ARCHITECTURE DRAWING TOPOLOGY

Contains contributions from: Cort Ross Dinesen Stephan Günzel Inger Berling Hyams Celia Lury Morten Meldgaard Anders Michelsen Peter Murphy Henrik Oxvig Luciana Parisi Ulrik Schmidt Guro Sollid Georges Teyssot Frederik Tygstrup and students of architecture at KADK, Copenhagen

ARCHITECTURE DRAWING TOPOLOGY

Cort Ross Dinesen Inger Berling Hyams Morten Meldgaard Anders Michelsen Henrik Oxvig (eds.)

Architecture Drawing Topology presents an extensive body of drawings and texts and their complex relationalities, ranging from ontology to history. These relationalities have been developed in response to the natural topography of the Greek island of Hydra, and tested in the urban landscapes of Berlin, Paris and Tokyo.

Through constellations that are both real and virtual, the collection is composed of numerous highly detailed drawings. The diverse drawings express a complex and ambiguous field of significations, instrumentalizing an open production of meaning. Positions, relations, orders, levels, dimensions, energies, and processes are discovered as a new field of possibilities, creating an architecture of the event.

A diversity of essays complement the collection of drawings. They explore concepts of topology that establish parallels with the architectural context in which we find ourselves today; a context in which the synergy of time and space is traversed by information and dynamic forces that cannot be restricted to conventional questions of scale, the principles and forms of modern architecture, or historical forms of building.

The book collects artistic research from a period of more than 15 years, with a range of reflections on architecture, drawing and topology in Cort Ross Dinesen’s Hydra project at the The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation (KADK).

Architecture Drawing Topology is an excellent book for students, academics and researchers in the fields of architecture and architectural theory, geography, media studies and cultural studies.

ARCHITECTURE DRAWING TOPOLOGY Edited by CORT ROSS DINESEN INGER BERLING HYAMS MORTEN MELDGAARD ANDERS MICHELSEN HENRIK OXVIG

ARCHITECTURE DRAWING TOPOLOGY Edited by Cort Ross Dinesen Inger Berling Hyams Morten Meldgaard Anders Michelsen Henrik Oxvig

ARCHITECTURE DRAWING TOPOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

This book presents contributions of drawing and text along with their many relationalities from ontology to history and vice versa in a range of reflections on architecture, drawing and topology. We hope to thereby indicate the potential of the theme in understanding not only the architecture of today, but – perhaps most importantly – also creating and producing architecture that is contemporaneous and reacts to the radical changes of the physical world which surrounds us in the increasingly artificial measures of new materialities and understandings thereof. The contributions range from the intricate issues of the imagination and the moving ratio in the topological culture, over urban topology, diagrammatisation, mediality and dynamics of transduction in the contemporary artificial environment.

The Hydra project, which has produced the drawing material in this book, develops a strategic and reflective approach to the artificial environments of today’s world. It may be seen as an aesthetic proposal for design acknowledging previously articulated and existing materialities. A common trait is that topology establishes a great many parallels to the architectural context in which we find ourselves today – a context which can be said to constitute time and space as a complex formation traversed by forces, information and synergies which cannot be restricted to the scales, principles and forms of modern architecture or historical forms of building.

What the drawings in this book articulate and configure are varied and ambiguous constellations that are both real and virtual. Most importantly, this forms a context which is co-developed by the act of drawing. Topology thus becomes not just a framework for understanding the context of architecture in terms of the surroundings in any particular way of a direct phenomenological approach to the world, but also something which relates to a host of concerns: anything that can be extracted from the significance of a map or a satellite image, for instance, and by such relationality co-constitute a movement and event in a context.

Since the beginning of the 2000s, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation (KADK), Study Department 6, Architecture, Space and Form has conducted research in close connection with the department’s teaching. A central part of this has been the role played by the Hydra Project – an annual summer school held on the Greek island of Hydra since 2004. Each summer, 12-15 students are engaged in a four week long intensive drawing practice.

The point of departure in 2004 was how the topography of the island could be worked and developed into architectural formats as different ways of considering topology. In the following years, this approach was developed with a new angle on an architectural drawing each year, through posing a series of questions, resulting in an extensive body of drawings as well as texts. One important step in this development was to involve urban landscapes from Berlin, Paris and Tokyo.

The latest stage in the work on Hydra explores architectural drawing as a special plastic event unfolded around an existing building – the Slaugtherhouse, here drawings, photographs and projections produced a spatial matrix that was recorded by the movements between the signs and markings, which created the special topological drawing space.

A more detailed description of the questions and concerns can be found in the ensuing introduction

by Cort Ross Dinesen.

The Hydra Project is to be understood as an ongoing dialogue between artistic research – articulated by the drawings – and scientific research, from the art history of architecture to the software that underpins

the ways and potential of architectural drawing today. Over the years, the Hydra Project became a repeated and differentiated dialogue between new formats and articulations of drawings and reflections on topology.

The Hydra Project has sought to provoke a mode of operation in between the real and the virtual which may be said to hold the sensing body as its pivot along with the phenomenology of the object – whilst at the same time considering and shaping virtual constructions. It draws on the many considerations of meaning, form, writing and signification, which have been indispensable for the development of architecture in many parts of the world since the 1980s. Most importantly though, it has produced a new understanding of what architecture can be said to be: how architecture produces works of art and how such art becomes situated in a context and, furthermore, what forms of aesthesis are involved in such building art.

At least three important problems that emerge out of this genealogy of the architectural event have inspired the selection of contributors to this collection: Topology. What are the options and implications of the continuity between projects, e.g. as expressed in drawings and the world: when drawing does not function as a representation but rather as enactive working of cartographic material, which feeds back into the engendered topologies?

Diagrams. What is the ‘flesh’ underwriting the mesh/tissues indicated hereinabove which enable diagrams and working of elements and entities apprehended from cartography and reinserted into transformations of real structures of artifice, e.g. in urban areas as new domains and scales?

Aesthetics. How does the aesthetics of the drawings produce reflections and knowledge forms, in particular perhaps, what is the role and potential of the intensities of computer based rendering, data resources and media?

The editors wish to sincerely thank the contributors to this book for their insightful and intellectually stimulating articles which we hope, in their compilation, will shed new light on the interplay between architecture, drawing and topology. The broad yet interlinked spectrum of argumentation of the articles offers detailed and sophisticated reflections that demonstrate the profound relevance for the further interest in this interplay.

In connection with this publication, special thanks are directed to the Dreyer Foundation, the Danish Arts Foundation, Nationalbankens Jubilee Foundation and the Royal Academy Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation for their financial support.

Copenhagen 2017

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Cort Ross Dinesen Inger Berling Hyams Morten Meldgaard Anders Michelsen Henrik Oxvig

INTRODUCTION

About Drawings in the Hydra Project

The drawing material from Hydra is divided into three sections. Section 1 is about the material from the period 2004-2008, Section 2 is from the period 2012-2015 and Section 3 contains material from 2015-2016.

The production of the drawing material took place in Hydra over four weeks in March every year, based on a series of questions that were phrased successively during the period. The approach was a rephrasing based on the previous year’s material and experience.

During the first period from 2004-2008, Hydra’s special topography was the starting point. Hydra, the town, and the surrounding landscape, its specific geography, structure, dimensioning, etc. gave rise to the development of a number of special morphological and topological drawings. In this connection, a number of drawing related discourses were developed, which contained the basis for a special way of handling complex relations and flexible forms, which were open to dimensioning and creating meaning of a particularly reflective character for the architectural drawing.

This artistic exploration always brought experience back to our study environment/department, where it was expanded on in projects. Not as methods, but rather as reflections on how a progression can be developed as the basis for project development.

The research on the drawings has had a rub-off effect on the creation of a special works appreciation, which seeks to develop a topological architecture, reflecting on and placing architecture’s possible manifestations in perspective at a time where urbanity and global relations are a condition for architecture’s concretion at the local level.

As its starting point, the work took a period where deconstruction posed questions about the meaning of the architectural order, completely transforming this against a context where urbanity was focusing on space and time. In a crossfield between architectural concretion as a fractal and a virtual space, the focus was directed at the handling of the complexity that dimensioned the architectural work and created operative and strategic manifestations, through which architecture could contribute to promoting and rephrasing its social significance.

In this perspective, the drawing work gave rise to, among other things, an exploration of the generic morphology, the vague and continual forms, and the non-hierarchical systems that opened up for supple and pragmatic compositions, in which it is the relations and the architectural movements that unfold special network-based aesthetics, creating a dynamic composition plan, from which an architectural position develops. From this point of view, the architectural handling of the complex relations is inscribed into a concretion with an openness, which, simplified, was previously a semantic and tectonic handling in the form of the open work as a structuralist paradigm and a confrontation with architecture’s autonomy – paradoxically, ending up here in the contemporary discussion, leading to greater attention to architecture’s ability to frame and shape a different and vitalising appearance with a special type of creativity, which positioned itself between the language of mathematics and the language of poetry.

Here, a concretion is unfolded, which does not evoke a response in the presence of a holistic picture, a holistic plan or a master plan, but which constitutes a fractal; a fractal that contains ‘its own totality’ at all levels.

As asked in the article Byens Laminær (The City’s Laminar), quote: How do you establish a way to relate to an urbanity that has lost the contours of a cleared space for settlement and obliterated its boundaries, making it difficult to speak about where the city’s soul begins, and where the shapeless urban appearance and the very weak contours of converging structures, which outline a cohesive meaning-making, are only faintly noticed through the immanence of things, and which almost in spite retain your memory of the city as a representational social construct?

As existence is spatial, this regenerates the question about how the cultural territory is constituted through the structure of the space as a place for an existence.

The ambiguity in the spatial constitution can be viewed as a sort of transfer, which creates a configuration of modal character that binds together without creating coincidence or unity between the reference and the model’s appearance.

Where the model takes its starting point in architecture’s experience of the scale, and through this, among other things, establishes a configuration of partial urban work character, which in a described horizon seeks to bind together problems/solutions, partly with necessary precision, and partly with attention to creating loose relations of mutually variable consequences, in a pliant complexity that weights an instrumentalisation of events, and which places the model in a perspective in an urban field by means of a modal generality.

This binding together differs from a traditional vertical model and its binding together of appearance and significance by having distinctive horizontal structures, where transverse interchanges evoke relations that produce or open up for new events, and where the semantic fades into the model’s procedural properties.1 Identifying the questions was an obvious discourse in parallel to this period from 2004 to 2008 on Hydra, which resulted in the book: MORPHOLOGY, TOPOLOGY, CARTOGRAPHY, 2009.2 In 2009, the task was to register the experience and the different discourses with a new starting point: From Hydra’s topography to three city sections in Berlin, Paris and Tokyo.

The six periods addressed a continual string of questions, which were exhausted in 2008, resulting in the book: MORPHOLOGY, TOPOLOGY, CARTOGRAPHY, 2009. As from 2009, the starting point was changed from Hydra’s topography to three city sections in Berlin, Paris and Tokyo.

