Catalogue: arquitecturas para el acontecimiento
Catalogue text: KIT by Marti Peran

Catalogue: Space Invaders

Catalogue: Autoskinning: Passive Abduction No. 2
Catalogue text: Autoskinning: Passive Abduction No. 2 by Bridie Lonie

Catalogue: [KIT] Autoskinning: Passive Abduction No.1
Catalogue text: I Used to Live in a Car by Michael Morley

Catalogue: arquitecturas para el acontecimiento
Published by Espai D’Art Contemporani De Castello, Spain, 2002

Catalogue text: KIT by Marti Peran
From arquitecturas para el acontecimiento catalogue
Published by Espai D’Art Contemporani De Castello, Spain, 2002

Autoskinning: Passive Abduction n. 6 és una arquitectura construïda per KIT a base d’airbags explotats i seients de cotxes accidentats en la vida real. Les estructures penjades es converteixen en una espècie de crisàlides a l’interior de les quals sonen uns sons insòlits que, veritablement, són el desenvolupament sonor per procediment informàtic del soroll produït durant el segon que necessita l’airbag per a esclatar.

La proposta, a pesar de la primera possible aparença –el vistant pot passejar entre aquestes estructures espacials-, no es redueix a construer una gran escultura Sonora mitjançant una feliç operació de reciclatge. Més avait al contrari. La contribució de KIT a arquitecturas del acontecimiento consisteix a indicar que l’accident, fins I tot allò catastrophic I la seua ferralla, no aniquilen allò real, sinó que el condueixen cap a un alter register, distint, aparentment anòmal, però aixi mateix licit amb independència absoluta de la seua utilitat. Juntament als processos convencionals, entre les dinàmiques establertes que modifiquen la realitat, els impulsos apocaliptics ocupen també un lloc. És un exemple radical, situate a un extrem, d’una de les idees plantejades en la nostra argumentació inicial: allò real és només una mena de present edipic que es consumeix permanentment a si mateix. Quan expressàvem aquesta idea ho fèiem des d’una perspective epistemological, és a dir, preteniem certificar la impossibilitat de conéixer allò real com una cosa sòlida i objectivable. Amb aquest projecte de KIT, aquesta idea pròxima a una concepció entròpica de les dinàmiques que organitzen el món real adquireix una nova dimension: la facilitat amb la qual la mediació tecnològica que caracteritza l’espai contemporani potencia aquesta disposició a l’accident, a l’error, a alló imprevisible catastrophic que d’una manera instantània impose un tomb sobre el curs dels esdeveniments. De fet, això suposa una lectura ben distinta de l’habitual interpretació de la tecnologia com un obstacle en la nostra relació amb allò real. La convenció pressuposa que allò tecnològic afavoreix la temptativa d’allò real en favor de tota classe de simulacions; per a KIT, contràriament, l’alta tecnologia no fa més que accelerar les possibilitats i la velocitat – encara que per la d’allò violent I impredictible- de les mutacions per les quals la realitat se sobreexposa I se satura constantmnet.

Space Invaders
Annual catalogue published by Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2004

Catalogue: Autoskinning: Passive Abduction No. 2
Published by Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra, Australia, 2001

Catalogue text: Autoskinning: Passive Abduction No. 2 by Bridie Lonie
From Autoskinning: Passive Abduction No. 2 catalogue
Published by Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra, Australia, 2001

KIT is a composite, a creature which, like one of Félix Guattari’s machinic assemblages, incorporates the organic and the inorganic, the subjective, technical, social and psychic, to produce new subjectivities which act in singular ways. (1) Parasitic, it feeds upon the underbellies of globalising systems. It suspends itself from the purlins and dwangs of non-places, exploring crevices left by the imperfect annealings of cyber-dominant functions. It revels in thwarted ecstasies and expiring dystopias. Like the DNA-shifting function of the HIV virus, which moves along a strand to disenable, almost inadvertently, its host, KIT’s displaced logics force paradigm shifts, of value if not of cognition. Exploring alternate ecologies, the biochemist James Lovelock’s logic found a Gaia whose ethical modalities depended solely upon the balance of chemical elements in the atmosphere. Similarly, KIT’s projects deconstruct (in its classic sense) globalisation’s systems, yielding progeny that unmask them by returning to them instances of inadvertence and experience. “We are part of a global collective who seek to
reintegrate the body into the material matrix.”(2)

