Tuesday, January 10. 2012
Via Pruned
-----
In case you need reminding, Bracket 3 is looking for critical articles and unpublished design projects that explore “architecture, infrastructure and technology [operating] in conditions of imbalance, negotiate tipping points and test limit states. In such conditions, the status quo is no longer possible; systems must extend performance and accommodate unpredictability. As new protocols emerge, new opportunities present themselves. Bracket [at Extremes] seeks innovative contributions interrogating extreme processes (technologies, operations) and extreme contexts (cultural, climatic). What is the breaking point of architecture at extremes?”
The deadline is 20 February 2012.
Also be on the lookout for Bracket [goes soft], scheduled to be available this month from Actar. Some of the projects in this second almanac sound like they also belong in the new one.
Personal comment:
Thanks for the reminder!
Wednesday, November 02. 2011
The Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University and the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry have co-published "New Art/Science Affinities," a 190-page book on contemporary artists that was written and designed in one week by four authors (Andrea Grover, Régine Debatty, Claire Evans and Pablo Garcia) and two designers (Luke Bulman and Jessica Young of Thumb).
"New Art/Science Affinities," which focuses on artists working at the intersection of art, science and technology, was produced by a collaborative authoring process known as a "book sprint." Derived from "code sprinting," a method in which software developers gather in a single room to work intensely on an open source project for a certain period of time, the term book sprint describes the quick, collective writing of a topical book.
The book includes meditations, interviews, diagrams, letters and manifestos on maker culture, hacking, artist research, distributed creativity, and technological and speculative design. Chapters include Program Art or Be Programmed, Subvert! Citizen Science, Artists in White Coats and Latex Gloves, The Maker Moment and The Overview Effect.
Sixty international artists and art collaboratives are featured, including Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Atelier Van Lieshout, Brandon Ballengée, Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, The Institute for Figuring, Aaron Koblin, Machine Project, Openframeworks, C.E.B. Reas, Philip Ross, Tomás Saraceno, SymbioticA, Jer Thorp, and Marius Watz.
The authors collectively wrote and designed the book during seven, 10-14 hour-days in February 2011 at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. During their sessions they held conversations with CMU faculty, staff and students from the STUDIO, Miller Gallery, College of Fine Arts, Robotics Institute, Machine Learning Department and BXA Intercollege Degree Program.
"The book sprint method was adopted in order to understand this very moment in art, science and technology hybrid practices, and to mirror the ways Internet culture and networked communication have accelerated creative collaborations, expanded methodologies, and given artists greater agency to work fluidly across disciplines," says lead author Andrea Grover....
Personal comment:
Note: there is a pdf downloadable version of the book on Nasabook website (follow the link above).
PS. Thanks also Sinan for the info.
Monday, October 17. 2011
Via Vague Terrain
-----
Editor's note: We just received a tip from Joseph Nechvatal about his new book project which looks quite promising. Note the details of the summary below and—best of all—the text is open-access.
The noise factor is the ratio of signal to noise of an input signal to that of the output signal. Noise can block or interfere with the meaning of a message in both human and electronic communication. But in Information Theory, noise is still considered to be information.
By refining the definition of noise as that which addresses us outside of our preferred comfort zone, Joseph Nechvatal's Immersion Into Noise investigates multiple aspects of cultural noise by applying the audio understanding of noise to the visual, architectural and cognitive domains. Nechvatal expands and extends our understanding of the function of cultural noise by taking the reader through the immersive and phenomenal aspects of noise into algorithmic and network contexts, beginning with his experience in the Abside of the Grotte de Lascaux.
Immersion Into Noise is intended as a conceptual handbook useful for the development of a personal-political-visionary art of noise. On a planet that is increasingly technologically linked and globally mediated, how might noises break and re-connect in distinctive and productive ways within practices located in the world of art and thought? That is the question Joseph Nechvatal explores in Immersion Into Noise.
Tuesday, September 20. 2011
Via Beatrice Galilee & The Gopher Hole
-----
Dear friends,
The first event of The Gopher Gala will be the story of WikiHouse, one of the most innovative global open source architecture projects today.
WikiHouse is an open community construction set. Its aim is to make it possible for almost anyone, regardless of their formal skills, to freely download and build structures which are affordable and suited to their needs. There is no single design, or single designer. Houses and components are designed by an open community of designers and users, of which you are invited to be a member. The presentation by architecture00:/ will include speakers from other open source design projects. The discussion will be chaired by Chris Foges, editor of Architecture Today.
Doors open at 6.30pm, tickets are free, there will be drinks and gala-themed party food! Reserve your seat: rsvp@holygopher.com
Architecture00:/
Architecture 00:/ is an architecture and strategic design practice based in London, whose work explores an expanded field of activity for design. Many of their projects test new kinds of social production and involve intense collaboration with innovators from other disciplines.
The Gopher Hole is an architecture, art, music, design, literature & miscellaneous culturegallery/venue in Hoxton.A collaboration between aberrant architecture and Beatrice Galilee, our agenda is to explore new waysof curating ideas in popular culture and to provide a forum forcritical debate on the arts and society.The Gopher Hole is part of ElPaso, a bar, workplace and dinerlocated in Shoreditch in East London.
The Gopher Gala is a week long event as part of Shoreditch Design Triangle which is promoting young design and projects in London. It ispart of a rolling programme of exhibitions, events, talks andscreenings that we hope will provide an open house for ideas that cross cultural boundaries, promote political and sociological thinking and encourage debate and exchange between disciplines.
