DPR-BARCELONA ON THE MOON.
César Reyes Nájera and Ethel Baraona Pohl of dpr-barcelona have posted on the idea that the moon is a shared space. It reminded me of Jorge Luis Borges’s poem ‘The Moon’ (1964), which opens with a man bent on “making an abridgement of the universe” who realises he’s forgotten the moon. Love the hand-composited panoramas from the Surveyor 7 probe.
AUGUSTE BLANQUI’S BARRICADING MANUAL
Léopold Lambert pointed out to me Auguste Blanqui’s Instructions pour une prise d’armes (1866), which explains in detail how to build barricades and fortify city blocks against the military. There’s an English translation of the introduction here.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE WOULD FAIL YOU FOR ROLLING YOUR EYES.
Because critical reading and prose fiction are such hard, weird things to try to study, a stupid-seeming comment or question can end up being valuable or even profound. I am deadly-serious about creating a classroom environment where everyone feels free to ask or speak about anything she wishes. So any student who groans, smirks, mimes machine-gunning or onanism, chortles, eye-rolls, or in any way ridicules some other students in-class question/comment will be warned once in private and on the second offense will be kicked out of class and flunked, no matter what week it is. If the offender is male, I am also apt to find him off-campus and beat him up.
David Foster Wallace sets his expectations for class discussions in the Syllabus for his “English 102—Literary Analysis: Prose Fiction Fall ’94”.. (Comment by Katie Roiphe at Slate). This could be read as swagger, I guess, but I don’t think it is. I think Wallace just wanted to stand up for the ideal represented by a university classroom in the plainest possible terms, uncouched in institutional argot. (via John Gruber).
We’re used to seeing crisp white surfaces as a marker of urbane essentialism—c.f. O.M. Ungers’ Haus 3, or Loos’s Müller House—so it’s a little disorienting to remember that what we talk about as ‘clean’ and ‘modern’ has had quite different connotations in the past. For J.M Gandy (see this profile by Christopher Woodward) in 1805, for example, it was a matter of rustic humility. In his book Designs for Cottages, Cottage Farms, and other Rural Buildings; including Entrance Gates and Lodges (London: John Harding) we find these stark white boxes: windows punched, untrimmed and horizontally oriented; surfaces unornamented; and with minimal overhangs. The images are somewhat surprising, given the sensitivity to materials, light, massing, and detail in his more famous images for John Soane.
Joseph Gandy, Cottage, 1805 (Plate V.)
Joseph Gandy, Cottage, 1805 (Plate XVII.)
Hyperobjects can be partially mapped or traced out as networks of effects—as transformational spaces. The relationship between horizons and the transformational space of hyperobjects is neatly articulated by Gregory Bateson, who gives the example of a blind man making prosthetic use of a cane:
“Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? But these are nonsense questions. The stick is a pathway along which the transforms of difference are being transmitted. The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not leave things inexplicable. If what you are trying to explain is a given piece of behaviour, such as the locomotion of the blind man, then, for this purpose, you will need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the stick, and so on, round and round. But when the blind man sits down to eat his lunch, his stick and its messages will no longer be relevant — if it is his eating that you want to understand.” (Bateson, 2000: 465)
The network of transformations is continuous, and the drawing of a horizon, a “limiting line” is necessarily a severing of some connections. Horizons are provisional, belonging to a particular encounter with a network of transformations. There is no ultimate horizon, because there is no end to the effects and transformations that could be included in the network.
Streaming 1 (2007), Carl Douglas
And its old and old it’s sad and old and it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms.
