Spaces of Flows

József Kollár

Spaces of Flows
(Building as Sculpture, Sculpture as Building)

In his Outline of European Architecture, Pevsner writes that architects are at once painters, sculptors and moulders of space: in the course of dreaming the two-dimensional space of the wall-surfaces, they are painters; in assembling the various volumes, they are sculptors; and when designing the interior space, they are artists focusing on the particular spatial relations. It is precisely this variegatedness that provides architecture with its aesthetic distinction, as it functions as the synthesis of a plethora of artistic branches. Nevertheless, these artistic branches continue to maintain their autonomy. According to Hegel, architecture is of a lower order than sculpture and painting. It is an earlier state of self-awakening of the absolute spirit than the other two forms of expression. As opposed to the spatiality of architecture, the basis of its temporality is music, the “measure of time of sounds”, or even its self, which “becomes merely the internal concentration of and the return to itself of” what it must be. The hero of our age observing himself in the digital waves undergoes a phenomenon similar to the experience of listening to music. The patterns of the self-reflecting digital flow (among others) form buildings that appear as sculptures from time to time. In the course of the artistic work of András Kapitány, these patterns function in their formation. He created the models of his 20-piece series entitled Fikagra, by “inter-morphing” the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest and Escher’s paradoxical edifices, which he then further moulded in his graphic works, or more precisely, his fikagra’s. His creations are the fictions of fiction: the products of the symbols of reality (in our day, flowing at the speed of lights), and not vice versa. While his works are embedded in the history of graphic art, at the same time, the building-sculptures he has realised in the virtual space are represented as fikagra’s.
Kaptány has recreated in virtual space the cloisters of the Museum of Fine Arts, which, in this medium, is truly ambulatory: everything is in motion, in flux, nothing is stable – least of all the viewer, who orbits in the arcades of passing time: in the course of taking it in, s/he simultaneously loses and finds her/himself.
With a penchant, Kapitány parasitically overtakes the strange edifices of Escher, projecting paintings onto their wireframe animation, by which the ensemble of sculpture, painting and building dislodges all three artistic branches from their original ontological places. The Hegelian hierarchy collapses, architecture mingling with sculpture and painting, their independent histories fusing retroactively, swelling into an obscure history comprising many little sub-narratives, expressing “timeless time”. This is ultimately a new pan-artistic product, which not only transcends the previously defined borders of the arts, but shifts these disciplines from their customary places.
András Kapitány engages with the tendencies of the architecture of our age that, contrary to the buildings that place habitability and functionality at the fore, consider buildings as the medium of artistic reception. These works, similar to the pyramids or Gothic cathedrals, bear some sort of symbolic content: in the virtual space, but in reality as well – with disdain for the warmth of the quasi-pens that provide a home – they are the laboratories of wild experimentation, which aim at human perception, so that in possession of new experiences, the recipients may also view their built environment differently.
Kapitány’s pulsating, throbbing buildings expose that region of reality that contains the wide diversity of individual experiences, as opposed to the world enclosed within the walls of conceptuality. He renders possible the experiencing of the flowing medium of time instead of space.
According to Manuel Castells, “space is the expression of society”. The changes of the information society have also influenced our notions of space. In perpetually renewing space, the constantly forming society is reflected in its own totality. Space simultaneously expresses the interests and values facing each other, and from this perspective, it is not homogeneous in the least. In my own opinion, various subcultures constitute their own spaces is different ways, i.e., social space is comprised of many subspaces coexisting alongside each other. Castells believes that “space is solidified time”. “From the perspective of social theory, space is the basis of time-divisional social praxis.” Space provides room for practices coexisting in time and space. “Our society is organised around various flows – capital flows, information flows, technological currents, organisational reciprocal currents, and furthermore, flows of images, sounds and symbols.” He holds that network society is the space of flows. “Flowspace is the material organisation of time-divisional social practices functioning through flow.” To be more precise, Castells is referring to the space of flows. I find it to be of illuminating power to assert that space is solidified time, or to speak about spaces of flows, and not only one kind of space. In other words, we can speak about many flowspaces that meet and converge, then part, at other times flowing in parallel, side by side. The flowspace of a community living in a given subculture can be completely separate from the space constituted by the dominant social practice. They simply do not know the rules establishing the channel of the main current; values and conflicts live in a world from whence the processes are not visible which might have an impact on their own practices. We have only to think of a mass of people who are occupied by their own thoughts and feelings, ignoring completely the dominant flowspaces. The buildings of our age are the expressions of these various spaces of flows. Individual buildings are themselves flowspaces, and the experimental laboratories for the examination of flowspaces.