Monday 19th‘The Wikihouse & Other Stories’ Architecture00:/ present their project WikiHouse and discuss the possibilities of open sourcedesign. Chaired by Chris Foges, editor ofArchitecture Today
Tuesday 20th ‘Archive of Spatial Aesthetics’Curator Tina Di Carlo presents the Archive of Spatial Aesthetics and Praxis. ASAP aims to be the foremostcollection of spatial practice today, collecting and exhibitingarchitecture as part of a broader social, political, and aesthetic discourse.
Wednesday 21st 'Young London: The Best of 2011' ′The best projects of 2011 will be presented in an all-nightextravaganza by a score of young London design studios, includingtalks by Revital Cohen, Nelly BenHayoun, Assemble, Something & Son, The Decorators, Klassnik Corporation, Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, Kieren Jones and Bedford Press. Music by Type Two Error. Curated by Anna Bates & The Gopher Hole.
Thursday 22nd 'Exploding China – China’s New Megacities' Talk and booklaunch’Shanghai-based multidisciplinary think Go West Project will be in London to discuss their newbookHow the City Moved to Mr Sun in conversation with Beatrice Galilee.
All tickets are free and events start @ 6:30pm to reserve yours please rsvp@holygopher.com
Personal comment:
Unfortunately the opening was yesterday, but the event goes on for the week.
Therefore more about community architecture & open source approach during this week at the promissing Gopher Hole that is run by Beatrice Galilee & aberrant architecture in Hoxton/London.
Tuesday, August 02. 2011
Via Next Nature
-----
The sublime is an aesthetic concept of ‘the exalted,’ of beauty that is grand and dangerous. Through 17th and 18th century European intellectual tradition, the sublime became intimately associated with nature. Only in the 20th century, did the technological sublime replace the natural sublime. Have our sense of awe and terror been transferred to factories, war machines, and the unknowable, infinite possibilities suggested by computers and genetic engineering?
By JOS DE MUL
When we call a landscape or a piece of art ‘sublime,’ we express the fact that it evokes particular beauty or excellence. Note that the ‘sublime’ is not only an aesthetic characterization; a moral action of high standing or an unparalleled goal in a soccer game may also be called ‘sublime.’ Roughly speaking, the sublime is something that exceeds the ordinary. This aspect of its meaning is expressed aptly in the German word for the sublime: the ‘exalted’ (das Erhabene). In the latter term we also hear echoes of the religious connotation of the concept. The sublime confronts us with that which exceeds our very understanding.
The notion of the sublime goes back a long way. It stems from the Latin ‘sublimis,’ which – when used literally – means ‘high up in the air,’ and more figuratively means ‘lofty’ or ‘grand.’ One of the oldest essays on the sublime dates back to the beginning of our calendar. It is a manuscript in Greek entitled Περὶ ὕψους (On the Sublime), long ascribed to Longinus, though probably incorrectly so. In this treatise, the author does not provide a definition for ‘the sublime,’ and some classicists even doubt whether ‘the sublime’ is even the correct translation of the Greek word used – hypsous. Using a number of quotes from classical literature, the author discusses fortunate and less fortunate examples of the sublime. For one, the sublime must address grand and important subjects and be associated with powerful emotions. For pseudo-Longinus, the sublime landscape even touches upon the divine. Nature “has implanted in our souls an unconquerable passion for all that is great and for all that is more divine than ourselves” (Longinus 1965, 146).
The dynamic sublime evokes both awe and fear; it induces a ‘negative lust’ in which attraction and repulsion melt into one ambiguous experience.
|
Longinus’ essay was hardly noticed by his contemporaries and, in the centuries that followed, we rarely find references to this text. The essay was printed for the first time as late as 1554 in Basel. But only after the French translation by Boileau (1674) and the English translation by Smith (1739) did the text begin its victory march through European cultural history. From the Baroque period onward, which culminated in Romanticism, the sublime grew to become the central aesthetic concept, at which time it was often associated with the experience of nature. In the eighteenth century, we find it predominantly in the descriptions of nature of a number of British authors, portrayals of their impressions collected on Grand Tours through Europe and the Alps (a common practice in those days among young people from prosperous families). These authors use the term to render the often fear-inducing immensity of the mountain landscape in words.
The sublime refers to the wild, unbounded grandeur of nature, which is thus contrasted starkly with the more harmonious experience of beauty. In A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), Edmund Burke defines the sublime as a “delightful terror” (Burke and Womersley 1998, 101-102) That the forces of nature may nevertheless leave the viewer in a state of ecstasy is connected with the fact that the viewer observes these forces from a safe distance.
In German Romanticism, however, the sublime loses its innocent character. The work of Immanuel Kant has been of particular critical importance in this respect. In the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), Kant, following Burke, makes an explicit distinction between the beautiful (das Schöne) and the sublime (das Erhabene). Beautiful are those things that give us a pleasant feeling. They fill us with desire because they seem to confirm our hope that we are living in a harmonious and purposeful world. A beautiful sunrise, for instance, gives us the impression that life is not that bad, really. The sublime, on the other hand, is connected with experiences that upset our hopes for harmony. It is evoked by things that surpass our understanding and our imagination due to their unbounded, excessive, or chaotic character (Kant 1968, B74B).
Kant makes a further distinction between the mathematical sublime and the dynamic sublime. The first, the mathematical sublime, is evoked by that which is immeasurable and colossal, and pertains to the idea of infinitude. When we view the immensity of a mountain landscape or look up at the vast night sky, we are overcome by a realization of our insignificance and finitude. Kant associates the second, the dynamic sublime, with the superior forces of nature. The examples he uses include volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and turbulent oceans. Here, too, we experience our insignificance and finitude, but in these cases this understanding is supplemented by the realization that we could be destroyed by the devastating power of these forces of nature. The dynamic sublime evokes both awe and fear; it induces a ‘negative lust’ (Kant 1968, B89.) in which attraction and repulsion melt into one ambiguous experience.
