ExtraLegal by micah rutenberg

ExtraLegal

Micah Rutenberg

MS_DR Pamphlet Series, No. 17

Excerpts of fiction and essays: “Nosce Te Ipsum” by Fergus Nicholson “Axolotl” by Julio Cortazar “Chuang Tzu” by Herbert Allen Giles “Hiding” by Mark C. Taylor “The Premise of Recombinant Architecture” by Benjamin Bratton “The Order of Things” by Michel Foucault

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-logue Introduction The New Aesthetics of Spatial Organization and the Politics of the Interior 1 13 42

>> Degrees of Interiority 3 >> Extralegality/ Extraterritoriality 9 >> Membranes of Conductance

>> Tattooing 15 >> Surfaces of Inscription 21 >> Thinness 29 >> Surface over Volume

>> Arrest 43 >> Body as Membrane-Media Stack 49 >> Redness 51 >> The Legal Institution of Public and Private 57 >> The Courthouse 59

-logue

Exploring spatial affiliations between institutions, territories and subjects, the MS_DR program seeks new models of practice within a contemporary digital culture that compels us to do so. The MS_DR program asserts ideas, ideation, and the making of theory as ground for an independently pursued research path. Studio work places architecture deep inside its cultural site of reckoning, working vividly with media influences, technological imperatives, and representational biases within contemporary digital culture. Studio practices collude with the rigors of seminar work in an effort to push design work towards applied research.

â&#x20AC;&#x201C;logue

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his pamphlet is meant to give context to a yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s worth of work on and in design research through the various territories that design itself works: culture, society, and representation. While design often acts as a backdrop to our experience of the everyday, design research suggests the foregrounding of this backdrop as a site of investigation- it suggests that design is not simply an aesthetic or artistic discipline, but rather a discipline whose effect permeates culture and society such that it simultaneously establishes and is the result of modes and principles of spatial occupation. It is to say that as designers we not only produce ways of being, but we are produced by them. The role of design research is to be critically aware of this fact and to engage the production of being as an ethos of the ethical designer. Research in the discipline of architecture is in its infancy. Its roles are ambiguous and contentious at best as the role of research seeks definition within the discipline. Given this state of things regarding research, this pamphlet locates itself within a larger series of pamphlets that seek to actively perform research as a means of honing rather than as an attempt to preemptively define and secure its position within the discipline. It is a means of wayfinding that capitalizes on large intellectual swoops and fortuitous misdirections over the more common beeline of global positioning mentality. This kind of research promotes the capacities of oceanic networks like Google over best-of lists. What design research is has yet to be determined, but its roles are clear; to engage our habitable world not on hermetically defined disciplinary terms, but on terms set out by culture, society, and the representation of being.

Introduction: The new aesthetics of spatial organization and the politics of the interior

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he classical order of seeing presents us with a spatial organization in which the space of representation relies on and produces the fixity of the viewer. To give an example: In Las Meninas, the spectator is created by and creates the spatial order of the painting. But for the spectator to understand the painting and the painting to ‘work,’ the spectator must be assumed to be static (although their vision is mobile) and must reproduce the lines of sight and representational orders that the painting demands. And so it does demand- one cannot ‘understand’ the painting without relying on its logic of classical perspective and representation. The painting, therefore, like its invisible subject King Philip IV, is itself a sovereign; an autonomous professor of law that determines our mode of operating in the space of the painting. This is a space of control. But in Velasquez’s case, laws of classical perspective and controlled, ordered space are used subversively, undermining power structures (in the subject matter) through the use of void and invisibility. It is what is not in the painting and how it is represented that we understand the political maneuverings of the interior: “Who is not there?” The King and his wife are pale, out-of-focus representations in the mirror. They are at once the subjects of each character’s gaze, and yet they are the only ones absent except in the reflection in the mirror: they are ghost-like in their occupation of the void. The cones of vision that the order of the painting produce arrest the body and arrest sight in an endless cat and mouse struggle as a means of launching out of and exceeding that which can be contained materially and physically. This describes the viewer-painting experience; an event that is always current, in the moment, resulting in a metaphysical chronology between now (the time of the viewer) and then (the time of the painting) where time and space are layered upon one another and compressed onto a computer screen-like surface that is increasingly thin, yet infinitely thick in its encyclopedic containment of subjective and objective relationships. This pamphlet tries to act like the surface of Las Meninas; it tries to act like a surface through which our expectations about social, political, and cultural relationships are refracted, realigned, and then mapped back onto us as a record of its potentialities. Not only does the pamphlet move through meta-themes of interiority, faciality, and extralegality, but it moves along their surface as well, inscribing other possible ways of seeing and

“Nosce Te Ipsum”

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Mahdi and his hordes were laying siege to Khartum, defended by General Gordon. A few of the enemy passed through the lines and entered the besieged city. Gordon received them one by one and indicated a mirror where they might see themselves. He thought it only right that a man should know his own face before he died.â&#x20AC;?

--Fergus Nicholson

“The mirror, by making visible, beyond even the walls of the studio itself, what is happening in front of the picture, creates, in its sagittal dimension, an oscillation between the interior and exterior.”

