The Fourth iDisplacement
Across the gravel raked away from the steps of the French Pavilion, the light fell through the oak trees in the honeycomb spotlights of late afternoon. The spots glanced the pavilion threshold, sweeping westward without pausing to allow the devices to set.
With determined confidence, a child of five approached, crouched, and tucked a phone—whose?—deeper into the gravel. Otherwise, Biennale goers stood by in a ring — still, tense, watching. There was a palpable atmosphere of nervousness coupled with a cautious curiosity. As some participants related afterwards, the altered environment was marked by the urge of device-contributors to document, followed immediately by an anxious sense of incompleteness when the usual appendage, the quotidian recorder of the banal and exceptional alike, was re-membered to be absent.
It resulted in a hesitant, delicate hostility that stretched the moment taut, even as the traveling sun kept the dappled spotlights in passing motion.
Only the customised colours of frames and cases, or the particular curve of an android edge, or surface cracks that correlate to a particular slip or drop, distinguished one inflection of black from another. A projection of distinction upon a point within the group—of a sticky notion of associative individuality—registered only in the eye corresponding to the correspondingly empty hand.
The tension that sprang from the temporary severing of the appendage’s appendage testified to a network of links and twitches and flicks and swipes and gestures, from the eye to the mind to the digit to the screen, rendered aimless. Like the idea of the four humours, unbalanced: the melancholic body brought about by an excess of black bile, by the black out of place. The matter that clogs the connections between nodes.
To witness, to continually watch the coordinates of the displacement and recognise ‘one’s’ as distinct, comforted the witness. The goers plucked up and wiped off the devices; re-adhered, they dispersed to document their proximity to the works designated by plaques and national association, edged by white walls and lit by targeted fluorescence.
This post is part of a series that narrates nine iDisplacements implemented at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Follow the iDisplacements publication on Medium and/or the iDisplacements hashtag on Instagram to read and see the next instalments.
