UIC Garofalo Fellowship Application

2016 DOUGLAS A. GAROFALO FELLOWSHlP APPLlCATlON AARON TOBEY aarontobey@gmail.com 156 Wickenden Street Providence, RI 02903 434.987.1262

PERSONAL STATEMENT

Dear Garofalo Fellowship Search Committee, My name is Aaron Tobey. I am a recent alumnus of the Rhode Island School of Design’s Master of Architecture program. I currently practice as a digital artist at the architectural visualization firm Studio AMD. My trans-disciplinary education, research, and work at has instilled in me the belief that it will be crucial for students and architects to develop critical tools for addressing a globalizing and technologizing world. Digital-global technolog y is redefining cultural and personal identity. As architectural educators and digital practitioners we must also (re)imagine the material, sites, and boundaries of our discipline. The collaborative and speculative setting of academia provides the space for both students and professors to participate in this (re)imagination by inviting them to take chances, ask open-ended questions, and explore unknown territory.

My work, influenced by theorists such as Keller Easterling and Reinhold Martin, (re)imagines architecture at its intersection with global capital, digital technolog y, and social issues. I have explored how digital software and spatial hardware (re)map the globe in the image of Capital through two field-research trips, one crossing the borderlands of central Asia on foot, and another crossing the Pacific aboard a container ship. I experienced first hand the instability of what is abstracted into line on a map and met the workers mobilized by the click of an Amazon “buy” button. My research directly folds into the courses I have taught, asking students how digital technologies act socio-spatially and therefore shape an architecture’s conceptualization rather than merely its production. By including narratives and cultural behaviors as course material, I challenge students to (re)consider the objectivity and neutrality of digital tools. My studio practice combines the global scale of my research with the local and technical specificity of my teaching to address how the codification of spatial relationships produces and challenges cultural identities. (Re)working the protocols of representation and the regimentation of mobility, my work complicates the simplistic distinctions of here/there and us/them, to propose a more inclusive world-view.

In contrast, most architectural practice today results from the orchestration of creative knowledge within a scientized, abstract, world-view defined by precision and the universalization of measurability. Through this world-view, conventional architectural practice and its attendant Bauhaus pedagog y interpolate anything that can be measured into architectural material. However, the local embodied knowledges, lived networks, and affects that animate the world and which cannot be translated into abstract measurability are excluded from architectural material. I seek to open architecture to these immeasurable forms of knowledge through my work and in doing so (re)define architectural materiality as an inclusive social domain of habits, processes and connections.

This (re)definition of material (re)imagines the relationship of pedagog y to practice as a dispersed, always-ongoing process of lifelong learning that does not conform to the traditional binaries of academic/professional practice, paper/concrete architecture, or technician/craftsman. Architects can thus be part artist, anthropologist, biologist, physicist, politician, psychologist, or systems theorist. I believe we can develop new challenges to architecture’s existing assumptions by adopting such diverse roles and reconfiguring the tools that we use to imagine the future world.

Whereas my previous work concerned the intangible material of identities and world-views, my goal with this fellowship is exploring the effects of introducing immeasurable forms of knowledge on architecture’s relationship to physical material. How does architecture use digital-global technolog y to physically define the bodies and objects that occupy it? What underlying assumptions about materiality are made by its pedagog y and systems of fabrication? How are these assumptions revealed in the limitations of precision and repetition? What do they excluded as error? Asking these questions I hope to leverage the forum of teaching and research to work with others in transforming architecture from an art of form making into a way of thinking, (re)imagining it as an open-ended way of engaging with the world.

Thank you for both your time and your consideration. I look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely, Aaron Tobey

CURRlCULUM VlTAE education

Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, RI Master of Architecture, 2015

University of Cincinnati (UC), Cincinnati, OH BS Architecture, Summa Cum Laude, 2011

Ecole Speciale d’Architecture (ESA), Paris, FR September - December 2010

teaching experience

Advanced Computer Applications: Rendering: Roger Williams University

January 2016 - Present - Co-professor with Jon Kletzien and Matt Paquin - Seminar and studio on the mechanics of digital imaging and modeling.

- Focused on the differences of material and light in digital spatiality to physical spatiality.

- Addressed mechanical and metaphorical aspects of vision as they relate to digital tools.

- Emphasized situation of images within a larger visual culture, drawing from painting and film.

Systemic Space: Qualities in Digital Modeling and Rendering: RISD

January - February 2015 - Professor - Self designed seminar and studio including readings, discussions, and analyses.

- Focused on digital rendering tools, their history, theory, and use/techniques.

- Introduced students to software as a means to challenge manual/digital distinction.

- Emphasized visual and conceptual literacy to enable reading of images semiotically.

- Approached rendering as a way of designing/thinking rather than as a tool.

- Students developed a visual language of concepts through their iterative application.

Architectural Projections: RISD

September - December 2014 - Teaching Assistant - Advanced/conceptual architectural drawing course including orthographics and axonometrics.

- Focused on the translation between 2d and 3D information and representational conventions.

- Addressed questions of translatability, scale, and fineness in both digital and manual tools.

- Students developed unique and rigorous methods of measurement and delineation.

Landscape Architecture Summer Drawing Foundations: RISD

August 2014 - Teaching Assistant - Introductory drawing class for landscape architecture graduate students - Focused on abstraction of physical concepts and observations into diagrammatic languages.

- Addressed questions of measurement and interpretation of non-material/dynamic forces.

- Students developed methods for representing non-linear and non-planar information.

Informed Form: Data, Design, and Computation: RISD

January - February 2013 - Professor - Self designed seminar and skills lab on computational design tools.

- Focused on the integration of data and the construction of complex/recursive systems.

