2100 the World Wide Web of multispecies entanglements
emissary forks at protection by ian cheng
studio The Radical Kinship studio will create space for students to identify urgent agendas, develop strategies and invent new forms of architectural practice in order to instrument change. Together we will learn to speculate in a persistent and precise way and to transform those speculations into new realities. We will do this by identifying opportunities in specific contexts and introducing new, wild elements to transform them. The objective of the studio is to explore how we as architects might design for more symbiotic relations between human and non-human agents in the city. This might mean working with landscape or wildlife but could also mean considering technology as a tool, legislation as an object for design, institutions as spaces to be reconfigured and social norms as ripe for challenge. Students will work with narrative as a way of describing new conditions but also test proposals at 1:1 to discover what their impact might be.
causal loop diagram of several important feedback loops in world3 from: the limits to growth, d. meadows, 1972
change dominant factor world as it will Isaac Asimov
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urgency Over the past two years, there has been a great public awakening around humanity’s impact on the environment, including the rising popularity of ‘sustainable’ design amongst architects. But this begs the question, what exactly are we sustaining? By focusing on maintenance, sustainability fails to move beyond the status quo, offering, at best, mitigation and management. This studio calls for a new deal to be struck between humanity and our planet; a negotiation between the poles of techno-optimism and an impossible return to primitivism which elevates the role of non-human agents. From the animals in our landscapes to the bacteria in our stomachs to the flora and fauna on which we feed to the Amazon Alexa in our bedrooms, delivery robots in our backyard and Autonomous Vehicles on our roads; the arrival on Artificial Intelligence in our lives reminds us that the category of ‘human’ is an unstable one.
We know that it is already too late to escape the consequences of global warming. Climate collapse will likely completely change the way we live over the next 100 years. To avoid widespread societal collapse, our relationship with the natural world must be re-thought from first principles. A deep adaptation must occur, and this process demands reflection on different forms of life and coexistence, their attendant material cultures, their relationship to ‘growth’ and, ultimately, new ways of relating to our non-human kin. What does it mean to be truly interdependent? In the future, how will we live with non-human life forms? More to the point, how will they live with us? We are in desperate need of alternate narratives of how we will live together in a post-anthropocentric society. Together we will focus on the narrative development in the year 2100, producing a collection of designed interventions and artefacts brought back from speculative future worlds.
i shop therefore i am, barbara kruger, 1990
The Pink Chicken Project is a proposal to use a recently invented biotechnology called “Gene Drive� to genetically modify the bones and feathers of all chickens in the world to the color pink. As scientists suggest chicken bones to be a primary identifier of our time (the Anthropocene), this intervention would modify the future fossil record, coloring the geological trace of humankind pink. Framed as an activist campaign/startup, this speculative proposal reveals the intimate link between social and ecological justice, and allows us to think about the impact of novel biotechnologies from multiple ethical and political perspectives in a shifting landscape of human-and nonhuman power?
the pink chicken project by nonhuman nonsense
web We live on a human-damaged planet, contaminated by industrial pollution and losing 200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal every 24 hours. Our continued survival demands that we learn something about how best to live and die within the entanglements we have. Suffering from the ills of another species: this is the condition of the Anthropocene, for humans and nonhumans alike. This suffering is a matter of material interdependence. Without intestinal bacteria, we cannot digest our food. Without endosymbiotic dinoflagellates, coral lose their vitality. Yet such symbioses have been anaethema to the organization of modern industrial progress. Industrial campaigns exterminate impurities, undermining the coordinations that make life possible. Plantations grow monocultures - single crops that deny the intimacies of
companion species. Modern dairy and meat farms raise a handful of supercharged breeds. Yet our entanglements, blocked and concealed in these simplifications, return as virulent pathogens and spreading toxins. Industrial chemicals weave their way through our food webs; nuclear by-products sicken us through our cells and our bacteria. How shall we approach such blowback of the modern? We might begin by admitting that our Englightenment-era disciplines are no longer fit for purpose; that the separation between nature and culture is a colonial construct; and that ‘the sciences’ and ‘the humanities’ should never have been distinct. We might engage instead in what Donna Haraway calls ‘science-art activism’ – for which the Gerritt Rietveld Academy seems the perfect place to start. A dingo-induced trophic cascade from: the conversation, australia
Bobtail squid provide an example of the redundancy of ‘the individual’ and the power of symbiosis. They have a symbiotic relationship with bioluminescent bacteria (Aliivibrio fischeri), which inhabit a special light organ inside the squid’s mantle. The bacteria are fed a sugar and amino acid solution by the squid and in return hide the squid’s silhouette when viewed from below by matching the amount of light hitting the top of the mantle. In this way the squid and the bacteria work together to hide themselves from potential predators.
