There is something soothing and even soporific about repetition; it is, after all, the foundation not only of lullabies but also of certain hypnotic techniques. Sometimes, however, the monotony of repetition becomes irritating, unbearable, indeed, eventually torturous. The Paris-based Albanian artist Anri Sala is an expert in creating mesmerizing forms of repetition that produce strange states of mind, but he never goes so far as to cause pain. In the film Uomoduomo, 2001, which won the Young Artist Prize at the 2001 Venice Biennale, an old man in a Milan cathedral is drowsing away. His head

On the TV series Star Trek, whenever people are hungry, they walk to a terminal and say the word “cake,” and within seconds the object of desire materializes out of thin air. “Non-Standard Architectures” would be a Trekkie’s wet dream: Order a house or chair, and a design will go straight from a hard drive into the automated controls of a factory, where the desired object will then be pumped out according to the infallible laws of the algorithm. No more clumsy maquettes, no more stockpiles of prefab components, no more standardization (since all will be made-to-order)—but also no more architects.

Valérie Jouve’s Synopsis d’un territoire (Synopsis of a Territory), 2003, could be described as the story of the Val-de-Marne, an administrative département southeast of Paris. Or as the story of a public commission for twelve or fifteen photographs which became an installation of 170 images and an accompanying sound track. Or also as the story of a museum in the making, namely the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Vitry-Val-de-Marne, which, in anticipation of its opening in 2005, has created a temporary exhibition “pavilion” on the construction site. However you choose to see it, Synopsis d’un