspondences so implicated.
In the above example, where is the line of sight of the formerly blind person?
Where is the place of sight and of that which is seen? Does a distinction
between "real sight" and "virtual sight" matter? Is the reality in which benches
can speak real or virtual for the blind person? Such divisive barriers and
causal connections cede to a play of interrelations; the relations between, for
example, walking, speech, and geography, between movement and interdiction,
between embodiments, systems of codes, and the economies that produce and are
produced by them, intertwine and complicate each other. Barriers are
repositioned as porous and actively configurative, structured through relations
both trans-spatial and trans-actional. Lines of sight are transformed from
vectors (eye --> object) to circulatory trajectories that disrupt polarities
and interweave themselves into body, language, and landscape, shifting the
nature of performativity. No longer a mirror of the body, language as such
arises out of a complex of circuitries, which connect biological/synaptic
processes to social processes to those of multlayered spaces of code, prompting
active alterations of bodily contours and actively configurative processes of
bodily sedimentation. The concept of language as a mirror or reflective surface,
staging a separation, a differentiality, and a sequentiality, is augmented with
a conception of language as production, circulation, circuitry, and
interfaciality. Narrativizations and divisions, problematized and disrupted,
stand as temporary demarcations within circulatory constructs. The body and
subject, then, do not precede or stand outside of these networks of
signification but are rather at all points enmeshed within them. The emphasis
turns to a study of the increasingly complex webs of signification within which
and in relation to which we construct such transactive relations fueled by the
economies of information as living, ambulatory entities. That techne [5] that
allows us to visualize and materialize these extended or alternate relations of
subjectivity, body, and sociality is the interface. It is an interface, however,
whose structure, following the logic traced above, is dismantled from its most
familiar Cartesian incarnations such as the "picture plane" of the computer
monitor and swept out into the networks of everyday life, a soft and permeable
element, actively configurational, that does not divide viewer from viewed or
real from virtual, but rather which interweaves fields of action.
Thus
the logics with which to articulate this situation are those that map not only
the differential relations within coded structures but the passages traversing
them. To view the networked computer screen, for example, is to simultaneously
order its surface and to look through it, in a disruption and transformation of
the "place" of sight and of speech: through the mediation of the interface,
subjectivity is extended and relocated, embodiment repositioned, object and
environment re-potentialized, allowing communication to arise out of a new
social dynamic that produces and is produced by shifting patterns of subject,
embodiment, object, and environment. Through social representation-schemes,
built of shared language and assumptions, these patterns become meaningful.
Communication in this situation, then, is built in the transformation of data
flow across the interface, and in the patterns that it assumes on its
interfacial surface. Embodiments and environments are built precariously upon
the patterns of these activated codes, which spin circulatory systems across the
interface extended biofeedback connections between bodies, bodies of codes, and
the economies and technologies that produce and are produced by bodies and codes
[6] that make visible the interconnections between biosocial dynamic and spatial
form. From the interaction of these placeless sites, subjectivity and agency
emerge: an interstitial parole speaks from an informational elsewhere. Here we
conceptualize not only in terms of difference embodied by this interstitiality
but in terms of mediated, circulatory flow. The surfaces or systems that mediate
this flow, through which social energies circulate and around which they
mobilize, become new objects of study.
The dialogical context of art
provides a vital arena for the study of such surfaces and systems, as it
historically and self-consciously foregrounds its own surface or structure of
mediation in line with these concerns. In its historicized focus upon the
signifier, its conditions of existence and possibility, its placement and
displacement in narrativization and circulatory flow which extends into and
disrupts its own substantiality, while maintaining its own materiality, art has
staked out a territory separate from, but intertwined with, other discourses
engaging this situation (although it has clearly ceded much of its critical
influence to them). In its study of the constitutive relationships between
subject, object, and context, and the social production of meaning, art differs
from these discourses in this historicized play of signification which, again,
points outward into the world and inward into its own corporeality, although not
dualistically but in the sense of mediated, circulatory flow which holds its
body in dynamic tension as a mediatory surface, situation, or contextual space
that prompts a meditation on its own existence. The challenge, then, is to
embody this dynamic structurally while critically engaging the pictoriality of
art a dialectic visible, for example, in the artwork of Rainer Ganahl, who
structurally reconfigures the interface while drawing analogies to modernistic
enframements.[7] If this challenge can be met within the new sets of conditions
that present themselves in this historical moment which might be seen in terms
of the rise of "informatics" art can assume a substantial role in emerging
informatic discourses (as, perhaps, an "informatic art"). Here, then, is where
the artwork and the interface meet, each addressing urgent concerns of the other
and allowing a vital interchange. Thus embodied, they are not absorbed into one
another but stand in productive dialectical relation, in the charged, hybrid
exchange-fields that are weaving new modes of sociality. Facing this challenge
is crucial at a time when painting appears once again as the answer to the art
world's crisis, and on the other hand, when technological spectacle or "computer
art" stands as its high-tech analogue: it becomes ever more crucial to contest
these emerging expressionisms that threaten to seal off art's critical value in
the information economy.
