The seam
The emergence of relations among things, more than the things themselves, always gives rise to new meanings.
Aldo Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography
In Spook Country, William Gibson imagined a piece of locative art: stand at a spot on the Sunset Strip, put on your visor, and there is River Phoenix overdosing on the sidewalk outside the Viper Room [1]. A macabre invisible monument, one world written over the other. That image has stayed with me for years, because it points at the thing I keep circling. Meaning gathers where the digital and the physical overlap, and that seam is where our richest contemporary experiences are hiding.
Years before Gibson wrote that scene, a group in Toronto had already built it (pre-iPhone, pre-visor). [murmur] planted a small sign with a phone number at a spot in Kensington Market, and a call from the sidewalk played you someone’s story about that exact place, told as if they were walking you through it [2]. You can still see those mysterious green ears pinned high up on telephone poles all around the city.
Half a century ago, land artists were exploring how meaning and place were entwinned, playing with ‘monumentality’. Matta-Clark took a chainsaw to a suburban house and split it open [3]. Dan Graham photographed New Jersey tract housing with a drugstore Instamatic and ran it as a magazine spread, mass tools turned on mass production, the present examined with the instruments of the present [4]. None of these works live on a screen. They live where they stand. That is what Gibson’s monument turns on. If a location already holds meaning, a layer written over it deepens the place instead of replacing it.
Digital and magnetic media can layer time the way place layers meaning. Magnetic tape remembers every hand that played it, the hiss its history made audible. A video copied from a copy from a copy carries each generation on its surface, the master buried underneath, present but unreachable. The loss is not subtracted. It accumulates, one stratum over another, until the layering itself is what you hear.
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Collage taught me to leave the edges visible, to let the seam show instead of smoothing it away. I keep returning to it because the screen keeps promising the opposite, a world of its own, free of weather and friction and decay. Krauss called modern sculpture homeless, the monument cut loose from its site, abstract and self-referential [5]. The placeless feed is its heir, a manic stream of opinions and reactions increasingly designed by and for automated agents in the perverted service of engagement metrics and advertising dollars. An empty scroll vs an intentional monument. The more interesting promise points the other way, back toward the material, the shared, the situated. Not the screen instead of the world, not the world instead of the screen. The seam between them, where the meaning gathers.
- Spook Country, William Gibson, 2007
- [murmur], James Roussel, Shawn Micallef and Gabe Sawhney, 2003
- Splitting, Gordon Matta-Clark, 1974
- Homes for America, Dan Graham, 1966
- Sculpture in the Expanded Field, Rosalind Krauss, 1979
