Thresholds 38 – Future by MIT

thresholds 38 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Architecture, Room 7 - 337 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139

thresholds 38

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Editor Orkan Telhan Assistant Editor Adam Fulton Johnson Graphic Design

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Advisory Board Mark Jarzombek, Chair Stanford Anderson Dennis Adams Martin Bressani Jean-Louis Cohen Charles Correa Arindam Dutta Diane Ghirardo Ellen Dunham-Jones Robert Haywood Hassan-Uddin Khan Rodolphe el-Khoury Leo Marx Mary McLeod Ikem Okoye Vikram Prakash Kazys Varnelis Cherie Wendelken Gwendolyn Wright J. Meejin Yoon

thresholds is the peer-reviewed, bi-annual journal of architecture, art, and media culture produced by editors in the Department of Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Opinions in thresholds are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors, the Department of Architecture, nor MIT.

Patrons James Ackerman Imran Ahmed Mark and Elaine Beck Tom Beischer Yung-Ho Chang Robert F. Drum Gail Fenske Liminal Projects, Inc. R.T. Freebaim-Smith Nancy Steiber Robert Alexander Gonzales Jorge Otero-Pailos Annie Pedret Vikram Prakash Joseph M. Siry Richard Skendzel

No part of thresholds may be photocopied or distributed without written authorization. Correspondence thresholds Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Architecture, Room 7-337 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA thresh@mit.edu architecture.mit.edu/thresholds/ copyright 2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology ISSN 1091-711X PSB Job # 10-08-0288 Printed by Puritan Pressâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Hollis, New Hampshire Text set in DIN. Design by Vassia Alaykova Cover illustration by Lucy Cheung

Special thanks to: Mark Jarzombek for his advice and advocacy; Sarah Hirschman for her incredible dedication to the thresholds spirit; Adam Fulton Johnson for his support and feedback. thresholds is indebted for the tireless support of Rebecca Chamberlain, Jack Valleli, Minerva Tirado, Michael Ames, and Puritan Press, Inc.

thresholds 38

Editorial 00 5 ORKAN TELHAN

The Irrational Genome Design Contest 01 6 Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

Shaping Eternity: The Preservation of Lenin’s Body 02 10 Alla G. Vronskaya

An Architecture of Humors 03 14 R&Sie(n)

The Illusions of Control 04 26 Radical Engineers and Reactionary Artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr

Design for Decline: The Bank of Savings and Futures 05 32 ChrisTOPHER TOHRU Guignon

What Do We Do With This Future? 06 36 An Examination of Tempelhof Airport Elizabeth Krasner

Networking Overload, with Potplants 07 40 An interview about the Natural Fuse project Usman Haque, interviewed by Matthew Fuller

From Here to Infinity: 08 46 Make-Believe and Virtuality On the Japanese Driving Range John Zissovici

ISLAND PHANTASMAGORIA - Exploring the Political/Philosophical Underpinnings of 09 52 Fictional Islands and Imagining a Future of Plastic-Pirate-Island-Utopias Manar MourSi

Towards Diversity in Data Culture 10 58 Marc Böhlen

ARUPtocracy and the Myth of a Sustainable Future 11 64 Mark Jarzombek

The Domestication of the Prison or the Demonization of the House 12 66 MICHAIL Vlasopoulos - PETROS Phokaides

The Golden Institute 13 70 Sascha Pohflepp

Composition of the Earth 14 76 Studio And

Turning the Black Box into a Great Gizmo 15 80 Timothy Hyde

Fight the Google-Jugend! 16 84 Wilfried Hou Je Bek

Orkan Telhan Editorial

Future never arrives ‘as is.’ Without critique, future is dogma; a sovereign institution, a blind vector driving what is now and present towards silent, monotone, and prescribed experience. What we think of as future inscribes a limit onto the present; transforming and regulating what it is, we do as we know by now. Writing for and with future increases awareness of what it is now. It improves the capacity to deal with the fear of the unknown; not the one that is probable now, but rather the one that is to come— the one that can suspend its image from the present. thresholds 38 disseminates seeds— literary, biological, synthetic, utopian— hopefully non-conformist positions within the current future. What you will find inside the bag on the cover is the common vetch: V.sativa*. Vetches saw many futures. Since their first domination in the Near East—9500 years ago—they resisted many biological, economic, ecologic and social pressures; became the residues of the past—got mutated, synthesized, or colonized—yet survived until today. When they meet the soil, they will continue again writing their future—in negotiation with what they know about it by now and what it will be by then. Common vetch is aggressive and invasive, it spreads fast. But it is good for restoring land. It adds nitrogen to the soil, breaks up its compaction, and distributes a lot of organic matter through its roots. It prepares the land for other crops. Seed it on a piece of land and it will know what to do. What follows V.sativa are a series of positions to mobilize our current perception of future—to treat it both as temporal regime that puts current cultural production into perspective—but also as a mode of organization that can

defamiliarize us from our existing habits of future. As synthetic biology firmly claims itself as a new design discipline, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s irrational genome competition asks us what lies behind the inherent myth of synthesizing life. This is not a contest for building new Frankensteins; rather an exercise to think about unintentional life—hopefully, free from the prescribed myths and narratives of what we already know now—as life. In contrast to the biopolitics of the newly synthesized, Alla G. Vronskaya draws our attention to the future of the death where propaganda is constructed by preservation and necrophilia. As Vronskaya traces the history of Lenin’s dead body, she reveals the design of his myth—a combination of the body and its symbolism—the technology that not only preserves it, but also presents it as the very architecture of the regime. R&Sie(n) discuss their architecture of humors: an interplay of protocols between biochemistry, neurobiology, and robotics. For the “future purchasers” of architecture, R&Sie(n) familiarize us with a new logic of fabrication that is not based on structuration rather on desiring—which operates with dopamine, adrenalin, serotonin and hydrocortisone—and computes an architecture of secretion and weaving materialized in bio-plasticcement. For Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, the drive for the future of life-making relies heavily on illusions of control—the desire to open up new frontiers to force fit the engineering mindset to manage life and its flow. Catts and Zurr highlight the need for a cultural reaction against the Taylorization of life and its products by artists and designers who can radically challenge the engineers in their ivory workshops. Christopher Tohru Guignon proposes the bank for our new capitalism—a prudently

designed architecture that epitomizes a failing economy—a future in depletion and decline. In a world that is myopically driven by our unchecked growth and romantic notions of progress, Guignon’s architecture not only feels more convincing, but also much more prepared—for the many failures to come. Elizabeth Krasner tells us what happens when multiple visions of future get stuck in architecture and drain imagination. In Berlin’s Tempelhof, Krasner witnesses the tension that gives birth to the contested space of the airport: a site that simultaneously bears the denial of an embarrassing regime but also the demands from a youth that is ready to leave behind the fear of a past future to claim a better one. Usman Haque discusses Natural Fuse with Matthew Fuller. In times when we witness everyday a plethora of ideas to fix the dying planet, Natural Fuse goes beyond the regular Band-Aid. A network of plants and people—and a thinking that is deeply rooted in participatory culture— offers a more convincing alternative to the resentment-driven, commercial remedies for the so-called sustainable futures. John Zissovici dissects the anatomy of the driving range and the role of virtual golf as the emerging recreational ritual in Japan. Refusing to be city or nature, image or space, real or virtual—the virtual golf range offers a new vantage point for Zissovici: a new display landscape that can be read as an elegant hybrid mashup for new expectations; not a this or that architecture. When 75% of the world’s population is projected to live by precarious coastlines, Manar Moursi prepares us—part real, part fiction—for island habitation. Moursi proposes not only viable strategies for our survival, but also alternative models of real-estate and governance; adaptive economies and piracy—that could

respond better to the socio-political necessities of the coming era and finally free us from our rigid conceptions of structure, stability and reality. Marc Böhlen walks us behind the scenes of culture and peeks into the recent trends in the gathering, manipulation, and interpretation of data. Like a real tech support, he reads the symptoms of our current data malaise and assures us that there is not much to fear from our pleasures to be seen or remain invisible; there is still much room to explore— conceive diverse experiences—with data. Technology plus control is not equal to nature. The myth of the sustainable future is not what ARUPtocracy wants us to believe. Marc Jarzombek cuts the pipe that pumps the opium for our masshallucination. He asks us to step outside from our false hopes of sustainability and learn to live, theorize, engineer and design—once again—in a nature that was never natural or sustainable. Flesh is the prison of the soul. Michail Vlasopoulos and Petros Phokaides traverse a landscape of technologies and interrogate our drive for self-confinement. Theirs is a dystopian document for the sociologists of the future—an exposé of our representational, metaphorical and animistic drives—for imagining and building enclosure. It is 1981, Carter wins another term against Reagan and becomes the 40th president. Sascha Pohflepp writes the fictional future of America from the perspective of the Golden Institute. An America that is not dependent of fossil fuels; capable of modifying climate to harness energy from lightning, and utilize its highways to generate energy where drivers are paid back by franchising chains for their high-speed exiting. Cities are always known best from their fictional artifacts. But one needs to be

really lucky to find an urban meteorite imagined by Studio And. In times when it is easy to lose oneself in the nausea of cities, urban meteorites are like mysterious street diamonds—the contemporary bread crumbs—perhaps our only hope to imagine a way back home. Timothy Hyde looks at the future of disciplinary knowledge with the black box and the gizmo—as two different models for design pedagogy. After taking an x-ray of the black box of architecture and dissecting the old rituals of the practice, Hyde tells us why the gizmo model is more relevant today—both for addressing contemporary concerns and to open up the field towards more inter- and transdisciplinary epistemologies. We are miserable creatures. We are stunted in our growth. We are mostly naked. We are not like you. In our concluding text for the issue, Wilfried Hou Je Bek speaks us from the language of savages who do not need Google, who already know everything they need to know. This manifesto is another last hope to confront our very unconscious before we have to search for it online t * Due to agricultural legislations, only the issues distributed in the U.S. will have the seed bag on the cover.

The Irrational Genome Design Contest Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a designer, artist and researcher interested in the future. She uses design to explore the implications of emerging and unfamiliar technologies, science and services. She has an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art, a degree in Architecture from Cambridge University, and spent a year at Harvard University as a Herchel Smith scholar. Daisy recently completed a residency at Symbiotica, the art and science collaborative laboratory at the University of Western Australia. Recent projects include E.chromi, a collaboration with James King and Cambridge University’s grand prize winning team at the 2009 International Genetically Engineered Machines competition (www.echromi.com) and a science fiction short story for Icon magazine, UK, co-written with SymbioticA’s Oron Catts. Her work is currently exhibited in the Wellcome Trust’s windows in London, curated by Dunne & Raby. Daisy is now Design Fellow on the EPSRC/NSF-funded research project, Synthetic Aesthetics (www.syntheticaesthetics.org), between Stanford and Edinburgh universities, bringing together synthetic biology and design.

“A myth is a lie that tells the truth,” says Arshia Sattar, Sanskrit scholar and expert on Indian mythology to a group of teenage art and design students from Bangalore entering iGEM, MIT’s annual International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, a synthetic biology legend in itself.1 We are sitting out on a terrace in Bangalore on a sweltering mid-summer night, eating pizza, and sipping Thums Up laced with Indian rum. It is my birthday. A few weeks earlier, Yokohama, Japan: “An international competition to support future specialists in rational genome designs for synthetic biology;” a press release announces a new synthetic biology competition, the International Rational Genome-Design Contest, GenoCon, launched by the Bioinformatics and Systems Engineering division of the RIKEN research institute. Rationality. That’s the key to synthetic biology. Synthetic biology rejects contextual solutions and disorder in favor of control and rationality. Binary biology. Universal solutions. Predictive not descriptive. “The first self-replicating species that we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer,” proclaimed one American character in this story, J. Craig Venter, earlier this month as he announced to the world his lab’s achievement in creating what they described as the world’s ‘first synthetic cell.’

Synbio’s multiple protagonists promise to engineer life into a state of functional order. No gray space here; just black and white promise. We can save the world: through limitless diesel pumped out by safely lab-locked bacteria fed a syrupy diet of Brazilian sugarcane, or by their engineered cousins, just as safe, released into the great oil slicks of dirty technologies to digest their failures. Or so it is claimed. These stories are the myths manufactured to help us get closer to the scientific truth. Just as in Indian mythology—as Arshia reminds us back on the terrace, horns beeping and dogs barking out in the darkness of the Bangalore night—myths have variants. Synthetic Biology is a story told in different ways by its different characters. Of course, manufacturing myths does not imply intentional misconstruction; this is about metaphor and storytelling, an integral part of science. Imagining promise allows us to fulfill it. This is how science and technology works, how we develop enthusiasm to pursue these imagined futures, how science funding works. We’re always looking towards ‘New Horizons.’ The Irrational Genome Design Contest is a fictional competition I’m inventing right now to add to the synbio myth. But let us start nearer to the beginning. Since the synthetic biology story could turn into an epic, we’re probably only in the first few pages. Synthetic biology is filled with big, real competitions—the Irrational contest could be another of the intellectual battles. In reality, there is the open source iGEM, where the Bangalore students are headed. Growing exponentially, this year it will host around 150 undergraduate teams from around the world, each entering a novel, engineered bacteria. That translates to nearly 2,000 students being introduced to synthetic biology in 2010. Many of their universities are also new to it, entering the research community through a pedagogical exercize that began in 2003 as a short class at MIT. iGEM’s intention is to fill the Registry of Standardised Biological Parts, a gray freezer located at MIT, with a library of sequences of DNA, each interchangeable, characterised and useful in constructing genetic circuits. These engineering components are known as BioBricks™. Then there is the Japanese GenoCon, which one of my synbio colleagues passed on via email, adding wearily, “For those of you who think we don’t have enough to do getting synbio foundational technologies established.” GenoCon, is virtual and web-based. Teams will design sequences of DNA for a plant called Arabadopsis thaliana, a model organism, well understood. The challenge: design a DNA sequence that programs this delicate little cress to eliminate and detoxify airborne formaldehyde pollution. These rationally designed sequences (under 2000 base pairs of DNA) will be submitted online; the best will be inserted into real plants, and observed in formaldehyde-rich environments, cultivated in a lab in Yokohama. Sequences may remain secret for those working towards patents, which is what keeps industry away from iGEM’s open source ideology. The winner will be the best-performing plant, or rather, the scientists and engineers responsible for designing it. Even high school teams can enter. The third is CAGEN, Critical Assessment of Genetically Engineered Networks, being drawn up this year by iGEM founder Drew Endy and Adam Arkin. CAGEN will be a more grown-up version of iGEM for established groups working in biological circuit design. Winners here will get their work characterized (measured) at the National Science Foundation-funded BioFab, Endy and Arkin’s new venture out in Emeryville, CA, the ‘world’s first biological design-build facility’ and the “winner will be selected based on a set of quantifiable metrics.” But why are there so many competitions? As engineer Theodore Van Karman once explained, “Scientists discover the world that exists, engineers create the world that never was.” Synthetic biology has many compelling, inspiring characters with differing visions, leaders from both science and engineering who are challenging the way we think about life, and potentially conceiving some of the most world-changing technologies yet. From infamous human-genome-sequencer Venter’s quest for the minimal genome (he also sails his yacht, Sorcerer II, far out to sea to scoop up microbes, prospecting choice fragments of DNA), to Endy and the engineers, building libraries of characterized parts based on the ideologies of the Industrial and Information

Technology revolutions. Berkeley’s Jay Keasling is engineering metabolic pathways, creating anti-malarial drug molecules and fuel with immense funding from the Gates Foundation, BP and now Total. There are others creating new systems, like Jason Chin at Cambridge University, creating new languages for alternative genetic codes (its grammar based on four bases rather than biology’s existing three), George Church at Harvard, engineering new bits of genetic machinery like the synthetic ribosome, and researchers in Europe and elsewhere pursuing the design of protocells—life-like cells made from different kinds of chemistry. What is crucial is that synthetic biology requires inter-disciplinary working, breaking down institutional barriers in funding and research relationships. Synthetic biology’s DIY gene architecture draws its teams of architects from engineering and biology, computer science, chemistry, math, physics and beyond. This is no solo endeavor. Constructing the complexity of life into biological machines is a massive task, relying on the maturation of supporting enabling technologies like gene sequencing and synthesis. Moving from the bespoke ‘tinkering’ of genetic engineering into the total engineering discipline is a technological as well as philosophical question. “Biology is still complex, but what we are trying to do is much better than what has been tried in the past,” says Cambridge’s Jim Ajioka. But there are still many things we may not be able to conquer. Biology is fiendishly complex, working in context-dependent networks, not simply as homogenous, linear tapes of information. Can we really apply engineering’s central dogma of modularity, standardization, abstraction, decoupling to life? Is biology now just another material for engineering? Back in the evening heat in Bangalore, Zack Denfeld, an artist working with biotechnologies, suggests, “Synthetic Biology is taking myth and making history.” Synthetic biology is indeed building on a myth, a promise we can engineer life rationally. It’s reverse engineering, in a way. Now we have to make it happen. Whether this can be achieved as promised is to be seen. What will materialize could well be far from the current vision. But, rather than the promise or peril polarity we normally hear about, it could be just as desirable. Within the scientific establishment, there are those who reject synthetic biology. Within the field itself, the different characters sometimes dismiss the other approaches. More than one may come true. If science is about closing down variables to find the truth, a role of fiction and narrative is to create many versions of the truth, to open up space to find new questions and ideas. The Irrational Genome Design Contest isn’t about designing monsters, about bad designers and bad engineers or scientists misapplying their skills, intentionally or unintentionally. Rather, it could be an alternative vision for synthetic biology. In synbio, we can strip out everything we don’t need, want or understand and make elegantly engineered, reductionist, clever machines. But when was life ever like that? The Irrational Genome Design Contest will celebrate irrational design, context-based approaches and even single-use designs. These biological artifacts need not be functional, but they will still be useful to allow us to understand why we are fearful of synthetic biology, what part of our own selves, our own genomes, do we fear compromising. Back on the terrace, the ArtScienceBangalore team is developing their own myth for iGEM, just like every other engineering team entering the competition. These students have to decide what story they want to travel to MIT to tell t

Shaping Eternity: the Preservation of Lenin’s Body 1

Alla G. Vronskaya

Alla G. Vronskaya is a third-year doctoral student in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art at MIT; her research interests include architecture in socialist states. In 2007, she received “candidate of arts and sciences” degree in Art History from the Russian Academy of Sciences, State Institute of Art Studies (Moscow), where she has also since 2006 been working as a research fellow in the Department of Classical Western Art.

How can a revolution, a momentary, instantaneous event, become everlasting? This was one of the first questions the leaders of the victorious October Revolution of 1917 had to answer. Inscribing it into the names of streets and squares and erecting monuments of ‘monumental propaganda’ was one strategy. Another one, which opened this historical moment into the indefinite future by stopping the clocks’ hands at exactly 6:50 pm on 21 January 1924, was the mummification of the body of Vladimir Lenin, the head of the young Soviet Republic.

Lenin on his Deathbed Photograph, 1924. Published in: Zhizn’ Lenina v portretakh [Lenin’s life in portraits]. Moscow: Mospoligraf, s.a.

Lenin died from atherosclerosis that was the complication of a bullet injury after the murderous assault of 1918. Initial measures to temporarily preserve the body were taken immediately after the death to allow the long farewell ceremony; the idea of a long-term preservation of Lenin’s body was announced a week after his death by Leonid Krasin, People’s Commissar of Foreign Trade. Krasin, alongside the Commissar of the Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky, the writer Maxim Gorky and the philosopher Alexander Bogdanov, had earlier been involved in the God-building movement that proclaimed socialism a new religion—worshipping the progress, the collective and the society—for which a new god should be ‘built.’ Ironically, Lenin himself was highly critical of the movement, reminding that “every god is a necrophilia.”2 Taking Lenin’s metaphor somewhat too literally, Krasin (who was educated as a refrigerators engineer) suggested the freezing of Lenin’s body; later on this technique was substituted with that of embalming. The success of the endeavor surpassed the boldest expectations: Lenin’s body still exists, more than eight decades later. Moreover, the anatomists managed to ‘restore’ Lenin’s appearance, making him look fresher than while still alive. Soviet propaganda often stated that the reason for the permanent preservation of Lenin’s body was the impossibility of stopping the flow of people who came to pay their homage, and the multiple letters addressed to the Party pledging to make the body imperishable as the symbol of the new communist era (contemporary scholarship, though, discovered that these letters mostly dealt with the perpetuation of his memory in monuments or architectural memorials).3 Meanwhile, Lenin’s family opposed any attempts to preserve

the body in a vain attempt to prevent the emerging cult of his personality. Lenin’s widow Nadezhda Krupskaya wrote in the newspaper Pravda 30 January 1924, addressing the readers: “I have a big favor to ask you: do not let your grief for Il’ich4 go into the external adoration of his personality. Do not erect monuments to him, build palaces in his name, organize magnificent ceremonies in his memory—to all this he, during his lifetime, paid so little attention. All this was a burden to him.” But (and here Lenin would have definitely agreed) the Party interests were more important than the individual ones: the revolution demanded more than Lenin’s whole life—it also needed his cadaver. After Lenin’s death the Party was left without a universally respected leader; it risked not just wallowing in the internal rows, but also being abandoned by the broad masses of its supporters. Rebutting this threat, Lenin’s preserved body signified a continuous material and spiritual presence of the late leader in the political life of the country, emphasizing the exclusive privilege of the Party to proclaim his decisions. The Party’s intentions to rebuild Lenin as a quasi-god of the future religion were quite conscious:

This grave will become the site of the world’s pilgrimage. As long as in the world still remain the oppressed and the offended, for whom Lenin had lived and struggled, the Mausoleum with his remains will be the place of the pilgrimage of all those who are oppressed and offended by the current system. In the future, this will become the site of the pilgrimage of the entire liberated humanity. Already now, Lenin’s name is inscribed in the sacred calendar [sviatsy] of the Revolution as the name of the people’s greatest leader who has ever appeared in history.5 This new cult required its shrines. The sarcophagus and the mausoleum were commissioned to renowned architects Konstantin Melnikov and Alexey Schusev, respectively. Both used geometrical forms in order to convey abstract quasi-religious symbolism. For Schusev, “the cube is eternal in our architecture. It is from the cube that all the variety of architectural creativity stems.” Therefore, he suggested “to make the mausoleum in the memory of Vladimir Il’ich as a derivative of the cube.”6 At the same time, the form of Schusev’s mausoleum makes a reference to another symbol of eternity—Egyptian pyramids. The sarcophagus was designed by Melnikov in the shape of a high tetrahedral pyramid, which is said to have resembled a crystal. Thrice reflected from the side glass, the body of Lenin-the-god was miraculously transformed into trinity.7 The dark Mourning Hall was lit just by the electric lamps at the top verge of the sarcophagus: the harsh dramatic light and sharp shadows were described as “à la El Greco.”8 The uncanny darkness of the hall and the baffling reflections of the sarcophagus would have contrasted rather dramatically with the simplicity of Lenin’s appearance. His face was cleanly shaven and the body was dressed in a brown pseudo-military jacket of a type which, as the contemporaries noticed, he never wore during his lifetime. Presenting Lenin as a heroic martyr, the military costume was perhaps also referring to Fanny Kaplan’s 1918 bullet rather than to atherosclerosis as the real cause of Lenin’s death.9 This atmosphere of cult and mystery, however, was undermined by the fact that this ‘shrine’ was completely open to everyone and, in fact, specifically designed for the display. It was supplemented with a positivistically objective exposition about the process of mummification: initially, alongside Lenin’s body one could see embalmed anatomical preparations (human body parts) that were preserved using the same technology as the actual body of Lenin. Also, the Party commission (which included Dzerzhinksy, Molotov, Voroshilov, and Krasin among others) asked the scientists to compile a “popular description of the method” and publish academic articles on the technology of Lenin’s preservation.10 Indeed, numerous publications followed in mass periodicals and scholarly journals, in Russian and Western languages as well as in the languages of other republics of the USSR.11 This dualism of Lenin’s body has been recently noticed by Boris Grois, who called the Mausoleum a “videocombination of a pyramid and the British Museum”: “Lenin’s mummy is worshiped and solicitously

stored in the pyramid that is called ‘Mausoleum.’ At the same time, the museum ‘Mausoleum’ is exhibiting Lenin’s body.” Translating Groys’s argument into terms introduced by Walter Benjamin we can say that Lenin’s body unites cult and exhibition value. Indeed, cult value, in Benjamin’s theory, being the earliest form of artistic value, is an instrument of magic, which only later came to be recognized as a work of art; it demands art to be hidden, as in pre-historic caves. Exhibition value is its complete opposite: having emerged with the new forms of reproductive technology, it makes the art object visible and approachable to everyone.14 Groys continues to say that, although unraveled, the mummy still keeps its mystery due to special exhibition conditions: those of a contemporary art museum, which creates a mystery by“ not demanding an explanation of why this or that example of banality is kept there.”15 In this respect, Groys compares Lenin’s mummy to a readymade, which, for him, is a banal object that happened to be in a museum only by an accident. To illustrate this observation, the scholar points to Lenin’s banal costume (the jacket, white shirt, and tie) that makes him look like everyone else. However, I would like to suggest another explanation for the role of Lenin’s outfit: it indeed looks banal, but this banality was designed to destroy, not to create, the enigma. This costume dates back to the late-1930s —it was then when the relationship between cult and exhibition of Lenin’s body was reversed. Indeed, in 1938 the conception of Lenin’s display was radically changed at the direct request of Stalin. The old Melnikov’s crystal-like sarcophagus was replaced by a new one, made after the architectural project of Schusev and sculptural decoration of Vsevolod Iakovlev in 1939-1944. The team of professionals working at redesigning the ‘exposition’ also included the leading Socialist Realist painter Alexander Gerasimov, who was responsible for supervising light and color effects. In the new sarcophagus, the glass leaned towards the viewer to prevent reflections. The sarcophagus, which resembled rather a glass coffin with a little mausoleum model on its top than any abstract symbolic form, rested on a platform richly decorated with banners and other sculptural motifs. The light, too, was made less dramatic: sharp shadows disappeared, so that the contemporaries now compared it to Rembrandt’s palette. Moreover, the lamps were now supplied with pink filters that improved Lenin’s face color, making it more joyful in accordance with the new Stalinist aesthetics. If Lenin’s old costume presented him (alongside with Stalin, who started wearing a jacket of the same type) as a heroic leader of the Revolution, the new one shifted him into the domain of subjects for whose happiness Stalin (still continuing to wear the old heroic costume) allegedly fought alone. Lenin’s new costume parallels —in time, subject, and goal—Old Bolsheviks’ purges: nobody was allowed to compete with Stalin for the role of the leader of the Revolution. At the same time, in 1944 a central tribune was added to the Mausoleum (that previously had only two side tribunes). One could speculate that Lenin was now denied his voice: instead of being in the center of the building, with the actual speakers staying at his sides (which would have emphasized the idea that they were just mediums through whose mouths Lenin spoke), Lenin was now reduced to the role of a pedestal under the new ruler’s feet. A further step in desacralization was achieved when, also in 1939, a secret embalming laboratory was created for the preservation of Lenin’s body and potentially applying the same techniques to creating other mummies (and indeed seven were produced between 1949 and 1994 to eternalize the leaders of other socialist countries). This replication of mummies destroyed the status of Lenin’s body as the only original, which, as Leah Dickerman has argued, previously guaranteed the truthfulness of multiple reproductions of his image, transferring it to the sphere of replicable objects.16 The year 1939 brought yet another reform: all the work connected to the functioning of this laboratory and the embalming of Lenin’s body became strictly secret.17 This move of Stalin raises many questions: nothing

could be farther away from the original conception of explaining all the scientific details of the process of embalming, and more contradictory to the desacralizing policy that Stalin adopted in regards to Lenin’s cult. How can this sacralizing move be reconciled with the desacralizing one that was made simultaneously? I suggest that by the late 1930s Lenin’s body had fulfilled its mission: unification of the country around the Communist Party and unification of the Party itself. Moreover, it became superfluous in the situation when the country was united around the new leader. Burying Lenin, however, would be perceived as blasphemy. The chosen way offered a solution to the dilemma: Lenin’s body remained in its place, signifying the continuity of the regimes, but by depriving it of the cult value and by transmitting the latter to the process of its preservation, the new ruler was stealing Lenin’s magic power: now only Stalin, who knew the secret, was the sole guarantor of his predecessor’s existence in the Mausoleum. Earlier, on the contrary, the body was sacral, whereas the process of its preservation was desacralized: this was legitimizing the status of Party leaders as being in magical touch with Lenin, still following his orders. By saving his body for the future, the heirs of Lenin suggested two different stories their descendants had to learn about the Revolution: according to the first, recounted in 1924, Lenin was a godlike genius who gave his flesh and blood for the salvation of the people; according to the second, rewritten by Stalin, Lenin was a mere honest man, the preservation of whose body reminds one of the achievements of a future that has already ensued—a “better and more joyful” life that was finally brought to last forever t

Lenin’s Mausoleum Today (author’s photograph, July 2010).

