Texts New-T / 90-2016
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Parrhesia-stases (AD 2016) In Parrhesia-stases, NewT speculates about the ramifications of architecture as a paradigm of disobedience. Operating between the obscene and methods of estrangement and displacement, Parrhesia-stases interrogates the agendas of aesthetics present in repulsiveness, condemnation and punishment. Deeply rooted in Michel Foucault´s proposal for a re-evaluation of an ethico-political approach (including social conformism), the body of work investigates an alternative architectural position which utilizes strategies of transformation and transfiguration to provoke a set of pathological habits and behaviours. Going beyond what has already happened, facing a posthumous text, collateral effect or artefact of the ‘Architecture of the Mood’ stuttered in a previous AD, we can now unfold the parrhesia-stases epilogue. It … is happening back stage, ‘off stage’ , behind the wall, the curtain. And someone on the wall, is telling you about it. What happens there, behind the wall is horrid, disgusting, repulsive, offensive …obscene – however it will be her who will be accused of obscenity. The one who tells the story, who reports it. And that’s where obscenity is, its difference from intimacy, is that it belongs to everyone. It is because you ‘see’ it that it is obscenity, because you recognize it … and indeed we always shoot the messenger. The obscene is looking at you. The scene of course is off scene and if it stayed off scene it would not be considered off-scene (obscene). It is because of that transcript that the obscene is reached. Although if you can ‘see it’ it’s because you know it, you know that place, you have been there but you do not want anyone to know about that, although it is clear that they all know as well. Obscenity is a trigger to the imagination (like what happens off screen in a film, often more powerful than what we are given to witness) and it turns the ‘victim’ guilty. It is on this wall, on this frontier, that freedom of speech is at stake, it collapses on the other side, but it remains here ambiguous. Looking now at how the laws evolved regarding that matter, we understand the society we now live in much better. For if these matters begin with self-censorship, they are then controlled and implemented by governments through the law apparatuses, quite quietly, at first imprecisely, clumsily, almost innocently, as an administrated legal management of the self-censorship. Nowadays reaching deplorable proportions with the self-policing of social networks, and latest offspring of the cultural hegemony . Obscene turned inside-out into showing off its own guts. But what is the object of repulsion here? It is not the totem, but the act, the weakness of the act, the surrendering to it … that is condemned. Can the obscene exist without its implied condemnation and subsequent punishment? The laws only reveal their own weaknesses towards it. Their difficulty in framing what is to be condemned as obscene is almost touching, refusing to name what is nothing else than the bourgeois moral code, the society Freud studied from within. And transgression only eats its very definition. We can have exceptional authors who flirt with these boundaries, but don’t we know the exception confirms the rule … We should rather think of a society which would deal differently with objects and aesthetics of repression, a society which probably then would not be relying solely upon consumerism of goods and information, or as we see it today, of nothing – for to consume is a satisfying act in itself, and does not need in fact a product to be consumed – as its main structural social binder , in a strategy of political Fiction as defined by Althusser . Let us go together behind the wall for a little while, and see what is there … secret, hidden, concealed, kept behind …. In the crypt … Beyond this obscene and psychotic cavern, the ‘’mythomaniaS project’’, (2011–16) by New Territories) is refering to last research of Foucault, mainly about the notion of ‘’parrhesia’’ , _ a strategy of discourse, attitude and form which re-evaluate the ethico-political approach facing the social conformism. Foucault developed this concept through the transfiguration of Baudelaire, through the posture of Alteration by Cynic philosophical decay, with the figure among others of Diogenes, and through the method of ‘’estrangement’’, as a displacement of values by Ginsberg. The Diogenes agenda, as an aesthetic research of the being, has to be understood, according Foucault, as an intentional enterprise of falsification of ‘the habit and currency’. Organized around the celebration of human-beast, or the beast-human, the critical and performative borderline is used as a weapon to corrupt the repetition of the conventional routines and discourses to operate, ultimately, a strategy of transformation, of transfiguration of what is politic, of what we should consider as politic. It’ s about to make visible, the singular dimension, through the contingencies of the arbitrary constraints, inside of what is considered as universal, necessary and obligatory… Architecture is used in our systemicism as a paradigm of disobedience ‘’to paraphrase the essays of Henry Thoreau or la Boetie , as an experiment of what should not have been revealed, able to help us to get back our voice, our scream, through what Foucault defines as the “truth”, which cannot emerge in another way than through an alterity, extreme and radical… 1)“Next Door Instruction”, A.D. The new Pastoralism issue, Volume 83, Issue 3, p. 126-133. An architecture des humeurs’ (2009-2011) is based on the potential that contemporary sciences offer to reread human corporalities via their physiology and chemical balance. This assumption attempts to make palpable and graspable, through technologies, the emotional transactions of the ‘body animal’, the body headless, the chemistry of the body, so that those psycho-physio-technologies informs us of its adaptation, sympathy and empathy, confronted with a particular situation, with the sensitive perception of an environment. See www.new-territories.com/blog/architecturedeshumeurs/. 2) Derived from the Latin ‘obscaena’ (offstage), a cognate of the Ancient Greek root ‘skene’. In classical drama, some potentially offensive content, such as murder or sex, was depicted offstage, in an ‘’obscaena’ situation. 3)‘Cultural hegemony’ is a term developed by Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), activist, theorist and founder (of the Communist Party of Italy. It describes the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of that society — the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values and mores — so that their ruling-class worldview becomes the worldview that is imposed and accepted as the cultural norm, as the universally valid dominant ideology that justifies the social, political and economic status quo as natural, inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class. 