James Joyce, (1992 [1939]) Finnegan’s Wake London, UK: Penguin. p.627-28
This is one of the finest passages of writing I know of. I’ve barely managed to penetrate the surface of Finnegan’s Wake, but the opening (“riverrun, past Adam and Eve’s…”) and the closing (Away a lone a last a loved a long the”) are imprinted in my textual consciousness. The sense of the river’s exhaustion as it returns to the ocean (from whence to cycle back to its beginning) is palpable, mixed with the fear of the ocean as a cold father, and the longing for it as a lover. Drawing to the close of a lecture series that has been exploring the condition of ‘thrownness’ into the world, this passage has a resonance for me. The vastness of a strange, active world opens up in front of us like the expanding grey of the sea. As fluids ourselves running through the countryside and city, we could be forgiven for thinking of ourselves as the animate ones passing through a static world. But at the end of our journey, after a moment of seasilt saltsickness, the banks peel back, and we spill into the ‘moananoaning’ ocean.
Auckland: Wednesday May 25th, 10.30-12pm, Lecture room WS 114, City Campus AUT University, 34 St Paul Street
How do we sense and make sense of immense phenomena, such as climate change, or radiation, which are real, but real in ways which most of us do not directly experience? As ecotheorist Timothy Morton puts it, “It is very hard to get used to the idea that the catastrophe, far from being imminent, has already taken place”.
Morton, together with media arts historian Douglas Kahn, will discuss ways in which we can think about the challenges to humanity of nonsentient entities, like climate change and radioactivity, phenomena Morton calls ‘hyperobjects’. They ask, how can we productively respond to these challenges with the energies available to us? How do we radically question the ways in which we understand and interact with what used to be known as ‘nature’?
Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation at the National Institute of Experimental Arts (NIEA), University of New South Wales. Until recently, he was Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University of California, Davis. He is the editor of Source: Music of the Avant-Garde. and the author of Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, which has been highly influential and remains the benchmark text concerning sound-based art. Forthcoming books include Mainframe Experimentalism, a collection on early computing and the arts, and Earth Sound Earth Signal, on the geophysical trade of acoustics and electromagnetism in communications, science and the arts. www.douglaskahn.com
Timothy Morton is Professor of English (Literature and the Environment) at UC Davis. His interests include literature and the environment, ecotheory, philosophy, biology, physical sciences, literary theory, food studies, sound and music, materialism, poetics, Romanticism, Buddhism, and the eighteenth century. His two most recent books, The Ecological Thought (Harvard UP, April 2010) and Ecology Without Nature (Harvard UP, 2007; paperback 2009), have had a wide and transformative impact on how ecology is conceived within the arts and humanities. Tim blogs at www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com
Brought to you by Now Future, in conjunction with Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, AUT University, the ADA Network, Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the National Institute of Experimental Arts, UNSW, Sydney.
Paolo Portoghesi, Islamic Cultural Centre, Rome (1974). Portoghesi is interesting – his best details approach Scarpa, and the intensity of his relationship to Borromini is clear; but some of his work is clunky and kitschy. The mosque of his Islamic Cultural Centre is amazing – sinuous and dense. But then he’s also responsible for this. Ignore that and look at these:
Minecraft image by Djohaal
This is a very beautiful passage from Alphonso Lingis’s ‘The Elemental Imperative’, regarding Levinas’s separation of sensing from perception:
“The ground, reservoir of support, the light, the luminous clearing, the silence or the incessant murmur of the city, the heat and the damp of the monsoon, the night in which all the contours of the things are engulfed and which is not nothingness but darkness—these surfaceless phenomena, without contours, inobservable from different viewpoints, without boundaries, but also without horizons, are not simply conditions fot the possibility of things, as Husserl defined the field, nor simply the dimensions in which objects are extended, like the infinite space-time dimensions of Kantian pure sensibility, nor are they levels generating things. One comes upon things in light, distributed over the supporting earth; one hears a sound in the slience; one takes hold of a tool in the dark, moves it in the light. But what get apprehended as things also revert to the elemental. As a tool a hammer is a surface of resistance and an axis of force determinate in its involvement with other surfaces, implements and obstacles. But the tool, in being used, reverts to a rhythm in the vigor of the carpenter bathed in the morning sun. The house is a tool-chest, in which implements are arranged in the order most suitable to the specific uses of the inhabitant, a machine for living, as Le Corbusier said, but in being inhabited, it and all its contents sink into the elemental density of a zone of intimacy and retreat from the open roads of the world.”