Autoskinning: Passive Abduction No.1 archives the way in which a car’s safety systems default to the logic that a car must become obsolescent. KIT’s black humour unpicks the ethic of the automobile safety regulatory systems. Care, here is after the fact; the car and its systems are unnatural-born killers, their natural progeny newer and faster cars and the detritus of their passing. The project began with the proposition that forms altered by impact might offer a new methodology: “ impact art”. So car crashes are seen from the point of view of the car’s internal skins, its seat covers and its lungs, the air-bags. While they signify safety, air-bag owners may now switch them off, after estimating the relative probabilities of being poisoned, suffocated or impaled. Airbag and seat-belt casings here provide mouth, lung and limb function for chrysalid forms that twitch and jerk in an enduring death-in-life. Their bodies are made from seat covers that have incorporated their inhabitants’ genetic material, to a greater or lesser degree. These objects are beautifully crafted from the indexical traces of events whose relation to such globalising assemblages as petrol companies force us to recognise that somewhere there is an ill match between system and subject. The driver it seems manifests more passivity than control.

Recently, DRIVE, power>progress<desire, at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand, took the fast lane, its catalogue cover a detail from David Noonan’s M3 (1998): headlights converging into a girl’s face at a point somewhere above her molars.(3) The image’s stilled antithesis, Charles Ray’s Unpainted Sculpture(1997), which reconstituted a facsimile of a wreck in which a woman had died, was quickly framed as a memorial/monument for the famously crashed. Again and again, images of cars and highways offer conflicted visions of possibility and enclosure, duration and the ever-possible final cathartic moment. As Giovanni Intra points out, instead of catharsis, there is either death or an enduring disability.(4)

KIT’s approach to road kill is consistent with their wider practice, which combines imitation and resistance, in a parodic subaltern strategy. Globalising programmes ignore specificities, of individual life or of location. The autopoietic machines of art inevitably clash with such conceptualisations, seeing them as interstices into which they may insinuate destabilising practices. Subjectivities of different orders develop, lived in those other non-places of cyber-space, the video monitor and the CD-Rom; or that privileged space, the art gallery. Like corporate bodies, KIT operates as an entity without individual faces, anonymous and genderless. A meta-contract, between art-event and viewer, recuperates the anonymity of such environments, but remains contained within the subjectivities of art.

KIT’s Greylands (1999) asked web site viewers to design houses for themselves upon leBreton Flats, in Ottowa, Canada. This polluted expanse has been grassed over, a “green” place in urban space. KIT were represented as housing developers in an onsite porta-cabin. Participants were given an index of the toxins present in the site they had chosen ( this type of letting of information almost closed the project down) and were asked to use them productively: to become complicit with them. A klutzy robot disguised as a ride-on lawnmower and programmed using Global Positioning Satellite systems drew the plans onto the surveyed sites, tracing awkward interfaces between the virtual, the ideal and the actual. For these hearth-designing participants, asked to imagine and display their private lives as they might be played out in a toxic waste site, “ (t)he very body of the connected witness happens to be the ultimate urban territory, a folding back over the animal body of social organization and of a conditioning previously limited to the core of the old city. In bodily terms, it resembles the core of the old familial "hearth. " (5)

KIT’s strange progeny love places in which deaths-by-hypertechnology are rationalised and ordered. Black Boxes provided sound-tracks for the C.O.T.I.S. (Cult of the Inserter Seat) works, such as that in which participants agree to be locked in a black container for ten minutes while the last sounds of air-crew and passengers echo around them. “…. C.O.T.I.S exposes the closed-circuit of mediated mourning, along with the silent satellite witnesses of cathode addiction. The medium may well be the message, but the messenger moves more swiftly when there is the scent of blood and smoke in the air.” (6) In Autoskinning: Passive Abduction No 1, KIT’s parody of the speed-desire-death equation employs a carnivalesque-subaltern logic, as it both mimics and subverts, doubling submission with resistance. Within the semiotic flux of art, the abject names some limitations of its own.

Notes:

1. Félix Guattari, chaosmosis, an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, Power Press, Sydney, 1995
2. Dominic Pettman C.O.T.I.S. review, http://members.tripod.com/~webkit/
3. Greg Burke, Hanna Scott, Drive,power>progress>desire, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 2000
4. Giovanni Intra, “Too autopoietic to drive”, pp 62-71,in Burke and Hanna, Drive, power>progress>desire
5. Paul Virilio "The Third Interval: A Critical Transition." In Re-thinking Technologies, Chapter 1. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
6. Dominic Pettman, C.O.T.I.S. - The Art of the Accident (1998) Published by NAI / V2 Organisation

Catalogue: Autoskinning: Passive Abduction No.1
Published by Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2001

Catalogue text: I Used to Live in a Car by Michael Morley
From Autoskinning: Passive Abduction No.1 catalogue
Published by Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2001

“He gets a hard-on thinking about all of those networks and transfers and switchings. Yearning for more than a light bulb (although in a pinch that might do), he jacks off dreaming electricity and fibre-optic cables, the disembodied Eros lurking behind those crumbling, merely material walls. He thinks, I want out of this dungeon and into the mysteries behind the walls, returning to the core of life rather than persisting in this vile body which only remains the husk. It isn’t going to be easy, but after so many years of deliberate, patient scheming, he imagines that he just might make it to the True Reality.”

