AA Berlin Laboratory: The City as a Laboratory by AA Berlin Laboratory

AABL 2009 MARIANNE MUELLER & OLAF KNEER EDS.

AA Berlin Laboratory : The City as a Laboratory

AA Berlin Laboratoryâ&#x20AC;&#x2030;: The City as a Laboratory

Brett Steele PREFACE 3

Marianne Mueller & Olaf Kneer BERLIN AS A LABORATORY 4 Rory MacLean THE MAKING OF A LABORATORY 10 Hans Jörg Rheinberger in conversation with Marianne Mueller THE ART OF KNOWING 18 Jens Casper & Sven Pfeiffer UNIT 1 BRIEF: BERLIN MAPPING 27

Larissa Fassler KOTTI 42 Jorinde Voigt in conversation with Rory MacLean SYMPHONIC AREA VAR. 1 – 27 46 Christopher Dell & Stefano Rabolli Pansera UNIT 2 BRIEF: VOID VERSUS TERRITORY 51 Christopher Dell ABOUT THE ATONAL LOGIC OF THE URBAN: NOTATION & PERFORMING THE DIAGRAM 58 BIOGRAPHIES 68

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Bertram Weisshaar in conversation with Kai-Olaf Hesse STROLLOLOGY 36

The AA Visiting School features a wide variety of courses, programmes and workshops for visiting and international students, from short, one-week courses in London or abroad to an entire year of full-time study. ln the 2007 / 08 year the AA launched an exciting new initiative for a series of Global Schools in cities around the world. Attended by a mix of local students, architects and designers and visiting overseas participants (including current or recent AA graduates), these intensive courses are based around a tightly focused design programme and supported by a series of seminars and presentations by AA and eminent local experts on topics related to the setting. Projects are pursued in the format of the AA unit system. Over the past year these courses have been held in Tel Aviv, Madrid, Singapore, Daejon, Shanghai and Berlin. ln the coming year, Santiago de Chile, Beijing, Bangalore and Tokyo are among the new destinations. To obtain further information and register for any of the programmes please go to the Visiting School section of the AA website or contact the Visiting School Director, Christopher Pierce, at visitingschool@aaschool.ac.uk

CONTENTS / PREFACE

by Brett Steele Director, AA School London, September 2009

In scientific inquiry, an experiment (Latin: ex- periri, ‘to try out’) is a method of investigating particular types of research questions or solving particular types of problems. The experiment is a cornerstone in the empirical approach to acquiring deeper knowledge about the world. Any experiment is a way of generating new knowledge. AA Berlin Laboratory investigates the role of experimentation within design processes and promotes research-based design methodologies. AA Berlin Laboratory is a new series of events organised by the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, located in and about Berlin. AA Berlin Laboratory is part of the AA Visiting Schools, a worldwide platform of design and research programmes initiated by the Architectural Association and implemented in collaboration with local partners. Over the past years, Berlin has emerged as a major platform for contemporary artistic production within Europe if not the world. Labeled ‘poor but sexy’, Berlin is attracting a vast creative community that makes use of the city’s unique economic and spatial conditions and its concentration of skills.

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Berlin as a Laboratory Marianne Mueller & Olaf Kneer

Berlin: Island and Void Exposed and land locked, geographically, Berlin is in an isolated position. Also politically, the city stands alone. Previously a republic of its own right, today Berlin is constituted as an autonomous city-state within the federation of German states. After the second world war, the Berlin Wall cut off the city: locking its Eastern part behind the iron curtain and transforming its Western half into a fortified island only connected to the Western world through a system of tunnel-like infrastructures and fragile air bridges. Special conditions keep West Berlin alive and attractive: grants, tax benefits, exemption from military service, the waiver of a curfew and other privileges reinforced Berlin’s special status as an island city with its very own rule system. In 1977 Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas proclaimed Berlin as a ‘Green Archipelago’, a type of anti-city. This project took on board the ongoing process of depopulation and projected Berlin as a new type of ideal city where recognisable neighbourhoods (islands) would be immersed into an ever-expanding landscape space gradually taking over the city. Berlin’s present emptiness is also one of its major

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The exceptional status of Berlin as an island with its own rule system, a type of laboratory, has given rise to various phases of intense creative production throughout its history. From the 1920’s when the city was as the centre of the film industries rivaling Hollywood, to the mid 70’s when the international music scene gravitated towards Berlin to produce some of their best works there, to the condition today where the production and dissemination of art is putting Berlin once again at centre stage. The legacy of these phases is inscribed into the city’s fabric as an inventory of past and present experimentations and fragmented manifestos. ‘The City as Laboratory’, the first of AA Berlin Laboratory’s projects, explores modes of creative production and their manifestations in the city, drawing on Berlin’s long-standing relationship with the experiment. Using the city as a field for investigation and intervention, the project aims to trace the complex relationship between cultural production and the city. The role of experimentation is at the core of this inquiry.

Berlin as an island

The City as a Laboratory ‘The City as a Laboratory’, took place from 4 – 12 September 2009 at Aedes Network Campus Berlin, in the midst of vibrant East Berlin. It attracted 32 students from 17 different countries — a reflection of the enormous attraction Berlin currently represents. AA unit master Stefano Rambolli Pansera collaborated with Berlin based composer, musician and theoretician Christopher Dell. Their ‘Void versus Territory’ unit searched for a performative paradigm for Berlin. Berlin based architect Jens Casper collaborated with art/architecture collaborator and AA workshop leader Sven Pfeiffer. Opening numerous doors, their ‘Mapping Unit’ investigated the dynamic relationship between the art world and the urban fabric of the city. Visits to artist’s studios included Larissa Fassler’s,

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potentials. Built for double the amount of inhabitants around the turn of the century, Berlin’s depopulation leaves its current residents with an abundance of space: an unusual opening in the city’s fabric which waits to be interpreted, claimed and experimented with. Transitory, temporary or informal programmes often occupy these leftover spaces: a laboratory of alternative types of urbanities. Ungers and Koolhaas’ project touches on another condition of Berlin: the process of void formation and erasure present in the city. The wiping out of memory, types of destruction due to war, will or neglect, the creation of voids, both physically and mentally, and the difficulties of dealing with them is something that the city seems to be preoccupied with. The most prominent example is the void left by the recently demolished Palace of the Republic and questionable reconstruction of the Castle in its place, a discussion of epic scale. But Berlin has a fascinating tradition of discussion, rebellion, non-conformism, guerilla action and resistance. Berlin is all process and never predictable. Berlin is — and will always remain — a city ‘in the making’, a city in a constant ‘state of becoming’, another — an alternative — place with its very own dynamic. For now, post-wall Berlin retains this defining quality: the character of an island. Both conditions: island and void — bounded yet open — keep on fueling Berlin’s potential as a laboratory, a city of extraordinary conditions, a kind of heterotopia’ or counter-site.

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Jorinde Voigt’s and Olafur Eliasson’s studio and a special walk along the Avus racetrack with landscape artist Bertram Weisshaar. A public programme of events accompanied the workshop with participants from architecture, science and art. The experimental Jazz trio ‘dra’ gave an open rehearsal, allowing us insight into the complex structures of their compositions. In ‘The Art of Knowing’ Prof Hans Jörg Rheinberger from Max Planck Institute for the History of Sciences talked about the history of the experiment. In ‘A Laboratory in the Making’ Canadian travel writer Rory MacLean shared his experiences of a city he had fallen in and out of love with for over thirty years. On Saturday 12.9.2009 AA Berlin laboratory went public with an open presentation to numerous invited guests and concluded with a spontaneous concert by tutor Christopher Dell.

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‘Ich bin ein Berliner,’ proclaimed John F. Kennedy when he came to isolated West Berlin in 1963, defying the Soviet attempt to suffocate the city. ‘Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner” …All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words “Ich bin ein Berliner!” ’ Not so long before Kennedy made his speech, the red-haired, rasping-voiced cabaret artist Claire Waldorff had sung — to equally enthusiastic applause — ‘Berlin bleibt doch Berlin’. Berlin will always be Berlin — no matter what happens. In these opposing views lies the key for understanding Berlin. On one hand the liberal, progressive, international perspective as espoused by Kennedy and most familiar to foreigners through the work and lives of Isherwood, Bowie, Brian Eno, Daniel Libeskind and even Tarantino. On the other the conservative, folky (volkisch), traditional view as sung by Waldorff. Today I want to explore this polarization, and the process of Berlin becoming Berlin, and to show how its dynamism — and potential to be a laboratory — depends on the co-habitation of these extremes.

