Sous la Dalle de la Défense, une scéance immersive hypnotique. Vous êtes conviés à pénétrer dans les dédales de béton, à la fois cathédrale Païenne et résidus infrastructurels des 60ties où un guide officiera ‘the white rabbit’, par petits groupes de 12 personnes, non sans une certaine apprehension de vous y perdre, et pour, in fine, faire face à un dispositif, une dispute, une controverse « polyphonique et caverneuse », entre des entités paréidoliques, cosmiques, issues d’un ailleurs temporel, d’un rétrofutur archéologique qui nous regarde nous débattre dans le fatras de l’ici-et-maintenant. Ces espèces ont muté, l’humain entre autre, à la fois vulnérable, technoïde et végétal, lui-même chrysalide et chimère darwinienne… et elles, ces creatures post-pariétales se donnent le droit de spéculer sur l’hypothèse d’une nouvelle branche de l’évolution… et vous remontrez à la surface… dans la psyché d’une ”Blue Pills”…
Under the SLAB de la Défense, a hypnotic immersive experience. You are invited to enter the concrete labyrinths, part Pagan cathedral, part infrastructural residue of the 60s, where a guide will officiate ‘the white rabbit’, in small groups of 12, not without a certain apprehension of getting lost, and to, in the end, we’re faced with a device, a dispute, a “polyphonic and cavernous” controversy, between pareidolic, cosmic entities from a temporal elsewhere, from an archaeological retro-future that watches us struggle in the mess of the here-and-now. These species have mutated, the human among them, at once vulnerable, technoid and vegetal, itself a chrysalis and a Darwinian chimera… and they, these post-parietal creatures, give themselves the right to speculate on the hypothesis of a new branch of evolution… and you rise to the surface… in the psyche of a “Blue Pills”…
Screening / Biennale Venice 2014-2018 / Biennial Chicago 2015 / Tars Gallery 2014-2019 / Istanbul Biennale 2015 / Frac Orleans 2017 / Botanic Museum Berlin 2019 / Medium Gallery Bratislava 2019 / Sydney Biennale 2022 / Vienna Biennale 2022 / among other places…
… incarnations of Thoreau (1) and Proudhon (2), one facing his political isolation to re-discover a monist (3) relationship, the other promoting the success of a bottom up urban social contract (4) in which they have both participated in the past, sharing their protest, illusions and utopian ideals on the barricade.
The Thoreau avatar has developed a tree disease (5), which he uses to protect and feed him… as shelter and cannibalism… in a monstrous physiological proliferation of keratin branches.
The Proudhon avatar affectively and vainly tries to convince him to return to the city they created a few years ago… A city of a social model which “Thoreau” renounced and abnegated.
We face two systems of “anarchia” (6), of political choices: the multitude of bottom up, music of the swarm as Rimbaud talked about in the ‘commune of Paris’ revolt; versus its “dandyism” (9) antidote, through an individualistic disobedience and intellectual-physical regression, to (re)discover a naturalist daily routine (10) , an ecosophical relation with the beats of mother earth…
A chorus assist in this ontological dispute…and expresses what they suppress…
1 Henry David Thoreau, a leading transcendentalist, had an early influence on the individualist anarchist school of thought. He is best known for Walden; or Life in the Woods which reflects on his two years experience of living in solitude on the shores of Massachusetts Walden’s Pond where he ponders simple living in natural surroundings.
2 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is considered to be the founder of anarchism and mutuelist theory. He is best known for his works Property is Theft and What is Property? where he contested the legacy about property resulting in the origins of collectivism.
3 Monist is the ideology that only one ‘thing’ exists, from where species and biotopes are co-substantial.
4 A bottom-up social contract is the piecing together of systems to give rise to more complex systems, thus making the original systems sub-systems of the emergent system.
5 The treeman syndrome (Epidermodysplasia verruciformis) is a rare skin disorder resulting in the uncontrolled growth of scaly warts over hands and feet
6 Anarchism is a political philosophy that advocates self-governed societies based on voluntary institutions. Anarchism holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary and harmful and thus societies should be stateless.
9 Dandyism (antidote) – description about how a system of equality needs the disruption of and individualist character to break monotony !
10 (re)discover a naturalist-vitalism-animism daily routine – anthropocentric arrogances ignore “by nature” the ‘’rights’’ of the earth.
20 years after “He(s) / She(s)”, his first exhibition at the Frac Centre-Val de Loire, the “architect” and his friends have been invited for a “1993-2050 flashback”. The exhibition will retrace … years of scenarios, productions, and controversy… “eILe Pr_FAIRE la FICTION” presents itself as a story in four acts – Here and now, Here & Tomorrow, Elsewhere & Simulnateously and Daily psycho routine. Conceived as a “path of bifurcations”, the exhibition is a “tragicomic odyssey” through the architect’s exhaustive body of work. The architectures, whether completed still projects, make up a narration in the form of a jerky tracking shot through the exhibition space, paranoïd and mythomaniac. Voice-overs requested by the architect – Sylvia Lavin, Paul B. Preciado, Jeff Kipnis, Bruce Sterling, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Cynthia Davidson, Greg Lynn, Bart Lootsma,… – guide us through a fiction / reality refrain.
François Roche refuses any form of imprisonment, and lives in a state of permanent migration; always elsewhere – elsewhere geographically, elsewhere in practice – architecture, film, collaborations with artists. But still he asserts the permanence of his commitments and thoughts. Thoughts that are always offbeat to avoid becoming caught up in formalistic, technological or computational dogma… Architecture is not a matter of projection; it is a matter of “distortion of reality”.
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“Experimental architecture has shifted toward a new corpus of instrumentations, made out of tools, computation,
mechanisation, but also and simultaneously of fictions and lines of subjectivity, synchronous with our symptoms; of fears and great escapes in the “here and now”. The purpose of this 1993-2050 flashback is to explore attitudes that show a correlation, a codependency with the forms they underpin, through their conflicts and reciprocities. It is to discover a post-digital, post-human, post-activist, post-democratic, post-feminist world, … a queer,androgynous, carnal, disturbing, disenchanted, pornographic, transient, transactional world, … where scenarios, mechanisms, misunderstandings, and psychological and physiological fragments are what make up walls and ceilings, cellars and attics, … schizoid and paranoid, between the lines of operative
and critical fictions… The androgynous folds and recesses behind which… he(s) / she(s) … hide(s), trigger(s) confusion and gut reactions, suspect hostilities, fantasised idealisation, and even premeditated oblivion. We must use paradoxical postures and aesthetical mechanisms to highlight bio-political challenges, the potentials and disorders of contemporary technologies, from their early stages to their merchandising, and suspect them of not being so harmless, beyond conventional discourses and selfconscious aesthetics…”
Avatar NT ®/ 2016
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eILe pr_ FAIRE la FICTION se donne à voir dans un récit en quatre actes – Here & Now, Here & TO-Morrow, Elsewhere & simultaneously, Daily Routine. Conçue comme un « chemin de bifurcations », l’exposition est une « odyssée tragicomique »au travers d’un corpus exhaustif de l’architecte. Les architectures réalisées ou à l’état de projets constituent dans les espaces de l’exposition une narration dans un traveling saccadé, paranoïaque, schizophrenique. Des voix off sollicitées par l’architecte Francois Roche, qui se cache avec d’autres derrière cet avatar hybride _Sylvia Lavin, Paul B. Preciado, Jeffrey Kipnis, Cynthia Davidson, Greg Lynn, Bart Lootsma, Hans Ullrich Obrist, Bruce Sterling…, – nous guident dans une ritournelle fiction / réel.
” …L’architecture expérimentale s’est déplacée sur un nouveau corpus d’instrumentations, fait d’outillage, de computation, de machinisme mais aussi et simultanément de fictions et lignes de subjectivités, en synchronicité avec nos symptômes ; de peurs et d’échappées belles ‘’ici et maintenant’’. L’occasion de ce flash back 1993-2050, c’est de parcourir des attitudes en corrélation, en co-dépendances des formes qu’elles sous-tendent, au travers de leurs conflits et réciprocités. C’est découvrir un monde post digital, post humain, post activiste, post démocratique, post féministe, …un monde queer…androgyne, charnelle, inquiétant, désenchanté, pornographique, transitoire, transactionnel, …ou les scenarios, dispositifs, malentendus, fragments psychiques et physiologiques sont les matériaux mêmes des murs et des plafonds, des caves et des greniers, …schizoïdes et paranoïaques, aux creux de fictions opératoires et critiques… Les plis et replis androgynes derrière lesquelles… ils/elles… se dissimulent déclenchent confusions et réactions épidermiques, hostilités suspectes, idéalisation fantasmée, voir oubli prémédité. Mettre en lumière via des postures paradoxales, via des dispositifs esthétique, les enjeux bio-politiques, les potentiels et les désordres des technologies contemporaines, de leur balbutiement à leur marchandisation, les suspecter de ne pas être si inoffensives, ni innocentes, hors du conformisme des discours et des esthétiques empruntées…”
Int{M’}Bassy / Are we Human ! _makation#7 / worKshop /application 10th May /
In the stuttering of languages and European politics / At the occasion of the Biennial of Istanbul 2016 / SexPolitic&Robotic[but]Architecture / Do a small Embassy / flirting with the forbidden
[a project of synesthesia / Political _”PORN”_Computational-Robotic]
TAG inti{M’}bassy / a mind-sexual temptation Embassy / in the pursuit of “The Köln symptom'” / “Comput-Biology of passion” / sweating design, with affinity, allurement for a special shelter on the European Territory facing eastern survival drive, wild migration, cultural confrontation, protoracism and real prosecutions / an anthropotechnics research and fabrication with expertise in operative conflict with human pathologies / e-motion tracking design process : from sensitive impulses to robotic sensor interfaces_ real time feed back and fabrication / #AntiOedipus
New-Territories / MindMachineMakingMyth / …a research on NEOTENY / rOB-fAB-sTASE-insTASE-eXsTASE-inTIMITY-…………..ex-TIMITY
Francois Roche with Camille Lacadee, Stephan Henrich, Vong Wongkillalerd, Benjamin Ennemoser, Joey Jacobson.
With the help of Graham Foundation, CNC France
———————- ‘’Ex-Timity’’ consists in a ‘model-prototype in process’ along with a short film, both derived from the tale ‘Councillor Krespel’ by E.T.A. Hoffmann.
… the piece is derived from the first part of the novel in which the Councillor Krespel encloses his own daughter, Antonia, and prevents her from singing, from her inclination towards a morbid bliss … in the literal sense. The short film originating from this makes visible a suspended moment, in the meanders of her psyche, where she ponders whether or not to live her pleasure, mixing life and death drives, physiological and pathological pathologies. The monologue at the end of the film reintroduces the debate between Charcot and Freud on the origins of the state of torpor, the loss of consciousness, inanimate body, state of exaltation, passionate state, suspension of the will (Sabina Spielrein, Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being). We can see in Antonia’s behaviour the premises of this debate on hysteria, considered by Charcot as a neurocerebral disease, a pathological trouble, genital neurosis which would enable the disqualification of the feminine gender and its humours, associating it with convulsionary troubles, of pathological origins (in opposition to medieval beliefs of bodies being ‘possessed by the devil’). Freud will shatter the organismic theories of Charcot, scoring hysterical ecstasy as a psychic pathology, whose care requires an intelligible device bound to language and not a mise en abime, a spectacle with the doctor as the master of ceremony. Antonia in the research ‘’Ex-Timity’’ is in this moment of interrogation, a century before the debate between Charcot and Freud. She identifies the two hypotheses as an external authority upon her body, both attempting to format her behaviour. Following Charcot’s hypothesis of a physiological disease, she can allow herself to be in representation, exhibitionist … science gives her that right. In Freud’s view, she is a zone of passage to the unconscious which can only unfold via language, speech, analysis, and its discursive corollary. Thus she hesitates to adopt one format or the other, not neglecting that being ‘possessed by the devil’ can come as a plausible escape (there are no more public burning at the stake nowadays). She will, as the film progresses, internalize her libido and its corollary linked to the state of ecstasy, in organismic and psychic dimensions in order to metabolize her addiction. She discovers a sort of clearing, in the meaning of Heidegger, where she can negotiate her monstrosity, a place of en-stasis, she will overcome her libido, which she can now externalize with pain and disgust for herself. The body is in space, it is the space and it inhabits it (Moebius surface). She reaches sexual maturity before going out of this uterine incubator, and invalidates a reference to the concept of Neoteny dear to Lacan: man and woman, in a body point of view, are premature foetal primate having reached sexual maturity while remaining larval, basically unfinished, constitutively deficient … This way Antonia escapes her morbid destiny and Hoffmann’s tale cannot endlessness…
Soliloquy (english)
…no … not yet … … where you from … … … i’m not ready ………… porn-vulnerable premature … sexual immature … you see … can’t you see … i’m still in limbo …… … un-stripped of my molt … … lecherous voyeur … unveiled in my extimacy …….a larva ….. libidinal …. …. a primate fetus……….. wait …. Come back later …
… really not in place … … not my place … i exit-inUterus … and i’m hungry … one doesn’t come here innocently …… … miss-than-abim … ah … but i’m not really there either …… ailing … amiss …… i’m a faker … breathless … … carnal embodiment … obscene incarnation … naive native profanity … i’m sick … deranged … … you don’t wanna mix everything up
Yes … i will stay here … instead … or rather … there … but … in this hole
Mmmmm … i’m still a larva …… diaphanous … almost transparent ………… no hairs yet …… the forehead … bulging … … the eyes … the mouth … and the lips … the teeth ! ………… i’m not formed yet … i embryonic …… leave me alone …… i got work to do …
i must … get rid of this skin … scar less … no i don’t deserve any better … … must make the lips fatter … i don’t feel much yet anyway … … must bring the eyes closer … lower the eyelids … must stand up … must vo-ci-fe-rate … …. but no … it … really … is fine for me ….. yes … i will stay there for another while … … … slashing the entrails … … desexualizing …… on the outside … no i won’t say anything ……… have no words of my own …… no voice … i’m veiled … un-unsealed … everything here in stasis … …… enstasy …… inside … folded … undeveloped … enfolded … curled up concealed twisted torn … in reverse embrace … fondling faces … … …
what do you want you? … that i close my mouth when i eat like this … that i spread my lips … like that … i tell you what … I have nothing to tell you ……… let the devil do its dance … … the ecstasy of expulsion … I want more … the dirty insularity of my flesh …
You can go to hell … … I don’t care … I adopt combat pose …… whole …… reconstituted … …. auto-imago terminal … equivocal carnation …… underlying schizoid … … hideous idol … I complete the strip … … and tomorrow … a monster will be out … … you can go to hell …… in nonsense innocence … I belong to me … to me
The larva moves in her silky element, white, indifferent to the world and its mechanisms of which she is prettily unaware. She wanders through dead-ends, encountering only herself, everytime feeling distressed about it. She would not pass the imago stage, she remains fragmented, disintegrated, scattered. By dint of renouncing ecstasy – which would lead to assume her body as a whole, joint to her mind – she suffocates in a form of enstasy, of which we do not see how she will come out. She displays a muffled enjoyment, unrestrained but painless, without joy nor outbursts nor consequences. Her hysteria is cold, her nakedness premeditated, apathetic although odorous.
Understanding if she constrained herself or if centuries of external authority upon her body and its manifestations are responsible for her current state of stagnation seems irrelevant today. The question is whether and how she is going to unfold.
It is symptomatic that her biotope is that of culs-de-sac, where she goes in circles without anyone’s knowledge. She grows, she pushes for a resolution, but with no scream, with no excess, without tempting the void, nothing will come out. To follow her destiny of libidinal larva, to give up her previous form and embrace an instinctual beastly innocence, she will have to…
‘’a mind-sexual temptation Embassy / in the pursuit of “The Köln symptom’” / a special shelter on the European Territory facing eastern survival drive, wild migration, cultural confrontation, protoracism and real prosecutions / an anthropotechnics research and fabrication with robotic expertise and human pathologies’’
For the Istanbul Biennial 2016
with Francois Roche, Ezio Blasetti, Stephan Henrich, Danielle Willems, Vong… and special guests
Don’ t miss the Application opening 10th April / dead line 10th May
Sound – voice for RSI (real sensor interface) perturbations of trajectories/stochastic
Concrete[I]Land- fiction-short movie (8mn)
concrete[i]land
(bkk mαkkαsαn)
a ‘post-culture’ spasm
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The Bowl of mad-mud
In the muck-dirt-turd / human cradle to cradle loop / where substances meet in all their states of chemical transformation / from the fruit of the earth to the rejection /
Human Matter…”where it smells shit, it smells human” to quote Antonin Artaud (‘Là ou ça sent la merde, ça sent l’être.’ Pour en finir avec le Jugement de Dieu, 1947) from body metabolism…. As a cycle… of rejection – recycling (physical context), extracted, pumped, remixed, extruded from the open sky sewage ground below the pilotis… emerging on the above level, the visible level.
Robotic production from recycling matter, first antagonism.
The Ghost Content
Something was lost… the relation to the initial system of knowledge transmission… in this ‘Idiocratic’ post-capitalist regime … no one reads no more… and language has been reduced to a daily life commerce… banality and merchandising.
The people of the Slum, because of their interzone, lawless situation, can re-question this social, political and cultural Alzheimer global XXI century phenomena… via a transgressive line of escape.
We derive, we drift within the situation… to shift this relation to knowledge (rapport au savoir) in a subjective, immersive mode…
In the library, people aren’t expected to read… but to sniff the ashes coming from the books, targeting a travel ‘shot’ to a subculture cinematographic adaptation of the book.
Book readers are sniffers, disseminated in the Slum in a subjective immersive ego-trip, in the pursuit of the Selfie, a self-portrait in Alchemist mode.
At the opposite of Pro-Bono enterprises usually intervening in the slum to promote politically correctness and right consciousness…
Concrete[I]land / short film
from the book of Ballard /
Mαkkαsαn, a kind of ‘Alpha Ville’, as the fear of word’s disappearance, now a fact, with the emotions that came with them, as the impoverishment of the means of expression, as a displacement perhaps and yesterday’s world might be gone and dead. The rise of the selfie as the only way to witness one’s life. To take it and put it there, nowhere really, directly, with no one acknowledging it. The absence of meditation, permanent obsession of self-portraiture, the obscene display of solitudes.
The short film is about 2 worlds (upper-condo/highway and below-slum self-organization). Below is the genetically diseased autarky, island of degeneresence, living among their rejects, in the acceptance of society’s garbage, where the social contract is a constant work in progress, unstable.
What is burned though is our memory, our culture in the form of books. The written world is sinking in the canal slum water, putrid, smelly-belly. While North Pole polar bears change their gender membership to increase their reproduction probability in the melting-ice age, here in Makkasan, people are developing by-product of substitution, a kind of cultural methadone, of easily-accessible stirring stifling barely-bearable immersive-emotional self-suggested shots.
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Robotic voice process / The shelter components are done through real sensor interface robotic system… where ‘nick’s reading of the book affects the trajectory of the nozzle (voice intensity and timber) / Microphone + Sound voice recognition + RSI-Kuka = seismograph movement of the robot linked to frequency and amplitude of the sound sinusoidal curve)/ & the shelter petrified the Books reader’s voice … witness of a lost paradise (Milton)…
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A positive entropy engaging a counter movement in the negative mode, as the first Thermodynamic law in the Anthropocene balance ?
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In Bangkok 2015
with Michigan-Ann Arbor / M4
Credits: New-Territories / M4 / Michigan / Francois Roche with Camille Lacadee, Vongsawat Wongkijjalerd, Daniela Mitterberger/ Michigan architecture school: Po-Jen Huang, Te-Shiou Chen, Jakkrit Jannakhon, Linnea Cook, Salam Rida, Min Zhang, Weiqi Zhang, Stefan Klecheski, Beth Carliner, Peter Sepassi, Tracey Weisman, John Yoon
The Vagabond & the Machine / Tourette Syndrome and RSI (kinect sensor) for 450 Glazed-Clay Components / LabM4-RMIT / with support of the Centre for Design Practice Research (D___lab)
Symmetric pathologies / strikethrough life and death / tads and dotard facing their suspicious candor and instinctual obscenity / cruel laughter / sardonic growling // no words / ignorance on the verge of Alzheimer / sneering with borborygmi / gobbling and snoring / slobbering / drooling through identical reflects in the mirror / a multitude of Janus double-face // projection / illusion / the escape from those two states of sarcasm / in the darkness of the street / man faces me to get the backlash of his creation / to articulate his ‘reason of being’ / time-break of god’s existence // the perpetuation of the scene of the crime, without hope / Pandora Box / and ‘you think it’s funny’…
(In the versions of Chełm and Prague, as well as in the Polish version of Brothers Grimm, Golem is inscribed with Hebrew words, such as the word emet (אמת, “truth” in Hebrew) written on its forehead… but being deactivated by removing the aleph (א), from “truth” to “death” (met מת =”dead”).
Credits: New-Territories / M4 / RMIT / Francois Roche with Camille Lacadee, Gwyllim Jahn, Vongsawat Wongkijjalerd, Daniela Mitterberger / RMIT architecture school: Dechao Sun, Marc Gibson, Jordan Wells, James Pazzi, Danica Yee, Judy Junyan QI, Louis Nuccitelli, Tian Zhen, Bowen Nie, Lucian Clifforth
What could happen, what must.., in this ascendant vehicle, in the snowy whiteness, without perspective and devoid of sight, on a rickety mountain train? We traverse through the cold to reach the last sanatorium up in the heights, where Thomas Mann wrote Tristan[1].
During the journey, an unexpected event suddenly halts the train. This is not purely hazardous. A roll of the dice will never abolish chance[2]. But we will be safe and sound. It has all been foreseen, evaluated, predicted, anticipated… security and safeness considered.
The train is a metaphor[3] or the impetus to reach an illusory point that can never be met. The artefact is in the way. There’s enough paganism, enough mysticism in the mountains to alter the journey’s trajectory of expectedness, of foreseeable modes. Now you are on the bandwagon.
Sounds and noises[4] of uncertain origin, uncertain, explained phenomena, creatures’ tracks[5], chill, hypothermia and its imminent threat, of dilated pupils, of inaudible heartbeats, the anteroom to unconsciousness, mortem-post-mortem, a close call, absolutely painless, ataraxic, asymptotically. As the curve reaches closer to its fate a rite of passage is lived over and over again.
A piling-up of intertwined bodies, contorted, fastened in carnal embraces, a multitude, a humming swarm, the crackling noises of successive congealing, ever-ending. The phase change of water[7], chemistry, sublimation.
Through this experiment our participants will reunite in the good death, an escape or weaning[8]. Here the migration of souls, the exchange for an elsewhere – those on the train will climax indefinitely and then finally, at the cost of our story’s Mcguffin.[9]
Credits
Scenario-Structure-Movie-Texts / New-Territories / M4 / Francois Roche with Camille Lacadee, with Vongsawat Wongkijjalerd and Daniela Mitterberger / 2015
Mac Guffin / Pierre Huyghe
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[1] 1903 novel by Thomas Mann, set in a Swiss alps sanatorium
[2] Stéphane Mallarmé’s last major poem, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, 1897
[3] Etymologically ‘metaphor’ means ‘vehicle of transportation’, directly from Latin metaphora, from Greek metaphora – ‘a transfer’
[4] Referred to as music, a hum, or a whisper, but an explanation of a mysterious noise that has been heard by some people over Lej Nair has never been found. In other lands and times it would have been an object of superstitious reverence or dread.
[5] ‘La Diavolezza’, legend of the beautiful she-devil, cause of the disappearance of many young mountain hunters.
[6] Switzerland has legislatively permitted assisted suicide since 1942
[7] Supercooling is the process of lowering the temperature of a liquid or a gas below its freezing point without it becoming a solid. The intrusion of an impure element then results in the instant-freezing of the water.
[9] A plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues, usually forgotten by the end of the story
Critical Apparatuses
Bart Lootsma
Something makes people want to walk, ride or climb to mountaintops, how dangerous an undertaking this may be because of conditions of terrain and weather. It is something completely irrational. Some have themselves brought to the tops of mountains with trains, cable cars and even helicopters. It is often thought that this is to appreciate a sublime, untameable nature, since it has been already the theme of many a sublime Romantic painting or poem. But in fact most Alpine mountain tops are as artificial as a Dutch polder, not just with the cross on top of it, but with mines dug underneath, avalanche protection, restaurants, hotels, ski slopes, ski lifts, half pipes for snowboarders, artificial lakes to produce artificial snow, a view on the urbanized valley below, and in summer cows not for the production of milk and meat but for maintenance. All of this is realized only to enable people dressed in special clothes, helmets and harnesses, to throw themselves down again literally as soon as they have arrived on top, using sleighs, ski, snowboards or specially designed, and high-tech so-called freeride mountain bikes. They hardly have a choice. It has to go fast. Even the sky is filled with gliders and para gliders, enjoying the turbulence along the slopes. An aspect of danger, and at least a flirt with a latent death wish should be involved to feel alive, as a faint memory of older myths. “Everywhere it is machines – real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.” Deleuze and Guattari write, and between the different machines there are just couplings and passages, “functioning smoothly at times, at other times it fits and starts”. 1) The Alps are one big Bachelor Machine, a perpetual carrousel that turns the love for nature into a death mechanism.
Innsbruck, the city where I live, is one of the innovation centres of Alpine sports. . The ‘shadows’ of Bruno Taut and his Alpine Architecture are haunting the stations for the funicular railway up to the Hungerburg as glass memories of the shapes that remain after an ice storm. From the Hungerburg a cable car takes people further up to the North Park with the Seegrube and the Hafelekar, just left of which we find a mountain peak called Frau Hitt. According to different sagas, Frau Hitt once was a woman, a giant queen. About why she turned to stone the stories differ but the best-known version tells that she was so stingy, that when a beggar asked for some food, she gave him a stone instead. So the beggar cursed her, turned Frau Hitt and her horse in stone and left her in the place where we can still find her today. In winter she is dressed in snow; in spring she unveils herself to become the unreachable piece of stone she is in summer, alternatingly attracting and repelling us. All in all, we can see the landscape of the Nordkette in Innsbruck as a complex ecosystem, which is defined by man and nature in equal parts. It includes the social, the economical and even the incorporeal and invisible systems of language: myths, sagas and fairy tales.
It is no different with the landscape of La Diavolezza, a mountain and skiing area near Pontresina in the Swiss Alps, named after a beautiful fairy-queen who allegedly seduced young huntsmen who saw her bathing in Lej Nair, a frozen lake at the summit of the Bernina Pass. The huntsmen who followed her disappeared mysteriously and somehow one must expect they were frozen to death. Freezing to death is a known method for suicide, described among others in Jack London’s To Build a Fire: “… Well, he was bound to freeze anyway, and he might as well take it decently. With this new-found peace of mind came the first glimmerings of drowsiness. A good idea, he thought, to sleep off to death. It was like taking an anaesthetic. Freezing was not so bad as people thought. There were lots worse ways to die. . . . Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known. ”2) Suicide is an issue in Switzerland, as assistance to suicide is legal there as long as it does not bring profit. The Swiss Dignitas organization legally assists people who want to terminate their own lives -be it not by freezing to death. For the she-devil haunting Lej Nar, the freezing of the huntsmen was not enough though, and she only left the region when the whole mountain was frozen and covered with a glacier.
Other myths, sagas, fairy tales and literary narratives surround the la Diavolezza area. Thomas Mann’s sanatoriums in Tristan and The Magic Mountain might have been situated here, only accessible by a forgotten branch of the Rhaetian Railway, somewhere high up in the mountains. Paul Scheerbart saw them as logical predecessors of an architecture made entirely out of glass, because they lit the Alps. As such, they were the predecessors of Bruno Taut’s radiating Alpine Architektur, which would crown the mountain tops like an artificial Alpenglühen.3) His protagonists thought they might be healed from tuberculosis here, in times before penicillin was discovered. Most of them died of course.
Who would be better chosen than New-Territories/Francois Roche, Camille Lacadee with their friend Pierre Huyghe to explore this place? Their work –architecture, installations, situations, films, props- is characterized by a mixture of the archaic and science fiction, moving between myth making and pataphysics; schizo-analysis and paranoia. For New Territories, architecture is not just a pragmatic solution for a problem. It is in the extended pragmatism of a specific situation, that its identity and meaning is produced, as a hyper-localism, as Roche calls it, a specific haecceity, an ultimate thisness, as a biopsy of a biotope. This biotope is a part not just of a “deep” or “shallow ecology”, but of something like Deleuze’s flat ecologics, which opens up “the “philosophical subject” to the realm of nonhuman machines, affects, haecceities and what Maturana/Varela call “structural couplings” 4); or Guattari’s ecosophy, which sees ecology as a complex phenomenon which incorporates human subjectivity, the environment, and social relations. 5)
New-Territories produce critical apparatuses in the double meaning of the word. They construct machines that try to reveal disturbances in the systems we are caught up in: misunderstandings, bugs, aberrations, perversions, stutterings. By doing so they also produce critical apparatuses in the sense of footnotes: the critical and primary source material that accompanies an edition of a text. Francois Roche (whose texts sometimes produce almost the same quantity of footnotes as the texts are long, by the way) writes that “machines also simultaneously produce artefacts, assemblages, multiplicity and desires and infiltrate the “raison d’être” of our own body and mind in the relationship to our own biotopes.” 6) Thus the props and McGuffins 7) New Territories make, like the frozen bodies and their miniatures for La Diavolezza, may trigger complex and unpredictable events, which in the end may only exist in our memory or imagination but reveal something about our complex and ambivalent relation to the Alps.
Footnotes
Gilles Deleuze, Felic Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Penguin Books, London, 2009, pp. 1
Paul Scheerbart, Glasarchitektur & Glashausbriefe, Verlag Klaus G. Renner, , München, 1986, pp. 57; Bruno Taut, Alpine Architektur, in: Matthias Schirren, Bruno Taut, Alpine Architektur, Eine Utopie – A Utopia, Prestel, München/Berlin/London/New York, 2004, pp. 27-115.
Bernd Herzogenrath, Nature/Geophilosophy/Machinics/Ecosophy, in: Bernd Herzogenrath, Deleuze/Guattari & Ecology, Palgrave MacMillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke/New York, 2009, pp. 11-12
Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, Continuum Impacts, London/New York, 2008.
In fiction, a McGuffin is a plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues, often with little or no narrative explanation. The specific nature of a MacGuffin is typically unimportant to the overall plot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin
On the pursuit of Ötzi / Scenario – Props – Movie …
Innsbruck Architecture University / M4
I’m the unknown Ötzi proto-human friend / lost in the whiteness i could spoil / for limited time / preliminary condition to rebirth everyday / / to make tomorrow possible / daily animal instinct / night psychosis /// an impulse to make shelter / diurnal silence / nocturnal conflicts staging my human schizophrenia // hopefully // call me Sybil/ in my multiple echoes // from larva to nymphas // cycle of repetition / and exquisite corpses…
Credits:
Produced by: M4 / New Territories _University of Innsbruck (institute for experimental architecture.hochbau) / Francois Roche with Camille Lacadée, Stephan Henrich / Assistant Producer / Galo Moncayo Asan, Marc Ihle, Peter Griebel / CAST: Martina Lesjak / SCENARIO: Alexander Grasser, Jörg Stanzel / P.R.O.P.S: Lukas Härtenberger, Philipp Rust, Theresa Uitz / SUIT | ROBOT: Lino Lanzmaier, Pedja Gavrilovic, Simeon Brugger / CINEMATOGRAPHY: Alexander Nikolas Walzer, Gülay Güldemir / DIALOG: Theresa Uitz / DIRECTION: Francois Roche / EDITING: Francois Roche & Camille Lacadée / SOUNDDESIGN: Alexander Nikolas Walzer, Gülay Güldemir / ROBOT: Stephan Henrich / MAKE UP: Gülay Güldemir / SUPORTED BY: Spielraum – Fablab Innsbruck, RexLab – University of Innsbruck, Institute for Archeology – University of Innsbruck, Agrargemeinschaft Haggen / SPONSORS | PARTNERS: institute for experimental architecture.hochbau, Vice Rector for Research – University of Innsbruck, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture – University
…it is about the compulsion that moves the body towards animality… an orifice that summons… it speaks and promises absolutes… it becomes the impossibility to resist the call of the embassy, the call of desires…
The situation is of dialogue, an exchange between a Diogenean human and a wild rat; caught somewhere in between. Inherent in this situation is a paradox, that by longing to identify with the wild, one is inadvertently tamed, caged in an opposing intention. The urge to consume, the hunger for mutualism in its entirety. The (il)logic imposes to be repeated
in the Deep Wild Thai Forest for 3 weeks of immersion at the research of the Feral ChildExpedition-Odyssey / 20 people / Scientific, Biologist, Ethnographer, Architects,…& Hunter /Blog / http://www.new-territories.com/blog/DIY2014/
30 June 2014 / 7 PM / Opening of the LAB M4 / MindMachineMakingMyths / Non-Profit Academic inter-zone /5 Stores Building on Chao Praya river[eIf/bʌt/c] / Institute for contingent scenario / (including 6 axes robot, 3d printers, 3d Scanners + Spindle, Extruder, Plasma and other cutting, forming, additive, substractive systems…+ HD Camera, SteadyCam, 20 Desktops, A0 printer… Cat and Kitchen…)New-Territories/ 450 Trok Saphan Yao (Shop house on Chao Praya river) Chakkrawat / 10100 Bangkok / Thailand / +66(0)26225626 / newterritories@new-territories.comPreamble of this LAB / 6 DIY-Computation-Experiments / http://www.new-territories.com/blog/?p=1516
On one side the fetishism of the industrial products and components (Italian International Pavilion) and on the other the celebration of the political failure of the world… as a naive agitprop able to wrap the architect with politically correct conscientiousness… self-complaisance for this comfortable dualism.
We are in the pursuit of the diagrammatic hoax he himself promoted 20 years ago, same arrogance of reductionism to avoid embracing and gathering complexity in a productive way, in an aesthetic way, for a critical production, not for a simulation of a critical behavior… sponsored by Rolex.
