Graduate Thesis 2022 Provocations

Provocation

Week 01

1. Words

dissconnect domestic ecology performance wilderness

2. Texts

Banham, Reyner. A Home is not a House. Volume 2. New York: Art in America, 1965.

Bratton, Benjamin. The Terraforming. Moscow: Strelka Press, 2019.

Farocki, Harun. Phantom Images. 660, 2004.

Gage, Mark. Aesthetics Equals Poltics. MIT Press, 2019.

Ghosn, Rania, and El Hadi Jazairy. Geostories. New York: Actar Publishers, 2019.

Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Penguin UK, 2018.

Latour Bruno. Essay. In What Is Cosmopolitical Design: Design, Nature, and the Built Environment. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015. Head, 1986.

Markopoulou, Areti. Ecologies and Ecosophies: A Conversation. IaaC Bits. Barcelona: Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catelona, 2019.

Morton, Timothy. “Guest Column: Queer Ecology.” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 125, no. 2 (2010): 273–82. https://doi. org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.2.273. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Morton, Timothy. Black Ecologies. Columbia University Press, 2018.

Rosen, Philip, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, Columbia University Press, 1986.

Tarkovsky, Andrey. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. London: Bodley

Tschumi, Bernard. Architecture and Disjunction. MIT Press, 1996

3. Projects

Koolhaas Houselife Mon Oncle

4. Works outside of the field of architecture

Photography, Cinema, Land Art

5. Techniques, technology materials The thesis will have a strategically coordinated script, occurring on a larger time scale. The project will be rendered in Cinema4D and presented in a movie. There will be various techniques, including xparticles, which will allow me to depict the architectural object in an everchanging form and conditions.

6. Contemporaneity

What makes the thesis contemporary is the use of modern technologies while exploring reality. The combination of existing cinematographic experiences, recaptured in a digital medium, can transcend the dualism between the content and its structure by flattening them and then understanding them as one momentum. This momentum is artificial, weird, irrational, uncomfortable or even awakening.

Week 02

Dissconnect

"One of the reasons why we feel so powerless when asked to be concerned by ecological crisis, the reason why I, to begin with, feel so powerless, is because of the total disconnect between the range, nature, and scale of the phenomena and the set of emotions, habits of thoughts, and feelings that would be necessary to handle those crises—not even to act in response to them, but simply to give them more than a passing ear."

"So what do we do when we are tackling a question that is simply too big for us? If not denial, then what? One of the solutions is to become attentive to the techniques through which scale is obtained and to the instruments that make commensurability possible. After all, the very notion of anthropocene implies such a common measure. If it is true that “man is a measure of all things” it could work also at this juncture."

Architecture and Ecology

Buildings as ecosystems within ecosystems which actively adapt to momentary changes in their physical reality. The metaphor should be left behind now.

"we envision architecture as a new living organism in synchronization with multi-species inhabitants and the environment itself, adapting to nature and evolving with it, co-existing with bacteria, animals, humans and augmented humans" ... to quote Haraway: "To be one at all you must be a many, and that's not a metaphor." "The ecological wisdom of architecture cannot be a metaphor."

Fig 1 Truman Show.USA: Paramount Pictures, 1998. Ref 1 Bruno Latour, What Is Cosmopolitical Design?: Design, Nature and the Built Environment (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 22 . Ref 2 Markopoulou, Areti. Ecologies and Ecosophies: A Conversation. IaaC Bits. Barcelona: Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catelona, 2019.

Phantom Shots in House of Bears by Dmitry Kokh

In 2021 Russian wildlife photographer Dmitry Kokh discovered a group of polar bears living at the abandoned meteorological station on Kolyuchin Island. The drone took photos and videos from a position that a human being cannot usually occupy. In the following document, I will refer to these photos as so called phantom shots, a term borrowed from Harun Farocki. What is fascinating about the images is the connection between collective human behavior and its effect on other species and the environment. These images show us the inevitable realness of climate change phenomena and their impact in an almost surreal manner. I want to address climate change and the notion of Latourian disconnect through different scales of time and space in the form of phantom shots and various actors coexisting and inhabiting the stage - a specific place like an abandoned meteorological station on the Kolyuchin Island.