It’s the first point in Lingis’s paper to hold my attention, although I’m still processing it. There is something very attractive in the idea of conditions that are not simply backgrounds, or conditions of possibility, or conditions of generation, but elemental conditions.
"Highway damaged by the Northridge earthquake, California, January 1994", from Bruce Mau, Massive Change; (2004)
Georg Simmel, in a short text called ‘Bridge and Door’, writes of the dual nature of reality: as simultaneous fully connected and entirely disconnected.
“The image of external things possesses for us the ambiguous dimension that in exernal nature everything can be considered to be connected, but also as separated. The uninterrupted transformations of materials as well as energies brings everything into relationship with everything else and make one cosmos out of all the individual elements. On the other hand, however, the objects remain banished in the merciless separation of space; no particle of matter can share its space with another and a real unity of the diverse does not exist in spatial terms.” (1997: 170-71)
Clearly, Simmel is thinking here of disconnection in Cartesian space. For him, space is the medium of connection and disconnection. His assertion that things cannot occupy the same space relies on the assumption that the things in question are made of exclusive lumps of matter. If we make allowances for this, however, permitting a broader conception of ‘things’ that doesn’t presume a spatial medium, there’s a nice resonance here with Graham Harman and Bruno Latour’s perspectives on the separation of objects, and the concept of a total referential contexture (Harman’s term).
I’ve been reading Timothy Morton‘s Ecological Thought (2010) and discussing it with students. It’s a nice way into speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, because right at the very outset it presents a simple, intuitive concept with deep rabbit-hole potential:
“The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy – for some, strangely or frighteningly easy – to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up.” (Morton, 2010: 1)
I’m really enjoying my conversations with students about this. Some students (perhaps a slight majority), saw this as an intimidating proposition. One conceded that it might be a possible way of thinking, but asked if it’s a useful one from a human perspective, and others commented that it gave them a sense of placelessness (how do I position myself in this infinite tangle?) and disempowerment (because the lack of grounding in concepts like Nature or Society gave little to push against). Against this, one student suggested that in fact, this was an empowering understanding, because it meant that things were actually connected and we could therefore have actual effects on the world. Because everything is connected, everything can possibly be affected.
It’s important to balance the idea of connectedness, I think, with the observation that things are only connected because a connection is established. Connections are made. While interconnectedness is a matter of fact, it is a contingent fact: things that are connected, could possibly be disconnected as well (I like Meillassoux’s idea that contingency is the only necessity – that the only thing that is certain is that things could be different to how they are). Simmel presents this dual condition nicely. He refers to the way that bridges and doors are both connectors and separators, revealing decisively, “how separation and connecting are only two sides of precisely the same act” (172):
“Precisely because it can also be opened, [the door’s] closure provides the feeling of a stronger isolation against everything outside this space than the mere unstructured wall. The latter is mute, but the door speaks.” (172)
Simmel clearly can’t remotely be considered as an object-oriented-ontologist avant la lettre. His essay goes on to argue that it is an essentially human ability to connect things, and allied to this is the observation that it is only humans who separate things: “Only for us are the banks of a river not just apart but ‘separated’… Because the human being is the connecting creature who must always seaprate and cannot connect without separating – that is why we myst first conceive intellectually of the merely indifferent existance of two river banks as something separated in order to connect them by means of a bridge.” (171-74)
One of the most subversive and powerful strategies in the object-oriented toolkit is to ask the question, ‘but why only humans?’. Simmel is wrong about the privileged role of humans in separation and connection, but he’s not wrong about the importance of recognising their simultaneity. If we substitue the more general ‘objects’ for humans in Simmel’s text (mad-libs style), we have a fascinating picture of their efficacy. Objects stand in the doorway, as it were:
“Life on the earthly plane, however, as at every moment it throws a bridge between the unconnectedness of things, likewise stands in every moment inside or outside the door through which it will lead from its separate existence into the world, or from the world into its separate existence.” (174)
Harman, G. (2006). Tool-Being. (Chicago, IL: Open Court).