Where are the political mechanisms in Rem’s obscenity? Where are underlying apparatuses, at the origin of the global ‘malentendu’, he self-enjoyed to play with, with literal self-indulgence and a high degree of criminal innocence.
As a counter example, it reminds me of Hans Haack fired from the Guggenheim in 1971 for showing the mechanisms of property and alienation of NY cities, particularly the capitalism of slums. One is doing entertainment, which most architects applaud as Penguins, the other is taking the personal risk to open the Pandora box.
But the worm was in the fruit. It started when Rem derived to his own profit (Exodus) the ‘Continuous Monument’ of Super Studio for the Casabella competition in the early 70ties. We could date this trick as the first act of selling Merchandised radicalism to the global market. And the new-age dematerialized mirror roof of Natalini (Superstudio) became in the hand of Rem a functionalist Corbusean iconography to justify he was able to initiate the passage between what seems for him political romanticism (radicalism) to pseudo functionalist statement (to be sold to global ignorance).
The loop-story of authorship-economy, ironically wrote J.F. Lyotard in his ‘philosophical postmodern description’, has to come back ‘in the pocket’ of the one who will be able to vectorize the story, eviscerated of any toxicity for the financial world dimension, and never to the one who is at the origin of the storytelling, facing his solitude. Rem sociologically represents this kind of extreme arrogant icon of the ‘new-wave’ Hegelian movement (at the Opposite of the notion of Sublime defined by Kant and Lyotard). This movement surfed since the 70ties on the work of the others (David Lynch abusing of Rivette for Mulholland Drive, or his plagiarism of Jodorovsky’s Dune). Their protagonists are so occupied to play their Ziggy Stardust’s role of post-modern Shaman, full-time Guru that they forgot to innovate, to risk their position and their neck.
This passage from Radicalism to Marketplace is a Hoax. They mainly succeeded because of their correspondence and adaptation to the global brainlessness organized by media and politics, in the 90ties, during the period called the “Age of the ice’ by Deleuze and Guattari.
This voluntary and systematic duplicity between standardization of product on one side (to flatter the conventional way of industrial system and offer to the architect the only possibility to become a property master) and on the other side an appearance of criticality of the world conflict without to absorb, digest this multiple ambivalence as a “reason d’etre”, as the starting point of a production.
This discovery of the failure of the world is similar to mister Jourdain’s syndrome in Moliere’s play, discovering with naivety and self-confidence the existence of the rules, the rules of language, the rules of the world, and thinking that he is the only one to get this consciousness… With a post un-interruptus egotist coitus pleasure….
It is so easy to show the pathology of the world on one side and on the other the repetition of industrial components…. To avoid seeing that creation is exactly at the opposite… articulating production and critical meaning, associating emergencies and knowledge, absorbing simultaneously the desire of production and the pathology of the drama, digesting and metabolizing beauty and toxicity, vomiting it in a strategy of knowledge, of critic…. of design (and not in the literal Death Star way), developing apparatuses, as said M Foucault, which question the order of discourses, meaning and authority.
We have to face the main aspect of this biennial…. Who gave Rem the authority to take part in the burning of the discipline (from exodus diploma, to ‘fuck the context’, from fake activism to ‘hysterical preservation’). Who benefits from the crime? Who was interested to this reductionism…
Creation, situationism and creation as a strategy of political aesthetic (including some courage) is exactly at the opposite … of this commercialization of consciousness. We have to show the mechanism at the origin of the mechanism, to manipulate anxiety as a process of knowledge and aesthetic… far away from this immature reductionism…
The next Biennale should stop these kinds of clichés, for an operative critical production, and avoid this hoax between stereotype of ‘reproduction’ and political entertainment for dummies.
Some visit /on pavilions:
–The Russian / the music of Titanic …. Sad and joy… we wonder if they are playing a ragtime of a god save the queen when the boat was sinking. Not so far away from the musician in the Hieronymus Bosh’ ‘Delicious Garden ‘. The game of Rem’s Topic… as a legitimate Funky Fuck You for a non productive vision… the statement of the end…with musicians… the last dance.
–The Korean and French / Utilizing the past / the puppets of Rem / Historical usurpation from architect and critic… Do we need a Biennale to know the conflict in Korea? or that the French missed modernity… except the ones who were not architects (Tati -playtime-Hulot) and Prouve (the industrial craftsman in a Walter Benjamin ambiguity, between era of reproduction and aura of the object…)? How institution used the ones who resisted against them, both in bankruptcy at the end of their life, without any attention from the same institutions who are now, after their death, using their critical position to promote the French of flag >>>That should be awarded as the best hypocrisis… hopefully they received it / 30 pieces of silver = one honorable mention… the price of Judas… a ‘cocardisme’ postmortem.
PS / never want to promote our own babies / and it’s not the subject of this paper / But the two projects in DMZ in Korea are able to talk, show and critic the situation in a design process… in a strategy of meanings… articulating tools and critics of situation… Korea / New-Territories / http://www.new-territories.com/he%20shoot%20me%20down.htm /
-The German / Naked Cynicism (intentional or not – not so clear in fact)… but in any case the standard of the past becoming the stereotype of the Asiatic Petit Bourgeois continent… In fact more real than any political activism… to show the ugliness of our discipline, supported by BMW-Mercedes.
–The American / A cultural Maddofian scheme pyramid organized by StoreFront to fake multiple discourses for speeches of tenure track academic teachers. A strategy to water the fish and make Noise… to brew the void in an incredible self-sufficiency. Thanks to the epigone of Frida Kahlo who also participates in sinking the boat.
-The polish / just regressively monarcho-fascist as the factual output of the theme.
–Israelian / A copism of a machine already shown in previous Venice Biennale for the ideal Cartography in the sand to easily erase problem, history and guilty borders…
2 open letters following the European Vote last Sunday (National Party winner).
2 lettres ouvertes, au dimanche soir du 25 May 2014 / Adult Contents
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english
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My dear friends…
What have you done ?
The {K}ultur you are carrying as a flagship, the >>>> in random order Barre, Migayrou, Alba, Arlot, Chaslain, Edelman, Cohen, Riciotti, Nouvel, Castro, historically Belmont and Bloch-Laine, and some kids Rambert/ Caille… but others know it… they are the future new-comers in this ad-hominem list… of this French invention which you made so moribund, nowhere audible except in your small power boudoirs..
What have you done other than creating the manure of today’s stench
Your intelligences were only used to serve yourselves… your haughtiness… hypocrisy
It suits you well to cry Wolf, while your arrogance in enclosing creation in the back room of your own interests, of your small franco-french affairs, are at the origin of the situation.
Everyone has to clean his/her own backyard… and the small crime of the architect (and of his/her administrators !) is not less punishable than the one of a politician… in fact it became its toy, thanks to you…
No the Samaritan is not the problem… it is the Philarmonique attributed in a fake competition which should be considered one (and we would shoot the second opus of Ferreri ‘Touche pas a la femme blanche’ in the aborted construction site), it is the choice of the curator from the Biennale Pavilion in Venice, it is the PLU of Paris and its ‘queue-jumping’… which is already one… it is to have for 20 years preferred the copy to the original (J.N. and R.R. in front display, with all their epigones – see the Milan Pavilion, graceless clone of the Seville one), but even more to have organized it, to have consciously orchestrated it… and its representation headquarters.. dedicated to the ‘in the style of’… as in the time of Bernini and Colbert conflict … your Model.. not mine… where the administration power complies with the ignorance of the Prince to in fine manipulate him (see the pathetic dairy of Frederic Mitterrand)… You have sown the seeds of power abuse, via a dominating politico-cultural administration drunken on its kingly ‘puissance’… simultaneously ignorant to the World and ignored by it… It is now time for the operetta elites to harvest these pernicious providences.
AA, the typically french architectural magazine, is in the hands of ‘faquins’, the Order, the Guild has not left the Vichy suburbs and the institutions are blinded by their lack of means… clearly a good pretext for inertia… and so on and so on… the list is long…
But this time I will come to your lectures, I will confront your mediocrities, in Venice… where despite your disqualifications we are again and again invited… but also to give you the cue… for all the prattling you have crafted… for the stench you have provoked… Can you see the price to pay?
It is not so much a vindictive being from the servile crowd of the Venice Biennale which will confront you but the one who has seen and fought your co-optation systems, from within, since over 20 years and can testify to your masquerades and democratic hoaxes at the origin of the public command mechanisms and mediation, standing to attention… silly typesetters (of d’A, AA etc.)
You made a small personal affair out of architecture… I am ashamed to have met ‘US’…
For the record / demission letter for the French Pavilion curating in 2002 >>Letter/The cultural exception was already sleeping with the National Preference / Siamese concepts
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french
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Chers amis
Qu’avez donc vous fait ?
La {K}ultur que vous portez en étendard, les >>>>>dans le désordre Barré, Migayrou, Alba, Arlot, Chaslain, Edelman, Cohen, Ricotti, Nouvel, Castro, historiquement Belmont et Bloch-Lainé, y-compris quelques lampistes Rambert/ Caille… mais d’autres le savent …ils sont a-venir dans cette liste ad-hominem… … de cette création française que vous avez rendue moribonde, inaudible ailleurs que dans vos petits boudoirs de pouvoir…
Qu’avez-vous fait d’autre que de créer le lisier de la puanteur d’aujourd’hui
Vos intelligences n’étaient qu’au service de vous-même… de votre superbe…hypocrisie
Cela vous va bien de crier au loup, alors que vos arrogances d’enfermer la création dans l’arrière boutique de vos propres intérêts, de vos petites affaires Franco-Francaises, sont à l’origine de la situation.
Chacun doit balayer devant sa porte… et le petit crime de l’architecte (et de ses administrateurs! grands commis et petits commis de l’état) n’est pas moins punissable que celui d’un politique…il en est devenu son jouet, grâce a vous…
Non la Samaritaine n’est pas le problème… c’est de construire le Philarmonique, suite au déni de concours qui devrait en être un (et on tournerait le second opus de Ferreri ‘Touche pas à la femme Blanche’ dans le chantier avorté), c’est le choix du curateur du Pavillon de la Biennale de Venise qui aurait dû en être un, c’est le PLU de Paris et ses passe-droits… qui en est déjà un ….c’est d’ avoir depuis vingt ans préféré le plagia à l’original (J.N. et R.R. en tête de gondole, épigones inclus -voir pavillon de Milan, clone débile de Seville), mais plus encore de l’avoir organisé, orchestré sciemment … avec ses officines de représentations pour faire ‘à la manière de’ ….comme du temps du conflit entre Bernini et Colbert… votre Modèle… non le mien…… ou le pouvoir de l’administration se plie, au service de l’ignorance du prince pour in fine le manipuler (voir le journal pathétique de Frédéric Mitterrand)…Vous avez ensemencé l’abus de pouvoir, celui d’une administration politico-culturelle dominante enivrée de sa puissance régalienne…et simultanément ignorante au Monde et ignorée du Monde….Aux Elites d’opérettes…de récolter maintenant les providences malsaines…
AA (le magasine FRanchouillard d’architecture) est aux mains de faquins, l’ordre n’a pas quitté les faubourgs de Vichy (non sans humour) et les institutions sont aveuglées par leur manque de moyen… bon prétexte en fait pour n’en prendre aucun … et ainsi de suite…la liste est longue…
Mais cette fois ci je viendrais à vos discours, à vos médiocrités pour vous faire face, à Venise….ou malgré vos disqualifications, nous y sommes encore et encore invités… Mais aussi pour vous faire réplique….à toute les facondes que vous avez façonnées…. A la puanteur que vous avez créée…. Voyez-vous le prix à payer… ?
Ce n’est pas tant un vindicatif dans la foule servile de la Biennale, qui vous fera face que celui qui a vu et combattu vos systèmes de cooptations, de l’intérieur, depuis 20 ans et peux témoigner des mascarades et canulars démocratiques à l’origine des mécanismes de la commande publique et de sa médiation, le petit doigt sur la couture, .., par de simples pigistes...
L’architecture vous en avez fait une petite affaire personnelle… J’ai honte de ‘NOUS’ avoir rencontré …
FR /
Pour mémoire / Lettre de démission du curating du Pavillon Français en 2002>>> Letter / L’exception culturelle couchait déjà avec la préférence Nationale / Concept Siamois /
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English / Letter to the Frac Orleans
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Dear friends from the Frac Orleans
Once upon a time you were a tool for emancipation, for confrontation, almost a zone of conflict… Not a ghetto destined to a bunch of Happy Few… in drowsy consumption… with as a bonus a grey eminence nightclub bouncer.
FRAC has built its ‘has been’ insipid and authoritarian Turbulences, while abusing es-robotic masters in its first exhibition, with Friedman® as an alibi, instead of having supported the winning project Olzweg which could have provoked a deflagration, an ambition… and change the landscape ‘of what was admissible to conceive and to make’… and we would not be there today. Did you know that?
For the record / The 2006 project Olzweg (co-winning) was of a kind to reconcile the curiosity of some with the ignorance of others (20 years Machine Celibataire). We had at that time stopped the legal proceedings to cancel the competition for passive corruption in the second round… on your request and to save your head… from what Michel Sapin, president of the region Centre in 2006, had put at stake (mettre en jeu ici… ca va?), if we had unveiled the consultation deceits… In fact a great strategic mistake from our part …
Because of your exclusion and cultural and intellectual gullibility politics … we are again getting plagiarism in Milan, again a… French pavilion… under influence… is this your success? To condone… after having been stifled by the then DAPA obliging you, without protest, to hire its sbires and expose its offspring… to drive your boat where it was sure to wreck… on a sympathetic inoffensive coral, a kind of kinder-garden, with its shovel, plastic rake and sandbox…?
Having surfed over a combative and generous generation, at the origin of the Frac to afterwards put its suitor into position, without undertaking any historical work?! Is it your success to participate to the jamming, the daubing of events and emergences… from those who initiated them to those who pursue them and in fine (we are still in this Beaux-Arts atavist France) to those who plagiarize…
Your archiving is magnificent yes, and as museum conservators, we have no choice but to respect you… yet your cultural politic in real time is distressing by its complaisance… and it is no longer of interest to anyone… check the frequentation rate… what you stamp as ‘recherche’ is not profitable anymore… shall we question its content?.. is this your new agenda, to produce paper hens… painless, colourless, abstruse. A lot of them are my friends, they were expecting better than your infantile instrumentation, rather that you’d help them to overcome this status of prepubescent geeks which is getting under their skin. Who is to blame? your Mentor and its Philosophy for Dummies pocketbook ? or you lack of ‘cultural political science’ ?
You think that you are not responsible for the rise of the indifferences… but you are one of its vectors. We expected courage from your part, instead you made culture into a queue-jumping, a kind of monarchic privilege, reserved for subscribers… and the nation is rebelling… and it’s violent, it’s obscene… but this monstrous and mean Golem … you took part in its begetting…
I had refused in 2002 (see above) to be the co-curator-scenographer of the French pavilion with you. The reasons have not changed and the consequences are getting worst… but nothing to report, everything will be all right, in the French cultural Teletubbies… you will get your pay at the end of the month… ‘I’ll be seeing you.’
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French / Lettre au Frac Orleans /
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Chers Amis du Frac Orleans
Vous étiez un outil d’émancipation, de confrontation, voir une zone de conflit …et non un ghetto réservé à quelques Happy Few…pour une consommation abrutie… avec en prime…. un physionomiste de boite de Nuit en éminence grise.
Le FRAC a construit ses Turbulences ‘has been’ et insipides tout en se gargarisant à la première expo de maitres es-robotiques, avec Friedman en Alibi, à défaut d’avoir porté le projet Lauréat Olzweg qui aurait pu produire une déflagration, une ambition…et modifier le paysage ‘de ce qu’il était admis de concevoir et de faire’… et nous n’en serions pas là aujourd’hui. Le saviez vous ?
Pour mémoire / Le projet de 2006, Olzweg (Co-Lauréat) était de nature à réconcilier la curiosité des uns avec l’ignorance des autres (Machine Célibataire sur 20 ans). Nous avions à l’époque stoppé la procédure judiciaire d’annulation du concours pour corruption passive au second tour, cela sur votre demande et afin de sauver votre tête, ce que Michel Sapin, président de la région Centre en 2006, avait mis en balance, si nous dévoilions les supercheries de la consultation. … Grave erreur stratégique que la nôtre en fait.
A cause de votre politique d’exclusion et de naïveté culturelle et intellectuelle… on se tape encore un plagiat à Milan, encore un…pavillon Français…sous influence…c’est cela votre réussite… ? De laisser faire…..après avoir été bâillonné par la DAPA de l’époque vous obligeant, sans que vous trouviez à redire, à employer ses sbires et exposer ses progénitures…pour piloter votre navire là où il était sûr de s’échouer…. sur un récif sympathique et inoffensif, une sorte de jardin d’enfant, avec pelles, bac à sable et râteaux… !?
D’avoir surfer sur une génération combative et généreuse, a l’origine du Frac pour installer par la suite ses prétendants, sans qu’aucun travail historique ne soit fait ? Est-ce là vôtre réussite de participer aux brouillages, aux barbouillages des évènements et des émergences…de ceux qui les initient à ceux qui les poursuivent et in fine (nous sommes toujours dans cette France aux atavismes Beaux-Arts) à ceux qui les plagient…
Votre archivage est magnifique, certes, et comme conservateurs de musée, on ne peut que vous respectez…mais votre politique culturelle en temps réel est affligeante de complaisance….ce qui n’intéresse plus personne…. voir le taux de fréquentation… ce que vous Estampillez ‘recherche’ ne fait plus recette… Faut-il en questionner le contenu ? Est-ce là vôtre nouveau cahier des charges de produire des cocottes en papier…indolore, inodore, abscons. Beaucoup sont mes amis, ils attendaient mieux que votre instrumentalisation infantile, et qu’au contraire… vous les aidiez à dépasser ce stade de Geeks pré-pubères qui leur collent à la peau. La faute à qui ? A votre Mentor, et son ‘Que Sais-je’ de philosophie en poche ? ou à votre manque de ‘science politique culturelle’ ?
Vous croyez ne pas être responsable de la montée des indifférences…mais vous en êtes l’un des vecteurs. On aurait pu attendre de vous du courage, mais vous avez fait de la culture un passe-droit, une sorte de privilège monarchique, réservé aux abonnés…et le peuple se révolte…c’est violent, obscène…mais ce Golem monstrueux et méchant… vous avez participé à son éclosion…
J’avais refusé en 2002(voir plus haut) d’être co-curateur-scénographe avec vous du pavillon Français. Les raisons n’ont pas changées, les conséquences elles s’aggravent… mais RAS, tout va bien aller, chez les ‘teletubbies’ Culturels Français…vous serez rémunérés à la fin du mois… ’Bonjour chez vous’.
I’ve to react… sorry to be the first but everybody is thinking perhaps the same….on his own…about you..boy
The invitation at the origin was only concerning people I respect… at the origin of the shifting>>>
But for some reason, a ‘stupid Spanish’ has been included without any attention of the initial agreement… of the meaning of the initial agreement…
So clearly NO>>>
I will never do a lecture with this kind of brainless testosterone puppet
Francois Roche
From: Alejandro Zaera-Polo
To: F Roche
Wonderful!
I am glad not to have to share the poster with irrelevant people. I will leave the pleasantries for Venice…
From: : F Roche To: Alejandro Zaera-Polo
You are a symptom, dear Alejandro as Patrick S.. as those kind of ‘clever monkey’ who are now distributing award to other ‘clever monkey’…to be sure to blind your playground and avoid to re-question why you got the position… and what could happen outside of your childish border …?
Which has the advantage crime ? At your opinion ? You are a symptom, dear Alejandro, and you get money back mainly because this symptom is simultaneously your blind spot.
The discipline crashed deeply since 10 years.
Few of you are directly responsible of the sinking… from intellectual reductionism.
I will see you in Venice with the Frida Kahlo Epigone (storefront)… dancing a Rumba between mister testosterone and miss nymphomaniac… superb… those people are so LVMH, so Hype, so sexy…catharsis-tic…. and so what ! we vomited fun…
BKK / 2013 / RMIT / New-Territories / Movie ‘∑ days’ under editing / with Gwyll Jahn, Mark Kowalyov, Agatha Partyka, Jack Mansfield-Hung, Daniel Balacich, Lynda Nguyen, Christopher Ferris, Khunakorn Terdkiatkhachorn, Victor Wong, Grant Trewella
Machines / N.T. / Francois Roche – Stephan Henrich (including some LAB-usc/angewandte)
There are many machines, so many desirable machines that in fact pretend to do more than they are doing. In the pursuit of pataphysics – the branch of philosophy that deals with the imaginary realm – they never reveal their deep natures: whether it is their lineage or their illusionary appearance, their genuine qualities or their sham features. Simultaneously speculative, fictional and accurately and efficiently productive, these machines navigate the world of Yestertomorrowday, with happiness and innocence, walking briskly through the mountains of rubbish of the 21st century and beyond. These pataphysical machines articulate symmetrically – through weird apparatuses – different arrows of time, different layers of knowledge, but more efficiently they negotiate the endless limits of what we could consider the territory of absurdity, where illogical behaviour is protocolised with an extreme logic of emerging design and geometry, where input and output are described by mathematical rules …
Neither a satire of ‘this and other worlds’, nor a techno-pessimism or a techno-derision, these machines reside at the very limits of the dystopian or they constitute the limit between the territory of conventions, of certainties and stabilities, where it is comfortable to consider everything legitimated by an order, or an intuition of an order, and by other territories; all the other paranoid, phantasm-like imaginings reported back by travellers.
In a casual and basic sense, machines have always been used to elaborate technicism as the extension of the hand, through its replacement, its improving, its acceleration of the speed and powers of transformation, of production. However, it seems very naive to reduce the machine to this obvious objective dimension, in a purely functional and mechanical approach; limiting it exclusively to a Cartesian notion of productive power, located in the visible spectrum of appearance and fact. In parallel, machines are producing artefacts, assemblages, multiple associations and desires, and are infiltrating the very raison d’être of our own bodies and minds that are codependent on our own biotopes or habitats.1 Fundamentally, everywhere in nature, at the origin of all exchange processes, in the transaction of any substances, they are the guarantee of its vitalism.2 Machines’ coexistence with nature renders them in effect a paradigm of the body. This is true of all processes, protocols and apparatuses, where transitory and transactional substances3 constitute and affect simultaneously all the species, where machines’ identities and outputs are both object and subject.
In pursuit of this polyphonic approach, we cannot pass over the notion of ‘the bachelor machine’4 as a tentative attempt to integrate mechanical apparatuses in a narrative transaction and transmutation (in the mode of the alchemist). This is the opposite approach to a headlong critique or denouncement of capitalism that highlights the substitution of craftsmen with unskilled workers manning machines5 (the natural consequence of this now being a mechanical system without workers). Walter Benjamin described this shift as a move from the singularity of production to mass production.6 This contrasts with the nostalgic romanticism that bachelor machines evoke through our fascination with their sophisticated ‘human-made-like’ construction: their eroticism or even barbaric eroticism.7 The ‘impulsive urge’ and gut-wrenching repulsion they generate means they exist in a permanent state of schizophrenia, vacillating between the simultaneous potential of production and destruction.8 Both positive and negative processes are the product of the same industrial system; their genesis is consubstantial, and their collateral effect diametrically in opposition. They are both dependent on this schizoid potential.
Following are a few examples of those pathological strategies of narration-production.
Darwinian Star-gate
Instructions: Stand up and face the ghosts in the depths of your private garden!
Rent this vehicle to transport yourself from a seated, peaceful, sleepy archaic body posture to a standing, lucid awakened position that induces bravery in those faced with the present.
Powered by photovoltaic cells, the Darwinian Star-gate’s arms unfold on their way from a panoptical to a worrisome heterotopic space you would normally refuse to see.
The star-gate machine introduces the passage of time between two constructions of different origins and periods. As a strategy for questioning the orientation of the arrow of time, it is able to quieten the anxiety of misunderstanding provoked by the shifts between the Modern to Postmodern, Postmodern to Digital, and Digital to Robotic Computational extension, in a ‘beam me up scotty’ rhyzomatic shortcut. The travel could take an evolutionary and/or regressive trajectory. But mainly this machine is most efficiently used as a vector of discovery that reaches a point of uncertainties, of un-determinism, to escape from a zone where everything has already been flattened, classified and validated.
Its first use and development was for ‘thebroomwitch’ experiment.
Precautions for use: Using the vehicle too often might cause a sensation of time deprivation and sometimes immortality, but also ultimately a good excuse for denial of your duties in a given time. You might also lose the sense of time passing, which can significantly impair synchronising motor actions. Abuse of the device can be extremely dangerous for mental health and seriously affect the user’s temporal perception, especially in regards to the notion of a specious present. Ultimately, it can cause memory loss.
On the contrary, overexposure to the present time (staying in one time or another) might cause the user depression, cynical behaviour or other pathological distresses, which the vehicle shall not be held responsible for …
The device does not work for French architecture, which already confuses its origins.
Antipersonnel Nymphomaniac Wanderer
Instructions: Rent this machine to brave the danger and bring back to you on her back rotten species, decomposed biomass, from any ‘no-man’s land’.
The Wanderer can be transformed for collecting other materiel. All robot ‘tuning’ of terminations, articulated arms, legs and tips is authorised, under the condition that you return the machine in its initial state.
The machine collects any ingredients to be recycled in a new productive use. This grants a second life to the waste, and the trash in polluted areas such as post-military zones with unreachable infrastructure interstices.
Legends and fairytales are simultaneously transported out of the deepness of those abandoned situations, as in a ‘Stalker’ experiment to touch the unknown. Please take care of the backlash of those creatures.
Its first use and development was for the ‘itshootmedown’ experiment.
Precautions for use: The machine is originally built with a very high self-estimation sensorial device, as well as a danger-blinding component, both necessary for its brave actions and responsibilities. However, depending on the environment it is exposed to, the machine could be subject to sudden and violent changes in self-esteem.
In case of failure or small breakdown (if the danger-blind component gets hurt), the machine will exhaust itself until suicide. If you notice that the machine repeats a very high exposure to dangerous situations, put it off to avoid risks of suicidal tendencies disguised into bravery.
Introverted Eczemetal Recycler
Instructions: Transforming informal heaps into deformed ones, this machine recycles waste from metallurgic and construction sites into potential troglodyte morphologies.
This machine is still in development. It is thus available for rent under a special discount as a beta test. The provision of sufficient energy levels for the effective gathering of steel has not yet been accurately gauged, and dysfunctions may easily occur when the Recycler is in operation. We recommend for this machine only to be rented in parallel with the crane that is able to stabilise its agenda and positioning. We require feedback from customers to improve the reasons behind its design, which appear for now weak. This machine will be removed from the catalogue if there are no further reasons for it being in existence.
Precautions for use: Due to its lack of resolution, this machine is especially vulnerable.
Protect it from the feeling of identity loss by engaging with it on a private level – otherwise it might show a tendency to confuse its own being with the built environment, and develop skin camouflage diseases in order to disappear inside its own construction. An early stage of depersonalisation can be spotted by its tendency towards metallic somatisation.
Difference and Repetition/Intricate Randomiser
Instructions: Rent this device to populate a surface that will be revealed by the trajectory you convey by impulse to the machine. Its multiple arms will follow a dance of intricacy in compulsive articulated movements, giving ideal programmable empirical shape and outcomes.
This machine has to be rented with a specific number of components (only available in packages of 500 units) to be populated in any condition, any situation. The individual component is developed as a Velcro termination, self-attached by a comb-feather design, with variable positions able to assume, at your convenience, polyphonic structures; be they massive, fluid, opaque or transparent.
The machine is able to be packed in a pick-up of 3 x 2 x 1 metres (10 x 7 x 3 feet) including the tracks that are 10 metres (33 feet) long. Please refer to the installation instructions for ascertaining the dual positions of the machine/component on the ground. You will be trained in the inverse cinematic process that will enable you to draw first the structure manually, as curves in space by manipulating the machine tips, and secondly discover how the footprint of your handy movement is becoming the trajectory of the components stacking, automatically repeated and assembled by the machine (4 metres/13 feet high maximum). The intricate packing fabrication will follow the isocurves you defined in the space in a repetitive adaptation.
Precautions for use: Due to the requirement of unpredictability of its work, the machine is subject to bipolar disorder, alternating manic, hypomanic and depressive episodes of varying lengths. Although these episodes are necessary to the nature of the random intricacy process, they might in the long run cause side effects such as racing thoughts and rest (mode OFF) deprivation.
Take care of possible exhaustion of the machine, as well as of the feeling of impuissance in front of its never-ending chore.
On the contrary, if the machine shows repetitive, ordered or systematic combination processes, bring it back to the shop immediately for emergency reprogramming.
Body-Builder-Shitter
Instructions: Rent an agile hyper-proteined device, shitting liquid concrete in a vertical phallic extrusion, which is turned into coagulations that it stands on to continue the construction process in defiance of gravity.
The Shitter is only made available to rent to a minimum of 30 families, dedicated and driven by a bio-politic decision.
The device is a usable, operative machine for a self-organised micro-urbanism conditioned by a bottom-up system. The 30-plus families, called ‘the multitude’, are able to drive the entropy of their own system of construction, their own system of ‘vivre ensemble’. It is based on the potential offered by contemporary bioscience, the rereading of human corporality in terms of physiology and chemical balance to make palpable and perceptible the emotional transactions of the ‘animal body’, the headless body, the body’s chemistry, and information about individuals’ adaptation, sympathy, empathy and conflict when confronted with a particular situation and environment. The construction process developed through ‘machinism’ – indeterminate and unpredictable behaviour – with the creation of a secretive 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 composed of successive geometrics according to a strategy of permanent production of anomalies: with no standardisation, no repetition, except for the procedures and protocols at the base of this technoid slum’s emergence.
Its first use and development was for the ‘anarchitecture_deshumeurs’ experiment.
Precautions for use: The machine is set in between anal and foecal stages, leaving both unresolved in order to achieve full development of its construction capacities. Anal expulsive behaviours, as well as exhibitionism, are frequent phenomena of the machine and are to be considered as signs of good health.
Placed in an extremely social zone, these behaviours could later develop into paraphilia: manifesting in hyperbolic intensifications, distortions, monstrous fruits of erotic expression outside of normal eroticism. It is strongly recommended, therefore, not to place it in public zones (ie outside of your own multitude).
The device is also slightly narcissistic, which could provoke strong reactions in similar devices of different multitudes.
OCD Packer
Instructions: Rent this extremely efficient packing, ordering, classifying, numerating and xyz-positioning machine, for an endlessnessless stacking and staggering. The Packer is only available for long-term rent.
The machine works to extend existing construction, by testing the possibility of wrapping, smearing and invading a previous situation to develop a surrounding maze with multiple uncertain trajectories and ‘parcours’. The morphological trap it creates is both a jail and a protection apparatus. This dual strategy avoids the occupant perceiving their own madness and protects others from their own pathologies.
Participants require a personal agreement and discharge to play this game as a ‘voluntary prisoner’, lost in the permanent entropy of packing. In any case you could use, if necessary, RFIDs on PDAs to rediscover positioning – but at your own risk.
Its first use and development was for the ‘Olzweg’ experiment.
Precautions for use: In order to achieve high efficiencies in ordering, numbering, arranging, checking, cleaning, etc, the machine was implanted with intrusive thoughts that can produce uneasiness, apprehension, fear and worry.
The repetitive behaviours aimed at reducing these anxieties can also manifest in an aversion to particular numbers or in the absurd repetition of nervous rituals.
In case you notice such signs of obsessive compulsive disorder, please bring the machine back to the shop immediately for a diminution of input anxieties.
Algae-Sacher-Cyclothymia
Instructions: Rent this under-seawater device that behaves as an extractor removing algae and extracting chemicals (calcite) and particles from the water in order to agglomerate a masochism structure. The progressive accumulation is condemned to be pulled and pushed by the current and tide, which drives the orientation and the progression of the crystallisation without a forecasted positioning agenda.
The machine is usable only in seawater, which contains approximately 400 milligrams per litre of calcium and represents 1.6 tons per cubic kilometre. The calcium is obtained from dissolving rocks such as limestone, marble, calcite, dolomite, gypsum, fluorite and apatite. Before renting you need to request a survey to confirm the quantity of calcium in your location. We can provide this expertise.
In order to function, the device requires a water depth of between 6 metres and 20 metres (20 and 65 feet).
The extraction, transformation processes are patented. The chemistry filtering and reaction cannot be divulgated in these instructions of uses. Please do not open the sealed core of the machine; it is toxic.
Precautions for use: The machine is built with a total submission to external factors such as currents, tides and lunar eccentricities. The more it is ill-treated by the water, the better it will work. The machine is also cyclothymic, subject to mood swings, and is voluble in its responses to the water humiliations.
Due to the mixture of these characteristics, the device is susceptible to construct totally useless structures, and cannot be held responsible for the unusable nature of the structures built. You are renting it at your own risk.
In extreme cases of maltreatment, where the machine is overexposed to water or other environmental factors, it could become self-defeating or suicidal. Ultimately, it could completely stop functioning.
Bulimic Enclosure-Weaver
Instructions: Rent this silk cocoon-weaving device – preciously precise and accurate – to create temporary buildings, camping sites, outdoor workshops or garden parties.
Do not complain that this machine is both the producer and the structure of the production, trapped in its own net. It is its own process of know-how.
The silk membrane could be waterproof or not. Please refer to the density of knitting in the machine’s instructions. The wire is the product of bio-production, starch and flax. Its lifespan is around 10 days before it degrades and loses its structural resistance. This melting condition is 100 per cent natural, and the process of necrosis will provide nitrogen and nutritional elements to the ground. Do not be afraid of the ostensible pollution it seems to generate.
Different time spans for synthetic silks are available on application.
The synthetic silk wire is provided by a bobbin of 10 kilometres (6 miles).
Precautions for use: The machine is conditioned to have a lack of bodily feeling in its surfaces in order to keep it endlessly weaving surfaces. However, it can unexpectedly reject the surface and return to its body, inducing the formation of a protective cocoon around itself.
