Some Dark Products

SOME DARK PRODUCTS A TRAVELOGUE OF NINE INSTRUMENTS FOR ARCHITECTURE

CURTIS ROTH

SOME DARK PRODUCTS A TRAVELOGUE OF NINE INSTRUMENTS FOR ARCHITECTURE

CURTIS ROTH

Published in Stuttgart in 2017 by Akademie Schloss Solitude Solitude Haus 3, 70197 Stuttgart, Germany http://www.akademie-solitude.de Tel. +49 (0) 711 99 6 19 0

2017 Curtis Roth

The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

You can copy, modify, and distribute this work, even for commercial purposes, without asking permission.

Printed in Louisville, Kentucky by Merrick Printing

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roth, Curtis, 1986Some Dark Products, A Travelogue of Nine Instruments for Architecture. – 1st ed.

ISBN 978-164007780-5 (alk. paper) 1. Curtis Roth. 2. Architecture – United States – History - 21st Century Design.

3. Design – United States – History – 21st Century. I. Curtis Roth. II. Title. III. Title: Some Dark Products.

For Solitude.

SOME DARK PRODUCTS

4

CONTENTS

Part A: Our Dark Products This book begins by arguing that the work of architecture is a work of architecture. That is: that today, our instruments manufacture ad hoc spatial constructions through the electric distribution of design’s labor.

On Our Dark Products..................................................................................................................................................................................................................6 Instrument I: The Detail............................................................................................................................................................................................................12 Instrument II: The Specification..............................................................................................................................................................................................22 Instrument III: The Mesh..........................................................................................................................................................................................................44 Instrument IV: The Document.................................................................................................................................................................................................52

Part B: Their Dark Products This book continues by contending that space inscribed through the circulation of sunshine underwrites a new politics of distance defined by the steady stream of signals atop dumb earth.

On Their Dark Products............................................................................................................................................................................................................62 Instrument V: The Drawing......................................................................................................................................................................................................66 Instrument VI: The Text............................................................................................................................................................................................................74 Instrument VII: The Model........................................................................................................................................................................................................82 Instrument VIII: The Survey......................................................................................................................................................................................................88 Instrument IX: The Rendering...............................................................................................................................................................................................100

Part C: Epilogue This book concludes with the ambition to redesign architecture’s instruments of service so as to make perceptible (i.e. something like critical) something like a Yung Distance.

An Open Syllabus for Yung Distance....................................................................................................................................................................................114 Notes.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................118

5

OUR DARK PRODUCTS

These are our dark products: the alien spaces assembled by the instruments through which we organize the labor of design across enormous distances. They’re the colossal assemblies of human bodies, infrastructures and energies - the spatial after effects left behind by the electric circulation of our images, the networked protocols of our software platforms and the physical migration of our laborers.

Evans is particularly struck by the fact that while Allen’s The

A: Perhaps, but statistically speaking (at least according to Robin

Origins of Painting of 1773 depicts the invention of paperspace in keeping with the myth’s conventional telling, showing

Evans) probably not. Like the kind of Saturday sci-fi that always

Boutades’ first drawing occurring on the lamp-lit wall of an

ends in disappointment, any story of this causing that is eventually

architectural interior, Schinkel’s The Origins of Painting of 1830

burdened with obfuscating the stalemate of eternal returns. Or:

departs from the narrative’s conventional context, substituting

of how any this must ultimately have come from nothing at all;

the architectural substrate of Boutades’ invention with the

and Translations from Drawing to Building, Evans’ indispensable

chiseled surface of a stone in an untamed pasture, and the

text on architecture’s structure of causality is no different. Evans

light emanating from Boutades’ oil-lamp with the near-parallel

obfuscates the origins of drawing by substituting its impossible

rays of the sun itself. In other words, Evans is struck by the

beginning with myth, suspending our disbelief with two painterly

peculiar fact that in the architect’s depiction of the origins of

depictions of drawing’s invention, one produced by the Scottish

drawing, architecture itself is nowhere to be found.2 Evan’s

painter David Allen, the other by the Prussian architect Karl

opportunistically elaborates Schinkel’s peculiar painting into

Schinkel. The myth in question, recycled from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, recounts the Corinthian maid Boutades tracing the shadow of her departing lover with charcoal across an inert surface.1 Evans’ text begins by examining the two depictions’ diverging accounts of this original paper-space itself. For Evans, their differences either underscore a fundamental distinction between artistic and architectural models of causation, or simply divert our attention from the drawing’s lingering problem of the nothing at all that must have preceded it.

[1] The Origin of Painting (The Maid of Corinth), David Allen, 1773 / [2] The Origin of Painting, Karl Freidrich Schinkel, 1830

6

Q: Can a building precede its drawing?

something like architecture’s Principle of Reverse Directionality, as in: for an architect, drawings cause buildings to appear, and thus it’s only reasonable to presume that Boutades’ wall could not have preceded the invention of drawing itself.3 The generative power of drawing for architecture is precisely in the strange fact that the subject depicted within an architectural drawing is brought into existence by the drawing itself.4 When he died, Evans was adapting his famous principle into

ON OUR DARK PRODUCTS

a Costner feature in which various architectures traveled backwards in time to erase their own drawings, the audience would sit in suspense, wondering if buildings that killed their drawings were still architecture or just ordinary objects; it ended in disappointment. But far more interesting than the well-rehearsed assertion that architectural objects are almost always preceded by drawings would have been the film’s sequel, which could have finally dealt with the obvious, but seldom asked sequitur to such an assertion:

Q: What precedes a drawing?

those narratives within a nascent capitalist economy.5 Malton’s

A: For example, imagine that I’d lied. Or at least that the

upon a recurring visual effect epitomized by his library proposal

particular claim towards a professional expertise was staked of plate no. 25.

authorial credit annotating the technical drawing above was only technically correct. Imagine instead that I’d commissioned

7

The library’s geometric concept initially strikes one only as

and breakfast from http://SilvermineSystems.com, a web-

the kind of entirely unremarkable work expected from an

template hosted from a Shenzhen suburb promising to “bloom

architect a year before his death. The structure consisted

outsourcing globally” while specializing in smuggling AutoCAD

of three components repeated three times over, annotated

templates on USB drives across Yellow Sea shipping routes and

in Malton’s plan as: (A) a central rotunda, spoked by (B) three

into the anonymous, state sponsored, drafting houses of Rason,

identical hallways radiating from the circular central volume

North Korea. Imagine that this disclosure was followed by

at 120 degree angles, each terminated by (C) three additional

another question, as in: does the spatiality of the drawing as first

rotundas half the size of the central entry volume. The additive

presented differ from the same drawing as now understood? Or,

nature of Malton’s tri-axial scheme was concealed behind a

if only to avoid the stalemate of a polar response, imagine that

variable poche that presented the library, from the exterior, as

my answer began with a more open-ended question like:

a single trefoil volume excavated by three intersecting circles

Q: how do we cause drawings to cause things to appear in the world?

A: I’ll begin with an altogether different story of origins, as in:

plate no. 25 from James Malton’s A Collection of Designs for Rural Retreats as Villas from 1802. Plate no. 25 contains two counterpoised depictions of Malton’s unbuilt proposal for a private pastoral library designed for the pleasure of an unnamed aristocrat. At the top of the plate, rendered in the full tonal depth of early 19th century lithography, an elevation, and laid below this elevation in an equivalent scale, an un-rendered diagrammatic plan. The pattern book genre, to which Designs for Rural Retreats belonged, was in equal parts a self-published monograph and an emerging form of professional advertisement by which the first modern middle-class practitioners invented new narratives of architectural expertise, and devised new markets to financialize

[3] Standing Seam Detail, Curtis Roth, 2016 / [4] Plate no. 25, James Malton, 1802

the drawing for around a buck and a half between a shower

that were double the size of his original central rotunda. But the mastery that Malton’s simplistic plan belies is divulged in the observation that the plan’s geometric concept, adequately described in my previous two mediocre sentences, seems entirely impossible to intuit from the elevation placed directly above. If the pattern book genre’s conventional graphic pairing of plans below their corresponding elevations was typically only the rote demonstration of an architect’s mastery over the aesthetic and technical bifurcation of architecture as an art and a profession, Malton’s thesis lies precisely in the lack of correspondence between his own two depictions. In short: the viewer is incapable of deducing the project’s underlying concept through recourse to the elevation alone.

Malton elaborates upon this peculiar effect on the following page in plate no. 26, which depicts the same project through three equally incoherent views. The foreground of this rendered

OUR DARK PRODUCTS

perspective features two figures, one proudly displaying the plan

For early professional architects like Malton and his colleagues

from plate no. 25 to his companion. Over the figure’s shoulders

however, the significance of arcane effects like those featured

lies a carefully constructed view of the project in which a sliver

in Designs for Rural Retreats went far beyond the pedantic

of a third minor rotunda appears behind the edifice stretched

demonstration of an architect’s skill. The pattern book genre

between its two anterior counterparts. This glimpse of the

was a highly visible medium through which an emerging cadre

project’s posterior third axis, now visible from our new vantage

of middle-class architects attempted to construct a new market

point but concealed in the elevation of plate no. 25, allows a

for practice that was distinct from preexisting economies of

perspicacious viewer (such as yourself) to just barely deduce

building production.7 Critical to the success of this endeavor

a correspondence between the phenomenal object in the

was the professional’s ability to monopolize a new form of

background and the conceptual diagram held in Malton’s hands.

knowledge, and to persuade a clientele as to the financial value

But this short-lived moment of clarity evaporates again in the

of that professional monopoly. In her thesis on the rise of 19th

axial vantage point of a small crowd gathered in front of the

century professionals like Malton, sociologist Magdalene Sarfatti

architectural object. Both deprived of the plan in the foreground

Larsen describes this process as the negotiation of cognitive

and unable to see the hidden third axis, the implied perspective

exclusiveness.8 This negotiation was a process in which middle-

of the crowd returns us to the effect of plate no. 25. In Malton’s

class market professionals attempted to construct and control

heavy-handed allegory of architectural translation, the further

new economies for selling time and specific intellectual skills as

the plan recedes from view, the further one’s experience of the

opposed to clearly defined products.

object is divorced from its own underlying conceptual causes.

In a letter written to his former student by America’s first Malton’s graphic acrobatic act, in which appearances and their

purported professional architect in 1796, Benjamin Henry

geometric concepts intersect only to separate again before

Latrobe summarized the crowded economy of architecture

our eyes, proffers an ideal formalism that causes unideal experiences, arguing that the purpose of a building’s phenomenal experience need not necessarily be to attain cognizance of its causal concepts.6 Never one for subtly, Malton goes on to repeat this effect throughout Designs for Rural Retreats, demonstrating his dexterity in its execution through both acute bi-axial and cruciform shaped designs.

[5] Plate no. 26, James Malton, 1802

8

against which middle-class practitioners, like himself, struggled for recognition: “The profession of Architecture has been hitherto in the hands of two sets of Men. The first of those [gentlemen-architects] who from travelling or from books have acquired some knowledge of the theory of Art, know nothing of its practice, and the second of those [building mechanics] who know nothing but the practice,

ON OUR DARK PRODUCTS

and whose early life being spent in labor, and in the habits of a

brief letter to his bill, detailing for the Assembly the rationale

laborious life, have had no opportunity to acquire the theory. The

behind his peculiar standard of compensation. The letter

complaisance of these two sets of Men to each other, renders it

began with Latrobe’s barely condescending attempt to educate

difficult for the Architect to get in between them, for the Building

the assembly on the “accepted” practices of billing employed

Mechanic finds his account in the ignorance of the Gentleman-

by the majority of European architects. In addition to expenses

Architect, as the latter does in the Submissive [sic] deportment

for travel and lodging, this customary financial model entitled

which interest dictates to the former.” 9

the architect to a commission equaling 5% of the total cost of the project. Latrobe justified his request for an equivalent

So when Malton demonstrated his ability to arrange form in

compensation by conflating his own abstract intellectual skills

such a way that the resulting architectural objects obscured

with the more-demonstrable expertise of the hydrological

their own geometric causes, he introduced a distance between

engineer William Weston, whom he had met in a Richmond

drawing and building and declared his intellectual mastery over

pub while conducting his initial surveys of the James River site.

that distance in a single cunning gesture. Malton’s purported

“It would be hypocrisy in me to say that either my experience,

expertise was neither the humble material expertise of the

or my opportunities of acquiring professional knowledge were

building mechanic, nor the abstract conceptual expertise of

less than his,” claimed Latrobe, “[and] his testimony in my favor

the gentleman-architect, but was instead a monopoly over the

renders comparison unnecessary.” 12

effects produced during the translation of concepts into objects.

In adopting the Engineer’s flat percentage commission model, Malton’s negotiated monopoly relied on a delicate reconstitution

Latrobe attempted to charge the Virginia General Assembly for

of the architectural drawing’s historical function. By turning

his intangible expenditure of time and intellect on the project.

translation into a specialized form of intellection, Malton

But this intellectual justification for the value of Latrobe’s

elevated the drawing’s profane managerial obligations into the

work is ultimately compromised by the very same underlying

tangible evidence of his own intangible intellectual expertise.

contradiction intrinsic to Malton’s mail-order architect. Latrobe’s

This sleight-of-hand conveniently allowed Malton’s professional

letter amends his strict 5% fee with the additional expectation

architect to participate in the base economies of construction,

that he should receive, “…a certain sum for fair drawings, if

while insulating the architect from construction’s lower-class

furnished, according to their difficulty, number, or beauty.”

connotations - transforming their participation from mere labor

Latrobe’s model of compensation at the turn of the 19th century

into the demonstration of a specialized metaphysical skill.

was deeply divided between two irreconcilable narratives of an

13

architect’s value: as a highly-specialized intellectual on one hand, However persuasive Malton’s metaphysical claim may seem to

and as a mere producer of tangible commodities necessary

us today, any negotiation of cognitive exclusivity is only valuable

for construction on the other. The century-long struggle to

if accompanied by a financial model capable of turning one’s

substitute the latter with the former would be waged as much

intellectual skills into marketable assets. While his reformulated

by the rhetorical content of design work like Malton’s, as it would

professional had purportedly cornered a market in new

be by a collection of emerging professional organizations intent

intangible intellectual abilities, Malton, nevertheless, seemed

on institutionalizing Latrobe’s compensatory protocols.

unable to imagine a sustainable financial model of practice that wasn’t contingent on the literal sale of drawings as mere

Rather than state licensure, standardized education, or dull

material commodities. In the opening paragraphs of Designs

national conventions, it was the normalization of fee structures

for Rural Retreats, Malton offered his professional services as

intimated in Latrobe’s early letters that precipitated the founding

a mail-order architect, furnishing distant clients with executable

of the first American architectural institutions like the AIA and

drawings in response to a checklist of desired styles and

the WAA.14 In a letter written by the architect Richard Upjohn

potential project

budgets.10

Malton’s financial model of practice

and circulated amongst the early board members of the AIA,

turned his lofty metaphysical practitioner into a common

Upjohn declared the primary goal of this nascent association as,

producer of mail-ordered material goods.

“the establishment and maintenance of a perfect understanding as to the prices and methods of conducting business.”

15

The

It would take another half-century, and a continent loosed

methods advocated in Upjohn’s letter referred to the same

from the control of labor guilds and an entrenched aristocracy

5% commission model pioneered by Latrobe half a century

to arrive at an economy capable of sustaining the normative

prior. But while the AIA’s goal of normalizing a percentage

model of the architect as a professional translator.

model promised to financially liberate the architect’s intangible intellectual skills from mere economies of labor, convincing the

The Architect’s Intellectual Merchandise

public of its value was not without its difficulties. This model of compensation provided the architect with the problematic

In 1798, Benjamin Latrobe sent a bill for around $750 to

incentive to inflate the cost of a project so as to increase the

the Virginia General Assembly in exchange for his services

sum of their commission.16 And the first decades of the AIA’s

relating to a penitentiary house overlooking the James River.11

activities were primarily devoted toward rectifying this oversight

Assuming that his billing protocols were rare enough in the

through public education on the merits of an architect’s intellect,

United States to warrant an explanation, Latrobe attached a

and the codification of ethical standards for practitioners.