--Foucault, “The Order of Things”

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understanding these meta-themes and suggesting possible methodologies for designing and acting on and within the institutions, territories, and subjects around which the pamphlet locates itself. The pamphlet is organized around three meta-themes: interiority, faciality, and extralegality. They are unfolded and explored along their seams through writing, image, and design work. This progression, however, is interrupted by aphoristic outbursts that pretend to elaborate or extract a particular term, methodology, or potentiality within the work. Neither the meta-themes nor the aphoristic outbursts have a particular order, rather they are intended to dance and oscillate relative to one another, gaining credence through promiscuity. The meta-theme ‘interiority’ tries to establish a different relationship between inside and out that is formulated along the lines of mediatic tendencies rather than being exclusive to the material and physical institution of interior and exterior. Faciality approaches the notion of ‘skin’ and ‘face’ via self-image, celebrity, and surface, implicating potential spatial methodologies and ways of thinking that begin within the disciplinary establishment of architecture, but quickly diverge from it. The meta-theme ‘extralegality,’ by aligning with a particular prefix, tries to suggest the desire for this pamphlet and the work contained within to reach the beyond. The work tries to make space for readings and places of action that live outside of established design protocols given that technological velocity has accelerated social and cultural change to the extent that our understanding of our historical place is filled with more void than mass. In other words, though American society seems to strive for well-defined institutional protocols, the reality is that technology suggests more feral social and political formations. Thus gaps are formed through the technological instability of institutions and protocols that populate our society, illustrating the need for attention to and versatility of our imagination.

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resent architectural practice seems to gloss over the importance of interiority in favor of facade and faciality as an exuberant expression of urbanism. The interior is seen as a localized condition whereas the exterior refers to a larger urban context, expressive of larger attitudes about the city. Architecture has become thin in this sense; its role in the city is as a shell, an envelope, an enclosureâ&#x20AC;Ś architecture is all face and no guts. But technological and sociocultural trends suggest that focusing so heavily on the exterior as a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;facialâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; surface [facade] within the city as architects tend to do is a failure on our part to see that surface is no longer superficial. Rather, surface is an inter-face; a frontier of ever emergent scales of interiority. In other words, exterior and interior are not diametrically opposed; instead, they are

>>Degrees of Interiority As the notion of a differentiated public and private realm is obliterated by communication and social technologies, the notion of a differentiated interior and exterior is displaced in favor of degrees of interiority. Increasingly our interior self (identity, self-image) is proliferated through more and more media formats. Each of these formats is an extension of our interior self to a varying degree. Where walls once held the border between privacy/interior and public/exterior we can instead think of them as thresholds from one interior to the next.

Ultimately, ‘exteriority’ [facade, envelope, etc.] is always overcome by interiority. Space in the digital age is a build-up of physical and virtual skins that capture one another, producing interior after interior in an endless network: an infinitely thick skin– a hyperdermis. The thickness of skins [layered upon one another] is in part the result of mechanical devices that operate through internalization; devices that are networked within a larger technological apparatus, operating through modes of capture, registration, and dissemination. We can call these devices cameras. They are not contingent on a notion of the outside, but rather on the interiority of a scene, by which I mean something that always exists within and is framed by an apparatus. The concept of ‘façade’ as a spatial idea is not necessarily defined by exteriority, but rather defined by a surface directed toward a viewer. What is behind that surface directed at the viewer is only of consequence as a continuation of ‘this’ interior behind which we are bound to find another. Think of the painting ‘Las Meninas’ by Diego de Velazquez, in which the artist paints himself in a scene that depicts the princess surrounded by her caretakers, and in which we see an image of the King and Queen of Spain reflected in a mirror on the back wall. The painting not only captures an image, but it captures (and produces) a series of interiors that are both real and virtual. The most explicit interior is that of the painting itself that depicts the interior in some room of the royal residence. This depiction contains explicit qualities and content that can be enumerated

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symmetrical inversions of one another. Thus interior and exterior are conditional. However, the notion of the exterior–in the sense of being outside–is problematized by the feedback loop of interiority that emerges as one passes through a surface. To pass through a surface is to emerge from one interior into another while the exterior is pushed further into the distance, begetting the notion that interiors exist in levels. While we need the rhetorical notion of ‘exteriority,’ we only need it as a means of understanding it conditionally relative to interior.

>>Extralegality/ Extraterritoriality Predator drone pilots operate in highly structured interiors somewhere in this country (the U.S.), yet they are operating in a legal territory that is somewhere else, where the rules of engagement are likely to be different than the rules of engagement here [in the U.S.]. The territory by which we understand how these two systems communicate are undefined at this point. This condition is the extralegal and the extraterritorial.

Predator Drone pilots operate aircraft stationed in the U.S. operate unmanned aircraft abroad.

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The notion of speed in the Virilian sense is being exceeded by instantaneity: a state in which the body is able to occupy two spaces at once and where interfaces are no longer merely translative planes, but crystal balls through which one’s actions ‘here’ result in actions ‘there’. If speed is distance over time, the Predator drone suggests a coming reality in which time is infinitely small and distance infinitely large to the extent that the notion of “habitable circulation”* becomes nullified as the notion of “circulation” itself is rendered incomprehensible by its context. To recover a notion of “circulation”– or more fundamentally “movement”– requires us reformulate their terms. *From Virilio’s work with Claude Parent suggesting the city is formed around speed and motion: “The focus of my research,” Virilio noted, “has shifted from topology to dromology, i.e., the study and analysis of the increasing speed of transport and communications on the development of land-use.” http://bratton.info/projects/texts/introduction-to-speed--and--politics/ 7

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The Predator Drone is an unmanned aircraft used for military attack and reconnaissance missions. They have been operational most recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Predator Drone pilots operate the unmanned aircraft from a console at a military base in the U.S. while the aircraft itself is performing those operations abroad. The Predator Drone poses interesting questions about the legal space in which the pilot and aircraft operate; the physical body is operating under a particular set of laws (presumably that of the U.S.) while the aircraft is operating in a different legal space with different laws. It brings into question the notion of the physical body as the locus of action in a given legal territory according the institution of lawâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; is the Predator Drone an extension of the body or does its virtual nature sever that continuity? Is the Predator Drone itself another iteration of a legal body?

