SCI-Arc Grad Thesis Magazine P1

I N S T RUC T O R :

L AW R E N C E _ Y UA N

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ss2020 grad thesis magazine submmision

LAWRENCE YUAN

SCI-Arc semester: spinr 2020

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THESIS_LAB :: DEFINITION LABORATORY

畢業設計

SCI-ARC

3GBX GRADTHESIS MAGAZINE

2019 .01 08 - 2019

COO R D I N AT O R :

INSTURCTOR: CASEY REHM SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA INSITUTE OF ARCHITECUTRE

Lawrence Yuan

2018 .09 01 - 2018

M.ARCH2 SS2020 GRAD_THESIS MAGAZINE :: & WRITTEN THESIS STATEMENT VERBAL PRESENTATION OF THESIS STATEMENT

WK3013 01.5

2019 .09 03 - 2019

format : pdf - two pages spread

STANDARD PORTRAIT 8.5”X11” FORMAT.

Lawrence “we will focus on the format of a Laboratory, as a way to research the realm were ideas could be found, a place that provides opportunity for experimentation, observation, in a field of study”

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 01: PRECARIOUS FUTURE

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-ALIENATION

-DIGITIZED ALIENATION = Hito Styerel “How Not to be Seen” = Keiichi Matsuda “Hyper-Reality” -INDUCTIVE STAGNATION

-CRINGE OF UNKNOWN = The Cthulhu

02: NEW GENRES

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-TO ACCELERATE

-CONSTRUCT NEW EXPERIENCES

02: MAKING READY

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-NEW BIG-WORLD -DETERRITORIALIZATION

Interview with: Benjamin Bratton -NEW FORM OF ARCHITECTURE

p.4 p.5 p.5

p.7 p.7

p.8 p.8 p.9

p.14 p.16 p.16 p.18 p.19 p.19 p.23

p.21

Lawrence Yuan

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CHAP.1

PRECARIOUS FUTURE

ALIENATION Marx’s alienation theory is based on the alienation of life, that is, the alienation of objectification activity from life itself.

After alienating from the products that workers produced, and the entire process of production, an “alienated labor” is created which is alienated from human’s own essence.

Under alienated labor, the essence of human disappeared and became a vassal of the capitalist production process Today, our bodies and all social behaviors are penetrated by numbers, we turned into a data cluster on a digital platform, we use digital virtual bodies to participate in social interaction, economic production and political participation.

Therefore, today’s alienation has changed from materialized alienation to digitized alienation.

DIGITIZED ALIENATION The core of Lukacs’ critique of materialization is not about real “object”, but an abstraction that becomes an intermediary between man and nature, and the relationship between man and man. in this way, the real problem is not materialization, but quantification or digitization. It is the digitization form of objects that is the intermediary between people. so today, when big data and cloud computing become the dominant rules, each of us is further abstracted into a series of data, mediated by data and numbers.

Such as in today’s mobile phone apps, physical forms such as credit cards have been abandoned. They all belong to a digital account number and password.

Lawrence Yuan

“Unless we are digitized, we will lose the meaning of existence, as if we had forgotten our smartphone passengers on the subway.”

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DIGITIZED ALIENATION::

Hito Steyerl In How Not to be Seen, the alternative reality it communicates escapes the uncontrollable eye of technology that monitors us even when we do not wish to be seen.

But our online presence is not only monitored through those watching, it is also driven by our social habits.

“In the digital age we strive to be seen.” it is a question of control. Are we in control of our digital representation and are we in control of our identity online?

This represents the decreasing understanding of our control over how we are represented online.

Keiichi Matsuda Matsuda introduces darker themes of how interactive interfaces could render identity and existence easily disposable.

However, the film’s take on how capitalism and technology alter our perception of space is its core idea.

“Everyone sees this as the successor to the smartphone, it’s the thing that’s going to keep Silicon Valley at the top of its game,” “I’m always thinking of the price we have to pay on our privacy.”

As soon as you’re in this world you’re in a surveillance state, a total surveillance state, all of your conversations are monitored, your social value, it compromises us in lots of different ways.

Lawrence Yuan

The film’s trying to understand if that level of invasion is something we want.? Is it something we’re willing to accept or is it something to push back on, before it’s too late?”

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Figure 1. Interchangeable component correspondences computed by our system. An alien generated by shuffling the parts.

Figure 8. Component shuffle: (a) initial position of the shuffled-in component; (b) position after automatic midpoint alignment; (c) and (d) zoom in onto the boundary region; (e) formation of overlap region for blending; (f) final result

INDUCTIVE STAGNATION “From the perspective of reason, this plight is buttressed by the proliferation of what we could call ‘inductive stagnation’, where inductive logic is when ‘truths’ about reality are derived from a set of already known, observable entities, and where that generalized pattern is believed to be true. “

CRINGE FROM UNKNOWN More generally, what this example demonstrates, is the way in which this particular logical process for reasoning the world, only grants access to what we already think we know, while barring access to novelty, or the unknown.

The malignant contradiction of our era, is that those who perpetuate the economic concept of the human as immutably real, as an undecidable fact.

