Review of Musings on a Glass Box / Diller Scofidio + Renfro
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Transcript of Review of Musings on a Glass Box / Diller Scofidio + Renfro
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Musings on a Glass Box
Diller Scofidio + RenfroIn collaboration with David Lang and Jody Elff
Fondation Cartier pour lart contemporain
261, boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris
October 25, 2014 - February 22, 2015
Published at Hyperallergic.com herehttp://hyperallergic.com/183396/architecture-that-integrates-the-human-body/
View of the left gallery of Musings on a Glass Box Photo Luc Boegly
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View of right gallery in Musings on a Glass Box Photo Luc Boegly
View of screen in right gallery in Musings on a Glass Box Photo Luc Boegly
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View of screen content in right gallery in Musings on a Glass Box Photo Luc Boegly
Installation view of Musings on a Glass Box: Diller Scofidio + Renfro
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The Fondation Cartier pour lArt Contemporain in Paris commemorates its 30th
anniversary with Musings on a Glass Box, a two-part immersive installation by
controversial New York design studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro, that nearly empties the
museums ground floor. This huge emptiness, besides signifying a power and grandeur
seen before in art museums in Paris, places the Jean Nouvels building its glass walls,
mechanical systems, and acoustics under closer scrutiny. For its third installation at
Fondation Cartier, Diller Scofidio + Renfro plays with the architecture of the building,
incorporating a very effective integral sound art component by composer David Lang that
offers the most rewarding sensual element to the installation.
Visually, Musings on a Glass box looks kind of dumb in its bland emptiness, but it is
actually technologically sophisticated, particularly when one learns of the robotics that
engineer Marty Chafkin developed for it. The high ceilings and transparent walls of the
Fondation Cartier building, made from the best glass technology of the 1990s, are used
here as perverse starting points to goof on one of Frank Lloyd Wrights highest goals: to
connect the interior to the exterior world. Diller Scofidio + Renfro takes that ambition to
an extreme and presents us with the clich of a leaky roof when the rain drips in. This is
the gag of the left half of the show, where one enters the theatrical setting of a cold,
cavernous empty space to encounter only a single red plastic bucket on wheels. The
windows have been blurred over with some sort of translucent material. Soon, the bucket
begins slowly moving about the space and suddenly stops so as to catch a naughty
leak from the ceiling. Only three drips drop into the bucket, before it starts to move
around again. The bucket moves apparently on its own and in random directions, before
precisely halting in position to receive three drops more, and so on, elsewhere.
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However, in many ways it is the sound of the installation that rewards the visit, by
delighting a focused mind with a textured symphony. The drop of water hitting the half-
filled bucket below sets off an audio response that amplifies and expands into a
mammoth reverberating noise that includes hints of a human chorus, creating one huge
hum that makes for a meditative experience.
The use of water, sound, sensors, robotics, and remote communications achieved
through Jody Elffs real-time sound processing program recalls Diller Scofidio +
Renfros extraordinary creation of an artificial cloud jutting out onto Lake Neuchtel at
Yverdon-les-Bains, The Blur Building. It, too, had a powerful and restless sound
environment, there designed by Christian Marclay.
The second half of the installation, located on the right side of the building, consists of an
immense jumbo-tron that looms from the ceiling close to the ground. One slithers under
the screen by use of little black go-carts into a literally top-down architectural folly that
results in a rather oppressive (but fun) experience.
The Fondation Cartiers two ground galleries have been hooked up to interconnect in a
feedback loop. As the drops of water fall into the bucket, they create light changes that
are then captured in real time by a tiny camera (installed inside the bucket) and are
transmitted and amplified onto a screen in the right gallery. Its a neat idea, but, visually,
a big come down. All that potential visual impact of the suspended huge screen seems
wasted on blurry and shaky abstract images that amount to almost nothing of visual
interest. I assume that we are supposed to be satisfied with the grand scale of it all, as the
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great screen hovers over us like a great truth that cannot be questioned, but only tinkered
with.
This out-of-whack sensual link between the two galleries reveals and rectifies the
imbalances and incongruities between our visual perception of the outer world as
captured by technology and our inner, less palpable audio experiences. Musings on a
Glass Box suggests for architecture a new goal for connecting interior to exterior by
designing spaces that integrate the human body. For Diller Scofidio + Renfro, that means
spaces laced with intelligent computer-robotics run by an algorithmic code which
connects our experiences of sight and sound into one seamless digital and spatial
experience. As such, Musings on a Glass Box appears to be a rather modern musing on
the tension between our personal, inner experiences and the dominant visual spectacle of
architecture, a cogent apprehension that yields fantastic intellectual aftermaths.
Many intelligent and visceral questions and obsessions are raised in this show concerning
interfaces between body/mind/machine/structure. For example, the circulation of data in
this in-and-out playhouse suggested to me that one challenge of our computer era, with
its round-the-clock time zone, is in dealing with a shift away from sensual vision towards
mechanical vision. This thought, in turn, encouraged me to enjoy the rest of the day
outdoors.
Joseph Nechvatal