This bulimic tendency to recreate a virtual dimension of potential traits, connections, affects, and movements around its own body are symptoms of the future loss of the machine inside its own production.
At this stage nothing should be attempted to stop the claustrophobic process.
The Astrolabe Stutterer
Instructions: Rent this device – the Astrolabe Stutterer – to ascertain the level of threat posed by two discrete planets, the sun and the moon, and the human pathologies they produce. This machine detects any potential harm that these planets threaten, and secures your negotiation with the celestial vault: protecting you from magnetic storms and radiation from the sun, and the psycho-lupus affliction of the moon.
The Astrolabe Stutterer cannot simultaneously maintain an equal position between the sun and the moon, except during eclipses, every 6 585.32 days, exactly 18 years, 10 or 11 days and 8 hours, depending on the occurrence of leap years.
The part of the machine dedicated to the sun indicates the planet’s celestial cycle. It particularly highlights any gap in the sun’s position and the degree of protection afforded by the interaction of solar rays with the ozone layer, which has had its impact depleted by UV emissions. The device can be used in correspondence with uranium powder, which has a natural afterglow that indicates the intensity of UV emissions. The uranium powder is provided with special conditions, because of the emission of alpha rays (below the administrative threshold), which have been agreed by legal settlements. This machine has the potential for a double paranoia: one harmful substance acts as sensor to another, providing a chain of past–present–future industrial collateral effects.
The moon part of the device points to the symptoms of the moon: the forces of attraction, and fear of transformation (real or illusionary). It works as a vector of ‘science of the imaginary’, through a pataphysical approach. Nothing seems real, but everything in fact affects your metabolism.
Its first use and development was for ‘theBuildingwhichneverdies’ experiment.
Precautions for use: Due to the dual nature of the object to be read, schizophrenic episodes of low intensity are normal and even necessary to the effective functioning of the device.
If placed under ambiguous coordinates, the clock is subject to delusive and paranoiac interpretations of the astral movements and this will induce disorganised reports and drawings, impossible to be read or understood under normal circumstances.
Hallucinatory episodes may include the creation of a third aster or the predictions of absurd mortal events such as over-exposure to the moon’s dangerous UV light or again a daytime invasion of werewolves.
If pushed to its extreme, the device will run from purposeless agitation and motions to complete catatonia in which case it is recommended to unplug.
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In the next decade or so, the widespread adoption of robotics is set to transform the construction industry: building techniques will become increasingly automated both on- and off-site, dispensing with manual labour and enabling greater cost and operational efficiencies. What unique opportunities, however, does robotics afford beyond operational effectiveness explicitly for the practice of architecture? What is the potential for the serial production of non-standard elements as well as for varied construction processes? In order to scale up and advance the application of robotics, for both prefabrication and on-site construction, there needs to be an understanding of the different capabilities, and these should be considered right from the start of the design and planning process. This issue of AD showcases the findings of the Architecture and Digital Fabrication research module at the ETH Zurich Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, directed by Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler, which explores the possibilities of robotic construction processes for architecture and their large-scale application to the design and construction of high-rise buildings. Together with other contributors, such as Neri Oxman, François Roche and Antoine Picon, they also look at the far-reaching transformations starting to occur within automated fabrication: in terms of liberation of labour, entrepreneurship, the changing shape of building sites, in-situ fabrication and, most significantly, design. Contributors: Thomas Bock, Jelle Feringa, Neri Oxman, Antoine Picon, François Roche, Camille Lacadee, Stephan Henrich. ETH Zurich contributors: Michael Budig, Norman Hack, Willi Lauer and Jason Lim and Raffael Petrovic (Future Cities Laboratory), Volker Helm, Silke Langenberg and Jan Willmann.
PROLOGUE / A ghostly emergence amid a jungle… sombre mimicry negotiating the right distance… between flirting and repulsing… feeding and fighting… in a silent war…
The scenario is developing a strategy to infiltrate an abandoned tropical forest, in the middle of bkk through the principle of timidity (trees’ crown shyness phenomenon), in a mimesis of the pheromonal foliage behavior.
The existing trees are used to metabolize the museum “alien”, made by the intricacy of a multitude of bio-components, issued from nature’s recycled waste…computational growth in the negative void.
This cradle to cradle scenario re-negociate the relationship between alive and dead ghosts, between eros & tanatos… the timidity symptom is a chemistry, an allelopathic app aratus to re-inject a degree of dispute, of conflict between ‘proto and crypto’ natures
GEOMETRY / Scanning 3D of all the trees…three months of duty! To get 5 gigas bytes of Point Cloud…micro station for transferring point could in millions of Rhino point…Python to generate attractors, repulsor effect and reveal the negative, the void of the forest, where something could infiltrate… approximation of surface…3Dprint and modeling in synthetic plaster to blur the positivism of the scientific process… 3D scanning by Kinect…and distribution and cluster population on surface by Python-Rhino…grasshopper shaking…Design of the intricable component, test of cnc milling scale one by Kuka-Agilus…and preparation of the final aluminum Mold, again by CNC….dripping of bio-plastic for 15 000 units…
The research on geometry is a mathematical development revealing a shape according to the existing obstacles surrounding it (the trees – calculation of distances to trunk, branch, foliage), followed by an equation to define a Timidity relation between the limits of the emerging shapelessness and the contour of the existing morphologies.
ALLELOPATHY/PHYTOHORMONE / Ethymologically…..“to suffer from each other”> Active or passive effect of chemicals released into the environment which influences other organisms. We include in the bio-plastic of 15000 Components some D.E.P. / diethyl phthalate (amember of the group of phthalic acid esters known as phthalates). D.E.P. belongs to the low molecular weight (lmw) group with a molecular weight of <250 dalton and comparatively low viscosity and high volatility. it has a faint disagreeable odor and can be transferred from the plastics that contains it, creating a pheromonalallelopathy between the museum and the jungle, to keep them at distance from each other (around 0.9 meter), in a dynamic antagonism.
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Post-Critical Scenario/ NDE (NEAR DEATH EXPERIMENT) / The museum is simultaneously a ‘spot’ for artistic experimentation and a stupa for Arts Collectors, who confuses, in a ‘buddhist’ way, the cultural objects and the subject of their possible (re-)incarnation… themselves object of their own collection, dictated by the desire to reach an illusionary status of impermanency… corpses haunting the situation, cultural icon flirting with their fatalistic migration of souls (metempsychosis)… in fact just a fantasy or a fanaticism to become an entity of their phantasm.
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Program
– Museum 2500m2
– House of Collector 2000 m2
– Employees quarter 600 m2
-Detail Design Phase / Spring 2013-14
-Initial date for Completion / December 2016
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The Crew
-Petch Osathanugrah / Client
-New-Territories, [eIf/bʌt/c] / Architects
Main team, Francois Roche, Camille Lacadee, Cyril Lami, Jeep P. Narongthanarath
Collaborators, Devin Jernigan, Tiziano Derme, Myrtille Fakhreddine , Vongsawat Wongkijjalerd, Ip Panit, Patrick Mc Kechnie, Katrin Hochschuh, Hadin Charbel…
Biennale Installation, Nicolas Grawitz and Iris Godbille
Time of studies / June 2013-April 2014 / Details Design Phase completed
With Design partners
-Ezio Blasetti / Architect / Mathematical Process
-Andrew Snalune / Façade Engineering
-Sakkarn Sirisrisak / Steel Engineering
-Sanitas Studio / Landscape Architect
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LAST previous news / we are obliged to suspend the ‘Timidity Symptom’ museum project because of the period of Thai political shift, the new Military Coup 2014.
Development of a non linear G-Code between sliding track and XYZ positioning nozzle (extrusion polymer Gun) / Francois Roche with Wes Mc Gee and Michigan Ann-Arbor Master Class / Research course on language and stochastic feed back (winter 2012) /
Tourette syndrome or Gilles de la Tourette syndrome is an inherited neuropsychiatric disorder with onset in childhood, characterized by multiple physical (motor) tics and at least one vocal (phonic) tic.
Le bateleur / “Rentrez ! Messieurs, Mesdames“….dans mon espace d’Architecture paramétrique, géométries complexes, design procédural : si vous êtes convaincus de l’intérêt de ces nouveaux outils pour la conception et la modélisation de vos projets, ce message pourrait vous intéresser. Autrement, vous avez peut-être gaspillée 23 secondes de votre temps pour ouvrir ce mail et j’en suis désolé.
Le joker / En 15 sec…. Vous apparaissez comme un faiseur… Un plagieur…. Faut-il 10 s de plus…
Le bateleur / Je ne comprends pas. Plagieur de quoi ?
Le joker/ Seriez-vous ignorant ou naïf ou simplement dédié au marché français.. Eviter de faire de spam sur l’architecture paramétrique… Un sujet qui vous dépasse …. Et dont vous ignorez même le langage…Faite de la pub… Sur vos petits mondes…afin de tirer profit du travail des autres…Cela n’a de valeur qu’en France…et ça semble vous suffire…
Le Bateleur / Ah Ah !Je vois le genre….Voulez-vous bien vous renseigner à mon propos avant de vous permettre certaines banalités ? Et dire que je vous avais fait parvenir mon portfolio pour éventuellement travailler ensemble… Je vais tirer profit de cet échange. PS : concernant votre accusation de spam, je vous signale que vous avez postez une offre d’emploi correspondante à mes compétences. Veuillez la retirez si elle n’est plus d’actualité.
Le joker/ Je ne pense pas vous avoir répondu sur votre offre…..C’est à priori qu’elle n’était simplement pas valide….non dans sa forme mais son contenu….Votre préciosité et vos références n’intéressant que vous même…. dans le Comté franchouillard… ou personne ne regarde ce qui se passe ailleurs…Je peux vous envoyer d’ailleurs un texte qui fait critique sur le crétinisme pédant de Saraceno desquels vous semblez vous enorgueillir…(ortho a corriger)….Cela vous soulagerait un peu….
Le Bateleur / L’ouverture d’esprit qui caractérise ma génération (saviez-vous que nous sommes dans l’ère des réseaux ouverts ?) et mon indulgence envers vos insultes gratuits me permet de voir une certaine valeur dans nos échanges. Je veux bien que m’envoyiez le texte dont vous parlez. Oui, je m’enorgueillis de mon parcours et mes collaborations (notamment avec Tomás Saraceno que vous n’aimez pas). Vous dites que mes références n’intéressent que moi-même, je vous assure que ce n’est pas le cas. Vous n’arrêtez pas de me parler de la France (elle vous aurait fait quelque chose?), alors que je suis italien et mon parcours et européen (principalement Espagne, Italie, France) mais pas seulement (avez-vous ouvert mon cv?). Visiblement cela ne vous arrive pas de discuter d’architecture paramétrique en dehors de votre cercle, car autrement vous auriez déjà entendu mon nom. Je vous propose de nous rencontrer pour travailler ensemble
Le joker/ Ci joint / Sur un site archi FR ….Et….sur le site NT…avec version anglaise… Archicool / New-Territories(english version)
Le joker/ Je ne passe plus par Paris….La computation est une chose belle…le paramétrique j’en doute….c’est un peu comme l’anthropométrie criminelle…Bertillon …. Confondant science et pouvoir de la science…Voir le Log 25 édité à ce sujet entre autre a NYC… il y a deux ans….Epuise depuis…je crois…mais on doit le trouver sur le net….
Le Bateleur / La différence entre computation et paramétrique est un problème de langage spécifique de langue française car le mot “computation” n’a pas de traduction. Je préfère dire “computational design” plutôt qu’ “architecture paramétrique”. Je serais curieux d’en savoir plus sur les méthodologies employées dans votre projet à Bangkok. Seriez-vous disponible pour un entretien en ligne ?
Le joker/ Scanning 3D…point Cloud…micro station pour les transférer en points sur rhino…Python pour générer des attracteurs…approximation de surface…3Dprint… remodelage de la surface via ‘plaster’… scan Kinect…puis rhino pour générer des cluster…et contrôler la population et distribution….un peu de grasshopper dans tout ça…pour éviter les page de code inutile…et….fraisage dans bloc d’alu…coulage de PP avec insert pour modifier le components sur les 30 000 unités…+ un Kuka-Agila pour tester les fraisages négatif-positif…. Je ne crois en rien à l’architecture paramétrique…c’est un délire d’omnipotence de Patrick Schumacher (entre autre)… et des archi un peu feignant qui ne veulent pas s’affronter aux formes qu’ils génèrent… en justifiant de la procédure soit disant scientifique pour les valider…cela produit une ignorance-stupidité du milieu qui confond leur raison d’être avec l’alibi de leur emergence…cela génère des Singes savant sous payés…..un savoir trigonométrique digne d’un élève de terminal….les responsables de cette faillite sont connus…et leurs intentions sont loin d’être innocentes… à qui profite ce crime… à ton avis ? Le retour de flamme fait mal….l’architecte est devenu une sorte de sous prolétaire…asservi a son language … ignorant du monde……aveuglé par son ‘scientifisme’ de petit garçon….(écrit entre deux avions…mon français est un peu bâclé.. sorry)…
Le Bateleur / Je comprends le point de vue. Andrea Graziano, que vous devriez connaitre et rencontrer, a la même position. Personnellement, je m’intéresse plus à l’action qu’au langage. Ton projet a l’air super-intéressant. As-tu embauché le chef de projet 6 mois que tu cherchais ? Des évolutions récentes dans mes autres projets ne me permettraient pas de m’absenter pendant 6 mois, mais je serais vraiment intéressé pour m’y impliquer si des occasions de collaboration plus courtes se présenteraient. C’est quelque chose d’envisageable ?
Le joker/ De quelle action vous parlez…Opposer le langage a l’action… Mais ou avez-vous puisé cette idée…les architectes sont étonnant de crédulité … C’est pour cela qu’ils sont devenus très peu crédible….Bon je ne vous en veux pas personnellement….. Juste un symptôme…. Que vous véhiculez sans bien saisir les causalités et dépendances…Donc de votre question….oui…il y a 15 personnes à Bangkok…qui travaillent et agissent, enfin pas exactement sur vos critères….d’‘actions….ici…on parle souvent voir trop…A votre avis… L’annonce était faite pour trouver qqn….? Ou pour mettre une sonde dans votre-leur système ?…. 199 euros pour tester ou, les français de France …ceux qui sont resté claquemuré dans leur petit confort………à la fois arrogant et naïf… pas trop malin….mais fier de l’être…Le constat est super triste…. d’où ma réaction à votre premier email….par contre j’apprécie que vous…vous sachiez prendre des coups….en boxe c’est un putain d’avantage… Donne presque envie de vous proposer qq chose…Vous scriptez en Python !…. Donc faite moi un L-système récursif génératif sur 4 incrémentations à partir de plusieurs émetteur et limite en expansion par une surface nurbs ………les divisions des générations sont positionnées à partir de la distance à la surface donnée…elle, définie autour des émetteurs……surface qui agit comme un repulseur attracteur….Première génération de division à x mètres de la surface en trois branches….. Deuxième a x-y mètres en quatre……troisième a x-y-z etc. En cinq….etc….48 heures….à partir de demain… action….réaction…. ?
Le Bateleur / Ulà….mais ça va pas là-bas ? Le fait que je sois plus ouvert que toi ne veut pas dire que je suis un con. No comment sur l’action pitoyable de publier une annonce d’emploi fake. On se demande même si ton projet existe vraiment. Si vous avez des propositions sérieuses de collaboration sur des projets intéressants (pas d’exercices Python.. nous ne sommes pas à l’école), revenez vers moi. Dans ce cas, tiens compte d’un délai d’un mois pour réserver mes disponibilités et d’un tarif approximatif de 800 € HT / jour (50% payés à l’avance). Il faudra ensuite penser à formuler l’exercice de manière compréhensible et sans fautes d’orthographe (jusqu’à là j’ai supporté mais c’est bon, t’es plus français que moi tu peux faire un effort)….histoire de remettre les choses en ordre.
Le joker/ Vous êtes so prévisible…On vous emmène avec délectation dans vos petites affaires…privées…Venez a la Biennale de Venise…et vous verrez ce que d’autres font mieux que vous…Et sur Python… votre réponse en dit long sur la méconnaissance des écritures…Champollion de salon…Bon on arrête la…. assez joué….Bye bye
Le Bateleur/Merci ! Concernant le fait de publier des échanges privés sans le consensus des intéressés, tu sais peut-être que c’est totalement illégal. Je déciderais à un autre moment si portez plainte ou pas…Pour l’instant tout ça m’arrange énormément et ça, toi qui ne connais pas les réseaux, tu ne va pas pouvoir comprendre.
Le joker/ Les réseaux… notre génération les a mis en place pour vous divertir …et ca marche plutôt bien…(hélas en fait) . Et sur votre couardise …franchouillarde (que vous ayez le passeport importe peu…)…vous en empruntez les attitudes…rien a dire…Le petit monsieur se repend sur son blog…qu’ il va tout devoiler….et quand cela est fait… pas grand chose en fait!….ce petit monsieur veut faire son petit procès…Ne seriez-vous pas juste un Rastignac ridicule ?
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Dialogue par email-texto (y compris ortographe incertaine) entre Francesco Cingolani et Francois Roche / sur 10 jours…suite à une annonce via Archicool / sur 78 CV, 77 ont joué le jeu, l’un est à BKK depuis 1 mois et demi, et un autre renâcle encore…mais ce dialogue, mal ecrit, voir mal pensé est plutot revelateur des mécanismes qui sous-tendent les modes de discours. D’ou sa mise en ligne (ndlr)
As multipurpose as a Swiss army knife, shunted back and forth every which way between art and architecture, he is at once an alibi, a foil, a spiritual father, a defeated ideologue whose scars are an atonement (the deafness, whether real or feigned – we’ll come back to it later) and rather handy… a paper architect, an ideologue, the kind of brand that keeps on giving, still legitimized by the French establishment, that funny alter cocker Yona Friedman®with the slight Slavic accent that makes you smile, whose foibles everyone forgives, since they’re so charming and “inoffensive.”
Yona Friedman® is perfectly adaptable… inflatable balloons to mimic the Spatial City,[1] floating cartons filed with salon-utopian political phraseology, pathetic and pathological. You see them everywhere: GPS helicopters made for a militarized robot city[2]… everything in Yona Friedman® is good for something, and those who instrumentalize him don’t see any connection with the anarcho-scientism underlying his thinking and production.
Hardly a month goes by that some ideologically-challenged curator or architect in need of a pseudo-political installation doesn’t revisit the Spatial City for his own purposes, plucking a couple of citations, out of indolent self-aggrandizement, from a body of work he cannot understand and whose provocative intensity is beyond his grasp. We’ve seen his work used, too, at international art fairs, as a counterpoint, a cheap antidote to easily-monetizable narratives meant for the commodities market. Showing Yona Friedman® is an act of political/aesthetic name-dropping, a way to deck yourself out with a little utopianist hedge, a cool antidote that has the advantage and the privilege of not challenging the conditions of its utilization… In these little tributes the Spatial City becomes nothing more than a bunch of scaffolding sponsored by the manufacturer, with a few hastily positioned flowerpots to give it a false “improvised” look. The 2013 version of the Cloud at the Serpentine[3] was no exception to the rule. The original was not a garden folly [4] but a fragment of something larger, exhibit number one in the argument for the Spatial City where all human adventures would be tolerated and even suggested; here its purpose was slap the Friedman® label on an antiseptically elegant design and dissemble the artist’s own intentions.
Has Friedman become, through no fault of his own, an icon for fakers, architects who reek of cheap – and lazy – political aesthetics? Perhaps his image could adorn a special bar of soap sold by art centers to raise money for the disadvantaged? It could be used for washing your hands of him as part of the collective amnesia, and take nothing from his work but the geometric inclinations and scientific and technological strategies that underpin his preambles, discarding the human, the stink, filth and comedy, to borrow a phrase from Artaud,[5] and seeing human beings as nothing more than decorative options on lop-sided cardboard shelves awaiting visitors, an attempt to summon up a soupcon of improvisation, a utopian palliative!
What are we talking about here? A cultural and museological endeavor launched 15 years ago whose mission was to rewrite history, specifically the radicality of the heroic post-war years – marked by architects like Ionel Schein and Yona Friedman – until the oil crisis and the postmodern reaction put an end to that chapter. Their brief was alluring, and historical work more necessary than ever to combat the willful blindness of the power-and-thought structure that had unceasingly ignored them in the 1990s. That work was well done, except for one thing, and no small thing it was: The architecture and the architects were stripped of all their combativeness and friction in the face of their society, against it and as part of it, and all that was retained was the cultural and instrumental dimension (see exhibition at the Pompidou Center [5.1]). Their work was expunged of all its pathogenic elements, the sources of disorder, incompleteness and political and social unpredictability[6] that were the very reason for its existence. No, Frederick John Kiesler’s Endless House is not a scale model, an “exquisite corps” in a collection labeled “culture.” It was an attempt to dissolve the expectations that still condition architecture, to restage its premises and conventions in order to reconfigure its relationship with the world. Doing political architecture politically, to rephrase Godard, means using aesthetic strategies diametrically opposed to the Fine Arts models of thought and transmission, i.e., of objects without subjects.
The data was stored, but when this experimental architecture was resurrected, instead of confronting the world of today, it became nothing but a spectacle, a “lite version” for planetary dummies. The purpose of Michelet’s subjectivized rewriting of the monarchical period was to serve the republic. The “culturization” of architectural radicality has had a perverse effect – that radicality has been taken captive by the museum.
Thus architecture is reduced to a lovely object, painless, odorless and inoffensive, drawing its legitimacy from the experiments of the Sixties, not to interrogate their meaning for today and their non-synchronicity with our times, their naivety and toxicity, but to use them as historical and cultural excuses, as a shield to protect its autonomy. A little faux-Friedman® goes a long way!
He himself went deaf to the world, literally, thumbing his nose one last time, like a mischievous kid or a kind of self-protection against abusive appropriation… A dialog of the deaf.
Science + Fiction
Let’s get back to this trademark question and see what’s involved.
Right before our eyes / Geometric interlacing floating over the city, a precursor of the castle in Miyazaki’s Heaven, but without the organicity, a geometric multiplication, a kind of checkerboard with strict square patterns and uncertain boundaries, an addictive and repetitive addition of squared circles, deliberately demonstrating perfect mastery in terms of their dimensional and structural logic and their mode of assembly, utilizing successive incremental and recursive combinatorial mathematics in a scientific system in which the architect uses descriptive geometry[7] as a Deus ex machina to control and dominate his subject.
This interlacing, a rational and well-ordered superstructure, is on standby, or, more precisely, suspended, in both meanings of the word. Literally, in that it hangs above the city whose aerial interstices it occupies, but also suspended pending a hypothetical human colonization, which, in contrast, is dedicated to the free will of one and all, the negotiated interfacing of individuals and groups that determine the modes of habitation and interrelation according to their impulses and moods, or in other words, to the disorder of human activities and the incompletion of the desires of the multitudes.
That’s exactly where the schizophrenia of the Yona Friedman® brand works its magic. Precisely there and on two levels: a preliminary scientific exposition that anchors a constructive reality in the achievable, the plausible, the prehensible, followed by a narrative of its “colonialization” in the form of a political fiction about participative and collective habitability… without that human energy, that animal vitalism,[8] ever being worked out in any other field other than the ideological (I dare not use the word theory, so much does that word remain a mystery or even a hoax).
Here we can see the following consequences:
1) The control of the structures and combinations of polyhedrons, tetrahedrons and polytope extensions (trihedral-1955) underlying the geometry to be colonized is stated based on a “structuralist” mode of exchange in which each element (structure/colonization) is definable only by its relations of equivalence or opposition with the Other and the others. This ensemble of relationships is what makes up the “metabolic structure.”
The relationship between the mathematical enunciation and the anarchy of the modes of colonization generates a system of opposition that involves neither development nor correlation, nor organization in the sense of a co-functioning. It is not a symbiotic symbolic protocol, and there is no mutual affinity between the elements. The hierarchized chronologies of systemic-systematic permutations are not produced by the principles of contagion and epidemics[9] that would phagocytize and dissolve the previously established geometries. The contact and development of the disordered entanglements of the human, all too filthily human multitude does not metabolize scientific causality. Plato’s “solid geometry” retains its imprint and its snot, indifferent to those they are supposed to invite.
In contrast, Constant’s hypotheses developed for his New Babylon project starting in 1953 sought to face up to the ugliness of human incompletion, human indeterminism, and privilege the aesthetic incoherences born of the multitude, the cannibalistic generation and degeneration of Rimbaud’s Paris Commune, like swarming music that rustles, buzzes and teems.
2) The current abuse of the Friedman brand is based on this schizoid operatory mode, the ambivalence of the binary Science + Fiction (not to be confused with Science Fiction), like the production of antinomian and autonomous forms of knowledge. To be awarded the Yona Friedman® label, all that’s needed is a few repetitive geometries (computation) and a link referencing its guru-genitor. Thus one becomes a member of the now hyped and has-been sect called radical architecture.
But what about the human dimension, the “cursed part”[10] so ardently desired by the brand but never really sought after, so present in the prologues but so absent in the procedures and generative aesthetics? Are human relationships so tricky to take into account that they have to be ideologized, idealized, carefully eschewing and excluding their excessive nature, the combinations of misunderstanding, conflict and resignation that produce meaning and thought at the price of the defection of the latter? As Lacan said, “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I think not.” Is it possible to reactivate these ambiguous substances that lie at the origin of the relational modes, so that the science is not just an operational pretext but an object to be marginalized, cannibalized and broken down so as to metabolize its positivist principles and political arrogance?
MISINTERPRETATION
Paris, 11 a.m. in 2011, in a laboratory basement,[11] a physiological experiment is being conducted.
“You are about to take a physiological test to determine the mapping of your future residence area. This will only take three minutes. Relax and slide your hand into this box. It will set a baseline by measuring your bodily equilibrium over the next 30 seconds.
“The procedure is simple. There’s nothing to worry about. Your body will become the vector of your emotions, and we’ll record it. Your body will react naturally to my voice. Let my voice soak into you. Don’t be nervous. Just let yourself feel it and react.
“During the test a kind of vapor will be released. It helps us capture the changes in your emotions without being intrusive. Let it flow into you, breathe it in. It can’t hurt you. I’ll be inhaling it at the same time as you are.
“The test is about to start.
“In front of you is a robot construction machine. It is simultaneously your guide and your emotional indictor, your dynamic portrait. Its movements are directly influenced and affected by the nano-particles you will inhale and exhale. Breathe deeply and slowly…
“But first we’re going to do a little exercise. You’re in your habitat, your future habitat, one that you desire without yet knowing what it’s like yet, but you can feel it and walk through it. You breathe in the atmosphere of this dwelling; you let it infuse you. You might feel more comfortable here or more uncomfortable. Either way it doesn’t matter. You let yourself go further, and be filled by the sensations it suggests, as you discover all sorts of details you never saw before and whose existence you didn’t even suspect.
“First of all, your habitat is inseparable from the dizziness it made you feel to access it_Acro_(phobia-philia)_ lost in a labyrinth of tangled ramifications and arborescences. You took pleasure in this vertigo. In an unstable, tenuous equilibrium… you felt this dizziness like something that is still inhabits you… the void is right there, under your feet. It’s taking you over.
“But that’s not enough to describe where you are right now. The family, your family, has become a conflict zone and you can no longer be in denial or calm things down. You’d like to be able to renegotiate the separations involved, for the distances between you to expand or contract depending on your mood. To get away from the deafening shouts of squabbling teenagers, the blaring TV vomiting the evening news coming from your next-door neighbor whose noise is ruining your life… Socio_(phobia-philia)_ and sometimes even remove yourself from the presence of others, other people from whom you’d like to negotiate a little distance in time and space… It seems that you’ve wanted to unalienate yourself from that community you’re submerged and drowning in…
“It’s not an illusion to believe that space can help you with that. Not that space has the power to reduce and absorb those underlying, exhausting, gnawing conflicts, but it can offer layouts that encourage the morphology of the moment, and offer you choices in your relationships…
“… to go along or withdraw into yourself_Claustro_(phobia-phila)_ to hole up there, protected in your box, all wrapped up in your singularity… autonomous…
“Or, on the contrary, to unfold yourself in space and time… to make the area where you live visible_Socio(phobia-phila)_exposing it, exposing yourself… a little proudly… and it shows… showing off your pleasure… a pure enjoyment, purely enjoyment… finally your habitat changes according to your impulses, or more precisely, it becomes their vector. Synchronized to your own body, your arteries, blood and genitals, to your beating organism… and you are a thing, an element amid that whole ensemble, porous, able to merge, respiring and aspiring to be your own environment.
“But that’s not enough to completely satisfy you. There’s something missing, something rare, you feel the lack of this thing without being able to say exactly what it is. It’s somewhere in you, an area of childhood, of its innocence and cruelty_(phobia-phila)_. But you’ve learned how to hide that, to make yourself believe that you can do without it…
“You may feel dizzy again… this time much more intensely than what you felt when you first started. There’s no need for the void for that. This thing envelops you… mixes of ugliness and beauty, obstacles and possibilities, refuse and efflorescence, threats and protection_Neo(phobia-phila)_, vitalism and animism, mechanical powers and natural forces, this body that unfolds before your eyes and that you inhabit.
“Here everything is knotted together and intertwined. It’s all there, in the process of becoming, in a movement in the process of becoming. Let yourself go. Don’t think. Just let yourself slip into this silky and strange sensation that terrifies and caresses you…
“That terrifies and caresses you…”
5 – 10 seconds, nothing
“Pull yourself together and don’t get up until you feel ready to do so. You might feel slightly confused for a few seconds while the nano-receptors are being expelled and reabsorbed. Techno_(phobia-philia)_ So wait a little bit before coming back to space and time… Your body data has been recorded. You can take a look at your physiological report on the screen in front of you.
“The session is over. I won’t see you to the door; you know the way. Later, we’ll record your voice, on each of the suggested questions, so that the expression of your desires is the combined result of your physiology and its changes during the test phase, so that we can resynchronize your habitation request.
“Thank you. I won’t see you out. Please leave the way you came in[12].”
Texte de François Roche / Ghost Writer Camille Lacadée
[1] For example, the tributes to the Spatial City such as the installations by EXYZT, Philippe Rizzoti,Tomas Saraceno, …among others.
[2] The objection here is not so much to the concept and the project as to the curators’ analogy to the “brand.”
[4] A fabrique de jardin(sometimes called a folly in English) is an ornamental structure located in a park or garden. They usually served as stopping-place for strollers or to indicate a ‘picturesque view’ (Wikipedia).
[5]To Have Done with the Judgment of God, radio play by Antonin Artaud
[51]The enterprise of ‘Brainwash’ engaged by Frederic Migayrou in France, which opened the door to new Alphonse Bertillon (criminal anthropometry) and August Comte(positivism) confusing Science and Abuses of Science, tooling and ideology, parametric and computation, making possible the emerging of some idiotcracy artifact as Patrick Schumacher and many other epigones.
[6]Olzweg, a co-prize-winning scenario written for the FRAC Centre art space by New Territories, based on the robotic principles of uncertainty and incompletion. Very different than the petrified Turbulences made after an unbelievable second round, a kind of administrative prank.
[7] Descriptive geometry is the graphic resolution of problems regarding the intersection of geometrically defined volumes and surfaces in a space of 2-3-n dimensions. Developed by the mathematician Monge in the 18th century.
[8] At MIT during the 1970s Friedman worked on making a computer capable of organizing the Spatial City democratically. The program asked individuals for their special preferences, and then analyzed and processed this data based not only on the desires of their neighbors, but also light, access to ventilation, etc. He finally abandoned this project because he deemed that his computer could not understand the twists and turns and complexity of the process of human decision-making.
[11]Expérience – ‘an architecture des humeurs’ / New Territories / Le Laboratoire, Paris 2011
[12] The architecture of ‘humeurs’ 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 language’s 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. This physiological test (above) 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, 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.
This physiological test helps us map the visitor’s 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.
À toutes les sauces, ballotté dans tous les sens, du champ artistique à celui architectural, il est à la fois l’alibi, le faire valoir, le père spirituel, l’idéologue vaincu, dont les cicatrices sont expiatoires (surdité feinte ou réelle, nous y reviendrons), et exploitables…. Architecte de papier, idéologue … sorte de marque déposée qui sert et ressert tant que l’on s’en sert… et les institutions Françaises n’ont de cesse de s’en légitimer… du rigolo papi Yona Friedman®, au doux accent slave qui force le sourire, dont on pardonne les bizarreries, tant elles sont charmantes, et ‘inoffensives’…
Yona Friedman ça sert à tout… de ballons gonflables pour mimer, mimicquer la Ville Spatiale[1], des cartons flottants avec phraséologie d’utopiste politique de salon, pathétique et pathologique, en voici, en voilà… des hélicos GPS pour une ville militaro-robotique[2], ça marche aussi… tout est bon chez Yona Friedman®… tant que celui qui l’instrumentalise ne fait aucun lien avec l’anarcho-scientisme qui en sous-tend la pensée et la production…
Il n y a pas un mois sans qu’un curateur en mal de ‘raison d’être’ idéologique, qu’un architecte en mal d’installation pseudo politique ne reprenne la Ville Spatiale à son compte, avec deux trois citations afin de s’anoblir paresseusement d’une production qu’il ne saurait ni comprendre, ni saisir pour son intensité provocatrice… on l’a vue également aux expos internationales d’art, en contre point, en antidote à moindre frais des récits monnayables sur fond de productions-marchandises … Exhiber les travaux de Yona Friedman® en ‘name dropping’ politico-esthétique, c’est s’enrubanner d’une caution utopiste…antidote sympathique qui a l’avantage et le privilège de ne pas remettre en question les conditions de son utilisation… La Ville Spatiale devient le temps d’un hommage-citation, un assemblage d’échafaudages, sponsorisé par le fabricant… avec deux trois pots de fleurs maladroitementpositionnés pour y injecter un ‘ersatz’ d’improvisation… le Cloud de la Serpentine[3] version 2013, ne déroge pas à la règle… Non il ne s’agit pas d’une ‘fabrique’ de jardin, sorte de topiaire métalliques a vocation ornementale[4] mais d’un fragment de la chose, voir la pièce à conviction de cette Ville Spatiale où toutes les aventures humaines seraient tolérées voire suggérées par celle-ci … au label Friedman® de combler l’ élégance sur-aseptisée de son design pour nous illusionner sur ses intentions ?