Defined by Katherine Hayles, following Donna
Haraway, as "the technologies of information as well as the biological, social,
linguistic, and cultural changes that initiate, accompany, and complicate their
development,"[8] informatics clearly marks a complexified and hybridized
sociocultural environment whose powerful textualities spin whirlwinds around
earlier modes of signification. To employ this term in relation to art allows
us, in response to this condition, to not only to posit the artwork as a kind of
interface but to revisit historical work in terms of that interfaciality,
opening the channels of circulation. The art-interface can be understood, then,
following the diagrams traced above, as both a play of surface allowing logical
ordering (language) and as a medium of exchange, a negotiational space that
mediates traffic across the border (economy). Such an interface, then, is one
that stands in dynamic tension, simultaneously located and blurred: located
through the textual surface (the page, the picture plane, or the computer
window) as well as through its constitutive exchange-relations, which dissolve
the translational surface, manifesting those on its "other side," foregrounding
its constitutive social relations and its modes of production. In this sense it
reveals the societal mechanisms that are masked by the fetishized object or
technology, whose reification it resists, following Marx, shifting attention to
the relations within which it is produced. However, again, this is not
dualistic, as its "objectness" fetish or not is, correspondingly, carefully
considered, particularly in its role as agent. Endowing objects with agency, in
this sense, is powerful currency in the newly constructed situations enabled by
communications technologies (visible in the navigation system for the blind
described above and within the object-oriented structure of the MOO); however on
the other hand objects and technologies do not themselves "do" anything so much
as mask power interests and narratives of control, in whose benefit it is to
productize relation. This masking or obscuring is not only founded on a
dialectic of appearance and disappearance, as implied by Baudrillard, for
example, in his observation that objects "are secretly irradiating from what
disappears behind" them.[9] It is also founded on an interfaciality whose
"irradiation" marks its actively circuitous traversal. The object, in this case,
can be said to interface its own disappearance, bringing its interfaciality to
the fore and subsuming its existence as representation or mimesis. Such a
dynamic is visible in, for example, the artwork of Jeffrey Schulz, whose
constructed objects and systems dissolve within nets of linkage, operating as
dynamic interfaces for the navigotiation of bioinformatic space. Such a dynamic
is also embodied in the artwork of Ben Kinmont, whose work employs objects,
texts, and systems as mediating elements that allow a situation to coalesce, but
then which dissolve to allow for the ongoing mechanics of that situation, and
other situations that it sets in play, to be foregrounded. The artwork,
embodying this dynamic, is located in social space and in the relations of
production, allowing for its constitutive socialities to become actively visible
and resisting their reification as the "art object" which no longer stands in
for, or occludes, such relation. In this sense it constitutes an economy of
resistance a staging of alternate currencies and transactionalities as art.
The artwork-interface relation is, again, contradictory and tensional.
