The Apparatus: a Description of NCSU's Creativity Studios
"Method of the project: literary montage, I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them."
- Walter Benjamin
The James B. Hunt, Jr. Library’s Creativity Studio is both a highly-modifiable writing apparatus and an interactive space. It has full networking capabilities and is comprised of two rooms, multiple cameras, projectors, monitors, and adjustable panels that serve as projection surfaces suspended from an elaborate tracking system.
It is a canvas that invites its users to imagine the future of reading as a response to the ever-advancing technologies of textual production and the new ways of seeing they make visible.
ABOVE: Photos taken at various stages of setup.
ABOVE: William Blake obsession meets search for Cold War propaganda.
The apparatus was configured to emphasize its potential as a versatile means of artistic expression, one that blurs the line between word and image and transforms and allows texts to be experienced as interactive environments.
ABOVE: A search for advertisements that reached back to the 1700s blended with eye-catching moments of nostalgia for reading.
Images and words emerged in varying constellations. Wrenched free of their context, they combined to form fleeting landscapes of minutia, mixing history with fiction, advertisement with propaganda, and manufacturing with high art.
ABOVE: Klee's 'Angelus Novus' breaks up a close up shot of some flowers I stumbled on many years ago. Benjamin wrote of this painting in his Nineth Thesis on the Philosophy of History: "A Klee drawing named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
The flat, framed-in world of the computer screen took on new dimensions as it interacted with transparent and reflective surfaces at varying angles.
ABOVE: Many philosophical and literary themes underlying this story emerged in this image. In the foreground, grocery store orchids wrapped in plastic reflect onto the shiny surfaces of the panels. Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was integral to the work of Deleuze who I studied in depth while developing my approach to Benjamin's arcades. The novel itself provides an excellent example of a flâneuristic narrative technique, one that blends the mind of the narrator with his surroundings.
The text became a physical space, through which each reader was left to wander, a unique cache of all that could be remembered of the dream.
ABOVE: Eyes in the architecture. (Photo by Jason Jefferies.)
Configuration on April 5, 2014
In the final configuration, the panels were arranged so that the four glass panels would align in a staggered fashion, connecting the two rooms in the same way the Parisian passages--arcades--connected otherwise separated parts of the city.
Both doors were left open during the exhibit so as to vary the order in which participants would experience the flow of text.
The swiveling doors adjoining the two rooms were aimed at the Southern corners. If aligned in this manner, both sides of the doors became illuminated, as well as the East and West walls in the South studio. If the swiveling doors were aligned with the Northern corners, the East and West walls in the North studio would be illuminated.
I chose to illuminate the Southwest and Southeast walls because there were already 4 TVs on the Northwest and Northeast walls.
Panels were arranged in front of the South and North walls so as to break up the texts and images, accentuating and modifying their content through the geometry of optics.
ABOVE: Configuration from 1-4PM on April 5, 2014
ABOVE: the Creativity Studio is pictured as it was first encountered.
ABOVE: The above images and specifications were taken from NCSU's information website for the Creativity Studio available at https://magnolia.lib.ncsu.edu/tech_specs/?room=crn
ABOVE: NCSU's Standard Configuration is pictured. Panels are typically stored providing the most amount of open space. The studio has various furnishings, among them several chairs and tables.