Fig 1 Frame of Polar Bears Occupying the Abandoned Building Fig 2 Phantom Shot of Polar Bears Taken by the Drone Ref 2 Farocki, Harun. Phantom Images. 660, 2004.

Fig 4

Week 03

What is Nature or How to be Ecological?

The first task of the thesis is to define that nature and humans are not separate from each other but rather the same thing. As described in Dark Ecology, to preserve our environment, the idea of nature needs to be abolished. Here Zizek goes even further by claiming that "to confront the threat of a new ecological catastrophe is to cut off our roots in nature and become more artificial."

"Diagnosing how climate change is anthropogenically artificial is not to redraw borders between human culture and nature, but to recognize that technical intelligence is what makes anomalously regular patterns regular. Climate change’s epistemic challenge to everyone is that the entire world has become an exercise in interpreting artificiality. The implication is that our response must also be resolutely anthropogenic. The plan is and must be artificial.”

Fig 1 Zizek at the Landfill Fig 2 Exomind by Pierre Huyghe Fig 3 Disneylands by Thomas Struth (next page) Ref 1 Examined Life. Canada: Sphinx Productions, 2009. Ref 2 Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology. Columbia University Press, 2016. Ref 3 Bratton, Benjamin. The Terraforming. Moscow: Strelka Press, 2019.

Week 04

Workshop with Casey Rehm

1. How does the use of platforms and AI for the automation of intellectual labour impact the agency of individual designers?

It gives a certain kind of freedom of expression, especially when it comes to results. A designer can hybridize or invent new aesthetics or visual concepts. This kind of aesthetics could potentially develop new ideas which are not bounded to current dogmas. To me, a more interesting question is how to interpret this data and what to do with it?

2. How does the investment of labor, energy, and capital in the production of design technology influence power structures it creates?

It can destroy the systematic hierarchy if the AI serves its users rather than users serving the AI. But, on the other side, it has a dangerous power to create a platform owned, constructed, and designed by its owner, in the sense that all the infrastructure is owned by one entity, which dictates the reality of that specific world. I think this is a dangerous threat to democracy and the freedom of speech, if they even exist. The real potential of moving away from certain constructed dogmas with AI loses its primary meaning if the process does not have a certain amount of freedom. Input Text: One of the reasons why we feel so powerless when asked to be concerned by the ecological crisis, the reason why I, to begin with, feel so powerless, is because of the total disconnect between the range, nature, and scale of the phenomena and the set of emotions, habits of thoughts, and feelings that would be necessary to handle those crises not even to act in response to them, but simply to give them more than a passing ear.

3. What opportunities does automating repetitive tasks in architectural production have for reshaping contemporary practice.

It helps to concrete certain processes, which are a part of the common workflow.

Output Text: We cannot even imagine how such vast, overwhelming events must feel, or why we should want to stop the bleeding, or the suffocation, just because of some trivial, trivial, insignificant changes in our life. But we are all very familiar with these things. We understand the importance of an adequate diet, adequate exercise, adequate sleep. We understand that if we can afford to do more for the planet and ourselves than we're already doing and if the Earth is still ours and we're still in this world—well, we're not going do anything else for the next hundred years, at least not unless we want the planet to be completely destroyed. It's going to be earth in the hands of us, and it's going to be a planet of us, unless we're going to keep it the way it is now, we're going to keep ourselves in charge. It's a given.

