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8.1.1 IaaC Lecture Series Neil Leach

IaaC Lecture Series:

Home(ostasis) / Neil Leach

(IaaC Lecture Series 23 May 2016; synopsis by Jordi Vivaldi)

One of the main deficiencies of today has to do with the weak status of theory. We are indeed in a moment of crisis, when even some voices are claiming the death of theory. But the main problem is that those ones that still seem to be producing theory are doing it from a strong right wing point of view, as we can see in the publications of authors like Pier Vittorio Aureli or Graham Harman. We are in a moment of crisis, and what is urgent is to develop what we could consider the foundations of the theory of digital. It looks paradoxical, but there is not theory of digital technology. Why not? What is there instead? We have for now the work of Antoine Picon and Mario Carpo, but they are very far from the work itself. What we need is a kind of Greg Lynn or Manuel Delanda, people that are implied in the practice of digital architecture but still have the capacity to make theory out of it and go beyond the mere technicalities that you need to master. During a certain period, Philosophy was the mother discourse, specially through thinkers like Derrida and Deleuze. The problem is that Philosophy failed in approaching the problem of architecture with a precise agenda, and in this sense it seems more pertinent to look to some cognitive sciences like psychology, artificial intelligence, neurosciences, anthropology… In relation to these procedures, I wrote a book some years ago called Camouflage. It was written under a psychoanalytical background, and in this sense, the discipline which I’m convinced that will be the future most fruitful collaboration with architecture is neuroscience. Actually everything started with Freud, and there are mainly two aspects which are crucial for us: 1. The main two drivers that govern activity are Eros and Thanatos, the first one related to life, and the second one related to death. It’s a dialectic Cover - Embryo, IaaC Archive. Figure 1 - Alcatraz, IaaC Archive. Figure 2 - Stelarc, IaaC Archive. 2

relation: Eros disturbs while Thanatos seeks resolutions. As Slavoj Zizek comments, its relation is similar to the relation among photographies and movies: a photograph is frozen, while a movie is a continuum, but both are connected because a movie is the addition of many snapshots. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what is meant by dialectical operation. 2. Our first experience with architecture is under our mother body protection. In opinion of Freud, this is our particular Nirvana: we are feed and protected by our mother. The disaster occurs when we are ejected from this paradise. Life becomes hard, and during all this period we have a regressive compulsion to return to this condition, in this paradise where we were. Beside this dichotomy, another one seems pertinent to be on the table: the idea of auto-plastic and the idea of allo-plastic. That is to say: how we articulate ourselves to become the world, and how we animate the world to make if for us. They are both different manners of adaptation, different manners, from an architectural point of view, to connect human beings to building. One very clear example of this case has to do with Alcatraz, one of the most terrible places in the world. After being there for several years, Nelson Mandela asked to have a exact replica of it, in what could be called a architectural version of the Stocholm syndrome. If we are eventually used to everything, then design does not matter. It is actually the opposite: if human beings have tendency to adapt, then design is aimed to facilitate this process, to animate the environment and to connect to it somehow.

If until now we have approached this relation through philosophical or psychological concepts, neuroscience will be the emerging theoretical discourse in the world of architecture. There are 2 dominant technics in neurosciences, on the one side the use of magnetic resonance to understand the functions of the brain and on the other side the analysis of the measurement of the changes of the blood flow. Until now it cannot be related to a real time flow, which beside the operational difficulties, is not as straight forward as the resonance system. However, there is still a lot of work to do, specially in terms of precision. In this sense, the work of Antonio Damasio can be really fruitful, specially in relation to the electrical activities of the brain and how they generate some brain wave patterns. If you could learn how to decode the 3 dimensional operations of the body, you could use emotion tracking devices to understand what is happening on the brain. Neuroscience, indeed, has a lot of potential. The case of Anthropology, however, is different. Traditionally, we had in mind that anthropology is mainly concerned with exotic tribes. But actually we can do it with us, or, even better, we can be more precise and use anthropology to approach the notion of prothesis. We all know the work of Stelarc, and how he was developing the concept of Cyborg and cybernetics. The idea of a hybrid personage, half person and half machine, it is not that far from some contemporaneous experiments and practices, as for example the exoskeleton recently presented by NASA. These artefacts augment the capacity of the human beings, and actually we have seen this in the film industry in movies like Avatar or Elysium. In a certain manner, you could understand human beings as natural born cyborgs, and the use of technology is really modifying the structure of our brains. If for example you would produce a cross section of the brain of a pianist and a golf player after 20 years of activity, you would detect some physiological differences. As Damasio writes, the brain is not a command control centre, that is to say, it is not a top-down operation centre, but rather the brain is like a balancing device, a kind of thermostat that is continuously balancing emotions. According to Damasio, it is through emotions that we connect to the outside world, and therefore, instead of approaching the brain through a psicocoanalitical dialectic of death and life, we would develop a hydraulic mechanism to understand how the brain operates. In a certain manner Freud is doing it as well, but the power of neurosciences brings it to a different level, and notions like artificial intelligence or cybernetic form part of it.

Figure 2 - Exosqueleton, IaaC Archive.

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