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>>Embedded Interiors From the undifferentiated public and private realm, and the favoring of degrees of interiority, the notion of architecture as a series of embedded interiors allows the architect to engage forms of spatial governance in a new way. ‘Embedded interiors’ follows ‘degrees of interiority’ in suggesting that technology (especially media) allows interiority to extend outward and begin to connect with other interiors producing networks that house themselves within one another. Reality television and predator drones are emblematic of this condition. In the case of reality television one’s ‘private’ life (interior) is projected into the homes of others, casting the TV screen as a threshold that embeds one interior into another. Existing within limits figured as spatial; belonging to the inner relations or intrinsic nature of anything Internal, domestic Inner, as distinct from what appears on the surface or is publicly declared Belonging to or existing in the mind or soul; mental or spiritual, as distinguished from that which is bodily; ‘inward’*

* Definition of Interior from The Oxford English Dictionary 9

The space of the museum in which the painting sits gets appropriated as an extended interior– ‘outside’ the painting is obliterated by the fact that the viewer him or herself is an extension of the painting and falls within its visual organization such that there is a convergence between the interior that the viewer occupies and the interior depicted in the painting. The interiors of the painting are further proliferated by the complication of the mirror that reflects the King and Queen of Spain on the back wall. If the painting is reflecting the King and Queen, then the viewer occupies the ‘real’ position of the King and Queen; the viewer is occupying a virtual space within the royal residence and resides within the scene itself producing a space in which the viewer simultaneously occupies the space of the museum and the royal residence. But the viewer, in the act of viewing as a completion of the painting becomes Velazquez the painter himself; a network of virtual and real interiors that include the museum, the royal residence, and Velazquez’s workshop. In ‘Las Meninas’ there is only interiority. It structures space in such a way that the viewer is always within its spatial feedback loop: the viewer is always embedded within a series of interiors set up by the painting, disallowing the possibility of ever existing outside of it. This same interior networking is reflected in the pervasiveness of communication and social technologies: they are transforming society to [Opposite page] ‘Las Meninas’ printed on card stock, with Target wallpaper pattern laser cut into surface, scanned. These studies address surface and ‘motif’ relative to context and the making of surface as an endeavor that oscillates between two- and three-dimensions both in its making and mechanical documentation. The laser cutter moves along the surface, translating data as an indifferent subject. The scanner poses as a faithful reproducer using parallel projection and mirroring as its translational methods. It collapses multiple surfaces of light onto a single plane using glass as the surface of transmission. But the scanner betrays itself as resolution diminishes at the moment where the third dimension begins to overcome the apparatus. Regardless, the object enters at varying degrees of resolution into the surficial realm.

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and discussed. However, with the viewer as an active participant in the creation of the painting, the painting begins to structure the appropriation of different kinds of interiors.

The aquarium is a membrane of conductance; It is a “permissive surface” that allows rather than prevents transmission to create a threshold in which multiple realities are suspended in a mix.

“Axolotl”

>>Membranes of Conductance

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;My face was pressed against the glass of the aquarium, my eyes were attempting once more to penetrate the mystery of those eyes of gold without iris, without pupil. I saw from very close up the face of an axolotl immobile next to the glass. No transition and no surprise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I understood.â&#x20AC;?

--Julio Cortazar

“Chuang Tzu ”

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly and, when he awoke, did not know if he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who was dreaming he was a man.â&#x20AC;?

--Herbert Allen Giles

The notion that our identity is embodied comes into question along with the body as a container that defines an interior and exterior. Our identity is proliferated and multiplied through networks and apparatusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; that operate independently of the individual and at scales outside the scope of individual intervention. This system works collectively as an inversion of ourselves; that which is considered to be contained within the embodied self finds a new carrier: a new interior.

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perform in similar ways to the structure of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Las Meninasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;; our identity passes through and is organized by different media steams and is captured and registered in so many ways that our identity is no longer singular but proliferated and multiplied.

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main concern and line of inquiry in this project is the notion of ‘faciality,’ which is directly tied to the complexities and ambiguities contained within polity, citizenship, and the definition of ‘public’ that arise from mass mediation, social networking, and the increasing thinness and invisibility of computing. The body that pre-dated these inventions was thought to have a complete, singular identity that could be registered through very specific criteria such as fingerprints, weight, height, eyes, hair, etc, and captured in one’s image. However, it is no longer the case that our identity is singularly embodied in our selfimage. In fact, the singularity of our self-image and identity becomes contested as it is proliferated, multiplied, and delivered through the vast range of media that we participate in only to show up in

>>Tattooing Tattoos make explicit a threshold between public and private; a threshold in which the public-private distinction is obscured in favor of a suspended mix. The skin acts as a membrane that is at once impossibly thin and infinitely thick; it is a surface of inscription that represents the subversion of the bodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s volume in favor of its expressive surface area. And yet the skin is infinitely thick as it exposes and mixes an intimate interiority with the ethereal expanse of the public realm to the extent that interior and exterior become indistinguishable from one another.

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This condition begins to question the status and notion of ‘face’ as a surface, as an image, and as a portrayal of identity. What I am calling ‘faciality’ refers to the contested condition of one’s identity beyond characteristic features as it proliferated and multiplied through the media; it is the image of one’s self as it is unfolded and inscribed along the surface of vast media networks.

Neo-phrenological Faciality

hrenology, developed in the late 18th century and popularized in the early 19th century, was an attempt by the German Physician Franz Joseph Gall to relate physical and mental reality by suggesting that one’s mental capacities and characteristics determine the shape and size of the cranium. The face, then, becomes a topological expression of one’s inner being and identity that can be thought of not as a collection of inherent physical traits, but as an interface between interior and exterior; the skin of the face becomes a thickened surface of transference between internal and external realities. Social networks and the proliferation of identity through media form a new skin with a new metric for understanding and measuring one’s interior reality. This skin is in the public domain and requires and requires mass media and participation for its completion: it is a skin with tags, comments, likes, pokes, ratings, etc. With each media interface, that skin is altered, shifting in its perception and reception. Our physical face is only one facial form: we have many faces that extend into an ambiguous public realm, resonating through vast social and civic

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different, often unexpected, places. It is now the case that one’s facebook profile or twitter account is as much a function of one’s identity as their image, though not recognized as such in any legal sense. But, as far as civic presence is concerned, these venues are of equal importance as is exemplified by the acceleration of celebrity in the recent past because of these media types.

