Benno Premsela Lecture 2013

Matthew Stadler

Interior Decorating in War Time

Benno Premsela Lecture 2013

Interior Decorating in War Time Interior Decorating in War Time

by Matthew Stadler A few years ago my son thought he was turning into a bird. He was eleven at the time. He wrote me an email about it. “At the river I could hear the movement of rocks (that clacking sound you hear when your head is underwater and rocks bump together) but through my feet, like the sound traveled up my body from my feet and into my ears, as if my bones were hollow, like a bird’s. So, I think I’m turning into a bird, and I’m kind of excited.”

Matthew Stadler

While he liked the idea that he might fly, flying was not the point for him.

Becoming a bird was transformation, growth, and we took his transformation seriously. People change. So, what happens when a boy becomes a bird? How does a bird live? How does the father of a bird make a home?

I’m not savvy about rooms, but I’ve had the help of friends who are. I was especially lucky to learn from Joseph Holtzman and Carl Skoggard, the founders of Nest magazine, an unusual quarterly of interiors. “National Geographic, for the indoors,” we liked to call it. I was the magazine’s literary editor. Joe, who dreamed it up, was art director and editor in chief.

Carl was the staff writer, author of the magazine’s many lines of unattributed text, all of the captions, the side comments and, most profoundly, the “letter from the editor” that Joe dictated for each issue.

Here’s the letter I’m thinking of tonight, and which I will read out loud in this beautiful room. Carl and Joe wrote it for Nest issue #17, summer 2002: “When the Master Decorator made the first room, what did he really do?

“Well, he smoothed out a floor, making it perfectly level, and saw that it was good. Next he erected a surface perpendicular to his floor. This was even better. And for good measure he squared off the walls, making them four, with four equal corners. Finally he made an opening in his perpendicular, so that you could look out from the new enclosure; the opening, which the Master Decorator in his wisdom made a rectangle, framed the tilting and tossing of the rest of creation beyond.”

Here was fundamental wisdom about the interior. There is a level surface, enclosed by perpendicular walls—and there is an opening, a way to see out. Outside is chaos, “the tilting and tossing of the rest of creation.” But inside is order, stability, safety. “Adam and Eve…dragged their belongings inside,” Joe and Carl wrote, “where nothing wanted to roll away or topple

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Interior Decorating in War Time over.” The interior is built to suit human needs. The level floor lets us sleep; the perpendicular walls rise to meet us as we stand, composed now, ready to walk out of the room, into the tilting and tossing of the rest of creation.

Matthew Stadler

Several things are at play in this idealization of “the first room.” Principally three: the room; the “domestic;” and, the “interior.” Common usage conflates all three, so that when we think about interiors or interior design we typically think of rooms and the problems of domesticity. But they are not the same. Rooms are a subset of interiors; there are many other kinds.

And domesticity is its own concern, sometimes relevant to the rooms we inhabit and sometimes not. The most important of these, for me, is the interior, which I regard as a fundamental human right; a right that is, in our time, under unprecedented attack.

I arranged my home to suit my son as much as myself. For instance, I cleared out what had been a dining room and covered the floor with futons. We put a digital projector in the room to watch movies, or so he and his friends could play games on a wall-sized screen in this big soft cave. That room opened onto the kitchen, where I put big, overstuffed easy chairs so my friends would sit with me while I cooked. We ate at a long table on the front porch, weather permitting. You could also sleep on the porch, if you liked fresh air. Or you could sleep on a big couch in the living room next to the fire place, which my son liked to do.

On a typical evening, before dinner I would join him in the cave playing a video game. On the wall, clouds twist and rush past us. There is gun fire.

The room tilts and turns, crazy as all of creation. He seems to be flying an aircraft.

If the screen is, in this case, the opening out, the one the Master Decorator made a rectangle, it is barely doing its job of framing the action. Somehow we seem to have flown through it. My body twitches and jerks, lying on the futon, as my son navigates an unstable world that has enveloped us both. We move swiftly through shades of gray and black, plus the lightning bursts of fire from enemies all around us (the reassuring simplicity of war: good guys versus bad guys). I think of the magician, Howl, from Hayao Miyazaki’s confounding movie, transforming into a great, tattered night bird, turning the colored wheel beside his moving castle’s door to black, and then flying out into a liquid sky of fire and bombs. There is a war, and we’re flying into it.