9

OUR DARK PRODUCTS

By the time Latrobe’s 5% fee structure was adopted by the AIA in

drawings to the planetary-scaled electric clouds beneath our

1866 as the normative model of compensation for professional

contemporary BIM interfaces. These are architecture’s dark

practice, it was a deeply compromised version of the flat

products. They’re the even distribution of corporate offices

percentage rate he had originally endorsed so many years

across global time-zones, allowing the circulation of .DWGs

prior. In order to avoid incentivizing unethical design practices,

to keep pace with the rotation of the earth. They’re the offsite

this reformed percentage model distributed the architect’s

rendering servers that compute the work of French visualization

5% commission across a schedule of project completion that

studios with the abundant oil reserves of the Brazilian rainforest.

coincided with the delivery of architectural drawings from early

They’re the networked drafting platforms that adjoin the high-

design studies to final construction documents. On the surface,

value brains of designers in the first world with the low-cost

this was a victory in the half-century struggle to financialize the

drafting labor of CAD technicians in the third. And they’re

profession’s enduring metaphysical alibi, and the AIA’s early

the interstate financial networks that brought my opening

contract was quick to assert that though the increments of these

illustration from an anonymous drafting farm in Rason to your

payments coincided with the material delivery of drawings, the

desk today via the elasticated underwear strap of a Yellow Sea

payments were not in exchange for the drawings themselves.

fisherman. Our dark products are the alien spaces caused by

Richard Upjohn reiterated this rhetorical claim in his address to

the instruments through which we organize the labor of design

the AIA general convention in 1869, arguing, “Our merchandise

across enormous distances.

is our brain, we sell our ideas.” 17 These

10

products

undermine

architecture’s

most

basic

But within this peculiar financial arrangement, that would be

understandings of space, authorship and agency even as

adopted by the US courts as the standard model of architectural

they service the abstraction of paper-space itself. They’re less

compensation in 1894, and remains the norm for professional

formed than they are formations - the spatial after effects left

practice today, one finds a convoluted fiction that mirrors Malton’s

behind by the electric circulation of our images or the physical

original negotiation of cognitive exclusiveness.18 If Malton

migration of our unpaid interns. They’re utter banality renders

inflated the utility of the drawing, as a mere tangible instrument,

these spatial formations invisible to conscious disciplinary

into the evidence of an architect’s intangible expertise, the AIA’s

critique, consigning the responsibility of their design to office

payment schedule performed an equivalent sleight-of-hand that

protocols, or software platforms. To understand the spatiality

allowed compensation to coincide with the delivery of drawings,

of architectural work as a work of architecture asks us to

as mere commodities, while purporting to remunerate the

relocate the myriad ethical, political and economic issues these

architect only for their lofty intellectual merchandise.

formations precipitate from architecture’s extra-disciplinary sociological milieu to the crux of architecture itself. In the end,

Motivating these financial and conceptual arrangements that

this proposition asks for nothing less than a new model of the

support architecture’s contemporary metaphysical alibis,

architectural imagination itself.

lies an enduring disciplinary class politics that privileges the merchandise of the mind over the labor of the body in the

The following project is an attempt to put forward this alternative

production of architectural meaning. This ethic legislates

imagination through a travelogue tracing the bizarre journeys

the financial economies of our practices, it structures our

of nine architectural instruments, from renderings produced

pedagogies and it prefigures the forms of agency we imagine

for the pleasure of airborne algorithms to digital models

architecture to possess, but above all, it furnishes us with

navigating the online bureaucracies of international copyright

a model of architectural causation in which an architect’s

legislation, each instrument discloses the perverse mutation

specialized imagination causes their instruments to cause

of space, authorship or subjectivity that currently underwrite

things to appear in the world.

contemporary architectural work. Some Dark Products argues that to refashion the architectural imagination we must begin by

So in returning to the paradox of my opening drawing: while one

asking our most prosaic instruments to evidence architecture

can intuitively understand that a technical drawing produced by

in new ways, or in other words, by asking our most prosaic

myself, and a technical drawing whose processes of production

instruments:

have been smeared across a planetary array of bodies and

Q: how else might architecture cause things to appear in

state-borders are not spatially equivalent, this non-equivalency doesn’t lie in the drawing as evidence of any intellection but in the disavowed status of the drawing as a concrete instrument for distributing labor.

Toward Another Imagination Underneath the discipline’s centuries-long disownership of the drawing as a material commodity lies a colossal assembly of human bodies, infrastructures and energies stretching from the postal networks that supported Malton’s primitive mail-ordered

the world?

ON OUR DARK PRODUCTS

11

OUR DARK PRODUCTS

Our dark products are fabricated by .DWGs whose global circulation is syncopated with the rotation of the earth, or by third world rendering farms computing atmospheric realisms with Amazonian oil reserves, or by interstate financial networks delineating lines between an anonymous drafting house in North Korea and your desk today via the elasticated underwear straps of Yellow Sea fishermen.

Late in March of 2016, I commissioned eight architectural

in the translation of the detail’s detailed authorial hierarchy into

details, from weep-holes to scuppers, each depicting a designed

a geographically networked supply chain stretching between

leak in the surface of an unspecified building. The drawings were

their legally responsible front-office in Ahmadabad, India, and

commissioned from an Ahmadabad-based corporation called

an anonymous pool of drafting technicians working within the

Silicon Valley Infomedia, a subsidiary of the more-ominously titled

Rason Special Economic Zone, a North Korean financial enclave

Silvermine Systems, a shadow-corporation, ambiguously located

located 800km northeast of Pyongyang.

somewhere inside China’s Pearl River Delta Economic Zone.

Silvermine’s labor-sourcing strategy is referred to by Deutsche

12

2

The paradox of any architectural detail is that for all its

Bank’s just-in-time logistical gurus as “China plus one.”

While

precision, it’s a fuzzy kind of thing. At times, standing-in as the

China’s GDP accelerates, the cheap land and labor that once

unmistakable authorial signature of an individual architectural

rendered it a reservoir for the outsourced minutia of architectural

author, from ornamental I-beams to seafoam toilets. While

production evaporate. Instead, repetitive anonymous tasks,

in other contexts, slipping below some ambiguous cultural

such as architectural detailing, have been further subdivided

criteria of authorship altogether into the rote technical labor of

into distributable units of labor and outsourced across

document preparation performed by anonymous interns and

developed and developing economies in accordance with the

buried beneath layers of plastered poché. The detail is thus, at

task’s specific authorial obligations. At the most menial end of

one and the same time, the perfect expression of an authorial

this outsourced outsourcing economy lies the Rason Special

imagination; where the obligatory formal will of a particular

Economic Zone, a controversial attempt to short-circuit the

architect is exerted upon the resistant matter of buildings

embargoes lobbied by the UN against the DPRK since the

themselves, while simultaneously constituting an economic

late 2000s.3 Behind 56-kilometers of electrified fence, Rason

matter of concern around which the architectural office, as a

specializes in forms of creative production that fall below the

specific socio-economic network often congeals. This paradox

cultural conventions of authorship. Rason is where the foggy

of the architectural detail, as either a signature of a perfunctory

atmospheric environments of our video games are modeled

professional obligation adjudicates between design, as an

(only to be obscured by the action in the foreground), it’s where

authored cultural discourse, and architectural construction as

Disney’s individual animation frames are hand-rendered (only to

a professional system for organizing authorially absent classes

be erased at a framerate of thirty per second), and it’s where

of design labor.

the architectural details supporting a host of international projects are designed (only to be buried beneath architecture’s

Silvermine Systems has turned the detail’s underlying authorial

visible surfaces). These immaterial forms of creative labor

paradox into an economic model smeared across half the earth

provide North Korea with a profitable stream of foreign currency

itself.1 Their practice is contingent on the awareness that details

while relying on Chinese intermediaries to bypass international

are themselves detailed, or in other words: that the global supply

sanctions against North Korean corporations.

chain of contemporary detail production is made possible only through a logistical ordering of the detail’s authorial divisibility.

But outsourcing labor to North Korea is no easy task. Rather

At one end of this supply-chain, lies the legal promise of a detail’s

than simply transferring files online, the digital content that

intended performance, a responsibility financially shouldered

supports these anonymous economies of creative work

by the detail’s nominal author. While at the other end lies the

circulate through the smuggling of physical memory devices

anonymous bodily regiments of drafting that make details, as

like USB drives across what might be the most militarized

specific graphic marks, visible. Silvermine Systems specializes

border on earth.4 Where the internet has historically been

INSTRUMENT I: THE DETAIL

13

misunderstood as a dialectic to geographic space, wherein

anonymity of both file formats like .DWGs and specific types

ethereal clouds undermine the solidity of geo-political borders

of labor like the delineation of architectural details, this same

and totalitarianism melts under the easy-flow of electric

economy operates on platforms underwritten by a paranoid

airwaves, in Rason, the situation is precisely reversed: objects,

attempt to relentlessly connect files with the human agents of

in the form of concealed hard drives and DVDs are just nimble

their distribution.

enough to circumvent the almost-absolute border of North Korea’s sovereign Kwangmyong internet enclave.

In the commissioning of these eight architectural details, Silicon Valley Infomedia was provided with eight AutoCad template files within which each individual leak was to be drawn. These .DWG

within the interfacial space of Red Star OS, a state-produced,

files were modified with a counter-script of my own design,

Linux-based operating system, first developed by the DPRK

intended to read, isolate and preserve the digital watermarking

in 2002 and built atop the pirated source code of MAC OS X 1.0. While similar, both aesthetically and functionally, to Apple’s ubiquitous operating system, since the third release of Red Star in 2013, the operating system has become a highlypoliticized digital space through the deployment of a host of insidious subroutines buried beneath the system’s standard operating

protocols.5

One of these sub-routines, known as

gpsWatermarkingInformation, was designed to track the illegal sharing of South Korean films and pop music by watermarking the underlying hex-code of files with an encrypted traceable registration code the moment any external storage device is connected. These watermarks, identifying the particular computers that came into contact with a particular file at a particular moment, remain in the file’s hex-code for the life of that file, allowing the state to forensically reconstruct any file’s geographic journey. So while Rason’s economy hinges upon the

[1] Watermarked .dwg hexcode captured in Red Star OS, Curtis Roth, 2016

Once across North Korea’s borders, the detailing itself occurs

of Red Star OS, allowing the erased authorship of these files to be digitally archived and later displayed as the absent laborer’s unique 32-bit encrypted signature. Upon receipt of the eight cryptographically signed drawings, each leak was rendered in a fluid simulator and indexed by its author’s computational signature. What’s left is only the after-image of an absent detail, signed by the watermark of an absent North Korean detailer; a cartography of the invisible networks lingering in the erased space of our contemporary details’ details.

OUR DARK PRODUCTS

14

[Leak 01] as drawn by: 6e ac 1e 00 e6 77 a9 b2 08 60 a5 86 08 ba 01 65 and rendered by: Curtis Roth, Rason SEZ/Columbus, 2016

INSTRUMENT I: THE DETAIL

15

[Leak 02] as drawn by: d9 00 60 ea 00 4c 9e 00 6f c3 00 09 6e 00 1e 00 and rendered by: Curtis Roth, Rason SEZ/Columbus, 2016

OUR DARK PRODUCTS

16

[Leak 03] as drawn by: 6e ac 1e 00 e6 77 a9 b2 08 60 a5 86 08 ba 01 65 and rendered by: Curtis Roth, Rason SEZ/Columbus, 2016

INSTRUMENT I: THE DETAIL

17

[Leak 04] as drawn by: 50 58 a3 31 00 7f af 91 92 2a ab 01 6c b5 b0 79 and rendered by: Curtis Roth, Rason SEZ/Columbus, 2016

OUR DARK PRODUCTS

18

[Leak 05] as drawn by: 9e 00 6f c3 00 09 6e 00 1e 00 20 77 a9 00 08 60 and rendered by: Curtis Roth, Rason SEZ/Columbus, 2016

INSTRUMENT I: THE DETAIL

19

[Leak 06] as drawn by: 9b 00 a6 f3 0f ac a3 01 de 8b 6b 57 6a 83 fc fc and rendered by: Curtis Roth, Rason SEZ/Columbus, 2016

OUR DARK PRODUCTS

20

[Leak 07] as drawn by: b6 03 05 76 04 60 09 0d 6f a0 e0 09 50 58 a3 31 and rendered by: Curtis Roth, Rason SEZ/Columbus, 2016

INSTRUMENT I: THE DETAIL

21

[Leak 08] as drawn by: 14 1b 04 58 7f 09 79 00 26 10 87 48 66 19 7e 00 and rendered by: Curtis Roth, Rason SEZ/Columbus, 2016

OUR DARK PRODUCTS

Our dark products manufacture alternative epistemologies through design software protocols and drawing conventions. They cleave the authorial intellection of design from the manageable intelligence of construction. They transform thought itself into only the commodified property of specific classes of labor. As in: ad hoc enlightenment packaged into overseas FTP transfers.

For

just over one hundred copies of a painting like Ilya Repin’s 1883

the minimum expertise of a worker tasked with executing a

portrait of Russian art critic Vladimir Stasov. This is Dafen

drawing’s directives. Its authority relies on an epistemological

Village, the turpentine-soaked capital of copied art. Established

distinction drawn between two forms of intellection: the creative

during the post-socialist economic reforms of China in the

imagination of the architect and the interpretive know-how of

early 1990s, Dafen is responsible for over 60% of the earth’s

the fabricator. This authority cleaves the authorial intellection of design from the manageable intelligence of construction, rendering these more menial forms of thought only the commodified properties of specific classes of labor. The second instrument in this collection of nine depicts the specification’s 22

strange authority by deploying it in an urban mono-economy that profits by conflating precisely such epistemic certainties.

In a small gated development located three kilometers outside the Special Economic Zone of the Chinese megacity Shenzhen, just over one hundred painters gather every year to produce

[1] An art factory in Yiwu, Zhejiang, Chris Chen, 2012

precision: the architectural specification prescribes

total volume of reproduction paintings.1 But the marginalized, mostly migrant painters participating in this particular annual competition are paradoxically competing for liberation from the $43,000,000 USD copying economy itself.

If Walter Banjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction claimed, “…that which withers under modernity is the aura of the work of art,” then Dafen is nothing less than the mass-manual remanufacturing of modernity’s lost auras.2 Dafen’s economy is premised not only on the painter’s ability to reinvest over-saturated images like Van Gogh’s self-portrait

INSTRUMENT II: THE SPECIFICATION

or da Vinci’s Mona Lisa with the financial premiums associated with hand-crafted auras, but moreover, on a state-sanctioned narrative that the perfect resurrection of such auras might even elevate the brute labor of copying into an “original” artistic act in itself. Call it Dafen’s Dream, the virgin birth of original authorship, born out of the perfect copy while supplying Dafen’s economy with a steady stream of low-cost painting labor. The competitor’s ability to convincingly resurrect Repin’s aura will be judged by the local propaganda department, and the top ten painters will be awarded state sponsorship as original artists, and more importantly, afforded the right to legally register as citizens of Dafen.3 This manufactured aspiration turns upon two competing accounts of painting’s value, as a culturally profitable form of artistic expression, and as the financially profitable organization of surplus labor. The worker’s proficiency in resurrecting auras, adjudicated through competitions like the annual Dafen Copying Competition, serves as the measure for disentangling humans. In 2004, in an effort to rebrand Dafen as a Bohemian tourist attraction, the village was rezoned, from a migrant worker’s settlement into a residential community.4 The select minority of original artists were afforded a collection of human rights such as housing and political representation that differentiate these artists from the scores of undocumented laborers anonymously Frankensteining the over-glowing lamp-lit auras lining three-star hotel lobbies from Atlanta to Vancouver.

Today, the aspirational dream differentiating human artists from their undocumented counterparts parcels the city itself, relocating the fraction of original artists to highly-visible groundfloor studios along popular tourist avenues, while segregating the scores of undocumented laborers into the unregulated recesses of corporately-owned image factories in which painters collectively sleep, live and labor. The deployment of the second instrument attempts to render the absurd segregation of Dafen’s aura economy visible through the perverse deployment of architecture’s own absurd instrument for segregating authorship from labor: the specification.

To begin, ten images were outsourced to ten copying corporations, each specializing in the production of the kind of balloon-washed, atmospheric renderings employed by real estate developers to market our mixed-use futures. Each corporation was contracted to reproduce a single historical example from the marginal 19th century painterly genre illustrating Pliny’s mythic origin of drawing. Each commission was accompanied by an architectural specification dictating the precise conditions for each image’s reproduction. Where Pliny’s myth portrayed the origin of drawing in the Corinthian maid Boutades’ tracing of her lover’s shadow across the wall of an architectural interior, each attached specification obliged each painter to depict the painting itself atop the factory wall against which they toiled.5 Upon the completion of the original ten images, the canvases were mailed to one of the original painter’s local competitors, who were supplied with a second specification obliging this second painter to erase all but the studio wall of the first painter.