>>Surfaces of Inscription The latent potential of the surface is as a volume in itself rather than as a container of volume; it becomes a surface of inscription in which information and content is embedded. Surface becomes autonomous rather than acting as an expression of that which lies beneath.

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[Methodology: Inscribing the surface] Idaho potato inscribed with black ink using prison-style tattoo gun. The surface gets worked as the locus of the objectâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; as the site of a spatial meander that re-maps the object based not on its volumetric or geometric qualities, but based on the thing being a surface. Inscribing the surface is an act of re-defining the object via surface.

Media Faciality

ocial media (like facebook and twitter) and mass media in general have become a way of acting on one’s public self-image–or public ‘face’– to a similar degree that a face tattoo re-aligns the public reception of one’s face as a public image. In fact, it can be said that the media face and the tattooed face are not merely analogues of one another, but that they often work in tandem to the extent that the facial tattoo itself becomes a media effect. This relationship is often expressed in celebrity where the facial tattoo becomes a reading of that person’s public self and their presence in the realm of popular culture. Take Mike Tyson, for example, whose tribal tattoo on his face marked a re-emergence of his persona on the public scene. After he bites off a portion of Evander Holyfield’s ear during a boxing match, he disappears from public view only to return later with re-invented celebrity status and a re-invented face within the media that simultaneously and mutually mark his new character as the unstable, potentially insane anti-hero that shows up in odd places in television and movies. What emerges from the interaction of the media face and the tattooed face is the questioning of the institution of the body and body identification as an unassailable fact of one’s identity. It becomes apparent that to inscribe the skin and to manipulate its image and reception is a form of mediatized proliferation of one’s public image that produces many potential realities about one’s identity: the celebrity face, the birth face, the ink face, the material and immaterial face, the meta face, etc.

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territories, returning to us altered by a facial feedback loop: I am who I say I am, You say who I am, I am who you say I am, You am who I say you am.

NOTES: A different kind of

[Best Fit]

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NOTES: Gordon Matta-Clark “Fake Estates”

Property lines act like Bratton’s “elongated wedge” typology.

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[Unaccountable Static]

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interiority NOTES: Moholy-Nagy “Long Exposures”

Pablo Picasso “Light Paintings”

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[Residual Representations] Official property line diagrams are subjected to the representational regime of the Google earth toolbar and the resultant property lines are mapped back onto the original. What results is the residue of a particular representational and technological subjectivity; the plan as a reliable representational convention is destabilized and a surface of simultaneous conventionality emerges in its place.

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extralegality [ABOVE] Image of Las Meninas is printed on card stock, property line overlay is laser cut, then folded. The surface is refolded and space reconceived along the lines of the inscribed surface according to a logic of compounding surfaces that includes the parallel projection of the object on the surface of the scanner bed.

[LEFT] Image of Las Meninas by Diego Velazquez overlaid with property line survey of Hackensack, New Jersey Inscribing the surface of the page redefines that which is interior and exterior to the surface of the canvas: surface begets surface begets surface.

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>>Thinness Objects are becoming increasingly thin while our tactile interaction with the objects that surround us is becoming increasingly surficial. We engage thinness differently- we operate at its surface rather than engaging its volume. As a result, our everyday technological expertise and object focus has shifted from hardware to software and operation systems: skin has become transparent and guts opaque.

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>>Surface over Volume distinct structures and systems, but as layers of skin (dermis). This view of the body suggests that it is not a volume but an accumulation of various layers and types of dermis that grow, change, shed, and replenish in an infinite cycle. The body as layers of skin is a continually expanding threshold that always privileges the role of surface over volume.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Hidingâ&#x20AC;?

The subversion of volume in favor of surface. Mark C. Taylor posits the body not as

“When nothing remains...nothing but skin and bones, when bones appear to be nothing...nothing but layers of skin, what once was called ‘reality’ becomes not only unbearably light but impossibly thin.”

“‘Skin rubbing at skin’...Hides hiding hides hiding...If depth is but another surface, nothing is profound...nothing is profound. This does not mean that everything is simply superficial; to the contrary, in the absence of depth, everything becomes endlessly complex.”

--Mark C. Taylor

[Surface inscription 3]

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Facial modalities

nifying these potential modes of faciality is the importance of skin, which is part and parcel of a general cultural condition that privileges surface and thinness. Hopefully what we can mine from this are a few courses of action or things we might be able to react to relative to faciality: 1) We can think about faciality methodologically as inscribing the skin or surface across multiple mediatic territories and realities, 2) Inscribing the skin or surface becomes a means of proliferation, 3) Faciality destabilizes the singularity of the surface.

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[Surface inscription 5] 38

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n pursuit of the extralegal, this chapter explores the status of the interior and its potential to realign institutional and territorial agendas in favor of alternative modes of governance. As mass mediation obliterates notions of public and private, what emerges conceptually in its place are a series of embedded territorial interiors viewed and participated in through general notions of media. The interior becomes a topological lining that stages spatial protocols as a type of governance different from the set coding of the city and the explicitation of its exteriors, rendered as a series of mediatized surfaces that allow us to reengage territorial and institutional structures. As both an institution and a territory of investigation, this chapter uses the [mediatized] courtroom as a launching point to explore the potential of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;surfacingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and embedded interiors to produce alternative readings of space that transcend the legalistic determinacy of the city. What the project seeks is an extralegal

>>Arrest Registration of the body is instrumental in its “arrest”; fingerprints, photographs, bodily descriptors (eye color, hair color, height, weight, etc.), and identification cards form a catalogue of skin or skins that stabilize the body and one’s identity in such a way that “arrest” becomes possible per the law.