L’homme Y. Friedman serait-il, bien malgré lui, le chantre involontaire des feignants, de ceux qui sentent bon l’esthétiK-politique à moindre frais… à moindre exigence…. Ça pourrait même se vendre en savon estampillé Frac Centre pour les plus démunis… et de s’en laver les mains pour participer à l’amnésie collective, et n’extraire de ce type de production que les velléités géométriques, les stratégies scientifiques et technologiques qui en sous-tendent les préambules…évacuant l’humain, ses puanteurs, sa saleté et ses comédies, pour reprendre Artaud [5], pour ne le voir, l’humain qu’ en option décorative sur étagères en carton de guingois, en attente de spectateurs… ‘convoquant’ l’improvisation…en palliatif utopique !
De quoi s’agit-il en fait ? D’une entreprise culturelle et institutionnelle, lancée il y a 15 ans, et qui s’est donné pour missionla réécriture historique de la radicalité, des années héroïques de l’après-guerre, Ionel Schein et Yona Friedman inclus, jusqu’à la crise du pétrole et sa réaction Post-Moderne, fin de chapitre. Cahier des charges aguichant, et travail historique plus que nécessaire pour combattre l’autisme des structures de pensée et de pouvoir qui n’avaient de cesse dans les années 90 d’ignorer leur existence. Le travail fut bien fait. A ceci près, et ce n’est pas le moindre des défauts, que toutes velléités combatives, frictionnelles de l’architecture et de l’architecte ont été soigneusement éviscérées … pour ne retenir que leur dimensions “esthetiques” et instrumentales (voir Non Standard au Centre Pompidou[5.1]) … expurgeant de toute productions les éléments pathogènes, générateurs de désordre, d’incomplétudes et d’imprévisibilité[6] politique et sociale à l’origine de celles-ci. NON, le projet ‘Endless House’ de Frederick John Kiesler, n’est pas une maquette, cadavre exquis d’une collection labélisée culture, mais une entreprise de dissolution des attendus qui conditionnent encore et toujours l’architecture, une entreprise de re-scenarisation des présupposés et de ses conventions afin de re-cartographier sa relation au monde. Faire politiquement de l’architecture politique, dans ses formes et dans ses énonces, pour reprendre Godard, c’est opérer des stratégies esthétiques frontalement opposée aux modèles de pensées et de transmission Beaux-Arts, d’objets sans sujets.
L’archivage des savoirs a eu lieu, mais qu’en est-il quand la résurrection des architectures expérimentales, qui en lieu et place de s’affronter a ce monde contemporain, en véhiculent le spectacle, en version light pour ‘Dummies’ planétaires. La réécriture subjectivisée des temps Monarchiques par Michelet se voulait au service de la république. La sur-culturation de la radicalité architecturale a produit un effet pervers ; elle est devenue otage de l’espace muséal.
L’architecture est alors limitée à son bel objet, indolore, inodore, inoffensif, puisant sa légitimité dans les expériences des sixties, non pour en questionner leur actualisation, leur de-synchronicite, leur naïveté, leur toxicité, mais pour servir d’alibi citationnel historico-culturel, rempart de son autonomie.[7]
Quel petit bonheur donc que ce label Friedman ®!
Lui-même étant devenu sourd au monde, littéralement….dernier pied de nez, sorte de polissonnerie de gamin, pour de se prémunir de son usage abusif …Dialogue de malentendants….
Science + Fiction
Revenons un peu sur ce qui constitue cette Trade mark, en droit d’inventaire
Sous nos yeux / des Entrelacs géométriques, flottant sur la ville, précurseur du château dans le Ciel de Miyazaki, mais sans l’organicité… une multiplication géométrique, sorte d’échiquier, de carroyage aux pattern stricte et aux limites incertaines, addition addictive et répétitive de quadratures de cercles, a la maitrise assumée et revendiquée quant à leur logique dimensionnelle et structurelle, quant aux modes d’assemblages ; incrémentation successives et combinatoires mathématiques récursives… pour un système scientifique où le Deus ex machina de l’architecte, via la Géométrie descriptive[8], domine et contrôle son sujet.
Cet entrelacs, superstructure raisonnée et ordonnée, est en attente, plus précisément en suspens…et cela doublement. D’une part, littéralement, sur la ville dont elle occupe les interstices aériens, mais plus encore en suspens d’une hypothèse de colonisation humaine, qui, elle, par opposition est dédiée au libre arbitre de chacun, à la négociation mitoyenne des individus, des groupes qui en détermineront les modes habitables, les modes relationnels au gré de leur pulsions-impulsions, bref aux désordres des activités humaines et à l’incomplétude des désirs des multitudes.
C’est justement là que la schizophrénie du label Yona Friedman® est opérante. Précisément là et en deux temps, un développement préalable scientifique qui ancre une réalité constructive dans l’ordre du faisable, du plausible, du préhensible suivi d’une narration, dite de colonisation, sur un mode de politique fictionnelle d’habitabilité participative et collégiale… sans que jamais cette énergie humaine, ce vitalisme animal[9] ne soit élaboré sur un champ autre que celui de l’idéologie (je n’ose dire de la théorie, tant ce mot reste un mystère, voire une imposture).
On peut y voir quelques conséquences…
1) Le contrôle des structures et combinaisons de polyhedrons, tetrahedrons, extensions de polytopes, (trihedral-1955), qui sous-tendent la géométrie à coloniser s’énonce à partir d’un mode d’échange propre à la pensée ‘structuraliste’, ou chaque élément (structure/colonisation) n’est définissable que par les relations d’équivalence ou d’opposition qu’il entretient avec l’autre, les autres… cet ensemble de relations formant la « structure métaboliste».
La relation entre l’énonciation mathématique et l’anarchie des modes de colonisation génère un système d’opposition qui ne développe ni corrélation, ni agencement, au sens d’un co-fonctionnement : ce n’est pas un protocole symbiotique, ni une « sympathie » entre les éléments. Les chronologies hiérarchisées de permutation systémique-systématique ne sont pas issues de principes de contagions, d’épidémies[10] … qui phagocyteraient, dissoudraient les géométries préalables. Le contact et la croissance des enchevêtrements désordonnés de la multitude, humaine, salement humaine, ne métabolise pas la causalité scientifique La géométrie dite des Solides de Platon garde son empreinte et sa morve, indifférente a ceux qu’elle est sensée inviter.
A l’opposée, les hypothèses de Constant, via sa New-Babylon des 1953 vont tenter de s’affronter à la laideur de leurs inachèvements, de leur indéterminismes… favorisant les incohérences esthétiques nées de la multitude, les générescence -dégénérescence cannibales, à l’image de la Commune de Paris de Rimbaud comme une musique en essaim, qui bruisse, bourdonne, grouille…
2) L’abus actuel du Label Friedman vient justement de ce mode opératoire schizoïde, ou de l’ambivalence de ce duo Science + Fiction (qui ne peut s’assimiler à la Science-Fiction), comme la fabrique des savoirs antinomiques, autonomes.
Pour être estampillé Yona Friedman®, il suffit de quelques géométries répétitives (computation) et du lien de référence à son Gourou-géniteur. On s’intronise ainsi dans la secte devenu très HYPE-HASBEEN de l’architecture radicale.
Mais qu’en est-il de cette dimension humaine, de cette part maudite[11]… si ardemment souhaitée par le Label, mais jamais réellement convoquée, tellement présente dans les prologues mais tellement absente des procédures, et des esthétiques génératives. Les échanges humains sont-ils si délicat à introduire qu’il faille les idéologiser, les idéaliser, en prenant garde d’évacuer, d’exclure leur natures excessives, combinaisons de malentendu, de conflit, de démission, qui produisent du sens et de la pensée, au prix d’une défection de celle-ci… comme Lacan nous le dit ‘là ou ca pense, je ne suis pas, là où je suis, je ne pense pas’. Peut-on réactiver ces substance ambiguës, à l’origine des modes relationnels, afin que la science ne soit pas seulement un alibi opératoire, mais un objet à marginaliser, cannibaliser, gangrener, pour en métaboliser les principes positivistes, les arrogances politiques…
CONTRESENS
Paris, 11h du matin 2011, dans le sous-sol d’un laboratoire[12], expérience physiologique en cours /
‘On m’envoie vous faire passer un test physiologique pour déterminer la cartographie de votre future zone habitable. Cela ne prendra que trois minutes. Détendez-vous….. Et glissez votre main dans cet écrin…. Il va se calibrer sur votre équilibre corporel pendant les 30 prochaines secondes.
Le protocole est simple, vous n’avez pas à vous en préoccuper ; votre corps va devenir le vecteur de vos émotions, et nous allons l’enregistrer. Il va naturellement réagir à ma voix, laissez-la vous envahir, ne soyez pas inquiet……il vous appartient de la sentir et de la ressentir.
Durant le test, une sorte de vapeur sera émise, elle nous aide à collecter l’évolution de vos émotions sans intrusion nocive… Laissez-la vous pénétrer, respirez-la. Elle n’est aucunement dangereuse pour vous … j’en absorbe moi-même simultanément.
Le test va commencer….
Une machine constructive, une machine robotique est face à vous, elle est à la fois votre guide et votre indicateur émotionnel, votre portrait dynamique… ses mouvements sont directement affectés et influencés par les nanoparticules que vous allez inhaler et exhaler. Respirez profondément et lentement…
Mais d’abord nous allons faire un petit exercice. Vous êtes dans votre habitat, votre futur habitat, celui que vous désirez sans encore le connaitre, mais vous le sentez, et vous en parcourez les lieux…. Vous respirez le climat de cette habitation, vous vous laissez imprégner par cette atmosphère… vous pouvez vous y trouver plus à l’aise ou mal à l’aise. Mais cela n’a pas d’importance…
Vous vous laissez aller plus en avant, et vous vous laissez pénétrer par les sensations qu’il vous suggère, à la découverte d’une foule de détails qui ne vous étaient pas apparus, que vous ne soupçonniez pas. _mise en condition_note de l’auteur
Premièrement, votre habitat est indissociable du vertige qu’il vous a procuré pour y accéder, _Acro_(phobia-philia)_ perdu dans les dédales des enchevêtrements, ramifications et arborescences, ….. Vous avez tiré plaisir de ce vertige…. dans un équilibre instable, fragile…vous avez ressenti ce vertige, comme une chose qui vous habite encore …le vide est juste la…sous vos pied …il vous envahit…
Mais cela n’est pas suffisant pour qualifier là où vous êtes maintenant…. … la famille, votre famille est devenue une zone de conflit que vous ne pouvez plus nier, ni apaiser……. vous aimeriez en renégocier les distances…qu’elles s’étirent ou se contractent au gré de vos humeurs… à la fois de vous éloigner des cris assourdissant des ados qui se chamaillent……de la télé qui gueule et vomit son JT de 20h chez ce voisin qui vous abime la vie…_Socio_(phobia-philia)_… et même parfois de vous extraire de la présence de l’autre, de cet autre avec lequel vous négociez un partage de temps et d’espace… Il semble que vous cherchiez à vous désaliéner de cette communauté qui vous submerge et vous étouffe…
Ce n’est pas une illusion de croire que l’espace peut vous y aider, non qu’il ait le pouvoir de résorber, d’absorber ces conflits….lassants, latents et lancinants, mais, il peut vous offrir des agencements qui favorisent une morphologie de l’instant…. pour vous laisser le choix de la relation….
… de vous plier et replier sur vous-même _ Claustro_(phobia-philia)_… de vous y loger, protégé de son écrin…emmitouflé dans sa singularité……autonome…
Ou alors…. à l’opposé….. de vous y déplier, dans l’espace et le temps…. afin que la zone que vous habitez s’exhibe _Socio_(phobia-philia)_ , sur elle-même, sur vous-même…. pas peu fier de cela……..cela se voit…….exhiber votre plaisir… …une jouissance pure, une pure jouissance…… l’habitat décline enfin vos pulsions……. plus précisément…. il en est lui-même le vecteur…. Synchronisé à votre propre corps, à vos artères, à votre sang, à votre sexe, à votre organisme palpitant….et vous êtes une chose, un élément parmi tout cet ensemble, un élément fusionnel, poreux… qui respire et aspire à être son propre environnement.
Mais cela ne peut complètement vous satisfaire, une chose vous manque, une chose rare, vous sentez cette chose qui vous manque sans pouvoir la définir précisément, elle est quelque part chez vous, une zone de l’enfance, de l’innocence, et de sa cruauté _(phobia-philia)_, …Mais cela vous avez appris à le dissimuler… à vous faire croire que vous pouviez vous en passer…
Il est possible que vous ressentiez à nouveau ce vertige …cette fois bien plus intense que celui que vous ressentiez quand vous êtes arrivé, nul besoin de vide pour cela…Cette chose vous enveloppe… mélanges de laideur et de beauté, d’obstacles et de possibilités, de déchets et d’efflorescences, de menaces et de protections _ Neo (phobia-philia))_, de vitalisme et d’animisme, de puissances machinistes et de forces de la nature, ce corps se déroule sous vos yeux et vous l’habitez.
Ici tout se noue et s’entrecroise. Tout est là, en train de se faire, dans un mouvement en train de se faire … Laissez-vous emporter. Ne pensez pas et glissez-vous dans cette sensation soyeuse, étrange, qui vous effraie et vous caresse …
Qui vous effraie et vous caresse…
5 secondes à 10 secondes en suspens
Reprenez vos esprits et attendez pour vous lever que vous vous sentiez prêt à le faire. Il est possible que vous ressentiez un léger trouble, le temps d’évacuer et de résorber les nano-récepteurs _Techno_(phobia-philia)_,… Vos données corporelles sont bien enregistrées. Vous pouvez d’ailleurs entrevoir votre bilan physiologique[13] sur l’écran face à vous…
La séance a pris fin. Je ne vous raccompagne pas, vous connaissez le chemin.
Texte de François Roche / Ghost Writer Camille Lacadée
[1]… en référence-hommage-illustration de la Ville Spatiale divers installations d’EXYZT, Philippe Rizzoti, Tomas Saraceno entre autres….
[2] Ce n’est ici pas tant le concept et projet qui est en cause que l’analogie au ‘label’ qui en est faite par ses curateurs
[4] Une ‘fabrique’ de jardin est une construction à vocation ornementale au sein d’un parc ou d’un jardin. Wikipédia.
[5] Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu. Pièce Radiophonique, A. Artaud
[5.1 ]Difficile de passer sous silence l’entreprise de lavage des cerveaux initiée par Fréderic Migayrou, dont le moindre des ‘mérites’ est d’avoir rouvert la boite de Pandore du scientifisme, entre Alphonse Bertillon (Anthropométrie criminelle) et Auguste Comte (positivisme), validant par la même ses artefacts ‘Idiocratiques’ _ Patrick Schumacher et ses épigones en tête de gondole.
[6] ‘Olzweg’ , scenario co-lauréat pour le Frac Centre, de New-Territories, sur des principes robotiques d’incertitudes et d’inachèvement. Loin des ‘Turbulences’ pétrifiées qui ont été construites au terme d’un rocambolesque deuxième tour, en mode canular administratif.
[8] La géométrie descriptive est la résolution graphique des problèmes d’intersections entre volumes et surfaces définis de façon géométrique dans l’espace à 2-3-n dimensions. Mis au point par le mathématicien Monge / 18eme.
[9] MIT, années 70… Yona Friedman travaille à fabriquer un ordinateur capable d’organiser démocratiquement la ville Spatiale. Le programme demandait à l’individu ses préférences spatiales… puis analysait ces données et les traitait en fonction de désirs des voisins mais aussi de la lumière, l’accès et la ventilation… Il abandonnera finalement cette recherche, jugeant son ordinateur incapable d’appréhender la complexité méandreuse du processus de décision humain…
[12] Expérience ‘an architecture des humeurs’ / New-Territories / Le Laboratoire, Paris 2011
[13] «L’architecture des humeurs» se pose comme préliminaire de relire les contradictions de l’émission même de ces désirs ; à la fois ceux, qui traversent l’espace public par la capacité à émettre un choix, véhiculé par le langage, à la surface des choses…, et ceux préalables et plus inquiétants peut-être, mais tout aussi valides, susceptibles de rendre compte du corps comme machine désirante et de sa chimie propre, physiologique ; dopamine, cortisol, mélatonine, adrénaline et autres molécules sécrétées par le corps lui-même, imperceptiblement antérieur à la conscience que ces substances vont générer. La fabrication d’une architecture est ainsi infléchie d’une autre réalité, d’une autre complexité, de celle du corps acéphale, du corps animal…La science, la neurobiologie au service de la captation des malentendus, entre atavisme et vitalisme. Plus sur / http://www.new-territories.com/blog/architecturedeshumeurs/
Gsapp 2013 / Last installation with Pork Intestines (2km) and master class / Catenaries + Shrinking / About the transformation of a controlled trajectories from Computing to Biotopes affects…
Terra Insola is a collective enterprise of scientific storytellers, speculative archeologists, regenerative engineering, deviant-mythologists and dirty-physiologist exploring the mythic figure of Ariadne as an archetype of a modern feminist, living within a suspended time between two stages of her life, in the time between her relationships with Theseus to Dionysus, between the macho-man and the alcoholic.
She is bound by a daytime routine and her perpetual commitment to a machine, releasing herself from all constraints and achieving self-sufficiency. In desexualizing her innate nature she reaches a degree of serenity and ‘ataraxy’. She lives in an idyllic biotope without context or reference, extracting fluid sap from the eucalyptus tree that sustains her nourishment in an anthroposophic exchange, and mixes her physiological substances (such as urine) with the earth that surrounds her to secrete ceramic for the structure that shelters and interlaces her. The structure itself is a metaphor of an endlessness creation, an architectural process that emerges within an infinite loop. The myriad of spiraling mazes and glazed clay components that wrap her body and her mind are developed by and with a machine tamed and domesticated by Ariadne to extend her desires and construct her needs in a reflexive, affective and contingent agenda. La “Demoiselle”, the nickname she gave to her “productive” pet seems to engage an intertwined, co-dependent relationship that emerges from sympathy to empathy.
Ariadne is a woman divided by the pathology of multiple personality disorder, haunted by the echoes of her mythic past and her involuntary landing within the Schengen trap.
When she lands, the barrier of Schengen was already since a long time considered as a fortress. Nobody remember exactly when this fence became for European citizen their own jail… inversing the preliminary reason of its constitution, to protect them against the world… but appearing contradictorily as an historical illusion.
In this a political and ideological island, Ariadne appeared with two identities, the one who escapes from inside, embracing with her friendly “Demoiselle” a topological inversion, as an infinite fortressless animism, to protest emotionally against the contradiction, the absurdity of the situation, and the other trapped in a postindustrial location, crossing zombified human hostage of alienated Fordism tasks rhythmed by mute, dumb machinism.
Chania-Naxos becomes the location of Ariadne’s own schizophrenia simultaneously releasing and congealing herself from her state of limbo.
The Location of the event is an existing “fortress” in Chania, an abandoned Venetian walled zone of 15 meters high in the middle of the city, inaccessible… Ariadne takes refuge inside this no man’s land, ignored by the people living around… there, she could re-invent, as an utopia the routine of her freedom…but just in the middle of the European Union “Protectorate”.
Οργανωτής:
Δημιουργική ομάδα TerraInsola αρχιτεκτόνων, κατασκευαστών, συγγραφέων, μηχανικών ρομποτικής,σκηνοθετών:
Kαθηγητές / Crew: Camille Lacadee, Danielle Willems, Lydia Kallipoliti, Francois Roche, Ezio Blasetti, Stephan Henrich, Andreas Theodoris, Johnny Boquet-Boone, Cecil Barnes, Danielle Griffo, Hasti Valipour Goudarzi, Gary Edwards, Martin Lodman, Maximiliam Lauter, Melodie Yashar, Shalini Amin, Pierre Bourdareau, George Avramides, George Louras, Jonathan Requillo, Αλεξάνδρα Σαράντη, Raquel Sanchis Ulacia, Luis Felipe Paris, Robinson Strong, Kim Se Hyun, Λεωνίδας Λεονίδου, και Lorenzo Villagi. Τοπικοί συνεργάτες υπήρξαν οι Γιάννης Αποστολόπουλος, Άγγελος Θεοδωρίδης, Ματθαίος Λιοδάκης, Γιάννης Παπατάκης, Δημήτρης Μαριδάκης, Νίκος Γεωργιαδάκης, Αθανασία Ζώτου, Μαρία Φουράκη, Δημήτρης Ξενάκης, Αχιλλέας Παπακώστας, Θοδωρής Παπαδουλάκης, Αλέξης Κουβαριτάκης, Γιώργος Καλλιγέρης, Αλέξανδρος Βαζάκας, Ζέτα Χρυσαφάκη, Αλέξανδρος Μηχαηλίδης, Αναστασία Τζιγκουνάκη, Νατάσα Αποστολάκη, Πετρουλάκης Αντώνης, Παντελής Πετσετάκης, Παναγιώτης Σημαντηράκης, Δημήτρης Μιχελογιάννης, Κυριάκος Παπαδάκης, Ρούλα Οικονομάκη και η ηθοποιός Κική Ριζου.
Συνδιοργανωτές: Columbia University [GSAPP, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation], ΣΑΔΑΣ ΠΕΑ- Τμήμα Χανίων, ‘Eνωση Ξενοδόχων Νομού Χανίων, Οικονομικό Επιμελητήριο Ελλάδος-Τμήμα Δυτικής Κρήτης, Περιφέρεια Κρήτης- Περιφεριακή Ενότητα Χανίων, Πνευματικό Κέντρο Χανίων, 28η Εφορεία Βυζαντινών Αρχαιοτήτων, Περιφερειακό Ταμείο Ανάπτυξης Κρήτης
It’s about the choreography of several dancers, several mind-machines, disarticulated and in disequilibrium, petrified in four different positions, spraying some cloudy substances, top down very dense foggy matter, disseminating a random cocktail of physiological alterated states (euphoria, melancholia, hysteria, phobia, phyllia, joy, delusion, delirium, anxiety, amnesia…) to disrupt the perception, for a drift in a synesthesia multiple and heterogeneous sensations.
The physio-zones are an initial preparation, a shamanism ceremony to reach a point of emotional delivery. It’s engaging an emphasis of the acephalous body, released from its rational jail and limits, by rationalities, as a strategy to reach a line of subjectivities escaping, crossing real and unreal, logic and illogic, through the viscera, the arterials, and the headless desirable machinery of the human body.
The cloud is using chemistry synthesis of human Pheromones ANDROSTA-4,16-DIEN-3-ONE (A5) + ESTETRAENOL (E1)
“It’s a safe experiment, if you feel some perturbation, let yourself drifting in this sensation but the experiment is done at their own risk of the spectator who cannot complain against author, gallery and laboratory of Chemistry on any in-desirable post effects…”
Small shop of 40 m2 / Ken Okada / 1 ter rue de la Chaise / Paris /
«…mais je te vois…nue »
C’est une boutique de vêtement, japonais, à Paris, elle-même, découpée comme un patron d’habillage-desabillage, une invagination, une cartographie, géographie en creux dans le ‘’tissus’’ parisien… pas grand-chose… presque jetable.
Réalisée en stratifications de mousseline dans la continuité des modèles sophistiquées de Ken Okada : le contenant et contenu s’assimilent, fusionnent, se confondent….
Fragile, sensuelle, sensible au moindre souffle, au moindre passage, le design s’efface et se fait membrane, vêtement….caresse sur la peau.
L’érotisme est dé(voilé)…l’existant se dérobe sans être caché…la nudité est belle.
L’installation est réalisée sur computer, via découpage numérique, par laser et jet d’eau sous pression… la technologie devient ici un outil incarné, support d’anomalies et de singularités…d’extrème sensualité…
——————————————————————————
Ken Okada / 2011 / Paris
Architect: New-Territories / R&Sie(n)… Creative team: François Roche, Stéphanie Lavaux, Toshikatsu Kiuchi, with Christoph Eppacher, Gabriel Blue Cira
Cost: $30K
Text:
A small shop for Japanese designer in Paris.
Scenario:
1) Just a continuum between practices, with same apparatus, mock-up, prototype with fabric, sewing and laser cut including the last minute retouch. An extension of scales between envelops and contents / same fragility and limited time (cold water machine washable). Clothing the shop of fashion design clothes, including prototyping (on site).
2) Fitting room, according to personal choice, in exhibitionist or intimacy mode.
“gre(Y)en” This seems to be a history of the stuttering between Green and Grey, between chlorophyll addiction, the dream of an ideal biotope re-primitivised and re-artificialized in pursuit of paradise lost, of Eden Park lost, a story to calm the fears of little boys and girls, and Grey, the dark grey that never appears in the visible spectrum (“The Devil’s best trick is to convince you that he doesn’t exist,” wrote Baudelaire/1 ), an antagonistic stealthy force, an embedded demon – a mix of contradictory human desires emerging from the mud, from permanent, unpredictable and relentless conflicts, factors of domination and servitude, destruction and emergences, sparking unlimited quantities of arrogance and illusion, where the notion of success or failure depends on a kind of absurd Pendulum/2 swing between life and death, caressing the boundaries of both in an infinitely unstable movement, polymerizing ugliness and beauty, obstacle and possibilities, waste materials and efflorescence, threats and protection, the fantasy of technology and revenge on nature, all knotted together in a process of becoming, a never-ending movement… where we glide into a silky, strange sensation that scares and caresses you… that scares and caresses you… We are at a crossroads. Faced with the autistic, blind, deaf and mute violence of our technological, industrial and mercantile machinery and our own human servo-mechanism, nature reacts… with violence and without warning, in a flattering of the original chaos… a mutiny against human organization… Gaia seems to take revenge (Katrina, El Niño, Hurricane Jeanne, the cyclones Thomas and Nargis, the Xynthia storm and the Ewiniar typhoon, the Indonesian and Japanese earthquakes with their collateral tsunamis all the way to Fukujima… a chain of devastating incertitude, unpredictable despite our seismographic sciences). The elements rage, and the gods, so quick to pardon our folly, seem powerless to appease the rebellion, armed with infernal power… Nature is not an ideological “greenwashing” for backyard politics, nor the millenarian, eschatologist dream of Eden Park from which we have very fortunately escaped, freeing ourselves from gatherer-hedonist blindness, to negotiate consciousness with the hostile dark forces stuck in the depths of the forest… But these forces have come out of their hiding places, their biotopes, they are invading the spaces that Man had thought he could take without giving anything in exchange, with no transaction. War has been declared… nature’s revenge is not a bedtime story for innocent brains… our bellicose enemy operates openly… in the light of day… the ultimate arrogance. How could we reveal the conflict between the strategies of “knowledge and domination” of the former and the monstrous wild beauty of the latter’s destructive power in this field of an unpredictable battle, cleared of all that greenish moralistic junk and its post- capitalist allure…
To get a sense of this ambivalence, this permanent disequilibrium where contingencies are the main factor of emergences, let us navigate in this history of “gre(Y)en”.