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The Making of a Laboratory Rory MacLean

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I’ve been coming to Berlin for over thirty years, falling in and out of love with the brash, volatile city. My first visit was as a baby-boom Canadian ‘doing’ Europe, a child of the most liberal and stable of nations. During a happy, footloose summer I climbed the Eiffel Tower, tripped down the Spanish Steps and felt the earth move under the stars on an Aegean beach. Then on the last week of the holiday I saw the Wall. The sight of that brutal barrier shook me to my core. At the heart of the continent were watchtowers, barbed wire and border guards who shot dead ‘defectors’ because they wanted to live under a different system. I knew the history. I understood what had happened. But I couldn’t conceive how it had happened. The individuals whose actions had divided Germany and Europe — the wartime planners, the Soviet commissars, the East German Grenzpolezei — weren’t monsters. They were ordinary men and women. I ached to understand their motivation, how they came to act as they did, yet at the same time I was repulsed by their crimes and needed to give voice to their victims’ suffering. So what had happened? In 1939 Hitler — with the support or acquiescence of the German people — began a war the objective of which was the re-creation of a German empire across Europe, and the elimination of the Jews. 5 1⁄2 years later 60 million people were dead. Stalin — who had had a pact with Hitler which aimed to divide Europe between them — seized the opportunity to take the countries which Hitler had conquered. As a result between 1946 and 1961 3.5 million East Germans — around 15% of the population fled west from occupied East Germany. The Wall was built to stop the drain of people — without it East Germany would simply have ceased to exist — and West Berlin became an island outpost. The city was the place where east met west, an artificial yet defiant enclave which needed to survive to stop further Soviet advances into western Europe. Simply put, if Berlin had fallen, so might have West Germany in time, France would have acquiesced, and all continental Europe become Communist. I next came to West Berlin to work on a David Bowie movie. I was fresh out of film school and Bowie, wanting to initiate me in the ways of the city, invited me and others to his favourite transvestite club, the Lützower Lampe. The club’s star, a sixty-year-old

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drag queen named Viola, sat on my knee and crooned German love songs in my ear. I was just the lowly director’s assistant — a gopher as its known in the industry (as in ‘Go for this… go for that…’) — but over the next months I met Bowie every day on the set. We worked with Marlene Dietrich and, at the end of the shoot and his Berlin sojourn, he and I sang a duet (or, at least, a line-and-a-half from ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’.) Through him I learnt that Berlin was not simply a political island. I understood that it was a creative place apart to which he had escaped to write the Berlin Trilogy of albums — ‘Low’, ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lodger’. Berlin was an island for experimentation which enabled him to reinvent himself, away from mainstream. Berlin has always been an island — surrounded by a long plain of marshes stretching as far as Warsaw. The original settlement was on a low-lying island in the Spree (forget the urban myth about Berlin bear — the name Berlin comes from a Slavic word meaning swamp). This island — das Land in der Mitte — was one of the last parts of central Europe to be Christianised. As late as the twelfth century Mark Brandenburg and Berlin was a pagan pocket, surrounded on one side by Holy Roman Emperors and on the other the Christian Polish kings. Then the Hohenzollern princes, who ruled for 500 years, transformed the island into Prussia, the ambitious, militaristic state which unified Germany and hammered together the German Empire (die Zweite Reich). Next in the ‘Golden Twenties’ artists from Britain, France, America and Russia moved to Berlin, attra cted by creative and sexual freedom, as well as by the least repressive censorship laws in Europe. They created a innovative, liberal, decadent island within the island, set apart from, and so unlike, the rest of Germany. During those Weimar years a remarkable cultural flowering bridged east and west and transformed Berlin into the world capital of modernism. The place pulsated with life and easy money. Heinrich Mann called it ‘a city of excitement and hope’. The historian Peter Gay wrote that living in the city then was the dream of ‘the composer, the journalist, the actor; with its superb orchestras, its 120 newspapers, its forty theatres, Berlin was the place for the ambitious, the energetic, the talented. Wherever they started, it was Berlin that they became, and Berlin that made them

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famous.’ Here Walter Gropius conceived the Bauhaus, Kurt Weill penned ‘The Ballad of Mack the Knife’ and Isherwood immortalized the cabaret. Nabokov, Kafka, Auden and Spender were inspired in its cafés. At Babelsberg Studio Fritz Lang filmed ‘Metropolis’ while von Sternberg and Dietrich created ‘The Blue Angel’. For ten breathless years, artists and intellectuals danced on the edge of a volcano. When their vision of a new world was rejected by Germans in 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor, Berlin’s exiles carried their new modernity abroad. To the majority of Germans the Weimar years were an experiment in uncertainty — and it had failed. In 1933 ‘Red’ Berlin swung to the right and conformed with the rest of Germany. For most of its existence Berlin had been surrounded by enemies: Slavs to the east, French to the west (remember that Napoleon took the city in 1806). Through the bloody experience of a dozen wars, Berliners had learnt that survival depended on strong, autocratic rulers. Most pledged to them their allegiance, even their individuality. The state, the system, the rules, the stability and safety of the island home, were considered more important than individual free will. I remember years ago an early visit to Berlin. One Saturday morning I popped out early to buy a loaf of bread. The footpaths were busy and I waited with other pedestrians to cross a main street. After a moment I looked to the left. Then I looked to the right. The streets were free of traffic. I tried to catch a fellow pedestrian’s eye in the hope of gleaning an explanation for this sheep-like obedience to a light bulb. But no one looked back at me of course. So I summoned my basic German and asked a man, ‘Why are you waiting?’ ‘The light is red.’ ‘But there are no cars coming.’ ‘The light is red.’ Get A Life I thought, and strode across the deserted street. Now came the shock. On the opposite pavement another small crowd of pedestrians were also waiting. As I approached them they closed ranks and blocked my path. No words were spoken between them. It was an instinctual, communal response. I stood stock still before them, gobsmacked by their behaviour, wanting to laugh out loud at the blatant rejection of my independence. They were leaving me stranded on the road, which was suddenly a concern as cars were now rapidly approaching

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me. So denied the time for a philosophical discussion, I stepped left, and the pedestrians shifted left. I stepped right, they shifted right. I didn’t consider retreating back to the other side; in any case there was no longer time. Simply put, I was within seconds of being run-over for not conforming with the crowd. In his last book, the autobiography The World of yesterday, Stefan Zweig remarked of the Germans that they could bear anything, wartime defeats, poverty and deprivation, but not disorder. By crossing against the red I mocked the other pedestrians’ need for order. In response they had no qualms about watching me be squashed like an audacious bug. Behaviour tends to be heightened on island. And it’s human nature that a conformist society produces radicals. Rebellion grows out of convention — it’s the correlate. So on Berlin’s stable foundations, built by the steady labours and hidden fears of the dutiful, hard-working burghers, the rebel, the free-thinker, even the anarchist can question, experiment, even design their own life. Berlin is a German city, but it’s one where one in seven Berliners is a foreigner — and their presence has contributed to being the most unGerman city. Daniel Barenboim and Simon Rattle live here. The American Academy and DAAD — the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst — give workspace to visiting thinkers and artists. Quentin Tarantino, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt have — or had — houses here. So many New york painters have opened studios that one half expects a Lexington Avenue Express to pull into Bernauer Strasse U-Bahn station. Cheap rent, breathless nightlife and an edgy sense of danger — without actually being dangerous — continue to draw people from around the globe. Berlin is the place where 30 years ago, standing by the Wall, I decided to become a writer, where I grew up. yet at the same time the majority of its residents wait unquestioningly for the light to change on a deserted street, campaign for the rebuilding of the old Berliner Schloss, even sentimentalize the East German dictatorship. Most days I ride my bicycle across the former death strip, past the Holocaust Memorial, the undulating labyrinth of concrete plinths which commemorates the murdered European Jews. Every time I pass it I realize that Germans — and especially Berliners — no longer shy away from acknowledging the darkness

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in their past. Convinced of the Freudian idea that the repressed (or at least unspoken) will fester like a canker unless it is brought to light, Germany has subjected itself to national psychoanalysis. Past atrocities are unearthed and confessed, as a condition of healing, as if the psychic health of a society depends it. It is this courageous, humane and moving process which today galvanizes again this volatile, ever-changing city, drawing so many painters and writers… it’s why I’m here. Berlin is a polarised and volatile island. No other city has repeatedly been so powerful, and fallen so low. No other city has inspired so many artists and witnessed so many murders. It’s an island filled with islands. And it’s the dynamic — between conformity and rebellion, continuity and change, innovation and tradition, blind nationalism and self-aware humanity — which makes it a laboratory.