Bobtail squid (order Sepiolida) a group of cephalopods closely related to cuttlefish
who ‘we’
In the twentieth century, the natural and social sciences alike imagined the world as composed of individuals – with distinct bodies, genomes and vested interests. Symbioses, when they were recognized, were considered rare, anomalies in a world characterized by individual autonomy and relentless competition. It turns out, however, that such assumptions were wrong. Twenty-first century research on organisms ranging from bacteria to insects to mammals has shown that symbiosis in a near-requirement for life – even for homo sapiens. Our bodies contain more bacterial cells than human ones. Without bacteria, our immune systems do not develop properly. Even reproduction appears to be bacteria enabled. Life, put simply, is symbiosis all the way down. Ant expert Deborah Gordon embodies the forms of curiosity we hope to cultivate. Rather than succumbing to liberal economic theories, with their focus on individual determination of group outcomes, Gordon focuses on ‘collective behavior’. As a biologist committed to longterm fieldwork, Gordon has spent more than two decades observing ant interactions with the eye of a natural historian, designing new kinds of experiments that show the flexible indeterminacies of ant interactions with each other. Where other observers saw only rigid ‘castes,’ Gordon was able to notice how ants are not individuals but shifting senses and signals that respond to situations of encounter as well as their environment.
Yet the symbioses which keep us alive are vulnerable; the fate of one species can change whole ecosystems. Take for example the commercial hunting of sea otters off Pacific North America which changed kelp forests to sea urchin barrens; without the otters, urchins took over. Because they were connected by common soil ecologies, whole suites of perennial grasses and wildflowers disappeared in California with the invasion of European annual grasses. Entanglement with others makes life possible, but when one relationship goes awry, the repercussions ripple. During our semester we will learn about trophic cascades like this one, including Beyonce’s role in the global lobster trade, and explore the experience of non-human actors within them.
by singing about ‘taking her man to red lobster’ beyonce’s performance of her hit single ‘formation’ at the superbowl in 2016 caused a increase in lobster fishing in nova scotia
noticing The seductive simplifications of industrial production threaten to render us blind to multispecies interdependency by covering over both lively and destructive connections, burying once-vibrant rivers under urban concrete. Living in a time of planetary catastrophe thus begins with a practice at once humble and difficult: noticing the world around us. We must remain curious at all times. How can we repurpose the tools of modernity to make visible the worlds it has ignored and damaged?
Take for example scenario planning, a tool developed by the RAND Corporation for the US Military in the 1950s to predict nuclear warfare and adopted by Royal Dutch Shell in the 1970s to predict changes in the climate which would impact the availability of oil, and in its wake, profit. Together we will repurpose the tool of scenario planning to project futures which regenerate rather than extract from the natural world. We’ll move beyond prediction into design – challenging ourselves to invent new ecologies, perhaps even new words and characters, which cross disciplinary boundaries. Inspired by Donna Haraway we’ll embark together on ‘Worlding’ – the practice of theorizing and storytelling rooted in the meetings between humans and nonhumans.
a drone’s perspective on the street from: drone aviary, superflux
alternatives live now
other ways of be ursula le guin
s to how we
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Design human If anything sets ours apart from the animal and plant kingdoms, it is design. Give a bird a stick and it will use it to pull worms out of the ground for the next 60 million years. Give homo sapiens a stick and it won’t use it in the same way for two days running. The process of shaping objects and then be shaped by them is perhaps the most human of all. It becomes the way humans ask questions and thereby continuously redesign themselves. In Are We Human Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina show how the relationship between technology, man and nature has been one of co-evolution, from the earliest rocks shaped for hunting to agricultural practices to modern machinery to birth control to the World Wide Web and indeed Artificial Intelligence, which is today prompting us to question the very nature of humanity.
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Since design has contributed so much to the destruction of our natural habitat over the past decades, it should at least be prepared to contribute to its restoration. Can we design our way out of this mess? The least we can do is try. Benjamin Bratton points out that the very concept of climate change is an accomplishment of design – more specifically ‘of planetary scale computation’ - which organises the sensing apparatus required to recognize its patterns. In the future, not just sensing but surveillance and predictive modelling of carbon flows will be essential to the survival of our planet. Indeed, much of what we know ecological connection comes from tracking the movement of radiation and other pollutants. Contamination often acts as a ‘tracer’ – a way to see relations. We notice connections through their ruination; we see the importance of dinoflagellates to coral reefs only as the corals bleach and die. It is urgent that we start paying attention to more of our companions before we kill them off entirely. Unless we learn to listen, we may miss the biggest story of life on earth: symbiogenesis, the comaking of living things and technology.
beyond human
Where ‘human-centred design’ has become the dominant paradigm of the innovation economy (thanks IDEO) we can see that the more human-centred we become, the less we think about our environment. Every one-click delivery we make is pulling trees from the Amazon and putting carbon into the atmosphere. The long-tail of our eccentricities, purchases and cat memes is staggering. If design over the last century has focused on hiding these externalities within complex supply chains, in the next our design task is to reveal and avoid them.