The three cities contain clearly different characteristics, and it was natural to explore how the drawing space’s encounter with this urbanity would take shape. In 2012-2015, a new and characteristic material was developed, focusing on cartography as large sheets that contain both visible and invisible forces, intensities, relations, figures etc. in a continuous and flexible form with many inherent scales. A special plasticity and depth were developed in the drawing, including both strategies and operative traits for handling urbanity and cartography. The material contained traits that formed the basis for thinking about passage and enfolded and unfolded movements, domains, levels, dimensioning, meaning, relations and figures as well as an architectural discourse with special relational aesthetics.

Cartography as a pure writing/drawing action creates a form that opens for something to step forward and create relations and cross connections, and which finds different manifestations. Here, the only validity in the process is the ability to develop effective deliberations, and, drawing a parallel to historical progress taking its starting point in afunctional structures, to facilitate the establishment of a diagonal movement from a plan that contains a design (drawing) based on something specific (aerial photo) to a point where it is also possible to generate statements of high public use (contributions to research). Here, it must be conducive to find a number of reasons why architecturally significant forms can develop effective structures that can link industrious relations and productive processes in multitudes of functional structures – functional in the sense that they encourage action and promote developments in the local, but reach beyond this by pointing to the global.

Such a practice seems very natural if you look at the sections from Berlin, Paris and Tokyo. In a way, all three aerial photos contain the same. As an urbanity, they speak about

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the different cultural practices through the ages. However, they are modern as sections, considering that they are fragments that express and contain our modern idea of an urban landscape as a compound of combinations of practice forms, which create structures, and where the intensities dimension the appearance forms. Through the special and unique, the sections point to bodies that we connect with a combined expression of a global organisation.

A section of a city and a rural area will always indicate a number of practices for the organisation of a life that has been lived. The section will also, by being a section, inscribe itself at several levels in the perception of this practice, both in reality and in virtual reality, and as a section it will point to our modern experience, i.e. that the sections’ appearance is both unique and an indication about the omnipresent conditions that merely appear with a different emphasis in the heterogeneity. We see a description of urbanity’s many appearance forms in the aerial photos of Berlin, Paris and Tokyo.3 In 2015-2016, attention was again directed at Hydra, turning the starting point from a macro world and satellite imagery to the micro world of a slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse is located on the edge of Hydra town, and it is now the backdrop for artistic activities under the Deste Foundation in Athens. The mapping of the slaughterhouse began with detailed drawing-related measuring and photographic registration. The universe of drawings developed into a number of notation forms, not unlike the architectural drawing’s conventional elements of mimicry, which unravels a number of ‘landscapes’ of pervading intensities as continuously configured and completed groupings of relations. As a contrast to this, the photos created a special saturation through the almost haptic appearance that became the object of a cutting up, marking and drawing based inscription of signs.

These two sets of drawing experience were brought together in a series of projections in the slaughterhouse, creating a drawing space that people could ′step into′. During the last period, in 2016, the work aimed to create such drawing related installations in the slaughterhouse, and on this basis to develop several montages, which in their handling contained a conceptual indication of the drawing material’s ′mindset′. A different way of handling the architectural discourse in a material that has been the focal point since 2004.

This is how the text about Slaughterhouse ends, expressing and summarising the ′desire′, which in 2004 was latent in the exploration concerning ARCHITECTURE, CARTOGRAPHY, TOPOLOGY: Slaughterhouse violence, which not only as a reference, as a concretion, contains the obscenity’s beauty, arouses a desire. The slicing, veiling, scratching of the surface, the cutting, skinning of the animal – all these are artistic tools that arouse our desire for initiating something. Slaughterhouse is a testimony, and the drawings and the photo provoke our capture and are seen as a rite. Creation is linked to the flesh and the blood as a sacrifice that stirs our urge to possess. The drawing constitutes a rite in sketches, and the photo in the view.

The projections at the slaughterhouse created, through the movement and the edited observation, a focus back towards the figures, the appearance forms, unfolding new utterances. Qualitative events occur, are obscured, and focusing brings out other motifs. Clipping, courses, overlapping etc. edit the story, and the reflection crosses backwards and forwards along many lines of sight. Transversals emerge, and time is compressed.

This corresponds to the drawing’s work with keeping together the many lines without going back to a plan that determines the drawing’s compositional or other hierarchical level, which is characteristic of tradition.4 Many architectural works and practice forms have been objects of parallel studies. Among these, three works should be mentioned, as the issues they address are important in this context, forming a basis for discussing the installational, topological and relational.

The Inujima Art House Project by SANAA consists of the insertion of a series of small built installations in a village in the archipelago around Narashimo, Japan. They form part of a revitalisation project in the local community along with other structures and art installations. In particular SANAA’s two glass pavilions with their softly curved glass surfaces, which reflect the organic print on the glass, create a contrast, which in its artificial elaborateness comments on the Japanese built environment – the dense interconnectedness with the cultivation between the smaller buildings and the provisional structures.

The lightness and materiality of SANAA’s pavilions give them a strong architectural appearance, which does not aim to resemble the local building tradition, but rather creates a simple and minimalist form that contains Japanese architecture’s sensuous and fine laminations of spatial separations in a web of modulations between places, in both the interior and the exterior environments.

The strongly aesthetic appearance is the moment that opens up for the differently shaped components to interact and function architecturally. Precisely the installational traits and the clear, artificial architectural expression – which does not mimic the local, but rather has an autonomy of its own in its appearance, and which adds presence to the environment as you pass through the estate – are inspiring in relation to seeing an architectural concretion in the virtual urbanity, which points at architecture’s ability to create a difference through the artificial, which in its pure form without representation opens up for a reflection on possible possessions, thereby vitalising the context.

The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, by SANAA contains another significant aspect of the fractal as a topological component. The museum is located in a green, open space, surrounded by roads and adjacent buildings. It is circular at the ground level and features a rectangular plan underground, from which a number of cubes of varying sizes rise up, filling the circle. These cubes house the exhibitions. These volumes are grouped without a superior structure in a grid-like matrix.

Among these volumes and the building’s circular contour, a number of residual areas emerge along the entire facade. These residual areas provide space for meeting places, resting, play, a café, a restaurant, book sales etc.; i.e. a number of social spaces have been modulated into the periphery. Here, you stay behind the glass, and during the day you can watch life unfold in a panoramic view on the green surface between the small works of art. The glass creates a practically frameless view to the surroundings.

In the evening, when the museum’s interior is lit and you are outside in the dark, the exhibition volume and the passages in between are experienced as a city and its streets. Here, the stage is reversed, and the internal outplays our memory of the social, cultural spaces, which belong to the city as focal points.

This double modulation creates two sides of the reflection: the dense, sensuous closeness, the presence, and the community metaphor. The encounter with the other. In this way, the exterior is folded into the interior and vice versa in a topological figure that contains a pervasion and filtration of signs that create a meaning sphere in this architectural fractal.

Due to the compositional openness in the different sizes of the museum’s interior volume and their mutually offset positions and opposition to the circle, a composition plan emerges, which creates the possibilities for the pragmatic modulation around the building’s functions. This inscribes an institutional

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function as a meeting place into a context where the building as a fractal contains both its interior and its exterior relations, and into which we inscribe our existence through the movement between the shapes and their destabilisation of the relations.

The Rolex Learning Center, Lausanne, by SANAA contains several features related to the fractal component as an architectural concretion. The centre is located in a university area, constituting a gathering point for the students. Architecturally, it is shaped as a large, rectangular disk, raised above ground in a wavy form. The building takes its shape from the wavy movement in the plan’s two directions with a volume that features the same floor height in its entirety. The building is cut through by a number of large, soft voids that create several meeting places, light openings, and clearings for people to stay between the ground level and the building. In the places where the building is lifted above ground, you are invited into the middle, and from here, you enter the learning centre.

The special thing about the centre is the open compositional structure. There is no particular overall feature in the exterior environment under the main body of the building or in the building’s interior organisation – everything is suspended in time and space. Both outside and inside, you find your way around by means of places. Like a sundial, the light draws places in the grounds, creating a movement towards ′clearings in the forest′, and inside, the shadows along the glass facades around the cutthrough voids draw the light’s continuous movement, which is followed through the building’s sections, throwing shadows onto the surfaces. This sense of time is enhanced in the movement through the centre, where the wavy shape opens and closes for the view as you move across the exposed, open surfaces, offsetting your view in depth and at the horizontal level. Here, you also find your way between places.

‘Islands’ with a café, shop, study cells, library, restaurant etc., which create special horizontal levels in the surface where people can stay. Add to this a number of components, such as a ramp facility and similar, which contribute to distending distances in the large surface. Elements, cells, surfaces and places for the programmes bring about a tension field in the building, constituting the composition plan that can be described as being distended in places – actions – and in time and space.

The centre stands out as an autonomous volume, functioning as a series of action spaces, which in their pragmatic appearance seem like an open programmatic structure that frames the meeting, creating cohesion around this, stretching out into spheres containing an awareness of a cohesion with a greater context than the centre’s association with the local environment.

All three examples point to an architectural way of contemplating work/urbanity, the global/local, space/time and relational aesthetics as a possibility field for creating manifestations and possibility fields in the creation of architectural solutions in a context that challenges our handling of complexity.

It is in this professional space that the work and research on the architectural drawing takes place with attention to how the work can create a framework for the life lived in a close study of creativity’s ability to unfold and spark questions that challenge our architectural thinking, which is an obligation in teaching and research as well as in practice.

Cort Ross Dinesen, Copenhagen 2017 NOTES Cort Ross Dinesen, Byens Laminær. https://kadk.dk/sites/default/files/files/grid_9-10, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture ,1999. p. 1.

2 Cort Ross Dinesen, MORPHOLOGY, TOPOLOGY, CARTOGRAPHY, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture, Publisheres, 2009.

3 Cort Ross Dinesen, CARTOGRAPHY AND URBANITY. Hydra 10, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture, 2010. pp. 18-23 and ARCHITECTURE, DRAWING, TOPOLOGY, 2017. pp. 93-98.

4 Cort Ross Dinesen, SLAUGHTERHOUSE, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture, Design and Conservation, 2015, pp. 5-9 and ARCHITECTURE, DRAWING, TOPOLOGY, 2017. pp. 165-170.

