Serial Things by ADS4

ADS4 ——— Serial Things Royal College of Ar t School of Architecture

Nicola Koller

Second Year

Tom Greenall

Carolyn Kirschner

Rosy Head

Eleanor Connolly Emmeline Quigley Isabel Ogden Liam Rawlins Lucie Beauver t Marcus Cole Muhammad Enayet

First Year Bamidele Awoyemi Bilaal Saheed Chao Heng Yang Christopher Straessle Hannah Rozenberg Jacob Riman Marie Ramsing

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ADS4 Folio published on the occasion of the

Royal College of Art School of Architecture

exhibition RCA Show 2017.

Kensington Gore London SW7 2EU

This is one of seven publications, each focused on

the work of one Architectural Design Studio (ADS) at the Royal College of Art School of Architecture.

www.rca.ac.uk/schools/school-of-architecture/

Adrian Lahoud, Dean of Architecture

school-of-architecture@rca.ac.uk

Beth Hughes, Head of Programme, Architecture First edition, published June 2017 Edited by David Burns

Printed in United Kingdom

Design by Lucrezia Tettoni

ISBN 978-1-910642-24-5

Printing by Art Quarters Press © 2017 RCA, editor, designer and contributors Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

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ADS4

Serial Things

Tutors

Acknowledgements

Nicola Koller Tom Greenall Rosy Head

Adrian Lahoud Alice Theodorou Beth Hughes Jenny Melville Jo Dejardin Jonas McQuiggin Laura Jouan Matteo Mastrandrea Mike Lim Nick Beech Ollie Alsop Phinneas Harper Roberta Marcaccio Safia Qureshi Stefan Tribe

Live Project Tutor Matteo Mastrandrea

Live Project Collaborators Jonas McQuiggin Ollie Alsop

Technical Tutors Mark Boyland Orla Kelly

Students Second year Carolyn Kirschner Eleanor Connolly Emmeline Quigley Isabel Ogden Liam Rawlins Lucie Beauvert Marcus Cole Muhammad Enayet

First year Bamidele Awoyemi Bilaal Saheed Chao Heng Yang Christopher Straessle Hannah Rozenberg Jacob Riman Marie Ramsing

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ADS4

Contents

Introduction

Serial Things Learning from Television Serialism in Art and Architecture Emerging Technologies and Simulation as Serialism World Building and Collaboration Beyond the Screen

6 8 10 11

Carolyn Kirschner

AKDM

Eleanor Connolly

The Long Now

Emmeline Quigley

International Belief Machines

Isabel Ogden

Waiting Room

Liam Rawlins

Which England?

Lucie Beauvert

What is the Next Machine?

Marcus Cole

Splendid Automation!

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Serial Things Writing a studio brief is hard. It takes us ages. All summer in fact. Now in our sixth year of teaching together, it isn’t getting any easier. We start by sending each other articles, papers, images and references that interest us and then we meet up week after week to chat about our thoughts. The trouble is we get distracted. We start doodling, watching YouTube, or more recently, watching an episode. Before we know it we have watched a whole season of Stranger Things. What is it about this form of cultural consumption that we find so easy to participate in? Why can’t architecture be this forthcoming? And what can we learn from watching television?

“I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I just can’t stop eating peanuts.” – Orson Welles In America last year 113 pilot television series were made, 35 of those were chosen to go to air and just 13 of those were renewed for a second season. This year, the number of pilots made rose to 146. The cost of these pilots was somewhere between $300m and $400m1. That’s a huge amount of money with no guarantee of success, popularity or longevity. In this we see a similarity with the construction industry in which a large number of new pieces of architecture (as distinct from buildings) are conceived as prototypes, one-offs or indeed pilot projects. While cities around the world continue to be burdened by unsuccessful, ill-conceived and expensive pilots, the world of entertainment is adapting to the contemporary desire for ondemand services. Despite only launching in the UK in 2012, Netflix now represents 20% of all UK internet traffic. Combined with YouTube, these two video streaming sites use up more than half of the internet’s bandwidth. Cities are being dug up and telecommunications infrastructure redesigned to cater for this level of demand, demonstrating that technological innovation can emerge out of a desire for amusement. Clearly the success of the Netflix model—releasing the entire season at once—proved one thing: people want control over how they consume culture. The current expectation for on-demand access—anything, anytime, anywhere—has been

