thresholds 38

thresholds 38
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Editor
Orkan Telhan
Assistant Editor
Adam Fulton Johnson
Graphic Design
Vassia Alaykova
Editorial Policy:
Advisory Board thresholds is the peer-reviewed, bi-annual journal of architecture, art, and media culture
Mark Jarzombek, Chair produced by editors in the Department of Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Stanford Anderson Opinions in thresholds are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily represent the views
Dennis Adams of the editors, the Department of Architecture, nor MIT.
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Jean-Louis Cohen
Charles Correa No part of thresholds may be photocopied or distributed without written authorization.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ISSN 1091-711X
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thresholds 38
 Editorial 00 5
ORKAN TELHAN
The Irrational Genome Design Contest 01 6
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

Shaping Eternity: The Preservation of Lenins Body 02 10

Alla G. Vronskaya

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

The Illusions of Control 04 26

Radical Engineers and Reactionary Artists
Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr

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

ChrisTOPHER TOHRU Guignon

What Do We Do With This Future? 06 36

An Examination of Tempelhof Airport
Elizabeth Krasner

Networking Overload, with Potplants 07 40

An interview about the Natural Fuse project
Usman Haque, interviewed by Matthew Fuller

From Here to Infinity: 08 46

Make-Believe and Virtuality On the Japanese Driving Range
John Zissovici
ISLAND PHANTASMAGORIA - Exploring the Political/Philosophical Underpinnings of 09 52
Fictional Islands and Imagining a Future of Plastic-Pirate-Island-Utopias
Manar MourSi

Towards Diversity in Data Culture 10 58

Marc Bhlen

ARUPtocracy and the Myth of a Sustainable Future 11 64

Mark Jarzombek

The Domestication of the Prison or the Demonization of the House 12 66

MICHAIL Vlasopoulos - PETROS Phokaides

The Golden Institute 13 70

Sascha Pohflepp

Composition of the Earth 14 76

Studio And

Turning the Black Box into a Great Gizmo 15 80

Timothy Hyde

Fight the Google-Jugend! 16 84

Wilfried Hou Je Bek
 Orkan Telhan
Future never arrives as is.
Without critique, future is dogma; a
sovereign institution, a blind vector
driving what is now and present towards
silent, monotone, and prescribed
experience. What we think of as future
inscribes a limit onto the present;
transforming and regulating what it is,
Editorial we do as we know by now.
Writing for and with future increases
awareness of what it is now. It improves
the capacity to deal with the fear of the
unknown; not the one that is probable
now, but rather the one that is to come
the one that can suspend its image from
the present.
thresholds 38 disseminates seeds
literary, biological, synthetic, utopian
hopefully non-conformist positions within
the current future.
What you will find inside the bag on the
cover is the common vetch: V.sativa*.
Vetches saw many futures. Since their
first domination in the Near East9500
years agothey resisted many biological,
economic, ecologic and social pressures;
became the residues of the pastgot
mutated, synthesized, or colonizedyet
survived until today. When they meet the
soil, they will continue again writing their
futurein negotiation with what they
know about it by now and what it will be
by then.
Common vetch is aggressive and invasive,
it spreads fast. But it is good for restoring
land. It adds nitrogen to the soil, breaks up
its compaction, and distributes a lot of
organic matter through its roots. It prepares
the land for other crops. Seed it on a piece
of land and it will know what to do.
What follows V.sativa are a series of
positions to mobilize our current
perception of futureto treat it both as
temporal regime that puts current
cultural production into perspectivebut
also as a mode of organization that can
defamiliarize us from our existing habits
of future.
As synthetic biology firmly claims itself
as a new design discipline, Alexandra
Daisy Ginsbergs irrational genome
competition asks us what lies behind the
inherent myth of synthesizing life. This
is not a contest for building new
Frankensteins; rather an exercise to think
about unintentional lifehopefully, free
from the prescribed myths and narratives
of what we already know nowas life.
In contrast to the biopolitics of the newly
synthesized, Alla G. Vronskaya draws our
attention to the future of the death where
propaganda is constructed by preservation
and necrophilia. As Vronskaya traces the
history of Lenins dead body, she reveals
the design of his mytha combination of
the body and its symbolismthe technology
that not only preserves it, but also presents
it as the very architecture of the regime.
R&Sie(n) discuss their architecture of
humors: an interplay of protocols between
biochemistry, neurobiology, and robotics.
For the future purchasers of architecture,
R&Sie(n) familiarize us with a new logic of
fabrication that is not based on
structuration rather on desiringwhich
operates with dopamine, adrenalin,
serotonin and hydrocortisoneand
computes an architecture of secretion and
weaving materialized in bio-plastic-
cement.
For Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, the drive
for the future of life-making relies heavily
on illusions of controlthe desire to open
up new frontiers to force fit the engineering
mindset to manage life and its flow. Catts
and Zurr highlight the need for a cultural
reaction against the Taylorization of life
and its products by artists and designers
who can radically challenge the engineers
in their ivory workshops.
Christopher Tohru Guignon proposes the
bank for our new capitalisma prudently

designed architecture that epitomizes a
failing economya future in depletion
and decline. In a world that is myopically
driven by our unchecked growth and
romantic notions of progress, Guignons
architecture not only feels more
convincing, but also much more
preparedfor the many failures to come.
Elizabeth Krasner tells us what happens
when multiple visions of future get stuck
in architecture and drain imagination. In
Berlins Tempelhof, Krasner witnesses
the tension that gives birth to the
contested space of the airport: a site that
simultaneously bears the denial of an
embarrassing regime but also the
demands from a youth that is ready to
leave behind the fear of a past future to
claim a better one.
Usman Haque discusses Natural Fuse
with Matthew Fuller. In times when we
witness everyday a plethora of ideas to fix
the dying planet, Natural Fuse goes
beyond the regular Band-Aid. A network
of plants and peopleand a thinking that
is deeply rooted in participatory culture
offers a more convincing alternative to the
resentment-driven, commercial remedies
for the so-called sustainable futures.
John Zissovici dissects the anatomy of the
driving range and the role of virtual golf
as the emerging recreational ritual in
Japan. Refusing to be city or nature, image
or space, real or virtualthe virtual golf
range offers a new vantage point for
Zissovici: a new display landscape that can
be read as an elegant hybrid mashup for
new expectations; not a this or that
architecture.
When 75% of the worlds population is
projected to live by precarious coastlines,
Manar Moursi prepares uspart real,
part fictionfor island habitation. Moursi
proposes not only viable strategies for
our survival, but also alternative models
of real-estate and governance; adaptive
economies and piracythat could
respond better to the socio-political
necessities of the coming era and finally
free us from our rigid conceptions of
structure, stability and reality.
Marc Bhlen walks us behind the scenes
of culture and peeks into the recent trends
in the gathering, manipulation, and
interpretation of data. Like a real tech
support, he reads the symptoms of our
current data malaise and assures us that
there is not much to fear from our
pleasures to be seen or remain invisible;
there is still much room to explore
conceive diverse experienceswith data.
Technology plus control is not equal to
nature. The myth of the sustainable future
is not what ARUPtocracy wants us to
believe. Marc Jarzombek cuts the pipe
that pumps the opium for our mass-
hallucination. He asks us to step outside
from our false hopes of sustainability and
learn to live, theorize, engineer and
designonce againin a nature that was
never natural or sustainable.
Flesh is the prison of the soul. Michail
Vlasopoulos and Petros Phokaides
traverse a landscape of technologies and
interrogate our drive for self-confinement.
Theirs is a dystopian document for the
sociologists of the futurean expos of
our representational, metaphorical and
animistic drivesfor imagining and
building enclosure.
It is 1981, Carter wins another term
against Reagan and becomes the 40th
president. Sascha Pohflepp writes the
fictional future of America from the
perspective of the Golden Institute. An
America that is not dependent of fossil
fuels; capable of modifying climate to
harness energy from lightning, and utilize
its highways to generate energy where
drivers are paid back by franchising
chains for their high-speed exiting.
Cities are always known best from their
fictional artifacts. But one needs to be
5
really lucky to find an urban meteorite
imagined by Studio And. In times when it
is easy to lose oneself in the nausea of
cities, urban meteorites are like
mysterious street diamondsthe
contemporary bread crumbsperhaps
our only hope to imagine a way back home.
Timothy Hyde looks at the future of
disciplinary knowledge with the black box
and the gizmoas two different models
for design pedagogy. After taking an x-ray
of the black box of architecture and
dissecting the old rituals of the practice,
Hyde tells us why the gizmo model is
more relevant todayboth for addressing
contemporary concerns and to open up
the field towards more inter- and trans-
disciplinary epistemologies.
We are miserable creatures. We are
stunted in our growth. We are mostly
naked. We are not like you. In our
concluding text for the issue, Wilfried
Hou Je Bek speaks us from the language
of savages who do not need Google, who
already know everything they need to
know. This manifesto is another last hope
to confront our very unconscious before
we have to search for it online t
* Due to agricultural legislations, only
the issues distributed in the U.S. will
have the seed bag on the cover.
01
The Irrational Genome
Design Contest
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a designer, artist and researcher interested in the future. She uses
design to explore the implications of emerging and unfamiliar technologies, science and services.
She has an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art, a degree in Architecture from
Cambridge University, and spent a year at Harvard University as a Herchel Smith scholar. Daisy
recently completed a residency at Symbiotica, the art and science collaborative laboratory at the
University of Western Australia. Recent projects include E.chromi, a collaboration with James
King and Cambridge Universitys grand prize winning team at the 2009 International Genetically
Engineered Machines competition (www.echromi.com) and a science fiction short story for Icon
magazine, UK, co-written with SymbioticAs Oron Catts. Her work is currently exhibited in the
Wellcome Trusts windows in London, curated by Dunne & Raby. Daisy is now Design Fellow on
the EPSRC/NSF-funded research project, Synthetic Aesthetics (www.syntheticaesthetics.org),
between Stanford and Edinburgh universities, bringing together synthetic biology and design.

A myth is a lie that tells the truth, says Arshia Sattar, Sanskrit scholar and expert on Indian
mythology to a group of teenage art and design students from Bangalore entering iGEM, MITs
annual International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, a synthetic biology legend
in itself.1 We are sitting out on a terrace in Bangalore on a sweltering mid-summer night,
eating pizza, and sipping Thums Up laced with Indian rum. It is my birthday.

A few weeks earlier, Yokohama, Japan:

An international competition to support future specialists in rational genome designs for
synthetic biology; a press release announces a new synthetic biology competition, the
International Rational Genome-Design Contest, GenoCon, launched by the Bioinformatics and
Systems Engineering division of the RIKEN research institute. Rationality. Thats the key to
synthetic biology. Synthetic biology rejects contextual solutions and disorder in favor of control
and rationality. Binary biology. Universal solutions. Predictive not descriptive.

The first self-replicating species that weve had on the planet whose parent is a computer,
proclaimed one American character in this story, J. Craig Venter, earlier this month as he
announced to the world his labs achievement in creating what they described as the worlds
first synthetic cell.
7
Synbios multiple protagonists promise to engineer life into a state of functional order. No gray space here; just
black and white promise. We can save the world: through limitless diesel pumped out by safely lab-locked bacteria
fed a syrupy diet of Brazilian sugarcane, or by their engineered cousins, just as safe, released into the great oil slicks
of dirty technologies to digest their failures. Or so it is claimed. These stories are the myths manufactured to help
us get closer to the scientific truth.

Just as in Indian mythologyas Arshia reminds us back on the terrace, horns beeping and dogs barking out in
the darkness of the Bangalore nightmyths have variants. Synthetic Biology is a story told in different ways by
its different characters. Of course, manufacturing myths does not imply intentional misconstruction; this is about
metaphor and storytelling, an integral part of science. Imagining promise allows us to fulfill it. This is how science
and technology works, how we develop enthusiasm to pursue these imagined futures, how science funding
works. Were always looking towards New Horizons.

The Irrational Genome Design Contest is a fictional competition Im inventing right now to add to the synbio
myth. But let us start nearer to the beginning. Since the synthetic biology story could turn into an epic, were
probably only in the first few pages.

Synthetic biology is filled with big, real competitionsthe Irrational contest could be another of the intellectual
battles. In reality, there is the open source iGEM, where the Bangalore students are headed. Growing exponentially,
this year it will host around 150 undergraduate teams from around the world, each entering a novel, engineered
bacteria. That translates to nearly 2,000 students being introduced to synthetic biology in 2010. Many of their
universities are also new to it, entering the research community through a pedagogical exercize that began in
2003 as a short class at MIT. iGEMs intention is to fill the Registry of Standardised Biological Parts, a gray freezer
located at MIT, with a library of sequences of DNA, each interchangeable, characterised and useful in constructing
genetic circuits. These engineering components are known as BioBricks.

Then there is the Japanese GenoCon, which one of my synbio colleagues passed on via email, adding wearily,
For those of you who think we dont have enough to do getting synbio foundational technologies established.
GenoCon, is virtual and web-based. Teams will design sequences of DNA for a plant called Arabadopsis thaliana,
a model organism, well understood. The challenge: design a DNA sequence that programs this delicate little
cress to eliminate and detoxify airborne formaldehyde pollution. These rationally designed sequences (under
2000 base pairs of DNA) will be submitted online; the best will be inserted into real plants, and observed in
formaldehyde-rich environments, cultivated in a lab in Yokohama. Sequences may remain secret for those
working towards patents, which is what keeps industry away from iGEMs open source ideology. The winner will
be the best-performing plant, or rather, the scientists and engineers responsible for designing it. Even high
school teams can enter.

The third is CAGEN, Critical Assessment of Genetically Engineered Networks, being drawn up this year by iGEM
founder Drew Endy and Adam Arkin. CAGEN will be a more grown-up version of iGEM for established groups
working in biological circuit design. Winners here will get their work characterized (measured) at the National
Science Foundation-funded BioFab, Endy and Arkins new venture out in Emeryville, CA, the worlds first biological
design-build facility and the winner will be selected based on a set of quantifiable metrics.

But why are there so many competitions? As engineer Theodore Van Karman once explained, Scientists
discover the world that exists, engineers create the world that never was. Synthetic biology has many
compelling, inspiring characters with differing visions, leaders from both science and engineering who are
challenging the way we think about life, and potentially conceiving some of the most world-changing technologies
yet. From infamous human-genome-sequencer Venters quest for the minimal genome (he also sails his
yacht, Sorcerer II, far out to sea to scoop up microbes, prospecting choice fragments of DNA), to Endy and
the engineers, building libraries of characterized parts based on the ideologies of the Industrial and Information
 9

Technology revolutions. Berkeleys Jay Keasling is engineering metabolic pathways, creating anti-malarial
drug molecules and fuel with immense funding from the Gates Foundation, BP and now Total.

There are others creating new systems, like Jason Chin at Cambridge University, creating new languages for
alternative genetic codes (its grammar based on four bases rather than biologys existing three), George Church
at Harvard, engineering new bits of genetic machinery like the synthetic ribosome, and researchers in Europe
and elsewhere pursuing the design of protocellslife-like cells made from different kinds of chemistry. What
is crucial is that synthetic biology requires inter-disciplinary working, breaking down institutional barriers in
funding and research relationships. Synthetic biologys DIY gene architecture draws its teams of architects from
engineering and biology, computer science, chemistry, math, physics and beyond. This is no solo endeavor.

Constructing the complexity of life into biological machines is a massive task, relying on the maturation of
supporting enabling technologies like gene sequencing and synthesis. Moving from the bespoke tinkering
of genetic engineering into the total engineering discipline is a technological as well as philosophical question.
Biology is still complex, but what we are trying to do is much better than what has been tried in the past,
says Cambridges Jim Ajioka. But there are still many things we may not be able to conquer. Biology is fiendishly
complex, working in context-dependent networks, not simply as homogenous, linear tapes of information.
Can we really apply engineerings central dogma of modularity, standardization, abstraction, decoupling to
life? Is biology now just another material for engineering?

Back in the evening heat in Bangalore, Zack Denfeld, an artist working with biotechnologies, suggests,
Synthetic Biology is taking myth and making history. Synthetic biology is indeed building on a myth, a promise
we can engineer life rationally. Its reverse engineering, in a way. Now we have to make it happen. Whether
this can be achieved as promised is to be seen. What will materialize could well be far from the current vision.
But, rather than the promise or peril polarity we normally hear about, it could be just as desirable. Within the
scientific establishment, there are those who reject synthetic biology. Within the field itself, the different
characters sometimes dismiss the other approaches. More than one may come true.

If science is about closing down variables to find the truth, a role of fiction and narrative is to create many
versions of the truth, to open up space to find new questions and ideas.

The Irrational Genome Design Contest isnt about designing monsters, about bad designers and bad engineers
or scientists misapplying their skills, intentionally or unintentionally. Rather, it could be an alternative vision
for synthetic biology. In synbio, we can strip out everything we dont need, want or understand and make
elegantly engineered, reductionist, clever machines. But when was life ever like that?

The Irrational Genome Design Contest will celebrate irrational design, context-based approaches and even
single-use designs. These biological artifacts need not be functional, but they will still be useful to allow us
to understand why we are fearful of synthetic biology, what part of our own selves, our own genomes, do we
fear compromising.

Back on the terrace, the ArtScienceBangalore team is developing their own myth for iGEM, just like every
other engineering team entering the competition. These students have to decide what story they want to travel
to MIT to tell t
02
Lenin on his Deathbed
Photograph, 1924. Published in:
Zhizn Lenina v portretakh [Lenins
life in portraits]. Moscow:
Mospoligraf, s.a.
Shaping Eternity:
the Preservation
of Lenins Body 1
Alla G. Vronskaya
Alla G. Vronskaya is a third-year doctoral student in the History, Theory, and Criticism of
Architecture and Art at MIT; her research interests include architecture in socialist states.
In 2007, she received candidate of arts and sciences degree in Art History from the Russian
Academy of Sciences, State Institute of Art Studies (Moscow), where she has also since 2006
been working as a research fellow in the Department of Classical Western Art.
How can a revolution, a momentary, instantaneous event, become everlasting? This
was one of the first questions the leaders of the victorious October Revolution of 1917
had to answer. Inscribing it into the names of streets and squares and erecting monuments
of monumental propaganda was one strategy. Another one, which opened this historical
moment into the indefinite future by stopping the clocks hands at exactly 6:50 pm on
21 January 1924, was the mummification of the body of Vladimir Lenin, the head of the
young Soviet Republic.
Lenin died from atherosclerosis that was the complication of a bullet injury after the
murderous assault of 1918. Initial measures to temporarily preserve the body were
taken immediately after the death to allow the long farewell ceremony; the idea of a
long-term preservation of Lenins body was announced a week after his death by Leonid
Krasin, Peoples Commissar of Foreign Trade. Krasin, alongside the Commissar of the
Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky, the writer Maxim Gorky and the philosopher
Alexander Bogdanov, had earlier been involved in the God-building movement that
proclaimed socialism a new religionworshipping the progress, the collective and the
societyfor which a new god should be built. Ironically, Lenin himself was highly
critical of the movement, reminding that every god is a necrophilia.2 Taking Lenins
metaphor somewhat too literally, Krasin (who was educated as a refrigerators engineer)
suggested the freezing of Lenins body; later on this technique was substituted with
that of embalming. The success of the endeavor surpassed the boldest expectations:
Lenins body still exists, more than eight decades later. Moreover, the anatomists
managed to restore Lenins appearance, making him look fresher than while still alive.
Soviet propaganda often stated that the reason for the permanent preservation of Lenins
body was the impossibility of stopping the flow of people who came to pay their homage,
and the multiple letters addressed to the Party pledging to make the body imperishable
as the symbol of the new communist era (contemporary scholarship, though, discovered
that these letters mostly dealt with the perpetuation of his memory in monuments or
architectural memorials).3 Meanwhile, Lenins family opposed any attempts to preserve
 11

the body in a vain attempt to prevent the emerging cult of his personality. Lenins widow Nadezhda Krupskaya
wrote in the newspaper Pravda 30 January 1924, addressing the readers: I have a big favor to ask you: do not
let your grief for Ilich4 go into the external adoration of his personality. Do not erect monuments to him, build
palaces in his name, organize magnificent ceremonies in his memoryto all this he, during his lifetime, paid
so little attention. All this was a burden to him.

But (and here Lenin would have definitely agreed) the Party interests were more important than the individual
ones: the revolution demanded more than Lenins whole lifeit also needed his cadaver. After Lenins death
the Party was left without a universally respected leader; it risked not just wallowing in the internal rows, but
also being abandoned by the broad masses of its supporters. Rebutting this threat, Lenins preserved body
signified a continuous material and spiritual presence of the late leader in the political life of the country,
emphasizing the exclusive privilege of the Party to proclaim his decisions.

The Partys intentions to rebuild Lenin as a quasi-god of the future religion were quite conscious:

This grave will become the site of the worlds pilgrimage. As long as in the world still remain the oppressed and
the offended, for whom Lenin had lived and struggled, the Mausoleum with his remains will be the place of the
pilgrimage of all those who are oppressed and offended by the current system. In the future, this will become
the site of the pilgrimage of the entire liberated humanity. Already now, Lenins name is inscribed in the sacred
calendar [sviatsy] of the Revolution as the name of the peoples greatest leader who has ever appeared in history.5

This new cult required its shrines. The sarcophagus and the mausoleum were commissioned to renowned
architects Konstantin Melnikov and Alexey Schusev, respectively. Both used geometrical forms in order to
convey abstract quasi-religious symbolism. For Schusev, the cube is eternal in our architecture. It is from
the cube that all the variety of architectural creativity stems. Therefore, he suggested to make the mausoleum
in the memory of Vladimir Ilich as a derivative of the cube.6 At the same time, the form of Schusevs mausoleum
makes a reference to another symbol of eternityEgyptian pyramids.

The sarcophagus was designed by Melnikov in the shape of a high tetrahedral pyramid, which is said to have
resembled a crystal. Thrice reflected from the side glass, the body of Lenin-the-god was miraculously
transformed into trinity.7 The dark Mourning Hall was lit just by the electric lamps at the top verge of the
sarcophagus: the harsh dramatic light and sharp shadows were described as la El Greco.8

The uncanny darkness of the hall and the baffling reflections of the sarcophagus would have contrasted rather
dramatically with the simplicity of Lenins appearance. His face was cleanly shaven and the body was dressed
in a brown pseudo-military jacket of a type which, as the contemporaries noticed, he never wore during his
lifetime. Presenting Lenin as a heroic martyr, the military costume was perhaps also referring to Fanny
Kaplans 1918 bullet rather than to atherosclerosis as the real cause of Lenins death.9

This atmosphere of cult and mystery, however, was undermined by the fact that this shrine was completely
open to everyone and, in fact, specifically designed for the display. It was supplemented with a positivistically
objective exposition about the process of mummification: initially, alongside Lenins body one could see
embalmed anatomical preparations (human body parts) that were preserved using the same technology as
the actual body of Lenin. Also, the Party commission (which included Dzerzhinksy, Molotov, Voroshilov, and
Krasin among others) asked the scientists to compile a popular description of the method and publish
academic articles on the technology of Lenins preservation.10 Indeed, numerous publications followed in mass
periodicals and scholarly journals, in Russian and Western languages as well as in the languages of other
republics of the USSR.11

This dualism of Lenins body has been recently noticed by Boris Grois, who called the Mausoleum a
videocombination of a pyramid and the British Museum: Lenins mummy is worshiped and solicitously
stored in the pyramid that is called Mausoleum. At the same time, the museum Mausoleum is exhibiting
Lenins body. Translating Groyss argument into terms introduced by Walter Benjamin we can say that Lenins
body unites cult and exhibition value. Indeed, cult value, in Benjamins theory, being the earliest form of artistic
value, is an instrument of magic, which only later came to be recognized as a work of art; it demands art to
be hidden, as in pre-historic caves. Exhibition value is its complete opposite: having emerged with the new
forms of reproductive technology, it makes the art object visible and approachable to everyone.14

Groys continues to say that, although unraveled, the mummy still keeps its mystery due to special exhibition
conditions: those of a contemporary art museum, which creates a mystery by not demanding an explanation
of why this or that example of banality is kept there.15 In this respect, Groys compares Lenins mummy to a
readymade, which, for him, is a banal object that happened to be in a museum only by an accident. To illustrate
this observation, the scholar points to Lenins banal costume (the jacket, white shirt, and tie) that makes him
look like everyone else.

However, I would like to suggest another explanation for the role of Lenins outfit: it indeed looks banal, but
this banality was designed to destroy, not to create, the enigma. This costume dates back to the late-1930s
it was then when the relationship between cult and exhibition of Lenins body was reversed.

Indeed, in 1938 the conception of Lenins display was radically changed at the direct request of Stalin. The old
Melnikovs crystal-like sarcophagus was replaced by a new one, made after the architectural project of Schusev
and sculptural decoration of Vsevolod Iakovlev in 1939-1944. The team of professionals working at redesigning
the exposition also included the leading Socialist Realist painter Alexander Gerasimov, who was responsible
for supervising light and color effects.

In the new sarcophagus, the glass leaned towards the viewer to prevent reflections. The sarcophagus, which
resembled rather a glass coffin with a little mausoleum model on its top than any abstract symbolic form,
rested on a platform richly decorated with banners and other sculptural motifs. The light, too, was made less
dramatic: sharp shadows disappeared, so that the contemporaries now compared it to Rembrandts palette.
Moreover, the lamps were now supplied with pink filters that improved Lenins face color, making it more
joyful in accordance with the new Stalinist aesthetics.

If Lenins old costume presented him (alongside with Stalin, who started wearing a jacket of the same type)
as a heroic leader of the Revolution, the new one shifted him into the domain of subjects for whose happiness
Stalin (still continuing to wear the old heroic costume) allegedly fought alone. Lenins new costume parallels
in time, subject, and goalOld Bolsheviks purges: nobody was allowed to compete with Stalin for the role
of the leader of the Revolution.

At the same time, in 1944 a central tribune was added to the Mausoleum (that previously had only two side
tribunes). One could speculate that Lenin was now denied his voice: instead of being in the center of the
building, with the actual speakers staying at his sides (which would have emphasized the idea that they were
just mediums through whose mouths Lenin spoke), Lenin was now reduced to the role of a pedestal under
the new rulers feet.

A further step in desacralization was achieved when, also in 1939, a secret embalming laboratory was created
for the preservation of Lenins body and potentially applying the same techniques to creating other mummies
(and indeed seven were produced between 1949 and 1994 to eternalize the leaders of other socialist countries).
This replication of mummies destroyed the status of Lenins body as the only original, which, as Leah Dickerman
has argued, previously guaranteed the truthfulness of multiple reproductions of his image, transferring it to
the sphere of replicable objects.16

The year 1939 brought yet another reform: all the work connected to the functioning of this laboratory and
the embalming of Lenins body became strictly secret.17 This move of Stalin raises many questions: nothing
 13

could be farther away from the original conception of explaining all the scientific details of the process of
embalming, and more contradictory to the desacralizing policy that Stalin adopted in regards to Lenins cult.