Since the sublime remains primarily an aesthetic category in Kant’s work, he maintains the idea that ‘safe distance’ characterizes the experience of the sublime. When viewing a painting of a turbulent storm at sea, one can contemplate the superior force of nature while remaining comfortably assured that one is safely in a museum and not at sea! Friedrich Schiller, in contrast, takes things one step further and ‘liberates’ the sublime from the safe cocoon of aesthetic experience. The political terror under Jacobin rule following the French Revolution had deeply impressed him and shaped his view of the sublime, as elaborated in a series of essays.
In the era of converging technologies, it is technology itself that gains a confounding character in its battle with nature.
|
In order to accomplish this liberation, Schiller rephrases Kant’s distinction between the mathematical sublime and the dynamic sublime. In a 1793 text called On the Sublime (Vom Erhabenen), Schiller argues that the mathematical sublime ought to be labeled the theoretical sublime. The immeasurable magnitude of the high mountains and the night sky evoke in us a purely reflexive observation of infinitude. When nature shows itself to be a destructive force, on the other hand, we experience a practical sublime, which affects us directly in our instinct for self-preservation. Still, in Schiller’s view, we need to make yet another distinction. When we view life-threatening forces from a safe distance – for instance, by observing a storm at sea from a safe place on land – we might experience the grandeur of the storm, but not its sublime character. An experience can only be truly sublime when our lives are actually endangered by the superior forces of nature.
And yet, for Schiller, even that is not enough. Human beings have an understandable urge to shield themselves both physically and morally from the superior forces of nature. He who protects his country by building dykes attempts to gain ‘physical certainty’ over the violence of a westerly gale; he who believes his soul will live on in heaven after death protects himself by means of ‘moral certainty.’ He who manages to truly conquer his fear of the sea, or of death, shows his grandness, but loses the experience of the sublime. According to Schiller, truly sublime is he who collapses in a glorious battle against the superior powers of nature or military violence. “One can show oneself to be great in times of good fortune, but merely noble in times of bad fortune” (“Groß kann man sich im Glück, erhaben nur im Unglück zeigen”). (Schiller 1962, 502). Schiller’s work transforms the sublime from an ambiguous aesthetic category into a no less ambiguous category of life.
History doesn’t stop, however. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the main site for the ambiguous experience of the sublime has gradually shifted from nature to technology. Our current period is viewed as the age of secularization. God is retreating from nature and nature is gradually becoming ‘disenchanted’ in the process. Nature no longer implants in us, as was the case in Longinus’s time, “an unconquerable passion for all that is great and for all that is more divine than ourselves,” but invites technical action and control. Divine rule has become the work of man. The power of divine nature has been transferred to the power of human technology. In a sense, the sublime now returns to what it was in Longinus’s work: a form of human technè. However, these days it no longer falls into the category of the alpha technologies, such as rhetoric, but rather, we find ourselves on the brink of the age of sublime beta technologies. Modern man is less and less willing to be overpowered by nature; instead, he vigorously takes technological command of nature.
As David Nye has documented in great detail in his book, American Technological Sublime (1994), Americans initially embraced the technological sublime with as much enthusiasm as they had embraced the natural sublime. The admiration of the natural sublime, as it might be experienced in the Grand Canyon, was replaced by the sublime of the factory, the sublime of aviation, the sublime of auto-mobility, the sublime of war machinery, and the sublime of the computer (Nye 1994).
The computer in particular discloses a whole new range of sublime experiences. In a world in which the computer has become the dominant technology, everything – genes, books, organizations – becomes a relational database. Databases are onto-logical machines that transform everything into a collection of (re)combinatory elements. As such, the database also transforms our experience of the sublime, and the sublime as such. The mathematical sublime in the age of computing manifests itself as a combinatorial explosion. As Borges has shown in The Library of Babel, the number of combinations of a finite number of elements – in his story, 25 linguistic symbols – is hyper-astronomical (Borges 1962). Borges’s library, consisting of books of 410 pages, each having 40 lines of 80 characters – contains no less than 251,312,000 books. The number of atoms in the universe (estimated by physicists to be roughly 1080) is negligible compared to the unimaginable number of possible (re)combinations in the ‘Database of Babel.’ And the number of possible (re)combinations of the 3 billion nucleotides of the human genome is even more sublime (cf.Bloch 2008).
Twenty-first century man has been denied the choice to not be technological.
|
Moreover, by actively recombining the elements of the database (by genetic manipulation or synthetic biology, for example), we unleash awesome powers and, in so doing, transform the dynamic sublime. In our (post)modern world it is no longer the superior force of nature that calls forth the experience of the sublime, but rather, the superior force of technology. However, with the transfer of power from divine nature to human technology, the ambiguous experience of the sublime also nests in the latter. In the era of converging technologies – information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology and the neurosciences – it is technology itself that gains a confounding character in its battle with nature. While technology is an expression of the grandeur of the human intellect, we experience it more and more as a force that controls and threatens us. Technologies such as atomic power stations and genetic modification, to mention just two paradigmatic examples, are Janus-faced: they reflect, at once, our hope for the benefits they may bring as well as our fear of their uncontrollable, destructive potentials.
According to David Nye, this explains why enthusiasm for the technological sublime has transformed into fear in the course of the twentieth century. This is also why it is often said, in relation to such sublime technologies, that we ‘shouldn’t play God.’ At the same time, twenty-first century man has been denied the choice to not be technological. The biotope in which we used to live has been transformed, in this (post)modern age, into a technotope. We have created technological environments and structures beyond which we cannot survive. The idea that we could return to nature and natural religion is an unworldly illusion. In fact, because of its Janus-faced powers, technology itself has become the sublime god of our (post)modern age. Assessments regarding the fundamental transformation from the natural to the technological sublime may vary; however, no one can deny that technology is a no less inexhaustible god.