The interface as techne alone, of course, is not art. Art itself is arguably a
techne, although only in the analytical side of the playing field. Art movements
have introduced new relations similar to those that interfacial technologies
such as the printing press and the telephone have wrought; however, again, art
does so continually and historically self-aware of its own conditions of
existence, marking an appearance and disappearance, a struggle of interior and
exterior a self- consciousness that technology, alone, does not maintain. The
artwork and the interface, on the other hand, are both interstitial and
unstable, enmeshed in the networks between sociality and spatiality, positioned
on the brink, as it were. Both mediate new communities of awareness between the
physical space of the present and that "alternate" reality that is not
contiguous with it. The artwork was once equated with the picture plane and
marked a dualistic separation between author and viewer; likewise, the
interface, and the picture plane of the telecommunicational environment, both
overwhelmingly Cartesian, mark a similar structure and dualistic separation of
phenomena. As the interfacial structure is today brought down off the wall, so
to speak, dismantled into the space of sociality, it is perhaps illuminating to
draw an analogy to certain periods in art when such a deconstruction occurred,
such as in the late 1950s, when artists reacted against the rigidity of
modernist painting and geography. Perhaps connecting to this situation, not only
in a linear, historicized mode, but in a more circulatory, negotiatory, and
transactive one, can provide powerful insight into the dynamics of the interface
and the possibilities at its intersection with art in this current period of the
informatic. Such a technique of historicization might itself constitute a kind
of interface, as might the Cartesian paradigm itself: the latter could
constitute a vital stage in the construction of space, employed in order to
narrate a displacement (for example, Cartesianism figures interfacially in
Gibsonian cyberspace in order to allow the otherwise unimaginable complexity of
this last to be articulated and understood); the interface as such exists as a
tool for ordering self, space, and sociality, and which contains the seeds of
its own undoing.
The late Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica's gradual
reaction, in the late 1950s, against geometric abstraction and the rationality
of art concret then prominent in Brazil provides an interesting correspondence.
Oiticica sought to "organicize" the mechanistic objectivity of art, animating
its surface elements, its structure, its space of interaction, and its modes of
construction in a dynamic interplay of corporeal, social, and spatial relation.
Beginning with a "nuclear" exploration of color-structure, he began to
"dynamize" the geometric elements within his paintings, adding movement and time
to their structuralities; these elements then broke off on their own to become
their own structural planes; these planes advanced out from the wall and into
the space of exhibition in suspended, configurative arrangements; viewers were
then prompted to walk among these complex arrangements of planes which could
fill a small room in order to "view" the work. As viewers entered the work as an
active element of the work, thus implicating themselves within its labyrinthine
structure, they could no longer view it from afar, capturing its entirety in
their gaze, producing it in a mastering, encapsulating line of sight from
subject to object. Such a situation disrupts and frustrates the detached,
masculinist, controlling gaze similar to that which stands on one side of the
computer interface and which orders surface, space, and sociality accordingly.
However not only does Oiticica's development narrate an analogous breakdown of
the distinctions between the constructs of the computer screen on one side and
their viewer/masterer on the other, but, with his creation of the Parangolé [10]
in 1964, it further "softens" these elements such that they are always in a
process of materialization, always co- formed in circulatory relation to active
bodies or processes of embodiment.
The Parangolé developed as a
"softening" of the structural planes of the work; as Oiticica writes,
"everything which before was either background or support for the act and the
structure of painting, transforms itself into a live element."[11] The
viewer/participant, enveloped within an artwork whose structure was deepened in
a dynamic play of spatial and social relation, was now prompted to wear its
structural planes on the body, or view others doing so, such that the elements
of the work were always created by direct bodily action. The Parangolé took the
form of a soft, wearable vesture that resembles a cloak or cape, made of one or
more layers of brightly-colored (following Oiticica's related spatialization of
color-structure) material that requires direct movement of the body and reveals
itself in this act. The artwork, no longer something in relation to which one
stands, became something in which one is immersed: a "cycle of participation" in
which viewer and viewed, "watcher" and "wearer," are enmeshed in circulatory,
changing patterns. Like the flat surface of the computer interface, the
Parangolé is softened and deepened through interaction: it draws the participant
into the space of the artwork similar to the way the interface draws the
participant into an alternate, hybrid space or situation. To "put on" the
Parangolé or the computer interface (or the environment that seemingly lies
behind it) is to merge body and technology, in order to alter or extend body and
sociality and to integrate subjects, bodies, and social formations in a process
of constructing and inhabiting space.