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The subject-body produced by legal institutions is that of skin and bones; a body conceived of as stable, contained by skin, and supported by solid bone such that the body can be “arrested.” The stable body (skin and bone) moving in prescribed ways through the city then produces the “criminal” or “suspect” as a body outside the prescribed modes of being in the city underwritten by the judicial system. The ability for the judicial system to “arrest” the body whose status is given as suspect is contingent upon the body being conceived of as stable. Conceiving of the body as only flesh begins to suggest subversive modes of being, but that are always contained within the confines of the bodily envelope. Early research in the field of Phrenology suggested that the interior of the body and mind could be read in particular ways on the body’s surface, or epidermis. If one considers the body as layers of dermis as Mark C. Taylor does, it becomes possible to instrumentalize the epidermis as a communicative or translative surface. If one is then to imagine intervening in the surface of the body, such as clothing or tattooing the body, then the procession of the body from interior to exterior is reversed such that the exterior envelope of the body works inward. It is, in a matter of saying, the hijacking of skin to perform other tasks, not to mention the fact that processes such as tattooing and plastic surgery detour from the institutionality of the stable body: altering the body undermines the registration process necessary for “arrest.”

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The general notion of the extralegal is that it exists outside of normal institutional and spatial protocols of territory. The most poignant example that has arisen already in this pamphlet is the Predator drone. It is a case in which there are multiple actors, both animate and inanimate, operating in different legal territories simultaneously, resulting in an ambiguous space of action that lives outside of any definite legal space: A Predator drone pilot sits at a console in the U.S., maneuvering a drone aircraft in, say, Afghanistan. The pilot operates in the legal territory of the U.S. and the drone in the legal territory of Afghanistan. The question becomes; where is the locus of the legalistic body? Is it in the drone pilot himself or in the inanimate aircraft? Or is it multiple, migratory, and simultaneous? The extralegal aligns itself with the latter: the multiple, the migratory, and the simultaneous. If this is so, then it points to the heart of a larger cultural phenomenon: All forms of communication between humans and objects as well as humans and humans, and the loci of their activity are increasingly multiple, migratory, and simultaneous. This phenomenon can be described as the result of the commonly parsed terms ‘the Internet of things’ and ‘ubiquitous computing.’ In the first industrial revolution at the turn of the 20th century, the relationship between humans and technology was largely antagonistic in that the populace saw humanity as hostage to machines. But in the technological revolution that we are living today, based on technological industry and gadgetry, our relationship with machines has become sympathetic, liberating, and permissive rather than enslaving. The heavy machinery of industry that we grew accustomed to up until the late 20th Century gave the impression of permanence and physical immobility; factories had to be massive to house the machines necessary to produce goods. The durability of the machines in the factory was equal to that of the factory itself. Although large factories and cumbersome machines continue to be necessary, technology has shifted toward making these machines smaller, more efficient, and software based so that they are more agile, adaptable, and functionally mobile. Rather than ‘manning’ machines and

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space: a televisual, migratory, temporal space that emerges from within the interstices of spatial doublings and embedded interiors.

“The Premise of Recombinant Architecture”

“Even as genomic and transgenic design destabilizes the very bodies with which we inhabit our shared worlds, what is most crucially at stake is not the integrity of the physical body per se, but of the local and global social institutions built over centuries upon concepts of the body as a stable, natural referent. At the same moments when the biological medium of the body fragments from universal singularity to genetic and digital assemblage, the worlds we define through the body become themselves equally destabilized and re-determined by recombinant imaginaries. Any institution based on bodily discourses is a potential site for some recombinant revolution (the family, the home, the nation-state, “space” itself), and this leads us in several contradictory and sometimes dangerous directions. This is quite different from a “post-modern” multiplication of textual selves. It is a recognition of the only conditionally material membranes between body and world. The 21st century will be populated with genomically reflexive/self- conscious children, born and growing in bodies known to them as inhabitable expressions of “binary code”. Are we populating the early years of a eugenic century with a nightmarish biotechnological singularization of humanity? Are we also participating in the first years of a new society of biomaterial freedom, an architecture of the self that will allow (and demand) new reflexive practices of bodily expression and purpose?”

--Benjamin Bratton

>>Body As Membrane–Media Stack

A move toward skin as membrane is an attempt to move beyond the confines of the body to suggest multiple beings, both embodied and disembodied. Such states of the body are already being suggested by current technology. Identity for example is both in one’s physical appearance, but also in one’s Facebook page. If one imagines the body proliferated through the various media that we engage then the body becomes fluid rather than stable. The subjectbody that the notion of membrane suggests is other than that which is posited by current legal institutions, marking a very real problematic, and necessitating a re-conception of the stable subject-body. *Bratton, Benjamin. Lecture at the University of Michigan, “Surviving the Interface,” 11/2/10. Bratton suggests that the near future organization of the world surrounds ‘stacks’ of data at varying scales from individual body to institution to nation pointing to a realignment of the human/data relationship; our everyday will be defined through this human/data interface. 49

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Stills from â&#x20AC;&#x153;Augmented (Hyper)Reality.â&#x20AC;? 50

>>Redness The red [velvet] that provides a backdrop for the research is about setting a stage and providing material context that taps into other territories and other networks of inquiry. Red is the reformulation of the stripes on the American flag that sits directly behind a judge in a courtroom, and the redness of the velvet curtain in a movie theater, or redness as a rupture...that this material can hook into other things providing an out from the closing off of the courthouse as an institution...[Jason Young interjects: ...or even that as a model; here in the culture of the third floor, trying to push that beyond the status it would almost automatically get as a model].