References
Bloch, W. G. 2008. The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Borges, J. L. 1962. Ficciones. New York,: Grove Press.
Burke, E., and D. Womersley. 1998. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: And Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, Penguin Classics. London/New York: Penguin Books.
Kant, I. 1968. Kritik Der Urteilskraft. Vol. X, Theorie-Werkausgabe. Frankfurt.
Longinus. 1965. On the Sublime. In Classical Literary Criticism, edited by T. S. Dorsch. Baltimore: Penguin Books.
Nye, D. E. 1994. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Schiller, F. 1962. Vom Erhabenen. In Sämtliche Werke. München: Hanser.
Wednesday, July 27. 2011
Via Archinect
-----
by Archinect
All seems to have been forgiven. Last week events in Europe, Washington and three Canadian cities honored the centennial of the birth of the man who is now widely credited as the world’s first media theorist and who introduced ideas like “the medium is the message” and “the global village” into everyday use. The festivities have helped renew debate over the meaning of his often dense and cryptic, yet challenging, work.
Monday, June 20. 2011
Via DomusWeb
-----
An op-ed
A proposition for a different approach to designing space to succeed the single-author model includes tools from disparate sources to create new paradigms for thinking and building
The contributors to this article included Paola Antonelli, Adam Bly, Lucas Dietrich, Joseph Grima, Dan Hill, John Habraken, Alex Haw, John Maeda, Nicholas Negroponte, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carlo Ratti, Casey Reas, Marco Santambrogio, Mark Shepard, Chiara Somajni, Bruce Sterling*
Open Source Architecture (OSArc) is an emerging paradigm describing new procedures for the design, construction and operation of buildings, infrastructure and spaces. Drawing from references as diverse as open-source culture, avant-garde architectural theory, science fiction, language theory, and others, it describes an inclusive approach to spatial design, a collaborative use of design software and the transparent operation throughout the course of a building and city's life cycle.
Cooking is often hailed as an early form of open source; vernacular architecture—producing recipes for everyday buildings—is another form of early lo-fi open-source culture, openly sharing and optimising technologies for building. A contemporary form of open-source vernacular is the Open Architecture Network launched by Architecture for Humanity, which replaces traditional copyright restrictions with Creative Commons licensing and allows open access to blueprints. Wider OSArc relies on a digital commons and the shared spaces of the World Wide Web to enable instantaneous collaboration beyond more established models of competition and profit. Traditional architectural tools like drawings and plans are supplemented and increasingly replaced by interactive software applications using relational data and parametric connectivity.
OSArc is not only involved with production; reception to a given project—critical, public, client, peer-related—can often form part of the project itself, creating a feedback loop that can ground—or unmoor—a project's intention and ultimately becomes part of it, with both positive and negative consequences. OSArc supersedes architectures of static geometrical form with the introduction of dynamic and participatory processes, networks, and systems. Its proponents see it as distinguished by code over mass, relationships over compositions, networks over structures, adaptation over stasis. Its purpose is to transform architecture from a top-down immutable delivery mechanism into a transparent, inclusive and bottom-up ecological system— even if it still includes top-down mechanisms.
OSArc relies upon amateurs as much as experienced professionals—the genius of the mass as much as that of the individual—eroding the binary distinction between author and audience. Like social software, it recognises the core role of multiple users at every stage of the process—whether as clients or communities, designers or occupants; at its best, it harnesses powerful network effects to scale systems effectively. It is typically democratic, enshrining principles of open access and participation, though political variations may range from stealth authoritarianism to communitarian consensualism.
Open Source Architecture revolutionises every step of the traditional building process, from brief-building to demolition, programming to adaptive reuse, including the following:
Funding
New economic models, exemplified by incremental microdonations and crowd-funding strategies like Sponsume and Kickstarter, offer new modes of project initiation and development, destabilising the traditionally feudal hierarchy of client/architect/occupant. Financing of private projects increasingly moves to the public domain, offering mass rather than singular ownership, whereas funding of public projects can be derived from more flexible, responsive frameworks than simple levies or taxation. OSArc has particular appeal for builders outside the mainstream economy, such as squatters, refugees and the military.
Engagement
Traditional developments deploy engagement programmes in which the community is consulted on incoming developments, with blunt tools such as focus groups, which often result in lack of representation and input, or at worst can result in NIMBYism. With crowd-funded models, forms of engagement are built into the process, enabling a kind of emergent urbanism in which use of space is optimised on terms set by its users. This reclamation of people's power can be seen as a soft, spatial version of Hacktivism. OSArc can suffer some of the organisational drawbacks of open-source software, such as project bifurcation or abandonment, clique behaviour and incompatibility with existing buildings.
Standards
Standards of collaboration are vital to OSArc's smooth operation and the facilitation of collaboration. The establishment of common, open, modular standards (such as the grid proposed by the OpenStructures project) addresses the problem of hardware compatibility and the interface between components, allowing collaborative efforts across networks in which everyone designs for everyone. Universal standards also encourage the growth of networks of non-monetary exchange (knowledge, parts, components, ideas) and remote collaboration.
Design
Mass customisation replaces standardisation as algorithms enable the generation of related but differentiated species of design objects. Parametric design tools like Grasshopper, Generative Components, Revit and Digital Project enable new user groups to interact with, navigate and modify the virtual designs, and to test and experience arrays of options at unprecedented low cost—recognising laypeople as design decision-making agents rather than just consumers. Opensource codes and scripts enable design communities to share and compare information and collectively optimise production through modular components, accelerating the historical accumulation of shared knowledge. BIM (Building Information Modelling) and related collaboration tools and practices enable cross-disciplinary co-location of design information and integration of a range of platforms and timescales. Rapid prototyping and other 3D printing technologies enable instant production of physical artefacts, both representational and functional, even on an architectural scale, to an ever-wider audience.
