Crafting Glitches - From Postcard to Post-Digital - Theory by Francesco Degl'Innocenti

/ AFGANG 2016 FRANCESCO DEGLâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;INNOCENTI

CRAFTING GLITCHES

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL, S. FREDIANO IN CESTELLO, FLORENCE

/ AARHUS ARKITEKTSKOLEN_STUDIO URBAN/LANDSCAPE SUPERVISOR_TOM NIELSEN

/ FRANCESCO DEGLâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;INNOCENTI CRAFTING GLITCHES

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ PREFACE MAP: CONTENT, MEDIUM, FORM This is a map, but not a plan, a project, a program. Although it may result in one, it hasn’t been voluntarily built for that. This text, its content, its very form are an overall exploration of the three founding principles of the Glitch: process, ambiguity and relationality. Freely inspired by A. Koestler’s “Theory of non-linear systems” investigating complexity, it is constituted of individual entities, some consequential, some far apart: they behave as holons, autonomous yet integrated in a system of a higher degree of information (architecture). Like Bohr’s electrons orbiting around nuclei (disciplines), their configuration (significance) depends on the proximity to others: many connections arise spontaneously, intended to suggest others. Connections of a peculiar sort: they are the ramification of multiple thoughts, held together by disjunctive synthesis and logical conjunctions. A precise effort was made to resist linear organization, for it is the residue of an old (if not obsolete yet) paradigm of spatial analysis; its content evolved through time keeping the structure undefined, and the process similar to a stream of consciousness. These months I have studied the frictions between Florence (the Historic City) and the Networked Society (the Contemporary), using the tools of the latter: the result is non rectilinear, loosely hierarchical, at times confused and unpredictable. Maybe schizophrenic, but very human. After all, these very features link our mental space with the virtual realm. Among the numerous narratives emerging from this process, only at the end of the book I will suggest a personal, plausible interpretation. 6

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION â&#x20AC;&#x153;Crafting glitches: from postcard to Post-Digitalâ&#x20AC;? studies the inevitable malfunctions present in the historic center of Florence, and tries to instrumentalize them as pockets devoted to the Contemporary. It examines the evolution of space through media and technology (drawing a line between Renaissance and glitch art) in a context strangled by preservation rules. Learning from noise artifacts, it investigates the changing relationship of urban incoherences with the cult of image that drives millions of visitors. With the information of the Appendix, it tries to propose a dynamic balance between tradition, communication and innovation, using architectural strategy as the medium of choice.

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

/ PREFACE MAP: CONTENT, MEDIUM, FORM

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ GLITCH STUDIES THEORY AND ART cy brings “Although the search for complete transparen transparency newer, ‘better’ media, every one will always have their own fingerprints of imperfection. While most people experience these fingerprints as negative (and sometimes even as accidents) I emphasize the positive consequences of these imperfections by showing the new opportunities they facilitate.” Rosa Menkman

The Glitch acts in opposition to the persistent upgrade culture, to deconstruct the myth of linear progress. Media artist Rosa Menkman wrote in her Glitch studies manifesto that only breaking social, political, and economic conventions, the audience may become aware of the preprogrammed pattern: this is caused by the un-engagement of the individual in the protocols controlling its personal routine, which can be exposed through disturbance and interference. The role of the glitch is twofold: it shows the critical state of the medium (transforming the way normality is perceived), and challenges its politics toward “self-reflexivity, self-critique, self-expression”. “Somewhere within the destructed ruins of meaning, hope exists”: the ambiguity of interruptions can lead to the emotional creation of something original, “replacing the membrane of the normal”. The instant of the interference depends not only on the information, but as well on the (corrupting or encoding) foreign input, on the technological medium and on the audience (in charge of the reception of the message, the decoding). All these factors are not steadily placed, but sometimes overlap in roles: the framework in which glitch operates is therefore highly relational. 10

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

Glitch-art is a genre of media art, which explores errors and disruptions of flow in software, to create distinctive aesthetics of noise, dysfunction and imperfection. Technically speaking, glitch is a term used to describe a malfunction caused by voltage fluctuation, for instance a signal failure in the circuit. But glitch is not just any software malfunction, it is always an error which materialises in perceptible form, a transmitted signal which results in an output merged with noise. Accidents are the building material of glitch artists, especially their procedural dimension is essential for originating noise; accident (as a concept) describes the instant of erroneous materialization, perceived as post-digital aesthetics; in Paul Virilio’s opinion, it acquires a positive connotate for it questions faith in technology. Based on McLuhan’s distinction of communication media (cool media are low-definition, thus require high participation of the audience to fill in information, and viceversa for hot media) Menkman introduces a separation to stress the importance on methodology in the production of errors: cool glitches have a post-procedural basis and unexpected evolution; they capture the brief moment between total destruction and unpredictable creation. Hot glitches, on the contrary, are domesticated, standardized, erroneous artifacts. They show the visual effect of glitch, bypassing its procedural level. Hot glitches produce irrational aesthetic using rational tools, and reduce the experimentation to a fashionable filter. Thus, for Kim Cascone (glitch musician and theorist) the difference between real glitch art and its imitation doesn’t necessarily lie in the aesthetics, as much as in the methodology used to interfere with the information.

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

Glitch diagram from Glitch Studies Manifesto, Rosa Menkman, 2009

/ GLITCH STUDIES THEORY AND ART

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ PERCEPTION OF NOISE LINE, PARASITE, TIME The results of glitch manipulations are also called “noise artifacts”. In order to analyze the role of the accident in historic urban contexts, it seemed essential to get acquainted with the concept of noise, introduced by Shannon and Weaver in 1949 with their The mathematical theory of communication at the dawn of Information Theory. According to it, information is defined as the opposite of entropy: being entropy is the measure of disorder, noise is identified as the interruptions of the static, linear notion of transmitting information. In their debated and criticized diagram, the information source delivers linearly a message, from a transmitter (as signal) toward a receiver destination, via a contingent yet systemic interference (the noise source). This unidirectional process of communication is reasonably deterministic, and its predictability is undermined by the overall addition of noise. Without lingering any longer, one aspect became crucial in many of the later modification of Shannon’s simplified model: the interfering nature of noise could be experienced only by the sender, and mistakenly interpreted by the receiver as part of the information itself (same ambiguity expoited by glitch artists). The idea that noise mixes with the message and becomes part of it, turning into a second-order source (like a parasite) was the initial reflection which led French philosopher Michel Serres to elaborate another theory in 1982: “background noise is the ground of our perception, uninterrupted; it’s our perennial sustenance”. The term has a semantic valence both in biology (organism that lives off a host), in social context (a social loafer) and in information (static noise in a circuit): the common principle is the interference to a determined set of relations. 14

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION For Serres, noise (a consequence of communication) is the only sign of presence of a Medium between sender and receiver (otherwise the clear transmission of information would be purely message). The appearance of a Medium, or in the words of Giorgio Agamben “the exhibition of mediality”, forces the information system to adjust or expel the new secondary source: the organism is structured around the (potential) exclusion of this Parasite. In a system where unfixed senders and receivers change alternatively role “like in a dialogue”, the Parasite doesn’t operate on one, rather on the link between them: its nature is purely relational. The language of Serres has a constant referral to the spatiality of the Medium (etymologically milieu, environment): airports, streams, switching stations, and so on; his use of spatial metaphors is fundamental, as in the work of McLuhan (later examined). To elaborate further on the relation noise theories bare to architecture would be probably far-fetched, indeed naive; nevertheless, the idea that noise is the base of perception suggests a direct comparison to what we usually consider “context” (which, we agree, spans far beyond the physical state). Building upon this insight, if the measure of architecture is space (therefore it is the information system, speaker 1 and 2), noise could be interpreted as its connected temporailty (“the perennial sustenance”, the secondary source): only the convergence and synchronicity of these two allows for the generation of a contemporary physical Medium. Contrarily, protection might be the expression of the spatial system working toward the expulsion of Serres’ parasite: the divergence between space and time sanctions once and for all the exclusion of the Contemporary (read, noise) from the historic city. 15

CLAUDE E. SHANNON, 1948 A MATHEMATICAL THEORY OF COMMUNICATION INFORMATION SOURCE

ME E SENDER (ENCODER)

SIG CHANNEL

ED IV

E EC

NA SIG

NOISE SOURCE

RECEIVER (DECODER)

ME E AG SS DESTINATION TYPE OF MODEL

LINEAR

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

/ PERCEPTION OF NOISE LINE, PARASITE, TIME

MICHEL SERRES, 1982 THE PARASITE

NOISE (PARASITE)

SPEAKER 1

CHANNEL

SPEAKER 2

CODE (OF INFORMATION)

TYPE OF MODEL

RELATIONAL 17

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ PERCEPTION OF AMBIGUITY OPENING ARTWORKS More than elements, the glitch alters the relation between elements: the relationality is the only mechanism to unlock its multifaceted and provocative character. By now it’s becoming clear that the operational framework of the glitch is inherently semantic: it lays its roots in the ambiguous concept of the creative malfunction, which is an idea which has been debated for years, especially in the art world. Art, as the communicative act and of interpersonal dialogue, is founded on a dialectic relation between definiteness and openness: on the one side, the artist generates “an object well defined and completed, result of a precise intention; on the other, the artistic object will be experienced by a plurality of people, each one adding to the act of fruition its own features, psychological and physiological, its own cultural environment and education” according to Italian philosopher Umberto Eco in Opera aperta. More and more, contemporary art explored the destruction of the univocal interpretation, through “art objects which possess in themselves a mobility, a capability to re-present kaleidoscopically as always new to the eyes of the beholder”. Artists, rather than favoring the reception of a precise meaning, aim at offering a scheme of meaning, at communicating the ambiguous, the polyvalent. To obtain this, it’s required an active intervention, an operative choice from the reader/spectator. This doesn’t mean that the artwork dissolves itself in the plurality of uses, because the artist (and the architect) establish at first an orientation. How open, how dynamic is an artwork, is related to notions such as indeterminacy and discontinuity: without fixed points of view, all perspectives are equally valid and potentially rich. 18

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION The reception of these arguments has spurred in architecture an ongoing debate which had several phases, currents and explorations (especially around authoriality): the most important were the less formalist ones, led by architects who tried to incorporate the citizenship in the design process (John Habraken, or Giancarlo De Carlo), or advocated for a retreat from planning at all (Rayner Banham and Cedric Price). Many of these experiments did not succeed, some others became useful case-studies. Without lingering much, the discussion has been revived in the last decade, especially now that participation can be integrated with digital tools. MIT professor Carlo Ratti published with Matthew Claudel a book entitled Open source architecture in 2014, which reflected on the relation between architecture and the audience up til the age of digital interaction. The most intriguing aspect of the book is maybe not its content (at times generic) but the procedure that led to its conception and edition: inspired by the principles of open source, the two authors forwarded the initial draft to a group of 14 international co-authors, in a document modifiable at all times: each contributed with parts, edited others (all being registered), pushing the discussion on further trajectories. After the publication the editing process was open also to the public, with sections of the text still available for modification: a Wiki page.

Digital water pavilion, Zaragoza expo, Carlo Ratti Associati, 2008

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

/ PERCEPTION OF AMBIGUITY OPENING ARTWORKS

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ PERCEPTION OF PRESERVATION THE AMBIGUITY OF PROTECTION The historic center of Florence is one of the most known sites in the Unesco Heritage List, attractiong tourists well before its official admission in 1982. Ever since the first Unesco Convention ten years before, three fundamental elements drastically changed in deciding what to protect, according to Ipposito Pestellini: the scale, the typology and the institutions involved. In times of “the apotheosis of heritage”, Florence constitutes the archetype: the preservation status grew over time, encompassing from civic and religious buildings to entire neighborhoods (in other cases, even larger portions). Moreover, institutions dedicated to the defense of such areas proliferated: while Unesco is a global political lobby, local reality showed an ecosystem of similar entities, spanning from public to private to NGOs, with either international interests or punctual necessities. This also led to an explosion of codes of conduct at different scales, some of which also politically adopted into ruling regulations (as the case of the Unesco Management Plan, a shared document between the Municipality and the Unesco Bureau). The legal restrictions for preservation (thus transformation) in Florence are extremely rigid, and all aimed at the apparent immobility of the existing environment. Respectively: - a national law which preserves Florence under a specific status (as “centro storico”); - a preservation status declared by the Tuscany Region - another conferred by the Province of Florence; - the Firenze Municipality has its own set of protection; rules legislating according to adopted urban plans and effective building regulations; - the Unesco Plan of Management, defining guidelines in public decorum, historic identity, cultural protection. 22

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION Normative rigidity has become one of the reasons why cities like Florence did not have the chance to adapt in the last decades, to absorb modern urban functions, to accommodate needs and services. Being preservation only a very recent concept in history, this regime often killed any potential transformation of the urban fabric. This was not only necessary, but also the essential aspect in the past for the achievement of the current protected status. The Unesco criteria of selection got more and more vague as more countries joined the Convention. Objectiveness has become a political issue, since the inscription in the WHS List influenced tourist flows and economies, especially in developing countries. The first sites were recognized as “cultural heritage” in 1978, soon trailed by maritime and forest heritage; 2008 was crucial for the admission of communities’ traditions and know-how: the shift from physical to intangible heritage was complete. More than any other global institution, Unesco has historically shown a difficulty negotiating between protection and transformation. Watching the global distribution of the Unesco sites, it is therefore possible to start defining future areas of extreme conservation, as opposed to zones of extreme demolition and constant reconfiguration. An ambiguous preservation fever hit the world, unable to mediate between Viollet Le Duc’s vision (in favour of restoring and transforming the past) and John Ruskin’s (for the authenticity of the ruins). The main goal became visual coherence, regulations followed to guarantee it: shape over content, medium over message, facade over urban function. Protected areas changed purpose implicitly, from entering buildings to going around them. The paradox: protection glorifies historified fakes. 23

cultural heritage

intangible heritage

forest heritage

maritime heritage

protected areas

HISTORIC CENTER OF FLORENCE

500

1978

1980

1990

own data-visualization, sources: Unesco List 2015, whc.unesco.org, International Union for Conservation of Nature

