Analogies are mechanisms
that allow categorization to happen. They surface in our brains with no purpose
and they appear to rapidly go away. We find analogies everywhere, when we
perceive a common essence between two or more things, when external impulses trigger
associations in relation to our memories, our ideas and interests.
Creating random paths in
our intellectual mesh, "analogies are our interstate freeways of
cognition", therefore, I will use them to think through this project, and
bring together concepts that may seem to come from dissimilar
places. I aim to build new superhighways in my brain as well as in
the brains of others who follow these ideas.
Multiple Dimensions are to
Space as this Project is to the AEIVA Building.
I denote this project to be
a "multilayered project" because I am interested in achieving a
holistic and trans-disciplinary vision of art. The project will be a major
endeavor that will involve education, large-scale installation, researching,
writing, conceptualizing, and art production. It will involve collaboration,
the study of architecture and contemporary art, and the relationship between
art and science. The final outcome will conclude in an immersive environment
that will host different events, bringing people together to experience
unconventional sensations, enabling a new encounter with reality.
My first approach to the
idea of multidimensional space comes from the understanding of higher geometry.
In 1884, Edwin Abbot wrote Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions,
a satirical novel that illustrates how a higher dimension can be viewed and
understood from a lower dimension (1). Once one starts to understand the
possibility of higher dimensions, a world of endless possibilities and unseen
realities become conceivable.
I like to think of space in
opposite ways. On the one hand, there is what I call the hard-edge, physical
space: a brain, a building, a country, a planet, the cosmos, amongst many other
examples. On the other hand, I see space as a dynamic fluid, as an
abstract, intangible filler that exists in, between, over, before, during, and
after the hard-edge space. The dynamic space inhabits the physical space: an
idea, sensations and feelings, sociological patterns, human behavior, and the
expansion of the universe respectively.
Along those lines, this
project aims to act as a higher-dimensional model where, teaching and art
production will work as the dynamic space that will inhabit the hard-edge space
provided by the building of the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts
(AEIVA), designed by the Architect Randall Stout.
Since the building itself
is the starting point for the conceptualization of this proposal, architecture
will be at the core of the formulation of my ideas. I will think of
architecture in an expanded way, as the platform that will hold this project
together, and as a fundamental structural form that speaks of connectivity,
networks and fabrics of different sorts.
The Tower of Ideas: The
City of Codification
I am interested in the
notion of the building, or the tower, as a solid standing element supported by
central columns and beams. The same way as a theory is, the tower is a
statement, a connected assembly linked within its components. Namely, the
theory is a structure of ideas, and no matter how true or false they are, if
they are built with caution, the theory withstands like a building. I am an
advocate of the construction of theories, and a true believer in the power of
ideas.
A tower of ideas, just like
a building, belongs to a much larger space, the space of the totality of human
knowledge and the urban space respectively. We can now think of the Internet as
a parallel to the city, where most of human knowledge flows in a mega structure
of distributed networks. Shopping, dating, traveling, working, everything we
know to be characteristic of a contemporary city has been codified. A mirrored
virtual image of the “outside” has been created inside our computing machines.
Even the ways our cities are planned seem to correlate to the structure of a
motherboard. Paul Virilio, in The Information Bomb, addresses the
notion that the Internet is a virtual city. He describes it as a
cyber-continent, as a "rhizomatic universe with no authorities, with no
head". This comparison between the city and technological
advancements can also be observed in SUPERSTUDIO's Ninth City from 1971, whose
conception I would like to compare to the way we live in the information age:
"This is an extremely
efficient city, it's a mechanical city. It generates itself for the good of the
inhabitants. The inhabitants live in the machine endlessly dragged along by
conveyor belts, by chutes and pneumatic tubes from the time of birth to the
time of death. The machine takes care of everything, along with the innumerable
routes that intersect, unite and divide, according to the incomprehensible
programming of the machine. The inhabitants find food and fear, sleep and joy,
sex and hope, death and anger, sometimes also rebellion; but they know very
well that if they get off the obligatory routes established by the machine,
they will inevitably be crushed by it's machinery."
Is this dystopian
conception of the city realistic when we think of the "routes of the
machine" as systems of thought imposed by the status quo? Can we build
towers of ideas, little buildings within the system that influence the overall
output of the cyber-continent on our daily lives?
Creating as a Blending
Machine
This project is
written in support of practices that insist in the idea that art, science, and
philosophy, address the same fundamental notions in different languages.
These three main branches of knowledge can come together into a multidisciplinary
approach to be merged into a comprehensible vision of information as a whole.
[1] Abbot describes the two-dimensional world of the "Flatlanders" who suddenly are visited by a higher-dimensional creature, a sphere. It explains how a flatlander (a two-dimensional creature living in a plane) perceives the sphere as it crosses its two dimensional field; as a dot that turns into a flat circle that appears to grow, then to shrink to finally disappear. This visualization opens possibilities for us to imagine how we would perceive a fourth-dimensional object from our three-dimensional perspective.
