Interceptors
Brian Boigon asks Peter Eisenman, Andrew Ross, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Chris Sheppard about seamless technology
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Excerpt of “Interceptors.” Culture Lab, 15 February 1993. Brian Boigon fonds, CCA. Gift of Brian Boigon © Brian Boigon.
The following text is an excerpt from Culture Lab 2.3: “Interceptors”. Culture Lab is a series of symposia hosted by Brian Boigon throughout the early 1990s at The Rivoli Club in Toronto. Boigon’s symposia are the central focus of the CCA exhibition, Interactive Entertainment Architecture: Culture Lab, Toronto 1991–1994, curated by Farzin Lotfi-Jam.
- Brian Boigon
- A polyvocal act is a complex thing to put together. One requires analytical, see-through machinery. Interceptor vehicles that shake, shimmy, and flow. Mixers that spin the dirt, dust, and filth of mass cultural production with the clean, dry, and high of the family. The interceptor: shapeshifting, creatureless, morphic forms who seek to reroute the flow, but not destroy it. Not appropriation, not sampling, not groove sucking. Interceptor theory is sublime interruption, flow without deflection, rebound without flow, deflection without retractors, geometry without vectors.
“Wait a minute, honey. I think you better come here and see this… There’s a UFO message coming across our TV, and they’re saying that we better stop using ear cleaners.” You know why? Because they interfere with the transmission signal coming from their organic brain probes. They say one out of every three Earthlings has a probe mashed in their brains.
Michael Awad, View of Brian Boigon during Culture Lab 2.3: Interceptors, Toronto, Canada. 1993. Gelatin silver print. ARCH292480. Brian Boigon fonds, CCA. Gift of Brian Boigon © Michael Awad
- BB
- Every time I ask a question in this audience to these people up here, I get confused. It seems my brainwaves get crunched. However, I will make a very simple and straightforward set of questions. As the world of technology becomes more seamless, televisions and computers will be one and the same. What do you think will be the distinguishing features of a landscape that may or may not have any bumps in the bed sheets? How would you begin to mark out the tactile world in one that seems to always seek to erase error and imperfection? Do you think that interception, as a field of delivery, could be a way to introduce the problem of the tactile sense in the data field? For example, do you think bank machines should be given feelings?
Michael Awad, View of Chris Sheppard during Culture Lab 2.3: Interceptors, Toronto, Canada. 1993. Gelatin silver print. ARCH292478. Brian Boigon fonds, CCA. Gift of Brian Boigon © Michael Awad
- Chris Shepherd
- I still haven’t figured out how to work a bank machine yet, so I’ll leave that one to someone else.
In reference to the first question, for years I’ve tried to obtain a digital sound. I had a lot of analog equipment, and I left it all behind. I wanted to go completely digital, and now that we live in an age where we’re all directed to appreciate the marvels of digital sound and information, I’ve turned cold. I’ve started to admire the strengths of analog sound. When I’m asked to compose music for compact discs, I’ve added back the hiss and pop society has become used to on their old vinyl. Technology is moving faster than society, and the things we’ve cleaned up with technology are the things we once considered mistakes. These are the elements that provide warmth, humanity, and fallibility.
What about you, Peter? Do you pick up some sort of cosmic wave when you’re punching in at your bank machine?
Michael Awad, First view of Peter Eisenman during Culture Lab 2.3: Interceptors, Toronto, Canada. 1993. Gelatin silver print. ARCH292479. Brian Boigon fonds, CCA. Gift of Brian Boigon © Michael Awad
- Peter Eisenman
- Well, I’ve lost all my [bank] cards. I don’t think they need to have feelings at all.
I was reminded of a day when I was in the Madrid airport. I have a great fear of flying when there is bad weather, but it was a beautiful, clear day. I had no anxiety at all. I had a first-class ticket because I wanted to make sure that I got on this plane. I got up to the counter and there was this young Spanish clerk. I presented my ticket and she said, “You’re not flying today.” I said, “Well, what do you mean I’m not flying today? I mean, it’s such a beautiful day.” And she said: “Your name isn’t in the computer.” And I said, “Well, that must be some mistake with the computer, because here I am. I’ve flown all the way from the United States to catch this flight going to Seville. The flight is clearly going, and I have an okay ticket.” She replied, “I’m sorry, sir. The computer says you’re not going to go.”
What I realize is that in the world of electronics, where people no longer have any mediating value, they begin to lose the possibility of acting like human beings. They lose their feeling, their capacity to have sensate responses to physical stimuli—like the spaces that architects make. I would argue that we have to reprogram people to act more like people—especially at counters in front of computers—and also to be concerned about what their physical environment might be like.