An Architecture of Humors R&Sie(n) R&Sie(n) is an architectural practice based in Paris. This group, which consists of François Roche, Stéphanie Lavaux and Toshikatsi Kiuchi (since 2007), works simultaneously through the architectural practice R&Sie(n) and the “new-territories” research organization. It also leads architectural research labs such as the Advanced Studio at Columbia University - GSAPP in New York City. Web site: www.new-territories. com. Their architectural designs have been shown at, among other places, Columbia University (New York, 1999-2000), UCLA (Los Angeles, 1999-2000), ICA (London, 2001), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, 2004), Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2003), MAM / Musée d’Art Moderne (Paris, 2005, 2006), the Tate Modern (London 2006) and Orléans/ArchiLab (1999, 2001, 2003). Work by R&Sie(n) was selected for exhibition at the French pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennales of 1990, 1996, 2000 and 2002 (they rejected the invitation that year), and for the international section in 2000, 2004 and 2008, and they have been selected in the next one, International Pavilion, in September 2010.

Preambule An architecture of humors is a research project/exhibition in which the R&Sie(n) architectural practice has worked with a group comprised of a mathematician, programmers, architects and a robotics designer to develop a computational approach based on biological and physiological data scanned from visitors who are put through situations inciting repulsion, stress and pleasure to conceive housing units and urban fragments based on relational protocols. This research was visible in Paris from January 22 through April 26, 2010, at Le Laboratoire, 4 rue du Bouloi, 75003 Paris, and is going in 2010 to Basel and Graz. This research is being carried out with François Jouve, the mathematician in charge of working out dynamic structural strategies; with the architect and robotics designer Stephan Henrich and Marc Fornes, Winston Hampel and Natanael Elfassy on the computational development; and Gaetan Robillard and Fréderic Mauclere on the physiological data collection station, following a nano-technologies scenario by R&Sie(n) - Berdaguer & Pejus.

An architecture des humeurs Une architecture des humeurs is based on the potential that contemporary sciences offer to reread the human corporalities via their physiology and their chemical balance. The assumption of this research attempts to make palpable and comprehensible, through technologies, the emotional transactions of the ‘body animal,’ the body headless, the chemistry of the body, so that this one informs us of his adaptation, its sympathy, of its empathy, confronted to a situation, to an environment.

Apparatuses for the architectural assemblages on transactional and structuring protocols : One aspect is comprised of computational, mathematical, and machinist procedures designed to produce an urban structure following certain protocols of improbable and uncertain successive indeterminations, aggregations and layouts to rearticulate the link between the individual and the collective. The layout of the residential units and the structural trajectories are conceived and developed here as posterior to the morphologies that support social life and not as an a priori. These structures are calculated following simultaneously incremental and recursive structural optimization protocols whose principle result is the concurrently generated physicality and morphology of an architecture.

The ‘algorithm’ developed by François Jouve differs from ‘directly calculated’ structural methods such as calculating a load-bearing structure of a building after it is designed. In contrast, the ‘algorithm’ allows the architectural form to emerge from the trajectories of the transmission of forces simultaneously with the calculation that generates them. The ‘algorithm’ is based on (among other things) two mathematical strategies, one taken from the derivative initiated by the research of Hadamard and the other from the protocol of the representation of complex shapes by Cartesian meshing through level set. The mathematical process of empirical optimization makes it possible for the architectural design to react and adapt to previously established constraints instead of the opposite. The other aspect is the collection of data regarding the chemical body, based on the neurobiological emissions of each future owner. Until now the collection of information involved in the residential unit protocol has been exclusively based on visible and reductive data (surface area, number of rooms, access mode, and party walls). Instead, this experiment will be the occasion to interrogate an obscure area that could be called ‘the emission of desires’ by the capture of these physiological signals based on neurobiological secretions, and to implement a chemistry of the humors of future purchasers, taken as inputs generating a diversity of habitable morphologies and the relationships between them. The groundwork for this architecture of humeurs is a rereading of the contradictions inherent in the expression of these desires, both those that traverse public space through the ability to express a choice by means of language, on the surface of things, and those that are underlying and perhaps more disturbing but just as valid. By means of the latter we can appraise the body as a desiring machine with its own chemistry—dopamine, hydrocortisone, melatonin, adrenaline and other secreted molecules that are imperceptibly anterior to the consciousness these substances generate. Thus the making of architecture is inflected by another reality, another complexity, that of the acephalous body, the animal body.

An architecture of humeurs means breaking into language’s mechanism of dissimulation in order to physically construct misunderstandings. A station for collecting these signals is offered. It makes it possible to perceive these chemical variations and capture the changes in emotional state so

that they affect the geometries emitted and influence the construction protocol.

The research is organized on several levels: From the physiology of humors to misunderstandings The humors collection is organized on the basis of interviews that make visible the conflict between and even schizophrenia of desires, between those secreted (biochemical and neurobiological) and those expressed through the interface of language (free will). Mathematical tools taken from set theory (belonging, inclusion, intersection, difference, etc.) are used so that these ‘misunderstandings’ produce a morphological potential (attraction, exclusion, touching, repulsion, indifference, etc.) as a negotiation of ‘distances’ between the human beings who are to constitute these collective aggregates.

Misunderstandings This means taking conflicts into account as an operational mode, allowing architecture to become their transactional vector. I’d love to but at the same time/ and maybe/ not/ and the contrary.” These misunderstandings are directly influenced by the pathologies of collective living: Claustro (phobia-philia) Agora (phobia-philia) Xeno (phobia-philia) Acro (phobia-philia) Nocto (phobia-philia) Socio (phobia-philia) Neo (phobia-philia)

From the misunderstanding of humors to physiomorphological computation These relational modes are simultaneously elaborated within the residential cell and on its periphery in relation to the neighbors. The multiplicity of possible physiomorphological layouts based on mathematical formulations offers a variety of habitable patterns in terms of the transfer of the self to the Other and to others. This is an informational

area, a Temporary Autonomous Zone (T.A.Z.) allowing future purchasers to have access to a morphological combinatorics with multiple permutations produced jointly by the expression of their avowed desires and their indiscrete biochemical secretions.

complex, non-standard geometries through a process of secretion, extrusion and agglutination. This frees the construction procedure from the usual frameworks that are incompatible with a geometry constituted by a series of anomalies and singularities.

The volume of an entity-unit is 12 x 12 x 12 meters. This is the basis on which our calculations and hypotheses have been made.

Toolings/ Robotic process

From Physio-morphological Computation to the Multitude A multitude of aggregations of physio-morphological layouts is organized according to parameters of chronological positioning and variable distances between the entities (collective, tribal, human clusters or conversely singleton units). This includes public layouts and micro-places.

Mathematical Operators for Structural Optimization As indicated above, these are mathematical processes whose purpose is to achieve an incremental and recursive optimization (ex-local, local and hyper-local) that simultaneously calculates and designs support structures for the physio-morphologies. Forms are fabricated only by successive iterations that link, by physically and structurally coagulating, the interstices between morphologies so that they support each other. The calculations satisfy precise inputs (constraints and characteristics of the materials used, initial conditions, dead load and transfer of forces, intensity and vectorization of these forces, etc.).

The ‘Algorithm(s)’ Basically this is the name of a physio-morphological residence unit. But more precisely it is a name that characterizes a structural aesthetics thought as a geometry resulting posterior to the morphological fabrication of residential areas. The point is to emancipate architecture from the conceptual logic that takes structuration as the starting point, and instead allow the emergence of a physical matrix that can react to the multiplicity of morphologies and the ambiguity of the desires of ‘future purchasers.’ Thus this open-source mechanism can replace the determinist and predictable topology of collective habitats.

From the ‘Algorithm(s)’ to Bio-knit Physicality Development of a construction protocol that can deal with

The development of a secretion and weaving machine that can generate a vertical structure by means of extrusion and sintering (full-size 3D printing) using a hybrid raw material (a bio-plastic-cement) that chemically agglomerates to physically constitute the computational trajectories. This structural calligraphy works like a machinist stereotomy comprised of successive geometrics according to a strategy based on a repetitive protocol.

This machine is both additive and formative. It is called Viab02. Tooling/ Bio-cement weaving (material expertise) Development of a viscous and adherent secretable material so as to produce this morphologically complex structure (a material and procedures similar to the contour-crafting developed with the Behrohk Khoshnevis Lab at USC for the “I’ve heard about” project). This is a bio-cement component, a mix of cement and bio-resin developed by the agricultural polymers industry that makes it possible to control the parameters of viscosity, liquidity and polymerization and thus produce chemical and physical agglutination at the time of secretion. The mechanical expertise of this material is made visible (constraints of rupture induced by traction, compression and shearing, etc.). This material emits low C02. Animist, vitalist and machinist, the architecture of humeurs rearticulates the need to confront the unknown in a contradictory manner by means of computational and mathematical assessments. The architecture of humeurs is also a tool that will give rise to ‘Multitudes’ and their palpitation and heterogeneity, the premises of a relational organization protocol.

Interview With R&Sie(n), F. Roche By Caroline Naphegyi (Curator Of This Research) Q: How do you do research and an exhibition at the same time? A: There are two parts. Research unfolds in what we call the Process room, a pretty basic space. You have to take your time so that the interactions between physiology, robotics and computation fully emerge in their logic and interdependence. The other part, the exhibition, is a suite of visual indices. Since these clues are neither didactic nor chronological nor pedagogical, visitors construct their own logic and subjectivities. Furthermore, this part has an immersion area, a physiological testing station, where visitors, called prospective purchasers by analogy to a sales office, are themselves experimental subject and object. This cognitive and immersive mechanism thus articulates a thirst for knowledge and a willingness to lose oneself in that quest. Q: What’s this about? A: It’s an unprecedented experiment in which architecture harnesses several different fields of exploration – neurobiology, mechanization, and math protocols – working together as an ensemble of structural, transactional and relational operating modes. This is not a sequel to the I’ve heard about show held by the MAM (Paris municipal modern art museum) in 2005, although that show did explore the relationship between physiology, computation and indeterminism in the sense of its preconditions, its genesis. That earlier piece sought to understand and write (in the sense of writing code) biological geometries that mimic natural ones. The predominant figure was that of coral and its growth. This second piece, at Le Laboratoire, goes beyond that representation, since we’ve already worked on what conditions the emergence of such a geometry, namely principles of exchange, dynamic principles based on a system’s immanent forces. But that’s not all. We wanted to get a better handle on something already sketched out at the MAM show: the capture of body chemistry as an element able to disturb and alter linear logics, the logics of authorities, replacing a top-down approach with a bottom-up one. Q: In fact, for you, the axiom on which your architecture of humors research is based is the contingency of the humors of the inhabitant on the habitat itself. A: Humors in the sense that Hippocrates used the word, a concept brought up to date by today’s possibilities for detecting body chemistry. Until now the acquisition of information used in residence protocols has been based exclusively on visible, reductive data. In our research we want to add the corporalities and their own substances. They can provide information about the relationship between bodies and space, and especially about the social relationships of bodies, the relationships between them, of the self to the other, both inside a single housing unit and in terms of the osmosis of vicinity. Q: In the physiology station located at the entrance to the exhibition, a machine captures visitors’ chemical data. So visitors are put into a very particular psychological state. As she asks you to slide your hand onto a screen, Melisa whispers into you ear, “Your body becomes the vector of your emotions. These vapors help you capture the changing course of these emotions…” A: The signal collection station makes it possible to perceive individual variations and how these changes in emotional state affect the resulting geometries and influence the morphological protocol at the “living together” level. This physiological test works like an emotion detector. It unleashes your corporal chemical reactions, principally molecules like dopamine, adrenalin, serotonin and hydrocortisone that feed us information about your animal reactions/degree of pleasure or repulsion, curiosity or disinterest. This physiological test helps us map the visitor’s future dwelling area. It only takes seven minutes. The protocol is simple. During the test, a sort of vapor (of nanoparticles) is emitted, so that we can detect the evolution of these emotions without noxious intrusion. A voice whispers into the visitor’s ear, “Let it enter into you, breathe it in. You are in absolutely no danger from this vapor…

Your family has become a conflict zone and you can no longer calm things down. It’s an illusion to believe that architecture can help you with that. But you can negotiate the distances by negotiating the details… The area where you live can react to your desires. It has the power… to allow you to experience this conflict without denying its existence or making up fantasies about it. Your living area can be transformed into a morphology of the moment. You’re free to go along with others or retreat into yourself.” For us this is an occasion to interrogate the confused region that lies between the notion of enjoyment and that of need, by detecting physiological signals based on neurobiological secretions and thus realize a ‘chemistry of humors,’ treating future buyers as inputs generating the diversity of inhabitable morphologies and the relationships between them. Consequently the formulation of desires in language is inflected by another realty, another complexity, that of the acephalous body, the animal body, so that it can tell us about its adaptation, its sympathy and empathy, in the face of specific situations and environments. Q: Why do you introduce contradictory signals—what you call ‘misunderstandings’—into the heart of your architectural protocol (the inhabitable morphologies)? How does this physiology of desires, this living and unpredictable material, radically shift the architect’s whole approach? A: We decided to take the preliminary step of revisiting the contradictions within the very expression of these desires, both those that traverse public space because of their ability to express a choice, a desire conveyed by language, on the surface of things, and those preexisting and perhaps more disturbing but equally valid desires that reflect the body as a desiring machine (as Deleuze put it), with its own chemistry, imperceptibly anterior to the consciousness those substances generate. The architecture of humors is a way of breaking and entering into language’s mechanism of dissimulation in order to physically construct its contradictions. It means staging a break-in to the logic of things when language has to negotiate with the depths of the body, down to the bottom folds, like with Antonin Artaud and his compulsive catatonia. The concept of free will may be simultaneously the most beautiful and the most corruptible of all. The cultural media pierce us to the core; their influence penetrates us everywhere, generating a conformism that can be considered obscene. We are both its vector and instrument. What we like to do is just the opposite, to seek out the dark side, our animal side, in order to subvert the other side using reactive and emotional data. We’re glad that our choices are not guided exclusively by architectural conventions, both the conventions of the client and those of the architects themselves. There’s more to architecture than serving the prince and his totems, as people around here like to do. To speak to some of today’s issues, the debate about high-rises is pathetic. Of course density has to be rethought, but I don’t think it’s relevant for southern Paris to be filled with reproductions of models of verticality conceived for 1950s business districts. The proposals submitted by the architects selected by the city are puerile in that regard, and the plans for Greater Paris no less so. Architecture has become like a schoolyard full of kids who constantly flatter politicians about what is really that world’s weakest point, its modes and fantasies of representation… and then they end up crying about it when the politicians don’t commission them to design their Xanadu, like Jean Nouvel, the perfect example of the new cynicism. The politicians have largely sucked the lifeblood out of the past. Let’s hope that the future can be different. But that’s not what we’re supposed to be talking about… Q: You introduce the possibility of contradictory relational modes into the residential units themselves. How has set theory made you able to handle these ‘misunderstandings’ and the contradictory ways in which individuals relate to their family and those around them? A:The interviews at the physiological station make it possible to collect some seldom-seen materials. They make visible how the body reacts to a situation of exchange, and indicate the degree of pathology that would afflict the visitor – I mean the ‘future buyer’—if she or he were placed in a productive reality. I would have loved to be able to set up a sales office where people could make a purchase and concretize their bio-architecture in a collective aggregation. The data obtained from the physiological interview tell us about: Familial socialization (distance and relationship between residential areas within a single unit), neighborhood socialization

(distance and relationship between residential units), modes of relations to externalities (biotope, light, air, environment, and also seeing, being seen and hiding, modes of relating to access (receiving and/or escaping, even self-exclusion) and the nature of the interstices (from closely spaced to panoptic). We use formulations taken from set theory to define these relationships. This branch of math was founded by the German mathematician Georg Cantor in the late 19th century. Its aim is to define the concepts of sets and belonging. This theory can be used to describe the structure of each situation as a kind of set defining the relationships between the parts and the whole, while taking into consideration that the latter can’t be reduced to the sum of its parts or even to the ensemble of relationships between the parts. It allows you to define all the properties of a situation as relational modes, both the relationships between the elements (residential areas) and those between these elements and the ensemble or ensembles they fit into. The operators of belonging, union, inclusion, intersection and disjunction describe morphologies characterized by their dimensions and position and above all by the negotiations of distance they carry out with the other parts. This produces relational protocols, protocols of attraction, repulsion, contiguity, dependence, sharing, indifference, exclusion, etc. Before the morphology of a habitat is reduced to a functional typology, first it’s structured as an area of exchange. Mathematical formulas aid the development of these combinations and thus become the matrix for the relational structure on which an inhabitable space is based. In contrast to the standardized-model formatting of habitats, this tool offers the potential for negotiation with the ambiguities of one’s own humors and desires. It makes it possible to mix contradictory compulsions (appearances) and even some ‘malentendus,’ which could be translated by both misunderstandings and mishearing: “I’d like that but at the same time / maybe / not / and the opposite.” These ‘malentendus’ are directly influenced by the pathologies generated by collective living: Claustro_(phobia-philia) / Agora_(phobia-philia)/ Xeno_(phobia-philia) / Acro_(phobia-philia) / Nocto_(phobia-philia) / Socio_ (phobia-philia) / Neo_(phobia-philia), etc. Q: In other words, you approach architecture as a dynamic principle, incorporating incompletion, incertitude and indetermination. These parameters are the basis of your parametric construction system, aren’t they? A: Nature is basically made up of indetermination protocols. Algorithms can simulate the growth of a tree in terms of reproducing its geometry, but the fit between geometry-photosynthesis-equilibrium-growth is and always will be a hidden protocol that can’t be reduced to its simple mathematical and geometrical dimensions. Using the architecture of humors we have staged a constructive and narrative machine that is receptive to two contradictory inputs, the order of desire codified by language and the order of its anterior and even hidden chemical secretion. We wanted this schizoid rereading of an architect’s brief ‘in constant becoming’ to be able to generate protocols of incertitude and incompletion. An urban structure based on these computational and robotic procedures, these vectors of variability and indetermination, makes visible the potential of these heterogeneous aggregations. Q: One of the subjects of this research was to consider the bearing structure of these residential units, and thus the final shape of the building, as a product and not the starting point. The fact that the bearing structure is not designed beforehand makes it necessary to constantly recalculate the segments and force trajectories that carry these inhabitable cells. How did math solve one of architecture’s problematics: how to respond to indeterminate situations, a construction based on affective variability, with a constantly changing form (you use the metaphor of trees, which grow incrementally)? How did your partnership with the mathematician François Jouve start?

A: One of the objectives of our research was to imagine structure as a postproduction element, emerging a posteriori to the inhabitable morphologies, which are themselves thought as unique entities, “singularities,” emancipated from the conceptual logic where the structure is the starting point, the matrix for human organization, so that the spatial contract takes the place of the social contract. Since it’s conceived a posteriori, the structure is reactive, adaptive to multiplicity, ‘the multitude’ to use Antonio Negri’s term. François Jouve developed a mathematical process for ‘empirically’ seeking optimization by creating forms out of constraints and not vice-versa. That’s different than “direct calculus” methods which, for instance, calculate a building’s beams after establishing its design. Instead, it calculates form based on trajectories, the vectorization and intensity of forces, without that form being predetermined. Produced by a simultaneously recursive and incremental optimization protocol, this form, which appears only through the calculations themselves, has to satisfy precise inputs (material constraints, the client’s brief, initial and environmental conditions, etc.). In this particular case, the unknown is the form, the hidden part revealed only by the experiment itself. Through the use of these computational, mathematical and mechanization procedures, the urban structure engenders successive, improbable and uncertain aggregations that constantly rearticulate the relationship between the individual and the collective. Q: You emphasize the passage from an industrial era (seeking uniformity and standardization) to the reintroduction of the concept of singularity in architecture by means of robotics and computations. More recently, what has science – especially math – and technological development – robotics and a biochemical understanding of raw materials – brought to the table in architecture? What new speculative issues has it raised, particularly in France? A: Nothing is happening in France. The field of architecture is totally sclerotic and held on a leash by a dozen people. It’s shameful. Along with our “professional” practice as R&Sie(n), we have a research organization called ‘new-territories,’ and for the last five years I’ve been teaching labs at Columbia University. Not only are these core questions in today’s debates; they’re also a core source of speculations and learning. The point is to get back to the idea that architecture should be a site for knowledge and debates, a site for experimentation, and not just for grandiose celebrations of necrosis organized by the Palais de Chaillot and its ‘Cité du patrimoine.’ Regarding your question, it only takes a few years for technology to drain and absorb speculations that once seemed unreal. For instance, in Switzerland and Japan we’ve designed two buildings entirely conceived by numerical control using optimization algorithms, one made of solid wood and the other of polyurethane foam. In five years what once was merely plausible has become possible. In this case, it’s important to conceive protocols and designs not to stand out in some glamour interior decoration magazine but to magnetize a point in the near future, so that it draws our present towards itself. Regarding the architecture of humors, Bherokh Khoshnevis and Stephen Henrich have done research in robotics and mechanization that make it possible to foresee the first prototypes in two or three years. Q: Since its opening in 2007, Le Laboratoire has sought to give visibility to research projects jointly undertaken by scientists and artists. In the ‘Processes’ space that is at the heart of this show you unfold the various phases of your research, going so far as to make the computational script available as open source software. First of all, the software is available for anyone who wants to further mutate it. Second, the building’s final form is the result of a structural calculation and not vice-versa; it’s out of the architect’s control. What do you expect from this stance, this renunciation of authorship and even copyleft? A: A script is above all a form of writing, a language. There’s no point to it unless it’s shared so that other people can take it up and improve it. But it’s a tricky position. We all remember the madness of the computer programmer in Tron whose all-powerfulness makes him think he’s the master of the universe and that he knows everything about everything. Luckily, the mathematicians we’ve worked with are protected against this kind of positivist mysticism t

The Illusions of Control Radical Engineers and Reactionary Artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr

Award winning Artists, researchers and Curators, Catts and Zurr formed the internationally renowned Tissue Culture and Art Project. They have been artists in residence in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology since 1996 and were central to the establishment of SymbioticA in 2000. They are considered pioneers in the field of biological arts and are invited as keynote speakers, curate exhibitions, publish widely, and exhibit internationally. Catts is the Co-Founder and Director of SymbioticA: the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts at UWA and Dr Ionat Zurr, who received her PhD from the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts, UWA - is researcher and SymbioticA’s academic co-ordinator. SymbioticA won the inaugural Prix Ars Electronica, Golden Nica in Hybrid Art Category. They were recognised by Thames & Hudson’s “60 Innovators Shaping our Creative Future” book as one of five in the category “Beyond Design”, and by Icon Magazine (UK) as one of the top 20 Designers, “making the future and transforming the way we work”. They were Research Fellows in Harvard Medical School (2000-2001) and Visiting Scholars at the Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University (2007).

27 Victimless Leather- A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Biodegradable polymer skin and bone cells from human and mouse. 2004

Hamsa The Tissue Culture & Art (Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr). Skin tissue over found object. 1997

Having control over life and its processes may have always been an ambitious human endeavour. What is changing is the accumulation of scientific knowledge and technological capabilities, mounting up with increasing speed and scale of manipulation. A choreographed interplay between hype and actuality is overlaid on a public that is bombarded with information that should excite, but which is also easily forgotten. A recent recurring trope mobilized to describe our coming future is the promise of applying engineering principles to biological systems, or more generally the idea of the single engineering paradigm that engulfs nanotechnology, synthetic biology, as well as in some cases cognitive and neuro-sciences. The idea of biology as engineering is not new. However, as the perception of the level of control possible increases, it seems that whereas previously biologists were employing their understanding of engineering to the life sciences, now it is the engineers who force-fit engineering methodologies into living systems. Therefore, two issues need to be scrutinized: the first deals with how the application of engineering logic to life will reflect on the different cultures and societies where it is going to take place. The second issue, which is more particular, is concerned with the locus of the places where radical assaults on culturally perceived norms in the 21st century are now occurring. Is it correct to assume that it is now the engineering workshops rather than the artists’ studios, the philosophers’ ivory towers or even the scientists’ labs?

Historical reflections The application of engineering logic to life has historical precedents. Already in 1895, H.G Wells reflected on a body as a malleable entity in his essay The Limits of Individual Plasticity, saying “[t]he generalization of heredity may be pushed to extreme, to an almost fanatical fatalism.”2 A year later Wells demonstrated some of these ideas and their possible consequences in his novel The Island of Doctor Moreau. The plasticity of life processes, through human intervention not in the fictional realm, was demonstrated quite spectacularly only three years later in 1899 when Jacob Loeb, developed what he called “artificial parthenogenesis... the artificial production of normal larvae (plutei) from the unfertilized eggs of the sea urchin.”3 In other words, Loeb demonstrated the capacity for fertilization (in a sea urchin) without the use of sperm. Loeb wrote, following his discovery, “it is in the end still possible that I find my dream realized, to see a constructive or engineering biology in place of a biology that is merely analytical.”4 Loeb symbolized a change in the field of the biological sciences from descriptive to prescriptive, from the realm of knowledge gathering to the realm of technological application. Loeb adopted in his experimentation and biological research what he described as the “engineering standpoint.”5 What an “engineering standpoint” or “engineering mindset” is will be speculated upon further, but nevertheless Loeb’s strong belief in control over life and his mechanistic approach to life led him to argue that “instinct” and “will” were “metaphysical concepts ... upon the same plane as the supernatural powers of theologians.”6 The belief that instinct and will can be engineered as well as the belief that science should be pragmatic, can lead to interesting interpretations and applications. Ten years later Alexis Carrel, a surgeon, demonstrated the plasticity of the body, through the development of the technique of tissue culture—the growth of living tissue cells in-vitro—in an artificial environment. Carrel was a well-known and respected scientist who advanced the medical field in new techniques of suturing arteries and transplantation as well as tissue culture, and won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1912. He was also a complex and controversial figure—a person who pushed the ontological implications of his discoveries to some extreme and morally questionable places, far from its strictly bio-medical or even scientific realms into ontological and socio-political issues. Carrel was so convinced in humans’ abilities to control life through the sciences that he believed that his experiments in engineering a “body” in which to grow cells would eventually lead to the ability to resurrect through techno-scientific methods.7 This is manifest in this somewhat surreal conversation extract: “What would be my responsibility if I bring people back to life?” Carrel asked… “Responsibility for what?” The lawyer asked.