David Rimanelli, Monster
From Peter Halley, Maintain Speed, Distributed Art Publishers, New York, 2000, Pg 153

I once lived in a car. While living in the car I was generally struck by the variety of the architecture when I allowed myself the space for such contemplation. Admittedly confining when compared to the dimensions of a dumpster, the car affords multiple uses and if managed correctly enables one to live a life of comfort beyond that which can be imagined. Yes there is no way one can have guests arrive. The point was that within the car life was ordered, predictable and safe.

The car in question was a station wagon and even then not really a station wagon but more of “an estate.” A Triumph Herald Estate to be precise. The vehicle was once owned by Sir Mountford Tosswill Woollaston and thus conveyed more than just the mundane, it conveyed an air of authority albeit related to the notion that Woollaston drove up and down the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand, Haast to Hokatika and beyond, hawking his Rawleigh products to the general population and dreaming of painting.

The vehicle was acquired by pure chance. A random advertisement in a newspaper on a day when I was looking for something like a car. The vehicle became an abode when I travelled beyond the city to visit points north. It was 1986 and I had no job, no prospect of a job and didn’t even want one. This was before air-bags, before mammoth turbo diesel four by four wheel drive Japanese imports, before GPS assisted navigation and before the advent of daily/morning motorway crash reports via the National Radio Network.

The car was my safety net, until the chassis detached from the body on Auckland’s Southern Motorway sometime in 1989, it enabled me to experience a space in which to travel and to think and to dream. I was forced to live in it for months on end when it did finally die I still lived in it, even when I had the god forsaken job I still lived in it and used a skateboard to get to work. The attachment and reliance was that strong. I was finally forced into a proper suburban existence when the vehicle was stolen while I was at work. A major organisational feat considering there was no fuel in the petrol tank and there was still the problem with the chassis/body relationship. I had toyed with the idea that I should live in the city and forgo the daily ritual of the skateboard into town, but as I would spend my Friday nights, on my way home, drunkenly throwing empty beer cans from the Hopetown Bridge onto the streaming motorway traffic below, I was reluctantly forced into suburbia.

Now I wouldn’t want to give you the wrong impression, living in a real house was pretty normal for me really and I had done it before. I enjoyed the comforts of the television, the viewing device that replaced my windscreen, except everything happens just a little faster. There was the obvious increase in available physical space. One could lounge rather than perch and I was able to acquire complete junk in order to furnish my surroundings. On bombing forays into the city I was able to pick up stuff all the time; bookshelves, oil paintings, lamps, glassware, crockery, plants, bicycles, stereos and tables. The sort of thing that wears out fast and is easily replaced by a short trip to the “store.” The connection between the inner city work place environment and the inner city suburban residence became blurred when I was finally “let go” as an act of contrition perpetrated by management. Finally again free to explore the diverse intricacies of modern life I once again fled to the motorcar for safety and sustenance.

The enveloping warmth of the vehicle enabled me to reconsider the notion of the vehicle as a device for transformation. The ability to go from one part of the world to a completely different other no matter how small or great the distance. The only real constraint being time and we are all confronted by this problem at some point in our lives. The vehicle becomes the device by which our banal existence does mutate into this other, the exotic traveller, the wandering minstrel, the carpetbagger, the explorer, the idyll wanderer, the fervent capitalist, it operates as a medium in which we can conduct the eternal search for real meaning. Having spent some time experiencing the somnambulist cradling of technology, the motorcar does still represent the perfect expression of our free and simultaneously controlling society. At once the expression of freedom, the symbol of individuality and the target of thieves and government, the vehicle retains its other role as cocoon for our daily transformation from blind sedentary drone to highly mobile voyeur. If we are to ever understand how this metamorphosis assists our very existence it is incumbent upon us to investigate in detail the nature of the reality surrounding the object. This search cannot but help to abstract the physical reality and enable us to view the very beating heart of the beast as something other than a steaming bloody mess of tissue and fluid.

“ There was an old woman, Ignatevna, who cured children of hunger. She gave them a potion of mushrooms cut with sweet grass and the children died peacefully away, dry from foam flecked on their lips. The mother would kiss the child on its aged, wrinkled forehead and whisper, “He’s through suffering, praise God!” Ignatevna stood there and said “ He passed on, the quiet little thing…He’s better off than the living, lying there like that…now he’s listening to the silver winds in heaven…”

Andrei Platonov, Chevengur, 1928