From the physiological, early, simple dualism of the 1990 “shadow & light” where the Neuswantein/3 Grotto was fictionally adjusted to become a mirror-image of Playtime/4, weakly connecting a cavernous, dark, humid, sensorially primitive atmosphere with its schizophrenic, antagonist twin brother, crystalline, cold, luminous, dry, technologically blind, the recognition of an impossible, stuttered dialogue, to… the 1993 “Growing up” where chlorophyll energy and entropy collapse and strangle a fragile “chicken legs” house, wrapped up in and masochistically dominated by the danger of its own predictable death if the owner does not ritualize the necessary maintenance, a permanent conflict between nature’s destructive power and his need to survive… to the petrochemical blur “Filtration” in 1997, with its 5,000 square meters of plastic strips floating in a tree at the edge of a seasonally tidy wild river carrying nitrates and residues of plastic insecticide bags that farmers had abandoned on its banks as it passed through their fields, awaiting the spring floods to perform a natural depollution service and erase the traces of their chemical addiction, while instead, and paradoxically, the river brings them back to the visible spectrum as the floods ebb, leaving the bags hanging from tree branches. By means of the “Filtration” layer this concentration of waste plastic in forest canopies reveals the aesthetic planning of the countryside arising directly from its human management… and on to the weird “aqua alta1.0” in 1998, which sucks up the disgusting, viscous, super-polluted liquid called the Venetian Lagoon, so that through capillary action this contaminated water literally infiltrates PVC membranes and a building emerges from these lagoon substances… to “aqua alta 2.0”, the bar at the 2000 Venice Biennale of Architecture where “conventioneers“ could refresh themselves by drinking the lagoon soup as it was depolluted, in real time, by a military purification machine /5 being tested in the conditions of the Biennale, producing a schizophrenic reaction, swinging between a green-washing rhetorical discourse and repulsion, a digestive paranoia about the reliability of a cleaning machine of the kind often promoted as an efficient technology (for other people)… to “shearing” in 2001, a simple stealthly private home, an organized simulacrum of its own impermanency and apparent fragility, unfolded in the countryside, its entire envelop made of the petrochemical non-biodegradable fabric authorized by the government, following an agro-industrial logic, for use in natural settings to prevent rabbits from destroying newly-planted saplings… to the 2002 “Dustyrelief”, designed for to protect the skin and biotope of the Bangkok contemporary art museum from the city’s dust and the residue of its monstrous traffic jams (carbon dioxide and monoxide), in a recognition of the failure of public transport in the “greynish” equatorial eroticism, where a special fog of specks and particles becomes the traces of hypertrophic human convulsing activity, an adaptive second nature amid a bottom-up, unpredictable, unmastered and un-planned urban aesthetics. Without delegating power to autocratic and aseptic technocratic experts instead of the chaotic emergences of the multitudes, the aleatory rhizomes, the arborescent growths that are simultaneously a factor for its transformation and its operational mode. This unhygienic, intoxicating urban chaos is a sign of its human vitality, a permanent vibration between Eros and Tanatos… invisible but breathable substances are bred and attracted by an electrostatic machine to form a “skin” on a freakish hairy structure, exacerbating a schizoid climate split between the indoors (the Euclidean geometry of the white cube and its labyrinth) and the outdoors (the topological geometry of the dust reliever), and, in a second step, using a drainage system to collect the particulates that fell during the monsoon season period and then compacting them into bricks and using them to build a tea pavilion alongside the museum, an embodiment of the failure and beauty of the city…. to the “mosquitosbottleneck” scenario, in Trinidad, 2002, a week-end residence designed to deal with the epidemic of the mosquito-borne Nile Virus, signalling this disease as an objectively-based paranoia triggering strategies for safety. The fragile net in the shape of a Klein bottle protects people’s lives both by disjoining them from and in resonance with the death of the insects. The sound of their buzzing as they die, trapped in the double membrane, becomes the proof of the efficiency of the system, preserving humans against nature, against its offensive non-inoffensive biotope, protected and surrounded by the theatre of its own barbarity… to the buffalo machismo no-tech mechanization of the 2003 “HybridMuscle” in Thailand, a local mammal-muscle power station using gears to lift a two-tonne steel counterweight in a battery house, the mechanical energy transformed first into electricity (with an outlet and other connections) and secondly into the movement of pneumatic rubber muscles, making elastomer membrane leaves quiver and creating a breeze in the suffocating, hot, sweaty climate in an endogeneous-exogeneous narrative… to the “greengorgon” in 2005, its phasmid morphologies embedded in wood feeding the confusion between artificial and domesticated nature, its outdoor surfaces forming a vertical swamp to recycle the inert grey water, a water purification plan infrastructure that rejects only the clean liquid of Lake Geneva… to “Mipi”, 2006, a PI Bar in a temple of cognitive science, MIT-Cambridge, an extension of the Media Lab, a venue for experimentation to study the immuno-therapeutic affects of reabsorbing one’s own urine, including the schizoid balance between reflexive disgust and healthy effects… to a stochastic machine that vitrifies the city in “Olzweg”, 2006, spreading the contamination from a radical architecture museum in pursuit of Frederick Kiesler’s endlessness. This smearing is done through the recycling of industrial glass, mainly French wine bottles that are swallowed up and vomited out by a 12 metre-high machine in a process of staggering, scattering and stacking. Random aggregation is part of this unpredictable transformation following the fuzzy logic of the vanishing point. The machine works to construct a museum extension and collects “voluntary prisoners” wrapped in the permanent entropy of the grafting, who test the glass maze by getting lost in multiple uncertain trajectories and rediscover the heterotopian non-panoptical sensation of their youthfulness, using, if necessary, RFIDs on PDAs to rediscover their positioning… the opposite of an architecture that petrifies, historicizes and panopticalizes… to “waterflux” in 2007, a scenario for scooping out hollows in solid wood by means of a five-axis drill, supplied by 1,000 trees (2,000 cubic metres) cut down as part of the maintenance of the forest surrounding the site of this of extraction-manufacturing-transformation facility, following an anthroposophic logic where technologies and machinery are part of the site’s territory, endemic to the situation and its mutation, at the same time reviving the local forest economy… to the “gardenofearthlydelights” in 2008, a toxic garden in a new green house in Croatia, on the site of a former mediaeval Apotiker, a Franciscan monk medicinal plant garden, with access barred but the products able to be tasted and tested through a distillation and de-concentration mechanism, available at a bar… only for those who really want to try them, producing physiological and psychological effects similar to what happens with the Japanese “Fugu” fish, with an “at your own risk” protocol… where ecosophy is considered as a global interaction porous to the human body, as a Gaia /6 exchange, a chain of interaction and dependencies… articulating life and death and knitting paranoia… to “Heshotmedown” in 2008, a tracked biomass machine penetrating into the military zone known as the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea, collecting rotten substances, the coating of a forest in decomposition, and bringing back this material to plug all the external surfaces of a projectile-shaped building, forming a natural eco-insulation utilizing the fermentation of the grass and the heat produced by its chemical transformation. Full of land mines, the DMZ is a restricted zone where North and South Korea never stop playing Cold War. The machine collects the residue of this pathological period and recycles it for productive use in this highly dangerous no-man’s land abandoned since the end of the war (more than half a century ago), restoring its natural wildness, with the reappearance of elves, wizards, witches and harpies, and some new plant species. Legends and fairy tales are transported out of the depths of the forest, as in a “Stalker ” /7 experiment, to touch the unknown… to “I’mlostinParis” in 2008, a bacteriology lab where the “Rhizobium” agent cultivated in 200 beakers is used for its potential to increase the nitrogen content of plant substrate without the use of chemical fertilizer, through the injection of these substances into the individual nutritional hydroponic system… in order to maintain a “rear window” /8 minimum distance from the petit bourgeois conservatism of Parisian neighbours located at the opposite end of a closed courtyard… this Devil’s Tower /9 emergence is constituted by 2,000 ferns whose origin dates back to the Devonian period, which are technologically domesticated to survive in the current “regressive monarchical period in France”… to a paranoiac system, the “TbWnD” (the building which never dies) in 2011, an alert detector or marker of our past/future symptoms: a Zumtobel laboratory for the study of “dark adaptation” and solar radiation intensity detection, covered with phosphorescent components (an “Isobiot®opic” oxide pigment made from raw uranium) that serve as a UV sensor and detector to indicate and analyse the daily intensity of the UV rays that reach the area and its inhabitants (including humans and all other species). Some 5,000 glass components reveal the depletion of the ozone concentration in the stratosphere and simultaneously the origin of this phenomenon, the sun’s radiation. This lab articulates the risk presented by ozone layer depletion (due to industrial pollution and CO2) with the paranoia generated from the last century’s scientific ignorance and criminal exploitation of the characteristics of some natural elements /10… to several escaping, lines of escaping (“les échappées belles” of Deleuze ) coming first through an utopian protocol of an “architecture des “humeurs” in 2011, a self-organized city conditioned by a bottom-up system in which the multitudes /11 are able to drive the entropy of their own system of construction, their own system of “vivre ensemble”. Based on the potential offered by contemporary bio-science, the rereading of human corporalities in terms of physiology and chemical balance, to make palpable and perceptible the emotional transactions of the “animal body”, the headless body, the body’s chemistry, and produce information about individuals’ adaptation, sympathy, empathy and conflicts (antipathy) when confronted with a particular situation and environment… to adapt the “malentendus” /12 of this result to an endless process of construction involving undetermined and unpredictable machine behaviour by developing a secreting 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 embody the computational trajectories. This structural calligraphy works like a stereotomy machine with its successive geometrics determined by a strategy of the permanent production of anomalies…with no standardization and no repetition except for the procedures and protocols, so that, based on this, technoid slums emerge… and… last but not least, the latest experiment, “hypnosisroom” in 2006 (Paris) and 2012 (Japan)… using hypnosis to produce a stargate effect in pursuit of the somnambulist/feminist political movement during first half of the 19th century that used hypnosis (called magnetism during that period) in an attempt to develop spaces of freedom and an egalitarian, un-racist, un-sexist social contract that could only be perceived and explored by travelling through this layer… in the face of the impossibility (or difficulty) of modifying the mechanisms of the real, tangible, political state of the world, this pre-feminist movement strove, on the contrary, to create this suggestive, immersive and distanced layer of another social contract… Although diabolized and treated as charlatanism, nevertheless all of pre-modern reformist thought drew on this movement… and…
End of the first chapter…
1)“Mes chers frères, n’oubliez jamais, quand vous entendrez vanter le progrès des lumières, que la plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas,” Baudelaire, “Spleen of Paris”, 1858. 2)Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” was the first Bachelor Machines scenario. 3)Neuschwanstein Castle, a palace commissioned by King Ludwig II of Bavaria as a retreat and as homage to Richard Wagner, famous for its artificial Romantic grotto. 4)Playtime, a 1967 movie by Jacques Tati, with its cold-glass-deterritorialized futuristic urbanism. 5)A machine using dual ozone and ceramic filters to produce drinkable water, though the Italian authorities forbid calling it “Natural Venice Water”. 6)The Gaia hypothesis is the bio-geo-chemical scientific theory that the earth (including its biosphere) is a dynamic physiological system that has maintained the planet and life in harmony for three billion years. 7)Stalker, a 1979 movie by Andrei Tarkovski, 1979, about a kind of post-apocolypse war interzone that can only be crossed according to a protocol, a ritual that has to be strictly followed to avoid awakening unknown forces. 8)Rear Window, by Alfred Hitchcock, a 1954 film about voyeurism, neighbourhood relationships, fantasies and realities… 9)Spielberg used Devil’s Tower in Wyoming as an alien meeting point in his 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In this move the character played be Richard Dreyfus reproduces it in his own living room, using soil, plant and mud materials acquired, in a raging fit of lucidity, by destroying a small decorative garden in the neighbourhood and taking these materials into his home. 10)From the discovery of the properties of radium by Pierre and Marie Curie to the plutonium day-after devastation of the “Little Boy” bomb. 11)In the sense of the word used by Spinoza and Antonio Negri. 12)A French word which navigates between mishearing and misunderstanding
(introduction of LOG#25 / about capitalism, technologies, masochism, machinism and languages…)
Reclaim Resi[lience]stance//….R2
I am an imposter. They told me so… finally… it’s out… What am I to do now with the life of agreeable fakery that binds me, in claimed feebleness, to things and to people, to suspect humanity. We could wonder about this…, and wander… together… as if it were some new territory to discover… a blank map, some terra incognita… a Moby Dick[1] on the move with Gregory Peck clutching at the ropes of his Harpoon, dead yet still alive at the same time… Step right up, Boys, Girls, and Androgynes, you’ll get your money’s worth… Log is so cheap… let yourself be what you’re not, too, slip into a schizophrenic zone, a thick soup of contradictory desires emerging from the clay like the hydrocephalic Golem-Golum… that way you, too, can naively elude our unpredictable and irreducible conflicts, which are part and parcel of domination and slavery, destruction and the new, fusions of ugliness and beauty, obstacles and possibilities, garbage and fresh blooms, threats and various forms of protection, technicist prowess and forces of nature… Here everything comes together and interlocks. It’s all here, in the making, in a movement in the making… Step right up, Boys, Girls, and Androgynes… Let yourself get carried away, to see and tell what connects us, the people behind this Log, but also all the rest, the ones who stir up trouble and take shelter in these friendly, territorial, womblike refuges where you can circle around in the ill winds that blow through congregations and metropolises, in all those places, those little hotspots. And anyone can follow suit, as long as it goes toward making a “place” that we can mine for whatever remains habitable, desirable, or musical in the gloomy universe of planetary noise. It’s good, it’s really good. It comes in the form of a human group, a re-peopling of the social structure in the form of a dream. A dream of social climates, empty lots, existing forms of nature and people and enhanced intimacy. It alters what exists, it marks out vanishing lines, subjectivities, it throbs in the form of local stories and languages, little tales, the stuff of fables and narratives garnered by tacking together and tinkering.[2] It isn’t totally iconoclastic, but cultivates a profound fear, an aversion to preformed, reproduced optic matter, standardized image/merchandise. It’s also nasty… Not really ready to buckle under and keep its mouth shut. Then again, it’s naive and full of good ideas, forced as it is to elbow its way through the monstrous dump of social media junk… It’s the planet within the planet, the swarm of bees buzzing in the face of a society that has become bogged down in the deterritorialization programmed by Deleuze and Guattari (Anti-Oedipus, 1972). It’s “the weed in the human cabbage patch” that Henry Miller talked about. “True, the weed produces no lilies, no battle ships, no Sermons on the Mount… Eventually, the weed gets the upper hand… Grass is the only way out… The weed exists only to fill the waste spaces left by cultivated areas. It grows between, among other things. The lily is beautiful, the cabbage is provender, the poppy is maddening – but the weed is rank growth…”[3] It lives in this grassy environment, between the flotsam and jetsam and other detritis of this society of chaotic performance. It tinkers, recycles, reconstructs in all historical senses of the term. In other words, it proceeds without apparent method, by means of declarations, unstable desires, and objectives – so much so that it’s fun to see those bent on destruction deducing scraps of theories and rules of etiquette from it all. Go ahead, trample on this patch of lawn, it can stand up to anything, it’s a football field with lots of sides. But is it the final round of human forms preceding the final collapse and freezing over, or just some bushy piste, with “succesive lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside?”[4] Then again, no one gets it, it remains an ellipsis, but so much the better… a problem of writing, there absolutely have to be “anexact” expressions to nail something exactly. Let’s say that it is about naming those aesthetic species that grow wild between social snowdrifts. The rhizomatic bad seed sown by the two philosopher friends that stocks us up again.
It proceeds by variation, expansion, and conquest, via crossing points, recycling, adaptation, capture, embrace, tweaking… It’s a connection to sexuality, obviously to the animal realm, the plant realm, the world, politics, artifice, machines and bits… like a thousandth plateau… it means discovering continuous areas of intensities pulsating all by themselves and evolving by avoiding being directed toward a culminating point or external end, a little war machine, an automatic pistol of combinations, associations… assemblage in vivo that’s a lot more incisive than innovation in vitro… It operates like so many “dream machines,” pitted against the methods, messianisms, and mercantile theories of happiness, the natural state privatized and reprimitivized, symbols, progress. When everything has once and for all suddenly descended into anything goes, the deep freeze, urban guerilla warfare, and the rest of the whole shamozzle, there remains that sixth sense, nerve endings and defensive reflexes. And don’t think it takes to the maquis, either, that it goes in for underground resistance. There is a reality principle that doesn’t seek to be right against the daily disorder but walks gaily over its ruins. It lives in broad daylight, not in the shadows, because the shadows are a refuge for jumpy activists living in the comfort of their ideals… clowns, as Zizek calls them. It doesn’t illustrate destruction or violence, but is a state of things, a palpitation between Eros and Thanatos. It isn’t there to reproduce what is, or to eliminate its existence, its precondition, its affects… “Nostalgia is a weapon,” wrote Douglas Copeland in Generation X. Why should we deny ourselves access on the pretext that this particular furrow has been ploughed by the archaeologists “della città,”[5] regressively, in lazy imitation? The word still exists, the sentiment too, we’re going to have to wheel it out again, push it into the very heart of whatever situation, like a hesitation of time’s arrow, here and now, here and elsewhere, elsewhere but not just anywhere, avoiding the futurist past as much as the positivist future… Quite the opposite… And anyway, why would “It” be more moral, why would it have some right over the whole collection of good wishes and good consciences? There are so many people who are happy to carry morality’s flag, they’re legion, as numerous and powerless as criminals.[6]
Reclaim Resi[lience]stance …..R2[7] In this violent antagonism, within the hollow of this personal disorder, this personal confict, we are facing two worlds facing each other: WEF versus WSF, Davos[8] versus Porto Alegre[9]… on one side, business and its operative economy, both financial and managerial; on the other, all the multitudes and their potential for organization from the bottom up – for a productive and operative resistance against the first. How can the architect, artist, scientist, writer, and citizen absorb, swallow, and digest this Janus-like condition without favoring one over the other? How can they walk on the razor’s edge, following a schizoid strategy of weaving together contradictory forces, of knitting together two genetically opposed wires? On the one hand, technology as a vector of invention in the pursuit of “businessdom,” the mix of free enterprise and the ideology of progress that was a basis of the democracy empire, and on the other, the growing of the bottom-up, of the biopolitical tribes, suspicious of the delegation of power’s simulacrum as a highly imperfect and corruptible system that needs to be renovated by, and through, the multitudes and their creative energy and potential. Log 25 explores ways to navigate this antagonism, which could be negotiated in an (un)certain and ambiguous manner… nonhierarchical, nondeterministic, defining a path in which architectural protocols could fuse bottom-up and top-down, contingently, simultaneously, as if the ingredients were making recipes, and the recipes were modifying the substance of the ingredients… apparatuses of exchange,[10] which transform the game of power and the knowledge diffused through that game.
The stuttering between Resilience[11] (recognizing vitalism as a force of life) and Resistance (“Creating is resisting”)[12] seems, in a schizophrenic logic, a plausible hypothesis… shifting, drifting, in the crack of territories between strategies of emergences, manipulating processes, computation, fabrication… flirting with the fetishism and the arrogance[13] of tooling, daily updated Stakhanovismly as a psycho syndrome of our alienation… and… at the opposite… the line of their own subjectivation, their “raison d’être”…
In this context of endless perplexities, it is not innocently that a group of philosophers requestions the foundation of “our ideal insane asylum,” called democracy, through the validity of its structure and the procedures of delegation of power; questioning notions of government, of governance, of bio-democracy.
Contradictorily, the discipline of architecture in the time of now feigns ignorance of this genuine conflict, and concurrently legitimizes more and more its identity, or the illusion of an identity, at a condition of noninvasive, nonsubversive, nonpolemic, nonpolitical consequences.[15] In this inoffensive demonstration of wallowing in a cozy postdigital a(e)ffect, addicted to a totemic production,[16] “we” seem to be afraid of the wolf… afraid of losing the privileges acquired over a period when the reason of the few prevailed over the destiny of the many, sitting squarely within the fantasy of control: from a disciplinary urbanity, based on the model of psychiatric hospitals, and panoptic prisons as a model and instrument of urban planning,[17] we have slipped into an informational system of control, into a whole panoply of watchwords, to take up Deleuze again.[18] The modes of constituting the city are so well-coded and planned that they induce in advance instructions for its “proper usage,” “directions for use” in which playing around with its reordering is no longer tolerated. The systems of incarceration of the classical age have no reason now to exist, so the manufacturing of cities apes its principles of surveillance[19] in an “open sky.” This is something we sense… but what’s more pertinent, as Antonio Negri underlines in the conversation that follows here, seems to be the return to the industrial world, of the factory, the mill, via its modes of production, profit and enslavement in relation to what lies outside it… of the city itself, which has become the very stakes of the production and trafficking of ideological and financial values. The architect has become the mainspring, the cheville ouvrière, of this process in the literal sense: he is the “worker” on the city assembly line, from Detroit to Shanghai, producing the icons of triumphant, authoritarian capitalism (the new El Dorados of Asia!) via its exchange zones without being remunerated with the surplus values engendered, the capital generated.
As a hired hand, capable and lobotomized, the “sub-proletarianized” postcapitalist architect is not only the main link in the assembly line of industrial and urban products; parallel to this, he is also the elegant mask of the duplicity of a system that hides its true nature through the artificial eroticization of this “flagshipshit.” Subservience to a manufactured product, without questioning the conditions in which that product is made – which could be read as the conscious projection of willing slavedriving – has simultaneously generated a general impoverishment and dumbing-down of the field of architecture. To trigger and regulate this intellectual pauperization, the “professionals of the profession” have invaded and cannibalized the terrain of the academies so as to bend them to their own needs: to produce the alienated workforce, super-talented when it comes to tools but servile when it comes to their jobs, required to surf modes of manufacturing that are at once operative and cynical… eviscerated of any rebellious, not to mention alternative, hypothesis that would turn their talent into a tool for transforming the system.
It’s not so much postcapitalism that is in question here as it is the conditions in which architects have tried not to play around with its malleability, its capacity to absorb strange, not to mention toxic, bodies capable of undermining its predictable mechanisms…
It’s true that the media visibility that arises from such submission operates like some psychotic reward. It produces systemic pathological effects: precisely the known symptoms of the industrial sub-proletariat: the worker of the week at McDonalds and the “Pritzker Prize” are blood brothers – a photo on the wall of their dependency, in thanks for their docility. But submission to the mechanisms of power and authority “doesn’t pay” except for those who serve as vehicles for that illusion. It is only in strategies of conflict, opposition, indignation, and occupation that the capitalist structure, an ectoplasm with an adaptable and variable geometry and contours, agrees to renegotiate its transactional modes… But for this malleability to operate, we first have to run the risk of confronting it, causing it to crack, biting it, in close combat, using tactical strategies of visibility and fallback… facades and dissimulation… offensive drives… occupation of turf, in the hollows of conflicts, in the hollows of speech utterances, their rescripting, their de-alienation – not in the cozy living-room idealism of the defeat of thought.
Architects as a whole have neglected to hunt “the beast.” [20] Claiming to be serious, rigorous, expert, professional, they have naturally and willingly and as a matter of course made themselves subservient to the system that is supposed to feed them, and in return, logically, they are underpaid for such subservience. This particular form of masochism, which is not so much masochism as it is acceptance of the sadism of the system, is actually, height of irony, seen as… a performative act.[21]
Surely we’re forced to reread the political distance… the ontological schism… between these the notions of sadism and masochism22… from the one, we should be able to exercise our strength by the effective recognition of enslavement to a system, by finding new contract-based solutions to its limits, its contents and modes of dependence and strategy of infiltration, of resilience; and from the other… the sadism that profits from our ingenuity, false virtue, or proclaimed cynicism, to organize the institutions and modes of operation taking advantage of this (false) innocence… to alienate, bow, bend, according to its specific agenda, with no safeguard other than its quarterly profit and loss accounts…
In these conditions, and by default, it would be prudent to ask ourselves about the legal framework of such a submission, of the protocols of Sacher-Masoch, and even to define the mechanisms of exchange, domination, enslavement, eroticization and suffering, as a potentially contractual support element of this same transaction… and to redefine what constitutes the nature of that contract… not just in terms of the relationship between the parties, but in terms of the representation of this relationship: masochism is a theatricalization of the transactions involved in the human comedy, a way of exorcizing their hidden face, revealing, reawakening, opposing urges, Eros and Thanatos, life and death, at one and the same time… indissociably… and liberating the protagonists from the authority of the systems of control, in order to introduce obstacles, conditions and limits, instructions and contradictions, childish pranks and perverse acts… that make the nature of these transactions visible…
This is what the ecosophy of things, substances, and beings is… as well as the lucid recognition of a kind of operaism… capable of transforming the rules of its exercise, of its power… like the rules invented by “the bent man”[23] who faces his demon: the supposed weakness of a strategy of resilience, nestled in the very hollows of modes of operation that act, bend, corrupt, script, subjectivize… in order to free the narratives from alienation…
But make no mistake, we are not dealing here with crazy new flagellants, eschatologists, oozing blood at the feet of the cult’s ministries, but with tribes which infiltrate the very mechanisms that underpin and articulate the visible, both those linked to language, from speech utterances to all kinds of writing – poetic, political, psychological, prosaic, mathematical, computational, as well as multiple crisscrossing, entangled narrations, but also those linked to machinist tools, to the manufacture of things and substances, as well as those navigating this side of that, casting lines of subjectivation, of force, cracks, great escapes, made up of incongruous assemblages, tactical bouts of paranoia and schizophrenia, about to venture into possible new orderings, operative and affective critical apparatuses[24]… in a stuttering swarm.
François Roche, Bangkok June 2012
(Acknowledgements to Julie Rose, Translator and Olivier Zahm)
[1] In Herman Melville’s novel, the animal’s whiteness should be viewed as one of the last unknown lands to still resist the mapping of the world and its reduction. A last vestige of a time when nature did not allow itself to be tamed or ruled… before its sudden, violent, blinding awakening (Hurricane Katrina, El Nino, cyclones Jeanne, Tomas, and Nargis, Hurricane Xynthia, Typhoon Ewiniar, earthquakes in Indonesia, Japan, the coastal tsunami of Fukijima… a chain of devastating uncertainties that we couldn’t predict, despite our seismographic sciences). Faced with the autistic, blind, deaf and dumb violence of our mechanisms of technological, industrial, mercantile, and human domination, nature reacts… in a stuttering version of the original chaos… in a mutiny against human organization… Gaia seems to take its revenge. Nature is not an ideological “greenwashing” in some cozy living-room politics, neither is it a millenarist eschatological Eden park, which we’ve been very lucky to escape from, liberating ourselves from the hedonist harvester so we can negotiate with the dark, hostile forces that were hiding in the depths of the forest…
[2] From the French bricolage, from bricole, the Roman catapault, a seige weapon, made in situ by extracting and transforming the materials at hand in whatever situation.
[3] Cited in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 18.
[7]Reclaim Resi[lience]stance -“a plat de resistance” – The letter “R” in Gilles Deleuze’s “Abecedaries” – Resistance as William Morris, Walter Benjamin, John Ruskin with Baudelaire / the spleen and the “aura” against mass production / from Craftsmen to Computation Craft, jumping over the standardization of the Bauhaus Gropius period – Resistance as Structural Optimization (genetic algorithm, evolutionary algorithm) to “discover” the output by incremental and recursive calculation, through reiteration, for uncertain, unpredictable, un-deterministic protocols – Resistance in the social and philosophical manifesto, in the pursuit of the “Etablis”, the “Situ” with some friends in the luggage as Diogenes, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, Negri… – Resistance as a strategy of obstruction (The Five Obstructions, by Lars von Trier) – Resilience in the recognition of nonlinear systems in nature as a potential for emergence – Resistance as a strategy of opposition / La Boëtie (Voluntary Servitude), Thoreau (Civil Disobedience) and Gandhi’s methods – Resistance as suspicion of the resolution of science’s failure by science . . . – Resistance-resilience as feedback . . . animism, vitalism, machinisn feedback. . . for narrative bachelor machines and contingents scenario…
– Resilience as the recognition of the post human, infiltrated by and porous to technologies and information, as both a transitory object and subject. – Resilience as the recognition of the planet’s disease and the madness and contemporary barbarousness and the stupidity of the planetarian petit-bourgeois media class
– Resilience in a strategy of absorption (human adaptation after a shock, a trauma, an impact) – Resilience as the inoculation of a pathogen, of a toxicity to improve the resistance to this very pathogen
[8] The World Economic Forum (WEF), a nonprofit foundation based in Geneva, describes itself as an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas. The Forum organizes its annual meeting in Davos, a mountain resort in the eastern Alps region of Switzerland. The meeting brings together some 2,500 top business leaders, international political leaders, selected intellectuals and journalists to discuss the most pressing issues facing the world…as it should be.
[9] The World Social Forum (WSF) is an annual meeting of civil society organizations, first held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which offers a self-conscious effort to develop an alternative future through the championing of counter-hegemonic globalization. Some consider the WSF to be a physical manifestation of global civil society, as it brings together NGO, advocacy campaigns as well as formal and informal social movements seeking international solidarity. The WSF prefers to define itself as “an opened space – plural, diverse, nongovernmental, and nonpartisan – that stimulates the decentralized debate, reflection, building exchange, and alliances among movements and organizations engaged in concrete actions toward a more democratic and fair world….a permanent space and process to build alternatives…against what it seems to be.
[10] In pursuit of the notion of Félix Guattari’s “The Three Ecologies.”
[11] In psychology resilience refers to the idea of an individual’s tendency to cope with stress and adversity. This coping may result in the individual “bouncing back” to a previous state of normal functioning, or using the experience of exposure to adversity to produce a “steeling effect” and function better than expected. Resilience is most commonly understood as a process, not as a trait of an individual.
[12] A scientist, a mathematician, creates a function…it is mainly an act of resistance… against the wishes of casual opinion… against the whole domain of stupid questioning…Creation is resistance…it is production of exaggerations…and their existence is the proof of their resistance… against the stupidity and vulgarity… See “Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, R, Resistance,” television interview with Claire Parnet.
[13] When John Ruskin writes of the arrogance of the Renaissance, he claims both the over-instrumentalization on the part of geometry to frame limited types of knowledge and, simultaneously, the arrogance of the people owning this tool to discredit all others and to establish their authority, putting an end to the social organization of knowledge and construction developed during the Middle Ages.
[15] “Non-Standard,” the 2004 exhibition at the Pompidou Center, is behind this shift or, rather, regression in the status of the architect, who once more becomes a simple designer… As Hal Foster writes, “After the heyday of the Art Nouveau designer, one hero of modernism was the artist-as-engineer or the author-as-producer, but this figure was toppled in turn with the industrial order that supported it, and in our consumerist world the designer again rules. Yet this new designer is very different from the old. . . . One thing seems clear: just when you thought the consumerist loop could get no tighter in its narcissistic logic, it did: design abets a near-perfect circuit of production and consumption, without much ‘running-room’ for anything else.” Hal Foster, Design and Crime (and other Diatribes) (London: Verso, 2003), 17–18.
[16] The scale of production acts like capitalist compensation for the architect’s loss of influence, as does the money received in exchange for recognition of his powerlessness, on condition that it be both cynically performative and three times the size it was. Vouloir-faire, wanting to do, is substituted for savoir-faire, know-how (kunstwollen vs kunstkönnen).
[17] See Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006).
[18] According to Deleuze, “disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance).” Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 5.
[19] And neither the abusive “greenwashing,” nor “social networking entertainment,” nor, worse still, “postdigital-parametric” blindness are likely to redefine a position, a transmission point, from which we could “exercise our power,” our praxis (in the sense of human activities capable of transforming social and political relationships).
[20It is no innocent matter that the very people who generated the factory city, “a product of industry and marketing” to use the political phraseology of the barricades of the 1970s, are now transforming that factory city into a tool of capitalist propaganda, sharing in its construction like a randy, gangsterized rotary club. It is no innocent matter, either, that the critical systems in charge of questioning their validity simply offer them a helping hand, fascinated by the power that these great strategists grant them in return for their dependence.
[21] At the tip of the iceberg are Rem’s epigones and rejects whose names, among others, would be pointless to list.
[22] A subtlety developed by Gilles Deleuze in “Coldness and Cruelty” (1967), in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989).
[23] “Call it madness, if you want. . . But the new world knows only resistance. . . When I bend in order to avoid accepting the rules of their authority, I am destroying the foundations, I am insulting their legitimacy. . . . There is rage in the face of my madness, a ferocious rage as if they found themselves faced with an act of revolt. . . Cretins, don’t you understand that it’s exactly that?” Antonio Negri, “The Bent Man” (2005), in Trilogy of Resistance, trans. Timothy S. Murphy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
[24] Gilles Deleuze, “What is a dispositif?”, in Michel Foucault Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1991). “What is an apparatus […] in a game of power, strategies of relationships supporting types of knowledge and supported by themselves; both orderings of desires and of creations in Deleuze, apparatuses of knowledge and of power in Foucault, indissociably linked”. Agencements deleuziens, dispositifs foucaldiens », Monique David-Menard, College international de philosophie, revue rue Descartes, #59, 2008
Co-Curating a dark side night at the 13th Biennale of Venice / 28th of October / Somewhere on the Laguna
The Menu:
(in)Toxic Sublimini
A recipe for the feedback of repulsive magnetism, screaming “poiesis” in the syrupy distressnessless misunderstanding. Three ingredients of the sublime: the noble, the splendid and the terrifying form a course oscillating between toxic substance and boundless form. You have to be sublime at least once a day; toxic could be the cure for it, if produced twice a day.
Grotesque Romanticizing
A gravy for schmaltzy affect, effect, infects, faces, fooding facing realities and Trolls, in the childish meal of cruelty.
The grotesque as a romantic notion, framed by desires for beautiful, tasteful monsters, exquisite corpses and synthetic nature. Grotesque romanticizing cannot be cooked it can only be tested, so we can only hope for them, and them forget about the hope and we left with them.
Nostal(geek) Atmosphera
A birthday cake for the temptation of sugar-ice-comput-DIY vomiting a back tomorrow lost tasty paradise. Who said yes-Tea-day? Chromatic pastry radiating in atmospheric hues, triggering the Geeks desire to explore (the past? The present? The future?). Therefore the alternative to paranoid delusion, paranoid atmospheres, so we are trading on an emergency of the now, maybe atmosphere becomes Lust, not a bad trade.
Creative team Scenario, Camille Lacadee, Francois Roche, [eIf/bʌt/c] Design process, Computation, Ezio Blasetti Robotic Design, Special effects, Stephan Henrich _______________________________ Making-of, Danielle Willems Sound design, Myrtille Fakhreddine, Devin Jerrigan Computation, fabrication, construction, Mark-Henry Jean Decrausaz, Cameron David Newnham, Mark Kowalyov, Javed Godkin Paul de Costa, Peeraya Suphasidh Cameraman, Suthiwat Yanawiboot Storyboard, Pim Jular Model, Props, Pajareeya Suriwong, Nichapatara Swangdecharux Machinism special design, Cheng Yu Ling Planning, organization movie, Wachira Leangtanom Making-of, organization, Pantira Unarat Assistant historical research, Natreeya Kraichitti Assistant community negotiation, Lila Tedesco Assistants production, Arisa Juengsophonvitavas, Papat Jinaphun, Nicha Laptaveepanya, Nuthapong Jiratiticharoen, Benjawan Lamsa-ard, Tachapol Danaboonchai, Suthata Jiranuntarat, Yanisa Chumpolphaisal, Jenwit Narukatphichai, Permpoon Rojanasakul
Acknowledgements Sri Ganapati Vedeshwar, librarian / Elias Tabet, principal Pandrata Circle / Sanjeen SingPawat / Gwyl Jahn
Construction Manjunath & Co, Engineer Ravi N.Pattegar, Civil Engineer Contractor _______________________________________________ It’s a story… of how an illusion is able to create things, signs, research, fragment, assemblage, agencements and finally a shape, an object…. How a line of subjectivation is used as a strategy materializing in the physical world, in the tangible, touchable zone of our environment. It is an experiment, linked to the study circle existence and contents… how to extract from the multitude of books and knowledge stored in the site, a possibility of substantiation, a possibility of materialization….to reveal what the words contained in them, for their ability to transform the way we negotiate with realities… The relationship to the location (laterite stone), to the study circle (mainly constituted by philosophical and psychological references), to the owner, mister Vedeshwar…… and his mind… and his own practice of discovering knowledge through enigma, dilemma, signs, esoteric language and times clock gap between solar or lunar calendar based (3mn56s)…which becomes the process to manifest his illusion in the spectrum of the real. It’s a story of someone, involved in the rereading of the Baghavad gita, its multiple psycho interpretation, about the war between two cousins which could be understood as a personal fight against our own indecision, against our own self-indulgence…. A story of somebody which found the way to extract through signs and mathematical logic a shape, which passes from his mind to a cartography, from a cartography to a 3D object drifting slowly to a real construction at scale 1 by his own enlightening… he is himself becoming a fragment of this construction….on the site where he found the sign, to understand that this indeterminacy structure has the power to help him to renegotiate his own complaint (as the Krishna dialogue with Arjuna). / movie 15mn / Shell-ter 30m2
For Jitti’s Demon In Venice chroregraphy performance, in the pursuit of Thomas Man’s novel…with an apparatus trying to contain the invasion of the epidemic disease, the Cholera, trying to repulse the wind of Death and its somberness to preserve the particles of life scattered behind the illusory protection wall… Wind and water are never considering the efficiency of human obstacles as impassable; their natures are untamable, driven by encroachment, overcrossing, overflowing … The flooding of both Bangkok and Venice is a real and non-contingent fact… here despite the awkwardly dismembering landscape, with its lost whiteness, its lost paradise… Black is the future, and the naïve and fragile barrier turns its own physicality against the protagonists, who are coated, wrapped, smothered and strangled by the decaying, by the fragmenting, in a multitude that human constructed and organized… to become again a swarm with its own logic, with its own impermanence and scattered distribution. The pool was a pool, not any more…it turns into a deep, bottomless sinkhole, engraving and digging the ground to find the door to hell…. while the moonlight observes the “dance macabre ” of the daemon in the Siamese twin sister of Venice, Bkk
Final review the 9th of december 2011Location GSAPP / Room 114 Avery Hall (architecture department, Basement)
with : Molly Nesbit / Lydia Kallipoliti / Rirkrit Tiravanija / Pierre Huyghe / Roland Snooks / Ben Aranda / Danielle Willems / Michael Young / Leopold Lambert / & / Miranda Romer, Ezio Blasetti, Francois Roche
Une piste de dance, un « Stage » pour Richard Siegal a Chaillot, entracte de William Forsythe, dans le foyer, pour des performances live….. Spectacle et légèreté mises en abime…chaotiques, cacophoniques…Il semble qu’il se soit passé quelque chose ici… et les murs ne sont pas amnésiques…du temps ou le jazz et son corollaire d’acrobaties chorégraphiques, le Lindy Hop, …relégués au statut de truc dégénéré…les murs suintent encore du ralliement de la police Française, en grande pompe pour mettre en place des rafles et l’organisation de la Solution Finale nazi…sur les lieux même ou Richard Siegal se propose de faire ‘gigoter’ ces pas de danses « Nègres » …mais tout est devenu instable, en déséquilibre, et l’architecture (la ‘’stage’’), support de leur jonglerie humaine ne peux plus porter les corps, elle renvoi l’impulsion du pitre danseur pour mieux le déstabiliser, le désarticuler et lui faire perdre pied, littéralement… la ‘’Stage’’ et la tentation de son effondrement,…ici, il n’y a plus de logique à la gravité, le sol se dérobe, les choses et les êtres vacillent… ça s’appelle le Palais de Chaillot, et la bourgeoisie Parisienne y est invitée pour ripailler /,…
Civic Mimic
Chaillot / Paris / 2011 / Stage for Richard Siegal
Architect: New-Territories / R&Sie(n)… Creative team: François Roche, Stéphanie Lavaux, Toshikatsu Kiuchi, with Christoph Eppacher, Gabriel Blue Cira
Cost: $30K
Text:
A stage of bodies’ performances for the Civic Mimic choreography of Richard Siegal.
Scenario:
1) A back lash, feed back stage which is able to react even to collapse on the dancers weights and movements as a result of —
-Historical Situation of ‘’Palais de Chaillot’’ in Paris, where the Collaborationism of French Police was organized and “mise en spectacle”
-Choreography related to Lindy Hop, the alleged “degenerated dance of Negros” according to the memory of the walls, which are sweating this sticky stinky period.
-Including a long table, where the Parisian ‘’Bourgeoisie’’ are able to feast their ignorance and amnesia.
Call it madness, if you want . . . but the new world knows only resistance . . . when I bend in order to avoid accepting the rules and their authority, I am destroying the foundations, I am insulting their legitimacy . . . There is rage in the face of my madness, a ferocious rage as if they found themselves faced with an act of revolt . . . Cretin, don’t you understand that it’s exactly that?
