Friday, September 6, 2013

Archives, Architecture and the Ruins of the Internet


The online exhibition summary of the 2003-2004 Canadian Centre for Architecture exhibition out of the box: price rossi sterling + matta-clark concludes with a hyperlink to the microsite component of the exhibition, describing it as “a trace of the installation at the CCA” and asserting the dual purpose of the site to “document the exhibition and at the same time provide an open-ended framework to support ongoing investigation and discussion.” At the time of the exhibition’s opening in fall 2003, the internet was already understood to be a significant component of everyday life and one that might offer fruitful avenues for communication, research and collaboration, even if the specific forms those potentialities might take were not yet known. In the nearly ten years since the life of the exhibition, many new and significant online platforms and technological hardwares have been developed that have indeed expanded the reach of the internet over the global populous as well as the depth to which the internet penetrates daily life and functions as an integral component of everyday living—namely social media, internet-enabled smartphones and the general expansion of global e-commerce. 

In those same ten years, the website component of the out of the box exhibition has remained largely unchanged, save for the uploading of short videos and digital photographs documenting the various symposia, programs and community events that took place around the themes of the exhibition. As a “trace” of the installation, the website functions more fully than many other exhibition websites of its time. Users can experience every significant aspect of the installation and its contents, from the opening photomontage of the unpacking of the archive crates, to a full range of images and didactics detailing the lives and works of the four architects whose archives were unpacked for the exhibition, an installation plan, and compressed videos depicting moments from keynote lectures on each of the four architect-artists, the exhibition of whose archives occasioned the show and its digital presence. The very design of the website—a minimal text-based interface that is navigated by a series of multicolor links attached to the left side of the thin, interrupted box that serves as the visual and thematic leitmotif of the site—recalls a time when the web was regarded as a virtual space whose limitless capacity to present media was enabled by the infinitely mutable surface of the computer screen.

Hence, the website presents its contents within as a series of screens within screens. Each link on the left side of the screen summons a new screen that presents a subcategory of the exhibition based around each artist, and within each of these subcategories are five more groupings of screens presenting the introduction, point of view, artist’s biography, some unique aspect of his work, and a selection of references, most of which are printed materials that, at the time of the exhibition, were ironically not yet also available on the screen. The website, like the archives it seeks to represent, exhaustively documents the exhibition, giving a digital life to the show that has outlasted the physical display for nearly a decade and representing, albeit unintentionally, a hopeful attitude toward the possibilities of the internet as an infinite living archive during a unique moment when those possibilities could be foretold but not yet realized.




Select bibliography of James Stirling. CCA/outofthebox/stirling/reference/bibliography. Accessed April 24th, 2013.

The website assumes a logical and necessary function in support of the experimental premise of the exhibition—which is to allow the public to share in the very first moments of opening the boxes of four important archives—by extending the exhibition design goal of “develop[ing] a strategy, both logistic and formal, that reveals the great diversity of materials included in an archive” to a virtual space where the exhibition maintains an accessible presence so that, as the website’s mission states, “curators, students and researchers [can] engage in a continuing task of adjustment, correction and changes of course.”



Issue three of the exhibition strategy. CCA/outofthebox/exhibition/design. Accessed April 24th, 2013.




Statement of purpose of the website. CCA/outofthebox/introduction/1 of 2. Accessed April 24th, 2013.


This kind of ambitious early effort to construct an online presence for an exhibition is uniquely suited for a show that addresses questions of the archive through the archival materials of four architects whose work interrogated the very nature and necessity of the built environment. Now more than ever, the internet functions as an virtual architectural space with very real-life implications. In much the same way that architecture has structured the physical terrain in which human existence has played out for thousands of years, the internet now houses and structures an increasingly complex network of media, information, communications and economical transactions that constitute the contemporary human experience, which exists by necessity across the physical and digital platforms of space, architecture and the web. In this sense, the internet functions dually as archive and architecture of human experience by organizing and preserving past exchanges and interfaces even as it enables them in the emerging present. Wireless technologies have only deepened this inextricable meld, unhinging the digital experience from fixed architectural space and permitting it to permeate all aspects of physical life.

Despite its ambitious endeavor to enable and structure an ongoing inquiry around the archives of the four architects Cedric Price, Also Rossi, James Stirling, and Gordon Matta-Clark, the website for out of the box is no more than a dusty file in the living archive of an internet that has expanded exponentially in scope and abilities in a decade rife with expansions to its capacities, faculties and reach. Indeed, its retro-futuristic flash design marks it as a disused thing of the past, a virtual corollary of Matta-Clark’s Anarchitecture, with its numerous broken links to outside resources revealing, like his building cuts, the shifting forces and interests that render once useful structures obsolete.


Selection of external links concerning Aldo Rossi. CCA/outofthebox/rossi/Reference/Links. Accessed April 24th, 2013.



Error page resulting from following an external link from the Also Rossi Reference section. Accessed April 24th, 2013. 

And yet, the persistence of this website and its comprehensive documentation of an exhibition, which allows one to sample a decade-old show in depth, corroborates precisely the kinds of complex and ongoing interactions its makers imagined were possible online even before the web and its users were technically capable of providing them. The website itself is neither able to facilitate nor archive exchanges of discourse by its visitors, who are only offered a passive viewing experience despite the many screens, windows, hyperlinks and embedded media.


Biographical text concerning Matta-Clark with embedded video. CCA/outofthebox/matta-clark/artist/biography/5 of 7. Accessed April 24th, 2013.
  
However it does, in the spirit of the four architects it archives, anticipate a more elastic, adaptive and technology-infused architecture—a virtual realization of Price’s anti-architectural Fun Palace—that is infinitely capable of accommodating the varied and unknown future demands of people, experiences and information that have yet to be.



Price's Fun Palace as it is represented on the out of the box microsite. Accessed April 24th, 2013.

Essay by Elliot Reichert

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