The Inujima Art House Project by SANAA, 2013

The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, by SANAA, 1999-2004

Rolex Learning Center by SANAA, Lausanne, 2010

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CONTENTS

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INTRODUCTION Editors...7 INTRODUCTION About Drawings in the Hydra Project Cort Ross Dinesen...9 SPACE AS ELEMENTAL MEDIUM Architecture, Screen and Topology Ulrik Schmidt...19 PROXIMITY AS THE MOVING RATIO OF A TOPOLOGICAL CULTURE Celia Lury...31 COMPLEXITY’S IMMEDIACY Cort Ross Dinesen...43 HYDRA 2004-2008, DRAWINGS Cort Ross Dinesen...47 THE TECHNOLOGICAL UNCONSCIOUS Frederik Tygstrup...73 MODULATIONS, FORCE FIELDS, AND DATA Stephan Günzel...83 CARTOGRAPHY AND URBANITY Cort Ross Dinesen...95 HYDRA 2012-2014, DRAWINGS Cort Ross Dinesen...103 CHRONO-TOPOLOGY: The Aesthetics of Transductive, Metastable Objects Georges Teyssot...129 TRANSDUCED SPACE AND TRANSVISUALITY: Proto-topology and drawing Anders Michelsen...145 DIAGRAMMING THE IN – BETWEEN Inger Berling Hyams...157 SLAUGHTERHOUSE Cort Ross Dinesen...167 HYDRA 2015-2016, DRAWINGS AND PHOTO Cort Ross Dinesen...177

BY A WALL Henrik Oxvig...221 TOPOLOGICAL CREATION AND THE HOMOEOMORPHIC IMAGINATION Peter Murphy...235 THE TOPOLOGY OF BEFORE AND AFTER: Towards an aestheatics of the sequential Morten Meldgaard...247 CUTTING AWAY FROM SMOOTH SPACE Luciana Parisi...257 TOPOLOGICAL STRUCTURES Cort Ross Dinesen and Guro Sollid...279 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS...292 BIOGRAPHY...294

SPACE AS ELEMENTAL MEDIUM Architecture, Screen and Topology PROXIMITY AS THE MOVING RATIO OF A TOPOLOGICAL CULTURE COMPLEXITY’S IMMEDIACY HYDRA 2004-2008, DRAWINGS

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SPACE AS ELEMENTAL MEDIUM Architecture, Screen and Topology

Ulrik Schmidt

In topology, the classic Euclidian-Cartesian understanding of a metric space with fixed coordinates is replaced by an understanding in which space is defined by its potential variability. In a passage from his interview with Bruno Latour, Michel Serres explains this difference between classical and topological space by way of a didactical example: If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it certain fixed distances and proximities. If you sketch a circle in one area, you can mark out nearby points and measure far-off distances. Then take the same handkerchief and crumple it, by putting it in your pocket. Two distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed. If, further, you tear it in certain places, two points that were close can become very distant. This science of nearness and rifts is called topology, while the science of stable and well-defined distances is called metrical geometry.1 Hence, in topological space, categories such as scale and distance are no longer fixed and absolute. Everything is virtually linked to everything else by its potential proximity through processes of folding and unfolding in space and time. ′There is,′ as Gilbert Simondon remarks, therefore ′in effect no distance in topology′.2 Form, size, position and relation can change continuously between points and objects in both metric and non-metric space, but in topological space they do so without changing the basic properties of the space as a whole.

Topology, intensity and medium Therefore, topological space does not change and at the same time it potentially involves continuous transformation. As Manuel DeLanda describes it, topological spaces ′remain invariant under bending, stretching, or deforming transformations′.3 Whereas metric space is proportional and

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static, always divisible and measurable between points and parts, topological space is virtually under continuous transformation, incessantly in the possibility of being folded onto itself as a continuous whole. In other words, what varies in topology is not local proportions and distances but space itself as an intensive continuum, bending, rumpling and resonating in a perpetual flow of total variation without change.

DeLanda further argues that this difference between metric and topological space constitutes an ontological order of spatial morphogenesis in which ′the metric space which we inhabit and that physicists study and measure was born from a nonmetric, topological continuum as the latter differentiated and acquired structure following a series of symmetry-breaking transitions′.4 This order has an ontological qualification because of the very continuous and intensive nature of topological space. It concerns the basic ontological difference between extensive and intensive space ′in which an undifferentiated intensive space (that is, a space defined by continuous intensive properties) progressively differentiates, eventually giving rise to extensive structures (discontinuous structures with definite metric properties)′.5 This distinction between metric, extensive space and topological, intensive space is ontological and mathematical in essence. However, it also has deep aesthetic implications concerning the basic manners in which we design and experience our spatiotemporal surroundings. Hence, following Lury, Parisi and Terranova, we can speak of a ′becoming topological′6 of contemporary culture in the sense that the material surroundings increasingly imbue our socio-aesthetic sense of the world with a topological character. From an ontological understanding of physical space, topology has become an aesthetic attribute associated with contemporary culture: a way to affect and be affected by a specific configuration of space.

This affective potential, this becoming topological of our contemporary culture, has often been intimately associated – historically, politically, socially and aesthetically – with developments in digital culture, especially in relation to the embedding of ubiquitous computational devices and technologies into the built environment.7 ′As media become mobile, pervasive and instantaneous,′ Scott McQuire says, ′the contemporary city becomes a media-architecture complex′8 reconfiguring our built environments into fluid, intensive spaces under continual transformation. In other words, the becoming topological of contemporary culture involves a direct and quite specific merging of digital media and space into a complex topological continuum in which space begins to operate and affect us ′like a medium′ and vice versa.

However, as I wish to argue, the relation between medium and topological space in contemporary culture is both more complex and more wide-ranging than the mere integration of digital technologies into urban space suggests. Behind the complex merging of urban space and technical media lies another – and in many respects more general – notion of space itself as a form of medium. Accordingly, the becoming topological of contemporary culture is, at least to a certain extent, also a product of a more fundamental mediatic configuration of topological space beyond the existence and use of technical media.

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Space as Elemental Medium. Architecture, Screen and Topology Ulrik Schmidt

Space as elemental medium The understanding of topological space as a form of medium has a long tradition, going back to Aristotelian cosmology and physics. According to René Thom, it is possible to find ′primordial topological intuitions′ in Aristotle, who was the first, and for millennia the only, philosopher to think of space as a continuum.9 This topological understanding of space as continuum is expressed most directly in the key term περιέχον [periēchon], used by Aristotle to articulate a notion of space as a vibrant, surrounding medium associated with the fluid terrestrial elements of classical philosophy.10 Hence, in Aristotle space as a (topological) continuum was closely linked to an understanding of ambient space as a surrounding elemental medium: ′the all-embracing air, space, sky, atmosphere, climate: the ′cosmic′ milieu of man.′11 As Friedrich Kittler later remarked, this medium-oriented understanding of space was roughly forgotten in western ontology at least until Heidegger.12 However, already with Einstein around 1900, space was once again thought of as fluid and elemental, now explained as a ubiquitous flow of energetic matter resonating through an objectless space-time continuum under perpetual transformation.13 It is possible to find similar arguments in many contemporary philosophical interpretations of digital media as elemental and intensive continua of energetic forces, moving beyond the conventional distinction between technical and physical media. For example, Mark B.N. Hansen argues for a deep elemental and intensive aspect of media that extends both specific human and technical perspectives.14 Jussi Parikka claims that media ′are not only a technology, a political agenda, or an exclusively human theme. Media are a contraction of forces of the world into specific resonating milieus: internal milieus with their resonation, external milieus affording their rhythms as part of that resonation.′15 And in an expanded notion of natural space to also include digital media, Eugine Thacker and Alexander Galloway explicitly call for an ambient, elemental understanding of networks, digital and non-digital.16 ′The elemental,′ they argue, is this ambient aspect of networks, the environmental aspect – all the things that we as individuated human subjects or groups do not directly control or manipulate. The elemental is not ′the natural,′ however (a concept that we do not understand). The elemental concerns the variables and variability of scaling, from the micro level to the macro, the ways in which a network phenomenon can suddenly contract, with the most local action becoming a global pattern, and vice versa. The elemental requires us to elaborate an entire climatology of thought.17 In an extensive analysis of current developments in the field of ′radical ecology,′ German media philosopher Hanjo Berressem has again made similar arguments for an understanding of medium as intensive and elemental. He, therefore, calls for a ′medialogic′ understanding of topological space, which ′can address not only cultural/technical media, but also nature itself as a scaled ecology of media/form platforms that include such natural media as air, electricity or water.′18 Central to Berressem’s argument are the different ecological understandings of space observable in the philosophies of Humberto Maturana and Gilles Deleuze. This, says Berressem, especially concerns their clear and unambiguous differentiation between medium and environment. This differentiation may only be explicit in Maturana but it is just as central to Deleuze, albeit on a more implicit level, in his distinction between extensive and intensive space.19

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In Maturana’s systems theory, medium and environment indicate two different kinds of relation between the ′unity′ and its surroundings. While the environment-unity relation, according to Maturana, exchanges information with the observer by way of an engagement with separate, more or less individuated entities in space, the medium-unity relation does not involve such informational exchanges between separate entities. In contrast, the latter designates a formal and material production of energetic variation in the medium as a surrounding whole, which is not directly perceivable by the individual but nonetheless has a strong effect on its experience of its ambient spatiotemporal surroundings. As Maturana observes, when an observer distinguishes a unity he does not necessarily have access to the medium in which it operates as a unity, but he himself defines a domain in which he sees the unity as a separable entity. The domain in which an observer sees a unity as a separable entity I shall call the environment of the unity.20 Comparing Maturana’s distinction between medium and environment to Deleuze’s understanding of the plane of immanence as an intensive topological continuum, Berressem reasons that while environments are characterised by the distinction and relation between perceived entities as information in a coded and partly stratified space, the medium is rather characterised by a dissolution of actual separations and spatial relations between individual parts into an all-encompassing immanent topology of energetic variation that is both extraindividual/macroscopic and preindividual/microscopic, both radically complex and consistent, both differentiated and full at the same time. As Berressem concludes, the ‘environment follows perceptual/cognitive registers, which differentiates it radically from the medium, which follows intensive/energetic registers.’21 Thus, what takes place on the level of the medium are not meaningful relations between individual entities but rather a continuous set of immanent, preindividual modulations throughout the entire space as an intensive topological consistency. While the environment affords meaningful localisable interaction between parts in extensive space, the medium affects as a total field of intensive continuous vibration.

Spatial mediatisation As these different perspectives illustrate with great clarity, an understanding of space as elemental medium neither involves a return to a pre-modern understanding of the natural, physical medium nor to an anthropocentric notion of media as the ecology of techno-prosthetic devices, as implied by Marshall McLuhan and others.22 On the contrary, in regards to their aesthetic potentials the notion of an elemental medium indicates a continuum between technical and non-technical media beyond the human perspective. Technical media are not elemental because they resemble or represent a physical world of ′real′ elemental intensity, but because they operate and affect us directly as an objective field of intensive spatiotemporal variation. On a certain level and from a certain perspective, all forms of dynamic media, technical or physical, operate according to the same topological principles of all-encompassing continuous variation and variability. As long as they expose the topological dimensions of space as an aesthetic potential, all media are elemental media.

This crucial point further implicates that it is not possible to reduce the becoming topological of contemporary culture to the current, wide-ranging augmentation of the built environment with technological and computational devices. Instead, the becoming topological relates to a more general aesthetic

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Space as Elemental Medium. Architecture, Screen and Topology Ulrik Schmidt

mediatisation of space in modern culture in which space itself is configured to potentially affect us as an elemental whole under intensive transformation. Mediatisation, in this specific sense of the word, thus designates a performative, aestheticising process in and by which topological space is staged, more or less deliberately, as a form of elemental medium.