[2] Specification 01, Curtis Roth, 2016 // (1) attached image // (2) studio wall // (3) min. dim. of attached image // (4) max dim. of attached image // (5) interior furnishing

the former from the latter, and ultimately, humans from non-

On its surface, the collection of images represents only a naive attempt to render the urban erasure of Dafen’s labor visible in the frame of the image itself. But the successful execution of each image is compromised by the state-sponsored aspiration for originality towards which each painter labors. In other words, each of the ten paintings raises a strange question, namely: whose intellection caused these spaces to appear? By that I mean that three irreconcilable accounts of authorship seem to present themselves. 1: Where one feels inclined to intuit that my specification was diligently executed by the original painter, then the space’s authorship belongs to my specification. An instrument causing the institutionally erased recesses of Dafen to appear in the image’s frame. 2: But this certainty is plagued by the suspicion that in most cases, the specification was never executed at all. That is, that the overly-idealized studio interiors are only the reflections of fictive-aspirations manufactured by the state itself. In which case, the specific intellectual work of design was paradoxically performed by the very anonymous painters these aspirations obscure. 3: However these first two readings are themselves challenged by the second painter’s act of erasure, for whom the specification asks them to creatively adjudicate which elements of an image constitute a wall and which elements constitute erasable content.

In the end, each depiction exists in a state of uncertainty between three potential authors, only the awkward evidence of our collective inability to precisely distinguish creative thought from manual labor in the global organization of our dark products.

23

OUR DARK PRODUCTS

24

The Wall of Jack’s Studio, as specified by: Curtis Roth, painted by: Jack and erased by: Bella, Stuttgart/Dafen, 2016/2017

INSTRUMENT II: THE SPECIFICATION

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OUR DARK PRODUCTS

26

The Wall of Polly’s Studio, as specified by: Curtis Roth, painted by: Polly and erased by: Jing, Stuttgart/Dafen, 2016/2017

INSTRUMENT II: THE SPECIFICATION

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OUR DARK PRODUCTS

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The Wall of Vera’s Studio, as specified by: Curtis Roth, painted by: Vera and erased by: Kevin, Stuttgart/Dafen, 2016/2017

INSTRUMENT II: THE SPECIFICATION

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OUR DARK PRODUCTS

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The Wall of Chao’s Studio, as specified by: Curtis Roth, painted by: Chao and erased by: Erwin, Stuttgart/Dafen, 2016/2017

INSTRUMENT II: THE SPECIFICATION

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OUR DARK PRODUCTS

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The Wall of Jiang’s Studio, as specified by: Curtis Roth, painted by: Jiang and erased by: Mei, Stuttgart/Dafen, 2016/2017

INSTRUMENT II: THE SPECIFICATION

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OUR DARK PRODUCTS

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The Wall of Ting’s Studio, as specified by: Curtis Roth, painted by: Ting and erased by: Gustav, Stuttgart/Dafen, 2016/2017

INSTRUMENT II: THE SPECIFICATION

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OUR DARK PRODUCTS

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The Wall of Mabel’s Studio, as specified by: Curtis Roth, painted by: Mabel and erased by: Zhu, Stuttgart/Dafen, 2016/2017

INSTRUMENT II: THE SPECIFICATION

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OUR DARK PRODUCTS

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The Wall of Norman’s Studio, as specified by: Curtis Roth, painted by: Norman and erased by: Eugene, Stuttgart/Dafen, 2016/2017

INSTRUMENT II: THE SPECIFICATION

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OUR DARK PRODUCTS

40

The Wall of Huang’s Studio, as specified by: Curtis Roth, painted by: Huang and erased by: Bao, Stuttgart/Dafen, 2016/2017

INSTRUMENT II: THE SPECIFICATION

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OUR DARK PRODUCTS

42

The Wall of Giacomo’s Studio, as specified by: Curtis Roth, painted by: Giacomo and erased by: Alan, Stuttgart/Dafen, 2016/2017

INSTRUMENT II: THE SPECIFICATION

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OUR DARK PRODUCTS

Our dark products circulate the afterlives of architectural history as a black-market cloud of fan art - an ever expanding pool of best guesses and shortcuts taken by cheapskate authors when authoritative images have become prohibitively expensive. The ghosts of our histories now limbo beneath Gmail’s 25mb file size threshold while appearing perfectly composed only in the 1080px of our Instagram feeds.

44

If our dark products, fabricated through the global networks

incompetence of Malevich’s Black Square, amateurishly

of contemporary architectural production, confound the

depicting only the most rudimentary relationship between

authorial distinctions between intellection and labor, then they

content and its supporting substrate. And it’s Giedion’s twenty-

also undermine our enduring models of meaning itself. Take,

one low-fi photographs of an unfinished villa, laying bare the

for example, our most well-worn model in the form of a once-

constructive dictums that underwrote its high-res formal

well-worn model house: Villa Savoye was always intended

maneuvers. For Groys, the weakness of these works is the

to be a dictum.1 A template outlining a particular model of

very position from which the utopian ideals of the early avant-

architectural meaning. But a dictum is a peculiar kind of thing,

garde were staged. By reducing the artistic gesture to the most

less Baudrillard than Plato, less a surface for straightforward

meager of efforts, weak images uphold a dictum as famous as

emulation than an expression of the belief that meaning itself

CIAM’s five points: that everyone might already be an artist.

lies below the surfaces of things in general, conducted from

author to audience via the ether beneath any object’s immediate

But weak images are necessarily tragic figures. Damned by the

presence. White walls always pointed elsewhere.2

simple fact that the more successfully a weak image explicates the universal structures of artistic meaning, the more quickly

In his essay “Le Corbusier and Contemporary Architecture”

it becomes incorporated into the rarified canons of art history.

from the fourth issue of the Parisian modern art journal Cahiers

This simple paradox was as true for Malevich’s Black Square as

d’Art, Siegfried Giedion published twenty-one images of Le

it was for Le Corbusier’s white villa.

Corbusier’s unfinished

villa.3

Like a spoiler, the photographs

depicted Le Corbusier and Giedion contemplating the villa’s

On February 25th, 1959, Le Corbusier wrote to Giedion requesting

half-baked formwork from behind its unevenly plastered

his help in the effort to restore and preserve a masterwork

facades. The figure of the villa in Giedion’s photographs is both

entropically returning to something like the villa Giedion had

visible and visibly lacking. It’s very imprecision more precisely

photographed twenty years prior.5 While the post-war story

evidencing the conceptual contours of a five point dictum soon

of the Villa Savoye’s decline, and eventual resurrection is well-

to be one-removed behind the Ripolin-white surfaces of the

known, its pristine contemporary status was wrought through

completed edifice. In Giedion’s rushed photography, one finds

the formation of Foundation Le Corbusier, a bureaucratic

the quintessential double-maneuver of avant-garde meaning

organization intent on preserving a villa that never exactly

itself. First: that an object’s significance lies beneath its tangible

existed in the first place. More Baudrillard than Plato, Foundation

physical presence; and second: that explicating the first point

Le Corbusier museumized the eponymous architect’s legacy by

through an assault on the surface democratizes a set of

polishing his oeuvre into consumable appearances that belie

operable truths capable of guiding any other work to follow. For

the rough-hewn dictums favored by Giedion’s photographic

example, imagine: R. Mutt.

guts. The aftermath of this entirely too cliché episode lingers in the ever-present policing of Le Corbusier’s contemporary visual

Theorist Boris Groys has called this double-maneuver a weak

legacy. Images of Le Corbusier’s work now comprise an online

universalism, a visual quality characterizing those images

legal enclave of highly-controlled distribution rights, funded by

produced in the earliest decades of the twentieth century so

exorbitant fees attached to every image permission granted

visually impoverished as to depict only the brute conditions for

and defended by a steady stream of cease and desist letters. At

the emergence of all images in general.4 The weak universalism

stake in the defense of Le Corbusier’s authorial rights is nothing

is the utter boredom of Warhol’s Empire, offering only a formula

less than an alternative model of meaning itself, one in which

for the conjunction of attention and value. It’s the painterly

white walls need nothing beneath.

INSTRUMENT III: THE MESH

But despite the foundation’s best intentions, the peculiar thing

Between February and May of 2016, a web-crawling bot

about Villa Savoye’s afterlife as a vigorously defended historical

named Siegfried_Giedion.txt surfed the internet downloading

icon is that the more the foundation protects Le Corbusier’s

every available digital mesh of Le Corbusier’s model villa,

monument as a high-visibility financial asset, the more it

eventually accumulating an archive of seventy-three good-

resembles the transcendentally weak work first documented

enough Savoyes. This automated collection assembles

by Giedion in 1930. That is: if the foundation’s nominal success

the afterlife of Le Corbusier’s weak dictum as it surfs the

lies in the Villa’s indispensability within the canon of modern

contemporary net. Once collected, the archive of shit-Savoyes

architecture, then it also necessarily lies in the Villa’s ubiquitous

was strung together into the circuit of an open source racing

status as the fodder for every first-year Sketch-up dilatant and

game, allowing visitors to tour an online Savoye-soup in a poor

Autocad amateur, all cutting their teeth on CIAM’s five points

approximation of Le Corbusier’s Voiture Minimum. As players

in low-res form. The villa’s paradoxical afterlife is both as an

circulate between the ill-proportioned columns and around

incontrovertible historical monument, polished into an eternal

mis-scaled ground-floor driveways, a script re-appropriates

present, and a counterfeit cloud of fan art, poorly simulating

fragments from various contemporary file-sharing treatises

the single most protected architectural image on earth. These

into an ad-hoc manifesto that users can post directly to their

amateur copies circulate in an ever-expanding pool of black

Facebook profiles. The game un-polishes the monument itself

market villas, the product of online amateurs’ best guesses, and

by accelerating a pleasure in its just good-enough simulations.

the shortcuts taken by cheapskate authors when authoritative

Suggesting, like Giedion almost a century prior, that the weak

images have become prohibitively expensive.

apparitions of the villa are paradoxically where its most radical provocations for meaning still lie.

Today, we’re inundated with a soup of shit-Savoyes, stuffing online archives with badly executed copies, strange errors policed appearances of Le Corbusier’s work even as they perversely recuperate his villa’s weak universalism. These are good-enough Savoyes: sloppy simulations bearing the jagged artifacts of their weak construction while limbo-ing underneath Gmail’s 25mb threshold for attached files and appearing more or less perfectly composed only in the 1080px of an Instagram feed. These good-enough villas recuperate the utopian politics of abstraction after the internet. Reducing the villa not to any constructive essence, but to the minimum preconditions of resolution, file size and legibility that govern any online model’s circulation. In being only good-enough simulations of the canonical villa, the ever-expanding pool of counterfeits skirts the image policing of Foundation Le Corbusier while taking the universalism of Villa Savoye’s democratic ideals seriously for the first time in a half century.

[1] Villa Savoye, Under Construction, Foundation Le Corbusier, 1929

and low-resolution matters of expedience that corrupt the

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OUR DARK PRODUCTS

46

A soup of good-enough Savoyes, as downloaded by the online bot: Siegfried_Giedion.txt

INSTRUMENT III: THE MESH

47

OUR DARK PRODUCTS

Good-enough Savoyes 05 and 06, [gameplay still]

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Good-enough Savoyes 13 and 14, [gameplay still]

Good-enough Savoyes 01 and 02, [gameplay still]

INSTRUMENT III: THE MESH

Good-enough Savoyes 21 and 22, [gameplay still]

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Good-enough Savoyes 03 and 04, [gameplay still]

Good-enough Savoyes 39 and 40, [gameplay still]

OUR DARK PRODUCTS

Good-enough Savoyes 01, 02, 05, 10, and 22 [gameplay still]

50

Good-enough Savoyes 01, 02, 05, 06, 19, 20, 22, 35, 36, 45 and 53 [gameplay still]

Good-enough Savoyes 09, 10, 19, 20, 25, and 26 [gameplay still]

INSTRUMENT III: THE MESH

Good-enough Savoyes 01, 02, 05, 06, 19, 20, 22, 35, 36 and 45 [gameplay still]

An reappropriated manifesto on file-sharing, assembled live via gameplay [game over]

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OUR DARK PRODUCTS

Our dark products distribute the intellectual effort of authorship across colossal chains of material production, while reifying a cultural perception of the author that precedes these very same networks of execution. They obligate workers to contribute their creative intellects even while erasing the successful fulfillment of this obligation somewhere between two oily shades of warm off-white.

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If, so far, this all seems not entirely unreasonable, that is: that

of architecture’s gizmos for segregating creative thought from

architecture’s instruments of service fabricate dark spatial

work ought to conclude with the legal power of the architectural

products that precede and make possible any architectural act

document. For brevity, we’ll call the document’s authority to

- then equally as important as the techno-economies currently

cleave thought from labor: [Or Equivalence]. [Or Equivalencies]

engineering these dark networks are the specific disciplinary

are the post-scripts to any architectural instruction set,

conventions we collectively employ in order to unsee them.

guaranteeing the survival of an idea even as it circulates through

Architecture is nothing if not a set of techniques for seeing

the unpredictable networks of its own fabrication. For example:

objects-as-intellection by unseeing the bodily economies

[Or Equivalent] insulates the idea of a wall, even when .625”

underwriting creative thought itself. If someday, in some parallel

sheetrock stands-in for its .750” equivalent, or when Benjamin

reality, some (overpaid) intern at some anti-ArchDaily were to

Moore’s Whisper White subtly substitutes for Frothy Surf. [Or

produce a clickbait list reducing the disciplinary techniques for

Equivalencies] are disciplinary travel insurance for the journeys

unseeing Our Dark Products to an Amazon wish list of gizmos

our concepts take through Our Dark Products.

for architectural anti-vision, I’d suggest the list should begin either with model stands or molding profiles.

But while any of us could be excused for mistaking Whisper White for Frothy Surf, somewhere between Purity and Moonlit

A: To begin narrating our anti-vision through the model stand

Snow, chromatic equivalence becomes a matter of contention

would be to focus on that peculiar kind of magic possessed

that some might even stretch to describe as creation. The

by our oily-white pedestals allowing them to make anything

hierarchical politics of authorship behind any [Or Equivalence]

visible by orchestrating their own self-erasure. The pedestal

lies in the addendum’s ability to distribute the intellectual effort

is a pseudo-invisible object insofar as it falls outside the

of authorship across the vast chains of material production,

purview of contemplative vision, belonging to a particularly

while reifying a cultural perception of authorship that precedes

forgettable class of matter bellying any authorship at all. Model

these very same networks of execution. [Or Equivalence]

stands stand-in for a discursively policed border disentangling

obligates a worker to contribute their creative intellect towards

objects, as substitutes for ideas, from objects, as anonymous

the authorship of a work, in order to adjudicate between Frothy

accumulations of matter.

Surf and Whisper White, even as the successful fulfillment of this obligation is erased somewhere between two oily shades

B: On the other hand, if the list were to begin with molding profiles

of warm off-white. [Or Equivalence] tasks the laborers who work

over model stands, its author might observe the fact that while

within Our Dark Products with the responsibility to creatively erase

model stands earn their pseudo-invisibility through their own

the evidence of their own intellects. The unseen distributions of

visual banality, molding profiles paradoxically erase the brute

authorial intellection underwriting any architectural instruction

labor underwriting intellection by multiplying labor’s visual

are the means by which an architect negotiates the exigencies of

evidence. Molding exacerbates the inevitable gaps between

matter’s circulation. The Fourth Instrument uses architecture’s

surfaces, transforming them into scroll-rolls and shadowed-

[Or Equivalent] clause, the disavowed creative intellection of

reveals that insure an architect’s ideas against the unpredictable

fabricators and the formal tropes of model stands and molding

exigencies of construction by turning the uncertainty of labor

profiles to map the ways in which authorship is segregated

into repeated demonstrations of an architect’s authorial control.

across the uneven circulation of things.

