!"# $ % %! ! & '() FATE : R E
curated by & michail vlasopoulos
dimiTra gelagoTi
FATE . Dimitra Gelagoti and Michail Vlasopoulos
“The head is a repetition of the whole trunk with all its systems” lorenz oken
ToureTTe Journal 6.0 bears the prefix “Re” as its title calling to mind processes of replication, reproduction and recursion. At the juncture of an age when theories grow more sensitive of the cycles that sustain this world, we ask ourselves whether it is FATE for mankind to reproduce, for our biology to regenerate, for history to be repeated or our innocence to be redeemed. What we most generally call ‘form’ is the cumulative result of reiterative generative forces. The notion of life is bounded with the notion of replication. In fact, a living organism can be minimally defined as a self-replicating, self-regulating pattern. Even more abstractly, the life of any dynamic system may be attributed to the recurrent processes by which it perseveres in its formal identity; “Look at the Mountain,” said Paul Cézanne, “once it was Fire.” Occasionally, it is the repetition of a fundamental unit that constitutes the shape of life in which an organism is cast. In a famous sketch from the 1790s Goethe delineated the sequentiality of structure across plants and insects. Later that year, when the great morphologist picked up a sheep’s skull in Venice, he imagined it as the unfoldment of an iterative modular vertebra. The idea of a fundamental organ and a developmental trajectory, soon after its conception, was extrapolated from plants and arthropods to vertebrates. The notion of replication allows us to navigate nature and culture through the same univocal process. From Dawkins’ replicators, -primordial crystals that bootstrap natural selection- to the Replicants from Blade Runner who lead a revolution, from industrial reproducibility to viral replication, from the aesthetics of the repetitious to the psychoanalysis of obsession, the concept of replication haunts our common grasp of form and formation.
ToureTTe 6.0 welcomes design projects, manifestos, interviews essays that investigate the notion of “Re� throughout the history of ideas, in culture and nature. Abstracts in American English, formatted according to the guidelines of the Chicago Manual of Style should be submitted by Sept 1, 2014 to tourette.journal@gmail.com.
Cover image: Reflex responses to rhythmical stimulation in the frog, from: Etienne-Jules Marey, Du mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie (Paris, 1868), 406, Fig. 132.
dimiTra gelagoTi is an architect, woriking at Adrian Smith +Gordon Gill Architects in Chicago. She holds a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University. Her interests are concerned with forensic science, narrative and domesticity. She secretly wants to become a professional caption-writer for the New Yorker. michail vlasopoulos is a PhD student at the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago. He graduated with a Diploma in Architecture from the National Technical University of Athens, after which he attended the Master in Design Studies program at Harvard University GSD, earning the Gerald M. McCue Medal of 2012.
INDEX 1.1 An Interview with Sanford Kwinter at Harvard GSD, “On Process,”
5.1 Lessons from Fractal Geometry, anna-maria vlasopoulou
michail vlasopoulos
2.1 Goethe, Oken and the Vertebral Theory of the Skull,
6.1 Repetition and the Infinitesimals in the Early Modern World, georgios roussos
michail vlasopoulos
3.1 The Return of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return,
7.1 Walter Benjamin and the Meaning of Reproducibility,
Trevor Tucker
peTros phokaides
4.1 Modernism and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder,
8.1 Themes of Replicability: BLADE RUNNER (1982), The PRESTIGE (2006) and MOON (2009),
dimiTra gelagoTi
sTelios giamarelos
... and others