Interventions: Thomas Demand/Olafur Eliasson.
Title: David Gissen, Subnature [read].
1
There are things
We live among 'and to see them
Is to know ourselves'.
Occurrence, a part
Of an infinite series,
The sad marvels;
Of this was told
A tale of our wickedness,
It is not our wickedness.
2
So spoke of the existence of things,
An unmanageable pantheon
Absolute, but they say
Arid.
A city of the corporations
Glassed
In dreams
And images —
And the pure joy
Of the mineral fact
Tho it is impenetrable
As the world, if it is matter,
Is impenetrable.
George Oppen, Of Being Numerous (NCP)
Following a friend's recent interest in Thing Theory, I dug up my copy of Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things from the storeroom (not quite a junkspace but definitely a pile of space-junk). Leafing through I was reminded of the array of (typo)graphical techniques employed by the book's designer Lorraine Wild, with the visual linkage device above being my favourite.
I see this as a form of what I would call augmented textuality; a superposition of layered semantic relationships on text. Having recently read the thought-provoking iA article on bringing web design concepts to newspapers, I'm wondering if the web couldn't learn something from book designers in terms of augmentation. In this example, I think there's scope for a javascript-based implementation to draw Bezier curves between anchors in HTML using canvas to achieve the visual linkage effect.
Wild also uses type variations in a single text body to convey meaning, with a number of typefaces reserved for particular neologisms or words imbued with specialist definitions in Sterling's lexicon. I find it a bit naive/obnoxious, depends on your typographic stance. The web-based alternative might be to re-examine link typologies, since the consistency mantra in web design tends to crowd out attempts at applying multiple link styles to a single body, creating a homogeneity of linkage on a site-by-site basis that is bemusing if you take a step back. With regards to keywords and specially loaded (technical) terms however, I probably prefer the approach taken by the English language version of Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis,
The text of which possesses a good rhythm, induced by both typographic and linguistic techniques. A mix of bold and italicised emphasis abound, the former reserved for words with significantly enhanced meanings in the hands of Lefebvre. It's simple but makes a difference. That the book itself is on rhythm makes it doubly effective.
A disproportionate amount — disproportionate given how much online text I've read daily over the past decade — of the ideas that have influenced me over the years have come from books or essays. A lot of that no doubt has to do with copyright and IP, but some of it is down to the forms of communication themselves. Whereas the web has naturally gravitated towards networked/collaborative knowledge systems, the essay, in contrast, is standalone and demands sustained attention.
The essay and the academic research paper are still amongst the foremost textual knowledge communication formats around, despite having a fairly antagonistic relationship with the web, the former seemingly sidelined by the blog post and the latter still published as a PDF or print artefact. I'll reserve my ideas on modern research publishing for the web (itself such a huge topic) for another time, but I simply think there's scope to improve on these knowledge forms in Webby ways, without stripping them of their fundamental offerings. For example, I would love to see a web publishing engine dedicated to the essay form.
Here's a quick implementation of some crude augmented textuality techniques using HTML5 and Javascript, applied to a Rem Koolhaas essay, the hyperbolic diatribe, Junkspace, from 2001:
→ View Augmented Junkspace Demo
The techniques are completely web native (though you'll need recent versions of Firefox, Chrome or Safari to view them). You could argue this is no longer an essay but a thinly disguised term frequency vector smattered with relational graphics, a set of wordnets or a pliable series of strings. Perhaps. I would apologise to Rem if it wasn't a calculated attempt at altering the state of the text through superposition, an uninvited act of post-production.
If you're an IE user, I guess you can make do with this graphic for now:
The Rest is Silence is a project published as a booklet by Jeff Kinkle and Emanuel Almborg. As Jeff explains over at Dossier,
In the late 1970s a group of people living in the borough of Hackney in East London began building a structure on a derelict lot in their neighborhood and continued building until this January. The story of the project’s origins are shrouded in mystery. What is known is that because the residents couldn’t decide on what they wanted to build, they made three rules. The first was that not only would they build without any plan or blueprint, they would not discuss the direction of the project at all. Second, when they were on the building site, no one was allowed to speak. Third, the building would never be completed in that anyone at any point could decide to take it in a new direction. So the structure was built for thirty years until last autumn when the council sold the land to a developer who tore it down in January.
The book is published by andperseand. You can pick it up at Artwords on Rivington St.
Bruce Sterling's space adventure, Schismatrix, charts the break-up of humanity, first into factions, then into clades and finally into genetically engineered post-human species. The 'schismatrix' describes the totality of humanity in all its strands after this break-up. Set in a colonised solar system and beyond, the vivid descriptions of circumlunar colonies bring to mind 70s NASA space art on the subject. This is about as vital as SF gets.
Humanity is split into prosthetically enhanced Mechanists and genetically enhanced Shapers, all of whom manage to scrape at least a couple of hundred of years out of a lifetime. If you've got cash, multiple regenerations make it possible to stay alive longer (replacement organs, skin tissue treatments, psycho-kinetic training etc), into seeming immortality.
