Haunted space [private]. (Feature).

A couple of years ago the gurus of cyberspace routinely hailed the coming of a new era; a new time and space where our messy material world is supplemented and, in the end, supplanted by a new kind of virtual space. Some have pointed to the Platonic and Gnostic roots of contemporary computer discourse: one often encounters the conviction that the material world is grossly imperfect, and that with the help of the computer it will be possible to leave this world behind and enter a higher habitat of pure data, of pure information. (1) This new space, then, holds the promise to supplement and even supplant our disenchanted physical space, as a technological heaven that can be entered at will. Sometimes, this discourse takes the form of a Romantic/Idealist narrative that sees history in terms of a progressive spiritualization; the reign of Pure Spirit will be realized by technology. Many self-styled visionaries have claimed that technology will soon enable people to download their minds, thus being able to live fo rever as Pure Spirit--a new version of the theories of spiritual evolution that were created by Idealist thinkers and later adapted in grotesquely caricatured versions by theosophy and similar movements. (2) This dream is now receding in the face of the often overwhelmingly mundane applications of computer technology. Parallel to this development, some artists have questioned or complicated the dream of virtual reality as a kind of "improved," transcendent space, purified of the restrictions inherent in matter. In these artists' virtual spaces, the stage is set for a return of the repressed.

SUBLIME DATA

Architects still rely on photography (often digitally altered) to publicize their finished buildings, but computer simulations are increasingly important to create images of an architect's approach. The look associated with the successful Dutch architectural firm MVRDV is created more by its computer sequences than by (photographs of) its finished buildings. Of course, there have been architects before who were influential mainly through plans, for example Boullee, Sant'Elia or Lissitzky. But while their drawings could be visionary, they were graphically quite conventional perspective or axonometric renderings of three-dimensional space. MVRDV, on the other hand, creates computer sequences that give the viewer the illusion that he or she flies through vast spaces, like an immaterial entity, a disembodied angel. One moves through the spaces of MVRDV's Metacity/Datatown videos and video installations not unlike the user of a computer game, except that in this case one cannot control one's movements. The main wo rk, Metacity/Datatoum (1998-2001), is a four-screen surround projection, in the middle of which the viewer sits completely passive--his path through virtual space being preordained. The spaces one traverses are the different sectors of Datatown, an abstract city consisting only, as MVRDV put it, of "huge, pure data." (3) The computer-generated spaces of Datatown exploit the trill of flying at immense speed through space, past vast volumes that look as if they could disappear or reappear at any moment. And, indeed, they sometimes do.

A recent addition to Datatown is the single channel video Pig City, featuring the simulation of a giant tower for the industrial breeding of pigs. Pig City shows the different elements of the tower appearing out of thin air, until the construction is complete--pigs included. The gradual construction of the virtual tower has practical reasons, insofar as this allows the viewer to gain an understanding of its inner workings, but it also enhances the viewer's sense of awe. The whole idea of this bio-industrial skyscraper is so unreal that one cannot help feeling that it is above all intended to enhance MVRDV's aura. Other parts of Datatown include a huge windmill curtain, consisting of an immensely high "wall" of metal tubes to which windmill blades have been attached at regular intervals. There is also a stacked forest: high above the trees there is an immense ceiling, above which there is another forest, and so on. All this stacking has to do with MVRDV's preoccupation with density, which is highly relevant to the densely populated Netherlands. However, its density studies quickly leave the world of Dutch pragmatism behind in order to soar to sublime heights. The animated structures of MVRDV are so immense that the viewer loses his or her familiar sense of scale and appears to be in the hands of powers beyond his or her control. One might imagine MVRDV to be master of the data sublime. This data sublime is an updated version of Kant's "mathematical sublime," which presents the subject with something so vast that it is beyond the powers of the imagination. Where the imagination fails, reason steps in to save the day: the imagination is stretched beyond its capacities, but sublime vastness is according to Kant comprehensible to reason. (4)