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well observed in other sectors and industries, including transportation (Uber), food (Deliveroo) and accommodation (Airbnb). Theorist Benjamin Bratton discerns that these “contemporary digital platforms are now displacing, if not also replacing, the traditional core functions of states, and demonstrating, for both good and ill, new spatial and temporal models of politics and publics”2. This year, ADS4 explored the new publics that might emerge from these current forms of cultural consumption (in particular binge watching television series) and how the serialisation of everyday life might relate to the broader field of serialism in art and architecture. Might the consideration of design as a serial process help people participate more actively as consumer citizens? Might the impact of media culture on contemporary life be as profound as the introduction of mass production after World War II that led to the emergence of serial production in art and later architecture? And might we revivify the critique of representation and mimesis that has historically been the core motivation of serialism? ADS4’s continued obsession with media culture not only formed the departure point for the studio’s research; this year it also provided the framework for the academic year. Briefs were reconsidered as episodes and the three terms were structured as three parts—or three acts, let’s say. These acts adopted a typical narrative arc used in storytelling or scriptwriting: Act One saw the set-up of the project, in Act Two we explored the projects’ conflict or dilemma, and Act Three led to the resolution of the project. The work that follows provides a highlight of the season finale—ADS4’s contribution to the RCA Show 2017.

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L O W E R E D G O A L S

E L M G R E E N & D R A G S E T, 2 0 1 2

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Learning from Television Media culture is an undeniable force in our lives, a persuasive and pleasurable power that is now familiar to us as a space of fragmentation, plurality and difference—a space of numerous and multiple voices, conflicts, and diversities that deny distinctions between fact and fiction. Through an exploration of television formats and serialism in art and architecture more broadly, we set out to understand how fiction might be better used in the production of the world around us. Through the scripting of speculative scenarios we sought to imagine and then address the (sometimes uncomfortable) contingent possibilities of our actions. While the relationship between film and architecture has been studied extensively (arguable with little ground having been made to conflate the two), the increasing influence of television on our

F I L M S T I L L

collective behaviour has been less well documented. But, objectively, our experience of television—and in particular long-form series formats—may be more relevant. In his essay, ‘The Fact of Television’, philosopher Stanley Cavell highlights that we maintain a relationship with a television series over a much longer period of time than we do with a film, often for years rather than just 2 hours. This duration is more akin to construction timescales and equally has to acknowledge the problems of aging and shifts in taste. Secondly, Cavell suggests that, whilst film is categorised by genre (sci-fi, horror, western, rom-com, thriller, etc.), television is appreciated as episodes in a series3. ADS4 began the year by testing whether an analogy could be drawn between genre as programme and episode as typology in order to interrogate architectural design through this lens.

CONFESSIONS OF A

S U P E R H E R O , 2 0 0 7 ( D I R . M AT T O G E N S )

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A D S 4 W O R K I N P R O G R E S S S H O W

2017

G L I T C H E D S T O N E H E N G E

ARTIST UNKNOWN

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Serialism in Art and Architecture After World War II, manufacturers stopped producing things for the war effort and turned their focus to consumer goods. People were hungry to buy everything that was not available during the war, and companies developed techniques of mass production to fill the orders. Pop artists like Andy Warhol borrowed the materials, technologies, and imagery of mass production for their art, making art in multiples that was intended to critique the commodification of the art world at that period. Taking a cue from Pop artists, Minimalist artists adopted the technologies and materials of the factory and created works that explored the world of industrial, mass-produced beauty without resorting to personal expression.

or letters is traced from the Californian Case Study Houses of the 1940s and 1950s through to John Hejduk’s Texas House series of the 1950s. However, very little has been done to consider serialism as an independent theme and there is no significant body of work or critical texts on the subject as found in music and art. Through developing a serial approach to design, might architectural drawings, models and buildings themselves become interchangeable and of equal status, such that the building comes to be seen as a representation of drawings or models rather than the other way round? For us, the final building need not necessarily be the ultimate embodiment of the idea.

