xxiii. In "Designing Inefficiencies," Ashley Schafer pinpoints the mechanism for this technification of the weather in Blur—namely, the 8-minute intervals in system self-regulation:
This lag time made adjusting for lone gusts of wind impossible, and even gradual weather changes were accommodated slightly after the fact, producing a constant variation in the density, shape, and limits of the fog. This instability affected the form of the cloud as well as visitor's experience inside. The most intriguing areas of Blur were not those that manifested the architect-specified “acceptable fog quality," but those that, in the grip of this delay, were almost devoid of mist. Within 8 minutes ... those locations became the setting of dramatic visual, tactile, material, and aural transformation. On an auspiciously warm, humid, and variably windy day in June, I gravitated toward these fog-deficient areas, chasing the possibility of witnessing the change. The hiss of the nozzles grew louder as the water pressure increased—a process that took about a second—followed by large plumes of drenching mist that almost immediately reduced visibility to near zero. This profoundly apparent temporal displacement attenuates the relationship between cause and effect, dissociating instruments of technology from means of control. In these intervals, Diller + Scofidio construct spaces in time that resist the modernist tyranny of efficiency by framing and questioning our present condition." (101, emphasis added)
CHAPTER 5
i. I discuss Kittler's conceptions of media separation and digital convergence at some length in "Cinema beyond Cybernetics, or How to Frame the Digital-Image."
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