Contemporary spaces are dynamic combinations of the real and the virtual. They are accessed, ordered, and navigated under the conditions of various online and offline protocols. These protocols include computer formats and settings, social codes and customs, and structures of agreement, arrangement, and formalization. These protocols serve to initialize, configure, and normalize space, rendering it inhabitable and infusing it with organization and procedure. Determined by larger forces as well as local practices, they might configure as walls, interfaces, and representations--"facings"-- that mark out an environment.
The space that results is simultaneously flat and deep, unitary and dispersed, near and remote, miniature and gigantic, live and recorded, reflective and immersive. To regard its structure is to block together these incompatible aspects and to figure inhabitants whose bodily constitutions and capacities have been adjusted to fit its diverse requirements.
Suspension proposes four structuring principles for regarding this hybrid environment. Matrix concerns the structure of signification, its indissoluble links to material substrate, and its figuration of recurrences; vehicle concerns body, signification, and technological apparatus as constituted in motion, including the ways that this apparatus converts, transports, and makes its users adequate to new velocities; phoropticality concerns the augmentation of vision by technological apparatus, its manufactured mistrust of the naked eye, and its role in converting the body; and pacing regards navigational modes that are adequate to the traversal of these conversional environments, and which organize space according to patterns, rhythms, and routines.
These investigations occur within a setting referred to as a "home." This home is not a determinable place so much as it is a mode or figure of presence. Both local and distributed, it is suspended between formats and protocols, sometimes miniaturized into devices and sometimes expanded into spaces. It is a rhythmic, behavioral, or articulatory dwelling-place: a process of localization and materialization wherein frequencies are atuned, beats synchronized, and patterns in/habited. It generates an occupation, a here in which a subject dwells and materializes itself in accordance with certain demands. It is part of a process of adjustment and calibration--at once subjective, social, and tectonic--through which accessors and environments are conditioned to one another. It is therefore a site of struggle, a locus of subjectivizing procedures and of their contestation. Always in conversion, it hovers somewhere between represented image, physical space, and access configuration while its inhabitant flickers within it like a ghost.
The home setting is always accessed through its facings and their systems of conveyance and interpretation. This involves not only protocols and their transfer and engagement apparatus, which set the conditions of possibility (the setting's "settings"), but also a vehicle that helps to transport and make adequate this accessor. A viewing body is engaged to locate, activate, and traverse the setting, and a viewing faculty adjusted to register its content and contours. This faculty is characterized by an extended, mobile, fluctuating point of view, able to resolve and incorporate diverse, conflicting fields and embody itself in accordance with them. As such it marks a suspension of body, space, and vision across the divisions of the facings.
Vehicles are the results and means of these acclimation-processes. They participate in molding bodies, orientations, and environments, while continually being molded by them, bearing the impressions of activation, navigation, and inhabitation patterns. They are products and producers of diverse agencies and highly localized, lived practices, shaped by market demands, production means, environmental protocols, bodily contours and uses.
Vehicles generate an interiority, a mobile bubble of immediate presence, against a constructed exterior. They prompt and register a "here" against a "there," or a "here-and-now" against a "later," between which their user is transported. They transform spatial metaphors into those of motion, movement, access, and frequency. Vehicles restrict and discipline the body's range of movements through molded mainframe parts and arrays of distributed components, which increasingly become social actors. The semi-automatic and nearly imperceptible motions of their users generate enormous changes in an outside world that is often but not always interpolated through codes projected on a surface. At the same time that the "window" of the vehicle is constituted by this projection, it is also an internalization, an injection. Vehicles materialize vast incommensurabilities, allowing enormously contradictory relationships to be held together as their own materiality implodes. Embodying both the promise of progress and the threat of obsolescence, they are densely-packed condensations of time, space, and scale that expand into controlled and regulated, or resistant and mutated, operation- systems of practice. They transgress the reflective distances upon which representation depends, identifying not in terms of mirrorlike relationships or oppositions but in terms of mutational interfoldings of inside and outside, small and colossal, near and far, subject and object, active and passive. The material and discursive objects that emerge within this space of active conversion are systematizations of these logically incompatible elements. They cohere not through visual or structural means but through patterns of recurrences or rhythms. This matrix objectifies the rhythmic and locates repetition pattern as form.
(source: http://jordancrandall.com/suspension/suspension.html)