the indicator: a rather large array

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The Indicator: A Rather Large Array

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The Rather Large Array in Art Centers Wind Tunnel Gallery. Photo by Joshua White

First, we have to get something straight. This is not the VERY Large Array. This is the

RATHER Large Array, the Very Large Arrays much smaller, distantand inexpensive

cousin and the flagship piece for Art Center College of Designs 2011 exhibition, MADE

UP: Designs Fictions (curated by Tim Durfee with Haelim Paek).

The other thing is that while the Very Large Array still exists out in its Dune-like remote

setting, spread across a giant Y configuration in the New Mexico desert, the Rather

Large Array (RLA) has all but vaporized back into the production streams from whence its

PVC tubing and hardware store components came from.

When asked about the beginnings of The Array, Tim Durfee, Core Faculty in Art Centers

Media Design Practices program, cites T.S. Eliots use of objective correlative, and the

multi-perspective, disorientating photography of Barbara Probst. This led the project team

to hone in on what he calls the splintered experience we have routinely now, as we livein one reality while tunneling through multiple other realities through our smart phones,

various networks, etc. In the end, they realized they were talking less about architecture

or an interior and more about an instrument.

Though it has been thus disappeared, it lingersin part because of its rough, dirty, and

improvisational off-the-shelf attitudeas one of the more thoughtful installations to

emerge out of the strange and unique world of design academe. In 2012 it commanded

an honor award from the Los Angeles chapter of the AIA. As one juror commented, We

love the tension you feel of this piece hanging, its so ordinary, yet with an elaborate

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25 FEB2013by Guy Horton

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3D Printing Pen Turns

Sketches Into Reality In

Seconds

24 Feb 2013

Torquay House /

Wolveridge Architects

The Rather Large Array. Photo by Joshua White

Courtesy, Tim Durfee.

system, and that in itself is really rich.

While the jury situated it within a material-effects artsy paradigm it failed to catch its full

significance as an invocation or will-to-power for the imputation of

performative/communicative space and the sinister or otherwise benevolent implications

that flow from that. The RLA abruptly and rudely concentrated forces that are already

coming down the road (literally in terms of toll lane scanners and intersection signal

cams, for example). We are being watched and re-combined and this is changing how we

behave in the world.

It also speaks to our make-shift, economically-austere present. While there is the

pressure to expedite such scanning and monitoring technology (security, special effects,

novelty) it usually becomes an appendage, prosthesis, or supplement, rather than being


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designed into the space as discrete, hidden machines. The design of the RLA is the

presentation of an obvious array of parts rather than its concealment. The

recombination of pre-designed, banal components determines, in part, the larger design.

In another sense, though, the machines, once arrayed, can disappear. Our perception,

already predisposed to accept scanning, recording, and monitoring, glances over the

instrumentation and functionality and leaps right to interface and interaction. Should it be

disturbing that there is little or no suspicion or critique?

Perhaps this is why the RLA seemed to so easily evade writing. It was mistaken for, as

the juror remarked, something so ordinary. I would like to suggest that this was

camouflage, that its appearance was not its essence. The essence was necessarily

materialized in the most expedient and urgent way and then artfully tweaked (the bends

in the PVC tubing, for example) to soften it. Its reassuringly ugly and ordinary (the

camouflage) while impacting the space with a sublime gravity that people should possibly

be anxious about. I imagine an opening night with patrons milling about, nervously

drinking and chain smoking by the giant roll-up door.

In my imagination, the RLA is somehow less like the extraordinary concentration of

scientific infrastructure embodied by the National Radio Astronomy Observatorys Very


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Cite:

Horton , Guy. "The Indicator: A Rather Large Array" 25 Feb 2013. ArchDaily. Accessed 25 Feb 2013.

Suchov Radio Antenna, c. 1921. Via http://www.shukhov.ru/deutsch.html

Large Array and more like Vladimir Suchovs steel diagrid hyperboloid radio antennasoutside Moscow, c. 1921.

Coincidentally, a grainy black and white photograph of this is the only accompanying

image for Gilles Deleuzes essay, Mediators. In this essay, first appearing in the journal,

October in 1985, Deleuze talks aboutthough he talks about a lot of thingswhat he

calls relations of mutual resonance and exchange between philosophy, art and science.

His discussion leads the reader to this point: Its a series: if you dont belong to a series,

even a completely imaginary one, youre lost.

In a sense, the RLA is such a mediator, placing and projecting peoplethemselves

collections of series within seriesin new spatial and perceptual arrangements via

sensing, recording, and the collective reordering of data. Thus, the RLA harkens things

much older, as I suggest above, but, in similar fashion to Suchovs radio antennas, it is

also suggestive of architectures futurea possible future at any ratethat has more to

do with form following a specific sort of informational program.

It also hints at the sort of infrastructural physicality Andrew Blum revels in in his recent

book, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, in which the structures housing the

invisible force of the Web are coaxed out from their hiding placeshiding in plain sight.

At a smaller scale, the RLA materializes invisible forces in the absence of the distinct

odorlessness of corporate control. But it still gives off the sense of a place defined by

unseen forces (182).

Hanging from the ceiling in Art Centers rather large Wind Tunnel Gallery, it provoked and

commanded attention the way some Cold War early-warning missile-sensing system

might have. It hung there in a pleasing and somehow comforting mixture of 2001: A

Space Odyssey attention to detail and refinement along with a caffeinated overdose of

weekend garage-geek expediency. It was tech wabi-sabi, to borrow the term from

Japanese aesthetics.

Even now, in the vacancy of the Wind Tunnel, the RLAs ghost remains and there is the

lingering expectation that it, now disassembled and recycled, has recombined itself

somewhere else and may continue doing so.


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Vladimir Suchovs precedent-setting steel diagrid hyperboloid radio antennas outside Moscow, c. 1921. Via

http://www.shukhov.ru/deutsch.html



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