Mentalis Structuram A/V Performance
Milano, Italy.
Kernel Fest.
CREDIT:
Direction_Design_Animation: Ouchhh (ouchhh.tv)
Sound Designers: Alican Okan, Hakan Özkan, Selçuk Can Güven
In Mentalis Structuram, Villa Tittoni Traversi’s history as his past, present and future would be represented by audiovisual mapping performance.
Our starting point was architecture and philosophy’s pertinent points of overlap. Architecture like philosophy is a mode of solving problems and theorising multiplicities. They are perpetually verging on, irresistibly drawn to, its own virtualities, to the ever-increasing loops of uncertainty and immanence that its own practices, engage and produce.
Architecture has tended to conceive of itself as an art, a science, or a mechanics for the manipulation of space, indeed probably the largest, most systematic and most powerful mode for spatial organization and modification. That space itself, the very stuff of architectural reflection and production, requires and entails a mode of time, timeliness or duration.
The time of history, of historicity, the time of reflection, the time of knowledge, a time we are accustomed to in the history of architecture and of philosophy, in the very idea of history, of orderly progression, of the segmentation and linear continuity of time and space.
Architecture has tended to face time and temporality through the questions posed by history, and through its response to the ravages of that history, its orientation towards monumentality. Architecture has thought time, with notable exceptions, through history rather than through duration, as that to be preserved, as that which somehow or provisionally overcomes time by transcending or freezing it, as that which is memorialized by time, honoured and respected through immortality.
But through the concept of virtuality, there is also represented a concept which not only requires a time before time, but also a time after time, a time bound up not only with the past, with history and historicity, but also with futurity.
This idea of the virtual, a concept prevalent if undeveloped in philosophy since at least the time of Plato, introduces a series of questions to both architecture and philosophy (with different effects in each case) which may force them to change quite fundamental assumptions they make about space, time, movement, futurity and becoming.
The time before and after time are the loci of emergence, of unfolding, of eruption, the spaces/ times of the new, the unthought, the virtuality of a past that has not exhausted itself in activity, and a future that cannot be exhausted or anticipated by the present. This past, which layers and resonates the present, refuses to allow the present the stability of the given or the inevitable. It is the past which enables duration as a mode of continuity as well as heterogeneity.
ouchhh.tv
kernelfestival.net