Michael Awad, View of Andrew Ross during Culture Lab 2.3: Interceptors, Toronto, Canada. 1993. Gelatin silver print. ARCH292482. Brian Boigon fonds, CCA. Gift of Brian Boigon © Michael Awad
- Andrew Ross
- I’m prepared to reject the ideology of seamless technology. I don’t think it’s an ideology that belongs to us or can be of particular use to us. The ideology of seamless technology is an ideology of the military industrial complex; it’s the ideology of command, control, and communications technology. We must reject the possibility of a centralized, technological control system. I’m not even sure if I want to accept that the counter ideology is to blame.
- BB
- I didn’t bring up the word ideology. I just brought up the word seamless. In my mind, the idea that two technologies, already so close together, already sharing cathode ray tubes, already sharing pixelated spaces, already sharing zones, are bound to have to come to terms with their similitude. That similitude is something that I think one needs to address in the same way that the four-track digital mixer addressed the garage band. Once you get certain technologies into the hands of people who could experiment with them, when those kinds of meltdowns occur, you get new kinds of hybrid forms. The idea of a merging of these two systems is going to produce possibilities that aren’t all ideologically negative, nor are they all militarized, or regime oriented. The idea of the sublime interruption comes out of the Walkman, and the possibility of someone being a producer and a recorder simultaneously.
- AR
- The reason I brought up the word “ideology” was to introduce the realm of ideas. What I’ve been arguing about is that one must do a certain amount of cultural work around the question of technologies. They’re not simply hardware presences, nor is their material presence inevitable. Technologies are as much cultural processes as they are hardware objects, and unless we think about technology as an idea, then we’re already giving in to the inevitability that accompanies their material presence when they land in our laps.
Michael Awad, View of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick during Culture Lab 2.3: Interceptors, Toronto, Canada. 1993. Gelatin silver print. ARCH292481. Brian Boigon fonds, CCA. Gift of Brian Boigon © Michael Awad
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
- I’m still waiting for the seamless melding of technologies. None of my software works with any of my other software. Every step I’ve made in dealing with my personal computer has blessedly introduced new elements of failure and impossibility.
Probably the most individualized, low-tech relationship I have has been carried on exclusively through email. It’s a relationship with somebody whom I was disastrously in love with twenty years ago. Somehow, in the space of email, through this highly mediated voice, this person no longer seems dangerous to me. What had been an overbearing presence becomes a mediated presence.
It goes back to the to the analog digital thing: to celebrate the recalcitrant presence of technological seams and the emergence of new technologies. There are new ways to be low-tech, and every time there’s an advance, I find that new kinds of old meanings adhere to it. I hope that will always be true.
- PE
- I want to make sure, just for the architects in the room, that while I support this idea of there being new ways to be low-tech, I don’t think we should interpret it as going back to a nostalgic evocation of style—as some architects would like. It means going forward rather than going backward. You’re not going to find new ways to be low-tech in the eighteenth century; you’re only going to find them in the next century.
- CS
- We have to watch out for the future, too. There are no warning signs on these things yet. The studies haven’t been done. NASA’s been flirting around with virtual reality long before we got our hands on it. They have yet to tell us what exactly is going to happen when all this stuff is introduced. And now they’ve got virtual reality home shopping. So, we’re all going to be corrupted. They still haven’t told us what television does to us! It’s who’s controlling it; they control cigarettes, guns, liquor and virtual reality, don’t they? That’s a strange group.
Michael Awad, Second view of Peter Eisenman during Culture Lab 2.3: Interceptors, Toronto, Canada. 1993. Gelatin silver print. ARCH292483. Brian Boigon fonds, CCA. Gift of Brian Boigon © Michael Awad
- PE
- If by technology, you mean media technology, I think media has come to dissipate the possibility of people being affected in a certain way by what I know as architectural space. I think people don’t really care anymore. I can take people into my building, the Wexner Center—which I think is an affective space—and most of the people who are not sensitized to architecture just begin to look at the TV monitors and think, “Oh, this is great! They got great TV monitors in there.” They’ve lost the capacity to be affected by space because of the overstimulated condition that their TV monitors produce.
Eisenman/Trott Architects, Axonmetric drawing of the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus, Ohio. ca. 1980s. Ink on vellum. DR1994:0149:1643. Peter Eisenman fonds, CCA © CCA
- PE
- I’ll give you one little example. We just finished a convention centre in Columbus, Ohio. We designed meeting rooms where we wanted people to have a spatial feeling. The forward scouts for conventioneers that are there booking conventions went into our meeting room, sat down, and a lot of them began to experience vertigo and a sense of nausea that they associated with air sickness. They reported this to the convention centre authorities, saying that they felt that their people couldn’t sit in these rooms because they would have a terrible sense of uneasiness.
Just before the building opened, we were made to change all the rooms back to vertical and horizontal orientations, just to appease the convention centre, when it was precisely the sense of vertigo that we wanted to instill in these people—to make them feel like they were experiencing some kind of reality. Would it have been good for them to experience this vertigo? I think they would have come out the other side. At least they would have experienced something. Now they’re just going to go into the same old meeting rooms that they would go into in Indianapolis and Calgary, ,or wherever you might want to find a convention.
