|Orient|ation -Oscillating in a Hypertext Labyrinth

The projected occupant of Hong Kong is forced to silence any questions of meaning and purpose to finally spontaneously internalize the city. The awareness of the city’s subject is called into question. Subtleties become overwhelming and the layers and density of the city strengthen the idea of narrative because of the individuals need for a selection process. This begins to unfold the subjectivity of experiencing the city. The peculiar realities of experiencing Hong Kong’s urban space become a subconscious time warp. It exists as a lapsing episodic system. The episodic memory is of autobiographical events which are composed of times, places, and other associated emotions. The inhabitant experiences the city through their semantic memory in tandem with their episodic memory. They recall the memory of meanings, understanding, and concept based knowledge outside of specific experiences. This conscious recollection of the factual information and general knowledge about the city is independent of context and personal relevance.

In this ego-less labyrinth of devolving impulsory sensations the subject is conditioning perception. The labyrinth shows itself as a slow history of space. One can only participate in and share the fundamentals of the labyrinth, but one’s perception is only part of the labyrinth as it manifests itself. The invisible city exposed and disappearing behind all our categorizations. The superabundant information canopy is experienced visually and allegorically. It provokes this sense of narrative which in turn produces the false sense of identity. The unfamiliar is no longer a sensual element within the familiar. Freud speaks of the uncanny as the rediscovery of something familiar, that has been repressed. The uncanny is felt as the presence of an absence. Without this sublime structure the human body would be incomplete. "The body is disintegration is in a very real sense the image of the notion of the humanist progress in disarray."¹⁸ Vidler also mentions the importance in discovering the power in interpreting the relations between the ‘psyche and house, the body and the house, the individual and the metropolis. Media saturation prevents image and meaning to coexist. The image becomes imbedded in the architecture of the city. Meaning becomes lost with the idea of securing clarity of the marketing image or of this idea of a projected imagined life. The theme of image is seized for its ability to represent and communicate, rather then for its attempts at establishing foundation.

The word ‘image’ commonly refers to that part of a thing person, or action that appears to others, rather than to the subject that the image constructs or the method of its construction. The image becomes more than a façade, it becomes real. Communication drives the image however it becomes vacant of any real meaning. The communication gesture transforms context of thinking, to merely interplay with the process or idea.

Hypertext transcends time and place. This idea of hypertext represents a relatively new innovation in user interfaces, which overcome the limitations of traditional text. The creation of this type of writing/information is that it is simultaneously an object and an action. Instead of being a static textual artifact the text is a perpetual activity which is continually undergoing change. The city begins to go beyond just image and becomes an interactive experience. The time delay between perception and conception becomes violated and canceled out by instantaneous electric media. There is a like for the time required for imagination to unfold and to oscillate, also to conceive the minor shift of limit and meaning that makes it capable to understand this city. Instant gratification and seemingly endless information blur between architecture and image.

 

House of Silence

"The film is a play on surface, the theater is a play in space, and thus difference has not been realized in any architecture, either that of the theater or the cinema. The ideal cinema is a house of silence. While in the theater, each spectator must lose his individuality in order to be fused into complete unity with the actors . . . . This is the most important quality of the auditorium; its power to suggest concentrated attention and at the same time to destroy the sensation of confinement that may occur easily when the spectator concentrates on the screen. The spectator must be able to lose himself in an imaginary, endless space."    -Frederick Kiesler


______________________________

In understanding the methods of spectatorship we must turn to the architecture of movie theaters. Throughout this thesis the spatial intersection between the wall and the screen will be explored as the device that creates cinema. The film requires more than the apparatus that simply projects the image, it demands a space, a container, a public site, a movie "house."

The Film Guild Cinema was designed by architect Frederick Kiesler in 1928. Keisler was more than an architect, among other things he was a theater designer, artist, and a theoretician. Located on the main street of Greenwich Village in New York City, the Film Guild Cinema seemed to react with the very pulse of the city’s momentum. Kieslers’ intention with this theater was to create a ‘house of silence.’ The theater was conceived with a specific type of film spectatorship in mind. Careful acoustical aspects and spatiovisual considerations were taken into the design intentions of this theater. Among one of the most defining characterics of this theater was the controlling of the screen.

Kiesler’s screen could change with respect to the size of the image being projected. An expanding and constricting "irus" could be controlled to adapt to the geometry of the film being displayed. This device was called the "screen-o-scope" and resembled that of the aperture of a camera. According to the design specifications the screen could contrict down to a one-inch square, as well as become enlarged enough to reveal full sized screens. This design choice accomodated a variety of mediums ranging between that of 35 and 16mm presentations.