This relationship between proprioception and vision was brought to my attention through my own experience of disorientation. In Mike Nelson’s installation at the Venice Biennial in 2011, titled "I, imposter", he created a circuitous route through the British Pavilion travelling through multiple rooms, up and down flights of stairs. He doubled one room, creating perfect doppelgängers that visitors meet on their journeys through the building. The installation was built so that there were two small rooms on the second level, which were in either corner of one side of the building. This room has two doors, one at the bottom of a short flight of stairs, and the other on the second level opposite that flight of stairs. Following the circuitous route through the series of rooms, I entered the first of these two rooms through the door at the bottom of the stairs. The second door in that room was locked. Exiting this room from the door I entered next to the stairs, I continued through a series of rooms and finally up another different flight of stairs to enter the second symmetrical room from the 2nd level door, the one that I believed was locked. The rooms had similar items in them, and the architectural design was identical. This second room also has an identical set of stairs leading down to a door which was locked. This made me wonder whether it was in fact the same room, but that one can only enter through the doors in one direction. For a moment I was lost, seeing the same room but feeling like I had travelled through the building in such a way that it couldn’t be the same room. It was then that I went through a reflective process, like Massumi describes as rolling one’s eyes up towards the sky to remove the visual cues and reflect on the proprioceptive memory. Retracing my steps, recalling the twists and turns in my path through the building, I deduced that this was a doppelgänger room on the other side of the building from the first. Nelson, in repeating the visual qualities of that room, creating a perfect duplicate of it and demanding a journey between the two through other rooms through doorways and around corners, was able to make me feel lost, and so doubt my perceptive abilities. That moment of feeling lost was both uncanny and exciting, but more important for my experience of the piece was that action of reorientation and doubt of my perceptive abilities as it brought out an awareness of my own process of orientation and reorientation.
There were simultaneously two kinds of encounter going on in this doubled room: the first was a direct encounter with the architectural space, materials and ephemeral objects, and the second was the confrontation with my sense of direction, memory, and relation to the architectural installation as a whole. This vertiginous experience of being somehow on unstable ground established a different kind of encounter, one that throws off-track the continuing intentional flow of movement and action through and with the building by introducing dissonance into the process of relating-to the surroundings. That feeling of doubt about my perceptive abilities remained with me for some time after leaving the installation. While I came to believe that there were two rooms, having found no documentation about this, it did stay with me that it could have been the same room. I doubted myself and my ability to properly orient within an architectural environment, but this was positive in the sense that I increased my attention to my orientation which was helpful for navigating the maze-like streets and canals of Venice. Some time later, I found documentation that offered some evidence that I was in fact right about the doubled room.
Nelson made this same gesture in another project, "The Coral Reef" (2000), doubling one room. The disorientation he creates by travelling through a series of small interconnected rooms is taken advantage of when he repeats a room that one has visited earlier, giving the impression that one has travelled full-circle and returned to the beginning of the installation. Reviewing this work, Claire Bishop writes,
Nelson’s architectural doubling creates a vertiginous feeling that calls into question one’s sense of orientation. This leads to further questions about the certainty of one’s perception, as Bishop notes. This disorientation, or destabilization, instigates a tentative way of relating to the surroundings. Being unsure of our direction, of what we have moved through and when, establishes a different kind of relating-to our surroundings. In this event, there exists the disjunction Massumi describes “between the visual and the proprioceptive.” The lack of accord creates an uncertainty about our location but also about how to relate to the environment.
This disorientation evokes feelings of entrapment, something often experienced in a maze. Nelson’s manipulation of this relationship between person and surrounding architecture was to mirror his criticism of how ideologies frame our perception and experience of the world, of what surrounds us. In an interview he stated:
Whereas Nelson has made statements about the relationship between feeling lost in "The Coral Reef" and the ideas behind that project, in "I, imposter" Nelson has made no such statements. His reasons for this room repetition are not clear, but the experience of this doubling evokes this same disorientation and destabilization.
The overwhelming multisensorial design of the spaces he builds serves to draw attention to that sense modality and away from the proprioceptive reckoning of one’s movements through the rooms. Furthermore, the transition from room to room has been shown in recent psychological experiments to lead to forgetting. Radvansky and Copeland have shown in experimental situations that walking through doorways causes forgetting, believed to be caused by the spatial shifts affecting cognition which demand that a person update their understanding of the spatial environment they currently find themselves in. Adjusting to a new space causes a cognitive disruption, and so moving through multiple doorways has a (statistically significant) potential to disorient. The particular relation between this effect and the visual and proprioceptive dimensions is not yet clear.
