THE PULSING STOPS WHERE TIME HAS BEEN

—Thom Gunn

Video scored to "1. New York Counterpoint: Fast" by Steve Reich

A lone bird flies across the field of vision.

An ordinary event straddles the focus of attention and the blur of oblivion.

Extraordinary: an object escapes the camera's relentlessly objective cross-sectioning of time, disappearing into the fissures between frames per second.

Asian American Arts & Cultural Center

Conceived and produced for the M.Arch. studio program, Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation, New York, NY.

The project began during the cruelest cold snap in Manhattan's history. Chinatown's vapors carried the promise of warmth: fragrant steam from the carts of the most stalwart of street vendors; exhaust from Canal Street traffic; steady streams from buildings' outtake systems pouring through the stark geometric grillwork of fire escapes and onto the narrow alleys below; frozen breaths lingering in the air; even the whispered sighs of powdery snow blown off rooftops.

Numb from the cold, this encounter tapped into the density of sensation recalled from childhood visits to other Chinatowns: the hustle of the crowds, the babble of different dialects, the vibrations of the subways coursing underfoot.

The proposal mapped the site's extant sensory zones of stillness and noise, then nestled the programmatic elements within that soundscape according to their ambient sound requirements (for instance, while theaters require an ambient noise level of 25 dBA, noise in a subway tunnel can surpass 95 dBA.) The density of lines communicates stillness and activity. Viewed in profile, the site models' high points correspond to quiet, low points to noise.

Program guidelines allocated the most square footage to theater functions, spaces traditionally swaddled in acoustic insulation.  The next most significant programmatic function was of our own invention, a wild card. The proposed subway concourse pulled the Canal Street station north one block, stitching together the 4, 5, and 6 lines with the J, M, and Z lines, and capitalizing upon the near-constant activity of the trains running alongside the site. The concourse would house a night market, extending the hours of a Chinatown that typically shut down by 9 o’clock.

Rather than completely isolate the theater, the proposal played upon the proscenium theater’s intrinsic cleft, one reinforced in a program that prescribed separate square footages for the stage and seating. The open-air theater floats overhead, cocooned in a circulatory hollow while the rest of the structure wraps around it. Sound filters up from the subway concourse, feeding into where an orchestra pit might ordinarily be. The theater becomes a listening chamber for a performance colored by the many shades of urban white noise.

From the din and rumblings of the trains below to the hush of the theater above, procession through the space follows the arc of this trajectory.

A cross-inquiry focused upon the children's string game, Cat's Cradle. Its near symmetries evoked the subway lines flanking the site to the east and west as well as inherent, perhaps not immediately apparent programmatic couplings. The game itself is structured in three parts: (1) patterns, an endpoint, a goal; (2) tricks, when after much complex manipulation, the loop is suddenly drawn from the hand by some simple movement (thereby dramatically changing the structure); and (3) catches, when certain strings are pulled, the hand of some fingers may be caught in the running noose.

That evidence of...migration may be found in [string figures] is not unlikely....Many are closely connected with racial history and mythology, with traditional tales and fortune-telling; some are accompanied by muttered chants or songs; in others a consecutive story follows from movement to movement, or perhaps a touch or a word is associated with a certain turn or twist of the string. (Caroline Furness Jayne. String Figures: A Study of Cat's Cradle in Many Lands. New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906.)

The Rogue Edition

100 days 10 visions

A clock runs in reverse, racing to the origin, already too late for never.

He names this aqua mirabilis in honor of his new hometown; but really, it is a memory of and longing for a moment and feeling of where he is no longer and may never have been.

What color is time now?

This original essay and artist’s book was composed, designed, and produced under the auspices of a Curatorial Fellowship at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI), a Los Angeles-based non-profit artists’ collective in 2011.  Capping off the ambitious 100/10 project series, highlighting 10 curatorial visions over the course of 100 business days, this contribution to the final deluxe edition of five recuperated the used book's morphology with heavily dog-eared, time-yellowed pages, ghostly annotations, and abandoned bookmarks.

In keeping with the mischievous artful dodge that conflates the authentic with the forgery, the rogue edition of 30 copies began its release into the wild in late August 2014.

drawing : transcription

Conceived and produced for Basic Drawing, led by Chris Sharples, M.Arch. Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation, New York, NY.

Tasked with drawing an athletic shoe to scale using precise measuring tools of our own device, many constructed elaborate machines, recalling Albrecht Dürer's perspectival contraptions and the Renaissance invention of perfect monocular optics. Fresh from a visit to the Cooper Hewitt's National Design Triennial. "Inside Design Now," I wondered how one might re-create Benjamin Fry’s typographic sequencing of the human genome: the lush richness and variability of DNA rendered into sweeping textural wallpaper patterns. 

If only a string wrapped around the shoe could somehow be imprinted or encoded with the surface conditions that it touched...

