‘A central theme of my work has been the making visible of conditions, configurations, processes and equipment that form the Western cultural urban world and which are nor¬mally invisible through habitual use, consensus and their means of representation. These conditions are so pervasive as to be environmental and apparently continuous, shaping the ways in which we relate to Nature, to the Other and to Authority. By creating a gap in the continuous environment, processes are exposed and space is made for actions which do not fit the totalising prescript. In my architectural work, my strategy has been to self-consciously expose the uncon¬scious city, by visually or concretely remaking its forms and contents; the user is confronted by the uncanny, the Double of the city. In my practice as an artist, the Double becomes a complex of possibilities of readings. Our conventional understandings of the world exist through language, through constructions that are increasingly authoritarian. Immediately we recognise that meaning in language is not unified, and that its constructions are constantly responding to contextual conditions to maintain their authority, then that Authority is prised apart; resistance to prescription becomes possible and meaning can be re-made. I wish to speculate on the potential of specificity. I want to acknowledge that recognition of the world (as an '’open’' street) may come as much through mistaken readings of it as through readings which are '’correct’', even if these may have broken free of the habitual. In addition to the possibility of criticality that lies within the specific - of making visible the apparent instrumentality of the 'public' world - is the possibility of revelation of the historical and ethical construc¬tions that bear upon our perceptions and locations. This potentially transforms the public world as perceived from a self-perpetuating complex of closures to an open domain of new readings and "makings".'
[LESS]‘A central theme of my work has been the making visible of conditions, configurations, processes and equipment that form the Western cultural urban world and which are nor¬mally invisible through habitual use, consensus and their means of representation. These conditions are so pervasive as to be environmental and apparently continuous, shaping the ways in which we relate to Nature, to the Other and to Authority. By creating a gap in the continuous environment, processes are exposed and space is made for actions which do not fit the totalising prescript. In my architectural work, my strategy has been to self-consciously expose the uncon¬scious city, by visually or concretely remaking its forms and contents; the user is confronted by the uncanny, the Double of the city. In my practice as an artist, the Double becomes a complex of possibilities of readings. Our conventional understandings of the world exist through language, through constructions that are increasingly authoritarian. Immediately we recognise that meaning in language is not unified, and that its constructions are constantly responding to contextual conditions to maintain their authority, then that Authority is prised apart; resistance to prescription becomes possible and meaning can be re-made. I wish to speculate on the potential of specificity. I want to acknowledge that recognition of the world (as an '’open’' street) may come as much through mistaken readings of it as through readings which are '’correct’', even if these may have broken free of the habitual. In addition to the possibility of criticality that lies within the specific - of making visible the apparent instrumentality of the 'public' world - is the possibility of revelation of the historical and ethical construc¬tions that bear upon our perceptions and locations. This potentially transforms the public world as perceived from a self-perpetuating complex of closures to an open domain of new readings and "makings".'