In the remaining part of the text, I will explore in more detail some of the aesthetic implications of this performative mediatisation of space in contemporary architecture. Effects of spatial mediatisation have indeed become pervasive components of much contemporary architecture and spatial design. However, due to the sheer amount and complexity of its different manifestations alone, I will restrict my analysis to a single, particularly prominent aspect of this process by focusing on the staging of interior and exterior spaces as screen-spaces and their aesthetic implications for a general mediatisation of contemporary space as a topological continuum of elemental transformation. Screen effects, we must keep in mind, are but one form of spatial mediatisation; automation of movement, algorithmic design, warped and curved façades and interior frameworks, transparent, reflective and resonating surfaces and the ubiquitous flow of the open plan are other leading factors in a deep mediatisation of contemporary space as topological. In my exploration of architectural screen-spaces and their topological implications, I will further focus my attention on a number of prolific projects by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R). My intention here is not primarily to make a direct contribution to the already extensive bulk of existing research on DS+R. I rather take their innovative use of screen effects as a prolific and remarkable example of a broad tendency in contemporary architecture to stage architectural spaces as screen-based topologies beyond the distinction between technical and non-technical media.

Screen-space In his analysis of contemporary architecture, Hal Foster argues for the production of ′screen-spaces′ as ′a prime condition of contemporary culture.′23 Like many others, he associates the aesthetic effect of screen-space directly and unambiguously with the accumulation of digital monitors in the spatial design. However, at the same time, he broadens the perspective considerably by describing screen-spaces as a merging of mediated and unmediated parts of space. Screen-space, he says, is the aesthetic consequences of ′a convergence of immediate seeing with mediated seeing.′ If ′much modern architecture, ′Foster continues, ′focused on structure and space and much postmodern design on symbol and surface, then much contemporary practice […] is drawn to a zone somewhere in between – to a mediated blend of screen-space.′24

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In a remarkable analysis of various projects by DS+R, Foster demonstrates more specifically how this blend of mediated and non-mediated space in contemporary architecture takes place with a special focus on the ways the architects ′refashion the contemporary façade as imagistic and mobile.′25 Of special interest here is the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), which was built in 2006, where the visitor on several occasions is invited to engage in a complex performative mix of technical and non-technical screen practices. Undoubtedly, the part of ICA where this mediatised blending of different screen-practices is staged and thematised most directly is in the Poss Family Mediatheque. Suspended under the cantilever, the small multilevel room, equipped with rows of digital monitors, descends towards the harbour like a medium-oriented indoor counterpart to the outside amphitheatre. A large window, taking up the entire far wall of the mediatheque, provides the room’s only exterior view to the harbour. Because of its leaning position downwards towards the sea, the single window frames the

exterior in such a way that it excludes all other context from view, leaving the water-scape to fill up the entire view like a moving panorama in aquatic slow-motion.

According to Foster, the ICA mediatheque is a profound example of the performative blending of immediate and mediated seeing. With ′its mise en abyme of window and screen,′ the mediatheque creates a scenario in which ′the harbour view might initially be mistaken for another digital image.′26 However, for Foster the major cause of this blended effect of mediated and unmediated seeing is found in the presence of a single type of images – that of the digital monitors – making the mediatheque the perfect demonstration of a broader tendency in contemporary culture in which ′the flow of video has become the telltale form of media visuality and temporality today, perhaps as cinematic montage was in a previous moment of modernity.′27 Hence, regarding its aesthetic implications, the screen-space of the ICA mediatheque is, in Foster’s argument, basically characterised by the way it produces a screenbased flow of electronic images associated with video as a specific technical medium.

DS+R obviously show a strong interest in incorporating digital screens to stimulate the aesthetic confusion of natural and technologically mediated screen images. Such a mix was already a strong feature in Diller and Scofidios′ early, unrealised Slow House (1991) with its performative placement of a large video screen outside the panoramic window comprising the building’s entire rear façade. However, the spatial mediatisation of the ICA mediatheque into a screen-space is not, I will argue, primarily a result of the use and integration of digital monitors, just as the profound presence of digital images on the monitors do not confusingly warp the experience of the window-screen into a simulation of another form of video display, as Foster seems to indicate. What DS+R both reveal and utilise as a key factor in the mediatheque is the basic capacity of screens – whether windows or digital monitors – to expose the topological character of space itself. In contrast to Foster’s claims, it is not the flow of video but the flow of topological space itself, which becomes present, which presents itself, to the viewer as mediatic, transforming the entire space into an elemental medium of continuous flow and variation. And what most effectively exposes this performative staging of topological space in the mediatheque is not the video monitors but the window-screen. In fact, the space does not really afford any visual access into exterior space, for example by offering a panoramic overview of the harbour. On the contrary, the window absorbs the very ubiquitous and continuous variation of the elemental water-scape itself, the way it flows, whirls and fills the entire view, into a warped topological performance of total architectural transformation. The vibrating texture of hydrodynamic flow becomes a generic model for the experience of the entire room as elemental medium.

Obviously, different screens can stage this topological dimension of space itself more or less effectively and dramatically. As Deleuze has argued in his analysis of the relation between the image frame and the out-of-field (the invisible space outside the frame), ′the more the image is spatially closed, even reduced to two dimensions, the greater is its capacity to open itself on to a fourth dimension which is time.’28 The sharper the framing of a screen-based image is, the stronger becomes the sense of a durational flow of time on-screen. In a similar way, the sharp framing of the ICA mediatheque window leaves no clear sense of an out-of-field outside the frame. Instead, the water-scape fills the entire view in an allover effect of intensive on-screen transformation. In a sweeping, almost physically perceptible gesture, the descending amphitheatrical structure of the space dramatically amplifies this effect by drawing all attention down towards the end of the room, making the window-screen the predominant stage for the

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Space as Elemental Medium. Architecture, Screen and Topology Ulrik Schmidt

aesthetic experience of the room as a whole. Indeed, this staging of the entire space as a medium of elemental flow is substantially supported by the performative presence of the video monitors, but it is in no way initiated by them. They only help to intensify a more basic architectural staging of the room as an all-encompassing elemental medium.

The architectural staging of topological screen-spaces by DS+R is not restricted to the Boston ICA. On the contrary, it can be seen as a leading feature in their entire oeuvre. I have already mentioned Slow House as a vibrant example of this. The haptic chaos of their Blur Building (2002), in which the entire space is literally permeated by a dense fog, has a similar effect of elemental mediatisation, albeit now both more spectacularly open and haptically engulfing at the same time. However, the topological screen-space of the ICA mediatheque perhaps finds its most direct successor in the different ′outdoor theaters′ located along the New York High Line (2009-2014). Arguably, the visual staging here is more subtle and discreet than in the ICA, at times reducing the screening component of the space to nothing but a single, disconnected and windowless steel frame. Still, however, the principal screening effects of elemental mediatisation are basically the same.

This is arguably most apparent in the High Line’s main outdoor theatre, located on Tenth Avenue and 17th Street. Cut into the industrial steel fence of the former railroad, a horizontal panel of four large rectangular windows open the view onto a busy car-filled street below the rail. Reminiscent of the suspended ICA mediatheque, the High Line theatre descends towards the panel of window-screens, staging it as the space’s unparalleled centre of attention by forcefully directing the view down towards the street.

But once again, what the visitors to the High Line theatre experience is neither a panoramic overlook of the city nor the gazing effect of following a line of flight towards a vanishing point somewhere in the distance. In perfect accord with the ICA mediatheque, the main visual effect staged in the urban theatre is the flow of time itself in the form of continuous elemental variation. As a result of the sharp amphitheatrical framing, the view of the street is spectacularly cut off from its immediate surroundings and all you see is the endless movement of cars, slowly passing in from one edge of the screen and out in the other. Hence, the glassed screen not only invites visitors to experience the street in ′cinematic′ silence, detached as it is from the noisy chaos normally associated with New York traffic. By utilising the massive, repetitive flow so essential to traffic, the theatre stages reality itself as a screen-based spectacle of continuous mediatic variation: the topological character of physical space as flickering time-image.

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Topology and screen Undoubtedly, the mediatisation of topological space as screen-space has become an emblematic element not only in DS+R but also in many other current representatives of ′global style′ architecture.29 This current pervasiveness, however, should not lead one to regard screening effects as a unique feature of contemporary architecture alone. In fact, one could argue that similar effects were already a key component in much early modernist architecture, most evident perhaps in Le Corbusier, but also noticeable in the works of Martin Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and others. As both Beatriz Colomina30 and Anne Friedberg31 have argued, the development of the modern window panel – originally manifested

by Le Corbusier’s fenêtre de longeur, extending horizontally across the walls in all rooms in the Villa Savoye (1929-1931) – added a new potential for a screen-based framing of exterior movement as an aesthetic component of the interior space itself. The Savoye windows do not so much open up to offer a convenient visual access to the surrounding landscape. Rather, they cut a sharp unadorned frame

into the wall in which the regular, undramatic flow of the outside is absorbed into the interior as a haptic widescreen effect of flat, silent and scaleless continuous variation. The exterior dynamism is absorbed into interior space as an integrated component of the architectural framework itself.

This screen-effect of scaleless flow and variability is even more directly staged in another part of the villa. Outside in the upper roof garden, boldly staged as a screen-based finale of the ′architectural promenade,′ a large rectangular hole in the wall meets the visitors while they ascend the final ramp to the upper roof. In form of another screen – now entirely open and glassless and dramatically cut into the uniform whiteness of the garden wall – Le Corbusier offers an invitation to exchange the continuous bodily movement through open space, now coming to a final halt, with the haptic view into the framed, intensive flatness of the open sky. On the right occasion, a simple cut in a wall is all one needs to stage topological space as an elemental medium of continuous transformation.

This all took place long before the video images that Foster claimed were the leading factor behind the production of screen effects in DS+R. For that reason alone, Le Corbusier not only helps us to expose how the modern interior was already mediatised as screen-space in many of its very first manifestations.

He also demonstrates how windows in and by themselves can help to mediatise a particular place by exposing its topological potential as an aesthetic effect in its own right through a simple production of screen-effects. However, on the other hand, it is also most evident that not all windows produce such effects. Without surprise, windows themselves are not a sufficient factor for a considerable mediatisation of topological space. They must introduce a performative framing that, by itself, is capable of mediatising space as a form of screen-space. What DS+R have in common with Le Corbusier, in this respect, is precisely their performative attitude towards the window frame as a key potential for a deep and profound ′screening′ of interior space. The window must not simple function and operate as window in order to aesthetically unfold the topological potentials of a given site; it must become screen.

This performative staging of the window frame as screen not only depends on the specific character of the framing itself. It also, and perhaps most importantly, depends on the very space that is framed as an on-screen scenario. In DS+R, both in the ICA mediatheque and in the High Line outdoor theatres, as well as in Le Corbusier’s rooftop window, the window-screens are all placed in such a manner that they capture and produce a certain type of image. Not only is the out-of-field so radically cut off that the framed images appear to be synthetised within the frame in full mediatic isolation, staging the screen-image itself as a topological field of pure aesthetic immanence by leaving no sense of external source or origin.