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Interior Decorating in War Time

Matthew Stadler

Miyazaki counterposes Howl’s moving castle—his home; his rooms; his family—against the terror of war, through which Howl must fly, as a bird, to battle the dark forces of hatred and destruction. In that movie, the dark forces are the state. Howl has only his magic to oppose an enemy who is both powerful and legitimized by politics. Whenever my son flies into battle in his beloved, dark games of good guys and bad guys, I think of Howl.

While his games focus and refine my fears—the way good art does—they aren’t the point. The same instability arises every time I open a window onto the digital realm. I might be sitting at my desk, say, on a bright sunny afternoon, doing something as innocent as chasing down the rabbit hole of Facebook posts. Windows open onto windows and I get lost. I experience a similar vertigo, lifting away from solid ground and try to imagine that I’m still an embodied person, walking through rooms, choosing which thresholds to cross, an illusion that is skillfully abetted by the software’s designers. But I am not in rooms. There are no walls. I hurtle over unseen thresholds into new domains I have never chosen, and from which it is difficult to turn back.

If the interior was a simple material fact—a place bounded by walls, with an opening out—we would never be able to leave through the aperture of a video screen. Nor, to cite older examples, by opening a book or contemplating a tapestry.

We want to understand “the interior” at a time when technological change has radically undermined the stability of what we know. We understand “rooms.” But how is the interior changed by the digital realm, which extends so seamlessly from the rooms we have long called home? Home is now an interlacing of the digital and the material. So, what, or where, is “the interior?” Some useful clues can be found in the synagogue where we sit, which first opened its doors in 1673.

The beautiful light in this room is 17th-century light. Even dying, it bleeds in through big, clear windows. The wealthy merchant families who built the synagogue felt at home in the world. They had escaped the living hell of Spain’s inquisition and been reborn in the frank, moneyed capitalism of Amsterdam. This building shows their joy and openness. The synagogue is not a fortress of god but a house of congregation, open to the world.

Held in this light, we feel welcome. An interior, even a built, material one, is primarily an act of the imagination.

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Interior Decorating in War Time Ideas and matter commingle. The boundary that keeps heresy out is neither just the interdiction against heresy nor the heavy wooden door that can be slammed shut in the face of the heretic: it is these two commingled— the interdiction and the door. Of the two, the idea, the interdiction, is the stronger. Walls must carry ideas to be strong. They are “load-bearing” walls. Articulating these ideas (in the material arrangement of things) is the task of the decorator.

Matthew Stadler

The architecture here is generic. The synagogue was designed by Elias Bouman, a 17th-century stone mason and surveyor with experience building churches. In preparation, Bouman studied nearby examples, including the then-recently completed Oosterkerk (where he had worked as a stone mason) and the Great Synagogue of Amsterdam’s Ashkenazy congregation. He proposed a pragmatic blend of the features he liked, a generic version of 17th-century church design. It’s the only building he’s credited with, and it’s a very good one.

The building’s architectural plainness frames the surpassing clarity of its interior, so that we take in a lot with ease. Immediately we see the basics: four walls and an opening out (which is also the way we came in). Generous clear windows pierce the walls. So, this fundamental ambivalence of the interior—a boundary pierced by openings—is richly the case here.

The ambivalence is crucial. The interior is neither a sealed box, nor an open space. It is the simultaneity of both boundary and opening, a stage for the human activity of withdrawal and emergence. The interior is a social instrument, the necessary shelter that enables each of us to either retreat or come out, in which activities we become more fully human.

My understanding rests on this assumption: that people are neither solitary nor social, per se, but only fully human in their agency to partake in both, to cross the threshold, or not. Denying a person the right to solitude and society—access to both, and the ability to choose —undermines their human rights.

We crossed a series of thresholds on our way in, as if we were passing into rooms within rooms within rooms. This is typical of interiors, to nest one within another. The thresholds are filters to further exclude, and thus define whose room we are in. Of interiors, we always ask “whose?”— Whose room? Whose house? Whose office? The thresholds are, thus, political boundaries. Strangers must ask permission. Guests will be met and welcomed by the host. Some will never be allowed. Homer gives some good advice on welcoming strangers, in The Odyssey. He describes

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Matthew Stadler

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Interior Decorating in War Time

Matthew Stadler

the routine when Athena, in the guise of a stranger, arrives at a feast thrown by Telemachus: “Telemachus stood beside her and took her by the right hand, and relieved her of the bronze spear, and spoke to her: ‘Welcome stranger. You shall be entertained as a guest among us. Afterwards, when you have tasted dinner, you shall tell us what your need is.’” Relieve them of their weapons, then make them welcome.