- Introduced students to relevant contemporary and historical literature of computation.

- Treated computation as an adaptive way of seeing/interpreting the world.

- Addressed questions of digital morphologies and material limitations.

- Developed stances on digital authorship and the making/application of tools.

History, Theory, and Criticism: Modern Architecture: UC

March - June 2011 - Teaching Assistant/Seminar Leader - Comprehensive modern Euro-American architectural history lecture.

- Designed weekly research papers and analytique assignments.

- Seminar focused on nexus of social and theoretical aspects of buildings and history at large.

CURRlCULUM VlTAE work experience

Studio AMD: Providence, RI

June 2013 - December 2013, May 2014 - Present - 3D Artist - Creating and editing content for architectural visualizations.

- 3D digital modeling and 2D image manipulation.

- Managing projects ranging in scale from landscapes to detailed interiors.

Fougeron Architecture: San Francisco, CA

March - August 2010 - Intern Architect - Created and edited written and graphic content for firm monograph.

- Managed DD through 100% CD sets for renovation project at UC Berkeley.

- Assisted with competition entries and construction admin. on multiple projects,.

Atwood Architects: Charlottesville, VA

September - December 2009 - Intern Architect - Managed two residential additions through SD and DD phases.

- Interfaced with city agencies and business in proposing a large scale hotel development.

Service Employees International Union: Cincinnati Urban Farm: Cincinnati, OH

April - June 2009 - Project Manager/Designer - Worked with community, and interest groups to design and build urban farm in Cincinnati.

- Held community design charettes, locally sourcing materials and labor to execute the design.

- Received an award from the Keeping Cincinnati Beautiful Foundation.

Hamady Architects: Charlottesville, VA

June - September, December 2008 - Intern Architect - Involved in multiple simultaneous projects from design development to construction admin.

- Hand and computer drafting, product specification, creation of presentation documents.

leadership / service

RISD Architecture Symposium and Outreach Assistantship

February 2015 - June 2015 Assistant coordinator and designer of Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities symposium and related materials for institutional outreach. Co-designer and producer of exhibition catalog.

RISD Graduate Student Alliance: Communications Director

June 2012 - June 2013 Oversaw communications for RISD graduate student government, organized incoming graduate student orientation, university-wide studio exhibition, and discussion series.

RISD Architecture Degree Project Exhibition Assistantship

September 2012 - June 2013 Assistant coordinator of fall and spring degree project exhibitions. Co-designer and producer of exhibition catalog.

awards

RISD Graduate Research Grant

July - August 2015: $5500 Funded research trip aboard container ship from US to China focused on the socio/spatial implications of international trade and its protocols.

RISD Architecture Graduate Fellowship

September 2012 - June 2015: $11,500 per annum

UC Cincinnatus Scholarship

September 2007 - June 2011: $3000 per annum

CURRlCULUM VlTAE publications

Fast Company: The Value of Randomness - Geometric Randomness Generator

October 2015, Carl Lostritto, http://www.fastcodesign.com/3052333 the-value-of-randomness-in-art-and-design,

When We Begin We Finish - Here and Where: Navigating Fuzzy Borders May 2015, Jen Liese ed., RISD Department of Graduate Studies http://issuu.com/risd/docs/risd_graduate_studies_annual_2015

Work in Progress No. 16: Doubletake - You are Your Own Dance Partner May 2015, Brandon Wang ed., RISD Department of Architecture, http://issuu.com/risdarchitecture/docs/wip_spring_2015_issue_16

Representing Landscapes - Images from Sus Nuevos Vecionos

2014, Nadia Amaroso, Routledge London, ISBN: 9780415589574

RISD Graduate Book 2013 - Managing Editor May 2013, Hanahan, et al., RISD Department of Graduate Studies

Architektur Aktuell: Hybrid Lifestyles City Follows Culture - Excerpts from Tapestry May 2011, Angelika Fitz and Sussane Stacher, Architektur Aktuell GmbH

exhibitions

RISD Graduate Thesis Exhibition - Excerpts from A Feigned Translucence

May 2015, curated by RISD Exhibitions

Complexity (RISD Museum Gelman Gallery) - A House for a Puzzle Maker

September - October 2013, curated by Steven Pestana

DAAP Works 2011 - Cincinnati Hindu Temple

skills

May - June 2011, curated by School of Architecture faculty

Software:

3DS Max - Adobe Creative Suite - AutoCAD - Cinema 4D - Final Cut Pro - Flash - FormZ Grasshopper - Microsoft Office - Microstation - Python - Revit - Rhinoceros - Sketchup Syntheyes - VRay - Vectorworks - Wordpress

Design:

3D Printing - Drafting - Intaglio/Alternative Printmaking - Laser Cutting - Model Making Photography - Rendering - Watercolor - Wood/Metal Shop

references

Carl Lostritto

Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, Rhode Island School of Design clostrit@risd.edu - 401.454.6281

Laura Briggs

Department Head, Department of Architecture, Rhode Island School of Design lbriggs@risd.edu - 401.277.4849

Patricia Phillips

Dean, Department of Graduate Studies, Rhode Island School of Design pphillips@risd.edu - 401.454.6134

A FElGNED TRANSLUCENCE: HlDlNG lN PLAlN SlGHT Masters Thesis, September 2014 - May 2016

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Building on previous research into global trade and digital technology my thesis asked two fundamental questions. How do trade and technology (re)map the world to collapse some distances and amplify other so? And, how can we appreciate the weight of our global connectedness, our manipulations of vast landscapes from great distances. Taking these questions literally I began constructing tools to distort maps and landscapes, using principles of optics to project global Capital back onto them, devices to make the world conform to image. These explorations revealed the cost of adopting Capital’s world-view, what was lost, covered over or excluded from its streamlining of borders, fetishizing of objects, and projection of desires.

