AArchitecture 41

AArchitecture 41

Fenlandia

Issue 41 includes three conversation pieces. In doing so we hope to replicate the informal interactions that used to happen within the buildings of the aa that are so central to the development of every aarchitecture issue. We have deeply missed the constancy of the aa bar, itself an archive of experiences and dialogues glimpsed and overheard in passing. The distance we have had has spurred us to create conversations that may otherwise have never taken place.

This issue is the third and last in a series exploring the topic of collecting through the artist’s archive. We have looked at an object, an infrastructure and now we move to the scale of the landscape, represented through a collection of pixels. Our starting point, Susan Collins’ Fenlandia, is a body of work that challenges not only the representation of but also the notion of landscape itself. Each piece is made up of thousands of pixels each taken at a different second across 21.33 hours. The result is a constantly distorting landscape of pixels built up from left to right, then top to bottom. The stills reveal bands of light, black sections at night and the changing colours of the sky in day. The archive here is a survey of the fens; an apparatus divulging, transforming and constructing the complexity of the land.

The issue explores notions of accumulation, the accumulation of objects, words, time, pixels, material, fibres and dust. Perhaps this issue is the most personal account from the series, looking beyond the object into the narratives surrounding image-making today.

We explore the role of the individual, the archivist, the viewer, the account, the director, ‘the maker of edges’. Issue 41 reveals conflicting ideas on the role of time in relationship to placemaking. With that, an attempt to explore how current ways of representing the landscape affect architectural discourse. For example in Collins’ images the ‘architecture of the landscape’ and the ‘frame’ are the only constants. Time, light, weather and humans are in constant motion. The movement that runs across every inch of the frame leaves us to focus on what is made to be still.

AArchitecture is a magazine edited by students of the Architectural Association, published three times a year.

AArchitecture 41 Term 1, 2020– 21 www.aaschool.ac.uk

Student Editorial Team: Gabrielle Eglen, Amy Glover, Georgia HablÜtzel, Theo Sykes, Paul Vecsei

Editorial Board: Alex Lorente, Membership Ryan Dillon, AA Print Studio Design: Oliver Long, AA Print Studio

Printed by Blackmore, England Published by the Architectural Association 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES

Architectural Association (Inc) Registered Charity No 311083 Company limited by guarantee Registered in England No 171402 Registered office as above

© 2020 All rights reserved

An Interview with Susan Collins Amy Glover and Georgia HablĂźtzel

This interview took place on 3rd August 2020.

Fenlandia 1

For 12 months from May 2004, a webcam was placed on the roof of the Anchor Inn, a 17th century coaching inn in the heart of rural England, part of an area known as Silicon Fen overlooking the Great Ouse and the New Bedford River at Sutton Gault in Cambridgeshire, an area where technology is literally embedded in the flat horizons of a reclaimed landscape of canals, sluices, dykes and ditches.

The webcam was programmed to record images a pixel a second, so that a whole image would be made up of individual pixels collected over 21.33 hours. Each image was collected from top to bottom and left to right in horizontal bands continuously, like writing on a page.

The result was Fenlandia, a series of gradually unfolding, classically romantic landscape images harvested and archived over the course of a year.

The work was intended to be slow, encoding the landscape over time, with different tonal horizontal bands recording fluctuations in light and movement throughout the day and with broad bands of black depicting nighttime. Stray pixels appear in the image where a bird, person, car or other unidentifiable object may have passed in front of the webcam as the pixel was captured.

Time is intrinsic to the work as the previous 76800 seconds or 21.33 hours – just under a day – is displayed pixel by pixel, second by second within a continuously updating single frame. Poised between the still and the moving image, the lens and the pixel, Fenlandia explores how images can be coded and decoded using both light and time as building blocks for the work.

It seems to be recording now… Shall we start by explaining the series of issues that led to this one? We’ve been loosely looking at the artist’s archive on different scales from objects to infrastructure. Then we wanted to widen it even further to the scale of the landscape – and it was a really nice excuse to use your work as a starting point because we love it so much. It seems to be very accumulative on lots of levels. So it’s an archive – I don’t know what your thoughts are on this – but it’s an archive over many years but also each image in Fenlandia is an archive of moments of time isn’t it?

You’re absolutely right, it’s archiving the archive. But it’s interesting what you were saying about architecture as well because one of the things that I realised through making images over time is that it also records what’s permanent and what’s not permanent so that the architecture of the landscape is revealed. There are all the ephemeral things that come and go so you really get a sense of what’s permanently there, and what isn’t, and that we are the transients. Obviously, landscape and land masses change massively over eons, so it’s not perfectly permanent from that point of view. In terms of the archive, with Fenlandia and Glenlandia I deliberately set the cameras to record every two hours, as well as every time the image completed. So the Glenlandia archive represents two year’s worth of images. When I did Seascape I had five cameras in place for a year, I decided slightly insanely to record each image every five minutes, so I’ve got half a million images, most of which I’ve never even seen. When it comes to the landscape I think of it as harvesting my images to make these continuously accruing archives. But it’s true, each image is also an archive in itself.

AArchitecture 41 2

Are there ever any consistent rules or variables that run within the image or is it quite an intuitive accumulation of pixels?

It’s intuitive to some extent. One rule is that the camera shouldn’t move for the duration of the work. With the landscapes I think quite compositionally; foreground, middle, distance.

I quite deliberately have a tree at the left in both Fenlandia and Glenlandia. Having said that, I have to be quite opportunistic about where I’m allowed to put my camera so there’s always a slight trade-off between where I can perch a camera, get permission, internet connectivity, electricity and security for a year. With Fenlandia, somebody chopped the tree in the image down halfway through the year. I sit in my studio at home checking on my cameras, so I feel a real sense of ownership over the place that I’m looking at. I contacted the owner of the inn who had let me put my camera on their roof and he said, ‘oh yeah we chopped the tree down’. So after that all the Fenlandia images changed, and were treeless.

Then with the Seascape series, I was really looking for something that could give me very different compositions, more abstract, really playing with the idea of horizon. So I very deliberately framed the images without a foreground, middleground, or any artefacts. So there are some very distinct rules I set myself for each work. There’s a logic that leads me to where I want to go.

How do you select your sites through the whole course of that series?

A lot of it’s invitational actually. Previously, before this series, each work I made was completely different, distinct, I never repeated myself or I did my best not to. I had done a piece back in 1997 called In Conversation where I connected the public space of the internet and the public space of the street and I brought them together so that people on the internet could send messages to people in the street via a speaker. It was one of the earliest live streaming events, alongside newly streamed services from nasa and internet pornography.

Because of that, I was invited to do a show by Newlyn Art Gallery in 2002 in Cornwall where in Cornwall are you now Amy? I’m quite near Saltash. I was down in Lerryn, near Fowey and now I’m up in Saltash.

A slightly different area, but anyway, so Newlyn is on the south coast and you can see the lights of Penzance from the gallery. They invited me to do this show just as broadband was coming in and even though that’s where the cable was laid for the new high speed broadband, initially it was actually bypassing Cornwall itself. So at the time of the invitation the gallery was finally about to get broadband and they really wanted to do something that would connect them to the rest of the country and they invited me to respond to that situation. At the same time, Site Gallery in Sheffield were interested in doing something with me so proposed doing a two gallery solo show simultaneously. What came out of that was a piece called Transporting Skies where I pointed a little webcam at the sky and I swapped the sky [at each location] so that it was projected large and provided the light source for the alternate location. Both of the galleries also had second spaces and I wanted to do something that located the work somehow, however I had very little bandwidth left to work with. I wondered how I might transmit an image of each location to the other using the smallest means possible, pixel by pixel and if so, what that might look like. I worked with a programmer to develop simple software that could transmit a webcam image at the rate of a pixel a second, at a really low resolution, 320 by 240 pixels. [It would take] just under a day; 21.33 hours to complete! I had no idea what the images were going to look like until the day of the opening when it was launched. It was a revelation because I didn’t know you'd get these horizontal bands of fluctuating light. In the Newlyn image [there are] pixels where it’s possible a bird may have been passing, you're thinking it's a bird, but actually it could have been anything. You could see the lights of the lights of Penzance in the distance at night, and each image had a big band of black which captured the hours of nighttime.

