VEHICLE USER'S MANUAL

Important: Read this information before operating the vehicle.

1. Vehicles enable the presence of interiority, whether it involves an actual enclosure or an intimate proximity to the body. This interiority is a model for subjectivity: a here-and-now of immediate presence. It helps to institute a self against an other; a here against a there; a now against a later.

2. Such an interiority or intimacy must be sustained over time. The vehicle acts as a "coherency device" that allows the occupant to be stabilized, held, and moved from one place to another. At times this requires a degree of destabilization or productive friction.

3. Vehicles help to structure articulation, apprehension, and attention in ways that are always intertwined with material structure and practice. They sometimes employ representations -- screens, windows, signs -- but they also work non-representationally through sensation and rhythm. Vehicles are connected not only through language but through protocols and standards, working through sameness as much as difference.

4. The vehicle is means of transport and convertibility, movement and mutation. Vehicles drive the transition between places, between moments, or between states of being. Vehicles translate between language and embodiment; form and process; movement and stillness; and signification, sensation and rhythm.

5. Vehicles are controlled by small, repetitive, semi-automatic bodily motions while the spaces across which they transport and the systems that bind them are gigantic in scale. These tiny motions can generate enormous changes in an "outside" world. The vehicle attempts to materially bridge these disjunctions of scale.

6. Vehicles trace and adjust parameters in ways that engender embodied forms. The vehicle's molded parts and components restrict and contour ranges of movements, disciplining the bodily faculties, orientations, behaviors, and perceptions of their inhabitants. They condition the their occupants by compelling them to adjust to the demands of the movements, locations, and relations that they enable.

7. Vehicles are themselves embodied through practices: in order to endure, they must adjust themselves according to the changing use-patterns and values of their users. Their form is linked to their relation to the human body as well as with other vehicles with whom they intersect, along with the means of production from which they stem.

8. When leaving the vehicle, the body is equipped with an array of access modes and "mobile peripherals" and a drive to be continually plugged in through them. In this sense occupants do not really leave vehicles but move from one vehicle to another in the places where they overlap. The occupant of a vehicle may not be located inside it, or may not be visible in a conventional sense -- though its patterns and forms can be interpolated as a function of the vehicle's operation.

9. Vehicles do not work in terms of conventional distinctions between interior and exterior, inside and outside, embodied or disembodied, so much as through zones of transition, networks of linkage, and thresholds of emergence or mutation. Often the vehicle is only "revealed" in a crisis. The mutational moment can be glimpsed in the crashing of vehicles -- the moment when interior and exterior, flesh and code interpenetrate and the vehicle becomes something radically other.

10. Vehicles are embedded in, and constituted by, historically specific sets of technologies, code-structures, materials, and bodily capacities, ensconced in a normalizing mode of transport. The vehicle attempts to generate and register a fit between societal conditions and the conditions of the occupant: it helps to "optimize" routines and forms according to social and economic demands, often in the name of progress, fitness, self-improvement, and adequacy. The vehicle is an engine of optimization. It transports that which matters. One inhabits it in order to matter.