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Opposite: Visit to Olafur Eliasson’s studio

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Marianne Mueller: Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, you are investigating systems of experimentation in scientific research and more specifically the experiment as a knowledge generating device. Here, you see the role of error as key. These are subjects that we would like to discuss today. Hans Jörg Rheinberger: Thank you very much for this invitation which brings me before a group of people I normally I do not have much contact with. I find these occasions most interesting. I am going to talk about the art of exploring the unknown in the sciences; the notion of experimental system plays an important role here. I want to start with a quotation by the art historian George Kubler. In ‘The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things’ he reflects on the developmental structures and mechanisms behind the evolution of forms of art, in particular of ornamentation in architecture. I read it for you: ‘Each artist works in the dark guided only by the tunnels and shafts of earlier work, following the wind and hoping for a bonanza and fearing that the Lord may play out tomorrow.’

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The Art of Knowing Hans Jörg Rheinberger in conversation with Marianne Mueller

THE ART OF KNOWING

Let’s transport this thought from processes in art to processes in the sciences. As far as I see and as far as my experience goes, each scientists who is devoted to research and not just applying that what is already known — meaning scientists who are working at the boundary between the known and the unknown — essentially work in the dark guided only by the tunnels and shafts of earlier work. Working on the boundary between the known and the unknown, reaching into the unknown, cannot be done by having ‘good ideas’. One has to appreciate that our capacity for anticipation as human beings is very limited, but usually ‘good ideas’ do not go far enough. So there has to be something in between — and this is what I want to talk about. One could frame it best with the words of one of the most important historians of science of the twentieth century, Thomas Kuhn. Around the same time as Kubler, he published a book on the structure of scientific revolutions where he essentially says that the scientific research process is a ‘process driven from behind’. It is not driven by the means of anticipation or by having a clear telos or an objective — although that’s how scientists are often perceived: there is a problem and the scientist work on the solution — the situation is not as easy as that. Let’s stay with the notion of working in the dark, the fears and uncertainties that go with that. French molecular biologist, Sir François Jacob, who produced ground breaking work in molecular biology in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, describes what happens when scientists go public with their work: ‘…describe their own activity as a well or ordered series of ideas and experiments linked in strict logical sequence… Reason proceeds along a high road that leads from darkness to light with not the slightest error, not a hint of a bad decision, no confusion, nothing but perfect reasoning. Flawless.’ But then he identifies a flip side to this bright image that he calls the ‘science of the day’. In the laboratory there is another kind of science going on that Jacob labels ‘science of the night’. He characterises this science as follows: ‘Night science wonders blind. It hesitates, stumbles, recoils, sweats, wakes with a start doubting everything it is forever trying to find itself, questions itself, pulls itself back together. Night science is a sort of workshop of the possible where what will become the building material of science is worked

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out. Where hypotheses remain in the form of vague sentiments and woolly impressions, where phenomena are still no more than solitary events, with no links between them, where the design of experiments has barely taken shape. Where thought makes its way along meandering paths and twisting lanes, most often leading nowhere.’ This is a very poignant characterisation of what goes on in a scientific laboratory. Looking at science only from its published results you do not get access to these aspects of scientific work. I would say approximately 90% of the work that a scientist conducts in the lab is leading nowhere. But you have to go through these 90% in order to get to the 10% that are leading somewhere. Now, I would like have a closer look of what really goes on in the laboratory. Again, François Jacob gives us a hint. In ‘The Statue from Within’ he says: ‘In analysing a problem the biologist is constrained to focus on a fragment of reality. On a piece of the universe which he more or less arbitrarily isolates to define certain of its parameters. In biology …’ — and I think we could generalise that and say in science — ‘… any study begins with the choice of a system. On this choice depends the experimental freedom to manoeuvre, the nature of the questions he is free to ask and even often the type of answers he can obtain.’ In this statement emphasis is put on the limitation of this call for action. It is important to recognise that such systems convey upon the experimental. I would like to call them ‘Experimental Systems’ in order to make this more precise. But there is also the flip side of this limitation, this narrowing down of the gaze, this focusing on a particular question. It is like an hour glass with a tiny hole through which the sand has to pass. But there is an opening on the other side. So the narrowing down actually opens up perspectives. This is exactly what experimental systems are doing. Experimental systems are extremely tricky installations and we have to have a closer look at how they are constructed, because we have to recognise them as ‘installations of emergence’, installations of making something unprecedented happen. Experimental systems are a little bit like spider webs. Something has to be able to get caught in them but one never knows exactly when the prey will come and what it will be.

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They are devices for the production of unprecedented events or generators of surprise. François Jacob, to quote him again, talks about experimental systems as ‘machines for making the future’: ‘une machine a fabriquer de l’avenier’. Let’s narrow the focus on one particular laboratory and the things that are go on in one laboratory. Experimental systems can be seen as the smallest working unit of laboratory science. They have an epistemic character to create new knowledge. But the material arrangement to make them function and their institutional setting is also part of this. They come as a package. This makes it very complex and means that experimental systems have many facets. They are historical entities too. As productive entities through which knowledge is produced at the frontier between the known and the unknown, they are only productive for a certain time. Scientists have a good nose to realise when the Lord has played odds and one has to look for something different. But these systems are not isolated occurrences. Today, they usually come in landscapes of experimentation that are scattered over the whole globe. So that what goes on in the laboratory in Boston will be recognised in a laboratory that is working on similar problems in Beijing. The complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman talks about something he calls a ‘patch procedure’. Although he did not mean to apply it to the sciences I find it a beautiful characterisation. I’ll read it for you: ‘The basic idea of the patch procedure is simple — take a hard conflict laden task in which many parts interact and divide it into a quilt of non overlapping patches. Try to optimise within each patch. As this occurs the couplings between parts in two patches across patch boundaries will mean that finding a good solution in one patch will change the problem to be solved by the part in the adjacent patches. Since the changes in each patch will alter the problems confronted by the neighbouring patches and the adaptive moves by those patches in turn will alter the problem faced by yet other patches. The system is just like our model co-evolving eco systems. We are about to see that if the entire conflict laden task is broken into the properly chosen patches the co evolving system lies at a,’ — here speaks the physicist — ‘lies at a phase transition between order and chaos and rapidly finds very good solutions. Patches in short may be a fundamental

MM: Your description of the scientific working process is really captivating; a working process that is located in the dark and although it is being post rationalised and re-ordered when it comes to its publication, the process itself is less structured, full of pitfalls and dead ends. A lot of people here in this room might relate to this way of working very much. For architects and other creative disciplines one issue is that — unlike scientists — there is a choice whether to subject oneself to a systems-based approach. Often there isn’t a problem and our products can be produced without a systems aspect to the creative process. Often this would mean simply working with ‘good ideas’, hunches or intuitions. You mentioned earlier that anticipation can be a major driving force within a process. But as you identified very clearly, that means working with what one already knows and is the opposite of a knowledge generating process. Looking at the role of the experimentation process from your point of view, it is the application of a system that actually facilitates the generation of new knowledge to emerge and with it new work. Your description of experimental systems as ‘installations of emergence’ is very thought-provoking in

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process we,’ — he means humanity, humans — ‘have evolved in our social systems and perhaps elsewhere to solve very hard problems.’ Science is working as such a patch structure. The structure of this system has developed in the course of modern research over the last three hundred years of scientific developments, since the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. Eighteenth century scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg says ‘One has to do something new in order to see something new.’ And then he goes on: ‘For once on household management it would deserve to be quite seriously investigated why most inventions have to be made by chance. For this reason it would undoubtedly be useful to suggest certain rules for departing from the rules.’ But then he says: ‘Obviously such an algorithm has not yet been developed in history.’ Although this is still valid, I think experimental systems are at least the places where we can address and study where these deviations from the rule are practical and where they are occurring in scientific practice.