Fenlandia 3

AArchitecture 39

4

Fenlandia, 21st December 2004

Fenlandia, 1st July 2004

Fenlandia, 29th March 2005

Fenlandia, 5th July 2004

Angel

5

Not long after this, Steven Bode, director of Film and Video Umbrella, who I've known for years, came over for tea. As he was leaving I said, ‘you know I'd really like to show you some of these images’ and he looked at them and was quite excited as he was developing a project called Silicon Fen, which was exploring the Fens and Cambridge in relation to both the landscape and the new media companies located there. He was looking to commission artists working with technology to do [work] around the Fens. So Fenlandia was commissioned as part of this wider Silicon Fen project. And that's how Fenlandia came about.

What do you think it is about the Fens, of course you were commissioned to make work there, but is there something about that landscape in particular that was really interesting?

What grabbed my imagination and why Steven immediately responded when he saw my images, was firstly because I'm an artist working with technology and landscape, but also because the Fens are a reclaimed landscape, a technology of an earlier age from the 1700s. So in a way technology is completely embedded in the landscape and it's also very flat, it's a very horizontal landscape and the way that I'm accumulating the images is horizontal. The image is a technological replication or technological understanding of what you're looking at and what you're looking at has technology embedded in it, so the whole thing is completely interlinked, form and content.

A year after Fenlandia was launched, in 2005, the new Perth Concert Hall in Scotland opened and as one of the opening commissions I was invited by Iliyana Nedkova the curator there to do a piece based on Fenlandia [which I very imaginatively called it Glenlandia].

I went up to Scotland looking for locations and Iliyana told me about this loch, Loch Faskally, that looks like a quintessentially natural loch but is actually man-made. It is made by the Pitlochry Dam which generates power for the region, and the water levels of the loch rise and fall depending on the demand for power in the area. You're looking at something that looks like a quintessentially natural landscape, but technology is not only embedded into it (in the way that it was with Fenlandia) but also what you're looking at completely relates to the use of electricity in the surrounding glens. The day after I'd installed Glenlandia, I went to look at the images from the previous 24 hours and I saw this white streak through the sky and at first I thought it was a comet! And then I realised it was the moon. You're seeing what you know, but you're seeing it depicted in another kind of way. It changes your understanding, or maybe it just helps you understand a little bit more; the implications of the planet moving, it moving around us or us moving around it.

Amy and I have been looking at the English territory and the privatisation of land. We're always referencing artists in our research and we are wondering where you place the importance in challenging representations of landscape today?

I don't know if you've seen the images I did in Jerusalem? I was invited to do something in a gallery in Tel Aviv and I think they would have been happy for me to do a Seascape. As a (non practicing) British Jew I have a diasporic relationship with Israel and it's complicated. So I approached it as an opportunity to explore my own thoughts around how I feel about the territorial situation there. But, who am I to do this?... I'm diasporic, not from the region, but I am an artist who points a camera and looks at things. I knew the view I wanted [from previous visits with the curator Vered Zafran Gani], which was looking out from Mount Scopus over the West Bank towards the mountains of Jordan. Bezalel Art Academy which is located on Mount Scopus gave permission to install a camera on their rooftop from where you can see the Mount of Olives, Palestinian villages, the separation wall and a new road that leads to one of the contested settlements. You're framing all of these things within a single image which appears as quite a beautiful, timeless composition, however if I talk to people I can decode the image for them, I can describe roughly what’s there, what they are looking at.

The way I talk and think about it is – and it's probably naive – that I'm unifying the territory

AArchitecture 41 6

within a single image. We might as humans contest the territory all we like, but that thing that I mentioned at the beginning, the architecture of the landscape, is what endures.

Because of the way I collect my images over time, things might slightly interrupt the image, but they really don't change the shape of the image. The light changes it more than anything, the time changes [it] more than anything. We are custodians or guardians, this land doesn't really belong to any of us. I called this piece LAND. Thinking back to this idea of the architecture of the landscape... it makes me imagine what it would be like if you made an image over thousands and thousands of years. What would then become the permanent thing? If those architectures start to change, then suddenly it would revert back to the light being the more permanent thing.

The light would be there, it's a permanent thing. We think of light being light but of course light itself is about time, so time becomes the absolute bottom line. I do change the durations of [the images]. So each time I do a piece I try and think of an appropriate timeframe for that work and then I stick to it.

What is your relationship to site? Is the site the image you construct, or is it the material thing that you place that camera within?

I definitely respond to place. I have an idea of what I think I'm looking for but then I really respond to what I get. For example, for Seascape, I knew that I wanted to do something with the sea but that didn't have artefacts interfering or interrupting the images. What happened was – do you know the De La Warr Pavilion?

Yeah.

In 2008 I was invited, through Steven Bode, to go down to the De La Warr Pavilion. I'd not been there before, and I just knew immediately what I wanted to do; I wanted five cameras.

I wanted them spread across the South-East Coast and I wanted to show the five live feeds projected against the actual, real Seascape of the De La Warr Pavilion setting itself. If you we're a certain height you could actually line up the horizons in all of the projected images with the actual horizon behind. [The gallery] put gel on all of the windows so that they could ‘stop down’ the light in the space so that we were able to project and see out at the same time. It's partly the specifics of place in terms of that place, but it's also the concept of the architectural space and what that space allows for. Actually this does connect with my earlier interactive works; I create a circumstance, a framework or an architecture that has a set of parameters or variables and then I press play and I don't know what's going to happen. What I do is I control the edges of that. I construct the circumstances for the work to play out and what I really want is to be surprised. I'm currently working on installing a new camera work in the water itself [in Greece], I'm hoping to be able to direct the camera placement remotely via facetime. In my head I'm thinking, oh yes, I'm going to have the camera located at the halfway height of the tide so it'll be fluctuating between being above water or completely underwater. I am imagining I might be lucky sometimes to get a bit of both in an image. It would have been much easier for me to put a camera in the window [of the gallery overlooking the sea], and it would have just taken a beautiful new Seascape image. But that wasn't very challenging for me. I need to push the work and do something I haven't done before, and to make the most of an opportunity and its location. I ask myself what's the context that this is going to be seen in? What's the context of the place itself? A number of years ago I made a work for Harewood House, a stately home just outside Leeds. The grounds there are all designed by Capability Brown, so that's a very different kind of constructed landscape. What is interesting about Harewood is that the gardens took their inspiration from paintings... so I tried to frame the image in as classical a way as I could - art imitates life imitates art, imitates life.

Fenlandia 7

Are your cameras all placed on private land?

No! It's anything from private houses to beach cafes to publicly owned buildings, it doesn't hurt to ask, I have got quite good at asking.

Do you think everything is inherently political? I was just thinking whether you believe your work is political in today's conversation on landscape, environments, climate change, borders and walls... which I think your work does constantly talk about, maybe through its representation at first, but also through the conversations and the relationships you've formed to get these images.

I'm personally political and I would love for the work to be, but, in a way, it is what it is.

All I'm doing is pointing a camera and then recording images over time. If I can find a way for it to be useful in some way for any of those conversations I would welcome it, however I haven't forced it. I certainly don't think it's a-political but I don't think I've been clever enough to make it properly political or eco political. I can feel slightly fraudulent when included in shows looking at landscape ecology, because in terms of planning the work, that hasn’t necessarily been the aim. I do think however that there is a complete relationship between artwork that is observational and certain kinds of science that are observational.

What struck me the most when I went [to Jerusalem] was the proximity to the most contested and celebrated sites all in a single frame. That idea of measure and distance which you get from your images despite the disruption or the way that light alters the resolution means there is still a relationship between you and that view.

What interested me with the Jerusalem image actually was how Biblical it looked, how timeless it looked. I understand from friends that it's an Arabic village because of the colour of the water towers (black). There are specific clues in the images that if you know how to decode them you will. Because of the pixelated nature of it, you don't get that level of detail to the naked eye. For me that image is so loaded, on the one hand it just looks like a lovely Biblical, innocent image, and then the moment you start decoding it, it's all in there! I'm very aware that I feel very strongly about it. I don't believe in putting up walls. I believe in dialogue. I believe in engagement, I don't really believe in closing down dialogue or shutting things off at all. I think it's really important to just keep all of those channels of communication open and open borders and everything and I am, like many others, devastated about what's happened here.

