POSTPRODUCTION by ADS4

PO S T P RO DUC TI O N 4

MANUAL FOR REDESIGNING REALITY

This brief was designed with the help of an algorithm. The paper colour was chosen by a neural network which named it â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;clay cowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. (R161 G193 B172)

ADS4 Nicola Koller Tom Greenall Matteo Mastrandrea www.ads4.co

Sarah Huckabee Sanders learns why you shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t wear green on TV

POSTPRODUCTION: Manual for Redesigning Reality Much of this brief was written in our living room. It was written whilst eating food ordered via an app, from a restaurant recommended by an algorithm, delivered by a self-employed bicycle courier who we tracked using the location services enabled on his phone. We paid in advance using a “hot coral” coloured cash card produced by a “digital, mobileonly” bank that was founded in 2015, before eating on a table cut using a CNC milling machine, based on an open source design. And while not a single aspect of this situation would have been possible a decade ago, none of it will seem particularly remarkable to you today. This is simply the shape of the normal in our time.

A D S 4 2 0 1 7 1 8

We now stand at a juncture where there is no pursuit that cannot in principle be undertaken by an automated system. But the requisite integration of smart technologies into our devices, buildings, streets, and public spaces that makes this automation possible is consequently enabling the internet to leave the screen and manifest materially. Images, sounds, buildings, and even entire cities are now routinely transitioning beyond the screen and into a different state of matter, forcing us to critically assess what this might mean for the environment, the economy, our societies, and indeed our own psyches. While the media warns us daily of the imminent arrival of a “postproduction” world in which robots and algorithms have dutifully taken on all forms of work and human labour, reality itself is increasingly susceptible to other forms of postproduction. In 2016, the prevalence of political fact abuse gave rise to the spreading of fake news with such unprecedented impunity that the Oxford English Dictionary named “Post-Truth” its Word of the Year. We supposedly witnessed the largest ever presidential inauguration crowd for a candidate that we were told could never win; we heard how Hillary Clinton ran a paedophile ring from a Washington DC pizza parlour while selling weapons to ISIS; and were told that the Holocaust may not have happened. While these statements are neither true nor accurate, they now exist on the internet, in perpetuity. Spread by algorithms and other nonhuman entities, these “alternative facts” have already informed opinions, ignited prejudices, and swayed elections. In an age of filters, photoshop and social media, reality itself has become vulnerable to manipulation, editing, and distortion. Under this contemporary condition, production (of goods, of capital, of design even) has morphed into postproduction. The associated tools—editing, colour correction, filtering, cutting, and so on—are no longer simply tools of representation; they become a means of creation. According to filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl, reality itself has become postproduced and scripted—affect rendered as aftereffect—meaning the world can be understood but also altered by

A D S 4 2 0 1 7 1 8

these tools. Indeed, by better understanding the technologies that support our reality—including photography, video and cinema, as well as printing, 3-D modelling, and other digital processes—we can seize control of the tools of representation, changing the nature of an already “post-produced” reality by appropriating post-production methods ourselves. As Steyerl puts it, “if reality is postproduced, then it also means we can change reality through postproduction…”. As architects, we can “reverse photoshop” our world to create preferable, or at least alternative, realities. ADS4’s ambition this year is to interrogate postproduction in architecture in two senses, both as process (a series of design tools and techniques) and as problem (an emergent context). The Process (Postproduction): Software advances are providing architects with new digital tools (BIM, simulation softwares, VR, AR, etc.) that are arguably bringing them closer to the construction process than they have been in decades. How might the techniques used by postproduction artists and filmmakers (dubbing, editing, remixing, subtitling) be translated into tools for architectural design and what new forms might emerge? The Problem (Post-Production): The emergence of smart technologies and increasing levels of automation will inevitably create a number of challenges for architects and built environment specialists. Early forms of ‘soft’ artificial intelligence (AI), such as Apple’s Siri, along with infrastructural AI, such as high-speed algorithmic trading, smart vehicles and industrial robotics are increasingly a part of everyday life—part of how our tools work, how our cities move and how our economy builds and trades things. These forms of AI can outperform human beings at numerous specific tasks and are spreading to thousands of domains, eliminating jobs as they do. Over time this technology will come to control semi-autonomous and autonomous hardware like self-driving cars and robots, displacing factory workers, construction workers, drivers, delivery workers and many others. Might increasing levels of automation lead to a new urban landscape of post-production—a future without work?

