DIS-SITES

@ Site-Seeing. Die Disneyfizierung der Städte?

A project by Office for Cognitive Urbanism (Andreas Spiegl, Christian Teckert) for the exhibition „Site-Seeing. Die Disneyfizierung der Städte?“, curated by Soenke Gau and Katharina Schlieben, Kuenstlerhaus Vienna, 2002

A project by Office for Cognitive Urbanism

Having been invited for the design of the lecture space within the exhibition Site-Seeing the Office for Cognitive Urbanism chose to select specific spaces for the respective topics of the lectures in the cityscape. These places or "DISsites" reflect the images and the politics of perception within the exhibition topic of "disneyfication" and it’s regimes of vision. Regimes of vision regulate how urban spaces appear and become visible.

We identified five specific regimes of vision in order to let the spaces be displayed, displaced, distributed, distanced or dislocated. Thereby the city itself becomes a place of discourse-production, an urban lecture space. The original exhibition space in the Kuenstlerhaus Vienna was left empty, except of a series of diagrams on the walls indicating the geographical directions to the specific lecture spaces in relation to their regimes of vision. The specific locations in the city were casted like spots for a filmset. Each scene had a different plot, which was connected to a specific regime of vision, which would form the background for the lectures.

The lecture-evening "displayed" was set in a glass pavillion of the project space of Kunsthalle Vienna, resembling the mode of a „vitrine“ with a distanced view of the original venue of the exhibition, – the Kuenstlerhaus Vienna.

The lecture-evening "displaced" was set in the conference room of Austria’s state broadcasting station ORF, overlooking the whole city in the background, punctuated by series of TV screens, which resembled the mediatic regime of vision.

The lecture-evening "distanced" was located in a huge glass box on the rooftop of a building next to 19th century Gasometer in Vienna, resembling the notion of a inverted Panopticon, crossed with the panorama as a device for spectucalar landscape views for an immobilised observer.

Finally the lecture-evening "dislocated" was set in the virtualised interiority of the Planetarium Vienna, which displayed the galaxy on the huge dome inside the space, representing the non-materiality of the screen as an interface between look and gaze.