How can this sacralizing move be reconciled with the desacralizing one that was made simultaneously? I
suggest that by the late 1930s Lenins body had fulfilled its mission: unification of the country around the
Communist Party and unification of the Party itself. Moreover, it became superfluous in the situation when
the country was united around the new leader. Burying Lenin, however, would be perceived as blasphemy.
The chosen way offered a solution to the dilemma: Lenins body remained in its place, signifying the continuity
of the regimes, but by depriving it of the cult value and by transmitting the latter to the process of its preservation,
the new ruler was stealing Lenins magic power: now only Stalin, who knew the secret, was the sole guarantor
of his predecessors existence in the Mausoleum. Earlier, on the contrary, the body was sacral, whereas the
process of its preservation was desacralized: this was legitimizing the status of Party leaders as being in
magical touch with Lenin, still following his orders.

By saving his body for the future, the heirs of Lenin suggested two different stories their descendants had to
learn about the Revolution: according to the first, recounted in 1924, Lenin was a godlike genius who gave his
flesh and blood for the salvation of the people; according to the second, rewritten by Stalin, Lenin was a mere
honest man, the preservation of whose body reminds one of the achievements of a future that has already
ensueda better and more joyful life that was finally brought to last forever t

Lenins Mausoleum Today (authors photograph, July 2010).

03
An Architecture
of Humors
R&Sie(n)
R&Sie(n) is an architectural practice based in Paris. This group, which
consists of Franois Roche, Stphanie Lavaux and Toshikatsi Kiuchi
(since 2007), works simultaneously through the architectural practice
R&Sie(n) and the new-territories research organization. It also leads
architectural research labs such as the Advanced Studio at Columbia
University - GSAPP in New York City. Web site: www.new-territories.
com. Their architectural designs have been shown at, among other
places, Columbia University (New York, 1999-2000), UCLA (Los Angeles,
1999-2000), ICA (London, 2001), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, 2004), Centre
Pompidou (Paris, 2003), MAM / Muse dArt Moderne (Paris, 2005,
2006), the Tate Modern (London 2006) and Orlans/ArchiLab (1999,
2001, 2003). Work by R&Sie(n) was selected for exhibition at the French
pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennales of 1990, 1996, 2000 and
2002 (they rejected the invitation that year), and for the international
section in 2000, 2004 and 2008, and they have been selected in the next
one, International Pavilion, in September 2010.
15
Preambule
An architecture of humors is a research project/exhibition
in which the R&Sie(n) architectural practice has worked
with a group comprised of a mathematician, programmers,
architects and a robotics designer to develop a computational
approach based on biological and physiological data scanned
from visitors who are put through situations inciting
repulsion, stress and pleasure to conceive housing units
and urban fragments based on relational protocols.
This research was visible in Paris from January 22 through
April 26, 2010, at Le Laboratoire, 4 rue du Bouloi, 75003
Paris, and is going in 2010 to Basel and Graz.
This research is being carried out with Franois Jouve, the
mathematician in charge of working out dynamic structural
strategies; with the architect and robotics designer Stephan
Henrich and Marc Fornes, Winston Hampel and Natanael
Elfassy on the computational development; and Gaetan
Robillard and Frderic Mauclere on the physiological data
collection station, following a nano-technologies scenario
by R&Sie(n) - Berdaguer & Pejus.
An architecture des humeurs
Une architecture des humeurs is based on the potential
that contemporary sciences offer to reread the human
corporalities via their physiology and their chemical balance.
The assumption of this research attempts to make palpable
and comprehensible, through technologies, the emotional
transactions of the body animal, the body headless, the
chemistry of the body, so that this one informs us of his
adaptation, its sympathy, of its empathy, confronted to a
situation, to an environment.
Apparatuses for the architectural assemblages on
transactional and structuring protocols :
One aspect is comprised of computational, mathematical,
and machinist procedures designed to produce an urban
structure following certain protocols of improbable and
uncertain successive indeterminations, aggregations and
layouts to rearticulate the link between the individual and
the collective. The layout of the residential units and the
structural trajectories are conceived and developed here as
posterior to the morphologies that support social life and not
as an a priori. These structures are calculated following si-
multaneously incremental and recursive structural optimiza-
tion protocols whose principle result is the concurrently
generated physicality and morphology of an architecture.
The algorithm developed by Franois Jouve differs from
directly calculated structural methods such as calculating
a load-bearing structure of a building after it is designed.
In contrast, the algorithm allows the architectural form
to emerge from the trajectories of the transmission of forces
simultaneously with the calculation that generates them.
The algorithm is based on (among other things) two
mathematical strategies, one taken from the derivative
initiated by the research of Hadamard and the other from
the protocol of the representation of complex shapes by
Cartesian meshing through level set.
The mathematical process of empirical optimization makes
it possible for the architectural design to react and adapt to
previously established constraints instead of the opposite.
The other aspect is the collection of data regarding the
chemical body, based on the neurobiological emissions of
each future owner. Until now the collection of information
involved in the residential unit protocol has been exclusively
based on visible and reductive data (surface area, number
of rooms, access mode, and party walls).
Instead, this experiment will be the occasion to interrogate
an obscure area that could be called the emission of desires
by the capture of these physiological signals based on
neurobiological secretions, and to implement a chemistry
of the humors of future purchasers, taken as inputs
generating a diversity of habitable morphologies and the
relationships between them.
The groundwork for this architecture of humeurs is a
rereading of the contradictions inherent in the expression
of these desires, both those that traverse public space
through the ability to express a choice by means of language,
on the surface of things, and those that are underlying and
perhaps more disturbing but just as valid. By means of the
latter we can appraise the body as a desiring machine with
its own chemistrydopamine, hydrocortisone, melatonin,
adrenaline and other secreted molecules that are
imperceptibly anterior to the consciousness these
substances generate. Thus the making of architecture is
inflected by another reality, another complexity, that of the
acephalous body, the animal body.
An architecture of humeurs means breaking into languages
mechanism of dissimulation in order to physically construct
misunderstandings. A station for collecting these signals
is offered. It makes it possible to perceive these chemical
variations and capture the changes in emotional state so
 17

that they affect the geometries emitted and influence the

construction protocol.

The research is organized on several levels:

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

Misunderstandings
This means taking conflicts into account as an operational
mode, allowing architecture to become their transactional
vector.

Id love to but at the same time/ and maybe/ not/ and the
contrary.

These misunderstandings are directly influenced by the

pathologies of collective living:

Claustro (phobia-philia)

Agora (phobia-philia)

Xeno (phobia-philia)

Acro (phobia-philia)

Nocto (phobia-philia)

Socio (phobia-philia)

Neo (phobia-philia)

From the misunderstanding of humors to physio-

morphological computation
These relational modes are simultaneously elaborated
within the residential cell and on its periphery in relation
to the neighbors. The multiplicity of possible physio-
morphological layouts based on mathematical formulations
offers a variety of habitable patterns in terms of the transfer
of the self to the Other and to others. This is an informational
19
area, a Temporary Autonomous Zone (T.A.Z.) allowing
future purchasers to have access to a morphological
combinatorics with multiple permutations produced jointly
by the expression of their avowed desires and their
indiscrete biochemical secretions.
The volume of an entity-unit is 12 x 12 x 12 meters. This
is the basis on which our calculations and hypotheses have
been made.
From Physio-morphological Computation to the
Multitude
A multitude of aggregations of physio-morphological layouts
is organized according to parameters of chronological
positioning and variable distances between the entities
(collective, tribal, human clusters or conversely singleton
units). This includes public layouts and micro-places.
Mathematical Operators for Structural Optimization
As indicated above, these are mathematical processes
whose purpose is to achieve an incremental and recursive
optimization (ex-local, local and hyper-local) that
simultaneously calculates and designs support structures
for the physio-morphologies. Forms are fabricated only by
successive iterations that link, by physically and structurally
coagulating, the interstices between morphologies so that
they support each other. The calculations satisfy precise
inputs (constraints and characteristics of the materials
used, initial conditions, dead load and transfer of forces,
intensity and vectorization of these forces, etc.).
The Algorithm(s)
Basically this is the name of a physio-morphological
residence unit.
But more precisely it is a name that characterizes a structural
aesthetics thought as a geometry resulting posterior to the
morphological fabrication of residential areas. The point is
to emancipate architecture from the conceptual logic that
takes structuration as the starting point, and instead allow
the emergence of a physical matrix that can react to the
multiplicity of morphologies and the ambiguity of the desires
of future purchasers. Thus this open-source mechanism
can replace the determinist and predictable topology of
collective habitats.
From the Algorithm(s) to Bio-knit Physicality
Development of a construction protocol that can deal with
complex, non-standard geometries through a process of
secretion, extrusion and agglutination. This frees the
construction procedure from the usual frameworks that
are incompatible with a geometry constituted by a series
of anomalies and singularities.
Toolings/ Robotic process
The development of a secretion and weaving machine that
can generate a vertical structure by means of extrusion
and sintering (full-size 3D printing) using a hybrid raw
material (a bio-plastic-cement) that chemically
agglomerates to physically constitute the computational
trajectories. This structural calligraphy works like a
machinist stereotomy comprised of successive geometrics
according to a strategy based on a repetitive protocol.
This machine is both additive and formative.
It is called Viab02.
Tooling/ Bio-cement weaving (material expertise)
Development of a viscous and adherent secretable material
so as to produce this morphologically complex structure (a
material and procedures similar to the contour-crafting
developed with the Behrohk Khoshnevis Lab at USC for the
Ive heard about project). This is a bio-cement component,
a mix of cement and bio-resin developed by the agricultural
polymers industry that makes it possible to control the
parameters of viscosity, liquidity and polymerization and thus
produce chemical and physical agglutination at the time of
secretion. The mechanical expertise of this material is made
visible (constraints of rupture induced by traction,
compression and shearing, etc.). This material emits low
C02.
Animist, vitalist and machinist, the architecture of humeurs
rearticulates the need to confront the unknown in a
contradictory manner by means of computational and
mathematical assessments. The architecture of humeurs
is also a tool that will give rise to Multitudes and their
palpitation and heterogeneity, the premises of a relational
organization protocol.
 21

Interview With R&Sie(n), F. Roche By Caroline Naphegyi (Curator Of This Research)

Q: How do you do research and an exhibition at the same time?

A: There are two parts. Research unfolds in what we call the Process room, a pretty basic space. You have to take your time
so that the interactions between physiology, robotics and computation fully emerge in their logic and interdependence. The
other part, the exhibition, is a suite of visual indices. Since these clues are neither didactic nor chronological nor pedagogical,
visitors construct their own logic and subjectivities. Furthermore, this part has an immersion area, a physiological testing
station, where visitors, called prospective purchasers by analogy to a sales office, are themselves experimental subject and
object. This cognitive and immersive mechanism thus articulates a thirst for knowledge and a willingness to lose oneself in
that quest.

Q: Whats this about?

A: Its an unprecedented experiment in which architecture harnesses several different fields of exploration neurobiology,
mechanization, and math protocols working together as an ensemble of structural, transactional and relational operating modes.

This is not a sequel to the Ive heard about show held by the MAM (Paris municipal modern art museum) in 2005, although
that show did explore the relationship between physiology, computation and indeterminism in the sense of its preconditions,
its genesis. That earlier piece sought to understand and write (in the sense of writing code) biological geometries that
mimic natural ones. The predominant figure was that of coral and its growth. This second piece, at Le Laboratoire, goes
beyond that representation, since weve already worked on what conditions the emergence of such a geometry, namely
principles of exchange, dynamic principles based on a systems immanent forces.

But thats not all. We wanted to get a better handle on something already sketched out at the MAM show: the capture of
body chemistry as an element able to disturb and alter linear logics, the logics of authorities, replacing a top-down approach
with a bottom-up one.

Q: In fact, for you, the axiom on which your architecture of humors research is based is the contingency of the humors
of the inhabitant on the habitat itself.

A: Humors in the sense that Hippocrates used the word, a concept brought up to date by todays possibilities for detecting
body chemistry.

Until now the acquisition of information used in residence protocols has been based exclusively on visible, reductive data.
In our research we want to add the corporalities and their own substances. They can provide information about the
relationship between bodies and space, and especially about the social relationships of bodies, the relationships between
them, of the self to the other, both inside a single housing unit and in terms of the osmosis of vicinity.

Q: In the physiology station located at the entrance to the exhibition, a machine captures visitors chemical data. So visitors
are put into a very particular psychological state. As she asks you to slide your hand onto a screen, Melisa whispers into you
ear, Your body becomes the vector of your emotions. These vapors help you capture the changing course of these emotions

A: The signal collection station makes it possible to perceive individual variations and how these changes in emotional
state affect the resulting geometries and influence the morphological protocol at the living together level.

This physiological test works like an emotion detector. It unleashes your corporal chemical reactions, principally molecules
like dopamine, adrenalin, serotonin and hydrocortisone that feed us information about your animal reactions/degree of
pleasure or repulsion, curiosity or disinterest. This physiological test helps us map the visitors future dwelling area. It
only takes seven minutes. The protocol is simple. During the test, a sort of vapor (of nanoparticles) is emitted, so that we
can detect the evolution of these emotions without noxious intrusion.

A voice whispers into the visitors ear, Let it enter into you, breathe it in. You are in absolutely no danger from this vapor
 23

Your family has become a conflict zone and you can no longer calm things down. Its an illusion to believe that architecture
can help you with that. But you can negotiate the distances by negotiating the details The area where you live can react
to your desires. It has the power to allow you to experience this conflict without denying its existence or making up
fantasies about it. Your living area can be transformed into a morphology of the moment. Youre free to go along with others
or retreat into yourself.

For us this is an occasion to interrogate the confused region that lies between the notion of enjoyment and that of need,
by detecting physiological signals based on neurobiological secretions and thus realize a chemistry of humors, treating
future buyers as inputs generating the diversity of inhabitable morphologies and the relationships between them.
Consequently the formulation of desires in language is inflected by another realty, another complexity, that of the
acephalous body, the animal body, so that it can tell us about its adaptation, its sympathy and empathy, in the face of
specific situations and environments.

Q: Why do you introduce contradictory signalswhat you call misunderstandingsinto the heart of your architectural
protocol (the inhabitable morphologies)? How does this physiology of desires, this living and unpredictable material,
radically shift the architects whole approach?

A: We decided to take the preliminary step of revisiting the contradictions within the very expression of these desires, both
those that traverse public space because of their ability to express a choice, a desire conveyed by language, on the surface
of things, and those preexisting and perhaps more disturbing but equally valid desires that reflect the body as a desiring
machine (as Deleuze put it), with its own chemistry, imperceptibly anterior to the consciousness those substances generate.

The architecture of humors is a way of breaking and entering into languages mechanism of dissimulation in order to
physically construct its contradictions. It means staging a break-in to the logic of things when language has to negotiate
with the depths of the body, down to the bottom folds, like with Antonin Artaud and his compulsive catatonia.

The concept of free will may be simultaneously the most beautiful and the most corruptible of all. The cultural media pierce
us to the core; their influence penetrates us everywhere, generating a conformism that can be considered obscene. We
are both its vector and instrument. What we like to do is just the opposite, to seek out the dark side, our animal side, in
order to subvert the other side using reactive and emotional data. Were glad that our choices are not guided exclusively
by architectural conventions, both the conventions of the client and those of the architects themselves.

Theres more to architecture than serving the prince and his totems, as people around here like to do. To speak to some of
todays issues, the debate about high-rises is pathetic. Of course density has to be rethought, but I dont think its relevant
for southern Paris to be filled with reproductions of models of verticality conceived for 1950s business districts. The proposals
submitted by the architects selected by the city are puerile in that regard, and the plans for Greater Paris no less so. Architecture
has become like a schoolyard full of kids who constantly flatter politicians about what is really that worlds weakest point, its
modes and fantasies of representation and then they end up crying about it when the politicians dont commission them to
design their Xanadu, like Jean Nouvel, the perfect example of the new cynicism. The politicians have largely sucked the
lifeblood out of the past. Lets hope that the future can be different. But thats not what were supposed to be talking about

Q: You introduce the possibility of contradictory relational modes into the residential units themselves. How has set
theory made you able to handle these misunderstandings and the contradictory ways in which individuals relate to
their family and those around them?

A:The interviews at the physiological station make it possible to collect some seldom-seen materials. They make visible
how the body reacts to a situation of exchange, and indicate the degree of pathology that would afflict the visitor I mean
the future buyerif she or he were placed in a productive reality. I would have loved to be able to set up a sales office
where people could make a purchase and concretize their bio-architecture in a collective aggregation.

The data obtained from the physiological interview tell us about:

Familial socialization (distance and relationship between residential areas within a single unit), neighborhood socialization
(distance and relationship between residential units), modes of relations to externalities (biotope, light, air, environment,
and also seeing, being seen and hiding, modes of relating to access (receiving and/or escaping, even self-exclusion) and
the nature of the interstices (from closely spaced to panoptic).

We use formulations taken from set theory to define these relationships. This branch of math was founded by the German
mathematician Georg Cantor in the late 19th century. Its aim is to define the concepts of sets and belonging. This theory
can be used to describe the structure of each situation as a kind of set defining the relationships between the parts and
the whole, while taking into consideration that the latter cant be reduced to the sum of its parts or even to the ensemble
of relationships between the parts. It allows you to define all the properties of a situation as relational modes, both the
relationships between the elements (residential areas) and those between these elements and the ensemble or ensembles
they fit into.

The operators of belonging, union, inclusion, intersection and disjunction describe morphologies characterized by their
dimensions and position and above all by the negotiations of distance they carry out with the other parts. This produces
relational protocols, protocols of attraction, repulsion, contiguity, dependence, sharing, indifference, exclusion, etc. Before
the morphology of a habitat is reduced to a functional typology, first its structured as an area of exchange.

Mathematical formulas aid the development of these combinations and thus become the matrix for the relational structure
on which an inhabitable space is based.

In contrast to the standardized-model formatting of habitats, this tool offers the potential for negotiation with the ambiguities
of ones own humors and desires. It makes it possible to mix contradictory compulsions (appearances) and even some
malentendus, which could be translated by both misunderstandings and mishearing:

Id like that but at the same time / maybe / not / and the opposite.

These malentendus are directly influenced by the pathologies generated by collective living: Claustro_(phobia-philia) /
Agora_(phobia-philia)/ Xeno_(phobia-philia) / Acro_(phobia-philia) / Nocto_(phobia-philia) / Socio_ (phobia-philia) /
Neo_(phobia-philia), etc.

Q: In other words, you approach architecture as a dynamic principle, incorporating incompletion, incertitude and
indetermination. These parameters are the basis of your parametric construction system, arent they?

A: Nature is basically made up of indetermination protocols. Algorithms can simulate the growth of a tree in terms of
reproducing its geometry, but the fit between geometry-photosynthesis-equilibrium-growth is and always will be a hidden
protocol that cant be reduced to its simple mathematical and geometrical dimensions.

Using the architecture of humors we have staged a constructive and narrative machine that is receptive to two contradictory
inputs, the order of desire codified by language and the order of its anterior and even hidden chemical secretion. We
wanted this schizoid rereading of an architects brief in constant becoming to be able to generate protocols of incertitude
and incompletion.

An urban structure based on these computational and robotic procedures, these vectors of variability and indetermination,
makes visible the potential of these heterogeneous aggregations.

Q: One of the subjects of this research was to consider the bearing structure of these residential units, and thus the
final shape of the building, as a product and not the starting point. The fact that the bearing structure is not designed
beforehand makes it necessary to constantly recalculate the segments and force trajectories that carry these inhabitable
cells.

How did math solve one of architectures problematics: how to respond to indeterminate situations, a construction
based on affective variability, with a constantly changing form (you use the metaphor of trees, which grow incrementally)?

How did your partnership with the mathematician Franois Jouve start?
 25

A: One of the objectives of our research was to imagine structure as a postproduction element, emerging a posteriori to
the inhabitable morphologies, which are themselves thought as unique entities, singularities, emancipated from the
conceptual logic where the structure is the starting point, the matrix for human organization, so that the spatial contract
takes the place of the social contract. Since its conceived a posteriori, the structure is reactive, adaptive to multiplicity,
the multitude to use Antonio Negris term.

Franois Jouve developed a mathematical process for empirically seeking optimization by creating forms out of constraints
and not vice-versa. Thats different than direct calculus methods which, for instance, calculate a buildings beams after
establishing its design. Instead, it calculates form based on trajectories, the vectorization and intensity of forces, without
that form being predetermined. Produced by a simultaneously recursive and incremental optimization protocol, this form,
which appears only through the calculations themselves, has to satisfy precise inputs (material constraints, the clients
brief, initial and environmental conditions, etc.). In this particular case, the unknown is the form, the hidden part revealed
only by the experiment itself.

Through the use of these computational, mathematical and mechanization procedures, the urban structure engenders
successive, improbable and uncertain aggregations that constantly rearticulate the relationship between the individual and
the collective.

Q: You emphasize the passage from an industrial era (seeking uniformity and standardization) to the reintroduction of
the concept of singularity in architecture by means of robotics and computations. More recently, what has science
especially math and technological development robotics and a biochemical understanding of raw materials brought
to the table in architecture? What new speculative issues has it raised, particularly in France?

A: Nothing is happening in France. The field of architecture is totally sclerotic and held on a leash by a dozen people. Its
shameful. Along with our professional practice as R&Sie(n), we have a research organization called new-territories,
and for the last five years Ive been teaching labs at Columbia University. Not only are these core questions in todays
debates; theyre also a core source of speculations and learning.

The point is to get back to the idea that architecture should be a site for knowledge and debates, a site for experimentation,
and not just for grandiose celebrations of necrosis organized by the Palais de Chaillot and its Cit du patrimoine.

Regarding your question, it only takes a few years for technology to drain and absorb speculations that once seemed unreal.
For instance, in Switzerland and Japan weve designed two buildings entirely conceived by numerical control using optimization
algorithms, one made of solid wood and the other of polyurethane foam. In five years what once was merely plausible has
become possible. In this case, its important to conceive protocols and designs not to stand out in some glamour interior
decoration magazine but to magnetize a point in the near future, so that it draws our present towards itself.

Regarding the architecture of humors, Bherokh Khoshnevis and Stephen Henrich have done research in robotics and
mechanization that make it possible to foresee the first prototypes in two or three years.

Q: Since its opening in 2007, Le Laboratoire has sought to give visibility to research projects jointly undertaken by scientists
and artists. In the Processes space that is at the heart of this show you unfold the various phases of your research, going
so far as to make the computational script available as open source software. First of all, the software is available for anyone
who wants to further mutate it. Second, the buildings final form is the result of a structural calculation and not vice-versa;
its out of the architects control. What do you expect from this stance, this renunciation of authorship and even copyleft?

A: A script is above all a form of writing, a language. Theres no point to it unless its shared so that other people can take
it up and improve it. But its a tricky position. We all remember the madness of the computer programmer in Tron whose
all-powerfulness makes him think hes the master of the universe and that he knows everything about everything. Luckily,
the mathematicians weve worked with are protected against this kind of positivist mysticism t
04
The Illusions of Control
Radical Engineers and
Reactionary Artists
Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr
Award winning Artists, researchers and Curators, Catts and Zurr formed the internationally
renowned Tissue Culture and Art Project. They have been artists in residence in the School of
Anatomy and Human Biology since 1996 and were central to the establishment of SymbioticA
in 2000. They are considered pioneers in the field of biological arts and are invited as keynote
speakers, curate exhibitions, publish widely, and exhibit internationally.

Catts is the Co-Founder and Director of SymbioticA: the Centre of Excellence in Biological
Arts at UWA and Dr Ionat Zurr, who received her PhD from the Faculty of Architecture,
Landscape and Visual Arts, UWA - is researcher and SymbioticAs academic co-ordinator.
SymbioticA won the inaugural Prix Ars Electronica, Golden Nica in Hybrid Art Category. They
were recognised by Thames & Hudsons 60 Innovators Shaping our Creative Future book
as one of five in the category Beyond Design, and by Icon Magazine (UK) as one of the top
20 Designers, making the future and transforming the way we work. They were Research
Fellows in Harvard Medical School (2000-2001) and Visiting Scholars at the Department of Art
and Art History, Stanford University (2007).

The concept of the single engineering paradigm indicates a future in which the control
of matter and life would be achieved by applying engineering principals; through
nanotechnology, synthetic biology and, as some suggest, cognitive- and neuroscience.
Ironically, this might seem an admission by the life sciences that the idea of the unifying
theory of biology cannot be achieved and therefore a utilitarian application based approach
might be the next best thing. Looking at such a future, is there anything we can learn
from the past? In addition, in the light of some recent research into the engineering
mindset, what might an artistic mindset achieve? Can it be a counter-balance or an
attempt to artistically engage with an engineering future doomed to be perceived as
reactionary in one way or another? In this deliberately polemic piece of writing, we will
tackle these issues.

In recent years, we have witnessed a resurgence of the application of engineering logic

in the field of the life sciences. With the recent introduction of the concept of Synthetic
Biology, a revolutionary rhetoric is being employed, such as a radical shift and Synthetic
Biology will revolutionize the technology of the future. As is pointed out:

Engineers are interested in synthetic biology (or in biology in general] because the living
world provides a seemingly rich yet largely unexplored medium for controlling and
processing information, materials, and energy. Learning how to effectively harness the
power of the living world will be a major engineering undertaking.1
 27

Victimless Leather- A Prototype of Stitch-less

Jacket grown in a Technoscientific Body
Biodegradable polymer skin and bone cells from
human and mouse. 2004
Hamsa
The Tissue Culture & Art (Oron
Catts & Ionat Zurr). Skin tissue
over found object. 1997
 29

Having control over life and its processes may have always been an ambitious human endeavour. What is changing is the accumulation
of scientific knowledge and technological capabilities, mounting up with increasing speed and scale of manipulation. A choreographed
interplay between hype and actuality is overlaid on a public that is bombarded with information that should excite, but which is
also easily forgotten. A recent recurring trope mobilized to describe our coming future is the promise of applying engineering
principles to biological systems, or more generally the idea of the single engineering paradigm that engulfs nanotechnology,
synthetic biology, as well as in some cases cognitive and neuro-sciences.

The idea of biology as engineering is not new. However, as the perception of the level of control possible increases, it seems
that whereas previously biologists were employing their understanding of engineering to the life sciences, now it is the
engineers who force-fit engineering methodologies into living systems. Therefore, two issues need to be scrutinized: the
first deals with how the application of engineering logic to life will reflect on the different cultures and societies where it
is going to take place. The second issue, which is more particular, is concerned with the locus of the places where radical
assaults on culturally perceived norms in the 21st century are now occurring. Is it correct to assume that it is now the
engineering workshops rather than the artists studios, the philosophers ivory towers or even the scientists labs?

