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

Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 2002 by Sven Lutticken

Although Ruff utilizes advanced technical equipment, he also employs technology that is apparently completely anachronistic. His use of stereoscopic photography is an example of this; stereoscopy is after all associated with its heyday in the Victorian age. It appears to be completely outmoded--and yet, when one is confronted with a good stereoscopic image, it still proves to be fascinating. Geoffrey Batchen has characterized stereoscopy as a nineteenth-century form of virtual reality that has been edited out of photographic history, because it seemed to put photography in the service of spectacle rather than of serious art. (10) However, in an age when science-fictions such as The Matrix posit a world that looks real, but is in fact a computer-generated illusion, the anachronism called stereoscopy gains a new relevance. In stereoscopy, the architecture-turned-photographic-image becomes a kind of virtual architecture, but contrary to the simulated world of The Matrix it does perhaps not really fool anyone. Ru ff's stereoscopic images of buildings like Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion present a strangely airless and unreal space to the viewer. The space between different volumes appears to be quite deep, though disturbingly empty, while the volumes themselves (buildings or parts of buildings) look like two-dimensional cutouts. Such is the space of stereoscopy. Ruff is not the first artist to rediscover it. In the early twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp adopted this already outmoded medium as a means to lead art beyond the retinal, beyond the flat surfaces of modernist painting. In Handmade Stereopticon Slides (1918/19)--two photographs of the sea with a line drawing of a slender pyramid on each one-Duchamp used the analogy of the "creation" of a third dimension by the brain to hint that one might also be able to gather a glimpse of the fourth dimension by observing and mentally manipulating three-dimensional objects. More than Duchamp, Ruff focuses on the weird character of the virtual three-dimensionality of stereographs; the distance between his two cameras when he takes stereoscopic pictures is considerably larger than the distance between the human eyes, thus creating a distortion that suggests a viewer with a hugely inflated head. (11)

To take a typical example of Ruff's work for three dimensions: the space defined by the pool, the walls, terrace and overhanging roof in one of Ruff's stereographs of the Barcelona Pavilion (stereo d.p.b. of, 2000) is not inhabitable; it is virtual unreality, utterly airless and frozen. The strange thing about this kind of space is that it totally excludes the viewer, who cannot really picture him- or herself in this eerie vacuum with its cardboard buildings, mountains and plants. By refusing to show people and by choosing strict, formal compositions, Ruff emphasizes this lack of life. Even though his spaces need the viewer to come into being, as it is only in the viewer's head that the two separate photographs fuse into one strangely three-dimensional picture, that viewer is nonetheless barred from the image in his head. He cannot enter a space that exists in his own mind. By excavating such an uncanny form of virtual reality from photographic history--a kind of VR that does not seem to need and want human b eings--Ruff pierces through the anthropocentric rhetoric of cyberspace and virtual reality. He suggests that virtual spaces that are created by human beings are not necessarily made for them. These spaces are uncanny. Freud states that an umheimliches Haus (an uncanny or, to use a more common term, "spooky" house) cannot be defined in any other way than as a house that appears to be haunted by ghosts. (12) But in Ruff's case the buildings themselves are the ghosts: they are uncanny not because they appear to be haunted by the ghosts of deceased people, but because they are themselves "deceased," and yet still there. They are utterly unreal, but they refuse to dissolve into thin air.