In here you'll find adaptive architecture - entire landscapes made of pheromone emitting skin tissue - observations on sustainable ecosystems, cultural heritage, new materials and forms. The derelict landscape of crippled space colonies and alien/human race relations provide a heavyweight SF backdrop, high on science, speculation and imagination. Sterling's observational powers & wit propel this above most other books in its category.
Our narrator ends the story by genetically engineering post-human species to live on a sunless planet he intends to colonise. He returns to an uninhabitable earth to recover genetic material from abyssal organisms still living in the depths of our oceans, the one niche of the planet's ecosystem untouched by humanity and independent of the Sun. He founds Circum Europa, a dark planet of underwater post-humans.
By avoiding the transcendent man/machine narrative of Neuromancer and focusing on materials, politics and (the right) technologies in a pragmatic manner, Schismatrix has aged slightly better than Gibson's creation. Written in 1985, Sterling did well to avoid the spectre of AI & VR and chase technological ideas that would truly alter the course of humanity in the coming decades, focusing on the genetic future of humanity (before the human genome project had even begun) and landscape/geo-engineering, still an emerging field. In particular sustainability, biological regeneration & GM humanity are issues to be dealt with in my lifetime, whereas the singularity, well, it still seems a bit abstract.
Best of all this is laid out in a concise book, not some sprawling multi-volume epic. Oddly, not that many people seem to have read it. So go get a copy.
Grid Index by Carsten Nicolai is a truly excellent visual investigation of 2D planes. Comes with vector files for every tiling/grid in the book.
The unprecedented history which has been sketched in the previous chapters, can be summed up in two ways: either as the final liberation of architecture from the ballast of structure, or its total subservience to the goads of mechanical service. Both interpretations of the situation are current, largely because of the infantile fallacy that architecture is necessarily divisible into function and form, and that the mechanical and cultural parts of art are in essential opposition. The division also typifies the split between the generations of architects - now and right back through the twentieth century, the sign that an architect was achieving 'maturity' and success was that he had tacitly, or noisily, abandoned the attempt to extract symbolic values and cultural performance from the application of advanced technology.
- The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment, Reyner Banham (also check his TV piece from 1972, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles)
First City: 2000-ton CityEven and perfect, the city lies amid green lawns, sunny hills and wooded mountains; slim, tall sheets of continuous buildings intersect in a rigorous, square mesh, one league apart. The buildings, or rather the single, uninterrupted building consists of cubic cells 5 cubits each way; these cells are placed one on top of another in a single vertical stack, reaching a height of a third of a league above sea-level, so that the relative height of the building varies in relation to the level of the ground on which it rises. Each cell has two external walls. Cell walls are of opaque material, porous to air, rigid but light. The wall facing north is capable of emitting 3D images, sounds and smells. Against the opposite wall is a seat capable of moulding perfectly to the human body, even of enclosing it completely. Incorporated in this seat is an apparatus for satisfying all physiological needs. When not in use, this membrane and all apparatus withdraw and the wall reforms. The floor is a simulator, and can evoke all sensations of living things. The ceiling is a brain-impulse-receiver.
In each cell is an individual whose brain impulses are continually transmitted to an electronic analyser set at the top of the building, beneath a continuous semi-cylindrical vault. The analyser selects, compares and interprets the desires of each individual, programming the life of the entire city moment by moment. All citizens are in a state of perfect equality.
Death no longer exists. Sometimes someone indulges in absurd thoughts of rebellion against the perfect and eternal life granted to him. At first the analyser ignores the crime; but if it is repeated, the man who has shown himself unworthy is rejected. The ceiling panel descends with a force of two thousand tons until it reaches the floor.
At this point, in this marvelous economy, another life is initiated. The panel returns to its original height, and all the individuals living in cells within a disance of a quarter of a league from the empty cell donate an ovum or a group of spermatozoa, which are transported in channels created for this purpose in a mad race to the now-empty seat. Here, an ovum is fertilized and the seat is transformed into a uterus, protecting the new son of the city for nine months, until his happy dawn.
Second City: Temporal Cochlea City
...
- Life Without Objects, Superstudio
The fountain of forms, the coloured orbs in their conscious arrays and purposefully changing lattices gave place to a static composition of uprights and diagonals, of flat planes and curving cylinders, all carved out of some material that looked like living agate, and all emerging from a matrix of living and pulsating mother-of-pearl. He was looking... at a small square table, and beyond the table at a rocking-chair, and beyond the rocking-chair at a blank wall of whitewashed plaster. The explanation was reassuring; for in the eternity that he had experienced between the opening of his eyes and the emergent knowledge of what he was looking at, the mystery confronting him had deepened from inexplicable beauty to a consummation of shining alienness that filled him with a kind of metaphysical terror.
His attention shifted from the geometrical constructions in brown agate to their pearly background. Its name, he knew, was 'wall'; but in experienced fact it was a living process, a continuing series of transubstantiations from plaster and whitewash into the stuff of a supernatural body - into a god-flesh that kept modulating, as he looked at it, from glory to glory.
Out of what the word-bubbles tried to explain away as mere calcimine, some shaping spirit was evoking an endless succession of the most delicately discriminated hues, at once faint and intense, that emerged out of latency and went flushing across the god-body's divinely radiant skin. Wonderful. And there must be other miracles, new worlds to conquer and be conquered by.