mitigation of shock superflux, 2019
terra0, A self-owned augmented forest by paul seidler, paul kolling & max hampshire
tuda syuda the new normal, strelka, 2018
format The objective of the studio is to look for tensions between nature and technology and to ask how we as architects can find ways to build better futures – those which meet the needs of both nature and society. Situating our projects in the future allows for change to be designed. Our future scenarios will operate between prophecy and warning, existing in a timeframe that is not so near to overlap with the present, but not so far to fall into science fiction. Where possible we will step away from static representation techniques and instead use time-based media such as animated drawings, performative models, audio recordings or annotated films to capture our ideas. The semester is split into two halves and four quarters:
part one
1. mapping the present We will begin our investigation by analysing existing environments where the tension between human, nonhuman and technology are most evident. We will visit FloraHolland Aalsmeer, an automated landscape in which flowers are traded via a network of natural, technological and human agents. Each student will map the space from a non-human perspective in order to reveal the hidden factors (physical, political, economic) which produce it. We will be introduced to techniques for material flow analysis within the circular economy and then literally embody those non-human agents through the medium of Systemic Constellations – a practice which draws on existential phenomenology and Zulu attitudes to family to reveal hidden connections between people and things.
2. worlding the future Next we will extrapolate our findings from a non-human perspective to forecast possible futures. We will draw on scenario planning tools from the army and oil industry (namely the Global Business Network’s Four Futures methodology) but turn them to a more ecologically progressive purpose, taking inspiration from Donna Haraway’s practice of worlding. Using the year 2100 as a destination we will imagine more symbiotic relations between humans, technology and ‘other critters,’ illustrating them through time-based media like video and sound. The output of this worlding exercise will determine the parameters of each student’s design project (Who? What? Where? When? Why?)
part two
3. intervening in the future In the second half of the semester we will further elaborate our scenarios by intervening in them. With the material and cultural agendas for the project now established, we will begin describing a proposed world through the lens of the change you wish to bring about. Moving into an applied design task, students will be asked to develop 1:1 design interventions supported by input from practitioners from related disciplines including Futurists and Speculative Designers. Emphasis in this semester is on diverse media and modes of operation – armed with an urgent agenda and a refined technical ability, we will question how to employ architecture beyond just its aesthetic, formal or experiential qualities, transforming it into a real agent for change.
4. bringing something back In this future world, how are our notions of nature affected? What are the architectures, landscapes or urban spaces make sense there? Who are the communities that inhabit them? And what is the best medium to effectively communicate them through? The final part of the semester will draw on Dunne & Raby’s speculative design theory, which focuses on the agency of artifacts from the future to describe what’s at stake there. We’ll be inspired by the contemporary applications of speculative artifact design, including studios like Near Future Laboratory and Superflux to develop 1:1 objects which could take the form of products, tools, pieces of code, manuscripts, songs or poems which relay future rituals.
part one
Mapping the present
Worlding the future
part one
output: spatial mapping from non-human perspective media: precision drawing
mapping the present
media: time-based media film worlding theegfuture
wk 3
wk 4
Jan 20th
wk 5
Jan 27th
wk 6
Feb 3rd
wk 7
Feb 10th
wk 8
wk 9
Feb 24th
wk 10
Mar 2nd
wk 11 Mar 9th
Fri Feb 7th Final Mapping reviews
Worlding reviews
Fri Mar 6th
Systemic Constellations Workshop led by Robert Rowland Smith
Worlding workshop Scenario-building in 2100
Mon Jan 27th
Tues Feb 25th
Site visit FloraHolland Aalsmeer
Joint site visit with FAMU, Prague to Europoort Rotterdam
Friday Feb 21st
Zoological Futures Workshop at Het Nieuwe Institut*
All classes are on Fridays unless otherwise indicated all classes take place on fridays unless otherwise indicated *optional advised workshop during break - tickets required
*optional advised workshop during break - tickets required
wk 13
Final Worlding reviews Fri Mar 13th
Fri Jan 31st
Introductory lecture The urgency of future-building from non-human perspectives
wk 12
Mar 16th
Fri Mar 20th
Fri Feb 7th Mapping reviews + guest lecture: Tamara Streefland, Metabolic
Fri Jan 17th
i
output: scenario for 2100
output: spatial / supply chain mapping from non-human perspective
Jan 13th
p
output: scenario for 2100
part two
Intervening there
Bringing something back
part two
output: 1:1 interventions from non-human perspective media: open
intervening there
bringing something back
output: intervention from non-human perspective
output: object from 2100 designed from non-human perspective
wk 14
Mar 30th
wk 15 Apr 6th
wk 16
Apr 13th
wk 17