AArchitecture 41 8

Scrolls of Elapsum: Coincidences of journey, astronomy and pixeltopography in Susan Collins’ -landia series Doreen Bernath

Fenlandia 15th February 2005

Fenlandia 9

A step at a time; a pixel at a time; a pixel at a step, accumulating and agglomerating along furrows of the plasma screen. The site of each pixel seeds a live moment a second long; the seeded past is the germinating pixel to the left and the next pixel to the right, as a relic of a second-long past will be sowed with the future. Images along images, within images, of images, yielding a relentless loop of constituents appearing, erasing and renewing, infinitely permutating into a never-the-same totality.

Digital photography here departs from the immediate yet incidental force of punctum in traditional photography proclaimed by Roland Barthes. It enters a new category of elapsum.

Surveying, coding, feeding, delaying and lapsing, the parallax between systems of vision - webcams, recorder and encoder, wireless transmission, live screens, timed archiver - dissolves the ideal, immortal and transcendental status of landscape into the plural and distracted realm of partial, technically-augmented experience. The elapsum further torments the permanence of the image with the time-lapsed programme of incomplete captures and the impatient wait for the next moment. The pixels on the plasma screen, as steps in a new digital landscape and the material of recursive viewing experiences, are sequenced to produce elapsum. For Fenlandia (2004– 06) and Glenlandia (2005–07), Susan Collins' sowing of pixels in a chronometrically elapsing structure across a new substrate of transmission and display has ruptured the pictoriality of the 'landscape' in the digital age.

The pixel has begun to acquire an alternative significance of its own, long misunderstood as the digital counterpart of silver grains on photographic papers, which Diane Arbus describes as ‘a kind of tapestry of all these little dots and everything would be translated into this medium of dots… skin would be the same as water would be the same as sky’. Roy Ascott suggests a way of seeing the pixel as constituents of a life ‘of a permeable data field… in an implicit world that evolves within the flow of hypermedia - layered, relational and constantly shifting in content and context, depending on the behaviour and consciousness of the viewer.’ The pixel is unleashed in ‘the scene of hypermediated transactions’ as the exuberant virtual interface of Ascott’s work.

Susan Collins reinstated the physical dimension of pixels at work, by giving each of them a concrete duration and the reference to an actual landscape that is ‘live’ and ‘lived’ a pixel at a time.

Certain stills, like archaeological specimens, have been kept during this continuously looped cultivation of a scene. Like archaeological digs where each slice of unearthed plane contains anachronistic uncertainties, the digitally aggregated plane of a 'still' came about as a slice of space that contains several times: precisely every second for two hours and thirty-five minutes, or every second for twelve hours, or every second for twenty-one hours and twenty minutes.

May/June 2004 in Fenlandia, two figures appeared, serendipitously overcoming the fact that each pixel is suggesting their presence is of a different time.

An effect of elapsum is felt. Did they really stay still or could it be one person becoming two images on screen, a relocation or an apparition, a glitch of bodies or a glitch of technology? July/August 2004 again in Fenlandia, a van appeared with its doors opened, but no recognisable figures. Another duration of lapsed, partial captures to produce the effect of an elapsum. The seemingly unoccupied open van appears like a prop on stage, awaiting characters and plots to give it a purpose; or instead, it belongs in the new tapestry of a lapsed and recursive vision, as part of the order of the pixels marching disinterestedly across the surface of display.

May 2006 in Glenlandia, smears of a bright moon appeared across two nights. Astronomical, visual and pixel-chronological events intersected at least five times in the dark patch of the harvested picture. There are many moons in this landscape, and the instrumental precision of the technical setup carries the illusion of an image of incidental truth, rather than a manipulated illusion. The elapsum achieves what was part of the scientific dream of creating a cosmic cartography; a measurable sky of constellations with coordinates governed by the subdivision of space through time. Rather than a Cartesian logic, the coordinates of elapsum of several moons in Glenlandia relies on chance crossings between several different time-axes – camera at work in time, moon trajectory in time, pixel updating in time and viewing moments in time – as the basis of a multiplicity of event coordinates in the unfolding visual grid, released from the construed space-time on

AArchitecture 41 10

stage to the uncertainty of everyday life. Roy Ascott attributes this new contingency of the direct involvement of viewers in relation to the evolving work as a leap of empowerment, as ‘she becomes a manipulator of that image, as the one in whose hands the destiny of the image may lie.’ How many viewers happened to have witnessed the live transmission of five or more moons in a temporary totality of a landscape image? And would that, without the forged, retrospective ‘still’ of an untrue totality, be the fleeting truth of view at the age of atomised, dispersed, scrambled and spliced media?

As if Étienne-Jules Marey's array of precision chronophotographic machines have been left to record random, coincidental activities before, beside or after the staged event of moving bodies, pixels acquire the role of atomised cameras, all 76,800 of them, embedded in the information transmission grid. Each loyally contributes the serial nature of digitised data.

The set duration of one second per pixel acts as a scale of a unit of lived experience. The march of pixels across the screen oscillating between live (moving image) and dead (still image) – shifts of one live cell passing 75,799 dead cells – intertwines as much with the science of the grid of optic nerves at the back of the retina as the rambling bodies across the topographic grid of surveyed land.

Chronophotography has turned into pixeltopography. The mathematical register of energy force and moment differentials recorded by the pixelated series shape the resulting ‘image’ in the awaiting eyes and mind and 'form' in the relative spatial definitions and positioning of frames, movements, transmissions and views. Thus the screen turns literally into a scroll of time that loops back onto itself in the relay of a landscape as both alive moment synchronous with an experience in time, and a post-rationalised aggregate that attempts to approximate eternal nature. Precisely because pixels are neither merely parcels of visual information on a spatial display coordinates (chemically or digitally), nor merely programmed visual codes according to timing of transmission, they become substantial and forceful in the construction of a contemporary ontology of landscape. This resonates with the impulse of Deleuze, more than what has been probed through his two Cinema episodes, and his obsession with Leibniz’s proposition of continuity

achieved in the flow and variation of folds or bending movements, which are manifestations of the flow and variation of forces. Deleuze writes: ‘That is what Leibniz explains in an extraordinary piece of writing... a continuous labyrinth is not a line dissolving into independent points, as flowing sand might dissolve into grains, but resembles a sheet of paper divided into infinite folds or separated into bending movements, each one determined by the consistent or conspiring surroundings.’

This is what one witnesses at every blink of each pixel in turn on the plasma screen, a singularity of unexpected live experience intertwined with the universality of mundane scenes retrospectively stitched together. The work of each pixel transcends the material change of its own site to affect the significance of the entire image, lapsing the present with a modified past and an imminent future. Each pixel topples the equilibrium a second ago to modify the existing. Precariously alive rather than safely dead, the landscape and pixels that shape it can never again be a ‘still’.

Pixels are signals of change, of forces, of differences, the tipping over of excess and the replenishing of the lack. Pixels flow and leave behind material traces, asserting themselves as ‘monads’ of contemporary culture. ‘Each different, each a percipient of the universe around it, and each mirroring that universe from its own point of view’. As we plough along the monadic transformations on the new terrain of pixel-topography, one is not far off to imagine a mythical and substantial correlation, through these scrolls of elapsum, of sky, water, journeys, bodies and moonshine lapsed and sedimented, metamorphosing into a new, coincidental and universal lapse-scape of contemporary culture.

Fenlandia 11

Where Rivers Used to Run

Icescape beneath textile covering

Yufei He and James Horkulak

Today, several direct measures are being employed to minimise snowmelt: watering, snowmaking, wind or albedo management.

During the last few summers, Rhône Glacier – one of the oldest Alpine glaciers – has been covered with white polyester fleece. Interestingly, the covering serves an additional purpose: for almost 200 years the Carlen family has run an ice grotto within the glacier – a touristic and controversial endeavour – which is now being threatened by climate change. This clash of catastrophe, conservation, greed and beauty creates an obscene landscape that fascinates us. Every summer, the necessary surface area of the covering increases. It has now reached the size of several football fields.