Historical reflections
The application of engineering logic to life has historical precedents. Already in 1895, H.G Wells reflected on a body as a
malleable entity in his essay The Limits of Individual Plasticity, saying [t]he generalization of heredity may be pushed to
extreme, to an almost fanatical fatalism.2 A year later Wells demonstrated some of these ideas and their possible
consequences in his novel The Island of Doctor Moreau. The plasticity of life processes, through human intervention not in
the fictional realm, was demonstrated quite spectacularly only three years later in 1899 when Jacob Loeb, developed what
he called artificial parthenogenesis... the artificial production of normal larvae (plutei) from the unfertilized eggs of the
sea urchin.3 In other words, Loeb demonstrated the capacity for fertilization (in a sea urchin) without the use of sperm.
Loeb wrote, following his discovery, it is in the end still possible that I find my dream realized, to see a constructive or
engineering biology in place of a biology that is merely analytical.4

Loeb symbolized a change in the field of the biological sciences from descriptive to prescriptive, from the realm of knowledge
gathering to the realm of technological application. Loeb adopted in his experimentation and biological research what he
described as the engineering standpoint.5 What an engineering standpoint or engineering mindset is will be speculated
upon further, but nevertheless Loebs strong belief in control over life and his mechanistic approach to life led him to argue
that instinct and will were metaphysical concepts ... upon the same plane as the supernatural powers of theologians.6

The belief that instinct and will can be engineered as well as the belief that science should be pragmatic, can lead to interesting
interpretations and applications. Ten years later Alexis Carrel, a surgeon, demonstrated the plasticity of the body, through
the development of the technique of tissue culturethe growth of living tissue cells in-vitroin an artificial environment.
Carrel was a well-known and respected scientist who advanced the medical field in new techniques of suturing arteries and
transplantation as well as tissue culture, and won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1912. He was also a complex and controversial
figurea person who pushed the ontological implications of his discoveries to some extreme and morally questionable
places, far from its strictly bio-medical or even scientific realms into ontological and socio-political issues.

Carrel was so convinced in humans abilities to control life through the sciences that he believed that his experiments in
engineering a body in which to grow cells would eventually lead to the ability to resurrect through techno-scientific
methods.7 This is manifest in this somewhat surreal conversation extract:

What would be my responsibility if I bring people back to life? Carrel asked

Responsibility for what? The lawyer asked.

For those I bring back, said Carrel. Food and Lodging and all that. If I bring them back an old man too old to work. Or, in the
case of a young man, suppose something happens and he isnt able to do anything for himself. Am I liable for his support?8
The concept of the single engineering paradigm indicates a future in which the control of matter and life would be achieved
by applying engineering principals; through nanotechnology, synthetic biology and, as some suggest, cognitive- and
neuroscience. Ironically, this might seem an admission by the life sciences that the idea of the unifying theory of biology
cannot be achieved and therefore a utilitarian application based approach might be the next best thing. Looking at such a
future, is there anything we can learn from the past? In addition, in the light of some recent research into the engineering
mindset, what might an artistic mindset achieve? Can it be a counter-balance or an attempt to artistically engage with an
engineering future doomed to be perceived as reactionary in one way or another? In this deliberately polemic piece of
writing, we will tackle these issues.

In recent years, we have witnessed a resurgence of the application of engineering logic in the field of the life sciences. With
the recent introduction of the concept of Synthetic Biology, a revolutionary rhetoric is being employed, such as a radical
shift and Synthetic Biology will revolutionize the technology of the future. As is pointed out:

Engineers are interested in synthetic biology (or in biology in general] because the living world provides a seemingly rich
yet largely unexplored medium for controlling and processing information, materials, and energy. Learning how to effectively
harness the power of the living world will be a major engineering undertaking.1

Having control over life and its processes may have always been an ambitious human endeavour. What is changing is the
accumulation of scientific knowledge and technological capabilities, mounting up with increasing speed and scale of manipulation.
A choreographed interplay between hype and actuality is overlaid on a public that is bombarded with information that should
excite, but which is also easily forgotten. A recent recurring trope mobilized to describe our coming future is the promise of
applying engineering principles to biological systems, or more generally the idea of the single engineering paradigm that engulfs
nanotechnology, synthetic biology, as well as in some cases cognitive and neuro-sciences.

The idea of biology as engineering is not new. However, as the perception of the level of control possible increases, it seems
that whereas previously biologists were employing their understanding of engineering to the life sciences, now it is the
engineers who force-fit engineering methodologies into living systems. Therefore, two issues need to be scrutinized: the
first deals with how the application of engineering logic to life will reflect on the different cultures and societies where it
is going to take place. The second issue, which is more particular, is concerned with the locus of the places where radical
assaults on culturally perceived norms in the 21st century are now occurring. Is it correct to assume that it is now the
engineering workshops rather than the artists studios, the philosophers ivory towers or even the scientists labs?

Historical reflections
The application of engineering logic to life has historical precedents. Already in 1895, H.G Wells reflected on a body as a
malleable entity in his essay The Limits of Individual Plasticity, saying [t]he generalization of heredity may be pushed to
extreme, to an almost fanatical fatalism.2 A year later Wells demonstrated some of these ideas and their possible
consequences in his novel The Island of Doctor Moreau. The plasticity of life processes, through human intervention not
in the fictional realm, was demonstrated quite spectacularly only three years later in 1899 when Jacob Loeb, developed
what he called artificial parthenogenesis... the artificial production of normal larvae (plutei) from the unfertilized eggs of
the sea urchin.3 In other words, Loeb demonstrated the capacity for fertilization (in a sea urchin) without the use of sperm.
Loeb wrote, following his discovery, it is in the end still possible that I find my dream realized, to see a constructive or
engineering biology in place of a biology that is merely analytical.4

Loeb symbolized a change in the field of the biological sciences from descriptive to prescriptive, from the realm of knowledge
gathering to the realm of technological application. Loeb adopted in his experimentation and biological research what he
described as the engineering standpoint.5 What an engineering standpoint or engineering mindset is will be speculated
upon further, but nevertheless Loebs strong belief in control over life and his mechanistic approach to life led him to argue
that instinct and will were metaphysical concepts ... upon the same plane as the supernatural powers of theologians.6

The belief that instinct and will can be engineered as well as the belief that science should be pragmatic, can lead to
 31

interesting interpretations and applications. Ten years later Alexis Carrel, a surgeon, demonstrated the plasticity of the body,
through the development of the technique of tissue culturethe growth of living tissue cells in-vitroin an artificial environment.
Carrel was a well-known and respected scientist who advanced the medical field in new techniques of suturing arteries and
transplantation as well as tissue culture, and won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1912. He was also a complex and controversial
figurea person who pushed the ontological implications of his discoveries to some extreme and morally questionable places,
far from its strictly bio-medical or even scientific realms into ontological and socio-political issues.

Carrel was so convinced in humans abilities to control life through the sciences that he believed that his experiments in
engineering a body in which to grow cells would eventually lead to the ability to resurrect through techno-scientific methods.7
This is manifest in this somewhat surreal conversation extract:

What would be my responsibility if I bring people back to life? Carrel asked

Responsibility for what? The lawyer asked.

For those I bring back, said Carrel. Food and Lodging and all that. If I bring them back an old man too old to work. Or, in the
case of a young man, suppose something happens and he isnt able to do anything for himself. Am I liable for his support?8

In the 1930s, the surgeon (Carrel) joined forces with the mechanic, the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, to devise the
Organ Perfusion Pump, a mechanical pump for circulating nutrient fluid around large organs kept alive outside of their host
body. Carrels affiliation with Lindbergh, the great American hero, extended to a shared ideology of eugenics, which Carrel
outlined in his 1938 publication Man, the Unknown:

Those who have murdered, robbed, ... kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important
matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases. A
similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts.9

It can be argued that the application of mechanical/engineering logic to the living body preceded the same line of thinking that
led Carrel to treat human societies as objects to be engineered. These engineered objects can be fixed by removing faulty parts.
Eugenics, Carrel wrote in the last chapter of Man, the Unknown, is indispensable for the perpetuation of the strong. A great
race must propagate its best elements.10 The book, a worldwide best-seller translated into nineteen languages, brought Carrel
international attention.

It took more than eighty years to discover that cells can be grown in three dimensions to form a functional tissue. This
development came from the collaborative work of a surgeon, Dr Joseph P. Vacanti, and a material scientist, Dr Robert Langer,
in the early 1990s. They developed a system that used specially designed degradable polymers that act as a scaffold for the
developing tissue.

Tissue engineering (TE) was developed as a surgical solution for a body fixing/reconstructing problem. In modern medicine, the
system imagined to fix the body is a mechanical one, using mechanical, non-living apparatuses to replace failing body organs,
such as metal or plastic bits to replace joints, a pump for a heart and an external filtering machine to replace a failing kidney (a
dialysis machine). Until the late 1980s the notion of the cyborga human body enhanced by mechanical meanswas the dominant
mental picture both in the sciences and in the arts. The conceptual shift with the advent of tissue engineering was to look at and
treat the body as a regenerative site, to use the bodys own tissue to repair itself. This would not only avoid the problem of rejection
of foreign materials and foreign cells (from other bodies) but also, in Eugene Thackers words, tissue engineering is able to
produce a vision of the regenerative body, a body always potentially in excess of itself11a body that is not dependent on artificial
means to fix itself, but is an endless resource. In that respect, TE can be perceived as a natural almost non-technological technique
(although TE is a highly technological application within the biotech industry). Tellingly, although the technique is perceived as
natural and dominated by a biological approach, it was named Tissue Engineering.

This trend of adding the term engineering to biological fields is not exclusive to TE. It can be argued that in order to legitimize
the shift from descriptive to prescriptive approach, as well as to enhance the technological aspects, biologists started to
refer to their work as engineering (such as in Genetic Engineering, Tissue Engineering, Cell Engineering etc.). The opposite
05
Design for Decline:
The Bank of Savings
and Futures
Christopher Tohru Guignon

Two renderings of the same

view. The first showing the
Bank of Savings and Futures
in its present-day state, and
the second showing its
contingency design for a
future of decline.
 33

Spliced axonometric showing a three-part transition of

the architecture from bank to barter market. Materials
are stripped from the building and sold on site,
facilitating a spatial transformation of the architecture
and activating the site as a place for the new economy.
That the way down can be prosperous is the exciting
viewpoint whose time has come. Descent is a new frontier
to approach with zeal.
-Howard and Elizabeth Odum,
The Prosperous Way Down.1
Design for Decline
The turn of the millennium has been marked by global
economic and environmental instability. Sustainability has
emerged as the prevailing response to unchecked growth
and shortsighted planning, repositioning the notion of
future as central to the architectural project. However, in
the process of attaining mainstream recognition,
sustainability has been co-opted into the Western, neo-
liberal ideology of progress. Molded to fit the ideological
framework it once deemed unsustainable, and given the
task of preserving indefinite progress, sustainability has
lost its capacity to envision possible futures beyond growth.
As the depletion of resources and the instability of ecological
and economic systems quickly outpace development of
renewable technologies, nations and individuals alike must
abandon a linear history of progress and come to terms
with the possibility of decline.
Architects especially must reexamine their own complicit
participation in progressive obsolescence, that
quintessentially modern doctrine. Myopic design is all too
evident in the abandoned and dilapidated buildings of former
boomtowns and rapidly imploding suburbs. Designed with
growth in mind, obsolete architecture is both a symptom
of, and contributor to, urban decay. When confined to the
goal of a singular, desired future, the basic ideals of
sustainability, namely, foresight and prudence, offer an
incomplete solution to this problem. It is envisioning
alternative futures to sustained progress that provides
the architect with a strategic design tool for mitigating the
possible, if not imminent, transition between growth and
descent. In doing so, we can imagine an architecture that
facing an enduring future of economic stagnation and
resource depletionrepays its material investment while
simultaneously transforming itself spatially to better serve
a culture of decline.
By superimposing the architecture of two different
socioeconomic realitiesour current growth society and a
society in descentDesign for Decline investigates how the
architect designs contingency into a building. The thesis
tests this idea by considering the architecture of the
institution most closely tied to the booms and busts of our
free market system: the bank. Bank architecture has
evolved through the centuries as a symbol of global
capitalism. In the U.S., banks have changed to reflect the
development of our economic system, as well as the
American peoples changing relationship with their money.
A paradigmatic shift in our economy would undoubtedly
reshape existing spaces of transaction. A bank designed to
endure beyond the crest of our current age of progress will
also need to fundamentally reshape itself to reflect the
newest development of the economic system: failure.
It is designing for failure that offers the architect compelling
new opportunities. Sir John Soane offered insight into an
analogous proposition when he commissioned Joseph Gandy
to render his design for the Bank of England, as a ruin. As
Mark Jarzombek points out:
[Gandys painting] gives us an Hegelianesque, counter-view
to the ideology of hope and optimism. And so, one hundred
and eighty years later, the questions for us might be: What
does the assembly hall of a failed democracy look like? A
school for a failed educational system? A park for a failed
public space? A housing complex for a failed social policy?
A city for a failed urbanity? A court house for a failed
immigration policy? These are some of the pressing design
issues in our future.
Like Gandys rendering, the thesis asks, What does the
bank of a failed economic system look like? Unlike Gandys
rendering, the answer does not amount to romantic ruins
to an obsolescent institution, but rather the fulfillment of
a prudently designed architectural process. The tasks,
then, are to envision the future of the failed system, design
an architecture that accommodates the cultural byproducts
of that failure, and then design the process by which the
architecture of todays bank becomes, in the event of a
paradigmatic shift from progress to descent, the architecture
of tomorrows economic reality.
The Bank of Savings and Futures
The evolution of the bank is a story of the institutionalization
of the storage and transaction of assets. The origin of the
word can be traced back to the Ancient Roman bancu,
meaning bench or table. In the beginning, transactions
needed nothing more than a simple bench for the trade and
barter of commodity goods. As barter transactions became
cumbersome, symbolic money in the form of coinage or
bank notes replaced the actual trade of items. Storage then

became instrumental in the safekeeping of the commodity
assets represented. Our present-day monetary system
currently in crisis and no longer based on any tangible
commodity standard, but rather a system of intangible
debthas undermined any lingering perception of the bank
as a site of safe storage or honest transaction. As the legal
tender of this system has become less secure, communities
have seen a return to transactions based on commodity
goods. Trends of this nature can be found in recent history
(the collapse of the Soviet Union offers a clear example of
a widespread return to a barter economy), as well as in
todays news (gold acquisition surpassed record levels this
year, fueled by conservative pundits and economic
trepidation). It is reasonable, then, to forecast a future in
which the bench is once again a more appropriate site for
transaction than the ATM, and the vault a more useful form
of storage than the hard drive.
When perception of assets shifts significantly from
intangible credit to tangible commodity, architecture, too,
is subject to a change in perceived value. A buildings
programmatic assets, facing obsolescence, are more quickly
eclipsed by its material assets; that is to say, in a time of
material scarcity, or loss of confidence in the monetary
unit, the material constitution of the architecture itself
becomes a significant asseta material bank. The Bank
of Savings and Futures capitalizes on this facet of the
transitioning economy by both anticipating the future value
of the banks initial material investment, as well as the
spatial transformation made possible by the harvesting of
these materials in a subtractive process of asset-stripping.
Based around four vault-like, concrete structures (two of
which are, in fact, heavy-duty vaults), the Bank of Savings
and Futures is designed with an extravagant investment in
four materialswood, copper, limestone, and fiberglass
chosen for their potential value in a future of resource
scarcity. About thirty single-family homes worth of
dimensional lumber, an asset due to its dual application as
construction material and fuel, lines the interior of the
banking hall, diverging at times to form partitions, seating,
and tellers counters. Ten-foot strips of copperwhich can
be rolled and traded, or melted down for numerous uses,
including raw material for simple batteriesprovide the
exterior envelope of the bank; its patina subtly tracking its
years of use before its harvest. Limestone blocks line the
sales and consulting spaces of the Bank of Savings and
Futures, its use-value in the future the same as a millennia
ago: as a key ingredient in cement and mortar production.
35
Lastly, corrugated fiberglass reinforced polyester panels
provide transparent enclosure for the bank; its transparency
and durability a valuable commodity in a petrochemical-
scarce future of peak oil.
The removal of these materials reveals the underlying
contingency design of the future bank. The stripping of wood
and copper, for fuel and barter, first uncovers access to
more materials. As materials are further removed, the
spaces of private transaction for an obsolescing economic
system gradually open up to facilitate the banks
transformation into a public barter market for the new
decline economy. Wood, harvested from the banking hall,
reveals steps that provide access to an existing pedestrian
bridge while doubling as stadium seating for an auction
space. The four concrete structures around which the
spaces of the Bank of Savings and Futures are organized
offer the most important investment: permanence. Like
the bank vaults constructed a century before them they
anchor the site of the bank, ensuring its longevity while
also providing downsized spaces of storage or inhabitation.
The process of asset stripping and its consequent
transformation of the bank to public barter market work in
tandem to mitigate the catastrophic effects of the failed
economic system; however, the initial investment for such
a contingency plan can only occur now, at this latest crest
of history. Failure to plan for the possibility of decline may
be the difference between debilitating collapse and a
prosperous way down. Ultimately, Design for Decline: The
Bank of Savings and Futures is a case study in how liberating
the idea of future from an ideology of progress can provide
the architect with new directions in design. Sustaining our
capacity to transition from eras of growth to eras of decline,
rather than our capacity to maintain our current trajectory,
is a goal that requires a paradigmatic shift in the current
discourse of sustainability. As futures beyond progress
become increasingly plausible, architects might want to
consider what constitutes an asset or a liability in their
architectural investment t
06
What Do We Do With
This Future?
An Examination of
Tempelhof Airport
Elizabeth Krasner
Elizabeth Krasner received her undergraduate degree in the history, theory and criticism
of architecture from MIT in 2008. She has been working as an editor and writer at Volume
Magazine in New York and is currently studying architecture in Berlin as a fellow in the
Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Program. Next year she will start an MArch abroad as a
Rotary Ambassadorial scholar.

Since the fall of the wall, architecture in Berlin has come to play the roles of both relic and resistancelegally protected,
but hotly contested. Buildings that celebrated now-defunct regimes are woven into the urban fabric but as their continued
use is put into question, they become temporally stucksimultaneously representing visions of the past and future.
Tempelhof airfield and airport, fenced off since its closure in 2008, is a perfect example of the disparity between a collective,
living memory of history and the directives of a modern European capital.

To understand Tempelhofs difficult temporal presence, it is necessary to see it as the battleground for two different kinds
of futures, conceived at different times and for different ends. The first is the future that the Nazis envisioned for themselves,
in which Tempelhof became a monumental first representation. Designed in the 1930s by Ernst Sagebiel under the direction
of Albert Speer and built as an assertion of architectural permanence in a newly technological world (the structure is clad
in limestone), the architecture is both grandiose and severelacking in ornamentation and dominated by the geometric
rhythm of flat, narrow windows. Though never fully completed (unrealized plans for the building included a ballroom, beer
garden and stadium1), it was planned as the first step in a new Nazi city center, abutting a square and surrounded by new
ministries. Designed to be visible from space, its arcing hangar resembles the spread wings of an eagle in flight and is
more than a mile long.

The second vision for the space is conceived of from a contemporary perspective: how will German legislators develop this
problematic space, which has consistently been a drain on the local budget? Unsure of how to answer this question, the
city has left the building empty since the closure, prompting a slew of citizen responses. Though the popularity of Tempelhof
as a subject for debate among Berliners and the international press continues to mount, Berlin government officials have
yet to make a decision about what to do with it. Instead, it has stood completely inaccessible, behind a chain-link fence in
the center of a major European capital, a locus of denial. It is as if by acknowledging its presence, the city would somehow
have to acknowledge the possibility that the Nazis could have won. Rather than acknowledge this power, its emptiness is
apocalyptic and celebrated its functional sterility is a testament to the victory and prevention of the historical (unrealized)
future. Equivalent to an entire Berlin neighborhood (an entire city locality, in fact), its sheer size is visionary and futuristic.
By containing and fencing the area, the city denies even this: the buildings ability to exert the power of its size.

An element of policy change also contributes to the heated debate. When the Berlin Wall came down, the Eastern districts
of Prenzlauer Berg and Friedrichshain were in terrible condition; many of the buildings lacked central heating and personal
 37

1 2

toilets. Soon after, the newly-unified city invested public money into the 3
Behutsame Stadterneuerung (Careful City Renewal) mandating three
levels of preservation: to maintain the physical space, to preserve the
social composition of the building, and to design in consultation with the
community. But most of these regulations had twenty-year statutes, and
on the anniversary of the fall of the wall buildings are being bought by
private investors, rents are rising, and neighborhoods are changing.
There is a push to develop neighborhoods across the city as quickly as
possible, to try to aid the economy of what is now the poorest capital city
in Europe. Simultaneously, squatter groups are re-emerging as a form
of civic resistance to the lapse in renewal laws.

Political resistance is complicated by the fact that Berlin is both a city

and a Bundesland, which makes for conflicting interests at different
levels of power. Tempelhof is centrally located, situated among
neighborhoods formed while the Berlin Wall was still standing (Neuklln 1, 2 Posters Promoting the Squat Tempelhof
and Kreuzberg, respectively) and that developed geographically and 20.06.09 Protests
ideologically on the fringe. Many residents are self-described political Photo by Elizabeth Krasner
radicals, activists and anarchists. Closing Tempelhof seemed like a 3 Poster Promoting the Squat Tempelhof
relatively uncontroversial ideato relieve the national government of 20.06.09 Protests in Neuklln
operational costs and to open up the possibility for the local government Photo by Elizabeth Krasner
to bring in foreign investors in the form of commercial development.
These political aims did not take into account the desires of the local
population, or the history of citizen activism in the area.

Within these neighborhoods, two protest groups have formed to address

Tempelhofs future. The first, Tempelhof fr Alle, has tried to work
within the framework of the neighborhood associations (BergerInitiatives),
leading community walks around the fences, soliciting media attention,
and petitioning the district government. Their flyers, scattered across
Berlin, proclaim: STOP GENTRIFICATION / TAKE YOUR RIGHT TO THE
CITY. A second faction, Squat Tempelhof, advocates a literal squatting;
redefining the airport as habitable through physical reclamation. This
group resists gentrification more broadly with Tempelhof as a priority
their posters across Berlin proclaim: first squat Tempelhof, then

Poster Promoting the Squat Tempelhof
20.06.09 Protests
Photo by Elizabeth Krasner
squat the rest. Flyers are how they communicate with the city they hope
to expand, to bring in the public in whose interest they claim to act; this is
their propaganda. They take a step towards reclaiming and repurposing
this space (Take your right to the city!). Their actions propel the physical
space into the discourse of today, and strip it of the future it represents
and never saw. It is both a movement against another future (a commercial
development) and a point from which to understand the complete rejection
of once-celebrated futures.
On June 20, 2009, at the peak of controversy, the two resistance groups
organized the Squat Tempelhof 20.06.09 protest along the fence of the
airfield. The city, concerned about the growing media attention, dispatched
approximately two thousand armed police officers in what would become
a culminating battle between city government and activists. The riot police
stood guard against a mere four thousand protestors, waiting behind the
fence with tear gas and water cannons. There were accounts of inciting
violence from both sides, and several incidents of police brutality were
reported. No one got over the fence. Given the anti-establishment bent in
these areas, sending out 2000 riot police only served to fuel the fire; public
attention turned towards Tempelhofs future.
The idea of squatting an airport extends the longstanding tradition of squatting
in Berlin. After all, most of the people who squatted East Berlin tenements
after the wall came down became their eventual, legal owners. Squatters
exist (and succeed) today in empty warehouses and lots across the city.
Tacheles, a twenty-year-old, visiting artists community, cultural landmark
and tourist destination, is the result of some very persistent squatters.
Berliners have a history of claiming space as their own and, for the most
part, of succeeding. More generally, fighting for prohibited space has an
historical precedent in Berlin that is echoed in the demands of protesters
today. At the root of the Tempelhof Airport conflict, its very cause for
contention is the fact that it currently stands empty and unusable. Emptiness,
and the sheer abundance of empty spaces, is a recurring phenomenon across
the city (an estimated 100,000 apartments stand empty, according to a study
earlier this year in Prospect Magazine). The fact that the city itself is so large,
and so sparsely inhabited, is the legacy of two cities which became one; all
across Berlin, empty voids are the markers of history.
Tempelhof exists today as locus for denial of the protestors, of the civic
desire to use the space and of what it was built to represent. There it stands,
in the middle of the city, inaccessible, untouchable, uninhabitable, while
the city government refuses to allow it to become a part of contemporary
Berlin life. There have been small attempts to use the airport space, though
largely unsuccessful. For example, in July 2009 Berlin hosted their annual
Bread+Butter Fashion show there, hoping to use the long hangar as the
runways of German Fashion Week. The private event was diminutive in the
massive space, dwarfing the thousands of onlookers. The public pressure
to develop Tempelhof, or at least to appear to, is finally beginning to take
effect: as of 2009, the state-funded Adlershof Projekt GbmH, known for
 39

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

building a high-technology center that generated thousands of jobs, had been put in charge of developing a concept proposal.
By focusing on the program of the airfield (the developers are unable to touch the airport building under architectural
historic preservation laws), the government has once again ignored the problematic existence of Tempelhof airport.
Moreover, Tempelhof is hardly the last frontier; Tegel Airport will be closed in the next five years. In an eerily similar
situation, it is to be replaced by the new Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport, a monolith that is being touted by city
officials as the salvation of Berlin, a symbol of their dream for Berlin.2

Tempelhof is just one of several sites in Berlin on which the ideological battle for democratic space is fought. Since the fall
of the Berlin Wall two decades ago, the citys attitude about public space has changed, and with it, a resistance has grown
among Berliners. Public money that was invested to preserve and modernize East Berlin with special attention to community
planning and social responsibility has since run out; the rent limits for tenants who have kept their apartments for the last
twenty years have been lifted; the city now faces the largest inner-city peacetime migration in Europe. All of these factors
have created a context in which urban spaces have become a kind of contested public right in Berlin; a right that is enunciated,
demanded, and sometimes even seized. Tempelhof airport, at the center of the city, has come to serve as the symbol of this
struggle.

Ultimately, the debate over the use of public spaces in Berlin is about much more than physical terrain. Tempelhof, as an
unprogrammed space, is an example of the problematic monuments littered across German cities, Shared vessels of
memory overflowing with conflicting views of the past.3 But Tempelhof, as a building, is much more complicated: it
represents the power that the Nazis once held, the freedom of West Berlin, the fiscal problems of an underdeveloped
capital, and a placeholder for gentrification more broadly. It represents a future so powerful that is has invoked responses
of fear, violence and collective denial in Berliners.