How is it that women are sitting in this room? The Portuguese Synagogue is an orthodox Jewish house of worship. By that authority, women are barred from entering this part of the room. They come in through different doors (on either side of the far end of the building) and go up directly to sit behind the lattice in the balconies. But the Talmud Torah congregation, which built the synagogue 340 years ago and still worships here today, allows the physical room to contain two separate interiors, separated in time but not in space. One—under their authority—is the minyan that will gather here again on a coming Saturday, when the women will again sit only in the balcony. The second, a secular space, is used variously by others, including as a venue for lectures about design. As guests of the congregation we’re respectful of the sanctity and meanings of this space.

And as generous hosts they bend the rules a little for us. And so women sit amongst us today, a powerful reminder that the interior is a fundamentally political thing, a matter of establishing dominion within clear boundaries.

This room also belongs to history. Whose room? Not just ours or the congregation’s, but the past’s, our shared heritage. It’s a 17th-century room; there is candlelight and sand on the floor. It’s a miracle the room has survived time. We owe the Talmud Torah congregation a huge debt of gratitude for keeping it intact through grave danger, wars, and the worst possible threats.

A congregation member whose family has worshiped here for five generations, told me, “it’s like home.” He first read the Torah from this Tebah when he was thirteen, at his bar mitzvah. His own son did the same. He pointed out the seat that is his, near to the Tebah (itself older than the building, having come from the prior synagogue). He remembers when the balcony lattice was painted; he described the benches that used to line the walls, calling them “cap benches.” “That’s where the poor people sat.” They couldn’t afford the nicer hats observant Jews in the congregation wore, and so they wore caps. He pointed to the thin columns holding up the balconies—”12 columns for the 12 tribes”—the four massive ones lifting the vaulted ceiling—”the four matriarchs”—the 72 windows—he was smiling now, “for the 72 letters of His name, written in full…”—laughter in his eyes,

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Interior Decorating in War Time “the 613 candles, for the 613 interdictions in the Torah…”—and then he laughed out loud, adding “We’re not even sure if there are 613 candles.

But you know, you live in a place and you start making up stories.” Home is where you make up stories.

Matthew Stadler

The stories elaborate a shared purpose that is evident in every detail of the room’s design. The benches are arranged to all face the Heichal, the ark, and the Torah. The placement of the Heichal in the direction of Jerusalem, points us toward that center. The blemish where part of the beam supporting the women’s balcony is left unfinished, reminds us of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. The Ner Tamid, the eternal light of faith, always burns in a flame on the brass chandelier immediately in front of the ark.

Interiors nested within interiors. Each threshold—from the street into the courtyard; from the courtyard into the synagogue; from the doorway to our place in the room; to the ark we face, watching; to the Tebah, where the Torah will be unrolled and read aloud—leads the congregation finally into the words of the Torah. They come together in the sound of these words read aloud. Tonight, in a secular context, I’m given the honor of reading aloud a text where we all gather.

And this is astonishing. What is the interior? It is a text, a composition.

The congregation enters the Torah together by hearing it. The rules of intoning that the hazzan learns, and which any member of the congregation must know if given the privilege of reading, are precise. The sound of the words is the interior that shapes the congregation. It is their place of gathering.

This is an admittedly unusual idea of the interior. Texts aren’t normally counted among the rooms that we can enter or leave. But I think the claim is valid; and it will prove useful as we look for definitions that keep pace with radical change in the ways we shape what is inside and what is outside.

I carry a book with me almost all the time. I don’t mean a sacred text, but whatever book I happen to be reading. Right now it’s a collection of Glenn Gould’s writing. It’s not that I’m so pressed for time that I have to use all my spare moments to read. I have plenty of time to read. But the book I carry is a portable interior, a place I retreat to, so I can compose myself whenever the tilting and tossing of the world threatens to undo me.