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Borders of the Shenzhen SEZ unfolded by a container Device for producing overlapping images of objects Manipulation of land to match projected images

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A FElGNED TRANSLUCENCE: HlDlNG lN PLAlN SlGHT Masters Thesis, September 2014 - May 2016

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The actions of global Capital, predicated on visibility, led to questions about the economy that feigned translucence, that we know is there but that we all pretend is invisible, the economy of image.

In this economy selective invisibility has value, but also leaves open the opportunity for camouflage. Utilizing such an opportunity in the legal apparatus of the special economic zone, (SEZ) I subverted the image economy surrounding migration along the US/Mexico border in El Paso. Choosing the site of yearly national television broadcasts, I began mapping the border’s variable visibility for a national audience in order to move people across it. For this image economy to function, where the border was not visible it did not need to exist, but where it was visible it could not betray its subverted nature.

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View-shed projections from individual stadium seats Aggregate view-shed projection showing overlap

A FElGNED TRANSLUCENCE: HlDlNG lN PLAlN SlGHT Masters Thesis, September 2014 - May 2016

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Through the laws of the SEZ, and the workings of the image economy, so long as the connections between the US and Mexico were unseen, those crossing could hide in plain sight, the would effectively appear to be in the US legally. In order to conceal the new border crossings the SEZ required I developed a topography of visibility, a tool with which to direct paths between the SEZ and Mexico. This topography controlled the behavior of the path, determining when it turned, tunneled, or skirted the landscape.

Once the pathways were determined a secondary set of sight lines was projected from them to guide their total concealment by further geographic manipulations. In effect, this created a scenographic landscape, facades of mountains with nothing behind.

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Process of projecting visibility data onto topography Hybrid topography of visibility surrounding stadium Axonometric of pathway and secondary sight lines

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A FElGNED TRANSLUCENCE: HlDlNG lN PLAlN SlGHT Masters Thesis, September 2014 - May 2016

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The landscape surrounding the stadium was thus transformed by taking literally its need to operate as an image. To transform this singular solution into a tool capable of being deployed elsewhere, I developed a strategy by which to reveal the hidden space within such images, a way to see the world as hollow, able to be occupied subversively in plain sight. Taking a typical image of the stadium from a television broadcast and the topography of visibility I had created, I constructed a model of the stadium, which if viewed from a specific angle appeared as the flat two dimensional image, but from other angles revealed the space behind. Finally, my thesis proposed an exploitation of the exploitative the world-view of global Capital in a pragmatic spatial form of justice.

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Process for translating image into anamorphic model Anamorphic projection model in non privileged angle Anomrophic projection model distended and collapsed

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SUS NUEVOS VEClNOS: ClTlZENSHlP MACHlNE Advanced Architecture Studio, February - May 2013

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The foreclosure crisis had a major effect on the Spanish economy which was predicated on the construction of vast new areas in the semi-urban hinterland of Madrid and other cities. On the other hand, Spain has a unique system of public lands that have become the sites of novel forms of urbanism undertaken by marginalized groups. Learning from the ways in which these groups creatively read laws and occupy space, this project rethinks an uninhabited mega-development as a tool for solving multiple crises. Analyzing the spatial and economic desires of different user groups the project is not an idealized formal response to an abject landscape, but a radically pragmatic alignment of interests into a built framework. Within this framework new forms of citizenship, collective habitation, and business practices are proposed.

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Rendering of foreclosure crisis in relation to public land Non-master plan: Heterotopia of different user groups

SUS NUEVOS VEClNOS: ClTlZENSHlP MACHlNE Advanced Architecture Studio, February - May 2013

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Immigrants, unable to afford conventional real estate, and developers unable to find buyers for their now foreclosed housing are brought together in the establishment of a new operative icon for the areas’ only major business, IKEA. This tower operates simultaneously as billboard, training center, residences, broadcast antenna, and investment tool. Using a loophole in Spanish law, immigrants who agree to work for IKEA and live in the tower for two years become citizens with financial stability to move into the surrounding neighborhood. IKEA is supplied with a labor force and additional revenue by leasing advertising space on the tower’s envelope. Local TV stations have a partner to invest in their communications infrastructure and broadcast their message.

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Exploded axonmetric of digital media envelope Section of tower highlighting spiral of public programs Diagram of constituency groups included in framework

SUS NUEVOS VEClNOS: ClTlZENSHlP MACHlNE Advanced Architecture Studio, February - May 2013

refurbished playground

1 community center diy projects

market makeovers

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permanent restaraunt

mobile front porch pop community gardens food up markets and kitchens

reading rd. rehab

pathways

effective timeline

8 weeks

mobile food

food distribution with food trucks

15 weeks

4 weeks 6 weeks

market makeovers

site choice

prep

information distribution

20 weeks test period

10 years

25 weeks

transition

use of new healthier food sales model

2 years

25 weeks construction and installation

use of diy projects to grow food, increase access and security, incourage interaction 25 weeks

front porch pop up markets

10 years periodic releases of new projects through community groups and work sessions, continued upkeep on existing projects

25 weeks

operation of porch businesses

25 weeks

1 year

10 years provide space for community meetings and distribution of services and encourage continued efforts

pop up restaraunt test period

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Timeline of project implementation/path to citizenship Typical plan showing adaptable cohabitation spaces

full service permanent restaraunt developed from one of the pop up tests 5 years

2 years new bus routes and bike share

2 years

10 years

5 years

2 years rehab of existing structure

pathways

Each group involved in the project makes strategic compromises to achieve their longer term goals. In the process of these compromises, unlikely alliances and new spatial relationships are formed. A socialist TV station shares space with a major corporation, a tower serves as a habitable billboard, public and private space flow seamlessly into each other. The power in the architecture is not in serving each of these interests but in hybridizing their identities, asking what role each can play for the other, what masks it can wear or cover it can provide. This in turn asks how architecture always does more than simply delineate a stage set for events, but create the conditions for certain actions. In doing so this project exposes the latent political content of architectural form and opens it as a site for insurgent/subversive action.