However, even more importantly, what is shown on-screen in Le Corbusier and DS+R – the water-scape, the traffic, the sky – is itself of a radically continuous, elemental character that fill the entire frame with a ubiquitous field of abstract-concrete transformation. The framed window-images in Le Corbusier and DS+R are in fact not scenarios at all. They do not offer a visual perspective into a tree-dimensional space in which individual objects are localised and isolated actions take place. Instead, like one of James Turrell’s skyspaces, they render the screen-space as radically opaque and massive, transforming all sense of distance and extensive, metric proportionality into an intensive blur of immanent, continuous transformation. In other words, the framed images themselves are topological, intensive spaces. It is the very topological character of the screen-space that produces the image as a form of elemental medium.

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Space as Elemental Medium. Architecture, Screen and Topology Ulrik Schmidt

The double mediality of topological space By framing and synthetising the outside into a flat, ubiquitous field of immanent modulation, space itself is staged, from the inside, as a topological medium – not in the physical sense, but aesthetically.

This mediatisation of topological space is in fact twofold in the sense that it continuously produces an emergent double mediality. First, space is mediatised by creating a dynamic, mediating engagement of the outside continuously folding itself onto and into the boundaries of the interior space as a form of topological screen-effect. And second, mediatisation takes place by producing space itself as a surrounding elemental medium under continuous transformation. This double mediality in fact corresponds etymologically to the two original meanings of the word medium: medium as ′middle′ and medium as ′milieu′32 – elemental medium as a topological field of mediation between inside and outside and elemental medium as the ambient topological space surrounding a body.

In her analysis of the surface in contemporary architecture and what she calls ′architecture of mediatic transformations,′ Giuliana Bruno argues for a similar double mediality in which the architectural surfaces are ′energized […] and stretched as membranes and treated increasingly as envelopes.′33 Far from ′representing any perspectival ideal,′ Bruno continues, the contemporary screen is no longer containable within optical framings but is to be reconfigured as a different surface. In my view, a screen-membrane is emerging, performing as a connective tissue, and turning architecture and art into pliant planes of moving images. […]

Partition, shelter, and veil, it can be a permeable architectural envelope, and it is habitable space. On this material level, the current intersection of canvas, wall, and screen […] is a site in which distinctions between inside and outside temporally dissolve into the depth of surface. The screen itself signals a state of becoming, and the material realm appears to fold back into screen surface – that reflective, fibrous canvas texturally dressed by luminous projections.34 By way of this double mediatisation – as mediating membrane and as ambient envelope – contemporary space is increasingly staged as aesthetically topological. This development is, of course, not restricted to mediatising screen-spaces, which has been the focus of my analysis here. The production of screen-space is but one aspect of an extensive staging of topological space as mediatic in contemporary culture. Moreover, as I have wished to demonstrate this staging is not essentially a product of the introduction of digital media technologies into the architectural space, but something that must be regarded as a central component in modern architecture on a more general level. Still, however, this should of course not lead one to draw the opposite conclusion either: that the becoming topological of contemporary culture is in fact entirely dissociated from the existence and use of technical media and digital technologies. The accumulative presence of such devices obviously contributes, and does so extensively, to the overall staging of contemporary space as increasingly topological. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to view this development solely as a result of the specific technologies themselves. The becoming topological of contemporary culture is always already encouraged by a deep, continual staging of modern space itself as intensive, elemental medium.

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Bibliography Aristotle. De Caelo (On the Heavens), in W.D. Ross (ed.), Works of Aristotle, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922).

Bruno, Giuliana, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materials, and Media (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

Berressem, Hanjo, ′Structural Couplings: Radical Constructivism and a Deleuzian Ecologics′, in: Bernd Herzogenrath (ed.), Deleuze/Guattari & Ecology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 57-101.

Colomina, Beatriz, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994).

DeLanda, Manuel, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London & New York: Continuum, 2002).

Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (London, The Athlone Press, 1986).

Foster, Hal, The Art-Architecture Complex (London & Brooklyn: Verso, 2013).

Friedberg, Anne, The Virtual Window (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006).

Galloway, Alexander and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

Günzel, Stephan, Raum/Bild: Zur Logik des Medialen (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2012).

Hagen, Wolfgang, ′Metaxy: Eine historiosemantische Fußnote zum Medienbegriff′, In S. Münker and A. Roesler (eds.), Was ist ein Medium? (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008), pp. 13-29.

Hansen, Mark B.N., Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Lury, Celia, Luciana Parisi & Tiziana Terranova, ′Introduction: The Becoming Topological of Culture′ Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 29, 4-5 (2012), pp. 3-35.

Maturana, Humberto R., ′Cognition′, in Peter M. Hejl, Wolfram K. Köck, and Gerhard Roth (eds.), Wahrnehmung und Kommunikation (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1978), pp. 29-49. Available online: www.enolagaia.com/M78bCog.html (last visited on 12 January 2017).

McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man (London & New York: Routledge, 2001).

McQuire, Scott, ′Mobility, Cosmopolitanism and Public Space in Media City’, in S. McQuire, M. Martin & S. Niederer (eds.), Urban Screens Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009), pp. 45-64.

Parikka, Jussi, Insect Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

Parisi, Luciana, Contagious Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013).

Kittler, Friedrich,′Towards an Ontology of Media′, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 26, 2-3 (2009), pp. 23-31.

Serres, Michel and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

Spitzer, Leo, ′Milieu and Ambiance′, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3.1, September (1942), pp. 1-42.

Simondon, Gilbert, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Paris: Aubier, 1998).

Thom, René, Semiophysics: A Sketch (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990).

Notes 1 Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 60.

2 Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Paris: Aubier, 1998), p. 225.

3 Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London & New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 26.

4 DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, p. 26.

5 DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, p. 27.

6 Celia Lury, Luciana Parisi & Tiziana Terranova, ′Introduction: The Becoming Topological of Culture′, Theory, Culture & Society 29, 4/5 (2012), pp. 3-35.

7 Luciana Parisi, Contagious Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013). Scott McQuire, ′Mobility, Cosmopolitanism and Public Space in Media City′, in S. McQuire, M. Martin & S. Niederer (eds.), Urban Screens Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009), p. 47.

9 René Thom, Semiophysics: A Sketch (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1990), p. 165.

10 Wolfgang Hagen, ′Metaxy: Eine historiosemantische Fußnote zum Medienbegriff′, In S. Münker and A. Roesler (eds.), Was ist ein Medium? (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008), pp. 13-29.

11 Leo Spitzer, ′Milieu and Ambiance′, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3.1, September (1942), p. 2.

12 Friedrich Kittler, ′Towards an Ontology of Media′, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 26, 2-3 (2009), pp. 23-31.

13 Stephan Günzel, Raum/Bild: Zur Logik des Medialen (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2012), p. 35.

14 Mark B.N. Hansen, Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 2015).

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Space as Elemental Medium. Architecture, Screen and Topology Ulrik Schmidt

15 Jussi Parikka, Insect Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. xiv.

16 Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. 157.

17 Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit, p. 157.

18 Hanjo Berressem, ′Structural Couplings: Radical Constructivism and a Deleuzian Ecologics′, in: B. Herzogenrath (ed.), Deleuze/Guattari & Ecology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 76.

19 Berressem, ′Structural Couplings′, p. 75.

20 Humberto R. Maturana, ′Cognition’, in P. M. Hejl, W. K. Köck, and G. Roth (eds.), Wahrnehmung und Kommunikation (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1978), pp. 36-37.

21 Berressem, ′Structural Couplings′, p. 75.

22 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man (London & New York: Routledge, 2001).

23 Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex (London & Brooklyn: Verso, 2013), p. 96.

24 Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex, p. 96.

25 Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex, p. 96.

26 Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex, p. 96.

27 Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex, p. 96.

28 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (London, The Athlone Press, 1986), p. 19.

29 Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex.

30 Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), pp. 310-311.

31 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), pp. 123-129.

32 Leo Spitzer, ′Milieu and Ambiance′, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3.1, September (1942), pp. 1-42.

33 Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materials, and Media (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 4.

34 Bruno, Surface, p. 5.

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1

PROXIMITY AS THE MOVING RATIO OF A TOPOLOGICAL CULTURE

Celia Lury

Introduction An imaginary is not an image of something; it is unceasing creation.1 In this respect, it can be understood as similar to what Foucault describes as a ΄middle region΄: …between the already ′encoded′ eye and reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself: it is here that it appears, according to the culture and the age in question, continuous and graduated or discontinuous and piecemeal, linked to space or constituted anew at each instant by the driving force of time, related to a series of variables or defined by separate systems of coherences, composed of resemblances which are either successive or corresponding, organized around increasing differences, etc. This middle region, then, in so far as it makes manifest the modes of being of order, can be posited as the most fundamental of all: anterior to words, perceptions, and gestures, which are then taken to be more or less exact, more or less happy, expressions of it (which is why this experience of order in its pure primary state always plays a critical role); more solid, more archaic, less dubious, always more ‘true’ than the theories that attempt to give those expressions explicit form, exhaustive application, or philosophical foundation.2 This paper proposes that the imaginary or middle order currently finds expression as a specific logic: a moving ratio in which figures, forms and patterns emerge across and disappear into shifting grounds in constantly changing relations of nearness and nextness. A surface, never fixed, always surfacing.

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The turn to the surface To describe this logic, I begin with Siegfried Kracauer and his studies of the mass culture of the Weimar Republic.3 In these studies, Kracauer – who was initially trained as an architect – famously identifies a ′turn to the surface′. In developing his description, Kracauer pays special attention to the objects, media and practices that ′display an elective affinity′ with the surface such as the hotel lobby, arcades, and dance troupes as well as newspapers, cinema and photography. For example, he describes the dance displays in popular revues, where troupes such as the Tiller girls performed, as ornaments made out of bathing suited bodies. The attraction, he says, is the display of ′indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics′.4 He develops this argument through the concept of a mass ornament, a term that refers to the arrangement of people as a mass.

The mass ornament Kracauer observes is characterised by a mathematical ratio, a ′Euclidean geometry′. Cultural and social forms such as the assembly line obey the logic of a ′linear system′, and the ′elementary components′ of physics, such as ′waves and spirals′, train ′the broadest mass of people to create a pattern of undreamed-of dimensions′. For Kracauer, the pattern is the ′aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires′;5 as he puts it, ′The hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller girls′.6 Many writers suggest, however, that the cultural and social forms of post-industrial, knowledge-intensive societies are no longer organised by a linear ratio or by Euclidean geometry.7 The proposal put forward here builds on these ideas and the thesis I put forward with Luciana Parisi and Tiziana Terranova8 that the rationality emerging today is topological. In particular, the paper aims to develop the claim for the significance of a topological rationality for what the Hydra project describes as the emergence of ′dynamic, continuous and virtually underwritten and thus transversal surfaces′9 And as part of developing this argument, it focuses on the patterning of the contemporary mass ornament in a moving ratio of proximity. This is a ratio that constantly produces nearness and nextness in relations ′across′. As both a preposition and an adverb, ′across′ can imply one or all of: the process of moving; moving from side to side or crossing a space; a width or space as a whole and relative positions in that space. The surfacing of the contemporary mass ornament, I suggest, is a product of the organisation of relations ′across′ in a moving ratio.

