A.D.I.E.U. (ARCHITECTURAL DEVELOPiVfENTS IN ESCAPE UNITS), 1999. DIGITAL PRINT
ON WATERCOLOUR PAPER; PHOTO: COURTESY THE ARTISTS.

Ilfre- Iranscendencel
DOMINIC PETTMAN <

Over the last few years, KIT has taken something of an interventionist approach to a
constellation of concerns, including architecture, urban space, technology and eschatology. They not only reflect on the ways in
which these discursive sites are produced
and policed, but actively trace the political
vectors through which these phenomena are
both validated and contested. Based in Canada, England and Australia, this revolving
collective have built up a solid reputation
based on conceptual installations which challenge, unsettle and inspire. Guardedly influenced by such maverick figures as Tesla,
Fuller, Archigram and Teamx, KIT take critical theory firmly under their wing, without being seduced by its more common
mantras.

1.1 N E W TOXIC HOMES

The "lots" referred to here are in fact a faux
housing development in Ottawa's LeBreton
Flats, an area so polluted by the legacy of
local industry that it is now unfit for human
habitation, KIT'S project links a website with
the real life site of LeBreton Flats, tracing a
virtual connection between these two coordinates in order to emphasize the highly mediated subtext of globalizing technologies;
that being, to continually colonize and delineate new frontiers.

Borderline Developments - KIT'S corporate
persona for this project, in association with
What the map ciits up, the story cuts across.
Artengine - navigate a theoryscape as dis— Michel de Certeau1
orienting, overwhelming and flexible as the
There is a scene in John Woo's film, Face Off
metropolis itself. Taking a cue from Michel
(1997), in which the villain Castor Troy
de Certeau, KIT seeks to create a tactical re(played at this point by John Travolta) comsponse to the urban environment by indulgments on his new-found suburban situation,
ing in the "art of manipulating and enjoying
forced upon him in the interests of laying low
it." The premise for such an endeavor quesincognito. Staring out at the generic pickettions de Certeau's suggestion that "futurfenced lawns from his car, he makes the
ology provides no theory of space,"6 indeed
personal prophecy: "I'll never get a boner
This project asks the audience to inhabit the abthat space itself is largely forgotten in the
again." Such an observation captures a sigstract spaces of both these sites. Rendering the required
capitalist reification of time. By tracing
nificant millennial shift in perception - where
social interaction as a concrete example of the "nonthe parallel exponential growth of human
the suburbs were once seen as an idealistic
place urban field," the website as property developpopulations and industrial waste, New Toxic
Homes counters the entrenched logic of Taylorism with the stark
fact that large sections
of the planet are becoming uninhabitable.
(A point which is becoming particularly
pertinent in Australia
due to the Pangea Corporation's proposal to
use the outback as one
of the world's major
plutonium dumps.)
C.O.T.l.S. (CULT OF THE INSERTER SEAT), 1998, INSTALLATION VIEW; PHOTO: COURTESY THE ARTISTS.
The symbolic leverage afforded by Borderline Developments
creates a conceptual
switch-board between Benjamin's "empty
ment site will ask the audience to draw out a building
compromise between rural and urban life,
homogenous t i m e " and the real-estate
onto the drawing applet which would not only exist in a
they now represent the topography of a
agent's "empty homogenous space" (and the
toxic landscape, but which would also fully utilize the
creeping malaise: a kind of scrap-heap for
timely deconstruction — or should that be
toxins, feeding off a previous generation's by-products.
the spirit (along with the libidinal economy
demolition? - of both). The digi-mechanical
As it is drawn onto the web it is also drawn onto the acthrough which it usually circulates). Indeed,
manipulation of an environment now classed
tual toxic landscape in Ottawa via a GPS system which
novelist J.G. Ballard has gone so far as to loas off-limits enables a sense of vicarious enis linked up to a fully automated robot.
cate the apocalypse itself within the doublepowerment and access. The blueprints of
lockup-garages and sparkling kitchens of
Thus, with the click-and-drag of a mouse,
our imaginary domiciles are simultaneously
the suburban neighborhood:
the web-surfer can design a virtual dwelling
etched onto the polluted ground, and the
for
themselves
inside
a
meta-virtual
space
I would sum up my fear about the future in one
"mattering maps" (Grossberg) of the every(at
least
in
the
sense
that
actual
habitation
word: boring. And'that's my one fear: that everything
day.
would
mean
certain
death).
In
doing
so,
KIT
has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is
carves out a zone which is equal parts Thomas
This project stems directly from KIT
ever going to happen again. . . the future is just going
Pynchon
and
Hakim
Bey:
a
liminal
and
temHomes,
a 1997 installation which empowered
to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul. . . . [The subporarily
autonomous
space
open
to
various
council-estate
kids who found their school
urbs are] dangerous places - you're not going to get
ironic
inscriptions.
In
this
sense
KIT
endeavor
threatened
by
real-estate tycoons. After
mugged walking down the street, but somebody might
2
to
fold
colonial
logic
back
onto
itself
through
inviting
the
kids
to design their own ideal
steal your soul. I mean that literally - your will to live.
the
"little
tactics
of
the
habitat"
(Foucault).
living
spaces,
these
fantasy blueprints were
KIT, however, sees an end to this horror,
In
an
uncanny
echo
of
Cerne
Abbas
and
the
etched
onto
the
demolition
site itself. By
stating that their new project - New Toxic
Nazca
Desert,
New
Toxic
Homes
traces
the
taking
aerial
photographs
and
displaying
Homes - "predicts the eventual doom of this
outline
of
displaced
desire
in
a
world
now
them
in
mock
housing-sales
offices,
KIT excentury's suburban project, killed by the
defined
by
the
transarchitecture
of
technolposed
not
only
the
ruthlessness
of
urbar
very cult of hurtling consumption that
4
3
ogy
and
the
"dislocating
localizations"
of
"development,"
but
also
the
Utopian
possicreated it." KIT attempts to counter the
its
attendant
para-spaces.
Such
are
the
lines
bilities
which
sprout
in
the
interstices
o1
"crushing isolation of the suburban dweller"
of flight, rooted firmly to the toxic earth.
voracious capital.
through a two-pronged interrogation of the
sociopolitical foundations of rational space.
Such a metaphoric cartography skirt;
1.2 CROSSING T H E LINE
"Unlike Gerald Ford's two-car Utopia," they
alongside the fringes of terrain vague - the
assure us, "this project proposes no fulfillFrench term used to describe the disregardec
A boundary is not that at which something stops but,
ment from particleboard, rather the lots are
edge between locations. In an age when
as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is from which some- liminality is the norm, the hyper-hybridir
plotted as a post-Y2K landscape of desire, a
thing begins its essential unfolding. - Martin Heidegger5
panopticon of shifted powers."
of KIT Homes and New Toxic Homes blurs an'