4) Althusser argues that even the parliamentary structures of the state, constituted by delegation of citizen and their will, their free-will is an Ideological State Apparatus involving the "fiction, corresponding to a 'certain' reality, that the component parts of the system, as well as the principle of its functioning, are based on the ideology of the 'freedom' and 'equality' of the individual voters and the 'free choice' of the people's representatives by the individuals that 'make up' the people." Althusser, Louis (2014). On the Reproduction of Capitalism. London/New York: Verso. pp. 222–223. ‘Parrhesia; is a figure of fearless speech: ‘to speak candidly or to ask forgiveness for so speaking.’ See Michel Foucault, ‘Discourse and Truth’, six lectures at University of California Berkeley, October to November 1983: www.openculture.com/2014/10/michel-foucaults-final-uc-berkeley-lectures-discourse-and-truth-1983.html; Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983, Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 2011; which includes the last serie of lecture before his death, ‘The Courage of Truth’, in 1984. 5) Étienne de La Boétie , 1 November 1530 – 18 August 1563, is the French founder of modern political philosophy and author of the ‘’Discourse on Voluntary Servitude’’ essay. Henry David Thoreau is the americain author, and naturalist, and abolitionist, and surveyor, and more… , 12 July 1817-6 May 1862, author of the “civil Disobedience’ essay
MMYST vs. concrete[i]land (log 36 / NYc / 2016) Preamble: The play is between two characters, twins Thanatos and Hypnos, using machines and mind machines as alibis for their obsessions, as a correlation of their phantasms, an extension of their own niche of discourse. In the following dialogue, they add to the recurrent debate: scientific idealism vs. anthropo-contingencies. Thanatos embodies a Georges Bataille–addicted subject, using every excuse to manipulate and extract what lies under the carpet, hidden because it constitutes scatological, improper, incorrect matter that is pushed away from the visible spectrum of daily social routine. With his pathological motion-emotion tracking, he perennially tries to demonstrate the discordance between scientific assumptions and human contingencies … proving through their respective failures, like a Nietzschean research on vitalism, the life and death drives, simultaneously … as an aesthetic of their confrontation, antinomy, and direct antagonism, navigating through the traceability of their ambiguous sweating secretions, stinky metabolization, and necrosis. His cynicism is not cynical in the contemporary manner, but refers to E.M. Cioran, whose History and Utopia definitively ruins any Enlightenment idealism. His venture, concrete[i]land, is a small library located in Makkasan, one of Bangkok’s slum villages. Its components are made of mud-dirt-turd, the human matter leaking from the slum on pilotis to the ground below in a loop: from the fruit of the earth to its rejection by the digestive belly-village to the open-air sewage that surrounds the pilotis… now piling up to the level of the visible, the smellable. The books in this alchemical library are burned and vectorized via the carbon residues of their ashes for an immaterial and psychotic transaction. The readers become sniffers of condensed words and particles in suspension, a kind of cultural methadone… easily accessible, stirring-stifling, barely bearable, immersive-emotional, self-suggested content. To provoke or transgress the situation, after two months of sniffing the first book was read aloud in a robotic secretion session guided by a real-time sensor interface. The reading of the book affected the movement of the robot, agitating the nozzle’s trajectory through a seismograph sensitized to the amplitude and frequency of the reader’s voice. To some degree, the content of the writing became imprisoned in the matter as a whisper haunting the walls, the ground, and the ceiling. Hypnos, meanwhile, defends the possibility to articulate, negotiate, and eventually transcend Thanatos’s antagonism with a holistic vision of relationships over objects, a permanent energy of negotiation, sharing, compensation, and mutualism, where the process of fabrication is politically oriented in order to develop a kind of synesthesia between science and anthropology through a zone of sensitivity (not sentimentality), flirting with science-mysticism in a sort of Wittgensteinian vision of the world’s border, where informe and informal are consubstantial… in an instrumental-aesthetic strategy. Her scheme, MMYST, an experimental farm-resort in Krabi, Thailand, is based on a strategy of mutual exchange between two species – human and swiftlets – where a human shelter and an artificial bird cave are intertwined. Mutualism between humans and swiftlets is here an exchange of substances and ambiences in a scenario of reciprocal benefit. Swiftlets make their nests from strands of their saliva, a by-product of their diet of living insects, which they swallow while flying by night over the tropical forest. This saliva hardens when exposed to air. Eating swiftlet’s-nest soup is believed to help humans maintain a balanced qi (life energy) and reinforce the immune system. The humans in turn maintain the fragile conditions needed for the the birds’ reproduction, controlling their indoor habitats through temperature, humidity, reverb noises, shadows… This emerging farm is located on an existing black substrate, a petrified lava flow where a robotic extruder builds up a continuum of black, lava-like strands, intertwined and knotty. To introduce stochasticity into its trajectories, the movement of the nozzle is directly perturbed, in real time, by the robot’s very noises. The sounds (machine clicks, joint movements, pneumatic pistons) of the predictable programmed work modify in real time the path of the extrusion, a stuttering feedback coming from the intrinsic protocol of doing, increasing the intricate meanderings of the tool in an always inaccurate positioning loop. Continuing the morphology of the existing habitat, MMYST organizes gradations between several identified structures as a fragile equilibrium between animal, vegetable, and mineral (lava rope morphologies),… a way of territorializing technologies, but in a condition to be defined through indeterminate and unpredictable loopholes. In the dispute below, these two visions of robotics – as a metaphysical instrument in pursuit of Deleuze and Guattari’s “Bachelor Machines,” and as a scientific holistic paradigm – are in conflict. They both appear as subterfuges, thus the hermeneutic of the conflict itself is lost in this endless debate, which lies at the origins of anthropotechnics. While the projects seem antagonistic, they share the same tooling, a 6-axis robot, which becomes the system (systemism) of their antagonism as well as the vector, the proof, and the apparatus articulating the content of their dispute. Finally, the robot seems to be a pretext … an artifact or a catalyst able to open the door of exchange … between their thoughts … Hyp: In your scenario for concrete[i]land, do you