But whether epitomized by the model stand’s pseudo-invisibility

Between May and October of 2016, three exhibition fabrication

or the molding profile’s multiplication of labor, any description

firms headquartered in three disparate cities were each

INSTRUMENT IV: THE DOCUMENT

53

contracted to fabricate a custom model stand and a picture

no man’s lands, unavailable materials were substituted with

frame. Each firm was supplied with a construction document

equivalent thicknesses at the builder’s creative discretion. As

detailing the fabrication of each pedestal and frame, and

the piecemeal construction progressed, each equivalency

outlining the legal scope of equivalent substitutions permitted in

exacerbated the inevitable translational errors of construction,

the execution of the drawings. Each drawing further elaborated

misaligned edges and unsightly gaps became both a map of

a piecemeal schedule of construction awkwardly protracted

the time-space geographies of matter’s circulation and the

over the course of the project’s six month duration.

evidence of the intellectual creativity of each fabricator’s ability to negotiate the fluctuation of material empires over the course

performance in fabrication were strategically chosen geographic anomalies in the normally smooth flow of dimensioned matter. Each of the three selected firms, in London, Hong Kong and Lima exist on the ambiguous border between two competing dimensional empires, oscillating with the global economies of trade between standard metric and imperially dimensioned materials. These continual oscillations between roughly-equivalently dimensioned materials make visible the unpredictable global economies of raw goods in the subtle misalignments between 12mm plywood and its .5” equivalent.

When a Russian forest falls, Hong Kong builds in Metric; or when shipping across the Pacific becomes too costly, Peru builds in imperial. In the construction of three model stands and three picture frames from within these three dimensional

of the object’s fabrication.

[1] The Benjamin Moore Off-White Collection, Curtis Roth, 2017

The three particular sites of this inadequately scripted

Upon receipt of the six objects, each of these ad hoc creative contributions was multiplied through the development of a collection of geo-political molding profiles, negotiating the strange gaps in equivalent materials and placing into tension the specific authorial choices of my workers and my own visual control over the strangely segregated authorship of six objects.

OUR DARK PRODUCTS

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[Picture Frame 01] As prepared by: Curtis Roth and constructed by: Vis Com, Stuttgart/London, 2016

INSTRUMENT IV: THE DOCUMENT

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[Model Stand 01] As prepared by: Curtis Roth and constructed by: Vis Com, Stuttgart/London, 2016

OUR DARK PRODUCTS

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[Picture Frame 02] As prepared by: Curtis Roth and constructed by: Corporacion Visual Designs SAC, Stuttgart/Lima, 2016

INSTRUMENT IV: THE DOCUMENT

57

[Model Stand 02] As prepared by: Curtis Roth and constructed by: Corporacion Visual Designs SAC, Stuttgart/Lima, 2016

OUR DARK PRODUCTS

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[Model Stand 03] As prepared by: Curtis Roth and constructed by: Creative Ideas Global, Stuttgart/Hong Kong, 2016

INSTRUMENT IV: THE DOCUMENT

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[Picture Frame 03] As prepared by: Curtis Roth and constructed by: Creative Ideas Global, Stuttgart/Hong Kong, 2016

SOME DARK PRODUCTS

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CONTENTS

Part A: Our Dark Products This book begins by arguing that the work of architecture is a work of architecture. That is: that today, our instruments manufacture ad hoc spatial constructions through the electric distribution of design’s labor.

On Our Dark Products..................................................................................................................................................................................................................6 Instrument I: The Detail............................................................................................................................................................................................................12 Instrument II: The Specification..............................................................................................................................................................................................22 Instrument III: The Mesh..........................................................................................................................................................................................................44 Instrument IV: The Document.................................................................................................................................................................................................52

Part B: Their Dark Products This book continues by contending that space inscribed through the circulation of sunshine underwrites a new politics of distance defined by the steady stream of signals atop dumb earth.

On Their Dark Products............................................................................................................................................................................................................62 Instrument V: The Drawing......................................................................................................................................................................................................66 Instrument VI: The Text............................................................................................................................................................................................................74 Instrument VII: The Model........................................................................................................................................................................................................82 Instrument VIII: The Survey......................................................................................................................................................................................................88 Instrument IX: The Rendering...............................................................................................................................................................................................100

Part C: Epilogue This book concludes with the ambition to redesign architecture’s instruments of service so as to make perceptible (i.e. something like critical) something like a Yung Distance.

An Open Syllabus for Yung Distance....................................................................................................................................................................................114 Notes.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................118

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THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

These are their dark products. Electrified spatial arrangements that amplify power by modifying the properties of space in unforeseen ways. Their dark products manufacture a new politics of distance, coursing through spaces torqued into something distinctly unlike the omnipresent Cartesian ooze architecture’s instruments were once designed to manipulate.

By all accounts it had all gone to shit, that delicately negotiated

and his colleagues could have imagined. Today Anderson’s

19th century professional monopoly over the translation

accidental architecture reformats the earth from the invisible

from drawings to buildings. Or more accurately, by Lawrence

haunts of telecom planning departments and the training

Anderson’s account.

camps of net-savvy terrorists. The following is an account of their dark products:

The account in question was a letter written by Anderson, thenIt began over the course of a spring night in 1967. Utilizing

1968 report to the institute’s president.1 The shit in question

mostly salvaged timber and cinderblocks, a collection of MIT

was a metropolitan crises compounded out of so many racial,

undergraduates anticipated Anderson’s short-circuit in its

ecological and economic catastrophes that architects and

clumsiest early form by transforming their studio spaces into

planners of a previous generation were seen as complicit in

a densely subdivided network of mezzanines. This overnight

perpetuating. In Anderson’s account, this crisis precipitated

architectural happening was initially intended as a student

from a general deterioration of the very intellectual expertise

protest. A demonstration of anti-skill aimed against the same

upon which the profession of architecture once negotiated its

impotent professional-leaning pedagogy that Anderson himself

economic monopoly over building practices. If architecture’s

would challenge in his report the following year.5 But like any

“old-style professionalism” relied on a mastery of the affects produced through the translation from drawings into buildings, the shit seemed to evidence only a profound misalignment between architecture’s instruments and their ends.2 The specialized, abstract space of the drawing, suddenly seemed an ill-suited simulation of the urban chaos within which the architectural imagination was being disastrously realized.

Anderson’s report went on to outline a concerted attempt on the part of the institute to renegotiate architecture’s cognitive exclusivity through a pedagogy that privileged participation over translation.3 The radical collection of experiments that followed, experiments described by Anderson as disciplinary short-circuits, promised to refigure the very conceptual models through which the post-war architect caused things to appear in the world.

In hindsight, Anderson’s short-circuit was exactly wrong and only coincidentally right. While MIT’s broad attempt to remodel architecture’s aging narratives of causality would suffer in subsequent critiques that (justifiably) questioned the ethics of Cambridge architects using a DOD bought, IBM 704, to pilfer aesthetics from squatter communities in Argentina, Anderson’s short-circuit nevertheless accidentally prefigured another architecture altogether.4 One far more radical than he

[1] MIT’s undergraduate architecture lofts, Donlyn Lyndon, 1968

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dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, in his spring

ON THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

effective student protest, a semester later, the angst of their mezzanine happenings would be successfully squashed when the administration incorporated their protest into the curriculum itself. In the fall of 1968, department chair Donalyn Lyndon officially designated MIT’s design studios Space/Use Workshops and Experimental Areas.6 In this year-long pedagogical experiment, all first, third and fourth year architecture undergraduates were expected to fabricate their studio spaces “for their own use,” under the close supervision of faculty and building services. These ad hoc constructions were posited as temporary, intuitive experiments in the occupation of space. Experiments that were built first and drawn second. Students translated their constructions into more conventional architectural representations only after their personal fragment of the mezzanine complex was constructed, drawing from within the very spaces they were representing.7 In truth, the results of this protest-turned-curriculum were unremarkable three dimensional accumulations of hippy junk, amateurishly tacked together in a collection of crumbling 19th century studio volumes. But as unimpressive as the outcomes appear in Lyndon’s collection of grainy snapshots documenting their collective experiment, the student’s reliance on the unpredictable surpluses of found material, and Lyndon’s mandate that the designs continually evolve over the course of the semester in response to their use, unambiguously asserted a materialist confrontation with the abstract ex-nihilo paperspace of the drawing. If the expertise of an architect had been

paper-space, a computer-aided paradigm promised the digital

historically consolidated in their wielding of instruments that

augmentation of the architectural mind itself. Conscripting

both preceded and produced reality itself, Lyndon’s experiment

the mind and an intelligent architecture machine into a

was the assertion of a world that preceded any specialized

conversational exchange characterized by a state of mutual

architectural intellection at all. The constructions short-circuited

interruptability. Under such a condition, the drawing’s typically

architecture’s historical teleology of translation from drawing to

inert paper-space would prefigure the architect’s intellect,

building with an alternative model of expertise that, in Lyndon’s

supplying the designer with a constantly updated collection of

words, “could not have been perceived in project drawings

governing criteria such as labor costs or average circulation

pinned to a wall, then shelved.” 8 In producing objects that came

distances that promised to channel the architect’s imagination

before their own drawings, Anderson would highlight Lyndon’s

towards a series of optimized outcomes. If computerized

early experiment in his 1968 letter as a critical first attempt to

drawing simply bolstered an aging model of the architectural

upend what Robin Evans would later describe as architecture’s

imagination contingent on the mastery of translation,

Principle of Reversed Directionality. But if Lyndon’s Space/Use

Negroponte’s computer-aided conversation promised nothing

experiments were a one-liner, substituting drawing-to-building

less than the end of mediation itself.

with building-to-drawing, a few pages later in Anderson’s pedagogical short-circuiting, or a few steps down the corridor

Negroponte’s AD profile would take this proposition to its most

from the trash constructions of MIT undergraduates, this same

radical (and ethically fraught) conclusion with a pictorial account

ethical imperative to upend the blank paper-space preceding

of the Architecture Machine Group’s 1969 project INTERACT.

intellection was motivating the earliest origins of digital drawing.

This short-lived experiment attempted to provisionally realize

the co-director of MIT’s Architecture Machine Group highlighted an important distinction between computerized and computeraided drawing

operations.9

For Negroponte, computerized

drawing entailed the straightforward electrification of the architect’s professional mastery over translation. Leveraging the computer as an instrument only to more accurately manage the specialized space between drawing and building. In distinction to computerization’s simplistic substitution of screen-space for

[2] INTERACT, Richard Hessdorfer, 1969

the de-mediation of the architectural process by replacing In an essay in AD Magazine from 1969, Nicolas Negroponte,

the specialized architectural mind with a purportedly neutral interface between buildings and the spatial aspirations of their future inhabitants.10 Developed by Arch Mach researcher Richard Hessdorfer, INTERACT was a subroutine allowing “consumers” to speak, in plain English, to an empathetic architecture machine via an electric keyboard. Users could “voice” their environmental desires to this offsite thinking machine, where INTERACT’s subroutines would extrapolate user’s goals into spatial models of their environmental needs.11

63

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

To best illustrate the architect’s impending obsolescence,

fissures into expressive instruments for representing the post-

INTERACT was, “brought into the South End, Boston’s ghetto

representational potential of computation. Their computer-

area” to demonstrate its conversational dexterity with an

aided fiction substituted working software for the outsourced

architecturally illiterate public. In the images that followed, three

work of African Americans, employed as expressive tropes by a

“ghetto” inhabitants, two of them African American, one of them

white architect in a drama intended to make amends for white

wearing a Tenants Power badge were depicted conversing with

architects’ neglect of African Americans’ urban aspirations.

INTERACT, “…in plain English” about, “slum landlords, highways, schools and the like.” 12

Hessdorfer’s performance of computation was a template for our dark products. Like a cargo-cult prophesy of Revit’s global

The ameliorative racial subtext of Hessdorfer’s 1969 experiment

rationing of editing permissions, INTERACT transformed the

was as clear as his project’s broader ambition to short-circuit

distribution of architectural labor into a spatial assembly

the architect’s presumed complicity in the urban turmoil of

politicized through the allocation of authorial privileges.

places like Boston’s South End. A complicity highlighted in Anderson’s letter to MIT’s president a year prior. The AD profile

The Architecture Machine Group’s cynical bait and switch,

would render the experiment’s subtext explicit, claiming, “The

between a de-mediated ideal made possible by the hyper-

three user-inhabitants said things to this machine they would

mediated exploitation of bodies across vast distances is

probably not have said to a human, particularly a white planner

emblematic of a misconception that underwrites digital

or politician: to them the machine was not black, was not white

discourses to this day. In a speech given at the Net’98

and surely had no prejudices.” 13

Conference in Taipei, digital law theorist Lawrence Lessig outlined a now-influential comparison between physical space

64

Computer architecture was born out of a moral imperative to

and cyber-space. Lessig argued that the governing structural

de-mediate the architect’s specialized conventions of working

constraints of physical space, those of laws, norms, markets

so as to build without prejudice. INTERACT promised to obviate

and architecture, have been substituted in cyber-space for the

the architect’s presumed complicity in the disastrous legacy of

constraints of laws, norms, markets and code.15 For Lessig,

urban renewal by consolidating the disciplinary knowledge of

computation has supplanted architecture as the primary

architecture into the apolitical interface of a machine. While this

instrument for channeling the coercive capacities of laws,

imperative undoubtedly underwrote Anderson’s call for a short-

norms and markets. Not without irony, this is a misinterpretation

circuiting of architecture’s “old-style professionalism,” in truth,

shared in equal measure by left-leaning theorists like Lessig,

Hessdorfer’s 1969 experiment harbored a far more profound

Silicon Valley tech-bros fronting billions for offshore libertarian

short-circuiting in the simple fact that it was a fiction through

Utopias, and architectural technologists pining for the death of

and through. According to Negroponte’s own parenthetic

translation from the near-infinite precision of their CAD/CAM

admission at the end of the AD profile, “The reader should know,

platforms. Everywhere, it’s imagined that computers undermine

as the three users did not, that this experiment was conducted

distance, whether it’s the distance between Kremlin hackers

over telephone lines with teletypes, with a human at the other

and John Podesta’s inbox or the genitals of Tinder patrons.

end, not a machine.” 14 While promising to re-run the experiment

And perhaps nowhere is this misconception more evident

shortly with an authentic architectural machine, the three

than in architecture itself. For too long we’ve been preoccupied

participants had unwittingly been conversing with an architect

with Negroponte’s computer-aided dream of an unmediated

masquerading as an imaginary computer all along.

architecture, overlooking the simple fact that what makes code so particularly powerful is not that it eradicates distance, but

As an experiment, INTERACT is a forgotten footnote in digital

more precisely: that code politicizes distance by modifying its

architecture’s half-century long moral crusade to de-mediate the

expected properties. So while each generation of architects

discipline. An ambition that still haunts the empathetic intuition of

perennially anticipates the ever-approaching end of translation,

gesture-based VR design platforms or the real-time immediacy

an alternative computational project, prefigured by the dark

of robotic fabrication. But as a performative fiction, INTERACT

side of Hessdorfer’s bizarre performance is already modifying

points towards a far more radical alternative for computer

distance into something architecture itself is entirely ill-equipped

architecture. Hessdorfer’s performance conscripted unwitting

to account for.

laborers into an itinerate architectural assembly, stretched between Boston and its southern ghetto in order to play-act

At the 2012 New York Battle of the Quants, a conference for

computer-aid minus any actual computer. The permission to

algorithmic asset traders, high-speed trader Mani Mahjouri

author within this spatial assembly was unevenly distributed

presented an algorithm for buying and selling shares of a

by Hessdorfer between offsite extras instrumentalized to

commodity called SPY.16 SPY is a security pegged to the S&P

produce natural depictions of ghetto life and onsite architects

500 Futures index, a derivative market speculating on the future

miming a fictive computer. This uneven geographic distribution

value of 500 leading companies. SPY is the S&P’s mirror, in

of authorial privileges paradoxically reified the very uneven

lockstep with fluctuations in its value down to the sixth decimal.

distributions of political power that INTERACT purported

But by an historical coincidence, the S&P 500 Futures index is

to redress. Far from ameliorating any of Boston’s racial,

traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 711 miles from

economic or cultural fissures, INTERACT transformed these

its mirror’s home on the New York Stock Exchange. For human

ON THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

investors, this distance between the S&P and its reflection has

network at the behest of Hezbollah.19 This illegal, alternative

always been irrelevant. But Mahjouri’s algorithm seized upon

FiOS network was designed by the militarized Lebanese

the realization that while SPY (in New York) moves with the S&P

political party to sidestep Israeli cellular jamming and Lebanese

Futures index (in Chicago), the S&P’s value typically leads SPY’s

state surveillance. Like Hessdorfer tripping on acid, Hezbollah

by a few milliseconds. In essence, Mahjouri had discovered a

managed the authorial privileges of thousands of itinerate

way to bet on horse races that had already been run, reading the

workers to fabricate their territory of sunshine in piecemeal

futures index and trading in shares of SPY in the milliseconds

fashion, each laborer oblivious to their neighbors’ actions.

before New York can catch up to Chicago. Mahjouri’s research is part of an emerging wave of high-speed trading that relies