- Island, Aldous Huxley
Our towns and buildings are all made of patterns. The patterns of our time, like all other patterns in the built environment, come from the pattern languages which people use.For instance, freeways are built from handbooks, which contain, more or less exactly in the form of patterns, rules which prescribe the optimum spacing of exits at different densities, the best configurations for the exits under different conditions, the proper curvature and inclination of the petals of a cloverleaf...
Consider, for example, the language which generated my office at school. It is an ugly place, terrible, dark and dead. It is one of many similar offices, and these are generated by the following language:
* LONG AND NARROW
* DAYLIGHT AT ONE END ONLY
* WINDOW THE FULL WIDTH OF THE WALL
* CONCRETE WAFFLE CEILING, 5' GRID
* FLOURESCENT LIGHTS AT 10' CENTERS
* FLAT CONCRETE WALL
* UNPAINTED CONCRETE CEILING SURFACE
* STEEL WINDOW
* PLYWOOD WALL SURFACEThis terrible language has generated hundreds of offices.
Patterns always come from languages. Of course, patterns do not come only from the work of architects or planners. Architects are responsible for no more than perhaps 5% of all the buildings in the world.
Every person has a pattern language in his mind.
The fact is, that the creation of a town, and the creation of the individual buildings of a town, is fundamentally a genetic process. This conclusion, simple though it is, calls for a shattering revision of our attitude to architecture and planning. We may conclude that the central task of "architecture" is the creation of a single, shared, evolving, pattern language, which everyone contributes to, and everyone can use.
What are the disadvantages of identity, and conversely, what are the advantages of blankness? ...The fact that human growth is exponential implies that the past will at some point become too "small" to be inhabited and shared by those alive. We ourselves exhaust it.The Generic City is the city liberated from the captivity of center, from the straitjacket of identity. Some continents, like Asia, aspire to the Generic City; others are ashamed by it. In the Generic City individual "moments" are spaced far apart to create a trance of almost unnoticeable aesthetic experiences: the color variations in the flourescent lighting of an office building just before sunset, the subtleties of the slightly different whites of an illuminated sign at night. Like Japanese food, the sensations can be reconstituted and intensified in the mind, or not - they may simply be ignored. This pervasive lack of urgency and insistence acts like a potent drug: it induces a hallucination of the normal.
The Generic City is fractal, an endeless repetition of the same simple structural module; it is possible to reconstruct it from the smallest entity.
The Generic City, Rem Koolhaas
I believe in the signal of the bass drum. It is the heartbeat of my life.
Danceflorensics, Wolfgang Voigt
The solar system is synergetic - unpredicted by its separate parts. But the interplay of Sun as supply ship to Earth and the Moon's gravitationally produced tidal pulsations on Earth all interact to produce the biosphere's chemical conditions which permit the regeneration of life on Spaceship Earth. This is all synergetic.Topology provides the synergetic means of ascertaining the values of any system of experiences. Topology is the science of fundamental pattern and structural relationships of event constellations. It was discovered by the mathematician Euler. He discovered that all patterns can be reduced to three prime conceptual characteristics: to lines; points where two lines cross or the same line crosses itself; and areas, bounded by lines...
Architectural Project #1 by Dick Higginsis performed by
- taking some gigantic concrete blocks to the top of a hill
- rolling them down one at a time against each other
- connecting them where they fall
- hollowing them out to taste
- living in the resulting structure
Vostell/Higgins/Cage/Fuller/Schwitters/Bueys/Oppenheim et al, Fantastic Architecture
Once I was beset by anxiety. I couldn't tell right from left or orient myself. I could have cried out with terror at being lost. But I pushed the fear away by studying the sky, determining where the moon would come out, where the sun would appear in the morning. I saw myself in relation to the stars. I began weeping and knew I was alright. That is the way I make use of geometry. The miracle is that I am able to do it by geometry.
Marie Darrieussecq, Dans la maison de Louise
Century is almost definitely the best 'introduction' to the philosophy of Alain Badiou. Compiled from a set of lectures taking as their subject the 20th Century, it makes for some remarkable reading and gently introduces aspects of his wider philosophical vision. What I'm most struck by is the Lacanian influences and his ability to examine the Century in terms of what it says about itself. It's tantamount to the psychoanalysis of an epoch and illuminates his central thesis that the common thread behind the significant developments of the century is a passion for the real (where the 'real' takes a Lacanian meaning). His mathematically grounded ontology (based on Cantor-fuelled set theory), thoughts on multiplicity and Marxism are also subtly on display in these lectures.
Badiou is passionate, highly readable, succinct and immensely knowledgeable on the literature, visual art, poetry and politics of the Century. He makes seemingly simple, profound statements over and over again whilst examining Brecht, Breton, Mao, Mandelstam, Celan, Mallarme and others. If you've trawled through your fair share of Derrida and Foucault, Badiou is a refreshing, brilliant counterpoint with an astoundingly complete and mature ontology of his own.
I leave you with this drawing by Badiou himself, produced during a lecture entitled 'Truth procedure in politics':