I adore the book’s clean rectangle. You’ll see me at someone’s noisy party

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Interior Decorating in War Time sitting in a quiet corner next to the damp coats in the spare bedroom, with my book pressed to my face. I only need ten or fifteen minutes. Glenn Gould calms me, and I get my head straight. Then back out into the party I go.

Matthew Stadler

I’ve noticed that my son uses his hoodie in the same way—as a refuge, a place to compose himself. Think about this phrase: To compose oneself.

At its heart is a fundamental human need: to put ourselves together, to become presentable, to have something to present. The interior is the space of composition. It’s where we go to collect ourselves, to author our own subjectivity. We come back into society as ourselves, or else we bring nothing. Our subjectivity is what we have to give; it is our value in society. Let me say that again, in this wonderful room: our subjectivity, our difference, is our value to others. And to have it, to author it, we need a space of composition.

That function is obvious in a dedicated room such as this one. The congregation forms itself here. It does so regularly, and goes back out into the world suitably composed as itself, aligned with its values. The congregation remembers who they are. This is equally the case for our private interiors. In our private rooms the underlying story told by the decor might be more idiosyncratic. But our rooms remind us who we are. What we put in a room, and the relationships we organize there—the distance or nearness of things, the barriers or occlusions, the openings out, the placement of what we love most—suit us. The private interior, where we feel at “home,” is the space of composition for the self or sometimes the family (and then, as a site of domesticity).

Wherever my son alights the ample sleeves of his hoodie are drawn down and the capacious room of his cowl-like hood flips forward, harboring him safely inside. To the shadowed opening of this head-cave he brings the soft glow of a hand-held device, or sometimes a book, and then his interior is complete—a boundaried space with an opening out. From the safety of this warm redoubt he views the world through the glowing screen.

I’m always curious what he’s seeing. Mostly it’s games, a vividly animated world of intensely social interactions in a virtual space. My son enters in the guise of his self-decorated avatars. He loves to decorate his avatars.

Haircuts, body shape, armor, weapons, skin ornament. He is as meticulous and refined in the design of his avatars as Joe Holtzman was with the pages of Nest magazine. In the rapid action of his glowing screen my son meets his friends (themselves sitting in similar hoodies in other rooms, near or far). The virtual rooms they fight in are pure surface—ornate, digital,

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Interior Decorating in War Time placeless. When not battling they’re texting or calling, again through that same window that opens from the shadowed front of the hoody.

The hoody is as much of an interior as are the larger rooms many of us prefer. It performs exactly the function of the interior—a boundaried space with an opening, that one can choose to cross or not. A space of composition—but using minimal and exquisitely portable means.

I share my generation’s usual bias against virtual social settings. But I cannot deny the pleasure of my son’s digital interior. There he feels held, welcome, at home. He aligns with the rhythm and shape of that space.

He comes into the composition.

Matthew Stadler

Digital technology makes astonishing new interiors. It creates an affective space of inclusion, of holding and being held, without material proximity.

It’s a kind of magic. There’s an interesting discussion among some rabbis now about the validity of a virtual minyan. The minyan is the gathering of ten or more Jews, the necessary number for communal prayer.

Would it be kosher to convene a minyan over Skype? Rabbinical blogs say the current understanding is that a minyan must be constituted by ten Jews in physical proximity in the same room, but that once this is established others may join the minyan, and the communal prayer, by remote means, including Skype. Similarly, my son hurries home from school, heading in the opposite direction from his friends, to sit in our dark cave and join those same friends and others, in the virtual space of “Assassin’s Creed.” Their thumbnail avatars pop up on the screen as each one arrives home, somewhere across the city, and they find each other, in their rooms, on their machines, and reunite in the interior of the game.

So how did these screens enter our rooms? They were smuggled in, as windows. Always, the interior has pivoted on the opening: the view out.

Early on, we supplemented the few real openings in a wall with artificial ones: first in tapestries; then paintings; and then the bulky consoles of the first television sets. Where windows could not be made, we made our own views out. This long history led, finally, from television sets to computer screens—the flat high-definition screen that now dominates our rooms.

This innocent screen appeared to be, like all its primitive ancestors, a view out, in some ways the best and most realistic artificial window we had ever known.