In a confidential email written in 2008 and released by WikiLeaks,

as much on conventional market intelligence as it does on the

Lebanon’s then-Telecom Minister Marwan Hamadeh argued

digital manipulation of distances.

that Hezbollah’s covert FiOS network completed the group’s decades-long construction of a geographically superimposed

A few years prior to Mahjouri’s presentation, a New Jersey-

counter-state.20 But Hezbollah’s hacked territory is a peculiar

based company called Spread Networks began buying

kind of thing. Unlike a traditional state, which is constituted

infrastructure rights on tracts of land in the 703 mile stretch

by its geoscopic autonomy from the territories surrounding it,

between Chicago and Carteret New Jersey, the location of the

Hezbollah’s counter-state exists only because the glass wires

primary data center for Nasdaq.17 The United States’ civilian

that constitute it are indistinguishably bundled with Lebanon’s

fiber-optic network closely follows transportation infrastructure

legal telecom network. A fact that left US-based private

routes like rails and highways, and was organized to primarily

intelligence agency Stratfor to conclude that dismantling the

serve major population centers. As a result, the average time

hacked-state would prove to be a virtual impossibility.21

to execute an online trade between Carteret and Chicago on public FiOS is 15.9 milliseconds. Spread Networks was making

Hezbollah’s counter-state demonstrates the simple fact that

a multi-billion dollar gamble on the first “premium” dark fiber

their dark products profit by undermining our most rudimentary

network for high speed trading, bypassing population centers

assumptions of space itself. But buried beneath coincident

like Philadelphia and Cleveland in order to shave 175 miles, or

nations and the steady shrinkage between Carteret and Chicago,

2.8 milliseconds off of the distance between the two markets.

their dark products also imply an alternative repertoire of spatial

Two months before Mahjouri’s presentation at the Battle of the

techniques for something like another digital architecture after

Quants in March, his own company Tradeworx had completed

the myth of de-mediation. These alternative techniques leverage

a microwave network that bypassed the ground altogether,

the electric distribution of labor as a creative medium for

bringing online an airborne link between the two cities that

manipulating the strange expanse of post-internet space. The

reduced the time of a transaction to a mere 8.5 milliseconds.18

itinerate assemblies of bodies, algorithms and devices shortcircuit distance in order to prophesy stock prices, fabricate

While scrounging for milliseconds between Carteret and

nations from sunshine, and play-act impossible architectural

Chicago through multi-million dollar dark fiber networks may

machines. These distant manipulations of actors (both human

appear to evidence only the death of distance intimated in

and non-human) posit alternative assemblies of power that

Negroponte’s earliest account of digital architecture, the point

circumvent architecture’s well-worn spatial conventions of

of such dark networks is not to collapse the distance between

walls and boundaries, fabricating warped territories through

Carteret and Chicago as such, but rather to engineer new

the remote management of agency; whether in the editing

ways of profiting from their separation by divorcing distance

permissions of a digital drawing file or the transcontinental

from delay. These are their dark products. Electrified spatial

route of a day trader’s script. For architecture to survive the

arrangements that amplify power by modifying the properties

death prophesied by Lawrence Lessig two decades ago, it

of space in unforeseen ways. Their dark products represent a

must coin new instruments for creatively traversing the strange

new politics of distance, coursing through spaces torqued into

permutations of contemporary distance that are currently

something distinctly unlike the omnipresent Cartesian ooze

refiguring planet earth itself.

architecture’s instruments were designed to manipulate.

If the journeys taken by the previous four instruments depicted For example: In the aftermath of the most recent war between

the digital networks of architectural labor that underwrite our

Lebanon and Israel, the Lebanese state launched a nation-wide

dark products, then it follows that these networks might not

reconstruction campaign intended to repair the transportation

only be depicted, but designed; strategically assembled as

and telecommunication infrastructures destroyed during the

drifting spatial propositions for occupying their dark products.

July 2006 conflict. But over the next two years, the private

The five remaining journeys in this travelogue each invent

construction firms tasked with the concrete execution of

an alternative spatial network for distributing architectural

these rebuilding efforts were unknowingly conscripted into

labor across post-internet space. From militarized internet

the construction of a second, covert state, grosstopically

architectural criticism to Google’s second earth in the

coincident with Lebanon itself. Through a campaign of bribes,

stratosphere, each narrative assembles an experimental labor

misinformation and sabotage, these local subcontractors were

pool in order to tell a story of space after code. The following

unwittingly employed to produce a secret nation-wide fiber-optic

is an account of their dark products:

65

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

Their dark products are brute infrastructures buried in the dirt, and for all of their purported irreverence to geography, their interterritoriality isn’t so much the drift of any post-national electric cloud, as they are the under-earth leakage of clogged tubes. Power is now the privilege to interrupt, a privilege wielded as an emerging form of statecraft - vacuuming sunshine as it leaks across state lines.

In any network, power is the privilege to interrupt. A point

Hours after Palestine’s microwave link was operational its

highlighted in Alaskan State Senator Ted Stevens’ infamous

bandwidth quota was maxed out, its electromagnetic “tubes”

2006 Series of tubes argument opposing net-neutrality, in

were clogged, and the signals which it purported to send were,

which he eloquently claimed, “Ten movies streaming across

in fact, rerouted through Israel’s neighboring communications

that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal

infrastructure.3

Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my

66

staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday

The Second Oslo Accord granted Palestine the right to

[Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these

construct their own internal broadcasting infrastructure, even

things going on the Internet commercially. […] the Internet is

as it reified a preexisting Israeli monopoly over the region’s

not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big

international routing switches, fiber-optic networks, and

truck. It’s a series of tubes.”

1

While absurd, Stevens’ clogged

the allocation of local signal bandwidth. The famed 1995

tubes strike us as hilarious precisely because his argument

agreement promised Palestine digital independence through

relies less on the ubiquitous contemporary myth of the internet

the right to construct and autonomously manage their own

as a post-territorial cloud, than it does on an anachronistic,

private cloud, but its fine print specified the very impossibility

though arguably more accurate analog of the internet as a

of Palestine’s signal sovereignty by awarding Israel a

super-highway. The net is the brute arrangement of physical

monopoly over the underlying “tubes” that make the myth of

infrastructures buried in the dirt, and for all of its much-lauded

any cloud possible in the first place. In disengaging from the

irreverence to geography, its inter-territoriality isn’t so much

fraught physical occupation of the Gaza Strip, while bolstering

the drift of a post-national electric cloud, as it is the under-

their control over the physical substrates of Palestine’s

earth leakage of clogged tubes. In any network, power is the

digital communications networks, Israel is pioneering a form

privilege to interrupt.

of dromological occupation that substitutes the control of geography for the manipulation of speed, and the power of

Take, for example, Article 36 of the Second Oslo agreement

violence for the privilege to interrupt.

between Israel and Palestine, which stipulated that, “Israel recognizes the right of the Palestinian side to establish

While the signal’s perpetual leakage across borders bolsters

telecommunication links (microwave and physical) to connect

endless iPhone fantasies substituting state-politics for

the West Bank and the Gaza Strip through Israel.” 2 A few short

meteorology, the sunshine that leaks across national borders,

months after the agreement’s ratification, while clouds were

like those between Israel and the Gaza Strip, isn’t the end

replacing super-highways as the dominant cultural analog of

of the nation state but its electric rejuvenation. While the

the internet, just such a microwave link, drifting between two

topological enclosure of space asserts power through the

halves of a separated state, was completed. But while initially

prohibition of bodies and goods crossing state-borders,

lending credence to the myth of an overcast post-geographic

power in the dromosphere relies precisely on coaxing electric

internet, Palestine’s microwave link soon supplied a readymade

signals across these same militarized borders. By heavily

answer to Stevens’ long- ridiculed rhetorical question:

policing Palestine’s bandwidth window, Israel forces clogged

Q: “Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what

communications within Palestine to leak through Israel’s own,

happens to your own personal Internet?”

A: It leaks through someone else’s tubes.

closely monitored, communications backbone; facilitating everything from widespread surveillance to state sponsored communications black-outs.4 Israel’s electric border is useful only when it is transgressed.

INSTRUMENT VI: THE DRAWING

Palestine is a cul-de-sac in the mesh network of the internet.

blocks distributed throughout the total drawing set. The drawing

While the internet’s speed relies on the redundancy of any single

has become a class society in networked form. One in which the

line, the Gaza Strip represents one of a limited series of sites

power of authorship is redefined as the permission to interrupt.

on planet earth in which the redundant mesh of the cloud thins

67

into the controllable “tubes” of Stevens’ super-highway. In such

http://the-speed-of-the.earth is a web-based interface that

cases, power becomes the privilege to interrupt. This privilege

uses the networked parceling of an architectural drawing as

is wielded as an emerging form of statecraft, less interested

a framework for mapping the electric speed of planet earth in

in the ever-changing topology of geographic borders than the

real-time.

vacuuming of sunshine as it leaks across state lines.

First: eight architectural drawings depicting eight geopolitical borders were produced in AutoCad Revit. Each of these drawings

interstate infrastructure as it is for the contemporary digital

depicts a cul-de-sac in the internet; a bottleneck in which the

drawing. Building Information Management (BIM) platforms

manipulation of speed is being actively deployed as a medium

are networked manifolds for parceling an architectural drawing

for dromospheric statecraft. Second: Each of the eight drawings

into hierarchical, pseudo-political classes characterized by their

depicting eight geographic borders are drawn across the very

ability to interrupt the collaborative paper-space of the drawing

borders that they graphically depict. The drawing files are hosted

itself. Autodesk’s Revit Vault, for example, is a secured database

from a server farm on one side of the border, while their linked

that distributes the labor of architectural drafting across vast

line-work is fed from server space rented from the opposite

geographies, while segregating the authorial rights of the

side of this same border. Third: Every two and a half seconds

drawing into seventeen permission classes. These classes promote a “frictionless” collaboration between disparate building specialists, reducing the potential for interference between a façade consultant, an interior architect or an HVAC specialist, while manufacturing an array of digital borders between segregated classes of architectural workers. A design architect in Los Angeles might be assigned the permission class of Change Order Editor Level 1, allowing them to “change, edit, participate, and read” any of the associated files in a particular drawing set, while the physical labor of producing lines on the screen might be performed by an anonymous offsite drafting technician operating with an Item Editor Level 2 permission class, allowing them access only to a limited collection of

[1] the-speed-of-the.earth screen-capture, Curtis Roth, 2017

The underlying authority of the interruption is as true for

the host terminal interrupts the drawing’s content, momentarily severing the interstate electronic connection between the file and its linked line-work, forcing a relink request to be transmitted from one state to its neighbor. Fourth: The time between the drawing’s request for content, and the arrival of that content is logged. http://the-speed-of-the.earth measures the duration of these repeated requests and builds a wall, simulating the speed of a particular border at a particular moment in time. http://the-speed-of-the.earth reflects on the simultaneous strangeness of the drawing and the state in a moment in which space gives way to speed, and power becomes the privilege to interrupt.

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

68

The speed of the earth between Nairobi, Kenya and Kampala, Uganda on: 05, 01, 2017 at: 7:59:52 PM

The speed of the earth between Cairo, Egypt and Medina, Saudi Arabia on: 05, 01, 2017 at: 7:51:57 PM

INSTRUMENT VI: THE DRAWING

69

The speed of the earth between Jerusalem, Israel and Gaza City, Palastine on: 05, 01, 2017 at: 5:37:30 PM

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

70

The speed of the earth between Miami, United States and Mexico City, Mexico on: 05, 01, 2017 at: 6:32:16 PM

INSTRUMENT VI: THE DRAWING

The speed of the earth between Odessa, Ukraine and Yalta, Crimea on: 05, 01, 2017 at: 8:06:12 PM

The speed of the earth between São Paulo, Brazil and Buenos Aires, Argentina on: 05, 01, 2017 at: 7:36:16 PM

71

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

72

The speed of the earth between Tokyo, Japan and Shanghai, China on: 05, 01, 2017 at: 7:11:28 PM

INSTRUMENT VI: THE DRAWING

73

The speed of the earth between Chennai, India and Mogadishu, Somalia on: 05, 01, 2017 at: 6:45:03 PM

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

Their dark products capitalize on the addressability of all forms of internet interaction. Today, we all always live as targets, constantly demonstrating our humanity so as to mutate into micro-marketplaces for the laser-precision of internet advertising gurus selling penis enlargement pills or outsourced warriors in Nevada coordinating Predator drone strikes.

The contemporary internet is a factory in which individuals

twenty-four hours” 2 Airforce General Hawk Carlisle would later

all always labor. Despite the ubiquitous narrative of the web

reminisce. After this successful proof-of-concept, a month

as a platform for accelerating the social connections between

later in February, 2015, the United States Airforce activated the

us, a narrative proselytized in equal measure by politicians’

363rd ISR Wing. Headquartered at Langley Air Force Base in

speeches and tech CEOs’ annual earnings manifestos, these

Langley Virginia, the 363rd is devoted to the cryptic, darker-half

forms of labor primarily profit from our relentless individuation

of the double entendre of Target Production.

as unique human subjects. Our ability to surf the electric factory

74

depends on our constant ability to evidence proof-of-life, as in:

For those who prefer drone-feeds over Buzz-Feeds, Target

“The name of my first cat was Mindy, I grew up on Steele Street

Production refers to the innovative practice of locating the

in Portland, Oregon, and I’m not a robot.” The net is a platform

targets of state violence through an analysis of the architectural

for mining those aspects of our subjectivities once considered

backdrops of a target’s social media feeds. Target Production is

extra-economic. Our primitive abilities to perceive this from that,

the crowd-sourcing of military intelligence, hinging on the wager

to remember our own lives or to form opinions and preferences

that if contemporary terrorist organizations have outsourced

now work to differentiate the crowd into a marketplace of

the difficultly of recruitment to crowd-based platforms such

infinitely addressed individuals to be data-mined.

as Twitter and YouTube, then the difficulty of reconnaissance might

also

be

outsourced

from

costly

ground-based

This process, by which anonymous IP addresses are assigned

intelligence gathering endeavors to low-risk (and low-skilled)

marketable qualities of life like age, sex, location and shopping

laborers surfing social media from Air Force bases across the

preferences is referred to by net-marketing experts as Target

United States. The most advanced forms of Target Production,

Production. Today, we live as targets, constantly demonstrating

referred to in military-speak as “cross-domain targeting and

our humanity so as to mutate into micro-markets for the

analysis” rely on the deployment of Remote Administrative

laser-precision of internet advertising. But Target Production

Tools (RATS), a computer hacking procedure developed in the

is a neologism with a double meaning, both referring to

early 2000s that allows for the remote (and invisible) control of

ways in which subjects-as-marketplaces are carved from the

webcams from an external administrator. Ratting transforms

anonymity of the crowd by Captas and click-bate, as well as an

the webcam, a device typically used to address the internet, into

experimental form of military reconnaissance designed to geo-

a window through which any subject is addressed. A webcam

locate the targets of state-sponsored violence through crowd-

allows a target to project herself into the world through an

based media surveillance.

IP address even while that same IP address transforms that same webcam into a window for geo-locating her through

Early in the winter of 2015, three Joint Direct Attack Munition

her architectural backdrop. Like the advertising techniques

(JDAM) bombs pierced the façade of an ISIS operating

of internet marketing gurus, Target Production capitalizes on

headquarters in Kobanî, Syria.1 The building was identified

the addressability of all forms of internet interaction. Whether

as an ISIS command post twenty-two hours earlier, after it

you’re selling penis enlargement pills or coordinating predator

appeared in the background of a selfie uploaded to Twitter

drone strikes, the transformation of anonymous crowds into

by an ISIS soldier named Abu Ahmed. Ahmed’s architectural

addressed targets is your primary task.

backdrop was isolated, analyzed and geo-located by a group of United States Airman with the 361st Intelligence, Surveillance

Target Production relies on the 21st century reframing of

and Reconnaissance group based in Hurlburt Field Florida. “It

our primary visual encounters with architecture itself, as the

was a post on social media to bombs on target in less than

blurred backgrounds of webcam feeds, Instagram posts and

INSTRUMENT V: THE TEXT

Skype calls. If one can broadly trace a history of architecture

like wage guarantees or health insurance. This magazine is

through its dominant logics of depiction, from Renaissance

the accumulated efforts of these bodies coordinated into two

perspective

scripted tasks:

to

post-war

thermodynamic

rainbows,

the

contemporary is marked by the architectural interior as the ever-present backdrop of everyday social media platforms.