Meillassoux, Q. (2008). After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. (London, UK: Continuum).
Morton, T. (2010). The Ecological Thought. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Simmel, G. (1997). Simmel on Culture. (London, UK: Sage).
Spent today trying to formulate my PhD proposal. Didn’t get very far. Appreciated Timothy Morton’s series of posts on how to plan a PhD, particularly this one on archives. I’m going to be doing design research, however, so there is a bit of translating to be done regarding the concept of the archive. I think perhaps a site could serve as an archive in this sense, along with some bodies of material to be approached analytically: for example, a set of drawings or projects by another person. My view on design research is founded on the idea that design is a mode of thinking, not just a mode of applying thinking. In the same way that we might write to explore hypotheses, we can design to explore them. One of the difficulties I face is that currently I read and write a lot more than I design (myself – I spend a lot of time helping others to design). I see a design research PhD as a gesture of faith in the native language of my field. The other problem I have is that I tend towards what Morton called the eagle’s view, rather than the mole’s. But I’m an eagle eager to be a mole, face down in a pile of contingencies. I tried to draw a bit – its a drawing I’ve made probably fifty times, through which solidity occurs as a residue of collision and interference of patterns. Less blank-page abstraction needed next, I think.
In 2009 and 2010 I ran a postgraduate research cluster at AUT University, in the Department of Spatial Design with Elvon Young called Haptic Environments. The cluster solicited projects that dealt with bodily effects, and was targeted at two observed areas of weakness in our undergraduate teaching: excessive emphasis on expression instead of effect; and a naive conception of nature. In this series of posts I want to explore these two weaknesses, and describe the shift in my thinking that has lead to what I am now calling the Hyperactive Environments Research Cluster.
1. Expression and Effect
Students are taught (and seem predisposed to operate this way) to design by expressing a concept rather than produce an effect. The difference between expression and effect is like the difference between teaching and learning — you can teach all you like, but you can’t guarantee your students are learning. Similarly, you can express all you like — stand at the top of a hill and bellow to the four winds — but you can’t guarantee that you have had any effect on anything. A fatalistic shrug of the shoulders accompanied with a jaded sigh implying that it is somehow not your problem to consider how your work is received or encountered (perhaps also appealing lamely to the principle that nobody can finally determine how something is interpreted) brings to mind the lecturer who stands and delivers every week, making no concessions to his listeners, heedless of the fact that he is having no effect on anybody at all. Effect asks what difference is produced. Effect is oriented towards the examination and disclosure of effects, not of intentions. Effect takes the other seriously, and notices that translation is required between any two entities. For one thing to have an effect on another, some work has to take place.
Having encountered students who were very sure of themselves in explaining what their designs were ‘about’ or what their intentions were, but who seemed bemused or stunned when they were questioned as to how or whether the desired effect would in fact be produced, I wanted to establish a programme that explicitly asked students to take a more rigorous approach to translation.
(to be continued…)
The Call for Papers for the 2010 Interstices Under Construction Lecture Series is out. The subject this year is the production of interior space:
This year’s symposium is inspired by the writings of German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, for whom the creation of interior space is one of the most important aspects of being human: prematurely entering the world from the first inner space, the womb, we endlessly recreate spheres in which to immerse ourselves. Ideas to be explored during the symposium include why and how humans categorise spaces into those that contain us (interior) and those that expose us (exterior).
You can inquire or follow up with Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul of AUT’s Department of Spatial Design, or Ross Jenner of the University of Auckland’s School of Architecture and Planning.
You might have seen this confused, offhand little piece about the Queen’s Wharf sheds by historian Professor Paul Moon of AUT in the NZ Herald.
Moon doesn’t like the sheds. They are ‘rightly-maligned’, ‘long-unloved and unlovable’, of ‘negligable’ value even if restored, ‘dour and decaying’, ‘morose’ and slouching, and ‘grim’, holding the wharf ‘hostage’. In their place, he would like to see ‘something genuinely inspirational’. He assumes that works of this kind can only take place on a tabula rasa.