Within architecture, the advent of projects undertaken in sequence and identified by numbers

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Emerging Technologies and Simulation as Serialism

However, in recent years the emergence of rulebased and parametric procedures, facilitated by computers, has led to the conflation of serial techniques with those used in digital design. Theorist Marcos Novak claims that, “for the first time in history the architect is called upon to design not the object but the principles by which the

object is generated and varied in time”6. It is this focus on the design of the process by which the form is produced that links the digital production of architecture with serialism. And importantly, digital design no longer has to refer to the design of blobs and superficially complex forms. According to filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl, “Data, sounds, images and even buildings are now routinely transitioning beyond screens into a different state of matter. They surpass the boundaries of data channels and manifest materially”7. This transition of the digital into the physical is increasingly relevant to architects and designers, who are spending more and more time in the virtual world of the CAD model, a world often substituted for the real one. With the uptake of BIM in architectural practice coupled with advances in simulation software, soon all buildings will be realised as multiple iterations; first fully simulated in the virtual realm and then in the real. Through this form of serialism, might parity finally be achieved between drawing and building?

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS, 2012

Today we confront another gamut of materials and technologies that is potentially just as transformative as the advances in mass production in the post-war period that led to the emergence of serialism in art. From biotechnology to the Internet of Things to artificial intelligence and robotics to networked additive manufacturing and replication, this material palette provides for the recomposition of the world at scales previously unthinkable4. Yet, the era of cultural production we are currently traversing is arguably one of “impoverishment and mediocrity”, suggests Muteber Erbay & Sengül Öymen Gür; “Everything is everything. Form has lost its value as a paradigm of meaning and as a sign of identity”5.

GREGORY CREWDSON

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World Building and Collaboration As designers, we have the ability to extrapolate and project knowledge in order to imagine new worlds for others to inhabit. As advocates of Critical Design—a form of design practise developed by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby8 —ADS4 uses speculative design proposals to explore and interrogate these worlds, employing strategies and techniques developed by other disciplines as our design tools. This year, ADS4 continued its collaboration with Squint/Opera—a creative agency that produces work across a variety of disciplines, from video content and animation, to interactive exhibitions, branding, websites, design, games and strategy. With the additional guidance of comedy director Jonas McQuiggn, we questioned the potential of serialism in contemporary architecture by experimenting with scriptwriting, characterisation, and narrative structures as

instruments for both research and design. This collaboration focused on ADS4’s ‘Live Project’, which resulted in the production of a short film exploring a post-Brexit future for London. A series of workshops in script writing, storytelling, film treatments and filmmaking encouraged the exploration of architecture through techniques and methodologies that are complimentary to ADS4’s approach to Critical and Speculative Design. Over the course of January, actors were auditioned and cast, locations recce’d, and props designed and sourced. The film was shot at a variety of locations across London over the course of an intense weekend and is intended to provide an insight into the society that might develop within our speculative scenario.

FILMING FOR THE ADS4 LIVE PROJECT WITH COMEDY DIRECTOR JONAS MCQUIGGIN

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Beyond the Screen The projects undertaken in ADS4 are often described as ‘Design Fiction’. Although they are hypothetical—fictional to an extent—they are based on hard facts rather than science fiction. By speculating through design we intend to offer up alternative social scenarios that provide new perspectives on the challenges facing us today. The projects that follow are about real people not ‘users’, demographics, or simplified statistics. The projects interrogate the hopes, fears, anxieties, and desires that make us the complex and troubled people that we are. As such, the students of ADS4 have already taken their projects beyond the confines and safety of the institution to test their scenarios in the context of the real world, to allow them to be judged and critiqued by experts in other fields or simply to engage those that are likely to be most affected as a consequence of their speculations. Re-enactments have been staged in local newsagents; lawyers have been instructed to advise on intellectual property; papers have been given at international conferences, and students have been commissioned to make their projects a reality before the final exam even took place. In April, Carolyn Kirschner presented her project to an international audience that included artists, architects, musicians and social scientists as part of the “Imaginaries of the Future: Utopia After the