The concept of the single engineering paradigm indicates a future in which the control of matter and life would be achieved by applying engineering principals; through nanotechnology, synthetic biology and, as some suggest, cognitive- and neuroscience. Ironically, this might seem an admission by the life sciences that the idea of the unifying theory of biology cannot be achieved and therefore a utilitarian application based approach might be the next best thing. Looking at such a future, is there anything we can learn from the past? In addition, in the light of some recent research into the ‘engineering mindset,’ what might an artistic mindset achieve? Can it be a counter-balance or an attempt to artistically engage with an engineering future doomed to be perceived as reactionary in one way or another? In this deliberately polemic piece of writing, we will tackle these issues. In recent years, we have witnessed a resurgence of the application of engineering logic in the field of the life sciences. With the recent introduction of the concept of Synthetic Biology, a revolutionary rhetoric is being employed, such as ‘a radical shift’ and Synthetic Biology will ‘revolutionize the technology of the future.’ As is pointed out: Engineers are interested in synthetic biology (or in biology in general] because the living world provides a seemingly rich yet largely unexplored medium for controlling and processing information, materials, and energy. Learning how to effectively harness the power of the living world will be a major engineering undertaking.1 Having control over life and its processes may have always been an ambitious human endeavour. What is changing is the accumulation of scientific knowledge and technological capabilities, mounting up with increasing speed and scale of manipulation. A choreographed interplay between hype and actuality is overlaid on a public that is bombarded with information that should excite, but which is also easily forgotten. A recent recurring trope mobilized to describe our coming future is the promise of applying engineering principles to biological systems, or more generally the idea of the single engineering paradigm that engulfs nanotechnology, synthetic biology, as well as in some cases cognitive and neuro-sciences. The idea of biology as engineering is not new. However, as the perception of the level of control possible increases, it seems that whereas previously biologists were employing their understanding of engineering to the life sciences, now it is the engineers who force-fit engineering methodologies into living systems. Therefore, two issues need to be scrutinized: the first deals with how the application of engineering logic to life will reflect on the different cultures and societies where it is going to take place. The second issue, which is more particular, is concerned with the locus of the places where radical assaults on culturally perceived norms in the 21st century are now occurring. Is it correct to assume that it is now the engineering workshops rather than the artists’ studios, the philosophers’ ivory towers or even the scientists’ labs?

interesting interpretations and applications. Ten years later Alexis Carrel, a surgeon, demonstrated the plasticity of the body, through the development of the technique of tissue culture—the growth of living tissue cells in-vitro—in an artificial environment. Carrel was a well-known and respected scientist who advanced the medical field in new techniques of suturing arteries and transplantation as well as tissue culture, and won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1912. He was also a complex and controversial figure—a person who pushed the ontological implications of his discoveries to some extreme and morally questionable places, far from its strictly bio-medical or even scientific realms into ontological and socio-political issues. Carrel was so convinced in humans’ abilities to control life through the sciences that he believed that his experiments in engineering a “body” in which to grow cells would eventually lead to the ability to resurrect through techno-scientific methods.7 This is manifest in this somewhat surreal conversation extract: “What would be my responsibility if I bring people back to life?” Carrel asked… “Responsibility for what?” The lawyer asked.

“For those I bring back”, said Carrel. “Food and Lodging and all that. If I bring them back an old man too old to work. Or, in the case of a young man, suppose something happens and he isn’t able to do anything for himself. Am I liable for his support?”8 In the 1930s, the surgeon (Carrel) joined forces with the mechanic, the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, to devise the Organ Perfusion Pump, a mechanical pump for circulating nutrient fluid around large organs kept alive outside of their host body. Carrel’s affiliation with Lindbergh, the great American hero, extended to a shared ideology of eugenics, which Carrel outlined in his 1938 publication Man, the Unknown:

Those who have murdered, robbed, ... kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts.9 It can be argued that the application of mechanical/engineering logic to the living body preceded the same line of thinking that led Carrel to treat human societies as objects to be engineered. These engineered objects can be fixed by removing faulty parts. “Eugenics,” Carrel wrote in the last chapter of Man, the Unknown, “is indispensable for the perpetuation of the strong. A great race must propagate its best elements.”10 The book, a worldwide best-seller translated into nineteen languages, brought Carrel international attention. It took more than eighty years to discover that cells can be grown in three dimensions to form a functional tissue. This development came from the collaborative work of a surgeon, Dr Joseph P. Vacanti, and a material scientist, Dr Robert Langer, in the early 1990s. They developed a system that used specially designed degradable polymers that act as a scaffold for the developing tissue. Tissue engineering (TE) was developed as a surgical solution for a body fixing/reconstructing ‘problem.’ In modern medicine, the system imagined to fix the body is a mechanical one, using mechanical, non-living apparatuses to replace failing body organs, such as metal or plastic bits to replace joints, a pump for a heart and an external filtering machine to replace a failing kidney (a dialysis machine). Until the late 1980s the notion of the cyborg—a human body enhanced by mechanical means—was the dominant mental picture both in the sciences and in the arts. The conceptual shift with the advent of tissue engineering was to look at and treat the body as a regenerative site, to use the body’s own tissue to repair itself. This would not only avoid the problem of rejection of foreign materials and foreign cells (from other bodies) but also, in Eugene Thacker’s words, tissue engineering “… is able to produce a vision of the regenerative body, a body always potentially in excess of itself”11—a body that is not dependent on artificial means to fix itself, but is an endless resource. In that respect, TE can be perceived as a ‘natural’ almost non-technological technique (although TE is a highly technological application within the biotech industry). Tellingly, although the technique is perceived as ‘natural’ and dominated by a biological approach, it was named Tissue ‘Engineering.’ This trend of adding the term engineering to biological fields is not exclusive to TE. It can be argued that in order to legitimize the shift from descriptive to prescriptive approach, as well as to enhance the ‘technological’ aspects, biologists started to refer to their work as engineering (such as in Genetic Engineering, Tissue Engineering, Cell Engineering etc.). The opposite

05 Two renderings of the same view. The first showing the Bank of Savings and Futures in its present-day state, and the second showing its contingency design for a future of decline.

Design for Decline: The Bank of Savings and Futures Christopher Tohru Guignon

Spliced axonometric showing a three-part transition of the architecture from bank to barter market. Materials are stripped from the building and sold on site, facilitating a spatial transformation of the architecture and activating the site as a place for the new economy.

“That the way down can be prosperous is the exciting viewpoint whose time has come. Descent is a new frontier to approach with zeal.” -Howard and Elizabeth Odum, The Prosperous Way Down.1

Design for Decline The turn of the millennium has been marked by global economic and environmental instability. ‘Sustainability’ has emerged as the prevailing response to unchecked growth and shortsighted planning, repositioning the notion of ‘future’ as central to the architectural project. However, in the process of attaining mainstream recognition, sustainability has been co-opted into the Western, neoliberal ideology of progress. Molded to fit the ideological framework it once deemed unsustainable, and given the task of preserving indefinite progress, sustainability has lost its capacity to envision possible futures ‘beyond growth.’ As the depletion of resources and the instability of ecological and economic systems quickly outpace development of renewable technologies, nations and individuals alike must abandon a linear history of progress and come to terms with the possibility of ‘decline.’ Architects especially must reexamine their own complicit participation in ‘progressive obsolescence,’ that quintessentially modern doctrine. Myopic design is all too evident in the abandoned and dilapidated buildings of former boomtowns and rapidly imploding suburbs. Designed with growth in mind, obsolete architecture is both a symptom of, and contributor to, urban decay. When confined to the goal of a singular, desired future, the basic ideals of sustainability, namely, foresight and prudence, offer an incomplete solution to this problem. It is envisioning ‘alternative futures’ to sustained progress that provides the architect with a strategic design tool for mitigating the possible, if not imminent, transition between growth and descent. In doing so, we can imagine an architecture that— facing an enduring future of economic stagnation and resource depletion—repays its material investment while simultaneously transforming itself spatially to better serve a culture of decline. By superimposing the architecture of two different socioeconomic realities—our current growth society and a society in descent—Design for Decline investigates how the architect designs contingency into a building. The thesis tests this idea by considering the architecture of the

institution most closely tied to the booms and busts of our free market system: the bank. Bank architecture has evolved through the centuries as a symbol of global capitalism. In the U.S., banks have changed to reflect the development of our economic system, as well as the American people’s changing relationship with their money. A paradigmatic shift in our economy would undoubtedly reshape existing spaces of transaction. A bank designed to endure beyond the crest of our current age of progress will also need to fundamentally reshape itself to reflect the newest development of the economic system: failure. It is designing for failure that offers the architect compelling new opportunities. Sir John Soane offered insight into an analogous proposition when he commissioned Joseph Gandy to render his design for the Bank of England, as a ruin. As Mark Jarzombek points out: [Gandy’s painting] gives us an Hegelianesque, counter-view to the ideology of hope and optimism. And so, one hundred and eighty years later, the questions for us might be: What does the assembly hall of a failed democracy look like? A school for a failed educational system? A park for a failed public space? A housing complex for a failed social policy? A city for a failed urbanity? A court house for a failed immigration policy? These are some of the pressing design issues in our future.” Like Gandy’s rendering, the thesis asks, ’What does the bank of a failed economic system look like?’ Unlike Gandy’s rendering, the answer does not amount to romantic ruins to an obsolescent institution, but rather the fulfillment of a prudently designed architectural ‘process.’ The tasks, then, are to envision the future of the failed system, design an architecture that accommodates the cultural byproducts of that failure, and then design the process by which the architecture of today’s bank ‘becomes,’ in the event of a paradigmatic shift from progress to descent, the architecture of tomorrow’s economic reality.

The Bank of Savings and Futures The evolution of the bank is a story of the institutionalization of the storage and transaction of assets. The origin of the word can be traced back to the Ancient Roman bancu, meaning bench or table. In the beginning, transactions needed nothing more than a simple bench for the trade and barter of commodity goods. As barter transactions became cumbersome, symbolic money in the form of coinage or bank notes replaced the actual trade of items. Storage then

became instrumental in the safekeeping of the commodity assets represented. Our present-day monetary system— currently in crisis and no longer based on any tangible commodity standard, but rather a system of intangible debt—has undermined any lingering perception of the bank as a site of safe storage or honest transaction. As the legal tender of this system has become less secure, communities have seen a return to transactions based on commodity goods. Trends of this nature can be found in recent history (the collapse of the Soviet Union offers a clear example of a widespread return to a barter economy), as well as in today’s news (gold acquisition surpassed record levels this year, fueled by conservative pundits and economic trepidation). It is reasonable, then, to forecast a future in which the bench is once again a more appropriate site for transaction than the ATM, and the vault a more useful form of storage than the hard drive. When perception of ‘assets’ shifts significantly from intangible credit to tangible commodity, architecture, too, is subject to a change in perceived value. A building’s programmatic assets, facing obsolescence, are more quickly eclipsed by its material assets; that is to say, in a time of material scarcity, or loss of confidence in the monetary unit, the material constitution of the architecture itself becomes a significant asset—a ‘material bank.’ The Bank of Savings and Futures capitalizes on this facet of the transitioning economy by both anticipating the future value of the bank’s initial material investment, as well as the spatial transformation made possible by the harvesting of these materials in a subtractive process of “asset-stripping.” Based around four vault-like, concrete structures (two of which are, in fact, heavy-duty vaults), the Bank of Savings and Futures is designed with an extravagant investment in four materials—wood, copper, limestone, and fiberglass— chosen for their potential value in a future of resource scarcity. About thirty single-family homes’ worth of dimensional lumber, an asset due to its dual application as construction material and fuel, lines the interior of the banking hall, diverging at times to form partitions, seating, and teller’s counters. Ten-foot strips of copper—which can be rolled and traded, or melted down for numerous uses, including raw material for simple batteries—provide the exterior envelope of the bank; its patina subtly tracking its years of use before its harvest. Limestone blocks line the sales and consulting spaces of the Bank of Savings and Futures, its use-value in the future the same as a millennia ago: as a key ingredient in cement and mortar production.

Lastly, corrugated fiberglass reinforced polyester panels provide transparent enclosure for the bank; its transparency and durability a valuable commodity in a petrochemicalscarce future of peak oil. The removal of these materials reveals the underlying contingency design of the future bank. The stripping of wood and copper, for fuel and barter, first uncovers access to more materials. As materials are further removed, the spaces of private transaction for an obsolescing economic system gradually open up to facilitate the bank’s transformation into a public barter market for the new decline economy. Wood, harvested from the banking hall, reveals steps that provide access to an existing pedestrian bridge while doubling as stadium seating for an auction space. The four concrete structures around which the spaces of the Bank of Savings and Futures are organized offer the most important investment: ‘permanence.’ Like the bank vaults constructed a century before them they anchor the site of the bank, ensuring its longevity while also providing downsized spaces of storage or inhabitation. The process of asset stripping and its consequent transformation of the bank to public barter market work in tandem to mitigate the catastrophic effects of the failed economic system; however, the initial investment for such a contingency plan can only occur now, at this latest crest of history. Failure to plan for the possibility of decline may be the difference between debilitating collapse and a prosperous way down. Ultimately, Design for Decline: The Bank of Savings and Futures is a case study in how liberating the idea of future from an ideology of progress can provide the architect with new directions in design. Sustaining our capacity to transition from eras of growth to eras of decline, rather than our capacity to maintain our current trajectory, is a goal that requires a paradigmatic shift in the current discourse of sustainability. As futures beyond progress become increasingly plausible, architects might want to consider what constitutes an asset or a liability in their architectural investment t

What Do We Do With This Future? An Examination of Tempelhof Airport Elizabeth Krasner Elizabeth Krasner received her undergraduate degree in the history, theory and criticism of architecture from MIT in 2008. She has been working as an editor and writer at Volume Magazine in New York and is currently studying architecture in Berlin as a fellow in the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Program. Next year she will start an MArch abroad as a Rotary Ambassadorial scholar.

Since the fall of the wall, architecture in Berlin has come to play the roles of both relic and resistance—legally protected, but hotly contested. Buildings that celebrated now-defunct regimes are woven into the urban fabric but as their continued use is put into question, they become temporally stuck—simultaneously representing visions of the past and future. Tempelhof airfield and airport, fenced off since its closure in 2008, is a perfect example of the disparity between a collective, living memory of history and the directives of a modern European capital. To understand Tempelhof’s difficult temporal presence, it is necessary to see it as the battleground for two different kinds of futures, conceived at different times and for different ends. The first is the future that the Nazis envisioned for themselves, in which Tempelhof became a monumental first representation. Designed in the 1930s by Ernst Sagebiel under the direction of Albert Speer and built as an assertion of architectural permanence in a newly technological world (the structure is clad in limestone), the architecture is both grandiose and severe—lacking in ornamentation and dominated by the geometric rhythm of flat, narrow windows. Though never fully completed (unrealized plans for the building included a ballroom, beer garden and stadium1), it was planned as the first step in a new Nazi city center, abutting a square and surrounded by new ministries. Designed to be visible from space, its arcing hangar resembles the spread wings of an eagle in flight and is more than a mile long. The second vision for the space is conceived of from a contemporary perspective: how will German legislators develop this problematic space, which has consistently been a drain on the local budget? Unsure of how to answer this question, the city has left the building empty since the closure, prompting a slew of citizen responses. Though the popularity of Tempelhof as a subject for debate among Berliners and the international press continues to mount, Berlin government officials have yet to make a decision about what to do with it. Instead, it has stood completely inaccessible, behind a chain-link fence in the center of a major European capital, a locus of denial. It is as if by acknowledging its presence, the city would somehow have to acknowledge the possibility that the Nazis could have won. Rather than acknowledge this power, its emptiness is apocalyptic and celebrated – its functional sterility is a testament to the victory and prevention of the historical (unrealized) future. Equivalent to an entire Berlin neighborhood (an entire city locality, in fact), its sheer size is visionary and futuristic. By containing and fencing the area, the city denies even this: the building’s ability to exert the power of its size. An element of policy change also contributes to the heated debate. When the Berlin Wall came down, the Eastern districts of Prenzlauer Berg and Friedrichshain were in terrible condition; many of the buildings lacked central heating and personal

toilets. Soon after, the newly-unified city invested public money into the Behutsame Stadterneuerung (‘Careful City Renewal’) mandating three levels of preservation: to maintain the physical space, to preserve the social composition of the building, and to design in consultation with the community. But most of these regulations had twenty-year statutes, and on the anniversary of the fall of the wall buildings are being bought by private investors, rents are rising, and neighborhoods are changing. There is a push to develop neighborhoods across the city as quickly as possible, to try to aid the economy of what is now the poorest capital city in Europe. Simultaneously, squatter groups are re-emerging as a form of civic resistance to the lapse in renewal laws. Political resistance is complicated by the fact that Berlin is both a city and a Bundesland, which makes for conflicting interests at different levels of power. Tempelhof is centrally located, situated among neighborhoods formed while the Berlin Wall was still standing (Neukölln and Kreuzberg, respectively) and that developed geographically and ideologically on the fringe. Many residents are self-described political radicals, activists and anarchists. Closing Tempelhof seemed like a relatively uncontroversial idea—to relieve the national government of operational costs and to open up the possibility for the local government to bring in foreign investors in the form of commercial development. These political aims did not take into account the desires of the local population, or the history of citizen activism in the area. Within these neighborhoods, two protest groups have formed to address Tempelhof’s future. The first, Tempelhof für Alle, has tried to work within the framework of the neighborhood associations (BergerInitiatives), leading community walks around the fences, soliciting media attention, and petitioning the district government. Their flyers, scattered across Berlin, proclaim: STOP GENTRIFICATION / TAKE YOUR RIGHT TO THE CITY. A second faction, Squat Tempelhof, advocates a literal squatting; redefining the airport as habitable through physical reclamation. This group resists gentrification more broadly with Tempelhof as a priority —their posters across Berlin proclaim: “first squat Tempelhof, then

1, 2 Posters Promoting the “Squat Tempelhof 20.06.09” Protests Photo by Elizabeth Krasner 3 Poster Promoting the “Squat Tempelhof 20.06.09” Protests in Neukölln Photo by Elizabeth Krasner

squat the rest.” Flyers are how they communicate with the city they hope to expand, to bring in the public in whose interest they claim to act; this is their propaganda. They take a step towards reclaiming and repurposing this space (“Take your right to the city!”). Their actions propel the physical space into the discourse of today, and strip it of the future it represents and never saw. It is both a movement against another future (a commercial development) and a point from which to understand the complete rejection of once-celebrated futures. On June 20, 2009, at the peak of controversy, the two resistance groups organized the ‘Squat Tempelhof 20.06.09’ protest along the fence of the airfield. The city, concerned about the growing media attention, dispatched approximately two thousand armed police officers in what would become a culminating battle between city government and activists. The riot police stood guard against a mere four thousand protestors, waiting behind the fence with tear gas and water cannons. There were accounts of inciting violence from both sides, and several incidents of police brutality were reported. No one got over the fence. Given the anti-establishment bent in these areas, sending out 2000 riot police only served to fuel the fire; public attention turned towards Tempelhof’s future. The idea of squatting an airport extends the longstanding tradition of squatting in Berlin. After all, most of the people who squatted East Berlin tenements after the wall came down became their eventual, legal owners. Squatters exist (and succeed) today in empty warehouses and lots across the city. Tacheles, a twenty-year-old, visiting artists’ community, cultural landmark and tourist destination, is the result of some very persistent squatters. Berliners have a history of claiming space as their own and, for the most part, of succeeding. More generally, fighting for prohibited space has an historical precedent in Berlin that is echoed in the demands of protesters today. At the root of the Tempelhof Airport conflict, its very cause for contention is the fact that it currently stands empty and unusable. Emptiness, and the sheer abundance of empty spaces, is a recurring phenomenon across the city (an estimated 100,000 apartments stand empty, according to a study earlier this year in Prospect Magazine). The fact that the city itself is so large, and so sparsely inhabited, is the legacy of two cities which became one; all across Berlin, empty voids are the markers of history.

Poster Promoting the “Squat Tempelhof 20.06.09” Protests

Photo by Elizabeth Krasner

Tempelhof exists today as locus for denial – of the protestors, of the civic desire to use the space and of what it was built to represent. There it stands, in the middle of the city, inaccessible, untouchable, uninhabitable, while the city government refuses to allow it to become a part of contemporary Berlin life. There have been small attempts to use the airport space, though largely unsuccessful. For example, in July 2009 Berlin hosted their annual Bread+Butter Fashion show there, hoping to use the long hangar as the runways of German Fashion Week. The private event was diminutive in the massive space, dwarfing the thousands of onlookers. The public pressure to develop Tempelhof, or at least to appear to, is finally beginning to take effect: as of 2009, the state-funded Adlershof Projekt GbmH, known for

A view of Tempelhof airfield in June 2009. Photo by Elizabeth Krasner

building a high-technology center that generated thousands of jobs, had been put in charge of developing a concept proposal. By focusing on the program of the airfield (the developers are unable to touch the airport building under architectural historic preservation laws), the government has once again ignored the problematic existence of Tempelhof airport. Moreover, Tempelhof is hardly the last frontier; Tegel Airport will be closed in the next five years. In an eerily similar situation, it is to be replaced by the new Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport, a monolith that is being touted by city officials as the salvation of Berlin, “a symbol of their dream for Berlin.”2 Tempelhof is just one of several sites in Berlin on which the ideological battle for democratic space is fought. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall two decades ago, the city’s attitude about public space has changed, and with it, a resistance has grown among Berliners. Public money that was invested to preserve and modernize East Berlin with special attention to community planning and social responsibility has since run out; the rent limits for tenants who have kept their apartments for the last twenty years have been lifted; the city now faces the largest inner-city peacetime migration in Europe. All of these factors have created a context in which urban spaces have become a kind of contested public right in Berlin; a right that is enunciated, demanded, and sometimes even seized. Tempelhof airport, at the center of the city, has come to serve as the symbol of this struggle. Ultimately, the debate over the use of public spaces in Berlin is about much more than physical terrain. Tempelhof, as an unprogrammed space, is an example of the problematic monuments littered across German cities, “Shared vessels of memory overflowing with conflicting views of the past.”3 But Tempelhof, as a building, is much more complicated: it represents the power that the Nazis once held, the freedom of West Berlin, the fiscal problems of an underdeveloped capital, and a placeholder for gentrification more broadly. It represents a future so powerful that is has invoked responses of fear, violence and collective denial in Berliners. Within the category of abandoned, futuristic cities, what are we to make of architectural visions of the future once the buildings themselves become outdated? The development of Tempelhof Airfield and Airport is a useful point from which to examine what happens when visions of the future shift dramatically, and what to do with architectural relics that blatantly celebrate our past expectations. It is a space that belongs alternately to a nostalgic past, and a horrifying, prevented future. Its various temporal presences are precisely what make it a problematic site. It has become so bound up in the battle between current and historic visions of the future that there is virtually no room left to imagine a present use for it. Protestors have attempted to overcome this by proposing a populist future, reclamation of the space as both historic and civic. Conversely, by ignoring its future, the city government has equated the building’s inaccessibility (and, by extension, uselessness) with its irrelevance as a usable space. The incredible potential of an empty, undeveloped neighborhood is short-circuited by a complete denial of its existence and power. It is as if the city thinks that by closing it off, everyone will forget it is there. More importantly, they will forget that the future it represented ever existed t

Networking Overload, with Potplants An interview about the Natural Fuse project

Usman Haque, interviewed by Matthew Fuller Usman Haque, is director Haque Design + Research Ltd (www.haque.co.uk), founder of Pachube. com and CEO of Connected Environments Ltd. He has created responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and mass-participation performances around the world. His skills include the design and engineering of both physical spaces and the software and systems that bring them to life. Trained as an architect, he received the 2008 Design of the Year Award (interactive) from the Design Museum, UK, a 2009 World Technology Award (art), a Wellcome Trust Sciart Award, a grant from the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, the Swiss Creation Prize, Belluard Bollwerk International, the Japan Media Arts Festival Excellence prize and the Asia Digital Art Award Grand Prize. Matthew Fuller’s books include ‘Media Ecologies, materialist energies in art and technoculture,’ ‘Behind the Blip, essays on the culture of software’ and the forthcoming ‘Elephant & Castle.’ With Usman Haque, he is co-author of ‘Urban Versioning System v1.0.’ Editor of ‘Software Studies, a lexicon.’ A co-editor of the new Software Studies series from MIT Press, he works at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. http://www.spc.org/fuller/

Natural Fuse is a micro scale carbon dioxide overload protection framework that works locally and globally, harnessing the carbon-sinking capabilities of plants. Generating electricity to power the electronic products that populate our lives has consequences on the amount of carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere, which in turn has detrimental environmental effects. The ‘carbon footprint’ of the power used to run these devices can be offset by the natural carbon-capturing processes that occur as plants absorb carbon dioxide and grow. Natural Fuse units take advantage of this phenomenon. Each Natural Fuse unit (they are now distributed in households in London, New York and San Sebastian) consists of a houseplant and a power socket. The amount of power available to the socket is limited by the capacity for the plant to offset the carbon footprint of the energy expended: if the appliance you plug in draws so much power that it requires more carbon-offsetting than available, then the unit will not power. The problem is that even low-power light bulbs draw more power than can be comfortably offset by a single plant. So, all the units are connected together via the internet so that they can communicate and determine how much excess capacity carbon-offsetting is available within the community of units as a whole.

Natural Fuse, San Sebastian, Spain.

