updated 24 november 1999

 

Assignments

Research

Walden Supermax

Links

This country's network of national parks and national prisons are coextensive formations in the production of "nation-space", with its constituent myths of national origin, national identity, national continuity.

As new political technologies are expanding the coercive apparatus of carceral society, institutional leisure space offers relief and diversion, promising rewards through privileged access to liberatory natural knowledge. In park space and time, presumably, disciplinary surveillance will be evaded. The public body, free to mirror the naturalist's gaze, is appeased through consumption of emancipatory cultures: the festivals and sciences of rediscovered "nature".

Y+2Pstudio will explore rifts and disjunctures that emerge from superimposed matrices of national parks and national prison systems, a topology agitated by disputes over the jurisdictions of nature and technology. How are boundaries and horizons produced to situate this 'geographic imaginary'? What topography is inscribed within collisions and interpenetrations of ideas about�order and disorder -- taxonomic ideas of identity and classification that underwrite representations of both natural and social bodies?

 

 Y+2Pstudio tracks flows of transient pilgrims and penitents -- innocent and guilty -- whose desire is projected across the landscape of signs, who seek utopia through transparent natural law, discovering distopia in the opaque space of the penal code. In mapping theaters of emancipation and suppression, Y+2Pstudio is absorbed into the audience of our national spectacle of reward and punishment.