Formerly the material of the
picture plane metaphorically and literally the Parangolé unfolds and interweaves
itself within the social and spatial environment, disrupting and agitating the
conditioned situation of the artistic experience, instigating alternate
relations while, accordingly, making such relations visible. However such
visibility is, again, not covetous and controlling, not oriented to ocular
possession; as Lygia Clark, a contemporary of Oiticica's, writes, it addresses
itself to the "eye-body" not the "eye-machine," and is always in a process of
becoming.[12] It thus escapes the totalizations of the eye and its binary,
vector relationships, and instead results in a kind of circuitous, interstitial
seeing closer to that induced by the navigation system for the blind outlined
earlier. Such a seeing opens the channels between body and environment such that
"sight" is not originary, Cartesian, and linear, but rather a phenomenon arising
within a transactional network: a decentralized, configurative site of ongoing
negotiation where bodies, bodies of codes, and environments are actively
interlinked. When linked with the economies and technologies that produce and
are produced by bodies and bodies of codes, such phenomena become enmeshed in a
dialectic between biosociality and spatial form and mark a hybridized and
intensified social spatiality a restless social geography whose "windowing" or
parcelling out can be contested and whose mechanics and power interests can be
uncovered.
Such was a concern of the Situationists in the late 1950s in
Europe, whose work constitutes an urban parallel to Oiticica's reaction against
modernist totalizations. The Situationists began to disrupt, animate, and
actively spatialize the rigid geometry of the modernist urban map in an
analogous mode to Oiticica's disruption and spatialization of the elements of
geometric abstraction, and Situationist techniques of the derivé resemble
Oiticica's establishing of "'perceptive-structural relations' between what grows
in the structural grid of the Parangolé..." and what is 'found' in the spatial
environmental world [13]. Consider Oiticica's description of the favela, a
structure that for him has an implicit Parangolé character: "The structural
organicity of its constituent elements and the internal circulation and external
dismemberment of these constructions mean that there are no abrupt transitions
from 'room' to 'living room' to 'kitchen,' only the essential, which defines
each part connecting to the other in a continuity." Such orders "are not
established 'a priori,' but create themselves according to creative necessity as
it is born." Appropriating its "objective-constituent elements upon embodying
itself, upon forming itself in its realization,"[14] such a structure forms
itself contingently through the path and actions of the ambulatory subject, who
engages in a process of inhabiting space. In this sense both the Parangolé and
the derivé constitute interfacial techniques of resistance against a totalizing
geography a landscape of segmentation, homogenization, commodification and
instead fuel what Michel de Certeau calls a "mobile organicity" in the
environment, a kind of pedestrian speech that weaves "sequence[s] of phatic
topoi."[15] The totalized construct, whose relations are reflected in the gloss
of its factory sheen, dissolves to that of an interface. Through such fissures,
alternate sites of agency and speech erupt.
Ivan Chtcheglov, a founding
Situationist who derived to such extent that he wound up in a psychiatric
clinic, wrote, while institutionalized, how the derivé (with its flow of acts,
its gestures, its strolls, its encounters) was to the totality exactly what
psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. If it is true that a
spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which
one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going
further), then the walker actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way,
s/he makes them exist as well as emerge. But s/he also moves them about
and...invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of
walking privilege, transform, or abandon spatial elements...In the framework of
enunciation, the walker constitutes, in relation to his/her position, both a
near and a far, a here and a there. To the fact that the adverbs here and there
are the indicators of the locutionary seat in verbal communication...we must add
that this location (here-there) (necessarily implied by walking and indicative
of a present appropriation of space by an "I") also has the function of
introducing an other in relation to this "I" and of thus establishing a
conjunctive and disjunctive articulation of places.[17]
The derivé,
as "going with the flow," requires a mediatory system or surface to transform it
from endless babble to meaning, and it requires an interdiction in order to
dialectize it and integrate a body. Michel de Certeau shifts Chtcheglov's
analogy somewhat in stating that the "act of walking is to the environmental
system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered." Just as
the speaker appropriates the language, the pedestrian appropriates the
topographical system; just as the speech act is "an acoustic acting-out of
language," the walker engages in a "spatial acting-out of place." Walking, then,
is a "space of enunciation."
