Bruce Nauman
In the closed-circuit installation Live/Taped Video Corridor (1969-70), a study from the Performance Corridor work group, Nauman set two monitors above one another at the end of a corridor almost ten meters long and only fifty cm wide. The lower monitor features a videotape of the corridor. The uppermost monitor shows a closed-circuit tape recording of a camera at the entrance to the corridor, positioned at a height of about three meters. On entering the corridor and approaching the monitors, you quickly come under the area surveyed by the camera. But the closer you get to the monitor, the further you are from the camera, with the result that your image on the monitor becomes increasingly smaller. Anther cause of irritation: you see yourself from behind. Moreover, the feeling of alienation induced by walking away from yourself is heightned by your being enclosed in a narrow corridor. Here, rational orientation and emotional insecurity clash with each other. A person thus monitored suddenly slips into the role of someone monitoring their own activities.
Diller+Scorfidio
According to the rhetoric of the visionary new technology of the curtain wall, glass would liberate architecture from the disciplinary enclosure of masonry. The technology of glass guaranteed a world without boundaries in which information would be available to everyone, unimpeded by conventional spatial limitations. The democratization of information was an important theme in the ideology of the modern movement and glass was considered a material of “truth,” an instrument of disclosure. The dematerialization of the wall would lead to a more open and healthy society––a transparent architecture for a society with nothing to hide.
As the curtain wall became the dominant building technology of the twentieth century, albeit for predominantly economic reasons, utopia quickly became dystopia. The transparent building that was to permit unlimited vision to the outside, in fact, exposed itself to observation from that very same outside. Glass was, unexpectedly, a two-way system, an alienating medium of optical transgression, a threat to privacy, and an agent of all that was sinister about modern architecture. In the harsh words of Richard Sennet, “The space created by the architecture of glass, far from being neutral, is highly charged. It is space that in its hostility to livability, in its very hostility to nature, seeks to consecrate itself – to become sacred, inviolable, an architecture which in its very inhospitableness, creates a privileged position for itself. This is the highest most arrogant privilege.”
It became apparent that the technology that initially promised disclosure could also be availed to display false appearances, the technology that once offered democratic visibility to everyone also possessed surveillance capabilities that could look back, the technology that once guaranteed a space with unlimited freedom of movement became subject to the restrictions and regulations of conventional space. Rather than the open society promised by Scheerbart, the technology of glass spawned new paranoias that had yet to evolve new tactics of secrecy. The material of freedom had turned into a material of anxiety and gave rise to the question: whose freedom and on which side of the glass?