Task 01: Take a picture of yourself with your web camera. Using

But beyond its contingency on architecture as our ever-present

a photo editing software, then erase yourself from that photo.

fuzzy background, Target Production represents the first

Upload the resulting image as a .PNG file for a payment of

attempt to outsource the labor of architectural criticism itself.

$0.50usd.

Target Production analyses our architectural backgrounds through a perverse form of post-internet critical regionalism.

Task 02: Look at an image of a room with an erased figure in the

This untheorized form of architectural criticism weaponizes

foreground. Write six sentences of architectural analysis about

the cultural specificities of interior décor choices, geo-locates

the room. Using the details present in the image, speculate on

picturesque views from unobstructed windows, and mines

the geo-location of the room. Upload the resulting paragraph as

targets out of the peculiarities of regional construction

a .DOCx file for a payment of $0.50usd.

techniques. In other words, the reading-list for the web-surfing spies of the 363rd ISR Wing undoubtedly includes heavy doses

The unedited accumulation of these scripted tasks is both an

of Frampton and Rudofsky.

examination of the domestic architectural spaces of people erased through the fiction of crowd-sourced labor, as well

The following serial publication, simply entitled Targeting

as the aggregation of an experimental mode of architectural

Products, explores the conflation of this term as both a means

criticism, currently mining crowds in order to erase people.

of transforming IP addresses into laborers and as a militarized form of outsourced architectural criticism. The publication updates the dominant media through which the discipline has historically attempted to target the interior architectural preferences of the crowd: the lifestyle magazine. The specific intellectual and creative work of the magazine’s production has been outsourced to the anonymous workers of the micro-labor

Perhaps more than any other platform, Mechanical Turk epitomizes the internet’s demand for proof-of-life. The platform, publicly launched in 2005, farms out individual tasks that require human intellection to a vast array of marginalized bodies, while leveraging the narrative of “crowd-sourced labor” to sidestep the historical affordances made to working subjects

[1] Selfie, Abu Ahmed, 2015

platform Mechanical Turk (http://mturk.com).

75

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

76

INSTRUMENT V: THE TEXT

77

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

78

INSTRUMENT V: THE TEXT

79

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

80

INSTRUMENT V: THE TEXT

81

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

Their dark products assemble in the fever sweat to address all that ever was. Democracy’s rabble has become the congealed scraps of our excess addresses. Today’s citizen is your online yesterday once it’s stopped pointing back at you. Slushy pools of deleted dick pics, forgotten URLs or abandoned twitter profiles scraped by web-crawling bots into the Frankenstein source material for new online subjects.

If one were to look for the minimum criteria of an architectural

and squashing this first after-us uprising, was how to tell the

model, that is, the first condition that a model must absolutely

difference between a human and their scripted simulation. In

meet, I suspect that it would be the model’s prerequisite to point

other words, it was a struggle to determine in which direction an

elsewhere. Whatever a model is, it’s always something else.

online profile was pointing. A struggle, as it turns out, which is as old as democracy itself.

In January of 2012, the Damascus Post observed that a central avenue in Latakia Syria, originally named to commemorate

The struggle began, at least according to a tourist brochure I

the March 8th 1963 coup d’état that brought the Ba’ath party

once read, in a sloppy semi-circle, carved into a mound of dirt

to power, was suddenly commemorating the March 15th

called Pnyx, one kilometer west of the Acropolis. This purported

2011 eruption of anti-Ba’ath protests in 82

Darraa.1

Or more

birthplace of democracy was faced with the same challenge as

accurately: the physical infrastructure officially known as 8th

Google’s engineers two millennia later: how to implement what

of March Avenue was annotated on GoogleMaps as 15th of

Hito Steyerl has described as democracy’s underlying algorithm,

March Avenue. The street’s double was inexplicably pointing

“to distinguish between noise and speech to divide a crowd

elsewhere. The Post’s observation, of a physical street named

between citizens and rabble.” 3 Democracy’s abstract algorithm

after the 8th whose digital representation was pointing towards

was actualized at Pnyx through a circulation system that was

the 15th, came at the tail end of a six month long online struggle

at once spatial and legal.4 Pnyx could be entered in one of two

between pro and anti-Assad programmers. At stake were the

ways: from the north, descending onto the speaker’s platform

online presentations of the very real sites across Syria in which

in such a way that the speaker’s approach was made visible to

the bloodshed of the pseudo-revolution was then being spilled.

the crowd below; or from the south, ascending from the hillside

This online detournement saw the ideologically significant

below in such a way that one’s entry into the anonymous crowd

names of monuments, avenues and institutions across the

was concealed by the platform of Pnyx itself. Pnyx was a pre-

country changing, and changing back again, over the course of

computational logic-gate, disentangling the legal consensus

months. These short-circuited digital representations of Syria’s

of an anonymous crowd from the active political agencies of

monuments and public squares would concretize Assad’s claim

identified orators. This circulatory system made the procedures

on eternity in one moment, only to call for his head in the next.

of democracy possible by guaranteeing the crowd’s anonymity,

But while the Damascus Post’s story went on to unfold an

while recording the identities of speakers so as to ease their

elaborate conspiracy theory involving Google plotting with Israel

eventual prosecution should their speech prove detrimental to

for regime change in Syria, the truth was something far stranger.

the state. But Pnyx also reminds us that any democratic forum, like an architectural model, is contingent on its capacity to point

GoogleMaps’ online cartography of Syria was being perpetually

elsewhere. As in: a granite platform pointing towards Athens

rewritten by two opposing armies of bots. These armies were

itself.

exploiting a short-lived loophole in Google’s Mapmaker platform that allowed the consensual intelligence of the crowd to make

Today however, any form of digital access is made possible only

sites.2

through the assignation of a non-repeating internet protocol (IP)

Hundreds of programmed chat bot soldiers made thousands

address, meaning that we all enter a purportedly democratic

of modifications to GoogleMaps every hour over the course

cyber-space from Pnyx’s stage door. So while millennial net-

of 2011, modifying sites from Syria to San Francisco and

entrepreneurs and aging boomer politicians endlessly fetishize

explaining their cartographic rationale in only semi-coherent

the new political power of a liberated digital “crowd,” it’s our

diatribes. The struggle for Google, in closing this loophole

online status as individuals that makes the internet such a

real-time modifications to the digital names of physical

INSTRUMENT VII: THE MODEL

profitable enterprise. We are no longer subjects alone, but ever

models are arrayed within the private domestic interior of the

expanding pools of addresses. Our once-stable subjectivities are

model maker, filmed with a Foscam FI9821P WiFi camera

carved into so many schizophrenic multiples by smart fridges

and broadcast live on http://Monuments-After.us. Concealed

broadcasting our binge eating and tracking cookies archiving

beneath your browser’s graphic rendering, each model is

our favorite pornography, and all the while the datamining

assigned an open online form, accessible only to bots scanning

economy of addressing relentlessly accelerates. By the time

the site’s underlying HTML and scripted to perpetually rename

our dwindling supply of IPV4 addresses are replaced with a 128

the monument with the bot’s most recent invective.

bit IPV6 infrastructure sometime next year, there will be enough possible addresses to assign one to every atom on the surface

Monuments-after.us is an architectural model with a pointing

of one hundred earths.5

problem. What follows are three Bristol-board depictions pointing towards three elsewhere monuments seamlessly substituting

In the fever sweat to address all that ever was, democracy’s

for the monuments themselves. These objects are relentlessly

contemporary rabble has become nothing less than the

scaled by the model-maker’s banal background activities even

congealed scraps of our excess addresses. Or in other words:

as they paradoxically absorb the very real political spaces of the

today’s rabble is your online yesterday once it’s stopped pointing

physical elsewheres they represent. Or then again, perhaps this

back at you. Slushy pools of deleted dick pics, forgotten URLs

pointing problem belongs only to democracy itself, if so, then what

or abandoned twitter profiles are scraped by web-crawling

follows are three forums for algorithmic political demonstrations

bots into the Frankenstein source material for new online

that point back to both you and I as contemporary democracy’s

subjects. For every human online in 2016 there was a bot acting

citizens and rabble at once. In other words: these three

as a mirror of all of us all at once. These bots re-present the

monuments are caught within our current inability to distinguish

leftovers of our own online lives back to ourselves in ways we

something itself from something else.

can’t recognize. They spread birther conspiracy theories while offering discounted Ray-Bans, they tweet their support for Erdogan’s twitter ban while maintaining a respectable cat.gif archive, and they fight over whether a street in Latakia Syria is named after the 8th or the 15th of March.

For whatever it is we still call democracy after the internet, the disentangling of speech from noise is impossible, precisely because we are both citizens and the raw-material of rabble at models, sited in the ambiguous space between something and something else. These monuments preserve political bots designed for the now-exhausted revolutions of 2011, and redeploy them as scale-figures in the maybe-model itself.

Unable to effectively determine between humans and their simulations, GoogleMaps terminated their Open Mapmaker early in 2012.6 But the cobbled together afterlives of our online subjectivities that once fought on electric front-lines from the Eastern Syria to the western United States still troll the web, accelerating the noise of post-democracy wherever an online forum exists. Monuments-After.us consists of something resembling

three

architectural

models,

each

a

scaled

representation pointing towards three urban sites contested during the 2011 after-us revolution. These three possible

[1] GoogleEarth screen-capture of Latakia, Syria, Stefan Geens, 2012

once. Monuments-After.us is an online collection of possible

83

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

A monument sits still while: a model-maker wonders if he will always be alone

84

A monument sits still while: a model-maker prepares a fruit parfait off camera

A monument sits still while: a model-maker laces his shoes

INSTRUMENT VII: THE MODEL

A bot renames a monument: “The Why Participation Trophies Causes Heterophobia And How To Stop It Monument” while: a model-maker poses in a clean white shirt

85

A bot renames a monument: “The Is Microwaves Why Tweens Keep Avoiding Going to Their Shitty, Cissexist Doctors Monument” while: a model-maker showers

A bot renames a monument: “The Toxic Masculinity is Danger To Society Monument” while: a model-maker tapes work to his studio wall

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

A bot renames a monument: “The No cold feet, just too hot for the guy who’s been looking through old... Monument” while: a model-maker sleeps in

86

A bot renames a monument: “The really, just business expense as well... though this is the type of real visionary... Monument” while: a model-maker cooks his lunch

A bot renames a monument: “The Is BofA the biggest threat to BIODIVERSITY? Monument” while: a model-maker pays his student loan bills

INSTRUMENT VII: THE MODEL

A bot renames a monument: “The La quería immensamente pero ella fue perjura y llenó de honda... Monument” while: a model-maker inspects his upper body physique

87

A bot renames a monument: “The ‘MERICA Monument” while: a model-maker breathes fresh air

A bot renames a monument: “The No More Law Dollars for the Aid and Comfort of Our Enemies!! Pairs of the human! Monument” while: a tabby cat contemplates

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

Their dark products profitably misalign the topological borders of sovereign geographic territories and the fiber-optic edges of unseen sunshine empires. Their sludgy borders are simultaneously physically domestic and electrically international, covertly mining my dank domestic meme stash for fragments of your overseas working drawings for a dirty bomb.

The NSA’s project codenames are generated by an algorithm

bundled into packets and routed through a fastest-possible-

that likely reads Saussure in its down-time. For example,

path ad hoc mesh network before being reassembled into

Cultweave designates a SIGINT database, Dewsweeper

legible content by the end-user’s terminal.5 So while 90% of

describes a USB host tap, Foxacid is a malicious malware

all internet communication on earth is eventually routed

tool targeting TOR users, and Moneyrocket identifies a cable

through the United States’ domestic fiber-optic infrastructure,

intercept program in the Middle East.1

For an algorithm, the most

the sunshine streamed through these underground strands

important part of naming a covert intelligence op is to name

of glass are legally unmanageable mashups of my dank

it badly. Intelligence historian Matthew Aid claims that absurd

domestic meme stash amalgamated with your overseas

designations, like these, are the handiwork of a proprietary NSA

working drawings for a dirty bomb.

software platform designed to ensure that code names never 88

meaningfully describe the projects they designate.2 A market

This conflation of fairness, from telephonic streams to indifferent

demand for meaninglessness that was made public by the 2012

digital bundles, would be publicly challenged in September of

surveillance disclosures of Edward Snowden, which revealed a

2008, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation brought a lawsuit

thick catalog of intuitive, pre-computational codenames like

against the NSA challenging Project Fairview.6 Their argument

PRISM, developed by the human operators these algorithms

hinged on the assertion that unlike international phone calls, the

would eventually replace. For a human, the most important part

web’s underlying packet bundling protocols hopelessly entangle

of naming a covert intelligence op is to justify its morality.

legally searchable foreign communications with protected domestic content, rendering Fairview a violation of the Fourth

Take for example 1985. The year after US federal regulators

Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches. But

dismantled Ma Bell’s telephone monopoly, Bell System’s long

even as the fairness of Fairview was being challenged in US

distance division, AT&T, began partnering on a wide-ranging

federal court, Fairview was already morphing into an umbrella

surveillance collaboration with the National Security Agency

operation hosting a variety of precision oriented surveillance

called Project Fairview.3 This collaboration originally entailed the

programs. One of these programs is named Upstream.

tapping of AT&T’s foreign fiber-optic lines in order to intercept long-distance overseas communications. Fairview’s title offered

In ten leaked photographs taken during a May 2012 NSA

an ethical justification for the project itself. It asserted the NSA’s

training briefing, Upstream was presented as an architectural

unrestricted constitutional authority to intercept any foreign

intervention into nine, corporately owned, cable landing houses

communication passing through the sovereign space of the United

along the left and right coasts of the United States. A cable

States without a warrant. But the relationship between ethics and

landing house is a discrete architectural object containing the

infrastructure is fraught. In the decades that followed, as AT&T

technical manifold that frays the 25 millimeter international

slowly reconstructed Bell System’s fractured monopoly over

submarine cables into their 50 micrometer terrestrial

national communications infrastructure, the fiber-optic lines that

counterparts, before stretching them across the continental

were originally used for long-distance telephonic communication

surface of the US. These landing houses, situated between one

were repurposed into the backbones of the global internet, and the

and ten miles from the shoreline itself, profitably misalign the

NSA’s original ethical assertion regarding the fairness of views was

topological borders of the United States’ sovereign territory and

awkwardly grafted atop radically different technical protocols.4

the fiber-optic edges of its sunshine empire. The cable landing houses are physically domestic and electrically international,

Unlike the shortest-possible-path routing of telephonic signals,

their siting on domestic soil affords the NSA the legal authority

the internet’s information is fractured into manageable bits,

to operate, while the disentangling of foreign from domestic

INSTRUMENT VIII: THE SURVEY

89

data in their interiors ensures the pseudo-legality of Fairview’s

minutes prior. While each of the nine cable landing houses are

warrantless surveillance. While the leaked photographs of the

ostensibly corporately owned, and thus lawfully viewed from

NSA’s 2012 PowerPoint presentation depicted the relative

public space, what was being asserted in my encounter with the

regional locations of these nine architectural objects, the

guard was a legal privilege of photographic invisibility reserved

precise locations of the United States’ inland sunshine borders

only for active US military installations.7 As the guard deleted

have never been publicly disclosed.

my photographs I posed the NSA’s original ethical assertion back to him, inquiring what a consensually fair view of the site

Out of all of architecture’s numerous instruments of service,

might be.

the site survey can undoubtedly be understood as the most The nine photographs that follow are the product of nine

depiction of what is, the survey is necessarily what precedes

negotiations between nine photographers hired to document the

creative intellection. But after months of public records requests

United States’ sovereign internet border, and nine guards tasked

eventually revealed the edges of our sunshine empire as nine

with preventing its documentation. Each photographer (myself

suburban sites, each discretely censored from every major

included) has captured a fragment of these legally protected

online mapping platform, the convoluted moralities of surveying and surveillance seemed to be precisely what was at stake.

Less remarkable than the immediate physical contexts of these houses, was the simple fact that the sites in which the ethics of viewing are currently being rewritten have themselves been erased from public visibility.

This panoptic contradiction originally occurred to me as a private security guard monitoring the first of these nine houses, a dull suburban cinderblock edifice outside Boston, politely deleted the photographs I had taken of the building a few

[1] Fairview map shown on Brazilian television, 2013

distanced from authorship. Bound to a pseudo-objective

geo-political infrastructures in images that serve as evidence of a tenuous, ad hoc agreement regarding fairness, reached between sixteen workers on the edge of our sunshine empire.

