Rouen Touring Machines Intermittent Futures

Exhibition: Le Génie du Lieu

Organization: Usine Fromage - Centre d'Art Contemporain

Curator: Béatrice Simonet, Usine Fromage, Darnétal-Rouen

Collaboration: François Lasgi, École des Beaux-Arts de RouenJean-Claude Schmid, INEAA, Rouen

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Preface

Dark Visions...The USA is everywhere and nowhere at once. Not a country, but a vision of a culture disguised as multi-national entertainment. Permeating what we know of the world, our old world, with a barrage of images of itself that are both omnipresent and forgettable. These images stick to us, they take over. They are alive. Somewhere deep inside of here, this is where they live. We don't always recognize them when they find us. We can't resist them as they enter, invisible. Digesting us, whole.

They reduce everything to the same level of banality, to themselves. Then they "mutate and grow."

What should we do? What will we become?The others, they became what they beheld.

Urban space, left open, is filled with them. Advertising is their Esperanto; the mall is civic space. Where do they go? And us?

Planning does not allow their capture in the invisible space of their flows. These images, endlessly changing, always arrive, like language—before speaking, on the tip of the tongue—and then, half spent, disappear. Not gone, but still-born, waiting.

To survive through them, you must imagine what they are. To survive, you must let yourself go inside, inhabit them. Enter the space where they are real. Only then can you make them out. For your experience of them is everything.

It is the only way to embody the liminal space that bridges the abyss separating the object world from the image world. You have to cross to the other side of the screen. Not to go there means to stay forever outside, on the surface, disconnected from what is increasingly our reality.

Not to go there means that we will never make sense of our increasingly despatialized world—a world in which often the things that most affect us are invisible. Where “here” is nowhere because we are elsewhere. But where, exactly, are we?

Our experience of a homologous representation of the city has given way to the increasing fear that the urban world is beyond our control. We in the US have no public space. We cannot perform the “dérive” of the Situationists because “the street” no longer exists. It has already been overtaken.

We must find other strategies, new ways. We must make of the city what it has become, a fiction, or we will become what we behold.

So this dark vision comes to this city in the form of an urbanism that is inevitable, but already here—in traces that you read as you visit this city. This city, like all cities, has a past. A city that is also imagining a future.

"Rouen: Touring Machines/Intermittent Futures" is a guide to this fictional city, a city we made up, to see what would happen. It doesn't ask you to visit places that exist, but to imagine Rouen as other places; as a hybrid space encompassing architecture, literature, and fiction.

It asks the question: What if people lived in an interior world of their making, traveling out (going out) only in their minds? What happens to a city when it has given itself over to external events? When it is overtaken by popular cultures whose boundaries intrude, showing no respect?

At the site of the new urban school, which could be any unfinished building in any city, anywhere, there is a tangle that could be the future. It doesn't look like much—this mess of cables protruding in the room—but it has the capacity to deliver the world in Rouen. Right here. Off, it is dark, nothing happens. On, it sheds light. Pulsing and sputtering, "sampling" the guidebook that we have distributed throughout the city.

Portraying imaginings. Churning and sputtering, the fibers come to life, drawing you in, at the speed of thought. You follow it. First one place, then the next. It means something, but it doesn't make sense. It spits you out and sends you—reading.

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