combination of playground with school physical eduaction courses and new transit connections

2 years construction

1 year

reading rd. rehab

10 years

5 years extension of pathways from playground to adjacent neighborhoods

community center

10 years conversion of abandoned school into garden and kitchen center, develop relationship with civic garden organizations

growing together of satellite sites

1 year construction

permanent restaraunt

expansion of businesses beyond porch through connections with street or satellite locations

5 years

2 years development of small satellite communty gardens on vacant land

10 years

5 years

2 years gradual conversion of porches into extensions of home businesses

community gardens and kitchens refurbished playground

10 years self run and organized mobile food distribution to set locations from central hub

construction of central hub and market spaces

6 weeks

diy projects

2 years

set up of satellite locations

5 years

small interventions along sides

10 years

8 years

construction of community porches and bus stops along new paths

extenstion of paths into and across ravines 10 years

8 years

comprehensive signage, facade, street scape, and access upgrades

infill development and reurbanization

A HOUSE FOR A PUZZLE MAKER Advanced Architecture Studio, January 2013

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How might fluid natural forces and the idiosyncratic narrative of a fictional character’s daily life define architectural form? Would such a form be stable? Responding to these questions, this project posits form as an emergent set of behaviors rather than as a fixed shape. As the tide rises and falls the architecture adapts itself to allow the puzzle maker to go about both their unique and quotidian activities. Planes rise and fall, pathways open and close as floors become walls. The house itself is a puzzle that the is made and solved continuously by water and human. Because the shape of the house is constantly changing, the solution to the puzzle, its form, also changes. The rhythms of interior and exterior worlds are overlayed on one another and indexed in the house’s form as pieces come together in a singular image.

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Section through working/sleeping spaces at low tide Section through lounging/cooking spaces at high tide

A HOUSE FOR A PUZZLE MAKER Advanced Architecture Studio, January 2013

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The puzzle maker solves the puzzle in the act of making it. Always knowing its final form in advance, they find joy in the coming together of discrete parts into coherent isolated whole images.

Tasked with eternally remaking the same puzzle, the puzzle maker seeks indeterminacy in the form of the puzzle, its behavior, rather than its shape, the partial images produces along the way. Like the puzzle maker, to arrive at such an indeterminate architecture required me to always see both part and whole of the project. To do this I developed parametric digital modeling tools to measure the movement of individual pieces of the house. A set of correlational charts produced by these became the template for the simultaneous design the house and the story of the puzzle maker.

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Diagram of tide-based folding/unfolding behavior Plan of house unfolded at high tide Plan of house folded at low tide with intermediary steps

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YOU ARE YOUR OWN DANCE PARTNER Advanced Architecture Studio, September - December 2014

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OUTDOOR FITNESS AREA

GROUP FITNESS

LOBBY / EXHIBITION

FORECOURT

CAFE

HEALTH FOOD MARKET

LIFESPAN HEALTH HEADQUARTERS (EXISTING)

FARMER’S MARKET (SEASONAL)

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The way information comes to us is not neutral, it effects the way we interpret the information by prioritizing some things, and minimizing others. Often what is excluded is the process by which information itself is produced. This project explored how exposing the production of information and what it prioritized could be a tool to rethink our relationship to buildings. Diverse questions from how we understand space visually to the ethics of digital information gathering were brought together in the design of a research gym using principles of surveillance and camouflage.

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Concatenation of multiple one point perspectives Analysis of perspectival concatenation in 3 spaces Diagram of building privileging hallway location Diagram of building privileging vertical relationships Diagram of building privileging unit locations Ground plan of programmatically concatenated gym

YOU ARE YOUR OWN DANCE PARTNER Advanced Architecture Studio, September - December 2014

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Designing the gym asked not simply how architecture regulates the body, how it is physically seen or exposed, but also how it psychically displaces this power to the self-regulation of the body, telling us how to behave. Through the design process it became clear that the way in which information occluded the means of its own production was responsible for this displacement, refigured as the adopting of a world-view that is not entirely one’s own.

The design of the research gym thus took on the flipping of the surveyor/surveyed roles and privileged the physical processes of information production over the operative fiction of the information. This culminated in a series of drawings, speculative sections whose claims to informational truth are interrupted by the process of their own production, their biases exposed.

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North section occluded by the process of its making South section occluded by the process of its making

EQUlLLlBRlUM: FLOATlNG CLASSROOM Design Build Studio, February - May 2012

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Understanding the material tectonics of construction is crucial to the conceptualization of architectural form. On top of this tectonics, design-build studios provide windows into the labor mobilized by and embodied in forms. The process of realizing a project reveals the economic and physical costs, as well as the intangible social relationships that are developed and leveraged.

The process of designing and building a floating classroom for a local school itself became a classroom for those involved in its realization. With extreme demands for flood-resilience, user safety and minimal environmental impact, the project became a lesson in balancing constituencies, priorities, and physical forces of nature. By introducing these elements, the scope of the project expanded beyond a single site to a way of thinking about place.