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Interior Decorating in War Time But the screen isn’t only a window. It’s also a camera; someone else’s camera, pointed at us. The world in the screen is as much interested in us as we are in it. And so, wanting windows, we’ve filled our lives with cameras, with surveillance so that others can watch our pale, glowing faces. We stare into the screen, thinking we are looking out at the world when, in fact, we’re being watched.

Matthew Stadler

Birds set boundaries through action, making a home range that swells and collapses, grows or disappears, in bursts of song or swiftly repeated patterns of flight. Their marking is dynamic, conversational, composed in call and response. A different picture from the lumbering bear who bites and claws trees or pisses along his trail. Of course the bear must make his rounds frequently. But two bears never stand by one rock, pissing together to co-author a boundary. Birds both call and listen. They have a conversation.

It’s difficult for earthbound creatures to imagine the dynamic shape of territory for a bird. It’s nothing like a home address, and yet it is as or more fiercely defended than the urine-scented territory of mammals. When a boundary is aural it is also performative, requiring constant attention. The shape of home changes depending on the activity or stasis of the bird.

A bird stirs to rise to the call of another, drawing a line by singing with force, then by performing a series of postures and flight, then by a dance that’s like capoiera, a kind of ritualized fighting, to draw the territory.

Home, for a bird will change shape as the day changes, as the conversation tweets and twitters away. Texting, posting, commenting, “liking,” Tweeting— people have been lifted up into a slew of dynamic, bird-like activities that pattern our digital homes. There are so many conversations to attend to, so much call and response. Yet our understanding of these interactions has stubbornly stayed earth-bound, anchored in the experience of human dwelling, the language of rooms.

At two levels, digital interiors masquerade as material architecture. One is in their surface: designers make increasingly convincing simulations of 3-D space for users to navigate kinetically, so that the puzzle of action and relationship in digital space will feel as much like navigating a material interior as possible. Sometimes we move our whole body (as with the XBox Kinect or Wii gaming systems) but more often the hand stands in for the body, performing a series of elegant, precise gestures, loping through the digital world via the swift fluttering of our fingers and wrists.

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(Where is our Leonardo, our sharp-eyed depicter of hands? Never before in human history have hands played so preeminent and versatile a role.)

Second, more deeply, we imagine digital interaction by thinking of bodies in space. We seek addresses, open doors (or windows), enter rooms, put up walls. Digital relationships are experienced as spatial ones.

Entering the digital interior, we see a forest of things, all of them metaphorical—windows, rooms, and walls; inboxes, cookies and trash; trash cans, shopping carts, bread crumbs, folders, files, feeds, pins, snapshots, bit coins, an information superhighway, the blogosphere, and cyberspace—where we engage in physical activities: surfing, lurking, poking, browsing, mining, harvesting, and so on. We feel agency because the metaphors assure us our body is doing familiar things in a familiar world.

Want privacy? Build a firewall and close all the back doors. But digital privacy is not as simple as closing doors or putting up walls. Nor is “privacy” exactly the point. In digital relationships visibility and sharing with strangers are strengths; a bird calls to be heard. Rooms may require privacy, but composition depends on agency. We risk losing crucial political battles because of this error.

The space of composition in the digital realm is more musical than it is architectural—more a matter of negotiating one’s place in a dynamic field of song, a kind of music we’re drawn into or move away from. We need better language—not only the right words to use, but a visual language of design—to activate metaphors that articulate this difference without falsely suggesting that the digital is a secondary “virtual” instance of a primary material “reality.”

The 20th-century American writer, Gertrude Stein, can help us. Her 1926 lecture, “Composition as Explanation,” presciently lays out some of the problems we’re living with now. Written almost 90-years ago, during an afternoon that she spent sitting in a Paris mechanic’s garage waiting for her model-A Ford to be repaired, “Composition as Explanation” was Stein’s attempt to describe the way she wrote her masterpiece, a long novel called The Making of Americans. Written between 1906 and 1914, it was published, finally, in 1925, occasioning this lecture. (And when published, by the subscription-based press, Contact Editions, it sold 13 copies.) Stein was interested in what she called “the continuous present,” which she wrote by “beginning again and again and again,” and by “using virtually everything.”

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Stein understood composition as a universal human activity that manifests in every field of making, without plan or much awareness. “Any one creating the composition in the arts does not know it either,” Stein wrote.