As we delve deeper into these issues, we will consider the corporate and bureaucratic aesthetics employed by much Conceptual art (and later Postproduction art) that marked the beginning of the service economy. We will focus on issues of technology, evolutionary processes, digital imagery, and corporate aesthetics in order to develop a manifesto for Postproduction Architecture: a manual for redesigning reality.

Mark Leckey, See, We Assemble, 2011

I. Postproduction: Emerging Tools Throughout history, a recognition that to cite, borrow and steal the work of others leads to the discovery of new knowledge, has given birth to a series of different appropriation techniques: imitatio, collage, cut-up, bricolage, détournement, montage… Although these ideas and techniques have been utilised extensively within the scientific community (see particularly Don Swanson’s work on “Undiscovered Public Knowledge”), their most significant applications have always been found within the realm of cultural production—music, literature, cinema, architecture and art. Indeed, art history is now widely accepted as a history of reinterpretations, appropriations, cross references, dialogic presuppositions, and recontextualisations; and the most vibrant aspects of contemporary culture also indicate an obsession with the act of copying and the production of copies.

A D S 4 2 0 1 7 1 8

More careful consideration needs to be given to the extent to which reproduction, borrowing and amalgamating have been, and can be, a source of innovation; we find real insight into what human beings and the world are like through thinking about what we reproduce, and—perhaps more importantly—the way we collate and assemble the reproductions we wish to make. How, in other words, do we draw together the heterogeneous elements of existence that history has furnished us with? How should we post produce our world? Since the early nineties, an ever-increasing number of artworks have been created on the basis or pre-existing works. More and more artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, use works made by others, or subvert readily available cultural products. Yet this “art of postproduction”, as curator Nicolas Bourriaud terms it, is more advanced than a facile process of copying or borrowing. It goes beyond a simple “art of appropriation”, which naturally infers an ideology of ownership, and instead moves toward a culture of constant activity based on a collective ideal: sharing. It therefore responds to the proliferating chaos of global culture in the information age, which has led to the eradication of the traditional distinction between production and consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original work. Within the film and media industries, postproduction traditionally meant synching, mixing, editing, colour correction, and other procedures performed after shooting. With digital technologies, these processes have accelerated substantially; in recent years, postproduction has begun to take over production wholesale. Modelling, rendering and animation—techniques used extensively by architects—now belong to the realm of postproduction. Fewer and fewer components actually need to be shot because they are partially or wholly created in postproduction.

A D S 4 2 0 1 7 1 8

However, the impact of postproduction goes way beyond the world of art or media, even far beyond the world of digital technology, to become one of the main modes of capitalist production today. Whilst some of these techniques are certainly employed by filmmakers in order to create scenes that would not be possible in the real world, more often than not the decision to postproduce is in fact driven by economic imperatives. It is simply cheaper to do it in the machine than on location. Similarly, the tax relief schemes offered by the government for filming in the UK have not only bolstered postproduction expertise in this country, but also seen the development of new filmic narratives in which London becomes a key protagonist. As such, the tools available to us are those that, under our current capitalist ideology, we have collectively chosen to develop. The computer screen of the postproduction artist, therefore, provides a black mirror that reflects society’s values at large. Whilst methods of postproduction have been extensively explored in other fields, less has been done to consider the implications for architecture. Postmodernism’s cursory attempts to borrow the sampling and remixing techniques of different disciplines may have successfully challenged the prevailing Modernist discourse, but it did little to fundamentally question the tools of production and was therefore unable to drive tectonic innovation or offer much more than commentary. It is essential, therefore, that we appreciate the capabilities of these tools if we are to have agency as designers. Or as the American writer and artist William Burroughs proposes in the context of his own cut-up technique, “When you cut into the present, the future leaks out”. In ADS4, we think that the real challenge for design is to shift people’s beliefs, values, ideals, hopes and fears. If these don’t change, then reality won’t change either. If society’s values are embedded in our tools of postproduction (in how we postproduce), then by experimenting with these tools we hope to find a way to imagine new or alternative worldviews that can challenge the narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens about the role that design plays in the world today.