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Floating platform and hinged walkway from river bluff Project master plan highlighting flood mitigation

EQUlLLlBRlUM: FLOATlNG CLASSROOM Design Build Studio, February - May 2012

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To build the classroom required working with local community leaders to secure, funding, and materials and social support for its future programming. The interests of the community had to be balanced with the reality of state regulations regarding access to the river during yearly floods of more than 20 feet. The resulting form of the classroom was a material index of the negotiations of these interests and the physical labor of the studio. What became clear over the course of the process was the social implications of every aspect of the design, from how a hand bends to reach a screw location to who is included and excluded in the imagination of the project.

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Construction of floating platforms on land Removing form-work from terraced retaining walls Completed stairs from pavilion to river Pavilion and hinged walkway from floating platform

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APPLlED VALUES: PROFESSlONAL WORK Studio AMD, Ongoing

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Working in a collaborative, team based environment, at Studio AMD, I am part of the apparatus by which architecture’s imaginary is (re)inscribed through digital image production. Embedded in each image are messages about how we should see the world, idealized virtual materializations which condition our expectations. Through their digital immateriality these images have the potential to be both inclusive and emancipatory, opening op the question of what could be, or exclusionary and marginalizing, foreclosing the possibility of imagining differently. Which of these two modalities is dominant depends on whether or not digital technologies are treated as neutral tools of production.

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608 Main St. Houston, TX - Picard Chilton Architects Transbay Block 5, San Francisco, CA - SOM Utopia Hotel, Nashville, TN - Marks and Barklay Global Engagement Center, Grinnel College - EYP

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RESEARCH: CULTURAL lDENTlTY Thread over Thread: Excerpts from January, 2014 Travel Journal, Sri Lanka The landscape is branded. The topography is inscribed with the water collection systems, vertical and horizontal pathways, and even the select nutrients that give Mackwoods’ tea its flavor. It is this branding, seen and unseen, a collapsing of man-made layers of control that makes the block letters on the hillside superfluous if not detrimental through their extraneous reference.

The temporal and spatial organization of the tea plantation, achieved via the controlled interaction of multiple parallel systems, is used to overcome such varied and unpredictable qualities as weather patterns and economic trends. This is done in order not just to preserve tea production but with it a specific identity, a brand.

The tea plantation, the colonial example of spatial layering, and its correlated/disguised form, accumulation, is an organizational structure with repercussions in social, economic, and other fields. There are two poles of representation for the relationships of the abstract organizational structure which in combination allow the structure’s embodiment; the section, in which all active components become visible independently, and the overview, the final image, or brand, that the layered system produces.

Sri Lanka is especially interesting in this regard because of its social and physical layering arising out of its various religious groups, art-historical traditions, colonizations, and now, economic alliances. In this context the components of the layered system are the physical artifacts of Sri Lankan art and architecture, the final image is what could be called Sri Lankan national identity, and their relationship is the discursive realm in which one informs the other.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Going out into the sea from the old port area of Colombo a small sliver of land is rising. Set off from the churning of the water by mounds of concrete forms, like handfuls of jacks hastily flung aside by the giant cranes that have come to occupy the peninsula, eager to quit their small games and take on more serious business. Some of these jacks, so carelessly left behind, have fallen over top of sections of the old port, threatening to either completely cover it with one small shift of the pile’s balance, or else inundate it with redirected sea water.

The cranes are the most obvious example, the visible layer in the growing import export system that is becoming the organizational structure defining Sri Lanka. And like its preceding organizational structures, it subsumes its predecessors rather than usurps them, adapting them into a means of justification. Now that the island’s cultural identity has been secured, it must broadcast, share with the world for the benefit and profit it will bring in return. But what comes in return is not benign physically or socially.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The image culture prevalent in advertising, fashion, and architecture in Sri Lanka is drawing an increasingly large degree of tropes, and almost as often, actual images, from western advertising and style. In an inversion of the colonial era, the trousers now cover the cloth. New, foreign aluminum cladding covers old Sri Lankan concrete, though there is a 70% chance that the concrete too is foreign.

Even the signs for government run corporations and development projects with their obligatory photograph of the President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, using explicitly nationalistic rhetoric such as “I am Sri Lanka” or “Strong Motherland Today Flourishing Tomorrow” are always paired with images of economic/industrial development or leading individuals from national sporting teams, as if to say, “we can meet you on the playing field, we accept your standards.” To be appear developed/western is a sign of vitality, of investment in the nation.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The cranes are hardly aware of the drama playing out behind them. Their attention is outwards to the sea, to the west, and increasingly, to the east, despite their geographic location. The future is out there, “the future of our country lies in the ocean around us,” the backs of the cranes broadcast to all within sight. But, perhaps, this is the same as it always has been.

Tea Plantations, Nuwara Elia, Sri Lanka: Land and physical labor dedicated to creating goods for near immediate export. Such physical persistence of colonial era practices and brands through the control of Sri Lankan nationals’ relationship to the landscape raises the question to what degree the land itself could be called Sri Lankan.

Colombo International Container Terminal, Colombo, Sri Lanka: How do we experience the scale of the global in our everyday personal activities? How do the mechanisms of global trade account for individual experience? How we define and occupy global space? How do spaces structure our relationships? How do lines both connect and divide?

RESEARCH: MODERN BORDERS Excerpts from A Feigned Translucence: Possession/Ghost Borders This space of overlap, in which possession as the right to exclude becomes perceptible, exists at the moment control of landscape and control of the subject become discontinuous.14 In our contemporary global experience these marginal and indeterminate moments are international borders. They are seams that in their both allow and limit movement through their double definition of the landscape and the subject.15 If you apply Israeli law you imply certain things you may not want: one of them for instance, is that you intend to annex the region. Secondly you automatically obligate yourself to grant citizenship to the entire population . . . You cannot apply law to the land and not on the people. . . . . . Order and Justice do not always go hand in hand.