“They are conducting life and that makes their composition what it is, makes their work compose as it does.” Grounded in idiosyncrasy, composition blossoms as human variety and difference. Stein’s approach was to sit each morning and simply begin writing, not stopping until it was lunch time. She filled hundreds of blue examination notebooks with her generous, loopy script, and handed them off to her partner, Alice B. Toklas, who typed them up as manuscripts. In composition we make without plan, through our presence and awareness in the act of making. It is what we do alone in our rooms.

Stein contrasts “composition” to another way of making she calls “the academic.” The academic begins with plans and then inflexibly carries them out. That is why, Stein wrote “those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having become past is classified and the description of it is classical. That is the reason the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.” Rejected or unheard in its time, composition is later classified, which enables the academic mode to turn it into plans and reenact it.

Despite the punishing powers of the academy, the contemporary composition flourishes, as it must.

Interestingly, it flourishes most in war. Stein was fascinated by war. In “Composition as Explanation,” she makes the astonishing claim that “war may be said to have advanced a general recognition of the expression of the contemporary composition by almost thirty years.” What does she mean?

We get a clue from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein’s breakthrough popular book, of 1936), wherein she recalls walking with Picasso along the boulevard Raspail in 1914 when a great camouflaged cannon turned a corner to face them. “It is we who have made that,” Picasso tells her. He is surely making a visual observation, noting the Cubist geometries of camouflage. But Picasso is also aware of the paradox of finding a weapon of war on this pretty Paris boulevard. The man who collaged daily news clippings with oil paint and invitation cards cannot have been unaware of the juxtaposition of civil society and war that this cannon presented.

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Interior Decorating in War Time Stein, who called her own method “literary Cubism,” recognizes it too.

Her summoning of the anecdote suggests that the way war thinks is the same way she and Picasso thought. Which is why war could “advance the contemporary composition” so radically. War is the true avant garde.

Matthew Stadler

Stein shares some of her contemporary, Marinetti’s, envy for the uncompromising intensity of war’s aesthetic regime. War is glory, power, historical scope—all things she desired for her writing and for art generally. When she regards war it is not with fear, but with a mix of envy and hope, an almost shocking eagerness to learn, to better war in art. She esteemed the ruthless American Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant as the greatest figure in American history. She believed war was a leveling, democratic force that “made everyone not only contemporary in act not only contemporary in thought but contemporary in self-consciousness.”

Stein had the luxury of standing outside of war and considering it. She condemned the “academic” generals of WW I, whose stubborn execution of preconceived plans drove millions of men to their deaths in the trenches.

She was a brave woman, and bought her first car during that war so that she and Alice could drive to the front and bring medical aid to the wounded.

Interestingly, she never learned how to use the reverse gear, and drove her car only forward. The pair survived in Vichy-era France as two American lesbian Jews, without ever going, strictly, underground. Even during war, Stein had ways to live in peace and regard her subject from a distance.

We might not have that luxury. The opening of the digital interior has changed the geography of war. It is home to a post-privacy culture of fluidity and exchange that extends the leveling tendencies of war into the most intimate places. Stein was shocked to see the contemporary composition, as she knew it, come lurching into view, in the form of a cannon, on the boulevard Raspail. We’re shocked to open our tablets or iPhones and find national security forces or local police sharing the line, staring back at us through the screen.

The revelations of whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden—that the entire Internet is subject to state surveillance—may be shocking, but we can hardly be surprised. Digital law has mostly enabled surveillance rather than deterring it. For many, the intrusion is merely an extension of our already massive voluntary self-surveillance, the “terms of use” we routinely click with Facebook and Google, and all of our other helpful watchers.

In the digital interior, the space of composition has always been noisy and crowded; so be it. But the implications of state involvement are horrific.

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We now face the absurd injustice of lulzsec hackers facing decade-long prison sentences for carrying out hacks assigned to them by FBI undercover agents, including hacks against foreign governments. Had this only been a matter of corporate espionage the hackers would have been paid a salary, told to keep quiet, then turned loose on their next assignment.

But states fight war by granting or taking away basic human rights, like liberty and life. Increasingly, non-state actors are using these same tools.

The state calls them “terrorists.”

War has reached us. It rides in your coat-pocket, waiting to be powered up, so you can check-in again. It’s bolted to the eaves of every building of every city in the world. It hovers in drones or the absurd bulk of helicopters.