Human” conference at Cornell University, New York. Throughout the year Lucie Beauvert engaged specialists in the fields of mathematics, physics, artificial intelligence, and archaeology, most notably the renowned mathematician Giuseppe Longo. By 3D scanning Longo himself during one of their meetings, she opened up a non-linguistic dialogue between the mathematician and her AI expert in the UK. In May she hosted radio show on Resonance FM that continued this cross-disciplinary conversations and questioned the future of architectural practice.

1K evin Spacey giving the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0ukYf_xvgc]

6 S andra Kaji-O’Grady, ‘Serialism in Art and Architecture: Context and Theory’, 2001.

2 B enjamin Bratton, ‘The Black Stack’, E-Flux Journal The Internet Does Not Exist, 2015 3 Stanley Cavell, ‘The Fact of Television’, 1982. 4 Benjamin Bratton, ‘On Speculative Design’, DIS Magazine, 2016. 5M uteber Erbay & Sengül Öymen Gür, ‘Universal “memes” of the global style in architecture and the problems of identity and place’, 2010.

With the announcement of the snap general election in May, Liam Rawlins’ newly formed relationship with the leader of the Yorkshire Party, Stuart Arnold, was turned on its head when Liam was commissioned to develop designs for a new parliament building that was to feature on the Yorkshire Party’s campaign material. The unexpected conversations that emerged from these collaborations informed the projects greatly by reminding us of the people for whom we are designing. In doing so they ensured that the work produced has value and relevance beyond the field of architecture.

7H ito Steyerl, ‘Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead’, included in the E-Flux Journal The Internet Does Not Exist, 2015. 8A nthony Dunne & Fiona Raby (Dunne & Raby) use design as a medium to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the social, cultural and ethical implications of existing and emerging technologies. www. dunneandraby.co.uk

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THE CAST OF ADS4, 2017

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Carolyn Kirschner AKDM Akademgorodok is a former Soviet science town, in the depths of the Siberian woods. In 2006, Putin called for its revival and announced its prospects as ‘the next Silicon Valley’ – an ambition yet to be fulfilled.

AKDM is its virtual counterpart; an autonomous, extra-state territory inhabited by algorithms, who take on this promise for the city’s future. • As definitions of territory and ontology are extended into the virtual realm – with the June 2016 NATO declaration of cyberspace as operational territory alongside land, air, and sea, as well as the February 2017 European Parliament resolution which calls for the recognition of bots as ‘electronic persons’ – the intangible (and yet irrefutably palpable) spaces and beings beyond the screen are increasingly legitimized as equals to their physical counterparts. In acknowledging the growing influence of the virtual, these pieces of legislation mirror broader changes in global information infrastructures: simulation and CGI technologies are becoming indistinguishable from reality. Bots now represent 51.8% of Internet users, with billions of them autonomously crawling the web, as content creators, user impersonators, data miners, spammers, and moderators. Profound changes in how information circulates, facilitated by the structure of the Internet and social media, means that facts and falsehoods are now distributed in the same way. As realities multiply and truths are manufactured and post-produced, the interface between the physical and the virtual therefore emerges as a site of heightened tension – a multiplier that makes reality so fragmented that it becomes ungraspable. In this context, AKDM speculates on this interface as the site for a new type of urbanism and territorial identity.

