Contemporary spaces are dynamic combinations of the real and the virtual. They are accessed, ordered, and navigated under the conditions of various online and offline protocols. These protocols include computer formats and settings, social codes and customs, and structures of agreement, arrangement, and formalization. These protocols serve to initialize, configure, and normalize space, rendering it inhabitable and infusing it with organization and procedure. Determined by larger forces as well as local practices, they might configure as walls, interfaces, and representations--"facings"-- that mark out an environment.

The space that results is simultaneously flat and deep, unitary and dispersed, near and remote, miniature and gigantic, live and recorded, reflective and immersive. To regard its structure is to block together these incompatible aspects and to figure inhabitants whose bodily constitutions and capacities have been adjusted to fit its diverse requirements.

Suspension proposes four structuring principles for regarding this hybrid environment. Matrix concerns the structure of signification, its indissoluble links to material substrate, and its figuration of recurrences; vehicle concerns body, signification, and technological apparatus as constituted in motion, including the ways that this apparatus converts, transports, and makes its users adequate to new velocities; phoropticality concerns the augmentation of vision by technological apparatus, its manufactured mistrust of the naked eye, and its role in converting the body; and pacing regards navigational modes that are adequate to the traversal of these conversional environments, and which organize space according to patterns, rhythms, and routines.

These investigations occur within a setting referred to as a "home." This home is not a determinable place so much as it is a mode or figure of presence. Both local and distributed, it is suspended between formats and protocols, sometimes miniaturized into devices and sometimes expanded into spaces. It is a rhythmic, behavioral, or articulatory dwelling-place: a process of localization and materialization wherein frequencies are atuned, beats synchronized, and patterns in/habited. It generates an occupation, a here in which a subject dwells and materializes itself in accordance with certain demands. It is part of a process of adjustment and calibration--at once subjective, social, and tectonic--through which accessors and environments are conditioned to one another. It is therefore a site of struggle, a locus of subjectivizing procedures and of their contestation. Always in conversion, it hovers somewhere between represented image, physical space, and access configuration while its inhabitant flickers within it like a ghost.

The home setting is always accessed through its facings and their systems of conveyance and interpretation. This involves not only protocols and their transfer and engagement apparatus, which set the conditions of possibility (the setting's "settings"), but also a vehicle that helps to transport and make adequate this accessor. A viewing body is engaged to locate, activate, and traverse the setting, and a viewing faculty adjusted to register its content and contours. This faculty is characterized by an extended, mobile, fluctuating point of view, able to resolve and incorporate diverse, conflicting fields and embody itself in accordance with them. As such it marks a suspension of body, space, and vision across the divisions of the facings.

Vehicles are the results and means of these acclimation-processes. They participate in molding bodies, orientations, and environments, while continually being molded by them, bearing the impressions of activation, navigation, and inhabitation patterns. They are products and producers of diverse agencies and highly localized, lived practices, shaped by market demands, production means, environmental protocols, bodily contours and uses.

Vehicles generate an interiority, a mobile bubble of immediate presence, against a constructed exterior. They prompt and register a "here" against a "there," or a "here-and-now" against a "later," between which their user is transported. They transform spatial metaphors into those of motion, movement, access, and frequency. Vehicles restrict and discipline the body's range of movements through molded mainframe parts and arrays of distributed components, which increasingly become social actors. The semi-automatic and nearly imperceptible motions of their users generate enormous changes in an outside world that is often but not always interpolated through codes projected on a surface. At the same time that the "window" of the vehicle is constituted by this projection, it is also an internalization, an injection. Vehicles materialize vast incommensurabilities, allowing enormously contradictory relationships to be held together as their own materiality implodes. Embodying both the promise of progress and the threat of obsolescence, they are densely-packed condensations of time, space, and scale that expand into controlled and regulated, or resistant and mutated, operation- systems of practice. They transgress the reflective distances upon which representation depends, identifying not in terms of mirrorlike relationships or oppositions but in terms of mutational interfoldings of inside and outside, small and colossal, near and far, subject and object, active and passive. The material and discursive objects that emerge within this space of active conversion are systematizations of these logically incompatible elements. They cohere not through visual or structural means but through patterns of recurrences or rhythms. This matrix objectifies the rhythmic and locates repetition pattern as form.