think proposing to sniff books’ ashes instead of reading them could be considered serious? Smelling ashes seems like the sort of useless intervention pro bono flag carriers usually do … while you take people hostage of your insane brain … Than: The slum needs trespassing, transgression, intellectual polemic … Why should politically correct moralists invade this situation? As a feedback for your own guilt, to wash your small criminal enterprise? … Do you think they need architects and NGOs … to be evangelized and brainwashed? The mind-machine recipe calls for pataphysical ingredients, where science is used as a vector of narration and production, intertwined, in an indistinct Siamese-twin relationship, with the dependencies between metaphysics and anthropology. Remember that Leibniz never trespassed the description, the analysis, or the decoding of phenomena under the pretense of unveiling the reasons, the origins of that phenomena, considering the border between the explained and the unexplained as subject to being pushed ever further, as displacing instead of erasing itself, and therefore embracing the unexplainable as a necessity, a given. Since the Age of Enlightenment, the belief in science as a religious credo cannot minimize the pathology of human nature nor the ontological debate between Plato and Aristotle … The scientific and industrial barbarity of the 20th century is no longer considered an error of modernity, a perversion of history, but is its cynical and intentional accomplishment. Hyp: Humph! Than: Coming back to concrete[i]land…The voice of the reader affects the design process and the mechanical tooling, injecting the dust as a permanent anomaly in the craftsman’s gesture, which has been lost by industrialization and reproduction (remember Walter Benjamin) organizing the massification of desires. The system is, in our case, driven by lines of subjectivity and lines of fabrication in an intricate assemblage. Whispering, reading, sniffing, cheating, shitting, is all part of the “noosphere,” dating the origins of human impact on the planet to the initial thought of the mastery of techniques and speech… Hyp: To call primitivism, atavism, paganism a religious decline, a strategy of un-growing, to use technology with a neo-new-age flavor in your ideology of human dejection – where machines are extracting, transforming, re-aggregating our stomach’s rejects – seems quite inefficient in terms of operative negotiation, dialogue, exchanges, intimacies, and extimacies … I think this is just a pose, a dandy posture to denounce a form of widespread good conscience – and on this I almost agree with you – but it is only intellectual and has no real effect or consequence … Than: I receive your critique, but it sounds to me like there is a dishonesty in the way you formulate a kind of dissembled hygienism, in fact masking repulsion for non-ennobled matter … Don’t forget Plato’s book, and this dialogue between Socrates and Parmenides, where the first, as the voice of Plato, disqualifies matter which is not coming from any “essence”, such as hairiness, menstrual blood, dust, etc. … But in an ecosophical time, where we have to reconsider the entire passage, entropy, of substances, whether material or immaterial, objective or subjective, the ones under the carpet have the same legitimacy as the ones above it … Following a certain order, they are consubstantial, depending on the traceability of their chemical transformation, with what we cultivate, cook, swallow, digest, metabolize, shit, decompose, de-compost, recycle, as a nutritional loop, where the full cycle is visible. Technologies have replaced the cleaning pigs of the European medieval city … the pig is now a physiological and mechanical machine we have designed and tamed … Hyp: Oh please, don’t start quoting Bataille’s Story of the Eye or any other Eros epigone to test my resistance to repulsion! We cannot always regress to this old addictive antagonism and call for the forbidden as a way of liberation from the norms and rules of an ideal … I agree that the forbidden is a tool to pass through a door, but we must go further than that … Give up your moralistic view of the world! You know the origins of this dispute, between Aristotle and Plato, between the paradigm of a supreme order only reachable through abstraction, ideas, and mathematics, and on the other hand the sensible, perception as a permanent illusion, as a work of the mind, condemning us to negotiate the here and now – always here and now – in a human exchange with matter … Whereas mathematics is an artificial projection, detached from a sensible zone, arrogant and dismal. But it’s too easy and even false to choose one or the other, they were just tools for thinking … and today, after the 20th century, which simultaneously organized an almost religious ideology of progress and, in parallel, the sophisticated inhumanity of warfare – both sides of the same coin, justifying needs, inventions, technologies … and guilt. So you, after a century of scientific hoax, you think about going back to the mud in a medievalist escape … Very well, but to transgress the forbidden is somehow to accept it, it is working within the rule, within the system, it is even expected … and capitalism is waiting for you, nasty little pig … haha! To chew and spit you out in a smoother shape, one which can be sold. What about questioning this abolishing “forbidden” even just for a while? What about reaching the absurd, where there is no such thing as the forbidden …? Than: There’s a mathematical shape folding on your argument. Do you remember that Gilles Deleuze’s fold was simultaneously topological, linked to the baroque, and psychological, a drift of the fold of the soul, of the fold of Artaud …? The notion of subjectivity in Félix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies, or Anti-Oedipus with Deleuze, was oriented to redefine a new political mapping. The goal was to provoke an articulation between bodies and machines (real, virtual, pataphysical, subjective…), which escapes the system of control, survey, and “over-coding” … far away from navel-gazing performances and popular auto-celebrations. Guattari developed a kind of ethic-aesthetics called ecosophy. Lines of subjectivity were a strategy to face the system via a stuttering schizophrenic behavior … to disturb the phenomenon of centering, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization, and finalization … by and through aesthetics … Hyp: I agree that we are pulled and pushed in contradictory modes of exchange, and perhaps they are consubstantial with the planet’s equilibrium-disequilibrium … and no, we cannot romanticize a lost nature, the idealized Holocene, any longer … now that we are condemned to evolve in a so-called Anthropocene epoch, in thermodynamic flux, unstable and improbable, in additive-subtractive mode … Yes, we are definitively shaping the planet with our own substances, physical, physiological, psychological – our psyche has to be counted in the balance. The natures of the Anthropocene are sources of feedback-backlash, of