-Dov Shefi, Brigadier General (retired), Legal Advisor, West Bank Military Command The degree of discontinuity between control of the landscape and control of the subject, the thickness of the border is variable; ranging from walls which define the boundaries of both physical space and identity simultaneously,16 to the intentionally neutral and controlled space of international airport terminals,17 to the ambiguity of frontier borderlands in which large distances occur between physical and relational control if the border is recognized at all.18 The commonality of each is their control of the subject and its social relations via its relationship to physical space in its embodiment.19 Because it is within the space of the border that specific power structures are enacted upon the body, in a protracted manner and made available for our examination and intervention it is only within space that they might be challenged. In the discontinuous border not only do the specific modes of possession reveal their own limitations, but the limitations of possession, and definition in general. The border, that which allows us to structure knowledge as possession, is the place of its potential explosion.

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Foucault would describe these marginal spaces as heterotopias; marginal spaces that exist within a society to accommodate the excess, nonnormative behavior; the irreconcilable remainder that is the byproduct of definition understood as subdivision. Traditionally understood heterotopias include hospitals and prisons, which were born in the modern regimentation of the body. Such spaces also exist in places where possession becomes uncertain as a result of regimentation of the landscape and the body’s access to it.

A prime example of the inverse of this double definition is the phrase “you are here” in which both the subject and object are transient signifiers.

Whereas the “you are here” prompts the question of who “you” are and where “here” is, international borders endeavor to eliminate the possibility of such questions.

16

At a finer grain, walls themselves have variable thickness based upon; location, as in the hundreds of properties that lie between the Rio Grande river and the US border fence as a result of floodplain construction regulations; layering, as in double walled constructs such as the Berlin Wall; and in their construction methodology in which a border can be made all the more perverse by allowing sight while preventing movement.

15

The figuratively international space that exists at airports and other border crossings, and to a lesser degree, the literal international space in the sea and air (because of their modes of access), are the last places of frontier capitalism and legal ambiguity within easy and sanctioned access by large portions of the world population. As such they may function as relief valves within the structure of successive layers of definition/ organization and replace it with the singular capitalist subject.

Within the European Schengen Zone, it is now almost impossible to know the location the official border between countries, and because of migration within the zone, even relying on personal identification becomes problematic, leaving only legal definitions and the privileges they grant (voting) as solid ground.

Embodiment is the localization, and thus the limitation of global capitalism, in that it is incapable of functioning in a pure sense so long as physical and identity borders exist. This limitation is identified by Frederic Jameson in Cognitive Mapping, and expanded by Nigel Thrift in “Movement Space” as the reason for both the creation and failure of free trade agreements. The body cannot both participate in and perceive global capitalism in its totality.

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18

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Kyrgyz Woman Texting / Crossing Irkeshtam Pass, Sary Tash, Kyrgyzstan: Modern communications technologies have changed the meaning of borders. The technological ability to operate beyond traditional boundaries enabled complex social connections, hybrid identities, and served as meaningful proxy for true freedom of movement.

Karakoram Highway,Tashkurgan River Valley (looking South to Pakistan): An outpost at a strategic intersection of borders, which exercises a degree of control over international relations disproportionate to its remoteness.

Because of its semi-autonomy the borders around Tashkurgan multiply only to have the landscape dissolve them into meaninglessness.

RESEARCH: DlGlTAL ECONOMY Message in a Box: Materialism in the Age of Global Trade

In Panama, a new canal is being built. Newark, Miami, Mobile and other East coast cities are digging up their harbors. An Everest of earth-moving and millions of affected livelihoods all because of a 40 foot box.

Shipping containers are the glue of international trade. While the internet facilitates the near instantaneous ordering of any product from the far reaches of the globe, it is shipping containers that make such transactions economically plausible and their physical fulfillment possible. The increasing demand on quick global trade, and our reliance on the apparatus that enable it, the shipping container has profound, though largely unseen, spatial effects: altering the social and physical geography of the world through the emergent behavior of aggregation.

Floating clusters of 9,000, trains of 200, ports of innumerable stacks, the infrastructure of our material desire requires massive spaces, new zones and legal structures measured in Twenty Foot Equivalent Units. From the ships designed to carry them to the everyday products designed to most efficiently fill them, shipping containers reach beyond the spaces they directly organize to bring the global and the personal together in the common scale of mass transport.

Nearly ever domestic object we own is determined by the dimension and pilgrimage of the shipping container.

And yet, we collapse this unfathomable scale with a click of a button. In doing this we define and place ourselves in the world of global capitalism and its “fuzzy” boundaries between objects and their representations, ascribing particular momentary physical and temporal dimension to our ephemeral desires. Cyclically anticipating, subdividing, fulfilling, and engendering desires shipping container’s, like all containers, simultaneously connect and separate. They hold both objects and imagination as they combine distant locations, diverse objects and disseminated desires into a single system of measurable flows between discrete entities. They exclude other objects and other imaginations that do not conform to the protocols of containerization and digital organization, giving coherence to these “others” as such in order to legitimize the shipping container’s implicit imperatives for integration and claims of protection. The efficiently gridded and transient world of the shipping container has redefined the ability of individuals to cross borders, own property, and earn a living.

At its most basic, a shipping container is a digital-physical unit of capacity within the system of global trade.