In romantic art and poetry, the sublime was often used to emphasize man's futility by presenting something so powerful and great that one is overwhelmed by it: the sheer magnitude of sublime views was a weapon against the banality of modern space. However, poets also developed what Thomas Weiskel has called an "egotistical sublime," which emphasized the vastness and profundity of a poets mind. (5) By showing views that stretch our imagination to or beyond its limits, because they do not account for our political and social reality, MVRDV suggests that even the sky need not be the limit if only visionaries like MVRDV was given free rein. The architects' data sublime is thus transformed into an egotistical sublime. In the final analysis, these works are about MVRDV's great, awe-inspiring vision. MVRDV's actual buildings often have a hard time living up to the promises of its designs and virtual fantasies (although the canny use of digital photography goes a long way). The material world has all these bothersome limitations: creating skyscrapers out of thin air is exceedingly difficult. Old-fashioned, empirical space is bothersome and uncool. MVRDV gives the impression that it would like to download itself and be the virtual maker of virtual architecture. The world is not enough: augmented architecture must become and remain information. Thus MVRDV seems to partake in the tendency to seek salvation in the virtual. The architects reinforce this tendency in order to free them front the strictures imposed on architecture and let them share in the mystique traditionally associated with visionary artists.

Nonetheless, the eeriness of moving through the huge abstracted structures of Metacity/ Datatown casts doubt on the "progressive" nature of this work. In some cases, MVRDV suggests continuity between the concept of the sublime and Freud's notion of the uncanny, which he developed in an analysis of a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, the German romantic master of fantastic, gothic plots. Like the sublime, the uncanny creates a profound sense of crisis in the subject, but in the case of the uncanny this is not softened either by the triumph of reason or by an "egotistical" exaltation. According to Freud, the uncanny arouses our deep-seated animistic instincts. Once again, the world appears to be animated, alive--something that upsets our rational beliefs and undermines our sense of self. (6) In Metacity/Datatown things often happen as if by magic: the pig skyscraper seems to create itself, and in the 1998-2001 installation rectangles of farmland come floating through the air in a kind of apocalyptic storm, only to la nd in a neat grid which indicates the different uses the land is intended for, e.g. areas for chicken farms are indicated by enormous eggs and much smaller chickens. We seem to have entered a kind of space where normal rules of causality have been suppressed and where everything instead seems to be animated. This corresponds to the reemergence of primitive animistic beliefs to haunt modern man, as postulated by Freud. The clean new data space turns out to be the set for the return of the repressed; far from freeing us of the past, virtual space sees old specters coming back to haunt us. However, these specters clearly follow some grand plan laid out by MVRDV, and consequently MVRDV presents itself as a God-like creator, as master over the uncanny forces.

What is strange is that its spaces are both so "modern" and so "pre-modern." It is as if two types of space that fully crystallized around 1800 have fused. During the French Revolution, a proposal for a new map of France was drawn, with a structure of departments that had the shape-at least in the first, most "ideal" drawing--of perfect squares. The whole of France was turned into a perfect: grid. Due to conservatives who demanded some respect for traditional boundaries, and some consideration for natural barriers, this was soon diluted until the grid structure was barely recognizable. (7) Still, this map is of great importance. It shows modern, disenchanted, abstract space at its most radical. At around the same time, the (proto)romantic movement created a cult of numinous sites-dark and mysterious forests, haunted houses and castles. This cult indicated a desperate resistance against a conception of space for which even the darkest forest or creepiest mansion is part of the same continuum, the same grid. Th is romantic cult of uncanny places has been the faithful shadow of modern abstract space, with its claims to being single and undividable. Culture apparently needed spaces, whether mythified "real" places or purely imaginary ones, where specters of the past still resided, where the light of reason did not enter. Now these specters enter the world at large again--at least that is the impression MVRDV apparently wants to give. It seems that its primary intention is to awe the viewers and make them admire the artists-architects' command over these spooks: the egotistical uncanny.