HJG: It also applies to people working in the humanities like myself as a historian of science who doesn’t have a laboratory. For a worker in the humanities at least one of the systems that can have this creative function is the writing process itself. Sometimes the most interesting ideas do not occur to you when you are dreaming or sleeping but they occur while you are working hard on trying to write down something. So there is a systems aspect of the writing process and although it has not the same materiality than the experimental system for the experimental scientist. For architects the design process either using computers or using the blackboard also has similar aspects to it. So it might not be the process of building the edifice that counts. The most creative things might happen during the design phase. This design phase is also using very different media although they do not have the same material character. Sven Pfeiffer: That’s actually exactly where the fascination lies for architects. What architects have started to do, is to conceptualise the design phase — the creative phase — and to use tools that create a process that is designed, a type of set up. A process that is more objective but also produces more openness in the work. It is the experimental set up that becomes the object of design as rather than the final output. I really enjoy the myth you alluded to of this very, very linear process. HJG: It is a kind of trajectory but you hardly can characterise something like this as linear. MM: You introduced the idea of the ‘patch procedure’ and that science is working as a type of patch structure, meaning that these systems of experimental set-ups are not singular occurances but scattered all over the globe in what you called ‘landscapes

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this context. How does one create a working process that allows something to emerge which is not driven by one’s anticipation or knowledge? It is important to register that anticipation can literally be in the way of a knowledge generating process and that this process should really be driven by the system itself or ‘driven from behind’ as you said. This is something architects are very slow at recognising.

HJG: The ideal situation is that the sharing of information is complete. In the history of twentieth century genetics, for instance, you can find several attempts at creating these kinds of open structures in which everybody can participate. The credit allocation goes via publication and so you have this kind of inextricable tendency; on the one hand, as the researcher you rely on the sharing of information which is the only way to do productive work; on the other hand, to be the first is key. This creates an unsolvable contradiction. The problem of authorship is also occurring on a different level today, which makes two things very interesting. One of them is that if you look into the more recent research literature you can find papers in which more and more scientists are participating. you will find papers where the bigger part of the paper is consisting of names. Let’s say, 150 or 250 because so many laboratories have been contributing to the work and now they are the authors. And where is the responsibility for what is coming out? This becomes a very urgent question that is not at all solved. If you look fifty years back — that is the 1950s — you usually find research papers produced by two or three people. They usually had different backgrounds and shared their skills, allowing them to get access to something new. In the nineteenth century the usual publication structure is one single author. The other problem is, with increasing interaction

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of experimentation’ which have an effect onto one another. This leads us to a very interesting question, the question of authorship within an experimental process. This is a question that weighs heavily in architecture and the arts where the sharing of research is not necessarily something that is very common. Here, the role of authorship is often over-emphasised. At the Architectural Association this is currently being challenged at the Design Research Lab for instance students share their projects but they also share all the research that goes into these projects. This means a project can be picked up by another participant and then developed further. But this research-focused approach is very rare within architecture, where very little sharing of knowledge on that level goes on. How important is authorship in the sciences? How do they deal with this aspect?

MM: I have one last question which touches on the cross-disciplinary or interprofessional nature of scientific work. I assume a research project will usually not be handled by a single breed of scientist but one would have to cross disciplinary borders to bring together teams that consists of different professions to work on one particular research question. HJG: Yes. MM: This is very relevant for architecture and the creative disciplines at the moment. After experiments with cross-, inter- or trans-disciplinary modes of working, the term ‘interprofessional’ has been introduced recently to describe a collaborative working process where team members would bring their specific disciplinary knowledge to a joined research process within a shared research environment. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of that or its problems? HJG: Yes. With many basic research papers you will find it’s couples or triples of people who are coming from different backgrounds and joining their skills into one research process. For instance, James Watson and Francis Crick who discovered of the DNA molecular structure. James Watson being a biologist by training and a bird watcher and Francis Crick having been trained as a physicist. In this particular work there were two medical doctors, one bio-chemist, I think an engineer and a physicist. So there were different skills that were brought into the research. In this case one particular research technology played an important

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between academia and industry, the issue of patenting. The industry tends to encapsulate new findings into patents. This means that there is a delay until the knowledge that is encapsulated in these patents will become accessible. Funding agencies are now following the rule that the research that is being done has been funded by public money, has to be made public. That’s the ‘so-called open access’ question we have. It is important not to end up in a complete privatisation of knowledge which in the long run will be disastrous and go against the very grain of what it means to create knowledge. Knowledge should be accessible to everybody in the world in order to pick it up.

role — namely radioactive tracing — it is in a way intrinsic that this method will only work through the contribution of physicists because there is a physical aspect of this method. Chemists, because there is a chemical aspect, especially with respect to measuring. Engineering, which is the aspect of constructing measuring devices. Bio-chemists, which is the very process that is being explored here and maybe also medical doctors because they are bringing in questions of where this possibly could go. Molecular biology would never have come into existence without this kind of interdisciplinary work. Which does not mean that the disciplines of physics, of chemistry, of biology, of engineering will disappear from academia. But as far as the research front is concerned it’s not defined by disciplines. It’s defined by the kinds of experimental systems I have been showing to you.

THE CITY AS A LABORATORY

MM: Thank you very much for this discussion.

The Art world, a system of producing, showing and exporting art, is visibly starting to shape the city. Artists, collectors, curators and gallery owners have become pioneers in the colonization and transformation of spaces. Flats, warehouses, factories, streets, whole neighbourhoods and districts are being converted into both individual and shared studios and galleries. The borders between private engagement and public institutions have shifted and dispersed, new collaborations and typologies emerged. A complex relationship between the Art world and the urban fabric of the city of Berlin can be observed, waiting for conceptualization. During the AA Berlin Laboratory these relationships have been mapped by the

students — the networks of artists, collectors, curators, galleries, and the spaces they inhabit. The representation of a dynamic and unstable system such as the emerging Berlin art crowd called for tactical, operative and adaptive forms of cartography, able to represent specific situations and complex systems, relationships and actions, as well as global phenomena. Different layers of information, collected knowledge and graphic conventions needed to be connected to the physical experience made through field research.

UNIT 1 — BERLIN MAPPING

Unit 1 Brief : Berlin Mapping Jens Casper & Sven Pfeiffer

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Tracking the art crowd throughout Berlin

UNIT 1 — BERLIN MAPPING

Mapping accessibilty in Südliche Friedrichstadt

Art: Andreas was dressed only in white boxer shorts and had painted his body and hair white. He stood absolutely still for one hour while a film that he had made earlier of himself standing still was projected onto his white body. My memories: I was quite moved by this artwork. It was incredibly eerie. I was there with several Alm people. It became quite a social event on our side of the gate as it was boring to watch for more than a few minutes. It felt a bit irreverent but as people were coming and going there was not a lot that could be done. I had had conversations with Andreas about the practical aspects of this work for example what kind of paint would be the best to use: that wouldn’t dry too fast and wouldn’t be too hard on his skin. A while later I made a print of my body on my bedroom wall out of curiosity. I did it in light pink so it wouldn’t be too obvious.

Memories (Remembered Spaces)

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Space: The performance was at night in a dark backyard surrounded by high buildings and separated from the street by a gate with thick vertical bars. We, the audience stood outside on the other side of the bars, blocking the footpath and pushing each other aside to get a better look.

Space: The exhibition was in a white-walled shop space on a very busy road. The U-Bahn ran alongside it too. A guy actually lived there and made his life a work of art as well as occasionally exhibiting other artists.

My memories: Daniela exhibited photos of herself in bed on a building site. I really liked the photos because of the obvious contrasts between the rawness of the building site and the softness of her lying in her white bed in the snowy yard below. I didn’t find the other works particularly interesting. I nearly didn’t go to the exhibition because it was a 20-minute cycle away and I was feeling lazy. In the end I met people I didn’t expect to see and had quite an entertaining evening although nothing incredibly spectacular happened. I felt kind of involved in the making of the art work because I had gotten caught up in the commotion as it was going on. The crane driver from had kindly transported the bed from the yard next door to back up through the window of Daniela’s room on the third floor.

