The physical world is sadly static, and its interface is clumsy and laborious. When I hold a book against a shelf, does it click into place? Is the kitchen searchable by mechanical spider? Can I choose how much of the living room to show, based on my needs of the moment? No. None of these things are true. As my expectations are raised higher and higher by digital life, it seems increasingly that something ought to be done about the real world.
So I decided to spend the year making bounding boxes for everything in my house. A bounding box is the outline that surrounds the total area of an object in image manipulation software. You can grab onto the bounding box to scale the object, or rotate it, or even, in some applications, skew it. Maybe your expectations haven't been raised that high yet, but believe me, they will be. Anyway, it's nice sometimes to see where objects really end. Sometimes there's white space around them you weren't aware of, as though their influence extends for some way around them, bumping into other objects and shoving them out of place. Certainly my standing lamp kept getting crowded awkwardly into the corner; the big stuffed chair was pushing it in there, even though they never touched. I wanted to see that happening, to see their bounding boxes rubbing up against each other. I wanted to scale the chair down to about ninety percent, to teach it to behave itself.
Immediately some problems presented themselves. Materials were an issue, and so was engineering. On the computer, of course, you're looking at a flat screen, and so a bounding box is describing the area of the object from a single angle, which means it never has to change size. You can walk around real objects, and so their outline changes shape with every new perspective; so real-life bounding boxes would have to be adjustable. I was thinking in terms of hollow extendable rods, like telescopes, or the legs of tripods. That technical touch also seemed to give the whole enterprise a connection to the history of measurement and surveying, which somehow made it seem like a better idea.
That was how I explained it to a friend of mine, who was better at mechanical stuff than I am. She wasn't to sure what to make of the whole project, but she likes problem-solving, and I had made sure to leave some graph paper and pencils lying around when I asked her over. Pretty soon she was sketching, and I was looking over her shoulder and telling her I disagreed with her ideas. She always claims to be annoyed by that, but she always listens.
She suggested just making three-dimensional bounding boxes, like cages, out of lathe and string, but I thought that would be too obvious, too static. I didn't want just to document how much space my objects took up, I wanted to make visual perception tangible. I wanted to be able to feel the way things looked. My friend thought, as she often does, that I was just making things difficult to prevent myself from doing them, and of course that was true too, but that's why I asked her over. Finally, at about three in the morning, there was no way to keep arguing but to get out a tape measure and start making things.
The first bounding box, out of sawed-off adjustable shower curtain rods and corner connectors, looked like it had been built by drunken monkeys, but it was perfect. Even my friend admitted it, after breakfast and a lot of coffee. It was interactive; in fact you had to interact with it in order for it to mean anything at all. We both spent a lot of time peering through it, pacing around the couch, pulling and squeezing the bounding box to get it to match what we were seeing. This is how big it is from here, we would say, holding up the frame as though we were really discovering something new about the world.
And so we began to build boxes. We started big, because it seemed easier to get a hang, conceptually, of the couch and the coffee table. Then I started in on the books, while my friend started on my music collection. This was a little nerve-wracking, since it meant she was actually going through my music, judging my tastes of five years ago, ten years ago, my childhood; she was very thorough. This was exactly the kind of examination I didn't want. I wanted my belongings to be neutral shapes in space, empty of story, devoid of meaning. So I argued that, if were just measuring volumes in space, she should be building a bounding box for the entire collection, or at least one row of CDs at a time. She disagreed, but I have a lot of music, and the thought of building all those boxes got on her nerves after a while. By February she agreed to let the first CD bounding box stand in for the rest, and things started to go faster.
In March I thought about making all the bounding boxes react to my body as I moved around, adjusting to my perspective by means of lots of string. This was the beginning of the interface, making my apartment more malleable. But it didn't really work, mostly because by then my apartment had a tremendous amount of stuff in it, between the finished boxes, the materials for the boxes to come, and finally, under all the rest of it, the objects themselves. There really wasn't room for a lot of lines snaking through the air. After I nearly throttled myself a couple of times I gave it up, and at that moment I realized that to go any further, I was going to have to simplify the environment. So I started moving my belongings, the ones for which I'd already made boxes, out of the apartment.
This was a tremendous relief, and as the apartment emptied out, something started to be revealed. The empty bounding boxes hinted at their objects in a mysterious, expressive way that the objects themselves couldn't hope to compete with. By June I had picked up the pace of box manufacture, eager to get as much of my cluttered life as possible out of the way as fast as I could. At first I rented a storage space, but as the summer wore on I couldn't really live in my apartment any more, since the bed had been replaced by the outline of its space, and an increasing number of my clothes and kitchen utensils were demarcated by volume. So I rented another apartment, and began moving my things in there as I was finished with them. But I found myself getting rid of a lot of things altogether. I remembered my friend laughing over my more embarrassing pieces of personal history, and I didn't want that to be repeated. I wanted the story of my life to be contained in invisible packages, borders filled with nothing but the pure empty potential of the best possible life. I was careful not to say this to my friend, whose interest in the project was purely technical; as I ran out of problems to solve, she started to look more and more disapproving. I tried to talk her round, and as we headed into autumn I think I started to convince her that my apartment, empty of furnishings, had in fact become a more tactile, more informative experience than ever before. The pipes and joins of the boxes were as familiar to us now as our clothes, or books; we could see in them all our arguments and our solutions, and in the empty space within them we saw me. Or I did; I don't know what she saw. And it turned out that what I saw wasn't a hidden me, or an illusion of me, or the potential of other versions of me; it was me, the only me, complete and entire, on display in the history of absent objects in a way that made the objects themselves only a distraction.
By the time of the exhibition I had moved into my friend's apartment. My own second apartment was a mess, just a set of fragmented leftovers that neither of us really wanted to deal with any more. I don't recognize any of the objects in her place, or not in the same way; there's no depth to them, they're just surface. I don't mind, though; I like it, it's like exploring a new world. And so is my apartment, demarcated and measured, with stranger walking through manipulating the boxes. I'm resizing the couch! one of them cries, though in fact he's got hold of the rocking chair. But I know, and so does my practical-minded friend, and we can see my life changing and blossoming around us as we stand in the middle of the room, smiling, refusing to answer questions, touching nothing.