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By extrapolating the aforementioned pieces of legislation, which grant bots and virtual territories unprecedented status, the project reimagines Akademgorodok as a hyperreal tax-haven for algorithms, appealing to corporations which are soon to face taxation and regulation of bots in light of their newly granted status as ‘electronic persons’. Rather than attempting to attract real scientists and tech experts in an effort to rival Silicon Valley, the Kremlin instead targets tech companies’ algorithms, and relies on the resident bots to construct and control an autonomous, virtual territory, using the screen as a geopolitical tool to skew perceptions, exert influence and entice investment. Real Akademgorodok is consequently rendered virtually invisible, while its hyperreal counterpart multiplies across a myriad of screens and streams, and reveals itself as fragments at the interface – a TV advert, a tweet, or a satellite image. Driven by algorithms, this post-anthropocentric city operates at amplified scales and speeds, and what begins as a scripted choreography within a controlled framework spirals into unscripted contingencies. Through acts of revolution and subversion, the city’s bots soon consolidate their position as autonomous actors as opposed to the ‘tools of man’. The interface reveals itself as the bounds of our influence. AKDM thereby challenges the primacy of man in the criteria on which the city is designed and questions the singularity of physical reality. As the city is multiplying, contradicting and overlapping itself, the truth becomes increasingly indiscernible – and increasingly irrelevant. Email: carolyn.kirschner@network.rca.ac.uk

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AKDM

ASSET NO.

11, 37/102

AKDM M A N U FA C T U R I N G POPULOUS TRUTHS: A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE

AKDM PLINTH

WIP SHOW

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AKDM

MASTERPL AN OF AKDM, THE EXTENT OF

T H E S I M U L AT I O N

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AKDM

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AKDM EXPERIENCED THROUGH GOOGLE

E A R T H , A S E X P E R I E N C E S F R O M S I L I C O N VA L L E Y

AKDM

FA K E N E W S , A K D M A S P O R T R AY E D B Y C N N

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Eleanor Connolly The Long Now

“Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the shorthorizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase.” – Stewart Brand Technological acceleration is now driving economic acceleration. Moore’s Law has become the pacesetter for human events. Politics and culture are struggling to keep up. Whilst our scientific understanding of the world embraces eons, as a society we speak about events in terms of weeks and months, not decades let alone centuries. Our ‘plan-ahead’ strategy has shrunk to that of a political term—five years or less. In a society governed by technological acceleration, can architecture address our concerns over human obsolescence? More photos were taken in 2015 than were taken in the entire history of film. In 2017 it is estimated that 1.2trillion photos will be taken and then shared online, due largely to the ubiquity of smart phones and the accessibility of social media. Yet despite the growing trend for personal archiving [through Facebook, Instagram, etc.], future generations may well find themselves with little or no record of the 21st century due to technological obsolescence, the ephemeral nature of digital cloud infrastructures, our dependence on corporations that have been

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in existence for barely a decade, or simply our methods of archiving this huge amount of digital data. How might the typology of the archive be reconceptualised to address society’s pathological short sightedness? Located in the coastal town of Margate, this project attempts to promote long-term thinking through a strategy that considers deep time [geological time], technological obsolescence, and architecture in the development an archival landscape that exists beyond human biological timeframes. Considering time through a series of different ‘pace’ layers [Fashion, Commerce, Infrastructure, Governance, Culture and Nature] the design is represented at three distinct timeframes: NOW [02020], NOWADAYS [02060] and THE LONG NOW [10000]. Over the course of nearly 8,000 years, the design slowly exposes itself, revealing its capacity for yet to be defined programmes that collectively establish the future archive. As the coastline disappears the structure that gradually, but predictably, emerges can be considered as a form of measuring device—a linear clock that operates in the timeframe of the Long Now. Through a careful curation of the slowly eroding landscape, the design establishes a link between the cycles of creation and ruination, between memory and obsolesce. Email: eleanor.connolly@network.rca.ac.uk

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THE LONG NOW

MADELINE MEMENTO:

FIRST LOVE 239013 [2006-2011]

THE LONG NOW T O D AY, T O M O R R O W )

N O W ( Y E S T E R D AY,

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THE LONG NOW

N O WA D AY S ( L A S T

DECADE, THIS DECADE, NEXT DECADE)

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THE LONG NOW (10,000 YEARS)

THE LONG NOW

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Emmeline Quigley International Belief Machines

They do not know it, but they are doing it. They know very well what they are doing, but they still do it. They know that in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still, they are doing it.