It sits on your desk at home, linked in, waiting for your sleepless visits to catch up as dawn grays the sky. It is war when the network of surveillance directed at us links to profiling softwares that sort people into categories of action for police empowered to treat “perceived threats” without due process. It is war when a system, designed in the first place for the military, develops through an organic collusion of military, academic, and commercial interests pursued by institutions, such as MIT, Stanford, NASA, or Microsoft, that artfully blend all three. It is war when this network is lawless.

Law has not kept pace. We remain stubbornly focused on privacy, when lack of transparency is the bigger problem. Long-standing privacy protections are house-bound, dated by their focus on traditional interiors, on slamming the heavy door shut. In the US, the Fourth Amendment bars unreasonable searches of our “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” but digital information has never fit clearly into these categories. Opening the phone or tablet, our conduct departs from us and is transformed into information—or for the less lucky, evidence—to feed calculations that come back to us as the offer of a cheap hotel in a city we love or advice about a book we’ll like or a greeting from a long lost friend, or, less benignly, as a knock on the door and a warrant for your arrest. This information is not our “person” our “house” our “papers” or “effects.” Wanting control over it, we’re thrown back on laws and concepts that don’t fit. Moreover, privacy is the wrong concern. Law should attack the secrecy the state has reserved for itself while also giving individuals agency in the digital realm, ways to control what is done in their names—agency in the space of composition. Hiding isn’t possible, nor desirable.

All of this is worrying, for the father of a bird. It’s hard to say if my son and his friends will become tools of a surveillance society. We have enough plausible nightmares like that already, with U.S. Army 9-5 20-somethings

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Matthew Stadler

steering drones across Pakistan from the darkened office cubicles of their strip-mall gaming centers. There they sit—at the heart of the contemporary composition—birds in flight with no walls to stop them, only a kind of music they take part in making, and that we can either enter into or flee.

Of course we must enter, or turn our backs on the world. Can any of us summon Stein’s bold self-confidence? Or, the magician Howl. It is amazing to see, in “Howl’s Moving Castle,” his eager smile when he is faced with his enemy, Madame Suliman, how he quickens to her threat. He wants to both impress and utterly destroy her. Suliman is also a wizard, once Howl’s teacher, now the unchallenged advisor to the King. The state apparatus that she directs appears in the film as a kind of oily black slime, coalescing sometimes into striding armies of henchmen, sometimes into flying bugs that hurl bombs and spit fire; but more often as a hideous liquid that squishes between bricks and into houses and hallways. This slime even becomes a potion that is swallowed to poison a vital fire from inside. Miyazaki is a great poet. We need more like him. Howl lives a dual existence, a domestic life of refuge in the interior of his moving castle—his rooms, his family, the place he goes to put himself back together— and an exhausting immersion in the total war that rages outside.

“There is a room and there is a war.” This from the Canadian poet, N.S., in her book-length poem We Press Ourselves Plainly. “There is a room and there is a war.” These sources—a cartoon movie and a poem—help me, crucially, in a time when law has failed. So, what can we do as designers of the interior in war time? I see a way forward if we recognize that the interior is the space of composition and we focus on agency, rather than privacy. We must remain engaged as visible players, yet survive as ourselves. Life cannot be lived building firewalls against the contemporary composition.

Read the “Terms of Use.” Wherever you work within a legal context—say, as a business or signing contracts or managing work across borders— always look closely at the legal framework you agree to. Read your contracts. Talk about them. Hire poets and lawyers to write better, more relevant contracts. Fight for better laws.

Where work is lawless—and often that’s so because the legal framework is ignored by others, such as the NSA or British Intelligence or Google or Facebook or local police—prepare to work in war. Welcome it. Rush toward it with Stein’s instructive optimism. Become smarter. Become a better poet, a better artist, a better magician.

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Interior Decorating in War Time

Matthew Stadler

Remember that interactive screens are not only windows, but also cameras.