– Antonio Negri, The Bent Man, in Trilogy of Resistance, 2005
Two worlds face each other today: Davos and Porto Alegre. One represents business and the operative economy, both financial and managerial; the other, the multitudes and their potential for organization from the bottom up – for a productive and operative resistance against the first. How can the architect, artist, scientist, writer, and citizen absorb, swallow, and digest this Janus-like condition without favoring one over the other? How can they walk on the razor’s edge, following a schizoid strategy of weaving together contradictory forces, of knitting together two genetically opposed wires? On the one hand, technology as a vector of invention in the pursuit of the “businessdom,” the mix of free-enterprise and the ideology of progress that was a basis of the democracy empire, and on the other, the growing of the bottom-up, of the biopolitical tribes, suspicious of the delegation of power’s simulacrum as a highly imperfect and corruptible system that needs to be renovated by, and through, the multitudes and their creative energy and potential. LOG 25 will explore ways to navigate this antagonism, which could be negotiated in an (un)certain and ambiguous manner . . . nonhierarchical, nondeterministic, defining a path in which Urbanism and Architecture could fuse bottom-up and top-down, contingently, simultaneously, as if the ingredients were making recipes, and recipes were modifying the substance of the ingredients . . . apparatuses of exchange,[1] which transform the game of power and the knowledge diffused through that game. The stuttering between Resilience (recognition of vitalism as a force of life and innovation) and Resistance (“Creating is resisting”[2]) will be the goal . . . 1+1=? Architecture today is shifting, or drifting, in the pure logic and strategy of shaping, where fabrication, expertise, efficiency, and computation have become substitutes for the logic of the raison d’être. Like the car company producing cars, where a specific social organization has been created to manage production without diagnosing the structural and human alienation produced by that system, the discipline of architecture is going back to its own ghetto, constructing simultaneously an efficiency and legitimacy of knowledge from evaluation and expertise, which gather and target a high degree of professionalism . . . while raising the fences, the fortress wall of its “territory,” with loneliness and detachment and a kind of absurd arrogance[3]. Paradoxically the world is being pulled and pushed in so many directions, producing contradictory tensions, new conflicts, new nationalism, new local ideologies, even new El Dorados with flickering financial fireworks – mirages in the desert. In this context, it is not innocently that a group of philosophers requestions the foundation of democracy, the validity of its structure and the procedures of delegation of power; requestions the notion of government, of governance. Yet architecture, wallowing in its comfortable post-digital affect, or afraid to lose the privileges acquired in a period when the reason of a few presided over the destiny of many, stands straight in the phantasm of control, with tooling at its origin (master planning) and substituting the green-washing expertise of “ecology,” or the social meanings of “social networking,” for the need to refound its own practice, and the reason for this practice, in a polis-political approach.
[1] In pursuit of the notion of Félix Guattari’s “The Three Ecologies.”
[2] A scientist, a mathematician, creates a function…it is mainly an act of resistance… against the wishes of casual opinion… against the whole domain of stupid questioning…Creation is resistance…it is production of exaggerations…and their existence is the proof of their resistance… against the stupidity and vulgarity… “Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, R, Resistance.”
[3] When John Ruskin writes of the arrogance of the Renaissance, he claims both the over-instrumentalization one the part of geometry to frame limited types of knowledge, and, simultaneously, the arrogance of the people owning this tool to discredit all others and to establish their authority, putting an end to the social organization of knowledge and construction developed during the Middle Ages (from the processes of cathedral construction with its protocols of sharing for endless experimentation and artifacts — to the here and now… where technologies may re-question the potential of unachievement by developing uncertain “agencements” which operate as apparatuses, the transparences of the transaction…at the opposite of a deterministic and predictable system of emission…)
Reclaim Resi[lience]stance (references)
"a plat de resistance"The letter “R” in Gilles Deleuze’s "Abecedaries"Resistance as William Morris, Walter Benjamin, John Ruskin, or Baudelaire / the spleen and the “aura” against mass production / from Craftsmen to Computation Craft, jumping over the standardization of the BauhausResistance as Structural Optimization (genetic algorithm, evolutionary algorithm) to "discover" the design of something by the strength of incremental and recursive calculation, reiterationResistance in the social manifesto, in the pursuit of the "Etablis" /Robert_Linhart
Resistance as a philosophical position, in the pursuit of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, Negri
Resistance as a strategy of obstruction (The Five Obstructions, by Lars von Trier) Resilience in the recognition of nonlinear systems in nature as a potential for emergence (termite schizoid nonhierarchical and nonlinear construction / freeform analyses of Rupert Soar)Resistance as a nonviolent system of opposition / La Boëtie (Voluntary Servitude), Thoreau (Civil Disobedience) and Ghandi's methodsResistance as suspicion of the resolution of science's failure by science . . .Resistance-resilience as feedback . . . machinist feedback, and forced feedback . . . for narrative bachelor machines and scenario…
Resilience as the recognition of the posthuman, infiltrated by and porous to technologies and information, as both a transitory object and subject.Resilience as the recognition of the planet's disease and the madness and contemporary barbarousness (Primo Levi’s “shame of the world” caused by failing human solidarity
Resilience in a strategy of resilience (human adaptation after a shock, a trauma, an impact)Resilience as the inoculation of a pathogen in the body to improve the body's resistance to this very pathogen
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15 November 2011 / Opening of International competition (under 30 Y) / for scenario + fabrication / Bordeaux-Artigues / France / Architects+Artists+Landscape designers /
“Grass produces neither flower nor sermon on the mountain, nor airplane carrier, but in the end it’s always grass that has the last word. It fills emptiness, grows between, and amongst other things. The flower is beautiful, the cabbage useful, the poppy makes us mad, but grass is overflow.” / Henry Miller
We are at the crossroads, where, faced with the autistic, blind, deaf and mute violence of our mechanisms of technological, industrial, mercantile and human domination, nature reacts…with violence and without warning, in a faltering of the original chaos…in mutiny against the organization of men… Gaïa seems to take revenge (Katrina, El Niño, Cyclone Jeanne, Tomas et Nargis, the Xynthia storm, Ewiniar typhoon, Indonesian and Japanese earthquakes, collateral Tsunamis all the way to Fukujima…chain of devastating incertitude, unpredictable in spite of our seismographic sciences). The elements rage and the gods, so quick to pardon our folly, seem powerless to appease the rebellion, armed with infernal force…
Nature is not an ideological “green washing” for backyard politics, nor is it Eden park, millenarian, eschatologist, from which we have very fortunately escaped, freeing ourselves from the gatherer-hedonist to negotiate with the hostile dark forces that have lain hidden in the depths of the forest…
But these forces have come out of their hiding places, their biotopes, they are invading the spaces that Man had thought he could take without giving anything in exchange, without transaction…the war has been declared…nature’s revenge is not a bedtime story for children…our bellicose enemy operates openly…in the light of day…ultimate arrogance…
Here we are…here…on this terrain, … in the middle of the conflict, not in real time, this has already taken place, « çà c’est passé ici », in these forests, on the edges of these urban spaces…the divisions have confronted each other, clashed, been wounded…damaged…there’s one battlefield left, traces of this violence, flashes of this violence…we only have this zone left, where even the access protocol has been forgotten with time, clouded by the desire to erase the shock of titans, to delegate it to the ranks of myths…easier to tame…for a human…
This zone, we’re going to reopen it together, the space of an instant…necessarily limited…and even this not without trepidation…we need to establish a protocol, a ritual to protect ourselves from it…but protect ourselves against what, that remains unclear…the toxicity or monstrosity of which we are today the pacified children…the fear of seeing the face of this other reality by which we have become penetrable, to which we are bound…but here in combat uniform, with the highly-charged negative energy the military objective of which was to renegotiate, through force, a common space, a common matrix, a precarious balance made of openings and amenities…with those who thought they could dominate their natures …
The protagonists no longer exist as two distinct entities…« ça c’est passé ici » is a war zone which happened, wherein the structuring of the conflict remains a mystery…this doesn’t let itself be diagnosed as easily as all that…the implements of our contemporary archeology are not operating…« ça c’est passé ici »…
….
This session is the occasion to rethink our relation, not in terms of moralist ecology, nor in terms of preservation, but rather in terms of transaction and of body and zone of exchanges…
Each acquiescence must identify a relationship to the situation, in order for it to be compatible to the development of ideas and principles of the transition to the real…Due to the intrinsic nature of this competition, based on a space of conflicts, of transaction, of process and relations, the site must be perceived and exploited as a “swapping” zone. The project must not hold back from crossing barriers because they are too morally predictable, from negotiating repulsions, anomalies, impulses of life and death, entanglement between Eros and Thanatos …the failure of a system is not a criteria of its devaluation and disqualification…but rather a system of knowledge…
« ça s’est passé ici » is conjugated in the future past, or rather, in a retroactive anticipation of a previous future … signs and systems … enigmatic.
“This blog is a protest against the voluntary manipulation and intellectual corruption being used to eraze or sterilize the first French Theme Land Park, where nature is both artificialized and renaturalized by concrete engineering, from Eiffel and Hennebique, and Rocaille Pictureques as the first witness of a “Doctor Moreau Island”, a “Stalker wishes Chamber”… Blog includes memories, current views, maps, history, and the concrete innovation and evolution from XIXth Craft Man Know How, from a Walter Benjamin and John Ruskin uniqueness and rarity claims to… NOW… through Digital & Computation Craft, introducing bio-concrete without frame work as a potential of singularities, of multitudes of singularities… re-discovering the non standart prototyping productions “
The Zoo apears as an historical lift, a trans-door from XIXth to XXIth, jumping over the period of “repetition without anomaly”
This competition calls for a radical reimagination of the current relationship between humans and the built environment through the establishment of new architectural protocols of coexistence in the search of a new Partial-Total Ecology: “YUmen[eco]tec-pharming”.
In the past architecture has always operated as a mediator between humans and the built environment, within an anthropocentric ideological framework with a deterministic approach. This competition seeks to escape this direct relationship and asks for submissions able to produce new socio-ecological scenarios able to reimagine our current ideas and preconceptions, in relation to notions of equilibrium and sustainability within Western Culture.
Going beyond notions of moral ecology or fake sustainability, this competition asks for entries able to envision new architectural scenarios and moments of invention by looking into spaces of residual otherness to reconstitute canonical forms of thinking.
These new socioecological architectural visions will provide a new understanding and a new set of possible relations of humans with the planet.
Each entry must submit a scenario for a new Partial-Total Ecology: “YUmen[eco]tec-pharming” in the form of text, protocols, codes or images that clearly identify three objects of research and projection: subjects, scenario and tools.
I. Subject[s]-Inhabitant[s]: Co-species/Co-substances
In order to avoid direct anthropocentrism [that in essence is impossible to bypass], the competition asks to have as the subjects of inhabitation of these new scenarios a minimum of two different species [including human] and two different by-products [i.e. excrements] in relation to these species.
II. Site-Scenario: Relations-Processes
Each submission will have to identify/create a site condition suitable for the development of the projected Partial-Total Ecology: “YUmen[eco]tec-pharming”. Due to nature of the competition, based on relations and processes, the site is to be understood as a space of conflict, transaction and relations. The site will be identified through its own sharing protocols, evolutionary dynamics and transitory transactions. The project might be developed within spaces that go beyond current acceptable notions of correctness including disgusting, monstrous or repulsive. With a similar approach, notions of life or death, success or failure might be equally treated as value creators.
III. Tools: Chemical-Technical-Visceral
From the machinistic, passing by the chemical to the visceral, some of the processes that the entrant might consider in elaboration of this new Partial-Total Ecology are: screwed, chewed, shat, sweated, swallowed, vomited, pined, secreted, woven, knitted, extruded, staggered, scattered, coagulated, aggregated, welded, pinched, braided, spidernetted, bonsaied, crystallised, calcified, excreted, expanded, branched, pulped, smeared, coagulated, excavated, assembled and disassembled, bended, blended, and their machine picked, spiked, pinched, caressed, embraced, sliced, cut, laminated and loved [list in formation]
The Isobiot®ope installation unfolds a scenario about a mineral element which is able to indicate the degree of UV crossing the stratosphere through its after glowing appearance (pigment of Isobiotrope exited by the UV ray) and by this way revealing the degree of Ozone degradation at the origin of some human pathologies.
The natural stone is on the middle of the stripe in the installation. It is a radioactive natural element at the level of 0.88 microSievert / hours. A Geiger counter is set to control it. The natural radioactivity of the “citta di Venezia” is 0.16 microSV (in the installation the Alpha rays don’t across more than 15 centimeters and are filtered by human skin barrier).
This installation articulate the dangerousness of the nature, the science coming from the exploration of the nature (from Marie Curie to Little BOY) and in parallel, simultaneously, it is talking of HOW this Isobiot®opic element becomes NOW a marker of the uncertainties of our future, coming from the post-effect of human scientific development (ozone weakness which increases the UV intensity on the earth surface).
It is not a Catastrophic report, or a “green washing” report, but more a recognition of a transition, a translation between past and future, between psychology and physiology, where the natures & sciences has to be reconsidered, renegotiated through Safe and Unsafe aspect.
The 50 prototyping green components are done with 10 kg of Isobiot®opic substance. They are reacting to sun light UV ray, restituted in the Arsenal by artificial LED flash. It creates in this low intensity situation a photoluminescence effect of 3 mn (the process is done by photovoltaic cells within the glass component, collecting the light flash power which is exciting the Isobiot®opic substance through black light LED). Normally the average duration of after glowing (mix of phosphorescence and luminescence) is about 10-20 hours (from the intensity of sun – 50 000 lx).
These Isobiot®opic components are populating a research and laboratory building for Zumtobel-light Company. Arsenal installation is both a prototype and a “cabinet de curiosité” for an Architecture which becomes a Marker of mind and environmental mutations and paranoia.
On Saturday 17 July an international exhibition, Swarm Intelligence: Architectures of Multi-Agent Systems, will open at Architecture SH in HKU’s Shanghai Study Centre near the Bund, Shanghai, China.
Swarm intelligence is a revolutionary new theory for explaining how the world operates. It has already transformed a number of disciplines from biology to economics. But how can it contribute to the discipline of architecture? And what can architects learn from those working in swarm intelligence in other disciplines? This important exhibition brings together some of the world’s leading architects, engineers and artists to address this question for the first time, including: Zaha Hadid Architects, London; Kokkugia, New York and London; Biothing, London; R&Sie(n), Paris; Cecil Balmond, London; Casey Reas, Los Angeles; London and Foster + Partners, London; and schools: Architectural Association; UPenn; Columbia GSAPP; TU Delft; CITA and USC. It showcases some of the freshest and most inspirational digital design work to have emerged in recent months.
As the curators Neil Leach and Roland Snooks put it, ‘We are witnessing, it would seem, a radical new development within digital design. This exhibition is an attempt to chart this emerging phenomenon. It brings together some remarkably inspirational designs from some of the world’s leading emerging architects and top schools of architecture to illustrate the potential of this new digital technique for architecture.’
To coincide with the exhibition, a major international book is being published, Neil Leach, Roland Snooks (eds.), Swarm Intelligence: Architectures of Multi-Agent Systems.
A symposium will also be held in the VIP lounge of the Austrian pavilion at Shanghai 2010 Expo starting at 6pm on Wednesday 14 July. Roland Snooks and Neil Leach will discuss their exhibition and book with a panel of experts including digital theorist, Anne Balsamo and architects, Ma Qingyun, Stefano de Martino and Paul Tang.
Dialogue / Natanel Elfassy – François Roche / 2010Published in LOG /Spring-Summer 2010 / Thanks To Cynthia Davidson The only thing the reader will see marching past him are inadequate means: fragments, allusions, strivings, investigations. Do not try to find a well polished sentence or a perfectly coherent image in it, what is printed on the pages is an embarrassed word, a stuttering.[1]– Andreï Biély
Natanel Elfassy: In a restless moment near the end of their lives, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari revealed their sensitivity to the uncertainty within their work, which was constantly being reformulated, by asking what it means to create. While the act of creation is not a representation of something that already exists, it is also not an irruption of the uncontrolled or undefined; it is not born of pure chaos, nor does it refer to it. Chaos is the ultimate enemy of thought.
Resorting to the idea of creation as chaotic and morbid, in which words lose their basis in a colorless, mute night and where we don’t see any form and don’t hear any sound, is one of the dangers that lurks in creation. This danger is based on the misleading understanding of creation as an expression either of transgression, breaking order, or madness. What cannot be thought is the nonrelational – those potentials or movements that fail to be actualized. Creation is danger; however it is not the danger of madness, but rather the danger of exposing an abundant sanity.
Deleuze and Guattari place creation in the field in which it is destroyed and trembles. Stuttering, where it cracks and fractures, enables us to see the door to the rabbit hole that leads not to what is beyond, not to the transcendental, but inward, to the immanent. It is the act of creation, the necessary act of architecture – in its singularity – that can retain the access to this door.
Stuttering architecture stems from the lack of an outlet and constitutes a single outlet – a language of architecture that cannot be traced back to its origin, but can express creation’s intensities through its tremor, giving birth to an affective and intensive “foreign” language within language. [Architectural language is a mirror containing within it the moment of transition into concrete existence; the moment when an invisible wall bursts and formed language enters the desert of discourse, always suffering from the death, commonness, and familiarity of this new materiality. Each time, with each new utterance, architecture is again required to generate a new, real state of creation, to avoid being trapped in the net of empty words.]
François Roche: Stuttering is conflictual, it appears as a disruption of continuity between emotion and language – where they simultaneously corrupt each other, creating a synaesthetic rapprochement where the degree or level of confusion reveals the impossible negotiation between something that tries to articulate knowledge in the public sphere and the protest of the body against being reduced to its simple appearance.
It could appear as a field of battle, where the forces present produce noise and chaos, beauty and barbarism, Eros and Thanatos, impulses of life and death. But more to the point, it is the contradictory aesthetic generated from this field of battle that matters.
The catatonia of the stutter is similar – it is an articulation or de-articulation of a psychism and the production of a new physiology accessing public territories and repressed depths of consciousness derived from zones of paranoia and permanent disequilibrium. Antonin Artaud tried to reach this fragile state of schizophrenia, blending language, shouting, screaming, and muscle convulsions, to create in performative works a feeling of repulsion on the part of the spectator/reader and in this way requestioning the boundaries of social conventions and normality.
That is the main point. To stutter is a-social not because of the non-understandability aspect, but because it perverts the appearance of socialization – a shameless pornography.
NE: Let’s stay for a moment at the immanent field of the battle, at the fragile and conflictual state that you are carrying and operate within. We come before dimensions that deviate from language, but attempt to define how language should be considered as capable of internalizing this energy; pulling language by the tongue, and not allowing its dialectical closure. Voids open before us, wickets through which we meet expression in its raw state.
The stuttering architect is the one who acknowledges his disability and accepts his fate, his senses, and bodily intuition. This architect is like the stuttering man who knows the pain of not being able to speak eloquently, of suffering from the sense of stammering incomprehensibly, trying not to confront certain syllables – fricatives and sibilants – since he knows too well the frustration this attempt will bring upon him.
Abandoning any grammatical semblance, the phrase falls apart. It is the event of language/architecture, in which language/architecture is not used to describe or denote, but rather to unname (undenominate) and disrupt.
The body ceases to be an appendage, becoming instead that which makes it possible for us to have an immediate, pre-reflective familiarity with reality. This points us back to the source of creation, uncovering its finiteness in aphasia, all the while showing the greatness of what is human – that which contains the consciousness of infinity. The act of architecture extends, deforms, and breaks the boundaries of language. It emphasizes and empowers the dryness and meagerness of architectural language.
Creation is destruction; we must destroy language in its present form and create it in a different form, denying certain structures as we form a structure out of what other structures are not made of. This new structure is certainly a reality; it can be seen and touched. It is certainly not nothing. Both the signifier and the signified are always present simultaneously; what is seen is a truth in presence. Therefore, for the architect, saying is doing.
We need a measured intervention – a radical and eternal reassessment that seeks to give up the prophecy (temptations to transcendence), while failing to stop stuttering time and time again. Reverence for this “failure” is instructive in this regard – the failure is the architect’s vocation, not in reference to the architect’s subject matter; rather, a failure intrinsic to the very process of the architectural production. To fail does not mean to represent successfully existential failures or existential meaninglessness; it means to refuse to represent. Thus, we preserve cracks through which we can feel the muted, endless infinity behind architectural things – an infinity more devious and secret, which rejects attempts at divisibility and striations, refuses the mere instrumentality of architecture.
This frees the architect and thinker from the endless pursuit of pointing to the catastrophe, realizing that it won’t just disappear (if we only indicate it, if we only warn and inform, if we only pursue more information). There is a need, an urgent and asymmetrical necessity, to act.
FR: It’s difficult for me to trace or track the monstrosity you talked about. The musicians in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, in the Hell section of the triptych, produce the most ambiguous sensation, specifically because in our recent and contemporary history of barbarism, the musician was also used as the last perverse concert before the Zyklon B shower.
Not only was the bestiality increased, but I suspect that it was also the highest point of horror and pleasure (for the barbarian) – the combined malefaction and jouissance of human perversity. We reached so high a level of monstrosity in the 20th century – from Verdun to the slaughters of Pol Pot to the recent atrocities in Rwanda – that it is now difficult to hierarchically re-qualify this notion of human bestiality and the industrial dimensions of terror.
But the musician playing and dancing in Hell cannot be compared to anything else. This unnamable amoral cultural artifact elicits repulsion and vomiting that cannot be framed or clearly unfolded; vomiting in this case to be read as the ultimate expression of language.
Some extreme (in)human cultural productions, such as Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom by Sade-Pasolini, or Eden, Eden, Eden by Guyotat – have found ways to transmit and vectorize this ambivalent perception, weaving a sophisticated barbarism with empathy for the suffering victim. The most uncomfortable aspect is that they are not developed from voyeurism (at a distance), but are intrinsically embedded in our own bestial, individual schizophrenia. These works force us to look at the devil, not in front of us, but contained in our own nervous sweat.
NE: Following your multiple trajectories, shadows of the catastrophe escape from our body, screams and sparks, like an animal we had been sheltering. I hear the other voices, the gnashing of the teeth of an animal in the agony of death. The voice is in me.
We meet the spirits that haunt us, that haunt creation. Stuttering dismantles the face and we rediscover the head, the teeth, and the flesh; it emerges from beneath discourse as brute fact and takes us to the threshold. Following Francis Bacon’s portraits, Deleuze refers to this threshold as the zone of indiscernibility: flesh and bone, man and animal.
How can architecture think the moving gap as a movement of being itself? How can we cross the threshold that lies beyond the limit (beyond language, beyond the wall), which is neither virtualization nor actualization, but rather the indiscernible middle? How can architecture move from report to experience?
FR: The animal is waking up after a long hibernation. The development of the collective and individual moralism of the 20th century (hygienism, positivism, modernism, progressivism, ecologism) could be perceived as the Siamese-twin brother of the industrial potential for erasure and destruction of humans, biotopes, and entire territories. This permanent disequilibrium (destruction and preservation versus barbarism and humanism) cannot be reduced to a simple theoretical or rhetorical game; it has been and still is, here and now, the preliminary condition of any emerging discourse and practice. As a genesis, or a genetic illness, we were born out of these conditions and we have the choice, the irreducible and individual choice, to think the field of the battle, to take sides. On one side of the battlefield are those who are driven by the illusion of elegant moralism, where we might wrap ourselves with the mantle of the right consciousness and the denunciation of a system that at the same time feeds and clothes us. On the other side are those who profit from the barbarism, through individual cynicism, justified by the alleged cynicism of system, and asserted as “an individual valuation of lost values.” This apparent choice only seems to be reduced to one between the positions of the buffoon or the bastard – between the one who claims to always be on the right path, but who never tries to modify the conditions of production, and the one making, out of personal resignation, a voluntary cynical act of propaganda (and power).
But for exercer sa puissance, we have to go away, far away from these two evident and reductive symptoms, by moving simultaneously between the two sides of the battlefield, stuttering with the enemy as a permanent deforming mirror of ourselves. I cannot deny the strange “eroticism” of this schizoid strategy of shifting, but I have to recognize at the same time its intrinsic danger.
NE: The schizophrenic creative process of stuttering architecture that I seek to stress fundamentally resembles this indispensable failure or danger that you mention. But, like any defect, it has an advantage, a depth, which the shortcoming (and the shortcoming alone) may possess, losing something in order to add something else, decreasing in order to yearn. The eloquent word, the eloquent structure (the highest desire of the Modern Movement) is lost in order to teach people to give birth to a new ear – to feel the stutter, the pain preceding the birth of a new word.
Stuttering architecture is never disconnected from reality, but rather planted in the very heart of reality. This is architecture that does not seek to eliminate the separation by creating an identity and by abolishing the paradoxes, but rather stresses the differences and confirms them, and therefore spreads a rhizomatic complexity, which we must cross continuously, without halting. As Deleuze said, there are many ways to “grow from the middle,” or – as we say – to stutter architecture. Each of these ways coincides with a task, an experiment, a way of feeling space.
In Dustyrelief, an art museum project in Bangkok, you are reflecting this schizophrenia, constantly hanging between a breakthrough toward a new model and a breakdown into an old, used, and familiar model.
FR: The Dustyrelief museum is the perfect example of this ambiguity, as a building that is collecting the dirtiness of Bangkok’s biotope, which is due to several local conditions, including a lack of public transportation, monstrous traffic jams, and low-quality diesel fuel. The city and its surfaces and atmospheres are deeply polluted by carbon monoxide particles, which wrap the tropical environment in a gray, dusty coating. The aesthetic protocol that is the genesis for the building transforms this preliminary chemical condition. Through this scenario of collecting “urban failure” as a substance, as a materiality, it is possible to constitute the building and reveal the situation “here and now.” We maintained an equal distance from the two opposing attitudes that constitute this condition: first, to deny it; and, second, to dramatize it. Dustyrelief is not an “eco-smart-bio-green,” moralistic alibi for architecture, but a building-as-machine that is able to aggregate, fix, and recycle the filth, while simultaneously extracting from this process the aesthetic protocol of its appearance.
Its operation arises from a multitude of contradictions – between hygiene and dirt, topological and Euclidian geometry, panoptic and heterotopian space – and a permanent schizoid vibration between the illusion of controlling an environment and the failure – the malentendu (mishearing), of its application.
This discontinuity between what it seems to be, what it should be, and what is revealed by the crossing is an experience that could be defined as an “instructive” strategy, similar to the operating instructions you get with a new device, where the visible object cannot be reduced to its own physicality, its own appearance; where the panoptic view cannot embrace or “explain,” in the sense of explanare (making flat the relief), the protocols and apparatuses invoked by using the device.
This disruption of logic is a stuttering tool for developing narrative relationships, lines of subjectivization and apparatuses of de-identification. As Stéphane Mallarmé writes, “To name (or identify) an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment . . . which derives from the pleasure of step-by-step discovery; to suggest, that is the dream. . . . There must always be an enigma . . . the goal – there is no other – is to evoke objects (without naming them).”
The reality of the building may not be achieved by its physical construction, as when a subject is frozen into an object. In this case the construction will never accomplish its objective. The machine aspect is generating a permanent “after death experiment (ADE).”
I have to admit that this path was borrowed from a few other architects, specifically the strategy of the disruption of architectural logic. One is Adolf Loos and his raumplan, with the disjunction between the external boxy illusion and the space within. The second is Ken Adams, the Berlin architect and set designer for some of the first James Bond films, with his strange interlocking worlds, combining exotic naturalism with glossy modernist mise en scéne. Both architects, in contradiction to the mainstream of modernity, which asserts a logic of continuum (as parodied in Jacques Tati’s Play Time), developed a singular strategy of duplicity, of phenomenological disruption, of incoherencies as metaphor, in the etymological sense of “traveling vehicle.” Could we say that they reached the catatonia of Artaud, articulating the conflict between physiology and psychology.
The adventures of Alice in Wonderland proceeded from the same stuttering. The apparent illogic of the multiplication and diffraction of parallel universes, where Alice “tumbled down,” are articulated both by mathematic paradox and the paranoia of a little girl as two nonlinear inputs, two levels of the same trap.
But back to the Bangkok situation. The apparatus that collects the dirt and reveals the degree of pollution (secreted and stored day after day, year after year), realizes its own extension from this atmospheric substance generated by the city, while becoming, simultaneously (through embedding in the belly of this freak the hygiene of an art museum) a refugee zone for international contemporary art. We could complain how museums are becoming deterritorialized mausolea for art tourism (Bilbao, etc.), but in the case of Bangkok, these conventional white cubes are directly coated with the existing situation. This double identity forces the museum to negotiate and articulate a strategy of stuttering, tripping over its own intrinsic contradictions.
The collection of carbon monoxide particles is generated by several electrostatic machines (100,000 volts without any Ampere and intensity) connected to a mesh 37 meters high. It produces a negatively charged environment that is able to attract the positive voltage of the dust. A drainage system collects the detritus after the monsoon season washes it away.
As architects, we are always confronted with strange vibrations, composed by disaster and dream, by propaganda and illusion, by hypocrisies and realities. We deeply consider architecture to be a tool that could reveal and manipulate this stuttering – to eroticize our paranoia.
FR: The future is a Faustian contract drawn up by Sacher-Masoch.
[1]Andreï Biély, Carnets d’un toque (Geneva: L’Age d’Homme, 1991); cited in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), 113.
Opening of satelite of Pompidou Center, Metz, 11 may 2010.
Guiheux-Migayrou and Guignol-Rambert walk arm in arm, flaunting their self-satisfaction. That’s not the least of the day’s paradoxes, but it’s especially intriguing: these two fake figureheads, each seemingly so unlike the other, exposing themselves in the sun lights. After all, the former lives shut away in his refinery, fearing to face a world he can only see through the filters of the past, the battles that brought him the Pompidou scepter, and the latter… well, we’re still wondering what exactly he’s good for, aside from his promised and proclaimed servility… isn’t open cowardice a performative act in today’s society?
But the most surprising thing is to see the former, who once (long ago) was a pioneer, so fully assuming his present role of conservator, acting like the museum equivalent of a nightclub bouncer or a cop.
In a position to write history,[1] he exploits it, helping make it congeal and turn to stone, with the illusion and fantasy of classification… something between a Creationist entomologist and the malicious comeback of an ambushing Alphonse Bertillon…
He who freezes the future of things condemns them to never come to be, even if that’s done with sophistication and diligence, and decorated with an encyclopedic knowledge, and all the more so if the futile and fabricated demonstration of power is unfolded with the virtuosity of a wannabe philosopher, bitter that he has never been able to extricate himself from the royal armchair that has slowly and malignantly smothered him. That’s not harmless.
Anyway, here we are in this garrison city, with the carp and the rabbit strolling arm in arm, proud of their young friendship, with undisguised pleasure… or perhaps avowed obscenity.
How did these two come to form such a perfect union? What a coup – joining together one figure who gained legitimacy through the emergence of the Orléans FRAC (regional art center), standing on – and sucking the blood of – a generation of auteurs, in order to get them to commit voluntary euthanasia in his suicide opus Non-Standard, and another, a minor water-bearer in professional circles (from editor of the monthly D’Architectures to head of the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine), a man about whom there’s not much to say, except to mention his marvelous affability, like the devoted vizier in the Iznogoud comics, a question of character and calling. These two might seem an unlikely match unless you happen to know them personally. In fact, they were made for each other’s… cupidity.
What is the quiddity of their coitus non-interruptus? Of their wedding night? You tell me. It was the kiss of death at the eponymous institution: the grand ceremony as Claude Parent[2] was lowered into his coffin by the same man who helped liquidate him 20 years before, Jean Nouvel.
A clever move to take the whole pot. The two accomplices not only coolly planned out the whole thing, they claimed the prize as the dowry due them for their embrace.
It’s open all week, so come one come all. The lip-smacking prospect of a (funhouse mirror) show bringing together the little water carrier and the pseudo-philosopher using radical architecture to rehabilitate the Boomers, on the backs of those they spit on and those they silence to keep their powers of postmodern creativity as the admen that they are.
It’s what’s known as the strategy of the carp and the rabbit: power, glory, treason and mediocrity in the palace of the republic.
No need to say another word about the Metz show, no sir. The architecture room is as mortiferous as they are. A cadaver (not so exquisite) and a series of tombstones, as gray as they are… as desperately gray as death… and scale models refurbished for the occasion. Like the portrait gallery in a castle whose owner suffers from Alzheimer’s. Double-dealing hypocrites and double agents.
Architecture has nothing to do with what they make it. But their union is sacred and consummated. In France today, architecture is in their “dirty hands.”
On this May afternoon in the year 2010, Guilheux-Migayrou and Guignol-Rambert skipped the light fantastic at the Shigeru Ban.
Over the canopy hovered the specters of Frei Otto and Cecil Balmond, opening their cape like Mephisto in the Murnau movie, and what that cape covered and hid was labyrinthine, heterotopic and above all designed by Hans Poelzig….But more on that another time.
FR/2010
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Glossary
– “To marry the carp and the rabbit” is a French expression meaning a union of two people (often politicians) who don’t belong together.– Frederic Migayrou is the actual director of the architecture department at the Pompidou Center.– Alain Guilheux was the previous director of the architecture department at the Pompidou Center.– Francis Rambert is the actual director of the Chaillot architecture center– Guignol was a puppet conceived by Laurent Mourguet in 1808.– Alphonse Bertillon was a 19th-century criminologist and physiognomist. The latter word is used in French for a nightclub bouncer.– Non-Standard Architecture was an exhibition curated by Frédéric Migayrou at the Pompidou Center in 2005.– Dirty Hands, a 1948 play by Jean-Paul Sartre.– Iznogoud was a 1960s series of comic books by René Goscinny and Jean Tabary.– Jean Nouvel is a so-called “international” architect beloved by Boomers.– Claude Parent is a radical architect.– Pseudo : du grec pseudês ψευδἡς: false.– Frei Otto and Cecil Balmond, structural architect and engineer.– Faust, by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1926.– Hans Peolzig, architect, 1869/1936.[1] For someone (FM) who dreamed of being – and could have become – a Michel Ragon or Reyner Banham……and some others more actual….. the fall isn’t so much painful as monetizable… in these parts.[2] Perhaps Claude parent dreamed of it, both of the hilt of his sword [as a member of the Académie Française] and of being resuscitated by Iago, haunted by the ghost of Orson Wells. JN has the stature of a traitor, and that’s not the smallest compliment. We recognize his talent.
