Cloud: an unblurred message
[Alessandra Mariani, UQAM]
Diller Scofidio + Renfro built the Blur Building on Lake Neuchâtel in 2002. Visual impairment and disorientation were caused by a thick, white fog generated by its high-pressure nozzle system.
Blur was for its architects, a critique of our dependency to visual conditioning, a demonstration of the paradoxes of mass diffusion, and a space where the visual frame governing social interaction was eliminated. A space where the erosion of images hopefully gave way to a transmission mode involving the whole human sensorium.
While technology gave life to Blur and its visitors maintained it, the wind randomly revealed its artifice. Through the spectacle Blur both condemned and delivered, the accidental alteration of its suspended space revealed the logistics behind its operation.
Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness (1998) where the characters are also in a sightless state, describes how these suspended moments are the last resort for reflexivity. While an allegory of the human decency, the novel demonstrates that certain conditions are necessary to seize life’s tribulations.
In recent times, specific conditions placed us in a metaphoric cloud. Intensified by information, this state also faced unpredictable interruptions. Following Saramago‘s allegory, let us then think of Blur as a harbinger.
A demonstration of how criticality can be fostered through sequential disruptions.
A demonstration of how serendipity can arise from a heterotopia of suspended particles of space and time.