Within the category of abandoned, futuristic cities, what are we to make of architectural visions of the future once the
buildings themselves become outdated? The development of Tempelhof Airfield and Airport is a useful point from which
to examine what happens when visions of the future shift dramatically, and what to do with architectural relics that blatantly
celebrate our past expectations. It is a space that belongs alternately to a nostalgic past, and a horrifying, prevented future.
Its various temporal presences are precisely what make it a problematic site. It has become so bound up in the battle
between current and historic visions of the future that there is virtually no room left to imagine a present use for it.
Protestors have attempted to overcome this by proposing a populist future, reclamation of the space as both historic and
civic. Conversely, by ignoring its future, the city government has equated the buildings inaccessibility (and, by extension,
uselessness) with its irrelevance as a usable space. The incredible potential of an empty, undeveloped neighborhood is
short-circuited by a complete denial of its existence and power. It is as if the city thinks that by closing it off, everyone will
forget it is there. More importantly, they will forget that the future it represented ever existed t
07
Networking Overload,
with Potplants
An interview about the Natural
Fuse project
Usman Haque, interviewed by Matthew Fuller
Usman Haque, is director Haque Design + Research Ltd (www.haque.co.uk), founder of Pachube.
com and CEO of Connected Environments Ltd. He has created responsive environments,
interactive installations, digital interface devices and mass-participation performances
around the world. His skills include the design and engineering of both physical spaces and
the software and systems that bring them to life. Trained as an architect, he received the 2008
Design of the Year Award (interactive) from the Design Museum, UK, a 2009 World Technology
Award (art), a Wellcome Trust Sciart Award, a grant from the Daniel Langlois Foundation for
Art, Science and Technology, the Swiss Creation Prize, Belluard Bollwerk International, the
Japan Media Arts Festival Excellence prize and the Asia Digital Art Award Grand Prize.

Matthew Fullers books includeMedia Ecologies, materialist energies in art and technoculture,
Behind the Blip, essays on the culture of software and the forthcoming Elephant & Castle. With
Usman Haque, he is co-author of Urban Versioning System v1.0. Editor of Software Studies, a
lexicon. A co-editor of the new Software Studies series from MIT Press, he works at the Centre
for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. http://www.spc.org/fuller/

Natural Fuse is a micro scale carbon dioxide overload protection framework that works locally and globally, harnessing the
carbon-sinking capabilities of plants. Generating electricity to power the electronic products that populate our lives has
consequences on the amount of carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere, which in turn has detrimental environmental
effects. The carbon footprint of the power used to run these devices can be offset by the natural carbon-capturing processes
that occur as plants absorb carbon dioxide and grow. Natural Fuse units take advantage of this phenomenon.

Each Natural Fuse unit (they are now distributed in households in London, New York and San Sebastian) consists of a
houseplant and a power socket. The amount of power available to the socket is limited by the capacity for the plant to offset
the carbon footprint of the energy expended: if the appliance you plug in draws so much power that it requires more
carbon-offsetting than available, then the unit will not power.

The problem is that even low-power light bulbs draw more power than can be comfortably offset by a single plant. So, all
the units are connected together via the internet so that they can communicate and determine how much excess capacity
carbon-offsetting is available within the community of units as a whole.
 41

Natural Fuse, San

Sebastian, Spain.
For example, if you use an appliance that draws four watts, and there are six Natural Fuse units out in the
community that are not currently drawing power, then you can offset the carbon footprint of your appliance by
borrowing from others. (Calculations include the energy cost of powering the electronics inside the unit itself
too, of course).

The project is as much about the structures of participation as it is about energy conservation. Rather than just
having an on/off switch for your appliance, you are provided with a selfless/selfish switch. If you choose
selfless, then the unit will provide only as much power as will not harm the community carbon footprint. But,
if the carbon sequestering capacity of the community is low, the electricity will switch off after a few seconds
though it may be long enough for what you need to do.

If on the other hand you absolutely must have electricity (e.g. you hear an intruder in your apartment and you
must switch on your light at full power) then you might want to choose selfishwhich will give you as much
power as your appliance needs. BUT, if you harm the communitys carbon footprint (i.e. it goes from negative
to positive) then the Natural Fuse system will KILL SOMEBODY ELSES PLANT!

Each unit actually has three lives to lose, before which a vinegar shot is dispensed to the unlucky plant. So
as it loses each life an email is sent both to the owner and the owner that sent a kill signal; this provides
the capability to communicate and explain their situations to each other prior to final execution of the plant.

Peoples decisions to be selfish or not have a visceral impact on others in the community. By networking
Natural Fuses together, people share their capacity & take advantage of carbon-sinking-surplus in the system
since not all Natural Fuses will be in use at any one time. If people cooperate on energy expenditure then the
plants thrive (and everyone may use more energy); but if they dont then the network starts to kill plants, thus
diminishing the networks electrical capacity.

Matthew Fuller: The documentation of the experimental stages in the development of the design include a
lot of footage of dead and withering plants as you test potential plants and how fast they can be killed by the
application of vinegar to their various growth media. The idea of sustainable technology tends to suggest a
narrative of improvement in which the basic infrastructures of western society can remain untouched, indeed
globalised, whilst their modes of production and consumption are to be made kinder and gentler. Your homely
landscapes of poisoned soils and houseplant-scaled deforestation at once poses the idea of individual solutions,
of ingenuity in handling and testing them, but also perhaps stages it in terms of fundamental and multilayered
problems that are incommensurable with contemporary visions of an easy energy future?

Usman Haque: Im interested in the situation well described by game theorys prisoners dilemma. It is sometimes
used to explain why it is so difficult for human beings to take coherent decisive action with respect to tackling the
issues surrounding the environment and climate change: whoever makes the first move towards tackling global
problems in the short term is bound to suffer the most (this is unsurprisingly most often expressed in economic
terms). Prisoners dilemma shows how it is quite possible for us to make logical decisions that appear to be in
our own interest, but which, when viewed from a global perspective are actually counter to our own interests.

But initiatives like the Grameen bank in Bangladesh and other micro-credit systems have provided intriguing
strategies for socializing risk. In the Grameen bank, for example, although individuals take out loans, the
community as a whole is responsible for repaying themthis partly relies on peer-pressure with respect
to ensuring that individuals repay, but also partly on the idea that there will be a collective attempt to help
out an individual in time of need. Im interested in exporting this kind of approach to the debt that we owe
to natural resources.

The point is that there is no easy energy future. Weve got to stop trying to sell people the idea that there are
obvious ways to deal with the kinds of complex systems that govern both our social and environmental lives.
 43

It is often expressed that it is the task of designers to make things simple for people which I find patronizing
and counter-productive. If anything it is the task of designers to show how complex things are, and to help
build tools for dealing with that complexity (which is the basic function of the perceptual systems we are
endowed with anyway).

Whether it is bio-fuels on one hand (which for a brief moment seemed to be an obvious solution) or extensive
government subsidies (in the UK) for homeowners installing solar panels (which, when you do the math,
makes little economic sense, and merely makes people feel happy theyre doing something), we keep
discovering that the easy option has detrimental consequences.

Systems designed by tacit knowledge and slow custom-based development (such as the evolved designs of
unpowered ships and boats) often allow, within a general approach of precautionary over-engineering, for
certain components, usually the cheapest and easiest to replace, to be the first that will break under particular
stresses thus saving the larger structure. Within a sailing ship, these might be smaller cords attached to the
larger stays holding a sail in place. These would snap if a wind suddenly became too strong, in a way that
might otherwise damage the mast or sail. Power would be lost, but the core parts of the structure would
remain undamaged. This design to fail approach is quite different from the imperative for graceful degradation
often found in computing and HCI, where crashes are seen as abhorrent and problems are sublimated. But
it is also different from the fail-free design approach such as those developed on the bases of highly engineered
but mathematically driven and ostensibly optimized design which imagines problems can be simulated out.
In consumer electronics the fuse, embedded in the plug, is of course the part designed to fail if an electrical
surge is encountered. I wonder with this project if there is a more general ethic of brokenness that you
subscribe to in design?

This is an intriguing way to look at it, and I hadnt really considered Natural Fuse in those terms. But, certainly,
embedded in the core concept of the project is the idea of the canary in a coal mineusing proxies for ourselves
that break earlier and less expensively (in economic, social and ecological terms) in order to make it clear before
greater damage is done.

There is also an aspect of the project, not, I should say, carefully considered, that concerns the use of plants:
if we had killed an animal instead of a plant, that would be a lot more uncomfortable for people (and they
probably wouldnt have wanted to take on the responsibility, considering the life of the animal is in the hands
of someone else).

So using plants (apart from their carbon-capturing aspect) means that we can conveniently offer people
something that they wont need to worry about too much but which, nonetheless, grows on them - when you
adopt a plant, over time you become attached to it. So, surreptitiously, perhaps, weve got something into
your home that you didnt think you would care too much about but which you do actually begin to worry about
and have concern for its well-being. Plants seem non-threatening (in the sense of responsibility) but ultimately
become quite important to people. And this is intriguing since we tend to think that you can kill plants
indiscriminately (in a way that is not morally acceptable for animals), even though they may be extremely
good at helping us survive. A colleague has referred to this as horti-torture!

One thing that is notable in the project is that it reverses the genetic engineering scenario of the plant being
switched on and off at the chromosomal level by technologies working on biological material through the
metaphor of information. In this case, electronic systems are shut down by organic material. Does Natural
Fuse suggest some convergence of the informational view of life and a more organismic or ecological sense?

Partly, yes: but only because at heart Im interested in systems, and more specifically Im interested in coupling
systems. Most of my work looks at how we can couple human and non-human (I dont say natural because
that implies that humans are not natural) systems; electronic and social; ecological and economic.
 Thats also why, when we introduce Natural Fuse in a city, we try to encourage an economy of plants. I want to disrupt the
conventional economic approach, where money is used because its convenient. In Natural Fuse, people rent the units by
paying with plants that they bring to the exhibition or the storethey actually have to bring 5 or 10 Kg of plant material
which they leave behind. This is enough of an investment in time and effort that they must really want to participate.

(In New York, they were also able to rent in US dollars (ultimately donated to the Bronx River Arts Center), but the rental
fee was high enough to act as a disincentive and make paying with plants much more attractive).

Upon returning the Natural Fuse unit, they actually get their plants back (so in conventional economic terms they rented
it for free): in fact the way they have paid is by lending us the carbon capturing capacity of the plant they left behind
(which is applied to a very slowly brewing cup of coffee: it takes many dozens of plants growing for a long time to offset
the carbon footprint of making a single cup of coffee!).

Natural Fuse, San

Sebastian, Spain.
 45

An underlying argument of the project is that design produces social architectures. Every object stages a
set of more or less stable relations between infrastructures, resources, ecological processes, organisms
and technicities, that imply or require forms of community, of participation, of intelligence, that in a certain
way articulate the idea of the perfect user/s, or provoke encounters with the abstractions, ideas and actual
forces that are perhaps sometimes occluded in certain kinds of design. To say this another way, Natural
Fuse brings assumed ease of function, for the human user, painfully to the fore. Is this a kind of design for
inhibition or for knowledge?

I am not really trying to communicate something with Natural Fuse - its not that I want to say you must
conserve energy because otherwise we will all suffer. I think such strictures are counter-productive: we just
dont like being told we must do something. So its not about communicating.

Much more than energy issues, the project is primarily an experiment in the structures of participation: how
can one design a system in which available options are increased (e.g. you dont just have off/on, but you
have off/selfless/selfish) while making it possible (and more likely) that people will make decisions that
benefit the community as a whole. (See reference to prisoners dilemma above). I cant say that its necessarily
been a total success: we usually leave the actual kill function switched off for the first few days after launch
simply because it takes people a while to fully grasp that they may be killing other peoples plants on the basis
of their own decisions. And, interestingly, the demo unit left in the store or exhibition, which people feel no
ownership ofwas constantly left by visitors in selfish mode, to the extent that we had to remove it from
the network calculation because otherwise it would have always anonymously killed other peoples plants.

Clearly, as a designer, I have some idea of what I consider desirable goals for the kinds of things that I hope
people do. I would like people to act in a way that benefits the community as a whole. And it finds me unusually
optimistic: I feel that a project like Natural Fuse shows that people can make altruistic decisions in order not
to harm people they dont know.

In terms of participation the point is to involve people actively in the processes of decision-making and also
in the processes of carbon-capturing/energy reduction.

One of the major problems that I see in the so-called climate debate is that we are constantly told that there is
plenty of data out there for us to consume and process, and that conclusions should be obvious or self-evident.
But it is very difficult for ordinary people to form their own opinions about environmental and energy issuesthey
are confronted with so many dozens of valid explanations, visualizations and extrapolations of the data from a
variety of authority figures (politicians, scientists, media figures) but much of it is conflicting or contradictory.
Authority figures try to tell them what to believebut the authority figures dont all agree which means people just
opt out.

I think it is vital for people to be able to participate in the process of evidence-gathering: partly so that they
can question the standards of evidence, partly so that they can become part of a solution, but also so that
they can understand the methodological limitations to any data-acquisition (and carbon-capturing) process.
In Natural Fuse when a plant dies any carbon sequestered during the growth period is, in the absence of
continued sequestration (e.g. by sealing it deep within the earth), soon released back into the atmosphere. A
zero-sum situation depends entirely on where the arbitrary boundaries of the system are drawn. So what
might you do with your plant? Eat it? Bury it? Weave it? Of course eating it results in carbon dioxide output
from the body (exhalation, excretion, etc.); burying it takes a lot of energy; weaving it might be an optionbut
that becomes very object or product oriented.

It is important to understand the cascading consequences that sets of decisions can have: first at a local level
and later at a global level t
08
From here to infinity:
Make-Believe and Virtuality On
the Japanese Driving Range
John Zissovici
John Zissovici is Associate Professor at Cornell University where he teaches architectural
design and courses that deal with the impact of digital media on architectural thinking. His
current research on imagescape urbanism brings into alignment his various teaching interests
and has resulted in award-winning short films using images culled from Google Earth. His
architectural work includes built projects, competitions and speculative work, and has been
published in Japan, Austria, Germany, Ireland, and the U.S. His large-scale installations
involving digital media, robotics, and video have been exhibited at the Phoenix Museum of Art,
The Burchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY, Tsing Ha University in Beijing, and the Johnson
Museum of Art in Ithaca, NY.

Introduction
At one blow, they become the hollow mold from which the image of modernity was cast.1
Driving ranges mark the crossing point along the figure-eight shaped path whose two curved
ends correspond to the earliest appearance of the golf course in Japan and the emerging
contemporary phenomenon of virtual golf. The Japanese driving range represents both the
intersection of post-enlightenment Western ideas about nature, expressed in picturesque
landscape paintings and played out on the golf course, and the Zen gardens abstract
explorations of the pure space of the image. Their conflation produces a displaced and
displayed landscape that is for the eye and the ball only, a new yet vaguely familiar synthetic
hybrid that is already both too flat and too three-dimensional. As an instrument for processing
space into image, the driving range is both a model and a privileged vantage point for
examining the transformative possibilities of architecture. The driving range, as strategic
set-up that negotiates between architecture and the representational elements of the
landscapes of golf, also suggests alternative models to the purely representational, or totally
virtual leisure-fueled environments of the 21st century, embodied by virtual golf.

Golf is first introduced in Japan, a country with deeply rooted landscape traditions by the
British, just after the turn of the century. Though readily accepted from the beginning, there
were still only about 23 golf courses at the beginning of World War II, all faithful to Western
models, and mostly designed by Western course architects. By 1956, only the number has
changed, increasing to 72. The driving ranges sudden appearance around this time marks
Japans inevitable appropriation of the game, and signals a broader shift towards an
increasingly mediated field of deconstructed action that gradually becomes a prominent
feature of Japanese urban life. Its eventual disappearance from the consciousness of
 47

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

Practice
Practice fractures the spatial and temporal continuity of golf and replaces the epic journey
of the player hitting one ball into 18 consecutive holes, with the repetition of the drive from
a single point. With the linear narrative of the 18-hole journey through a mythic landscape
suspended, the driving range is free to propose its own space and scene through the two or
three greens artfully dispersed at various distances from the stationary golfer, but too close
to each other to be mistaken for the real thing.

Progress, precisely measured by distance traveled with the fewest swings along the folded
linked lines of the 18-hole course, must find a new definition on the driving range. Here
accomplishment is registered through the number of balls hit towards the greens, precisely
reflected by the amount of money fed into the automatic ball dispensing machines. The
inversion of paying for the ball one hits, or more precisely its retrieval from a space one no
longer moves through, rather than the upkeep of endless stretches of perfectly manicured
landscape, suggests that at the driving range, with each new ball, one has already started
to reel in the landscape.

Transformation
a contemporary golf course is already a second-order imagea landscape sculpture that
mimics a painting in the landscape tradition.3 Privacy on the driving range is a mental
construct, the meditative zone a golfer creates for the drive through the agency of the swing.
With its compressed yet airy spatiality, and the spirituality of the practice of the swing, the
driving range reveals unexpected affinities with traditional Zen gardens. The deceptively
simple set-up of the player in front of a net-enclosed, scaled down, synthetic reproduction
of the space of golf, only to deny him or her access except through the agency of the ball,
constitutes Japans ingenious transformation of golf. The driving range displaces the landscape
of golf outside arms reach, still within driving range, but no longer accessible, and turns it
into a scene to be looked into, the abstraction of an abstraction of nature, a model landscape
in which the mind [and the golf ball] can wander.4 The compression of the physical space
of the game, along with the players displaced relation to it, links the driving range to traditional
Japanese attitudes toward nature painting, landscape, garden design, and architecture. The
added degree of representation to an already second-order image seems perfectly suited
to Japanese sensibilities, for whom the golf course, like the scenic view is great, but more
admired is the reproduction.5
Tilted plane
The tilted, contoured, artificial surface of the Kyoto driving range, onto which players today
drive and chip balls from the multi-leveled Tee-house, is the hyper-evolved descendant of
the shortened, grassy fairway and green of early driving ranges. The operation that folds
the far back onto the near produces a layered, complex topographic condition with functional,
historical and perceptual consequences. At first glance, functionality seems to motivate
every aspect of this new nature. Each level of tee stations features ball vending machines
serviced by automated ball delivery systems, with screw drive conveyors that move up to
24,000 balls an hour from the pool of the mechanical washer, to which gravity, the golfers
invisible enemy, returns balls from the farthest corners of the field via invisible stream-like
channels in the folds and creases of the tilted fairway. Driving your profits higher is the
pitch, or promise made by ever more sophisticated American made RANGE AUTOMATION
SYSTEMS. Low maintenance, reliable drainage, effective ball collection, and a general sense
of modernity and cleanliness are legible in every detail. Less evident behind this veil of
efficiency and inventiveness are unmistakable allusions to the Katsura palace garden, a
mere fifteen-minute walk away, and to the Zen garden of Ryoanji, less than two miles further
north. Foregrounded by some 150 feet of carefully tended lush real grass, the artfully
scattered artificial greens, trapped ominously in a synthetic color field of blue and sand,
lead the eye towards its ultimate goal: the image of distance, the constructed dimension
separating the viewer/player from a point in the landscape. The farthest and highest part
of this sloping surface, by now a full storey and a half above the ground, is merely a denser
version of the back netting, folded down into the stretched illusion of ground, now at eye-
level with the equally ungrounded players on the second tier of the tee-house. Cars park
on the grassy lawn underneath it in a vain attempt to seek shelter from the sweltering heat.
The tilted plane, like the isometric construction of Japanese paintings from as far back as
the 11th Century, flattens space and merges the surface of golf with the city in the background
into a layered abstract image. The tilted, pictorialized field, with the holes in the greens as
its shifting centers, is the first step in making explicit the target-like character of the
landscape. The vertical projection screen of virtual golf is the last.

Typology
While the structure that houses the drivers, the TEE-house, draws its strength from more
than its functional clarity, its modernist lines and typological clarity and consistency seem
to suggest otherwise. As if modeled after clubhouses and Japanese golf resort hotels
overlooking world-class golf courses, the TEE-house provides the clubhouses comfort and
amenities, along with the golf hotels focus on the individual overlooking greens and fairways
from his balcony. As the first step in bringing golf in-doors, tees are distributed on elevated
curving balconies, reminiscent of the resort hotels balconies. With privacy screens reduced
to about 18 inches, the minimum height necessary to protect the adjacent player from errant
drives, the curving rows of players overlook not only the shared representation of the golf
course but also each other. Each tee is the tip of an invisible radius some 1200 feet long, the
guiding vector for the perfect shot towards a single invisible point in the distance, well beyond
the boundary set by the netting. From the covered comfort of the TEE-house you can now
drive your balls into the picturesque void even in driving rain. Weather as a factor is reduced
to its visual effects on the scenery. A chair and small table behind each TEE-station, replaces
the hotel room as the place to retire between buckets of balls. To bring the room back as a
useful programmatic element for urban sportsmen and sportswomen, merely requires
 49

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

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

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

Net
The presence of the real, rough, raw, random nature must remain yet remain not in fact but in
visionin the eye of the golferbecause, for Eden to mean anything, raw nature must remain visible
in the background transformed by the dialectics of civilization into the rougha symbol of that
temptation into which one prays not to be lead. 7
The driving ranges netting captures space and shapes it into aviary cathedrals, devoted to
curtailing the balls flight, while promoting the illusion of infinite space. The space of ground
reserved for golf by the netting satisfies the most fundamental requirements of the Japanese
garden: to be separate and enclosed from its surroundings, and for the sense of closure
never [to be] confining or absolute. There is always some visual escapeWithin its confines
ordinary scale is suspended, an ideal image of landscape.8 The city as the borrowed [urban]
landscape provides the mental distance to complete the drive cut short by the netting. The
net simultaneously fences out, and protects the city that has replaced a nature already in
short supply in post-war Japan. With risk removed from the equation, and the city standing
in for rough nature as the contemporary image and symbol of temptation, the allegorical
dimension of golf is brought up to date. The architecture of the driving range mediates
between the reconfigured game and its new urban surroundings. The net, effective in keeping
the ball from straying into the virtual rough of the surrounding city, now acts as a scrim
for the image of the city. More than just a supplemental dimension, the city amplifies the
exhilaration of the drive with the illusion of drilling balls, without penalty, into the crowded
city just beyond.

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

Virtuality
In the wax museum the past enters into the same aggregate state that distance enters
into the interior.9

Virtual golf begins where the image of the lone golfer at the edge of the carrier deck left
off. The implausible relation to gravity implied by the vertical plane of water is only surpassed
by the premise of virtual golf: to translate the physical properties of the balls movement
before it is absorbed by a vertical surface, into the image of the continuation of the balls
flight, now displayed on the same surface. In other words, to replace the death of the balls
movement in physical space, with a speculative, simulated version of its continued afterlife
in virtual space. The splash of the ball hitting the surface of water off the carrier deck is the
equivalent of the thunk coming from the screen in virtual golf. They both announce the
 51

encounter of the ball with a surface that is both an obstacle, and the medium to extend the balls Figures 1-6 are by Chad Gerth,
flight into dimensions that rely on the mind as much as on the eye. The moment of impact marks the a photographer who had spent
some time in Japan and was
appearance of the virtual ball in the projected image, and the illusion of its continued flight off into
also taken by the many
the distance is no less radical and disorienting to have an accent grave overe the first e. image of a strange and wonderful
train rushing towards the viewer, more than a hundred years ago. qualities of the driving range.

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

Conclusion
Virtual golf completes the cycle of implosion of the space of golf begun by the Japanese driving range
with its shift towards a single space, and elaborated at the Takenawa Golf Center with its emphasis
on the swing over the drive, or body over space. It also brings to its inevitably uninteresting conclusion
the shift toward the raw image with which the Zen garden, and the Kyoto driving range each flirt, but
avoid by keeping in play multiple layers of allusion and illusion. Seen through the digitally enhanced
rear-view mirror of our high speed present, the seamlessly joined ensemble of tee-house, tilted plane
and vertical scrim-like netting of the Kyoto driving range appears as a finely calibrated instrument
for the production of uncertainty. It is luckily, as the fine print on the mirror reminds us, much closer
than it appears. Powered by the energy of mass participation in ritualized recreation, the driving range
processes all reductive oppositional notions of East vs. West, city vs. nature, and real vs. virtual
into a formally elegant hybrid mash of this and that, the far and the near, the perfect model of
architecture for the often-conflicting needs of our local/global mediated future t
09
ISLAND PHANTASMAGORIA -
Exploring the Political/Philosophical
Underpinnings of Fictional Islands
and Imagining a Future of Plastic-
Pirate-Island-Utopias
Manar Moursi
Manar Moursi is an aspiring architect, artist and architectural theorist. She graduated from
Princeton University with an M.Arch. in 2008 and is currently working/living/breathing lots of
polluted air in Cairothis may/may not have affected her thoughts and writing.