Components of after glowing as UV radiation sensor
Isobiot®ope
Meeting someone means facing the unknown, the strange, or even confronting your own repulsion at negotiating unfamiliar surroundings. It’s neither comfortable nor pleasing. It means crossing a heterotopic space where the passage itself is the only way to define yourself in relation to what’s already there.
This involves consideration of risk and a determination of whether or not to go through with it.
Meeting doesn’t mean plunging into a masked carnival, or huddling in a dark room, as if in a ceremony meant exclusively for a sum of individualities. It means daring to risk the unknown together.
“I remember the inaccessible zone and the room where wishes are granted in the Tarkovsky’s movie Stalker; a place you enter after crossing a territory where the gods clashed with humanity – we still don’t know who won that battle. The truce is unstable. Nothing can be discerned but sweat and silence, like climbers roped together, seeking to transgress the forbidden. The fence simultaneously protects those who are still there, about whom we know nothing, and those who dare venture in without knowing how to make use of what they may find there. At the end of the journey, amid the humid dilapidation, looms this Room of Wishes, where architecture is precisely the meeting point…”
R&Sie(n)’s apparatus is something similar, touching something which could simultaneously intrigue, attract and repulse you. The meeting point is not pretending to be safety.
But it’s also a fragment of the design of “thebuildingwhichneverdies” commissioned by the Zumtobel Group for its Thorn subsidiary.
This building is a nocturnal observatory pivoting on itself. This research laboratory is intended to analyze human beings’ physiological and ocular adaptation to the dark, in order to be able to reduce urban light pollution. This lab is aimed at the moon when it’s above the horizon, to take advantage of the one-lux minimum moonlight and even amplify it.
But at night this lab restores the light intensity of daytime by discharging UV sensor units located on all the exterior surfaces. Thus, their phosphorescent components (Isobiot®opic oxide pigment), populated on all its outdoor surfaces, report on solar activity, its degree of dangerousness according to its variations of intensity and specific nature (UV – A,B,C).
The components afterglow as a detector, an architectural Marker of the mutation of our environment and occur as a signal of UV human pathologies.
The level of UV which has crossed the Ozone layer is only revealed with a gap of time, after people are plugged into the shadows of the day, in the death of the sunset, by the after glowing ghost, inter canem et lupum…
Protocols & Process / Dialogue between R&Sie(n) and Caroline Naphegyi (check the blog on the research “architecture des Humeurs“)
In the case of “Architecture des Humeurs”, released two month ago at the Laboratoire, Paris, and opened until the 16th of May, could you describe how your studio is managing research and exhibition simultaneously ?
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.
What’s this about?
It’s 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 I’ve 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 we’ve already worked on what conditions the emergence of such a geometry, namely principles of exchange, dynamic principles based on a system’s immanent forces.
But that’s 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.
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 ?
Humors in the sense that Hippocrates used the word, a concept brought up to date by today’s 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.
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…”
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 visitor’s 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 visitor’s ear, “Let it enter into you, breath it in. You are in absolutely no danger from this vapor… Your family has become a conflict zone and you can no longer calm things down. It’s 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. You’re 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.
Why do you introduce contradictory signals – what you call “misunderstandings” – into the heart of your architectural protocol (the inhabitable morphologies)? How does this physiology of desires, this living and unpredictable material, radically shift the architect’s whole approach?
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 language’s 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. We’re glad that our choices are not guided exclusively by architectural conventions, both the conventions of the client and those of the architects themselves.
There’s more to architecture than serving the prince and his totems, as people around here like to do. To speak to some of today’s issues, the debate about high-rises is pathetic. Of course density has to be rethought, but I don’t think it’s 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 world’s weakest point, its modes and fantasies of representation… and then they end up crying about it when the politicians don’t commission them to design their Xanadu, like Jean Nouvel in his Le Monde article. The politicians have largely sucked the lifeblood out of the past. Let’s hope that the future can be different. But that’s not what we’re supposed to be talking about…
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?
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 buyer” – if 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 can’t 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 it’s 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 of negotiation with the ambiguities of one’s 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:
“I’d 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.
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, aren’t they?
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 can’t 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 architect’s 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.
One of the subjects of this research was to consider the bearing structure of these residential units, and thus the final 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 architecture’s 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 François Jouve start?
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 it’s conceived a posteriori, the structure is reactive, adaptive to multiplicity, “the multitude” to use Antonio Negri’s term.
François Jouve developed a mathematical process for “empirically” seeking optimization by creating forms out of constraints and not vice-versa. That’s different than “direct calculus” methods which, for instance, calculate a building’s 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 client’s 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.
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?
Nothing is happening in France. The field of architecture is totally sclerotic and held on a leash by a dozen people. It’s shameful. Along with our “professional” practice as R&Sie(n), we have a research organization called “new-territories, and for the last five years I’ve been teaching labs at Columbia University. Not only are these core questions in today’s debates; they’re 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 “Cité 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 we’ve 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 plausible has become possible. In this case, it’s 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.
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 building’s final form is the result of a structural calculation and not vice-versa; it’s out of the architect’s control. What do you expect from this stance, this renunciation of authorship and even copyleft?
A script is above all a form of writing, a language. There’s no point to it unless it’s shared so that other people can take it up and improve it. But it’s a tricky position. We all remember the madness of the computer programmer in Tron whose all-powerfulness makes him think he’s the master of the universe and that he knows everything about everything. Luckily, the mathematicians we’ve worked with are protected against this kind of positivist mysticism.
The melancholy of a fragment weeping its own substances. As a protocol of life span he will slowly shrink on itself to become a flake, a “souvenir” of what he pretended to be.
Without “raison d’être”, its non existence affected his physicality, reduced to tears dirtying the floor / Opening Maxxi Museum – Roma end of May 2010
6 studios of Research in the pursuit of “I’ve heard about” experimentation will be presented at the next Biennale of Venice / Austrian Pavilion, curated by Eric Owen Moss
The pursuit of (n)certainties biotopes
Several teaching course titled “Uncertainties” has been developed through 5 universities, in Master Class and Cross studio (U-Penn + Columbia in 2006 / Columbia in 2007 / Angewandte + Columbia in 2008 / USC + Columbia in 2009).
These two opus articulate neurobiology, robotic, self-organisation and mathematics in term of the aggregation of “Multitudes” (notion developed by Antonio Negri)
The (n)certainties research is driven by François Roche and Stephanie Lavaux of R&Sie(n) and Stephan Henrich, architect and robotic designer. The other partners on the two cessions are François Jouve, mathematician, Benoit Durandin, architect, Julien Blevarque, programmer, Natanel Elfassy, Winston Hampel, architect, Marc Fornes (some rvb scripts in second opus).
The (n)certainties pursuit in Universities laboratories was the occasion to invite again Stephan Henrich at the origin of the research and some local involvement as David Benjamin in one course, Marc Fornes (script rvb training) in five courses, Manfred Herman and Mat Staudt in one course.
These laboratories articulated logic and illogic between machinism, vitalism and animism processes, in the sense of Leibnitz, through narrative-telling, computation and “gestalt” through scenarios which screwed, chewed, shitted, sweated, swallowed, vomited, pined and also secreted, weaved, knitted, extruded, staggered, scattered, coagulated, aggregated, welded, pinched, braided, spiderneted, bonsaïng, crystallised, calcified, excreted, expanded, branched, pulped, smeared, coagulated, excavated, assembled and disassembled, bended, blended, and their machine picked, spiked, pinched, caressed, embraced, sliced, cut, laminated and loved…
A. Neimark / F. Roche / Los Angeles / december 2009
AN: Do you have a portrait to fit with this interview ?
FR: NO. You asked if I had an portrait to go with the interview ! For fifteen years now, we censured our own portrait to represent R&Sie(n), we use an Avatar. This digital hermaphrodite is not only a kind of fantasy, a coquetry, it s a strategy of de-personalizing.
AN: Is the avatar a kind of simulacrum?
FR: The avatar de-personifies the architect. It allows us to talk from somewhere else, not directly from “me.” The identity of this character has allowed us to be as we want. I can lead my daily life without being a representation of what I am expected to be. It’s a way for us at R&Sie(n) to detach ourselves from the fragile egotism of the architect.
AN: Do you see the avatar as a construction of a character, as in fiction?
FR: In a way. The character allows us to construct a schizophrenic identity that constantly changes its personality. There is an American movie from the 70s, Sybil, about a girl with sixteen different personalities that offer her the possibility of being multiplied many times over. Schizophrenia is a strategy of resistance. Resistance is a term that I am borrowing from the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The tactic of using the multiple identity disorder allows one to speak from somewhere unpredictable using a language that is unpredictable and with an appearance that is unpredictable.
AN: So do you use this separation of the architect from his public representation as a way to create architectural narratives that escape one singular interpretation?
FR: Architecture is a tool for articulating narrative. It’s not a final static product. In Hybrid Muscle we designed a little building in Thailand’s countryside and we added an animal to animate the project. The albino buffalo labored in lieu of an engine to generate electricity that powered light bulbs and laptops. We were interested in designing the animal into the architecture. So what was in reality a staged performance seemed traditional in this countryside setting. It looked like a ritual that blurred the boundary between the modern hygienic building and the animal that made it dirty. So the animal was constantly shitting and stinking, but it was also producing electricity. We could have put a photovoltaic cell in place of the animal, but it was more interesting to create this uncomfortable relationship. And in the end, the juxtaposition of the animal and the building did not appear exotic; the ceremony seemed to be totally normal in the local situation.
AN: I’d like to segue from the narratives in your projects that you call “scenarios” or, in this case, a “ritual,” to digital scripts that also structure many of your architectural decisions. Could you talk about the scripts and whether you see them as parallel or contradictory to the narrative-based scenarios?
FR: Any algorithm has a fundamentally linguistic dimension. For instance: How could I ask to my mother to buy two baguettes, if I add a little bit more to also get some candy without to scare my mother on the real price of the baguette ? This child problem is an algorithm, but with a non-deterministic approach, with a fuzzy logic. This is not so far from the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s rewriting of the tale of Bluebeard through mathematics. Badiou uses algorithms to develop a strategy that articulates subjectivities and fuzzy logic through the theory of belonging. Bluebeard and his five wives constitute a global system that cannot be reduced to the addition of any particular relation between the monster and its five victims. The assembly of each element in this closed system is greater than the whole. The addition of indeterminacy to the choice of the next victim cannot be described by a probabilistic approach that considers the sum of its parts. In other words, ΣFx<∩Fx, if Fx is the relational function between the monster and each wife.
AN: So are you treating the digital script as a verbal act of communication?
FR: Not quite. We do not say “if, then, therefore” all the time; we mostly settle for “maybe” or for “perhaps.” But it is difficult to integrate “maybe” and “perhaps” into computational language.
AN: The “maybe” and the “perhaps” are conditionals that can destabilize a script. Can you invite unpredictability, the “maybe” or the “perhaps,” into your digital inputs?
FR: It all depends on the input that drives the machine. Is it purely an input of trajectories which are totally predictable, totally computational? Or can we integrate a strategy of conflict into the script, a strategy of disruption into the linear process? For example, in the 1920s, Maurice Maeterlinck conducted research on the morphology of the termite mound. He discovered that termites, which are blind, need to construct and deconstruct their mound in order to constantly regulate the temperature in the queen’s chamber, to keep it at equilibrium, thereby ensuring the reproduction and the survival of the termite community. So the termites constantly close the door or open it to bring in fresh air or to isolate the chamber according to the outside temperature. Depending on the position of the sun, day after day, they modify the position of the chamber using a kind of pheromonal GPS. They smell themselves; they smell their own trajectories and redefine their position or the conditions in which they are working. And because they are opening and closing the door all the time, the direction of the wind inside the mound is constantly changing. Of course, their pheromones are incredibly sensitive to the wind, and so the termites constantly struggle to redefine the zero point of their GPS, to regulate their own position. They construct something that modifies the way they position themselves. This conflict produces incredible structures constantly reorganizing the shape of the termite mound because its construction can never be stabilized by a predictive design. It’s always a work in progress.
AN: So, in a sense, you would need to collaborate with a termite to destabilize your own inputs! Your proposal is that machines can be imbued with intelligence. Could you describe what you mean by the skyzoid machine, a term that appears in the title of your lecture here at USC?
FR: Our concept of the skyzoid machine is based on Marcel Duchamp’s Bachelor Machine. It’s a machine which is not cybernetic. In other words, it’s a machine that does not define only on its efficient mode of production. The skyzoid machine pretends to do something while doing something else, thus creating a confusion about the degree of its functionality, the extent by which it belongs to science. Immediately, it questions the limits of the technology and its place in production. So the machine actually participates in creating a blurriness.
AN: Do you mean that even the machine participates in the production of culture?
FR: Yes, the machine’s role is not to simply produce something in the phantasm of efficiency. The machine is both a freak and an operating system at the same time. We try to introduce an unpredictable behavior, or a fuzzy logic, to explicate the confusion between what “they” pretend to do and what “they” are actually doing. In other words, the skyzoid machine completely changes your relationship to reality, leading to paranoia. Because all paranoia produces a parallel reality in your mind, filtering perception, you can perceive it and describe it through fiction. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland operates on an immediate level when he introduces illogic through pure logic, what in French one would call le malentendu. Malentendu – the wrongly heard or misunderstood – is a tool of linguistic exchange; it is a kind of stutter. We need misunderstanding or stuttering in order to communicate.
AN: The stutter defines a moment of misunderstanding between the physiology of the brain and the structure of language, where something misfires. The machine breaks down. It’s a kind of mental or biological sabotage. For the project Terra Incognita that you worked on with Pierre Huyghe, you created an automaton, an albino penguin, a machine with intelligence or with emotion, whose operational functions broke when they became rusty. Do you see this as a contemporary version of the 18th century Digesting Duck automaton by Jacques de Vaucanson?
FR: Yes! It’s not so far from Vaucanson! You know when he presented the Digesting Duck there was a huge debate about the mechanism inside. Everyone asked: Is it possible to mechanically model the fantastic process of digestion? But after he revealed that there was no mechanism inside, that the duck automaton held two disconnected chambers for food and shit, that no chemical reaction took place, he was right away rejected by the scientific community. Immediately, he was denounced as a charlatan. It’s quite an interesting story. Before, he was a genius! Before, he was a prophet! But at the instant of disclosure, he went from prophet to impostor. Where is the real : in the trick, in the mechanism of the trick, in the illusion to recreate life as the Golem of Rabbi Loew, or in the morale of the bourgeoisie which disqualified Vaucanson, for his misleading.
AN: But wouldn’t you say that he was both rejected and elevated? Vaucanson went from a scientist to a cultural producer. I am curious to hear about the roles that science and culture play in your penguin odyssey.
FR: When you decide to go on an odyssey, you need to prepare. The preparation of the odyssey can become even more important than the objective of the odyssey itself. So the preparation became an odyssey all its own. In the first part, we needed to come up with a story to justify our trip to the South Pole, which would not be the real story of why we were actually going there. It’s very similar to scientific practice. In science, you come up with a hypothetic or fake objective and you continue to broadcast this objective of the experiment until you discover the character of the artifact produced by the actual experiment. So we decided to do research on the “albino penguin” and to come back with the proof that an albino penguin existed. In order to guarantee that we would come back from the Antarctic with the penguin, we had to bring the penguin to the Antarctic.
AN: So you built the penguin before you went?
FR: I don’t remember…We came to the South Pole to film something that we built at home and brought with us on the boat. But I’m not sure it was the penguin….like Vaucanson’s duck, he was not a perfect machine. But on this schizoid odyssey we found evidence of how global warming was and still is transforming the topography of the South Pole. We documented evidence of new mountains appearing out from under the melting snow. We were perhaps the first humans to walk on some of these new cliffs. They had never been naked like that before; they had always been hidden under meters of snow and ice. So as ethnologists we came back to Europe with the report of this transformation. We developed a new island through a honeycomb aluminum structure in the Tate Modern and the MAM Paris. This island reacted to its environmental conditions; it appeared and disappeared responding to the evaporation of water in the space of the museum. The project modeled a dynamic process, not only to promote a fight against global warming, but also to visualize its transformative effects.
AN: Your architecture is always in dialogue with nature, primitive and wild, or hybrid and industrial. Can you elaborate on how you see the role of nature in your work?
FR: Yes. There is a big debate about what kind of nature we want to preserve – do we want to preserve the nature we create, our industrial nature, or do we want to preserve the very rare and confrontational primitive nature, the risky nature, the wild? There is a beautiful movie called Charisma by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The plot revolves around a grove of trees from the dinosaur period. The trees seem very weak and fragile and the community wants to preserve them as a testament to its history and the distant past. But at some point the trees begin to produce a toxin and they completely intoxicate the ground and begin to kill the forest all around them. Of course, the community decides to burn the trees, to burn the dinosaur, to burn Jurassic Park. The inhabitants wage war against the nature that is not domesticated, that endangers their industrial environment. But we want to ask the question, can we de-domesticate nature through architecture? In the project I’mlostinParis, we constructed a house in the middle of Paris with glass beakers in which we grew Rhizobium, a bacterium that boosts the production of nitrogen. This chemical hydroponic wall elaborates a relationship between Eros and Thanatos, between the moralism of green architecture and the fear stemming from the manipulation of bacteria as an alchemical process. Nature is wild and heterotopic, not exactly the dream of Disney with its ideal domesticated nature.
AN: Is your goal then to introduce risk and danger into our otherwise tame, domestic life?
FR: Our aim is to articulate antagonistic forces and to make visible their intrinsic nature, both on their own and in the way that they conflict with one another. We are pushed and pulled in many directions. We are both hostage to and dominated by the multiplicity and the arrogance of disorder. We can neither reduce the noise in a fake reductive strategy nor increase it by cynicism. R&Sie(n) is a tool of permanent negotiation between Faust and Mephisto; it is a tool of the illusion of power.
From January 22, 2010, the studio R&Sie(n) will render visible a project exploring new modes of architectural structuring and transaction:
‘’Architecture of Moods’’
Date : 2010-11
Architect: New-Territories / Francois Roche
with main partners François Jouve, Stéphanie Lavaux, Kiuchi Toshikatsu, Stephan Henrich
Key dimensions: exhibition-research on 600 Sq m
Client: Le Laboratoire, Paris, France / Kunsthaus Graz, Austria / Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland /
An architecture of moods is based on the potential which contemporary sciences offer to reread the human corporalities via their physiology and their chemical balance. This assumption of an architecture of mood attempts to make palpable and prehensible, through bio-technologies, the emotional transactions of the “body animal” and its neuro-chemistry, so that this one informs us of his adaptation, its sympathy, of its empathy, confronted to a situation, to an environment to create the condition of an emerging logic, an emerging architecture from our own pathology, fragility and vulnerability, our pathos and subjective matters…our psyche and unconscious mind.
Animist, vitalist and machinist, the architecture of Moods rearticulates the need to confront the unknown in a contradictory manner by means of computational and mathematical assessments.
It is a tool that will give rise to “Multitudes” and their palpitation and heterogeneity, the premises of a relational organization through a social bio-protocol, where Data are both digital and analogue, from codes and human substances, ‘’incestuously’’ simultaneous.
The research is organized on several levels:
– From the physiology of “humeurs” (captation of human bio-chemistry)to physio-morphological computation.
– From physio-morphological computation to Mathematical operators for structural optimization (emerging logic through Data)
– From the “Algorithm(s)” to bio-knit physicality
including Robotic process and Bio-cement weaving (material expertise)
Text:
Urban experiment of flat, fat growing processes and entropic indeterminism.
Scenario:
1) Extraction of human chemistry data though a protocol of interview and through Nano-particles.
1.1) Elaboration of mathematics (theory of belonging) approach to reveal the “malentendu” (misunderstanding) between the notion of “free will” and the headless bio-chemistry concentration (dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline, cortisol) to reveal the multitudes of morphologies of living (internal and osmotic logic between cells).
1.2) Aggregation of “volumetric” habitats through task-cellular automata.
2) Developing a mathematical script in C++ based on recursive and incremental approximation by Francois Jouve to generate an emerging structure as a resulting geometry, with structural optimization, where trajectories and forces of compression-tension are calculated simultaneously.
3) Developing a bio-cement, with polymerization specificity to construct physically this (n)certain, complex metabolist fragment (without any mold or standardized repetition).
3.1) Developing a machinism process to secrete and extrude the biopolymers sticks and realize a weaved system and intricate territory.
3.2) Releasing the structure from achievement and shape control, to engage a step-by-step re-negotiation of “the movement going to be done”.
———————–
This experiment presents the opportunity to interrogate an obscure area that could be called “the emission of desires” through the capture of physiological signals based on neurobiological secretions, and to implement a chemistry of the “humeurs” of future citizens, taken as inputs generating a diversity of habitable morphologies and the relationships between them. This research is directly influenced by the concepts of ‘’body without organ’’ and a ‘’desirable machine’’ of Antonin Artaud and Gilles Deleuze.
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 consider the body as a desiring machine with its own chemistry – with dopamine, hydrocortisone, melatonin, adrenaline and other molecules secreted by the body itself 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 language’s mechanism of dissimulation in order to physically construct ” malentendus ” and process of resistance, in a term of destabilizing the order of discourse and determination from architect corporatist conveniences and conventions. A station for collecting these signals has been offered. It makes it possible to perceive these chemical variations and capture the changes in emotional state so that they affect the geometries emitted and influence the construction bottom-up protocol. The expertise and control of tooling, Technic and Sciences, as computation-Robotic, as AI-deep learning are actually the main mode to maintain and reproduce the structures of power, it’s time to launch the antidote.
‘’if you think this world bad, you should see some of
the others’’ P.K.Dick
pictures R&Sie(n) / Matthieu Kavyrchine
(French version below)
An architecture “des humeurs”
Apparatuses for the architectural assemblages on transactional and structuring protocols :
– One aspect is comprised by 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 simultaneously incremental and recursive structural optimization protocols whose principle result is the concurrently generated physicality and morphology of an architecture.
The “algorithm” developed by François 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 of 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 chemistry – dopamine, hydrocortisone, melatonin, adrenaline and other molecules secreted by the body itself 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 language’s 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 that they affect the geometries emitted and influence the construction protocol.
The research is organized on several levels:– From the physiology of humors to misunderstandingsThe humors collection is organized on the basis of interviews that make visible the conflict 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.– MisunderstandingsThis means taking conflicts into account as an operational mode, allowing architecture to become their transactional vector.“I’d 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 computationThese 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 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 multitudeA 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 optimizationAs 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-morophological residence unit.But more precisely it’s 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 physicalityDevelopment 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 processThe 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 “I’ve 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 Co2_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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.
_____________________________________
Une architecture des Humeurs
Le Laboratoire, 4 rue du Bouloi, 75001 Paris, Open from Friday to Monday 12-7 pm
Crédits /
-R&Sie(n) / Le Laboratoire / 2010
-Scénario, design, production : R&Sie(n) / François Roche, Stéphanie Lavaux
-Gaëtan Robillard, Frédéric Mauclere, Jonathan Derrough / Design et Process de captations physiologiques
-Berdaguer et Péjus / Scénario Nano-récepteurs
-Mark Kendall / Microneedles
-Delphine Chevrot / Takako Sato / “The Lift”
-Candice Poitrey / Interview Physiologique
&
-Chris Younes / Introduction aux «substances affectives »
&
-Jiang Bin, architecte
-Laura Bellamy
-Rosalie Laurin
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Une architecture des Humeurs
Expérience inédite, l’exposition-recherche « Une architecture des humeurs », articule plusieurs champs d’exploration au service de l’architecture ; entre neurobiologie, machinisme et protocoles mathématiques qui œuvrent comme modes opératoires relationnels, transactionnels et structurels.
R&Sie(n) rend visible à partir du 22 janvier 2010 la première étape d’une recherche qui explore de nouveaux modes d’agencement, de structuration et de transaction de l’architecture :
– D’une part, au travers de procédures computationnelles, mathématiques et machinistes afin qu’une structure urbaine soit engendrée sur des protocoles d’indéterminations, d’agrégations et d’agencements successifs, improbables et incertains, qui réarticulent le lien entre l’individu et le collectif. L’agencement des habitats et des trajectoires structurelles est ici pensé et développé comme postérieur aux morphologies, support de vie sociale (et non comme un préalable). Ces structures sont calculées sur des protocoles d’optimisation structurelle, à la fois incrémentaux et récursifs qui font apparaître, simultanément, la physicalité et la morphologie d’une architecture comme un principe résultant.
L’ « algorithme » développé par François Jouve se différencie des méthodes structurelles à «calcul direct» comme la structure porteuse d’un bâtiment, dimensionnée postérieurement à son design. A contrario, l’«algorithme» permet à la forme architecturale d’émerger des trajectoires de transmissions des forces, simultanément au calcul qui les génère. L’ «algorithme» est basé (entre autre) sur deux stratégies mathématiques, celle issue de la dérivée de formes initiées par Hadamard et celle issue d’un protocole de représentation des formes complexes sur un maillage cartésien par courbe de niveau (level set).
C’est un process mathématique d’optimisation qui permet à l’architecture de réagir et de s’adapter aux contraintes préalables, aux conditions initiales et non l’inverse.
– D’autre part, au travers de la collecte d’informations de l’ordre du corps chimique, basé sur les émissions neurobiologiques de chacun des futurs acquéreurs : jusqu’ici, la collecte des informations du protocole d’habitation s’appuyait exclusivement sur des données visibles et réductrices (superficie, nombre de pièces, mode d’accès et mitoyenneté de contact…).
A l’opposé, cette expérience est l’occasion d’interroger la zone trouble ‘’de l’émission des désirs’’, par la captation de ces signaux physiologiques basés sur les sécrétions neurobiologiques et d’implémenter la chimie des humeurs des futurs acquéreurs comme autant d’inputs générateurs de la diversité des morphologies habitables et de leur relation entre elles.
«L’architecture des humeurs» se pose comme préliminaire de relire les contradictions de l’émission même de ces désirs ; à la fois ceux, qui traversent l’espace public par la capacité à émettre un choix, véhiculé par le langage, à la surface des choses…, et ceux préalables et plus inquiétants peut-être, mais tout aussi valides, susceptibles de rendre compte du corps comme machine désirante et de sa chimie propre ; dopamine, cortisol, mélatonine, adrénaline et autres molécules sécrétées par le corps lui-même, imperceptiblement antérieur à la conscience que ces substances vont générer. La fabrication d’une architecture est ainsi infléchie d’une autre réalité, d’une autre complexité, de celle du corps acéphale, du corps animal…
«L’architecture des humeurs» c’est rentrer par effraction dans le mécanisme de dissimulation du langage afin d’en construire physiquement les malentendus. Une station de collecte de ces signaux est proposée. Elle permet de percevoir les variations chimiques, et de saisir ces changements d’état émotionnel afin qu’ils affectent les géométries émises et influencent le protocole constructif.
La recherche s’organise sur plusieurs strates :– De la physiologie des humeurs aux malentendusLa collecte des humeurs s’organise sur la base d’interviews, (l’IPm), dont la formulation et le contenu sont susceptibles de faire apparaître un conflit, une zone de contradictions, de tensions schizophrènes, entre………d’une part, les émissions biochimiques, neurobiologiques sécrétées et d’autre part, celles émises par l’interface du langage (libre arbitre). Des outils mathématiques issus de la théorie des ensembles, (appartenance, inclusion, intersection, différence…) sont utilisés pour faire émerger de ces «malentendus» un potentiel morphologique (attraction, exclusion, frôlement, répulsion, indifférence…) comme la négociation des «distances» entre les êtres qui vont constituer ces agrégats collectifs (le protocole de collecte est à ce stade, soit décrypté par nano-récepteurs, soit par microneedles).– Les malentendusC’est la prise en compte des conflits comme mode opératoire, permettant à l’architecture d’être leurs vecteurs transactionnels : « J’aimerais cela mais en même temps / et peut-être / pas / et son contraire ».Les malentendus sont directement influencés par les pathologies du « vivre ensemble» :Claustro_(phobia-philia) / Agora_(phobia-philia) / Xeno_(phobia-philia) / Acro_(phobia-philia) / Nocto_(phobia-philia) / Socio_(phobia-philia) / Neo_(phobia-philia) …– Du malentendu des humeurs à la computation physio-morphologiqueCes modes relationnels s’élaborent simultanément en interne à la cellule d’habitation et, sur sa périphérie, en relation de voisinage. La multiplicité des possibles agencements physio-morphologiques, basés sur des formulations mathématiques, offre une variabilité de schémas habitables, de transferts individuels qui articulent la relation de soi à l’autre, aux autres. C’est une zone d’information, une T.A.Z. (Temporary Autonomous Zone) qui permet aux futurs acquéreurs de disposer d’une combinatoire morphologique, aux permutations multiples, issue conjointement de l’émission de leurs désirs avoués et de leur sécrétion indiscrète, biochimique.La volumétrie d’une entité-unité est de 12x12x12 m cube. C’est sur cette base que les calculs et les hypothèses sont effectués.– De la computation physio-morphologique à la multitudeL’agrégation des agencements physio-morphologiques s’organise en multitude sur des paramètres de positionnement chronologique et de variables de distance entre les entités (collectives, tribales, grappes humaines ou a contrario unité solitaire). Y compris distributions et micro lieux publics.– Opérateurs mathématiques d’optimisation structurelleComme indiqué ci-dessus, il s’agit d’un process mathématique d’optimisation incrémental et récursif (exo-local, local, hyper-local) qui simultanément calcule et dessine les structures supportant les physio-morphologies. La forme ne se fabrique que par itérations successives, en reliant, en coagulant physiquement et structurellement l’entre deux des morphologies afin qu’elles se sustentent à la fois les unes aux autres (calcul local), et par entités (calcul exo-local). Le calcul satisfait à des inputs précis (contrainte et caractéristique du matériau, condition initiale, poids propre et transfert des forces, intensité et vectorisation de ces mêmes forces…).– L’ « algorithme» / l’Alg(s)C’est, premièrement , le nom d’une entité habitable physio-morphologique.Mais plus précisément, c’est la dénomination qui caractérise une esthétique structurelle qui est pensée comme géométrie résultante, postérieure à la fabrication morphologique des zones habitables. Il s’agit, par ce biais, de s’affranchir de la logique de conception où la structuration est pensée comme un préalable, pour faire émerger une matrice physique réactive aux hétérogénéités des organisations humaines, adaptative à la multiplicité des morphologies et à l’ambigüité des désirs des “futurs acquéreurs”. Ce dispositif en « Open Sources » peut ainsi se substituer à la typologie déterministe et prévisible de l’habitat collectif.– De l’« algorithme » à la physicalité bio-tricotéeDéveloppement d’un protocole de construction qui puisse se confronter à des géométries complexes, non “standards”, via un process de sécrétion, d’extrusion et d’agglutination. La procédure de production s’affranchit des «Frameworks » (banchages), non compatibles avec une géométrie constituée d’une suite d’anomalies et de singularités.Le tricotage est de plus intégré au calcul structurel d’optimisation (calcul hyper-local).– Toolings / Process robotiqueElaboration d’une machine de tressage-sécrétion susceptible de générer une structure verticale par extrusion-frittage (print 3D à l’échelle 1), via une matière hybride (bio-plastique-ciment) s’agglomérant chimiquement pour constituer physiquement les trajectoires computationnelles. Cette calligraphie structurelle opère comme une stéréotomie machiniste, constituée de singularités géométriques successives mais basée sur une stratégie de mouvements et protocoles de répétition (behaviour).Cette machine est à la fois additive et formative, elle se nomme Viab02– Toolings / Tressage bio-ciment (material expertise)Elaboration d’une matière de sécrétion ayant des caractéristiques de viscosité et d’adhérence compatible avec le protocole machiniste (matière et procédures similaires au contour-crafting développées avec le laboratoire de Behrokh Khoshnevis à USC sur le projet «I’ve heard about »). C’est un composant bio-ciment, sorte de béton polymère, mélange de bio-résine et charge de ciment. La résine est issue de la filière des polymères agricoles, et qui permet de contrôler les paramètres de viscosité, liquidité, polymérisation pour générer l’agglutination chimique et physique, lors de la sécrétion. L’expertise mécanique de cette matière est rendue visible (contraintes de rupture selon efforts de traction, compression, cisaillement …).A l’opposé des calculs d’optimisation computationnelle qui font apparaitre les trajectoires des forces et leur volumétrie, le calcul de la « brique de tissage-construction », est postérieur à son algorithme de tressage. Cela génère et induit des zones d’engluements afin de correspondre aux trajectoires des lignes de charges.La bio-résine, matière agricole, est à faible émission de CO2 (non issue d’énergie fossile).
Animiste, vitaliste et machiniste, « L’architecture des humeurs » réarticule le besoin de se confronter à l’inconnu, et cela contradictoirement, au travers d’expertises computationnelles et mathématiques.
« L’architecture des humeurs », c’est aussi un outil susceptible de faire émerger des « Multitudes », et de leur palpitation, de leur hétérogénéité, les prémisses d’un protocole d’organisation relationnelle.
From January 22, 2010, the studio R&Sie(n) will render visible a project exploring new modes of architectural structuring and transaction:
‘’Architecture of Moods’’
Date : 2010-11
Architect: New-Territories / Francois Roche
with main partners François Jouve, Stéphanie Lavaux, Kiuchi Toshikatsu, Stephan Henrich
Key dimensions: exhibition-research on 600 Sq m
Client: Le Laboratoire, Paris, France / Kunsthaus Graz, Austria / Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland /
An architecture of moods is based on the potential which contemporary sciences offer to reread the human corporalities via their physiology and their chemical balance. This assumption of an architecture of mood attempts to make palpable and prehensible, through bio-technologies, the emotional transactions of the “body animal” and its neuro-chemistry, so that this one informs us of his adaptation, its sympathy, of its empathy, confronted to a situation, to an environment to create the condition of an emerging logic, an emerging architecture from our own pathology, fragility and vulnerability, our pathos and subjective matters…our psyche and unconscious mind.