For example, if you use an appliance that draws four watts, and there are six Natural Fuse units out in the community that are not currently drawing power, then you can offset the carbon footprint of your appliance by borrowing from others. (Calculations include the energy cost of powering the electronics inside the unit itself too, of course). The project is as much about the structures of participation as it is about energy conservation. Rather than just having an ‘on/off’ switch for your appliance, you are provided with a ‘selfless/selfish’ switch. If you choose ‘selfless,’ then the unit will provide only as much power as will not harm the community carbon footprint. But, if the carbon sequestering capacity of the community is low, the electricity will switch off after a few seconds —though it may be long enough for what you need to do. If on the other hand you absolutely must have electricity (e.g. you hear an intruder in your apartment and you must switch on your light at full power) then you might want to choose ‘selfish’—which will give you as much power as your appliance needs. BUT, if you harm the community’s carbon footprint (i.e. it goes from negative to positive) then the Natural Fuse system will KILL SOMEBODY ELSE’S PLANT! Each unit actually has three ‘lives’ to lose, before which a vinegar shot is dispensed to the unlucky plant. So as it loses each ‘life’ an email is sent both to the owner and the owner that sent a ‘kill’ signal; this provides the capability to communicate and explain their situations to each other prior to final execution of the plant. People’s decisions to be selfish or not have a visceral impact on others in the community. By networking Natural Fuses together, people share their capacity & take advantage of carbon-sinking-surplus in the system since not all Natural Fuses will be in use at any one time. If people cooperate on energy expenditure then the plants thrive (and everyone may use more energy); but if they don’t then the network starts to kill plants, thus diminishing the network’s electrical capacity. Matthew Fuller: The documentation of the experimental stages in the development of the design include a lot of footage of dead and withering plants as you test potential plants and how fast they can be killed by the application of vinegar to their various growth media. The idea of sustainable technology tends to suggest a narrative of improvement in which the basic infrastructures of western society can remain untouched, indeed globalised, whilst their modes of production and consumption are to be made kinder and gentler. Your homely landscapes of poisoned soils and houseplant-scaled deforestation at once poses the idea of individual solutions, of ingenuity in handling and testing them, but also perhaps stages it in terms of fundamental and multilayered problems that are incommensurable with contemporary visions of an easy energy future? Usman Haque: I’m interested in the situation well described by game theory’s ‘prisoner’s dilemma.’ It is sometimes used to explain why it is so difficult for human beings to take coherent decisive action with respect to tackling the issues surrounding the environment and climate change: whoever makes the first move towards tackling global problems in the short term is bound to suffer the most (this is unsurprisingly most often expressed in economic terms). Prisoner’s dilemma shows how it is quite possible for us to make logical decisions that appear to be in our own interest, but which, when viewed from a global perspective are actually counter to our own interests. But initiatives like the Grameen bank in Bangladesh and other micro-credit systems have provided intriguing strategies for ‘socializing’ risk. In the Grameen bank, for example, although individuals take out loans, the community as a whole is responsible for repaying them—this partly relies on peer-pressure with respect to ensuring that individuals repay, but also partly on the idea that there will be a collective attempt to help out an individual in time of need. I’m interested in exporting this kind of approach to the debt that we owe to natural resources. The point is that there is no ‘easy energy future.’ We’ve got to stop trying to sell people the idea that there are obvious ways to deal with the kinds of complex systems that govern both our social and environmental lives.

It is often expressed that it is the task of designers to ‘make things simple for people’— which I find patronizing and counter-productive. If anything it is the task of designers to show how complex things are, and to help build tools for dealing with that complexity (which is the basic function of the perceptual systems we are endowed with anyway). Whether it is bio-fuels on one hand (which for a brief moment seemed to be an obvious solution) or extensive government subsidies (in the UK) for homeowners installing solar panels (which, when you do the math, makes little economic sense, and merely makes people feel happy they’re doing something), we keep discovering that the easy option has detrimental consequences. Systems designed by tacit knowledge and slow custom-based development (such as the evolved designs of unpowered ships and boats) often allow, within a general approach of precautionary over-engineering, for certain components, usually the cheapest and easiest to replace, to be the first that will break under particular stresses thus saving the larger structure. Within a sailing ship, these might be smaller cords attached to the larger stays holding a sail in place. These would snap if a wind suddenly became too strong, in a way that might otherwise damage the mast or sail. Power would be lost, but the core parts of the structure would remain undamaged. This ‘design to fail’ approach is quite different from the imperative for ‘graceful degradation’ often found in computing and HCI, where crashes are seen as abhorrent and problems are sublimated. But it is also different from the ‘fail-free’ design approach such as those developed on the bases of highly engineered but mathematically driven and ostensibly optimized design which imagines problems can be simulated out. In consumer electronics the fuse, embedded in the plug, is of course the part designed to fail if an electrical surge is encountered. I wonder with this project if there is a more general ethic of brokenness that you subscribe to in design? This is an intriguing way to look at it, and I hadn’t really considered Natural Fuse in those terms. But, certainly, embedded in the core concept of the project is the idea of the ‘canary in a coal mine’—using proxies for ourselves that break earlier and less expensively (in economic, social and ecological terms) in order to make it clear before greater damage is done. There is also an aspect of the project, not, I should say, carefully considered, that concerns the use of plants: if we had killed an animal instead of a plant, that would be a lot more uncomfortable for people (and they probably wouldn’t have wanted to take on the responsibility, considering the life of the animal is in the hands of someone else). So using plants (apart from their carbon-capturing aspect) means that we can conveniently offer people something that they won’t need to ‘worry’ about too much but which, nonetheless, grows on them - when you adopt a plant, over time you become attached to it. So, surreptitiously, perhaps, we’ve got something into your home that you didn’t think you would care too much about but which you do actually begin to worry about and have concern for its well-being. Plants seem non-threatening (in the sense of responsibility) but ultimately become quite important to people. And this is intriguing since we tend to think that you can kill plants indiscriminately (in a way that is not morally acceptable for animals), even though they may be extremely good at helping us survive. A colleague has referred to this as “horti-torture!” One thing that is notable in the project is that it reverses the genetic engineering scenario of the plant being switched on and off at the chromosomal level by technologies working on biological material through the metaphor of information. In this case, electronic systems are shut down by organic material. Does Natural Fuse suggest some convergence of the informational view of life and a more organismic or ecological sense? Partly, yes: but only because at heart I’m interested in systems, and more specifically I’m interested in ‘coupling’ systems. Most of my work looks at how we can couple human and non-human (I don’t say “natural” because that implies that humans are not “natural”) systems; electronic and social; ecological and economic.

That’s also why, when we introduce Natural Fuse in a city, we try to encourage an economy of plants. I want to disrupt the conventional economic approach, where money is used because it’s convenient. In Natural Fuse, people rent the units by paying with plants that they bring to the exhibition or the store—they actually have to bring 5 or 10 Kg of plant material which they leave behind. This is enough of an investment in time and effort that they must really want to participate. (In New York, they were also able to rent in US dollars (ultimately donated to the Bronx River Arts Center), but the rental fee was high enough to act as a disincentive and make paying with plants much more attractive). Upon returning the Natural Fuse unit, they actually get their plants back (so in conventional economic terms they rented it for ‘free’): in fact the way they have “paid” is by lending us the carbon capturing capacity of the plant they left behind (which is applied to a very slowly brewing cup of coffee: it takes many dozens of plants growing for a long time to offset the carbon footprint of making a single cup of coffee!).

Natural Fuse, San Sebastian, Spain.

An underlying argument of the project is that design produces social architectures. Every object stages a set of more or less stable relations between infrastructures, resources, ecological processes, organisms and technicities, that imply or require forms of community, of participation, of intelligence, that in a certain way articulate the idea of the perfect user/s, or provoke encounters with the abstractions, ideas and actual forces that are perhaps sometimes occluded in certain kinds of design. To say this another way, Natural Fuse brings assumed ease of function, for the human user, painfully to the fore. Is this a kind of design for inhibition or for knowledge? I am not really trying to ‘communicate’ something with Natural Fuse - it’s not that I want to say “you must conserve energy because otherwise we will all suffer.” I think such strictures are counter-productive: we just don’t like being told we must do something. So it’s not about communicating. Much more than energy issues, the project is primarily an experiment in the structures of participation: how can one design a system in which available options are increased (e.g. you don’t just have ‘off/on,’ but you have ‘off/selfless/selfish’) while making it possible (and more likely) that people will make decisions that benefit the community as a whole. (See reference to prisoner’s dilemma above). I can’t say that it’s necessarily been a total success: we usually leave the actual ‘kill’ function switched off for the first few days after launch simply because it takes people a while to fully grasp that they may be killing other people’s plants on the basis of their own decisions. And, interestingly, the demo unit left in the store or exhibition, which people feel no ‘ownership’ of—was constantly left by visitors in ‘selfish’ mode, to the extent that we had to remove it from the network calculation because otherwise it would have always anonymously killed other people’s plants. Clearly, as a designer, I have some idea of what I consider desirable goals for the kinds of things that I hope people do. I would like people to act in a way that benefits the community as a whole. And it finds me unusually optimistic: I feel that a project like Natural Fuse shows that people can make altruistic decisions in order not to harm people they don’t know. In terms of participation the point is to involve people actively in the processes of decision-making and also in the processes of carbon-capturing/energy reduction. One of the major problems that I see in the so-called climate debate is that we are constantly told that there is plenty of ‘data’ out there for us to consume and process, and that conclusions should be obvious or self-evident. But it is very difficult for ordinary people to form their own opinions about environmental and energy issues—they are confronted with so many dozens of valid explanations, visualizations and extrapolations of the data from a variety of authority figures (politicians, scientists, media figures) but much of it is conflicting or contradictory. Authority figures try to tell them what to believe—but the authority figures don’t all agree which means people just opt out. I think it is vital for people to be able to participate in the process of evidence-gathering: partly so that they can question the ‘standards of evidence,’ partly so that they can become part of a solution, but also so that they can understand the methodological limitations to any data-acquisition (and carbon-capturing) process. In Natural Fuse when a plant dies any carbon sequestered during the growth period is, in the absence of continued sequestration (e.g. by sealing it deep within the earth), soon released back into the atmosphere. A zero-sum situation depends entirely on where the arbitrary boundaries of the system are drawn. So what might you do with your plant? Eat it? Bury it? Weave it? Of course eating it results in carbon dioxide output from the body (exhalation, excretion, etc.); burying it takes a lot of energy; weaving it might be an option—but that becomes very ‘object’ or ‘product’ oriented. It is important to understand the cascading consequences that sets of decisions can have: first at a local level and later at a global level t

From here to infinity: Make-Believe and Virtuality On the Japanese Driving Range John Zissovici John Zissovici is Associate Professor at Cornell University where he teaches architectural design and courses that deal with the impact of digital media on architectural thinking. His current research on imagescape urbanism brings into alignment his various teaching interests and has resulted in award-winning short films using images culled from Google Earth. His architectural work includes built projects, competitions and speculative work, and has been published in Japan, Austria, Germany, Ireland, and the U.S. His large-scale installations involving digital media, robotics, and video have been exhibited at the Phoenix Museum of Art, The Burchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY, Tsing Ha University in Beijing, and the Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca, NY.

Introduction “At one blow, they become the hollow mold from which the image of modernity was cast.”1 Driving ranges mark the crossing point along the figure-eight shaped path whose two curved ends correspond to the earliest appearance of the golf course in Japan and the emerging contemporary phenomenon of virtual golf. The Japanese driving range represents both the intersection of post-enlightenment Western ideas about nature, expressed in picturesque landscape paintings and played out on the golf course, and the Zen garden’s abstract explorations of the pure space of the image. Their conflation produces a displaced and displayed landscape that is for the eye and the ball only, a new yet vaguely familiar synthetic hybrid that is already both too flat and too three-dimensional. As an instrument for processing space into image, the driving range is both a model and a privileged vantage point for examining the transformative possibilities of architecture. The driving range, as strategic set-up that negotiates between architecture and the representational elements of the landscapes of golf, also suggests alternative models to the purely representational, or totally virtual leisure-fueled environments of the 21st century, embodied by virtual golf. Golf is first introduced in Japan, a country with deeply rooted landscape traditions by the British, just after the turn of the century. Though readily accepted from the beginning, there were still only about 23 golf courses at the beginning of World War II, all faithful to Western models, and mostly designed by Western course architects. By 1956, only the number has changed, increasing to 72. The driving range’s sudden appearance around this time marks Japan’s inevitable appropriation of the game, and signals a broader shift towards an increasingly mediated field of deconstructed action that gradually becomes a prominent feature of Japanese urban life. Its eventual disappearance from the consciousness of

Japanese people, (“oh that, that’s just a Just Hit It”, the literal translation of uchippanashi) is a measure of the by now more than 10,000 driving ranges’ ubiquity, and “the Japanese genius for assimilation, [whereby] incongruous elements...are brought together and…made to cohere in a unique manner,” thus becoming thoroughly Japanese.2 The driving range emerges in response to the opposing pressures of the need for more golf courses and the ever-decreasing amount of space available in the already crowded landscape. It is at the forefront of other similarly motivated ingenious programmatic and typological inventions, characterized by the mechanically enabled densification of objects, people, and activities in Japanese cities in the latter half of the 20th century. By stacking several concave curved rows of players practicing their drives, the driving range accommodates dozens of players in a space often right in the city, that is a fraction of a single hole on a regulation course. Concavity enhances the communal sense of participation in the shared mostly unattainable goal of the center, and nourishes the impulse to compete with all other golfers within one’s line of sight.

Practice Practice fractures the spatial and temporal continuity of golf and replaces the epic journey of the player hitting one ball into 18 consecutive holes, with the repetition of the drive from a single point. With the linear narrative of the 18-hole journey through a mythic landscape suspended, the driving range is free to propose its own space and scene through the two or three ‘greens’ artfully dispersed at various distances from the stationary golfer, but too close to each other to be mistaken for the real thing. Progress, precisely measured by distance traveled with the fewest swings along the folded linked lines of the 18-hole course, must find a new definition on the driving range. Here accomplishment is registered through the number of balls hit towards the greens, precisely reflected by the amount of money fed into the automatic ball dispensing machines. The inversion of paying for the ball one hits, or more precisely its retrieval from a space one no longer moves through, rather than the upkeep of endless stretches of perfectly manicured landscape, suggests that at the driving range, with each new ball, one has already started to reel in the landscape.

Transformation “…a contemporary golf course is already a second-order image—a landscape sculpture that mimics a painting in the landscape tradition.”3 Privacy on the driving range is a mental construct, the meditative zone a golfer creates for the drive through the agency of the swing. With its compressed yet airy spatiality, and the spirituality of the practice of the swing, the driving range reveals unexpected affinities with traditional Zen gardens. The deceptively simple set-up of the player in front of a net-enclosed, scaled down, synthetic reproduction of the space of golf, only to deny him or her access except through the agency of the ball, constitutes Japan’s ingenious transformation of golf. The driving range displaces the landscape of golf outside arm’s reach, still within driving range, but no longer accessible, and turns it into a scene to be looked into, the abstraction of an abstraction of nature, “a model landscape in which the mind [and the golf ball] can wander.”4 The compression of the physical space of the game, along with the player’s displaced relation to it, links the driving range to traditional Japanese attitudes toward nature painting, landscape, garden design, and architecture. The added degree of representation to an already second-order image seems perfectly suited to Japanese sensibilities, for whom the golf course, like “the scenic view is great, but more admired is the reproduction.”5

Tilted plane The tilted, contoured, artificial surface of the Kyoto driving range, onto which players today drive and chip balls from the multi-leveled Tee-house, is the hyper-evolved descendant of the shortened, grassy fairway and green of early driving ranges. The operation that folds the far back onto the near produces a layered, complex topographic condition with functional, historical and perceptual consequences. At first glance, functionality seems to motivate every aspect of this new ‘nature.’ Each level of tee stations features ball vending machines serviced by automated ball delivery systems, with screw drive conveyors that move up to 24,000 balls an hour from the pool of the mechanical washer, to which gravity, the golfer’s invisible enemy, returns balls from the farthest corners of the field via invisible stream-like channels in the folds and creases of the tilted fairway. “Driving your profits higher” is the pitch, or promise made by ever more sophisticated American made RANGE AUTOMATION SYSTEMS. Low maintenance, reliable drainage, effective ball collection, and a general sense of modernity and cleanliness are legible in every detail. Less evident behind this veil of efficiency and inventiveness are unmistakable allusions to the Katsura palace garden, a mere fifteen-minute walk away, and to the Zen garden of Ryoanji, less than two miles further north. Foregrounded by some 150 feet of carefully tended lush real grass, the artfully scattered artificial greens, trapped ominously in a synthetic color field of blue and sand, lead the eye towards its ultimate goal: the image of distance, the constructed dimension separating the viewer/player from a point in the landscape. The farthest and highest part of this sloping surface, by now a full storey and a half above the ground, is merely a denser version of the back netting, folded down into the stretched illusion of ground, now at eyelevel with the equally ungrounded players on the second tier of the tee-house. Cars park on the grassy lawn underneath it in a vain attempt to seek shelter from the sweltering heat. The tilted plane, like the isometric construction of Japanese paintings from as far back as the 11th Century, flattens space and merges the surface of golf with the city in the background into a layered abstract image. The tilted, pictorialized field, with the holes in the greens as its shifting centers, is the first step in making explicit the target-like character of the landscape. The vertical projection screen of virtual golf is the last.

Typology While the structure that houses the drivers, the TEE-house, draws its strength from more than its functional clarity, its modernist lines and typological clarity and consistency seem to suggest otherwise. As if modeled after clubhouses and Japanese golf resort hotels overlooking world-class golf courses, the TEE-house provides the clubhouse’s comfort and amenities, along with the golf hotel’s focus on the individual overlooking greens and fairways from his balcony. As the first step in bringing golf in-doors, tees are distributed on elevated curving balconies, reminiscent of the resort hotel’s balconies. With privacy screens reduced to about 18 inches, the minimum height necessary to protect the adjacent player from errant drives, the curving rows of players overlook not only the shared representation of the golf course but also each other. Each tee is the tip of an invisible radius some 1200 feet long, the guiding vector for the perfect shot towards a single invisible point in the distance, well beyond the boundary set by the netting. From the covered comfort of the TEE-house you can now drive your balls into the picturesque void even in driving rain. Weather as a factor is reduced to its visual effects on the scenery. A chair and small table behind each TEE-station, replaces the hotel room as the place to retire between buckets of balls. To bring the room back as a useful programmatic element for urban sportsmen and sportswomen, merely requires

putting golf in bed with sex, or mating the driving range with the ‘love hotel,’ a similar space and timesaving invention that has evolved into another ubiquitous and sophisticated Japanese institution. This new hybrid could still be called uchippanashi, though now, with a more nuanced meaning.

Verticality The elevated vantage point provided by the curved, stacked tiers, seems to privilege the spectator half of the golfer’s split personality. Being suspended some thirty feet above the already ungrounded tilted field of play in a rarified atmosphere of apparent weightlessness, hints at the potential of impossibly long drives. In a quaint gesture, the fee structure of the driving range vainly tries to reassert the value of reality, by charging more for the authenticity of the ground level tee stations. As proof of the decidedly un-imamekashi, or un-enlightened mindset behind these attempts at economic hierarchy, it is not unusual to find the upper tiers crowded, with only a few players occupying the ground level. The presence of skilled golfers on the upper levels reveals how little grounding is necessary to gauge accuracy and distance. It also seems to confirm, along with overwhelming figures [10,000+ driving ranges vs. 2,000+ golf courses], that despite its potentially second-class status as mere training ground for ‘nature’, a substitute for the real thing, the driving range is already much more than it is less, with deep roots in the rich history of Japanese landscape. Enhanced by verticality, the elevated spectator’s view tends to favor the abstraction of the plan, merely a supplemental feature in virtual golf, a picture within a picture, and recalls its subtle and complex evocation in early Paradise gardens. “Just as one perceived the structure of the garden through an interpretation of its mandalistic intention, so one perceived with the inner eye of understanding its ideal view from above.”6

Detour The Takenawa Golf Center, part of the Tokyo Prince hotel complex specializing in accommodations for “eternal weddings,” is an indoor golf facility where players come to work on form and style, surrounded by aerobic studios, beauty parlors, fashion boutiques, dermatology clinics, and high-end massage parlors, all intended to make you feel as if you look good. In this hedonistic context, the focus of the game appropriately shifts to the body and its movement, or the perfect swing, that is the precondition for distance, accuracy and consistency. The compact, two-level space, where no shot can ever travel more than some twenty-five feet, offers a single semi-circular synthetic green, as the sole remaining recognizable reference to an actual golf course. In fact, two thirds of the players face net-covered blank walls away from the green, where they can practice their swing without ever suffering the spatial consequences of errant shots. The teaching pro provides the missing element of embarrassment. With help from the instant replay on individual video monitors enhanced by virtual regulating lines, he deflects all attention back onto the player’s swing, the most elemental fragment of the game. A photomural of what seems like a lone putting green overlooking an idealized tropical landscape, but is in fact a highly doctored image of an actual Hawaiian course, the color of its green as artificial as the ‘real’ one in the foreground, greets visitors as they enter the facility. By virtue of its orientation away from the players’ line of sight, the image merely lingers on the margins, a false view reduced to a sign, offered as mere distraction from the otherwise generic athletic environment. The pure image has not yet recognized its own potential to become the target, and sole destination of every shot.

Net “The presence of the real, rough, raw, random nature must remain… yet remain not in fact but in vision—in the eye… of the golfer—because, for Eden to mean anything, raw nature must remain visible in the background… transformed by the dialectics of civilization into the rough—a symbol of that temptation into which one prays not to be lead.” 7

The driving range’s netting captures space and shapes it into aviary cathedrals, devoted to curtailing the ball’s flight, while promoting the illusion of infinite space. The space of ground reserved for golf by the netting satisfies the most fundamental requirements of the Japanese garden: to be separate and enclosed from its surroundings, and for “the sense of closure never [to be] confining or absolute. There is always some visual escape…Within its confines… ordinary scale is suspended, an ideal image of landscape.”8 The city as the borrowed [urban] landscape provides the mental distance to complete the drive cut short by the netting. The net simultaneously fences out, and protects the city that has replaced a nature already in short supply in post-war Japan. With risk removed from the equation, and the city standing in for ‘rough’ nature as the contemporary image and symbol of temptation, the allegorical dimension of golf is brought ‘up to date.’ The architecture of the driving range mediates between the reconfigured game and its new urban surroundings. The net, effective in keeping the ball from straying into the virtual ‘rough’ of the surrounding city, now acts as a scrim for the image of the city. More than just a supplemental dimension, the city amplifies the exhilaration of the drive with the illusion of drilling balls, without penalty, into the crowded city just beyond.

Dislocation The pleasure derived from the act of seemingly driving the ball into the city, when compared to that experienced by American sailors launching golf balls off the deck of an airplane carrier, confirms the ingeniously constructed economy of the Japanese version. The sailor merely exploits his surroundings, his swing a futile, wasteful, yet ultimately defiant gesture in face of the infinite, unavoidable water-trap. The splash momentarily marks a point of transition. After the ball disappears, it sinks and settles, adding thousands of invisible feet to the already hardto-gauge distance of the drive, to be transformed into a tiny invisible marker, a monument dedicated to the singular, decadent moment of the swing. In his 1950 film “Orphee” Jean Cocteau rotates his camera 90 degrees to transform a horizontal pool of water into a vertical liquid surface, the illusion of a mirror that is the boundary between life and death through which the poet must pass to descend to Hell. A similar operation on the ocean surface transforms it into the vertical target, and liquid boundary of the drive, now located about ten feet in front of the tee, too close for gravity to have any appreciable affect on the flight of the of the ball, and therefore temporarily useless in gauging anything about the accuracy or distance of the drive. A golfer, standing at the edge of the launch deck of the now hovering carrier, driving a ball full-force into a perpendicular oceanic wall of water ten feet away, is a disorienting image with radical implications for our thinking of the physical world.

Virtuality “In the wax museum the past enters into the same aggregate state that distance enters into the interior.”9 Virtual golf begins where the image of the lone golfer at the edge of the carrier deck left off. The implausible relation to gravity implied by the vertical plane of water is only surpassed by the premise of virtual golf: to translate the physical properties of the ball’s movement before it is absorbed by a vertical surface, into the image of the continuation of the ball’s flight, now displayed on the same surface. In other words, to replace the death of the balls movement in physical space, with a speculative, simulated version of its continued afterlife in virtual space. The splash of the ball hitting the surface of water off the carrier deck is the equivalent of the ‘thunk’ coming from the screen in virtual golf. They both announce the

encounter of the ball with a surface that is both an obstacle, and the medium to extend the ball’s flight into dimensions that rely on the mind as much as on the eye. The moment of impact marks the appearance of the virtual ball in the projected image, and the illusion of its continued flight off into the distance is no less radical and disorienting to have an accent grave overe the first e. image of a train rushing towards the viewer, more than a hundred years ago.

Set-up Virtual golf dispenses even with the foreground green of Tanekawa Golf Center, the last vestige of any literal allusion to the landscape of golf, and replaces it with a screen, some ten feet in front of the golfer, the potential site for an infinite number of images, and terminus of every drive, approach, chip shot, and put. The set-up of projector, tee, infrared sensors, computer, and stop/projection screen reveals in its sequentiality the trajectory of transformations, and information feedback that is the new technological space-time of golf. It also fits neatly into sports bars, sporting goods stores, and Donald Trump’s living room. The technology, aimed at analyzing the player’s swing, is upgraded with the most advanced electronic and digital technology, developed for space exploration and the military, and reoriented to observe and analyze the movement of the ball from the time it leaves the face of the club, until it smashes into the screen just ten feet away. Within the fraction of a second squeezed between the two impacts, infra red sensors track the trajectory, acceleration, speed and spin of the ball, and translate that information into a virtual image simulating the continuation of the ball’s flight from the player’s point of view in real time, if not space. The context for this simulated flight is the projected image of a hyper-realistic virtual model of any number of world famous golf courses. “Every element of the golf course is depicted on screen, from waving flags to water reflections… Balls bounce off trees, splash in water, spin on green, even hit the flag stick. A computerized grid allows players to read the topography and slope of each green, to gauge the speed and break of every put. No detail has been overlooked.”10 Full Swing Golf also promises an “exclusive recessed hitting mat with simulated fairway, light rough, heavy rough, and sand surfaces,” a less than twenty-squarefoot synthetic remnant of the hundreds of acres of well kept landscapes of the world’s finest courses, and all that is needed to fully replicate the experience of eighteen holes of golf, anywhere in the world. Players choose from as many as 50 world-class virtual golf courses, and navigate their way through with their drive, approach, chip shot, or put, as joystick.

Conclusion Virtual golf completes the cycle of implosion of the space of golf begun by the Japanese driving range with its shift towards a single space, and elaborated at the Takenawa Golf Center with its emphasis on the swing over the drive, or body over space. It also brings to its inevitably uninteresting conclusion the shift toward the raw image with which the Zen garden, and the Kyoto driving range each flirt, but avoid by keeping in play multiple layers of allusion and illusion. Seen through the digitally enhanced rear-view mirror of our high speed present, the seamlessly joined ensemble of tee-house, tilted plane and vertical scrim-like netting of the Kyoto driving range appears as a finely calibrated instrument for the production of uncertainty. It is luckily, as the fine print on the mirror reminds us, much closer than it appears. Powered by the energy of mass participation in ritualized recreation, the driving range processes all reductive oppositional notions of ‘East vs. West,’ ‘city vs. nature,’ and ‘real vs. virtual’ into a formally elegant hybrid mash of ‘this and that,’ the far and the near, the perfect model of architecture for the often-conflicting needs of our local/global mediated future t

Figures 1-6 are by Chad Gerth, a photographer who had spent some time in Japan and was also taken by the many strange and wonderful qualities of the driving range.

ISLAND PHANTASMAGORIA Exploring the Political/Philosophical Underpinnings of Fictional Islands and Imagining a Future of PlasticPirate-Island-Utopias Manar Moursi Manar Moursi is an aspiring architect, artist and architectural theorist. She graduated from Princeton University with an M.Arch. in 2008 and is currently working/living/breathing lots of polluted air in Cairo—this may/may not have affected her thoughts and writing.

