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Embodied Spaces, installation

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In 1964, Walt Disney exhibited a mechanized theater pavilion at the New York World’s Fair titled Carousel of Progress. The pavilion consisted of a revolving theater, with the audience seating area rotating around a circular fixed stage showing one nuclear family over four generations. In each of the scenes, the audience witnessed technology transform their domestic lives. Drawing from the Carousel of Progress, this piece shows three models of domestic interiors. However, rather than unequivocally celebrating technological advancement, this piece focuses on specific objects within each scene and interrogates their relationship to carbon form. Each scene is mounted onto a slide carousel that projects images of the object’s ‘embodied spaces,’ a term used here to denote spaces of production that are hidden from the domestic subject’s gaze yet are required to sustain the ‘wondrous’ feats of technological domesticity: sites of material extraction, infrastructures such as railroads and highways, industrial sites of labor exploitation, the back-of-house in department stores, wastelands, etc. The concept of embodied space alludes to the term embodied carbon—a scientific metric used to measure all the greenhouse gas emissions associated with raw material extraction, transportation, manufacturing installation and end-of-life cycle of a given product. While this term has vastly improved our understanding of human energy use, it neglects the extensive spatial networks that are as consequential as the energy itself. This version of the Carousel of Progress showcases archival photographs that trace the embodied spaces of three domestic objects shown initially in Disney’s version, each representative of a particular historical moment: a wooden chair (1890s), an electric lamp (1920s), and a dishwasher (1940s). Together, their embodied spaces reveal the interconnected nature of carbon form.

This project was first presented as a series of pop-up installations at Cornell AAP in the Fall of 2022, within the framework of Prof. Esra Akcan's doctoral seminar, "Architecture Exhibitions in the Age of Reparations."


©2024 Alican Taylan