Construction
The burgeoning Open Source Hardware movement enables sharing of and collaboration on the hardware involved in designing kinetic or smart environments that tightly integrate software, hardware and mechanisms. Sensor data brings live inputs to inert material and enables spaces to become protoorganic in operation; design becomes an ongoing, evolutionary process, as opposed to the one-off, disjointed fire-and-forget methodology of traditional architecture. Operating systems emerge to manage the design, construction and occupancy phases, created as open platforms that foster and nourish a rich ecosystem of "apps". Various practices jostle to become the Linux, Facebook or iTunes of architectural software, engaging in "platform plays" on different scales rather than delivery of plans and sections. Embedded sensing and computing increasingly mesh all materials within the larger "Internet of things", evolving ever closer towards Bruce Sterling's vision of a world of spimes. Materials communicate their position and state during fabrication and construction, aiding positioning, fixing and verification, and continue to communicate with distributed databases for the extent of their lifetime.
Occupancy
OSArc enables inhabitants to control and shape their personal environment—"to Inhabit is to Design", as John Habraken put it. Fully sentient networked spaces constantly communicate their various properties, states and attributes—often through decentralised and devolved systems. System feedback is supplied by a wide range of users and occupants, often either by miniature electronic devices or mobile phones— crowd-sourcing (like crowd-funding) large volumes of small data feeds to provide accurate and expansive real-time information. Personalisation replaces standardisation as spaces "intelligently" recognise and respond to individual occupants. Representations of spaces become as vital after construction as they were before; real-time monitoring, feedback and ambient display become integral elements to the ongoing life of spaces and objects. Maintenance and operations become extended inseparable phases of the construction process; a building is never "complete" in OSArc's world of growth and change. If tomorrow's buildings and cities will now be more like computers—than machines—to live in, OSArc provides an open, collaborative framework for writing their operating software.
References
— R. Botson, R. Rogers, What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, HarperCollins, New York City 2010
— M. Fuller, U. Haque, "Urban Versioning System 1.0", in Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series, Architectural League of New York, New York City 2008
— J. Habraken, Supports—An Alternative to Mass Housing, The Architectural Press, London 1972
— U. Haque, Open Source Architecture Experiment, 2003-05
— D. Kaspori, "A Communism of Ideas: towards an architectural open source practice", in Archis, 2003
— K. Kelly, Out of Control: the rise of neo-biological civilization, Perseus Books, New York City 1994
—C. Leadbeater, We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity, Profile Books, London 2008
—Nettime mailing lists: mailing lists for networked cultures, politics, and tactics
—Open Building Network / Working Commission W104, "Open Building Implementation" of the CIB, The International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction (meets in a different country every year since its first meeting in Tokyo in 1994)
—C. Price, R. Banham, P. Barker, P. Hall, "Non Plan: an experiment in freedom", in New Society, no. 338, 1969
—M. Shepard (editor), Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space, MIT Press, Boston 2011
—B. Sterling, "Beyond the Beyond", blog on Wired Magazine
*As part of the special report on open-source design published in issue 948, Domus approached Carlo Ratti to write an op-ed on the theme of open-source architecture. He responded with an unusual suggestion: why not write it collaboratively, as an open-source document? Within a few hours a page was started on Wikipedia, and an invitation sent to an initial network of contributors. The outcome of this collaborative effort is presented below. The article is a capture of the text as of 11 May 2011, but the Wikipedia page remains online as an open canvas—a 21st-century manifesto of sorts, which by definition is in permanent evolution.
Tuesday, February 01. 2011
Via InfraNet Lab
-----
by Lola
[Fourth Natures Conference]
InfraNet Lab is pleased to announce that we will be hosting a conference entitled ‘Fourth Nature: Mediated Landscapes’ at the University of Waterloo, School of Architecture, in Cambridge, ON, this Friday, Feb. 4th and Saturday, Feb. 5th. The conference brings together scholars and practitioners working at the disciplinary intersection of architecture, infrastructure, landscape and environment to present research and projects that propose emerging models for understanding ‘nature’, in its various scales and guises, in the 21st century. From the territorial to the nano-scale, mutant environments which fuse natural and artificial, technologic and infrastructural have been proliferating. Natures are monitored and controlled, ecologies are amplified or manufactured and interior landscapes are conditioned, with the intent of augmenting performance, controlling the flow of resources, monitoring data or redressing environmental imbalances. In the current scenario, the dialectic is no longer nature versus city, or natural versus artificial, but positions within a spectrum of mediation and manipulation of nature, landscape and built environment.