stuttering vibrations, a sort of eco-machinist-masochism, in the double paradox of Labov, observed and observing, object and subject, actor and spectator, vector of this mise en abyme. But all this is again and again about contradictions. I prefer misunderstandings or even compromises. Misunderstanding is the condition of an exchange, not a contradiction. I would disagree with the idea of choice – in fact, I think about a sort of permanent mode of compromise, of approximate exchanges and transitory transactions of matter between species, but also between machines, contingencies of codependencies. It’s in fact enlightening to look at where the word fabrication comes from, to remember that it contains the idea of a fake – etymologically: made by or resulting from art, artificial, from the Latin facticius/factitius, “artificial,” and from factus, “elaborate, artistic,” past participle adjective from facere, “to make, do; perform; bring about; endure, suffer; behave; suit, be of service” – thus the idea of an artifice ... So what do we make of fabricated things? Are they mere illusions? I do not think in terms of objects but in terms of relations, of trajectories, of embedded intentions … in fact, there are no such things as objects, it’s a well-known factitious fact. Does this mean that the way we project physical reality as a reality is suspicious? An illusion of values? In this case fabrication could be assimilated to a Decameron strategy, stretching time to feed our need for illusion and embedding emotions, feelings, intentions, desires, drives … Physical objects do have a mood …! We just have to reveal their DNA; shape and form have a psychology, as Gaston Bachelard told us. There’s no need to over-code their existence with over-poetic metaphor: “Do not change anything, so that everything is different,” Jean-Luc Godard said, inviting us to extract intrinsic transformations from the entropy of a system itself. Than: You confuse workerism and speculative materialism… Using a robot is not the clue, but a vector of disalienation, of de-positivism … to complete a transaction between technologies and anthropologies, atavism, machinism, and vitalism … from inside the main discourse, from inside the expertise, which excludes and discriminates in order to create ivory-tower positions. Design should be reevaluated as the opposite of its English definition, which lost its validity over the last 20 years to become exclusively determined by performance and rule: “Design is the creation of a plan or convention for the construction of an object or a system,” says the English Wikipedia. The French definition includes the notion of dessin/dessein – intentions and means, gestalt and Gestaltung : “Le design est la création d’un projet en vue de la réalisation et de la ...production d’un objet (produit, espace, service) ou d’un système, qui se situe à la croisée de l’art, de la technique et de la société,” says the French Wikipedia – in the maieutic of process and discovery.production d’un objet (produit, espace, service) ou d’un système… Hyp: Your belief in placing being at the origin of the existence of all phenomena, where perception and logic are incestuously consubstantial, seems to be a gift to Pathos, submerged by your emotional addiction. Than: With your supposed or pretended holistic virtue, driven by a kind of scientific neo-Rousseauism, could you explain the difference between your discourse and fashionable green-washing? … And what is a robot doing in this story of fabrication, of factitiousness? In terms of attitude and meaning in a transforming climate, how could you renegotiate the substance, whether material or immaterial, objective or subjective, sweet or repulsive, to face the filthy, grimy, grubby, mucky, drossy condition of our mind? It’s very easy, quite comfortable, to stay at a level of hygienizing meanings and means for an ideological yearning for progress, paternalizing human nature in deaf-mute-blind behavior. For instance, “fighting climate paranoia” implies escaping from the established posthygienist discourse, greenish simulacrum, or techno-fetishist ingenuity … disqualifying the propaganda of the neo–petit bourgeois franchise, refusing the chic, the smart, the fair, the fake immaculate vintage life décor, Pierre Bourdieu’s “habitus” for the technoid Teletubby world … whose consumerist lifestyle pollutes more than ever … At the opposite of this weak, immaculate immaturity, this incubated neoteny, nature’s life-death cycle produces nitrogen, smells, stinks … the conditions of its recurring rebirth. Hyp: MMYST integrates the feedback of its own running process to increase its degree of complexity and uncertainty. This Heisenberg strategy uses the noises of the device to disturb the vector on its own stuttering tool path via a real-time sensor interface, creating an open loop of variation where the nozzle’s position is defined by a conditional location … where the nozzle is never where it is supposed to be, moving to a should-be position it will never reach, sensitive to new packets of iterative information being sent, a loop of permanent reorientation. It affects the movement, the speed, and the trajectory of the machine … This indeterminacy, coming from a nonlinear input, develops the artifact by itself, the heuristic emerging shape, which uses the digital as a zone of passage able to generate conflict. We don’t abuse metaphor in a ridiculous anthropomorphology like you do, but we make uncertainty a strategy of knowledge … from the logic of the system itself. Our indeterminacy is a process of legitimation, of research, the opposite of yours, which is managed by storytelling, by an exogenous material of suppression and interpretation, of semiology, determined by the linguistics of poststructuralism and spread as “French Theory.” You are trapped in a post-Houellebecq speculative fiction, sad as a Radiohead song, a post-punk disillusionment in a Neuromancer bio-toxicity, using robotics and technology in a black, dystopian, puerile vision … We are instead defining science as a corpus of induction-deduction, empiricism and explanation, dealing with the necessity of contingencies – to quote Meillassoux and his notion of (un)finitude – where the philosophy of the human being cannot deny the scientific preexisting cartographies. Than: Is it a crime to be disenchanted, and to develop an aesthetic of this distress, with and within the technologies normally used to wash our souls and treat our minds’ affliction? We are perhaps on the same platform: we use the same robot, the same software, the same sensors … you via scientism and me, anthropotechnicism …Several angels could be dancing on one pin’s head … but don’t be fooled by apparent similarity. How can we confuse one monochrome with another, just because they seem similar? Are you sure Malevich could be mistaken for Rauschenberg erasing a De Kooning drawing? Notes 1) Concrete[i]Land is a production by M4/Michigan Ann Arbor, academic research and fabrication in 2015 / more on http://www.new-territories.com/blog/?p=2161 . Mmyst is supposed to be realized