Haunted space [private] - Feature - the architecture of virtual reality - Critical Essay

Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 2002 by Sven Lutticken

Nonetheless, the eeriness of moving through the huge abstracted structures of Metacity/ Datatown casts doubt on the "progressive" nature of this work. In some cases, MVRDV suggests continuity between the concept of the sublime and Freud's notion of the uncanny, which he developed in an analysis of a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, the German romantic master of fantastic, gothic plots. Like the sublime, the uncanny creates a profound sense of crisis in the subject, but in the case of the uncanny this is not softened either by the triumph of reason or by an "egotistical" exaltation. According to Freud, the uncanny arouses our deep-seated animistic instincts. Once again, the world appears to be animated, alive--something that upsets our rational beliefs and undermines our sense of self. (6) In Metacity/Datatown things often happen as if by magic: the pig skyscraper seems to create itself, and in the 1998-2001 installation rectangles of farmland come floating through the air in a kind of apocalyptic storm, only to la nd in a neat grid which indicates the different uses the land is intended for, e.g. areas for chicken farms are indicated by enormous eggs and much smaller chickens. We seem to have entered a kind of space where normal rules of causality have been suppressed and where everything instead seems to be animated. This corresponds to the reemergence of primitive animistic beliefs to haunt modern man, as postulated by Freud. The clean new data space turns out to be the set for the return of the repressed; far from freeing us of the past, virtual space sees old specters coming back to haunt us. However, these specters clearly follow some grand plan laid out by MVRDV, and consequently MVRDV presents itself as a God-like creator, as master over the uncanny forces.

What is strange is that its spaces are both so "modern" and so "pre-modern." It is as if two types of space that fully crystallized around 1800 have fused. During the French Revolution, a proposal for a new map of France was drawn, with a structure of departments that had the shape-at least in the first, most "ideal" drawing--of perfect squares. The whole of France was turned into a perfect: grid. Due to conservatives who demanded some respect for traditional boundaries, and some consideration for natural barriers, this was soon diluted until the grid structure was barely recognizable. (7) Still, this map is of great importance. It shows modern, disenchanted, abstract space at its most radical. At around the same time, the (proto)romantic movement created a cult of numinous sites-dark and mysterious forests, haunted houses and castles. This cult indicated a desperate resistance against a conception of space for which even the darkest forest or creepiest mansion is part of the same continuum, the same grid. Th is romantic cult of uncanny places has been the faithful shadow of modern abstract space, with its claims to being single and undividable. Culture apparently needed spaces, whether mythified "real" places or purely imaginary ones, where specters of the past still resided, where the light of reason did not enter. Now these specters enter the world at large again--at least that is the impression MVRDV apparently wants to give. It seems that its primary intention is to awe the viewers and make them admire the artists-architects' command over these spooks: the egotistical uncanny.