Still from A Perfect Home: The Bridge Project (Dead Reckoning Bridge), 2010. Synchronized four-monitor animated digital slide presentation, color.

Collection of the artist.

THE IMAGE OF THE WORLD: GEOGRAPHIES

OF A PERFECT HOME

Rania Ghosn

In his quest for A Perfect Home, Do Ho Suh operates within the paradigm of the geographic by inscribing his worldview onto the earth's surface, earth-writing as it were. There has been a remark­able resurgence of geography and of its interplay with design and artistic practices over the last decades. The visualization of the whole earth, the experience of world-scale infrastructures, as well as growing environmental concerns have brought about the geographic as a possible site, scale and formal repertoire of the spatial project. (1) With Suh's humor and playfulness, the

specters of domesticity haunt the geographic. In The Bridge Proj­ect, this transmetropolitian artist seeks to locate his house and subjectivity, in relation to the whole, not least through an exp­loration of a new formal vocabu­lary describing infrastructures and geographies.

International travel patterns, new visualization technologies, and ecological risks have shifted the perspective and scale of spatial imagination to a mediated view from above. In 1968, three American astronauts became the first human beings to see Earth's full disk from space. President Lyndon Johnson mailed framed copies of the Apollo mission's photographs to the leaders of every nation as an allegory of the inevitable unity that encom­passes all human division and diversity and binds us to the

natural world. The association of the total ity's i mage with cu 1-tural concord and environmental harmony could be understood as utopian. But in fact, the whole earth as a perceivable entity has since permeated spatial practices and imaginaries. The late twenti­eth century has witnessed the increase of air mobility patterns through world-scale transporta­tio~ infrastructures. The recog­nition of this accelerated move­ment has implied a celebration of fluidity, nomadism, and a space of flows. The development of geospatial imaginings, the exten­sive datascape of meteorology, geology, oceanography, and other earth sciences, has expanded the perceptual field to include a space of cognition beyond lived experience. This geographic turn unfolds in the context of gloomy ecological predictions for the

Earth and numerous associated attempts to establish productive reconciliations between natural and technological realms.

Suh intervenes with a gar­gantuan connective gesture between New York and Seoul; to some extent he lives space at a transcontinental scale. In his work, the world bridge material­izes the possibility of an affective space to inhabit. The dramatic restructuring of space and time in recent decades, associated with new high-speed geographies of travel, has been theorized against the backdrop of a "shrinking world." The "nomadic subject" has been described not only as in a spatial state of movement, but also an epistemological condition that refuses fixity. Far from the rigid ideological framings of global social theory, Suh's phi­losophy of space espouses both

place and flows in an attempt to reconcile his transmetropoli­tian lifes with the material and psychological distances of the Pacific Ocean.

At the scale of the city, Kevin Lynch has raised the question of the interrelation of mobility, perception, and legibility and responded in The Image of the City (1960), which serves as a means for geographical reorien­tation of people in the alienated space of the city as well as within the urban totality. Lynch's pro­posal for remapping of one's position resonates in the geo­graphic dimension of Suh's work. The artist's constant yearning for being here and there atthe same time produces ways of describing and representing the world as a scope of individual imagination. Across the four proposals, the investment of the map with

meaning is Suh's tool to inhabit his bi-polar world and overcome the distances between New York and Seoul. The initial large-scale Haussmanian intervention of The Shortest Bridge becomes his first gesture to project his space onto the representation of the world, inhabiting a spatial totality.

Beyond a mere shift in scale, being-in-the-world brings forth the question of the associated formal vocabulary ofthe geo­graphic. From bioengineering to meteorology and geology, various scales of expressing nature or environment have permeated design practices. The ecological agenda has reanimated the contextualism-autonomy debate, on whether and how natural forms or natural systems-thinking constitute and affect the spatial project. Within spatial arts, there appears to be, once again, a keen

interest in a type of organicism that emerges from an underlying system, complexity from simple roots, form that follows certain growth criteria and responds intrinsically to constraint systems such as ocean currents and site conditions or the external forces of weather and use. A certain nostalgia for nature is coupled with the potential of biotechno­logy to create new tools for the breeding of organisms, products, and living spaces. Such trends to naturalize form have tilted towards the mimicry of bio­environment, all while finding refuge in an ethical agenda of conservation and sustainability.

Through an ensemble of digital imagery, The Bridge Project proposes an aesthetics that maps one's subjectivity globally through biomimicry. Through mimicry of nature,

Still from A Perfect Home: The Bridge Project (The Shortest Bridge), 2010. Synchronized four-monitor animated digital slide

presentation, color. Collection of the artist.

building home and world could be conflated in a single represen­tational system. Biomimicry poses certain ideological traps.

It silences the agency of the artist or at best camouflages it within nature and its surroundings. However, played out as such, the

power of representation not only portrays contemporary condi­tions, practices and beliefs but also creates worlds in its image.

On the macro scale, Suh creates an animation by which he overlay his flight patterns over the years to interact with data visualization that shows sixteen years of global ocean current movement drawn from NOAA's OSCAR satellite remote sensing project. At a molecular scale, Suh channels the potential of biological technology to resolve the opposition of man against space in man-made-natural­objects that echo the figure of the recombinant body, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Donna Haraway's cyborg. His bridges progressively shift his relation to distance into a new world in harmony with his iconic house. While Dead Reckoning Bridge

utilizes technological systems and other applications of control theory to maintain stability across the Pacific Ocean, North Pacific Drift Bridge espouses the cu rrents of the Pacific Ocean as potential form generators. Instead of viewing space as a physical barrier to be overcome, nature is seen as a storehouse of forms and processes that humans can use to exist in a symbiotic manner with the rest of the world.

What usually falls outside the parameters of non-mediated visual ization, the i nfi n itely small and the infinitely large, are si m u Itaneously broug ht together and into sightto construct Suh's worldliness. The bridge proposals internalize the tools of biotechnologies and geospatial sciences all while exploring subsequent allegorical relation-

ships between body, structure, and site.

This essay echoes the founda­tional premises of the journal New Geographies, which aims to examine the emergence of the geographic and to bring itto bear effectively on the agency of design. The relation of contempo­rary modes of visualization, scale, and the production of architec­tural form are the central themes of New Geographies #4: Scales of the Earth, ed. EI Hadi Jazairy (Cambridge: Harvard GSD, 2010).

This publication was produced in conjunction with the exhibition A Perfect Home: The Brid e ~ by Do Ho Suh, at Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York.

Exhibition Dates September 14- December 7,2010

~ Research Do Ho Suh A Perfect Home: The Brid e Pro'ect, edited by Yasmeen M. Siddiqui

Published and distributed by Storefront for Art and Arch itectu re 97 Kenmare Street New York, NY 10012 212 - 431 - 5795 www.storefrontnews.org

© 2010 Storefront Books

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