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

90

“Look, just take your camera and leave please.” at: 42° 27’ 32.7996’’ N 70° 57’ 36.99’’ W on: 03, 21, 2016

INSTRUMENT VIII: THE SURVEY

91

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

92

“I don’t have a problem with that, as long as there’s no context and no address.” at: 25° 55’ 20.7156’’ N 80° 9’ 22.1976’’ W on: 04, 18, 2016

INSTRUMENT VIII: THE SURVEY

93

“Fine.” at: 45° 36’ 48.6252’’ at: N 123° 56’ 37.5936’’ W on: 07, 05, 2016

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

94

“You know what?...Okay. I’m really not going to ask you again, this is tresspassing.” at: 41° 24’ 11.7252’’ N 71° 36’ 21.2688’’ W on: 06, 12, 2016

“If you want to photograph the dirt I’m not going to stop you.” at: 39° 36’ 54.6408’’ N 74° 19’ 43.7664’’ W on: 08, 01, 2016

INSTRUMENT VIII: THE SURVEY

95

“You can keep that image.” at: 35° 16’ 44.7996’’ N 120° 43’ 5.286’’ W on: 07, 07, 2016

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

96

“Yes.” at: 25° 55’ 20.7156’’ N 80° 9’ 22.1976’’ W on: 02, 01, 2017

INSTRUMENT VIII: THE SURVEY

97

“I can let you have this one.” at: 26° 20’ 40.0092’’ N 80° 5’ 18.6108’’ W on: 02, 03, 2017

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

98

“Sure, whatever.” at: 43° 14’ 54.3336’’ N 124° 22’ 52.3308’’ W on: 03, 03, 2017

INSTRUMENT VIII: THE SURVEY

99

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

Their dark products are clickbait for helium gods, transforming the surface of the earth into a space for our multiplication. They promise us faster Wi-Fi speeds while serving as decoys for Apache strikes, they amp up our political voices even as they muddy the waters of our geotagged search histories. They constitute a theological architecture for the faith our plastic clouds have in us.

The first internet is running out of souls. If subjectivities

over the internet, like China’s infamous firewall, by engineering

are the raw material of the net economy, where shopping

a radically alternative technique for politically parceling

preferences and pornographic predilections are mined from

space. If, at least since 1648, the fundament of any political

our daily encounters with code, then the market for online souls

power has been drawn from the ability to divide and manage

has already begun a downward slide on the wrong end of a

the ground, Loon promises to supply Google with access to

bell

curve.1

For example: nobody with the ability to use Google

four billion additional souls through the colonization of the

doesn’t already now about Google, as in: Google has already

stratosphere, where legislation protecting access and personal

mined every web browsing-body available.

data privacy are nearly impossible to enforce. The sky is the emerging territory of an unprecedented silicone sovereignty.

100

For the ever-dwindling pool of major net corporations like

Google’s announcement of Project Loon was quickly followed

Google, salvation is ditheistic. First, in the refinement of more

by Facebook’s announcement of Aquila, an unmanned drone-

sophisticated ways of carving up the superhighway’s existing

based broadband infrastructure, and the Space-X Satellite

souls, epitomized by the internet’s relentless encroachment into

Constellation, a low earth orbiting internet backend.4

the previously dumb sphere of domestic things. And second, through the fabrication of another net altogether, epitomized by

Each of these aerial projects, heavily funded by the United States’

an efforts to baptize (in microwaves) the estimated four billion

Department of Defense, represents a seemingly contradictory

previously unconnected bodies on earth. My last story is the

opposition between state and corporate interests.5 These

prologue of this second internet, the internet to come.

infrastructures subvert state regulation over the net, even as they occasionally perform as an apparatus for extending the

In 2012, Google’s experimental think-tank Google-X began filing

traditional state itself. As these mobile infrastructures drift

the first patents for a confidential moonshot known simply as

across national borders, they oscillate between corporate

Loon.2

Project Loon is an alternative “backend” infrastructure

datamining technologies and surreptitious proxies for state

upon which a second internet will be built. While the backend

surveillance. Consider, for instance, the fact that the same

of the first internet was patched together with the developed

helium balloon promising west Texas faster Wi-Fi- speeds will

world’s preexisting telephonic fiber-optic lines, the second

eventually drift over Iran. These emerging airborne territories

internet’s backend will sidestep the entrenched politics of

aren’t independent of the ground, rather they profit precisely

the ground altogether. Google’s cartoonish patent drawings

from the friction between a stable aerial infrastructure floating

depict an airborne mesh network consisting of a modulating

above uneven political geographies below.

swarm of remotely guided helium-filled balloons. By the time the first balloons were being tested above New Zealand and

As it turns out, architecture has already been enlisted into the

in the radiation soaked deserts of New Mexico, Google was

service of Google’s stratospheric pseudo-state. While the aerial

promising balloons capable of circulating through stratospheric

technologies of the second internet mine disconnected bodies,

jet streams at 20km above the soil, communicating in an ad-

the body is an unreliable referent for coordinating the density

bands.3

and drift of Google’s overhead mesh network, as the body falls

Like any good colonial project, Loon presents itself as an act

below the 1m = 1px resolution spectrum of standard satellite

of charity, supplying pseudo-free internet connectivity to

imagery. In an unexpected turn, Loon’s spatial coordination relies

remote areas without the political difficulties of laying terrestrial

on the algorithmic viewing of architecture, as a metaphysically

infrastructure. But like any good colonial project, Loon is also

permanent stand-in for the fragile, low-visibility web surfing

a thinly veiled geopolitical coup; circumventing state control

subjects inside.

hoc network via the unlicensed 2.4 and 5.8 GHz ISM

INSTRUMENT IX: THE RENDERING

Google’s Loon and Facebook’s Aquila coordinate their airborne

contained a twenty-two point manifesto for life beneath a

mesh

recognition

post-representational aerial regime. This pseudo-architectural

algorithms that scan the surface of the earth for architecture

densities

through

advanced

building

manifesto detailed a catalog of building modifications designed

as a substitute for life itself. While we look at clouds and dream

to subvert the visual recognition algorithms commonly used by

of sheep, clouds will soon be looking at our architecture and

aerial drones to extract targets. More than that, however, the

dreaming of us. The algorithms themselves, a collaborative

document charts a peculiar disposition of resistance after our

effort between the United States’ military and Google engineers,

collective algorithmic-becoming. In an age in which subjects

represent a turn towards a new mathematical international

are the statistical fodder of computer vision, freedom is one’s

style, contingent on the detection of the quasi-universal formal

capacity to be seen incorrectly. Al-Qaida’s architectural manifesto

qualities of all buildings, whether in west Texas or Iran. These

was the built equivalent of a VPN, not camouflaging buildings

algorithms extract shapes, edges, shadows, coloration and

as such, but manipulating architecture’s formal qualities so as

geometries from satellite imagery in order to disentangle

to undermine the algorithm’s predictive accuracy. In short: Al-

architecture from roads, rock formations or vegetation. They

Qaida’s manifesto marked the invention of earth-spam.

index the surface of the earth into “building hypotheses,” a Earth Spam is clickbait for helium gods, transforming the

between one and ninety-nine percent. Google’s speculative

surface of the earth into a space for your own multiplication and

architectural algorithms, recently released to the public for

misidentification. Earth Spam promises increased Wi-Fi speeds

open-source development, represent nothing less than a post-

while serving as a decoy for drone strikes, it amps up your

representational sovereignty, one in which subjects are merely

political voice even as it muddies the waters of your geotagged

the statistical probabilities of deeply dreaming machines,

search history. Earth Spam is both a building and not, depending

filtering the pixel-soup of any digital image into the likelihood

on what you are when you look at it. It’s a theological architecture

of it containing a soul to be mined. But if architecture is quickly becoming a proxy for subjects in the daydreams of remote algorithms, this is a fact increasingly deployed in an attempt to extricate subjects from the aerial sovereignties above them.

In 2012, the same year Google began filing its first patents for Project Loon, the AP discovered a cache of papers in the former operating headquarters of Al-Qaida in Timbuktu, Mali, later referred to simply as the Al-Qaida Papers. Among suggestions for good government and covert accounting tips, these papers

[1] Google Loon subzero balloon testing, 2015

statistical probability of pixels-being-buildings that ranges

for the faith our plastic clouds have in us.

What follows are six experiments in Earth Spamming. Each experiment depicts a pseudo-architectural object rendered twice, once for your pleasure and again for the pleasure of Google’s open sourced speculative algorithm. These experiments serve as a catalog of the post-representational dispositions of architecture after vision.

101

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

102

A house with a sloppy figure next to a pool

INSTRUMENT IX: THE RENDERING

103

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

104

A house in fragments next to a parking lot

[A 92% probability of:] A house next to fragments

A house next to a floating roof

[An 86% probability of:] A house next to a house

INSTRUMENT IX: THE RENDERING

A house with an indistinct ed e next to a reenhouse

n8

A house next to an indistinct edge

105

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

106

A house with an impossibly narrow footprint

INSTRUMENT IX: THE RENDERING

107

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

108

A house next to a house next to a house

ttered into pieces

[A 97% probabilit

ieces

INSTRUMENT IX: THE RENDERING

A house in the shape o

[A 56% proba

nt line

A bent line

109

THEIR DARK PRODUCTS

110

A house with a bad outline next to lawn debris

INSTRUMENT IX: THE RENDERING

111

[A 94% probability of:] A house next to a ba

SOME DARK PRODUCTS

112

CONTENTS

Part A: Our Dark Products This book begins by arguing that the work of architecture is a work of architecture. That is: that today, our instruments manufacture ad hoc spatial constructions through the electric distribution of design’s labor.

On Our Dark Products..................................................................................................................................................................................................................6 Instrument I: The Detail............................................................................................................................................................................................................12 Instrument II: The Specification..............................................................................................................................................................................................22 Instrument III: The Mesh..........................................................................................................................................................................................................44 Instrument IV: The Document.................................................................................................................................................................................................52

Part B: Their Dark Products This book continues by contending that space inscribed through the circulation of sunshine underwrites a new politics of distance defined by the steady stream of signals atop dumb earth.

On Their Dark Products............................................................................................................................................................................................................62 Instrument V: The Drawing......................................................................................................................................................................................................66 Instrument VI: The Text............................................................................................................................................................................................................74 Instrument VII: The Model........................................................................................................................................................................................................82 Instrument VIII: The Survey......................................................................................................................................................................................................88 Instrument IX: The Rendering...............................................................................................................................................................................................100

Part C: Epilogue This book concludes with the ambition to redesign architecture’s instruments of service so as to make perceptible (i.e. something like critical) something like a Yung Distance.

An Open Syllabus for Yung Distance....................................................................................................................................................................................114 Notes.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................118

113

EPILOGUE

Imagine instead that architecture’s instruments might be reformatted: made to make visible the dark spatial products that underlie global architectural production. Learning to redesign our dark products is a tangible step in understanding their dark products, or: the profound ways in which the remote distribution of code is radically torqueing our most comfortable conceptions of power and distance.

114

An Open Syllabus for Yung Distance:

Readings:

This

seminar begins with two assertions. First: that the

Deamer. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015): 61.

production of architecture is contingent on the manufacturing

Robbins, Bruce. “Pathetic Substitutes.” Assemblage,

of our dark products, networked spatial assemblies fabricated

no. 23. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994): 86.

through our instruments in order to manage the labor of design

Magali Sarfatti Larson. Behind the Postmodern Façade:

across vast distances. And second: That our dark products are

Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America.

disavowed by the discipline, both for proffering an account of

(Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1993).

design as bodily labor (at odds with our enduring narratives

Peter Eisenman. “Notes on Conceptual Architecture:

of architecture as intellection), and for proffering an account

Towards a Definition.” Casabella 359-60. (Milan, 1971): 48.

Peggy Deamer. “Work.” in The Architect as Worker. ed. Peggy

of space as itinerate transaction (at odds with our historical models of space as Cartesian ooze).

Instrument I: Working in groups of three, students will survey any spherical

These two assertions are followed by a proposition. That is: that

object and document it through a collection of three scaled-

architecture’s instruments might be reformatted, made to make

drawings. This documentation will be performed in such a

visible the dark spatial products that underlie global architectural

way that the drawings depict not only the spherical object,

production. This proposition is motivated by the belief that to

but simultaneously document the specific parceling of labor

make the spaces of contemporary architectural labor visible is

between the three group members in order to complete the

also to render them explicit as acts of design.

assignment itself. The three final scaled-drawings will each be printed at 24” x 36” in landscape format and presented at the

This belief is underwritten by a hunch. As in: that learning to

beginning of the next class.

redesign our dark products is a tangible step in understanding

Week 03: Distance’s Managerial Instruments:

their dark products, or: the profound ways in which the remote distribution of code is radically torqueing our most comfortable conceptions of power and distance. In learning to talk about

Lecture:

distance in alternative ways, this seminar charts a path towards

If the discipline of architecture is negotiated through the

a new politics of space after the internet.

preservation of our distance from work, this distance

Week 01: Introductory Lecture:

paradoxically serves as the very construct that maintains

Week 02: Discipline as Distance from Labor:

architecture’s professional monopoly over the economies of building. This lecture will examine the architectural instrument as a bait-and-switch, whereby labor is both implicitly managed and rhetorically disavowed.

Lecture: Underlying the discipline’s autonomy from: economics, or

Readings:

politics, or matter, or et. al., lies a delicately negotiated fissure,

Robin Evans. “Translations from Drawing to Building.” AA Files,

cleaving intellection from the bodily labors of production. This

no.12. (London: Architecture Association Press, 1986): 3.

lecture will explore rhetorical fantasies such as: history, culture,

Sarah Hirschman, “Legalizing Architecture: How Congress

and conceptuality through which the discipline insulates any

Defined the Discipline.” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic

work of architecture from the labor of building.

Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism 12, no. 1.

AN OPEN SYLLABUS FOR YUNG DISTANCE

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015): 17.

scaled-drawings will each be printed at 24” x 36” in landscape

Dell Upton, “Pattern Books and Professionalism: Aspects

format and presented at the beginning of the next class.

of the Transformation of Domestic Architecture in

Week 05: The Demediation of Distance:

America, 1800-1860.” Winterthur Portfolio 19, no. 2/3.

(Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1984): 107.

John Macarthur, “Irregularity.” in The Picturesque:

Lecture:

Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities.

The digital architectural project emerges out of an anxiety of

(London: Routledge Press, 2007): 110.

distance, and a desire to demediate the convoluted processes

Curtis Roth, “On Our Dark Products.” in Some Dark

of making architecture through the real-time immediacy of

Products: A Travelogue of Nine Instruments for Architecture.

computation. This lecture will argue that this alibi continues to

(Stuttgart: Akademie Schloss Solitude Press, 2017).

animate contemporary computational tools while obscuring the more profound ways in which computation hyper-mediatizes

Instrument II:

the geographic distribution of architectural labor.

Working in groups of three, but separated by a minimum distance of 50 meters, students will survey any spherical object at least 50

Readings:

kilometers from the nearest student and document it through a

Nicholas Negroponte. The Architecture Machine: Toward a

collection of three scaled-drawings. This documentation will be

More Human Environment. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1973).

performed in such a way that the drawings depict not only the

Felicity Scott. “Discourse, Seek, Interact.” in A Second

spherical object, but simultaneously document the distances

Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the “Techno-Social”

between the object being surveyed and the group members

Moment. ed. Arindam Dutta. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013).

performing the labor of its documentation. The three final

Nicholas Negroponte. “Towards a Humanism

scaled-drawings will each be printed at 24” x 36” in landscape

Through Machines.” AD Magazine, no. 9. (1969).

format and presented at the beginning of the next class.

Lawrence Lessig. “The Laws of Cyberspace.”

Week 04: Our Dark Products:

Berkman Klein Center, Harvard University. (1998).

Accessed October 10th, 2016. http://cyber.harvard. edu/works/lessig/laws_cyberspace.pdf

Lecture: The disciplinary fissure between drawing and building is

Instrument IV:

not a symbolic distance but a physical expanse, fabricated

Working individually, each student will survey any spherical

by the operating protocols of architecture’s instruments,

object at least 50 kilometers away and document it through a

the bureaucratic organization of architectural work and the

collection of three scaled-drawings. This documentation will

software platforms that remotely manage the privileges of

be performed in such a way that the drawings depict not only

architectural authorship. This lecture will posit the work of

the spherical object, but simultaneously document the specific

(making) architecture as a (designed) work of architecture.

technologies of vision employed to traverse the distance between the object being surveyed and the student performing

Readings:

the labor of its documentation. The three final scaled-drawings

David Harvey, “Globalization and the ‘Spatial

will each be printed at 24” x 36” in landscape format and

Fix’.” Geographische Revue, year 3, issue 2.

presented at the beginning of the next class.

