| Abstract: | Chicago Scenarios , installed at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004, invited audiences to speculate about potential futures for the city of Chicago. We wanted to use the paradoxical situation of the installation—both embedded in and removed from the postindustrial city it addressed—to catalyze a public and collective mode of engagement with its fantastic realities and unrealized potential. The installation was organized as a series of pseudomonumental frames supporting a collection of devices, which broadcast scenarios that reframed and unframed the city's past and future. Oscillating between display and experiment, the array of scenarios produced rather than represented experience. The scenarios, crowded into a small room, superimposed, and cross-referenced, blurred into ambiance, producing immersive pseudodocuments that established a material connection between our audiences and Chicago's past and future. These scenarios operated as provisional structures for making new possibilities material and knowable. By devising scenarios, instead of conventional architectural representations, we could demonstrate the operations of catalytic processes—transformative events, which change the operation of systems—in time, with the force of a real proposition. |