Robert Crabtree, Origins, 2016

Vincent Fournier, Reem B #2 [Pal], 2010

II. Post-Production: The Elimination of Work In 1979, the American corporation, Rank Xerox, imagined transposing the world of the office to the graphics interface of the personal computer, which resulted in icons for “trash”, “files”, and “desktops”. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, took up this system of presentation for Macintosh five years later. From then on, word processing would be indexed to the formal protocol of the service industry, and the interface of the home computer would be informed and colonised from the start by the world of work. Today, however, the distinction between work and leisure is increasingly blurred. The professional world is flowing into the domestic world, because the division between work and leisure constitutes an obstacle to the sort of employee that companies desire, one who is flexible and reachable at any moment.

A D S 4 2 0 1 7 1 8

Of 702 detailed job categories identified in the United States, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne of the University of Oxford found that 47 percent of them were vulnerable to near-term advances in machine learning and mobile robotics. Among developing countries this rises to 69 percent in India, 77 percent in China and an astonishing 85 percent in Ethiopia. The economist John Maynard Keynes had foreseen this early on, coining the term “technological unemployment” sometime around 1928. He anticipated that societies might eventually automate the jobs that much of their labour force depended on. But what Keynes concluded—that the eclipse of human labour by technical systems would necessarily compel a turn toward a full-leisure society—has not come to pass, not even remotely. Furthermore, what neither Keynes nor any other economist reckoned with, until very recently, was the thought that the process of automation would stop when it had replaced manual and clerical labour. If automation was initially bought to bear on tasks that were one or more of the four “Ds”—dull, dirty, difficult or dangerous—the advent of sophisticated machine-learning algorithms means that professional and managerial work now comes into range. The evidence for this is clear: In 1964, the most valuable company in the US, AT&T, was worth $267 billion in today’s money and employed 758,611 people. Today’s telecommunications giant, Google, is worth $370 billion but has only about 55,000 employees—less than a tenth the size of AT&T’s workforce in its heyday. Some advocates of automation are driven by a sincere and passionate belief that automation is the most certain way of achieving a more equitable, egalitarian future. Some argue that bringing an end to economic inequality is best achieved by maximum automation and the elimination of work. Some argue that the soonest possible supplantation of human labour by cybernetic means is something close to an ethical imperative.

A D S 4 2 0 1 7 1 8

These views have heritage in architectural discourse: Constant Nieuwenhuys, the French Situationists, and the radical architectural practice Superstudio explored the spatial dimensions of postwork society between the late 1950s and mid-1970s, developing conceptions of what urban environments might look like when more broadly arranged around self-actualization and play. For Valerie Solanas, full automation of production was one of the hinges of her SCUM Manifesto, with its ever-resonant demand to “overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex”. But despite this historical speculation over what a fully automated future might hold for society (or humanity more broadly), the conclusions remain unconvincing. As Peter Frase points out in his book, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (2016), the reality will inevitably be somewhere between total leisure and total slavery, “utopia is a possibility, but the robots alone won’t get us there”.

III. PostPostproduction So what next for postproduction? Last year, under the title ‘Serial Things’, ADS4 explored the disruptive impact that today’s emerging technologies are having on the production of art and architecture. Our projects speculated on whether a new form of architecture (or a design process) might arise in a similar fashion to the serial art and architecture that resulted from the advent of mass production in the post-war period. This year, with our interest shifting from mass production to postproduction, our goal will be to actively engage with the structures and systems that have turned architecture into a tool of capital and made architects complicit in undermining architecture’s social purpose in order to reclaim autonomy, legitimacy and longevity.