(Berlin: Geographische Revue, 2001): 23.

Week 06: Midterm Presentation:

Henry Russel-Hitchcock, “The Architecture of Bureaucracy and the Architecture of Genius.”

Architectural Review, no. 101 (1947): 4.

Instrument V:

Mabel O. Wilson, Jordan Carver, Kadambari Baxi.

Working in groups of three, students will survey any spherical

“Working globally: The human networks of transnational

object and outsource its documentation into a collection of three

architectural projects.” in The Architect as Worker. ed. Peggy

scaled-drawings. The documentation will be outsourced across

Deamer. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015): 161.

a political border. This documentation will be performed in such

Sean Cubitt. “The Political Economy of Cosmopolis.”

a way that the drawings depict not only the spherical object, but

in Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and

simultaneously document the border’s imposition of political

Factory. (New York: Routledge Press, 2013).

power on the content of the drawing itself. The three final scaleddrawings will each be printed at 24” x 36” in landscape format and

Instrument III:

presented at the beginning of the next class.

Working individually, students will survey any spherical object

Week 07: Their Dark Products:

and outsource its documentation into a collection of three scaled-drawings. This documentation will be performed in such a way that the drawings depict not only the spherical object,

Lecture:

but simultaneously document the financialization of labor

Despite the enduring myth that the near-instantaneity of code

necessary to complete the assignment itself. The three final

collapses space, computation politicizes distance by modifying

115

EPILOGUE

the properties of space in ways that confound architecture’s

way that the image depicts not only the spherical object, but the

enduring conceptual models. This lecture will outline the

economy of remote image production resulting in the final image.

repertoire of techniques through which code transmogrifies the

The final rendering will be printed at 24” x 36” in landscape format

staid conventions of space into something like Yung Distance.

and presented at the beginning of the next class.

Readings:

Week 9: Tripping on Yung Distance:

Alexander Galloway. “How Control Exists After Decentralization.” in Protocol. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004): 1.

Lecture:

Gean Moreno, Ernesto Oroza. “Generic Objects” E-Flux, no. 18.

If Yung Distance proffers a catalog of alternative spatial politics,

(2010). Accessed December 9th, 2016. http://www.e-flux.com/

then it also implies new creative strategies for emancipation,

journal/18/67456/generic-objects

from hacking extra-state infrastructures to neo-avant-garde

Benjamin Bratton. “The Nomos and the Cloud.” The Stack.

laziness. The final lecture in the course examines the most

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015): 19.

interesting trajectories for something like freedom after Yung

Seb Franklin. “Control.” in Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic.

Distance.

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015): 3.

Curtis Roth, “On Their Dark Products.” in Some Dark Products:

Readings:

A Travelogue of Nine Instruments for Architecture. (Stuttgart:

Boris Groys. “The Weak Universalism.” E-Flux, no. 15.

Edition Solitude Press, 2017).

(2010). Accessed December 9th, 2016. http://www.eflux.com/journal/15/61294/the-weak-universalism

116

Instrument VI:

McKenzie Wark. “Hacking.” in A Hacker Manifesto.

Working individually, students will use the online labor platform

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004): 44.

Mechanical Turk to design a script for managing the labor of

Alex Williams, Nick Srnicek. “#ACCELERATE

a minimum of thirty-five online workers, each developing the

MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics.” Critical

schematic design for a spherical object. The designs will not

Legal Thinking. (2013). Accessed December 9th,

only depict particular schematic concepts for a spherical

2016. http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/

object, but simultaneously document your own script’s digital

accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics

management of the creativity of your hired laborers. The thirty-

Antoni Negro, “Reflections the Manifesto.” in #ACCELERATE#

five schematic designs will each be presented through one

The Accelerationist Reader. ed. Robin Mackay, Arman

architectural drawing each, printed at 24” x 36” in landscape

Avenessian. (Falmouth: Urbanomic Media ltd. 2014): 363.

format and presented at the beginning of the next class.

Week 8: The Politics of Yung Distance:

Instrument VIII:

Lecture:

fabrication will be outsourced in such a way that it not only

The alternative configurations of Yung Distance harbor a new

results in the production of a physical object, but documents the

politics of space, far removed from the well-worn dichotomies

itinerate flows of materiality necessary for the spherical object’s

of near or far, public or private and open or closed that have

construction. The final object will be a minimum diameter of 48”

historically structured the spaces of democracy. This lecture will

and presented at the beginning of the next class.

situate a new politics of space in an era of Yung Distances.

Week 10: Penultimate Presentation

Readings:

Working individually, students will outsource the fabrication of the rendering produced during the previous assignment. This

Jacques Ranciere. “Ten Thesis on Politics.”

Instrument IX:

Theory and Event, vol. 5 no. 3, (2001)

Working individually, students will return to Mechanical Turk

Keller Easterling. “Disposition.” in Extrastatecraft: The Power

in order to outsource the writing of an essay about the object

of Infrastructure Space. (New York: Verso Books, 2014).

produced during the previous assignment. This essay will

Hito Steyerl. “Proxy Politics.” E-Flux, no. 60. (2014).

be outsourced in such a way that it not only describes the

Accessed December 9th, 2016. http://www.e-flux.

architectural significance of the object, but the parceling of the

com/journal/18/67456/generic-objects

text itself into discrete blocks of organized labor. The essay will

Eyal Weissman. “The Politics of Verticality.” Open Democracy.

be a minimum of 2500 words.

(2002). Accessed December 9th, 2016. https://www. opendemocracy.net/ecology-politicsverticality/article_801.jsp

Week 11: Final Presentation

Instrument VII:

The final spherical object will be present in its totality. Guest

Working individually, students will outsource the rendering of

jurors will include: Martin Schaefer, Jean-Baptist Joly, David

one of the thirty-five schematic designs for any spherical object

Price, and Andrew Meier.

(produced during the previous assignment) to an offsite image production firm. This rendering will be outsourced in such a

AN OPEN SYLLABUS FOR YUNG DISTANCE

117

EPILOGUE

On Our Dark Products

Reproduction. (New York, Penguin Adult, 2008).

1. Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to

3. Winnie Wong, Van Gogh on Demand. (Chicago,

Building, AA Files no. 12, (London, Architecture

University of Chicago Press, 2014).

Association School of Architecture, 1986), 6.

4. Ibid.

2. Ibid. 7.

5. Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to

3. “Opportunistic” refers to the conceit in Evans’ footnotes

Building, AA Files no. 12, (London, Architecture

that the lack of architecture in Schinkel’s depiction might

Association School of Architecture, 1986), 6.

simply be chalked up to Schinkel’s conflation of the

Instrument III: The Mesh

myth of Boutades with the myth of Sandrart’s shepherd tracing the shadow of his sheep on the ground.

and the Villa Savoye, Future Anterior, Vol. 4 No. 2,

5. John MacArthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

Other Irregularities (London: Routledge Press, 2007), 131-132.

2. Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses.

6. Ibid. 160.

(Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2001).

7. Dell Upton, Pattern Books and Professionalism,

3. Siegfried Giedion, Le Corbusier and Contemporary

Winterthur Portfolio Vol. 19 No. 2/3, (Chicago,

Architecture, Cahiers d’Art, Issue 4.

University of Chicago Press, 1984), 107-112.

4. Boris Groys, The Weak Universalism,

8. Magdali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of

E-Flux, Journal # 15, April 2010.

Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis, (Berkeley,

Instrument IV: The Document

University of California Press, 2012) 9. John Van Horne, Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988), 882.

10. James Malton, A Collection of Designs for Rural

118

1. Panayotis Tournikiotis, Le Corbusier, Giedion,

4. Ibid. 7

---

On Their Dark Products

1. Lawrence Anderson, Report of the Dean, Massachusetts

Retreats and Villas, (London, J.T. Carpenter, 1802-1808).

Institute of Technology Bulletin, Report of the President 1968,

11. Latrobe on Architects’ Fees, 1798, Journal of the

(Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1968), 29.

Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 19 No. 3 (Berkeley,

2. Ibid. 30

University of California Press, 1960), 115-117.

3. Ibid. 31

12. Ibid. 117.

4. For example, see: Arindam Dutta, A Second

13. Ibid. 115.

Modernism: MIT, Architecture and the ‘Techno-

14. Ibid. 29.

social’ Moment, (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2013).

15. 22 February 1969 Circular Letter from Richard Upjohn,

5. Ibid. 34

pasted in the Board of Trustees Minutes, AIA Archives.

6. Donalyn Lyndon, MIT’s Lofty Practicum,

16. Woods, From Craft to Profession, 29.

Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 22 No.

17. Ibid. 29.

2/3, (New York, Taylor and Francis, 1968).

18. Ibid. 29.

7. Ibid. 20

Instrument I: The Detail

8. Ibid. 21

1. For a complete list of Silvermine’s services,

through Machines, AD Magazine, Vol: 9,

see: http://silverminesystems.com

(New York, Wiley and Sons, 1969).

2. “Plus One Country.” The Economist Newspaper

10. Experiments in Computer-Aided Design, AD

Limited, September 2nd, 2010.

Magazine, Vol: 9, (New York, Wiley and Sons, 1969).

3. James Cotton, The Rajin-Sonbong Free Trade

11. Ibid. 509

Zone Experiment: North Korea in Pursuit of New

12. Ibid. 513

International Linkages. (Working Paper, Australian

13. Ibid. 513

National University, Canberra, 1996).

14. Ibid. 513

4. Markets, Movies and Media: The Growing Soft-Power

15. Lawrence Lessig, “The Laws of Cyberspace,” Berkman

Threat to North Korea, Journal of East Asian Affairs, Vol 29

Klein Center, Harvard University, Accessed October 10th, 2016,

No. 1, (Institute for National Security Strategy, Seoul, 2015).

http://cyber.harvard.edu/works/lessig/laws_cyberspace.pdf

5. The Guardian, North Korea’s ‘Paranoid’

16. Jerry Adler, Raging Bulls: How Wall Street Got

computer operating system revealed, Guardian

Addicted to Light-Speed Trading, Wired Magazine,

Syndication, London, December 27th, 2015.

No. 20/09, (San Fransisco, Conde Nast, 2012).

Instrument II: The Specification

17. Ibid.

1. Damien Gayle, The World’s Biggest Art

19. Ian Black, Labanon told allies of Hezabollah’s

Factory. The Daily Mail, July 23rd, 2013.

secret network, Wikileaks shows, The Guardian,

2. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

London, December 5th, 2010.

9. Nicholas Negroponte, Towards a Humanism

18. Ibid.

NOTES

20. “Lebanon: Hezbollah Goes Fiber Optic” Wikileaks email ID: 08BEIRUT523_a, Accessed June 30th, 2016, https://

Instrument IX: The Rendering

1. John Naughton, Why Facebook and Google are

wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08BEIRUT523_a.html

buying into drones, The Guardian, April 19th, 2014.

21. “RE: Analysis For Edit – HezCom” Wikileaks email ID:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/20/

330071, Accessed June 30th, 2016, https://wikileaks.org/

facebook-google-buying-into-drones-profit-motive

gifiles/docs/33/330071_re-analysis-for-edit-hezcom-.html

2. Jonathan Brandon, Google patent may reveal original

Instrument V: The Drawing

intent of Project Loon, Telecom News, November 18th 2013.

1. Ryan Singel, Kevin Poulsen, Your Own

may-reveal-original-intent-of-project-loon/

Personal Internet. Wired Blogs. https://www.

3. Scott Cleland, Google’s Secret US Loon Test Implicates

wired.com/2006/06/your_own_person/

the FCC, FAA, EPA, State, & DOD/NSA. Precursor

2. Annis Kassim, The Palestinian Yearbook of International

Blog, December 17th, 2015. http://precursorblog.

Law, Vol. VIII, (The Hague, Kluwer Law International, 1996).

com/?q=content/google%E2%80%99s-secret-us-

3. Helga Tawil-Souri, Digital Occupation: Gaza’s High-

loon-test-implicates-fcc-faa-epa-state-dodnsa

Tech Enclosure, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 41,

4. Alex Hern, Facebook launches Aquila solar-powered

No. 2 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2012).

drone for internet access, The Guardian, July 30th, 2015.

4. Ibid, Tawil-Souri.

5. More Than Half of Google’s Revenue is From the U.S.

Instrument VI: The Text

Military and Government, Political Blindspot, May 9th, 2014.

1. Walbert Castillo, Air Force intel uses ISIS ‘moron’

revenue-is-from-the-u-s-military-and-government/

post to track fighters, CNN Politics, June 5th 2015.

An Open Syllabus for Yung Distance

2. Michael Hoffman, US Airforce Targets and Destroys ISIS HQ Building Using Social Media, Defense Tech, June 3rd 2015.

http://telecoms.com/198441/google-patent-

http://politicalblindspot.com/more-than-half-of-googles-

---

Instrument VII: The Model

1. Elad Benari, Syria Accuses Google of Supporting the Revolution, Arutz Sheva, January 8th, 2012.

2. Stefan Geens, Google Conspiring for Regime Change in Syria Through Maps? Hardly, Ogle Earth, January 8th, 2012.

3. Hito Steyerl, Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise, E-Flux, Journal # 60, December 2014.

4. K. Kourouniotes and Homer A. Thompson, The Pnyx in Athens, Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Vol. 1, (Athens, The American School of Classical Studies in Athens, 1932.)

5. Setting Protocol, Foreign Policy, No. 129, (Washington DC, Washington Post, 2002), 97.

6. Stefan Geens, Google Conspiring for Regime Change in Syria Through Maps? Hardly, Ogle Earth, January 8th, 2012.

Instrument VIII: The Survey

1. Cryptome, NSA/GCHQ Codenames, January 1st, 2014, Cryptome.org 2. Emily Heil, What’s the deal with NSA’s operation names?, The Washington Post, October 22nd, 2013.

3. Julia Angwin, Charlie Savage, Jeff Larson, Henrik Moltke, Laura Poitras and James Risen, AT&T Helpled U.S. Spy on Internet on a Vast Scale, The New York Times, August 15th, 2015 4. Ibid.

5. Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, (New York, Ecco Publishing, 2013).

6. AT&T Helpled U.S. Spy on Internet on a Vast Scale, Ibid.

7. Steven Richman, The Photography Law Handbook, (Chicago, The American Bar Association, 2015)

119

Some Dark Products is a travelogue tracing the online journey of

Curtis Roth is an Assistant Professor at the Knowlton School

nine architectural instruments, from renderings produced for the

of Architecture at the Ohio State University. He investigates

pleasure of airborne algorithms to digital models negotiating the

architecture’s processes valuation after the internet through

online bureaucracies of copyright legislation. Each journey tells

diverse media productions including movies, video games,

the fragmented story of some dark products.

internet micro-economies, drawings, texts and irl stuff.

Rather than the extrinsic outcomes of creative intellection, these products are the disavowed networks produced by architects in order to organize the labor of design across enormous distances.

They’re the even distribution of corporate offices across global time-zones, allowing the circulation of digital drawings to keep pace with the rotation of the earth. They’re the offsite rendering servers that compute the work of French visualization studios with the abundant oil reserves of the Brazilian rainforest. And they’re the networked drafting platforms that adjoin the highvalue brains of designers in the first world with the low-cost drafting labor of CAD technicians in the third.

Some Dark Products argues that to refashion the architectural imagination we must begin by asking our most prosaic instruments to evidence the spatialized labor of architecture as a colossal work of architecture.

I purchased this book thinking it would show me some amazing examples of classic and modern architecture that showcase darkness as a beautiful element. Instead of big, bold, beautiful dark images, I was taken on the journey of an eccentric architect who lost his way in life. It wasn’t what I thought it would be.

MTurk worker: A10ZKPA5MX77J6

The book Some Dark Products was pretty interesting overall.

However, I didn’t think that it added much to my knowledge of dark products. The author, Curtis Roth, didn’t add a lot of insight in the descriptions which I found disappointing. However, I would still recommend this book for those who are searching for something from an aesthetic point of view.

MTurk worker: A3GLMBZSG3VU4P

I think the book should include many issues, political issues, military issues, should focus on describing how to make it, the consequences of its use, history, the life and manufacturers.

Should give more specific examples and illustrations help even more books more better MTurk worker: A1WTD5OHCQS3TG

It was waste of time. No new ideas or information. Total waste of money. How could someone like him could even call him a writer?

MTurk worker: A2GIJ8E45BSAI

Akademie Schloss Solitude Press http://www.akademie-solitude.de