Animist, vitalist and machinist, the architecture of Moods rearticulates the need to confront the unknown in a contradictory manner by means of computational and mathematical assessments.
It is a tool that will give rise to “Multitudes” and their palpitation and heterogeneity, the premises of a relational organization through a social bio-protocol, where Data are both digital and analogue, from codes and human substances, ‘’incestuously’’ simultaneous.
The research is organized on several levels:
– From the physiology of “humeurs” (captation of human bio-chemistry)to physio-morphological computation.
– From physio-morphological computation to Mathematical operators for structural optimization (emerging logic through Data)
– From the “Algorithm(s)” to bio-knit physicality
including Robotic process and Bio-cement weaving (material expertise)
Text:
Urban experiment of flat, fat growing processes and entropic indeterminism.
Scenario:
1) Extraction of human chemistry data though a protocol of interview and through Nano-particles.
1.1) Elaboration of mathematics (theory of belonging) approach to reveal the “malentendu” (misunderstanding) between the notion of “free will” and the headless bio-chemistry concentration (dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline, cortisol) to reveal the multitudes of morphologies of living (internal and osmotic logic between cells).
1.2) Aggregation of “volumetric” habitats through task-cellular automata.
2) Developing a mathematical script in C++ based on recursive and incremental approximation by Francois Jouve to generate an emerging structure as a resulting geometry, with structural optimization, where trajectories and forces of compression-tension are calculated simultaneously.
3) Developing a bio-cement, with polymerization specificity to construct physically this (n)certain, complex metabolist fragment (without any mold or standardized repetition).
3.1) Developing a machinism process to secrete and extrude the biopolymers sticks and realize a weaved system and intricate territory.
3.2) Releasing the structure from achievement and shape control, to engage a step-by-step re-negotiation of “the movement going to be done”.
———————–
This experiment presents the opportunity to interrogate an obscure area that could be called “the emission of desires” through the capture of physiological signals based on neurobiological secretions, and to implement a chemistry of the “humeurs” of future citizens, taken as inputs generating a diversity of habitable morphologies and the relationships between them. This research is directly influenced by the concepts of ‘’body without organ’’ and a ‘’desirable machine’’ of Antonin Artaud and Gilles Deleuze.
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 consider the body as a desiring machine with its own chemistry – with dopamine, hydrocortisone, melatonin, adrenaline and other molecules secreted by the body itself 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 language’s mechanism of dissimulation in order to physically construct ” malentendus ” and process of resistance, in a term of destabilizing the order of discourse and determination from architect corporatist conveniences and conventions. A station for collecting these signals has been offered. It makes it possible to perceive these chemical variations and capture the changes in emotional state so that they affect the geometries emitted and influence the construction bottom-up protocol. The expertise and control of tooling, Technic and Sciences, as computation-Robotic, as AI-deep learning are actually the main mode to maintain and reproduce the structures of power, it’s time to launch the antidote.
‘’if you think this world bad, you should see some of
the others’’ P.K.Dick
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
pictures R&Sie(n) / Matthieu Kavyrchine
(French version below)
An architecture “des humeurs”
Apparatuses for the architectural assemblages on transactional and structuring protocols :
– One aspect is comprised by 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 simultaneously incremental and recursive structural optimization protocols whose principle result is the concurrently generated physicality and morphology of an architecture.
The “algorithm” developed by François 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 of 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 chemistry – dopamine, hydrocortisone, melatonin, adrenaline and other molecules secreted by the body itself 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 language’s 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 that they affect the geometries emitted and influence the construction protocol.
The research is organized on several levels:– From the physiology of humors to misunderstandingsThe humors collection is organized on the basis of interviews that make visible the conflict 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.– MisunderstandingsThis means taking conflicts into account as an operational mode, allowing architecture to become their transactional vector.“I’d 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 computationThese 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 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 multitudeA 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 optimizationAs 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-morophological residence unit.But more precisely it’s 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 physicalityDevelopment 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 processThe 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 “I’ve 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 Co2_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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.
_____________________________________
Une architecture des Humeurs
Le Laboratoire, 4 rue du Bouloi, 75001 Paris, Open from Friday to Monday 12-7 pm
Crédits /-R&Sie(n) / Le Laboratoire / 2010
-Scénario, design, production : R&Sie(n) / François Roche, Stéphanie Lavaux
-Gaëtan Robillard, Frédéric Mauclere, Jonathan Derrough / Design et Process de captations physiologiques
-Berdaguer et Péjus / Scénario Nano-récepteurs
-Mark Kendall / Microneedles
-Delphine Chevrot / Takako Sato / “The Lift”
-Candice Poitrey / Interview Physiologique
&
-Chris Younes / Introduction aux «substances affectives »
&
-Jiang Bin, architecte
-Laura Bellamy
-Rosalie Laurin
————————————————————————————————
Une architecture des Humeurs
Expérience inédite, l’exposition-recherche « Une architecture des humeurs », articule plusieurs champs d’exploration au service de l’architecture ; entre neurobiologie, machinisme et protocoles mathématiques qui œuvrent comme modes opératoires relationnels, transactionnels et structurels.
R&Sie(n) rend visible à partir du 22 janvier 2010 la première étape d’une recherche qui explore de nouveaux modes d’agencement, de structuration et de transaction de l’architecture :
– D’une part, au travers de procédures computationnelles, mathématiques et machinistes afin qu’une structure urbaine soit engendrée sur des protocoles d’indéterminations, d’agrégations et d’agencements successifs, improbables et incertains, qui réarticulent le lien entre l’individu et le collectif. L’agencement des habitats et des trajectoires structurelles est ici pensé et développé comme postérieur aux morphologies, support de vie sociale (et non comme un préalable). Ces structures sont calculées sur des protocoles d’optimisation structurelle, à la fois incrémentaux et récursifs qui font apparaître, simultanément, la physicalité et la morphologie d’une architecture comme un principe résultant.
L’ « algorithme » développé par François Jouve se différencie des méthodes structurelles à «calcul direct» comme la structure porteuse d’un bâtiment, dimensionnée postérieurement à son design. A contrario, l’«algorithme» permet à la forme architecturale d’émerger des trajectoires de transmissions des forces, simultanément au calcul qui les génère. L’ «algorithme» est basé (entre autre) sur deux stratégies mathématiques, celle issue de la dérivée de formes initiées par Hadamard et celle issue d’un protocole de représentation des formes complexes sur un maillage cartésien par courbe de niveau (level set).
C’est un process mathématique d’optimisation qui permet à l’architecture de réagir et de s’adapter aux contraintes préalables, aux conditions initiales et non l’inverse.
– D’autre part, au travers de la collecte d’informations de l’ordre du corps chimique, basé sur les émissions neurobiologiques de chacun des futurs acquéreurs : jusqu’ici, la collecte des informations du protocole d’habitation s’appuyait exclusivement sur des données visibles et réductrices (superficie, nombre de pièces, mode d’accès et mitoyenneté de contact…).
A l’opposé, cette expérience est l’occasion d’interroger la zone trouble ‘’de l’émission des désirs’’, par la captation de ces signaux physiologiques basés sur les sécrétions neurobiologiques et d’implémenter la chimie des humeurs des futurs acquéreurs comme autant d’inputs générateurs de la diversité des morphologies habitables et de leur relation entre elles.
«L’architecture des humeurs» se pose comme préliminaire de relire les contradictions de l’émission même de ces désirs ; à la fois ceux, qui traversent l’espace public par la capacité à émettre un choix, véhiculé par le langage, à la surface des choses…, et ceux préalables et plus inquiétants peut-être, mais tout aussi valides, susceptibles de rendre compte du corps comme machine désirante et de sa chimie propre ; dopamine, cortisol, mélatonine, adrénaline et autres molécules sécrétées par le corps lui-même, imperceptiblement antérieur à la conscience que ces substances vont générer. La fabrication d’une architecture est ainsi infléchie d’une autre réalité, d’une autre complexité, de celle du corps acéphale, du corps animal…
«L’architecture des humeurs» c’est rentrer par effraction dans le mécanisme de dissimulation du langage afin d’en construire physiquement les malentendus. Une station de collecte de ces signaux est proposée. Elle permet de percevoir les variations chimiques, et de saisir ces changements d’état émotionnel afin qu’ils affectent les géométries émises et influencent le protocole constructif.
La recherche s’organise sur plusieurs strates :– De la physiologie des humeurs aux malentendusLa collecte des humeurs s’organise sur la base d’interviews, (l’IPm), dont la formulation et le contenu sont susceptibles de faire apparaître un conflit, une zone de contradictions, de tensions schizophrènes, entre………d’une part, les émissions biochimiques, neurobiologiques sécrétées et d’autre part, celles émises par l’interface du langage (libre arbitre). Des outils mathématiques issus de la théorie des ensembles, (appartenance, inclusion, intersection, différence…) sont utilisés pour faire émerger de ces «malentendus» un potentiel morphologique (attraction, exclusion, frôlement, répulsion, indifférence…) comme la négociation des «distances» entre les êtres qui vont constituer ces agrégats collectifs (le protocole de collecte est à ce stade, soit décrypté par nano-récepteurs, soit par microneedles).– Les malentendusC’est la prise en compte des conflits comme mode opératoire, permettant à l’architecture d’être leurs vecteurs transactionnels : « J’aimerais cela mais en même temps / et peut-être / pas / et son contraire ».Les malentendus sont directement influencés par les pathologies du « vivre ensemble» :Claustro_(phobia-philia) / Agora_(phobia-philia) / Xeno_(phobia-philia) / Acro_(phobia-philia) / Nocto_(phobia-philia) / Socio_(phobia-philia) / Neo_(phobia-philia) …– Du malentendu des humeurs à la computation physio-morphologiqueCes modes relationnels s’élaborent simultanément en interne à la cellule d’habitation et, sur sa périphérie, en relation de voisinage. La multiplicité des possibles agencements physio-morphologiques, basés sur des formulations mathématiques, offre une variabilité de schémas habitables, de transferts individuels qui articulent la relation de soi à l’autre, aux autres. C’est une zone d’information, une T.A.Z. (Temporary Autonomous Zone) qui permet aux futurs acquéreurs de disposer d’une combinatoire morphologique, aux permutations multiples, issue conjointement de l’émission de leurs désirs avoués et de leur sécrétion indiscrète, biochimique.La volumétrie d’une entité-unité est de 12x12x12 m cube. C’est sur cette base que les calculs et les hypothèses sont effectués.– De la computation physio-morphologique à la multitudeL’agrégation des agencements physio-morphologiques s’organise en multitude sur des paramètres de positionnement chronologique et de variables de distance entre les entités (collectives, tribales, grappes humaines ou a contrario unité solitaire). Y compris distributions et micro lieux publics.– Opérateurs mathématiques d’optimisation structurelleComme indiqué ci-dessus, il s’agit d’un process mathématique d’optimisation incrémental et récursif (exo-local, local, hyper-local) qui simultanément calcule et dessine les structures supportant les physio-morphologies. La forme ne se fabrique que par itérations successives, en reliant, en coagulant physiquement et structurellement l’entre deux des morphologies afin qu’elles se sustentent à la fois les unes aux autres (calcul local), et par entités (calcul exo-local). Le calcul satisfait à des inputs précis (contrainte et caractéristique du matériau, condition initiale, poids propre et transfert des forces, intensité et vectorisation de ces mêmes forces…).– L’ « algorithme» / l’Alg(s)C’est, premièrement , le nom d’une entité habitable physio-morphologique.Mais plus précisément, c’est la dénomination qui caractérise une esthétique structurelle qui est pensée comme géométrie résultante, postérieure à la fabrication morphologique des zones habitables. Il s’agit, par ce biais, de s’affranchir de la logique de conception où la structuration est pensée comme un préalable, pour faire émerger une matrice physique réactive aux hétérogénéités des organisations humaines, adaptative à la multiplicité des morphologies et à l’ambigüité des désirs des “futurs acquéreurs”. Ce dispositif en « Open Sources » peut ainsi se substituer à la typologie déterministe et prévisible de l’habitat collectif.– De l’« algorithme » à la physicalité bio-tricotéeDéveloppement d’un protocole de construction qui puisse se confronter à des géométries complexes, non “standards”, via un process de sécrétion, d’extrusion et d’agglutination. La procédure de production s’affranchit des «Frameworks » (banchages), non compatibles avec une géométrie constituée d’une suite d’anomalies et de singularités.Le tricotage est de plus intégré au calcul structurel d’optimisation (calcul hyper-local).– Toolings / Process robotiqueElaboration d’une machine de tressage-sécrétion susceptible de générer une structure verticale par extrusion-frittage (print 3D à l’échelle 1), via une matière hybride (bio-plastique-ciment) s’agglomérant chimiquement pour constituer physiquement les trajectoires computationnelles. Cette calligraphie structurelle opère comme une stéréotomie machiniste, constituée de singularités géométriques successives mais basée sur une stratégie de mouvements et protocoles de répétition (behaviour).Cette machine est à la fois additive et formative, elle se nomme Viab02– Toolings / Tressage bio-ciment (material expertise)Elaboration d’une matière de sécrétion ayant des caractéristiques de viscosité et d’adhérence compatible avec le protocole machiniste (matière et procédures similaires au contour-crafting développées avec le laboratoire de Behrokh Khoshnevis à USC sur le projet «I’ve heard about »). C’est un composant bio-ciment, sorte de béton polymère, mélange de bio-résine et charge de ciment. La résine est issue de la filière des polymères agricoles, et qui permet de contrôler les paramètres de viscosité, liquidité, polymérisation pour générer l’agglutination chimique et physique, lors de la sécrétion. L’expertise mécanique de cette matière est rendue visible (contraintes de rupture selon efforts de traction, compression, cisaillement …).A l’opposé des calculs d’optimisation computationnelle qui font apparaitre les trajectoires des forces et leur volumétrie, le calcul de la « brique de tissage-construction », est postérieur à son algorithme de tressage. Cela génère et induit des zones d’engluements afin de correspondre aux trajectoires des lignes de charges.La bio-résine, matière agricole, est à faible émission de CO2 (non issue d’énergie fossile).
Animiste, vitaliste et machiniste, « L’architecture des humeurs » réarticule le besoin de se confronter à l’inconnu, et cela contradictoirement, au travers d’expertises computationnelles et mathématiques.
« L’architecture des humeurs », c’est aussi un outil susceptible de faire émerger des « Multitudes », et de leur palpitation, de leur hétérogénéité, les prémisses d’un protocole d’organisation relationnelle.
Interview de R&Sie(n) par Martin Le Bourgeois et Léopold Lambert,
MlB : Le pouvoir de l’architecte, plutôt que de le déléguer aux hommes ou aux usagers, vous préférez le déléguer à des machines, ou à la nature (cf : spidernet). Quand vous perdez le contrôle pourquoi ne le remettez vous pas aux usagers plutôt qu’à une altérité autonome et qui n’a pas pour vocation de servir l’homme ?
François Roche : Je sens poindre l’hypothèse qu’il y aurait un déficit d’humanisme. Je sens dans ta question, une critique qui s’insinue malignement comme un préalable, une critique qui flatte celui qui l’émet, drapé et paré d’un supplément d’âme, portant l’humanisme en écharpe, en bandoulière, voir en cartouchière, pour flinguer dans le confort et la complaisance tout ce qui présupposerait ne pas en être.
L’attention aux mécanismes humains, et aux structures qui les conditionnent, l’empathie aux situations, les valeurs climatiques, voir pollutives d’un environnement, la relecture chimique des humeurs, autant de petits dispositifs qui chez R&Sie(n) fonctionnerait plutôt comme sa dénégation et son antidote.
Comment ne pas se prémunir et se méfier d’une notion, resucée anachronique des idéaux de la Renaissance, qui a été le vecteur, le levier opératoire des envolées illusionnistes du XXe siècle. On ne peut en évacuer la duplicité, sous couvert de…, a l’ombre de… ; duplicité maligne auréolée de grandeur d’âme pour simultanément et contingentement s’asservir aux systèmismes de la standardisation fait de tabula rasa, d’autorité panoptique, de mode de production sous-surveillance…pour en éliminer les multitudes, les anomalies, les singularités.
Mais allons plus en avant en saisissant un contre exemple, voir un exemple contre nature. On ne peut se satisfaire de n’agir que sous l’emprise d’Eros, baigné et imprégné de pulsion positive, aveuglé du lyrisme de sympathiques idéaux, sans approcher voir apprivoiser son double, Thanatos, pour regarder le mal en face, intrinsèquement lové au creux du premier.
L’architecture s’articule précisément en traversant cette duplicité.
Je me souviens de cette machine barbare et érotique dans la Colonie Pénitentiaire, une machine qui trace au stylet bistouri les mots même de la sentence sur le corps de la victime. Mais la machine est Célibataire, au sens de M Duchamp, elle brouille son écriture pour que le ‘’spectateur’’ ne puisse en saisir le sens. Le condamné est ainsi le seul à pouvoir dans sa chair, lettre après lettre, par la souffrance produite par le stylet, saisir, sentir le libellé de sa culpabilité au fur à mesure que le supplice est mis en œuvre. Fin du récit et moment rare et effroyable où le bourreau se substitue à la victime, afin que les scarifications successives puissent lui révéler la sentence que la machine va lui attribuer, et par là même, la culpabilité qu’il ne connaît pas encore.
Alors que faire de votre humanisme de salon. Comment va-t-il réagir face au protocole masochiste que l’individu met lui-même en œuvre contre lui-même, afin de vivre la dualité de son éros-thanatos, fait de pulsions contradictoires siamoises et contingentes.
Cette narration ouvre les portes béantes des interprétations multiples, des champs entiers à défricher, des terra incognita sur lesquelles se cartographient des paysages que seul l’imaginaire sait articuler. Elle ne clôt pas les scenarios mais permet aux ‘’subjectivations’’ individuelles de s’y infiltrer, de s’y entortiller afin de vivre comme l’Alice de Lewis Carroll la confusion entre projections paranoïaques et l’illusion des perceptions. La logique n’est pas à la surface des choses, elle n’est révélée que suite au retournement masochiste de la Machine barbare sur soi même par le risque d’une immersion fatale.
R&Sie(n), c’est essentiellement une entreprise similaire à cette machine, qui élabore des dispositifs hétérotopiques, paranoïaques, vecteur et support de narration qui ne sont lisibles que par ceux qui prennent le risque de l’emprunter de les emprunter.
Stéphanie Lavaux : Je ne vais faire que répéter, mais la machine n’est là que pour rehausser l’exigence sur quelque chose qui à la fois nous fait peur, et à la fois nous transporte vers un futur possible, vers la modernité et va donc mettre la barre très haut et va ouvrir tous les champs humains qui nous préoccupent.
LL : Sortir de l’humain pour mieux y revenir.
Stéphanie Lavaux : Oui c’est ça
François Roche : Pour reprendre ta question, la nature s’est essentiellement constituée sur des protocoles d’indétermination. La croissance d’un arbre peut être simulée par des algorithmes afin de reproduire sa géométrie, mais l’adéquation géométrie-photosynthèse-équilibre-croissance, reste et restera un protocole caché qui ne peut être réduit à la simple dimension morphologique.
Tout en percevant l’impossibilité de circonscrire les échanges qui subordonnent cette forme en mouvement, comment ne pas être tenté, au sens de la tentation d’une chose trop grande pour soi, par ce “Work in Process, in Progress” qui n’en finit pas de s’autodéterminer en relation osmotique à un biotope lui-même transformiste. Comment ne pas être tenté d’introduire cette impermanence, cette dynamique génétique, cette adaptabilité au creux de la sclérose de l’architecture ; logiques de sens et fragilités du sens, protocoles et procédures, champs d’indétermination, perte de contrôle, fait de force et de fêlure, pour que des dispositifs constituent et se constituent sur ce qu’ils mettent en places, sur et à partir des stratégies relationnelles qu’ils mettent en place.
Au creux de ses indéterminations, on se plait à relire Spinoza par l’intermédiaire de Tony Negri, plus particulièrement dans son ouvrage écrit en prison, ‘’l’Anomalie Sauvage’’….on se plait à repenser les protocoles issues de procédures non déterministes, comme les équilibres instables et réactifs liés aux organisations sociales ou l’intelligence collective est le paramètre constitutif du vivre ensemble, où les multitudes ne sont pas kidnappées par les mécanismes de délégation de pouvoir, fussent-ils démocratiques. Que quelques architectes s’intéressent aux caractéristiques, aux identifiants, aux marqueurs de l’auto-organisation, pour dé-pathologiser ces protocoles d’incertitudes des fantasmes New-Age, communautaristes et alternatifs, semble une belle ligne de fuite, une ligne d’intensité, qui fissurent par la même tout le système de représentation…
LL: Dans cette quête de l’incertitude, de la perte de contrôle, nous mêmes nous posons la question d’intégrer la mort de l’architecture dans son processus de vie.
François Roche : La mort de l’architecte ou la mort de l’architecture ?
LL: La mort de l’architecture
François Roche : La nécrose de l’arbre fait partie de la nature même, de la logique même qui articule photosynthèse et croissance. Elle peut à la fois donner vie et créer son étiolement voir sa propre disparition. N’oublions pas que des villes émergent de ces forces contradictoires, Bangkok que nous connaissons bien est de celles-là, une ville où les bâtiments meurent, parfois suite à leur achèvement, parfois dans un état d’inachèvement, comme en attente, à l’abandon. Nous sommes dans le sens premier du cadavre exquis, et sur le cadavre pousse une autre histoire, un autre scénario, négociant son mode relationnel, entre indépendance et ”symbiotisme”.
LL: Le cadavre exquis dans toute sa littéralité !
MlB: Pour revenir un peu à la question d’avant, au droit ou à la capacité de l’usager à participer. Pour éviter de retomber dans les dérives modernistes faut-il que la participation soit aveugle ?
François Roche : Je vais revenir sur un point très délicat, sur lequel nous sommes très peu outillés. Cette gestion de l’indétermination, qu’elle soit narrative, paramétrique et/ou entropique, ne peut se limiter à la compréhension, la codification de sa morphologie. L’hypothèse d’un inachèvement, d’une indétermination doit se contractualiser, au sens de Sacher Masoch, simultanément et intrinsèquement à la zone d’émission, à la gestation de l’émergence. Le scénario doit rester un scénario ouvert, pour que la forme émise ou en train d’être émise puisent son indétermination de la contradiction des inputs qui la conditionnent. Ce n’est pas une méthodologie, l’inachèvement, l’indétermination ce ne peut être qu’un champ interstitiel, qui navigue entre des zones repérable, entre une géométrie générative, voir évolutionariste, une narration sociale et un protocole de construction. L’articulation de ces trois inputs, voir la contractualisation de leur non miscibilité est au creux des dispositifs que nous essayons de mettre en place.
Stéphanie Lavaux : Dans tout ce qu’on vient dire, on tourne autour de la chose en train de se faire, la chose en mouvement. La mort de l’architecture, oui parce que le cadavre exquis, ce n’est rien d’autre qu’une chose inerte en attendant que la narration vienne la re-posséder. C’est le problème de l’architecture et de sa représentation. C’est quelque chose de figé et, vouloir relier le corps à la chose figée, c’est très difficile et très délicat. La machine existe donc pour essayer de remettre la chose dans le mouvement en train de se faire. De quelle façon le protocole de négociation avec tout ce qui parle de l’architecture va être remis en question par le mouvement, par la façon dont tu vas vivre la chose.
MlB: Les sources de dynamique, c’est la nature ou la machine, ou la narration. Mais c’est peut-être aussi les hommes, par exemple dans la lecture que j’ai pu avoir de I’ve heard about, qui est très subjective et certainement superficielle, l’homme est une source de métamorphose imprévisible dans sa façon de disperser des informations sur son état de façon inconsciente. Est-ce que c’est important pour vous d’utiliser l’homme ?
François Roche : Là tu reviens sur ce grand récit qui a labouré tout le XXe siècle, et qui a consisté à mettre l’Homme au centre de toute chose. La modernité s’est illusionnée sur la nature de l’homme, je ne vais pas revenir là dessus, mais tel que tu le formules, cela me parait suspect.
Il m’intéresse plus de questionner voir d’invalider la formulation des désirs, quand ils ne sont légitimés que par la capacité d’un individu à émettre via son Libre arbitre. Que Spinoza ai suspecté que cette notion qui sous-tend le plus haut degré de liberté de pensée et d’expression soit par la même celle qui est utilisée comme instrument de servitude, d’esclavagisation de celui qui se pense libre, ne peut que nous amener qu’à une certaine prudence.
D’autant plus que la déflagration post-capitaliste de l’organisation des désirs est devenue le vecteur de sa survie, via la media culture : machine à produire des subjectivités, arguments de vente des produits support de la machine.
A contrario, sur l’expérience ‘’I’ve heard about’’, nous nous sommes posés comme préliminaire, de relire les contradictions dans l’émission même de ces désirs ; à la fois ceux, qui traversent l’espace public par la capacité à émettre un choix, un désir véhiculé par le langage, a la surface des choses, et ceux préalables et plus inquiétants peut être, mais tout aussi valides, susceptibles de rendre compte du corps comme machine désirante (cf. Deleuze) et de sa chimie propre ; dopamines, cortisols, mélatonines, adrénalines et autres chimies sécrétées par le corps lui-même, imperceptiblement antérieur à la conscience que ces substances vont générées :
L’émission du désir comme source de schizophrénie, entre le spectre visible de la parole émise dans la sphère publique et la chimie des corps. ‘’I’ve heard about’’ c’est rentrer par effraction dans le mécanisme de dissimulation du langage afin d’en construire physiquement les contradictions. ‘’I’ve heard about’’ c’est de mettre en scène l’effraction de la logique des choses lorsque le langage doit négocier avec la profondeur des corps, au creux d’un pli d’Antonin Artaud.
Via ‘’I’ve heard about’’, nous avons scénarisé une machine constructive et narrative qui soit réceptive à deux inputs contradictoires, entre l’ordre du désir codifié par le langage, et de l’ordre de sa sécrétion chimique préalable, voir dissimulée ; que la relecture schizoïde d’une programmation ‘’en train de se faire’’ puissent générer des protocoles d’incertitudes et d’inachèvement. Qu’une stratégie constructive soit émise sur des logiques non linéaires est ce qui conditionne leur hétérogénéité et hétérotopie. La non miscibilité de ces inputs liés à la formulation des désirs est à même de générer un fragment de ville qui ne soit pas univoques et totémique, mais qui conservent le conflit originel de leur inadéquation.
Les livres de Maurice Maeterlinck et Thomson D’Arcy, écrits au début et milieu du XXème nous ont largement influencés ; l’analyse de l’un ; de la sophistication des organisations architecturales et sociales des innombrables fourmis, termites et abeilles et la description des géométries induites et des mathématiques qui les sous tendent par le second sont les influences directes de cette recherche.
Les termites, par exemple, déconstruisent et reconstruisent leur habitat, pour maintenir par la ventilation ou l’isolation ainsi créées, la température idéale de reproduction et de ponte, alors que ces mêmes termites ne se repèrent dans ces labyrinthes de tunnels méandreux que grâce à leur phéromones (ils sont aveugles), qui eux-mêmes sont extrêmement volatiles et sensibles à toute brise si minime soit elle. L’adaptabilité climatique de la termitière selon les heures de la journée et du degré d’ensoleillement, force la modification constructive et par la même modifient et déplacent l’instrument de mesure, les phéromones, qui en permettent les modifications successives. Imaginez donc de construire un bâtiment avec un point d’origine de repérage en XYZ en mouvement aléatoire, un système référentiel GPS qui s’organise à partir du déplacement de son point zéro et cela sans prévisibilité…un GPS relatif et indexé à ce qu’il permet d’entreprendre, en perturbation permanente. La complexité vient de cette schizo productive, non de la fascination des termites à construire des alvéoles réticulaires exo-squelettiques.
Ce ‘’mouvement en train de se faire’’ est éminemment en pure contradiction avec les mécanismes d’achèvement, de prédiction, d’anticipation qui alimentent depuis Brunelleschi et sa Santa Maria del Fiori à Florence les modes opératoires et structurelles de l’architecture.
Dans ce ‘’mouvement en train de se faire’’, l’homme n’est pas placé au centre, il en est constitutif.
Stéphanie Lavaux : Ce pli inexplicable on y est constamment confronté soi même. Je ne vois pas pourquoi l’architecte viendrait comme un démiurge simplifier une réalité complexe. Tous ces inputs nous intéressent pour les re-questionner à chaque projet pour, au contraire, développer un scénario, dans lequel l’être, le corps va pouvoir trouver une porte ouverte pour s’épanouir. Sinon on est dans une architecture de représentation moderniste qui n’est qu’une représentation simplifiée et ennuyeuse du monde. C’est tout une cuisine intéressante.
LL: Toi François, tu parles beaucoup de Faust en général…
François Roche : Pas là !
LL: Non, effectivement ! Mais, on va y venir parce que tout système, implique tout de même, au préalable une auto-aliénation comme une espèce de pacte qui fait qu’on accepte ce système. Dans ma lecture d’I’ve heard about, en tout cas, c’est tout à fait ça, je crois, dans le sens où existent ces nano capteurs que tu avales, chaque matin, en guise de ré-acceptation du système.
François Roche : Aliénation volontaire, choix de sa propre servitude, foi en sa liberté alors que de manière contradictoire on est constamment enchaîné à des ritournelles de vie quotidienne, on est au creux de tout ça. La modernité s’est illusionnée sur la nature de l’homme, bien qu’il n’ait eu de cesse que de caresser la proposition de Méphisto.
LL: Alors justement, est ce que, dans I’ve heard about, c’est une part de cynisme…
François Roche : Non…est-ce cynique que de voir le mal en face, d’autant dixit Baudelaire, qu’il s’arrange toujours pour nous faire croire qu’il n’existe pas…
LL: …alors dans ce cas là ce serait plutôt une condition inévitable du dispositif.
Stéphanie Lavaux : Tu sais, à Barcelone, c’est déjà comme ça dans certaines boites de nuit où tu dois porter un patch sur l’épaule qui débite ta carte bancaire.
François Roche : Ca c’est un gadget, mais cela pose la question du post-humain, de la perte de l’intégrité, de l’identité du corps lui-même ; l’humain en tant que corps aliéné à la technologie que lui-même à utilise pour s’en désaliéner. Le corps contemporain est un corps imbriqué, mutant, fantasmé comme mutant, mais ‘’I’ve heard about’’ ce n est pas cela, cela n’a rien avoir avec Steve Austin, ‘’l’homme qui valait trois milliards’’… Il s’agit dans ‘’I’ve heard about’’ de réinterpréter la notion du désir, du corps comme machine désirante, afin que les ambiguïtés, d’inputs contradictoires de pulsion-répulsion soient à l’origine du système paramétrique de construction ; qu’un fragment urbain devienne, dans sa physicalité propre contingent aux humeurs de ceux qui l’habitent, voir même comme c’est le cas dans ‘’I’ve heard about’’ de ceux qui l’empruntent.
Rien à voir avec le mythe faustien, à l’origine de l’Homme moderne, de l’übermenschen. On se souvient que le docteur Faust en négociant, non pas avec un mal transcendant, mais avec le mal lui-même, le mal en lui même, de la quête de pouvoir, de surpuissance, devient l’architecte de sa perdition.
Nous ne pouvons ni théâtraliser ni nier cette situation. Mais simultanément à cet égotisme convulsif, apparaissent des hypothèses d’organisation où la trajectoire d’un individu se revendique comme contingente de l’ensemble du système, où les équilibres humains, thermodynamiques et instables, produisent des flux, des lignes d’intensités, des concrétions, des zones d’énonciations dans lesquels le corps, les corps de l’architecture et de ceux qu’elle est censée abriter, sont inextricablement noués.
La Cité n’est pas simplement composée de l’addition des individus en tant que particules intrinsèques et autonomes, mais doit être la matrice d’un système d’échanges, entrelacé, dans lequel la matrice générative ne peut être attribuée en préalable à un pouvoir centralisé. On ne peut, à ce titre passer sous silence les travaux sur la thermodynamique de Ilya Prygogine dans son livre ‘’La fin des certitudes’’.
De plus en plus de villes asiatiques (hors territoire Chinois, fantasmant les down-town des années 50) ou latino américaines s’étendent sur ce modèle, qui justement n’en est pas un, ou la négociation de voisinage devient le modus operandi de l’entropie urbaine.
LL: Voire même du contrat social originel…
François Roche : L’architecture dans ces cas précis est émise à partir de protocoles de mitoyennetés et de tolérances administratives. J’ai moi-même passé du temps dans les Slums de Mexico. Ces notions restent délicates à manipuler car toujours empruntée pour le mieux de gentil fantasme post New-Age un peu ridicule, pour le pire, de démission populiste. I’ve heard about prend néanmoins le risque d’une émission auto-organisatrice, en prenant garde de se prémunir à la fois de postures romantiques ou cyniques.
Pour revenir à Faust, et en finir, n’oubliez pas que ce mythe vient directement comme Frankenstein, de la création du Rabbin Löw, sculptant d’un tas de glaise l’image de l’homme pour se substituer au créateur. On est là au creux de l’histoire moderne, dans sa barbarie et dans ses fantasmes prométhéens, à la fois l’Odyssée 2001 de Kubrick avec la Nasa comme consultant et à la foisOrange Mécanique, avec son frère de sang, la CIA, pour une dance bicéphale entre le ”dream time” et le ”day after”. Ce double enfantement monstrueux, la modernité nous l’a incestueusement légué, je ne vois pas comment ne pas négocier avec ces pathologies psychotiques. Penser que la production humaine ne serait fondée que sur des idéaux positivistes et sympathiques est un montage intellectuel criminel.
Stéphanie Lavaux : Je ne me souviens pas et ne veux pas me souvenir de celui qui a dit « la meilleure façon de résister consiste à regarder le mal en face. »
François Roche : Il faut avoir une empathie pour l’antipathie.