Although this strategy of direct defunctionalization of vision certainly reaches its culmination in the Blur Building, it starts out as an attempt to split vision and thereby to catalyze an embodied synthesis—what Hays has called a “connective synthesis"—in the spectatorparticipant. Thus, in works such as Para-site (1989), Jump Cuts (1995), and X, Y (1997), Diller + Scofidio variously stage the presentation and consumption of irreconcilable images.
Developed for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Para-site screened images from three live feeds--the revolving entrance doorway, the escalators in the lobby, and the doors to the sculpture garden--on monitors installed in a gallery. As a critique of the institutional ideology that views the museum as a place of decontextualized, pure vision, this work effectively bridges Diller + Scofidio's early examination of social conventions and their later critique of the primacy of vision. The viewing gallery contains unusable chairs variously mounted on the walls and ceiling, cut in half, and imprinted with texts by Michel Serres and Jeremy Bentham, and the images screened on the cantilevered monitors are oriented at 90° or 180° with respect to the floor. The effect of this installation is to split the viewer's perspective, to put into question the normal taken-for-granted nature of bodily orientation to the image so that embodiment becomes an issue. Thus, in addition to consuming (indeed, in order to consume) the images presented, the viewer must reconcile his or her embodied perspective with the inhospitable perspective(s) presented by the images and the defunctionalized institutional props contained in the gallery space.
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