Research Method Statement
Posthuman Fun Palace The thesis has been developed as a guide to the Posthuman Fun Palace, which like Cedric Price’s ‘Fun Palace’ (1964) offers new forms of social interaction. It will be designed and augmented based on my own interests, in the way we will be able to create our own minds, bodies, spaces, environments and communities. As you enter the Fun Palace either physically or digitally you begin to be augmented and fractured, moving through the landscape you improve your cognitive attachment to the environment as it nurtures you into a form that maximises your visual sensorium towards a paradise of fun. Allowing you to manipulate and control the environment around you.
Tim Evans M.Arch Tutor: Nic Clear
The posthuman Fun Palace in 2066 is a highly dynamic, mixed reality wonderland, based on a number of speculative predictions from science fiction stories and hard science inventions. With the ability for every user to customise their synthetic form and virtual/ physical surroundings to match their own personal preference, the city is likely to become a complex maze of cultural hubs where people with similar interests join together to develop designed communities. These areas will contain a diverse range of different posthuman forms, where you may have to adapt and augment your body to fit in as you travel through different territories, just like we do in London today. Different areas affect what you wear, eat and how you move/walk through areas, depending upon the local cultures and traditions and how integrated we feel to the other people living, working or visiting the space
Introduction
The thesis uses a timeline of science fiction and science fact to create a speculative framework to inform the parameters of the Fun Palace, within a theoretical future. I have approached it in the same way Steven Shaviro writes his book, Discognition, “Perhaps we will be able to imagine what we are unable to know” (2015). Science fiction is a literature tool used to frame this guide and the environmental constraints it will be set within, I use a Paraliterature as Samuel R. Delany refers to it. The use of this genre allows us to ground our fabrication through the use of narratives in character’s cognition.
Overview
The primary focus of the Fun Palace is to explore the architectural, technological and environmental, designs, uses and visual representations within the constructed timeline. I investigate the idea of ‘fun’ within a highly efficient post-scarcity environment using Dada as the skeleton of the performance. It is an instrument to understand the mesh connections between mind, body and spaces.
Conclusion Speculative The conclusion to this guide does not follow the standard protocol in developing a closing statement because of the nature of this thesis. It does however provide the reader with a breakdown of the history and technicalities of posthuman architecture and design and frames them within a speculative park to demonstrate the possibilities of how this knowledge can be implemented into practice. The goal is to provide a conclusion that like the Fun Palace is unique to the user, created by working through the different guides within this collection. The RMS has only been updated through out the creation of the thesis to separate the guides from each other in order to provide a more efficient way of setting the scene for the Fun Palace. By separating each part and using a different style of language, the collection of guides are able to set the scenes, explain their creation and evolution and speculate the future of them, while integrating the reader/user within every step. The Companion Guide, which is the final part of the thesis has become the tool which has set the scene for my final design project.
The thesis is a transformative guide for developing a unique posthuman, as you journey through the Fun Palace. It considers both a physiological and psychological factor towards the amalgamation of your anatomy and cognition into the paradise, where there is little differentiation between the posthuman and the architecture. With the goal of posthumanism to become an entirely unique experience based around our individual needs and desires, the paper will be an exclusive perspective of my own method and progression through the process. Through the histories, theories, technologies, technicalities, social and political concerns of becoming posthuman along with the rich involvement of science fiction, we can develop a detailed brief on the need of a methodology towards developing our own posthuman palaces. The need for the guide now is of vital importance, given the rapid adoption of media coverage on the topic through both science fiction (Westworld: 2016 and Ghost in the shell: 2017) and actual scientific achievements like the neural lace, synthetic limb replacement and mixed reality architectures. The spaces themselves cannot be considered on their own, but require the connection between the mind and body, to be explored as a system. They are created either by designing the space around your body or designing your body around the space, creating a highly diverse landscape that require continuous augmentation for complete immersion. The Fun Palace will become a post-artist’s studio where many similar thinking minds collaboratively build up personalised spaces that both harmoniously and singly develop community zones for fun and enjoyment. As a spatially rich area, the interesting architecture becomes the seams between ideas, where slightly different minds create part fractured and intersecting spaces that are also influencing the design of the creators to better interact with the area.