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

/ PERCEPTION OF PRESERVATION THE AMBIGUITY OF PROTECTION UNESCO HERITAGE SITES 1031

2000

2010

2015

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ SAN FREDIANO IN CESTELLO A HISTORY OF EXCEPTIONS, 1 Once familiar with the definition of glitch, it’s not too far-fetched to draw an analogy between computing and the stratification of cities: both of them are the result of a process in a time T, in which various activators took part more or less consciously carrying on a series of operations, sometimes under the influence of un-foreseen perturbations. In technology we refer to them as glitches; in cities it is often possible to read these “malfunctions” in the layers of buildings, and in the sequence of planning phases: they can have the most disparate causes, from natural catastrophes to wars. The result is nothing but a three-dimensional glitch, which resists the positivist linearity of its environment, to testify its tribulations by unexpected means. Due to its rejection of (stylistic/volumetric/etc.) coherence, this space often ends up being considered residual in the wider narrative, a leftover at the banquet of post-production of history. To check their diffusion I mapped inside the Unesco Area 2 types of glitches (volumetric and programmatic) with the location of all listed buildings built after 1900: as imaginable, the stratification of epochs has concentrated most of the volumetric incoherences inside the medioeval fabric; programmatic ones don’t show clear patterns, and mainly concern parking lots in public squares and abandoned buildings. Interesting to see the centrifugal movement of contemporary architectures, forced out of the urban fabric across the Unesco border: speculating on their relation, they could instead exploit the occasional intersections of the two glitches. Reflecting these conditions, I have identified mainly 3 cases of “urban glitch” that did not reach the critical mass, and lay incohesively. Of them, one will be adopted as the project site. 26

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION The examined area is San Frediano in Cestello square, a public space in Florence Oltrarno (south of the river Arno) delimited between its waters and the church with the same name. The square facing the church of San Frediano is in fact one of the 3 or 4 open spaces along the river Arno, in the area once contained inside of the 13th century medieval fortifications. Now the ancient limit of the Walls is the line established by Unesco in 1982 as protected World Heritage Site. At first it may seem that the church of San Frediano in Cestello not be relevant to the history of Florentine architecture, but that is a common mistake: it is in reality one of the very few churches built during the 1600s, in a century that mainly saw the completion of unfinished buildings (as Ognissanti, on the other side of the river) and heavy works in restoration. It is the expression of Barocco Fiorentino, in line with a local sobriety of forms quite distant from the sensuality of the Roman examples of the same period. Its elaborate cupola stands well above red roofs, serving as a landmark for the neighbourhood now just like 4 centuries ago. Its facade was not taken to completion due to financial reasons, and still lays there crude, coarse. It was left showing its tectonic soul in hope of a more prosperous future to cling onto. The “unfinished” marks a very interesting condition, because “postcard cities” often affirm its denial in search of a stylistic coherence, a condition hardly ever guaranteed due to the accidents of history (whether economic like here, or else). Almost forgotten in favour of its older brothers, the mentioned aspects transform the little church into an architecture nothing short of extraordinary. 27

PROGRAMMATIC GLITCH

Sant’Orsola ex monastery, photo Wikipedia.com, 2015 VOLUMETRIC GLITCH

Loggia de i’ pesce, photo Wikipedia.com, 2014

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

/ SAN FREDIANO IN CESTELLO A HISTORY OF EXCEPTIONS, 1

VOLUMETRIC GLITCH PROGRAMMATIC GLITCH

SMN TRAIN STATION

UNE

SCO

SANT’ORSOLA EX MONASTERY

LOGGIA DEL PESCE

WHS

PROJECT SITE SAN FREDIANO IN CESTELLO

ARCHITECTURE PARABLE #1 REBUILDING BORGO SAN JACOPO

URBAN GLITCHES MAPPING THE UNESCO SITE 29

ARCHITECTURE PARABLE #2 THE FARCE OF ISOZAKI’S LOGGIA

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ SAN FREDIANO IN CESTELLO A HISTORY OF EXCEPTIONS, 2 An aspect of great interest is the analysis of the volumetric composition along the riverbanks: the Lungarni section contained within the Unesco borders is a continuous sequence of linear facades daubed in light, warm colours, scanned regularly by the rhythm of the openings. A sudden interruption is created by the setback of the church: its façade, rough and unfinished, opens doors to a second exception beside, a square, misused as a parking lot: we might summarise the condition as a broken linearity allowing a programmatic accident. This void draws attention on a third spatial oddity: an apparently spontaneous conglomerate of low-income homes crawls up high, creating an astonishing volumetric glitch in the regularity of the skyline. As the riverbank continues, its familiar, comforting rhythm is re-established: nothing happened, just (a cluster of) temporary malfunctions. Right under the square, along the river there is another exceptional element, the Pescaia di Santa Rosa, an historical weir (a little dam) that served as the endpoint to the navigability of the Arno; in fact the medieval harbour, its waterway to the Mediterranean 110 km downstream, was located beside San Frediano’s door to the city. This originates a unique condition still today: on a normal day the water sits on two different levels, few meters apart. The small dam was a very lively pocket for the city, meeting place for fishermen and access to water for the neighbourhood (as it’s possible to document from etchings by artists such as Giuseppe Zocchi). The present condition is in total contrast the past one: no possibility to descend down to the water levels, and the lively attitude is only testified by poorly-spelled sprayed messages in search of maximum visibility. 30

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION Florence is a city that decided to keep his river merely as a photo-opportunity, a stage prop for temporary citizens; at the same time, we denied the Arno involvement in our past and prohibited our engagement in its future. Several times in the last century architects tried to subvert this attitude toward the riverbanks, but all projects fell victim to the obstructionism of preservationists. The site location in relation to the river is absolutely pivotal: beyond its waters in fact it creates a very strong visual axis with another church with another square, in a complementary dialogue. On the exact other side of the Arno, the church of Ognissanti lived a very different destiny compared to the San Frediano’s: medieval in its constituency (with a tower as a reminder of its origins) and likewise left without facade for centuries, it found its aforementioned completion with a shiny baroque facade. The tension between the stories of these two churches reflects the lives of the riversides: the institutional, opposed to the working class. The neighbourhood of San Frediano kept this character until today, with a local population of local artisans and botteghe owners (neighbourhood shops) trying to resist the waves of tourist pressure. The reality of the life in the “rione” was masterfully portrayed in one of the most famous italian books after the WW2, “Le ragazze di San Frediano” by Vasco Pratolini. Following the success of the publication, the homonym movie became an example of the Italian Neorealism film-movement.

VOLUMETRIC GLITCH WATER ON 2 LEVELS

ECONOMIC GLITCH UNFINISHED FACADE

HISTORIC GLITCH BAROQUE CHURCH

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

VOLUMETRIC GLITCH VOID ON LUNGARNO

/ SAN FREDIANO IN CESTELLO A HISTORY OF EXCEPTIONS, 2

PROGRAMMATIC GLITCH PARKING LOT

VOLUMETRIC GLITCH INFORMAL HOUSING

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ ARCHITECTURE PARABLE #1 REBUILDING BORGO SAN JACOPO During WW2 the historic center was heavily hit by air raids and bombs, and the only bridge still standing was Ponte Vecchio; the process of reconstruction around it was the node around which public opinion started debating internationally. Next to many people calling for an integral reconstruction of lost buildings “where they were and how they were”, several other supported an urban intervention according to modern requirements, condemning all kind of slasish recovery. From the beginning, the position of Giovanni Michelucci, one of the most gifted Italian architects of 20th century, was clear: “The banks of the Arno river should not become a glorious mausoleum of memory, but a resourceful center for a new peaceful life”. He elaborated a proposal free from reverence to the past, interpreting the historic moment to outline a new city: old narrow streets were giving way to more pedestrial layers due to housing needs, all chained together in a ever-varying panorama. In the official competition, launched the 31st of december 1945, most of his innovative ideas were forgotten, and the 22 designed proposals were all far less incisive and courageous. Nevertheless each of the designs considered the task with an important uniformity of vision. This fundamental aspect was swept away in 1947 due to the clash between interests of single landowners and the plan. In March of the same year, while recognizing the success of the competition, the selection board did not count any project suitable to meet the requirements; the overall plan was blocked, and the Municipality’s public servants took over the procedures: every bold element of transformation was substituted with retro-features, fake decorations and a nostalgic urban re-institution. 34

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

“The mess of Borgo San Jacopo is the biggest occasion wasted by Italian architecture since WW2.” Bruno Zevi

The architecture critic Bruno Zevi dedicated a part of his “Cronache di Architettura” to the quarrel. In 1953 the reconstruction was far from over, with only “episodic, horrendous little houses, neither old nor new, whose loosely pictoresque character generates only yawns, fruit of organizational and creative shabbiness”. At the same time, a lot of the pre-war urban intricacy was lost due to the superficiality of engineers in the reconstruction of the river bunks, now rectilinear. Thus, any attempt to replicate the arcaic character of centuries of stratification, “natural phenomenon of serene assimilation”, was both impossible to reproduce and damaging on a symbolic level. Zevi was still hoping for a bold act of the Comune, re-assigning the plan to an architect with full power over regulations which were inviting to take compromises; this in fact happened, with the same Michelucci appointed. All hope was lost when he resigned a few days later, because landowners had limited the intervention to only the facades! The project was assigned to a young local architect with a bright future, Edoardo Detti. He resigned shortly after for the same reasons. In a back and forth diatribe among the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Comune’s boards, professionals, public debate, all attemp to keep the design uniform and the attitude courageous got lost along the way, while construction chaotically restarted. The episode became for Zevi emblematic of the internal struggle of Italian architecture once facing its own history: “the number one enemy of architecture is sloth”, he sadly recognized. 35

Borgo San Jacopo after the liberation, 1944

Plan of the reconstruction, 1946

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

/ ARCHITECTURE PARABLE #1 REBUILDING BORGO SAN JACOPO

‘47

‘53

‘44

CARRAIA BRIDGE

PONTE VECCHIO

POLITICAL PROCEDURES competition

mmh...

BUILDING RATE nay!

MEDIA COVERAGE

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ ARCHITECTURE PARABLE #2 THE FARCE OF ISOZAKIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S LOGGIA The extension of the Uffizi Museum had been debated ever since the 1960s, but only in 1998 the funds were disposed. In an attempt to revert the trend of poor relevance of Florence in the cultural scene, the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, together with the Comune as promoter, held an international closed competition inviting famous professionals with previous experience in the design of national exhibition spaces: the goal was to restore the forgotten back of the museum into the main exit of the institution, and an honorable public space for the citizenship. Between the cultural institution and the palace of the Municipality had been trimmed a inaccessible residual space with no defined function, fenced: a weird anti-landmark crossed daily by thousands of tourists. Volumetrically, the void created a clear sense of unfinished in the convergence of the 4 blocks, the backyard never meant to be shown. The architectures facing the narrow open space spoke very different visual languages, from the medieval stones of Palazzo Vecchio all the way to the postmodern renovation completed by Adolfo Natalini for ex-cinema Capitol. Among participants were Foster, Hollein, Botta, but the competition was finally won by Arata Isozaki with a covered space, reference to the florentine tradition of public Loggias. The architectural expression of the intervention was in dynamic dialogue with its incoherent surroundings through the wise use of current and traditional materials, establishing symbolically a bold focal point in a very privileged part of the city. The estimated delivery was 2003, but the decisional process never really developed due to the lethargy of political institutions: not yet started after 18 years, already 11 Ministers and 4 city mayors passed by. 38

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION Architecture became soon nothing but a pretext for political oppositions: promoted initially by a leftist city council, the first obstacle came into being with the victory of Berlusconiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s right-wing party in the 2001 national elections. From the following year the movement against the project caugh on under the leadership of Vittorio Sgarbi, an art critic and polemist which was Undersecretary of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage. Applying the very strict Italian regulations for new constructions in historic centers he managed to stop all procedures, and cut its fundings (starting a lenghty legal lawsuit between Isozaki and the commissioners). All decisions around the project stagnated. In later years the florentine community of architects supported it publicly as a symbol of the daily challenges in such a bureaucratic environment, trying to re-introduce it into the political agenda of leftist municipalities. From 2009, under mayor Renzi, in the last 3 mandates it has been rhythmically re-proposed as a topic to solve at last, in an oscillation between moments of cautious optimism and abandonment. No step was taken toward completion. Also in such a righteous efforts, the architectural design was barely ever debated: it was just the background scene to an ideologic dispute; all these years of negotiations highlighted the difficulties to deal with the symbolic layer embedded in any intervention on historic contexts. The story of Isozakiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Loggia constitutes one of the many lost chances to innovate the Italian urban fabric with a contemporary infill, even when it showed the absolute convergence of all three main conditions: the glitchy nature of the pre-existences, the urgent necessity of an intervention, and the exceptional visibility of the site. 39

Isozakiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s winning proposal, image Andrea Maffei

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

/ ARCHITECTURE PARABLE #2 THE FARCE OF ISOZAKI’S LOGGIA

‘07 ‘02

‘15

‘98

CAPITOL CINEMA

UFFIZI MUSEUM

POLITICAL PROCEDURES competition

mmh...

‘09

MUNICIPALITY

MEDIA COVERAGE nay!