Equip them with curtains. Don’t disguise digital sites as rooms. Reveal their dynamism, their instability and boundlessness. Remind us that by opening these screens we choose to travel in public. Help us travel with discretion. Design easy access to the so-called “dark net.” Dark net portals such as TOR or FreeNet—where one can choose what online identity others see, if any—are hobbled by the assumption that its users are hiding; they are suspect. If use of the “dark net” became default within networks, from ones as small as the reach of your WiFi, to as large as the digital systems of an office building, or the municipal systems of a city, then TOR and FreeNet would become, as they aim to, overwhelmed by legitimate use. Design can thus “normalize” the dark net, making it non-suspect.

Insist on stronger security protocols such as “forward secrecy.” And why not design bold, clear labels to mark when they are in use, as we do with organic foods? Or one-click spoofing (in which you can author new or multiple identities for your computer by inventing new MAC addresses to share with networks). This could be programmed as, say, a big yellow button on every open browser that says “SPOOF,” making it as easy as one-click shopping. Your difference is your value to others. Politeness matters. We need new ways to welcome strangers—and relieve them of their weapons—as we sit down together at the digital banquet. Maintain agency by recognizing it in others.

In material design, let idiosyncrasies of use define the shape of things.

Make sturdy generic objects with durable materials so that a lifetime of use will give them style. Think of a well-made knife, passed from mother to son. Save old things. Fix what breaks. Keep friends close (a similar skill). Trust human judgement, including human failure. Quality matters more than cost. Go with the classics—sturdy, generic things, well-made with durable materials that bear the marks of time.

Study war. It is no longer “a continuation of politics by other means” (as Carl von Clausewitz put it), but has become its own self-augmenting aesthetic system—war for war’s sake. Martin van Creveld, in The Culture of War, documents this reality: a world where non-state actors have become protagonists in asymmetrical conflicts far enough divorced from plausible political outcomes to have no conceivable end. Van Creveld describes a material culture of war that no longer terminates in politics, but perpetuates itself independently as an economic engine and, even

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Interior Decorating in War Time more so, as an autonomous cultural force. We produce stories of war, war games, warriors, war preparedness; we’re on a war-footing. A war on terror has no end point, only the boundlessness of terror itself.

Matthew Stadler

As an aesthetic system, war has one fundamental weakness—it cannot proceed without an absolute distinction between ally and enemy. Everything waits on this division. Confused by the noise of human judgement, ambiguity, indecision, war’s gears jam up. Digital interactions—where all knowledge is reconfigured as information; where algorithms can swiftly assign a one or a zero for enemy or ally (right or wrong)—frees the gears and war swells into dominance.

So: Fill the net of surveillance with every human failing—imprecision, paradox, multiple identities, love, fellow-feeling, projection, error, empathy, incompleteness, doubt—all the human capacities that prevent us from looking at any other person and seeing enemy or ally. The noise in the system is us, with all of our shades of gray, our fickleness, our partial knowledge, our doubts and reconsiderations. Riddle big data with the language of your difference. Reward human failure. Become weak, as a tactic. Culture is violence. Remember who you are.

Among the treasures in the schatkamer, across the courtyard, is a picture, from 1945, of the first service in this room after the war. It’s a miracle the room was still standing, a kind of magic. Dusty, in disrepair, it was, yet, intact, ready. The hundreds who gathered here were but a small fraction of the pre-War congregation. 8 out of 10 had been murdered in the death camps. They unrolled the Torah on this Tebah—this Tebah—and, again, they read the words out loud.

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Het Nieuwe Instituut

file Interior triptych in annual instalments

For more information and a video of the lecture, visit www.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/bpl2013

This lecture may not be published without the prior consent of the author or Het Nieuwe Instituut; to request permission please contact Bart Heerdink: b.heerdink@hetnieuweinstituut.nl

Matthew Stadler gave the Ninth Benno Premsela Lecture on 24 November 2013 at the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam.

programme Landscape and Interior

category Annual Benno Premsela Lecture

Each year Het Nieuwe Instituut invites a speaker to share his or her views on contemporary developments in design.

Previous speakers of the Benno Premsela Lecture have been Michael Rock, Werner Sewing, Ann Meskens, J贸zeph Mrozek, Henk Oosterling, Nancy Etcoff, Richard Sennett and Gunter Pauli.

The Benno Premsela Lecture is part of Landscape and Interior, a multiyear exhibition, research and studio programme at Het Nieuwe Instituut. The exhibitions 1:1 Sets for Erwin Olaf, Bekleidung and Richard Hutten at the Sonneveld House comprise part of the same programme.

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