Rhône Glacier is part of where rivers used to run – an ongoing research project in which hydrological transformations within several European landscapes are being investigated spatially.

AArchitecture 41 12

Fenlandia

13

Still from a point-cloud animation illustrating the geological transformations of RhĂ´ne Glacier over 1000 years.

Domestic Geology

Domestic Geology view

Susannah Bolton

AArchitecture 41 14

R e f r a c t e d looping Undulations afoot And holding it all down, I glitter above the broken Shreddies Cold that draws the comfort from my hand is Ungainly Slllumping it out Dragging dust crumbs and hair, a shrivelled pea becomes a geological erratic Hanging the duvet dropped the once-green boulder almost silently downstairs They said it would be up to seven working days for a new filter part. In the meantime, strata were laid: unwatched cornflakes pushed methodically into the carpet, gusts of loom dust hesitated Wavering over the weight of physics.

The luminescence held within quartz tells when the mineral last saw daylight. Defects within the crystal structure trap electrons: which Vax nozzle is best to suck these β particles out? ‘Static electricity, even the interactions of one atom with another can overpower the call of gravity.’

Space is very dusty. Vacuuming the vacuum, I’ve got a labelled bag waiting.

Fenlandia 15

AArchitecture 41

16

Core Sample install

Fenlandia 17

BRAWuN LAWuN

AArchitecture 41 18

I am very familiar with the Fens, a region of England that like the Essex marshes is historically regarded as a disease ridden place haunted by Will o the Wisps, rife with superstition and witches wandering through the marshes and darkened fields. My love affair with this place began during ww2, my grandfather built some of the 50 airfields in the fens. He used to take me as a boy in his black Humber Super Snipe on site visits. We sped from Nottingham at 70mph over moonlit deserted flatness, too fast for the witches. We would stop at remote farms, he would be given gifts of Brawn

or Lincolnshire Haslet, I would be sent to a barn to collect eggs, maybe a chicken or some chicks. Early off grid dealings. Today the Fens still remain haunted, other ghosts, the remains of these airfields, shadows of runways, ruins of control towers and the machines of death that they housed. Many people who tended and serviced the ww2 machines of the Fens were the same nationality of those now tending and servicing the robot farming equipment that inhabit the present industrialised landscape. They now receive a very different welcome.

Fenlandia 19

The Accursed Share Charles Pigott

The architect should be flattered by philately; a genuine accumulation of both history and currency that has enabled the function of architecture; album, archive; the letter box; that which can preserve the integrity of a nation, whether your own, or foreign! A much maligned art in the measurement of perforations, traffic lights, watermarks and phosphors, in the search for the error that makes it unique, and by default, of value. The facilitation of lip service, but more specifically the tongue, to the mount that saves its place on the page. The definitive or the commemorative; the mint or the used; and the job lot.

Memory is a device that illuminates the precision of time and through the course of the letter, stories unfold; like architecture, storeys unfold. Post Office is aligned with Postmodernism, both require the ideology of the envelope to deliver their message, addressed to everyone that pays attention. A stamp collection is an accumulation; an accursed share; a perpetual archive of imagery and ink that draws attention to the misplaced events of our epoch; that wages the notion of an economy with an economy of means; a minimalism of architecture by scale and its dexterity manipulated with tweezers; a crafty collection of memories whose art appears to be vanishing; corrupted by the collagist and the frank.

AArchitecture 41 20

Fenlandia 21

A Period of Landscape Julian Opie

AArchitecture 41 22

Below Overleaf All

Julian Opie. Grazing sheep 1. 2017.

Julian Opie. Ocean gulls. 2018.

Continuous computer animation on LCD screen. Edition of 4 with 1 artist proof.

Fenlandia 23

AArchitecture 41 24

Fenlandia 25

AArchitecture 41 26

Below

Julian Opie. Pig farm. 2017.

Fenlandia 27

Interview with Elsewhere (John Ng)

AA Facade, Sketch

Theodora Giovanizzi

AArchitecture 41 28

tg: One could say that Elsewhere is a carefully crafted landscape of ideas and pragmatic, often wild, practices that push the boundaries of the expected and never let you down. Which to begin with, brings me to your latest project, the aa World, the three large tableaux hanging from the facade of the aa in Bedford Square. Where did the idea of an orthographic elevation come from, as landscape drawings usually tend to be depicted in plan or perspective?

common is that there is no clear start or end to the creative process: every stage is approached with equal forms of intricate creativity, diligent organisation, delicacy and some love, always. One of the key references for the aa World is the Garden of Earthly Delights, where Bosch scattered many ambiguous details that reveal the most intricate and unexpected meanings. What hidden meanings are there within your tryptic? Does it have any concealed message that you would like to reveal?

AA WORLD jn: Initially, the project was simply called aa Facade We just knew that there was an idea for a facade project for graduating students. You’re right, landscape is normally represented as a plan in architecture, but we were looking at numerous examples of landscapes from history, for example the different ‘elevations of the world’ like the one of the Veduta di Villa D’Este which shows a combination of different types of projection, but also the drawings of Alexander von Humboldt, at a time when natural scientists were trying to mix different parts of the world together to show how different species exist at specific altitudes. Another reference was Chinese landscape paintings which are always shown as an elevation. There is one example with all these stamps of different scholars, showing that it is not the work of one, but many that contributed to this painting. In a very pragmatic sense, we wanted to show the graduating students in portrait rather than in a plan view [laughs]. This is why it became an elevation of multiple landscapes coming together on a single projection plane. One of the questions was: if you were to face the aa as an elevation, what would you see? We drew a line circling the entire world, starting from the aa. As you are facing it, you are also facing Hooke Park, the Amazon River Delta on the other side of the Atlantic, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, China and all the way across. tg: It is interesting that you mention the Chinese landscape painting with the stamps by different scholars, because it reminds me of your sketch, where you divided up the tryptic into 56 separate modules; it can only be achieved as a collective. jn: You know, when the brief came, we knew that because of the time constraints, it was going to be 20% drawing and 80% logistics. I treated the whole process as an architectural project. tg: One thing that all of your projects have in

jn: The Garden of Earthly Delights was always an important reference from my tutors in Diploma 5 throughout my student days, as a hyper surreal world of landscapes. In terms of hidden meanings, I kind of don’t want to say it because there are [laughs], but the minute I say it, it will ruin the fun. There are strange things in the drawing open for interpretation: the moon on the right-hand side is not circular but egg-shaped, the clouds are not what you would expect a cloud to look like, the flowers in the foreground are wildflowers from Hooke Park. When you look a bit closer, there are small arrows blown across the landscape that reveal the wind direction. I will leave it to people to read whatever they want. What I love is that it was completely out of my control, I wrote it as the last brief to the graduating students ‘how do you portray yourself as a graduate student? What do you want to say about your Unit?’

There are hidden meanings to me. But there shouldn’t be one single message.

AA ZODIAC tg: Could you talk about how you are revealing the unseen within this project: one can spot the aa Zodiac within the aa World, another fantastic piece published in aa Files 76 describing twelve possible future virtues for architects. Within this map of the sky which reveals the cosmic unseen, how was that astrological landscape exposed and composed? jn: The aa Zodiac came about after talks with Maria Giudici, who I absolutely adore and respect. For aa Files we started talking about how in pop-magazines there is always a horoscope at the end. So it seemed fitting with the letter ‘Z’ at the end of the publication.

When I was looking at how we could construct a new set of zodiac constellations, I thought, perhaps there’s an opportunity for a new constellation guided by recent technological advancement. Are there stars that have been discovered that we can use as a base? I came across this project by nasa, the Fermi Space Telescope, which was mapping out gamma ray sources

Fenlandia 29

around the universe such as black holes, pulsars, neutron stars and invisible celestial bodies of course. nasa being nasa, they created the geekiest website for the gamma ray sources and imagined a new set of the zodiac based on ‘contemporary references’. We forget that these zodiacs were based on once popular culture.

For the aa Zodiac we spent some time trying to construct a 3d model in Rhino which, in just a few kilobytes, became a model of the entire universe, of the visible constellations, mapping it with the invisible ones. Once we had this, I spent some time trying to see if there were any interesting patterns of constellations on the specific night when the aa Files was launched. I wanted new constellations that were not fixed archetypes but could constantly become something else. Some are specifically referring to the aa, while some others talk about emerging tendencies within the school. Others address wider issues in the world at the moment. I was trying to identify some meaningful pointers of what kind of architects we can become, and at the same time it becomes a snapshot of that moment, of what forms of popular culture are present within the world.

