Urban Image and Otherness: An investigation through practice of installation art.

This research examines the hypothesis that installation art:

-is not a medium but a mode of address, addressing the world as a multiplicity;

-uses tactics of 'dispersal', which as perceptual gesture is in affinity with notions of multiplicity.

The explanatory framework, which legitimates 'dispersal' as installation's defining tactic, is introduced step by step, through the articulation of certain concepts such as: 'field of activities' (Kaye, 2000), 'intervening screen', (Deleuze, 1968), 'dilation' (Ahearne, 1995), afterwardness' (Laplanche, 1992), 'the knowing not to know' (Derrida, 1992), 'emotion-value' (Barthes, 1977) and 'autopoetics closure' (Luhmann, 2000).

Structured by this framework, the practice for this research addresses, on one hand, the concept of otherness - understood as the infinite learning of 'differential truths' (Ahearne, 1995, p. 192) and on the other hand, a notion of urban image - understood as fragmentary imagery able to accommodate a sense of public space over imprints of experienced time. From the analysis of this practice the research concludes that:

-the employment of 'dispersal' as a defining tactic allows the work to surface into visibility as a sharing of a system of relevance;

-this sharing aims to displace meaning, by pushing it away from an autonomous condition, located on the work's surface;

-meaning, when presented as a sharing of a system of relevance, is relocated throughout different 'levels of immersion' inside the work;

-from this new positioning, meaning will only be retrieved by the work-in-situ of a particular viewer's reading;

-this condition of random retrieval implies that the work will generate meaning as 'differential truth' (Ahearne, 1995, p. 192), which exists outside 'the disease of identity' (Certeau, 1969, p. 179);

-as 'differential truth', meaning becomes a function, not of the authority of a specific voice, but of the ability to respond [a response-ability], exercised by the maker in facing the world, and by the viewer in the face of the work.