Scott Rogers: Tron, McLuhan and the Space Between

In Wireframe, Scott Rogers’ site-responsive installation at Stride Gallery, fundamental architectural contours of the gallery were traced with photo-luminescent tape to define a bare armature of space in glowing green lines.

It was as if we were seeing both a real place and a reproduction of a real place—a virtual space traced onto a physical one. In Wireframe, Rogers also duplicated the idiosyncratic, nearly human qualities of the site; the floating replicate skeleton line erased surface blemishes, but cautiously outlined structural imperfections.

In this immersive perceptual artifice, Rogers linked the virtual and the real in ways that evoked time as well as space. This is because his installation was redolent of early virtual reality models, and even rather comical in its reference to bygone, cheesy sci-fi effects and quick-and-dirty renderings of information graphics.

While virtual reality today approaches a nearly pedestrian function, Rogers fell back to retro-futurist imagery of the 1980s, when digital virtuality was just sprouting feet. As a low-res graphic interface, Wireframe provided an analog experience in a digitized information era. And by recalling predictive digital futures of the past, Rogers contextualized the present—a failed computational utopia wherein the physical body has not yet transcended into digitality as optimistic cyberspace prophets once promised.

Plotted along Cartesian coordinates, Wireframe’s outline referenced the inherent lack of space for the body in computative reality. The viewer’s body was set adrift in the nearly intangible void. The exhibition text—a set of instructions penned by Charles Stankievech—suggested approaches with which to locate one’s body in the space. A peculiar public engagement, this social interaction in the dark was based on the exchange of information: bodily position, conveyance of identity, “Lisa—is that you?”

As Marshall McLuhan proposed, the user is always the content of any new medium. Technical developments are first used to document and preserve existing art forms, then, as they become obsolete, artists reclaim them and push the content towards their own ends.

Rogers turned this principle on its head, creating an analog experience that was analogous to a virtual one. He discarded a new medium in place of an antiquated image of that technology, as if in anticipation of its obsolescence. Perhaps coping with the overabundance of an information-saturated culture, Wireframe had the unique capacity of identifying the present by mingling both the near future and near past.