M: I am constantly trying to ‘surface’ the project; I am always trying to deny the thing its volumetric object-hood. That is what I am doing with the match. I mapped out the color of the match; the redness, what that means, the white, what that is, where the stick comes from… and so that became a way of ‘surfacing’ the match. The match is denied as an object in favor of all of the networks of things that it hooks up into. By understanding where that thing comes from, in that sense you’ve denied that thing to be understood again as a match because you’re no longer talking about what it does, which is to start a fire, which is the least important part of the match. What is actually more important is that the red is red dye, the same as red food dye that you would put in red velvet cake. A: So you’re saying the redness of the match is something artificial? M: Initially the head of the match was red because it used red phosphorous, but red phosphorous is highly toxic and the factory workers would all get what’s called phossy-jaw where their jaw would disintegrate. So they [the match companies] stopped using it, but they maintained the redness of the match because it had a certain identifiability; people were used to seeing red matches. They switched over to using white phosphorous, which is non-toxic, but added red dye so that it would still be “a match.” The argument is that the object narratives and conceptual territories they tap into are more “the match” than the striking of the match, or at least that’s what it means to surface the match.*

*Transcription of the final Critical Conversation. March, 2011. 53

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TFT LCD

White phosphorus was outlawed in the early 1900’s through international legislation. It was known to be highly toxic and to cause “phossy jaw” in workers who handled it. An overwhelming majority of them worked in match factories.3 Zinc oxide is used in the tip of the match-head to give the white coloration that originally came from white phosphorus.

“Splints for its round wooden matches come from the 60,000-acre Diamond-owned tract of forest in Idaho and Washington. Diamond mills cut the timber and ship the match blocks to the factories, where machines turn out matches in one continuous operation.”1

zinc oxide

phosphorus sesquisulfide, potassium chlorate, and zinc oxide

phosphorus sesquisulfide, potassium chlorate, sulfur, rosin, a small amount of paraffin wax, and red dye

When phosphorus sesquisulfide was developed it replaced red phosphorus as the main ingredient in matches. To restore the iconic red coloration of the match-head, water-soluble red dye (like food dye) was added to the chemical mix.

water-soluble red dye

“In the Sacramento Valley is a 209,000-acre Diamond tract that supplies lumber to Diamond’s sixty retail lumber yards in California... the company also owns a 100-acre prune orchard...”2

Lamar’s red velvet cake donut

white pine or aspen 1 Henry A. Burd, “The Diamond Match Company,” The Journal of Marketing. Volume 4, Number 1 (July 1939). 2 Henry A. Burd, “The Diamond Match Company.” 3 David A. Moss, “Kindling a Flame under Federalism: Progressive Reformers, Corporate Elites, and the Phosphorus Match Campaign of 1909-1912,”The Business History Review, Volume 68, Number 2 (Summer, 1994).

[Methodology: Surfacing] Digital image collage The match is ‘surfaced’ by unpacking what IT is, not as an object that makes fire when struck against a surface, but as a series of networks that span material, culture, society, and representation. The formation of this new identity flattens its objectness, removing it from the context in which we expect it to exist, projecting it into wider territories of participation outside of its pragmatic being. In this way ‘surfacing’ becomes a way of knowing: the undoing and re-doing of the object across territories transforms the way we see it and what we thought IT was in the first place.

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“The Order of Things”

“This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought – our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing on afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, that stark impossibility of thinking that.”

--Michel Foucault

>>The Legal institution of Public and Private Space Public and private space within the city relies on the division of interior and exterior as legally defined, stable conditions. The stability of interior and exterior divisions and therefore public and private divisions provide the legal basis for the organization of the city around hyper-specific spatial boundaries and civic ownership. Without a stable notion of public and private, interior and exterior, our civic intention and the legal standing of our body in the city become ambiguous.

The way we interface with machines or gadgets is no longer through physical contact (although it is certainly present to some degree), but through virtual contact that occurs through ‘smart’ technology and apps. The gist of it is a shift from interfacing through hardware (the tactile and physical) to interfacing through software (the visual and atmospheric). Gadgetry is highly mobile, fluid, and adaptive. It is small and its lifespan can be short or long with minimal cost to the end-user. Gadgets are available to the masses and used on a massive scale, whereas bulky machines can only be managed and afforded by a few. As gadgets get smaller and smaller, thinner and thinner, but open up more and more content and information, gadgets and bodies come into closer being to the extent that nearly everyone is in constant contact with gadgets and the line between body and gadget becomes harder to distinguish. Institutions are bulky and cumbersome. But technology doesn’t wait. We stay current and informed of institutional movement through fluid media venues like twitter and smart phone apps: media that is fast, fleeting, and highly adaptable. While institutions maintain outdated notions of public, the public itself is changing as it encounters new ways to interface with institutions through these various technologies and media types. Take the legal system for example: the jury is no longer just those that sit in the jury box, but the larger public that follows a case on twitter or television, forming the court of public opinion. They become lawyers too, as expertise once held exclusively by print media is taken into the digital realm and made accessible to the masses. Thus traditional roles of judge, lawyer, jury, defense, and prosecution become convoluted and dispersed through a public that is able to interact and interface with the legal system in ways and from angles it never could before.

The courtroom

he implication for the city and its territory–founded on traditional legal protocols, and reliant on stability and inalienability–is that its spaces become multiple, migratory, and simultaneous as they encounter

<< 58

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physically pushing buttons, we are interfacing with them via gadgets that communicate issues, troubleshoot, and problem solve: machines man us.

>>The Courthouse

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The territory of the courtroom is encoded with the division of public and private. The law relies on this division even as it is obliterated by networks, networks of things, interfaciality and its increasing thinness.

