The installation by architect Andy Payne, of Lift Architects, Projection One “strives to challenge the way in which users perceive projection art.” In its simplest form, it is algorithmic abstract light patterns projected onto a volumetric surface.
The patterns respond to various inputs, such as the tonalities in music, ambient sound, or even gestural movements. The effect is a beautiful spatial representation of abstract inputs that all occur within the confines of the gallery it is displayed in. I would like to focus on the second half of the video, where the woman’s movements are providing the inputs for the projection.
So what does this piece have to do with control? Taking a deeper look into this precedent, one must remember Alain Joxe’s response to Michel Foucault. “Every distinction drawn between interest and person…can only have strategic sense if one is equally to establish that there exists contradictions between the bourgeois class and party, and that there are accordingly two interests present.”[1] In other words, the object/agent/party with power and its interests must be viewed as separate entities. We must dissect the workings of every power structure to determine this difference.
More traditional power structures are usually characterised by a clearly defined hierarchy, where one party is dominated to the benefit of another party. The dominators will nearly always benefit at the expense of the subservient. Examples of this include armrests on public benches preventing people from using them to sleep or high windows in British classrooms to prevent students from being distracted[2]. In each case, the subservient party has no say in their level of involvement with that piece of design. They are forced to behave in a certain way as a result of these architectures of control – the tramp must find other places to sleep, and the student is coerced into paying attention to the teacher.
In Projection One, however, a symbiosis exists where the motivation of the viewer aligns with the motivation of the art. The agency of both parties is for interaction to occur. The viewer’s impulse is to make the piece generate new patterns and they are rewarded with the subtle beauty of those patterns. The piece itself has agency (also to create new patterns) and it does this by making the viewer move. Both parties are making the other do work, but the result is that both are rewarded to an equal degree. To return to Alain Joxe, the two groups involved are clearly separate, but they share a common interest, which is interaction with the other party.
When viewed through this lense, the art piece is not the projection algorithm, nor the hanging volume of the screen, but the very act of interaction. The interaction feeds the generation of new possibilities and through that interaction, the viewer directly becomes a part of the system that the artist has created. There is a level of dependency associated with this act that elevates it to the focal point of the piece. Interaction allows the level of control to become re-evaluated because they share the same agency.[3]
If this level of alliance can occur in an art piece, whose commodity is essentially the value of the experience, can a similar level of symbiosis occur in more traditional systems of control, whose goals are to benefit broader society? What might those systems look like, and what fields could benefit from this kind of cooperative architecture?
With the clear disparity in fortunes that occur as a result of how top-down power structures carry out control in their architectures, a more egalitarian approach seems to be more in tune with the 21st century. Increased transparency through Wikileaks, and the online information vigilantism of LulzSec and Anonymous appear to be moving the landscape towards redistributed power structures. Ultimately, the architectures of control are tied up in this, and a new paradigm awaits for methods of control that are symbiotic in nature, and embed new possibilities within their structures.
[1] Space, Knowledge and Power, Foucault and Geography. Edited by Jeremy R. Crampton and Stuart Elden. P 29.
[2] Architectures of Control in Consumer Product Design. Daniel Lockton PHD dissertation, Cambridge University, 2005.
[3] Programming Interactivity: A Designers Guide to Processing, Arduino, and openFrameworks. Joshua Noble. 2005