This capacity has two components, to connect and to separate, which work in tandem to spatialize the ideolog y of global trade that posits itself as its own center. The shipping container’s persistence, its capacity to move unencumbered and relatively unscathed across great distances and for great periods of time, connects distant locations. However, in that connection it also reinscribes the structural separation of locations into the relationship symbolized by the terms “here” and “there.” The inequality embedded within the here/there relationship, in which desire and the means of fulfilling desire are displaced from one another, thus becomes the necessary justification perpetuating the connective action of global trade. Further, it defines an inside and an outside to the system of global trade, connecting those locales it touches and separating those it does not into a standing reserve for future expansion and exploitation by the container’s transformative connective capacity. This transformative capacity relies on the shipping container’s creation of a digital third space of separation and connection in addition to defining “here” and “there.” Standardized and regimented by the shipping container’s physical dimension but digitalized by its operation as a unit ability to interact with other containers, this third space abstracts spatial relationships into an abstract gridded matrix. Separating out each container as a discrete object on which it can operate, this relational matrix simultaneously connects them into a single representational space in which any container can be digitally and physically substituted for any other. In this digital-representational space each container is both always full and always empty, and space is treated as both object and non-object. When the container is empty of objects it is full of empty space as object. When it is full of objects it is empty of space as capacity. It is a space of pure capacity providing a means of measuring and predicting the physical operations of global trade as it fulfills and engenders flows of desire. What is measured is not the journey or contents of specific containers but the behavior of global trade as a whole; where there is capacity, where and when it is needed to preserve the delicate anticipatory logic of supply and demand.

ZIM San Francisco: Elizabeth, New Jersey, USA: A stevedore checks his smart-phone during container loading. Human and ship alike are part of a digital network connecting, monitoring, regimenting, and aligning the objects comprising global commerce. Flows of desire, disseminated across this system, create an invisible, self-perpetuating chain.

ZIM San Francisco: Northern Pacific Ocean, near the Aleutian Islands: The horizon disappears in fog off the starboard side of the ship. Digital instrumental navigation of the ship requires so little human intervention that limited visibility has is not a problem. However, the digital systems are reactionary, not predictive, and perform poorly in many situations.

RESEARCH: GLOBAL TRADE Excepts from There is no Horizon / There are only Horizons: Excerpts from Travel Journal, ZIM San Francisco, 7/5/2015 - 8/30/2015

How does an architect design around the labor of those producing their work? Where do building materials come from and how are they transported? How do other media transform the experience of architecture? Who are the people and the places that occupy the interstices of global architectural knowledge and practice? These questions are only possible because architectural practice today has expanded beyond the design of buildings and discrete public places traditionally considered the purview of the discipline. Empowered by the globalization of knowledge, resources, and relationships, architectural practice has claimed all forms of space, from the infinitely abstract architecture of systems to the minuscule concrete and quotidian regimentation of bodily functions, as its medium. In doing so architectural practice as spatial practice has exposed the unspoken and tacit anthropocene assumption of the field today: Not only is everything nature and in its naming as such, therefore also epistemologically man-made, but as both Charles Eames and Hans Hollein both said almost a half century ago, specifically “Alles ist Architektur.” The role of architects has thus also had to expand, alongside the definition of their medium and the architecturalizing of the entire planet into a system of human habitation, to encompass “everything.” Architects are now part artist, anthropologist, biologist, physicist, politician, psychologist, and systems theorist. Through these new roles, new questions have emerged that seek to challenge spatial practice’s existing assumptions and reconfiguring the tools that architects design into emergent relationships and systems of systems.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Completing this first hand research with the help of the GS Grant allowed me the freedom to challenge many of contemporary architectural practice’s inherent assumptions about the global space it is addressing. Most importantly, the experiences of the trip, particularly those which revealed the scale at which humans are manipulating or designing around “natural” systems, led to me to rethink the architectural practice as mediated feedback system in which man constructs the imagination and space of nature that is then reciprocally constructs and is occupied by man. This way of addressing architectural practice resulted in a great deal of writing both during my trip aboard the ZIM San Francisco and subsequent to my return, influencing submissions to a journal concerned with the architectural imagination of space, and a conference on the impact of digital media on cultural and ecological space. The trip itself provided additional information to continue the development of many of the ideas explored in my masters thesis as it confirmed and expanded upon many of the assumptions made therein.

A currently ongoing project is a series of drawings/mappings that explore the overlap of jurisdictions and identities influencing life aboard the ship. For example, how does a Sri Lankan crew member relate to the Israeli corporation which owns the ship and which is registered in Malta, and managed from Germany, while only sailing between America and China? The answer to this question is part of the answer to the questions posed to the entire field of architecture at the beginning of this report and which could be considered the beginning of a cognitive mapping of global trade in the style of those proposed by Nigel Thrift and Frederic Jameson.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------My re-imagination of global trade systems undertaken as part of the proposal process opened up the new my work to the questions centered on human engagement, both with the systems of digital-global trade and its representations outlined at the beginning of this report. As part of this re-imagination I had to develop an explanatory rhetoric of words and images for use by myself and others which could support ongoing work while remaining open enough to change as I learned more through the implementation of my proposal. The rhetoric I developed was one that mixed emotional, affective, and narrative elements of individual bodies and objects with concrete and statistical information of the digital-global systems they populate to build a rich framework which could accommodate multiple scales of detail. Mirroring the changes in architectural practice to incorporate human narratives, this rhetoric interpolates objects and bodies into its language, but as a means to construct an imagination of the world as architecture that is particularized and immanent rather than totalizing and transcendent.

ZIM San Francisco: Kingston, Jamaica: A break-bulk ship prepares to leave port. Around the world free-ports and other trade zones direct global trade. With relaxed laws, taxation, immigration and services catered to the powers they serve, these zones supplant traditional sovereignty with the trans-national sovereignty of capital.

ZIM San Francisco, Kingston, Jamaica: Containers await transport. The global trade system is built upon capacity.

The capacity to carry, and the capacity to anticipate. Predicting desires and mobilizing flows of materials to meet them requires massive stockpiles of unused containers and the coordination of consumer data with logistics.