Speakers include:
Keynote
François Roche (R&Sie(n))
Fourth Natures: New Contexts
Cary Wolfe (Rice University, Series Editor of Posthumanities )
Alessandra Ponte (Universite de Montreal)
Christine Macy (Dalhousie University)
Andy Payne (University of Toronto) (Moderator)
Fourth Natures: New Disciplines
Lydia Kallipoliti (Cooper Union, Columbia University, Director of Ecoredux)
John J. May (UCLA and University of Toronto, Millions of Moving Parts)
John McMinn (University of Waterloo) ( Moderator)
Fourth Natures: New Practices
Martin Felsen (Illinois Institute of Technology, Archeworks, Director of UrbanLab)
Janette Kim ( Columbia University, Director of Urban Landscape Lab)
Sean Lally (University of Illinois at Chicago, Director of WEATHERS)
Liat Margolis (University of Toronto) ( Moderator)
Detailed information about the conference schedule and speakers can be found at: http://www.architecture.uwaterloo.ca/fourthnatures/
Wednesday, January 19. 2011
Via Frieze blog
-----
The legacy of Guy Debord and the connections between terrorist strategies, the networked 21st century and historical avant-gardes
One of the most controversial comments made after 9/11 came from the avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who told a journalist in Hamburg that the attack was ‘the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos’. His comments caused uproar in Germany, where the association of art with political violence obviously raises troubling historical spectres. Whether or not Stockhausen was right to equate terrorism with art – and it would be disingenuous to deny the conceptual violence of his analogy, which he himself quickly recognized and sought to dampen – his comments point to an uncomfortable truth: for more than a century now, artists and terrorists have shared a common intention to produce reactions of shock in the spectator – in other words, to produce a spectacle. One need only think of the Futurists’ politics, or recall how the Iraq War was initially billed as a spectacle of ‘shock and awe’. Indeed, it is tempting to say that the past decade’s war on terror was a war of terror, in which violence and its mediatized exhibition fused to into one another and become two faces of a single aesthetico-political instrument deployed by states and ‘non-state actors’ alike. It is tempting to describe the ongoing global conflict as the outbreak of the first genuinely avant-garde war, one in which Modernist negation is efficiently integrated into a four-dimensional technological mediasphere conflict that is, to use the lingo du jour, viral.
None of this, of course, is news. Anyone with a glancing familiarity with 20th-century culture and critical thought knows that the intimate relation between mass spectacle and political violence hangs over it like a dark cloud. The list of thinkers who explore this territory is long. In recent years, Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of modernity as a ‘concentrationary’ biopolitics in books such as Homo Sacer (1998) and Remnants of Auschwitz (2002) have achieved iconic status. Before Agamben, there were works such as Paul Virilio’s study of the militarization of seeing, War and Cinema (1984), Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage (1967) and Walter Benjamin’s famous 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. All these writings insist in different ways on the continuity between modern communications media and political violence. Moreover, even though the historical avant-gardes are not shy about their use of a rhetoric of destruction, Thomas Crow reminds us that their acts of negation of traditional bourgeois culture have been appropriated by the spectacle from the outset: ‘Legitimated Modernism is in turn re-packaged for consumption as chic and kitsch commodities. The work of the avant-garde is returned to the sphere of culture where much of its substantial material originated […] In the 20th century, this process of mass-cultural recuperation has operated on an ever-increasing scale.’¹ Others see this recuperation in stronger terms. In Architecture and Utopia (1976) Manfred Tafuri identified the Dadaist negation of traditional bourgeois culture as the precondition for a ‘renewed bourgeoisie, capable of accepting doubt as the premise for the full acceptance of existence as a whole, as explosive, revolutionary vitality, prepared for permanent change and the unpredictable.’² For Tafuri, then, the art world may well represent the real shock troops of capital; the front lines of its domination and transformation of the means of production might well be places like Williamsburg and Berlin.
Today, however, one may well wonder to what extent the 20th-century pas de deux between the avant-garde and ‘society’ remains useful as a framework for thinking about art? If the spectacle has become the basis of a global war and terror, to what extent is negation still the critical gesture that defines the potential of progressive art? Does it even make sense to speak of a critical negation of society, or is the art world today simply a mobile and partly-sponsored research lab for capital? These are the questions ultimately provoked by Stockhausen’s comments.
At the minimum, it is undeniable that the ‘spectacular’ dimension of 20th-century mass culture is currently morphing into something that lacks an endoskeleton and can take any shape it likes, like a new generation Terminator. McLuhan’s medium-message is fragmenting into a dizzying variety of information packets delivered and consumed in ways that were difficult to imagine in the 1960s. More crucially, however, the relation between producers and consumers is in the midst of being entirely revolutionized, leading to the near-wholescale liquidation of what Frankfurt School theorists referred to as the ‘culture industry’. Blogging, social networking, tweeting and so on has flattened the hierarchy between producer and consumer. The culture industries – journalism, music, television, advertising and even cinema – primarily driven by the recuperation of the avant-garde into commodities and kitsch are being ‘rationalized’ and liquidated. The same functions are now being performed for free. The fans, critics, collectors and spectators who characterize 20th-century culture are becoming nodes in a network that realizes Warhol’s dictum regarding fame in a diminished and crepuscular version – one reserved for one’s circle of friends. Not everyone, as Joseph Beuys suggested, is an artist, but everyone has been given a technological form of self-expression and the status of a cultural worker whose taste will be archived and data-mined.
How do we think about this shift from a top-down structure into a viral mass-culture network in which the spectacle is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere – and perhaps soon reduced to a letter-box image displayed on a universal communicator device modelled on the iPad? Is this a game-changer for avant-garde practice, or just another turn of the same screw?
To answer these questions, it might be useful to consider the work of one of the avant-garde’s most mythical figures, the artist-thinker and self-proclaimed ‘strategist’, Guy Debord, the leader of the Situationist International (si) and author of Society of the Spectacle (1967). A law-school drop-out who participated in and soon broke with the Lettrist International centred in the early 1950s on the left bank of Paris, in 1957 Debord formed the si with a small group that counted, at different junctures, figures such as the Dutch painter Asger Jorn, the visionary architect Constant Nieuwenhuys, and, later, the art historian T. J. Clark. Ostensibly a collective endeavour, the si was nevertheless more Debord than anyone else. In addition to making a handful of films, including Society of the Spectacle (1973), Debord directed nearly all of its ‘activities,’ as its ‘secretary’ and edited its journal, the Internationale situationiste. The opening lines of the book are perhaps as good a place to start as any to begin to get a sense of his approach to the question of the spectacle: ‘The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.’³
I cannot hope to do justice here to the full scope of Debord’s thinking, but it’s possible to glimpse the sharp difference between his conception of the spectacle and that of media theorists such as McLuhan, for whom the spectacle amounted to the product and effects of the mass culture produced, regulated and dominated by communications technologies such as television, cinema and radio. For Debord the spectacle amounted to something far greater, ultimately nothing less than the whole of life in modern capitalist society, the form that structures social relations and society as such. Thus, for example, it was not cinema that produced the modern spectacle, but rather, the society of the spectacle that has given rise to cinema in its current incarnation: ‘It is society and not technology that has made cinema what it is. The cinema could have been historical examination, theory, essay, memories. It could have been the film which I am making at this moment.’4 As Thomas Y. Levin has noted, while cinema and television may well be privileged figures of the spectacle, in point of fact, they are merely expressions of a specific social situation. The spectacle is ‘not a collection of images,’ but rather ‘a social relation between people that is mediated by images’.5 In other words, for Debord, the notion of spectacle was not any particular technology or form of media, but rather the general condition of representation that includes within it the consumption of mass-produced images that we commonly associate with television, for instance, or the Hollywood ‘dream machine’.