with a 7th axes scissor crane, in situ, for a monolith secretion _ Concrete[i]Land is constituted by components (iteration without repetition), produced Indoor, and assembled on site. The fabrication of the 'prop' is developed from robotic processes. We operate the robot with real sensor interface (RSI), using signals, inputs, analogue or digital. In this process, inputs are collected through UPD signal and the chain of Processing, Firefly, Grasshopper, Rhinoceros and re-injected (every 2m/s) in the 'parcours' of the machine, creating a permanent conditional position, between 'the point where the machine was' to 'the point where the machine should be', as a vector of translation in an iterative redefinition ... without ever reaching any vanishing point as a goal of achievement. It introduces perturbations and stochastic positioning, in real time, where the trajectory of the nozzle is reacting to the robot's very noises (machine clicks, Inverse kinematics movement, pneumatic piston...) or other agents as any signal able to be transformed in data (even the pathologies and diseases able to be transcripted as input, as Tourette Syndrome with scanning Kinect). Those agents corrupt the programed predictable work and modify in real-time the path of the fabrication, as a stuttering feedback coming from the intrinsic protocol of doing, increasing the intricate meanders of the tool in an ever permanent inaccuracy of positioning, introducing non-linear processes ... as a way of territorializing technologies, but at the condition to be defined through nondeterministic and loophole logic-illogic ... 2) The noosphere is a stage of earth’s evolution that is defined by human creation (both industrial and subjective, and is separated by a rupture from the previous geological epoch, the Holocene. 3) “Design is the creation of a project with a view to the realization and production of an object (product , space, service) or system , at the crossroads of art, technology and society.” ‘Alchimis(t/r/ick)-machines (Log 22 / 2011) NewT with Stephanie Lavaux's stings / All the machines with Stephan Henrich At the ‘Alchimis(t/r/ick)[1] college ...There are some machines, some desirable machines, that love to pretend to do more than they really do. In a pursuit of ‘pataphysics – the science of imaginary solutions – they never reveal their inner nature, their origins and illusions, genuineness and fakeness. Simultaneously speculative, fictional and accurately and efficiently productive, they navigate in the world of Yestertomorrowday, happily and innocently, walking briskly over the mountain of 20th-century rubbish. Using strange apparatuses, these ‘Alchimis(t/r/ick) machines symmetrically articulate different arrows of time and layers of knowledge, but more specifically they negotiate the endless limit of their own absurdity, where behavior that seems illogical is protocolized by an extreme logic of emerging design and geometry, where input and output are described by rules and protocols… Neither a satire of the worlds, a techno-pessimism nor a techno-derision, they are located at the limit – or constitute the limit – between the territory of conventions, certainties and stabilities where one can comfortably consider everything legitimated by an order, or an intuition of an order, and all other territories, whether produced by paranoia or fantasy or reported back by travelers… In a casual and basic sense, machines have always been associated with technicism and used as the extension of the hand, through its replacement or improvement by accelerating its speed and power to produce and transform. But it seems very naïve to reduce machines to this first, obvious layer of their objective dimensions, in a purely functional and “machinism” approach, exclusively limited to Cartesian productive power, located in the visible spectrum of appearance and facts. Because machines also simultaneously produce artifacts, assemblages, multiplicity and desires and infiltrate the “raison d’être” of our own body and mind in the relationship to our own biotopes.[2] Basically everywhere in nature, they are at the origin of all processes of exchange, transactions of substances, entropy and vitalism.[3] Machines are a paradigm for the body in the sense of its co-extensibility with nature, through processes, protocols, apparatuses, where transitory and transactional substances[4] constitute and affect simultaneously all species, their identities, their “objectivized and subjectivized” productions and their mutual relationships… In this pursuit of a polyphonic approach, we cannot overlook the concept of the "bachelor machine"[5] as an attempt to integrate "machinism" apparatuses into a narrative of transaction and transmutation (in the alchemical sense). Contradictorily, these ‘Alchimis(t/r/ick)-machines operate as direct critique and denunciation of capitalist managerial reductionism, which replaced uniqueness and rarity with a system of repetition and standardization, erasing both the workers (when they are not becoming machines themselves[6]) and any singularities, any anomalies… providing products for a strategy of servitude which combined mass production and the production of the alienation of mass, as described by Walter Benjamin.[7] In opposition to this predictable ONE WAY dependency, bachelor machines simultaneously convey the fascination of this sophisticated human construction, its eroticism, its barbarian eroticism,[8] the "impulsion" and repulsion it generates, as a permanent schizophrenia alternating between its simultaneous potential for production and for destruction,[9] for a permanent dispute between Eros and Tanatos. They are vectors of both resistance and production, infiltrating the arrogance of the mainstream and revealing its schizoid values… The same industrial system produces both outcomes; their geneses are consubstantial, and their diametrically opposed collateral effects depend mainly on our ability to see and make visible that which lies beyond the mirror. In the work of NewT, ‘Alchimis(t/r/ick) machines try to reveal these disturbances, or are constitutive of them. The blurriness between what they are supposed to do, as perfect alienated and domesticated creatures, and the anthropomorphic psychology we intentionally project on them, creates a spectrum of potentiality, both interpretative and productive, which is able to re-“scenarize’’ the operating processes. A mind machine simultaneously transforms the real and our perception of what we consider real. In this sense machines seem to be vectors of narratives, generators of rumors, and at the same time directly operational, with an accurate productive efficiency. These multiple disorders, this kind of schizophrenia, could be considered a tool for reopening processes and subjectivities, for re-“protocolizing’’ indeterminacy and uncertainties. Agents of blur logic, of reactive and reprogrammable logic, the scenario created by and through these “machinism” processes asymptotically touch their own limits, revealing the fragile and movable border line between what seems to be, what should be and what should have been. The creatures produced by this machinism confront exterior forces, their ambivalence, their contingencies, their instability… They allow us to “exercise our power, to be conscious of our power, the consciousness of our power that is by the same token self-consciousness, consciousness of our vulnerability in the face of the enormity of this power.”