PHOTOGRAPHIC VIRTUAL REALITY

In today's culture, it is architecture's destiny to become image. In recent years a significant number of exhibitions and publications have been dedicated to the photography of architecture and to architecture in cinema. What was once a by-product of architecture (its image in a photograph or a film) manifests itself as the true essence of architecture, even as photography is increasingly altered by digital technology and the distinction between a photographic image and a computer-generated one has become indiscernible. Of course, many architects associated with early twentieth-century modernism were already highly aware of photography's capability to create ideal images of their buildings. However, this was rarely avowed, and such practices have only been studied comparatively recently. Art photographers from Gunther Forg to a variety of Becherschuler, who have received a large share of attention in the aforementioned publications and exhibitions, have stimulated an awareness of this turn. One Bernd and Hula Becher pupil, Thomas Ruff, has developed a particularly interesting dialogue with architecture--and with architects both living and dead. Not only has he worked with Herzog and De Meuron, with whom he designed a library building in Eberswalde (2000), he has also extensively photographed buildings by Mies van der Rohe, perhaps the most pictorial of modernist architects. (8)

Ruff's photographs from the 1980s of corporate and industrial architecture in Germany's Ruhr area were already mediated by other depictions of such buildings: picture postcards from the fifties and sixties, with which companies advertised their prosperity of the Wirtschaftswunder (industrial miracle, or boom) years.

Although the industrial architecture of the prosperous postwar decades rarely managed to avoid a drab look, Ruff's detailed color photographs invest these gray structures with a certain dignity. They are already ruins of a past era. The same is true of Ruff's photographs of equally gray tenement buildings from the same part of Germany. At a certain point, Ruff started using digital technology in his architectural photos, in order to remove bothersome trees or details that were not quite right. More explicitly than before, the buildings were now merely raw material for his art, to be transmuted by the photographer and his commanding technology. Whereas digitization was rather unobtrusive, rendered "invisible" in these works, the case is different with many of Ruff's recent pictures of buildings by Mies van der Rohe. Here, it is often evident that there has been some manipulation, for example in the colors. Although it is true that Ruff's analytical approach to photography is indebted to his teachers, the Beche rs, and beyond that to the habitually invoked "tradition" leading back to August Sander and other photographers from the 1920s and 1930s, the context has changed. Whatever similarities there may be, there is gap between Sander and Ruff similar to the gap between Mondriaan and Peter Halley. (9)

Although Ruff utilizes advanced technical equipment, he also employs technology that is apparently completely anachronistic. His use of stereoscopic photography is an example of this; stereoscopy is after all associated with its heyday in the Victorian age. It appears to be completely outmoded--and yet, when one is confronted with a good stereoscopic image, it still proves to be fascinating. Geoffrey Batchen has characterized stereoscopy as a nineteenth-century form of virtual reality that has been edited out of photographic history, because it seemed to put photography in the service of spectacle rather than of serious art. (10) However, in an age when science-fictions such as The Matrix posit a world that looks real, but is in fact a computer-generated illusion, the anachronism called stereoscopy gains a new relevance. In stereoscopy, the architecture-turned-photographic-image becomes a kind of virtual architecture, but contrary to the simulated world of The Matrix it does perhaps not really fool anyone. Ru ff's stereoscopic images of buildings like Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion present a strangely airless and unreal space to the viewer. The space between different volumes appears to be quite deep, though disturbingly empty, while the volumes themselves (buildings or parts of buildings) look like two-dimensional cutouts. Such is the space of stereoscopy. Ruff is not the first artist to rediscover it. In the early twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp adopted this already outmoded medium as a means to lead art beyond the retinal, beyond the flat surfaces of modernist painting. In Handmade Stereopticon Slides (1918/19)--two photographs of the sea with a line drawing of a slender pyramid on each one-Duchamp used the analogy of the "creation" of a third dimension by the brain to hint that one might also be able to gather a glimpse of the fourth dimension by observing and mentally manipulating three-dimensional objects. More than Duchamp, Ruff focuses on the weird character of the virtual three-dimensionality of stereographs; the distance between his two cameras when he takes stereoscopic pictures is considerably larger than the distance between the human eyes, thus creating a distortion that suggests a viewer with a hugely inflated head. (11)