The lan that draws humans toward islands extends the double movement that produces islands
in themselves. Dreaming of islandswhether with joy or in fear, it doesnt matteris dreaming
of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone or
it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew. Some islands drifted away
from the continent, but the island is also that toward which one drifts; other islands originated
in the ocean, but the island is also the origin, radical and absolute. Gilles Deleuze

More than 50% of the worlds population lives within 50 miles of the coastline, a percentage
projected to rise to 75% by 2020. The coastlines landscape of instability is currently under
threat of rising sea levels. On low-lying land like coastal river deltas, a sea-level rise of
just one foot will send water thousands of feet inland. Over the long term, much larger
sea-level rises will render the worlds coastlines unrecognizable, creating a whole new
series of islands.1 The new islands created by natural processes will not be the only
additions to the re-contoured landscape of the sea. While the sea eats away at our coasts,
we will continue to implant our coastal cities through the age-old processes of geological
prosthesis.2 In a future of climate-change compounded with a parallel growth in construction
of artificial islands, is it therefore possible to imagine that most of the worlds inhabitants
will be island inhabitants? What are the philosophical and socio-political implications of
inhabiting an eternally mutable and potentially isolated landscape? An investigation of
islands in fictive accounts, both written and cartographic, reveals key sociopolitical
dimensions specific to the context of island habitation. Examining two contemporary utopic
proposals for island habitation by placing them in the context of their historical precedents,
both fictive and real, will allow a fuller understanding of the radically different sociopolitical
possibilities in a future likely made up of island dwelling.
 53

1 Seasteading Institute: Swimcity

Source: Andrs Gyrfi, 2009

2 Synthetica: A New Continent of Plastics

Source: Fortune Magazine, 1940

3 Seasteading Institute: Rendering Freedom

Source: Anthony Ling, 2009

4 Aerial image of the site of the Burning Man

Festival as revived pirate utopia island
Source: NASA, 2005

1
I. HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS OF ARTIFICIAL
TERRAFORMING:
A. Governmental Refuse
The process of artificial-terraforming began as early as
prehistoric Scotland. The reasons motivating it rely primarily
on the political aspirations of the constituencies developing
the artificial islands, whether governmental, private
developers or utopic visionaries. In the case of utopic
visionaries, desire for political freedom remains the key
motivator, while for private developers, it is real-estate
speculation. For governments however, islands are typically
ascribed the negative connotation of dumping-ground. The
geopolitical implications of quarantine-prison-island are
understood as a spatial response to suspicion, threat, and
uncertainty. New York Citys islands from Hart to Roosevelt
Island are emblematic of this desire to isolate unwanted
members of society and undesired uses from the mainland
onto islands. Rem Koolhaas reading of Roosevelt Island
confirms this notion of island-as-quarantine-site-of-
exclusion: Originally the island was the site of hospitals
and asylums - generally a storehouse for undesirables.3
In the specific case of New York, the employment of island-
as-home-to-municipal-reform-institutions started at the
end of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it was inspired by
the British Empires isolation and transfer of its criminals
to Australia, a trend that gained currency in the Seventeenth
Century. The earliest identity of Australia was as a floating-
giant-continental-island-prison. Eventually, the vessel
which transported criminals became the final destination
a floating artificial-prison-island moored outside of the
city to house inmates.3
Prominent fictional accounts that depict this idea of island-
as-prison include Dickens 1812 Great Expectations which
opens with the protagonist crossing paths with an escaped
convict, whom he helps to obtain food and drink. Later on,
this convict is captured and returned to The Hulks
described as a wicked Noahs ark moored in the
neighboring River Medway.4 J.K. Rowlings fictional Azbakan,
the wizard-prison of the Harry Potter series, hints at the
geopolitics of quarantine on a physically isolated island
setting. It is portrayed to play a direct role in altering its
prisoners state of mind: [the fortress of Azkaban is]... set
on an island, way out to sea, but they dont need walls and
water to keep the prisoners in, not when theyre all trapped
inside their heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought.
Most of them go mad within weeks.5 The trend of artificial-
hulk-island as prison continues on to the contemporary
context, with two examples illustrating this: New York Citys
five-story jail-barge the Bain constructed in the early 90s
which stores 800 prisoners. And the Netherlands, desiring
to segregate its illegal migrant convicts from other
prisoners, utilizes the recently constructed Zaandam
barge to warehouse intercepted migrants.6
B. Real-Estate Utopias
Unlike the negative connotation ascribed to islands by
governments, private developers actively pursue
construction of artificial islands as prime sites for real-
estate speculation. The positive connotation of islands in
the public subconscious could partially be attributed to
utopic narratives such as Atlantis. Possibly the earliest
account of a fictive island Atlantis debuts in Platos
dialogues (circa 360 BC) as a naval power that conquered
many parts of Africa and Europe. Due to their isolated
setting, the Atlanteans developed greed and moral
bankruptcy as characteristics that distinguished them from
their mainland counterparts. It is implied that these
characteristics were the ultimate cause of their demise as
their island is finally submerged due to a natural disaster.
Numberless spin-offs of the Atlantis narrative exist, most
notable of which subvert the dystopic sociopolitical patterns
on the island which Plato depicts and instead, portray a
society where generosity and enlightenment, dignity and
splendor, piety and public spirit were the commonly held
qualities of the inhabitants.7 Francis Bacons 1627 essay
The New Atlantis portrays the island as a vision of the future
of human discovery. Ignatius Donnelys 1882 publication
Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, renders Atlanteans as
direct descendants from Neolithic culture, technologically
advanced and biologically superior.
Real-estate speculators seek to positively reference/
associate with these utopic-fictive-island accounts, some
even directly borrowing their names, with Atlantis-esque
projects existing from as far as the Bahamas to Dubai.
Further, residential island projects such as Dubais are
emblematic of a desire to achieve a so-called social utopia
in the sea. As stated by Anselm Franke: Utopia [is] imagined
as an island, artificially cut-off from the land - a place of exile
for the perfection of society. [It] begins with the establishment
of an extra-territorial space surrounded by social matter
it aims to leave behind. In the case of Dubai, the matter
left behind is a segregated city of unbridgeable inequality
between its expat workers and privileged locals.8
 55

3 4
C. Islands-of-Separation
While governments conceive of islands-as-quarantine-
sites and real-estate developers view islands-as-
speculative-tools, visionary utopists seek to capitalize on
the isolation of islands as a politically transformative tool.
According to these visionaries, dilemmas of political
division along ethnic lines or ideological orientations can
now be solved through physical separation onto islands.
Precedents exist in cartographers renderings of fictive
deluge scenarios to create islands-of-ethnic-separation.
For the contested land of Palestine/Israel, the French artist
Julien Bousac, proposes a fictional scenario in his map
The Archipelago of Eastern Palestine published in Le Monde
Diplomatique. The maps controversy stems from the
complete inundation of Israeli territory to create a fanciful
Palestinian archipelago. Bousac refutes allegations of
intentions to connote negative Biblical references, claiming
that the map is not about drowning or flooding the Israeli consequential is the Principality of Sealand, erected on an
population, nor dividing territories along ethnic lines, even
less a suggestion of how to resolve the conflict. More
simply, he explains, it is intended as an illustration of the
ongoing fragmentation of Palestinian territory. But this
fragmentation already clearly signifies divisions along ethnic
lines. Bousac heightens the irony by playing on the leisure/
pleasure association with islands: us[ing] typical tourist
maps codes sharpen(s) the contrast between the fantasies
raised by seemingly paradise-like islands and the Palestinian
Territories grim reality.9
A visionary map of Belgium is in the similar vein of imagined
cartographic depictions, where parts of a politically
contested mainland are submerged to create islands-of-
linguistic-separation. Ever since its inception in 1830, the
Belgian Federation has existed in strife between its Dutch-
speaking Flemings and French-speaking Walloons. This
map plays on the binary nature of the Federation depicting
a futuristic scenario, post-global warming, where the low-
lying Flanders region is submerged leaving only some of
its higher parts above water as newly formed islands-of-
separation. Thus, unlike the Palestine/Israel map, the
cartographer employed the less offensive logic of a post-
global warming world to propose a solution to the Belgian
conundrum.10
Capitalizing on this capacity of islands to separate politically-
divided people, liberals seeking freedom from the
restrictions of the mainland go out to sea to create artificial
liberal-islands. In the modern setting, this is mostly achieved
by occupying vessels/oil-platforms. The trend was initiated
as pirate-radio-station and abortion-clinic-islands. The
latter movement began in 1999 by Dutch pro-abortion
physician Rebecca Gomberts. Her Women on Waves project
seeks to provide reproductive health services to women in
countries with restrictive abortion laws. The pirate radio
stations began in 1964, off the Dutch coast. Since Dutch
law at the time did not permit commercial broadcasts, REM
Island was created to house Radio and Television Nordzee
outside of territorial waters. Later in the year however, the
Dutch government passed a REM law which declared the
seabed under REM Island as Dutch territory and led to the
dismantling of the oil-platform-island.
REM Island marked the beginning of a fast-growing trend
of pirate-media-islands. However, what initially started as
a desire for media independence evolved to a desire to create
sovereign micro-nations. Of these, perhaps the most
oil platform in 1967 by Major Paddy Roy Bates, for the original
intention of broadcasting his private radio station. Due to
ensuing legal battles, Bates attempted to declare the
Principality of Sealand as an independent sovereign state.
It was not until Operation Atlantis in the early 1970s that the
construction of artificial islands was pursued with the pure
desire to create liberal/libertarian enclaves. Freedom, the
concrete-hulled vessel was intended to act as the homestead
for libertarian dwellers. Due to a hurricane, the project was
aborted as the ship sank on its way from New York City to
the Caribbean, where it intended to anchor itself permanently.
Less than a year later, the Republic of Minerva was
established in 1972. The founders anticipated a republic
with no taxation, welfare, subsidies, or any form of economic
interventionism. According to Glen Raphael, The chief
reason that the Minerva project failed was that the libertarians
who were involved did not want to fight for their territory.
Ejection by troops from Tonga (who later on formally annexed
it), marked the final ending.
II. CONTEMPORARY PROPOSALS FOR UTOPIC
LIBERAL ISLAND HABITATION:
A. Pirate Utopias and TAZ
The projects of the late 1960s and early 70s set a crucial
precedent to two contemporaneous theoretical proposals
for island-utopias; the revival of pirate-island-utopias and
the proposal for competitive governments in the sea.

Inspired by pirate-island-utopias - secret islands once used
for supply purposes by piratesPeter Lamborn Wilson
proposes the concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones
(TAZ), that elude formal structures of control. To Wilson,
pirate utopias, such as the phantasmic Libertatia and the
more real 17th century Republic of Sal, represent the
earliest forms of autonomous micronations which existed
beyond the realm of governments: these pirate enclaves
typified proto-anarchist societies in that they operated
beyond laws and governments and, in their stead, embraced
unrestricted freedom.10, 11, 12
Anarchy on islands emerges in precedent fictional accounts
as the natural and dominant sociopolitical structure. Both
Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island for example, set the
islands anarchy in contrast to the mainlands structured
socio-politics. In the Crusoe account, the differences between
the Island of Despair and the mainland are panned out through
emphasis on Crusoes colonialist methods of replicating his
own society on the island. Crusoes civilized survival instincts
which propel him to build a private habitation grow crops,
use tools (an allusion to European technology), and even
make a calendarare markedly different than those of the
native island inhabitants. References to Crusoes political
superiority as king and governor of the mutineers all
reinforce the differences between the new, if rudimentary
political hierarchy that Crusoe brings to the otherwise
anarchist, savage society of the island. The motif of difference
between the socio-politics on the mainland vs. islands is
pronounced once again through the Stevenson account of
Treasure Island. Set in Hispanolia, an island historically
occupied by pirates and other vagabonds, the anarchist lack
of political organization and indiscipline of the pirates is
consistently contrasted with the virtues of the mainland
heroes of the novelnamely; truthfulness, loyalty, thrift,
religiosity, and discipline.
Wilson aspires to replicate the anarchy that is depicted to
exist on these pirate-island-utopias in his Temporary
Autonomous Zones (TAZ) proposal.13 Wilson suggests
concentrating on the present to release ones mind from
the controlling mechanisms that have been imposed on it.
He emphasizes the temporary dimension because
permanence deteriorates to a structured system. The
closest contemporary application of Wilsons concept is the
Burning Man Festival, held annually in the Black Rock
Desert in northern Nevada for the approximate duration of
a week. The project seeks to create temporary island-
utopias, free of political restriction, fostering radical
57
self-expression and radical self reliance.14
B. Seasteading
Clearly inspired by the 1960s and 1970s projects, seasteading
is the other contemporary proposal for liberal/libertarian
island-dwelling. A portmanteau of sea and homesteading,
seasteading proposes creating permanent dwellings at sea,
called seasteads, outside territories claimed by the
governments of any standing nation.15 On April 15, 2008, Wayne
Gramlich and Patri Friedman founded The Seasteading
Institute, an organization dedicated to creating experimental
mobile ocean communities with diverse social, political, and
legal systems. With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder
Peter Thiel, the Institute is actively researching the idea of
an entrepreneurial, DIY mentality to creating oceanic city-
states. In an official statement, Thiel explains his motivation
for supporting the mission of the Institute: Decades from
now, those looking back at the start of the century will
understand that Seasteading was an obvious step towards
encouraging the development of more efficient, practical
public-sector models around the world.16 The seasteads
propose a revolutionary concept of competitive governments
modeled on the competitive free-market economic system.
For the young Friedman government is an industry with a
really high barrier to entry, you basically need to win an election
or a revolution to try a new one.17 With his seasteading mobile
homes, You can change your government without having to
leave your house, and islands compete to attract citizens.
Conclusion
In a post global-warming world, where possibly the only
relic of human existence left will likely be non-biodegrad-
able artificial plastic, is it possible to imagine living on
plastic-garbage-patches as islands?18 What are the phil-
osophical and socio-political implications of island-inhab-
itation? From the surveyed literature of fictive and artifi-
cial islands, we can foretell some of the possibilities. The
simultaneous forces of isolation and constant flux due to
a precarious coastal position will potentially allow society
to replace rigid ideals of structure and classical notions
of stability, with flexibility, responsiveness and adapt-
ability. The possibilities of new forms of governance, and
of existence in smaller networks due to mobility will thus
become an increasingly attractive option for a future that
is less politically restrictive t
10
Towards Diversity in
Data Culture
Marc Bhlen

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

Stone Mountain Ultra-Secure Tier-4 Data Center

Mega-Complex (SMDC)

Twenty times the size of the Cheyenne Mountain

Operation Center in Colorado, SMDC will, upon
completion, set new standards for ultra secure data
storage. Carved into a mountain of limestone, SMDC
will have on site water and sewage treatment, a fire
station, a helipad, a power plant, medical facilities,
as well as police powers granted by the state to onsite
security personnel. The facilities are all under the
tightest surveillance, resulting in indefinite self-
sustainability for complete stand-alone operability
no matter what happens off-site.
http://stonemountaindataplex.com/index.htm

Photo: Courtesy L. Russell, Stone Mountain Data Center

Urbanites across the world are inundated with information. The emerging information culture growing in its wake constitutes
a fundamental element of 21st Century living. Data, the digital residue of information, has crept into the 21st Century with
astonishing ease, promising conveniences never before thought possible. Overwhelmed by information made both perceptible
and ceaseless, a public Attention Deficit Disorder has taken hold. It seems impossible to objectively measure the benefit
of data availability against its invisible and time-delayed side effects. And these include nothing less than an unprecedented
erosion of privacy and the commercialization of the public sphere.1
 59

A data culture malaise

There is nothing personal about computing other than the bacteria communities that coat your keyboard.2 While
most people seem to agree that computing has gone public, there is less agreement on which aspects of computing
and information remain most relevant. This might be due in part to the fuzziness of the concept of information that
spans electrical, biological, and logical media as well as factual, subjective and intangible things. The Shannonian-
mathematical concept of semantic-independent information (informed by prior work in thermodynamics) is a
different creature altogether from the linguistic concept of semantic-dependent information (informed by prior
work in linguistics). But information with real-world saliency is more, a thing that spans both domains, despite
attempts to conveniently reduce it to a single category.3 One might be tempted, for example, to disregard the
interdependence between the technical framework that makes mobile phone communication possible and the
cultural habits that form around it, but dropped calls and subsequent mutual accusations of rudeness remind us
that the technical and the social remain intertwined.

The twining is less of a problem than the polarizing positions the technical-commercial communities and the critical
socially engaged communities operate from. Sociologists and activists have been expending plenty of effort debating
just how asymmetric the power relations inherent in the Internet are without building any kind of alternative that
could behave otherwise.4 It is much easier to kill your data than to propose, let alone make, new and robust models
of living with information.5 The information technology (IT) camp is equally complicit in the current data culture
malaise. IT still seems to believe that every social and philosophical problem need only be addressed by the proper
technological fix.

Metaphors of virtualized computing

Security in the Ether, an article published by Technology Review on the current trend in virtualized data management,
better known as cloud computing, is a good example of the state of IT rhetorics that accompanies the data culture
malaise.6 The ether, according to Greek mythology the pure air breathed by the Gods, the material that fills the
region of the universe above the surface of the earth, is as inappropriate a term for the atmosphere as clouds are
for articulating the virtualization of computing resources. In a virtualized computing environment one does not
know where requested computing cycles are carried out, or where the data that is produced is stored at any given
moment. But there is nothing cloudy about this. Data resides in real places. And these real places data centers
are owned and operated by private interests. They sit in the countryside in non-descript buildings that belie their
significance and energy costs. They are real, but virtual. They operate in the background, out of sight.

One of the most ambitious future data security centers is currently being built underground, carved into a mountain
of limestone. This rock-solid abode suggests renaming the cloudy ether of virtual computing more aptly cave
computing. Mark Weiser claimed that profound technologies weave themselves into the background of everyday
life until they are indistinguishable from it.7 Maybe cave computing is a consequence of information technology
attempting to fulfill the Weiserian prophecy by putting itself into the background in order to become profound, or
at least profoundly secretive. IT may be moving into the background, but it is far from becoming insignificant. On
the contrary, information like oil, is significant enough to conceive 21st Century war scenarios over.8

From virtualized computing to revitalized data culture

It is time the discussion surrounding virtualized computing fell from the clouds and landed back on Earth. Addressing
the disjoint between computing technology, computing experience, and lived reality requires a new literacy, maybe
a 21st Century compatible enlightenment. On practical terms it needs, urgently, transparency and openness. But what
even the simple concept openness translates to is challenging. It is vested-interest dependent as WikiLeaks disclosure
of sensitive governmental, corporate, and religious documents that delight journalists and enrage corporations,
including the US Army, prove.9
 2a

2b
The Open Biometrics Project - 2002
The Open Biometrics Project challenges the fabrication of
automated biometric identification. Biometric classification is a
probability problem with social consequences. Consequently, this
system does not interpret its own results in a reductionist binary
manner, but shares its probabilistic result such that people can
see its intermediate results and decision making approach. In the
finger print analysis application here, the system calculates the
information currently used (in many finger print systems) to describe
a finger print: the characteristic points along with their image
coordinates, type code (ridge ending or bifurcation) and likelihood
(as a percentage) in a color-coded map (dots on the fingerprint in
variations of blue, above).

The popularization of biometric analysis has made the procedure of

2a and 2b photo courtesy realtechsupport
collecting biometric data too easy, in the sense that the results are
too easily construed to mean what they only imply. Applied on a large
scale, such efficiency-driven authoritative approaches guarantee
that errors that do occur, generate confusion and fear, because the
system does not make its own operational limits transparent.

Large scale public classification systems must be open, open to

insight and scrutiny. The Open Biometrics Initiative applies this
philosophy to finger print analysis. Other biometric markers could
be treated in a similar fashion.
http://www.realtechsupport.org/repository/biometrics.html
 61

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

4
The House for the Computer for the 21st Century (HC21)
2006, ongoing (with Hans Frei)

In the HC21, observation systems share information

amongst multiple participants and consider their divergent
interests in the collected information. For example,
surveillance cameras watch for unauthorized visitors and
simultaneously observe soft patches of grass that the
house dog enjoys.
http://www.realtechsupport.org/new_works/hc21.html

3 and 4 photo courtesy realtechsupport

The German Hacker group Computer Chaos Club (CCC) has its own interpretation of openness. CCC released a proposal
for a Datenbrief, a declaration of data, to improve citizen data self-defense. CCC wants any company that collects, transmits
or stores any kind of personal data to disclose this data in full in an annual letter to those whose data they retain. 10 The
goal is to reverse the current practice by which people are required to request access to what others know of them and to
place the onus of transparency on those who hold the data. Because there is a cost associated with this process, according
to the logic of CCC, data collection should become unattractive and companies will have an incentive to reconsider, if not
reduce, their data collection schemas. However, some have argued that this well intended intervention will require
authorities to find everyone; even those who do not want to receive their well intended data declaration letters.11

The 2004 EU initiative on the Disappearing Computer offers a different view on openness.12 As lead author of the projects
privacy design guidelines, Lahlou understands that privacy design is best addressed in the nexus of technical affordances,
social needs, and common sense. Indeed, many of the guidelines are general design principles while others seem at first
counter-intuitive. For example, the consider time guideline opposes the idea of durability as a design maxim. For public
information retention systems, the requirement is to limit data duration through explicit data expiry dates. Like food, data
should have an expiry date. Of course, the best way to reduce data is not to collect it in the first place. Lahlous privacy
razor stipulates that only absolutely necessary data should be recorded. This is in response to the acknowledged problem
of data creepthe bloating of data collection just because the act of collecting can occur. But the sharpness of the razor
is blunted by the fact that absolutely necessary is far from absolutely clear. Nonetheless, Lahlous interpretation of openness
is significant because it expands the concept of open to view data to open to view procedure with the goal of providing
a mental model of what an information system is actually doing.

From openness to diversity in data culture

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

5a and 5b photo courtesy realtechsupport

5a

5b
The Glass Bottom Float (GBF) 2008, ongoing (with Joe Atkinson)
GBF collects real time water and weather data into a 30 dimensional
environmental descriptor and combines this with input volunteered by
beach visitors to a new metric that emphasizes the potential pleasure of
being in the water. This new metric, the swimming pleasure measure,
combines the strength of analytic data produced by computers with the
intangible quality of intuitive experience that human beings are able
to articulate. In the example above, the interview data, the latest fecal
contaminant measurement, the weather and water data all suggest
a good day at the beach. The result is translated into a color-coded
light with the same color scheme as existing beach flag systems (red:
compromised conditions, blue: ok). More detailed data is available to
any internet enabled mobile phone. This allows beach goers to make
informed decisions about going to the beach before they leave their
homes and to compare their own experience directly with the results of
the GBF system.
http://www.realtechsupport.org/new_works/gbf.html.
 63

which there is no instruction manual. While the individual is overwhelmed and helpless, collectives hold new
powers. Teams of workers regularly produce complex assemblages such as operating systems and spacecraft
that no single mind can grasp. But where the disjoint between perceptual space and information space is ill-
defined, mental navigation, even for collective intelligences, becomes impossible. Technically, culturally, we are
at an impasse.

The history of communication technology illustrates how the shape of information space increasingly deviates
from that of physical space.14 Books draw together information dispersed in physical space and the newest
network systems promise to collapse all information into a single point. The disjoint between experience and
information accelerates the opportunity to search and find, but it further removes one from the ground truth
of physical experience. However, the disjoint need not produce the kind of skewed systems we currently suffer
from. Required are conduits that actively acknowledge the differences between the space of the real-experiential
and that of the informational-representational. Making the disjoint operational, conceptually and practically,
goes beyond performance transparency; it is an opportunity to fundamentally reconfigure information systems
and change the way knowledge is defined.

But this process has yet to begin in earnest. The growing discomfort, for example, with involuntary data, data
generated without consent, is generating loud disputes. The problem of involuntary data is not new and not
restricted to electronic information, as the discussion of tissue rights (body parts removed from patients and
later used for research without patients knowledge) show.15 Those who collect involuntary data cloak themselves
in unfittingly casual self justification. That is why automobile manufacturers who let their GPS-enabled vehicles
send log-data discretely back to headquarters for product evaluation act genuinely surprised by the outrage
of their unsuspecting customers. But even where the collection occurs in full view, such as in Googles Street
View, sources are taken for granted.16

Where the disjoint between experience and information is not articulated as a resource to be shared and
designed with this in mind, new kinds of conflict are pre-programmed. If every human folly can be recorded
and every social transgression tallied, then the ber-precise data recording systems of our own design need
to be endowed with a proxy of common sense and generosity; everyone shall have his/her fair share of allowed
(and recorded) transgressions that expire as predictably as the earth rotates.

However, where the disjoint between experience and information is interpreted as an experimental design
space, radically new opportunities will arise. It is well known that machines excel at repetitive tasks and that
people excel at intuition and invention. But the fusion of information from disparate intelligences with
complementing features can generate insights neither can achieve in isolation. Procedures with heuristics
yet untested might generate new qualities from masses of data no human being can behold, acknowledge
the disjoint between experience and information while offering conduits to deep understanding. Even business
analytics seeking to integrate intangible assets into service science models, seems to share such desires.
Harvesting intangibles is but one venue to explore.17 Information resource management of the future will
need the kind of long term view that guided the conception of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.18 In the long
term, information fusion approaches could act along temporal axes to combine the present with the past;
along cultural axes to combine information across language barriers, and across species axes as only science
fiction might consider. Imagine an earthquake early warning system that combines mammals sensitivity to
low frequency fluctuations in the earths magnetic field with the best seismic sensors available on the ground
and in the sky.19 This is material for a new data culture, one that might, over time, contribute to a diversification
of the monoculture from old machine generated data we have become unwittingly slaves to. If new information
polycultures are distributed liberally, the information forests of the future will offer plenty of space for
creatures of all kinds t
11
ARUPtocracy and the Myth
of a Sustainable Future
Mark Jarzombek