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ ARCHITECTURE PARABLE, AFTERMATH PERCEPTION OF THE CONTEMPORARY Interview with Vittorio Sgarbi, art critic and former Undersecretary of Ministry of Heritage, Cultural Activities and Tourism (2001-2002), 2014

“(Isozaki) is wrong a 1000 times, he is a old idiot who is fucking bugging us with his shitty little mattress, now I said it! (...) Now, how can four intellectuals, incapable retarded architects insist on this kinda bedframe to break balls with an architect who’s gone gaga without the humility to understand that you are in the city of Brunelleschi. (...) If we have to take up arms against these morons we will, but that would be a legalized vomit gag. (...) So the conclusion, it’s not that we do not wanna let architects work in Italy, but Italy is delicate, it’s not like the USA or Germany! Thus, something ugly, if one sees it he tries to stop it, rightfully so! Because those who liked it have no taste! They have no brain, no nothing, they are thieves, (...) it’s time to stop it!” Interviewer: “Then how do you solve the relationship between historical cities and contemporary architecture?”

“Looking for architects...humble...devoted... mmh...with taste...there are, maybe. Better a lady from a good family than an architect”. 42

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION Interview with Sandro Bondi, former Minister of Heritage, Cultural Activities and Tourism (2008-2011), 2009

“Whoever works in Florence should never forget to compare to Giotto, Michelangelo and Vasari. I wonder how that platform-roof would coexist with Vasari’s Loggias nearby without provoking a shock to the Florentine as well to tourists coming from all over the world”.

Vittorio Sgarbi, art critic and former Undersecretary of Ministry of Heritage, Cultural Activities and Tourism (2001-2002)

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

/ ARCHITECTURE PARABLE, AFTERMATH PERCEPTION OF THE CONTEMPORARY

Sandro Bondi, former Minister of Heritage, Cultural Activities and Tourism (2008-2011)

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ PERCEPTION OF TIME WHAT’S THE CONTEMPORARY? In order to intervene on the fabric of the historic city you are bound to question profoundly the role of your transformation in relation to Time. Entering the complex discussion tying architecture to past and future, the words to inscribe on the threshold would probably be “Of whom are we contemporaries?”, and thus foremost “What does it mean to be contemporary?” The answer could, only at last, seek spatial translation in the convergence of the concept of history with the physical context. Osip Mandelstam’s 1923 poem “The Century” offers a great opportunity to reflect on the artist’s role in relation to his epoch, and investigate the criticality of Time itself. Playing along with the ambiguity of the term vek (in Russian both century, or age), the poet depicts a powerful metaphor: like vertebrae fractured from their backbone, Time is broken into the “time of the individual” and the “collective, historic time”: the vocation of the artist must try to weld this rupture. This impossible task will lead to his sacrifice, a martyrdom redeemed by the achieved contemporariness. Building upon Mandelstam’s imagery, when meant as the tension between two processes (the former cyclical, round as human ribs, the latter linear as the vertebral column), the friction between one’s life and the historical century could be extended beyond sole individuals: larger organisms (historic cities) might react similarly due to a well-established consciousness of themselves, which we identify now as identity. Not being able to stop the progression of centuries, the living organism historic city can only manipulate its “time of the individual”: the more there is a similitude between the linearity of history and the circular path of a city, the more compact is the fracture. 46

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

“The contemporary is the untimely” Roland Barthes

At the same time, as much as the two scopes tend to coincide, the Contemporary will be consequently sacrificed: contemporariness emerges only where a breakage is generated for the artist to heal. In the realm of philosophy, here lays the unsolved paradox of architectural preservation. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, exploring with his students the term “contemporary” at IUAV University in 2007, drew on Nietzsche’s notion of untimely: “Contemporariness is a singular relationship with one’s own time which adheres to it, and at the same time keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is a relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism. Those who coincide too well with the epoch (…) are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it”. Contemporariness is a status indissolubly linked to one’s perception, therefore the concept itself is a-historical, independent from the present as such. In neurophysiology, darkness is not the privative concept of the absence of light, but a product of the retina itself. Similarly, perceiving the darkness of Time is not inertia or passivity: “the ones who can call themselves contemporary are only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of their era”, in a continuous engagement and concern. All eras, for those who experience contemporariness, are obscure. The contemporary is precisely the person who knows how to see this obscurity, who is able to write by dipping his pen into the darkness of the present. 47

ROLE OF THE ARTIST WELD FRACTURES

TIME OF THE INDIVIDUAL CIRCULAR

TIME OF HISTORY LINEAR

Brachial plexus, Leonardo da Vinci, circa 1508, Royal Collection London

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

/ PERCEPTION OF TIME WHAT’S THE CONTEMPORARY? THE CENTURY My beast, my age, who will try to look you in the eye, and weld the vertebrae of century to century, with blood? Creating blood pours out of mortal things: only the parasitic shudder, when the new world sings. As long as it still has life, the creature lifts its bone, and, along the secret line of the spine, waves foam. Once more life’s crown, like a lamb, is sacrificed, cartilage under the knife the age of the new-born. To free life from jail, and begin a new absolute, the mass of knotted days must be linked by means of a flute. With human anguish the age rocks the wave’s mass, and the golden measure’s hissed by a viper in the grass. And new buds will swell, intact, the green shoots engage, but your spine is cracked my beautiful, pitiful, age. And grimacing dumbly, you writhe, look back, feebly, with cruel jaws, a creature, once supple and lithe, at the tracks left by your paws.

Vek moi, Osip Mandelstam, 1923

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ PERCEPTION OF MODERNITY CONTEMPORARY VS. MODERN “The eyes (of the contemporary individual) are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time.” Giorgio Agamben

In light of the interpretation aforementioned by the Italian philosopher, such a quote is functional to clarify the frequent linguistic coincidence of “contemporary” with “modern”. Contrarily to their ambivalent use in everyday expressions, they are not synonyms. Extending the distinction to previous historical epochs, we might say that history have a sinusoidal path between “modern” ages of progress followed by “contemporary” ages of reflection (or in few cases, reaction). Our nearest oscillations, the Digital (or Information-) Age and the Post-Digital Age can be understood equally: the mass-implementation of technologies in every aspect of our existence generated a condition of drunken enthusiasm, obfuscating its outcomes and drugging behavioural awareness. “Technology is blind, and the formal play of form is reactionary: both are servile followers of production”, Alessandro Mendini noted in 1972 about the MOMA opening of “Italy: the new domestic landscape”, which pointed international spotlights on Radical Design. Technological determinism (born as reductionist theory to interpret History) became a faith to steer the Future, exploited by Western capitalist ventures to spike consumption: a shortcircuited Eucharest claiming to solve today’s issues with tomorrow’s discoveries. Thus, the Post-Digital Age rejects firmly any neo-luddist or even nostalgic behaviour: its goal is to inquire the political, cultural, social, artistic consequences on human beings through the tools of each discipline. 50

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

“Modern architecture is an oxymoron”

Adolfo Natalini

Adolfo Natalini, theorist and founder in ‘66 of the Florentine radical group Superstudio, advised that a necessary reflection lays in the etymology of the 2 words: the root of modern is modo, a latin adverb that means “just now, in this moment”, while both Arché and Techné stress the immanence or our work. The two terms are conflicting to a level that makes him eager to underline the impossible cohexistence resulting from their combination; modern architecture would yearn for belonging to the present moment, in a world where change is faster and faster: “its celestial aspiration is instantness, forgetting its foundation as the art of long times”. It’s not haphazard that modern and “moda” (fashion) share the same root, since both concepts introduce a discontinuity in time, redefining what is and isn’t actual, current. The time of fashion constitutively always anticipates itself, and consequently is already too late: an ungraspable threshold between a “not yet” and a “no more” (Agamben). Elaborating on his provocation, we could add that modern architecture (pursuing solely the latest fashion) might result counterproductive for it tries to get rid of its critical, “contemporary” attitude. The innate delay of architecture is engraved in its nature as a lenghty process, and, compared to the other more agile fields, this same disjunction contributes to give the discipline an aura of critical belonging to its Time. To be a Contemporary, the architect must be first and foremost a cultural interpreter. 51

MODERN HISTORY ART GRAPHIC DESIGN ARCHITECTURE 1800

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POSTMODERN HISTORY ART GRAPHIC DESIGN ARCHITECTURE 1800

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POSTDIGITAL HISTORY ART GRAPHIC DESIGN ARCHITECTURE 1800

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

/ PERCEPTION OF MODERNITY CONTEMPORARY VS. MODERN

DISJUNCTIONS ARCHITECTURE DELAY ARCHITECTURE

ARCHITECTURE

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FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ PERCEPTION OF THE FUTURE IMAGINATION VS. SPEED “Future is not a natural dimension of the mind, rather a modality of perception and imagination, a feature of expectation changing with culture.” Franco Bifo Berardi

On 5th February 1909 several Italian newspapers opened with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto Futurista: his exaltation of speed and the machine, it was one of the most important avant-garde testimonials of the optimism toward the notion of future that characterized the last century. Exactly a 100 years later, Italian Marxist philosopher Franco Bifo Berardi published “After Future - The exhaustion of modernity”, an essay that started from Marinetti’s revolutionary pamphlet to analyze the contemporary condition through the evolution of the idea of “future”. The thesis of the author is suggestive: contrarily to the 20th century (with its dramatic events and faith in progress), today’s condition denotes the impossibility in thinking the concept of Future. Imagination failed. The machine glorified by futurists became miniaturized, ubiquitous, and underwent a process of interiorization in the form of information (as McLuhan theorized); speed, the ultimate myth of modernity, exhausted its being a promise of richness and turned into an obsession, a curse. Under neoliberal capitalism (semio-capitalism, in the words of the philosopher) the machine melted with the concept of speed: a need for constant acceleration, in total contrast with the concept of exhaustion and scarcity. The financialization of capital markets, the cellularization of labor, the shift from physical to cognitive production are among the effects also explained by Guy Standing in his book “The Precariat – The new dangerous class”. 54

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

“Semiocapital puts neuropsychical energies to work, and submits them to the speed of electronic machinery. It compels our cognition, our emotional hardware to follow the rhythm of net-productivity” Franco Bifo Berardi

But for Bifo the principal consequence was on the semiotic level: with the tumultuous technological progress of these last decades, the relation of the individual with everything in its surroundings has changed so rapidly, and so often, that it was impossible to keep up with it. As semiologist Umberto Eco noted in an interview with the Italian newspaper Il corriere della Sera, in the age of communication media meanings emerge by the vicinity of 2 or more signs, not by the signs themselves; decades after, in a time of exasperated growing speed, the human mind is constantly forced to re-evaluate the semantic relationality with the ever-evolving environment, causing a sensory overload. The most immediate outcomes were visible as rising psychic pathologies: depression, withdrawal, stress, jeopardizing the very possibility of empathy and solidarity, and first and foremost affecting our capability to imagine the Future. The most interesting aspect of the philosopher’s book is the organic confluence of disciplines: he reads an artistic avant-garde that praised technology, in order to describe the socio-political condition under neoliberal economies. Moreover, he adds a multitude of examples to shun the risk of genericity: if economic analysis focuses on the West at large, most of the events and facts cited are related to the Italian society and politics of the last century; this makes the essay a highly adequate source to explore the cultural context of the project. 55

Plan Voisin, Le Corbusier, 1925

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

404_Pl@] V0|siN, personal elaboration, 2016

/ PERCEPTION OF THE FUTURE IMAGINATION VS. SPEED

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ POST-DIGITAL AGE TRANSMEDIALE 2016 Transmediale is an annual festival for media art and digital culture taking place for one week in February in Berlin. It is considered the forefront for the discussion around social and political implications of the Information Age, and recently an important testbed for artistic explorations in the real of this Post-Digital Age. In the attempt to define “Post-Digital Age”, I can refer to the concept of Paradigm of Giorgio Agamben: in 2002 he describes paradigms as “things we think with”, rather than “things we think about”. Therefore, Post-Digital doesn’t want to investigare a life after the exhaustion of digital: it may rather provide a paradigm with which it is possible to examine consequences of our relation to technology, and understand the moving threshold of the digital. The critical, inquisitive nature of Post-Digital places it in close proximity to the aforementioned concept of “the Contemporary” by Agamben. Called ‘Conversation Piece’, the 2016 edition embraced a rather participative approach compared to previous years (more artistically speculative): the highlighted feature was the dialogic, reflective angle around the intersections of culture, technology and art, with the manifest intent to spur debate in view of the coming 30th edition. As such, it seemed a transitional stage to “reboot the format” of the festival, and discuss the anxiogenic nature of what they defined as “post-capitalist world”. Organized in four interlinked themes (Anxious to Act, Anxious to Make, Anxious to Share and Anxious to Secure) all referred to the ambiguous tension between the eagerness to take action, and the nervous hesitation in doing so.

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION The result was a very theoretical edition, where several themes relevant to the practice of architecture (such as mapping, infrastructural planning etc) were explored from the point of view of different disciplines. While among the participants it was fairly uncommon to be from our field, some of the keynotes were held by renowned architects (activist Eyal Weizman, theorist Benjamin H Bratton, Yale professor Keller Easterling). After attending their talks it was evident the common red thread: they were invited to explain their contributions in blurring the border of practice and theory; only doing so they inquired the direct implications of architecture on another matters, and viceversa. A discussion panel about the future of social economy highlighted an interesting aspect: any technologic advancement carries a potential to change not only a certain discipline, but also the social message embedded. This was a paraphrasis of the notion of Umfunktionierung (initially proposed in relation to theater) by Bertholt Brecht: the duality of Form/Function was replaced by a triad of Material/Technique/Function, and the instable negotiation of the three toward the shaping of society. During the days of the Transmediale the Canadian Embassy hosted â&#x20AC;&#x153;McLuminationsâ&#x20AC;?, a very intriguing group conversation with 3 international scholars, starting from one of the themes theorized by Marshall McLuhan. At the same time, we were granted full access to the McLuhan archive in loco, the vastest collection of media on the massmediologist out of Canada: it opened up a world which I only knew partly.

The Collapse of PAL, Glitch-art video performance at Transmediale, Berlin, 201, Rosa Menkman.