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attorney/ witness room

attorney/ witness room sound lock

public

defense

prosecution jury box

podium

Deputy Law Clerk

court reporter witness stand judgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bench

<< 62

re dd

00:00

00:01

00:02

00:03

spectatorship lecterns

â&#x20AC;&#x153;A show where justice is dispensed at the speed of light.â&#x20AC;?

bench

00:26

roof plan of lighting 00:26

00:03

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spectatorship

“A show where justice is dispensed at the speed of light.”

[Migratory interiors and spatial doublings] A migratory spatial double is drawn as the camera lens moves through the courtroom producing a new interior that synthesizes public, mediatic, and institutional subjects. Judge Judy is an example of a mediatized courtroom in which a synthetic surface becomes the infrastructure for producing an atmosphere that poses in reference to a series of other atmospheres and interior conditions. Judge Judy is a stage set in California, posing as a New York courtroom. Through the ‘acting’ and subtleties of the interior (Judge Judy’s demeanor, the red brick wall just beyond the false window that suggests ‘New York-ness’, etc), Judge Judy’s courtroom as a [extralegal] televisual space taps into the internet of televisual interiors. Judge Judy only reveals itself within the network of interiors that it both produces and is a part of when we see the stage set for what it is. 64

The territory of the courthouse is based on a public operating in a city encoded with the division of public and private. The law relies on this division; one that is obliterated by social networks and networks of things produced by the technological revolution of gadgetry and media described earlier. As the traditional notion of legal institutionality gets obliterated in a post-public/private world, unanticipated relationships between the public and institutions emerge that are ambiguous at best. The potential of these relationships is the production of embedded interior conditions within the physical manifestation of the institution [of the courthouse and courtroom] that intensify the unanticipated mediatic structures that provide alternatives to the determinacy of what the courthouse maintains as an institution. 100%

110%

120%

130%

0째 15째 30째45째

[Time-based televisual mappings] The lens of the camera becomes the medium through which the surfaces of the courtroom are instrumentalized as agents of the institution. While outwardly invisible, the distortions of the camera lens render a space other than that which is governed by the institution- media provides an out from that which appears to be given. 66

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technological and mediatic protocols that render a legal system whose public is fluid and malleable.

[Folding Jig] The jig works on multiple levels. Its outer edges document the timebased televisual mappings and result in a virtual mediatic massing of the courthouse interior. Additionally, it produces a second (doubled) interior as the mass of the jig intersects with and mutually produces the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;migratory spatial doubleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (folded aluminum surface). The jig works functionally as a jig or template, and conceptually as a mutually constructed interior. In this way it begins to oscillate between the world of jigs, models, and representational space; between the world of temporary, disposable, migratory extralegal space, and durable institutional space.

[cut sheets]

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01:18

01:19

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01:

:18

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CMYK: 43,27,91,39

CMYK: 28,31,49,0

01:18

CMYK: 0,0,0,100

01:19

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[Migratory spatial double] waterjet-cut folded aluminum 74

court rep

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public

+14’-3”

prosecution

-5’-2”

+30’-8”

+10’-7”

+0”

defense +6”

porter

podium

+12’-0”

jury box

the bench

+0”

[Plan view]

witness stand

+6”

Interiors are embedded within one another to produce degrees of interiority and compound institutional hierarchies. The notion of ‘building envelope’ is corrupted by a series of other, emergent, ‘envelopes’... layers upon layers upon layers of skin. 76

â&#x20AC;&#x201C;logue

his pamphlet is meant to be projective; it is not meant to simply analyze, but rather to suggest futures for the work. It is assumed, with enthusiasm, that there will be open ends and frayed, incomplete edges. It is my hope that questions emerge at these edges with enough thickness to allow speculation on the part of others and to allow the work to follow trajectories that I could have never foreseen. Specifically in regard to surface, the pamphlet is a vehicle for me to collect a series of ways of thinking about surface, but they all have in common the intention of redefining surface and moving it into a new space of theorization. When it comes to surface, current architectural research tends to treat it like wrapping paper, getting caught up in the tectonic and technological loop of building envelope. Surface is like a sheet of paper that can be folded, etched, cut, rippled, etc., but it also like a gadget or screen that can be thought of as having rhizomatic properties and paradigmatic thresholds. It is essential that we engage the material tectonic definition of surface with the experiential, political, philosophical, mediatic, and paradigmatic aspects of surface to reach the potential depth of its value as an architectural medium. While the extralegal remains a nebulous term, it begins to suggest the possibility of multiple realities existing simultaneously as exponents of one another. And among the interstitial fallout from the mix of governmental apparatusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and representational regimes (the legal system, the media, the internet, democracy, twitter, facebook, etc.) that this pamphlet tries to capture, there is room for alternative forms of spatial practice. If we think of surface as a medium or threshold of this fallout, it imbues surface with the potential to be a multi-valent spatial agent within the discipline. I think of this work as existing within a field of stones being turned; it will only reveal new faces and surfaces of inquiry. This is what MS_DR, the extralegal, and surface is all about; thriving on oceanic expanses of intellectual inquiry and theoretical territory, and the magnetism of the multiple and the other. ... My sincerest thanks to Jason Young, Will Glover, and Perry Kulper who formed the core teaching team. Also Santiago Colas and Mark Wamble made major contributions through their mini-courses. And of course my classmates: Kelly Gawinek, Mark Stanley, Liu Fei, Sonja Janeva, Daniel Nissimov, Elizabeth George, and Wiltrud Simbuerger. Thanks to all of the critics and everyone that came to reviews and participated in the program.