To take a typical example of Ruff's work for three dimensions: the space defined by the pool, the walls, terrace and overhanging roof in one of Ruff's stereographs of the Barcelona Pavilion (stereo d.p.b. of, 2000) is not inhabitable; it is virtual unreality, utterly airless and frozen. The strange thing about this kind of space is that it totally excludes the viewer, who cannot really picture him- or herself in this eerie vacuum with its cardboard buildings, mountains and plants. By refusing to show people and by choosing strict, formal compositions, Ruff emphasizes this lack of life. Even though his spaces need the viewer to come into being, as it is only in the viewer's head that the two separate photographs fuse into one strangely three-dimensional picture, that viewer is nonetheless barred from the image in his head. He cannot enter a space that exists in his own mind. By excavating such an uncanny form of virtual reality from photographic history--a kind of VR that does not seem to need and want human b eings--Ruff pierces through the anthropocentric rhetoric of cyberspace and virtual reality. He suggests that virtual spaces that are created by human beings are not necessarily made for them. These spaces are uncanny. Freud states that an umheimliches Haus (an uncanny or, to use a more common term, "spooky" house) cannot be defined in any other way than as a house that appears to be haunted by ghosts. (12) But in Ruff's case the buildings themselves are the ghosts: they are uncanny not because they appear to be haunted by the ghosts of deceased people, but because they are themselves "deceased," and yet still there. They are utterly unreal, but they refuse to dissolve into thin air.

The Romantic cult of the uncanny questioned idealist narratives of spiritual evolution by suggesting, however indirectly, that there are things that elude the subject, things that cannot be subsumed in a grand narrative. The uncanny, that fissure in an enlightened, rational world, was after all not a manifestation of some higher spiritual sphere, but a return of a primitive attitude toward the world. When Freud put Romanticism on the couch in his essay on the uncanny, he effectively used it to undercut the idealist side of Romanticism the belief in spiritual evolution it bequeathed to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture. Similarly, the uncanny spaces in recent art sabotage a new tide of spiritual narratives revolving around the notion of cyberspace as a pure, new world where the past (the material world) can be left behind. But their very uncanny character also has a reassuring quality: das Unheimliche turns out to be heimisch after all. By staging a return to childish, "primitive" fears, it assures us that human concerns still matter. It is telling that Romanticism's darker side conceived the spiritual as already outdated. It was situated in the idealized realm of the Middle Ages or, as in gothic horror novels, in places like haunted mansions or castles that were remnants of the past--places that refused to become part of disenchanted modern space. The blossoming of the uncanny in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century culture is not so much an involuntary return of the repressed as it is the result of the desire to revert to an earlier state of things in order to be shielded against the empty, abstract modern world. Perhaps a truly empty house is more horrifying than a haunted one. Better invent ghosts than live alone. In Ruff's architectural photographs, and especially in his stereographs, it is precisely the absence of an overt uncanniness, of a suggestion that the world is alive and bearing us a grudge, that is uncanny.

SHOOTING IN THE HALLS OF MEMORY

The space of computer simulations such as MVRDV's MetaCity/DataTown is constructed along the lines of linear perspective. It obeys the same basic spatial rules as Renaissance painting. The crucial difference is of course that the Renaissance perspective is fixed, while the new perspective is mobile. If one could virtually roam though the space of a Piero della Francesca painting, one would quickly see that this is a pointless exercise, except to see how the painter has created a unique, two-dimensional view of a space that has no other reason to exist than to be seen from that single perspective. The most common experience of contemporary computer-generated, mobile and perspective space is undoubtedly not through an architect's presentations, but by playing computer games. Here the viewer is not passively submitting to virtual movements (as in the case of Metacity/Datatown), but largely creating them him- or herself. This makes for a sense of control that is absent in MVRDV's videos. In many games, it also cr eates a sense of constant danger. Whether one is driving on a race track or righting fantasy creeps in pseudo-medieval dungeons, one always has to be on guard. These are not spaces of contemplation, like those of painting, but of action. However, the action seems to take place in a parallel world where one can have superhuman powers. Computer games are like everyday equivalents of the Romantic-Idealist belief in spiritual evolution that are at work in recent cyber discourse. They enable one to become a character in a world where death is reduced to a minor embarrassment, followed by instant resurrection.