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

/ POST-DIGITAL AGE TRANSMEDIALE 2016

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ LOCAL GLITCHES 4TH NOVEMBER 1966, FLOOD On the night between 3rd and 4th November 1966, after days of rain, the police started receiving requests for help from villages up the Arno valley; the conditions of the river were giving cause for concern. In Florence, at 2.30am the Civil Engineering Department had already acknowledged that the city drains couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t cope with the amount of rainwater fallen. The first cellars in the neighbourhoods of San Frediano and Santa Croce started going underwater. Around 4am, upstream in Valdarno, the Levane and the La Penna dams were being proven under an extraordinary stress. After feverish consultations, in fear of a sudden collapse the decision of releasing some of the water pressure was taken: 2000 cubic meters per second started bursting downstream, about 20 times the normal flow rate of the Arno River. While the city was sleeping, the mass reached rapidly Florence, sweeping motorcycles and trees. Around 9, muddy waters had completely invaded the center: the narrow streets of the city acted as funnels, increasing the speed and height of the water, which reached 7,5 meters in Santa Croce. Only about 12 hours later the level finally started decreasing. An estimate of 600.000 tons of mud, 15.000 carwrecks, 5.000 homeless families left the city in despair. But the tragedy reached colossal dimensions when considered also the loss of cultural artifacts. Night watchmen in the various museums and libraries were caught completely by surprise and had no time to save anything: 14,000 movable works of art were damaged, 3-4 million books and manuscripts were submerged.

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION The flood evidenced the lack of a central emergency structure to deal with disasters in Italy. Most of the early help came from the mobilization of volunteers and private citizens: it took 6 days to see an organized effort from the Government. At the same time, from the very first day, volunteers from the US to Japan, the so-called “mud angels” turned up in the city and set about helping to rescue and limit the damage to more than a million books and almost a thousand paintings, frescoes and sculptures. For the first time a new generation of youngsters was bursting on stage as main actors, showing courage, eager to take part in the rescue of a city, of a history, of a culture: “mud angels” were the first hint of what happened only two years after, with the 1968 student protest. The Florence Flood revolutionized the field of art restoration as no other single event in history: new concepts, such as “phased conservation,” and methods in conservation, such as mass deacidification, were conceived during this period. Until November 1966, restoration and conservation were quite secretive crafts. Techniques and recipes were passed down from master to pupil with the sort of caginess once characteristic of artists themselves. But all that got blown to the wind in Florence: confronted with disaster on such a vast scale, the “mud angels” pooled their knowledge and experience for the greater good. Still today thousands of books, sculptures, paintings, at the time kept in archives of museums and libraries, are in need of restoration.

Nafta liquids invade the city, photo by Giorgio Lotti

Florence meets Venice, photo by Giorgio Lotti

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

/ LOCAL GLITCHES 4TH NOVEMBER 1966, FLOOD

3,5 m

04.11.1966 FLOODED AREAS 65

7,5 m

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ PERCEPTION OF THE FLOOD SUPERSTUDIO In the 60s the Italian cultural scene was in search of new stimuli, after neo-historicist post-war attitudes. Together with Pop Art at the ‘64 Venice Art Biennale, mass-mediologist Umberto Eco’s considerations about avant-garde and new theories of information were greatly influential to the new generation of politically involved students: after publishing “Opera Aperta” (The open work) in 1962, Eco in 1966 was teaching by chance at the Architecture Faculty in Florence. In such a culturally receptive context, the flood meant the end of rationality, the lost of innocence: the irrational had broken into the city, so rigorous, geometic, perfect, to turn its perception upside down. Arno had substituted the historic marbles with a liquid pavement; in it buildings floated, isolated and autonomous: “All pictures of the flood rendered a city very different from the historic image, - remembered Superstudio’s founder Cristiano Toraldo di Francia with its monuments immersed into a viscous fluid: there were these odd black stripes together with the mud, that turned the city into an optical-art masterpiece; a dynamic situation separating the architectural box, the monument, from its base. Tectonics was itself questioned.” Impressed by this whole new perspective offered by the distructive power of the river, both founders indicate that tragic moment as the genesis of Superstudio. The day after the flood, in a city still clogged in mud, other founder Adolfo Natalini met with Andrea Branzi (founder of Archizoom) for a walk around what was left of the city: traumatized, fascinated, they decided to organize the exhibition “SuperArchitettura” the following month, which gave birth to the Florentine avantgarde movement of Radical Architecture. Witness of the power of paradox, Superstudio et al. started questioning the meaning of architecture in the “consumer society”. 66

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION The iconographic change of historic contexts was further explored in their project “Rescues of historic centers. Your Italy” in 1972. Using a series of images depicting the main tourist attractions of Italian cities, they instrumentalized the flows of visitors to imagine scenarios totally devoted to them: the only way to save the city was to erase it, performing “the total sterilization of that organism which, born to be the home of man, became prison and sepulchre”. The provoking proposal for Florence dealt with the evergreen debate on preservation and reconstruction, once again rampant after the damages of muddy waters: with the most conservative side supporting the “as it was, where it was”, Superstudio exposed the paradoxical nature of this position through a bigger paradox: who decides when to stop time? “We said that, if you really want to restore the situation, - Natalini explained in an interview in 2009 - why just restore to the 19th Century? Why not restore the Renaissance situation? If you do that, why not the Medieval situation? In fact, why don’t you go back to the Roman situation? And if you go back that far, why don’t you go back to the Pleistocene situation? In the Pleistocene situation Florence was a lake! And we figured out what the level of the lake was. We said, it’s really easy, we can do it. We have to dam the Arno river in a certain place. Leonardo Da Vinci did a study that showed it could be done’. So we would dam the Arno river, and Florence would be a submerged city, which would be perfect for tourism. They could see the city by submarine instead of by bus!“. The overturning perspective caused by the flood was instrumentalized here against the illogic position of preservationists, figuratively the entire conception of Time degenerated in tourist cities. 67

Salvataggi di centri storici (Italia vostra), 1972, Superstudio

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

/ PERCEPTION OF THE FLOOD SUPERSTUDIO

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ TOURIST PRESSURE THE CONTEMPORARY IN ART CITIES The historic city is extremely fragile: any intervention, any transformation might disrupt the delicate, dynamic equilibrium between its extraordinary components. Under a constant flow of millions of visitors, this exceptional use to which it is exposed poses a threat not only to its architectural and artistic masterpieces, but especially to the city as a living and working organism. Living under these extraordinary conditions often provoke ruptures in the frail but still existing equilibrium between the city of inhabitants - the everyday city â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and the city of visitors â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the tourist city. The risk is pertinent to all cities with a high concentration of architectural works inside a delineated (but not necessarily limited) perimeter, such as the historic center of Florence, or even more prominently the insular land of Venice. Entering the field of semiotics, often we have seen a development of the cult of image into effective communication strategies. The promotion of the city as a visual continuum completes a duplex semiotic transfer, both towards the inside (the everyday city) and toward the outside perception of itself: its image constitutes the cornerstone of identity, at the same time confers its status as an historic city. Consequently, the perceived image comes to be considered even more vulnerable than the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s canvas or the medieval tower: visual coherency becomes the essential purpose. Taking such a direction, more or less consciously the city picks a side in the dispute between the quotidian and the temporary. Cities find themselves prisoners of their perceived image, therefore tend to re-affirm this identity by blocking the natural evolution of the urban fabric. They redefine their understanding of contemporary. 70

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION In the international panorama, the case of Venice is particular intriguing: contrarily to expectations the undertaken political decision was not at all to reject the contemporary. In a coup de théâtre, the contemporary would be made temporary. With the empowerment of La Biennale di Venezia to organize the circuit of exhibitions (Art, Architecture, Cinema, but also Theater, Music, Dance), Venice became an exceptionally vital center for all sides of contemporary artistic expression. The integration of the historic environment with a strategy of unexpected avant-garde infills created a fertile soil for testing 1:1 prototypes; applying a determined time to these transformation of the surroundings favored bold acts over complaints. Politicians’ choice affirmed worldwide the role of Venice: it would become the testbed for urban experiments. At the same time though, such a courageous statement implied that no long-term transformation could be ever accepted if out of the percepts of visual coherency: historical fakes would reign supreme over the works of Masters. Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterful design for a student residence on the Canal Grande started a public diatribe which prevented any further development. Le Corbusier’s hospital, although a necessary infrastructure for the city, got bogged down years after his death by technical variants and bureaucratic procedures. In recent years, OMA’s transformation of the interior of Fondaco dei Tedeschi was delayed under the fire of preservationists, re-enacting once again the debate on the fundamental necessity of urban evolution in historical contexts. 71

Balloon dog on Canal Grande, Jeff Koons, 2006

Teatro del mondo, Aldo Rossi, 1979

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

/ TOURIST PRESSURE THE CONTEMPORARY IN ART CITIES

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ TOURIST PRESSURE FLORENCE, VENICE, ROME The lack of organizational pattern creating a dependence between urban and peri-urban areas, allowed Venice to exploit its extra-ordinary condition to neatly distinguish the historic fabric from the space for Contemporary. Venice is still today a city with virtually no periphery. Florence faced the struggle in its entirety, in search of long-term transformations that never happened after the 1870s expansion. The quest for a contemporary identity went unanswered, generation after generation. The pursuit of the touristic image have dangerously transformed the parts of living city into a scenic bubble, with inhabitants playing the role of atmosphere actors in a theme park. German philosopher Georg Simmel highlighted the key of the problem already in 1906. Due to the perfection of its nature, Florence has no future: it cannot imagine anything other than itself, excluding any alternative. The lack of imagination would become the doom of its urban evolution. The schism operated in Venice, although providing a thriving atmosphere few months each year, accelerated the process of touristification: in 50 years the city center lost two thirds of its population (especially its youth) changing perversly the nature of its economy in subordination to tourist needs. To turn the center of Florence into Venice is the nightmare of each local: fortunately, it can still count on a (struggling, but) present apparatus of handicraft production, on active neighbourhood communities, on political decisions aimed at the preservation of quotidian life and activities. Florence is not a beautiful collection of vacant buildings; Florence is still a living organism. 74

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION Tourism was never really a danger: ever since the 16th century the city was a destination of the Grand Tour, home of foreign intellectuals and writers which quickly became part of the variegated cityscape: a sort of silent agreement was established to preserve its aura. Now, under the pressure of millions of tourists every year, this equilibrium no longer exists: mass tourism exposed the friction between tourist-city and local community (which more and more avoids the historic center); the quantity of people affected negatively by its side effects is large, and growing. Unable to pursue its way to the Contemporary, and strangled by tides of daily travellers concentrated in a few square kilometers, Florence is a city at risk now more than any other Italian “città d’arte”. The comparison with the tourist indexes of Rome and Venice (as municipalities) is significant to render visible the future reaching of a breaking point. The number of both single visitors and stays (or presences) is indicative in relation to the inhabitants: Rome leads in both values by far, but with a population that is incomparable. The index of “territorial turisticity” (turisticità territoriale, or environmental impact) measures the influence of the tourist load on the territory and on its hosting population; the intensity of the flows is independent from the size of the area. Florence (9,75) and Venice (10,41) values indicate the profound pressure under which they are submit. When related to the municipal area, the index of tourist density of the Tuscan city is about 5 times as high as the 2 competitors, showing an astonishing number of 145 tourists per square kilometer every day (the density value of Venice is nevertheless influenced by a total surface 3 times as small as the Roman, even taking into consideration all lagunar territories). 75

FLORENCE

VENICE

ROME

263.000

2.872.000

LOCATION ITALY

POPULATION 382.000 inhabitants

AREA OF THE COMUNE 102

inhabitants

415

km²

POPULATION DENSITY 3.742

inhabitants

1.285

km²

634

km²

2.227

inhabitants/km² inhabitants/km² inhabitants/km² own data-visualization, sources: Istat, Comune di Firenze/Venezia/Roma, Regione Toscana/Veneto/Lazio, Fondaz. Cesifin

FLORENCE

VENICE

ROME

INDEX OF TERRITORIAL TOURISTICITY 9,75 10,41 coeﬃcient

VISITORS 5,4 Mil

3,13 coeﬃcient

4,3 Mil

13,3 Mil

per year

STAYS 13,6 Mil

coeﬃcient

per year

10 Mil

per year

32,8 Mil

per year

DAYS

2,5

2,3

avg.

TOURIST DENSITY 52.941

10.361

visitors/km²

DAILY TOURIST DENSITY 145

daily visitors/km²

2,4

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visitors/km²

daily visitors/km²

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ CULT OF IMAGE ROME, 1900 Has the perception of identity in these three cities changed over time? They had been proto-tourist destinations for centuries, carrying a legendary aura well before the current waves of visitors. How has their relation to the evolving concept of the Contemporary mutated ever since? At the turn of the 20th century, German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel wrote three articles analyzing the perceived image of the three Italian “città d’arte per eccellenza”, Rome (1898), Florence (1906) and Venice (1907). Exploring the aesthetic interpretation of their identity, he started from the classical premise that beauty is not attributable to a single element, rather related to the “interdependent totality of the parts, suddenly appearing as the mysterious gift of unity”, drawing from the organic totality of Goethe. It’s possible, comparing them to the transformations of the following century, to try to highlight some immanent features interwonen into the urban fabrics.

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION In his earliest essay it’s evident the deduction of the city value from the aesthetic-philosophic principle of Gestalt, as its sensorial realization. In Rome, this reached its highest peak, with the impression that “differences in languages, styles, personality, experiences, all leaving their footprint, (…) here reach a unity, a determination, an affinity higher than anywhere else”. The supremacy of the organic totality is accompanied with the cohexistence between all functions, past and present over the transformation of the urban fabric. This fusion characterizing the spatial image achieves an equal efficacy in the shape of time; “in a peculiar manner hard to describe, here the diversity between ages became intertwined, they all became the contemporary: a-temporality. (…) Every single thing conquers a life absolutely immediate, in the entire image of Rome. (...) Each object acts according to its meaning, as if all casualties of history were disappeared, and the content of things, pure, deprived of any fortuity, is finally woven together”.