UNIT 1 — BERLIN MAPPING

Art: This was a collective exhibition of the work of paintings and photography.

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Final Presentation

UNIT 1 — BERLIN MAPPING

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Avus Nordkurve, walk with Bertram Weisshaar

UNIT 1 — BERLIN MAPPING

Bertram Weisshaar uses guided and sometimes artistically staged walks in order to sharpen our perception of the world and its historic, cultural and architectural as well as its landscape setting. On one hand photography serves him as a medium to convey projects and walks which he does on his own, on the other hand it serves him as a medium to document his undertakings with an audience. Beyond these two applications a rather idiosyncratic artistic work is emerging in its own right which can be valid in contemporary photographic-artistic practice. I have known Bertram Weisshaar since the midnineteen nineties, and have experienced quite a few joint excursions with him, partly in spaces and areas which I had myself travelled as a photographer in the past, and recently, on the occasion of Bertram doing research in Braunschweig, I had the idea that photography and walking actually share very similar convergence strategies regarding spaces, and as mediums they also display great parallels in how they access the world. Is it possible that these two practices are fundamentally related? A steep Theory, but on the basis of this thought the idea for the following interview was formed.

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Strollology Bertram Weisshaar in conversation with Kai-Olaf Hesse

Bertram Weisshaar: Yes. The term Strollology almost always throws people off balance, or often causes an amused smile as well. Well, with that you have already caught the attention and openness of the person you’re talking to. This is — first off — an advantage the walking researcher has over the photographer. Everybody knows (or thinks they know), what photography is. But everybody wants to find out what Strollology is. The sociologist and planning critic Lucius Burckhardt founded the Science of Walking in the nineteen eighties at the University of Kassel. For example one of the central headings says: Landscapes as such don’t actually exist, but they are a cultural invention, which only exists in our heads, in the manner of how we view our environment. Of course mountains, meadows and forests do exist, and the wind and the bird song. But the fact that we integrate these elements, which don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other as far as they themselves are concerned, into a complete image, which we then describe as a landscape experience; that is a culturally conveyed view of the world. And in this context it is interesting to see that certain features which are photographed by tourists over and over again are very important and ‘typical’ for landscapes, while other things, which are also part of the reality are blotted out, completely overlooked, and which are, in a sense, not part of the landscape.For instance the cows on an alm complete the landscape experience, whereas the milk lorry collecting the milk is blotted out, or is seen as disrupting the image. As soon as you start questioning things from a different angle, this will lead to a string of additional questions. And in this sense the walking researcher and the photographer are both on a similar quest. KOH: Photographers working in open space, towns or the landscape tend to walk a fair amount in order

STROLLOLOGY

Kai-Olaf Hesse: Bertram, first off: when the term photography or landscape / urban landscape photography is brought up, this very rarely causes astonishment, whilst conversely the term Science of Walking, or Strollology will initially bring about a hesitant reaction or even a shaking of heads. How was this choice of term arrived at?

to find their subjects. Are photographers scientists too, just as these walking researchers, or is there a difference?

KOH: Yes, but the actual ‘gaining of insight’ that the photographer experiences in situ seems to me to be very similar to the experience you gain as a walking scientist, or rather the experience gained by those participating in your walks; the process during which reality becomes an insight, or rather an image. Even if the photographer’s goal is the communication of the images to the audience — working with the picture after it has been taken tends to be of a very different nature, i.e. production, manufacture, hanging and so forth; in any case this tends to be less of a transcendental process. When looked at from this angle, in photography the engagement between the phenomenon and the viewer only happens after the event, once it’s on the wall or made into a printed product. This aspect presents itself as rather more immediate in walking science, doesn’t it? BW: The way you describe the role of the photographer, his function is rather that of a ‘medium’. The audience receives a mediated view of the phenomenon through his perspective. As a walking researcher I guide the audience directly to the place of the discovered phenomenon where the viewer gains his own immediate image through looking at it himself. This ‘being in situ’ opens up a complex view from his own perspective, because looking is complemented by his own hearing, feeling and above all experiencing the space which you can only achieve through your own movements. KOH: As part of your own work does photography have an autonomous artistic approach, or is it a subservient medium which you deploy in order to put into

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BW: Well, I think the photographer’s intention is quite clearly directed towards the product of the photograph, which the photographer uses to communicate with the public. As a walking scientist — I actually prefer the term walking researcher — I usually take a number of different media into consideration, and then I choose the one that seems to be most appropriate in that particular case.

BW: This has undergone many changes in the last few years. As far as my training is concerned, I am a photographer. Back then I thought in the terms of a scholarly framework, the photo or the printed publication was the goal and the result. Then I learned how to experience the walk as an artistic medium through Lucius Burckhardt, and through an encounter with the now redundant East German open cast brown coal mines. I was able to experience how people could be touched in a more direct, comprehensive and complex way, if I took them on a walk, as opposed to merely showing them a few photographs. I did a lot of photography in those days, but then I lost my interest in photography almost entirely. For instance I used to keep a camera hidden at the bottom of the coal pit in order to be able to have it handy whenever I came across an interesting subject. I completely forgot about this camera — it was lying unused at the bottom of the pit for an entire winter. The impressions and experiences I was able to convey to people via these walks back then — compared to what I felt that photography was basically nothing but a very lame crutch. Today — the landscape in question having since disappeared from the face of the earth due to flooding ten years ago — I see my photos from that period in a different light. In the last few years the idea that walking and the walk represent an autonomous artistic medium, and a separate form of artistic work has been increasingly asserting itself. Richard Long for example has been walking his way through contemporary art since 1967. This question is actually pretty unimportant, particularly because ‘art’ generally reaches only a very narrow circle of interested parties. The walk is a lot more open and enables a lot more groups of people to gain access. In addition from an artistic perspective it possesses a characteristic which virtually exposes it as a medium: A walk is always an original. Significantly, in our age of infinite reproducibility a walk cannot really be repeated. And the recipient has to make his own way, has to ‘work’ by joining together each individual

STROLLOLOGY

practice, prepare or document your own concepts? Is it possible to separate these areas at all, or is the walk, as an event, the artistic work after all? To what extent do you see your walks as being located in the realm of art?

KOH: assuming a work is about perception, conveying, interpretation and questioning of the realities of life using an industrial park or a business zone as an example, how would you describe the artistic, and above all the functional differences between photographs á la Lewis Baltz or Joachim Brohm’s Areal on the walls of an exhibition or in a book, and a guided walk with Bertram Weisshaar with respect to its documentation? BW: To a large extent the walk also fulfills the function of opening up a spatial understanding. Afterwards you have quite an accurate idea of the distance between A and B, and how varied or boring the route is between these two scenes. This function can only be partially conveyed by a photo or a series of photos. The observer rarely ever finds out what is happening and existing outside the picture frame, between the exhibited photos — but which is also part of life’s reality. On the other hand of course, photography has its own peculiar advantages. For example, as you have described it, it is possible to predetermine the observation to a very defined and perhaps also very reduced detail. The observer has no choice but to add the left and right in his own mind, and thus entering the image in a very intensive fashion. Or there is the possibility of putting the images next or opposite each other, in order to emphasise similarities, relationships, contradictions, that is far more difficult to achieve through a walk. Because you can only ever be in one place at a time, and therefore putting things next or

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scene himself in order to arrive at a complete image, and this isn’t simply offered to him in a gallery space. I have been trying for some time now to develop the intersection between the two artistic media, photography and walking. At the moment I have arrived at a point where I exhibit a series of ‘photographs’ at precisely the location which they depict. These are not in fact real photos, but each image is an individual projection, which can be looked at inside a walk-in camera obscura at the original location. This image cannot be stored and cannot be transported into a gallery space. Thus the visitor, as well as the mobile gallery space which I developed — the Strolling Gallery — have to stroll to the different locations.

opposite to each other can only be achieved using a sequence — in doing so many accidental and momentary events might interfere, which will in a sense disrupt the sequence of images again. I don’t think one’s own encounter with a place can be substituted with anything else. There are places where you only have to stand once — and you understand.

STROLLOLOGY

KOH: Bertram, thank you for this interview.