As we rapidly move towards a monoculture that makes imagining genuine alternatives almost impossible, the challenge for design is to shift people’s beliefs, values and ideals, not through challenging what we think, but changing what we do. This is the task of International Belief Machines.

The ideological illusion lies in the reality of what we do, rather than what we think. We are, as it were, ideologues in practice rather than theory. Our beliefs and convictions are not what we feel or think, but what we do.

I N T E R N AT I O N A L B E L I E F M A C H I N E S

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Email: emmeline.quigley@network.rca.ac.uk

‘282 SMOKE DETECTOR

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I N T E R N AT I O N A L B E L I E F M A C H I N E S

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I N T E R N AT I O N A L B E L I E F M A C H I N E S

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I N T E R N AT I O N A L B E L I E F M A C H I N E S

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Isabel Ogden Waiting Room There is only before and after, the now is transient, and the flow of time a tenseless illusion.1

But, wait— Since the Industrial Revolution, our species has endured an unprecedented compression of time and space. In recent decades, this new existential condition has engendered a mode of human subjectivity at odds with the rhythms and flows of nature. Instead of navigating their way through life using cyclical, solar conceptions of time, humans have found solace and efficiency in time’s unwavering, linear arrow. Waiting Room interrogates the nature of contemporary time in order to generate a scenario in which two competing temporalities (Oldtime and Onetime) produce a third (Sumtime). One half of society remains hopelessly shackled to the sun, living their luddite lives around the predictable cycles of dawn and dusk; the other is in constant pursuit of efficiency, promoting a universal temporal order and single clock, which eliminates all time zones in order to maximise economic gain. Yet, out of this Hegelian nightmare appears Sumtime, a new temporal order which embraces emergent behavioural trends: excessive consumption, the rise of binging and the Slow movement. For Sumtime, life is not ordered cyclically or linearly, but instead experienced as

chunks or blocks of repetitive action. However, this is no Fordist assembly line. Tasks are binged for themselves, without reason or agenda. They are done to excess, without worrying about efficiency or profit. They are done at any time, without recourse to the sun, the stars, or the arbitrary oscillations of a caesium atom. Within this tripartite temporal world, time itself is subject to constant redefinition: a complex, pliable construct, used in different ways at different moments in one’s life. Each of the three temporal approaches operate simultaneously, yet are at odds with one another. Oldtime seeks to preserve; Onetime seeks to eliminate; Sumtime seeks to reconstitute. But, wait— Although these competing temporal systems imbue and animate every facet of life, there is just one act— the act of ‘waiting’—that provides a prism through which the nuances of each temporal approach make themselves manifest. Waiting isolates time—it is a unique experience, where time itself is foregrounded; and the waiting room names a space “filled with time, pure time, refined, distilled, denatured time without qualities, without even dust”.2 Email: isabel.ogden@network.rca.ac.uk

1 J.M.E Mctaggart’s B Theory. 2 An extract from ‘Waiting Rooms’ by Howard Nemerov

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WA I T I N G R O O M

THE SERIES

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WA I T I N G R O O M

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S T I L L S F R O M ‘ T O WA I T ’ F I L M

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WA I T I N G R O O M

TIME:ONE / TIME:OLD / TIME:SUM

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Liam Rawlins Which England?

“For how long will English constituencies and English Honourable members tolerate at least 119 Honourable Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important, and probably often decisive, effect on English politics while they themselves have no say in the same matters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?” – The West Lothian Question, Tam Dalyell, 1977 The emergence of alternative forms of geopolitical order, independent city-states, enclaved principalities, autonomous regions and transnational unions suggests that the traditional Westphalian mode of nation-states and looped topologies is being overwritten. The future is neo-medieval. The United Kingdom is nominally a unitary nationstate and Westminster, it is assumed, reigns supreme. However, the UK contains within it four politically (un)represented nations - England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - along with a multitude of other geo-political units with varying economies, histories, sub-nationalities and powers. In practice, or in principle, the UK is quasi-federal, or federal-in-waiting, and ‘England’ precludes federalism as an alternative future for the Union.