Vatican City, photochrom print circa 1895, US Library of Congress, www.loc.gov

TEMPORAL IMMEDIACY

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/ CULT OF IMAGE FLORENCE & VENICE, 1900 If Rome renders the aesthetic value through a synthesis of form, time and function of the city, Florence adds also the overcome distinction of nature and art: “its works appear necessary, destined, anti-symbolic as much as products of nature”. For Simmel “the history of the European man here finally reaches its form, with art acting as a product of the soil. (…) Nature became visible spirit, (…) and Time does not fix the separation between Past and Present (as real Time does) but resembles the ideal time in which the work of art lives”. This is contrary to the germanic spirit or romanticism, separating reality from past, future, ideal, possible. “Here, the Past belongs to us as much as the eternal present of nature. (…) Because of this, the intrinsic limit of Florence is the limit of art itself”. The peculiarity of its relation with Time moulds the paradox of the Tuscan city: it cannot imagine anything other than itself, excluding any alternative. Due to the perfection of its “nature turned spirit”, Florence has no future: with a prophetic concern, Simmel wonders if the lack of self-imagination would become the doom of its urban fabric. His pages nonetheless show a sentiment of impatience toward “the happiness of humanity evenly mature”: “it [humanity] reaches here the essence of life or rejected it, and tries to find its form in this complete possession, or only in a full surrender”. In this last phrase it’s portrayed all the ambiguity of inhabiting an artwork, and the consequent rejection of its dogmas. This makes Florence (more than any other historic city) the designated environment for the growth of polemic micro-organisms, occasionally reaching a critical mass. 82

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION The birth of Manierismo, Michelangelo’s work of disruption of Renaissance elements can be framed in this context; so can also the international recognition of Archizoom, Superstudio, 9999, UFO and the whole Radical Design movement. Their critical wit, in open contrast towards the milieu (cultural and historic), turned them into manifestations of the Contemporary (by Agamben’s definition). Venice delineates a detachment from the other 2 cities: if Rome and Florence are products of the goethian organic totality, the architecture of the lagoon exalts the tragic character of the lacerated totality: appearance hides its life, the artificial facade seduces but deceives, like the backcloth of a theatre. Its innate feature of deception have turned it historically into “the city of the affair, the sensorial expression of the profound destiny of its image: impossible to constitute the home of our soul, but only adventure”. This erotic interpretation emphasizes the aspect of “the momentary” in Venice, where Time reveals itself through the sequence of parts for the impossibility to constitute a healed continuum: notable declination of the concept of Contemporary as temporary, therefore, embraced only decades after with the Biennale circuits. According to Simmel’s reconstruction of the “urban model” emerges that Florence and Rome represent city-organisms, able to accomplish the exigence of aesthetic truth to their interior life; the peculiar configuration of Venice shows instead the tragic “limit of seduction when generated by the affair, in which the form becomes unfaithful to life”. 83

NATURE MADE SPIRIT

Loggia dei Lanzi, photochrom print circa 1900, US Library of Congress, www.loc.gov

SEDUCTIVE AFFAIR

Concert in San Marco, photochrom print circa 1910, US Library of Congress, www.loc.gov

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ CULT OF IMAGE DIGITAL IMAGE, S.FREDIANO Electronic media have changed dramatically the perception of space adding to the private mind and to the physical environment a third, connected milieu in which we project our presence: its virtuality makes it similar to a mental space, fluid and inexhaustible. This third space acts around and between the physical and the mental, redesigning nodes and interfaces; it constitutes a valuable information layer playing more and more a prominent role in the everyday experience of urban environments. In an attempt to understand how this virtual, connective realm relates to the site in analysis, I have studied the point where it intersects the other funding principle of Florence, the cult of image: I investigated the perception of the digital image of the San Frediano in Cestello surroundings, through the agglomeration, cataloguing, data-analysis of the first 150 geo-referenced images at Panoramio.com (googleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own geolocation-oriented photo-sharing community), accessed on 27th april 2016. The process of the information was this: each picture was initially referenced on a site-plan, allowing me to have every dot in place where they were taken. Right after, each image was analyzed in accordance to its point of view, in order to reconstruct each visual cone; the superimposition of all 150 of them rendered an interesting early intuition on the main landmarks or foci of attention. The interpolation of all visual cones with the building volumes showed finally in detail which were the parts, sections, facades, elements, planes of greater interest in the studied area and their exposure. A multitude of insights surged of this process: the predominance of 2-point perspective images, exalting the concatenation of volumes in opposition to frontal photos; the absence along the North riverbank of a 86

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION privileged point of view, suggesting a spatial experience in continuous motion. Moreover, the irrelevance of what seemed (from above) a strong axis between the two churches of San Frediano in Cestello (in Oltrarno), with Ognissanti (in Santa Maria Novella): very few pictures were in fact taken from one toward the other. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not far-fetched to compare the two sides of the Arno; although encompassing very different visual elements (as well as values), volume show similarities: a public space breaking the homogeneity of fronts; a sequence of uniform facades before and after these voids; a church facing the river, each with materials incoherent to the surrounding cityscape. This is why the most notable result was the high number of pictures pointing south, at the Oltrarno side of the river; I consider the outcome of this comparison very intriguing, for most of the local monuments could have been anyway photographed from the analyzed area, but looking at the opposite direction. This denotes an implicit interest, a latent curiosity towards an alternative Florence which presents a great deal of glitchy features, in conflict with the advocated visual coherence: among others, the informality of the housing facing the square, the misuse of public space, the coarse faĂ§ade of the church, the sprayed messages along the riverbanks. Nevertheless, the south side scored almost double the amount of images. As media-artist Rosa Menkman affirms in her Glitch Studies Manifesto, glitches must reach a critical mass to be acknowledged as something further than mere malfunctions of a medium, and develop their critical potential into a message. This reinforces my intuition: the only way to intervene on this area is to strengthen its aesthetic of failure. 87

50m

100m

500m

RECONSTRUCTION OF DIGITAL IMAGE PLANAR EXPOSURE visual cone > 75 pics 55 > pics > 75 35 > pics > 55 own data-visualization, source: Panoramio.com

existing/new bikelanes

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

/ CULT OF IMAGE DIGITAL IMAGE, S.FREDIANO

PHOTO DIGGING GEO-REFERENCING

PHOTO ANALYSIS VISUAL CONES

3. SURFACE ANALYSIS PLANAR EXPOSURE 89

First 150 geo-localized photos of the area, Panoramio.com

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/ TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM THE INVENTION OF SPACE “Art, or the graphic translation of a culture, is shaped by the way space is perceived.” Marshall McLuhan

Already in the 1950s, communication Media and their novel pervasiveness became necessary to interpret the ongoing cultural and social revolutions in western countries: by working as extensions of physical and psychic faculties, Media altered the environment and evoked new ratios of perception. Marshall McLuhan, together with several other massmediologists, guided the transition of all related disciplines toward anthropology: the idea that societies have been shaped more by the nature of the technology used to communicate than by the content of that communication gave birth to the theory of technological determinism. In the organization of information (both physically and psychically, which is the kernel of this reductionist theory), spatial concept is fundamental: different perceptions of space were the manifestation of cognitive patterns in relation to the evolution of the technology used. McLuhan talks about an environment for thousands of years shaped exclusively by the ear, as the only necessary mean to comprehend one’s surroundings. This “acoustic space” was boundless, directionless, horizonless, driven by intuition and emotion. The appearance of ancient alphabets in early western cultures started the sensorial transition toward the eye: the written word is by all means a technology to process information, because it affects both its content and structure.

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

“The goose quill gave us architecture and towns, the hand that filled pages built a city.” Marshall McLuhan

Phoenician and Aramaic, being entirely consonantic (with the verbal addition of vowels), necessitated of the involvement of both sight and hearing to be interpreted. Since each symbol carried a significance in itself (as currently do ideograms in the East) the overall meaning was strictly dependent on its context. The organization of space started requiring a degree of linearity in connection to its new visual attitude. The transformation into a “visual space” was finally completed with the adoption of the Greek alphabet: letters became phonemes with no self-standing meaning; vowels contribute to disambiguate significance; information started being organized in a purely analytical manner; contextuality (as a wider scope) was overruled, whereas linearity became a necessity. The paradigm of communicating information shifted from contextual deciphering to analytical processing by the brain. The consequences were evident in the development of the Greek Polis, where “rationality” found its spatialization, “proportionality”. Hippodamus of Miletus introduced the grid as the spatial organizing tool of the new mental condition: a uniform, connected, continuous space. Space, until then perceived externally through skin and direct experience, slowly turned into an objective reality for being subject to visual analysis, classification, theory. The beginning of (visual) civilization: “a place for everything, and everything in its place”. 91

INFORMATION ACCESS CONTEXTUAL

INFORMATION STRUCTURE NETWORK TYPE OF SPACE

ACOUSTIC 92

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/ TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM THE INVENTION OF SPACE

A A A A A A

A A A A A

INFORMATION ACCESS ANALYTICAL

A A A A A

INFORMATION STRUCTURE LINEAR CONTINUITY TYPE OF SPACE

VISUAL 93

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/ TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM RENAISSANCE Gutemberg’s introduction of mechanical movable type printing stressed permanently the predominance of sight over other senses. Portable books became instrument to inspire and conspire: the birth of private point of view planted the seed for the cult of the individual. During those same years, Filippo Brunelleschi in Florence developed a set of geometric rules and scientific procedures to codify space and represent it. Contrarily to earlier pictorial expressions where dimensions carried symbolic meanings, perspective organized elements only according to their position on a grid of three axis: distance was nothing but the translation of space in time, achieving a systematic convergence of the two. Perspective allowed to compare ratios of distance; this satisfied greatly the viewer, for the similarities in processing information of the human brain. The perception of space changed dramatically: the observer was no longer involved in the scene, but detached and positioned out of the experience. The urban environment could be controlled in advance through composition and concatenation of its parts, sectors could be prioritized through preferential views, clarity defined as a spatial parameter. Space was finally planned with an absolute geometric construction: transforming into a stage, the city devoted its soul to the individual cult of the image. Monuments were either the background scene of a promenade performance, or the focus of it. Complex geometries of defensive walls neatly distinguished the humanist ideal city from the irrational chaos of the past. The motto became “a piazza for everything, everything in its piazza”: the compartmentalization of knowledge. 94

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

“Architectural facades, as well as perspective, theory, theater, they all conspire to create a clear distinction between the objectivity of what one sees and the subjectivity of who sees. The point of view is unique, and establishes the physical, psychological, ontological position of the self” Derrick De Kerckhove

Throughout humanism, the habit of analysis was in direct continuity with Vitruvius principles of Venustas-Firmitas-Utilitas: stressing visual principles, the reading mind generated spaces as theatrical constructions, putting man in a perpetual frontal relationship with the world. This has put us in a visual bias, with our literate past being challenged constantly under the networked nature of events. For sociologist Derrick De Kerckhove, the need of comprehending the new connection between body and environment pushed forward the importance of representation: the eye became the privileged bridge between the outside and the “mental space”. Internalization was the psychologic mechanism that made possible to represent imagination: what he called an “inversion of perspective”.

Tower of winds, Toyo Ito, 1986, photo Tomio Ohashi

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

INFORMATION ACCESS CONTEXTUAL

/ TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM ELECTRONIC MEDIA

INFORMATION STRUCTURE GLOBAL NETWORK TYPE OF SPACE

POST-EUCLIDEAN ACOUSTIC 97

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/ TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM ELECTRONIC MEDIA “Talk back to the media! When the environment processes information for you, that is propaganda. Propaganda ends when dialogue begins.” Marshall McLuhan

Right after the second post-war period, the explosive economic growth of the Western world generated an acceleration in the evolution of taste: visual culture evolved radically at the rate of decades, even faster. Progressively, this process synchronized with the major pushes in global culture; technologies and their relation to everyday life became the most influential. Ever since the emergence of electronic media, all the way from the telegraph, our very internal space has undergone another restructuring process: we redeveloped ratios of sense perception, modifying the degree that we use each sense. This change in perception altered the way of thinking. New communication media established from the beginning an “all-at-once-ness” in which space had vanished, time ceased. Everything was happening again simultaneously: civilization was rediscovering the concept of acoustic space (but post-Euclidean), where all factors of both environment and experience coexist in interplay. The manner to narrate through space also changed: the visual space there was the necessity to evidence a storyline, whereas the emerging space, due to its simultaneous relationships, would have been expressed by a compression of stories, all overlayed on top of each other (curiously resembling today’s glitch-art manipulations). Participation became the factor to classify communication media: cool media embraced low-definition, thus required a high engagement of the user to fill in information. Hot media: hi-def, scarce involvement. 98

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

“Like water makes us realize humans are part of a greater nature, electronic media may modify the boundary and meaning of the self.” Toyo Ito

Toyo Ito tried to adapt McLuhan’s acoustic space to architecture, giving an interpretation influenced deeply by eastern philosophical doctrines. In 1997, his essay “Tarzans in the media forest” proposed the Japanese idea that “all things in flux” had been strengthened by the emergence of electronic media; this trajectory was not new: McLuhan himself noticed an “orientalization” after the creation of a third “electronic” space (together with the physical and mental one). Ito underlined the importance of fluidity of space as the architectural manifestation of this overlapping, tri-spatial condition: it was therefore in the transition between outside and inside (not in symbolic terms, as much as between architecture and environment) that space could find a dimension appropriate to the times. If, as McLuhan said in Undestanding Media, clothing and architectures are both extensions of our skin able to control and protect us from the outside, for Ito this function of membrane will become fundamental in the transmission of information: the flow of electrons will be mediated by what he refers as a “media suit” cladding the space of the digital age. With the epidermis, Ito added another sensorial metaphor which, if read literally could lead to misrepresentation of sole thresholds as spatially relevant. In his text (“we are to define hearing as one of the cutaneous senses”) he proves to be well aware of still operating in the context of Post-Euclidean acoustic space. 99