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Kotti Larissa Fassler

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Kottiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is a model representation of the publicly accessible areas of the Zentrum Kreuzberg (ZK) housing estate and its surroundings. Starting once again with the act of walking I have measured this concrete housing estate as well as its front plaza and underground access tunnels in order to construct a third model-like structure that questions the impact of urban planning on communities, and conversely, the impact of communities on planning.

KOTTI

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KOTTI

Jorinde Voigt is one of German art’s rising stars. Tall and lean with intense dark eyes and high cheek bones, she met me in her studio near Berlin’s Hackescher Markt. (…) Across the floor spread a vast black ink work-in-progress for one of the dozen solo and group shows coming up this year. ‘My work is like music,’ she said, nodding at the drawing. ‘You can enjoy it without being able to read the score.’ (…) ‘Photography pretends to be objective but it’s not. It claims to tell the truth, but it doesn’t,’ she said. ‘I needed to rid myself of the camera’s limited perspective. (…) So I asked myself, what do I need? The answer was only a pen and paper. I started again from zero, trying to look at my subjects anew, as if for the very first time.’ (…) ‘Drawing allows me to develop maps to many constellations, across many possibilities’ she told me. ‘I deal a lot with what is subjective and objective. I create a time construct which is beyond our ability to experience.’ When I asked her to explain she smiled and said, ‘We are alive. We are not the person that we were yesterday. That’s why I am interested in multiple perspective.’ (…) ‘I find it exciting to ask a viewer to imagine something in a different way, in ten different ways. Of course people can just enjoy my work visually but I liked to share my thinking, to help them to understand its logic so they can — if you like — read the score.’

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Symphonic Area Var. 1 – 27 Jorinde Voigt in conversation with Rory MacLean

SYMPHONIC AREA VAR. 1 – 27

Top: Symphonic Area Var. 4 Bottom: Symphonic Area Var. 8

Detail of Symphonic Area Var. 4, Jorinde Voigt, Berlin 2009, Ink, pen on paper, 80 × 180 cm

SYMPHONIC AREA VAR. 1 – 27

In Berlin the historical traces mate- exploration of a given area in rialized in the form of gigantic Berlin, we defined a specific type empty spaces. How can we turn the of notation for a happening. The voids into new territories? How to transformation of the site (Place) dwell the voids not in the sense of into a public happening (Occasion) ‘occupying’ them but in the sense will promote a new way to dwell in of ‘making sense’ of them? Which the Urban void. spatial strategy can be employed to domesticate these spaces that have Structure lost any apparent urban dimenThe students worked in groups sion? Refusing simultaneously both in the first phase of research the classical rules of filling the (Space and Time) and together in voids with an ‘urban content’ and the staging of the final performance the romantic attitude of leaving the (Place and Occasion): voids as ruins, the Unit focused on notation as a tool for non-represen- DAY 1 Concert and lecture on structure and rhythm. tational design. DAY 2 Lecture of Christopher Dell Notation is usually seen as a tool on process notation (Brown, to represent what has to be played Stockhausen, Xenakis, etc.). DAY 3 Space: Mapping of a given musically. Though, in 1950s new Urban Void in Berlin. types of notation emerged: a proDAY 4 Time: Definition of the notation to cess draft that would enhance the represent the Void namely to process without fully describing it. represent the non-representational. DAY 5 Definition of the strategy for This form can produce a non-rephappening. resentational design: it does have a DAY 6 Pthe lace: meaning but this meaning unfolds Physical transformation of the site. in the performative practise itself. DAY 7 Occasion: Final performance. After a cinematic (Space – Time)

UNIT 2 — VOID VERSUS TERRITORY

Unit 2 Brief : Void Versus Territory Christopher Dell & Stefano Rabolli Pansera

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UNIT 2 — VOID VERSUS TERRITORY

Above: Discipline of Vision Opposite: One to One Previous: Void Alexanderplatz

UNIT 2 — VOID VERSUS TERRITORY

Above / Opposite: Nose Rangers Previous: The Anthology of a Void

Notation The concept of notation in music stands for the graphic signification of a musical process. Specific to European music, is the development of a musical notation that aims to fix pitch, duration and volume in all their particulars. Its concern was, and is, the perfect reproduction of musical works. A paradigm shift in the history of European music from orality to writing has not only led to the development of highly detailed musical notation, but decisively stamped performance praxis itself. Praxis is defined as the ‘interpretation’ of a script situated to represent and deconstruct performative processes to the last detail. In this context, the divide between the fixed, written text and the sound of music as it is performed also historically precipitates the growing divide between composition and performance, as well as between conception and performance. This is a departure from the clear definition of authorship, which rests on a postulate of originality. In Marx’s sense, we can also speak of a division of labour in music, witness, once again, to specific relations of production and dependence. The division of labour implies, for example, that the

THE CITY AS A LABORATORY

About the Atonal Logic of the Urban : Notation & Performing the Diagram Christopher Dell

NOTATION & PERFORMING THE DIAGRAM

representation of sound lies with the author, while the performer is charged with discovering it as faithfully as possible after the fact. In this field of discourse, the question is to what extent it is still the task of a performer within the graphical system of ‘New music’, which emerged in the second half of the 20th century, to return to the signs of notation and ‘deconstruct’ the performance: this is the question that we are concerned with here. The problem of specificity, relative specificity, or non-specificity taken into account, the relationship between notation and performance becomes problematic. The notation of the work cannot be the ‘true’, but only a representation of it, invoking its realization in sound. This situation implies consequentially that each notation — and they remain so differentiated — is incapable of transporting that which ‘actually’ occurs. If, in the 20th century, the composition process grew to an ever thicker volume of writings, the non-notation of graphic scores of the 50s and 60s were read as a counter-movement to the process of alienating performance. Graphic scores sought new ways of opening up form, testing it by applying available minimal structures and templates, and by reintroducing modular variations to challenge and elevate performance and the presence of the performer. Karkoschka points out here that, in notational history, notation always appears in the function of an aid. But if the appropriateness of musical notation for representing music is no longer only the sole criterion, and the capacity for performance enters the frame, it is clear that New music requires new forms of representation to achieve new performances. From out of this historical bottleneck, new practices of notation emerge in the 50s and 60s of the 20th century, which begin to emancipate themselves from the direct representation of a range of sounds. In the first place, according to Karkoschaka, ‘the musical graphics of our present obtain a sound result to some extent independent from their graphic worth’. These new notations are neither an attempt at reform, nor an improved representation of what is to be played: rather, they put forward a completely new conception of notation and performance. To wit: ‘Clearly, musical thinking… has changed so much, that the whole framework of notation up to now — and it is not alone! — has changed so much, as if it was unleashed

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by an explosion.’ The core experiment of new composers targets the way musical understanding has framed indeterminacy. It rests, for one, on the increasing consolidation of information in notation itself. Cumulative experience has led musical notation into such complexity, ‘that interpretation becomes increasingly unstable’. New experiments are being undertaken, particularly through the experience of jazz, which allow performers to enter into the composition process, and to integrate spontaneity, accident, and obscure sounds as noises. The composer Earle Brown, who devised ‘open form work’, recalls a synthesis, ‘in which, on the one hand, serial music, is given up a little way in, and on the other hand a few elements of aleatory… music are included. Both of those originated with jazz’. This new movement inspires Brown, ‘to write new, essentially more flexible compositions, as if it had been possible in ordinary metric standard-notation.’ This new way of musical thinking also promotes a new type of recording: ‘Composers are developing symbols for noting approximate values and, soon, “musical graphics” — symbols that intend no single musical phenomenon, but guide players towards analogous sound images.’ This has consequences not only for content, but also formally: in this way ‘the performer’s progress, merely approximated, should be made less inhibited, and opened to the spontaneous discovery of sound-events that haven’t been heard before.’ These new notations can be understood as frames of experiment that know no unequivocal representational attribution in sound phenomena; rather, they performatively frame and thematize an epistemological space. The modes of reflection of a ‘multilayered and meta-logical phenomenon such as music’ cannot be allocated to a rational space of reason outside its interpretation, but are embedded in the course of performance. Performance becomes an experimental space. ‘Many questions acquire their decisive contours initially through extended practice where constant reflection is always in place.’ Iannis Xenakis also sees himself as a composer who stumbles over the signs to the sense of music: ‘Looking back, I think it was more natural for me to draw. Sometimes, when I drew, the drawings expressed musical symbols. I knew traditional music theory, but I couldn’t get to a certain freedom that way. I was convinced it was possible to

develop another way of writing down music. I began to introduce myself to new sound phenomena, using drawings: spirals, intersected lines, and so on.’ In this way, the non-representational notational drafts of the New music precisely thematize the relationships between design, recording, repetition, interpretation, reproduction and improvisation. In connexion with architecture and city analysis, our goal is to research a range of topics developing in parallel, which investigate the transposition of the temporality of artistic processes and methods of communication. In artistic modes of production, notation takes on new meanings, or functions as a working tool that alters the form of art itself, as well as the way it is made and reflected. It is therefore important for us that notation in New music is understood in its essential aspect, the creative act.

