Global Clock - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 124

for Wired magazine. In a lecture at U.C. Berkeley, Koolhaas outlined plans for an
expanded Schiphol Airport, outside Amsterdam. The journalist paraphrases the
presentation—“The airport-island will be funded and supported by commercial
enterprises. It will be a shopping heaven.”—and then comments:
To ensure that even the most innocent among them got the point, he put up a slide
showing the symbols for the yen, the euro, and the dollar. “During some recent
work at OMA,” he said, “we noticed that the signs of the world's major currencies,
put together, spell YES. We are working inside this global YES.” 60
And Koolhaas, to his credit, was not shy about drawing out the most radical
implications of this “working inside.” In another lecture around the same time,
referring once again to the three currencies, he said:
They describe a regime under which we are all active and willing. On the one hand,
it is a regime that sets our parameters, and those parameters are fairly immutable.
But on the other hand, it is also a regime that gives us an almost unbelievable
amount of freedom to establish our own trajectories within it, and also to establish
whatever connections within it, including connections between not only people
but between different enterprises. 61
Postcriticality had everything to do with money, with saying YES to money, in
whatever currency, with not thinking much about money besides how to make it. I
wanted to do something else with the currencies.
To be honest, I expected the computers to crash as I was recording the data over
the millennium and that that my show would be a replay of the event—whatever
form that took. But instead, as I watched the celebrations that New Year's Eve all
around the world, starting in Australia, on TV and on the Internet, and I realized
my installation was doing just fine in Düsseldorf.
Nothing happened.