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

In April 2010, Peter Head of ARUP came to MIT and gave a
lecture in which he showed this equation:
(CO2- 80%)
+
1.44 GHA/Capita
Ecological Footprint
+
Human Development Index Increase
=
2050: The Ecological Age
I am not sure I understand everything about this equation.
But I do understand the equal sign, and it is at this point
that I will aim my critique. The equal sign intends to prove
that the equation not only will work out, but that it has
already been worked out. ARUP has (so one can presume)
placed the weight of its considerable reputation on this. The
equal sign is an expression of the ideology of certainty.
1.44 GHA does not = 1.43 GHA. As to what is right and left
of the equals sign, this can be translated into another
equation that I think conforms better to the actual goals of
ARUP. Technology + Control = Nature. In other words, what
ARUP aims for is a combination of technology and control
systems that work in accordance with the lives and needs
of human society. It is a laudable ambition. But should we
leave it at that?
I am not suggesting that ARUP engineers think that nature
is something dialectically different from culture; they know
that the nature they produce is just natural enough (for most
people at least) that it cannot be mistaken for the artifice
that it is. The result, of course, is that the natural has been
evacuated of its naturalness. Everything, even nature, is
not-nature. Architects, naturally, will continue to ornament
their drawings with green grass and trees and with the
romantic image of a happy and contented nature. But we all
know that this is all so much smoke and mirrors, for our
globe is basically an enormous vivarium. But unlike the
vivarium of old where we humans seeand constructthe
difference between nature and its artifice (unlike the animals
in the vivarium who presumably are unaware of this
difference), we are all now living in the vivarium and
constructing its habitat at the same time. The controls and
the dials are no longer outside the vivarium, but inside and
part of our daily human existence. Every machine we operate,
in fact, almost everything we purchase, changes the dial.
And yet we want to live as if we were in the vavarium of old,
with someone else taking care of things. We want to live like
the fish, snakes and birds who can live an entire life without
(ostensibly at least) realizing they are in an artificial landscape.
We should not be too shocked that the nature around us is
an illusion constructed in tight alliance with the world of
pipes, ducts and valves. But we should not just assume that
this is a death of the natural world. ARUPs equation
produces two natures. The first is nature as image and the
second is Nature with a capital N. The equal sign gives us
entre into this latter form of nature, a Nature that is
rendered transparent and at the same time comprehensible
in the abstractions of science. The equal sign is an indication
that the new vivarium culture can actually work, that we
can live in the enclosure of the globe and also manipulate

its inputs and outputs. ARUPs equation is the governing
principle of the new globe/vivarium.
The idea that Nature is not out there, but that it is identical
to science is, of course, an extension of Enlightenment
techniques of observation, calculation and prediction. The
Enlightenment rendered matter as dead so that it could
be enlivened by the equations that govern the world from
their magisterial heights. But it is one thing to describe
Nature through an equation and another to fiddle with the
equation in our globe/vivarium so that it works out to our
convenience. Heat has to be released and recaptured. CO2
will have to be measured and contained, bought and sold.
Methane will have to be curbed and natural resources
managed. According to ARUP, by implication, we cannot
trust politicians to do all of this. What we need is a special
brand of trained technicians and managers who supposedly
have nothing to do with politics. If Aristotle wanted us to be
ruled by an aristocracy, ARUP wants us to be ruled by an
ARUPtocracy, which would reign supreme in the Ecological
Age.
In discussing ARUP in this way I am trying to separate
ARUPs ideology of management pragmatism from its
philosophical position. We are often so infatuated by the
former that we do not see the latter. ARUP claims the
supra-legitimacy of a disinterested science over the
distrusted human institutions of governance and as such
represents a form of disengagement for the more prosaic
world of humans. It is modernisms (and modernizations)
last great gasp.
65
But the equation promises what it cannot deliver. The equal
sign is a fiction, an expression of a utopian projection of a
unified nature. This means that ARUPs approach to
Sustainability is to architecture what intelligent design is
to the discussion of evolution. It is an extension of the false
hope that there is a god in the system or, in this case, that
there is a big equation in the sky. It is not a real equation,
of course, but a make-believe, a pseudo-science made by
scientists who are then oddly surprised that no one believes
what they have to say anymore. So why are we amazed that
climate-change-deniers are so pervasive when our leading
intellectuals play around with the equal sign?
The result is an architectural discourse about Sustainability
from a cultural and theoretical point of viewthat is
tottering on irrelevancy. The reason we want Nature (and
the illusions of science) to exist is so that there is a fixed
point on which to leverage design and policy, but that
Archimedean pointand the utopian project of modernity
on which it is foundeddoes not exist and to hold on to the
illusion is absurd. Just as religion is the opium of the masses,
Sustainability is now the opium of architects and technocrats.
So let me be clear. We live in an unsustainable world and
we will always live in an unsustainabile world. This means
that we should build and theorize accordingly. The first
theoretical act is to clear the air, get rid of the word
Sustainability and learn to speak honestly about what it
means to design in an unsustainable world t
12
1 emerge out of the invisible ether of telecommunications. We bury this piece of paper
Domestic space as a form of control.
Digital Collage using imagery from
Modern Mechanix Magazine
The Domestication of the
Prison or the Demonization
of the House
Michail Vlasopoulos and Petros Phokaides
Michael Vlasopoulos holds a diploma in Architecture/Engineering from NTUAthens and has been
admitted to Yale University for Fall 2010. His research interests revolve around the concept of the
domestic space in relation to future developments in philosophy and technology.
Petros Phokaides is a Ph.D. Candidate at NTUAthens. His research focuses on the colonial archive
and its relation to the politics of architecture and space.
Future
We place a prison typology at the center of our investigations, inspired by the exhilarating
critical stance of the sci-fi dystopia genre and moved by architectures unique property to
conjure up potential futures before they occur. We decided we would focus on a future
where technology -detached from its allegedly benevolent purposes- hard-wires the prison,
eventually bringing it closer to a piece of twisted domesticity (fig. 1). By doing so, weve
entered a path taken by lots of intellectuals in the past who, researching an atmosphere
of social forces, found in the prison a concrete embodiment of the authoritative technique
and in the prisoner, the capacity of penal philosophies to impose a form on an anthropological
material. Jeremy Benthams infamous prison design was an abstract machine prototype
to furnish the enlightened state of the 18th Century. A truly operational symbol for the
modern era, far from its representational, metaphorical, or even animistic predecessors,
engineered into a tactile experience of a building configuration. Following this tradition of
thought, we use architecture as a plastic medium to record the inner-workings of our
societies. Eventually, we shall look for imprisonment techniques away from institutionalized
forms. We dare go as far as investigating the prison we keep within ourselves; a drive for
self-confinement we all locate among our pathoses.
We cannot hide the fact that we have been subconsciously answering the question posed by
professor Sanford Kwinter: (...)what figures, it might be asked, serve analogous functions
(to that of the Panopticon technique)1 in the twentieth century?2 Thus, we came up with a
narrative, featuring a building that cannot yet be realized in its complete, intimidating form,
but nevertheless haunts our collective imagination. It is crucial to sometimes use architecture
as a way to crystallize our fears of an imminent future, as we so far eagerly expect it to
architecture in these pages, waiting to be retrieved by the sociologists of the future. This
way we shall debate on built matter instead of plain fears, taping into our Piranesque collective
unconscious. Ultimately, this chimera has to be built in order to be destroyed.
 67

Exile
Prison, at its core, is a machine to prevent escape. It is a product of reciprocal evolution, an arms race in a way, between
man-escapist and building technology. Its final form has been refined by centuries of blocking escaping bodies with architecture
and coping with the corresponding solutions provided by human ingenuity (escapology).

There were older times when interiority was a manifestation of freedom and security, and the exterior so vast, unfriendly and
unattainable that myths proliferated. The territory of the woods surrounding the established civility of the medieval city, was
infested with beasts and demons, ravaged by chaotic, infernal forces. In times like that the exile from the ancient citys walled
asylum used to constitute a very significant punishment indeed. The first of the architects ever to design a prison (slowly engaging
in its institutionalization) inscribed this uncanny territory onto the prison walls. The facades of the prison used to be intensely
decorated with gothic scenes of mythical creatures. In this way, the ex-urban banned myths migrated in the form of architectural
details, and sculptural ornamentationsa cutting edge building technology of the timeas an attempt to transform this
otherworldliness into architecture. Thus, the prison has molded the figure of the inmate as a creature of an outer residual world.

Later on, the control over the composition of the society was tooled up with the death sentence. This ultimate penalty imposed
by the authorities served as a metaphor of the same exile, subjecting the punished to the vastness and emptiness of the
desert of non-existence. The guillotine executions, staged in front of a saturnalian crowd imposed an unforgettable lesson:
a supposedly cathartic exodus of the outcast from the social body through the ritualistic detachment of the soul from its body.

House
If life nests within a house, the prisonthis cumbersome artifact of our recent Western historyis probably inspired by the
archetypal shelter. We owe Mr. Bentham the very historical moment when the corporeal confinement was manifested in the
form of a small replica of the house, able to arbitrarily sustain the biological functions of a human being. The cell block, a
space of prolonged incarceration substituted the old waiting rooms before death. There is a very thin line between a safe
sanctuous home and the hellish absurdity of the jail. In a way, the cell and the room, similar in form and function are both
bounded spaces, but at the same time stretch out the concept of the shelter to two absolute extremes: the ultimate protective
haven in contrast with the absolute claustrophobic hole. The Laugierian primitive hut will never be the same again, since once
detached from its romantic and peaceful setting, the same piece of architectural design could work as a symbol of oppression
as well.

We should then study carefully the way the dystopian vision of George Orwell penetrates the house and destroys its holy
seclusion through the introduction of a television set, able to transmit and receive; a predecessor of our modern
cybernetic human-machine interfaces. It renders the prison obsolete, since it is metonymized in a domestic installation
that educes fear, control and punishment.

Given the nature of our new post-urban condition, people do voluntarily subject themselves to extreme security technologies,
since living in the city is regarded by specific social groups as a hazardous predicament. Wherever urban space is considered a
source of fear and anxiety, the need for retreat, or voluntary exile in the core of a domestic settlement simulates a habitable
homogenous environment. Sound alarms systems, surveillance and monitoring technology coupled with prison-like perimeter
walls spread throughout the gated communities.3 The human body submits itself to the technology of control, only to fortify its
skin and destroy its porosity. The unearthly creature of Kafkas The Burrow 4 builds the same kind of a house for itself, that
slowly and gradually turns into his condemn, while digging deeper and deeper into its intricate labyrinth of tunnels. Unfortunately,
the mole-like creature and silent cerebral narrator never finishes nor succeeds in securing its handcrafted hollowed-out house,
since its temporary escape fills his confined soul with anxiety, inertia and a psychosis with domesticity. Theres an uncontrolled
desire for confinement and solitude here. An urge for nesting. This beast is a digger of its own toxic home.

Experiment
Architectures symbolic role of providing stable and ordered environments gives rise to buildings insusceptible to change,
immune to commensurability. But what if architecture is ready to sacrifice its benevolent purpose to society, to indulge in
 2

The figure of the

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

the quantitative study of change? By doing so, we may come closer to the institutionalization of the first architectural experiment,
in favor of an ultra-rationalization of architecture and towards a science of designin the words of Branden Hookway.5 Space
has long constituted an idle abstract platform for dynamic occurrences. It has merely been the surrounding material container;
an elemental objectivity, where the human subject takes place. What if architecture could be perceived as a technique of a
controlled environment, monitoring its own content? A real-time documentation of the way the body inhabits space, the statistical
account of its contact with the surfaces, the locomotion of the body automatized by a set of domestic contraptions, the neurological
fluctuations in a given geometrical space, the psychodynamic events occurring in an artificial plateau...

Our project is concerned with an installation of an elaborate network of wiring, communications and logistics systems that
form an ultimate, intensive and unprecedented connectivity All of this infrastructure that surrounds and aids our modern
way of living, tubes that transmit and receive, hold, mobilize or supply, crawl here inside our ostensibly impenetrable domesticities.
Instead of a healthy animated flux of the everyday life, we designed a suffocating overabundance of technology, reanimating
the chilling uncanniness of the space behind the cameras. Each cell is sealed shut with tubes, wires and cables, a Gigerish
6
metaphor for the grotesque facades of the past. An introverted home hollowed out of a short-circuited infrastructural tissue.
For these wicked purposes, weve blasphemously shaped the cells interiors in the form of villa-replicas of renowned architects-
Kahn, Corbu, Mies, etc. Here, a series of quality controls, anthropological, medical and psychological experiments take place,
testing architecture to its limits.

Astronaut
As far as the design of the prisoner entity is concerned, we locate the figure of the astronaut at the centre of our blasphemy
to reiterate Haraways Cyborg Manifesto, replacing the word Cyborg with Astronaut (fig. 2).7 This creature (neither machine
nor human) operates within a stream of information that travels through the wires routed through the control room. The
astronaut is actually a team of swarming humans and machines collecting data. The astronaut sees through the flight controls
statistical-mechanical vision. The astronaut thinks with the guidance of an elaborate group of decision makers. Our astronaut-
prisoner entities voyage through their everyday life using the same tools. It almost seems like a voluntary underground exile,
in the heart of the informational flows, in favor of the absolute protection and captivation of the self, much like in the case of
the bomb shelters in Cold War American culture. The machine here is still enslaved by the human but, in contrast to the
dystopian nightmare of the Matrix movies, the biological energy of the body doesnt fuel the hungry/angry machineit is wasted
in order to retrieve the necessary information. Information in the Matrix is used to nurture the atrophied bodies whereas here,
information is the only ultimate outcome of this experiment. It was after all the authorities of the Enlightenment that saw the
 69

new penitentiary environments as ideal laboratories to glean information from people labeled as mad.

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

Cockpit
What frightens us the most in our sinister solution is the very absence of a Big Brother. The outdated fear of a single face
observing us is slowly being substituted by the idea of a surveillance assemblage that comprises every single urge for recording
and classification that is internal to our very existential core. The type of bodily confinement arising in our era is not governed
by a single and absolute center of power and knowledge, not even in Foucaults terms of multiple centers or structures of
power diffused throughout the social body.8 As new types of surveillance come into existence, as the computational power
increases and as new modes of real-time monitoring, registering and classification arise, the face of the infamous Big Brother
still refuses to appear. The urge for power and control is gradually replaced by an uncontrollable lust for information. The
Big Brothers gaze, dematerialized, stores our collective memory as an alert optic nerve. In this real-time recording, our
reality is being processed by an invisible and complex set of devices, remodeling and archiving the world of the human body.
In this condition, the subject surrenders itself to the surveillance assemblage almost voluntarily, almost deliberately.
Consequently, rehabilitation programs are being substituted by participation in the first real architectural experiment.

Our technology can even measure the speed that architecture disintegrates under the ravages of time. In that case, the
surfaces that record every possible interaction between human and space are designed to be so sensitive and intelligent-like
that every thing happening during the day -however small, irrelevant or seemingly unimportant- can be collected, evaluated
or archived. All aspects of everyday life should then be examined with the same intensity of a house being scrutinized after
a domestic murder. An inhabitant monitoring his own inhabitation. A literal prisoner of analytical reasoning, engaging in a
mechanized introspection. And, as such, he consciously and eagerly draws the attention of the eye of states intelligence. We
place the prisoner inside a hollow center controlling a periphery of instruments that gauge his own domestic life, rendering
the subject a cosmonaut of the everyday life. Our prison possesses the form of a Cockpit; a figure of a super-centralized,
self-referential technique of control over a manifold of external parameters.

Soul
Treating flesh as the prison of the soul has been a popular naivete of the Western mind; a culture of dualities recurrently
positioning one inside the otherone concept being imprisoned by the other. The technology we cumulatively deploy is
capable of attaining every little piece of information, which once added up, constructs real, unique identities. It slowly but
steadily transforms flesh into pure information. This process of decorporealization that already takes place inside the
hospitals MRI, CAT scan machines and the militarys identification gadgets breed a new generation of people that harvest
this data for their own delirious need for a quantifiable soul. The dream of grasping enough data so as to build a final
modelif not a complete human avatar itselfis a persistent goal that has been camouflaged through different historical
beliefs. The dream of an eternal memory of life: isnt that what the branch of history or evolutionary biology aims for?
Data stands for our last hope for escape from our physical impoverishment and that is why we see in it today a newly
perceived source of transcendencythe stuff of metaphysics. Our prison constitutes an observatory of the psyche.

This prison can be compared to an ultimate systemsuch as the ones raiding the sci-fi imaginationwhere the system
usually possessing a womans voice of uncommon sophisticationcalms and sustain the human body through time,
preserving its life in cryogenic chambers. Recording every possible little detail or fluctuation in the bodily functions. A
specter hovering above the white surfaces: ubiquitous, female voice and ear.

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

Does progress look like a straight line or does it rather follow an

erratic path? Are there certain developments which were meant to
be or have they always been a matter of choice? What things have
been tried in the past and how did we decide which worlds came
true and which worlds were discarded? The Golden Institute is the
attempt to materialize a fictitious America that never was. Diverging
at the US election of 1980, in which Carter wins another term against
Reagan and is inaugurated as the 40th American president in 1981.
Shortly after, he declares that the United States would be independent
from fossil fuels within six years. On a scale that echoes the Apollo
missions, the administration directs vast amounts of funding towards
the development of alternative sources of energy, leading to the
formation of the Golden Institute for Energy in Colorado, whose sole
mission it is to make the United States the most energy-rich nation
on the planet.
 71

The narrative of the Golden Institute is being told across a range of media including writing, film, scale models and visual
montages. Each materialization aims to explore how the Institutes work influences reality of a different level. The scope of
projects deliberately ranges from planetary scale (geo-engineering) via the infrastructural level (the American freeway system)
down to the level of individual participation, for example in weather experiments with an intentionally entrepreneurial
undertone. Although essentially fictitious, the individual projects have been created in collaboration with scientific advisors
and move within the boundaries of the possible.
Played by Stuart Packer, the face of the institute is Dr. Douglas Arnd, its senior strategist. Arnd, modeled after a US Army
official appearing in a clip found in the Prelinger film archive, appears regularly on national television. He explains the
Institutes ambitions and hopes, for example how modifying the climate means taking active charge of the planet as a system.
Their modifications to the freeway system hint at a willingness to make big changes to infrastructural elements of the country
in order to accommodate new technologies. The Institute endorses individual participation in those changes and welcomes
both a certain do-it-yourself attitude and the entrepreneurial spirit by which it is driven.
 73

At the scale of the planetary, project Quartz deals with the modification of the climate. The state of Nevada was officially
re-generated into a weather experimentation-zone by President Carter after the Institute had demonstrated that storm
systems can be successfully seeded by detonating silver iodide-filled balloons and their enormous energy contents harnessed.
Very tall lightning conductors have since been erected in the Nevada desert and electric discharges are being harnessed and
made available to consumers. Furthermore, Las Vegas casinos have adapted and are now offering games like Lightning Bingo
where gamblers can bet on specific poles within a lightning field. A digitally montaged landscape painting shows heavy
thunderclouds discharging in the distance and an illuminated city of Golden, Colorado in the foreground.
At the scale of the nation and its infrastructure, project Opal deals with harnessing the energy that is normally lost through
braking when a vehicle exits the freeway on which it was traveling. Many freeways have been modified to allow high-speed
exiting so that vehicles, equipped with magnets, will be gradually slowed down employing the so-called Lorentz force as they
pass through a series of induction-loops. The loops are typically operated by a franchise like Chucks Caf and, if used
effectively, will get the driver a discount on a cup of coffee.
 75

Finally, at the scale of the individual, and building on project Quartz, the first car-based lightning conductors appeared some
two years ago and since then have been a common sight in the Thunder State of Nevada. The owners of these vehicles set
out to the desert during one of the weather-modification experiments in order to catch a lightning-strike. If successful, they
are able to sell the stored electricity at any one of the drive-through energy exchanges, which have opened around the zone.
This entrepreneurial attitude is being appreciated and is in fact being likened to Benjamin Franklin flying his kite to draw
electricity from the skies. A model shows a Chevrolet El Camino modified to be a Lightning Harvester for use in the Nevada
desert. The collapsible lightning rod is mounted on the back. The trailer contains an array of super-capacitors to temporarily
store the electricity harvested from a lightning strike t
14 Composition of the Earth
Studio And
Studio AND is a collaboration between Audra Wolowiec and Niels Cosman. They share a studio in
Brooklyn, New York, where they make projects that exist somewhere between art, design, science,
and everyday life. In 2009, Studio AND created the Department of Mineral Science, a pseudo-
institutional branch dedicated to the inspiration of urban exploration. The departments main area of
study focuses around the curious phenomenon of Urban Meteorites. Urban Meteorites are part of an
ongoing investigation into the creation of a plausible fictional material. Composed from the materials
found in the urban landscape, Urban Meteorites are presented as artifacts from an imagined future.

The Origins of Urban Meteorites

Meteorites are naturally occurring objects that originate from outer space and survive both the extreme temperatures
entering the Earths atmosphere and the violent impact with our planets surface. These improbable extra-terrestrial
travelers bring with them invaluable information about the origins of the solar system and provide a glimpse into the
composition of our planet.

As the solar system formed more than four billion years ago, primitive particles collided and clumped into increasingly
larger bodies. Some of these accumulations retained their ancient components virtually unchanged, however, planets,
moons and large asteroids melted to create differentiated bodies. Dense molten iron sank to the cores of these bodies
while molten rock and silicate crystals hardened into rocky mantles above the cores. Further melting of the mantles
caused a crust to form, as on Earth.

Meteorites are characterized by the differentiated layer from which they were formed. Iron Meteorites, for example,
originate from the dense iron core, while Stony Meteorites are formed from a once-molten mantle layer. The rarest
of meteorites, the Urban Meteorite, is believed to have formed from the thin outer most layer of the crust.

Urban Meteorites are silica rich, rock-like objects that are found concentrated in urban areas. Like all meteorites,
they are given names based on the location they were discovered. Because of their rarity and unique qualities,
classifications are given based on city street names by adding a suffix of ite or yte. For example, an Urban Meteorite
found on Berry Street will be called a Berryte and one from Driggs Street will be called a Driggsite. An Urban Meteorite
find is always accompanied by the presence of Urban Tektites: silica crystals that are green-blue in color.

There is much speculation about the formation of Urban Tektites, more commonly referred to as street diamonds.However,
scientists believe they were created by a concentration of energy generated from impacts on the Earths surface. It
is thought that the heat generated from these impacts is sufficiently great to fuse all materials present.

Urban Meteorites comprise less than 1% of all meteorites found yearly, making them incredibly rare. You will be very
lucky if you find one t
 77

1
3

1 Studio AND, Recruitment Letter to Jasper, 2009.

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

2 Studio AND, Urban Meteorite Field Sample Kit,

2009. Mixed media, dimensions vary.
In order to expand the plausible provenance of Urban
Meteorites, Studio AND prepared a number of Field
Sample Kits to send to young individuals living urban
centers. These kits were sent under the premise of
recruitment into the Junior League of Future Geologists.
Sent in a wooden crate, the kits contained a letter, a
2 field guide, and a small Urban Meteorite Sample.

3 Studio AND, Urban Meteorite Field Guide, 2009.

Ink on paper, 2.75 x 4.25 in.
The Urban Meteorite Field Guide, included in the
Field Sample Kit, is used to assist in documenting
Urban Meteorite finds.
4 6

7

4 Studio AND, Urban Meteorite (Driggsite), 2009.
Concrete and glass, 1.5 x 1 x 1 in.
A detail of a small Urban Meteorite included in a Field
Sample Kit. Following the convention of naming
meteorites by the location they are found, this Urban
Meteorite was named a Driggsite after being discovered
on Driggs Street in Brooklyn, New York.
5 Studio AND, Member of the Junior League of Future
Geologists, 2009. Digital image.
A member of the Junior League of Future Geologists
inspects an Urban Meteorite.
79
6 Studio AND, Urban Meteorite: Brooklyn Sample
(Grandite) detail, 2009. Concrete and glass.
A detail of an Urban Meteorite found on Grand Street
in Brooklyn, New York. In this image one can clearly
see a number of the constitutive elements contained
in this sample. These elements include concrete, Urban
Tektites (commonly referred to as street diamonds),
and retroreflective glass beads.
7 Studio AND, Impact Site Location Map (Grandite),
2009. Ink on paper, 5 x 7 in.
This map documents the location in which an Urban
Meteorite (Grandite) was found and includes relevant
field notes.
8 Studio AND, Urban Meteorite: Brooklyn Sample
(Grandite), 2009. Concrete and glass, 6 x 4 x 2.5 in
An example of a large Urban Meteorite found on Grand
Street in Brooklyn, New York.
15 Turning the Black Box into
a Great Gizmo
Timothy Hyde
Timothy Hyde is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of
Design. He is Thesis Director for the Master of Architecture degree, and Area Coordinator for the
History and Philosophy of Design concentration of the Master of Design Studies Degree.

I propose to treat the architectural mode or presence as a classic black box, recognized
by its output though unknown in its contents.1 So declared Reyner Banham, twenty years
ago, in a striking evaluation of architectures own disciplinary knowledge. Architecture
could be seen to exist but the processes that led to its existence were obscure, perhaps
even deliberately obscured by the guild-like habits of the architectural profession.
Impenetrable distinctions separated the products of the architectural mode from other
seemingly adjacent modes of design. This was not to say that the content of architecture
could not be taught. On the contrary, Banham argued, the activities and practices concealed
within the black box were precisely those conveyed through studio instruction, through
charrettes and lectures and reviews, to contrive a students successful acculturation to
the mode of architecture.

Banhams contention isolates a pivotal question: how should architecture continue to produce
its disciplinary knowledge? As Banhams black box, architecture was a mysterious entity;
visible, even palpable, but nevertheless resistant to explication. One might pursue qualities
it undeniably containedfunction, form, materialityor attitudes it employedefficiency,
honesty, beautyand yet come no closer to an overt knowledge of its operations. A secret
value system remained at work, encountered with clockwork regularity at crits: Sorry
Its very clever/beautiful/sensitive, but it isnt architecture, you know.2 The vocabulary has
been updated, but the sentiment remains a common enough refrain at students reviews.

