I co-organized a project called PORT at the MIT List Center the first part
of this year. One of our main concerns was the creation of a space that had
no edges, in fact had no one site in the traditional museological sense of
presentation. This was both visual and aural -- the visitor to the gallery
often became part of the transmitted projection so that they would be
communicating ( with images, sounds and/or text) from MIT to the projector
in New York and then find their communication instantainiously projected on
the screen above their heads as part of the projection, creating a
circulatory network. I would then send the images or sound from the
projection back to the projector to be cycled again.
When this worked I absolutely felt I was in a place of no-place, that I
was somehow blending into another kind of spacial environment entirely, if
only with chat text or an image. That is a sensation I would like to find a
name for. It was a kind of chiaroscuro but instead of
foreground/background, it was MIT/New York. It was not as if it was a
painting by Caravaggio but I was Caravaggio in the act of creation
discovering chiaroscuro.
I noticed the Prof. Panofsky is subscribed to the list from the grave and
wondered if he had any thoughts. The dead would have insight to the
middle-between we living cannot fathom.
Robbin Murphy