THE SELF IN ORBIT
The ArcelorMittal Orbit is currently "closed for i construction." It is not closed for repairs, but for "construction." The tower's construction was completed in its entirety in the summer of 2012, shortly before London hosted that year's Olympic Games, for which the tower was commissioned and built. It follows that the Orbit's current transformation is rather than a construction project, a project of reconstruction. Being added to Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond's sculpture, is a slide by Carsten Höller. The project renderings show a slide that weaves its way through the entire height of the largely open steel structure, designed to leave the original structure entirely intact, leaning on it only occasionally, for structural support. The slide shown in the same red steel that the Orbit is famous for and glass panels hardly constitutes a radical transformation to the original structure, rather, its addition serves to entirely reconstruct the consumer-‐experience of the project. Though, it has been speculated that the Orbit was initially commissioned to serve as a beacon to the Olympic site in East London, to visitors coming from ii the city centre, and further West. Upon its completion the Orbit, even at nearly 115 metres tall, was not at all visible from the city. Since the realization that it could not be seen, the structure earned the reputation
(through a persistent and extensive marketing effort) of being a place from which to see. In his essay "The Eiffel Tower," Roland Barthes describes how the city of Paris is reframed from the bird's eye view offered by the Tower. The distance from the ground provided by the height of the Eiffel Tower, Barthes explains, allows for a formal abstraction of the city, an abstraction that is impossible to achieve from the ground plane where iii one at once immersed in and part of the city's fabric. This provision of critical distance and subsequent abstraction allows for the city to be read as a structure of relationships by its viewer. In this structural reading, the Eiffel Tower, as its facilitator, becomes its epicenter. The act of viewing from the Orbit, like taking in the view from the Eiffel Tower, places itself at the center of the very view it produces: to view from the Orbit is to view the centrality of the Orbit. While this structural prominence that the sculpture constructs for itself through its height was likely an important consideration for Mayor Boris Johnson when commission the sculpture that was to represent his political legacy, the cost of its operation has created a iv deficit of nearly £10,000 a week since early 2014. It was in the context of these financial losses that the Höller slide was commissioned. While the slide's design respectfully integrates with the existing sculpture, the experience it provides it a fundamental departure from that of the viewing platform. The slide is to be glazed, allowing for a dynamic view of the city throughout the rapid descent, but central point of this moving view is no longer the Orbit, still fixed in place. The individual making his or her descent becomes central to the structural reading of the city and the sculpture loses its privileged position instead facilitates an experience outside of itself. While the experience of this particular slide remains unknown, at least until its slated opening later this year, Höller has described his practice as one that creates "objects as tools to produce a situation v that is about one's relation to oneself." The slide creates an individual experience in which the participant is separated from a collective, populist reading of the city's structure and is likewise separated from one's cognitive self, and reconnected with one's physical self in order to reconstitute the individual subjectivity with bodily knowledge. While the Orbit previously allowed for a novel experience of the city through height, the addition of a slide delivers a transformation of the self through rapid descent, in an attempt to cut losses and capitalize on an existing infrastructure. The Orbit's period of construction is, then, a process by which the project is to move seamlessly from being paradigmatic of the "experience economy" to the "transformation vi economy." The addition of Carsten Höller's £3.5 vii million slide to the existing view, marks a fiscal belief
of the London Legacy Development Corporation in a changed capitalism where lucrative commodity culture is no longer tied to goods or products nor to experiences, but to effects on the body and subjectivity of the consumer. Then perhaps the change to the Orbit is not what need to be wary about, but rather the changes it promises to generate in its visitor.
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Signage around the Orbit site and at the entry gate of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park all indicate that the Orbit is "under construction." ii Murawski, Michal. "Power Tower." ed. Jack Self. Fulcrum No. 50: June 2012. iii Barthes, Roland. "The Eiffel Tower." in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1979. pp.3-‐18 iv Crerar, Pippa. "ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower Losing £10,000 Each Week." London Evening Standard. October 20th, 2015. v Von Hantelmann, Dorthea. "Experience" in Experience by Carsten Höller. New York City, New York: Skira Rizzoli Publications, 2011. pp.164 vi Pine, B. Joesph & Gilmore, James H. The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. Cambrige, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Press, 1998. vii Morton, Sophie. "ArcelorMittal Orbit Slide to Cost £3.5m." Newham Recorder February 2nd, 2016.