Consider for example the architectural thesis, in each of its institutional variations, as a
focused inquiry into disciplinary knowledge. A thesis attempts to gain a knowledgeable
perspective of architectural knowledge. The black box would seem to present an
insurmountable obstacle to any such attempt, and yet the thesis historically and currently
fosters the disciplinary conceit of the black box. It could even be considered one of the
boxs critical contents, a climactic test of a students satisfactory acquisition of disciplinary
habits and reflexes. An aura of induction into the secrets of the guild has long attached
to thesis, from its historical incarnations as the Prix de Rome at the Ecole des Beaux Arts

to theliterallyelevated position of thesis students at the
many schools where their desks occupy the balcony or the
top level of the studio. As a process through which several
aptitudes and talents are purportedly assessed, but whose
participants, students and faculty, can rarely explain how
these aptitudes and talents are explicitly directed or taught,
thesis certainly merits the adjective enigmatic.
There are more significant correspondences than just
atmosphere between the prevailing formats of the
architectural thesis and the disciplinary modes of the black
box. Two of the historic limits of the architectural thesis
have been, on the one hand, the demonstration of a precise
competence in architectural design, and, on the other, the
expression of an individual artistic volition. A thesis
demonstrative of competence succeeds to the degree that
it reproduces the practices of the institution that sponsors
it. This thesis will look like a thesis, recognizable for
having adopted the design methodology, the programmatic
concerns, and very likely the representational predilections
of its institution. Such a thesis could be successful on many
levels, evidencing both skill and creativity in its design; and
it would constitute a black box thesis precisely because the
full measure of that success would consist of the prior
concerns of its institutional setting. The emphasis placed
on the demonstration of competence reinforces a mastery
of the curricular components already in place, and success
must be cast as their close reproduction. The posture of
this thesis is one of imitation, irrespective of any formal
novelty it might possess in its outcome, because it acts out
the processesBanham would say the ritualsof its
institutional context.
The thesis that expresses individual volition will similarly
look like a thesis, though in this case often because of its
charged unconcern for institutional dispositions and habits.
In spite of its potential antagonism to its institutional or
even disciplinary context, here again, the thesis fulfills the
criteria of the black box. It does so in part because by
wheeling from the institution toward the authorial subject
81
it leaves the former intact and unaffected. The processes
of the institutional context are not reproduced but nor are
they interrupted. More than that, though, such a thesis
strengthens the black box precisely because it insists upon
subjective volition as a standard of evaluation, a personal
knowledge even less susceptible to interrogation than an
institutional one. This thesis adopts a moral imperative as
it attitude, a posture that may be adopted or rejected but
that cannot be refuted.
Banham speculated that some hint of the inside workings
of architectures black box had only recently been exposed
to view, pointing to Christopher Alexanders self-assessment
that the tenets of his pattern language, even when adopted
by architects, failed to overcome the predispositions of
those architects; it had not change[d] the nature of
architectural design.3 Banham concluded that Alexanders
patterns succeeded insofar as they conveyed some
authoritative force and were modified into other standard
patterns in the event that those patterns conveyed a similar
but greater claim of correctness or propriety: In other
words, each such pattern will have moral force, will be the
only right way of doing that particular piece of designing
at least in the eyes of those who have been correctly
socialized into the profession.4
The black box thus seems to conspire against architectures
contemporary disciplinary interest toward interdisciplinary
and transdisciplinary explorations.5 Even a successful
revelation of previously unseen or unknown aspects of the
discipline or its institutions (as in a critical approach) will
likely maintain the prerogatives of the black box, which
emphasize the act of discovering rather than the
ramifications of discovery.
What, then, is the future of the model of disciplinary knowledge
represented by the black box? Banham suggested that one
available option for maintaining the black box would be to
severely constrain disciplinary pretensions. One could, he
suggested, admit that architecture was a discipline limited
historically to a lineage tracing back to the Renaissance
concepts of disegno, and by forsaking the claim of
architectures universal spatio-temporal relevance,
maintain the black box as a preserve for the reproduction
of a still vital but more narrowly-defined discipline. Though
Banham himself did not endorse this definitionwhich he
noted would be seen by some as a crippling limitation on
buildings power to serve humanityit would certainly
ease the current pedagogical burden, because the
distinction between disciplinary knowledge and knowledge
of other technological or social dimensions would be
sharply drawn, and the former would become more
obviously the objective architectural education.
But the outline of a very different model of disciplinary
knowledge might be found in an earlier essay by Banham
entitled The Great Gizmo.6 A gizmo, Banham explains, a device like a surfboard as the proper way to make sense
is a device created expressly to obtain mastery over some
uncontrolled or disorganized set of circumstances. And it
obtains such mastery not through brute force, overwhelming
size, or great complexity but through expedience, adroitness,
and economy. So the Hoover Dam is not a Gizmo, but the
Evinrude outboard motor that propels a boat across Lake
Mead definitely is.
The outboard motor that Ole Evinrude patented in 1911 struck
Banham as one of the clearest examples of a great gizmo.
It transformed the set of complicated mechanical and
mathematical operations required to design and install a
motor, a shaft, and a propeller inboard a boat into a trivial
process of attachment and operation. The boatyard,
specialized tools, skilled artisans and artisanal knowledge,
forges, and traditions, all these were replaced by the clamps
that attached a single piece of equipment to a boats transom.
The outboard motor thereby liberated the boat and the use
of boats from any necessary proximity to the craft of boat-
building, and so transformed thousands of indifferent
waterways into particular routes of navigation. More recent
examples of gizmos offered by Banham included the spray
can, walkie-talkies, and Clark Cortez campers. The signal
characteristics of such gizmos were their independence from
larger infrastructural supports; their inducement of a free
mobility; and their ability to transform, to recast the properties
and potentials of their operational contexts.
If one considers Banhams gizmo in more general terms,
independent of its particular instances, I would argue that
the gizmo exemplifies a distinctive species of design and
furthermore that it offers a useful conceptual model. (Let
me underscore that I am not suggesting that architecture
should evolve into the invention of gadgetry. Rather, I am
proposing that the gizmo mode of design could replace the
black box mode of design as its underlying conceptualization.)
The gizmo appears to prioritize invention, but it is actually
more aptly described as an act of re-invention. First, the
gizmo reinvents the context within which it performs, a point
Banham illustrated by suggesting that one could recognize
of an unorganized situation like a wave.7 The surfboard
organizes the previously undifferentiated elements of the
wave into a specific shape and pace, and therefore into a
known and exploitable potential. Second, and more
importantly for the present concern of disciplinary knowledge,
the gizmo reinvents elements of the craft or the practices
from which it derives. The Evinrude outboard extrapolated
fundamental properties from the craft of boat-building, such
as calculations of scale or propulsion, but reapportioned
and condensed them into properties of the gizmo itself.
The two salient qualities of the gizmo mode of design are
this appropriation of highly specific disciplinary practices
and this outward reorganization of an indifferent context.
It is because the gizmo inserts itself between, or better,
fits between disciplinary habit and contingent reality that
it may model a different epistemological possibility for
architectures disciplinary knowledge. If the task of thesis,
then, were to design a gizmoagain, not a gadget but an
architectural proposal conceptualized as a gizmoits
prospective architectural knowledge would have two
components. Its adaptation of existing disciplinary practices
by the distillation and transformation of the intentions and
capabilities of those practices, would constitute a knowledge
of architectural knowledge. The actual operation of the
 83

gizmo, which in the form of thesis would be its intended primary aim is not to reinforce existing practice but to
effects or outcomes, would deploy architectural knowledge reinvent it, a gizmo would be far better suited as an
outward toward social or physical conditions, toward human instrument of research than a black box. Because its own
subjects, toward other disciplines or domains. discipline would be cast as a source rather than a beneficiary
of knowledge, it would be more appropriate to the
The gizmo offers a distinctive answer to the initial question:
explorations of inter- and trans-disciplinarity. The
how should architecture continue to produce its disciplinary
epistemological potentials of the gizmo are, therefore,
knowledge? The gizmos double orientation, at once
considerably more appropriate to contemporary concerns
reflective and projective, produces results that differ from
both inside and outside the discipline of architecture. And
those of applied research or the iterations of precedent.
at the same time, the gizmo neither implies nor necessitates
The gizmo produces an outward reorganization, already
a renunciation of the discipline. Its purpose is to clear a
familiar to architecture as its social and material
path for the discipline into adjacent fields of expertise,
consequences, but focused more sharply by the gizmo as
conduct, and thought.
a process of reorganizing or reconfiguring a context. This
diverges from applied research because the gizmo mode In order to orient itself toward a future adumbrated by this
of design does not export an object or mechanism resolved gizmo epistemology, architecture would have to begin to
abstractly in one field to situate it concretely in another. slough off the accumulated effects that Banham identified
The gizmo emerges in three steps, not two, with the first as its reproductive mechanisms. (Something the discipline
being its transformative distillation of existing disciplinary has very notably failed to do even in some of its most
practice. This already is its concrete act of design; no revolutionary moments.) Not only vocabulary and technique,
application is necessary to prove disciplinary knowledge, but the presumptions, habits, and rituals that make this
only to extend it through the additional step of an outward black box discipline recognizable. Recognizability, after
reconfiguration of context. all, is not the virtue it may seem, and if the model of
disciplinary knowledge were to be transformed from a black
The gizmo should also be distinguished from the conventional
box to a great gizmo, one might have to spend a bit of time
renovation of precedent upon which the operation of the
learning how to use it, but one would also learn much more
black box appears to depend. The gizmo does not take up
about the discipline it transforms t
an object or event as a precedent to be modified and offered
as a renewed object or event. It carries out a very particular
kind of modification, which is the condensing of a prior
system of dependenciesan object and its contextinto
the confines of the gizmo. This absorption of the systematic
relationships of which practices are composed forestalls
the reproduction of prior practices. Instead, the gizmo
identifies and overcomes the limitations of those practices
to render them obsolete or at least no longer indispensable.
So that unlike a black box thesis, the gizmo thesis would
not aim to reiterate the ineffable as a demonstration of
knowledge, but rather aim to translate the ineffable into a
knowable and operable form.

Novelty as such is not a gizmo concern, because of its

inherent disposition toward re-invention. Because its
16 Fight the Google-Jugend!
Wilfried Hou Je Bek
Wilfried Hou Je Bek is a reader/writer/psychogeographer. At the moment he is
documenting and theorizing the weed systems and cryptoforest of the g/local Amazon.

We are miserable creatures.

We are stunted in our growth.
We are mostly naked.

Our faces are hideous, bedaubed with paint.

Our skins are filthy, green tobacco slime drips down from our chins.
Our voices are discordant.
Our gesticulation is violent, without any dignity.
Our language is like the clearing of a throat.
Our language is hoarse, guttural, clicking.1

We are savages.
We do not need search.
We know everything we need to know.

We are not like you. We do not like you. You are not like us. We will hunt you like a wild pig.
We will plunge our spears deep into your body many times. The spears will not break. Down
you will go. We are like the jaguar. We have no fear.2 We are fighters. We are poets. We
know things from up close and from nearby. You are a gluttonous office-mule. We loathe
all travellers and all explorers, we shrink the heads of tourists, we shoot the anthropologists
if they dare to come near, we will eat the missionaries if they enter our lands. Stay home!
Do not leave your air-conditioned rooms! Stay behind your computer! Do not come here
and complain to us about the mosquitoes! We refuse to be described, we will never be
evangelized, we are not the photo opportunity of a life time.

We slash and we burn. We drift from fallow to fallow. Nature makes itself useful after the
burn. Our gardens are in splendid state, the crypto-forests are waiting to be harvested.
We are not lazy, as you seem to think, we are in fact highly economic: we take what we
 85

need and that is that; lazy days. We live by what we can SEE and HEAR and SMELL and TASTE, we are hunters,
gatherers and gardeners, but we are ambitiousness too and we want to garden beyond the garden, we want
to see beyond what we can see, we want to see the inside of that what makes us see and hear and smell and
taste. We know spirit vines which can do that. We want to go beyond the sensory experience of consensus
reality, we want to go beyond the interface of everyday routine. Listen to what the shaman said to Manuel
Cordova-Rios: You must realize, my friend, that the deeper we go into this, both written and spoken words
of formal language become less and less adequate as a medium of expression. If I could arrange it we would
have a session of visions ourselves and then you would understand. But that would take time. Meanwhile we
will continue with indifferent words and inflexible modes of expression.3

Opampogyakyena shinoshinonkarintsi; you have long suspected us of apathetic sadness, you think of us as
mute victims of progress, asylum seekers from the stone age.4 Ogakyena kabako shinoshinonkarintsi; you
hate our silence, you are deaf, dumb, stupid and blind. Okisabintsatana shinoshinonkarintsi; you waste the
night with sleep, we take naps when we need them. Amakyena popyenti pogyentima pogyenti; we chat and we
rave and we drink real alehome-made, spit-fermented from the finest sweet manioc in our gardens and
take all the time we need to tell the story of the sleep-inducing tree, of the girl who married a jaguar and of
the boy who lived with the fire-ants. Amakyena tampia tampia tampia; listen to Jerome Rothenberg sage of
EthnoPoetics: Measure everything by the Titan rocket & the transistor radio, & the world is full of primitive
people. But once the unit of value to the poem or the dance-event or the dream (all clearly artifactual situations)
& it becomes apparent what all those people have been doing all those years with all that time on their hands.5

Let me tell you. I went to find food. Here I will tell to you. Now I will tell to all of you. Listen to me. It was a cool
morning and I started following the trail that begins next to that old banana-tree. I followed the trail for a time.
I spotted a tapirs trail. I followed it. I followed it for the better part of the afternoon. Then I lost the trail. I could
not find the tapir. I did not know where I was. I did not know where to go. But I was not lost. We do not get lost.
The Curipira was messing with my mind. The red-haired, green-teethed Curipira was clouding my inner
compass. The feet of the Curipira are like human feet, but they are pointing backwards: if you would try to find
him by following his footsteps you would walk away from him. This is the genius of a trickster! These are the
paradoxes that inform our philosophy! The Curipira is a daemon ludens, confusion is solved by burying it with
riddles, a puzzle will not fail to challenge him. From a piece of bark I made a rope. The rope I tied around two
pieces of wood, and the resulting puzzle I left near the end of the tapirs trail. I walked. After a while I suddenly
saw a creek I knew, my vision had returned; the Curipira was solving the string puzzle, the Curipira was trying
to free the string without breaking the wood, and had forgotten about me. That night I had a dream, a man
came to me in my dream, he said: Where you were yesterday, in the tapirs path, there is a log that crosses
the trail. There am I going to leave a stone. Tomorrow you should go there and get it. This is a stone for manioc
and yams. I never suffer from hunger. Dont neglect the stone. Give it anchiote to drink, because it killed my
sister. Take care of it.6 The next day I went back and found the stone. We placed it in our garden and our
garden has never looked better.7

Let me tell you. I killed the panther. Here I will tell. Listen to me. Here the jaguar pounced upon my dog, killing
him. Here the jaguar pounced upon my dog, killing him. It happened with respect to me. There the jaguar
killed my dog by pouncing on it. With respect to it, the jaguar pounced on my dog. I thought I saw it. Then I,
thus the panther, pounced on my dog. Then the panther pounced on my dog. Then I spoke. This is a panther.
Then I spoke with respect to the panther. Here is where it went. I think I see. Uh. I said, the jaguar then jumped
on the log. As for the dog, the panther pounced on it. The panther killed the dog by hitting it. Then when I had
gunshot the jaguar it began to fall. To Kaapsi I spoke. Throw a basket. Throw me a basket. To put the dog
into. The cat is the same it pounced on the dog. The panther pounced on the dog. This it caused him to be not.
Put the jaguar into the same basket with the dog. Put it in with the dog, he caused the dog to be not. He has
therefore already8 Sorry, something has come up, gotta go, the bush pigs wont wait.
You eat food that was frozen first and tastes like plastic. You eat a sandwich that was wrapped in cellophane a week
ago, but makes you happy because it tastes as if it is only two and a half days old. You eat white chocolate. Are you
people insane? You spend your days in office spaces the size of a toilet and they hardly smell any better. You spent
entire days without seeing the sun and yet you count yourself lucky. Because your hands are clean and your clothes
are stainless. All these things we see in magazines. You are writing and reading all day and you say it makes you
very tired. A stranger from your world told us (and we laughed and laughed). The shamans tonic evokes the infinite
from a cascade of vomit and bile in the same way the sun appears from behind a thundercloud. One day you will
want to know this too. A spell is cast, a terrible disease will come over you. This happens. Assaulted by sorcery, a
snake in your hammock, a frog poison in your lizard-soup, a hairy spider reprogrammed to bite you. Assault sorcery
can happen to anyone unknowingly entering the wrong clearing at the wrong time. Your professors are trying to
steal our secret names, they are spooks from the netherworld, you cant just come here thinking you can trick us
into selling our souls in exchange for two glass beads and a mirror. This is Kanaima truth, listen to Neil L. Whitehead:
When the grave site is discovered, a stick is inserted through the ground directly into the cadaver, then the stick
is retracted and the maba (honey-like) juices sucked off. If the corpse is indeed sufficiently sweet (sopaney), it will
be partially disinterred in order to recover bone material and, ideally, a section of the anal tract. The use of previous
victims body parts is necessary to facilitate the location and killing of the next victim.9 I have this on good authority.
A shaman who doesnt want to be found cant be found. I have this on excellent authority. Have you ever seen a
devils garden? A place where the canopy is full but the under brush refuses to grow? This is where the shaman
goes to work magic, where he chants his chant. Listen to what Jacques Lizot overheard the shaman chanting: Ocelot
spirit, come down into me! Hekura, you did not help me. For whole nights I pondered my vengeance. I pondered the
Vulture Spirit and Moon Spirit. Moon Spirit was struck by Suhirinas arrow when he invaded the dwelling, eager for
human flesh; and from his wound, from his spilled blood, were born a multitude of flesh-eating vultures. Vulture
Spirit, Moon Spirit, you are cannibals. Vulture, your head is polluted with blood, your nostrils teem with worms. The
dragonflies gather in the sky. Those who have ordered the demons to capture our children will receive my vengeance,
wherever they may be. Already the Hekura are advancing on them; already the hekura are rushing on them. Soon
night will come, they will sleep soundly, and the little childrens cries will ring out. They are many; the hekura in my
breast! May lightning unveil the sky, may thunder explode! However distant you may be, I will reach you; I shall
choose the most beautiful child, the one with the attractive smile, and I shall kill him. I, too, eat children. My hekura
will come toward you, do not doubt it, and they will tear the bird breasts and the decorative feathers; then my nostrils
will fill with the strong odour of the newborn; they will breathe out the stale smell of mothers milk, and my breast
will be like a carcass. This is how my breast will be! Moon piles up the roots of rotten manioc with which he makes
the cakes that he cooks in old potsherds. When the cakes are ready, he prowls around the dwellings and calls for
the children from afar, shouting: COME TO ME, I AM HUNGRY FOR HUMAN FLESH!10

Despite ourselves we have our Caribbean moments. One day a very unhealthy looking man with a face as white as
ash and with dark circles around his eyes came to us. He said he was from Paris-teri. He requested to live with us.
He seemed to live on cigarettes. As said, we took it easy that day and said ok. We remember him clearly because
all the girls were afraid of him. He told us that an ancestor from his country had learned from one of our ancestors
that our whole day is spent in dancing. He wanted to see it, but we couldnt help him. He stayed nevertheless. One
evening, when we were all eating trio of monkey at the longhouse he started to tell a story in a language so broken
as to be inhuman. What he was saying though, we found out after a while, was familiar, but in a strange way. He
was telling us where we got fire from, where we got manioc from, how the milky way was formed. This man was
telling us our own stories as if he had invented them! He had weaved many small stories into a very long story and
we never heard it like that. It was like a basket case. Which was amusing. And it was raining anyway. His story had
many continuity errors though and he wanted us to tell him what they were. Then he left and we would have never
remembered him if this other white face had not come. There was much time in between because my uncles fathers
brothers daughter, who I call sister, now had given birth to four children. He was very pale and very sickly. He was
always in the roundhouse after dark. Lounging he called it. He would say nothing, but sometimes he would pick
up a book and look through it as if searching for something. One day, when Sededetiu was telling about the coming
 87

Illustration by Lucy Cheung

of Oshosha, at the time the old ones ate dirt and nothing else, he was doing this again and suddenly he started
to speak. He asked Sededetiu why he was telling the story the wrong way.11

You ignored the twigs clearly broken to warn you long in advance. You ignored the crossed spears that marked
the point of no return. You ignored the waypoints. Your GPS could have told you the soft way that you had
illegally entered our territory. Your own science argues against you. Now you must find out the hard way. No
one owes us a living. This is our world. We are the natives here, because the place cant exist without us.12
Everybody knows this. We find you laughable, you are unable to make decisions for yourself. You are loyal to
a chief you have never met and do not trust. Your chief needs armed men to do the things that are supposedly
for the greater good of all people. We are never sure where falsehood and cynicism replaces irony and sincerity
in your language. A real chief leads by example. Your presence is not enough to declare us contacted. You
have seen nothing yet, but I like your sunglasses. Give them to me. We are not a tribe, we are a self-help group.
We are splitters not lumpers, we are not like the other cannibals; have you not read the monograph that was
published about us by the Yugoslavian Ethnographic Society in 1963? Your brain is too large for your skull but
I like your watch. Give it to me. Given enough time we can face everything the world puts in our way without a
losing our own way. We do not speak for each other as if we have one mind. Every tribe, every village, every
family, every individual person is able to speak for him or herself. You are not your own boss and who are you
talking to anyway, chattering all day long into that phone, asking for answers while the problem you have is
right here in front of you, but I like your shoes. Give them to me. We do not want to eat you. First you need
prompting to say the right words to announce your arrival and your willingness to perform your duty. Aju ne
x pe reiurame, how difficult can it be? Every child here knows these words. But when dinner-time comes
you turn out to be a shivering baby-faced coward. You cry and weep and beg for mercy, bah! We do not want
to eat something as weak and scared as you.13 We do not want to become like you, but I like your Swiss pocket-
knife. Give it to me. Obey the yammerschooner syndrome.14 Begging is the power of the Force.15

God does not exist. Nothings happens when you say it. God does not exist. See! Thats why we killed the
culture-hero of your tribe.

The Panare killed Jesus Christ,

because they were wicked.
Lets kill Jesus Christ,
said the Panare.
The Panare seized Jesus Christ.
The Panare killed in this way.
They laid a cross on the ground.
They fastened his hands and his feet
against the wooden beams, with nails.
They raised him straight up, nailed.
The man died like that, nailed.
Thus the Panare killed Jesus Christ16

Our world is not a green hell and it never has been, you need to change your frame of reference. Civilization
did not begin in Babylon, culture did not begin in a Greek temple, art did not begin in a cafe in Paris, nature, as
you call it, did not begin in the Lake District. Animals know things. When we first came here we observed ant,
tapir, peccary, deer, monkey to know what to eat and what to avoid.17 We live in a garden of complexity and
 89

peculiarity that has grown above our heads, high into the canopy, and this is the way it should be. Our gardens
look like a random selection of grasses and weeds to you. What you call weeding we call second rate, even the
Inca could do better.18 The entire forest is our plaything and your wilderness is our orchard. We are gardeners
in permanent transit, weeding and pruning as we go, forever planning the next trek. In our village nobody is ever
at home. The lonely limp dogs left behind leave the message: gone trekking. We love to trek, it makes it easier
for the girls to talk to the boys. It is fun to search for turtle shells and yellow and red macaw feathers, while we
live of fallowed fields and collect foods from the dump heaps of yesteryear.19 A trek gives the ants and termites
the time to clean up back home. This manioc left here will feed our grandchildren. This peach palm grove is our
Delphi. Evolution is the generative survival of the singular as a part of the plural and the result is a red queens
race between the weirdest and the monstrous. We, in the largest definition that can contain us, in time and place,
have created the forest in our own image. All the forest is a fallow. The forest is our art and our science.20

Our ancestors could never have believed that our world was being watched keenly and closely by intellects
cool, dogmatic and unsympathetic (Yeah!), who regarded our world with envious eyes, and who slowly and
surely drew their plans against us (Yeah!). Early in the sixteenth century came our great disillusionment, we
were all counted amongst the dead when the pananakiri came.21 We are the feral children of the forest (Yeah!).
The collateral damage of the search for that mystery land of liquid Inca gold (Yeah!). Doomed orphans of El
Dorado (Yeah!). We have survived the euro-germs, for now, but as long as any one of us dies from the common
cold, the measles or the flu, the discovery of America is not yet over.

(Yeah!)
(Go on!)
(Yeah!)

Earth scraped bare (Yeah!) ! Plunder and deforestation (Yeah!)! Rubber Rubber Rubber (Yeah!)! Death Death Death
(Yeah!)! Sold into slavery (Yeah!)! The state will eat us all (Yeah!)! The center cannot hold (Yeah!)! Anarchy unleashed,
chaos and turmoil (Yeah!)! Fire and pain, disease and suffering (Yeah!)! The shabono teargassed, the maloka
nuked! (Yeah!) Thousand corpses, grinning missionaries (Yeah!)! Deluded anthropologists (Yeah!)! Post-crash
Tupi-Surrealism (Yeah!)! Myth verified as history (Yeah!)! The blotted-out forgotten past announces our second
coming (Yeah!)! The raised mounds of Marajo Island (Yeah!)!22The garden cities of Xingu (Yeah!)!23 The lost cities
of Z (Yeah!)!24 The forest islands of the Beni (Yeah!)!25 The geogplyphs of the upper Purus (Yeah!)!26 They are all
coming to the surface like badly healed broken bones scarring the skin from underneath (Yeah!)! Red and blistering
(Yeah!)! Infected and rotting (Yeah!)! It all started with the wrath of Viti-Vit (Oh Yeah!)!

Viti-Vit was just like a person, he had a nose, he had a mouth, he had ears and he had two eyes. He had everything
we people had. He went up in the tree to collect honey. He went in the night because the bees were very fierce.
He went with his brother-in-law and his sister. Up in the tree Viti-Vit scraped his right leg with a shell. He made
his leg thin and end in a point, to resemble an animals leg. Blood fell down in the clay pot, the brother-in-law
ate it all because it was dark. Then he found out and told his sister. They left, Viti-Vit didnt know where they had
gone. Viti-Vit went home but his brother-in-law had closed the entire house, fearing Viti-Vit would kill him with
his pointed foot. Viti-Vit left. Viti-Vit went on an indefinite walkabout in the forest. Nobody ever saw his face
again. He took all his people with him. Everywhere he went that seemed a nice place to live he created long deep
ditches for his people. He advised his people to build their villages outside the ditches, within the semi-circle
described by it, the ditches should be used in the season of the cold winds and one side of the arc should always
touch water. Most of these ditches are overgrown. Viti-Vit now lives at the shores of the great Kuikru-Ipa
Lagoon, at one end of the ditch, where it meets the water. At night Viti-Vits footsteps can be heard there. They
make a dry sound when he steps on the ground with his pointed leg: toc, tim, toc, tim27

That is all28 t
Endnotes / Credits
01 The Irrational Genome Design Contest
1 In The Implied Spider: Politics & Theology in Myth, Wendy Doniger cites Pablo
Picasso: Art is a lie that tells the truth. Arshia Sattar substitutes myth for
art.
References:
http://partsregistry.org/
http://2010.igem.org/
http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/CAGEN
http://genocon.org/
http://www.riken.go.jp/engn/r-world/info/info/2010/100524/index.html
http://www.biofab.org/
This article owes much to James King, Yashas Shetty and the ArtScienceBangalore
iGEM team 2010. http://hackteria.org/wiki/index.php/DesignWorkshop2010
02 Shaping Eternity: the Preservation of Lenins Body
1 This text was written in the course of Prof. Marek Barteliks seminar on
Constructivism at MIT in the Spring of 2009. I would like to thank Prof. Bartelik
as well as my classmates, in particular, Ana Maria Leon and Nicola Pezolet,
for their interest and useful feedback. I am also thankful to Caroline Jones,
Rebecca Uchill, Marilyn Levine, and Igor Demchenko for their commentaries
and suggestions.
2 Lenins letter to M. Gorky, 13 or 14th September 1913. Quoted in: K. Marx, F.
Engels, V. I. Lenin. O religii. Moscow: Politizdat, 1983, 242.
3 IU. M. (Iuri Mikhailovich) Lopukhin, Bolezn, smert i balzamirovanie V.I. Lenina:
pravda i mify (Moskva: Respublika, 1997), 63.
4 Ilich Lenins patronymic. When used instead of a first name in Russian, the
patronimic usually conveys a greater degree of familiarity.
5 IU. M. (Iuri Mikhailovich) Steklov, Mogila vozhdia., 2nd ed. (Leningrad: Gos.
izd-vo, 1924), 14-15.
6 Vladimir Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruevich, Vospominania o Lenine, 2nd ed.
(Moskva: Nauka, 1969), 465-466.
7 In a recent television interview, Melnikovs son affirmed that this effect was
intentional.
8 Lopukhin, Bolezn, smerti balzamirovanie V.I. Lenina, 115-116.
9 This was not the first change of dressing style in Lenins life: in 1917,
having triumphantly returned to Russia from the emigration, he abandoned
his bourgeois hat for a democratic kepi. As Velikanova testifies, although 3
April 1917 Lenin arrived to Petrograd in a hat, in the official iconography he
was always depicted wearing the kepi. Moreover, later even the depictions of
earlier periods of his life had to feature the kepi. (Olga Velikanova, The Public
Perception of the Cult of Lenin Based on Archival Materials [In Russian].
Queenston, Ontario, Canada, 2001: 231-232).
10 Lopukhin, Bolezn, smerti balzamirovanie V.I. Lenina, 107.
11 See: Kak balzamirovali telo Lenina (How Lenins Body was Embalmed),
Kharkovsky Kommunist (Kharkovs Communist), 12 August 1924, # 183; V. V.
Lauer, O Sposobakh, Prmenennykh pri Balzamirovanii Tela Lenina (About the
Methods Used during the Embalming of Lenins Body), Kubansky Nauchno-
Meditsinsky Vestnik (Kuban Scientific-Medical Newsletter), vol. 4, 1924; N.
Melnikov-Razvedenkov, Pro Naukovi Sposobi Permanentnogo Zberezhenia
Tila Lenina (On the Scientific Methods of the Permanent Preservation of
Lenins Body), Ukrainsky Meditsinsky Archiv (Ukranian Medical Archive),
vol. 5, 1930, #2: 148-50 (in Ukrainian); N. Melnikov-Raswedenkov, ber die
wissenschaftlichen Verfahren zur permanenten Erhaltung der Leiche von W. I.
Lenin, Ukrainsky Meditsinsky Archiv (Ukranian Medical Archive), vol. 5, 1930,
#2: 150-152, among others.
12 Boris Grois, Lenin i Linkoln obrazy sovremennoy smerti, in Utopii a i
obmen (Moskva: Izd-vo Znak, 1993), 353-356.
13 Walter Benjamin, The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, in
Illuminations, 1st ed. (New York,: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 217-253.
14 Benjamin, The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, 224-225.
15 Boris Grois, Lenin i Linkoln obrazy sovremennoy smerti, 353-356.
16 Leah Dickerman, Lenin in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In
Disturbing Remains: Memory, History, and Crisis in the Twentieth Century, ed.
Michael S. Roth and Charles G. Salas (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute,
2001), 77-110.
17 Lopukhin, Bolezn, smerti balzamirovanie V.I. Lenina, 112.
03 An Architecture of Humors
Copyright all pictures (3D)
R&Sie(n) / le Laboratoire / (name of the partner according to the production)
An architecture des Humeurs
R&Sie(n) / Le Laboratoire / 2010
Scenario, design, production: R&Sie(n)
Associated to:
Franois Jouve / Mathematical Process
Marc Fornes & Winston Hampel, Natanael Elfassy / Computations
Stephan Henrich / Process and Robotic Design
Gatan Robillard, Frdric Mauclere, Jonathan Derrough / Design & Process of
physiological collect
Berdaguer et Pjus / Nano-rceptors scnario
Mark Kendall / Microneedles
Delphine Chevrot / Takako Sato / The Lift
Candice Poitrey / Physiological Interview
Chris Younes / Text Natural Machine
Jiang Bin, architect
Laura Bellamy
Rosalie Laurin
04 Illusions of Control
Radical Engineers and Reactionary Artists
1 Synthetic Biology, Synthetic Biology: FAQ, http://syntheticbiology.org/FAQ.
html.
2 H. G. Wells, The limits of individual plasticity, in H.G Wells: Early Writing
in Science and Science Fiction, ed. Robert Philmus and David Y. Hughes,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 36.
3 Jacques Loeb, On the Nature of the Process of Fertilization and the Artificial
Production of Normal Larvae (Plutei) from the Unfertilized Eggs of the Sea
Urchin, American Journal of Physiology 3 (1899): 135-138; reprinted in Studies
in General Physiology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1905), 539-543.
4 Jacques Loeb to Ernst Mach, 28 December 1899, EM; on the myth of the
hero in late nineteenth-century German science see Frank J. Sulloway, Freud,
Biologist of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 445-495. Quoted in Scott F.
Gilbert, Developmental Biology, (New York: University Press, 2000), 93-117.
5 Philip J. Pauly, Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in
Biology (Oxford University Press: 1987), 47.
6 Ibid.
7 Eduard Uhlenhuth wrote in 1916: Through the discovery of tissue culture
we have, so to speak, created a new type of body on which to grow the cell.

