Bonaventure: Hyperspace - Sensorium - Connectivity - War takes as its starting point the Westin Bonaventure Hotel designed by architect John Portman in 1974.
Nested in the heart of Los Angeles, this ‘city within a city’ was infamously interpreted by pre-eminent Marxist theorist Frederic Jameson as a model of postmodern hyperspace and allegory for the logic of late capital. Less famously, the building became the site for a covert performance by Kreider + O’Leary in 2010. Spatially enacting Jameson’s interpretation of the building, the pair moved through its interior, exterior and peripheral spaces, stopping at various intervals to perform and record a short tap-dancing sequence. The video work LA Tapped (or, the story of an innocent, harmless little girl, who had been carried by a cyclone many miles from home; and she had never killed anything in all her life) (2012) documents this performance, whilst adding complexity to the allegorical enactment of the architecture by making visual and aural reference to the representational frameworks of both the Hollywood film industry and modern warfare. In doing so, the work aims to expose an enmeshment of the topologies and representations of our built environment not just with the logic of late capital, but also with the systematic violence that this logic both upholds and reinforces. Nested in the heart of this book, the video work becomes a ‘document within a document’ as stills from LA Tapped are coupled with further historical and cultural references through hyperlinks and found material from the internet.
The result, ultimately, further complicates an allegorical interpretation of the Bonaventure with all of its implications for the ethicopolitical discourse of the Iraq War era.