Out Of Site: Fictional Architectural Spaces

By Anne Ellegood - 12 January 2010

We have fully entered the information age. Technological innovations—the Internet, electronic mail, virtual reality, cyberspace, digital gaming, advanced design and engineering programs, complex computer graphics, robotics and wireless communication—are spawning new kinds of experience. While digital technologies broaden the scope of our capabilities and speed of access to information, the world is seemingly becoming a smaller place. An increasingly global economic system and population growth have given rise to unprecedented levels of international travel, migration, sub/urban sprawl, colonization and trade. Digital culture and global markets participate in the deterritorialization of space. Boundaries between interior and exterior, local and global, have blurred, giving way to hybrids of all kinds and permanently altering the way we experience and understand space. Including the work of fifteen contemporary artists, the exhibition Out of Site currently on view at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City posits that this profound shift in the understanding of perspective and spatial relationships is as consequential to artistic production as was the discovery of one-point perspective for the early Renaissance painters or multiple perspective for the cubists.
Out of Site takes fictional architecture as its premise. The artists use architectural constructs to investigate the ways in which digital technologies, virtual reality, and global expansion have impacted representations and articulations of space and perspective. The sites presented are marked by skewed and multiple perspective, compressed space, morphing geometry, rotating scale, layered topography, hypertrophic growth, unexpected hybridity and immersive environments and acknowledge the adaptability and flexibility that increasingly characterize architecture. As the architectural theorist Anthony Vidler surmises, today’s experiences of occupying space are reflected in an architecture of...