“The élan that draws humans toward islands extends the double movement that produces islands in themselves. Dreaming of islands—whether with joy or in fear, it doesn’t matter—is dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone— or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew. Some islands drifted away from the continent, but the island is also that toward which one drifts; other islands originated in the ocean, but the island is also the origin, radical and absolute.” Gilles Deleuze

More than 50% of the world’s population lives within 50 miles of the coastline, a percentage projected to rise to 75% by 2020. The coastline’s landscape of instability is currently under threat of rising sea levels. On low-lying land like coastal river deltas, a sea-level rise of just one foot will send water thousands of feet inland. “Over the long term, much larger sea-level rises will render the world’s coastlines unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands.”1 The new islands created by ‘natural’ processes will not be the only additions to the re-contoured landscape of the sea. While the sea eats away at our coasts, we will continue to implant our coastal cities through the age-old processes of geological prosthesis.2 In a future of climate-change compounded with a parallel growth in construction of artificial islands, is it therefore possible to imagine that most of the world’s inhabitants will be island inhabitants? What are the philosophical and socio-political implications of inhabiting an eternally mutable and potentially isolated landscape? An investigation of islands in fictive accounts, both written and cartographic, reveals key sociopolitical dimensions specific to the context of island habitation. Examining two contemporary utopic proposals for island habitation by placing them in the context of their historical precedents, both fictive and real, will allow a fuller understanding of the radically different sociopolitical possibilities in a future likely made up of island dwelling.

1 Seasteading Institute: Swimcity Source: András Gyõrfi, 2009 2 Synthetica: A New Continent of Plastics Source: Fortune Magazine, 1940 3 Seasteading Institute: Rendering Freedom Source: Anthony Ling, 2009 4 Aerial image of the site of the Burning Man Festival – as revived pirate utopia “island” Source: NASA, 2005 1

I. HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS OF ARTIFICIAL TERRAFORMING: A. Governmental Refuse The process of artificial-terraforming began as early as prehistoric Scotland. The reasons motivating it rely primarily on the political aspirations of the constituencies developing the artificial islands, whether governmental, private developers or utopic visionaries. In the case of utopic visionaries, desire for political freedom remains the key motivator, while for private developers, it is real-estate speculation. For governments however, islands are typically ascribed the negative connotation of dumping-ground. The geopolitical implications of quarantine-prison-island are understood as a ‘spatial response to suspicion, threat, and uncertainty.’ New York City’s islands from Hart to Roosevelt Island are emblematic of this desire to isolate unwanted members of society and undesired uses from the mainland onto islands. Rem Koolhaas’ reading of Roosevelt Island confirms this notion of island-as-quarantine-site-ofexclusion: “Originally the island was the site of hospitals and asylums - generally a storehouse for ‘undesirables.’”3 In the specific case of New York, the employment of islandas-home-to-municipal-reform-institutions started at the end of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it was inspired by the British Empire’s isolation and transfer of its criminals to Australia, a trend that gained currency in the Seventeenth Century. The earliest identity of Australia was as a “floatinggiant-continental-island-prison.” Eventually, the vessel which transported criminals became the final destination —a floating artificial-prison-island moored outside of the city to house inmates.3 Prominent fictional accounts that depict this idea of islandas-prison include Dickens’ 1812 Great Expectations which opens with the protagonist crossing paths with an escaped convict, whom he helps to obtain food and drink. Later on, this convict is captured and returned to “The Hulks”— described as “a wicked Noah’s ark” moored in the neighboring River Medway.4 J.K. Rowling’s fictional Azbakan, the wizard-prison of the Harry Potter series, hints at the geopolitics of quarantine on a physically isolated island setting. It is portrayed to play a direct role in altering its prisoners’ state of mind: “[the fortress of Azkaban is]... set on an island, way out to sea, but they don’t need walls and water to keep the prisoners in, not when they’re all trapped inside their heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most of them go mad within weeks.”5 The trend of artificial-

hulk-island as prison continues on to the contemporary context, with two examples illustrating this: New York City’s five-story jail-barge “the Bain” constructed in the early ‘90s which “stores” 800 prisoners. And the Netherlands, desiring to segregate its illegal migrant convicts from other prisoners, utilizes the recently constructed “Zaandam” barge to warehouse intercepted migrants.6

B. Real-Estate ‘Utopias’ Unlike the negative connotation ascribed to islands by governments, private developers actively pursue construction of artificial islands as prime sites for realestate speculation. The positive connotation of islands in the public subconscious could partially be attributed to utopic narratives such as Atlantis. Possibly the earliest account of a ‘fictive island’ Atlantis debuts in Plato’s dialogues (circa 360 BC) as a naval power that conquered many parts of Africa and Europe. Due to their isolated setting, the Atlanteans developed greed and moral bankruptcy as characteristics that distinguished them from their mainland counterparts. It is implied that these characteristics were the ultimate cause of their demise as their island is finally submerged due to a natural disaster. Numberless spin-offs of the Atlantis narrative exist, most notable of which subvert the dystopic sociopolitical patterns on the island which Plato depicts and instead, portray a society where “generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendor, piety and public spirit” were the commonly held qualities of the inhabitants.7 Francis Bacon’s 1627 essay The New Atlantis portrays the island as a vision of the future of human discovery. Ignatius Donnely’s 1882 publication Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, renders Atlanteans as direct descendants from Neolithic culture, technologically advanced and biologically superior. Real-estate speculators seek to positively reference/ associate with these utopic-fictive-island accounts, some even directly borrowing their names, with Atlantis-esque projects existing from as far as the Bahamas to Dubai. Further, residential island projects such as Dubai’s are emblematic of a desire to achieve a so-called social “utopia” in the sea. As stated by Anselm Franke: “Utopia [is] imagined as an island, artificially cut-off from the land - a place of exile for the perfection of society. [It] begins with the establishment of an extra-territorial space surrounded by ‘social matter’ it aims to leave behind.” In the case of Dubai, the “matter left behind” is a segregated city of unbridgeable inequality between its expat workers and privileged locals.8

2 3

C. Islands-of-Separation While governments conceive of islands-as-quarantinesites and real-estate developers view islands-asspeculative-tools, visionary utopists seek to capitalize on the isolation of islands as a politically transformative tool. According to these visionaries, dilemmas of political division along ethnic lines or ideological orientations can now be solved through physical separation onto islands. Precedents exist in cartographers’ renderings of fictive deluge scenarios to create islands-of-ethnic-separation. For the contested land of Palestine/Israel, the French artist Julien Bousac, proposes a fictional “scenario” in his map The Archipelago of Eastern Palestine published in Le Monde Diplomatique. The map’s controversy stems from the complete inundation of Israeli territory to create a fanciful Palestinian archipelago. Bousac refutes allegations of intentions to connote negative Biblical references, claiming that “the map is not about ‘drowning’ or ‘flooding’ the Israeli population, nor dividing territories along ethnic lines, even less a suggestion of how to resolve the conflict.” More simply, he explains, it is intended as an illustration of the ongoing fragmentation of Palestinian territory. But this fragmentation already clearly signifies divisions along ethnic lines. Bousac heightens the irony by playing on the leisure/ pleasure association with islands: “us[ing] typical tourist maps’ codes sharpen(s) the contrast between the fantasies raised by seemingly paradise-like islands and the Palestinian Territories’ grim reality.”9 A visionary map of Belgium is in the similar vein of imagined cartographic depictions, where parts of a politically contested mainland are submerged to create islands-oflinguistic-separation. Ever since its inception in 1830, the Belgian Federation has existed in strife between its Dutchspeaking Flemings and French-speaking Walloons. This map plays on the binary nature of the Federation depicting a futuristic scenario, post-global warming, where the lowlying Flanders region is submerged leaving only some of its higher parts above water as newly formed islands-ofseparation. Thus, unlike the Palestine/Israel map, the cartographer employed the less offensive logic of a postglobal warming world to propose a solution to the Belgian conundrum.10 Capitalizing on this capacity of islands to separate politicallydivided people, liberals seeking freedom from the restrictions of the mainland go out to sea to create artificial

liberal-islands. In the modern setting, this is mostly achieved by occupying vessels/oil-platforms. The trend was initiated as pirate-radio-station and abortion-clinic-islands. The latter movement began in 1999 by Dutch pro-abortion physician Rebecca Gomberts. Her Women on Waves project seeks to provide reproductive health services to women in countries with restrictive abortion laws. The pirate radio stations began in 1964, off the Dutch coast. Since Dutch law at the time did not permit commercial broadcasts, REM Island was created to house Radio and Television Nordzee outside of territorial waters. Later in the year however, the Dutch government passed a “REM law” which declared the seabed under REM Island as Dutch territory and led to the dismantling of the oil-platform-island.

REM Island marked the beginning of a fast-growing trend of pirate-media-islands. However, what initially started as a desire for media independence evolved to a desire to create sovereign micro-nations. Of these, perhaps the most consequential is the Principality of Sealand, erected on an oil platform in 1967 by Major Paddy Roy Bates, for the original intention of broadcasting his private radio station. Due to ensuing legal battles, Bates attempted to declare the Principality of Sealand as an independent sovereign state. It was not until Operation Atlantis in the early 1970s that the construction of artificial islands was pursued with the pure desire to create liberal/libertarian enclaves. Freedom, the concrete-hulled vessel was intended to act as the homestead for libertarian dwellers. Due to a hurricane, the project was aborted as the ship sank on its way from New York City to the Caribbean, where it intended to anchor itself permanently. Less than a year later, the Republic of Minerva was established in 1972. The founders anticipated a republic with “no taxation, welfare, subsidies, or any form of economic interventionism.” According to Glen Raphael, “The chief reason that the Minerva project failed was that the libertarians who were involved did not want to fight for their territory.” Ejection by troops from Tonga (who later on formally annexed it), marked the final ending.

II. CONTEMPORARY PROPOSALS FOR UTOPIC “LIBERAL” ISLAND HABITATION: A. Pirate Utopias and “TAZ” The projects of the late 1960s and early ‘70s set a crucial precedent to two contemporaneous theoretical proposals for island-utopias; the revival of pirate-island-utopias and the proposal for ‘competitive’ governments in the sea.

Inspired by pirate-island-utopias - secret islands once used for supply purposes by pirates—Peter Lamborn Wilson proposes the concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ), that “elude formal structures of control.” To Wilson, pirate utopias, such as the phantasmic Libertatia and the more real 17th century Republic of Salé, represent the earliest forms of autonomous “micronations” which existed beyond the realm of governments: “these pirate enclaves typified proto-anarchist societies in that they operated beyond laws and governments and, in their stead, embraced unrestricted freedom.”10, 11, 12 Anarchy on islands emerges in precedent fictional accounts as the natural and dominant sociopolitical structure. Both Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island for example, set the island’s anarchy in contrast to the mainland’s structured socio-politics. In the Crusoe account, the differences between the Island of Despair and the mainland are panned out through emphasis on Crusoe’s colonialist methods of replicating his own society on the island. Crusoe’s ‘civilized’ survival instincts —which propel him to build a private habitation grow crops, use tools (an allusion to European technology), and even make a calendar—are markedly different than those of the native island inhabitants. References to Crusoe’s political superiority as ‘king’ and ‘governor of the mutineers’ all reinforce the differences between the new, if rudimentary political hierarchy that Crusoe brings to the otherwise anarchist, savage society of the island. The motif of difference between the socio-politics on the mainland vs. islands is pronounced once again through the Stevenson account of Treasure Island. Set in Hispanolia, an island historically occupied by pirates and other vagabonds, the anarchist lack of political organization and indiscipline of the pirates is consistently contrasted with the virtues of the mainland heroes of the novel—namely; truthfulness, loyalty, thrift, religiosity, and discipline. Wilson aspires to replicate the anarchy that is depicted to exist on these pirate-island-utopias in his Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ) proposal.13 Wilson suggests concentrating on the present to release one’s mind from the controlling mechanisms that have been imposed on it. He emphasizes the temporary dimension because permanence deteriorates to a structured system. The closest contemporary application of Wilson’s concept is the Burning Man Festival, held annually in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada for the approximate duration of a week. The project seeks to create temporary “islandutopias,” free of political restriction, fostering “radical

self-expression” and “radical self reliance.”14

B. Seasteading Clearly inspired by the 1960s and 1970s projects, seasteading is the other contemporary proposal for ‘liberal/libertarian’ island-dwelling. A portmanteau of sea and homesteading, seasteading proposes creating permanent dwellings at sea, called seasteads, outside territories claimed by the governments of any standing nation.15 On April 15, 2008, Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman founded The Seasteading Institute, an organization dedicated to creating experimental mobile ocean communities “with diverse social, political, and legal systems.” With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, the Institute is actively researching the idea of “an entrepreneurial, DIY mentality to creating oceanic citystates.” In an official statement, Thiel explains his motivation for supporting the mission of the Institute: “Decades from now, those looking back at the start of the century will understand that Seasteading was an obvious step towards encouraging the development of more efficient, practical public-sector models around the world.”16 The seasteads propose a revolutionary concept of competitive governments modeled on the competitive free-market economic system. For the young Friedman “government is an industry with a really high barrier to entry, you basically need to win an election or a revolution to try a new one.”17 With his seasteading mobile homes, “You can change your government without having to leave your house,” and islands compete to attract citizens.

Conclusion In a post global-warming world, where possibly the only relic of human existence left will likely be non-biodegradable artificial plastic, is it possible to imagine living on plastic-garbage-patches as islands?18 What are the philosophical and socio-political implications of island-inhabitation? From the surveyed literature of fictive and artificial islands, we can foretell some of the possibilities. The simultaneous forces of isolation and constant flux due to a precarious coastal position will potentially allow society to replace rigid ideals of structure and classical notions of stability, with flexibility, responsiveness and adaptability. The possibilities of new forms of governance, and of existence in smaller networks due to mobility will thus become an increasingly attractive option for a future that is less politically restrictive t

Towards Diversity in Data Culture Marc Böhlen

Marc Böhlen is an artist-engineer based in Buffalo, Toronto and Zürich. He offers technology support, the kind of support technology really needs. Marc Böhlen is on faculty in the Department of Media Study, at the University at Buffalo. More at: www.realtechsupport.org

Stone Mountain Ultra-Secure Tier-4 Data Center Mega-Complex (SMDC) Twenty times the size of the Cheyenne Mountain Operation Center in Colorado, SMDC will, upon completion, set new standards for ultra secure data storage. Carved into a mountain of limestone, SMDC will have on site water and sewage treatment, a fire station, a helipad, a power plant, medical facilities, as well as police powers granted by the state to onsite security personnel. The facilities are all under the tightest surveillance, resulting in “indefinite selfsustainability for complete stand-alone operability no matter what happens off-site.” http://stonemountaindataplex.com/index.htm Photo: Courtesy L. Russell, Stone Mountain Data Center

Urbanites across the world are inundated with information. The emerging information culture growing in its wake constitutes a fundamental element of 21st Century living. Data, the digital residue of information, has crept into the 21st Century with astonishing ease, promising conveniences never before thought possible. Overwhelmed by information made both perceptible and ceaseless, a public Attention Deficit Disorder has taken hold. It seems impossible to objectively measure the benefit of data availability against its invisible and time-delayed side effects. And these include nothing less than an unprecedented erosion of privacy and the commercialization of the public sphere.1

A data culture malaise There is nothing personal about computing other than the bacteria communities that coat your keyboard.2 While most people seem to agree that computing has gone public, there is less agreement on which aspects of computing and information remain most relevant. This might be due in part to the fuzziness of the concept of information that spans electrical, biological, and logical media as well as factual, subjective and intangible things. The Shannonianmathematical concept of semantic-independent information (informed by prior work in thermodynamics) is a different creature altogether from the linguistic concept of semantic-dependent information (informed by prior work in linguistics). But information with real-world saliency is more, a thing that spans both domains, despite attempts to conveniently reduce it to a single category.3 One might be tempted, for example, to disregard the interdependence between the technical framework that makes mobile phone communication possible and the cultural habits that form around it, but dropped calls and subsequent mutual accusations of rudeness remind us that the technical and the social remain intertwined. The twining is less of a problem than the polarizing positions the technical-commercial communities and the critical socially engaged communities operate from. Sociologists and activists have been expending plenty of effort debating just how asymmetric the power relations inherent in the Internet are without building any kind of alternative that could behave otherwise.4 It is much easier to kill your data than to propose, let alone make, new and robust models of living with information.5 The information technology (IT) camp is equally complicit in the current data culture malaise. IT still seems to believe that every social and philosophical problem need only be addressed by the proper technological fix. Metaphors of virtualized computing “Security in the Ether,” an article published by Technology Review on the current trend in virtualized data management, better known as cloud computing, is a good example of the state of IT rhetorics that accompanies the data culture malaise.6 The ether, according to Greek mythology the pure air breathed by the Gods, the material that fills the region of the universe above the surface of the earth, is as inappropriate a term for the atmosphere as clouds are for articulating the virtualization of computing resources. In a virtualized computing environment one does not know where requested computing cycles are carried out, or where the data that is produced is stored at any given moment. But there is nothing cloudy about this. Data resides in real places. And these real places —data centers— are owned and operated by private interests. They sit in the countryside in non-descript buildings that belie their significance and energy costs. They are real, but virtual. They operate in the background, out of sight. One of the most ambitious future data security centers is currently being built underground, carved into a mountain of limestone. This rock-solid abode suggests renaming the cloudy ether of virtual computing more aptly cave computing. Mark Weiser claimed that profound technologies weave themselves into the background of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.7 Maybe cave computing is a consequence of information technology attempting to fulfill the Weiserian prophecy by putting itself into the background in order to become profound, or at least profoundly secretive. IT may be moving into the background, but it is far from becoming insignificant. On the contrary, information like oil, is significant enough to conceive 21st Century war scenarios over.8 From virtualized computing to revitalized data culture It is time the discussion surrounding virtualized computing fell from the clouds and landed back on Earth. Addressing the disjoint between computing technology, computing experience, and lived reality requires a new literacy, maybe a 21st Century compatible enlightenment. On practical terms it needs, urgently, transparency and openness. But what even the simple concept openness translates to is challenging. It is vested-interest dependent as WikiLeaks’ disclosure of sensitive governmental, corporate, and religious documents that delight journalists and enrage corporations, including the US Army, prove.9

The Open Biometrics Project - 2002 The Open Biometrics Project challenges the fabrication of automated biometric identification. Biometric classification is a probability problem with social consequences. Consequently, this system does not interpret its own results in a reductionist binary manner, but shares its probabilistic result such that people can see its intermediate results and decision making approach. In the finger print analysis application here, the system calculates the information currently used (in many finger print systems) to describe a finger print: the characteristic points along with their image coordinates, type code (ridge ending or bifurcation) and likelihood (as a percentage) in a color-coded map (dots on the fingerprint in variations of blue, above).

2a and 2b photo courtesy realtechsupport

The popularization of biometric analysis has made the procedure of collecting biometric data too easy, in the sense that the results are too easily construed to mean what they only imply. Applied on a large scale, such efficiency-driven authoritative approaches guarantee that errors that do occur, generate confusion and fear, because the system does not make its own operational limits transparent. Large scale public classification systems must be open, open to insight and scrutiny. The Open Biometrics Initiative applies this philosophy to finger print analysis. Other biometric markers could be treated in a similar fashion. http://www.realtechsupport.org/repository/biometrics.html

Shoeveillance - 2006 Shoeveillance is a surveillance system that tracks pedestrian traffic in public buildings and allows for data pleasure. From the goings and comings of shoes, the system tallies pedestrian traffic. As opposed to collecting data where people are loath to share it, shoeveillance takes it from the culture of shoe fashion. It encourages us to enjoy our vanities and prevents this pleasure from being misused for nefarious ends as even the most fashionable shoe never really reveals the identity of its owner. When invasive technologies become part of daily life, they must be tamed and disciplined. http://www.realtechsupport.org/repository/shoeveillance.html 3 4

The House for the Computer for the 21st Century (HC21) – 2006, ongoing (with Hans Frei) In the HC21, observation systems share information amongst multiple participants and consider their divergent interests in the collected information. For example, surveillance cameras watch for unauthorized visitors and simultaneously observe soft patches of grass that the house dog enjoys. http://www.realtechsupport.org/new_works/hc21.html

3 and 4 photo courtesy realtechsupport

The German Hacker group Computer Chaos Club (CCC) has its own interpretation of openness. CCC released a proposal for a Datenbrief, a declaration of data, to improve citizen data self-defense. CCC wants any company that collects, transmits or stores any kind of personal data to disclose this data in full in an annual letter to those whose data they ‘retain.’ 10 The goal is to reverse the current practice by which people are required to request access to what others know of them and to place the onus of transparency on those who hold the data. Because there is a cost associated with this process, according to the logic of CCC, data collection should become unattractive and companies will have an incentive to reconsider, if not reduce, their data collection schemas. However, some have argued that this well intended intervention will require authorities to ‘find everyone;’ even those who do not want to receive their well intended data declaration letters.11 The 2004 EU initiative on the Disappearing Computer offers a different view on openness.12 As lead author of the project’s privacy design guidelines, Lahlou understands that privacy design is best addressed in the nexus of technical affordances, social needs, and common sense. Indeed, many of the guidelines are general design principles while others seem at first counter-intuitive. For example, the “consider time” guideline opposes the idea of durability as a design maxim. For public information retention systems, the requirement is to limit data duration through explicit data expiry dates. Like food, data

should have an expiry date. Of course, the best way to reduce data is not to collect it in the first place. Lahlou’s “privacy razor” stipulates that only absolutely necessary data should be recorded. This is in response to the acknowledged problem of data creep—the bloating of data collection just because the act of collecting can occur. But the sharpness of the razor is blunted by the fact that absolutely necessary is far from absolutely clear. Nonetheless, Lahlou’s interpretation of openness is significant because it expands the concept of “open to view data” to open “to view procedure” with the goal of providing a mental model of what an information system is actually doing.

From openness to diversity in data culture However, none of these attempts reach far enough. Information and the control of information demand a new design philosophy. How should one design data collection, analysis and retention philosophies and practices that care for the cultural good information has become? Information flows faster and denser than eyes, ears, and minds can cope with, let alone discern meaning from.13 The era of information has led to the age of post-perceptual information management, for 5a and 5b photo courtesy realtechsupport

The Glass Bottom Float (GBF) – 2008, ongoing (with Joe Atkinson) GBF collects real time water and weather data into a 30 dimensional environmental descriptor and combines this with input volunteered by beach visitors to a new metric that emphasizes the potential pleasure of being in the water. This new metric, the swimming pleasure measure, combines the strength of analytic data produced by computers with the intangible quality of intuitive experience that human beings are able to articulate. In the example above, the interview data, the latest fecal contaminant measurement, the weather and water data all suggest a good day at the beach. The result is translated into a color-coded light with the same color scheme as existing beach flag systems (red: compromised conditions, blue: ok). More detailed data is available to any internet enabled mobile phone. This allows beach goers to make informed decisions about going to the beach before they leave their homes and to compare their own experience directly with the results of the GBF system. http://www.realtechsupport.org/new_works/gbf.html.

which there is no instruction manual. While the individual is overwhelmed and helpless, collectives hold new powers. Teams of workers regularly produce complex assemblages such as operating systems and spacecraft that no single mind can grasp. But where the disjoint between perceptual space and information space is illdefined, mental navigation, even for collective intelligences, becomes impossible. Technically, culturally, we are at an impasse. The history of communication technology illustrates how the shape of information space increasingly deviates from that of physical space.14 Books draw together information dispersed in physical space and the newest network systems promise to collapse all information into a single point. The disjoint between experience and information accelerates the opportunity to search and find, but it further removes one from the ground truth of physical experience. However, the disjoint need not produce the kind of skewed systems we currently suffer from. Required are conduits that actively acknowledge the differences between the space of the real-experiential and that of the informational-representational. Making the disjoint operational, conceptually and practically, goes beyond performance transparency; it is an opportunity to fundamentally reconfigure information systems and change the way knowledge is defined. But this process has yet to begin in earnest. The growing discomfort, for example, with involuntary data, data generated without consent, is generating loud disputes. The problem of involuntary data is not new and not restricted to electronic information, as the discussion of tissue rights (body parts removed from patients and later used for research without patients’ knowledge) show.15 Those who collect involuntary data cloak themselves in unfittingly casual self justification. That is why automobile manufacturers who let their GPS-enabled vehicles send log-data discretely back to headquarters for ‘product evaluation’ act genuinely surprised by the outrage of their unsuspecting customers. But even where the collection occurs in full view, such as in Google’s Street View, sources are taken for granted.16 Where the disjoint between experience and information is not articulated as a resource to be shared and designed with this in mind, new kinds of conflict are pre-programmed. If every human folly can be recorded and every social transgression tallied, then the über-precise data recording systems of our own design need to be endowed with a proxy of common sense and generosity; everyone shall have his/her fair share of allowed (and recorded) transgressions that expire as predictably as the earth rotates. However, where the disjoint between experience and information is interpreted as an experimental design space, radically new opportunities will arise. It is well known that machines excel at repetitive tasks and that people excel at intuition and invention. But the fusion of information from disparate intelligences with complementing features can generate insights neither can achieve in isolation. Procedures with heuristics yet untested might generate new qualities from masses of data no human being can behold, acknowledge the disjoint between experience and information while offering conduits to deep understanding. Even business analytics seeking to integrate ‘intangible assets’ into service science models, seems to share such desires. Harvesting intangibles is but one venue to explore.17 Information resource management of the future will need the kind of long term view that guided the conception of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.18 In the long term, information fusion approaches could act along temporal axes to combine the present with the past; along cultural axes to combine information across language barriers, and across species axes as only science fiction might consider. Imagine an earthquake early warning system that combines mammals’ sensitivity to low frequency fluctuations in the earth’s magnetic field with the best seismic sensors available on the ground and in the sky.19 This is material for a new data culture, one that might, over time, contribute to a diversification of the monoculture from ‘old’ machine generated data we have become unwittingly slaves to. If new information polycultures are distributed liberally, the information forests of the future will offer plenty of space for creatures of all kinds t

ARUPtocracy and the Myth of a Sustainable Future Mark Jarzombek

Mark Jarzombek is a Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at MIT and is also the Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. He has taught at MIT since 1995, and has worked on a range of historical topics from the Renaissance to the moder; his most recent book was entitled Global Hostory of Architecture, co-authored with Vikram Prakash and Frances Ching.