[10] They cross the line of logic and walk in the fields of absurdity as an intentional value! - For us and some others / absurdity is a strategy to expand the territory of “what could be,” and simultaneously unbolt the locks on our mind and perception… and production… - For all others / absurdity is a strategy to qualify the limit of “what could not be” and disqualify everything outside of the territory they previously defined. Genetically Siamese and consubstantial, this stuttering appears as a dysfunctional reflection in the mirror, organizing the way “we and the others” frame conflicts arising precisely from the state of the mirror, to quote Lacan[11] / Where the perception of the unicity of our corporality, through the mirror, is constructed in coincidence with the defragmentation of the perception of our environment. The process of “reductionism” to One Body is the symmetrical reflection of the One World, where all the complexities, the schizoid and paranoid assemblages, early childhood’s sweet disruption of consistency, are trapped in a univocal representation, framed and simplified. And consequently all the alien fragments that cannot fit in this perfect and comfortable representation of “INselves and OUTselves” are considered fatally flawed by absurdity, weirdness and oddity in order to preserve the illusion of this symmetrically operative but vain unicity. Beyond this point in childhood, we can never again experience the taste of “cul-bite-bouche-poil-chatte[12]”, with this multiplicity of distance and territories (where animalism, animism, acephalous bodies (CsO) and consciousness are interweaved with guilt-free discovery… “Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is –oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!” said Alice in the “The Pool of Tears,” but what appears odd is just a multiplication exercise using different bases and positional numeral systems… The confusion created by Charles Dodgson[13] arises contradictorily from a mathematic construction, not from triviality or irony, and still less Alice’s childishness. The disqualification we carry out is a strategy to avoid seeing that which cannot be, “ce qui n’a pas de raison d’être,” that which goes beyond our possible understanding and creates a “malentendu[14]” between our vision of the world as we have we simplified it (state of the mirror syndrome) and the contradictory complexity and “non sens” it generates as a permanent shadow theatre. Like Alice in Wonderland, we have to confuse our little girl’s perception with such apparatuses of “misunderstanding”, stretching lines of subjectivization to organize the physical perception of our paranoia. Absurd protocols seem simultaneously markers and activators able to de-alienate the edges of the illusory “truth” system, in order to re-invert the logic of meaning and turn it into a multiple vanishing point… As we suppose the mirror is simultaneously a landscape with a Janus 2faced-head, a simple glass over a brick wall, a mathematic and geometric construction to extend light rays through the surface to trace the discovery of an optical logic, or… the door to some parallel universe[15] sometimes simulated to symmetrically reproduce our own environment… Who said in the audience that we have to choose one? Who said that? I have to know… The history of science was an ideal playground for this multiple disorder pathology… confronted by the denial and disqualification of “that which cannot be,” sometimes out of ignorance but mainly because of reductionist conviction. The ideological dispute about the theory of heliocentrism[16] could be one of the best paradigms for the fragile boundary between official logic and infringement illogic, as the substrate, the loam for the absurd substances that sprouted until they finally reframed the frontiers of our knowledge… by metabolizing what was previously considered toxic to our framed and “bourgeois”[17] equilibrium. ‘Alchimis(t/r/ick) machines seek to articulate things and minds, objective and narrative production, “machinism” causalities and unpredictable dependences, to interrogate their “raison d’être “and the eroticism of their transgression, weaving together the malentendus and the illusions they generate, in a different arrow of time: “Here and now” as a live transaction, “here and tomorrow” as an operative fictional scenario, “Elsewhere and simultaneously” for speculative and political research... navigating between apparatuses of “animism, vitalism and mechanism”. The tools of mechanization drift from a self-organized urbanism (an “architecture des humeurs”)[18] to a stochastic machine with a predictable completion (Olzweg),[19] from the “machinism” ghost of a wild DMZ forest (heshotmedown)[20] to a paranoiac uranium laboratory (TbWnD),[21] to a simple transportation machine, a stargate experiment(Broomwitch).[22] Their ‘alchimis(trick) and skyzoid agendas are both products and vectors of paranoia.[23] ----------- Notes [1] A reference to the Collège de 'pataphysique founded in 1948 in honor of Alfred Jarry. We could consider the OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, Workshop of Potential Literature, whose members included the mathematician François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau) the first branch of that group, and the ‘Alchimis(trick) as a rotten branch of that branch. [2] A reference to the work of Ilya Prigogine, who considered human beings a “mechanism” of exchanges, of shared substances IN and OUT and vice versa. [3] “Vitalism presumes a monadological rather than atomistic ontology. In Leibniz’s ‘monadaology’ all substances are different from one another, whereas its opposite, Cartesian ‘atomism,’ presumes that matter is comprised of identical parts (atoms).” Scott Lash. [4] “All bodily phenomena can be explained mechanically or by the corpuscular philosophy." Leibniz, Letters to Arnauld. [5] Developed by a multitudes of artists, philosophers and writers such as Duchamp, Poe, Kafka, Deleuze and even, subconsciously, Cervantes. The term "bachelor machine" was first used by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 in connection with pieces of work that would later be assembled in the Large Glass of 1915-1923. For Deleuze and Guattari, the “bachelor machine” forms a knot between desiring machine and the body without organs, to create a new myth which seems to articulate Narcissus, Opheus and Sisiphus. It has been isolated by Michel Carrouges (in his book les Machines célibataires / Arcanes, 1954) [6] As seen in the organization of Henry Ford’s Detroit factories (Fordism). [7] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1936. [8] From Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” and Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” to