read this information before using the vehicle.
In her book entitled On Longing Susan Stewart notes that "the metaphors of the book are metaphors of containment, of exteriority and interiority, of surface and depth, of covering and exposure, of taking apart and putting together."
The metaphors of the box, like the book, are metaphors of containment and miniature. The vehicle, on the other hand, represents a self-contained world while at the same time availing itself as a means of transport. The car and the computer terminal are two vehicles. This categorical doubling puts into question the metaphors of containment alluded to above.
The late twentieth century offers a proliferation of such vehicles which at first glance appear to share certain attributes. Firstly, there is the presence of interiority, whether it involves the actual provision of enclosure or merely the referencing of an intimate realm by operating within close range of the body. Secondly, these vehicular object/spaces display a distinctly "molded" morphology which in turn is linked to their relation to the human body, their ability to transport and the means of production from which they stem. Thirdly, these vehicles are driven by high speed. Fourthly, they are controlled by small semi-automatic bodily motions, and so forth. On the other hand, the spaces across which they transport and the systems that bind them are gigantic in scale.
Jameson refers to this problem of incommensurability as the fundamental form problem of the twentieth century. How is the relation between a large number of very small, very similar entities and colossal structures presently constructed? The miniature vehicle and the gigantic spatial structure are programmatically connected through artificially constructed protocols rather than through a container/contained relationship. What other scenarios for this miniature/gigantic interdependency can be proposed? Can the colossal structure be conceived in terms of the small entities it contains?
Stewart notes that "the depiction of the miniature moves away from hierarchy and narrative in that it is caught in an infinity of descriptive gestures...everything is made to count" and nothing can be counted. It is interesting to note that this very definition of the miniature is by the same token a description of its monumentality.
It is important to distinguish here between size and scale. While size denotes a quantitative material presence, scale, in Stewart's words, "is established by means of a set of correspondences to the familiar." In other words, while the size of an object or space always remains the same, its scale always changes relative to a context. The extremely small like the extremely large turns its ordinary context into an extraordinary one. It is as such a vehicle of transformation of the everyday.
The blast5 vehicles are built in different sizes as formally self-similar, i.e., similar in quality and quantity of articulation. Rather than possessing a predetermined scale or significance, the blast5 vehicle assumes a particular scale and significance in association with (m)any everyday context(s) or in relation to some other thing or space. This is not to say that it is neutral. On the contrary, it would be more accurate to describe it as a cumulative index of multiple codes. This initial generative information has been assembled from a range of existing transportation/immersion vehicles and their codes and protocols. Each new vehicle was produced by incorporating several existing vehicular morphologies (such as a mouse, telephone receiver, and car seat). Although the latter were selected from a multitude of scales they were adjusted to each other in size, and their particular hybridizations were informed by qualitative coincidences of volume and surface articulations. The potential programmatic appropriation of these new vehicles--their new identity, as it were--is intended to be influenced in part by their performance value at varying scales and within various interrelations of spaces and objects. One such possible scenario is constructed in the smaller room of the gallery. Here, the vehicle is present to the visitor as a small object on a table and a projected architectural interior, in reference to which the object could also be regarded as a "model." The same set appears to the eye of the camera as a considerably larger object placed upon what seems to be a ground merging into the projected space. In addition to these two situations there are other spatial layers to and from the blast5 web site, as well as to the stageset vehicle, all of which converge into an extended feedback system that allows for multiple interventions.
Relations between vehicles, between the vehicle and other Blast items (including performative enactions in the gallery and on the web)--material that was formerly contained--as well as between the vehicle and other environments, are not based on a preconceived hierarchy but on a more fluid concept of interorientation--an orientation without fixed axes but across a field of moving, interchanging, or tranforming references.
The blast5 vehicle is a player's item, a user's item, and a collector's item. In operating in the capacity of varying agencies it is simultaneously TOY, PROP, INSTRUMENT, OBJET, and SPACE.
--Sulan Kolatan and William MacDonald