F L O W E R I N G D E S E R T ( 5 7 3) tg: One of your projects that tries to take the desert to its extreme, Flowering Desert in Masdar, was submitted as a competition entry. The intricacy of the flowering desert makes it ‘impossible to perceive [in] its scale and its quantity of elements’, yet it manages to delicately contain the features of the desert of Masdar and all its characteristics. How does the accumulation of elements play in the creation of this scale-less yet contained landscape?

H O O K E PA R K tg: In the Hooke Park Wakeford Hall project, you ask: ‘What if the landscape is the library and the library is a model of the landscape?’ The added element of time becomes a design tool allowing for an ever-changing spatial form and experience. How do you combine the unexpected with the more pragmatic side of an architectural project?

AA World

jn: In this project, in Abu Dhabi, the desert has a very unique landscape. One cannot understand scale in the desert, you can only experience it. It is a landscape

generated by wind blowing on vast amounts of small elements giving it its distinctive form as a series of dunes. So, how can you recreate this scaleless-ness while having an architectural space that has a specific size? The other interest I had was for Land Art or Earth Work from the 60s in America. Work such as Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field and Heizer’s Double Negative which wanted people to understand the vastness of the energy and to allow at least one whole day to experience it fully. It cannot be captured in a static form. If you look at Masdar from a satellite image, it is still very much a desert. I introduced this massive void cut into the desert itself, in the form of an inverted fortress found in the Emirates, and within it a landscape of desert flowers found in this landscape. The competition brief was to create a landscape that produced energy. I introduced these micro solar cells, distinct enough that you understand that the space is made out of elements, but there are so many that you cannot understand the full extent of the space. When you have so many elements the spatial qualities, colours, light are subjected to the slightest change of the external environments. Which is why a lot of my work is an accumulation of such a vast amount of varying elements. The pure, dynamic experience is the sole purpose. It is useless in a sense, but it is introduced to somehow remove the commodity space itself and to give back to the experience of it.

AArchitecture 41 30

Masdar, Plan

jn: I think that the way time was used in that project is a very Modernist one. It came from Sigfried Gideon, when he discusses time in relation to experiences and subjectivity; how can this be used as a design process?

I guess that it is more of a Modernist way of using time and landscape.

FUTURE tg: My last question is about the slogan of Elsewhere, which says ‘kiss the future!’ John, what is your advice for us students? How can we kiss the future? jn: I always feel that, whenever the aa asks me to do something, it brings out the most corny, sentimental side of me [laughs]. And when the competition came through, it was a very unique brief: of course it came out as a classic schedule of space requirements, namely toilets, library and a lecture hall. My first thought was that I really wanted the project to work with the academic cycle of the Design+Make program.

One of the things I love about Hooke Park is the material experimentation. So I took the most banal element of the brief, the requirement for toilets, and asked: how can you, as a student, each year come up with a different way to construct a toilet? So what the project provides is the basic infrastructure, and then students can construct in between and use it as a testing ground for materials and techniques. Then for the library, the question was: can a model become so large that, because of the scale, it becomes inhabitable? The proposed library is a 1:200 model of the entire Hooke Park estate, a landscape within the landscape that becomes a record and archive of the forest and of the work, the entire Hooke Park is a library itself. Then the final one is the lecture hall.

At the time, the description of the Design and Make program said that it is not just a place to test out technology and processes, but also to learn and to test ideas about landscapes, which I find fascinating. So the lecture theatre asked: how can we design it whereby it does not require us to cut any tree down?

The building is a living topiary that grows slowly. We are so used to the idea that a project will last a certain amount of time, but we forget that our work spans lifetimes. A project and a landscape goes on existing without the presence of the designer. The Hooke Park project allows it to be subjected to natural processes. tg: I think that nowadays, it’s necessary to shift our understanding towards not only designing for very stable conditions, but also expanding the purpose of design, considering longer time spans and moments of instability.

jn: Kiss the future came from this vintage blazer, written on a detachable Velcro that I got from eBay from the 80s collection of Walter van Beirendonck. At that time, the future was thought of as heroic. The world seems very dark at the moment. But it has always been dark. Perversely, the good thing is that we are more aware of it than ever before, that’s why it looks extra dark. As an educator, I’m incredibly hopeful for the future. I can see the urgency and pressure on the current generation of students. They are eager to do something about it. In the face of all the crises and injustices in the world, there is a need for seismic shifts in the way we do things. But, for the students, I believe that big changes can come from the accumulation of very small simple acts of kindness and the accumulation and mastering of knowledge in the world, of its diversity, to never settle on just one ‘right’ view, to see the diverse ways of understanding things and creating things. Agnes Martin talked about how ‘From music people accept pure emotion, but from art they demand explanation’. This is also true for architecture. Beauty and joy are not at all a superficial thing. In fact, this is one of the hardest things to try to achieve in any project. Beauty and joy can elevate us as humans, it’s difficult to capture in words, or any kind of intellectual argument. But beauty can be intelligent. It can be expressed in space and does not need any words. So, I hope students don’t shy away from beauty in their work just because it is not something that can be easily explained or argued for in words. Remember that ultimately what we do is rarely for ourselves, it is always for others.

Beauty in space has an incredible power to lift us.

Fenlandia 31

Land Reclamation Fabian Tobias Reiner

Hugh Venables, Fenland by Old West River, 2010

Group shows such as Silicon Fen, which Susan Collins’ piece Fenlandia was a part of, and the engagement with the Fens as a site of present interest meet one prerequisite: land reclamation. By definition this refers to a landfill – an infilling or draining – that allows disturbed soil to be used physically for further productive interventions. However, land can be reclaimed by a multitude of strategies and sensories. This is evident in relation to the Fenland as a seedbed for new technology. 1

AArchitecture 41 32

Bill Boaden, Fenland farmland near Ely, 2019

Before productivity has manifested itself, landscape can be characterised as ‘the Other’. It appears as something outside oneself, an endless horizon of sublime quality. Providing spatial, aesthetic and mental greatness, vast landscapes always triggered the human’s desire for conquest. The land as ‘the Other’ emerges as the horizon onto which the individual is projecting certain ideals. This projection enables an emotional relationship to a physical reality that pulls the spectator into the foreground. It renders a connection between here and there, background and foreground, Other and Self.2

Angel 33

Jeff Wall, The Crooked Path, 1991

Witnessing this effect, the possibility of an intimate relationship to a continuous territory crystallises. The territory frames the opposed elements of here and there and allows the culmination of a spatial continuum in a singular place. This phenomena points to what the French philosopher Jean-François Chevrier coins Territorial Intimacy.3 By mediating between inside and outside oneself, it unites the emotional ability of feeling intimate with the immediate physical environment of the territory – independent of place and size.

AArchitecture 40 34

1 1fvu.co.uk/projects/fenlandia 2 Already Hegel, in the 18th century, understood the existence of ‘the Other’ in mutual dependence with the concept of ‘the Self ’.

3 Jean-François Chevrier, Territorial Intimacy and the Public Space, 2016. This concept describes the crucial moment of the individuated body in relationship to Territory 4 Salutary is used in its concurrent meaning of being instructive and healing (therefore welcomed).

Andreas Gursky, Meerbusch, Krefeld, 1989

Encountering ever more photographic documentation about these crucial processes, one wonders if these interventions can cope with the intimate relationship humans establish with their immediate surroundings. Photographs by Jeff Wall, The Crooked Path, and Andreas Gursky, Meerbusch, Krefeld, appear salutary. The artists reveal a photographic understanding of Land and Territory, which undermines, through technology, that land reclamation is a sentimental endeavor.4 Their photographs depict the territory in light of the intimate. Their imagery acknowledges the emotional within the factual and captures the sensitive through the technological.

Fenlandia 35

Après le déluge Jeanne Clerc

‘How do we occupy a land if it is this land itself that is occupying us, fighting back?’ – Bruno Latour.

A shift in mentality is necessary from occupation to cohabitation.