In the past few years, the net art duo jodi (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) has made "modifications" to the rather antiquated computer games Quake and Wolfenstein 3D. These works consist of "patches" that manipulate the codes that make up the space of the game, as well as the objects and characters in it. Patches are popular in game culture; gainers can make their own imaginative detournements of the often cliched games offered on the market. Jodi's modifications are however of a special nature. Most "patches" are silly, pornographic or mildly subversive, and occasionally imaginative variations that leave the basic structure of the game intact. Jodi's are different. They have turned Wolfenstein into a series of pointless shootings of abstract, black-and-white graphic forms in a modernist, gallery-like interior, while Quake has been turned into a series of modifications with different degrees of abstraction. (13) In one of these, the fantasy set of Quake is abstracted and turned into bright grid-like struct ures on a black background. One can encounter a monstrous biomorphic creature that would seem more at home in a surrealist painting (or a work by Francis Bacon) than in an adventure game. To some degree, there is still action in this version of Quake (one is being shot at), but the codes have been scrambled to such a degree that one cannot play the game. The reflexes of the game player (collecting things, shooting) are frustrated; one moves through a disintegrated universe, reduced to the status of a roving eye rather than the programmed actions of an action hero. Sitting at the computer, the viewer can choose his/her own path trough the modified game, but not much more. The ability to move trough a simulated space is intact, but the other ability that is crucial to playing computer games--interacting in these spaces--is curtailed.

The mobile and interactive virtual spaces of computer games are reminiscent of the mental spaces of the ancient art of memory, which has been analyzed by Frances Yates. Her seminal book. The Art of Memory has had a surprisingly small echo in the fields of art history, theory and criticism, but it is invoked in countless recent publications on cyberspace and digital culture. (14) The art of memory was advocated by Roman orators like Cicero to help develop their memory: one should memorize certain places (a room or a sequence of rooms in a certain building) and place objects in these rooms that stand for certain words or notions. By walking through these rooms in one's mind, one could "collect" the objects in the order in which they were placed there, i.e. in which they were memorized, and hence reproduce one's argument. Yates describes how this art was rediscovered and given a Christian, moral purpose by the scholastics of the Middle Ages, and then "occultized" by the Renaissance hermeticists. Because this art revolved around mental spaces, it has left few tangible traces. Computer games are visible, not merely mental, memory spaces: one often has to remember where one can find certain objects (like keys) that one needs to accomplish a certain task or to gather points. A crucial difference, apart from the obvious fact that these spaces can be seen and "navigated" on a computer screen, is that they usually also contain adversaries, and that hence the user is constantly at risk. One constantly has to run and fight in the more popular, mainstream computer games. By scrambling classical games, Jodi sabotages this mechanism. There may still be shooting going on, but the game looses its logic and purpose, and the user explores the distorted spaces for the sake of exploration rather than for the sake of winning. Adversaries can become strange creatures that are appalling and compelling at the same time, like the Francis Bacon-like, biomorphic thing (seen as a dog in the un-patched version) in one of their Quake modifications.

The ancient art of memory could be disconcerting as well, In her book, Yates reconstructs some "memory images" that are eerily surrealist, She suggests that the necessity to make the images highly memorable could lead to quite hallucinatory scenes (especially as it was often recommended that the spaces should be rather dark, so the objects would stand out). On the basis of written documents, we can catch a glimpse of ephemeral spaces that were at the same time orderly and oneiric, unreal. Yates quotes Albertus Magnus: "For example, if we wish to record what is brought against us in a lawsuit, we should imagine some ram, with huge horns and testicles, coming towards us in the darkness. The horns will bring to our memory our adversaries and the testicles the dispositions of the witnesses." (15) This last remark becomes less enigmatic when one knows that the Latin word for witnesses is testes, but such a mental image is hardly a rational way of memorizing this fact. Albertus's uncanny ram seems to indicate that in the art of memory (at least in its medieval incarnation), the mind could conjure up images that threatened the subject's authority by their dramatic presence, rather than fortifying one's grip on the surrounding world.

