Urban Appointment
A Possible Rendezvous With The City: excerpt by Brian Massumi and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer in the context of the HUMO masterclass.
To catch the city in a different light, the Situationists
recommended making virtual appointments. A group member
was asked to show up at a certain corner at a pre-designated
time. Neither party knew who the other was. Steeped in uncertainty,
the encounter was destined to remain merely a possibility.
Merely a possibility? Fully a possibility. Think of what
it feels like going to meet someone you have never seen
before in a public place. Every person walking by might
be about to step into your life. The slightest of gestures
amplifies into an emergent sign of recognition. The space
around is no longer a neutral frame. It is charged with
anticipated gazes leading potential approaches. Your
peripheral vision sharpens to catch the subtlest flutter
of arrival at every angle all around, giving a much more
palpable sense of immersion than you normally feel. Space
thickens, liquefies and stirs. Wavelets of possibility fill
it like a fourth dynamic dimension. The device of the virtual
appointment is designed to make possibility movingly palpable,
in a city space now defined as much as an over charge of
potential paths of human encounter as by its geometrical
and geographical properties. The HUMO workshop made
a virtual appointment, not between individuals in the city
but between a collectivity and the city. Twelve artists
were invited to Linz, Austria, for the week of 3-7 February
2003. Waiting for them was the world's most powerful projector
mounted with a power generator on a 12-ton truck. The projector
is capable of throwing an image over 60 x 60 meters, large
enough to cover the facade of a large building. HUMO = HUge
and MObile. "The project", Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's call for
participation announced, "will consist of rapid deployment
of strategic images to transform urban landscapes. Logos,
emblematic buildings, quotidian spaces, suburban malls,
advertising billboards etc, will be the targets of unannounced,
unregulated ephemeral interventions ... below the radar
of potential regulators". The Ars Electronica FutureLab
was placed at their disposal for the preparation of digital
images and their transfer to acetate slides for rapid-fire
open-air projection. Like the Situationist dérive,
or experimental urban "drift", for which the possible rendezvous
was one tactic, HUMO was a plan to exceed the expected.
A truck-borne band of artists would roam the city making
stealth image attacks on buildings, factories, fields and
highway underpasses; onto anything and everything. The locations
would be scouted ahead of time or chosen on the spur of
the moment, in passing. They would be as central as a main
plaza or as marginal as an industrial slag heap. In either
case, art would leave the walls of the gallery behind to
flit for a moment on the periphery of official urban vision,
out of place, out of scale, out of nowhere. The image's
arrival would momentarily alter the perceptual conditions
of the local space, crystallizing at least a vague sense
of the unaccustomed possibilities it enfolds. Even if no
legible message were sent, the anomaly of the image's very
presence would signal a "more" postulating the existence
of an elsewhere, beyond the conventional logic of that place. Excerpt by Brian Massumi & Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, 2003