Current flood defence strategies only divert flood water away from valuable cities.

AArchitecture 41 36

Inhabitants of floodplains are the UK’s first climate refugees.

If we are to continue inhabiting these landscapes, the adaptation of infrastructure is crucial.

New infrastructure such as raised electrical access boxes could be new floodplain landmarks.

Natural flood management is a compromise between anthropocentric occupation and the natural course of water.

Fenlandia 37

Restoring marshlands and planting endemic species slows down erosion.

Dis-entombing urban areas facilitates drainage and supports biodiversity.

Floodwaters offer opportunities for a new form of agriculture, growing plants such as water reeds which can be used to thatch roofs and insulate buildings.

Local communities need to adapt domestic practices like gardening.

AArchitecture 41 38

Interview with Theodore Spyropoulos and John Palmesino Paul Vescei, Gabrielle Eglen and Theo Sykes

ts: The pixel refers to a resolution space; the context a foil for the construction of the image. It is so much a part of our everyday engagement that the apparatus or the way that time somehow either negated or somehow constructed the narrative of what we were actually seeing started to become almost paradoxical, and therefore, interesting.

Someone like Carlo Rovelli, who’s a quantum physicist, would say there’s no such notion of time as a singularity here, there’s no such thing as future, so the image gives us a probability that it is a landscape.

This interview took place on 28th July 2020.

jp: On many levels, these are works that lie right in the centre of the archival tradition of photography.

There is a clear relationship between the capacity of the mechanical or the digital apparatus to capture an event as a unique event, and that makes the possibility of the photograph as an indisputable fact of the existence of this landscape. This is really the fundamental condition of the archive, that there is a unique element, a unique correlation. This is really put at stake in the discussion about the relationship between present and future in the particular

Fenlandia 39

conservation of memory. It’s the appearance of a statement to use Foucault’s notions of the archive.

In this work, the conditions of recording time are not only embedded in the idea of a putative fact of the event that is recorded, but it raises more questions about the construct. ts: The conceptual apparatus is a construction in constant reconstruction. The landscape is quite fixed but the sampling is dynamic, in accessing this pixel space. There’s a nuanced idea of how time is understood, one example is Schopenhauer’s idea that we only understand time through difference. If an image maintains its fixity in the way that we see it, we do not recognise time in the same way that we see it when something in the scene changes.

When I came to study at the Architectural Association in the late nineties there was discussion around the digital. There was a position that the digital image was pure continuity and seamlessness (examples in the Manimal used by Caroline Bos and Ben van Berkel). The digital image is the structure of pixel matrix of discreteness; it is information that can be sampled and repurposed for many different things.

element is synchronicity. The entire discussion about architecture being a presupposition of a possible future is put in question the moment that you have a piece of work like this one.

I’m really interested in understanding how we can operate without having to always revert between the image and the text. I think that the centrality of images is becoming more and more important in architecture, it has been derided with the blasé idea that images are actually something superficial because what counts is continuity, presence and framing.

Attached to that is a sort of caricaturisation of the entire aesthetics of architecture which I think we need to be critical of. I think that a lot of the discussions recently have reverted to considering architectural representation on the same trajectory as social realism, where the direct relationship between what you see and what you think is represented is then somehow subjugating all other possibilities of ambiguity and abstraction. There are far more interesting relationships between images and what is supposed to be external to the images, the transvisual, that should be thought of in a far more complex, dynamic and articulated way.

jp: There was an alignment of preoccupations and efforts then, which is now becoming weaker; this attention to three elements of the image that were put into question by the appearance of digital technologies. The first one is the idea of the frame, what we’re discussing in classical images is always the relationship between the frame and what is outside the frame or between the image and the text. The particular ungraspable condition of the image, in relation to the presence of both the design process and the construction and materiality of architecture, was a site of extremely fertile investigation. I think that the question of presence still permeates a lot of the work of the Architectural Association, the relationship between the framed and the unframed condition,

Another element which is fundamental in an image is the presupposed continuity. (ts: yes) Continuity is equally a very important concept that has been deconstructed, analysed in order to escape it in contemporary architecture. I find that it is a very important moment when thinking of architecture with a possibility of interruption, blockage, disarticulation rather than of simply establishing a duration. It has mobilised a lot of the questions for our practice on the conditions of transformation and how architecture engages with transformation at multiple levels of magnitude. I’m not so sure that we currently are so clear about these themes. The third

ts: What we’re looking at is a construction. The basic premise of a ‘radical constructivist’ way of approaching certain things was that everything that you see is your own and that intelligence is something that’s not attributed to a thing, but it’s a relationship between things. It means what you see and what I see are coming from very different places and we have to have a shared agreement about the nature of what it is that we are speaking about. So if it is in image or if it is through text and language, from a conceptual perspective we know that we will never fully access what the other sees and understands.

There is a necessity to speak of how each of us relate to the world and how we can help to construct new ways of communicating and facilitating that form of communication with each other, which is very important but it comes with a conceptual problem.

There is a desire to believe that we’re all understanding the same thing and that has to somehow be unpacked a little bit. Projects like Fenlandia sometimes through their simplicity open up some paradoxical issues. They can serve as a framework to discuss seeing.

What I see right now somehow by default creates a way of thinking about tomorrow. When Wolf Prix came to the aa he titled his lecture ‘in two days tomorrow will be yesterday’. It resonated with me and I believe with the current conversation in architecture.

AArchitecture 41 40

I feel like we are resetting everything in a way which is only reinforcing representation because people don’t believe that architecture and the built environment have any agency. There is a tendency to speak of architecture as a history of failure, but I don’t actually believe this at all, and I feel like we have to really expand the purpose of what it is we are doing and for whom. I find a lot of the things that are talked about at the school interesting but if there isn’t a meaningful convergence or debate around these subjects, to give them agency, I think it is problematic. We have a very reductionist approach to a lot of these problems, only further enforcing specialisations that actually segregate knowledge instead of trying to find the greater synthesis of knowledge.

The scale and magnitude of some of the subjects for example that you (Territorial Agency) research necessitate new conceptualization and tools that afford new knowledge and sensitivity. This begins by acknowledging and creating an understanding of a problem beyond the familiar concept of building and urbanism towards ecology of things. Something that we share. jp: We tend to have a culture that has reduced images to readable entities; we need to be able to read them and they need to be read by a machine. That means there is a text attached. This brings us again to the discussion of what is the direct and unique relationship to the event that the image captures? I think that this is extremely problematic and needs to be undone completely to understand the centrality of these discussions (of the preoccupation of the visual) in contemporary forms of architecture.

There is a huge claim that architecture is architecture, architecture is central. As if the landscape in this image would be central, graspable, available and attainable in all its aspects directly, in an unmediated fashion. Then the question becomes really a very interesting one, what are the images if we think they can be simply external to architecture, external to the construction processes of the relationship between space and cohabitation; then where would they be? Are we then back into the possibility of a direct access to truth? I think this is an extremely impoverished notion of contemporary architecture, and unfortunately, I must say, it has permeated large parts of the school, labelling a discussion like the one that we are having now as external to the core of architecture.

Architecture is a very complex mediation and there is a mediative condition that architecture and the built environment pose on different practises.

ts: Forms of representation, for me, have a bit of a negative connotation because in some sense… it’s not talking about the thing itself, it’s talking about either the image of the thing or the language that one uses to describe something. Even in the 70s conceptual artists the likes of Joseph Kosuth talked about the notion of language being limited. The image of the chair, the definition of the chair, the object of the chair all qualify the linguistic definition but operate in the world differently. jp: In these latest discussions about the specific continuity of the autonomy of architecture, there is a transformation of that discourse into an infrastructure of attention. An infrastructure that is interested in transforming ambitions into protocols, creativity and ingenuity into typologies and norms.

There’s a normativity that is extremely worrying in parts of contemporary architecture. I think it has been a really remarkable regression that has occurred very quickly in the last five, ten years. It’s an infrastructure that doesn’t seem to be interested in infrastructure, in performing things other than allowing other practises.