In the above we have seen that the "involuntary return of the repressed" in the experience of the uncanny was perhaps not quite that involuntary from the Romantic era onward, when the uncanny offered consolation in a disenchanted world. MVRDV has understood that this voluntary uncanny can be used to create a sense of awe in the viewer to assert the artist's power. Ruff takes a more analytical approach, indicating the fear of emptiness that may be behind the Romantic/modern cult of the uncanny. But jodi's game modifications make things less clear-cut. Computer games create parallel worlds where things can happen that would not be possible in real life; these worlds seem so much more alive, so magically animated. It is a kind of domesticated uncanny, which the consummate player knows how to control, because of his memory and his skills. jodi's modifications effect a loss of control. By frustrating our navigation in the spaces offered through the games they modify, they create a space that cannot be mastered. It is a disintegrated memory space beyond our control. The usual commands do not work. The space looks modern, gridded, but one wanders trough the grid like someone lost in a forest. MVRDV creates a world with a passive and awed viewer; Jodi creates a befuddled and slightly frustrated viewer (or very frustrated, if one of their works messes up your computer). Jodi transforms a cliched character from Quake into a surrealist blob with which one cannot interact in the usual way--the rules of the "game" have changed. Like Albertus's ram, this clog sheds its banality and becomes a truly eerie presence. Images can develop a life of their own, and escape from one's grasp: constructed fantasies can come back to haunt their creator.

NOTES

(1.) Erik Davis, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998).

(2.) See Julian Stallabrass, Empowering Technology: The Exploration of Cyberspace" In New Left Review, No. 211, 1995, pp. 3-32; Richard Coyne, Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative. Holism. and the Romance of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

(3.) MVRDV, Metacity/Datatown (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, undated), p. 58.

(4.) Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Hamburg, Germany: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990), pp. 91-101. The book was first published in 1790.

(5.) Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 34-62 and 136-164.

(6.) Sigmund Freud, "Das Unheimliche" in Der Moses des Michelangelo: Schriften uber Kunst und Kunstler (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Fischer, 1993), pp. 135-172. The essay was first published in 1919.

(7.) Daniel Nordman and Marie-Vic Ozouf-Marignier, Atlas de la Revolution Francaise 4: Le territoire (1): Realites et representations (Paris, France: Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes on Sciences Sociales, 1989), pp. 29-30.

(8.) See the two exhibition catalogs, both by the same publisher, L.m.v.d.r. Thomas Ruff and L.m.v.d.r. 2 Thomas Ruff (Krefeld, Germany: Haus Lange/Haus Esters. 2000).

(9.) I disagree (in this and several other points) with Matthias Winzen, who tries to salvage the "tradition" of New Objectivity photography, to which Ruft allegedly belongs, by claiming that Ruff continues the tradition by breaking with August Sander's claim to photographic authenticity. Of course, Ruff might be said to continue working with a sensibility in part similar to Sander's, but it is highly questionable whether one can still talk of a "tradition' once its cornerstono (the claim to objectivity and authenticity) has been abandoned. Matthias Winzen, "Glaubwiirdige Erfindung von Realitat" in Thomas Ruff: Fotografien 1979 -- heute (Museum Folkwang, Essen/Museet for Samtidskunst, Oslo/Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munchen, 2002), p. 164.

(10.) Geoffrey Batchen, "Spectres of cyberspace" in Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual culture Reader (New York: Routlodge, 1998), pp. 272-278.

(11.) Thomas Ruff: Fotografien 1979 -- heute, p. 148.

(12.) "Das Unheimliche," p. 161.

(13.) Aside from having been shown in art spaces and published on CD-ROM (Untitled Game, 2002), examples of Jodi's game modifications can also be found on the internet at www.untitled-game.org. See also Tilman Baumgartel, (net. Art 2.01 Neue Materlalien zur Netzkunst/New Materials Towards Net Art (Nurnberg, Germany: Verlag fur Moderne Kunst Numberg, 2001), pp. 166-181.

(14.) Frances Yates, The Art a) Memory (London: Pimlico, 1992). The book was first published in 1966.

(15.) Ibid., p. 79.

SVEN LUTTICKEN teachers art history at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. He is one of the editors of De Witte Raaf, a Belgian/Dutch journal of art criticism and theory.