CittĂ ideale, anonymous, 1480-1490

100

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/ TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM INFORMATION AGE â&#x20AC;&#x153;Electricity put everything in touch, like the alphabet put everything in perspectiveâ&#x20AC;? Derrick De Kerckhove

The diffusion of electronic media in the 20th century has initiated a revolutionary shift in our perception of space; with the rise of the internet, a third type of realm (cyber, or virtual space) joined the private mind (mental space) and the natural environment (physical space). According to professor Anna Cicognani (University of Sydney) there are 5 main criteria to qualify space: direct interaction (as the possible transformations inside space); occupability (possibility of dwelling into it); community-building capacity (also beyond its geographical location); time-management; space management opportunity. With the (debatable) exception of the second, cyberspace qualifies according to all. Its behavioral similarities to nervous systems and mental spaces were staggering: they both process information, they are endowed with memory, intelligence and mechanisms of search-retrieve-display. The third space is between and around the former two, and operates on the relations designing nodes and interfaces: if the best conditions for the mind in a physical space were detachment, concentration and focus, in cyberspace these are controverted into ubiquity, connection, self-organization. De Kerckhove noted that if the alphabet expanded space to infinity (centrifugal universe that made information spread), the digital space reverses this logic compressing information centripetally. The spatiality of virtual space nevertheless is fluid, continuous and inexhaustible, multisensorial and immersive (eroding the predominance of the typical frontality of visual spaces). 102

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION A question that arises spontaneously is: If this is the digital, how will a post-digital space be? Mark Somol and Sarah Whiting tried to provide an answer to it in their influential essay “Notes around the Doppler effect and other Moods of Modernism”. It was released in Perspecta #33, an issue called “Mining autonomy”. After an analysis of the critical practice of Peter Eisenmann in relation to the architectural theories of Tafuri and Row, to propose a different approach they draw from McLuhan’s ideas of cool media (respectively, requiring participation of the audience, or not). Eisenmann’s critical architecture was “hot in the sense that it is preoccupied with separating itself from normative, background or anonymous conditions of production, and with articulating difference, (…) conveying very precise information in one mode”. By contrast, they advocated for a different type of critical architecture, where the information is compromised therefore needs the participation of the user: they call it projective architecture, diagrammatic, atmospheric, cool, inspired by the acoustics of the Doppler effect. The analogy with the sonic anomaly is explained in the overcoming of dualities: “Rather that isolating a singular autonomy, the Doppler focuses upon effects and exchanges of architecture’s inherent multiplicities: program, writing, atmosphere, economics, form, technologies, etc.”; the alternative they propose is not necessarily oppositional. Its main feature, conscious of the imperfection of the information it carries, is a high level of ambiguity, that in the essay is compared to another sensorial effect, the Parallax: “The apparent change in the position of an object resulting from the change in the position from which it’s viewed”. 103

CittĂ ideale, Raluca Sturzu, 2014

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/ TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM INFORMATION AGE

DYNAMIC IMPLOSIVE MULTISENSORY IMMERSIVE DISTRIBUTED CENTRIPETAL CONTINUOUS INTELLIGENCE-BASED 105

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/ METHODOLOGY EQUIVALENCE TRANSFERS For Marshall McLuhan the analytic framework to investigate space is linguistics, with the extensive use of metaphors as both rhetorical and pedagogical elements. “Even his less adequate ones were leading to some kind of creative insight”, in the words of scholar Donald Theall; psychologist Edward Murray names “semantic boom” this ambiguity enabling new meanings. To inspire reader’s participation, etaphors are his medium as well as message: “all media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into a new form” (McLuhan, 1964). Spatial metaphor plays a pivotal role in the layout and development of his theories: visual and acoustic spaces provide the author with an “orientational metaphor, by which to categorize all matters into oppositional relationships” (Gordon Gow). Perception of space shifted from acoustic to the opposed visual, to acoustic again with new communication media. But how can electronic data networks be acoustic in character? This can be explained only by the way McLuhan organizes the metaphor, as a systematic succession of equivalence transfers: from body to space, then on to technology and culture. The first transfer is experienciality: the application of sensorial aspects to the (still undefined) realm of space, based on the available technology (spoken word, written word). It generates the early notions of visual and acoustic space, which have a “semantic boom” when hybridized with the properties and qualities of such senses. The second transfer extends these features to the larger domain of culture and technology: from qualifying individuals within culture, to the qualities of cultures themselves. The spatial metaphor moves beyond bodily experience, all the way to become associated with historical periods. 106

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION Operating these 2 semantic steps, McLuhan gives an ex post facto interpretation of the relational causality between mind, media and cultures. Part of the literature that drew upon McLuhan’s spatial concepts misunderstood the importance of the second transference, because of an excessively literal interpretation. This led to difficulties grasping acoustic spaces beyond the oral/sonic equivalence (as they end up bearing little direct relation with the experience of sound). Starting from the senses McLuhan qualified space, through a succession of metaphors, to retroactively interpret culture. Since architecture is evaluated in space, I have decided to reverse his procedure: maintaining the systematic structure of equivalence transfers, I will inquire glitch-culture in order to achieve spaces. My process is still organized in two steps, but overturning the transformation direction: first studying the concepts of noise, accident, error (interpretation phase); then, drawing from Serres’ identification of noise as context, the application of glitch-techniques to different scales, to gather insights on what are the founding logics of such manipulations. Using these concepts emerged from the qualification phase, they are paired into strategies which at last drive design interventions (perception phase). It is important to underline that, as in McLuhan’s theories the biggest mistake has been to read literally his metaphors, equally the performance (without conceptualization) of glitch-techniques on the environment would be a great cause of misunderstanding. Producing three-dimensional glitches that mimic pixel-sorted illustrations would be a nonsensical jump from interpretation to perception: the middle passage is the one holding the process together. 107

TYPE OF SPACE

VISUAL

SEQUENTIAL ASYNCHRONOUS STATIC LINEAR VERTICAL LEFT BRAIN FIGURE SPECIALISM TONAL ISOTROPIC CONTAINER MECHANICAL PARTICLE

Vs. TYPE OF SPACE

ACOUSTIC SIMULTANEOUS SYNCHRONOUS DYNAMIC NON-LINEAR HORIZONTAL RIGHT BRAIN GROUND HOLISM ATONAL ANISOTROPIC NETWORK ELECTRICAL FIELD 108

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/ METHODOLOGY EQUIVALENCE TRANSFERS

MCLUHAN SPATIAL METAPHOR QUALITY PERCEPTION BODY

QUALIFICATION SPACE

INTERPRETATION CULTURE

EXPERIENCIALITY

DEGLâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;INNOCENTI REVERSE METHODOLOGY CONTEXT EXPERIMENT PERCEPTION INTERVENTION

QUALIFICATION LOGIC STRATEGY

PROCESS

TWO LINEAR, DETACHED STEPS 109

INTERPRETATION NOISE CULTURE

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/ PERCEPTION OF MICHELANGELO ERROR OR INVENTION When Giorgio Vasari wrote Le Vite, he placed Michelangelo Buonarroti significantly at its end: from the proemio he was presented as the embodiment of the “terza maniera”, the god-given artist breaking away from the conventions of Rinascimento toward the exploration of exceptions. Michelangelo’s ingegno and invenzione were so unique that Vasari anyway warned all artists looking up to him not to try to follow his “bizzarrie”, extravagances: any emulation in the approach of the master would make them fall into error. This, together with the etymology of the latin verb errare (“to stray from the right path”) highlights the ambiguous nature of the reception of Michelangelo among his contemporaries, balancing between architectural genius and capricious disregard of Vitruvian canons. The complex relation tying mistakes to invention is recognizable in the different interpretations of accident’s positive effect: the parameter of acceptable license. If Vasari exalted the Florentine master’s boldness, many other critics saw in him the unwarranted and gratuitous breakage of established rules. A very harsh adversary was Pirro Ligorio, architect and antiquarian: he saw in him the threat of fragmentation and disorder, capable to lead an entire generation into error. Michelangelo’s licenses were inherently subversive, unacceptable abuses for a man which instead favoured internal coherence and decorum. His rejection of the Florentine’s opera was total and uncompromising; he attempted every move in order to undermine the opponent reputation, all the way to questioning his religious orthodoxy. Similarly, Teofilo Gallaccini in his Trattato sopra gli errori degli architetti considered Buonarroti’s architecture virulent, comparing the recombination of its elements to anatomic defects and physical pathologies. 110

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION The theoretical debate on how to deal with deviations from norms, as noted by Daniel Sherer in Perspecta #46, was well established already: Vitruvius discussed it in several parts of his De Arquitectura; Alberti dedicated to the parameter of license a section of De Re Aedificatoria, limiting inventions to private buildings rather than public. Palladio debates the question in a chapter of the Four Books in which he seems open toward free invention. At the same time, he addresses the most extreme abuses of syntax, form, ornament and structure, identifying 6 common mistakes. Although without naming him once, it’s clear the author’s position on the issue: Michelangelo is the only architect who committed all 6 of them in his buildings. Nevertheless this implicit critique must be accompanied by the assimilation of some of the most daring aspects of the Florentine’s architectural language in the work of Palladio himself: the emerging idea is therefore the acknowledgement that Michelangelo had initiated a clear break from Vitruvian principles, per sé not a guilty act; purged of its excesses, his architectures could provide a great source of artistic invention. There was a profound ambivalence in the perception of Michelangelo architetto throughout 16th-17th c.: Buonarroti’s radical exploration of the latent potentials of Vitruvian canons: due to these, the new generations became more sensitive to the power and risks unleashed by the aesthetic of exception. The blurred architectural boundary between truth and error gets amplified even more, when read through the Paragone (comparison between the arts), a well known topos in Reinassance artistic theory. His “consapevolezza dell’errore” as Vasari calls it, makes Baroque historically and stylistically inconceivable without him. 111

Biblioteca Laurenziana, detail of the vestibule, Florence

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/ PERCEPTION OF MICHELANGELO ERROR OR INVENTION

Biblioteca Laurenziana, staircase and vestibule, Florence

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/ PERCEPTION OF RUPTURE LUCIO FONTANA Lucio Fontana was an Italian painter, sculptor and theorist of Argentine birth; his artistic production was charachterized by the influence of Baroque, the dynamic equilibrium between spectacle and essentiality. In 1960, few years after founding the artistic movement known as Spatialism, he released a controversial series of artworks under the title â&#x20AC;&#x153;Concetto spaziale Atteseâ&#x20AC;? (spatial concept - waits) which soon become a milestone in post-WW2 Art: all monochrome paintings were slashed by linear cuts in the surface. Pioneering the aestethics of breakage, his gesture nevertheless is that of a demiurge; the iconoclast rebellion of his act of rupture dismantles the sanctity of planarity in favour of space. The canvas becomes therefore nothing more than an element of transmission, a transfer of space with the background. It becomes a medium. The cut unlocks the spatial potential of the background, exposing (both dramatically and symbolically) a dimension always feared by the cult of image: darkness. Moreover, Fontana slashes the canvas to nullify the fiction of perspective, questioning the subordination of space to its mere representation. Perspective was for him the lie that reigned supreme in the world of Art for centuries; a cut could awake the consciousness of the viewer over his condition as a being in three dimensions.

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“I open a new dimension, one of infinite space. I slash the canvas, and from there appears the infinite.” Lucio Fontana

One aspect often unquestioned by art critics is the relationship that his cuts establish beyond their spatiality; I think his interest was even wider than the infinite space: as wide as it may be, it is still defined by 3 variables, while the title itself of the series (waits) introduces at a fourth dimension, temporal and essential. These few words show that space itself is nothing but a medium: an exporative tool for the human condition of space indeed, but space IN time. Making manifest “the” infinite, he inquires time through space. Things become intriguing when we relate this to Agamben’s concept of the contemporary synthesized in the struggle between the seculum (the time of History) and the time of the Individual. The fleeting act of cutting carries the transition of the present condition of the contemporary individual to a state of higher awareness. This way he opens to the infinite as an overcoming of the state of tension between the time of the Individual and the time of History. The infinite is not therefore the future, rather the contemporary itself. Contemporaneity as a temporal condition cannot be anything but a rupture of the cult of image.

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Lucio Fontana at work, photo by Ugo Mulas

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Concetto spaziale - Attese, Lucio Fontana, 1961

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/ PERCEPTION OF RUPTURE LUCIO FONTANA

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ PERCEPTION OF GLITCH-ART CONVERSATION WITH AN ARTIST From personal correspondence with Raluca Sturzu (1988), graduate architect and glitch-artist based in Bucharest.