The rhythmic fitting (RF) (or "connector-frequencer") is a portable vehicle component--a mobile peripheral. It is always incomplete, always a part of some other device (as its user becomes a "part"). Bound up in the escalating drive toward cellularity, miniaturization, and speed, its exists as a signal conduit between proliferating formats, reifying the struggle for format compatibility. It locates the battlefield for the signifying and subjectifying protocols of emerging systems--the setting of the terms--in the hand-held device, concealed in the gloss of innovation, choice, comfort, and convenience (and the impending gloom of incompatibility and age). The RF is the site of emerging agency: it is an increasingly powerful social actor whose objectness implodes only to open out into the invisible landscape of frequencies and rhythms, in terms of both signals and embodied activities. It is a phantom object constituted by ranges of motion--a trajective intertwined with pacing modes. Involving the registration and coordination of movements, frequencies, signals, processing rates, and transmission modes, it facilitates oscillations between spatial, subjective, and semiotic formats, as when one paces back and forth about a room in order to abstract vision, body, and space and in/habit a figuration, mobilized between actuality and virtuality. This is a zone of liberty and of commodification (where embodied temporalities and daily rhythms are annexed to the paces of market demands). The RF transmits and conducts such spaces and figurations through embodied conduits. It courts the transformation of spaces and figures into each other through encoded and embodied routines.

The figures (FIG) encode potential and lived in/habitation patterns. Formatted according to diverse, situated protocols of communication, they initiate and register a process of acclimation and habitation that is the result of both repetitive, embodied rhythms and routines and suspensional, cross-platform protocols. As formations that one in/habits, the figures and the spatial settings temporarily displace each other as one is virtualized and the other actualized, or as one becomes a sign-system and the other a materialization. The figures embody rhythms that organize spatial analogues as the spaces carry rhythms that organize figurations. Each projects into the other. Embroiled the network are various viewing trajectories and agencies.

The calibrating modules (CM) and their apparatus suggest means of orientation and organization. Each of these sets of facing modules rotate, circulate, and order within binding systems of convention, indexing projections and injections of subjective, significatory, or spatial movements. Each set of modules has horizons, encoded spaces, and multiple orientation grounds bearing the marks of the system within which it is lodged, which twist it in varied orientations, both within its "interior" and contextual "exterior." Each is constituted by these contortions, shaped according to the demands of production and prevailing spatial, social, and visionary norms. These calibrating modules are cross-platform perspectival constructions, reflecting, blocking, and diffracting projections, viewing trajectories, and agencies. The viewers that they index are both subjects and objects of the home setting, both agencies implicated inside and controllers stationed outside, caught within both a geometral space and an atmospheric surround that allows no stable objective viewpoint. These interference patterns generate fields of competing orientations, which prompt calibrations no longer measured in terms of sequentiality, distance, and magnitude.

The home processor (conductor-adapter) (HCA), annexing the CM as a property mark for the transnational technology industries, generates some of these projections. Like the domestic furnishings that are cross-bred with networked electronics in the emerging "smart home," these units partially conceal their hardware in the name of home improvement, economy, and intelligent living. The HCA functions as a buffer, absorbing the shock of impact between conflicting forces and formats, while stabilizing the vastly diverse processing rates between bodies and machines. Suspending both data and user in a holding-pattern as "home," it provides a conductive working, eating, and sleeping surface. The cross-format projections and orientations of the HCA and CM manifest a phoroptic deviation: they are "corrective" in the mode of the ophthalmologist's phoroptor, the device used to test for, and adjust, misaligned vision. Correcting through deception, this apparatus leads to the adjustment of ambiguous, contradictory vision in accordance with a norm. The correction is not necessarily in the sense of fitting the viewing subject with permanent lenses, but of opening up a suspended, pliable space within which body and visionary faculty can be continually shaped, converted, and reconstituted. Naked vision is not to be trusted: more trustworthy is a highly augmented, circuitous seeing, channeled into varying agencies and peripherals, which generates a multiplicity of perspectives in both real and manufactured spaces. As vision is dislodged and routed into new devices, the viewer is aligned and embodied in accordance with this multiplied and channeled vision.

These vehicles operate as semi-autonomous but interdependent components whose functions are to conduct (transfer), bind (connect and group), calibrate(signify and orient), and adapt (acclimate). They are p(l)acing mechanisms that shift and coordinate perspective, scale, movement, signal, and transmission rate. The home setting, in flux between the material and the figural, between rendering protocols, and between embodied and disembodied viewpoints, shifts according to the variable frequency coordination rhythms that uphold and animate the facings. The rhythmic alignment mode competes with the visual alignment mode in a complex of temporal and spatial rendering protocols. Embodied patterns and competing trajectories are imposed onto the objective visual fields, and the structures, rhythms, and conditions of the facings impose patterns on the ways that the setting is navigated and determined. In flux between are inhabitants.