Ballard’s Crash. [9] The latest subculture icon: Avatar, where the metempsychosis machine saves the ecologically-balanced Ewya Kingdom from the caterpillar machine which destroys the blue hobbits’ dreamtimes. The both are coming from the same “tea pot”. [10] Recorded lecture by Gilles Deleuze at the University of Paris-Vincennes in 1980. The exercise of our power as Nietzsche and Deleuze understood it, as a gift, a creation, and not the kind of dominance that they (the machines) could grant us. [11] Le stade du miroir. Théorie d'un moment structurant et génétique de la constitution de la réalité, conçu en relation avec l'expérience et la doctrine psychanalytique 1937. [12] “Ass-Dick-Hair-Mouth-Pussy” as the nearest reachable, fragmented environment. [13] The mathematician Charles Dodgson wrote under the name Lewis Carroll. [14] A malentendu is something between mishearing and misunderstanding. [15] In physics, quantum mechanics: Universes separated from each other by a single quantum event. [16] From Ptolemy to Hipatia of Alexandria, Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler to Einstein. [17] In the Marxist sense, the social class that owned the means of production in the 19th century and now owns, through the media, culture, the means of manipulating desires and subjectivities (Antonio Negri). [18] An “Architecture des Humeurs” / 2010. [19] Olzweg / 2006. [20] Heshotmedown / 2009. [21] The Building which never dies / 2009 -10. [22] Broomwitch / 2008. [23] In both senses, “critical paranoia” and pathological paranoia. Used before by R&Sie(n) in the book BIO[re]BO[o]T with Five apparatuses ---Olzweg: A stochastic machine that vitrifies the city, starting from a museum of architecture as the origin of the transformation, of the contamination, in the pursuit of Frederick Kiesler (endlessness) and more surprisingly Le Corbusier (“le musée spirale à croissance illimité”). This smearing is done by pollution, through the recycling element of glass from the French wine bottle, swallowed and vomited through a process of staggering, scattering and stacking, by the machine to become the visible part of the consummation of substances in search of parallel universes to escape our own servitude. The random aggregation is a part of this unpredictable transformation, as in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” We know when it starts but cannot predict its outcome, as a fuzzy logic of the vanishing point. The machine works to extend a museum and acquire “voluntary prisoners” wrapped in the permanent entropy of the graft. The opposite of an architecture that petrifies, historicizes, panopticalizes, classifies and freeze-dries in the maze of its multiple trajectories ---Heshotmedown: A tracked biomass machine to penetrate into the DMZ, the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, collect the rotten substances, the superficial coating of the forest in decomposition, and bring back this material to plug all the external surfaces of the building, in this way creating, through the fermentation of the grass and the heat its chemistry produces, a natural eco-insulation. Full of land mines, the DMZ is a joint security area, a restricted zone, where North and South play Cold War. The heshootmedown machine collects the pathological ingredients of this period and recycles them for productive use. This no-man’s land has been abandoned since the end of the war more than half a century ago. In this re-appropriation of nature by nature, elves, wizards, witches and harpies come back, new species appear, and legends and fairy tales are transported back to the safe zone, the south zone, as in a “Stalker” experiment. ---A paranoiac machine / TbWnD: An alert machine or a marker of our past/future. A laboratory of dark adaptation and the detection of the intensity of solar radiation by the afterglow on external surfaces, the influence of the sun’s seasonal and daily emissions on surfaces directly “touched” by its rays. The phosphorescent components (“Isobiot®opic” oxide pigment made from raw uranium) work as a UV sensor and detector and indicate by night the intensity of the UV rays that shone on the area by day, including on humans and all other species. Thus the oriented glass components in this Sunflower laboratory reveal and make visible the dangerousness of the sun’s radiation and the changing ozone concentration in the stratosphere. This machine articulates the dangerousness of nature and the science developed by the exploration of the nature in the past (from Marie Curie to Little Boy), and at the same time this Isobiot®opic element becomes a marker of the uncertainties of our future due to the after-effects of human scientific development. ---One transportation machine / broomwitch: A transportation machine from sitting down to standing up as a shortcut of human evolution, from the André Bloc house to this ghostly monstrous excrescence in the back of the garden as its heterotopical extension. Like a time machine, a machine to travel from the illusion of happiness of panoptical buildings and values of the 1950s to their consequences – the warming biotope, nature’s revenge. This element allows us to consider the direct link between these two realities... as a history of this crime. Beam me up, Scotty! ---One machine of the « multitudes » / an “architecture des humeurs”: A utopian machine to produce a self-organized urbanism conditioned by a bottom-up system in which the multitudes (in Spinoza’s and Antonio Negri’s use of the word) are able to drive the entropy of their own system of construction, their own system of vivre ensemble. This architecture des humeurs is based on the potential offered by contemporary science to reread human corporalities in terms of their physiology and chemical balance. It uses technology to make palpable and perceptible the emotional transactions of the “animal body,” the headless body, the body’s chemistry, so that it informs us about individuals’ adaptation, their sympathy and empathy, when confronted with a particular situation and environment, and adapts this result to an endless process of construction through “machinism” behavior. The development of a secretion and weaving machine that can generate a vertical structure by means of extrusion and sintering (full-size 3D printing) using a hybrid raw material (a bio-plastic-cement) that chemically agglomerates to physically constitute the computational trajectories. This structural calligraphy works like a machinism stereotomy comprised of successive geometrics according to a strategy of permanent and repetitive anomalies. Le pari(s) de BKK / NewT /2012 / LOG 22 / NYc (… betting on BKK/) Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) is a transactional transitory zone, a transdoor opening to a parallel, simultaneous, negotiable universe… The escape it offers may be narrow, it’s wonderful anyway... just right for a native emigrant. Every other week at a minimum over the last ten years, in order to extricate myself from the museum