In April 2010, Peter Head of ARUP came to MIT and gave a lecture in which he showed this equation:

(CO2- 80%) + 1.44 GHA/Capita Ecological Footprint + Human Development Index Increase =

2050: The Ecological Age I am not sure I understand everything about this equation. But I do understand the equal sign, and it is at this point that I will aim my critique. The equal sign intends to prove that the equation not only ‘will’ work out, but that it has ‘already been’ worked out. ARUP has (so one can presume) placed the weight of its considerable reputation on this. The equal sign is an expression of the ideology of certainty. 1.44 GHA does not = 1.43 GHA. As to what is right and left of the equals sign, this can be translated into another equation that I think conforms better to the actual goals of ARUP. Technology + Control = Nature. In other words, what ARUP aims for is a combination of technology and control systems that work in accordance with the lives and needs of human society. It is a laudable ambition. But should we leave it at that? I am not suggesting that ARUP engineers think that nature is something dialectically different from culture; they know that the nature they produce is just natural enough (for most people at least) that it cannot be mistaken for the artifice

that it is. The result, of course, is that the natural has been evacuated of its naturalness. Everything, even nature, is not-nature. Architects, naturally, will continue to ornament their drawings with green grass and trees and with the romantic image of a happy and contented nature. But we all know that this is all so much smoke and mirrors, for our globe is basically an enormous vivarium. But unlike the vivarium of old where we humans see—and construct—the difference between nature and its artifice (unlike the animals in the vivarium who presumably are unaware of this difference), we are all now living in the vivarium and constructing its habitat at the same time. The controls and the dials are no longer outside the vivarium, but inside and part of our daily human existence. Every machine we operate, in fact, almost everything we purchase, changes the dial. And yet we want to live as if we were in the vavarium of old, with someone else taking care of things. We want to live like the fish, snakes and birds who can live an entire life without (ostensibly at least) realizing they are in an artificial landscape. We should not be too shocked that the nature around us is an illusion constructed in tight alliance with the world of pipes, ducts and valves. But we should not just assume that this is a death of the natural world. ARUP’s equation produces two natures. The first is nature as image and the second is Nature with a capital N. The equal sign gives us entrée into this latter form of nature, a Nature that is rendered transparent and at the same time comprehensible in the abstractions of science. The equal sign is an indication that the new vivarium culture can actually work, that we can live in the enclosure of the globe and also manipulate

its inputs and outputs. ARUP’s equation is the governing principle of the new globe/vivarium. The idea that Nature is not ‘out there,’ but that it is identical to science is, of course, an extension of Enlightenment techniques of observation, calculation and prediction. The Enlightenment rendered matter as ‘dead’ so that it could be enlivened by the equations that govern the world from their magisterial heights. But it is one thing to describe Nature through an equation and another to fiddle with the equation in our globe/vivarium so that it works out to our convenience. Heat has to be released and recaptured. CO2 will have to be measured and contained, bought and sold. Methane will have to be curbed and natural resources managed. According to ARUP, by implication, we cannot trust politicians to do all of this. What we need is a special brand of trained technicians and managers who supposedly have nothing to do with politics. If Aristotle wanted us to be ruled by an aristocracy, ARUP wants us to be ruled by an ARUPtocracy, which would reign supreme in the Ecological Age. In discussing ARUP in this way I am trying to separate ARUP’s ideology of management pragmatism from its philosophical position. We are often so infatuated by the former that we do not see the latter. ARUP claims the supra-legitimacy of a disinterested science over the distrusted human institutions of governance and as such represents a form of disengagement for the more prosaic world of humans. It is modernism’s (and modernization’s) last great gasp.

But the equation promises what it cannot deliver. The equal sign is a fiction, an expression of a utopian projection of a unified nature. This means that ARUP’s approach to Sustainability is to architecture what intelligent design is to the discussion of evolution. It is an extension of the false hope that there is a god in the system or, in this case, that there is a big equation in the sky. It is not a real equation, of course, but a make-believe, a pseudo-science made by scientists who are then oddly surprised that no one believes what they have to say anymore. So why are we amazed that climate-change-deniers are so pervasive when our leading intellectuals play around with the equal sign? The result is an architectural discourse about Sustainability —from a cultural and theoretical point of view—that is tottering on irrelevancy. The reason we want Nature (and the illusions of ‘science’) to exist is so that there is a fixed point on which to leverage design and policy, but that Archimedean point—and the utopian project of modernity on which it is founded—does not exist and to hold on to the illusion is absurd. Just as religion is the opium of the masses, Sustainability is now the opium of architects and technocrats. So let me be clear. We live in an unsustainable world and we will ‘always’ live in an unsustainabile world. This means that we should build and theorize accordingly. The first theoretical act is to clear the air, get rid of the word Sustainability and learn to speak honestly about what it means to design in an unsustainable world t

The Domestication of the Prison or the Demonization of the House Michail Vlasopoulos and Petros Phokaides Michael Vlasopoulos holds a diploma in Architecture/Engineering from NTUAthens and has been admitted to Yale University for Fall 2010. His research interests revolve around the concept of the domestic space in relation to future developments in philosophy and technology. Petros Phokaides is a Ph.D. Candidate at NTUAthens. His research focuses on the colonial archive and its relation to the politics of architecture and space.

Future We place a prison typology at the center of our investigations, inspired by the exhilarating critical stance of the sci-fi dystopia genre and moved by architecture’s unique property to conjure up potential futures before they occur. We decided we would focus on a future where technology -detached from its allegedly benevolent purposes- hard-wires the prison, eventually bringing it closer to a ‘piece of twisted domesticity (fig. 1).’ By doing so, we’ve entered a path taken by lots of intellectuals in the past who, researching an ‘atmosphere’ of social forces, found in the prison a concrete embodiment of the authoritative technique and in the prisoner, the capacity of penal philosophies to impose a form on an anthropological material. Jeremy Bentham’s infamous prison design was an abstract machine prototype to furnish the enlightened state of the 18th Century. A truly ‘operational symbol’ for the modern era, far from its representational, metaphorical, or even animistic predecessors, engineered into a tactile experience of a building configuration. Following this tradition of thought, we use architecture as a plastic medium to record the inner-workings of our societies. Eventually, we shall look for imprisonment ‘techniques’ away from institutionalized forms. We dare go as far as investigating the prison we keep within ourselves; a drive for self-confinement we all locate among our pathoses.

1 Domestic space as a form of control. Digital Collage using imagery from Modern Mechanix Magazine

We cannot hide the fact that we have been subconsciously answering the question posed by professor Sanford Kwinter: “(...)what figures, it might be asked, serve analogous functions (to that of the Panopticon technique)1 in the twentieth century?”2 Thus, we came up with a narrative, featuring a building that cannot yet be realized in its complete, intimidating form, but nevertheless haunts our collective imagination. It is crucial to sometimes use architecture as a way to crystallize our fears of an imminent future, as we so far eagerly expect it to emerge out of the invisible “ether of telecommunications.” We bury this piece of paper architecture in these pages, waiting to be retrieved by the sociologists of the future. This way we shall debate on built matter instead of plain fears, taping into our Piranesque collective unconscious. Ultimately, this ‘chimera’ has to be built in order to be destroyed.

Exile Prison, at its core, is a machine to prevent escape. It is a product of reciprocal evolution, an ‘arms race’ in a way, between man-escapist and building technology. Its final form has been refined by centuries of blocking escaping bodies with architecture and coping with the corresponding solutions provided by human ingenuity (escapology). There were older times when interiority was a manifestation of freedom and security, and the exterior so vast, unfriendly and unattainable that myths proliferated. The territory of the woods surrounding the established civility of the medieval city, was infested with beasts and demons, ravaged by chaotic, infernal forces. In times like that the exile from the ancient city’s walled asylum used to constitute a very significant punishment indeed. The first of the architects ever to design a prison (slowly engaging in its institutionalization) inscribed this uncanny ‘territory’ onto the prison walls. The facades of the prison used to be intensely decorated with gothic scenes of mythical creatures. In this way, the ex-urban banned myths migrated in the form of architectural details, and sculptural ornamentations—a cutting edge building technology of the time—as an attempt to transform this otherworldliness into architecture. Thus, the prison has molded the ‘figure of the inmate’ as a creature of an outer residual world. Later on, the control over the composition of the society was tooled up with the death sentence. This ultimate penalty imposed by the authorities served as a metaphor of the same ‘exile,’ subjecting the punished to the vastness and emptiness of the ‘desert of non-existence.’ The guillotine executions, staged in front of a saturnalian crowd imposed an unforgettable lesson: a supposedly cathartic exodus of the outcast from the social body through the ritualistic detachment of the soul from its body.

House If life nests within a house, the prison—this cumbersome artifact of our recent Western history—is probably inspired by the archetypal shelter. We owe Mr. Bentham the very historical moment when the corporeal confinement was manifested in the form of a small replica of the house, able to arbitrarily sustain the biological functions of a human being. The cell block, a space of prolonged incarceration substituted the old waiting rooms before death. There is a very thin line between a safe sanctuous home and the hellish absurdity of the jail. In a way, the cell and the room, similar in form and function are both bounded spaces, but at the same time stretch out the concept of the shelter to two absolute extremes: the ultimate protective haven in contrast with the absolute claustrophobic hole. The Laugierian primitive hut will never be the same again, since once detached from its romantic and peaceful setting, the same piece of architectural design could work as a symbol of oppression as well. We should then study carefully the way the dystopian vision of George Orwell penetrates the house and destroys its holy seclusion through the introduction of a television set, able to transmit and receive; a predecessor of our modern cybernetic human-machine interfaces. It renders the prison obsolete, since it is metonymized in a domestic installation that educes fear, control and punishment. Given the nature of our new post-urban condition, people do voluntarily subject themselves to extreme security technologies, since living in the city is regarded by specific social groups as a hazardous predicament. Wherever urban space is considered a source of fear and anxiety, the need for retreat, or voluntary ‘exile’ in the core of a domestic settlement simulates a habitable homogenous environment. Sound alarms systems, surveillance and monitoring technology coupled with prison-like perimeter walls spread throughout the gated communities.3 The human body submits itself to the technology of control, only to fortify its ‘skin’ and destroy its ‘porosity.’ The unearthly creature of Kafka’s The Burrow 4 builds the same kind of a house for itself, that slowly and gradually turns into his condemn, while digging deeper and deeper into its intricate labyrinth of tunnels. Unfortunately, the mole-like creature and silent cerebral narrator never finishes nor succeeds in securing its handcrafted hollowed-out house, since its temporary escape fills his confined soul with anxiety, inertia and a ‘psychosis with domesticity.’ There’s an uncontrolled desire for confinement and solitude here. An urge for nesting. This beast is a digger of its own toxic home.

Experiment Architecture’s symbolic role of providing stable and ordered environments gives rise to buildings insusceptible to change, immune to commensurability. But what if architecture is ready to sacrifice its benevolent purpose to society, to indulge in

2 The figure of the astronaut at the centre of our blasphemy. Twofold: 3-d model and digital collage & Painting(right), Photo by Ralph Morse (left): “A volunteer performs bodily exercises in extreme heat, as scientists create various experiments before sending a man into space, Fort Knox, Kentucky, April 1959”. (Photo by Ralph Morse/ Time & Life Pictures/ Getty Images).

the quantitative study of ‘change?’ By doing so, we may come closer to the institutionalization of the first architectural experiment, in favor of an ultra-rationalization of architecture and towards a “science of design”—in the words of Branden Hookway.5 Space has long constituted an idle abstract platform for dynamic occurrences. It has merely been the surrounding material container; an elemental objectivity, where the human subject ‘takes place.’ What if architecture could be perceived as a ‘technique’ of a controlled environment, monitoring its own content? A real-time documentation of the way the body inhabits space, the statistical account of its contact with the surfaces, the locomotion of the body automatized by a set of domestic contraptions, the neurological fluctuations in a given geometrical space, the psychodynamic events occurring in an artificial plateau... Our project is concerned with an installation of an elaborate network of wiring, communications and logistics systems that form an ultimate, intensive and unprecedented ‘connectivity’ All of this infrastructure that surrounds and aids our modern way of living, tubes that transmit and receive, hold, mobilize or supply, crawl here inside our ostensibly impenetrable domesticities. Instead of a healthy animated flux of the everyday life, we designed a suffocating overabundance of technology, reanimating the chilling uncanniness of the space ‘behind the cameras.’ Each cell is sealed shut with tubes, wires and cables, a Gigerish 6 metaphor for the grotesque facades of the past. An introverted home hollowed out of a short-circuited infrastructural tissue. For these wicked purposes, we’ve blasphemously shaped the cells’ interiors in the form of villa-replicas of renowned architectsKahn, Corbu, Mies, etc. Here, a series of quality controls, anthropological, medical and psychological experiments take place, testing architecture to its limits.

Astronaut As far as the design of the prisoner entity is concerned, we locate the figure of the astronaut at the centre of our blasphemy —to reiterate Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, replacing the word ‘Cyborg’ with ‘Astronaut (fig. 2).7’ This creature (neither machine nor human) operates within a stream of information that travels through the wires routed through the control room. The astronaut is actually a team of swarming humans and machines collecting data. The astronaut ‘sees’ through the flight control’s statistical-mechanical vision. The astronaut ‘thinks’ with the guidance of an elaborate group of decision makers. Our ‘astronautprisoner entities’ voyage through their everyday life using the same tools. It almost seems like a voluntary underground exile, in the heart of the informational flows, in favor of the absolute protection and captivation of the self, much like in the case of the bomb shelters in Cold War American culture. The machine here is still enslaved by the human but, in contrast to the dystopian nightmare of the Matrix movies, the biological energy of the body doesn’t fuel the hungry/angry machine—it is wasted in order to retrieve the necessary information. Information in the Matrix is used to nurture the atrophied bodies whereas here, information is the only ultimate outcome of this experiment. It was after all the authorities of the Enlightenment that saw the

new ‘penitentiary environments’ as ideal laboratories to glean information from people labeled as ‘mad.’ A multi-layered sensory apparatus is lodged in our egg-shaped silo; a cell in a shell we may say. We’re standing in front of a saturated surface of informational absorbance, positioning the inmates in the core of the enfoldment. From that standpoint, the prisoner finds himself in the center of what used to be the Panopticon, but instead of being penetrated by a centralized eye-gaze, he is being stripped naked to his constituent biological functions by a swarm of sensors. Behold: a true diffusion and dissemination, vaporization of the centralized apparatus.

Cockpit What frightens us the most in our sinister solution is the very absence of a Big Brother. The outdated fear of a single face observing us is slowly being substituted by the idea of a surveillance assemblage that comprises every single urge for recording and classification that is internal to our very existential core. The type of bodily confinement arising in our era is not governed by a single and absolute center of power and knowledge, not even in Foucault’s terms of multiple centers or structures of power “diffused throughout the social body.”8 As new types of surveillance come into existence, as the computational power increases and as new modes of real-time monitoring, registering and classification arise, the face of the infamous Big Brother still refuses to appear. The urge for power and control is gradually replaced by an uncontrollable lust for information. The Big Brother’s gaze, dematerialized, stores our collective memory as an alert optic nerve. In this real-time recording, our reality is being processed by an invisible and complex set of devices, remodeling and archiving the world of the human body. In this condition, the subject surrenders itself to the surveillance assemblage almost voluntarily, almost deliberately. Consequently, rehabilitation programs are being substituted by participation in the first real architectural experiment. Our technology can even measure the speed that architecture disintegrates under the ravages of time. In that case, the surfaces that record every possible interaction between human and space are designed to be so sensitive and intelligent-like that every thing happening during the day -however small, irrelevant or seemingly unimportant- can be collected, evaluated or archived. All aspects of everyday life should then be examined with the same intensity of a house being scrutinized after a domestic murder. An inhabitant monitoring his own inhabitation. A literal prisoner of analytical reasoning, engaging in a mechanized introspection. And, as such, he consciously and eagerly draws the attention of the eye of state’s intelligence. We place the prisoner inside a hollow center controlling a periphery of instruments that gauge his own domestic life, rendering the subject a ‘cosmonaut of the everyday life.’ Our prison possesses the form of a Cockpit; a figure of a super-centralized, self-referential technique of control over a manifold of external parameters.

Soul Treating flesh as the prison of the soul has been a popular naivete of the Western mind; a culture of dualities recurrently positioning one inside the other—one concept being imprisoned by the other. The technology we cumulatively deploy is capable of attaining every little piece of information, which once added up, constructs real, unique identities. It slowly but steadily transforms flesh into pure information. This process of decorporealization that already takes place inside the hospitals’ MRI, CAT scan machines and the military’s identification gadgets breed a new generation of people that harvest this data for their own delirious need for a ‘quantifiable soul.’ The dream of grasping enough data so as to build a final model—if not a complete human avatar itself—is a persistent goal that has been camouflaged through different historical beliefs. The dream of an eternal ‘memory of life:’ isn’t that what the branch of history or evolutionary biology aims for? Data stands for our last hope for escape from our physical impoverishment and that is why we see in it today a newly perceived source of transcendency—the stuff of metaphysics. Our prison constitutes an observatory of the psyche. This prison can be compared to an ultimate system—such as the ones raiding the sci-fi imagination—where the system —usually possessing a woman’s voice of uncommon sophistication—calms and sustain the human body through time, preserving its life in cryogenic chambers. Recording every possible little detail or fluctuation in the bodily functions. A specter hovering above the white surfaces: ubiquitous, female voice and ear. A system in auto-pilot t

The Golden Institute Sascha Pohflepp Sascha Pohflepp holds a degree in media art from the Universit채t der K체nste Berlin and an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art in London. For the past six years he has been contributing to art and technology blog We-Make-Money-Not-Art. com. Currently, he is a researcher-in-residence at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. In October 2010 he will be participating in Synthetic Aesthetics, a research project focussing on synthetic biology.

Does progress look like a straight line or does it rather follow an erratic path? Are there certain developments which were meant to be or have they always been a matter of choice? What things have been tried in the past and how did we decide which worlds came true and which worlds were discarded? The Golden Institute is the attempt to materialize a fictitious America that never was. Diverging at the US election of 1980, in which Carter wins another term against Reagan and is inaugurated as the 40th American president in 1981. Shortly after, he declares that the United States would be independent from fossil fuels within six years. On a scale that echoes the Apollo missions, the administration directs vast amounts of funding towards the development of alternative sources of energy, leading to the formation of the Golden Institute for Energy in Colorado, whose sole mission it is to make the United States the most energy-rich nation on the planet.

The narrative of the Golden Institute is being told across a range of media including writing, film, scale models and visual montages. Each materialization aims to explore how the Instituteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work influences reality of a different level. The scope of projects deliberately ranges from planetary scale (geo-engineering) via the infrastructural level (the American freeway system) down to the level of individual participation, for example in weather experiments with an intentionally entrepreneurial undertone. Although essentially fictitious, the individual projects have been created in collaboration with scientific advisors and move within the boundaries of the possible.

Played by Stuart Packer, the face of the institute is Dr. Douglas Arnd, its senior strategist. Arnd, modeled after a US Army official appearing in a clip found in the Prelinger film archive, appears regularly on national television. He explains the Instituteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ambitions and hopes, for example how modifying the climate means taking active charge of the planet as a system. Their modifications to the freeway system hint at a willingness to make big changes to infrastructural elements of the country in order to accommodate new technologies. The Institute endorses individual participation in those changes and welcomes both a certain do-it-yourself attitude and the entrepreneurial spirit by which it is driven.

At the scale of the planetary, project Quartz deals with the modification of the climate. The state of Nevada was officially re-generated into a weather experimentation-zone by President Carter after the Institute had demonstrated that storm systems can be successfully seeded by detonating silver iodide-filled balloons and their enormous energy contents harnessed. Very tall lightning conductors have since been erected in the Nevada desert and electric discharges are being harnessed and made available to consumers. Furthermore, Las Vegas casinos have adapted and are now offering games like Lightning Bingo where gamblers can bet on specific poles within a lightning field. A digitally montaged landscape painting shows heavy thunderclouds discharging in the distance and an illuminated city of Golden, Colorado in the foreground.

At the scale of the nation and its infrastructure, project Opal deals with harnessing the energy that is normally lost through braking when a vehicle exits the freeway on which it was traveling. Many freeways have been modified to allow high-speed exiting so that vehicles, equipped with magnets, will be gradually slowed down employing the so-called Lorentz force as they pass through a series of induction-loops. The loops are typically operated by a franchise like Chuckâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s CafĂŠ and, if used effectively, will get the driver a discount on a cup of coffee.

Finally, at the scale of the individual, and building on project Quartz, the first car-based lightning conductors appeared some two years ago and since then have been a common sight in the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Thunderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; State of Nevada. The owners of these vehicles set out to the desert during one of the weather-modification experiments in order to catch a lightning-strike. If successful, they are able to sell the stored electricity at any one of the drive-through energy exchanges, which have opened around the zone. This entrepreneurial attitude is being appreciated and is in fact being likened to Benjamin Franklin flying his kite to draw electricity from the skies. A model shows a Chevrolet El Camino modified to be a Lightning Harvester for use in the Nevada desert. The collapsible lightning rod is mounted on the back. The trailer contains an array of super-capacitors to temporarily store the electricity harvested from a lightning strike t

Composition of the Earth Studio And Studio AND is a collaboration between Audra Wolowiec and Niels Cosman. They share a studio in Brooklyn, New York, where they make projects that exist somewhere between art, design, science, and everyday life. In 2009, Studio AND created the Department of Mineral Science, a pseudoinstitutional branch dedicated to the inspiration of urban exploration. The department’s main area of study focuses around the curious phenomenon of Urban Meteorites. Urban Meteorites are part of an ongoing investigation into the creation of a plausible fictional material. Composed from the materials found in the urban landscape, Urban Meteorites are presented as artifacts from an imagined future.

The Origins of Urban Meteorites Meteorites are naturally occurring objects that originate from outer space and survive both the extreme temperatures entering the Earth’s atmosphere and the violent impact with our planet’s surface. These improbable extra-terrestrial travelers bring with them invaluable information about the origins of the solar system and provide a glimpse into the composition of our planet. As the solar system formed more than four billion years ago, primitive particles collided and clumped into increasingly larger bodies. Some of these accumulations retained their ancient components virtually unchanged, however, planets, moons and large asteroids melted to create differentiated bodies. Dense molten iron sank to the cores of these bodies while molten rock and silicate crystals hardened into rocky mantles above the cores. Further melting of the mantles caused a crust to form, as on Earth. Meteorites are characterized by the differentiated layer from which they were formed. Iron Meteorites, for example, originate from the dense iron core, while Stony Meteorites are formed from a once-molten mantle layer. The rarest of meteorites, the Urban Meteorite, is believed to have formed from the thin outer most layer of the crust. Urban Meteorites are silica rich, rock-like objects that are found concentrated in urban areas. Like all meteorites, they are given names based on the location they were discovered. Because of their rarity and unique qualities, classifications are given based on city street names by adding a suffix of ‘ite’ or ‘yte.’ For example, an Urban Meteorite found on Berry Street will be called a Berryte and one from Driggs Street will be called a Driggsite. An Urban Meteorite find is always accompanied by the presence of Urban Tektites: silica crystals that are green-blue in color. There is much speculation about the formation of Urban Tektites, more commonly referred to as ‘street diamonds.’However, scientists believe they were created by a concentration of energy generated from impacts on the Earth’s surface. It is thought that the heat generated from these impacts is sufficiently great to fuse all materials present. Urban Meteorites comprise less than 1% of all meteorites found yearly, making them incredibly rare. You will be very lucky if you find one t

1 3

1 Studio AND, Recruitment Letter to Jasper, 2009. Typewritten text on paper, 8.5 x 11 in. This is the Letter of Recruitment sent to Jasper from Studio AND, requesting his participation as a member of the Junior League of Future Geologists.

2 Studio AND, Urban Meteorite Field Sample Kit, 2009. Mixed media, dimensions vary. In order to expand the plausible provenance of Urban Meteorites, Studio AND prepared a number of Field Sample Kits to send to young individuals living urban centers. These kits were sent under the premise of recruitment into the Junior League of Future Geologists. Sent in a wooden crate, the kits contained a letter, a field guide, and a small Urban Meteorite Sample. 3 Studio AND, Urban Meteorite Field Guide, 2009. Ink on paper, 2.75 x 4.25 in. The Urban Meteorite Field Guide, included in the Field Sample Kit, is used to assist in documenting Urban Meteorite finds.

4 Studio AND, Urban Meteorite (Driggsite), 2009. Concrete and glass, 1.5 x 1 x 1 in. A detail of a small Urban Meteorite included in a Field Sample Kit. Following the convention of naming meteorites by the location they are found, this Urban Meteorite was named a Driggsite after being discovered on Driggs Street in Brooklyn, New York. 5 Studio AND, Member of the Junior League of Future Geologists, 2009. Digital image. A member of the Junior League of Future Geologists inspects an Urban Meteorite.

6 Studio AND, Urban Meteorite: Brooklyn Sample (Grandite) detail, 2009. Concrete and glass. A detail of an Urban Meteorite found on Grand Street in Brooklyn, New York. In this image one can clearly see a number of the constitutive elements contained in this sample. These elements include concrete, Urban Tektites (commonly referred to as â&#x20AC;&#x153;street diamondsâ&#x20AC;?), and retroreflective glass beads. 7 Studio AND, Impact Site Location Map (Grandite), 2009. Ink on paper, 5 x 7 in. This map documents the location in which an Urban Meteorite (Grandite) was found and includes relevant field notes. 8 Studio AND, Urban Meteorite: Brooklyn Sample (Grandite), 2009. Concrete and glass, 6 x 4 x 2.5 in An example of a large Urban Meteorite found on Grand Street in Brooklyn, New York.

Turning the Black Box into a Great Gizmo Timothy Hyde Timothy Hyde is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is Thesis Director for the Master of Architecture degree, and Area Coordinator for the History and Philosophy of Design concentration of the Master of Design Studies Degree.

