STRATA Regulatory Nonsense:

property & geology a celebratory romp through worlds / words of dirt, data & dwelling tuesdaymornings 9:30am-1:30pm rmit design hub

Since Regulatory Nonsense began, NLP technologies have become more plausibly human but also more problematically opaque, in both content and intent. As criticality is obfuscated by hype, we must work harder — and work together — to unpick the logics and politics of AI/ML/DL technologies in design practice. Regulatory Nonsense therefore offers a collaborative curriculum: through structured esquisses, you will enact democratic processes, co-write ownership rules, and co-make worlds, while remaining individually accountable for you own (ethical and architectural) responses.

In Strata Party, you will perform two broad design investigations:

1) Together, we will negotiate and co-write a new regulation for ownership of dirt, data, and dwelling, with help from a suite of glitchy linguistic bots trained on our own critically curated datasets.

2) Collaboratively, you will conduct a series of architectural design quasi-experiments to evidence the effectiveness, limitations, and possibilities of this new regulation –eventually culminating in your own resolved and cohesive architectural project at the former Cave Hill Quarry in Lilydale

Before architecture, there is property. Before computation, there is geology.

If property relations are constituted and controlled through written language, can a linguistic shift in our regulations make our property relations otherwise? And what might this mean for architecture?

In Regulatory Nonsense, the written rules governing property relations are co-written by an AI-amalgamation of poets, storytellers, artists, and philosophers. Using this glitchy, linguistically thick language, we blur, nudge, and renegotiate title boundaries and thresholds of bare-minimum compliance in novel and generative ways. Perhaps, through these new and nonsensical property relations we may also find new possibilities for architecture.

This semester, we return to issues of property relations and regulations with a renewed focus on how acts of planetary ownership are locally and materially constituted. We will explore the ways that AI and architecture are both intrinsically material practices, reliant on extractivism. And, we will use the former Cave Hill quarry site in Lilydale as a speculative sandbox to explore the ways that regulatory language delineates or dilutes ownership conditions for dwelling, data, and dirt.

Along the way, we must be nimble in our disciplinary positioning, toggling back-and-forth between the reciprocal roles of policymaker and architect; juggling the demands of rule-making (for all, for others) and (our own) design intent; grappling with the ghosts of inherited colonial bureaucracy.

Site Visit: Saturday 29 July

Student Led Pre-Mid-Sem Peer Review: Week 6

Mid-Sem Review: Friday, Week 7

International Guest Lecture: Week 8