In many respects, it is tempting to see Tafuri’s skeptical diagnosis of the avant-garde’s complicity with modern capitalism as being equally applicable to Debord and the si, who undeniably continued previous avant-garde gestures of negation. At the same time, the practices of the dérive, defined as ‘transient passage through varied ambiances,’ and détournement, defined as ‘the integration of present or past artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu,’ are not reducible simply to acts of negation. Instead, they are attempts to create situations, and they extended the gesture of production beyond the purview of art, opening social forms to renegotiation as historical forms by revealing their underlying aesthetic foundations. In these, Debord the guerilla making raids on the perimeter of the occupying power is doubled by the romantic seeking the cozy warmth of direct and unmediated experience. One can easily object, of course, that there is no such thing as immediate experience, and yet, it was in the name of ‘life’ that Debord denounced previous vanguard movements as mere art: ‘Dadaism sought to abolish art without realising it; Surrealism sought to realise art without abolishing it. The critical position since developed by the Situationists demonstrates that the abolition and the realisation of art are inseparable aspects of a single transcendence of art.’
What can transcend art and mediate ‘life’? Is such a project nonsensical from the beginning and does it result in the imperial expansion of the art world? This question is not entirely simple, but Debord offers clues. In a letter to André Frankin of January 26, 1960, he writes: ‘I think that the “progressive” notion of the book excluded the pursuit of perfection, and any sort of completion. Formally and practically theoretical thought seeks its expression in a system of fragments, it seems to me. I am pleased with your comments about Passage [On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time, 1959] because criticism – or praise – has no true interest than when it emerges onto a collaborative perspective.’6 The ‘system of fragments,’ as it happens, is none other than Society of the Spectacle, where he pursues the thought in the following way: ‘Détournement is the antithesis of quotation, of a theoretical authority invariably tainted if only because it has become quotable, because it is now a fragment torn away from its context, from its own movement, and ultimately from the overall frame of reference of its period and from the precise option that it constituted within that framework. Détournement, by contrast, is the fluid language of anti-ideology. It occurs within a type of communication aware of its inability to enshrine any inherent and definitive certainty. This language is inaccessible in the highest degree to confirmation by any earlier or supra-critical reference point.’7 A lot of ink has been spilled on the status of citation in art, but here Debord identifies détournement not simply as appropriation in the name of cultural critique, but rather as a gesture that breaks the image down, turning it into a practice of writing whereby it no longer answers to the purposes of instrumental or political power and fails to support the creation of conceptually hardened positions. The fragment, it seems, fails to become a work, and cannot therefore become the citational basis for a theoretical or aesthetic judgment. What is created in the situation is a momentary passage that cannot become the aesthetic basis of a political position because it takes the form of a phrase, words situated amongst each other. It is in this, it seems, that Debord sought to transcend the complicity of the avant-garde and the spectacle as he defines it. The fragment can be identified with no medium and no conceptual formation, and as a result, in spite of his reputation for semi-Stalinist purges in the si, it seems to resemble a messianic paradigm generally associated with thinkers such as Benjamin instead of more directly engaged figures such as Brecht.
The fragment implies a poetics of art that does not seek to create an aesthetic shock in the spectator – and does not, contrary to recent ideas about ‘participation’, imagine a spectator at all. It should, moreover, also be distinguished from the highly fragmentary nature of what takes place and what is exchanged in the sphere of social media. The primary difference, it is tempting to say, is that whereas the former produces an aestheticized social experience that fully integrates expression and taste into an economic model of spectacle, Debord’s notion of the fragment is expressly set against information and only opens onto ‘life’ insofar is it interrupts the closed-circuit of information and sharply calls into question the fantasy of an archive identical to the society that produces it. In this, it recalls Nietzsche’s praise of the salutary effects of forgetting. For this reason, however, to remain true to this idea of language implies the paradoxical need to resist elevating Debord to an exemplary model for either art practice or a theory of politics. Rather, one is tempted to see in him a figure who plays ‘in blissful blindness between the fences of the past and future.’8
1 Thomas Crow, ‘Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,’ in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p.35
2 Cited by Thomas McDonough ‘Ideology and the Situationist Utopia’, his introductory essay to Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Thomas McDonough (Cambridge, mit Press, 2002), p.x
3 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p.12 4 Guy Debord, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, in Oeuvres cinématographiques completes, 1952–78 (Paris, Editions Champ Libre, 1978), p.207–8
5 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p.146
6 Guy Debord, Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957–August 1960) (Los Angeles, Semiotexte 2009), p.320
7 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p.146
8 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,’ in Unfashionable Observations (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1995), p.88
Saul Anton
Tuesday, January 18. 2011
Via Creative Applications
-----
by Jon Goodbun
Grey Walter’s robotic tortoises ELSIE
Usman Haque has, on several occasions, made the observation that there is an important difference between interactivity and responsiveness (see for example -pdf). A responsive system is a fundamentally linear set of relations, a kind of reaction where the same thing happens every time a given action is performed. A normal light switch is responsive in this sense. A typical light switch doesn’t consider any other variables, or have any other behavioural options. Pressing the switch will either turn it off or on, in what is a linear causal relationship. A properly interactive system is very different in its logical structure, and is characterised instead by a relational and circular (or more complex network) causality. In a properly interactive system, a given action will produce different results, because it depends upon the context at that moment, the history of previous interactions, and the relational creativity of the system. To take the banal example of a light switch again: in an interactive system an input might turn on a light, but it could equally result in other behaviour. A properly interactive light might set itself at different levels according to other sensor inputs, or the light might not come on at all, and instead curtains or windows might be opened to allow in more light. It might even ask you if you are afraid of the dark, or if you need help. It might try to sell you a torch, or it might just remind you that you are wearing shades. The post-war maverick ecologist and cybernetician Gregory Bateson used a different example to illustrate the same point. If you kick a stone, he said, then the trajectory of the stone is a simple mechanical affair, that can easily be calculated using Newton’s equations. If you kick a dog, then you do not know what is going to happen. It might bite you, or bark at you, or run away. A dog interacts with us. It has its own agency, and that is the important issue here.
