Suspensions of Perception

Scraping the surface: the techno-politics of modern streets in turn-of-twentieth-century Alexandria

“…Inattention, especially within the context of new forms of large-scale industrialized production, began to be treated as a danger and a serious problem, even though it was the very modernized arrangements of the labour that produced inattention. 106 The 1931 court case suggests that Crary's 'paradox of attention' may also be found in the modern street. Furthermore, it illustrates how the legal system operates as a disciplinary regime inducing attentiveness.…”

Rhetoric and Materiality in the Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art

“…56 Crary, too, acknowledges that no newly structured space of attention can direct us to a primordial, original, or ''authentic'' view, what he might call an ontologically privileged image of space. 57 Despite their use of natural materials, the NCMA's artists and conservators, with their focus on displays of natural forces and cycles, recognized this. Still, we wonder if some visitors to the Museum Park or similar outdoor venues might leave with the view that one need not venture into or be overly concerned about the loss of remote wilderness areas, since one can hike or run in the parks and, by encountering a specific space of attention, have virtually the same ''authentic'' experience of nature.…”

“…17 It is important to note that, as in many other parks and public art sites, the material rhetoric of the Museum Park does not so much articulate policy proposals in an argumentative space as it opens up an experimental, performative space, in which visitors are pushed to look beyond the normal conventions and boundaries of museums, as well as of urban and rural landscape design, to experience ''counter-forms of attention.'' 18 Following the work of Homi Bhabha, Pollock might explain this experience as ''the next best thing to an originary moment: it is . .…”

“…15 In addition to supplying local residents with recreational and leisure opportunities, the Museum Park also represents an emerging trend in art-related structures that seek to mediate the human/nature interface through mixed modalities, creating modes of attention which, as Crary explains, ''are neither exclusively nor essentially visual but rather constituted as other temporalities and cognitive states.'' 16 As Cant and Morris put it, ''[T]he human-environment relationships associated with art outdoors and explorations of art-forms . .…”

Drawing Adam’s navel: the problem of disegno as creative tension between the visible and knowledgeable

“…Visual knowledge, in particular, developed in nineteenthcentury culture in the manifestation of the spectacle. 48 When we understand we say 'I see'. In the legal accounting of truth the eyewitness is allimportant.…”