Let yourself go with the flow of words,
says the analyst. He listens until the moment he rejects or modifies (one could
say detourns) a word, an expression or a definition. The derivé is certainly a
technique, almost a therapeutic one. But just as analysis without anything else
is almost always contraindicated, so the continual derivé is dangerous to the
extent that the individual, having gone too far (not without bases, but...)
without defenses, is threatened with explosion, dissolution, dissociation,
disintegration.[16]
In such a diagram it appears as if the "I" who
speaks brings the object of its speech into existence through an intentional act
-that is, it gives birth to its referent, its "other," the there to its here, by
intending it. The "I" appears to stand prior to discourse and generates, through
the eruptive power of its will, an object through language. (Picture this "I" as
sitting at its computer monitor and penetrating through the screen to generate a
"virtual 'I'" in cyberspace, then logging off, secured in its primacy). However,
as Judith Butler indicates, the "I" is enmeshed within language, not prior to
informative speech, arising within discursive flux: it is an assumed position
within the nets of discourse, a citation of its place in speech. To posit an
originary or primary subject outside of language or outside of the
telecommunicational environment, or on the "real" side of the computer screen is
to encircle it with signification, thereby subsuming it within the networks of
signification. The discourse that allows for the place of the "I" to be opened
up and assumed co-forms its path through language and environment-its
intentionality. No longer a mirror of the body, language as such is "productive,
constitutive, one might even argue performative, inasmuch as this signifying act
delimits and contours the body" which it can then claim lies outside of such
construction.[18] Thus the performative is not a singular or deliberate "act" by
which a subject brings into existence that which it names, but rather the
reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces (regulates,
constrains) the effects that it names.[19] Its productive power is to be found
not in subjectivity or intentionality then but "in the citational legacy by
which a contemporary 'act' emerges in the context of a chain of binding
conventions."[20] Such binding conventions may arise, as Jeffrey Schulz
indicates, through rhizomatous, transactional networks, another productive
citationality, intertwined with and arguably prior to the discursive.[21]
The point is not to call forth the disturbing image sketched out earlier
of the networked, ambulatory blind person shuttled about in a play of competing
market interests, but rather to augment vector diagrams like those employed in
performative acts of speech and sight with a more configurative, circulatory,
networked arcology. For not only is sight produced in the blind person through
the networked construct of the navigational system, but de Certeau's pedestrian
is produced through a power of citational convention, which not only introduces
an other in relation to an "I," but which forms the "I" through its
significatory construct. The here and the there are points plotted in a network
of discourse; the extent to which they refer to subjects and objects is
contingent upon the reiterative biofeedback loops that link them to bodies,
bodies that constitute and are constitutive of such a body of codes. Thus the
links between signification and materiality are biological and hypertextual;
each forms the other in complex webs of circulation and signification, and the
matter of materializing a body and subject is one of alignment and reiterative
power, or production. It is as if the interfaces, stacked or aligned to offer
translated or transformed "viewing," produce a kind of sedimentation, an organic
process of materialization that builds a body, often in line with some or other
regulatory norm. (In this sense, to be "on line" is rather to be "in line" or
"aligned.") This sedimentation is however actively unstable and unfixed,
contoured as much by its constitutive outside hat which it has cast out to
fortify itself as much as by transformative passage through its interfacial
alignments. Such a process of materialization, then, is enmeshed in a
biological-informational dialectic, where the informational is not only a
product of the biological but at the same time rebounds back to shape biological
relations. These relations are social, standing in dialectical relation to the
production of space. The dividing or parcelling out of this last is, then, in
its instrumentalization through language or information ("real," "virtual,"
"cyber-," etc.), part of a mechanism of productive power, which proceeds through
the organization, segmentation, enclosure, and control of individuals and social
formations in space. The currency through which this productive power is
instrumentalized is generated through a particular colonization of informatics,
marking a change in the organic composition of capital which, as Henri Lefebvre
writes, achieves "growth" by occupying space, by producing a space.[22] Thus the
new spaces that we align ourselves with, willingly separate, or blindly embrace
as techno-utopias, are those "occupied" or produced "by an advancing capitalism,
fragmented into parcels, homogenized into discrete commodities, organized into
locations of control, and extended to the global scale."[23] The challenge,
then, is to see how our concrete abstractions--our objects, spaces, and
technologies, mystified and fetishized--constitute and are constituted by social
relations of production; in other words, the challenge is to see them in their
interfaciality. Subjects and objects, as nodal entities, become sites of
bioinformatically transformative activity through the mediation of the
interface--not parcelled out by it. Interstitiality, intercorporeality, and
transactionality, in info-biotic systems, as structured and structuring
relations, are mapped through the dynamics of the interface, which mediates
their traversals. Its unified surface is made disjunct, cascading in folds like
Benjamin's royal robe,[24] spilling out into the cloth of the *Parangole*, while
simultaneously whisked back in, held in dynamic tension, allowing passage while
foregrounding the hybridity and contradictoriness of same. As Homi Bhabha
suggests, after Benjamin, such a situation involves not the metonymic
fragmentation of the "original," but foregrounds the "'foreign' element that
reveals the interstitial": it "insists in the textile superfluity of folds and
wrinkles, and becomes the 'unstable element of linkage,' the indeterminate
temporality of the in-between, that has to be engaged in creating the conditions
through which 'newness comes into the world.'"[25] The *Parangole*, as such,
arises as a model for such interfaciality: one always part of the formation of
bodies, an active instigator of relation and sedimentation that makes embodiment
visible and material, like the cloak that momentarily contours the invisible man
and which instigates a condition of seeing.
