Installation

Definition

The installation, in the production-oriented register, is the typology of work where advanced spatial practices are developed and tested: "the proliferation of installations as a typology of work where advanced spatial practices can be tested, evaluated, deployed, sampled, and redeployed." For Clay Odom, the installation is not merely a genre of ephemeral art but the practice infrastructure of the effects-turn — one of three conditions that gave "the trajectory of design's movement from objects to space" its "escape velocity" (with digital tools and low-cost hardware). Its disciplinary role is explicit: "contemporary art installations, scenography, and temporary interior interventions are of particular interest because they have become the most accessible territories for emerging methodologies to be tested. Rather than focusing on mediation and problem solving as the end goals of design, this work begins to generate a range of potential conditions."

The concept's canonical works, in Odom's sequence: Diller-Scofidio's Blur Building (2002 Swiss Expo) and Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate (2004) as "early manifestations of the 'elusive qualities'" of POP productions; Christo; Olafur Eliasson (Feelings Are Facts); Numen/For Use; Tomas Saraceno's On Space Time Foam, "one in a series of iterative projects completed across of range of sites and times using similar methods and materials" — the installation as serial research vehicle. These projects "leverage form and surface not only for their own intrinsic qualities, but also for the ephemeral effects and experiences that they have the capacity to produce": Blur Building and Cloud Gate are "diagrams for productions of ephemerality and experience." The installation differs from the exhibition interior (Massey's ephemeral-interior) in its function: where the exhibition interrupts a host's permanence, the installation is a methodological apparatus — the site where a practice's systemized processes are "sampled, and redeployed."

Key Thinkers

• Clay Odom — the typology's theorist: installations as POPs' proving ground and "the most accessible territories for emerging methodologies to be tested"; his own Tesseract series as the practice's instance (2018).
• Diller-Scofidio — the precedent: Blur Building (2002), an "early manifestation" of the elusive qualities of productions (not yet paged — see log).
• Anish Kapoor — the precedent: Cloud Gate (2004) — "form and material integration not as ends, but as means of producing new situations and effects within the city" (not yet paged — see log).
• Tomas Saraceno — the serial-production exemplar: On Space Time Foam as "one in a series of iterative projects completed across of range of sites and times," where "moments away from contextual connection are conditions where surface and spatial effects are maximized" (not yet paged — see log).
• Olafur Eliasson — the atmospheric exemplar: Feelings Are Facts as a project "leverag[ing] form and surface… for the ephemeral effects and experiences that they have the capacity to produce" (not yet paged — see log).
• Anne Massey — the adjacent historian: her exhibition interiors supply the typology's historiographic predecessor — the temporary interior as the unit of an interior's real history (see ephemeral-interior, time-travel).

Related Concepts

• ephemeral-interior — the material condition: the installation is the temporary interior treated as method rather than as interruption of permanence.
• event-space — the temporality: the installation as event-typed interior — "not a place of quotidian habitation" at installation scale.
• production-oriented-practices — the practices that use the installation as their "typology of work."
• productions — the installation's output: "diagrams for productions of ephemerality and experience."
• exhibitionary-complex — the institutional frame installations share with exhibitions, minus the collection function.
• emergence — the methodological point of testing: "the emergent conditions" that only deployment reveals.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Productions: spatial practices, processes, and effects (Odom 2018) — the concept's source: installations as the escape-velocity condition ("tested, evaluated, deployed, sampled, and redeployed"); the "most accessible territories" thesis; Blur Building and Cloud Gate as precedents; On Space Time Foam's seriality and autonomy/connectivity dialectic; Feelings Are Facts; and the redefinition of design's goal from "mediation and problem solving" to "a range of potential conditions."
• source-notes/solomon-2018-public-spheres-hong-kong

Open Questions

• Is the installation a type (a genre of work) or a phase (a testing ground practices leave once methods mature)? Odom's "deployed, sampled, and redeployed" suggests a permanent serial practice; the Reader's other chapters treat installations as exceptions.
• The installation has no program, no client, no envelope obligations (cf. Olsen's "low-risk opportunities," Garófalo-Khan's grottoes that "do not address the environmental envelope"). Can a methodology tested only outside those constraints be transposed to interiors at all — or is the installation's freedom its non-transferability?
• Saraceno's seriality ("across of range of sites and times using similar methods") poses the site question: are installations site-specific works or samples of a portable system — and does the installation typology mark the return of the kit-of-parts logic (kit-of-parts) at artistic scale?