There's a sense in which, if you're thinking about the problems of planet earth, what you don't do is just to look at the problems and not start a project of change. You look at the problems that are there, and at the ways,

it might be possible to address them, and you start going from some specific problem to the more general problem—which becomes your project of change. But if you start with the abstract problem, your task is to identify the specific problem. Your goal can't be to change a million, a hundred million, a billion or a thousand million people as to how they deal with a problem, because they're going to be completely paralyzed and unable to deal with any problems. That's not the job; it's to focus on one, to start with one. We can only be involved in politics right now when we find out what, exactly, the problem is, and to find ways to deal with it that are not so specific as to make it very difficult for the people to be responsible for their own lives. How is the politics of the future going to be different?

The big differences are going to be that people don't live their lives by the rules of people who've been dead for centuries and generations.

That's the biggest difference, isn't it? Yes.

The old forms of thought and the superstitions that the ancient societies had about their place in a universe that was very different from their lives in Europe were very different from today's view. Their lives were very narrow because they could only know their own society and their own history.

Fig 1 AI Image 01 Fig 2 AI Image 02

Week 05

Notion of Inside and Outside

One of the ongoing disciplinary questions in architectural academia has been the notion of inside and outside. For example, where is the border between domestic and wilderness, and what kind of environmental perception does it trigger? Gregory Crewdson's work is one of the most provocative ones addressing a particular type of relationship between exterior and interior. With Crewdson's own words, "There's tension between some sense of stillness and some sense of unease. Ultimately these pictures are about a search, attempting to make a connection to something larger than yourself." Crewdson's images are anthropogenic, depicting highly detailed, fantastical worlds, which are open to interpretation.

By intervening between the two conditions, Crewdson's work transgresses beyond the standard perception of what is (not) nature. In relation to well-known text by Reyner Banham, A Home is not a House, the opposition to a house as an empty shell brings a whole new dimension, which goes beyond Banhma's technocratic approach. The world is not built from one or the other, but many, simultaneously juxtaposing in constant flux. Dellegret's anatomy reduces house to two conditions, which helps us to understand the complexity of technology, which is needed to operate our homes but does not diminish the connection between the inside and the outside of our domestic environments.

Humans are an active ingrediant of the environment, with all its dirty truths and realities. By accepting the idea, there is no real border between us and nature, we could allow unexpected things to happen, which occur in Crewdson's art as an example. I will take these images as an inspiration to the upcoming project for my thesis.

Fig 1

Fig 1 After Life Ahead by Pierre Huyghe Fig 2 Mother and Daughter by Gregory crewdson Fig 3 Home and Mood by Gregory Crewdson (next page) Ref 2 Epson Print Your Legacy | Photographer Gregory Crewdson. YouTube. YouTube, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=bp_bA7eJexo. Ref 3 Banham, Reyner. A Home is not a House. Volume 2. New York: Art in America, 1965.

Fig 2

Week 06

Domestic vs Wilderness

wilderness - wild, undomesticated, unrestrained, out of control, disorderly

domestic - domus, house, home, oikos, home economy, ecology, homemaking, homelife

While Latourian disconnect addresses the condition in which one feels 'out of place' in the current world, this thesis project explores connectivity. In Queer Ecology, Morton cites Shell by explaining, "All life-forms, along with the environments they compose and inhabit, defy boundaries between inside and outside, at every level. When the environments become intimate - as in our age of ecological panic and scientifically measurable risk (Beck) - it is decisevely no longer an environment, since it no longer just happens around us." Wild and domestic conditions are the key to explore the notion of connectivity. Different objects are penetrating through space, juxtaposing in the uncanny matter. Creating a strange or somewhat mysterious world in which one inhabits a domestic environment. What is the relationship between different objects, human and non-human actors occupying the space, exploring their relationships and boundaries? How are they connected, and how do these forms break the hierarchy of our daily perception?

Fig 1 House with Plants by Junya Ishighami Fig 2 Ca'n Terra House by Ensamble Studio Fig 3 Ca'n Terra House by Ensamble Studio Ref 1 Morton, Timothy. “Guest Column: Queer Ecology.” PMLA/ Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 125, no. 2 (2010): 273–82. https://doi.org/10.1632pmla.2010.125.2.273.

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