Architecture in New Zealand, Moon avers, is dominated by ‘fashion-infused mimicry’, is ‘safe and bland’, imitative, ‘bereft of any strong urge of creativity’. Apparently architects have become ‘the self-appointed arbiters of public taste’. (No architects I know of have claimed this position; in fact retaining the sheds has proven to be a rather unpopular position to defend). Moon opens with the bizarre argument that architects have forfeited the right to comment on the aesthetic value of buildings because they have become insufficiently artistic, putting their work in thrall to ‘structural capabilities and functional requirements’. It’s disturbing to hear a Treaty historian (of all people!) tell someone they’ve forfeited the right to speak. Moon implies that there hasn’t been any real artistic architecture since prior to the industrial revolution. He feels that architects are supposed to be individual creative geniuses like Bernini or Michelangelo, overlooking the fact that a number of these two architects’ most renowned works are in fact reworkings of (sometimes mediocre) existing buildings.
The idea that architecture springs in purity and force from some magical resource of creativity or inspiration, and must struggle to overcome the sniping of petty technicians is very Ayn-Randian, and completely out-of-touch with the way that design proceeds. Materials, stakeholders, constraints, context and – yes – history, are not wet blankets suffocating the creative life out of architecture. On the contrary, they are the raw materials out of which good design is formed. Moon might be nostalgic for a Howard Roark to sweep in and deposit his creativity all over the wharf, but this isn’t my idea of a good time. Architecture is not simply the production of great artworks. The lives and stories of which the sheds are a trace are common and everyday, but that doesn’t mean they should be erased from memory as unimportant. Again, as an historian, one might expect Moon to be more sensitive to minor histories.
He is preoccupied with questions of artistic style, counting against the sheds that they don’t instantiate the Arts and Crafts movement, modernism, or Gothic Revival. As if the only value in historical architecture is in reinforcing the march of architectural styles. As if, by not falling into a neatly labeled drawer they forfeit any value whatsoever. That Moon can’t think of any merit other than the reinforcement of art-historical meta-narratives is a good reason to seek out people who have spent time developing knowledge and expertise in the field.
Complaining that Queen Street is cluttered with ‘piles of stark steel and glaring glass’, Moon doesn’t seem to notice that an careless attitude towards the built and spatial heritage of the city was a major part of the problem! Similarly, one of the main reasons the leaky ‘caricatures’ of pseudo-Tuscan houses Moon mourns are bad architecture is not that they are insufficiently creative or inspired, it’s because they fail to take proper account of local conditions and traditions of construction.
Few architects are arguing that the sheds should be preserved at all costs. It is kind of Moon to point out that ‘just because something is (relatively) old’ it doesn’t need ‘a protective case placed over it so that it can be preserved in perpetuity’. Nobody that I am aware of has proposed this. But demolition is permanent. We shouldn’t knock the sheds down unless there are concrete plans for something demonstrably better. At the moment, there exists no master-plan for the CBD waterfront, no clarity about whether the wharf is to be a cruise-ship terminal or not and no realistic timetable for new construction to be completed in time for the Rugby World Cup, and no consistency in the process of procuring a design. Demolition should not be a default stance. Inventive, memorable, and imaginative architecture doesn’t have to begin with a clean slate.
Vanity Fair present this list of the most important architecture since 1980, and the most important works of the 21st century so far, as shortlisted by 52 architects and critics. Steven Holl’s list is good, I think; although he, along with Tadao Ando, had no compunction about listing their own works.
Question, though: what is important? Obviously it’s not best, because it might be possible for a work of architecture to be shockingly awful, and yet still important. Perhaps influential? Gehry’s Bilbao is certainly important for its influence on form-making, technical practice, and public perception of architecture as an urban and economic attractor; even though its not what I would call particularly good, myself. Important is a historically-conscious judgement that attempts to predict what will be seen as canonical looking back. And of course, the concept of a canon is dubious, reinforcing the closure and autonomy of a discipline that is neither. Who are these buildings important to?
Diffusive Architectures 