“I propose to treat the architectural mode or presence as a classic ‘black box,’ recognized by its output though unknown in its contents.”1 So declared Reyner Banham, twenty years ago, in a striking evaluation of architecture’s own disciplinary knowledge. Architecture could be seen to exist but the processes that led to its existence were obscure, perhaps even deliberately obscured by the guild-like habits of the architectural profession. Impenetrable distinctions separated the products of the architectural mode from other seemingly adjacent modes of design. This was not to say that the content of architecture could not be taught. On the contrary, Banham argued, the activities and practices concealed within the black box were precisely those conveyed through studio instruction, through charrettes and lectures and reviews, to contrive a student’s successful acculturation to the mode of architecture. Banham’s contention isolates a pivotal question: how should architecture continue to produce its disciplinary knowledge? As Banham’s black box, architecture was a mysterious entity; visible, even palpable, but nevertheless resistant to explication. One might pursue qualities it undeniably contained—function, form, materiality—or attitudes it employed—efficiency, honesty, beauty—and yet come no closer to an overt knowledge of its operations. A “secret value system” remained at work, encountered with clockwork regularity at crits: “Sorry… It’s very clever/beautiful/sensitive, but it isn’t architecture, you know.”2 The vocabulary has been updated, but the sentiment remains a common enough refrain at students’ reviews. Consider for example the architectural thesis, in each of its institutional variations, as a focused inquiry into disciplinary knowledge. A thesis attempts to gain a knowledgeable perspective of architectural knowledge. The black box would seem to present an insurmountable obstacle to any such attempt, and yet the thesis historically and currently fosters the disciplinary conceit of the black box. It could even be considered one of the box’s critical contents, a climactic test of a student’s satisfactory acquisition of disciplinary habits and reflexes. An aura of induction into the secrets of the guild has long attached to thesis, from its historical incarnations as the Prix de Rome at the Ecole des Beaux Arts

to the—literally—elevated position of thesis students at the many schools where their desks occupy the balcony or the top level of the studio. As a process through which several aptitudes and talents are purportedly assessed, but whose participants, students and faculty, can rarely explain how these aptitudes and talents are explicitly directed or taught, thesis certainly merits the adjective enigmatic. There are more significant correspondences than just atmosphere between the prevailing formats of the architectural thesis and the disciplinary modes of the black box. Two of the historic limits of the architectural thesis have been, on the one hand, the demonstration of a precise competence in architectural design, and, on the other, the expression of an individual artistic volition. A thesis demonstrative of competence succeeds to the degree that it reproduces the practices of the institution that sponsors it. This thesis will “look like a thesis,” recognizable for having adopted the design methodology, the programmatic concerns, and very likely the representational predilections of its institution. Such a thesis could be successful on many levels, evidencing both skill and creativity in its design; and it would constitute a black box thesis precisely because the full measure of that success would consist of the prior concerns of its institutional setting. The emphasis placed on the demonstration of competence reinforces a mastery of the curricular components already in place, and success must be cast as their close reproduction. The posture of this thesis is one of imitation, irrespective of any formal novelty it might possess in its outcome, because it acts out the processes—Banham would say the rituals—of its institutional context. The thesis that expresses individual volition will similarly “look like a thesis,” though in this case often because of its charged unconcern for institutional dispositions and habits. In spite of its potential antagonism to its institutional or even disciplinary context, here again, the thesis fulfills the criteria of the black box. It does so in part because by wheeling from the institution toward the authorial subject

it leaves the former intact and unaffected. The processes of the institutional context are not reproduced but nor are they interrupted. More than that, though, such a thesis strengthens the black box precisely because it insists upon subjective volition as a standard of evaluation, a personal knowledge even less susceptible to interrogation than an institutional one. This thesis adopts a moral imperative as it attitude, a posture that may be adopted or rejected but that cannot be refuted. Banham speculated that some hint of the inside workings of architecture’s black box had only recently been exposed to view, pointing to Christopher Alexander’s self-assessment that the tenets of his pattern language, even when adopted by architects, failed to overcome the predispositions of those architects; it had not “change[d] the nature of architectural design.”3 Banham concluded that Alexander’s patterns succeeded insofar as they conveyed some authoritative force and were modified into other standard patterns in the event that those patterns conveyed a similar but greater claim of correctness or propriety: “In other words, each such pattern will have moral force, will be the only right way of doing that particular piece of designing— at least in the eyes of those who have been correctly socialized into the profession.”4 The black box thus seems to conspire against architecture’s contemporary disciplinary interest toward interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary explorations.5 Even a successful revelation of previously unseen or unknown aspects of the discipline or its institutions (as in a critical approach) will likely maintain the prerogatives of the black box, which emphasize the act of discovering rather than the ramifications of discovery. What, then, is the future of the model of disciplinary knowledge represented by the black box? Banham suggested that one available option for maintaining the black box would be to severely constrain disciplinary pretensions. One could, he suggested, admit that architecture was a discipline limited

historically to a lineage tracing back to the Renaissance concepts of disegno, and by forsaking the claim of architecture’s universal spatio-temporal relevance, maintain the black box as a preserve for the reproduction of a still vital but more narrowly-defined discipline. Though Banham himself did not endorse this definition—which he noted would be seen by some as a “crippling limitation on building’s power to serve humanity”—it would certainly ease the current pedagogical burden, because the distinction between disciplinary knowledge and knowledge of other technological or social dimensions would be sharply drawn, and the former would become more obviously the objective architectural education. But the outline of a very different model of disciplinary knowledge might be found in an earlier essay by Banham entitled “The Great Gizmo.”6 A “gizmo,” Banham explains, is a device created expressly to obtain mastery over some uncontrolled or disorganized set of circumstances. And it obtains such mastery not through brute force, overwhelming size, or great complexity but through expedience, adroitness, and economy. So the Hoover Dam is not a Gizmo, but the Evinrude outboard motor that propels a boat across Lake Mead definitely is. The outboard motor that Ole Evinrude patented in 1911 struck Banham as one of the clearest examples of a great gizmo. It transformed the set of complicated mechanical and mathematical operations required to design and install a motor, a shaft, and a propeller inboard a boat into a trivial process of attachment and operation. The boatyard, specialized tools, skilled artisans and artisanal knowledge, forges, and traditions, all these were replaced by the clamps that attached a single piece of equipment to a boat’s transom. The outboard motor thereby liberated the boat and the use of boats from any necessary proximity to the craft of boatbuilding, and so transformed thousands of indifferent waterways into particular routes of navigation. More recent examples of gizmos offered by Banham included the spray can, walkie-talkies, and Clark Cortez campers. The signal characteristics of such gizmos were their independence from larger infrastructural supports; their inducement of a free

mobility; and their ability to transform, to recast the properties and potentials of their operational contexts. If one considers Banham’s gizmo in more general terms, independent of its particular instances, I would argue that the gizmo exemplifies a distinctive species of design and furthermore that it offers a useful conceptual model. (Let me underscore that I am not suggesting that architecture should evolve into the invention of gadgetry. Rather, I am proposing that the gizmo mode of design could replace the black box mode of design as its underlying conceptualization.) The gizmo appears to prioritize invention, but it is actually more aptly described as an act of re-invention. First, the gizmo reinvents the context within which it performs, a point Banham illustrated by suggesting that one could recognize “a device like a surfboard as the proper way to make sense of an unorganized situation like a wave.”7 The surfboard organizes the previously undifferentiated elements of the wave into a specific shape and pace, and therefore into a known and exploitable potential. Second, and more importantly for the present concern of disciplinary knowledge, the gizmo reinvents elements of the craft or the practices from which it derives. The Evinrude outboard extrapolated fundamental properties from the craft of boat-building, such as calculations of scale or propulsion, but reapportioned and condensed them into properties of the gizmo itself. The two salient qualities of the gizmo mode of design are this appropriation of highly specific disciplinary practices and this outward reorganization of an indifferent context. It is because the gizmo inserts itself between, or better, fits between disciplinary habit and contingent reality that it may model a different epistemological possibility for architecture’s disciplinary knowledge. If the task of thesis, then, were to design a gizmo—again, not a gadget but an architectural proposal conceptualized as a gizmo—its prospective architectural knowledge would have two components. Its adaptation of existing disciplinary practices by the distillation and transformation of the intentions and capabilities of those practices, would constitute a knowledge of architectural knowledge. The actual operation of the

gizmo, which in the form of thesis would be its intended effects or outcomes, would deploy architectural knowledge outward toward social or physical conditions, toward human subjects, toward other disciplines or domains. The gizmo offers a distinctive answer to the initial question: how should architecture continue to produce its disciplinary knowledge? The gizmo’s double orientation, at once reflective and projective, produces results that differ from those of applied research or the iterations of precedent. The gizmo produces an outward reorganization, already familiar to architecture as its social and material consequences, but focused more sharply by the gizmo as a process of reorganizing or reconfiguring a context. This diverges from applied research because the gizmo mode of design does not export an object or mechanism resolved abstractly in one field to situate it concretely in another. The gizmo emerges in three steps, not two, with the first being its transformative distillation of existing disciplinary practice. This already is its concrete act of design; no application is necessary to prove disciplinary knowledge, only to extend it through the additional step of an outward reconfiguration of context. The gizmo should also be distinguished from the conventional renovation of precedent upon which the operation of the black box appears to depend. The gizmo does not take up an object or event as a precedent to be modified and offered as a renewed object or event. It carries out a very particular kind of modification, which is the condensing of a prior system of dependencies—an object and its context—into the confines of the gizmo. This absorption of the systematic relationships of which practices are composed forestalls the reproduction of prior practices. Instead, the gizmo identifies and overcomes the limitations of those practices to render them obsolete or at least no longer indispensable. So that unlike a black box thesis, the gizmo thesis would not aim to reiterate the ineffable as a demonstration of knowledge, but rather aim to translate the ineffable into a knowable and operable form. Novelty as such is not a gizmo concern, because of its inherent disposition toward re-invention. Because its

primary aim is not to reinforce existing practice but to reinvent it, a gizmo would be far better suited as an instrument of research than a black box. Because its own discipline would be cast as a source rather than a beneficiary of knowledge, it would be more appropriate to the explorations of inter- and trans-disciplinarity. The epistemological potentials of the gizmo are, therefore, considerably more appropriate to contemporary concerns— both inside and outside the discipline of architecture. And at the same time, the gizmo neither implies nor necessitates a renunciation of the discipline. Its purpose is to clear a path for the discipline into adjacent fields of expertise, conduct, and thought. In order to orient itself toward a future adumbrated by this gizmo epistemology, architecture would have to begin to slough off the accumulated effects that Banham identified as its reproductive mechanisms. (Something the discipline has very notably failed to do even in some of its most revolutionary moments.) Not only vocabulary and technique, but the presumptions, habits, and rituals that make this black box discipline recognizable. Recognizability, after all, is not the virtue it may seem, and if the model of disciplinary knowledge were to be transformed from a black box to a great gizmo, one might have to spend a bit of time learning how to use it, but one would also learn much more about the discipline it transforms t

Fight the Google-Jugend! Wilfried Hou Je Bek Wilfried Hou Je Bek is a reader/writer/psychogeographer. At the moment he is documenting and theorizing the weed systems and cryptoforest of the g/local Amazon.

We are miserable creatures. We are stunted in our growth. We are mostly naked. Our faces are hideous, bedaubed with paint. Our skins are filthy, green tobacco slime drips down from our chins. Our voices are discordant. Our gesticulation is violent, without any dignity. Our language is like the clearing of a throat. Our language is hoarse, guttural, clicking.1 We are savages. We do not need search. We know everything we need to know. We are not like you. We do not like you. You are not like us. We will hunt you like a wild pig. We will plunge our spears deep into your body many times. The spears will not break. Down you will go. We are like the jaguar. We have no fear.2 We are fighters. We are poets. We know things from up close and from nearby. You are a gluttonous office-mule. We loathe all travellers and all explorers, we shrink the heads of tourists, we shoot the anthropologists if they dare to come near, we will eat the missionaries if they enter our lands. Stay home! Do not leave your air-conditioned rooms! Stay behind your computer! Do not come here and complain to us about the mosquitoes! We refuse to be described, we will never be evangelized, we are not the photo opportunity of a life time. We slash and we burn. We drift from fallow to fallow. Nature makes itself useful after the burn. Our gardens are in splendid state, the crypto-forests are waiting to be harvested. We are not lazy, as you seem to think, we are in fact highly economic: we take what we

need and that is that; lazy days. We live by what we can SEE and HEAR and SMELL and TASTE, we are hunters, gatherers and gardeners, but we are ambitiousness too and we want to garden beyond the garden, we want to see beyond what we can see, we want to see the inside of that what makes us see and hear and smell and taste. We know spirit vines which can do that. We want to go beyond the sensory experience of consensus reality, we want to go beyond the interface of everyday routine. Listen to what the shaman said to Manuel Cordova-Rios: “You must realize, my friend, that the deeper we go into this, both written and spoken words of formal language become less and less adequate as a medium of expression. If I could arrange it we would have a session of visions ourselves and then you would understand. But that would take time. Meanwhile we will continue with indifferent words and inflexible modes of expression.”3 Opampogyakyena shinoshinonkarintsi; you have long suspected us of apathetic sadness, you think of us as mute victims of progress, asylum seekers from the stone age.4 Ogakyena kabako shinoshinonkarintsi; you hate our silence, you are deaf, dumb, stupid and blind. Okisabintsatana shinoshinonkarintsi; you waste the night with sleep, we take naps when we need them. Amakyena popyenti pogyentima pogyenti; we chat and we rave and we drink real ale—home-made, spit-fermented from the finest sweet manioc in our gardens and take all the time we need to tell the story of the sleep-inducing tree, of the girl who married a jaguar and of the boy who lived with the fire-ants. Amakyena tampia tampia tampia; listen to Jerome Rothenberg sage of EthnoPoetics: “Measure everything by the Titan rocket & the transistor radio, & the world is full of primitive people. But once the unit of value to the poem or the dance-event or the dream (all clearly artifactual situations) & it becomes apparent what all those people have been doing all those years with all that time on their hands.”5 Let me tell you. I went to find food. Here I will tell to you. Now I will tell to all of you. Listen to me. It was a cool morning and I started following the trail that begins next to that old banana-tree. I followed the trail for a time. I spotted a tapir’s trail. I followed it. I followed it for the better part of the afternoon. Then I lost the trail. I could not find the tapir. I did not know where I was. I did not know where to go. But I was not lost. We do not get lost. The Curipira was messing with my mind. The red-haired, green-teethed Curipira was clouding my inner compass. The feet of the Curipira are like human feet, but they are pointing backwards: if you would try to find him by following his footsteps you would walk away from him. This is the genius of a trickster! These are the paradoxes that inform our philosophy! The Curipira is a daemon ludens, confusion is solved by burying it with riddles, a puzzle will not fail to challenge him. From a piece of bark I made a rope. The rope I tied around two pieces of wood, and the resulting puzzle I left near the end of the tapir’s trail. I walked. After a while I suddenly saw a creek I knew, my vision had returned; the Curipira was solving the string puzzle, the Curipira was trying to free the string without breaking the wood, and had forgotten about me. That night I had a dream, a man came to me in my dream, he said: “Where you were yesterday, in the tapir’s path, there is a log that crosses the trail. There am I going to leave a stone. Tomorrow you should go there and get it. This is a stone for manioc and yams. I never suffer from hunger. Don’t neglect the stone. Give it anchiote to drink, because it killed my sister. Take care of it.”6 The next day I went back and found the stone. We placed it in our garden and our garden has never looked better.7 Let me tell you. I killed the panther. Here I will tell. Listen to me. Here the jaguar pounced upon my dog, killing him. Here the jaguar pounced upon my dog, killing him. It happened with respect to me. There the jaguar killed my dog by pouncing on it. With respect to it, the jaguar pounced on my dog. I thought I saw it. Then I, thus the panther, pounced on my dog. Then the panther pounced on my dog. Then I spoke. This is a panther. Then I spoke with respect to the panther. Here is where it went. I think I see. Uh. I said, the jaguar then jumped on the log. As for the dog, the panther pounced on it. The panther killed the dog by hitting it. Then when I had gunshot the jaguar it began to fall. To Kaapási I spoke. Throw a basket. Throw me a basket. To put the dog into. The cat is the same it pounced on the dog. The panther pounced on the dog. This it caused him to be not. Put the jaguar into the same basket with the dog. Put it in with the dog, he caused the dog to be not. He has therefore already…8 Sorry, something has come up, gotta go, the bush pigs won’t wait.

You eat food that was frozen first and tastes like plastic. You eat a sandwich that was wrapped in cellophane a week ago, but makes you happy because it tastes as if it is only two and a half days old. You eat white chocolate. Are you people insane? You spend your days in office spaces the size of a toilet and they hardly smell any better. You spent entire days without seeing the sun and yet you count yourself lucky. Because your hands are clean and your clothes are stainless. All these things we see in magazines. You are writing and reading all day and you say it makes you very tired. A stranger from your world told us (and we laughed and laughed…). The shaman’s tonic evokes the infinite from a cascade of vomit and bile in the same way the sun appears from behind a thundercloud. One day you will want to know this too. A spell is cast, a terrible disease will come over you. This happens. Assaulted by sorcery, a snake in your hammock, a frog poison in your lizard-soup, a hairy spider reprogrammed to bite you. Assault sorcery can happen to anyone unknowingly entering the wrong clearing at the wrong time. Your professors are trying to steal our secret names, they are spooks from the netherworld, you can’t just come here thinking you can trick us into selling our souls in exchange for two glass beads and a mirror. This is Kanaima truth, listen to Neil L. Whitehead: “When the grave site is discovered, a stick is inserted through the ground directly into the cadaver, then the stick is retracted and the maba (honey-like) juices sucked off. If the corpse is indeed sufficiently ‘sweet’ (sopaney), it will be partially disinterred in order to recover bone material and, ideally, a section of the anal tract. The use of previous victims body parts is necessary to facilitate the location and killing of the next victim.”9 I have this on good authority. A shaman who doesn’t want to be found can’t be found. I have this on excellent authority. Have you ever seen a devil’s garden? A place where the canopy is full but the under brush refuses to grow? This is where the shaman goes to work magic, where he chants his chant. Listen to what Jacques Lizot overheard the shaman chanting: “Ocelot spirit, come down into me! Hekura, you did not help me. For whole nights I pondered my vengeance. I pondered the Vulture Spirit and Moon Spirit. Moon Spirit was struck by Suhirina’s arrow when he invaded the dwelling, eager for human flesh; and from his wound, from his spilled blood, were born a multitude of flesh-eating vultures. Vulture Spirit, Moon Spirit, you are cannibals. Vulture, your head is polluted with blood, your nostrils teem with worms. The dragonflies gather in the sky. Those who have ordered the demons to capture our children will receive my vengeance, wherever they may be. Already the Hekura are advancing on them; already the hekura are rushing on them. Soon night will come, they will sleep soundly, and the little children’s cries will ring out. They are many; the hekura in my breast! May lightning unveil the sky, may thunder explode! However distant you may be, I will reach you; I shall choose the most beautiful child, the one with the attractive smile, and I shall kill him. I, too, eat children. My hekura will come toward you, do not doubt it, and they will tear the bird breast’s and the decorative feathers; then my nostrils will fill with the strong odour of the newborn; they will breathe out the stale smell of mother’s milk, and my breast will be like a carcass. This is how my breast will be! Moon piles up the roots of rotten manioc with which he makes the cakes that he cooks in old potsherds. When the cakes are ready, he prowls around the dwellings and calls for the children from afar, shouting: COME TO ME, I AM HUNGRY FOR HUMAN FLESH!”10 Despite ourselves we have our Caribbean moments. One day a very unhealthy looking man with a face as white as ash and with dark circles around his eyes came to us. He said he was from Paris-teri. He requested to live with us. He seemed to live on cigarettes. As said, we took it easy that day and said ok. We remember him clearly because all the girls were afraid of him. He told us that an ancestor from his country had learned from one of our ancestors that our whole day is spent in dancing. He wanted to see it, but we couldn’t help him. He stayed nevertheless. One evening, when we were all eating trio of monkey at the longhouse he started to tell a story in a language so broken as to be inhuman. What he was saying though, we found out after a while, was familiar, but in a strange way. He was telling us where we got fire from, where we got manioc from, how the milky way was formed. This man was telling us our own stories as if he had invented them! He had weaved many small stories into a very long story and we never heard it like that. It was like a basket case. Which was amusing. And it was raining anyway. His story had many continuity errors though and he wanted us to tell him what they were. Then he left and we would have never remembered him if this other white face had not come. There was much time in between because my uncle’s father’s brother’s daughter, who I call sister, now had given birth to four children. He was very pale and very sickly. He was always in the roundhouse after dark. ‘Lounging’ he called it. He would say nothing, but sometimes he would pick up a book and look through it as if searching for something. One day, when Sededetiu was telling about the coming

Illustration by Lucy Cheung

of Oshosha, at the time the old ones ate dirt and nothing else, he was doing this again and suddenly he started to speak. He asked Sededetiu why he was telling the story the wrong way.11 You ignored the twigs clearly broken to warn you long in advance. You ignored the crossed spears that marked the point of no return. You ignored the waypoints. Your GPS could have told you the soft way that you had illegally entered our territory. Your own science argues against you. Now you must find out the hard way. No one owes us a living. This is our world. We are the natives here, because the place can’t exist without us.12 Everybody knows this. We find you laughable, you are unable to make decisions for yourself. You are loyal to a chief you have never met and do not trust. Your chief needs armed men to do the things that are supposedly for the greater good of all people. We are never sure where falsehood and cynicism replaces irony and sincerity in your language. A real chief leads by example. Your presence is not enough to declare us ‘contacted.’ You have seen nothing yet, but I like your sunglasses. Give them to me. We are not a tribe, we are a self-help group. We are splitters not lumpers, we are not like the other cannibals; have you not read the monograph that was published about us by the Yugoslavian Ethnographic Society in 1963? Your brain is too large for your skull but I like your watch. Give it to me. Given enough time we can face everything the world puts in our way without a losing our own way. We do not speak for each other as if we have one mind. Every tribe, every village, every family, every individual person is able to speak for him or herself. You are not your own boss and who are you talking to anyway, chattering all day long into that phone, asking for answers while the problem you have is right here in front of you, but I like your shoes. Give them to me. We do not want to eat you. First you need prompting to say the right words to announce your arrival and your willingness to perform your duty. “Aju ne xé peê reiurame,” how difficult can it be? Every child here knows these words. But when dinner-time comes you turn out to be a shivering baby-faced coward. You cry and weep and beg for mercy, bah! We do not want to eat something as weak and scared as you.13 We do not want to become like you, but I like your Swiss pocketknife. Give it to me. Obey the yammerschooner syndrome.14 Begging is the power of the Force.15 God does not exist. Nothings happens when you say it. God does not exist. See! That’s why we killed the culture-hero of your tribe. The Panare killed Jesus Christ, because they were wicked. Let’s kill Jesus Christ, said the Panare. The Panare seized Jesus Christ. The Panare killed in this way. They laid a cross on the ground. They fastened his hands and his feet against the wooden beams, with nails. They raised him straight up, nailed. The man died like that, nailed. Thus the Panare killed Jesus Christ…16 Our world is not a green hell and it never has been, you need to change your frame of reference. Civilization did not begin in Babylon, culture did not begin in a Greek temple, art did not begin in a cafe in Paris, nature, as you call it, did not begin in the Lake District. Animals know things. When we first came here we observed ant, tapir, peccary, deer, monkey to know what to eat and what to avoid.17 We live in a garden of complexity and

peculiarity that has grown above our heads, high into the canopy, and this is the way it should be. Our gardens look like a random selection of grasses and weeds to you. What you call weeding we call second rate, even the Inca could do better.18 The entire forest is our plaything and your wilderness is our orchard. We are gardeners in permanent transit, weeding and pruning as we go, forever planning the next trek. In our village nobody is ever at home. The lonely limp dogs left behind leave the message: gone trekking. We love to trek, it makes it easier for the girls to talk to the boys. It is fun to search for turtle shells and yellow and red macaw feathers, while we live of fallowed fields and collect foods from the dump heaps of yesteryear.19 A trek gives the ants and termites the time to clean up back home. This manioc left here will feed our grandchildren. This peach palm grove is our Delphi. Evolution is the generative survival of the singular as a part of the plural and the result is a red queen’s race between the weirdest and the monstrous. We, in the largest definition that can contain us, in time and place, have created the forest in our own image. All the forest is a fallow. The forest is our art and our science.20 Our ancestors could never have believed that our world was being watched keenly and closely by intellects cool, dogmatic and unsympathetic (Yeah!), who regarded our world with envious eyes, and who slowly and surely drew their plans against us (Yeah!). Early in the sixteenth century came our great disillusionment, we were all counted amongst the dead when the pananakiri came.21 We are the feral children of the forest (Yeah!). The collateral damage of the search for that mystery land of liquid Inca gold (Yeah!). Doomed orphans of El Dorado (Yeah!). We have survived the euro-germs, for now, but as long as any one of us dies from the common cold, the measles or the flu, the discovery of America is not yet over.…… (Yeah!) (Go on!) (Yeah!) Earth scraped bare (Yeah!) ! Plunder and deforestation (Yeah!)! Rubber Rubber Rubber (Yeah!)! Death Death Death (Yeah!)! Sold into slavery (Yeah!)! The state will eat us all (Yeah!)! The center cannot hold (Yeah!)! Anarchy unleashed, chaos and turmoil (Yeah!)! Fire and pain, disease and suffering (Yeah!)! The shabono teargassed, the maloka nuked! (Yeah!) Thousand corpses, grinning missionaries (Yeah!)! Deluded anthropologists (Yeah!)! Post-crash Tupi-Surrealism (Yeah!)! Myth verified as history (Yeah!)! The blotted-out forgotten past announces our second coming (Yeah!)! The raised mounds of Marajo Island (Yeah!)!22The garden cities of Xingu (Yeah!)!23 The lost cities of Z (Yeah!)!24 The forest islands of the Beni (Yeah!)!25 The geogplyphs of the upper Purus (Yeah!)!26 They are all coming to the surface like badly healed broken bones scarring the skin from underneath (Yeah!)! Red and blistering (Yeah!)! Infected and rotting (Yeah!)! It all started with the wrath of Viti-Vití (Oh Yeah!)! Viti-Vití was just like a person, he had a nose, he had a mouth, he had ears and he had two eyes. He had everything we people had. He went up in the tree to collect honey. He went in the night because the bees were very fierce. He went with his brother-in-law and his sister. Up in the tree Viti-Vití scraped his right leg with a shell. He made his leg thin and end in a point, to resemble an animal’s leg. Blood fell down in the clay pot, the brother-in-law ate it all because it was dark. Then he found out and told his sister. They left, Viti-Vití didn’t know where they had gone. Viti-Vití went home but his brother-in-law had closed the entire house, fearing Viti-Vití would kill him with his pointed foot. Viti-Vití left. Viti-Vití went on an indefinite walkabout in the forest. Nobody ever saw his face again. He took all his people with him. Everywhere he went that seemed a nice place to live he created long deep ditches for his people. He advised his people to build their villages outside the ditches, within the semi-circle described by it, the ditches should be used in the season of the cold winds and one side of the arc should always touch water. Most of these ditches are overgrown. Viti-Vití now lives at the shores of the great Kuikúru-Ipa Lagoon, at one end of the ditch, where it meets the water. At night Viti-Vití’s footsteps can be heard there. They make a dry sound when he steps on the ground with his pointed leg: toc, tim, toc, tim…27 That is all28

Endnotes / Credits

01 The Irrational Genome Design Contest

#2: 150-152, among others.

1 In The Implied Spider: Politics & Theology in Myth, Wendy Doniger cites Pablo Picasso: “Art is a lie that tells the truth.” Arshia Sattar substitutes ‘myth’ for ‘art’.

12 Boris Grois, “Lenin i Linkoln – obrazy sovremennoy smerti,” in Utopii a i obmen (Moskva: Izd-vo “Znak”, 1993), 353-356.