Notations as epistemological praxis: Traces of the experimental space Before we turn to the transpostion of notational processes to city analysis, we would like to interrogate the recognition-producing dimension of notation. The science historian Hans Jörg Rheinberger shows the role played by notation in the sciences and their experimental working practices: ‘Notation oscillates between ephemeral uncertainty and finite identification; associated with it is the transitional capture of what is fleeting, and its definitive entry within a fixed frame. The note can be a spontaneous incident or the effect or an extended process of performance and completion. And then there is everything that occurs and takes place between those extremes. There is indeed something connective that has to do with with writing or graphism in the broadest sense.’ The notation of processes in contemporary experimental arrangement engenders a ‘speaking’, a performative production of knowledge itself. Notation, as Rheinberger reveals, is not to be understood as distinct from knowledge. We write nothing down that we already know; rather, knowledge is perfected in the act of notation. Rheinberger refers in this context to Edmund Husserl’s comments in Origin of Geometry on the function of notation as information made virtual, as it were. ‘Accordingly, a transformation is completed by writing a transformation of the ideogram’s original mode of being into the geometrical sphere of

NOTATION & PERFORMING THE DIAGRAM

Notation as Diagram Our notations colonize the intervening space between performance and experiment; they use a form of performative representation in order to enter a mode of thought, in which it is possible to investigate the traces of the city itself. In doing so we proceed , like

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evidence that belongs to the geometrical figure being pronounced. It sediments itself, as it were. But the reader can make it evident once more by reactivating the evidence.’ Rheinberger speaks in reference to Husserl’s comments about an ‘iterative difference’ that makes possible a post hoc activation of ideograms. Notation, however, goes some way beyond that, as Rheinberger expressly points out: Notations become ‘perhaps not even principal… set back in the light of their primary evidence, but at the same time updated.’ That is, the time factor is written into notation, the time of processes in which ‘all new developments sediment themselves once more, again becoming working materials’, and knowledge transforms itself. Notation here implies not only writing in the narrow sense. Graphic forms of representation in the broader sense are also to be taken in account, according to Rheinberger. Graphisms are therefore not only as shown in New music; the history of mathematics is still decisively important. The developments sedimented as notations become materials to be worked with until the point at which writing begins, and they are laid down as sediment in their turn. We said above that, in musical graphics, performance becomes a space of experimentation. Rheinberger’s analysis of notation in science suggests the opposite: notes, as protocols, can be labelled as traces of the experiment; they are process-forms of experiment, which depart from traces and graphemes, writing them into a more or less regulated form’. Decisive, here, for Rheinberger is the performative-productive aspect of notation itself. This is no passive noting-down of what takes place during the experiment; process is ‘much rather the space of productive involvement with the material.’ What can be said for music itself is also true here: Notation makes it possible, for Rheinberger, to find music in the place where it actually occurs: between the lines. ‘For the sciences, notations generate epistemological records’, which themselves always take place outside of notation.

NOTATION & PERFORMING THE DIAGRAM

the graphisms of New music, diagrammatically and not representationally: What does that mean? We will now attempt to shed light on the meaning of the diagrammatic for our work. Deleuze says that the diagram is a map. But this map is an unusual one: it is an ‘abstract machine’. For Deleuze, this machine is defined by formal functions and matters, that in its expression, and in its cartography problematize the relationship and the difference between map and territory. So, the diagram does not simply express something, but rather refers to this expression as representation. This is interesting; we usually take as a starting point the assumption that representations are made, in order to identify truth. What Deleuze finds lacking in this concept is that it sets becoming aside, commencing always from fixed points and fixed forms of epistemological knowledge. The diagram, however, is intersocial and always grasped in becoming. So, says Deleuze, it never functions so as to ‘represent a preexisting world; it produces a new type of reality, a new model of truth… It creates history, insofar as it dissolves previous realities and meanings, and generating points of emergence or creating unexpected connections and improbable passages. It attaches a becoming to history.’ The diagram does not merely generate, but is productive. This is why Deleuze offers the paradox that the diagram as abstract machine is blind, ‘even though it is the thing to brings about seeing or speaking.’ As a process of production in time, the diagram acts in a more constructively improvisational way: it ceaselessly swirls matters and functions together so completely that they yield to constant changes.’ With regard to design aspects it is interesting at this point to investigate how the diagram, as an intersocial act, permanently reorganizes, as ‘it dissolves previous realities and meanings, thereby generating as many shapes as many points of emergence or creativity of unexpected connections and improbable passages.’ The potentials of a situation are brought to bear as functions, through which this function is either upgraded or actualized for the first time. The diagram can provide us with a representation of the processes for a remix or reprogramming of the city, in which there are fewer new objects generated than transformations. Their movements produce construction — form out of itself. Design must then be newly defined: no longer as

Towards an atonal logic of the urban A diagram is formed in this way by the performativity of its strategic qualities — the processes of passage and variation found on the same plain — which, from this topology, of points establish a nexus of contiguities which, while temporary, is also manifold and heterogeneous: Manifold because it is structurally open, rather than a system, Deleuze describes this phenomenon as an atonal logic. What does this mean for the conception of the city? We begin from the basic assumption that representational expressive forms as notations and conceptions are no longer adequate to discover how organization functions. Contemporary forms of city organization begin to explode, because their movements have

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a transcendental idea or form, describable as a plan which is then realized, but as a plan that fixes the object according to its form and use. This is because the diagram is blind, insofar as it can still be no exact description of that which it produces, or actualizes. And yet the diagram is neither chaotic, nor without direction; it is simply that different navigational controls are at work, viz. mechanisms from within the process and its interactions, rather than from without. The diagram works operatively and performatively; it produces form with its own causal quality, as an immanent and not totalizing cause: ‘the abstract machine is equally the cause of concrete settings, that establish its relationships, and these power settings proceed “not from above”, but within and through the nexus of settings produced.’ At the same time, it is the map of these power behaviours, as a projectogram, as notation of the unfolding process and its incisions. The diagrams introduced to form as digital or analogue maps are themselves also interruptions, which always attempt to describe a specific point in time of a specific field and, at the same time, to give an abstract picture of what is possible. The interpretation of this picture-diagram as a work of analysis. is both an exercise and training in thinking and anticipating diagrammatic movements from virtuality to actuality. The question is then no longer, ‘do I recognize this object?’ or ‘does this object with my idea as form?’, but rather: ‘When does an actualization take place as effect? How can I tell? And which criteria and values does the effect produce?’.

NOTATION & PERFORMING THE DIAGRAM

already exploded. Our thesis suggests that a focus on the figurative object of organization is no longer helpful in this respect. Rather, it is much more helpful to focus on the process of organization. Process in Marx is considered in opposition to industry and nature. Industry takes natural raw materials out of nature and returns it to her as waste. This process divides into the spheres of production, distribution and consumption. Marx suggests here that the basis of the distinction is constituted not only in capital and the division of labour, but also in the false consciousness, created by capitalist actors in and for themselves. Deleuze and Guattarri stress however, that ‘… in truth there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: Production is immediately consumption and recording process, without mediation. The recording process and consumption accord directly with production, although they do so within the production process itself. Hence everything is production.’ To take this a step further: ‘There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other, and couples them together.’ From this, Deleuze and Guattari deduce that ‘process’ signifies ‘incorporating recording and consumption within production itself.’ The exercise lies then in ‘making them the productions of one and the same process,’ so that: ‘There is only one kind of production, the production of the real.’ Which is to say: new meanings attach themselves to the recording of the process as movement. To this end, it becomes necessary to invent a new form of non-homogeneous notation and to reconceptualize it as a writing of the real itself, as ‘a succesion of characters from alphabets in which an ideogram, a pictogram, a tiny picture… suddenly make an appearance.’ The structures to be revealed only make sense when shown in their functioning, for they are either representations or the bearers of relationships of people; they are components of abstract machines and indicate a production process and relations of production that, because they are not recursive on representational inscriptions, are primordial. The diagrams of the city we seek represent nothing 1:1; they are not directly representative. Rather, they are the bearers of relationships and the distributors of agents, but the agents shape no identities as relationships are also not static. It is necessary to describe the complex of relations from

THE CITY AS A LABORATORY

the point of view of the recording of city as process, and in terms that correspond properly to it — including the their effect on the process itself (feedback). To ‘describe’ here, means to take a cross section of reports, together with creative production in notation itself. In this respect the interdisciplinary set-up of our AA London – ANCB Berlin unit was not intended to interpret city as music but has rather to be seen as an excercise to introduce musical thought into the analysis of the urban as performative process.

