tabeau economique #02: fungible
Site specific installation for The Unused, Melbourne International Festival 2002
Location - RMIT University, Melbourne. Australia
Date - 2002
tableau economique #02: fungible models space as a function of rates of exchange and articulates the consequences of a moment of ‘correction’ in that system. This rendering visible of the immaterial and fungible flows of capital in a moment of non-equivalence delivers these ‘virtualities’ that constitute the world open for encounter and discussion.
tableau economique #02: fungible is located in the emergency exit stairwell at the rear of Building 8 at RMIT University. This space is itself an interstitial place, a kind of non-place of transition. Hidden away and screened off as a kind of blind spot in or artifact of, the architectural program, its very ‘function’ as emergency escape route, meant that it was itself a kind of space in waiting - a lingering place, a kind of spatial delay, hiatus or detour.
Such lingering indeterminate spaces of non-equivalence are the very spaces which open themselves for other kinds of exchanges and other kinds of inhabitation. These are the spaces in which those who are themselves displaced, in transition, out of circulation, appear in their impenetrable particularity, in their opaqueness and their strangeness, and make their home.
Conceiving architectural space as necessarily the trace or expression of ongoing transformative dynamics, the first procedure was to locate, identify and model the space as being a function of rates of exchange, as a vector space produced by change over time. To do this the stairwell ‘void’ was modelled and positioned within its urban context, including the data flow streaming from the Melbourne Stock Exchange.
A data flow consisting of the international monetary exchange rates for a typical day in September was then projected through the space, and ‘visualised’ at the moment of intersection with planes of ‘real world’.
This arrest and materialisation of the immaterial flow in its intersection with the site is the loss of fungibility which generates the ‘fall out’ of physical space and the unexchangeable. In the delay of the fungible, in the text which wraps and bandages the stairwell, an opening is made for other artifacts and residues to ‘appear’.
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