So it’s not an entity itself it’s just there to disguise itself as an entity that’s only supporting other stuff, but at the same time this infrastructural project has turned into an all pervasive project of normativity in all its connotations about the autonomy of architecture, the insistence on different divisions of work. I find a paucity in that argument, it is just a whitewash of all the intelligence that has really tried to challenge the modernist project in all its aspects.

Intellectual, aesthetic, design techniques, design knowledges have been whitewashed in this infrastructural condition and this is really the pernicious aspect that is difficult to get a hold of.

Apparently it is good to be attentive, to take care, it’s good to have a notion of the domestic or being somehow interested in work. But that is somehow pernicious, because it assimilates one particular position; for instance work is always human work, it is never the work of a multiplicity of entities—some of which are human but most of which are, say, artificial.

It is also pernicious in relation to the performativity of earnestness, that is very troubling in my mind, that you have to pretend to be interested in others. It is a remnant of all the worst elements of the imperial structures of the enlightenment.

There is nothing more dangerous than pretending to be taking care of. The moment that you are thinking that you have to take care of, you are establishing a condition of stupidity, stupidity at work and stupidity in the sense that you don’t think that

Fenlandia 41

others are able to take care of themselves. By others, I also mean architectures, buildings, structures and cities.

The idea of intervention or engagement is equally dangerous today because it demands one to place oneself as outside first and then you have to engage. What does it mean not to be engaged and what does it mean to not pay attention?

There’s an inversion of the notion of activism, so central to the entire performance arts, the role of the artist and the architect in modernist times. This is a misunderstanding of intelligence. Intelligence can be quiet, can be observing, can potentially be not taking part. In that sense, engagement needs to be thought of in a far richer spectrum than we’re now thinking.

We tend to think of the world as being only human or artificial, but the world is alive in itself. So, I really think that this is the provocation that there is an entire discussion that is somehow masquerading itself as against the infrastructural but ultimately it is playing out attention as an infrastructure and this is my preoccupation, notions of design and planning as everyday life. Planning is now a word that has been relegated to the bureaucratic aspects of a non-existent government. We need to reclaim these notions against this performativity of attention, a performativty which is quite evident in the kind of images this infrastructure is producing, that can be so poor.

We need to be far more ambiguous in the images we produce, we need to be far more concentrated and understand that architecture is always elusive. ts: How does one engage in a meaningful way?

Engagement and responsibility are not that far apart from where I’m coming from. If one is to take a position, this I believe should happen through active engagement. I believe people can easily dismissive based on appearance of things. A kind of reactionary response to certain kinds of thematics and do not allow the complexity to really show. Attention is also being generous; to look at the act of seeing as something which isn’t completely objective. You see it through your eyes, sometimes using apparatuses. It is important to be aware of that and to use them in a way to show ourselves something that we haven’t seen or to problematise things that may be very familiar to ourselves.

‘This is landscape, this is nature.’ These distinctions limit and reinforce a period of thought that is suspect to me. If we continuously reinforce them we limit the ability to address contemporary conditions that may have rendered them obsolete.

My work is often about enabling people to see their

environment differently. It engages with public space – in moments of distress, you realise that space becomes that common ground where people can come together in a shared and collective manner to express themselves beyond language. jp: You mentioned that the framework enables this image to be set up. At the same time, the landscape that emerges and is constructed through this is familiar in a disturbing way. It’s disturbing to my mind exactly because the studies that we’ve been doing shows very clearly that that is not familiar. We live in a world that is completely the opposite of normal. The climate regime that we’re operating in requires all kinds of new forms of attention and so this image is really peculiar because in the end you see a fen. That’s what you see. You think that the fen is the same as before the digital, the fen is immutable, but contemporary forms of vision, vision technologies and the apparatus of vision have permeated all kinds of practices that have transformed that landscape completely and we cannot imagine that we are outside that landscape.

There’s an added energy into that landscape, given by the extraction of carbon fossils from the fen.

There are all kinds of activities going on there that are not in the image and then the idea of how architecture engages with this, in my mind, is an issue of aesthetics.

How to acquire sensitivity, is a question, in particular knowing that the more you engage with it the more sensitive you become, you expand your possibilities of perception and cognition. You are also knowing that the moment that you’re doing that, in the highly technological world that we inhabit, you are also affecting these structures that we think we are in charge of. This is a really exciting and troubling moment at the same time. You are really dealing with an entity that you cannot think is completely under your control.

AArchitecture 41 42

Seeing Through the Filter Hiroaki Yamane

When we look at black and white photos we subconsciously supplement the colours in our head.

The guesswork is based on past experience and knowledge about the world surrounding us – the tree trunks are dark brown, grasses are green and skies are light blue. We establish mental images that augment our vision. In a sense, we see more than what is before our eyes.

Speaking of photography, the monochromatic film of Kodak 400 Tri-X transposes the rectangular scene onto its gelatine silver emulsion. The silver grains are consequently activated by the incoming photons – equivalent to how the light hits our retina.

When the film is developed and scanned into the computer, it is then converted to the sequence of zeros and ones – binaries. The computer saves it out as an immaterial piece of information in either compressed or uncompressed formats such as jpeg or tiff.

Traditionally, computers simply stored the images, displaying them onto the screen upon request.

However, with the recent advancements in machine learning or more loosely, a.i., computers can perform more than that. One machine learning model can colourise monochromatic images into coloured ones.1 Another model can even estimate the depth of the image.2 These outputs are called ‘inference’ as they are deduced from neural networks trained on a vast amount of sample image datasets. It is not a programmer who writes codes to link ‘tree’ with ‘green’, but rather machines that autonomously translate those relationships. Taking a look at recent research, it can detect a particular type of cancer more

reliably than human eyes,3 and can discover planets that humans can’t read from the subtle signals from space.4 In a way, machines began to see more than zeros and ones and in some areas, they have learnt to see more than us.

Just as our memory applies the colourisation filter to monochromatic images, machines also apply the filters that enhance our perceptions beyond our eyes and brain. Just as bats use the ultrasound to sense their world, machines see their world with zeros and ones. While it is fascinating that we can see the world differently with the help of these filters, we need to be cognisant of what we truly see.

In fact, most people don’t realise that digital activities are indeed filtered everywhere. Amazon recommendations, Google search results, Instagram feeds are all tailored for individuals. It learns by actions (scroll, tap, scale, etc) and patterns to construct models of user preferences. Why? Because more time on apps leads to more advert revenues; better recommendations equal more sales.

That is, you may be seeing the world without knowing you are already seeing through the filters. If I were to hide any of the captions for the images placed in the spreads, some people would have taken the coloured images as original images and the monochromatic images as filtered. You could have fallen into the ‘fake news believer’ who believes true news is fake.

The truth lies in the eye of the beholder, but is your truth bare or filtered in the era of a.i.?

Fenlandia 43

AArchitecture 41

44

Window / Casa de Serralves, Porto

Canal, Venezia

Left Center Right

Original. Scan of Kodak 400 Tri-X negative The colourised image generated by DeOldify The depth image generated by MiDaS

1 Jason Antic, ‘A Deep Learning based project for colorizing and restoring old images‘, https://github.com/jantic/DeOldify.

2 Ranftl, René, Katrin Lasinger, David Hafner, Konrad Schindler, and Vladlen Koltun. ‘Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-Shot Cross-Dataset Transfer’. ArXiv:1907.01341, 6 December 2019. http://arxiv. org/abs/1907.01341.

3 McKinney, Scott Mayer, Marcin Sieniek, Varun Godbole, Jonathan Godwin, Natasha Antropova, Hutan Ashrafian, Trevor Back, et al. ‘International Evaluation of an AI System for Breast Cancer Screening’. Nature 577, no. 7788 (January 2020): 89–94. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1799-6.

4 Shallue, Christopher J., and Andrew Vanderburg. ‘Identifying Exoplanets with Deep Learning: A Five-Planet Resonant Chain around Kepler-80 and an Eighth Planet around Kepler-90’. The Astronomical Journal 155, no. 2 (30 January 2018): 94. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/aa9e09.

Fenlandia 45

On-White Hunter Doyle

On 14 June 1877 Henry Sherwin filed for a patent which would go on to change the interior landscape of rental properties around the globe, propelling forward a process of diy maintenance now standard amongst annual tenancy agreements.

