Unfoldable Arch is a vectorized space between virtual and physical fields of existence. Mapped out of the ancient window arc of the Salzburg Fortress, I created a virtual image that can be entered and navigated through in virtual space. In virtual space, revolutionary new ways of seeing the information in the architecture are revealed. As I uploaded my virtual model into the blender software, I encountered a most interesting paradox. The system could not handle, export, or even create a full image of the virtual space. The only way to encounter the information is to interact by placing oneself within the virtual space, navigating and spinning it around, and encountering walls, windows, objects, and forms as they appear out of thin air.
Unfoldable Arch is a “Spatial Probe”, an orbit and investigation of the emerging ambiguity of the intermediacy between the virtual, pictorial, and physical space and the information that can and cannot be provided. The ultimate aim of Unfoldable Arch is to reveal the relativity and interconnectivity of our world of information and interaction.
To provide true evolutions in communications - centered on revealing the potentiality and ambiguity of physical and virtual space in the becoming, and building bridges between these worlds, to achieve true new modes of creating, being, and connecting not by looking for an ultimate “end” to art or technology, but by entering precisely this dynamic of constant becoming, allowing for multiple temporalities and unique happenings - because it is our urgent responsibility to confront the notions of representation, perception, and control in an age beyond medium and market.
The temporarily of this virtual situation thus extends the spatial conditions of the work from that of the distinct object to the site of the performance, even as video already presents a site for the actions. Evoking a here-and-now that immediately draws attention to its elsewheres. To move toward my ambiguous site is not a matter of finding a place or returning to it but is instead to allow for dislocation, and breach this gap wide open. Unfoldable Arch candidly reflects on the limits and traps of its real motivations, instead of reading participation as the charitable savior of geopolitical struggle. Rather than breading the next generation of consensual facilitators and mediators, this is an urgent inversion of participation—no longer a process by which others are invited “in,” but a means of acting without mandate, as uninvited irritant: a forced entry into fields of knowledge that only benefit from exterior thinking, outside programmed thoughts. (The walls of my darkroom collapse and reveal darkness.) Unfold the arch, what do you see?
