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Lucas makes savvy, witty use of the medium with her disc, exploring a nebulous realm between the camera and the playback turntables, sound and physical space, performance and documentation. The camera is mounted on a DJ's turntable, spinning and rewinding as the artist looks down on it. Her head bobs into the frame from different compass points as if she were moving back and forth from a mixing board or record crates. The spatial orientation isn't entirely certain to the viewer, though; the rotating image makes you think at times that you're being tricked, and that the "ceiling" is actually a wall, with the sight line of the camera aimed towards it from a normal, standing position. Either way, the occasional synchronous rewinding of image and sound (and a kind of intermediate zigzag pattern that is a cartoon of rapid forward and backward movement) suggests that the artist is scratching the video as it is being filmed.
As it turns out, Lucas's visualization of "video on vinyl" exceeds the capabilities of Sengmüller's actual technology. In a live VJ-ing performance on the Vinyl Video website, you can see the VJs adjusting the speeds of various records, fading 2 discs, and moving the needle around to different points on the record but never backwards-scratching the image. In a sense, Lucas has created the ideal dj tool for this technology: VJs could put her disc on the platter and "air scratch" so people think they're manipulating the time-sequence of the piece. Which is kind of a shame, because it would be interesting to see what a VJ would do backward-scratching in real time Lucas's own, prerecorded facsimile: the image would run forward, of course, but the overall potential for spatiotemporal confusion would edge towards the head-exploding. Even without that capability, the smeared content can be sped up, slowed down, and skipped around in, with the space of the piece relative to the viewer becoming even more uncertain.
With the deadpan Lucas as your towheaded starship trooper guide, "Scratch It" simulates a trip down the Ketamine hole in a clubland-style funhouse. Walls spin, time and space refracts, the techno score plinks and howls. DJ Spooky has spoken of "dub architecture," but what he's shown by way of example--writhing 3-D computer graffiti tags floating over shots of building interiors--falls short of the cross-disciplinary cutting and splicing that phrase conjures. Lucas scratches space the way Lee Perry deforms recorded musical performance: instead of echoes and filters, she uses perceptual and conceptual slippages among camera, performer, and background.
Another Lucas project taking place in an ambiguous narrative space is here.
New York City just unveiled the plan for the new Fascism Tower--oh, sorry, Freedom Tower--that will once again disrupt the balance of the lower Manhattan skyline and give terrorists everywhere a goal to destroy. Yay! Just what we needed. Our Republican mayor and governor think the design for the "1776" foot tall building--the World's Tallest, until it's destroyed--is super-grand. The architect, Daniel Libeskind, and the developer, Larry Silverstein, agreed on the height of the building, just not the design and usage of the top 30 (largely ornamental) floors. Somehow we have got to adjust our notion that pride and patriotism always means a monster phallus.
According to press accounts Libeskind "compromised" with Silverstein's architect on the final design (the latter wants bird-slaughtering, supposedly power-generating windmills on the top floors): now, our only hope is that Libeskind plans to pull a Howard Roark and will blow up the building in the dead of night once it's completed (Roark, a character in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, did that after a developer incorrectly completed his design.*) Also, this is all contingent on shyster Larry getting the double payment he is seeking from insurance companies for his claim that two buildings were destroyed on 9/11. He needs 7 billion, not 3.5, to complete the project. C'mon, courts!
UPDATE: NY Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp gets paid the big bucks to write meaningless phrases. Here's the essence of his lead today about the newly unveiled World Trade Center design: "Sir, what you have produced is, if I may say so, a...piece of architecture."
Here's what they'd get if they hired me:
"Pointing its taloned middle finger at the sky, the new design says, 'Fuck you, we need a big building complex downtown and this is what you're going to get.' The most intriguing aspect of the project is that it is both fascist--with menacing sharp angles and a haughty disdain for the scale of the surrounding buildings--and treehugging, with the top floors devoted to power generation by wind. The latter is really just a sop to environmental sentiment, however--besides killing untold numbers of birds, the giant fans will only supply a portion of the building's greedy power suckage."
Times editors: "Tom, what you've written here is a...piece of criticism. Now, get out."
*UPDATE 2/DISCLAIMER: In the movie version of The Fountainhead, no one dies when Roark blows up his own building. He is put on trial for a property crime, makes a stirring speech to the jury about the glories of American individualism, and is acquitted.