Changes in pigment epithelium cells and iris pigment cells of Rana pipiens
induced by changes in environmental conditions, Journal of Experimental
Medicine 24 (1916): 690.
8 David M Friedman, The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel,
and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 39.
9 Alexis Carrel, Man, the Unknown (New York: Harper & Bros, 1935).
10 Ibid., 299.
11 Eugene Thacker, The Thickness of Tissue Engineering, in Life Science:
Ars Electronica 99, ed. Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schopf (New York:
Springer, 1999), 183.
12 Andrew Pollack, Custom-Made Microbes, at Your Service, The New York
Times, January 17, 2006, Science section, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/
science/17synt.html?emc=eta1.
13 Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, Why are there so many Engineers
among Islamic Radicals?, European Journal of Sociology 50 (2009): 201-230.
14 Ibid.
15 Emmanuel Sivan, Why are so Many Would-Be Terrorists Engineers?,
Haaretz, February 12, 2010, Opinion section, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/
spages/1149370.html 12/02/2010.
16 SymbioticA Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, http://www.symbiotica.
uwa.edu.au.
05 Design for Decline: The Bank of Savings and Futures
1 Howard T. and Elizabeth C. Odum, The Prosperous Way Down. (Boulder,
University Press of Colorado, 2001): 7.
2 Mark Jarzombek, Architecture: A Failed Discipline. Volume 19 (2009):
42-46.
06 What Do We Do With This Future? An Examination of
Tempelhof Airport
1 Jonathan Glancey, Board Now, Gate Closing, The Guardian, July 26, 2004.
2 Nicholas Kulish, Berlins Airport: Shining Beacon or Waste of Money. The
New York Times, March 8, 2010.
3 Gavriel Rosenfeld, Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and
the Legacy of the Third Reich. Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism,
Volume 22 (2000):
The research for this paper was completed with Max Zuckerman and Frithjof
Woddarg and was supported by a fellowship from Humanity In Action.
08 From here to infinity: Make-Believe and Virtuality On the
Japanese Driving Range
1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland & Kevin
Mc Laughlin (TheBelknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
and London, England 1999), p. 546
2 Teiji Ito, The Japanese Garden (The Yale University Press, New Haven and
London 1972) p. 146
3 Dave Hickey, Folie Blanche: The Quest for the Perfect Lie in Art Issues,
November/December 1992 #23, p. 19
4 Mitchell Bring & Josse Wayembergh, Japanese Gardens, Design and Meaning
(McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, Tokyo, 1981) p. 180
5 Ito, op. cit p. 149-150
91
6 Ibid., p. 163
7 Hickey, op. cit. p. 19
8 Bring and Wayembergh, op. cit. p. 180
9 Benjamin, op. cit. p. 533
10 (Full Swing Golf website)
09 ISLAND PHANTASMAGORIA - Exploring the Political/
Philosophical Underpinnings of Fictional Islands and Imagining a
Future of Plastic-Pirate-Island-Utopias
1 John Collins Rudolf, The Warming of Greenland, New York Times,
Jan 16 2007, Environment Section, Online Edition. http://www.nytimes.
com/2007/01/16/science/earth/16gree.html?pagewanted=print
2 From wikipedia.org: Despite a popular image of modernity, artificial islands
actually have a long history in many parts of the world, dating back to the
crannogs of prehistoric Scotland and Ireland, the ceremonial centers of Nan
Madol in Micronesia and the still extant floating islands of Lake Titicaca. The
city of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec predecessor of Mexico City that was home to
250,000 people when the Spaniards arrived, stood on a small natural island in
Lake Texcoco that was surrounded by countless artificial chinamitl islands.
3 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, (New York, NY: Monacelli Press, 1994).
4 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press,
1993) 32.
5 J.K.Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, (London, Bloomsbury,
1999) 19.
6 Dominic Hughes, Dutch Float Migrant Prison Scheme, BBC News, Online
Edition. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7096186.stm
7 Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=2434.
8 Anselm Franke and Eyal Weizman, Territories, The Frontiers of Utopia and
Other Facts on the Ground. (Verlag der Buchhandlung, Walther Konig, 2004).
9 Strangemaps http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/.
10 From wikipedia.org: Libertatia is said to have been a free communalist
colony forged by pirates under the leadership of Captain Olivier Misson in the
late 1600s. Whether or not Libertatia actually existed is disputed. It is described
in the book A General History of the Pyrates by Captain Charles Johnson, an
otherwise unknown individual who may have been a pseudonym of Daniel
Defoe. Much of the book is a mixture of fact and fiction, and it is possible the
account of Libertatia is entirely fabricated.
11 From Wilsons Pirate Utopia on Sale: Sal... dates back at least to
Carthaginian times (around 7th century BC). The Romans called the place Sala
Colonia, part of their province of Mauritania Tingitane. Pliny the Elder mentions
it (as a desert town infested with elephants!). The Vandals captured the area in
the 5th century AD and left behind a number of blonde, blue-eyed Berbers. The
Arabs (7th century) kept the old name and believed it derived from Sala (sic.,
his name is actually Salah), son of Ham, son of Noah; they said that Sal was
the first city ever built by the Berbers Sale, became a Pirate Republic in 17th
century - a type of micronation with its own seaport argot known as Franco.
Like some other pirate states, it even used to pass treaties from time to time
with some European countries, agreeing not to attack their fleets.
12 Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs
and European Renegadoes (Brooklyn, New York, Autonomedia,1995)
13 T.A.Z. is also inspired by Situationist ideology. From wikipedia.org:
The Situationist International (SI) was a restricted group of international
revolutionaries founded in 1957 with their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th
Century European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated experiences of life
being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order, for the fulfillment
of human primitive desires and the pursuing of a superior passional quality.
For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the construction of
situations, namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment
of such desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of
experimental fields of study for the construction of such situations, like unitary
urbanism and psychogeography.
14 The loose working definition of islands Ive used thus far in this paper:
an island is an area of suitable habitation surrounded by an expanse of
unsuitable habitation. In this case, the suitable habitation or utopic (2000): 312323.
islands are the grounds for Burning Man, where one can freely express. It
is an island because it is surrounded by an otherwise hostile and politically
restrictive environment.
15 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading.
16 Alexis Madrigal, Peter Thiel Makes Downpayment on Libertarian Ocean
Colonies, Wired Magazine, 2008 http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/
news/2008/05/seasteading.
17 Ibid.
18 From wikipedia.org: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as
the Pacific Trash Vortex, is a gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific
Ocean located roughly between 135 to 155W and 35 to 42N. Although the
affected area is certainly large, its actual size has not been established with
any certainty in the scientific literature. Media claims that the patch is larger
than the size of Texas are conjectural.
10 Towards Diversity in Data Culture
1 Marc Bhlen, Hans Frei. MicroPublicPlaces. The situated technologies
pamplet series on Architecture and New Media. The Architectural League of
New York, 2010.
2 Noah Fierer et al. Forensic identification using skin bacterial communities
PNAS 2010 : 1000162107v1-201000162, 2010.
3 Michael K. Buckland. Information as thing. Journal of the American
Society for Information Science. 42(5) (1991): 351-360.
4 Christian Fuchs. Towards a critical theory of information. tripleC 7(2)
(2009): 243-292.
5 Suicide Machine, http://suicidemachine.org/, accessed 11th Feb 2010.
6 David Talbot. Security in the Ether. Technology Review (Feb. 2010): 36-42.
7 Mark Weiser. The Computer for the 21st Century, 1991.
8 James Fallows. Cyberwarriors, The Atlantic Monthy, March:59-63.
9 http://wikileaks.org/.
10 Chaos Computer Club, 2010. Der Datenbrief, http://www.ccc.de/datenbrief,
accessed Feb 11 2010.
11 Detlef Borchers. Ich will wissen was ihr wisst, FAZ.NET (March 5 2010).
12 Saadi Lahlou, Franois Jegou. European Disappearing Computer Privacy
Design Guidelines V1.1 [EDC-PG 2004]. Ambient Agoras IST-DC, www.rufae.
net/tiki-download_file.php?fileId=11, and http://www.ambient-agoras.smart-
future.net/downloads/D15%5B1%5D.4_-_Privacy_Design_Guidelines.pdf (2003
version).
13 Paul Dourish, Johanna Brewer, Genevieve Bell. Information as a cultural
category. Interactions (12, 4 2005): 31-33.
14 Lars-Erik Janlert. Available information preparatory note for a theory of
information space, tripleC 4(2) (2006): 172-177.
15 Roy Hardiman. Toward the right of commerciality: recognizing property
rights in the commercial value of human tissue. UCLA Law Rev. Oct; 34(1)
(1986): 207-64.
16 http://maps.google.ca/help/maps/streetview/.
17 Brenda Dietrich. Resource planning for business services. Commun.
ACM 49, 7 (2006): 62-64.
18 http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/lmd/campain/svalbard-global-seed-
vault.html.
19 Joseph Kirschvink. Earthquake Prediction by Animals: Evolution and
Sensory Perception, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 90, 2,
12 The Domestication of the Prison or the Demonization of the
House
1 Writers notes in the parenthesis.
2 Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in
Modernist Culture. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001): 19.
3 See the analysis of South-African gated communities by Derek Hook, and
Michele Vrdoljak, Gated communities, heterotopia and a rights
of privilege: a heterotopology of the South African security-park. Geoforum.
33 (2) (2002): 195.
4 Franz Kafka, The Burrow. (New York: Knopf., 1954).
5 Branden Hookway. Computational Environment of the 20th Century:
Architecture, Interface and the Science of design (Phd diss. abstract,
Princeton Univeristy) Available at: http://soa.princeton.edu/05prog/prog_
frame.html (accessed July 7, 2010).
6 Deriving from the work of artist H.R. Giger, the designer of the Alien
character.
7 At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.
D. Haraway, Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist
Feminism in the 1980s. Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65108.
8 Michel Foucault and James D. Faubion, Power. (New York: New Press,
2000): 283.
15 Turning the Black Box into a Great Gizmo
1 Reyner Banham, A Black Box: The Secret Profession of Architecture. In A
Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1996), 293.
2 Ibid., 295.
3 Ibid., 296.
4 Ibid.
5 See Mark Linder, TRANSdisciplinarity. Hunch 9 (2005): 12-15. Linder also
assesses Banhams depiction of the Black Box.
6 Reyner Banham, The Great Gizmo. In A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner
Banham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 109-118.
7 Ibid., 110.
16 Fight the Google-Jugend!
1 Based on Darwins account of meeting the natives of Tierra del Fuego.
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (London, Penguin Classics, 1989).
2 Listen to Joe Kane: Spear killings remain a central fact of how the Huaorani
see themselves. Many adults carry, and proudly display, spear scars from the
battles of their youth, and the old people still chant killing songs. Gangsta!

Segment based on a Waorani spearing song as given by Joe Kane, Savages
(London, Pan Books, 1997).
3 Manuel Cordova-Rios, F. Bruce Lamb, Wizard of the Upper Amazon. (New
York, Atheneum, 1971).
4 Lines from a Machiguenga poem transcribed by father Joaquin Barriales and
given by Mario Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller (London, Faber and Faber, 1990).
5 Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred (University of California
Press, 1985).
6 Found object garden magic, quote from Michael F. Brown, Tsewas Dream:
Magic and Meaning in an Amazonian Society. (University of Alabama Press,
2006).
7 Listen to S. Alexandrian: Andre Breton organized group walks to look for
stones, sometimes on the banks of the Seine; he saw in the mineral kingdom
the domain of signs and indications. The interpretation of the stones which
one finds is considered to satisfy and develop the poetic sense, which needs
to be educated in man. In La Langue des Pierres, Breton stated the method of
the cult: Stones particular hard stones go on talking to those who wish to
hear them. The speak to each listener according to his capabilities; through
what each listener knows, they instruct him in what he aspires to know. The
discovery of a bed of stones on a drizzly day in the country gave Breton the
perfect illusion of treading the ground of the Earthly Paradise. The divinatory
nature of stones, and the second state they induce in the connoisseur, are
found only when the stones have been discovered as the result of a special
expedition. Breton said that an unusual stone found by chance is of less value
than one which has been sought for and longed. S. Alexandrian, Surrealist Art.
(London, Thames and Hudson, 1970).
8 Excerpt from Daniel Everett, Dont Sleep, There Are Snakes, Life and
Language in the Amazonian Jungle. (London, Profile Books, 2008).
9 Listen to Neil L. Whitehead. Kanaim is a form of Amazonian dark
shamanism and involves the killing of individuals through a violent mutilation
of, in particular, the mouth and anus, into which are inserted various objects.
The killers are then enjoined to return to the dead body of the victim in order
to drink the juices of putrefaction. The victim will first become aware of an
impending attack when the Kanaims approach his house by night, or on
lonely forest trails [asanda], making a characteristic whistling noise... a direct
physical attack might come at any point, even years thereafter, for during
this period of stalking the victim is assessed as to their likely resistance and
their suitability as food. In some attacks the victims may have minor bones
broken, especially fingers, and joints dislocated, especially the shoulder,
while the neck may also be manipulated to induce spinal injury and back pain.
This kind of attack is generally considered to be a preliminary to actual death
and mutilation;... fatal attack will certainly follow but, informants stress,
many months, or even a year or two, later. Gothic! Neil L. Whitehead, Dark
Shamans: Kanaim and the Poetics of Violent Death (Londres, Duke University
Press, 2002).
10 Jacques Lizot. Tales of the Yanomami: daily life in the Venezuelan forest
(Cambridge University Press, 1991).
11 Inspired by Marc de Civrieux, Watunna: an Orinoco creation cycle
(University of Texas Press, 1997).
12 Listen to William Burroughs He is a native to the place when the place cant
exist without him. William S. Burroughs. My Education: A Book of Dreams.
(London, Picador, 1996).
13 Based on the story of Hans Staden (1525-79).
14 Listen to Charles Darwin: It was as easy to please as it was difficult
to satisfy these savages. Young and old, men and children, never ceased
repeating the word yammerschooner, which means give me. After pointing
to almost every object, one after the other, even to the buttons on our coats,
93
and saying their favourite word in as many intonations as possible, they would
then use it in a neuter sense, and vacantly repeat yammerschooner. Charles
Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (London, Penguin Classics, 1989).
15 The power of begging, listen to Patrick Tierney: In 1800, they [the
Yanomami], too, seemed destined for extinction. The Yanomamis subsequent
territorial and demographic success underscored one of the principles of
coalition theory: weakness can be strength, and strength can be weakness.
If the Yanomami had been a highly organized, well-armed, military group led
by a charismatic chief, they would have provoked immediate opposition and
destruction. The last charismatic Amerindian chief in the area, Ajuricaba,
proclaimed himself the king of Gran Manoa in 1720. The Portuguese promptly
sent an army that crushed his coalition and carried Ajuricabe off in chains. By
contrast, the Yanomami expanded in all directions without a central authority.
Everywhere they went, they asked for food, steel goods, medicine, clothes. Two
airstrips in Yanomami territory, one at Boca Mavaca, Venezuala, and one near
Surucucu, in Brazil, were nicknamed Give me. The Indians habit of endlessly
asking for steel and food annoyed outsiders, but is also disarmed them. These
tiny, technologically poor people multiplied eightfold while expanding their
territory tenfold. Father Luis Coco half jokingly spoke about the Yanomami
Empire. Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and
Journalists Devastated the Amazon (New York, W.W. Norton and Company,
2000).
16 Listen to Norman Lewis: Difficulties arose from the fact that, as in the
majority of Indian languages, there are no equivalents in Panare for many
words held as basic to the concepts of the Christian religion. There is non, for
example, for sin, guilt, punishment and redemption. There are many other
pitfalls. The concept of a universal God runs contrary to all processes of
Panare thought, and in any case he cannot be thanked, but only congratulated.
God is love may be translated the great spirit is not angry. The Panare
mentality and character were established in a relatively protected forest
environment over thousands of years. In this famines were impossible, plagues
are not recorded, and the wars that shaped our history were reduced here
at most to a ceremonial skirmish. Consequently the Indians can only grope
after the meanings of words coined in a more stressful society. The biblical
dramas become hardly more than shadow plays. How can the walls of Jericho
fall down for a man who has never seen a brick? How can a Indian, who has
never known dearth, be urged to store up treasure in heaven? What point can
the parable of the talents of silver have to a Panare whose language has no
word for profit? Most of the biblical animals are missing in the rain forest, so
The Good Shepherd may have to be translated as the foodsharer who looks
after the pigs. (To some the image seemed inappropriate, so elsewhere small
numbers of sheep were imported and raised in an unfavourable environment,
so that this could be put right.) Redemption is explained as a trading bargain
after the arduous rigmarole of cash payments, debts and credits have finally
been made clear. Adam and Eve and the fall of Man are omitted from Panare
translations owing to their horror of incest... The translators may have decided
that the best way of tackling this was by re-editing the scriptures in such a way
as to implicate the Panare in Christs death. Norman Lewis, The Missionaries
God Against the Indians. (London, Picador, 1988).
17 Listen to Marc van Roosmalen Most of what I have learned about survival
in a neo-tropical rainforest I have learned from the red-faced spider monkeys
from Surinam. I also learned a lot from other animals. From mammals,
reptiles and birds who, like me, live on the ground. Agouties, agouties and
peccaries led me to those seeds and seedlings you can eat without risk, and
to others that are poisonous enough to kill you by touch alone if you happen to
have a scratch or small wound. Tapirs and deer taught me which seeds and
seedlings to avoid. They also taught me which green leaves from which trees I
could eat with relish. By studying the food habits of a wide variety of animals, by
observing what foods they are looking for, what foods they eat, and from which
foods they sometimes accidentally die, I soon started to feel comfortable in Landscapes, and the Future of the Amazon. (Science 321, 2008).
my new daily surroundings. More and more I started to look like a native of 24 David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.
the forest. My translation. Marc G.M. Van Roosmalen, Blootsvoet door de (New York, Vintage Books, 2010).
Amazone, De Evolutie op het Spoor. (Amsterdam, Bert Bakker, 2008).
25 Clark L. Erickson, The Domesticated Landscape of the Bolivian Amazon.
18 Listen to Mark Plotkin: Look at that garden, Kamainja whispered. Ive In Bale and Erickson (ed.), Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology. New
seen better-looking agriculture inside a leafcutter ants nest! To my untrained York, Columbia University press. 2006.
eye, the peasant garden did not look at all different from Indian agriculture.
26 Martti Prssinen, Denise Schaan & Alceu Ranzi, Pre-Columbian geometric
Once Kamainja stopped laughing, I asked him to explain. Look at that manioc!
earthworks in the upper Purus: a complex society in western Amazonia.
It is planted too far apart. You saw how we put ours together; the leaves form
(Antiquity, 2009).
a canopy like the forests, which keeps the sun and rain from directly hitting
the soil. And they have only one kind, whereas in our garden we have more 27 Viti-Vit, subtitled The Origin of the Ditches, is Kuikro myth explaining the
than twenty. That plantation is an invitation for the bugs to move in. Kamainja earthworks now known as the cities of Z/the garden cities of Xingu. Orlando
was right. Since the manioc plants were all of one variety, insects that feed Villas Boas, Claudio Villas Boas, Xingu, The Indians, Their Myths. (London,
on that one variety might undergo a population explosion. I began to see what Souvenir Press, 1974).
looked primitive to the two Indians. Look at the weeds! Shafee chimed in. 28 It is as Yeh Shieh wrote in 17th century China: When I write something
I dont see any. I said. Exactly! In our gardens we always leave some behind different from former masters, I may be filling in something missing from
it binds the soil in the rainy season. The peasants garden is probably cleaner their work. Or is it possible that the former masters are filling in something
than his house! And another thing, said Kamainja. You look at the plantation that is missing in my work. Deforestation is playing out a subtle palimpsestic
and you know the man doesnt understand the forest. A well-planned garden game with the landscape of Western Amazonia. Modern day clearings, villages
should look like a hole in the forest opened up when a giant ku-mah-kah tree and roads are mixing and aggregating, contrasting and accentuating with
falls over. Small openings in the forest are filled in by fast growing weedy squares and circles, parallelograms and plazas, mounds and ditches, fishing
plants that attract game animals. When you cut down too much forest, the weirs and glyphs dripped across clear-cut lands like a glass of red wine
little plants cant seed in from the surrounding jungle and you dont have any spilled over an expensive white tablecloth. The present is haunted by the past,
birds or peccaries coming in that you can hunt. Mark J. Plotkin, Tales of a the vanished civilizations of yesteryear have cartoon ghost transparency but
Shamans Apprentice. (London, Penguin Books, 1993). they point to something that used to be anathema to greens and industrialists
19 Listen to Darrel A. Posey: Although settled for several decades now, alike. The West has built her societies at the cost of the forest, the pre-
the Kayap have not deserted their semi-nomadic habits entirely. They spend conquest civilizations of the Amazon did not just sustain the forest as their
several months each year in the Brazil nut groves living in communal houses; numbers grew, they improved it. Improvements that are with us today. It is
go on frequent collecting and hunting trips; and before major festivals make as Ezra Pound wrote: An age old intelligence does not go away in an era of
two- or three-week treks to acquire ceremonial game and feathers. The speed. That is all.
Kayap have never left everything on their journeys to chance, however, but
have developed an interesting nomadic agriculture, which they continue to
use today. While routinely scavenging about the forest, the Indians gather
dozens of plants, carry them back to the forest campsites or trails, and
replant them in natural forest clearings. The plants include several types
of wild manioc, three varieties of wild yams, a type of bush bean, and three
or more wild varieties of kupa. These forest fields are always located near
streams, which generally guarantee a stand of trees. Even in the savanna,
where patches of forest are often few and far between, there are areas where
collected plants have been replanted to form food depots. The Kayap once
maintained an extensive system of interlacing trails linking all their vast
territory. Most of these ancient trails are now abandoned, but not all, and the
Kayap are still masters of the forest and savanna and travel considerable
distances. I once travelled for five days with four Kayap man on long-
abandoned trails to an ancient village site. Although the trails were overgrown
and difficult to follow, they had been used so much that in some places they
were etched six inches into the hard earth. Each night we would stop at a
stream in some spot flattened and hardened by years of use. The men would
slip off into the forest and soon return with a variety of roots, tubers, stalks
and fruits. Foods were readily acquired even on parts of the trail known to
have been abandoned 40 years before. Darrel A. Posey, Kayapo Indians:
experts in synergy. (ILEIA Newsletter 7(4), 1991).
20 See: Charles C. Mann. 1491 New Revelations of the Americas before
Columbus. (New York, Vintage Books, 2006).
21 Based on the opening lines of H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds.
22 Anna Roosevelt, The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chiefdoms. (LHomme,
1993).
23 M.J. Heckenberger et al. Pre-Columbian Urbanism, Anthropogenic
 95

Call for works

thresholds 40

Socio
Gone are the days of black and white and here is the time of grey. As social linkages have
become wildly complex, the normative positions that might bring them order have
evaporated. What if, for a moment, the rules were put on hold? What if you could stand
up for what you believe in without losing your cool?

Such action is urgent: We simultaneously have more awareness of and distance from
social crises than ever before. As economies collapse, wars are fought, and the masses
are left hungry, nothing seems more urgent than purchasing and enjoying a delicious
hamburger.

Do art and design have (or lack) agency to interface with these crises? Can there be
technological salvation when sciences objectivity is coming under fire? Is there a
metanarrative lurking in our culture that could chart a new trajectory for society? Or are
do-gooders the enemy, obfuscating real issues as social awareness has become hip?

Thresholds 40 invites projects, ideas, and beliefs in a variety of media, including scholarly
papers, visual work, and philosophical treatises, that explore the dangerous and messy
theme of socially charged cultural practice.

Submissions due March 28, 2011.

Thresholds is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal that aims Please send submissions to:
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