HE

G.0.TJS

is

residual distinction between virtual and actual. As a consequence, architecture is left
to reinvent itself in the ruins of its own rapturous rupture:

•v

As unrecognized producers, poets of their own acts,
silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of
functionalist rationality, consumers produce through
cheir own signifying practices something that might
be considered similar to the "wandering lines". . . drawn
by the autistic children studied by F. Deligny.7

While appreciating the counter-hegemonic
logic of de Certeau's capillaries, KIT sidesteps
the romantic resonance of his conclusions. To
play in the polluted spaces of the landscape
via the Internet is to already be (at least partially) complicit with the power-grids which
only cut deeper into the next millennium.
Borderline Developments thereby insist that:
These leftover spaces, abandoned by the concrete
realm because of inherent pollutants, uninhabitable
climate or corporate speculative indecision, may be
safely accessed by vision through the medium of the
screen. The entire process of territorial colonization
may occur in the space between the monitor and the
eye; discovery, exploration, purchase, design, construction and (visual) inhabitation of the "built" product,
involving only minimal physical exertion of the finger
tendons at the instigation of a downloaded consciousness.
C.O.T.l.S. (CULT OF THE INSERTER SEAT), 1998, INSTALLATION VIEW; PHOTO: COURTESY THE ARTISTS.
By thus extending Benjamin's flaneur into
a zone prohibited to fragile mortals, New
Toxic Homes initiates an intriguing dialogue
with modernist modes of appropriation and
resistance. Dwelling within "the blind spot
tional route of skyward rapture. De Certeau
ejection) - plays on the Titanic mentality
in a scientific and political technology," Borsimilarly plugs into this impulse when he
which has seeped into architectural disderline Developments' idiosyncratic detourwrites:
course through the twentieth century mannement uses the tools of alienation — the InterTo be lifted co the summit of the World Trade Center
dare of engineered salvation.
net, robots, indeed the logic of architecture
is to be lifted out of the cicy's grasp. One's body is no
itself- in order to clear a space for rethinking
longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it ac2.2 BLUEPRINTS FOR THE FUTURE
our habitus without becoming hostages to
cording to anonymous law. . . . It transforms the beour own nostalgia. (Hence their insistence
witching world by which one was "possessed" into a
At the extreme limit of pain, nothing remains but the
that their project provides a chance to escape
text that lies before one% eyes. It allows one co read it,
conditions of time and space. - Holderlin10
"Martha Stewart's myth of a global preinto be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltaThe meltdown of modernism has resulted in
dustrial cranberry-wreathed Connecticut.")
tion of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowla Chernobyl-like pollution of our percepedge is relaced to this lust co be a viewpoint and nothing
Indeed, KIT'S next project traces the movetion, so that art and architecture are now
more.9
ment from this habitus, to a more general
practically indistinguishable. Such a crucial
hubris.
historical juncture should alert us to the
KIT funnels the millennial urge for rapture
importance of re-inscribing "space" within
(a.k.a. "escape") through another pseudo2.1 ARCHITECTURAL
the necessary delusion of agency. When
corporate venture known as ADIEU (Archientire populations are being driven from
DEVELOPMENTS IN ESCAPE UNITS
tectural Developments in Escape Units).
their homes because of wars fought on the
Starting with Ballard's premise that "we are
very concept of territorial ownership, we
Ironically, the very scientific worldview and runaway
ail looking for some kind of vertical route out
would do well to remember the apocalyptechnological acceleration some say have produced the