References:

13 Walter Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” in Illuminations, 1st ed. (New York,: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 217-253.

http://partsregistry.org/

14 Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” 224-225.

http://2010.igem.org/

15 Boris Grois, “Lenin i Linkoln – obrazy sovremennoy smerti,” 353-356.

http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/CAGEN

16 Leah Dickerman, “Lenin in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Disturbing Remains: Memory, History, and Crisis in the Twentieth Century, ed. Michael S. Roth and Charles G. Salas (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001), 77-110.

http://genocon.org/ http://www.riken.go.jp/engn/r-world/info/info/2010/100524/index.html http://www.biofab.org/ This article owes much to James King, Yashas Shetty and the ArtScienceBangalore iGEM team 2010. http://hackteria.org/wiki/index.php/DesignWorkshop2010

17 Lopukhin, Bolezn’, smert’i bal’zamirovanie V.I. Lenina, 112.

03 An Architecture of Humors

02 Shaping Eternity: the Preservation of Lenin’s Body

1 This text was written in the course of Prof. Marek Bartelik’s seminar on

R&Sie(n) / le Laboratoire / (name of the partner according to the production) An architecture des Humeurs R&Sie(n) / Le Laboratoire / 2010 Scenario, design, production: R&Sie(n)

Constructivism at MIT in the Spring of 2009. I would like to thank Prof. Bartelik as well as my classmates, in particular, Ana Maria Leon and Nicola Pezolet, for their interest and useful feedback. I am also thankful to Caroline Jones, Rebecca Uchill, Marilyn Levine, and Igor Demchenko for their commentaries and suggestions. 2 Lenin’s letter to M. Gorky, 13 or 14th September 1913. Quoted in: K. Marx, F. Engels, V. I. Lenin. O religii. Moscow: Politizdat, 1983, 242. 3 IU. M. (Iuri Mikhailovich) Lopukhin, Bolezn, smert i balzamirovanie V.I. Lenina: pravda i mify (Moskva: Respublika, 1997), 63. 4 Il’ich – Lenin’s patronymic. When used instead of a first name in Russian, the patronimic usually conveys a greater degree of familiarity. 5 IU. M. (Iuri Mikhailovich) Steklov, Mogila vozhdia., 2nd ed. (Leningrad: Gos. izd-vo, 1924), 14-15. 6 Vladimir Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruevich, Vospominania o Lenine, 2nd ed. (Moskva: Nauka, 1969), 465-466. 7 In a recent television interview, Melnikov’s son affirmed that this effect was intentional. 8 Lopukhin, Bolezn’, smert’i bal’zamirovanie V.I. Lenina, 115-116. 9 This was not the first change of dressing style in Lenin’s life: in 1917, having triumphantly returned to Russia from the emigration, he abandoned his bourgeois hat for a democratic kepi. As Velikanova testifies, although 3 April 1917 Lenin arrived to Petrograd in a hat, in the official iconography he was always depicted wearing the kepi. Moreover, later even the depictions of earlier periods of his life had to feature the kepi. (Olga Velikanova, The Public Perception of the Cult of Lenin Based on Archival Materials [In Russian]. Queenston, Ontario, Canada, 2001: 231-232). 10 Lopukhin, Bolezn’, smert’i bal’zamirovanie V.I. Lenina, 107. 11 See: “Kak balzamirovali telo Lenina (How Lenin’s Body was Embalmed),” Kharkovsky Kommunist (Kharkov’s Communist), 12 August 1924, # 183; V. V. Lauer, “O Sposobakh, Prmenennykh pri Balzamirovanii Tela Lenina (About the Methods Used during the Embalming of Lenin’s Body), Kubansky NauchnoMeditsinsky Vestnik (Kuban’ Scientific-Medical Newsletter), vol. 4, 1924; N. Melnikov-Razvedenkov, “Pro Naukovi Sposobi Permanentnogo Zberezhenia Tila Lenina (“On the Scientific Methods of the Permanent Preservation of Lenin’s Body”), Ukrainsky Meditsinsky Archiv (Ukranian Medical Archive), vol. 5, 1930, #2: 148-50 (in Ukrainian); N. Melnikov-Raswedenkov, “Über die wissenschaftlichen Verfahren zur permanenten Erhaltung der Leiche von W. I. Lenin,” Ukrainsky Meditsinsky Archiv (Ukranian Medical Archive), vol. 5, 1930,

Associated to: François Jouve / Mathematical Process Marc Fornes & Winston Hampel, Natanael Elfassy / Computations Stephan Henrich / Process and Robotic Design Gaëtan Robillard, Frédéric Mauclere, Jonathan Derrough / Design & Process of physiological collect Berdaguer et Péjus / Nano-réceptors scénario Mark Kendall / Microneedles Delphine Chevrot / Takako Sato / “The Lift” Candice Poitrey / Physiological Interview Chris Younes / Text Natural Machine Jiang Bin, architect Laura Bellamy Rosalie Laurin

04 Illusions of Control Radical Engineers and Reactionary Artists 1 Synthetic Biology, “Synthetic Biology: FAQ,” http://syntheticbiology.org/FAQ. html. 2 H. G. Wells, “The limits of individual plasticity,” in H.G Wells: Early Writing in Science and Science Fiction, ed. Robert Philmus and David Y. Hughes, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 36. 3 Jacques Loeb, “On the Nature of the Process of Fertilization and the Artificial Production of Normal Larvae (Plutei) from the Unfertilized Eggs of the Sea Urchin,” American Journal of Physiology 3 (1899): 135-138; reprinted in Studies in General Physiology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1905), 539-543. 4 Jacques Loeb to Ernst Mach, 28 December 1899, EM; on the myth of the hero in late nineteenth-century German science see Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 445-495. Quoted in Scott F. Gilbert, Developmental Biology, (New York: University Press, 2000), 93-117. 5 Philip J. Pauly, Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology (Oxford University Press: 1987), 47. 6 Ibid. 7 Eduard Uhlenhuth wrote in 1916: “Through the discovery of tissue culture we have, so to speak, created a new type of body on which to grow the cell.”

“Changes in pigment epithelium cells and iris pigment cells of Rana pipiens induced by changes in environmental conditions,” Journal of Experimental Medicine 24 (1916): 690. 8 David M Friedman, The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 39. 9 Alexis Carrel, Man, the Unknown (New York: Harper & Bros, 1935).

6 Ibid., p. 163 7 Hickey, op. cit. p. 19 8 Bring and Wayembergh, op. cit. p. 180 9 Benjamin, op. cit. p. 533 10 (Full Swing Golf website)

10 Ibid., 299. 11 Eugene Thacker, “The Thickness of Tissue Engineering,” in Life Science: Ars Electronica 99, ed. Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schopf (New York: Springer, 1999), 183. 12 Andrew Pollack, “Custom-Made Microbes, at Your Service,” The New York Times, January 17, 2006, Science section, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/ science/17synt.html?emc=eta1. 13 Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, “Why are there so many Engineers among Islamic Radicals?,” European Journal of Sociology 50 (2009): 201-230. 14 Ibid. 15 Emmanuel Sivan, “Why are so Many Would-Be Terrorists Engineers?,” Haaretz, February 12, 2010, Opinion section, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/ spages/1149370.html 12/02/2010. 16 SymbioticA – Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, http://www.symbiotica. uwa.edu.au.

05 Design for Decline: The Bank of Savings and Futures 1 Howard T. and Elizabeth C. Odum, The Prosperous Way Down. (Boulder, University Press of Colorado, 2001): 7. 2 Mark Jarzombek, “Architecture: A Failed Discipline.” Volume 19 (2009): 42-46.

06 What Do We Do With This Future? An Examination of Tempelhof Airport 1 Jonathan Glancey, “Board Now, Gate Closing,” The Guardian, July 26, 2004. 2 Nicholas Kulish, “Berlin’s Airport: Shining Beacon or Waste of Money.” The New York Times, March 8, 2010. 3 Gavriel Rosenfeld, “Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich.” Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, Volume 22 (2000): The research for this paper was completed with Max Zuckerman and Frithjof Woddarg and was supported by a fellowship from Humanity In Action.

08 From here to infinity: Make-Believe and Virtuality On the Japanese Driving Range 1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland & Kevin Mc Laughlin (TheBelknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England 1999), p. 546 2 Teiji Ito, The Japanese Garden (The Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1972) p. 146 3 Dave Hickey, “Folie Blanche: The Quest for the Perfect Lie” in Art Issues, November/December 1992 #23, p. 19 4 Mitchell Bring & Josse Wayembergh, Japanese Gardens, Design and Meaning (McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, Tokyo, 1981) p. 180 5 Ito, op. cit p. 149-150

09 ISLAND PHANTASMAGORIA - Exploring the Political/ Philosophical Underpinnings of Fictional Islands and Imagining a Future of Plastic-Pirate-Island-Utopias 1 John Collins Rudolf, “The Warming of Greenland,” New York Times, Jan 16 2007, Environment Section, Online Edition. http://www.nytimes. com/2007/01/16/science/earth/16gree.html?pagewanted=print 2 From wikipedia.org: “Despite a popular image of modernity, artificial islands actually have a long history in many parts of the world, dating back to the crannogs of prehistoric Scotland and Ireland, the ceremonial centers of Nan Madol in Micronesia and the still extant floating islands of Lake Titicaca. The city of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec predecessor of Mexico City that was home to 250,000 people when the Spaniards arrived, stood on a small natural island in Lake Texcoco that was surrounded by countless artificial chinamitl islands.” 3 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, (New York, NY: Monacelli Press, 1994). 4 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993) 32. 5 J.K.Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, (London, Bloomsbury, 1999) 19. 6 Dominic Hughes, “Dutch Float ‘Migrant Prison’ Scheme”, BBC News, Online Edition. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7096186.stm 7 Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=2434. 8 Anselm Franke and Eyal Weizman, Territories, The Frontiers of Utopia and Other Facts on the Ground. (Verlag der Buchhandlung, Walther Konig, 2004). 9 Strangemaps http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/. 10 From wikipedia.org: Libertatia is said to have been a free communalist colony forged by pirates under the leadership of Captain Olivier Misson in the late 1600s. Whether or not Libertatia actually existed is disputed. It is described in the book A General History of the Pyrates by Captain Charles Johnson, an otherwise unknown individual who may have been a pseudonym of Daniel Defoe. Much of the book is a mixture of fact and fiction, and it is possible the account of Libertatia is entirely fabricated. 11 From Wilson’s Pirate Utopia on Sale: “Salé... dates back at least to Carthaginian times (around 7th century BC). The Romans called the place Sala Colonia, part of their province of Mauritania Tingitane. Pliny the Elder mentions it (as a desert town infested with elephants!). The Vandals captured the area in the 5th century AD and left behind a number of blonde, blue-eyed Berbers. The Arabs (7th century) kept the old name and believed it derived from “Sala” (sic., his name is actually Salah), son of Ham, son of Noah; they said that Salé was the first city ever built by the Berbers” Sale, became a Pirate Republic in 17th century - a type of micronation with its own seaport argot known as “Franco”. Like some other pirate states, it even used to pass treaties from time to time with some European countries, agreeing not to attack their fleets. 12 Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes (Brooklyn, New York, Autonomedia,1995) 13 T.A.Z. is also inspired by Situationist ideology. From wikipedia.org: The Situationist International (SI) was a restricted group of international revolutionaries founded in 1957 with their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th

Century European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated experiences of life being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order, for the fulfillment of human primitive desires and the pursuing of a superior passional quality. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the construction of situations, namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of such desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study for the construction of such situations, like unitary urbanism and psychogeography.

rights in the commercial value of human tissue.” UCLA Law Rev. Oct; 34(1) (1986): 207-64.

14 The loose working definition of islands I’ve used thus far in this paper: an island is an area of “suitable” habitation surrounded by an expanse of “unsuitable” habitation. In this case, the “suitable” habitation or utopic “islands” are the grounds for Burning Man, where one can freely express. It is an “island” because it is surrounded by an otherwise hostile and politically restrictive environment.

19 Joseph Kirschvink. “Earthquake Prediction by Animals: Evolution and Sensory Perception,” Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 90, 2, (2000): 312–323.

15 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading. 16 Alexis Madrigal, “Peter Thiel Makes Downpayment on Libertarian Ocean Colonies”, Wired Magazine, 2008 http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/ news/2008/05/seasteading. 17 Ibid. 18 From wikipedia.org: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Pacific Trash Vortex, is a gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean located roughly between 135° to 155°W and 35° to 42°N. Although the affected area is certainly large, its actual size has not been established with any certainty in the scientific literature. Media claims that the patch is larger than the size of Texas are conjectural.

10 Towards Diversity in Data Culture 1 Marc Böhlen, Hans Frei. “MicroPublicPlaces.” The situated technologies pamplet series on Architecture and New Media. The Architectural League of New York, 2010. 2 Noah Fierer et al. “Forensic identification using skin bacterial communities” PNAS 2010 : 1000162107v1-201000162, 2010. 3 Michael K. Buckland. “Information as thing.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 42(5) (1991): 351-360. 4 Christian Fuchs. “Towards a critical theory of information.” tripleC 7(2) (2009): 243-292. 5 Suicide Machine, http://suicidemachine.org/, accessed 11th Feb 2010. 6 David Talbot. “Security in the Ether.” Technology Review (Feb. 2010): 36-42. 7 Mark Weiser. The Computer for the 21st Century, 1991. 8 James Fallows. Cyberwarriors, The Atlantic Monthy, March:59-63. 9 http://wikileaks.org/. 10 Chaos Computer Club, 2010. Der Datenbrief, http://www.ccc.de/datenbrief, accessed Feb 11 2010. 11 Detlef Borchers. Ich will wissen was ihr wisst, FAZ.NET (March 5 2010). 12 Saadi Lahlou, François Jegou. “European Disappearing Computer Privacy Design Guidelines V1.1” [EDC-PG 2004]. Ambient Agoras IST-DC, www.rufae. net/tiki-download_file.php?fileId=11, and http://www.ambient-agoras.smartfuture.net/downloads/D15%5B1%5D.4_-_Privacy_Design_Guidelines.pdf (2003 version).

16 http://maps.google.ca/help/maps/streetview/. 17 Brenda Dietrich. “Resource planning for business services.“ Commun. ACM 49, 7 (2006): 62-64. 18 http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/lmd/campain/svalbard-global-seedvault.html.

12 The Domestication of the Prison or the Demonization of the House 1 Writer’s notes in the parenthesis. 2 Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001): 19. 3 See the analysis of South-African gated communities by Derek Hook, and Michele Vrdoljak, “Gated communities, heterotopia and a “rights” of privilege: a ‘heterotopology’ of the South African security-park”. Geoforum. 33 (2) (2002): 195. 4 Franz Kafka, The Burrow. (New York: Knopf., 1954). 5 Branden Hookway. “Computational Environment of the 20th Century: Architecture, Interface and the Science of design” (Phd diss. abstract, Princeton Univeristy) Available at: http://soa.princeton.edu/05prog/prog_ frame.html (accessed July 7, 2010). 6 Deriving from the work of artist H.R. Giger, the designer of the Alien character. 7 “At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.” D. Haraway, “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65–108. 8 Michel Foucault and James D. Faubion, Power. (New York: New Press, 2000): 283.

15 Turning the Black Box into a Great Gizmo 1 Reyner Banham, “A Black Box: The Secret Profession of Architecture.” In A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 293. 2 Ibid., 295. 3 Ibid., 296. 4 Ibid. 5 See Mark Linder, “TRANSdisciplinarity.” Hunch 9 (2005): 12-15. Linder also assesses Banham’s depiction of the Black Box. 6 Reyner Banham, “The Great Gizmo.” In A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 109-118. 7 Ibid., 110.

16 Fight the Google-Jugend!

13 Paul Dourish, Johanna Brewer, Genevieve Bell. “Information as a cultural category.” Interactions (12, 4 2005): 31-33.

1 Based on Darwin’s account of meeting the natives of Tierra del Fuego. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (London, Penguin Classics, 1989).

14 Lars-Erik Janlert. Available information – preparatory note for a theory of information space, tripleC 4(2) (2006): 172-177.

2 Listen to Joe Kane: “Spear killings remain a central fact of how the Huaorani see themselves. Many adults carry, and proudly display, spear scars from the battles of their youth, and the old people still chant killing songs.” Gangsta!

15 Roy Hardiman. “Toward the right of commerciality: recognizing property

Segment based on a Waorani spearing song as given by Joe Kane, Savages (London, Pan Books, 1997). 3 Manuel Cordova-Rios, F. Bruce Lamb, Wizard of the Upper Amazon. (New York, Atheneum, 1971). 4 Lines from a Machiguenga poem transcribed by father Joaquin Barriales and given by Mario Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller (London, Faber and Faber, 1990). 5 Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred (University of California Press, 1985). 6 Found object garden magic, quote from Michael F. Brown, Tsewa’s Dream: Magic and Meaning in an Amazonian Society. (University of Alabama Press, 2006). 7 Listen to S. Alexandrian: “Andre Breton organized group walks to look for stones, sometimes on the banks of the Seine; he saw in the mineral kingdom ‘the domain of signs and indications’. The interpretation of the stones which one finds is considered to satisfy and develop the poetic sense, which needs to be educated in man. In La Langue des Pierres, Breton stated the method of the cult: ‘Stones – particular hard stones – go on talking to those who wish to hear them. The speak to each listener according to his capabilities; through what each listener knows, they instruct him in what he aspires to know.’ The discovery of a bed of stones on a drizzly day in the country gave Breton ‘the perfect illusion of treading the ground of the Earthly Paradise’. The divinatory nature of stones, and the ‘second state’ they induce in the connoisseur, are found only when the stones have been discovered as the result of a special expedition. Breton said that an unusual stone found by chance is of less value than one which has been sought for and longed.” S. Alexandrian, Surrealist Art. (London, Thames and Hudson, 1970). 8 Excerpt from Daniel Everett, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle. (London, Profile Books, 2008). 9 Listen to Neil L. Whitehead. “Kanaimà is a form of Amazonian dark shamanism and involves the killing of individuals through a violent mutilation of, in particular, the mouth and anus, into which are inserted various objects. The killers are then enjoined to return to the dead body of the victim in order to drink the juices of putrefaction. The victim will first become aware of an impending attack when the Kanaimàs approach his house by night, or on lonely forest trails [asanda], making a characteristic whistling noise... a direct physical attack might come at any point, even years thereafter, for during this period of stalking the victim is assessed as to their likely resistance and their suitability as ‘food’. In some attacks the victims may have minor bones broken, especially fingers, and joints dislocated, especially the shoulder, while the neck may also be manipulated to induce spinal injury and back pain. This kind of attack is generally considered to be a preliminary to actual death and mutilation;... fatal attack will certainly follow but, informants stress, many months, or even a year or two, later.” Gothic! Neil L. Whitehead, Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death (Londres, Duke University Press, 2002). 10 Jacques Lizot. Tales of the Yanomami: daily life in the Venezuelan forest (Cambridge University Press, 1991). 11 Inspired by Marc de Civrieux, Watunna: an Orinoco creation cycle (University of Texas Press, 1997). 12 Listen to William Burroughs “He is a native to the place when the place can’t exist without him.” William S. Burroughs. My Education: A Book of Dreams. (London, Picador, 1996). 13 Based on the story of Hans Staden (1525-79). 14 Listen to Charles Darwin: “It was as easy to please as it was difficult to satisfy these savages. Young and old, men and children, never ceased repeating the word ‘yammerschooner,’ which means “give me.” After pointing to almost every object, one after the other, even to the buttons on our coats,

and saying their favourite word in as many intonations as possible, they would then use it in a neuter sense, and vacantly repeat ‘yammerschooner’.” Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (London, Penguin Classics, 1989). 15 The power of begging, listen to Patrick Tierney: “In 1800, they [the Yanomami], too, seemed destined for extinction. The Yanomami’s subsequent territorial and demographic success underscored one of the principles of coalition theory: weakness can be strength, and strength can be weakness. If the Yanomami had been a highly organized, well-armed, military group led by a charismatic chief, they would have provoked immediate opposition and destruction. The last charismatic Amerindian chief in the area, Ajuricaba, proclaimed himself the king of Gran Manoa in 1720. The Portuguese promptly sent an army that crushed his coalition and carried Ajuricabe off in chains. By contrast, the Yanomami expanded in all directions without a central authority. Everywhere they went, they asked for food, steel goods, medicine, clothes. Two airstrips in Yanomami territory, one at Boca Mavaca, Venezuala, and one near Surucucu, in Brazil, were nicknamed ‘Give me.’ The Indians’ habit of endlessly asking for steel and food annoyed outsiders, but is also disarmed them. These tiny, technologically poor people multiplied eightfold while expanding their territory tenfold. Father Luis Coco half jokingly spoke about ‘the Yanomami Empire’”. Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (New York, W.W. Norton and Company, 2000). 16 Listen to Norman Lewis: “Difficulties arose from the fact that, as in the majority of Indian languages, there are no equivalents in Panare for many words held as basic to the concepts of the Christian religion. There is non, for example, for sin, guilt, punishment and redemption. There are many other pitfalls. The concept of a universal God runs contrary to all processes of Panare thought, and in any case he cannot be thanked, but only congratulated. ‘God is love’ may be translated ‘the great spirit is not angry’. The Panare mentality and character were established in a relatively protected forest environment over thousands of years. In this famines were impossible, plagues are not recorded, and the wars that shaped our history were reduced here at most to a ceremonial skirmish. Consequently the Indians can only grope after the meanings of words coined in a more stressful society. The biblical dramas become hardly more than shadow plays. How can the walls of Jericho fall down for a man who has never seen a brick? How can a Indian, who has never known dearth, be urged to store up treasure in heaven? What point can the parable of the talents of silver have to a Panare whose language has no word for profit? Most of the biblical animals are missing in the rain forest, so ‘The Good Shepherd’ may have to be translated as ‘the foodsharer who looks after the pigs’. (To some the image seemed inappropriate, so elsewhere small numbers of sheep were imported and raised in an unfavourable environment, so that this could be put right.) Redemption is explained as a trading bargain after the arduous rigmarole of cash payments, debts and credits have finally been made clear. Adam and Eve and the fall of Man are omitted from Panare translations owing to their horror of incest... The translators may have decided that the best way of tackling this was by re-editing the scriptures in such a way as to implicate the Panare in Christ’s death”. Norman Lewis, The Missionaries God Against the Indians. (London, Picador, 1988). 17 Listen to Marc van Roosmalen “Most of what I have learned about survival in a neo-tropical rainforest I have learned from the red-faced spider monkeys from Surinam. I also learned a lot from other animals. From mammals, reptiles and birds who, like me, live on the ground. Agouties, agouties and peccaries led me to those seeds and seedlings you can eat without risk, and to others that are poisonous enough to kill you by touch alone if you happen to have a scratch or small wound. Tapirs and deer taught me which seeds and seedlings to avoid. They also taught me which green leaves from which trees I could eat with relish. By studying the food habits of a wide variety of animals, by observing what foods they are looking for, what foods they eat, and from which

foods they sometimes accidentally die, I soon started to feel comfortable in my new daily surroundings. More and more I started to look like a native of the forest“. My translation. Marc G.M. Van Roosmalen, Blootsvoet door de Amazone, De Evolutie op het Spoor. (Amsterdam, Bert Bakker, 2008). 18 Listen to Mark Plotkin: “’Look at that garden,’ Kamainja whispered. ‘I’ve seen better-looking agriculture inside a leafcutter ant’s nest!’ To my untrained eye, the peasant garden did not look at all different from Indian agriculture. Once Kamainja stopped laughing, I asked him to explain. ‘Look at that manioc! It is planted too far apart. You saw how we put ours together; the leaves form a canopy like the forest’s, which keeps the sun and rain from directly hitting the soil. And they have only one kind, whereas in our garden we have more than twenty. That plantation is an invitation for the bugs to move in.’ Kamainja was right. Since the manioc plants were all of one variety, insects that feed on that one variety might undergo a population explosion. I began to see what looked ‘primitive’ to the two Indians. ‘Look at the weeds!’ Shafee chimed in. ’I don’t see any.’ I said. ‘Exactly! In our gardens we always leave some behind it binds the soil in the rainy season. The peasant’s garden is probably cleaner than his house!’ ‘And another thing,’ said Kamainja. ‘You look at the plantation and you know the man doesn’t understand the forest. A well-planned garden should look like a hole in the forest opened up when a giant ku-mah-kah tree falls over. Small openings in the forest are filled in by fast growing weedy plants that attract game animals. When you cut down too much forest, the little plants can’t seed in from the surrounding jungle and you don’t have any birds or peccaries coming in that you can hunt.’” Mark J. Plotkin, Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice. (London, Penguin Books, 1993). 19 Listen to Darrel A. Posey: “Although ‘settled’ for several decades now, the Kayapó have not deserted their semi-nomadic habits entirely. They spend several months each year in the Brazil nut groves living in communal houses; go on frequent collecting and hunting trips; and before major festivals make two- or three-week treks to acquire ceremonial game and feathers. The Kayapó have never left everything on their journeys to chance, however, but have developed an interesting ‘nomadic agriculture’, which they continue to use today. While routinely scavenging about the forest, the Indians gather dozens of plants, carry them back to the forest campsites or trails, and replant them in natural forest clearings. The plants include several types of wild manioc, three varieties of wild yams, a type of bush bean, and three or more wild varieties of kupa. These forest fields are always located near streams, which generally guarantee a stand of trees. Even in the savanna, where patches of forest are often few and far between, there are areas where collected plants have been replanted to form food depots. The Kayapó once maintained an extensive system of interlacing trails linking all their vast territory. Most of these ancient trails are now abandoned, but not all, and the Kayapó are still masters of the forest and savanna and travel considerable distances. I once travelled for five days with four Kayapó man on longabandoned trails to an ancient village site. Although the trails were overgrown and difficult to follow, they had been used so much that in some places they were etched six inches into the hard earth. Each night we would stop at a stream in some spot flattened and hardened by years of use. The men would slip off into the forest and soon return with a variety of roots, tubers, stalks and fruits. Foods were readily acquired even on parts of the trail known to have been abandoned 40 years before.“ Darrel A. Posey, Kayapo Indians: experts in synergy. (ILEIA Newsletter 7(4), 1991). 20 See: Charles C. Mann. 1491 New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. (New York, Vintage Books, 2006). 21 Based on the opening lines of H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds. 22 Anna Roosevelt, The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chiefdoms. (L’Homme, 1993). 23 M.J. Heckenberger et al. Pre-Columbian Urbanism, Anthropogenic

Landscapes, and the Future of the Amazon. (Science 321, 2008). 24 David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. (New York, Vintage Books, 2010). 25 Clark L. Erickson, The Domesticated Landscape of the Bolivian Amazon. In Balée and Erickson (ed.), Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology. New York, Columbia University press. 2006. 26 Martti Pärssinen, Denise Schaan & Alceu Ranzi, Pre-Columbian geometric earthworks in the upper Purus: a complex society in western Amazonia. (Antiquity, 2009). 27 Viti-Vití, subtitled ‘The Origin of the Ditches’, is Kuikúro myth explaining the earthworks now known as the cities of Z/the garden cities of Xingu. Orlando Villas Boas, Claudio Villas Boas, Xingu, The Indians, Their Myths. (London, Souvenir Press, 1974). 28 It is as Yeh Shieh wrote in 17th century China: “When I write something different from former masters, I may be filling in something missing from their work. Or is it possible that the former masters are filling in something that is missing in my work.” Deforestation is playing out a subtle palimpsestic game with the landscape of Western Amazonia. Modern day clearings, villages and roads are mixing and aggregating, contrasting and accentuating with squares and circles, parallelograms and plazas, mounds and ditches, fishing weirs and glyphs dripped across clear-cut lands like a glass of red wine spilled over an expensive white tablecloth. The present is haunted by the past, the vanished civilizations of yesteryear have cartoon ghost transparency but they point to something that used to be anathema to greens and industrialists alike. The West has built her societies at the cost of the forest, the preconquest civilizations of the Amazon did not just sustain the forest as their numbers grew, they improved it. Improvements that are with us today. It is as Ezra Pound wrote: “An age old intelligence does not go away in an era of speed.” That is all.

Call for works

thresholds 40

Socio— Gone are the days of black and white and here is the time of grey. As social linkages have become wildly complex, the normative positions that might bring them order have evaporated. What if, for a moment, the rules were put on hold? What if you could stand up for what you believe in without losing your cool? Such action is urgent: We simultaneously have more awareness of and distance from social crises than ever before. As economies collapse, wars are fought, and the masses are left hungry, nothing seems more urgent than purchasing and enjoying a delicious hamburger. Do art and design have (or lack) agency to interface with these crises? Can there be technological salvation when science’s objectivity is coming under fire? Is there a metanarrative lurking in our culture that could chart a new trajectory for society? Or are do-gooders the enemy, obfuscating real issues as social awareness has become hip? Thresholds 40 invites projects, ideas, and beliefs in a variety of media, including scholarly papers, visual work, and philosophical treatises, that explore the dangerous and messy theme of socially charged cultural practice.

Submissions due March 28, 2011. Thresholds is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal that aims to publish only original material. Text should be in American English, limited to 2,500 words, and formatted in accordance with The Chicago Manual of Style. Images should be included separately and be of 8”x9” at 300dpi print quality. Submissions should include a cover letter with author’s name, telephone number and email address, and a brief bio. Author’s name or other identifying information should not appear elsewhere within the submission.

Please send submissions to: thresh@mit.edu Please send correspondence and inquiries to: Jonathan Crisman, Editor Thresholds, MIT Architecture 77 Massachusetts Ave, Room 7-337 Cambridge, MA 02139 thresh@mit.edu

Editor Orkan Telhan Assistant Editor Adam Fulton Johnson Graphic Design

Vassia Alaykova

Editorial Policy:

thresholds 38 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Architecture, Room 7 - 337 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139

thresholds 38

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