Doubting the original

Susan Gäensheimer describes how this doubling can become destabilizing through introducing uncertainty:

Both the original room and its double have their own specific function and, in their history, their own aura – the aura of uniqueness. The artist may at the same time be suspected of playing with his public, for the concept of aura is rapidly transformed into its opposite, the void. Gregor Schneider’s artworks are thus located on the borderline between these two poles. The act of duplicating and hence doubling negates the auratic, highly individual and thus unique character of the original. Doubling calls uniqueness into question and with it our orientation and our sense of security of what is irretrievable. It seems as if nothing is unique, nothing identical with itself.

In this way, the act of doubling begins to destabilize orientation in another sense, by introducing uncertainty into all interactions with surroundings. This calls into question not only our experience of the current architectural environment we might feel lost in or uncertain of, but all of our surroundings, perhaps everything that we identify as individually unique, is questioned, as we begin to doubt our ways of perceiving and identifying.


The destabilization such doubling evokes comes about by giving one a sense that something has been missed or overlooked, though not being clear about what this might be. Massumi describes this as an act of ‘oversight’, in the way that it calls our attention to qualities that might be overlooked, and in this overlooking falsely identified as unique. He proposes that the “eye is the organ of habitual oversight”, and in order to distinguish figures and make them stable and continuing, the eye is inattentive to parts of vision, but this results in overlooking a certain potential:

The overseen is unseen potential. The unity of identity, the simplicity, of the resulting object has been limitatively extracted from the complex chaos. That chaos continues to be seen, feebly: underseen in the form of identity. The chaos must continue for the object to have something to reemerge from, as anticipated.[...] Vision abstractly oversees order by synesthetically superadding habit’s abstractions to the singular immediacy of its ever-renewing chaos.

In relation to Schneider’s and Seator's works, architectural doubling calls attention to our habitual oversight of what surrounds us. The identities we believed to be unique are cast into doubt. The complex chaos Massumi describes, or the void that Gäensheimer describes, begins to come into view. Rather than a disorientation from a discontinuity between proprioception and vision, this disorientation acknowledges our inability to sense the full singularity of our surroundings through what is our typical manner of engaging with an environment. Introducing this doubt of our sensorial capacity and capability to fully perceive what surrounds us might lead us to rethink how we relate to and engage with environments. Acknowledging this perceptual limitation might afford an opportunity to see this unseen potential, and to consider ways to access it and carry it forwards.

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