A D S 4 2 0 1 7 1 8

Crucially for us, the prefix “post” does not signal any negation or surpassing; it refers to a zone of activity. We are certainly not after production. Rather we are in a state in which production is endlessly recycled, repeated, remixed, and multiplied, but potentially also displaced, humbled, and renewed. To return to Steyerl: “Production is not only transformed but fundamentally displaced to locations that used to form its outside: to mobile devices, scattered screens, sweatshops and catwalks, nurseries, virtual reality, and offshore production lines”. These contested territories will be our sites of speculation. With automation now increasingly being applied to the digital tools at our disposal (algorithmically generated news, music, film and book recommendations, autocorrected photos, etc.), the two aspects of postproduction outlined above are starting to merge. It is our critical position that only through understanding and exploiting these technologies will we be able to develop a means to test and critique their anticipated consequences, and to design alternative realities: An architecture of Postproduction as an antidote to our post-production future.

A D S 4 2 0 1 7 1 8

Doppelgänger Sites

To be effective as critical designers, we believe in thinking beyond just the design of buildings to imagine the wider implications of what we do as architects. As such, the projects developed in ADS4 exist in their own worlds. As architects we have the ability to construct these alternative realities for others to inhabit, to help shape cultural narratives and inform the way that we collectively think about the world. We refer to this process as ‘world building’. In ADS4 no project is allowed to exist in a vacuum. To ensure that we consider the consequences of our actions, students in second year will each be exploring ‘doppelgänger’ sites. This doesn’t necessarily mean two physical locations. It might be a real site and a virtual one, a speculative proposal and a ‘live action’ in the real world, or simply a consideration for how your action in one location might be perceived, interpreted and reported on in another. Acknowledging NATO’s 2016 declaration that cyberspace is an operational territory, alongside land, sea and air, the virtual realm will inevitably be a significant site of investigation.

Tropical Islands, Berlin A former Zeppelin hanger transformed into a multi-exotic spa landscape

FIRST YEARS A Postproduced Future Heritage Appropriation is the first stage of postproduction. Combining the two core themes in ADS4’s brief—postproduction techniques as tools for architectural design, and post-production as an inevitable future for London—the first year students will reappropriate an existing building that is deemed to have become (or is soon expected to be) architecturally obsolete as a result of automation or other disruptive technologies.

A D S 4 2 0 1 7 1 8

Planned obsolescence is a business strategy in which the obsolescence of a product is planned and built into it from its conception. This is done so that in future the consumer feels a need to purchase new products and services that the manufacturer brings out as replacements for the old ones. With our buildings and urban environments increasingly augmented with smart technologies that are controlled by algorithms, obsolescence is an increasingly significant concern for the built environment. Through our use of postproduction techniques, we will explore the idea of a building ‘upgrade’ as an alternative to reuse, restoration or refurbishment, and as a way of reassessing the prejudices associated with heritage conservation, in order to explore the potential of a Postproduced Future Heritage.

A D S 4 2 0 1 7 1 8

LIVE PROJECT Post-Retail

The role that technology has played in eroding the distinction between work and play is widely acknowledged. As social media departments are established in increasing numbers of companies, the idea of a nine ‘til five job is becoming extinct. At the same time people are increasingly aware that the services they now rely on the most—social media platforms, search engines, email providers, apps, etc—are provided to them free of charge is because the consumption of that service produces data from which value can be extracted. As a consequence, traditional distinctions between production and consumption, work and leisure, home and office have all but disappeared. The consumer has become the producer; the ‘prosumer’ has been born. This is the condition that will be explored through ADS4’s Live Project, developed in collaboration with British Land. Undertaken as a group project in the first term, the Live Project will compliment your individual design project. Addressing the emergence of the ‘prosumer’ as a vital protagonist in the development of the city, this project will explore the future of retail. The location for this project will be British Land’s site in Canada Water. Specifically, we will explore the idea of post-retail within the context of the existing Surrey Quays Shopping Centre and the adjacent Printworks site; a site made redundant first by vacation of the Grand Surrey Dock and Canal Company and more recently by the relocation of the Daily Mail’s printing operation to a site outside London. This history of change as a result of technological advances, and automation in particular, makes it of particular relevance to the studio’s overarching brief.

Top: Surrey Quays Shopping Centre Bottom: Printworks, Canada Water, formerly responsible for printing the Daily Mail