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The scenario is explored through a radical alternative to devolution in which in an effort to avoid the future break of up of the UK and as a post-Brexit political and economic strategy, Westminster and the Department for Exiting the EU draw up blueprints for a new UK, the United States of Greater Britain (USGB). The USGB is to contain 13 states, each with an elected parliament, equal powers and a citizenry. Yorkshire, with a population larger than Scotland, an economy twice the size of Wales and a historic collective identity is chosen as the ‘proto-state’ with which to begin this process. In the town of Todmorden, now cut in two by the Yorkshire and Lancastria state boundary, new typologies and urbanisms emerge in response to and as a consequence of its border condition. The projects explore the trade-offs, allegiances, spatial reconfigurations and tactics employed by the Yorkshire Party, the Yorkshire state and other actors in pursuing various priorities, opportunities, policies and ambitions. Email: liam.rawlins@network.rca.ac.uk

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W H I C H E N G L A N D ? T O W N H A L L . W O O L F E LT, 1 : 2 0 0

Y O R K S H I R E PA R L I A M E N T, F O R M E R LY L E E D S

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W H I C H E N G L A N D ?

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T H E Y O R K S H I R E - J A PA N A L L I A N C E

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W H I C H E N G L A N D ? THE HOLDERNESS COAST.

F I S H I N G I N F E D E R A L WAT E R S . 1 1 K M O F F

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Lucie Beauvert What is the Next Machine?

The Architect & the Experts.

“The [arithmetic] machine is dimensionless, or one-dimensional, which is a way to depart radically from physical reality.” – Giuseppe Longo, interviewed by Lucie Beauvert, Paris, 25th of January 2017 We departed from physical reality 80 years ago with the first arithmetic machines also known as ‘computers’, and the rapid transformation of technics when taken through the lens of algorithms suggests that the machines will be capable of computing their own thoughts in approximatively 40 more years of research, which leaves man once again debating with his own definition of knowledge. In the constructed realities of the mid-21st century, what is the appropriate method to negotiate with this epistemological turn -- smart instrument, the upgraded tool the astute mechanism VS sensible men Is it even machinic enough? While asking What is the Next Machine?, the aim is less to frame an answer than to expose why the question itself should be asked, by and for whom, and how it should be approached. The only necessity lies in the process of formulating and reformulating it. At the center of this investigation is the figure of a distressed architect; fascinated by --, yet disconnected from the modes of existence of digital

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objects he can only see the overwhelming horizon of ideas that are involved in the question he raises. The architect proposes to curate a general meeting between four experts that have been chosen to address the dilemma of a looming crisis of intelligence (--): a mathematician, a physicist, an archaeologist and a computational agent. The architect has called for a new team – surrounded himself with a different sets of collaborators to address the project. - Tuning the assumptions of the experts - Address the essentials of architectural process: materiality, scales and light - Structure and construction (Where = the excavation of the site and the precise location of the meeting is part of what the project proposes to trigger/reveal) Together the Architect & the Experts will approach the dilemma with their respective frameworks of understanding, stretching from one institution to the other --- seek a definition for what role technology plays in building the architecture of knowledge and they will attempt to overcome the oppositions and contradictions that stand between technics and culture. Eventually they will make the field of disjointedness a terrain for conversation. Email: lucie.beauvert@network.rca.ac.uk

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W H AT I S T H E N E X T M A C H I N E ?

W H AT I S T H E N E X T M A C H I N E ?, A C T I V .

MEETING [FILM STILL], DIRECTOR LUCIE BEAUVERT (DIR. OF PHOTO. ANNA GRENMAN), 2017

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W H AT I S T H E N E X T M A C H I N E ?