This ‘alternativelessness’ does not bare changelessness, our rapidly evolving socio-technical environment is evidence of this, but it only bares change within the parameters of sanctioned possibility delimited by an epistemic threshold.

Lawrence Yuan

When we hear of new visions of the human that make us intuitively cringe or that we deem as untenable, that is the predetermining force of the episteme at work upon our imaginaries of the possible.

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CRINGE FROMUNKNOWN::

The Cthulhu “Deep beneath the Pacific Ocean, entombed within the strange stone city of R’lyeh, lies dormant a being of unimaginable power.”

Cthulhu is the main character in a mythological fiction created

by Lovecraft.

Lovecraft claims that the subject of his writing is “cosmism.”

The basic concept of this theme is that human’s limited mind cannot understand the nature of life, and the universe is cruel and strange to humans.

According to Lovecraft, humans can never fully understand Cthulhu because his very existence is beyond mortal comprehension ways.

Lawrence Yuan

What Cthulhu pushes us to think is what if someday, all of these dissociated knowledge interact and then open up a maybe terrifying future, or maybe a way to remove the current world’s constraint, into the next age.

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Lawrence Yuan

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-NOT ONLY CAN’T WE STOP AND DELAY PROGRESS IN PRODUCTIVITY, WE ALSO NEED TO ACCELERATE AND MAKE THE CALCULATION AND ANALYSIS OF DIGITAL PLATFORMS IN THE DIGITAL AGE LARGER AND MORE COMPLEX. -THE CAPITALIST MODE OF PRODUCTION IS REVOLUTIONARY AND CAN TRANSITION TO ANOTHER SOCIAL STAGE, A STAGE IN WHICH HUMAN BEINGS ARE NO LONGER DOMINATED BY NECESSITY .

BY THAT MOMENT, ALIENATION WILL CEASE TO EXIST. “

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-THIS ASSERTION WOULD THEN SUGGEST, THAT TO CREATE NEW CONDITIONS OF THE WORLD REQUIRES NOT ONLY RESISTANCE TO THE RESIDUAL SYMPTOMS OF ITS EXISTING LOGICS. BUT THAT ULTIMATELY THE TARGET MUST BE SET ON THE TRANSFORMATION OF HUMAN SELF-CONCEPTION ITSELF.

CHAP.2

NEW GENRES

Lawrence Yuan

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TO ACCELERATE As James Trafford and Pete Wolfendale commented, the common thread of today’s Left-accelerationism is to use alienation as a positive force: It allows us to progress, free from the illusion of Eden-like harmony, and become a free synonym of genealogy.

Yes, not rejecting alienation but treating alienation as a weapon and integrating with it, accelerating it, then breaking the barriers of capitalism.

Williams and Snissek argue: “Accelerationism wants to liberate potential productivity. In this plan, there is no need to destroy the material platform of neoliberalism, only to redirect it to public purposes.

Then how do we create “novelty”?

CONSTRUCT NEW EXPERIENCE One can empirically encounter a novel entity in a fully-resolved way that upturns the established inventories of things in the world, provided we discover the existing world in broader terms and in more depth.

“The sets of givens we take as indisputable truths of the world (particularly social ones), cannot be blindly accepted as real, necessary or good without the activity of reasoned justification; an activity, moreover, that is always social.”

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When it comes to abstractions like a ‘new genre of being human’, it is a generic idea and there is no such empirical possibility of encountering this pre-existing entity in a similarly conclusive way.

This ‘new genre of being human’ is a conceptual invention, it cannot be discovered or found, it needs to be constructed.

Then, how do we set up seedbeds for them to be constrcued?

Lawrence Yuan

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CHAP.3

MAKING READY

NEW BIG-WORLD “This ‘making ready’ sees art as a playspace for constructing experiences from within the perspective of the big-world, as a way to train and ‘make ready’ our sensorium for its strange geometries and consequential modes of relation-building as a result. “ Its method is assuming nothing of the givenness of the world as it may manifest itself to us. Its ethos, not inductive, not merely demonstrating what we think we know of what there is in the world, but hypothetical, that is, a reasoning of being accounting for / being accountable to a big-world.

In this sense, the progress and products that it produces need to return to the collective itself that constitutes the data community. These data belong to the wealth of all human beings in the very first place.

The possession of these data by any group or individual is bound to destroy this life cycle and cause alienation.

DETERRITORIALIZATION We must develop in the constant interaction of rational systems and wider environment.

This is not to say that accelerationism disguises itself as a pre-programmed blueprint, but a complex rational mechanism, like a strategy without any individual decision maker.

Lawrence Yuan

Accelerationism is not to retreat, not even to fight against it, but to actively turn it into a positive force, into a weapon that can be controlled by the public and the proletariat, and to serve public purposes.

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: THE UNCANNY NOVELTY

INTERVIEW WITH: BENJAMIN BRATTION

Lawrence Yuan

2020 .01 13 - 2020 .01 27

NEW FOR OF ARCHI

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RM ITECTURE So, what is the kind of space that we build most of our â&#x20AC;&#x153;individual-to-collectiveâ&#x20AC;? relationships in?

Space that we evolve from daily experience, that we can contiously construct novelty, and transform the conception of our understanding.

Lawrence Yuan