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 9:54 AM RALUCA STURZU: (...) Anyway, thanks for the words regarding my glitches. It started as a side exploration after my graduation (...). I didn’t push it too far though. There are a lot of things to do in this area. (…) There could be a possible translation in three dimensions of the process, actually I believe that in a way that would be the next step for me (...). For the moment, what I am doing is 2D and relies on a series of alterations via code/script of an image read as data. Thus, I cannot entirely control the end result, but what I do is to make a series of such alterations according to some parameters and pick the one that I find the best suited for that particular input image. On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 12:28 AM FRANCESCO DEGL’INNOCENTI: I understand, letting go on the control over the final product is something us architects (in general) are still far from Learning. Also in your images the key is the fallacy of the single pixel, which was glorified in the digital age: now it’s required the participation of the viewer, to see not in an analytical perspective, but rather in a contextual one, like in your Rinascimento Masters’ series. Low definition cannot grasp detail, but is the best way to perceive movement. (...) On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 1:58 PM RALUCA STURZU: I am glad you liked my images in Burrasca, and the old masters series as well. (…) I adore the works of the old masters or just any 118

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION anonymous masters, beautiful portraits of people long gone - royalty or regulars. Images of lost places and things that sat well in those particular places. The fauna and the flora. Everything. The attention a painter would give to render the slightest thing must humble every owner of a camera. I feel ashamed that the pictures that I take with my camera are not good enough. Beauty is there, but not everyone can render it. I feel a bit impious as well to take one’s work and dissolving it. By a code that has no eyes, no knowledge. But there is something cleansing about that, in a way. And joyous. At least it destroys fake devotion. Here for off topic : ) On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 6:28 PM FRANCESCO DEGL’INNOCENTI: Love off-topics! To build upon it, just last week i had a similar discussion, about the ancestral reverence toward overwhelming technical perfection; i thought this is the reason that prevents most people from understanding contemporary art: earlier, in each brushstroke of each painter, good or better, we saw years of preparation, of monk-alike devotion to the craft. Value was amounted in hours, like a salary. Code, in your case, performs the change of mentality from Michelangelo to Duchamps’ pissing sink. And there is nothing wrong or more dignifiable in any of the two. Contemporary art is still seen thru modern eyes, and the two terms are not at all synonyms: your feeling of initial reverence, and still the decision to tweak it makes you contemporary. The same image, the same end result done “just because” would make you modern. Contemporary is maybe the critical belonging to time. 119

Untitled, Pixels on Old Masters series, Raluca Sturzu, 2014

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Untitled, Pixels on Old Masters series, Raluca Sturzu, 2014

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/ ERROR IN ARCHITECTURE REDESIGNING THRESHOLDS “[Error] defined as that which exceeds the constraints of required precision.” John Cage

Architecture never goes entirely according to plan: every project deviates from its designers’ expectations, and wise architects learn to anticipate, mitigate, at times celebrate the accidents along the way. Error within architecture has been a topic more and more debated lately: in her book “Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure, and the Misadventures of Precision” Francesca Hughes argues that behind the architect’s acute fetishization of redundant precision lies a special fear of physical error. A rising intolerance toward the vagaries of matter has produced the blind rejection of organic materials and the proliferation of material testing, all the way from the removal of ornament to digitalized fabrication: citing a wide range of case studies in industrial design, art, science, she delineates a strong critique of precision caused by the growing gap between abstract thinking and physical realization; the impossibility of matter to accommodate new fronts of the conceptual thought was considered erroneous, and interpreted univocally as a loss. At the same time, the author’s excessive focus on precision treats the effects, but doesn’t tackle the reason of the misunderstanding: the inability of architects to deal with the accidental, which is the root cause of errors, malfunctions, glitches. The topic of the accident is instead more interestingly debated in the issue 46 of Perspecta (Yale), which argues that error is inherently related to mistranslations, contradictions, happy accidents, wicked problems, aberrations; all these are part of the essence of architecture. 122

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION

“Is the discipline of architecture capable of anything other than detailing the deck chairs?” Bryan Boyer

One of the most intriguing essays is Bryan Boyer & Justin Cook’s, who affirm that architects are well equipped with form, but often try to avoid the contingent dynamics of city-making; describing their work on defining the brief of a important housing competition for Sitra (the Finnish Innovation Fund), the authors deal at large with errors in architecture. Understanting accidents should be our main concern, because when experiments of architects, politicians and planners start to fail “we are often left holding the bag” due to the visibility of our contribution, or the inability to defend design choices with evidences. Inspired by the field of statistics, they define 3 canonical types of errors: the first targets ignoring replicability and scalability of design solutions; it can be overcome with systematic analysis and strategic thinking. The second type of error is the retreat from engagement and integration, reason to the failure in seeing critical relationships between apparently disparate phenomena; they mitigated the risk of architecture’s marginalization increasing comprehensiveness of topics, and adopting a shared language among expertise. A third and last group deals with inappropriateness, warning against marketing scams like greenwashing: good strategies should include but not be limited to buildings, and they advocate, should have social, environmental, financial equity as overarching goal. Overall, they redefine the role of architecture as a trigger to discuss about building codes, energy policies, financial tools etc. At the same time, the scope of practice moves from design/construction to full-spectrum development (also occupancy and decommission). 123

Glorified error in architecture, photo by Magnum Photos, 1990

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/ ERROR IN ARCHITECTURE REDESIGNING THRESHOLDS

TYPE-1 ERROR IGNORING REPLICABILITY (NO METHOD TO SCALE UP)

TYPE-2 ERROR RETREAT FROM ENGAGEMENT & INTEGRATION (FAKE AUTONOMY)

TYPE-3 ERROR INAPPROPRIATENESS (INTEREST LIMITED TO BUILDINGS)

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/ ACCIDENT IN ARCHITECTURE STAKEHOLDERS “We must re-engage with the dark matter which runs cities.” Wouter Vanstiphout

The two aforementioned short tales (“The rebuilding of Borgo S.Jacopo” and “The farce of Isozaki’s Loggia”) narrated the difficulties encountered in the attempt of updating the image of historic Florence. The reasons of their collapse had nothing to do with design, which was merely debated throughout the course of events: failures laid roots in the engagement with both institutional and local factors; important stakeholders were forgotten, and later used all their power to oppose the project. If in 1946 landowners and preservationists were the main actors sinking a cohesive contemporary project (type-2, type-3 errors), the Uffizi competition never moved from such stage due to its total dependence from governmental funding: once the opposition party won the national election in 2001, the project turned into a dispute between parties (type-1, type-3 errors). The two stories were rebaptised “Architecture Parables”: they warn us that there is a level of accident barely considered, the root of error. The words of Wouter Vanstiphout (Crimson Historians, Tu Delft) point out that architects globally moved detached from the impactful engines of change, cosy in their well refurbished ghettos. A voluntary exile. While losing track of what is going on outside the profession, the tumultuous transformation (or here its opposite, the protected immobilism) of our cities has been delegated to financial dynamics and political agreements. As Hughes affirms, architecture depends on matter and material imprecisions are indeed part of the reality: at the same time, the more profound risk is to never even materialize them into errors. 126

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION Therefore, a careful analysis of stakeholders was carried our and mapped along two axis, one according to the power of each actor, one encompassing its territorial scope, starting with the most punctual interests on the site of the intervention, all the way to National and International interests. Eighteen different stakeholders might potentially benefit from the project. Trying to understand the leverage of each one, they were evaluated according to 3 initial parameters: the first grasps the importance of which one can legislate (laws & policies): clearly, both national and local governments are the ones dictating norms, but interesting to see the role of Unesco emerging, for instance with the redaction of the Management Plan, together with the Municipality. A second criterion was used to understand which withholds financial and economic means (money/ investments): they could be included into the process from the start to guarantee a higher resiliency throughout the transformation. The third constant looked at which holds the power to inform, apprise and engage (information). In the specific situation, the lively neighborhood of locals still plays an important part in what happens daily. This distinctive character imposes a necessity to structure a double arrowed strategy of communication of the project: one that engages directly with people, contemporarily a strong digital presence to make each one participate. At last, I tried to estimate roughly the effects of a transformation of San Frediano in Cestello: on the one side the public benefit in terms of jobs, and on the other the enhancement of services in relation to each stakeholder. 127

STAKEHOLDER

POWER

SITE

CITIZENSHIP

SHOP OWNERS

++ HOME OWNERS

LOCAL ASSOCIATIONS

LOCAL YOUTH

NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCILS

ONLINE MEDIA

CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

UNESCO HERITAGE

TERRITORIAL SCOPE

LOCAL PARTIES

PROFESSIONAL REGISTERS

MUNICIPALITY

PROVINCE

REGION

OFFLINE MEDIA

NATIONAL & INTERNATIONAL

TOURISTS

NATIONAL PARTIES

GOVERNMENT

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STAKEHOLDERS LAWS & POLICIES

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/ ACCIDENT IN ARCHITECTURE STAKEHOLDERS

STAKEHOLDERS MONEY/INVESTMENTS

STAKEHOLDERS INFORMATION

ESTIMATED EFFECT JOBS/PUBLIC BENEFIT

ESTIMATED EFFECT GOODS/SERVICES

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ ACCIDENT IN ARCHITECTURE STICKHOLDERS The other teaching assimilated from the two Architecture Parables is more implicit: there seems to be forces that, although apparently stakeholders, work ambiguously in the opposite direction. If a stakeholder system (common to all architecture projects) is by definition â&#x20AC;&#x153;denoting a type of organization in which all the members or participants are seen as having an interest in its successâ&#x20AC;?, some of these entities have a greater concern in the failure of the whole enterprise. They do not hold the stakes for support, they rather hold the punitive stick: the stickholders. Once identified, is it possible to mitigate the negative effects of their counter-productivity? If so, how? Could they ever be turned into stakeholders?

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ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION At this stage, stakeholders were examined not anymore as policy-makers, investors or communicators: rather, analyzed as structures which hold a power to influence others, and are influenced themselves. Which stakeholder can potentially condition policies? Who can make investments steer in one direction? Which entity might want to manipulate information in its favor? This system of influences showed the high relationality of the playground, to consider carefully before each design decision is taken. Actors were represented as both influence-pushers or influence-receivers: among the formers, it’s evident the growing importance of new media of communication, together with the conventional off-line media. The citizenship of the neighborhood (both private citizens and organized in associations) constitutes still a very proactive entity in putting pressure on local politics: for the same reasons, electoral consultations exalt the role of ruling political institutions as main receivers of influence. Analyzing stakeholder at the intersection of influences and inter-dependencies, I tried to investigate the weak links in the system. This helped me defining a “stickholder index”, in which each stakeholder is given a value according to the risk of sudden turn against the success of the project. Using this tool, it becomes highly revealing the peculiar role of some actors, for instance political oppositions (both local and national): every decision of the governing parties is under the scrutiny of opponents, often tending to use instrumentalizations for politically disruptive purposes. Under the current global economic conjunction, the most sensitive rethoric argument to polemize is the misuse of public money (a deeper analysis on stickholders is in the Appendix). 131

STICKHOLDER

POWER

SITE

CITIZENSHIP

SHOP OWNERS

++ HOME OWNERS

LOCAL ASSOCIATIONS

LOCAL YOUTH

NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCILS

ONLINE MEDIA

CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

UNESCO HERITAGE

TERRITORIAL SCOPE

LOCAL PARTIES

PROFESSIONAL REGISTERS

MUNICIPALITY

PROVINCE

REGION

OFFLINE MEDIA

NATIONAL & INTERNATIONAL

TOURISTS

NATIONAL PARTIES

GOVERNMENT

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/ ACCIDENT IN ARCHITECTURE STICKHOLDERS

INFLUENCE LAWS & POLICIES

INFLUENCE MONEY/INVESTMENTS

INFLUENCE INFORMATION

INFLUENCE RELATIONALITY

INFLUENCE RECEIVERS

INFLUENCE PUSHERS

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ GLITCH STUDIES GLITCH TAXONOMY There is a growing multitude of techniques to manipulate information adopted or invented by glitch-artists. With the application of some of them to context models, I’ve started a process of rationalization which led me to the identification of common features in their operational logic (see “first equivalence transfer, context experiment”). The results of this phase were synthesized in 5 categories, characterized by the modification either of the information itself (data) or of its shape only (edge): Fringing, Aliasing (acting on edge), Encoding/Decoding (acting on both content and edge), Compression and Data Moshing (acting on content). These 5 have later been transformed into 5 cubic models, each reflecting the techniques’ concept, to show a possible adaptation to spatial conditions. Methodologically, this marks the start of the second equivalence transfer (strategy). Fringing as a technique comes from the study of chromatic aberrations in digital photography; it is usually caused by the differential focus of lens to wavelengths of light. More visible when adjacent portions of the file are very contrasted, the resulting effect is perceived as a blurred, multi-layered distortion around those same edges. Aliasing comes instead from signal processing, and describes the resulting effect of a signal reconstructed from various samples. In other terms, the sampling operation causes a reduction of the edges of the original, continuous information to a discrete signal. Encoding/Decoding and Compression are part of the same operations, but are divided by the realm in which they act: compression is by all means an E/D operation, but exists only in a digital environment; on the contrary, other E/D artifacts can be out of the digital sphere. 134

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION Although the taxonomy of digital compression may be the most complex of all, it’s possible to simplify its logic: each file (as the repository of information) is connected to a format (a container) and to protocols of codification. As with other forms of encoding operations, the information depends on specific types of codecs (compression-decompression protocols), here divided into lossy and lossless: the former takes a distance from the original file and modifies it irreversibly, the latter allows to rebuild exactly the information retained before the operation. As Rosa Menkman writes in her Glitch Studies Manifesto, “the dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been, and will always be no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma”: this is partly why lossless are almost absent, whereas lossy mostly ubiquitous in digital media. Lossy data compression accepts its own fingerprints as imperfections, modifying the content; at the same time, it focuses only on the perception of relevant information, centered around transmission rather than on the permanence of its structure. Among techniques that alter the data content itself, Data Moshing is the act of altering raw data to influence the way the data is interpreted by computer programs; it is commonly used with video files to create effects that are exclusively digital in nature. The Data Mosh artifact is stable and reproducible, as it is the effective outcome of keyframes being deleted from one of the two sequences hybridized. The outcome of this deletion is the visualisation of the indexed movement of macroblocks, smearing over the surface of an old keyframe. This makes the video morph in unexpected colours and forms. 135

EDGE

ALIASING DISCRETIZATION

INFORMATION INITIAL STATE EDGE

FRINGING BLURRING

EDGE & CONTENT

ENCODING/DECODING MANIPULATION 136

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/ GLITCH STUDIES GLITCH TAXONOMY