One point to be made here then, is that many of the installations, systems and apps that we might broadly classify as interactive, are actually just responsive or reactive. There is nothing per se wrong with reactivity, and of course such responsive and reactive systems can in any case be ‘looped’ and networked to form components of more complex and properly interactive feedback systems. The important point rather, is that properly interactive systems are interesting, as they are able to stage a series of philosophical questions regarding the nature of agency and creativity – important questions that perhaps cannot be posed in any other way.
The way that circular causal systems which feature feedback and recursion act as minds was the broad research focus of the post war project of cybernetics, and has been the subject of a recently published book by Andrew Pickering, called The Cybernetic Brain – Sketches of Another Future (University of Chicago Press, 2010). In this work, Pickering takes the reader through this fascinating period of experimental work at the boundary of art and science, which he describes as “some of the most striking and visionary work that I have come across in the history of science and engineering”.
Pickering focuses upon the most radical traditions within cybernetic research, which largely arose out of the work of a series of distinctly eccentric British researchers, who he describes – borrowing a phrase from philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – as performing a nomadic science. He notes that “unlike more familiar sciences such as physics, which remain tied to specific academic departments and scholarly modes of transmission, cybernetics is better seen as a form of life, a way of going on in the world…” Pickering considers many experiments that have come to take on a legendary status within the history of cybernetics, ranging from Ross Ashby’s Homeostat (a network of four machines composed of movable magnets with electric connections through water, which would exhibit a range of emergent self-organised behaviours), Grey Walter’s robotic tortoises ELSIE and ELMER (which would respond to each other’s lights, or themselves in a mirror), to Stafford Beer’s remarkable Cybersyn project for Salvadore Allende’s government in Chile (an early form of the internet, which created the basis of a de-centralised socialist planned economy. For an information rich – though political analysis very poor – documentary, see here). Of particular interest to Pickering is the work of Gordon Pask, whose experimental installations and assemblages of various kinds captured in a uniquely distinct way, what Pickering describes as the “hylozoic wonder” of radical cybernetics – that is to say, under what conditions can we think of all matter as (at least capable of) being alive and thinking.
Gordon Pask was heavily influenced by the ideas of Gregory Bateson – in particular Bateson’s anthropological work with various Balinese tribes, and later with family therapy and schizophrenia. In this research Bateson showed how our very experience of being a ‘self’ is produced out, or emerges out of, our participation in a network or ecology of conversations with other actors in our environment: people, objects, rituals and so on. Bateson suggested that
“the total self-corrective unit which processes information, or as I say, ‘thinks’, ‘acts’ and ‘decides’, is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the ‘self’ or ‘consciousness’.”
For Pask famously, the conversation became the paradigm for thinking about interactivity – much of which focused on the question of how do systems learn and teach, or as Bateson described it, what is deuterolearning: learning how to learn? Pask’s writings in this area can often be rather obscure, especially to the newcomers to the field, and Pickering provides an excellent introduction to these projects – including Musicolour, SAKI, Eucrates, CASTE, and the yet more experimental chemical computing projects – many of which were developed in association with architecture schools and in art settings. In all of these projects, Pickering reminds us, Pask is ultimately staging questions about who we are, and what we and our world might be; questions which the ‘ecology of mind’ of radical cybernetics can still help us with today. In this regard, I can’t put it any better than Usman Haque, who has stated that:
“It is not about designing aesthetic representations of environmental data, or improving online efficiency or making urban structures more spectacular. Nor is it about making another piece of high-tech lobby art that responds to flows of people moving through the space, which is just as representational, metaphor-encumbered and unchallenging as a polite watercolour landscape. It is about designing tools that people themselves may use to construct – in the widest sense of the word – their environments and as a result build their own sense of agency. It is about developing ways in which people themselves can become more engaged with, and ultimately responsible for, the spaces they inhabit.”
–
About the Author: Jon Goodbun is researcher interested in networks of architecture, process philosophy, radical cybernetics, urban political ecology, and the natural and cognitive sciences. He sometimes refer to himself as an metropolitan tektologist, for want of a better description. His work focuses on near and medium term future scenarios. He is currently printing his PhD, working on a book ‘Critical and Maverick Systems Thinkers’, and planning some kind of exhibition on ‘Ecological Aesthetics, Empathy and Extended Mind’.
http://www.rheomode.org.uk
|