Image credits New York City Archives. New York City Crime Scene, 1914-1918. < http://www.nlm.nih.gov/visibleproofs/ media/detailed/ii_c_306.jpg >. Smye Holland Associates. Litre Meter Printed Circuit Board. < http://www.smye-holland.com/SmyeHolland_ImageLibrary/Copy%20of%20Printed%20circuit%20board.jpg >. Velazqeuz, Diego. Las Meninas. 1656. < http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/ARTH/ Images/110images/sl14_images/velazquez_lasmeninas_large.jpg >. Wn.com. Cutaway view of SLR. < http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/E-30Cutmodel.jpg/800px-E-30-Cutmodel.jpg >. BEPJ. UAV Pilots. < http://www.bepj.org.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/UAV-Pilots.jpg >. Dronewarsuk.wordpress.com. Predator firing missile. < http://dronewarsuk.files.wordpress. com/2010/06/predator-firing-missile4.jpg >. Onearthtravel.com. World Aquarium. < http://onearthtravel.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/ world-aquarium.jpg >. Mili, Gjon. Picasso Draws a Centaur. 1949. < http://www.gstatic.com/hostedimg/b4685f880b9aee1e_ large >. Potts, Bruce. Face tattoo. < http://www.tattooblog.org/images/face-tattoo-by-bruce-potts-_1_49.jpg >. Doobybrain.com. Lil Wayne. < http://www.doobybrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/lil-wayne-2. jpg >. Mavisxp.com. Glossy white iPhone. < http://www.mavisxp.com/iPhone/IMG_2007.jpg >. Lee, Frances Glessner. Bathroom crime scene, Nutshell Collection. c. 1940. < http://www.nlm.nih.gov/ visibleproofs/media/detailed/ii_c_409.jpg >. Kuhne, Frederick. Fingerprint diagram. c. 1940. < http://www.nlm.nih.gov/visibleproofs/media/detailed/ iii_c_204.jpg >. Bertillon, Alphonse. Bertillon poster of physical features. < http://www.nlm.nih.gov/visibleproofs/media/ detailed/iii_c_138.jpg >. Matsuda, Keiichi. Stills from Augmented (hyper)Reality. 2010. < http://vimeo.com/8569187 >. Hogarth, William. The Reward of Cruelty (Plate IV). 1751. < http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/obp-wiki/ images/d/da/Anatomist_large.jpg >. Aaslestad Preservation Consulting, LLC. Luzerne County Courthouse. < http://architecturalphotogrammetry.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/lz-4.jpg >. Stills from Judge Judy, earthquake episode. Paramount Studios, 2008. < http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9_oDqdncYt4 >. Stills from A Few Good Men. Dir. Rob Reiner. Columbia Pictures, 1992. DVD.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. “What is an Apparatus?” Standford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Bratton, Benjamin. Introduction. “Speed and Politics.” By Paul Virilio. < http://bratton.info/projects/texts/ introduction-to-speed--and--politics/ >. Bratton, Benjamin. “The Premise of Recombinant Architecture.” BRATTON.INFO, 2006. < http://bratton. info/projects/texts/the-premise-of-recombinant-architecture-one/ >. Bratton, Benjamin. “Surviving the Interface: Envelope and Polis.” The University of Michigan. A+A Lecture Hall, Ann Arbor, MI. 2 November, 2010. Cortazar, Julio. “Axolotl.” Blow-up and Other Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1985. 3-9. Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.” New York: Vintage, 1994. Giles, Herbert Allen. “Chuang Tzu.” Extraordinary Tales. Eds. Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. London: Souvenir Press, 1973. Lerup, Lars. “The Suburban Metropolis.” After the City. Boston: MIT Press, 2001. 47-83. Nicholson, Fergus. “Nosce Te Ipsum.” Extraordinary Tales. Eds. Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. London: Souvenir Press, 1973. Taylor, Mark C. “Hiding.” Chicago: Univserity of Chicago Press, 1998. Wigley, Mark. “Resisting the City.” TransUrbanism. V2_Publishing / NAi Publishers. Netherlands, 2002. 103-120. Zaera Polo, Alejandro. “The Politics of the Envelope: A Political Critique of Materialism.” Volume #17. 76105.

Exploring spatial affiliations between institutions, territories and subjects, the MS_DR seeks new models of practice within a contemporary digital culture that compels us to do so. The Master of Science Design Research program (MS_DR) is a two semester, post-professional degree program that posits architectural studio work as a research protocol. The 30 credit-hour curriculum is constructed around a two-semester studio/seminar combination that asserts ideas, ideation, and the making of theory as grounds for an independently pursued research path. Studio work attempts to place architecture deep inside its cultural site of reckoning, working vividly with media influences, technological imperatives, and representational biases within contemporary digital culture. The seminar colludes with this studio emphasis, deflecting studio practices through the heuristic making and leveraging of theory across a multitude of considerations within design research. A Special Topic Seminar and Workshop make each year within the MS_DR program a distinct experience as two visiting critics are asked to frame their own work with respect to the overarching emphasis within the degree program. These support courses allow inter- and trans-disciplinary perspectives to be formalized within the curriculum. A required course on architecture pedagogy encourages students to bridge between their individual research paths and the rigors of academic life, and thus positions the MS_DR as a teaching credential for those interested in transitioning into design education. Students conclude the two-semester sequence with an exhibition of work and the submission of a single document that presents both design exploration and theory production together in a hybrid format.

MS_DR Pamphlets Series: 2009 1 Patrick Carmody 2 Ellen Donnelly 3 Melanie Kaba 4 Susan Massey 5 Kaleena Quinn 2010 6 Ross Hoekstra 7 Sean Houghton 8 Sen Liu 9 Patrick Lynch 10 Colin Richardson 11 Claire Sheridan 2011 12 Kelly Gawinek 13 Elizabeth George 14 Sonja Janeva 15 Lufei Li 16 Daniel Nissimov 17 Micah Rutenberg 18 Wiltrud Simbuerger 19 Mark Stanley

Photo by Mark Stanley