A surface, surfacing In our earlier argument, Parisi, Terranova and I drew attention to the role of a range of logistical developments that we saw as contributing to the emergence of a topological ratio, including the gridding of time and space, the proliferation of registers, filing and listing systems, the making and remaking of categories, the identification of populations, the invention and growth of logistics, and the increasing ubiquity of computing. We began an exploration of the organisation and operation of this ratio that I want to extend here: more specifically, following Kracauer, this paper aims to explicate this ratio by considering some of the objects, media and practices that have an affinity with the surface to consider the nature and possibilities of the contemporary mass ornament. It takes particular inspiration from Kracauer’s analysis of the decisive role of photography in the turn to the surface. His claim is that photography does not simply change the context of the object seen but encourages a view of the object as if it could be seen from all positions at once, that is, as if the object could be observed in a spatial continuum. The continuum is understood here in terms of the making of relations of nearness and nextness and its implications for the mass ornament.

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Proximity as the moving ratio of a topological culture Celia Lury

To understand how the emergence of such a continuum of relations of observation might be possible – or at least how it might seem as if it were possible – Kracauer describes the nature of the ratio, the mode of abstraction, that he believes to be at work in ′seeing photographically′.10 In the essay ′Photography′, for example, Kracauer contrasts two photographic portraits – the subject of one is a diva, while the other portrays a grandmother. The essay starts with the sentence, ′This is what the film diva looks like.′ There is a specific kind of knowledge that informs this recognition: ′Everyone′, he asserts, ′recognizes her with delight, since everyone has already seen the original on the screen. It is such a good likeness that she cannot be confused with anyone else, even if she is perhaps only one twelfth of a dozen Tiller girls′.11 A comparison is drawn with the image of the grandmother, the discussion of which begins with a question, not a statement of recognition: ′Is this what grandmother looked like?′ Kracauer remarks, ′Since photographs are likenesses, then this one must have been a likeness as well’; but, he says, ′were it not for the oral tradition, the image alone would not have sufficed to reconstruct the grandmother′.12 In the case of the grandmother, the photograph is understood in relation to ′the contextual knowledge available to consciousness′13, whereas the likeness of the diva is to be found in a contiguity of images that can be found in the rapidly emerging inventory of the world associated with the rise of photography.

To further develop his analysis of the making of a surface from the multiplication of relations of contiguity, Kracauer draws a parallel between photography and historicist thinking, which, he observes ‘emerged at about the same time as modern photographic technology′.14 Just as photography presents ‘a spatial continuum′, the ′advocates of … historicist thinking believe that they can grasp historical reality by reconstructing the course of events in their temporal succession without any gaps′: According to historicism, the complete mirroring of an intratemporal sequence simultaneously contains the meaning of all that occurred within that time. … Historicism is concerned with the photography of time. The equivalent of its temporal photography would be a giant film depicting the temporally interconnected events from every vantage point.15 In contrast, he says that ′Memory encompasses neither the entire spatial appearance of a state of affairs not its entire temporal course. Compared to photography, memory’s records are full of gaps′.16 An individual retains memories because they are personally significant: Thus, they are organized according to a principle which is essentially different from the organizing principle of photography. Photography grasps what is given as a spatial (or temporal) continuum; memory images retain what is given only insofar as it has significance.17 This difference is understood by Kracauer in relation to two modes of ′reconstruction′, which rely on different kinds of support, either technical or organic. Each mode of reconstruction or abstraction has its limits. On the one hand, human judgements of significance are ′expressions of the tendencies of a particular era′ and so ′do not offer conclusive testimony about its overall constitution′.18 On the other, ′Surface level expressions, by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things′.19 However, such access does not result in an adequate understanding, since, so Kracauer says, ′Although the masses give rise to the ornament, they are not involved in thinking it through′.20

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Reason does not penetrate the mass ornament; its patterns are mute.

The Ratio that gives rise to the ornament is strong enough to invoke the mass and to expunge all life from the figures constituting it. It is too weak to find the human beings within the mass and to render the figures in the ornament transparent to knowledge.21 The implication of the limits of this second mode of abstraction for Kracauer is that the mass ornament is not and cannot be a moral unit: ′The production process runs its secret course in public. Everyone does his or her task on the conveyor belt, performing a partial function without grasping the totality′. Indeed, the (lack of) relation between individual and collective is what makes the people who emerge in the patterning of a surface into a mass: ′The bearer of the ornament is the mass and not the people … Only as parts of a mass, not as individuals who believe themselves formed from within, do people become fractions of a figure.′22 The characteristics of the mode of abstraction he describes here is similar to that afforded by ′aerial photographs of landscapes and cities in that it does not emerge out of the interior of the given conditions, but rather appears above them′.23 Since the time of Kracauer’s account of the surface, the technologically mediated capacity to see as if from all positions at once, multiplying relations of nearness and nextness in a moving ratio of proximity, has been vastly extended beyond photography and the illustrated magazines he also discusses, to include, for example, television. With television, at the same time that it is extended, the capacity to see as if from within a spatial continuum is also transformed in particular ways. In Samuel Weber’s analysis for example, the seeing at a distance afforded by television is not so much seeing as if from above as in the case of aerial photography but seeing across. Television, so Weber argues, occurs in three different places: the place of recording, the place of reception, and the place of transmission: it is the bringing of these three moments into recursive relations across a surface that is what actually constitutes television.24 In the terms of the argument being developed here, its cultural forms – including, for example, broadcasting, live television, series, flow, and the box set – can be characterised as instances of a moving ratio, each having a differential specificity.

Increasingly, this ratio is a complex function of digital computation, in which media and computational capacities are combined in multiple ways, iteratively, compulsively and convulsively. For example, Kenneth Goldsmith describes the way in which ′With the rise of the web, writing has met its photography′: Before digital language, words were almost always found imprisoned on a page. How different it is today, when digitized language can be poured into any conceivable container: text typed into a Microsoft Word document can be parsed into a database, visually morphed in Photoshop, animated in Flash, pumped into online text-mangling engines, spammed to thousands of e-mail addresses, and imported into a sound-editing program and spit out as music – the possibilities are endless.25

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Proximity as the moving ratio of a topological culture Celia Lury

Goldsmith suggests that, on the Web, ′we just want to get to the next click′, and so routinely ′save as′.

In this action, ′the reader has become an archivist. And, in turn, so has the writer′. ′Like quilting′ he says, ′archiving employs the obsessive stitching together of many small pieces into a larger vision, a personal attempt at ordering a chaotic world′.26 Laura Kurgan is one of a number of writers who describes how satellite imagery – once exclusively the domain of military and government intelligence organisations, and easily understood in relation to the history of aerial photography – is now an everyday part of the way in which many people routinely map out their lives.

For many of us, maps now are as omnipresent as the more obvious utilities (such as electricity, water, gas, telephone, television, the Internet), functioning somehow like 'extensions' of ourselves, to co-opt Marshall McLuhan’s famous definition of media.27 These ′extensions′ (which McLuhan also saw in terms of a numbing, or loss of sensing) offer particular capacities for the remaking of distance as a moving ratio of proximity: ′Identify an area′, Kurgan directs the reader, 'zoom in and examine the specific conditions. Zoom out and then consider both scales at the same time. The resulting image is no longer hard data. It is a soft map that is infinitely scalable, absolutely contingent, open to vision and hence revision′.28 In other words, the ratio of today’s computational media informs a capacity to render images, that is, both to produce accurate or precise images and to be able to transmit and transform them continuously, as if in a spatio-temporal continuum.29 In the activity of rendering, in the making of relations across, the contemporary surface emerges as multiply mediated, differentially specified relations of proximity.

Testing the world, thinking it through We might then ask, with the possibilities afforded for the reconstruction of the view from above as mediated proximity, is the mass no longer mute? When describing the ratio of the mass ornament in the Weimar Republic, Kracauer suggests that the human is not included, and further asserts that ′nobody would notice the figure at all if the crowd of spectators, who have an aesthetic relation to the ornament and do not represent anyone, were not sitting in front of it′.30 As part of the contemporary topological ratio, however, spectators no longer sit in front of a figure, but ′participate′ in it: they are not outside or above the surface, they are not viewing from a fixed geographical distance, but, are rather, as Kurgan puts it ′close up at a distance′. That is, they are recursively brought into the picture, in relations of nearness and nextness, their own activity contributing to the capacities and qualities of the surface. At the same time, it no longer – if it ever did - makes sense to talk of ′the′ observer as if observation were routinely located in a single, unitary entity, since there has been an expansion of the capacity to observe, both in terms of the sheer number of observers, both human and technical, and in the partially networked distribution of the capacity to observe across a continuously emerging surface.31 In other words, while, as Kracauer says, it may still be ′Only as parts of a mass, not as individuals who believe themselves formed from within, [that] people become fractions of a figure'32, the way in which such fractional figures are made is changing.

Consider, in this regard, the emerging field of data analytics, in which individuals ′participate′ in a topological ratio that makes a mass ornament of a new kind. Adrian Mackenzie’s reconstruction of a recent crisis-event, the 2009 A/H1N1 ′swine flu′ influenza pandemic is an illuminating example: he shows how numbers – specifically numbers ′in their heavily repeated, calculated and amassed modes of existence′33

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– contribute to the composition of groups, co-existence and modes of togetherness. Drawing on the mathematician and philosopher, Whitehead’s argument that ′the very notion of number refers to the process from the individual units to the compound group′34 he shows how, in their sometimes drastic reshaping of lived space-times, epidemics generate and attract a heterogeneity of numbers relating to human/non-human populations, human/non-human biology, vectors of infection, patterns of urban mobility, media use, clinical practice and laboratory tests. Some of these numbers are random distributions, while others refer to traces of activity. These different kinds of numbers multiply, in both the sense of proliferating and in the sense of coming together as units to form groups. In the analysis of how this is done Mackenzie shows how the making of groups – the mass ornament - involves the use of numbering practices in which the predictions that are the outcome of the model emerge from the making of relations across multiple date sets, even though those data sets are constantly changing, often only partially compatible, and relate to many different contexts in many different ways.