output: ob ect from 2100 designed from non-human perspective media: model, furniture, product, tool, piece of code, manuscript, song, poem
wk 18
wk 19 May 4th
wk 20
May 11th
wk 21
May 18th
wk 22
wk 23 Jun 1st
wk 24 Jun 8th
Fri June 5th
Final artifact reviews Weds May 20th
Artifact reviews
Fri Apr 17th
Final intervention reviews Weds Apr 8th
Intervention reviews
Fri Apr 3rd
Guest lecture + interventions intro Arthur Steiner Hivos Foundation
Fri May 15th
Artifact reviews
Fri May 8th
Guest lecture + artifacts intro Lisanne Buik Next Nature Network
floraholland aalsmeer
tutors
alice haugh, Space & Matter architects Alice is Strategic Design Lead at Space & Matter architects, focusing on the dark matter - organisation, funding, relationships and supply chains - necessary to transition the built environment to a circular economy. She also co-runs In-Between Economies, an urban think-tank that explores how technology affects city-making, in collaboration with IKEA’s innovation lab Space10 and Copenhagen Architecture Festival. Prior to this she spent two years as in-house futurist at UNStudio, working on strategic projects for clients in the Netherlands and abroad. These included exploring the future of work with modular furniture company USM, designing continental infrastructure like the Hardt Hyperloop station and envisioning a better future for sex work with a new Red Light District in Den Haag. Whilst living in London she worked at Hawkins\Brown architects, Publica Associates and the London Legacy Development Corporation, where she helped envision a new arts district for the Olympic Park. Alice trained as an architect at the Bartlett School of Architecture and then specialized in Urbanism and Societal Change at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where she was awarded the Vola Scholarship for her redesign of spaces of democracy in Britain.
visiting - part one
Robert Rowland Smith Robert Rowland Smith is a British author and philosopher. His books include Derrida and Autobiography; Breakfast with Socrates: The philosophy of everyday life; and AutoBioPhilosophy: An intimate story of what it means to be human. Robert is one of Europe’s foremost practitioners of Systemic Constellations – a practice stemming from psycho-analysis in which the deepest meta-structures of self are revealed. For our studio Robert will facilitate a workshop in which we embody together the perspectives of non-human actors, to try to really understand how it feels to be an animal, plant or A.I.
tamara streefland, metabolic Tamara leads circular economy consultancy Metabolic’s Cities Program, in which she tackles the major urban challenges from an ecological perspective. Her projects entail the design of viable and inclusive interventions at the interface of social and natural resilience. She has been involved in a wide range of projects regarding sustainable cities with a focus on topics such as water ecologies, the freight sector, waste systems, and renewable energy, in cities including Amsterdam and New York City. Her background as an earth scientist allows her to integrate knowledge on scientific processes that underlie the ecological impacts with creative solutions that engage novel technologies and are sensitive to social issues.
visiting - part two
Arthur Steiner, hivos foundation Arthur Steiner is an art historian working at the crossroads of contemporary arts, design and technology. He currently works at Hivos Foundation. Over the years, he has developed projects across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Through his work he has set up various collaborative spaces for art, design and technology in old medinas and industrial zones along the former Silk Road. Together with the British Council and Nesta he has set up a support toolkit on how to develop and run such creative hubs. His latest project is Digital Earth, a global research network of artists, designers, architects and scholars who map out, picture, and grasp how technology in the 21st century shapes geopolitics. He is editor of the forthcoming publication: Vertical Atlas and initiator of the ‘Force of Art research program’ with the Prince Claus Fund.
Lisanne Buik, Next Nature Network Lisanne Buik is a speaker, writer, experience designer and entrepreneur who invents stories, experiences, communities and tools to help organizations and professionals navigate the uncertainty of this technological moment with grace. Imagining new ways of seeing, being, and moving, including all senses and connecting all audiences, is a central mission of her work; from exploring new narrative pathways in AR through the lens of the Tarot, to sharing stories through 3D printed chocolate, to helping brands understand how to leverage the senses to evoke powerful emotions for their teams, or clients.
SWISS RESIDENTS WRAP GLACIERS IN BLANKETS TO STOP THEM MELTING
reading Students will be provided with texts at relevant points throughout the semester for discussion, but ideally you are also able to feed your own minds on the following: • • • • • •
We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design by Beatriz Colomina & Mark Wigley Extrastatecraft by Keller Easterling After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair & Restoration by Holly Jean Buck The Terraforming by Benjamin Bratton Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan & Nils Bubandt
SÉRIE QUASI OASIS, 17, SANTIAGO DU CHILI by SEBASTIÁN MEJÍA, 2012
emissary forks at protection by ian cheng
gerritt rietveld academie Architectural design semester:two tutor: alice haugh