Global Clock - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 123

8 Global Clock

Nothing happened

New York, 2012— As the turn of the millennium approached, I had an interesting
opportunity to take my work in a new direction. I had obviously done a lot of
work with data, but in general, it was visual data, maps or GPS readouts or satellite
imagery. I realized that it might be just as interesting to work with data that had a
spatial component, but was not already visual, which is to say to explore what is
now known as “data visualization.”
I was interested in movement, in flows of data across borders and around the
world, especially very high-speed flows, and in the challenges that some of these
flows posed to the way we think about space. I was invited to participate in an
exhibition in Düsseldorf organized around the question of money (it was called
The Fifth Element ), scheduled to open in January 2000. I had to plan for and install
the exhibit in 1999, and so I decided to record and archive financial data trans -
actions across the turn of the millennium. You can probably remember the panic
about what was nicknamed “Y2K” and the fear that computers and the networks
that linked them would somehow collapse as their software encountered dates that
began with 20 rather than 19. I thought it would be interesting to track the flow of
data about money across the millennium shift.
I also wanted to make a point about a turn that was taking place in architec -
tural discourse at the time, one that polemically positioned itself “against critique,”
or rather, “postcritically,” in favor of what was called “propositions.” The desire
to get beyond critique felt to me like a massive capitulation to a certain form of
the status quo, particularly a global financial one, and most especially a refusal to
investigate the new landscapes of data and technology with anything other than a
would-be instrumental relation. 59
It was a moment that Rem Koolhaas had called the YES regime—the image
was ubiquitous in his lectures of the time, and it caught the eye of a journalist