Made me smile constantly. The book, the artist (seems pretty broken though), the interviewer. Part of an interview.
p30 : “We always used to look at a map if we couldn’t find our way around a city. Now the map is part of the city, and you can either experience the city guided by the map and just be on the map, or you can go into the city and just be in the city. The map is not better or worse than the city; it just has a different representational level. The problem arises when freedom is limited – when you’re told that the map is, in fact, the city, or the city is the map, and you then believe this. Like at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, where it’s suggested you’re in a real situation, but in fact it’s very representational – you’re displaced, as it were.”
p34 : “To me, virtuality is connected with interactivity – not interactivity in a “press the yes or no button” kind of way, though. Until a few years ago, the feeling of the virtual was so representational that you could only relate to it as a sort of grid. I think this has changed now. Today, virtuality means interactivity in the sense that if you engage, the virtuality changes. And, perhaps more importantly, as you do that, you change as well, because you’ve taken it upon yourself to engage, to interact. The double perspective is acknowledged by the virtual space. The important thing is that virtuality should have an impact on you, just as you should have an impact on it. As a result, it contains a certain unpredictability.”
p41 : “Well, I think my medium is people … And a robot is only interesting because you know something about people. ... I think the weather has some great advantages over the car, such as its mundaneness … The weather, in all its shades, is really about tactility … It has these really physical aspects, but it’s also physical on an intellectual level. When you think about the cosmological potential of weather, it becomes almost physical. And yet, the weather also holds unbelievably profound questions: what is time? What is unpredictability? What is chaos? What is the turbulence of our atmosphere and universe? In other words, the weather also incites some very large, existential questions.”
p76 : the Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam
p80 : the Iceland National Concert and Conference Centre
p86 : Louis Vuitton store in Paris – Your loss of senses, 2005
p93 : “We are on the reverse side of Iceland. South behind us, north in front. The wind, as you can hear, is blowing from the north-northeast. We are not only on the rear stretch of Iceland, we are also behind the rest of the group. The ten other travelers are about four hours in front of us in two jeeps, keeping each other company. Having lost them, we are now on our own. We were delayed because we had to put our map-reader, Alain Robbe-Grillet, on a small rescue plane. I think they are flying somewhere beyond us, over the glacier. The air there is more dense because it is cooler, and the airplane can smoothly fly lower, so it is currently surfing the surface of the glacier down to Eiðar. This is also where we are heading.”
p96 : “The cupola was just to give [the car] that dimension that it absolutely did not possess, named the unexpected; it’s the car’s unpredictably reality. ... The car accommodates whatever kind of trip you want to have: we can bring a small kitchen if we want to have a chef-and-cuisine sort of trip, or we can just stock the usual astronaut food, which we did on this journey – much to our disadvantage, perhaps. We can really change it into anything. If we go fast enough it will start to fly – levitate, I call it. And it even sails if needed; hopefully this will not be the case. We also had a nice sound system put in recently. Maybe we should throw this song on. I think it suits the car.”
p113 : “But the thing about the Alps and their location in the center of Europe is that they’ve almost become another theme park. The mountains have been industrialized or colonized into something no longer about spatial questions, but about mediated relationships. ... There are no images or reports to compare [this vista in Iceland] to inside your head, nothing to calibrate it against. ... Of course, everything is fundamentally mediated insofar as we carry and project ideas from one knowledge set onto others, but that’s a discussion for another time.”
p120 : Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
p131 : “The idea is to establish an interdisciplinary school that focuses on spatial issues. It will do so primarily from the perspective of art and artists, but it should also have a group of architects and perhaps several scientists working on, for instance, psychophysical issues … the school is not about producing artists in the traditional sense, but about introducing a vocabulary through which artworks can become much more integrated into society, social structures, and scientific and architectural discourses.”
p136 : The afterimage experiment (30 min film), Zeiss Planetarium, Berlin, 2006. (Can’t find much about this, but this mentions it, and is quite interesting in itself)
p169 : Robert Irwin – also, Michael Asher – also.
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