of this particular concrete jungle," ADIEU hartic logic of an increasingly atavistic form of
spiritual vacuum and societal fragmentation that are
nesses the cathexis that transforms Manhatcapital. It is perhaps a distant hope - but
fertile ground for millenarian beliefs are spawning a
tan's ubiquitous water-towers into a fleet of
one we would do well to encourage - that
technoeschatology of their own - a theology of the
dormant escape pods waiting for the signal.
the makeshift Utopia of Gibson's Golden
ejector seat. - Mark Dery"
By setting up post-ironic salesrooms in orGate
Bridge lies dormant within the horrific
der
to
"sell"
spaces
in
the
Escape
Units,
KIT
When standing on a rooftop in Manhattan
squalor
of the refugee camp."
greases
the
psychic
hinge
which
links
suburit becomes very difficult not to be struck by
ban
entropy
to
metropolitan
panic.
A
planned
an epiphany of vertically so powerful as to
Perhaps architecture, like anthropology
set of infomercials pitching the benefits of
confound Baudrillard's basically sound oband various other anachronistic guilds, should
these escape pods - combined with the amservation chat we live in an era of "horizontal
take this opportunity co acknowledge its imbiguity
of their trajectory (i.e., no information
immortality." Suddenly a form of transcenpending obsolescence, and then return to the
as to their destination after the moment of
dence seems possible, through the tradidrafting board. Indeed architecture has been

NOTES
1. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans.
Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988: 129.
2.J.G. Ballard quoted in Andrea Juno and V. Vale, eds.,
J.G. Ballard, San Francisco: REsearch, 1984, pp. 8, 14.
3. Borderline Developments, Mediated Intoxication: How
to Navigate with Double-Vision, Mexico City: Virtualia,
1999, n.p. Uncited quotes by KIT below are from
this source.
4. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998,
p. 175.
5. Martin Heidegger. "Building. Dwelling, Thinking,"
in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, London:
Routledge, 1993, p. 356.
6. De Certeau, op cit., p. xxiii.
1 .Ibid., p. xviii.
8. Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of
the Century, New York: Grove Press, 1996, p. 8.
9- De Certeau, op cit., p. 92.
10. Holderlin quoted in Agamben, op cit., p. 185.
11. William Gibson, Virtual Light, London: Penguin,
1994.

D o m i n i c Pettman is a writer and cultural
critic who recently completed his Ph.D. entitled "After the Orgy: Libidmal Millenarianism and the Politics of Exhaustion" at
the University of Melbourne, Australia.
C.O.T.I.S. (CULT OF THE INSERTER SEAT), 1998. INSTALLATION VIEW;
PHOTO: COURTESY THE ARTISTS.

more effective than a hydrogen bomb in eliminating people so that structures are unburdened by constant human adaptation. Only
when the sculptors of our environment value
habitus over hubris will KIT'S robot be able
to escape the pathos of Douglas Trumbull's
Silent Running (1971), in which a lone droid
- watercan in hand - tends the Amazon rainforest inside a giant glass bubble floating in
space, long after the Earth itself has died.

Les projets de KIT constituent une reflexion
sur la production discursive et materielle
de l ' e n v i r o n n e m e n t bati p o s t m o d e r n e et
u n e remise en question des i n t e r a c t i o n s
oppressantes entre architecture, espace
public et technologic L'auteur a r g u m e n t e
que le travail de ce collectif «lubrine le pivot psychique qui fait le lien entre i'entropie banlieusarde et la p a n i q u e metropolitaine». Leur concentration sur les dechets
industriels, sur les terrains toxiques et sur
la pensee apocalyptique met au jour ce qu'il
y a d ' i m p i t o y a b l e d e r r i e r e le d e v e l o p p e m e n t urbain, et indique aussi la voie vers
«les possibilites u t o p i q u e s q u i g e r m e n t
dans les interstices du capital v o r a c e » .