What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
- The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land has been read by many as a lamentation of the failure to recover the past, an aspiration at once utopian and definitively modernist. Upon further reflection, however, one finds lament over a culture ostensibly corrupt from its very inception, and not sadly fallen from an earlier age of grandeur. It is only through reflection of the past, be it through archives and architectural rubble - the archaeological remains and misgivings of modern man- that one finds a history not formed of distinct epochs, but of eerie repetitions. The tiresomeness of historical circularity stems not only from this (ignorant) act of repetition, but from the moral enormity of its meaning(lessness). What is critical to note about The Waste Land, is its radical departure from traditional poetic style and structure incorporating historical and literary allusions framed within an unconventional use of language - a literary approach fraught with chaos, fragmentation and uncertainty.

This form of the unconventional also greets the viewer in the architectural online space of Gair Dunlop and Dan Norton's, tomorrow's project, where the seemingly disparate words: machine, decay, cyborg, processing and grotesquery, seductively work together to tempt the viewer into play. What takes place via sensory communication is the virtual building of space and time created from residual memory, music and fragmented and cinematic narrative - a relational aesthetic that activates the theory of liminality. It confronts and acknowledges the past, while making a concrete present and potential future via breathing life into found content through abstract form.

The concept of liminal space1, suggests notions of ambiguity and ambivalence. It is understood that within this space, opportunity allows for active exchanges of ideologies, concepts and methods of working, where an end point or final sense of resolve need not be defined, making it a highly anti-modernist concern. This space exists as a metaphorical realm where ideas and concepts: artistic, political, cultural, social or otherwise, are in constant states of contestation and negotiation. In the audience-specific aesthetic of the tomorrow's project, these very notions of liminality are critical. Image, sound and the conflation of seemingly disparate ideas - a visual entity akin to looking at a chaotically compressed synaesthetic newspaper - only forces attention on the purity of bold lines and shape that disrupt the image - both pictorially and subliminally - thus engaging tension between three-dimensional realities within a two-dimensional interface.

There is clearly a move to cross or negotiate between cultural, political, ideological and artistic entities, especially considering the technological format in which these artists have chosen to reference the past. In reflecting transitional states or identities, attention moves from the constructed nature of viewing, to the precarious space between a person and his/her role in society. Where liminality is seen to be associated with transience between alternative states, so the combining of the archive with abstract, digitized and essentially uncollectible shapes and sounds, reinforces the interrelationship between two phenomena rather than their opposition. The concrete ephemera of these montages juxtapose dominant ideologies with marginal discourse, thus a dynamic tension results as text and image interplay and refer to neither one particular place nor another; or one, modernist-type2 truth, but rather works to resolve a mutable space in-between. The criticality of this space is found in the back-and-forth nature between conceptual and physical dimensions, blurring the line between people and space; the artist and the audience; thus, the concern for cultural or sociological artifact is replaced with an experiential and ambient context, ready to mutate for the next person who activates the site, and so on.

Where traditional notions of architecture and habitation are synonymous with fixed, external building structures, Dunlop invites the viewers to see how other more transient media like text and art explores the blurring between the making and simultaneous experience of space. Where Dunlop sees the web as a place of information and exchange" it seems an apposite space within which to play out his interest in the "entropic modern."3

Footnotes:
1 Term introduced by Anthropoligist, Victor Turner
2 The term "Modernism" refers to teh drastic shift in aesthetic and cultural values of ar tand literature folloing the First World War. The movement marked a noticeable break from the ordered, stable, and inherently 'meaningful' texts of the nineteenth centurey and from Victorian optimism, instead presenting a profoundly pessimistic picture of society. In literature, Modernism became synonymous with the works of Eliiot, Joyce, Woolf, Yeats, Pound and Stein, among others. REcognizing the failure of language to ever fully communicate meaning, the Modernists were usually more concerned with an exploration of form than the development of contect. In doing so, it established a new fragmented, non-chronological style of poetic narration and form. Modernism's acclaimed emphasis on formal experimentation, however, was also the sourceof its derision: the movement was often criticized for its abandonment of 'reality' and the social world in favour of a narcissistic interest in language.
3 Interview with Gair Dunlop, March 14, 2005