RESEARCH: RANDOMNESS Border Conditions / Emergent Randomness / Chaos is God’s Body

Any appeal to randomness is fundamentally a repudiation of authorship in hopes of gaining some access to the truth of a particular data set. To that end, randomness is either used as a means to eliminate or, at least, diminish the influence of the author’s biases, or it is used in a generative manner as a means of overcoming the limitations of the author’s imagination in a particular situation.1 To that extent, randomness has the possibility to reveal deep structural patterns that might take a comparatively long time to arrive at otherwise.2 However, the attempt to diminish the influence of the author’s biases gives rise to the concern that the desire to hide the author’s hand is itself a bias. The patterns discovered via the use of randomness are themselves biased by the manner in which randomness was used by the author. Much like Karl Pearson’s admonition of earlier scientists for assuming their data conformed to normal curves,3 those wishing to challenge notions of authorship should not assume they have done so simply by using randomness. Likewise, in using randomness as a generative tool, the role of the author is not eliminated but simply displaced.4 In many such situations the author serves as external control by either choosing from the outcomes produced or by manipulating the rules of the generative process.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------In the field of architecture physical and material randomness are commonly seen as variables to be controlled. Wood is planed, walls plumbed, floors leveled. But this mindset has not always been dominant. Its ascendence can be tracked to the advent of increasingly precise means of standardization in production of materials and in the conventions and instruments governing their usage and application. The laser level has redefined the parameters for the physical embodiment of the abstract concept of “level.” In this regard Pollock is right in saying “the new requires new techniques. . . It seems to me the modern artist cannot express this age. . .”5 The precision which we desire is increasingly divorced from the physical reality of the object and can be digitally quantified in terms of file size and loss. What Pollock’s process and art show is that this distance has a physical pregnant with potential to reshape how we think about space. It forces us to consider the remainders and the indexically referenced, the paint that did not make it to the canvas, the stick with which the paint was flung. How much paint was required? Where do the wood shaving from the planed board go? Who is working in the gypsum mine to make this drywall? The questions raised by Pollock are not about the materials but our relationships to and through them, bringing our unconsciouses together.

1.

This is most often the case when the scale or scope of the variables being addressed are beyond the efficiently computational abilities of the human brain.

Kristina Shea, “Directed Randomness” in Digital Tectonics, Edited by Neil Leach, David Turnbull and Chris Williams.

Wiley-academy, Great Britain, 2004, 93, 100.

2.

Ibid., 93

3.

Deborah J. Bennett, Randomness, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1998, 124-125.

4.

Shea, 95.

5.

This statement is in response to a question regarding his method of painting.

Jackson Pollock, Radio Interview with William Wright. Published in Jackson Pollock, Interviews, Articles and Reviews. Edited by Pepe Karmel. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1999.

Geometric Randomness Generator: Iteration 1 Steps: A set of simple geometric rules controls the drawing of a line from an initial start point to a given border. As the line encounters the border it is reflected, the distance between the resulting endpoint and the initial start point is measured as a means to produce a semi-random number.

Geometric Randomness Generator: Iterations 1-66: Based on the unique seed value of each iteration radically different behaviors are produced in the course operation. Such results suggest that border relationships as defined have the potential to create emergent actions on a global scale from discrete and predictable actions on a local scale.

RESEARCH: DlGlTAL REPRESENTATlON Lines to Cross Lines: A Script for Discontinuous Borders

Projecting ahead to a place of refuge the border is moved step by step, Shifting, dematierializing.

Cut and directed by its visibility and topography the border becomes what it is: Imagined line, invisible except for its design of our movement and our imagination.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Architecture is one among many media, operating in and on an unseen and anticipatory void: Space Architecture organizes this space, leverages its capacity to hold in order to manipulate. to control without touching, to be present without being seen.

The unseen connects disparate moments in space and time.

Agreements, people, machines, objects; value is transmitted across and through trajectories, desires, and relationships entangling global, local together at once.

Architecture’s power lies in its ambiguity, the potential of the unseen; in what it conceals, what is reveals.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------To ask the question of whether utopian architecture seeks to overcome the mediating action of representation ignores the position of architecture itself as one among many media. Representation is the essence of architecture’s aesthetic and ethical dimensions. As with all media, it communicates, intentionally or not, as it serves as a physical “knowledge representation” of the social, economic, and other conditions of its creation. Buildings are the sketches playing out the potentials of the ontological commitments of a given regime in a given context.

Always working at a distance (even the hyper-phenomenological discourse of some cannot escape a reliance on a bodily or psychological hermeneutic), architecture constructs relationships between people, place, and objects through the values it represents in its physical instantiation. A border is a direct representation of the value of the land it divides, excludes, or contains as a function of the economic demand for protection/connection, and the treatment of a line as a structural element in a drawing is a direct representation of the value of materiality, both conceptually and monetarily. Speculative development, iconic formalism, and the entire theoretical turn in architectural discourse can thus be understood through the lens of architecture as a representational media as reifying latent and unconscious desires, though, admittedly with varying degrees of purity/fidelity.

Behaviorally Guided Lines: Iterations: 1-20: Using a simple set of behaviors, lines were drawn across a given topography as a means of analyzing characteristics that were otherwise not readily apparent. Over the course of each iteration the behaviors self refined creating strategies that prioritized specific values and unique anomalous solutions.

Behaviorally Guided Lines: Generational Aggregate The sum of the lines revealed unseen borders that multiplied, crossed, and made discontinuous the original border line from which they were drawn.

Clear patterns and flow emerged informing the hierarchy of solutions and suggesting new hybrids taking advantage of local behaviors.