ACT IV. MEETING [FILM

STILL], DIRECTOR LUCIE BEAUVERT (DIR. OF PHOTO. ANNA

W H AT I S T H E N E X T M A C H I N E ? D I R E C T O R L U C I E B E A U V E R T, 2 0 1 7

GRENMAN), 2017

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A C T I I . TA B L E [ F I L M S T I L L ] ,

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W H AT I S T H E N E X T M A C H I N E ?

ACT I. A THROW OF DICE

W H AT I S T H E N E X T M A C H I N E ?

ACT IV. MEETING [SPLIT

[ F I L M S T I L L ] , G I U S E P P E L O N G O I N T E R V I E W, I N T E R V I E W E R /

S C R E E N I N S TA L L AT I O N V I E W ] , D I R E C T O R L U C I E B E A U V E R T ( D I R .

DIRECTOR LUCIE BEAUVERT (DIR. OF PHOTO HÉLÈNE COMBAL-

OF PHOTO. ANNA GRENMAN), 2017

W E I S S ) , PA R I S , 2 0 1 7

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Marcus Cole Splendid Automation!

“Can we turn a technological object into the central character of a narrative?” – Bruno Latour “Aramis, or the Love of Technology” The term ‘technological unemployment’ has statistically dominated discussions on future thinking. It has been argued by international think tanks such as the World Economic Forum that we stand on the cusp of an era whereby automation will supplant both high and low-value workforces alike. This has resulted in a plethora of apprehensive futures that project drastic changes to governmental policy, economical structures and notions of value and identity within work. Yet while these futures depict technological hegemony at a global scale, our political climate indicates a more enigmatic future. Events like ‘Brexit’, coupled with national shifts towards isolationist policy suggest an anxiety towards automation and a desire to preserve as opposed to progress. A paradox between technological advancement and socio-political trends begins to emerge. This anxiety highlights the need to address tensions between humans and automation within the workplace and beyond. With identity so closely linked to the value of work, the potential for technological unemployment to facilitate social crisis is substantial. What role can architecture play in preserving, or indeed progressing identity within a transitioning automated society? Port Talbot, a small steel-town in Wales has been a historical exemplum of an urban scenario through which the products of labour provided the backbone of identity for the community. Throughout the town’s turbulent history, the welfare of the community has consistently relied on the state of its

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industry. This reliance has resulted in the success of Tata Steel production forming a causal and directly proportional relationship to the quality of life in the town- if the jobs dissipate, the town falls into disarray. The proposal portrays a future scenario for Port Talbot, through the lens of an increasingly automated steel industry. Set within a post-Brexit, automated society, Tata’s influence over the town is furthered by an assertive expansion scheme looking to experientially increase throughput by automating front and back ends of the production line. With British Steel experiencing an automated boom, Port Talbot is pulled along with it. The project centres upon two key design strategies. Firstly, the automated expansion of Tata, through the design of a new ‘Importation Pier’ and ‘Slag Export Facility’ and secondly, the repositioning and bolstering of Port Talbot’s football stadium. With the facilitation of automation and community identity integral to the design moves Tata make, the two strategies unite and formulate a physical structure through which issues of work, leisure and heritage begin to formulate a new architectural identity for the town of Port Talbot. Through the distilment of local amenities and industry work typologies, the boundaries of labour and spectatorship are blurred and the town’s identity is conditioned to expedite success in steel into success on the sports field. This redefinition of the existing relationship between Tata and the community helps alleviate and reimagine the preconceptions of ‘technological unemployment’. Email: marcus.cole@network.rca.ac.uk

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S P L E N D I D A U T O M AT I O N ! / BACK ALLEY

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S P L E N D I D A U T O M AT I O N !

A U T O M AT E D L A N D S C A P E /

TATA E X PA N S I O N M A S T E R P L A N S T R AT E G Y

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S P L E N D I D A U T O M AT I O N !

S P L E N D I D A U T O M AT I O N ! MECHANICAL DOGS?

STRUCTURAL MODEL PROTOTYPE

DO ELECTRONIC PERSONS DREAM OF