Another example of the making of the contemporary mass ornament is a measure of influence in social media I analysed with Carolin Gerlitz35: Klout. Like other such services, Klout takes records of activities pre-structured by a number of social media platforms, including tweets, retweets and replies on Twitter, comments, wall posts and likes on Facebook, and comments, re-shares and +1s on Google+ as data36, and puts these continuously updated data-points in various kinds of recursive relations across – specially relations of commensuration with each other – to calculate a Klout Score for each Klout user. At the same time, as acting as an individualising tracking device, however, each individual Klout Score also stands in an ordered relation to other individual users′ scores, and thus facilitates a process of comparison, or ranking, in which each individual may compare their score with those of others and/or with their own previous score. In other words, the numbers produced by Klout as individual scores feed a ranking that simultaneously creates relations of equivalence and difference between social media users, connecting them to each other as observers and influencers of each other, whilst demarcating differences between them by locating them in relation to each other in terms of relative position. The participation of individuals in this dynamic representation of the social relation of comparison is intensified by the socalled K+ function, a feature that allows individuals to nominate other users as influential in relation to algorithmically determined topics. The number of times an individual is able to use this feature in a day is itself a function of how often they are nominated by others. It is not only that an individual’s scores are steps in the staircases drawn by M. C. Escher that are joined together in an apparently seamless loop that goes both up and down, but the stairs are escalators!

Key to understanding the ways in which Klout operates according to a moving ratio are the non-uniform yet rigorously defined intervals between each step: it is the (algorithmic) organisation of these intervals or distances that creates the distinctive interplay between equivalence and difference in the rankings (a different kind of example of the differential specificity described by Weber in relation to television).

In the case of Klout, the distances between numbers grow exponentially the higher the position or the rank. Klout observes: ′The average Klout Score is not 50; instead, it is around 20. The Score becomes exponentially harder to increase as you move up the scale. For instance, it is much harder to move from a 70 to a 75 than from a 20 to a 25′.37 This kind of exponential ordinality is not uncommon in contemporary rankings; as Guyer observes, 'In many cases, intervals diminish radically going down the scale, both in real terms and in proportion to their next positions′.38 In addition, however, it is important to see that the ′distance′ between each number in the Klout ordinal scale is always changing as each individual user’s

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Proximity as the moving ratio of a topological culture Celia Lury

score is connected to the achievements of the referent population of all Klout users, whose size, composition, and activity is itself constantly changing. In the Klout scale, intervals are thus neither uniform nor fixed; they are constantly altering, stretching and bending, according both to the proprietary algorithm and to changes in user activities. In other words, ordinal series in cases such as Klout rankings ′behave more like topological spaces, where we can rigorously establish that a point is nearby another, but not by exactly how much (given that their separation might be stretched or compressed)′.39 As Gerlitz and I argue, the implications for valuation in such topological orderings are by no means self-evident because the intervals are not uniform and the (changing) magnitude and composition of the referent population are not made visible. However, we suggest that this topological ordering and the opacity of the intervals between individual user scores in Klout do not undermine the opportunities for valuation afforded by this measure, but to afford new ones. Consider, for example, the Klout Score of 100, which is more accurately described as a maximal rather than a maximum number; that is, it is more accurately described as an element in an ordered set of scores that is not smaller than any other element. While there is only one maximum, there can be more than one maximal, dependent as it is on the dimensions of the space in which it is calculated. What this means is that it is not an absolute value of the ‘most influential’ or the ′best′ that is determined by Klout in advance of participation by users but the limit of (a mix of) characteristics of influence that are constantly changing in a (partially) ordered relation to the participation of a constantly changing number of users. Moreover, while not a fixed or absolute best, a maximal rather than a maximum value, 100 is still a score in relation to which all other scores could be better. The consequence of this, we suggest, is that Klout does not motivate individuals in relation to a goal of having ′the most′ influence, being best at influencing others where what the value of best might be is defined in advance of participation, but rather of being – comparatively – better.

Moreover, the value of that comparison (the ‘what’ the individual user is encouraged to be better ′at′) is itself in process; it is continually transformed by who participates, what activities they carry out, how that participation is recognised by Klout, and how it is returned to users for further activity, for bettering.

The depth of a moving ratio More widely, there has been a radical expansion of the possibilities of establishing comparisons and a multiplication of orderings of proximity in terms of relations of nearness and nextness, differentially specifying the surface as a continuum. And this expansion is frequently dependent on ′participation′.

However, while that participation – in which media and masses mutually reconfigure one another – often involves little more than the gathering of traces of activity, it can be much more.

Consider, in this regard, an artwork titled Mass Ornament by the artist Natalie Bookchin.40 This work, a single channel, split screen video runs on a seven-minute loop. The work comprises a series of clips from YouTube, starting with images of empty rooms – bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms – before we see individuals peering into the camera to make sure it is working prior to starting to dance to an imagined audience. Sometimes there is just one screen, sometimes three and sometimes many presented in rows.

Each of the clips is annotated with the number of views it has received, sometimes the information that the video has been removed from YouTube. It is hard to see what’s going on in the image as a whole (as a mass?): should you let your eye be drawn to a single individual, who might catch your eye because of their clothes or a movement? If you do so, you will miss others: you won’t be able to see what they are wearing, or doing, how they are dancing, the expression on their face, what their room is like. If you

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try to watch them all, you can see none of them in particular, only a pattern, a pattern that is emphasised by the soundtrack, which provides a kind of orchestration of movement. While the pattern of their movements is never entirely regular it becomes more so; nevertheless, the movements of the individuals never achieve total synchrony: while their movements become increasingly similar to each other, there are no clear lines of symmetry as in the case of dance groups such as the Tiller girls, whose movements appear as if they are mirror reflections of each other. Instead, as you look across the moving image, you see a patterning that is continually interrupted, internally differentiated. As such, the work is a staging of both a moving ratio of proximity and 'intentional disparity′.41 At the same time, you are made aware of your own role, as an observer, and that of other observers (the number of views) in the making of that differentiation, and are forced to ask whether and how you (and other observers, in other places at other times) are inside or outside, within or beyond the series of images that are brought together here: whether and how your observation is constitutive of the mass you observe and are observed in.

Wendy Chun says of this work, 'Focused on actions shot in the home, Mass Ornament is not simply a negative critique – hey, we’re all the same – but also a hopeful revelation of an unconscious community or what Jaimie Baron has called ′found collectivity′ which we can trace through the mass archive′.42 However, perhaps – if we pause to recall Kracauer’s insight that the mass ornament is the aesthetic reflex of the rationality of the contemporary economy – the collectivities of the contemporary mass ornament are more accurately described as ready-made rather than simply found43? If so, we need to consider what opportunities, if any, they afford for the mass ornament to understand itself as a moral (or political) unit. Consider, for example, Kaldrack and Röhle’s discussion of Open Graph in Facebook, which they describe as the interlocking of the technical functionalities of addressing and distribution with the functionalities of categorisation, staging and usage.44 What is distinctive about the ratio they describe is the use of both statistical and network methodologies: …statistical methods assert similarities, normalities or deviations, focusing on the features of actors. Network-analytical measures supply statements about the value of individual nodes (or node associations) for the structure or topology of the network under consideration.

Whereas the taxonomy based on statistics employs a type as representing a group, thus severing the connection to the micro-level, in network analysis the topological structure underlying the group remains at least theoretically visible.45 Through the combination of these two sets of methods, a depth of perspective is introduced into the mass ornament. This perspective allows a phenomenon simultaneously to be perceived as both a micro and a macro-phenomenon. The combination of methods, so Kaldrack and Röhle say, informs ′the potential′ to attain ′lossless scalability – to be able to zoom in and out of features, nodes and networks′. This potential for lossless scalability – the capacity simultaneously to singularise and aggregate in relations of nearness and nextness – as if from all positions at once is, I suggest, a perspective that results in a mass ornament in which the centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.4647 As part of such a mass ornament you are always included and always excluded, without knowing how to belong.

Importantly, Kaldrack and Röhle suggest that the Facebook platform differentially affords the capacity to zoom in and out to what they describe as front-end and back-end viewing positions. From a front-end perspective (that is, from the viewing position of users), individuals may experience a sense of co-presence, deriving from the constitution of micro-publics without clearly demarcated borders.

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Proximity as the moving ratio of a topological culture Celia Lury

However, this co-presence, while offering individuals a kind of intimacy with others, does not allow full access to the mass: ′While these micro-publics, quantitatively speaking, can accommodate ′masses′ of users, we argue that they involve a mode of ordering that sets it apart from the mass proper′.48 From a back-end perspective, it is possible to observe the self-organisation of masses via orderings of groups, types and topologies. In short, perspective is a function of the capacity to zoom, but this capacity is selectively distributed. Moreover, the relations between front-end and back-end are not reciprocally symmetrical; the platform is not a two-way mirror but an interface that selectively organises a moving ratio across a multi-dimensional space. Relations across do not operate between fixed positions, but constitute the contexts they bring in relation to each other, partially and (dis-)proportionally, in and as relations of nearness and nextness, with uneven and unpredictable consequences for ′people’s capacity to hold and make their history present′.49 Conclusion The anthropologist Paul Rabinow advocates the use of the term the ′moving ratio′ to describe the object domain of an ′anthropology of the contemporary′, the aim of which is to move beyond modernity as the metric for all inquiries: the ′contemporary is a moving ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past and near future in a (nonlinear) space that gauges modernity as an ethos already becoming historical′.50 In this paper, I have stressed the specifically topological characteristics of some examples of this ratio in relation to the surface that emerges in the making of relations of proximity, of nearness and nextness, as if in a spatio-temporal continuum. The aim in doing so has been not simply to describe the transversal relations of the moving ratio in which a surface emerges, but also, by focusing on the mass ornament, to show the need to highlight the implications of how a continuum is produced for individual and collective self-understanding. In conclusion, I suggest that it is important that the ′as if′ nature of such a continuum is recognised51, for as Rabinow further asserts, we need to consider this ratio in terms of claims of authority about the truth, and ask ‘whose legitimacy to make such claims is accepted as plausible by other such claimants; as well as the power relations within which and through which those claims are produced, established, contested, defeated, affirmed, and disseminated′.52 Bibliography Baron, J., The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History. (Routledge, 2013).

Bookchin, N., Mass Ornament, http://bookchin.net/projects/mass-ornament/ (2009). http://bookchin.net/projects/mass-ornament/ Borges, J. L., ′Pascal’s Sphere′, in Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952. Trans by Ruth L.C. Simms, (University of Texas Press, 1993).

Bowker, G., ′The Theory/Data Thing′, International Journal of Communication 8, 1795-1799. (2014).

Castoriadis, C., The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. K. Blamey. (The MIT Press, 1987).

Chun, W. Hui Kyong, Updating to Remain the Same, (The MIT Press, 2016).

Crary, J., Techniques of the Observer. (The MIT Press, 1990).

Day, S. and Lury, C.,′New Technologies of the Observer: #BringBack, Visualization and Disappearance′ Theory, Culture and Society. (in press).

DeLanda, M., Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. (Continuum, 2002).

Deleuze, G., Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard, (University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Foucault, M., The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences. (Routledge, 2011).

Fourcade, M. and Healey, K., ′Classification situations: life-chances in the neo-liberal era′, in Accounting Organizations and Society, Volume 38, Issue 8 (2013) pp. 559-572.

Gerlitz, C. and Lury, C., ′Social media and self-evaluating assemblages: on numbers, orderings and values′ Distinktion, 15 (2), (2014) pp. 174-188.

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Goldsmith, K., ′On uncreative writing′, …ment, Issue 5, Attune…ment (Generation), http://journalment.org/article/uncreative-writing. (2014).