1. Daniel Goleman,
"Sonic Device for Blind May Aid Navigation," _The New York Times_, September 6,
1994. 2. Ibid. 3. Jonathan Crary, "Critical Reflections," _Artforum_,
February 1994, p. 59. Julia Scher's work is exemplary for its engagement of
these techniques. 4. George Hackett, "Cyberscope," _Newsweek_, September 26,
1994. 5. The Greek root of technology, roughly meaning "a system for making
or doing." 6. I owe this insight to N. Katherine Hayles. 7. In a paper
presented at a panel discussion at Here, New York City, Ganahl introduces the
idea of the interface as an analytical category--that is, as "a set of
descriptions and projections which explains, abstracts, or represents a segment
of the world." 8. N. Katherine Hayles, "Virtual Bodies and Flickering
Signifiers," _October_ 66, Fall 1993, p. 73. 9. Jean Baudrillard, interview
by Nicholas Zurbrugg, _World Art_, November 1994, p. 79. 10. Slang for
"animated situation" or "sudden confusion and/or agitation between people."
11. Helio Oiticica, "A transicao da cor do quatro para a espaco e o sentido
de constructividade," _Revista Habitat_ 70, Sao Paulo, 1962, p. 50. 12.
Lygia Clark, "Nostalgia of the Body," _October_ 69, Summer 1994, p. 94. 13.
Helio Oiticica, "Fundamental Bases for the Definition of the Parangole," in
_Helio Oiticica_ (exhibition catalogue), organized by Guy Brett, Catherine
David, Chris Dercon, Luciano Figueiredo, and Lygia Pape. Galerie Nationale du
Jeu de Paume, Paris; Projeto Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro; and Witte de With,
Rotterdam; 1992. p. 87. 14. Ibid. 15. Michel de Certeau, _The Practice
of Everyday Life_. Translated by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984, pp. 97-99. Reproduced in Laura Trippi, ed., "The Pocket
Dictionary of Spatial Drives," a digital hypertext in _Blast: The Spatial
Drive_, New York: The X-Art Foundation and The New Museum of Contemporary Art,
1992. 16. Ivan Chtcheglov, "Letters from Afar," _Internationale
Situationniste_ #9, 1964, p. 38. 17. de Certeau, pp. 97-99. Feminine
pronouns added in this citation. 18. Judith Butler, _Bodies That Matter_,
London: Routledge, 1993, p. 30. 19. Ibid, p. 2 20. Ibid, p. 225. 21.
See Jeffrey Schulz, "Synergistics 1.1: Bioinformatic Surfeits," text
accompanying exhibition at White Columns, New York, 1994. 22. Henri
Lefebvre, _The Survival of Capitalism_, London: Allison and Busby, 1976, p. 21.
23. Edward W. Soja, _Postmodern Geographies_, London and New York: Verso,
1989, p. 92. 24. See Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator,"
_Illuminations_, New York: Shocken Books, 1969, p. 75. 25. Homi K. Bhabha,
_The Location of Culture_, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 227.