The story goes

Directions for getting to Marfa

In homage to seriality, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, peripheral vision, and Consummate Readers, the following excerpt is drawn from a series of essays that circle around the poetics of the west Texas town of Marfa.

Prologue.

Train and book propel her forward through time, space, the narrative. Line after line, pages turn, and the desert slides by her window, frame by frame, the smudge of sage, the sulphur yellow and ochre of creosote bush, sun-bleached greys, a palette grounded in chaparral beiges, weathered tans, dust. Occasionally, she comes to her senses, lifting up her eyes from the page to fix her gaze upon the steady horizon and remember where she is, again. (Never mind that this is the first time she has been here.) Where is she?

Or perhaps it’s the other way around: that she returns to the story and the world therein unfurls in her mind’s eye such that even as she gazes out the train’s window, her attention is elsewhere. The novel’s characters inhabit another world, another era so markedly different from where she is. And yet, in a sense, she is there, transported, the story saturating her being. Who is she?

There is the figure of the Reader, the Traveler, the Wife, the Mother. This interpellating vector of velocity scatters names across terra incognita. She herself goes unnamed.

30 ̊18’43” N, 104 ̊1’29” W (30.311863, -104.024779)

The story goes that in 1883, a railroad engineer’s wife named this spot in the high desert plains of Texas after a character in the novel she was reading at the time, The Brothers Karamazov. [1] Her simultaneous immersion in book and desert as she accompanied her husband precipitates in this proper name, the distillate of an originary myth so oft-repeated as to acquire the solidity of fact, or at least the patina of a charming curiosity. [2] One’s imagination is struck by the sharp incongruity: the enlightened civility of the name’s provenance against the scarcely settled, recently incorporated expanse. But Marfa’s founding as a water stop on the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Galveston-Harrisburg-San Antonio line was borne of another kind of Enlightenment project. Since around 1845, federally-sponsored expeditions had surveyed the Western regions with the dual aims of settlement and defense. New rail routes to the Pacific would “chart the way to an agricultural empire—a ‘new garden of the world.’” The enormous outlay of time, labor, and materials to install this infrastructure converted the geological survey’s measure of the land into the currency of capitalism. The opening of the first passenger railroad on September 15, 1830, also anticipated opening a new landscape for leisurely consumption (the beguiling promise of easy access only hastening the frontier’s retreat into a hazily remembered fiction). The railroad was “the prime instrument of the large-scale industrialization which re-created American nature into ‘natural resources’ for commodity production, ... a chariot winging Americans on an aesthetic journey through the new empire.” [3]

But for the time being, human perception was not habituated to the railroad’s speeds, and so the first landscapes seen from the train were “erased to a blur, impossible to contemplate.” [4]  For the actress Fanny Kemble’s maiden trip during a preview of the Manchester and Liverpool Railroad, closing her eyes at thirty-five miles an hour provoked a “sensation of flying...quite delightful, and strange beyond description”; for Ulysses S. Grant, going at an average twelve miles an hour in 1839 Pennsylvania “seemed like annihilating space”; and for Fanny Kemble’s mother?—she was “frightened to death” of “a situation which appeared to her to threaten with instant annihilation herself and all her traveling companions.” [5]

Beyond civilization’s description, one faced the desert’s annihilating space; accelerating westward, one could annihilate desert space.

___

[1] Written and published serially in Russia from 1877 to 1880, The Brothers Karamazov’s earliest English translations were by Edward Garnett (1927), Constance Garnett (1947) and Avrahm Yarmolinsky (1949). Of these Constance Garnett’s was the most widely read until Pevear and Volokhonsky’s critically acclaimed translation in 2000. The town’s nameless interpellator may very well have been reading it in the original.

[2] How this foundational nominative act is told varies surprisingly little, perhaps because her gerundial anonymous person carries little property besides her reading and her husband, whose profession pretenses the anecdote. The wife carries on with reading, naming, accompanying while her husband is by turns a (chief) railroad engineer or a railroad executive. [On the property of Proper Names, see Roland Barthes, “Voice of the Person,” in S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (The Noonday Press, 1974), 190-1; orig. Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1970.] Equally strange is that none of these accounts bother to describe which character in the novel is Marfa. The anecdote seems to have contentedly ossified into a marketable myth for travel guides, the town’s occasional press coverage, and under a banner heading on the Marfa Chamber of Commerce relocation webpage that exhorts prospective residents to “Move Here!” (www.marfacc.com/relocation.htm; accessed 9 March 2007).

[3] Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, ed. Eric Foner (New York: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 19. While his is considered the classic work on America during this period, for a study focusing upon the government and military’s concerted efforts in railroad surveys and expeditions Trachtenberg refers to William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Knopf, 1966).

[4] Rebecca Solnit, “The Annihilation of Time and Space,” in River of Shadows: Eadward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking, 2003), 9.

[5] Qtd. in ibid., 9.