Opposite: Students gather for final presentation

JENS CASPER Jens studied architecture at the Technical University in Aachen and taught at TU Berlin. In 2003 he co-founded Realarchitektur and now directs his own practice Büro Jens Casper in Berlin. He has won several awards, including the Architekturpreis Berlin 2009 for his project for Christian Boros, the conversion of an air raid bunker into an exhibition space and private residence. His work reflects the tangible material organisation of space and the immaterial and negotiable realities that shape it.

LARISSA FASSLER Larissa was born in Canada, studied sculpture in Montreal and fine art at Goldsmiths in London. She now lives and workes in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited widely in Canada, the USA and Germany. RUTH HOMMELSHEIM Ruth is an artist working on interdisciplinary projects through the medium of photography. She studied photography in Darmstadt, and now lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been shown throughout Germany, Europe and recently in Wuhan. OLAF KNEER Olaf studied architecture in Dortmund and the Architectural Association. He worked with Ian Ritchie and Llewelyn-Davies before founding Mueller Kneer Associates / Architects in London in 1997. The practice has won several awards including AJ Corus 40 under 40 Awards identifying an emerging generation of architects in the UK. Olaf is Unit Master at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, curator of the Concrete Geometries research cluster and Director of AA Berlin Laboratory. RORY MACLEAN As a child Rory MacLean made a cardboard-and-crayon world atlas, slipping imaginary lands between the countries which he knew. His six travel books, including UK best-sellers ‘Stalin’s Nose’ and ‘Under the Dragon’, have challenged and invigorated the genre. Rory has won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work prize and an Arts Council Writers’ Award, was twice shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Prize and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a regular contributor to BBC Radio 3 and 4. He writes a regular column for the Guardian Unlimited and a weekly blog for the Goethe-Institut. Born in Canada, he now lives in Berlin.

THE CITY AS A LABORATORY

CHRISTOPHER DELL Christopher studied Philosophy at the TU Darmstadt, Music and Composition at Hilversum and Rotterdam, and Berklee School of Music, Boston. Christopher is one of Europe’s leading vibraphonists, has recorded numerous CD’s and toured throughout Canada, China, the USA, Japan, India, Africa. His won several awards including the Downbeat Allstar Award, the Award of the Deutsche Schallplattenkritik, the JazzArt-Award – Music of the 21st Century and the Musicprize of the City of Darmstadt, Grammy-Nomination. He is teaches architecture theory at the HafenCity University, Hamburg.

MARIANNE MUELLER Marianne studied architecture at the TU Darmstadt, Germany and the Architectural Association in London. She worked with CHORA / Raoul Bunschoten before establishing Mueller Kneer Associates / Architects with AA graduate Olaf Kneer 1997 in London. The practice has won several awards including ‘AJ Corus 40 under 40’ Awards identifying an emerging generation of architects in the UK. Marianne has taught at the University of East London and was guest professor at the Technical University Berlin. She is Unit Master at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, curator of the Concrete Geometries Research Cluster and Director of AA Berlin Laboratory.

SVEN PFEIFFER Sven studied architecture at University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg and Städelschule Frankfurt. Specialising in the development of bespoke design and fabrication strategies, Sven has worked on projects in architecture, art and digital fabrication and has taught at several institutions, including the University of Stuttgart, the FH Münster and the AA in London. He is co-founder of the research and education platform ‘genericdesignlab’. Sven lives and works in Berlin, teaches architecure at the TU Berlin, researching his phD on design processes and scientific methodology. HANS-JÖRG RHEINBERGER The focus of Rheinberger’s research lies in the history and epistemology of experimentation in the life sciences. He is a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin, the Collegium Helveticum Zürich, honorary professor at the Technical University Berlin, member of the BerlinBrandenburg Academy of the Sciences, member of Leopoldina, the German Academy of Natural Scientists and doctor honoris causa at the Federal Polytechnical Institute in Zürich. JORINDE VOIGT Jorinde studied philosophy and literature in Göttingen, sociology and comparative literature in Berlin and fine art at the Royal College in London and UdK Berlin. She now lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been widely published and exhibited throughout Germany and Europe. BERTRAM WEISSHAAR Bertram trained as photographer and studied landscape planing at the University of Kassel. Since 1996 he is working as a promenadologist (strollologist), artist and photographer; collaborating with such partners as Foundation Bauhaus Dessau, Expo 2000 SaxonyAnhalt, City of Leipzig, Europagarten 2003 Frankfurt (Oder), City of Frankfurt a.Main, IBA FürstPücklerLand, IBA Urban Redevelopment SaxonyAnhalt 2010, Ministry of Environment of Saarland and others.

BIOGRAPHIES

STEFANO RABOLLI PANSERA After having graduated from Architectural Association in 2004 with a cinematic thesis, Stefano worked for Herzog de Meuron where he was involved on several projects in Italy, Spain and US. He has been a Unit Master at the Architectural Association in London since 2007 and he has been Visiting Professor and Lecturer in Barcelona, Seoul, Cagliari, Naples, and Cambridge. He is director of Rabolli Pansera Ltd.

AA BERLIN LABORATORY 2009 4 – 12 September 2009 at Aedes Network Campus, Berlin

DIRECTORS Olaf Kneer, Marianne Mueller TUTORS Jens Casper, Christopher Dell, Sven Pfeiffer, Stefano Rabolli Pansera SPEAKERS Rory MacLean, Hans Jörg Rheinberger

STUDENTS Atilla Alitasan (TUR), Paola Bagna Simon (ESP), Andre Bonnice (AUS), Victoria Deligianni (GRE), Diana Drogan (GER), Lisl du Toit (NAM), Alberto Fiore (ITA), Matthias Grabe (GER), Rachel Hill (IRE), Sophie Hoyle (GBR), Paraskevi Iliopoulou (GRE), Aikaterini Kefalogianni (GRE), Isabelle Kievenheim (GER), Kate Kotcheff (GBR), Fee Kyriakopoulos (GER), Tena Lazarevic (SCG), Morgan Lewis (GBR), Giulia Lindsay (GBR), Bruno Malusa (ITA), Rory MacLean (CAN), Maria Millan (VEN), Ekaterina Muratov (RU), Anna Pipilis (GRE), Marie-Louise Raue (GER), Pippa Ruse (AUS), Isaac Smeke Levy (MEX), Stefan Stanojevic (SCG), Alessandro Toti (ITA), Luuk Vlamings (NED), Sun Joo yang (KOR) Special thanks to Olafur Eliasson, Larissa Fassler, Jorinde Voigt, Bertram Weisshaar, Justus Pysall, Frank Barkow, Carson Chen, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, Antje Buchholz, Thomas Arnold, Susanne Hofmann. Thanks also to Kristin Feireiss, Hans-Jürgen Commerell, Micheal Roper, Julia at Aedes Network Campus Berlin and Brett Steele & Sandra Sanna at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. THE CITY AS A LABORATORY Edited by Marianne Mueller & Olaf Kneer © 2009 Marianne Mueller & Olaf Kneer and each respective author. Book designed by Sam Baldwin Published by AA Berlin Laboratory Architectural Association School of Architecture 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES berlin.aaschool.ac.uk

THE CITY AS A LABORATORY

PHOTOGRAPHY Ruth Hommelsheim