Guyer, J., ′The eruption of tradition: On ordinality and calculation′, Anthropological Theory, 10 (1-2): (2010) pp. 123-131.

Harvey, D., Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. (Routledge, 2001).

Jiménez, A. C., ′The form of the relation, or anthropology’s enchantment with the algebraic imagination′, http://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/98307/1/the%20form%20of%20the%20relation.pdf. (2014).

Kaldrack, I. and Röhle, T., Divide and Share: Taxonomies, Orders and Masses in Facebook’s Open Graph, Computational Culture, Issue 4. (2014).

Kelly, S., ′The transversal and the invisible: how do you really make a work of art that is not a work of art′, http://www.republicart.net/disc/mundial/kelly01_en.htm. (2005).

Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin. (Harvard University Press, 1995).

Kurgan, L., Close up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics. (Zone Book, 2013).

Lash, S. and Urry, J., Economies of Signs and Spaces. (Sage, 1994).

Lury, C., Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity. (Routledge, 1997).

Lury, C., Parisi, L. and Terranova, T., Introduction: The Becoming Topological of Culture, Theory, Culture and Society, 29 (4-5) (2012) pp. 3-35.

Mackenzie, A., ′Multiplying numbers differently: an epidemiology of contagious convolution′, Distinktion, 15 (2): (2014) pp. 189-207.

Rabinow, P., Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. (Princeton University Press, 2007).

Rieder, B. and Sire, G., ′Conflicts of interest and incentives to bias: A microeconomic critique of Google’s tangled position on the Web′. New Media & Society, 16 (2), (2014) pp. 195-211.

Thrift, N., ′Movement-space: The changing domain of thinking resulting from the development of new kinds of spatial awareness′, Economy and Society, 33 (4), (2004) pp. 582-604.

Weber, S., Mass Mediaurus: Form, Technics, Media, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

Whitehead, A. N., Process and Reality, (New York: Macmillan, 1979).

Notes 1 Castoriadis.C., The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. K. Blamey. (The MIT Press, 1987).

2 Foucault, M., The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences. (Routledge, 2011) pp. xx-xxi.

3 Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin. (Harvard University Press, 1995).

4 Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament p. 76.

5 Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament p. 79.

6 Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament p. 79.

7 Lash, S. and Urry, J., Economies of Signs and Spaces. (Sage, 1994); Harvey, D., Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. (Routledge, 2001); Thrift, N., ′Movement-space: The changing domain of thinking resulting from the development of new kinds of spatial awareness’, Economy and Society, 33 (4), (2004) pp. 582-604.

8 Lury, C., Parisi, L. and Terranova, T., Introduction: The Becoming Topological of Culture, Theory, Culture and Society, 29 (4-5) (2012) pp. 3-35.

9 See Deleuze, G. Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard, (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) for further discussion of the transversal. See also Day, S. and Lury, C., ′New Technologies of the Observer: #BringBack, Visualization and Disappearance′ Theory, Culture and Society. (in press) for a more detailed discussion of relations ′across′.

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Lury, C., Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity. (Routledge, 1997).

Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament p. 47.

Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament p. 48.

Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament p. 58.

Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament p. 49.

Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament pp. 49-50.

Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament p. 50.

Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament p. 50.

Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament p. 75.

Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament p. 75.

Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament p. 77.

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21 Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament p. 84.

22 Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament p. 76.

23 Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament p. 77.

24 Weber, S., Mass Mediaurus: Form, Technics, Media, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

25 Goldsmith, K., 'On uncreative writing', …ment, Issue 5, Attune…ment (Generation), http://journalment.org/article/uncreativewriting. (2014).

26 Goldsmith, K., 'On uncreative writing'.

27 Kurgan, L., Close up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics. (Zone Book, 2013) p. 14.

28 Kurgan, L., Close up at a Distance p. 204.

29 Day, S. and Lury, C., 'New Technologies of the Observer'.

30 Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament p. 77.

31 As Crary argues, observation is not the purposeful, perceptual practice of an individual; rather, the observer is ′the effect of an irreducibly heterogeneous system of discursive, technological and institutional relations′ Crary, J., Techniques of the Observer.

(The MIT Press, 1990) p. 6.

32 Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament, p. 76.

33 Mackenzie, A., 'Multiplying numbers differently: an epidemiology of contagious convolution', Distinktion, 15 (2): (2014) p. 192.

34 Mackenzie, A., 'Multiplying numbers differently' p. 206 quoting Whitehead, Alfred North, Modes of Thought; Six Lectures Delivered in Wellesley College, Massachusetts, and Two Lectures in the University of Chicago. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1958) p. 127.

35 Gerlitz, C. and Lury, C., 'Social media and self-evaluating assemblages: on numbers, orderings and values' Distinktion, 15 (2), (2014) pp. 174-188.

36 Klout, 2012. https://klout.com/home 37 Klout, 2012.

38 Guyer, J., 'The eruption of tradition: On ordinality and calculation', Anthropological Theory, 10 (1-2): (2010) p. 126.

39 DeLanda, M., Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. (Continuum, 2002) p. 82.

40 Bookchin, N., Mass Ornament, http://bookchin.net/projects/mass-ornament/ (2009).

41 Baron, J., The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History. (Routledge, 2013).

42 Chun, W. Hui Kyong, Updating to Remain the Same, (The MIT Press, 2016) p. 173.

43 Kelly, S., ′The transversal and the invisible: how do you really make a work of art that is not a work of art′, http://www.republicart.net/disc/mundial/kelly01_en.htm. (2005).

44 In their description of Google, Rieder, B. and Sire, G., ′Conflicts of interest and incentives to bias′ also describe a logic that is characterised by a degree of abstraction that does not need to preserve metrics and modes of equivalence required by lower orders of abstraction. The logic they describe need not be: isotopic (in the sense that different actors from different places may participate); synchronic (because contributions can be made at different times and imply different durations); synoptic (because actors may operate at varying levels of visibility); homogeneous (because numerous and heterogeneous forms of materiality and agency may be involved); or isobaric (because actors may press with varying intensity into the process; that is, the force and capacity to shape outcomes may be unequally distributed). Instead, these differences may be brought into constantly changing relations of abstraction with each other. Indeed, the ability to do so – specifically through the implementation of forms of invariance that rely on a moving ratio of proximity – is precisely what distinguishes the logic of the contemporary surface as topological.

45 Kaldrack, I. and Röhle, T., ′Divide and Share: Taxonomies, Orders and Masses in Facebook’s Open Graph′, Computational Culture, Issue 4. (2014).

46 Borges, J. L., ′Pascal’s Sphere′, in Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952. Trans by Ruth L.C. Simms, (University of Texas Press, 1993).

47 Kracauer argues that the path of enlightenment ‘leads directly through the centre of the mass ornament, not away from it’ Kracauer, S., The Mass Ornament p. 86.

48 Kaldrack, I. and Röhle, T., ′Divide and Share′.

49 Jiménez, A. C., ′The form of the relation, or anthropology’s enchantment with the algebraic imagination′, http://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/98307/1/the%20form%20of%20the%20relation.pdf. (2014) p. 28.

50 Rabinow, P., Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. (Princeton University Press, 2007) p. 2.

51 As Whitehead insists, continuity is not something that is simply given, but is, rather, something that is accomplished.

Whitehead, A. N., Process and Reality, (New York: Macmillan, 1979).

52 Rabinow, P., Marking Time p. 4.

041

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

COVER IMAGES 2009 © Cort Ross Dinesen ARCHITECTURE DRAWING TOPOLOGY EDITORS Cort Ross Dinesen, Inger Berling Hyams, Morten Meldgaard, Anders Michelsen, Henrik Oxvig EDITORIAL COORDINATOR Inger Berling Hyams ESSAYS © editors, authors and AADR (Spurbuchverlag) HYDRA DRAWINGS © Students, KADK IMAGES © Cort Ross Dinesen pages 1,13, 42, 94,166, 174, 175, 176, 178, 194-195, 236, 242, 243, 278-291, 304 IMAGES © Birgit Skovfoged Østergaard pages 50, 51, 180, 181 GRAPHIC DESIGN Birgit Skovfoged Østergaard TRANSLATE Avanti Gruppen TYPOGRAPHY Century Gothic SUPPORT The Dreyer Foundation Danmarks Nationalbank Jubilæumsfond Statens Kunstfond / Danish Arts Foundation The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, KADK Institute of Architecture, Design & Landscape IBBL, KADK ISBN 978–3-88778-470-6 Publication © by AADR AADR is an imprint of Spurbuchverlag Am Eichenhügel 4, 96148 Baunach, Germany All rights reserved.

1. print run 2017 No part of the work must in any mode (print, photocopy, microfilm, CD or any other process) be reproduced nor – by application of electronic systems – processed, manifolded nor broadcast without approval of the copyright holder.

AADR – Art, Architecture and Design Research publishes research with an emphasis on the relationship between critical theory and creative practice.

AADR Curatorial Editor: Prof. Dr. Rochus Urban Hinkel, Stockholm & Nuremberg Production: pth-mediaberatung GmbH, Würzburg For further information on Spurbuchverlag and AADR visit www.aadr.info / www.spurbuch.de.

Contains contributions from: Cort Ross Dinesen Stephan Günzel Inger Berling Hyams Celia Lury Morten Meldgaard Anders Michelsen Peter Murphy Henrik Oxvig Luciana Parisi Ulrik Schmidt Guro Sollid Georges Teyssot Frederik Tygstrup and students of architecture at KADK, Copenhagen

ARCHITECTURE DRAWING TOPOLOGY

Cort Ross Dinesen Inger Berling Hyams Morten Meldgaard Anders Michelsen Henrik Oxvig (eds.)

Architecture Drawing Topology presents an extensive body of drawings and texts and their complex relationalities, ranging from ontology to history. These relationalities have been developed in response to the natural topography of the Greek island of Hydra, and tested in the urban landscapes of Berlin, Paris and Tokyo.

Through constellations that are both real and virtual, the collection is composed of numerous highly detailed drawings. The diverse drawings express a complex and ambiguous field of significations, instrumentalizing an open production of meaning. Positions, relations, orders, levels, dimensions, energies, and processes are discovered as a new field of possibilities, creating an architecture of the event.

A diversity of essays complement the collection of drawings. They explore concepts of topology that establish parallels with the architectural context in which we find ourselves today; a context in which the synergy of time and space is traversed by information and dynamic forces that cannot be restricted to conventional questions of scale, the principles and forms of modern architecture, or historical forms of building.

The book collects artistic research from a period of more than 15 years, with a range of reflections on architecture, drawing and topology in Cort Ross Dinesen’s Hydra project at the The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation (KADK).

Architecture Drawing Topology is an excellent book for students, academics and researchers in the fields of architecture and architectural theory, geography, media studies and cultural studies.

ARCHITECTURE DRAWING TOPOLOGY Edited by CORT ROSS DINESEN INGER BERLING HYAMS MORTEN MELDGAARD ANDERS MICHELSEN HENRIK OXVIG