AArchitecture 41 46

The patent, No. 1194,5154, was granted one month later on 28 August 1877 in Cleveland, Ohio and defined the first resealable paint canister. In a written statement to the US Patent Office Mr. Sherwin describes his invention as an ‘improvement in packing or shipping cans,’ as though he were already aware of the impact his device would have both in terms of the paint itself and the product’s potential to spread rapidly across the us housing market for his new commercial paint company, Sherwin-Williams.

The design of Sherwin’s invention seems alarmingly simple however it has greatly influenced our relationship to and image of interior domestic space.

Prior to the resealable can, all paint had to be mixed on site and used immediately, a process which required a degree of knowledge and skill on behalf of the painters themselves and therefore uncommon amongst those not professionally trained. The patent filed by Sherwin changed this process and helped to spur on a market for diy house painting across the country.

The 1 gallon, or 3.78 litre, tin can came filled with eggshell white paint to either be tinted or used as is.

The can itself (figure 1) was composed largely of completely straight sides responding to the geometry of the painter’s common tools, the knife and brush, used for removing material. The straight sides reduced overall waste and more importantly facilitated the painting process, making it easier for one to remove paint. A small dimple is formed just below the lip of the can creating a small gap between the lid and the can’s wall. This gap allowed the factory to seal the canister by running a bead of solder around the can’s circumference prior to filling it with paint.

(Interestingly, Sherwin’s patent is cited by two subsequent inventions, a critical device for containing uranium inside nuclear reactors as well as glass bottle caps for beverages.) Once sealed, paint was injected into the can through the hole in the base. While the straight sides helped one remove paint, the flared base stabilised the can itself allowing it to be safely placed on a variety of precarious surfaces as one moves up and down ladders, steps, sills, windows etc. In short, the can helped to make an otherwise somewhat mysterious and skilled process more accessible to first-time painters while also logistically making paint a viable commercial product nationwide.

In relation to architecture this device has had a dramatic impact as a tool for both maintenance and real-estate speculation. The ritual of touching up the paint in one’s apartment often corresponds to the end of a tenancy agreement. Layer after layer, tenant after tenant, interior walls thicken with matte white paint. An act of maintenance that can ironically

damage older structures, sealing them internally and increasing the likelihood of damage from mould or damp. A process of repainting, removing and covering the traces of oneself in preparation for the next tenant to move in. An act of forgetting and erasure allowing another renter to insert themselves into the space.

Partly a collective denial that another life existed here before a new contract begins. Unsurprisingly, eggshell white, in one shade or another, has become the de-facto colour choice for both lettings and sales.

Optically matte paint finishes refract light. The diffusion of light smooths out imperfections from previous wear in the eye while visually expanding a space, giving a sense that one’s apartment is larger than it actually is. However, this expansive phenomenon is not specific to the colour white and can take place over a wide range of chromatic values.

Therefore, the act of ‘whiting out’ one’s apartment or property can also be explained in terms of imagination. The ability of another potential renter or buyer to imagine themselves in a space. A screen upon which one can project themselves, their lives, their habits. Not yours, not ours, not last year’s, not today but theirs and their future. Excessive decoration is often discouraged, as if it could break the illusion that the new tenant or owner is somehow the first. The only. This is emphasised further through the whitely painted walls, floorboards, and moulding of properties, even those which are described as full of ‘character’ or ‘charm.’

While Loos makes a claim against ornament and decoration as wasteful practices it seems the exact opposite has transpired. A diffused, eggshell white interior meant to be ‘timeless’ has become ubiquitous.

A seemingly smooth space used for an ever increasing financialisation of architecture has led to material waste, capital accumulation and exclusion. Perhaps an architecture of colour or decoration is an architecture against financial speculation and real-estate development. Perhaps it is the desire for ‘timelessness’ that has been financially manipulated under the guise of ‘maintenance.’

There are myriad examples in architecture where the rituals of maintenance operate in exactly the opposite way. Where cleaning, maintenance and upkeep are considered from the beginning using the materials and design itself rather than left as an afterthought. An architecture of cleanliness, maintenance and inclusion does not mean an architecture of diffuse eggshell white.

Fenlandia 47

Next issue

Submit an abstract for proposed written and visual content that responds to this image by Monday 23 November 2020 to aarchitecture@aaschool.ac.uk Scan to see the extended brief:

AArchitecture 41 48

aarchitecture 41 – Biographies

CHARLES PIGOTT is an architect currently working as a document controller at ACME. He is preoccupied with the natural case for architecture leading to a variety of imaginative drawings and texts that attempt to proliferate the internet.

DOREEN BERNATH is an architect and a theorist across disciplines of design, technology, philosophy, visual art, media and cultures.

She is currently a co-editor of RIBA’s The Journal of Architecture, a co-founder of research collective ThisThingCalledTheory and a senior lecturer at Leeds School of Architecture.

FABIAN TOBIAS REINER is an Austrian architect currently pursuing an MA in History and Critical Thinking at the AA and an MSc in Architecture from ETH Zurich.

HIROAKI YAMANE is a second year student (EXP10). Prior to the AA, he was based in San Francisco as a creative technologist working on interactive design projects.

HUNTER DOYLE is a designer and researcher in the expanded field of architecture and industrial design whose lease in London is currently coming to an end.

JAMES HORKULAK graduated from ETH and joined Prof. Dr. Elli Mosayebi’s practice. Currently he is working as part of the Ernst Schindler and Theo Hotz research and travel scholarship.

JEANNE CLERC is an architect and artist based in Berlin. In her studies at the AA, she focused on questions of domesticity as a way to challenge societal issues and planetary crisis. She is a co-founder of AAction.

JOHN NG studied architecture at the University of Bath and the AA, where he has taught since 2011. He is also a visiting lecturer at the RCA. He founded ELSEWHERE and practises architecture in London.

JOHN PALMESINO is an architect and urbanist. With Ann-Sofi Rönnskog, he established Territorial Agency, an independent organisation that combines architecture, research and advocacy. He is a Diploma Unit Master at the AA. JULIAN OPIE graduated from Goldsmiths School of Art in 1983.

Opie’s distinctive formal language reflects his artistic preoccupation with the idea of representation, and the means by which images are perceived and understood. He lives and works in London.

LOCALLY AVAILABLE WORLD UNSEEN NETWORKS (LAWuN) augments and supports student driven work of all kinds inside and outside of the unit structure. A cross-school zone dedicated to asking questions through making work, where right and wrong give way to what if?

SUSAN COLLINS works in response to sites and situations often employing transmission, networking and time as primary materials. Collins is Professor of Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. SUSANNAH BOLTON is an artist, weaver, educator, parent living and working in the from the isle of North Uist. Susannah traverses the domestic environment, enacting geological processes by hand to feel close to what is distant.

THEODORA GIOVANAZZI is a fifth year student at the Architectural Association. During her year out she worked for PHASE3 Architecture. She is currently based in London.

THEODORE SPYROPOULOS is the Director of the Architectural Association’s Design Research Lab and Resident Artist at Somerset House. He directs the experimental art, architecture, and design practice Minimaforms.

YUFEI HE graduated from the ETH in 2019 and currently works there as a teaching assistant.

In this issue Susan Collins’ work encodes the landscape, an accumulation of pixels, an apparatus. Page 3 Doreen Bernath explores the pixel in the work of Susan Collins, a flow, an elapsum. Page 9 A clash and a covering are depicted in the images of Yufei He and James Horkulak. Page 12 Susannah Bolton recreates the geology of her domestic environment. Page 14 A love affair with the fens by LAWuN. Page 18 Charles Pigott speaks of accumulation through the envelope and the stamp. Page 20 A period of landscapes is depicted in Julian Opie’s stills. Page 22 John Ng and Theodora Giovanizzi discuss the unfolding of the landscape projected as an elevation. Page 28 Fabian Tobias Reiner explores intimacy and the territory through the photographic image. Page 32 Jeanne Clerc adapts floodplain infrastructures.

Page 36 Theodore Spyropoulos and John Palmesino discuss the ungraspable condition of the image. Page 39 The filter sees, and allows us to see, speculations upon seeing by Hiroaki Yamane.

Page 43 Hunter Doyle questions layers of accumulation through the maintenance of eggshell white. Page 46

Edited by students at the Architectural Association