ALTERATION

GLITCH TECHNIQUE SPATIAL STRATEGY CONTENT

COMPRESSION DECOMPOSITION 137

CONTENT

DATA MOSHING MORPHING

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ GLITCH STUDIES CONTEXT MODELS, 1 In order to elaborate a methodology that would operate within the glitch framework and still be specific to architecture, I have started to explore some of the most used techniques by media artists. Starting from the notion of Michel Serres of â&#x20AC;&#x153;context as noise itselfâ&#x20AC;?, I have applied these techniques to the surroundings: the objective was to disclose important aspects of the nature of the area through the use of digital aesthetics, to also grasp the founding logic behind such alterations. The first context model was a 1:10.000 site-plan analyzing the relation of the project area and the protected Unesco Heritage Site: it has gone through an aliasing operation, in which all the complex information of the initial drawing has been compressed and utilized in three dimensions. The critical aspect of the depicted data deals with the difficulty to draw a line that defines preservation; while the Unesco border was traced in 1982 along the 13th century city fortifications (approximately), this distinction was never perceptible at the street level: all buildings (either encompassed or not, on both sides of the demarcation line) are looking similar, and hardly ever belong to any peculiar historic age. Nevertheless, the neat delimitation creates an area of total preservation opposed to zones with far greater transforming attitude. It has been blocking the evolution of neighborhood functions and services in the last decades, stressing center-periphery patterns. This is why in the model the Unesco area is extremely visible, but only under a certain angle of light. Curiously, the corruption of contour lines happened in a completely unplanned way, due to an accidental command: it immediately revealed interesting critical aspects, such as the necessity to be perceived in low-definition to fully grasp its ambiguity. 138

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION Initially, glitch aesthetics developed from music into a theory applied to media and visual art. For this reason, an incredibly important context model has been explored as an acoustic translation of space through a process of Compression: the analyzed section of the Oltrarno spanned along the whole Lungarno Soderini, starting from the Carraia bridge to the Vespucci bridge. With the help of a Florentine music composer, Antonio Angotti, all information connected to the building volumes (placement in relation to the riverline, height, width, floors, color of the faรงade, number of openings) has been encoded, and then rendered via software into sounds and effects. After a first attempt where the output was the direct translation of such parameters, we took the decision to make the sequence more structured: we used one of the elements to introduce fixed rhythm as a scanning tool, allowing a better perception of dynamic changes and instants of alteration. The chosen parameter was the distance between windows at the last floor of each building, which was discretized into a uniform length. This soundscape, by all means a context model, provides a multi-sensorial idea of the fruition along the Lungarno, and underlines the exceptionality of San Frediano in Cestello: the setback, the chromatic changes, the broken volumetric homogeneity etc. are all glitchy aspects to be reinforced by design.

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/ GLITCH STUDIES CONTEXT MODELS, 1

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ GLITCH STUDIES CONTEXT MODELS, 2 Another physical context model, in scale 1:500, has been developed through a manual process of fringing: the buildings have been initially divided according to the “architecture/historic value” List, redacted by the Comune with other institutions. Later, all listed volumes have been rendered precisely, in high density polystyrene; all others have been left rough, exploiting the material properties of low density polystyrene, which is made of globules. The two chromatically similar materials can, on one side, give an idea of the volumetric cityscape as any normal 1:500 model; on the other side, it now renders perfectly the density of “historic fakes” in the Unesco Heritage site, a condition absolutely unexpected when one imagines the historic center of Florence. The model reinforces the idea that “visual coherence” in historic contexts has been one of the hardest factors to overcome, in hope of contemporary architectural expressions. Also in this case, the procedure of realization of the model has been totally open to accidents, such as the breakage of pieces of material.

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ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION Personally, I consider also this theory booklet a context model in itself for providing the analytical framework on both essential aspects of this semester: ambiguity and relationality. It could be considered an Encoding/Decoding artifact, being non-digital and requiring the participation of the spectator. As every other media explored previously, the book (as object, its shape) has been exploited to evidence the ambiguities in the search for a contemporary expression: two ways of fruition are dogmatic, and show you only what you want to see. A third way to experience it, instead tries to provide a more complete portrait of the matter. At the same time, the content of the book (its information) has been structured in self-standing elements, opposing linearity, detached, so that no evident storyline is suggested, leaving room for creative insights. A different meaning emerges as each of these sections comes near to one another, based on proximity: many connections arise spontaneously, intended to suggest others. This has been an attempt to materialize in a written form the concept of acoustic space theorized by McLuhan, as well as the modus operandi of the afgang.

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/ GLITCH STUDIES CONTEXT MODELS, 2

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ GLITCH STUDIES CONTEXT MODELS, 3 To investigate the logic of another glitch technique, compression, I picked 10 sources and encrypted their content similarly (about 20% of the material read throughout the semester). I established a code of analysis and one of representation, manipulating the structure of the information included in these sources. They were at first divided into 3 main areas depending on their expected focus: history, digital age, post-digital age. For each section, an approximately equal amount of content in books, book excerpts, scientific papers or other articles underwent the operation. Each text was scrutinized and divided into paragraphs. A color code (deriving from popular glitch-art experiments) was defined contemporarily, in relation to the main topic of the paragraph. The identified disciplines were eight: ARCHITECTURE, and anything strictly spatial; ART & DESIGN; MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY, together for their confluence in the information age; PHILOSOPHY, as the conceptual foundation of many applied theories; CONTROL , as the fundamental aspect of the post-digital age; HISTORY ; PERCEPTION ; ultimately, everything which did not fit in the previous was filed under CONTEXT. A segment was traced according to the length of each paragraph (in lines); following the narrative sequence, at the end of each paragraph the new string turned 90 degrees clockwise. To instead mark the end of each section or chapter, the line restarted after a modular jump of respectively 5 and 10 lines. I consider this experiment a context model by all means, since it supplies a necessary theoretical framework for the project.

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ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION The resulting representation renders a series of erratic paths in which is hard to define direction, beginning or end. It is the result of a lossy encoding process typical of post-digital aesthetics, operated on the content contained in the chosen sources. The objective was to try to investigate a possible evolution of space in the information age, portraying an environment apparently familiar yet conceptually very distant. The sequence of right angles suggests a continuity with centuries centered around the rules of perspective; nevertheless, the two ideas of space are in absolute opposition: in the perspectival space, each depicted element has lost all previously symbolic meaning, gaining significance only according to its position on the grid. We refer to this as “distance from the point of view”, and distance is nothing but the representation of time in space. In my elaboration, the whole erratic movement seems vaguely reliant on the same Cartesian grid, but in reality it controverts that logic: in fact, the only feature of a point that does not hold a meaning is its position on the canvas; the start is not essential, the scale is almost irrelevant, the orientation barely defined. At the same time, only the loss of a significant part of the data makes possible elaborating the information cohesively. Through this, its symbolic value is partly reinstated: the informational pregnancy contained opens up to the participation of the reader through an act of decoding, just like symbols in Giotto’s paintings called for a further step to comprehend the painter’s narrative. If the medium is the message, here content becomes form.

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SOURCE DIGGING AUTHORS

/ GLITCH STUDIES CONTEXT MODELS, 3

SOURCE DIGGING TEXT ANALYSIS

HISTORY 1. AGAMBEN 2.-3. McLUHAN 4. GOW DIGITAL 5. DE KERCKHOVE 6. ITO POST-DIGITAL 7. BLUMENKRANZ 8. MENKMAN 9. MANON 10. SOMOL

CODEC INCRYPTION TEXT SYNTHESIS

COLOR CODING DISCIPLINES ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION NEW CHAPTER NEW SECTION

LINEARIZATION SEQUENCE

CODEC DECRYPTION ERRATIC PATH START

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90Â°

FROM POSTCARD TO POST-DIGITAL

/ POSTFACE MAP: ONE TRAJECTORY In the historic context of Florence, can contemporary architecture manifest itself yet? The answer is twofold: if “contemporary” is intended purely as temporal expression of the present, a century of stillness says no; as in 1906 Georg Simmel had noted: “Florence will have problems with its future, for it cannot imagine anything other than itself”. But if I interpret the Contemporary in philosophical terms as Agamben suggests, then disjunction from its time becomes even a favourable condition. Moreover, the concept itself of future might has mutated; Franco Bifo Berardi writes: “After 100 years of modernity and optimism, now we [westerners] are not able to imagine the future anymore”. The lexical analogies of Simmel and Bifo are staggering, so let’s keep them in mind when I insert a third element in the equation: architecture in western countries is steering (at large) toward preservation. Now, an intriguing perspective emerges, spontaneous: what if Florence weren’t really 100 years behind, in the absorption of contemporary architecture? Speculating, what if it were a century ahead, having mastered already the art of immobility? How could it reaffirm its lost archetypical role? Analysing the history of the context, I tried to identify the immanent features upon which to structure this thesis, before defining the approach. Florence always had a strong connection with both architecture and communication, going back to geometric rules of perspective in 1400s. Their formalization marked an enormous impact on the perception and organization of space, shook only by the advent of electronic media of communication. Lately we are slowly entering an age of criticism toward the omnipresence of technological media. The Art World has already started adapting: glitch art 150

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION accepts, welcomes and manipulates technological malfunctions to re-imagine the future. Thus, this might be an appropriate moment for new critical approches. During the Renaissance, the debate around il Paragone delle Arti allowed a continuous comparison among the arts, inspiring each other: I though the juxtaposition of architecture and glitch art would be another very contextual aspect. My vision is that Florence should act as a glitch artist itself: it should instrumentalize the inevitable errors generated by the friction of history and spatial stratification. It happened before, afterall, right here: Michelangelo’s erroneous elements evolved into Mannerism and Baroque; or, the flood of 1966 gave birth to the Radical Design movement (Superstudio, etc). Notable how the notion of error and glitch is related to the accident (as origin), often feared by architects. But how do I translate in space “noise artifacts” without resulting flamboyant? To structure the action defining a (replicable) methodology, it could provide a trajectory for other cities facing architectural immobilism. At the same time, choosing to work on the concept of glitch (instead of the mere “appearance of failure”, or hot glitch for Menkman) would keep the procedural nature of glitch-art intact, enabling further reconfigurations. The other two features of the glitch are ambiguity (inherited by the openness of contemporary art) and relationality (for its multiple semantic configuration). The undertaken process applies glitch techniques to context models (suggested by the concept of noise by Serres), understanding how they manipulate information (edge and content). Grasped the concept of each, they will become spatial strategies, altering likewise the information of the site (including those accidental aspects which might generate errors). 151

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/ RESEARCH ESSENTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY BOOKS * Agamben, Giorgio, Che cos’è il contemporaneo e altri scritti, Roma (IT), I sassi nottetempo, 2008. Berardi, Franco “Bifo”, After the Future, Oakland (US), AK Press, 2011. Di Benedetto, Gaetano, L’Oltrarno tra mito e M.I.T., Firenze (IT), Polistampa, 2009. Eco, Umberto, Opera aperta. Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee, XXIII ed, Milano (IT), Bompiani, 2013. Eco, Umberto, Come si fa una tesi di laurea. Le materie umanistiche, XIX ed, Milano (IT), Bompiani, 2013. Eisenmann, Peter, Moving arrows, eros and other errors: An architecture of absence, Architectural Association Publications, London (UK), 1986.

* Ito, Toyo, Tarzans in the Media Forest (Architecture

Words), Architectural Association Publications, London (UK), 2011. Krapp, Peter, Noise channels. Glitch and Error in Digital Culture, Minneapolis (US), Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2011.

* McLuhan, Marshall & Fiore, Quentin, The Medium is the Massage, XI ed., Gingko Press, Germany, 2001.

* McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding media, the extension of man, XIV ed., Cambridge (US), The MIT Press, 2001. Palladio, Andrea, I quattro libri dell’architettura, ed.1980, Milano (IT), Hoepli, 1945. 154

ARCHITECTURE ART & DESIGN MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY CONTROL CONTEXT HISTORY PERCEPTION Ratti, Carlo & Claudel, Matthew, Architettura open source. Verso una progettazione aperta, Torino (IT), Einaudi Editore, 2014. Ryan, Zoe & Rosa, Joseph, Hyperlinks: architecture and design, Chicago (US), Yale University Press, 2010. Serres, Michel, The Parasite (Posthumanities), VII ed., Minneapolis (US), Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2007. Simmel, Georg, Firenze in Metropolis. Saggi sulla grande città di Sombart, Endell, Scheffer e Simmel, Massimo Cacciari (ed.), Roma (IT), Officina, 1973. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, The black swan. The impact of the highly improbable, New York (US), Random House Trade Paparbacks, 2006. Vasari, Giorgio, Le vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti, Firenze (IT), Newton Compton Editori, 1997. MAGAZINES Burrasca, Glitch, #3, Genova (IT), 2016. Monu, Editing Urbanism, #14, Rotterdam (NL), 2011. Perspecta - Yale University, Error, #46, Cambridge (US), The MIT Press, 2013. San Rocco, Mistakes, #3 Winter 2011, Pergine Valsugana (IT), Publistampa Arti Grafiche, 2011.

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PUBLICATIONS * Blumenkranz, A. (2012) Instrumentalising the accident, AND ARTICLES MA Dissertation in Interactive Media, University of London. Cascone, K. (2002) ‘The Aesthetics Of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music ‘, Computer Music Journal, vol. 24, no. 4, Winter.

* Gow, G. (2001) Spatial metaphor in the work of Marshall

McLuhan, Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 26.

* Manon, H. and Temkin, D. (2011) ‘Notes on Glitch’, World Picture 6.

* Menkman, R. (2009) Glitch Studies Manifesto, Amsterdam/Cologne: http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com.

Menkman, R. (2011) The Glitch Moment(um), Network Notebooks 04, Institute of Network Cultures. Moradi, I. (2004) Gtlch Aesthetics - Undergraduate Dissertation, The University of Huddersfield.

* Somol, R. & Whiting, S. (2002) Notes around the Doppler

Effect and Other Moods of Modernism, in Perspecta #33.

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/ RESEARCH ESSENTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

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