Kapitány’s compositions functioning as parasites on Escher’s works are sculptures of “dislocated time”, expressions tying together the subspaces of “timeless time”, messages blurring the “eternity” glittering on the waves of the digital streams.
The most beautiful metaphor of the reflection of time derives from Heraclitus: “We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not”. (Everything flows, nothing stands still.) While we, the late descendants of Heraclitus, look at our changing mirror-image, it is not one, but the many rivers side by side, babbling, overflowing and drying up, intersecting each other in the digital stream, the information-deluge of genes surging over our bodies, the parasites of cultural genes infecting our minds. Kapitány’s series entitled “Parazita *.SR”, which he began to work on in 1995 within the framework of the international project, Working Space II, under the subtitle The Genes of Architecture, expresses his way of looking at things very well. The artists researched the phenomena, considering the possibilities of the computer, of how an architectural structure could be transformed into a sculpture in virtual space. The “timeless time” introduced by Castells came into being. The building changed according to unknown laws, with the waves of digital streams forming strange, aesthetically appreciable patterns. Kapitány’s still images and animation seize the diverging patterns of the digital streams, in which the various portraits of digital Heraclitus musing on the ephemerality of time and themselves are reflected, as it were, frozen in the eternity of network society. The artist, in the absence of any sort of pathos, looks contingency straight in the face, with “the unbearable lightness of being”. There is no lack of “daring, (…) a wisdom, (…) talent, to somehow indicate that: time is fluid, one moment is no more important than any other, and every moment evaporates” (Vonnegut); only the obscure eternity of confused and dislocated times remains for us. In one of Kapitány’s animations, the wall, ceiling and floor constantly glide over each other; meanwhile, the compositions of the Constructivist artists he deems great flash past. The confounded viewer is constrained to undergo complex and intensive experiences, i.e., to experience that “the cessation of sequential order creates undifferentiated time, which is the equivalent of eternity”. In these artworks, the relationship between the closed and the open, the part and the whole, is relative: constancy is merely momentary; the experience of change, transience, and incompletion dominates, as opposed to immutability, the organic whole, and reality enclosed in rigid categories. The being of the artwork can be best apprehended through the expression “holon”. The terminology was first employed by Arthur Koestler in his book, The Ghost in the Machine. The word (from the Greek holos, whole) denotes a whole, which on the one hand, can be divided into parts, and on the other, is itself the part of a larger whole. In such systems, the part and the whole can clearly be separated from each other, but not in an absolute sense. The whole is always a part of a larger totality, while the part is a smaller whole. Holons can be characterised by two basic properties: the endeavour for independence, and the propensity for cooperation. If in the course of autonomous problem-solving, cooperation is necessary, then they are effectively capable, while they remain systems suited for autonomous decision-making.
It is nearly impossible to find a vertical or horizontal wall in Kapitány’s holonic edifices; however, he has a predilection for crystal-structures (acute angles). The new building-sculptures/sculpture-buildings become stimulating and surprising, just as the bridges and buildings of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, which are exciting examples of the artistic application of concrete and steel.
In the virtual space of the computer, Kapitány, as opposed to architectural traditions known until now, disregards gravity and statics, and is not even concerned with the stability-load capacity of materials. The building produced in virtual space can change its form, is malleable, can be floating, and thumbs its nose at the laws of gravity. Kapitány’s works are at once buildings, sculptures and paintings, thus dislodging the original genres from their former ontological places, whilst generating entirely new holonic structures: monuments to time rendered timeless. For Kapitány, the feasibility of building futuristic buildings is a secondary consideration, as he strives rather to develop a new architectural vocabulary.
Similarly to other works of art, buildings can also be forced into the air, and we can bear witness to the evolution of a pulsating, vertiginous architecture, freed from its terrestrial bonds. This architecture examines – and represents – change over time and variability, thus casting light on the mutable nature of reality, and the special eternity of the twenty-first century, proceeding from the non-differentiation of time. Ultimately, this architecture might refer first and foremost to time rendered timeless, i.e., to us – our volatility and contingency.