city, frozen, transfixed in its smothering conservatism and pedantic degradation… CDG Airport Terminal 1… ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’ BKK/ The dust enshrouds the city and its biotope, modifies its climate… Within this fog of specks and particles Bangkok turns into a melting pot of hypertrophic human activity, of convulsive exchanges of energy. At the antipode of the canons of modern urbanism and its panoply of instruments of prediction, planning, and determinism, the city of Bangkok, ectoplasmic, is conceived in between aleatory rhizomes where the arborescent growth is at the same time a factor of its transformation and its operational mode… It is an urban environment made of protuberances and emergences, where capitalist merchandise flows through a profusion of gigantic, aseptic, cold, and deterritorialised malls, immersed in an intoxicating urban chaos. Le pari(s) de BKK is a mixture of dirtiness and beauty, of metabolism and verticality, of traffic jams and smashed-flat motorcycles that swiftly find their way through, of fly-over concrete-bridge-networks snaking their trajectories through a stochastic urbanism with a permanent confusion, indistinction, de-identification between publicness and privacy, exhibitionism and intimacy, repulsion and magnetism… It is an apparatus (and not a display) whose emergences do not pretend to be long lasting or eternal… Surviving, dying, resurrecting, dying again in a logic of contingency and vitalism, the logic of a palpitating organism stuttering between life-and-death drives, Eros and Thanatos… a second nature where the urban tissue is alive, and where the city is not limited and framed by its ‘representation’, not frozen into a normative and panoptical system of survey and representation… Le pari(s) de BKK is an inter-zone where the possible is uncertain and the impossible plausible… an ad hoc principle of urban (un)planning… Stuttering/ In the hotchpotch entanglement of flux, friction, trifle and cum, a few spots sparkle, ingrain, identify themselves as the temples of normalised shopping mall exchanges: Terminal 21, Siam Paragon, MBK, Emporium, Gateway, Future Town, Central World, Robinson, plus a handful always under construction, like Samaritaine, Galerie Lafayette, BHV-Bazar Napoléon, or Bon Marché in Paris… These 19th-century temples of commerce work under ritualised transactional modes as the first penitentiary worlds of exchange, socialised and hierarchical biospheres from the cashier to the department head, where the customer, machine subject and object of desire, is able to exercise the fiction of his/her power, of his/her supposed jouissance, where the climate as well as the ambulatory and relational social modes are codified, formatted and artificialised as the counterpoint to the swarming and untameable city blighting its accesses… But in Paris these capitalised zones have malevolently turned inside out, and the city itself is now confused with their merchandised display, originally limited, contained and recognisable within geographic (id)entities… Paris and BKK, two points on the planet, two asymmetrical evolutions, as if following two divergent, contingent space-time cynosures… one confusing the client with the citizen, the other still relying on the original contradiction between the object and the ‘subject’ of capitalism. Let us not be mistaken… This is not so much an opposition between two cities as it is an opposition between several temporalities: Le pari(s) de BKK is the Paris of a future anterior eviscerated of all nostalgia, projecting a time when the city was not (yet) conditioned by the subordination of the little bourgeois Ecolo plugged into his/her iPod mini, on a Velib ride, whatever his/her origins, education, salary and gender, to a standardisation of appearances… free-willingly becoming the symptom of a global intellectual fraud. Schizoid apparatuses/ What perhaps is most relevant in Le pari(s) de BKK is the potential confrontation between the antagonistic forces of two urban models, a permanent union and divorce of the ‘Commune and the Capital’, intrinsically intertwining to generate a systemic live output. The first model is made of the sound of the human swarm, musical and terrestrial, on the city’s ground, and includes permissiveness of transformation, adaptation, graft and necrosis on its first four-five floors from the ground… where one can erect, destroy, alter, gangrene and nest one’s familial, commercial or amicable system without having to report to a public authority, as if in the midst of a judicial vacuum… The other is looking down on the first, appearing as a skyline, a vertical succession of malls, condos, and hybrids … emerging without creating any centralised downtown, subject to opportunities, speculations and resistances… themselves subject to strict rules of materiality, normality, and global representational aesthetics. Le pari(s) de BKK is this caress, rustle, friction territory… It makes the encounter possible between the one who only exercises his/her power through the compulsive merchandise of turnkey life models, and the one who, conversely, is in synchronicity with the animal pleasure of things and beings, smells and sounds, illusions and ripe fruits… One makes a skyline, the other humming asphalt... One is capitalising his/her economy by freezing it in the standardisation of an imaginary vertical home (a condo 70 percent unoccupied, like so many financial products where habitability is a fiction), a producer but not a consumer of a horizontal urban line, a financial transfer zone… The homogenisation of desires and satisfaction allows for the flow of merchandise and the circulation of the money-narrative (the city has turned into a transactional economic vector), which disincarnates in the construction of pseudo-luxurious, pseudo-comfortable, pseudo-designed, pseudo-inhabited, speculated, and volatile products in a skylinisation process… before the bursting of the financial bubble into a myriad of collateral effects, junk bonds, and fatal contingencies… The predictable deorganisation of profits… The other has nothing to capitalise except its daily ritornello of ‘difference and repetition’ in an erotic, pornographic rustle conditioning; as Lacan wrote: ‘the epidermal contact, complete, total, between the body and a world itself open and quivering […] from a touch, and at the horizon, a lifestyle of which the poet shows the way and the direction’. Le pari(s) de BKK stutters on two models of jouissance, between the city-as-product-of-the-capital and the city-that-doesn’t-give-a-shit, busy as it is getting pleasure from it, in the superimposition of two strata, two morphologies, two mechanics of nonlinear exchanges… But Paris only has one model left: the human bourgeois, or bourgeois-becoming, insulated in his/her soundproofed home, listening for the least untimely noise that might get through the partition walls to immediately denounce it, confusing life with its representation… with its corollary of sadness and its dependency on the display organised by the central system of power delegation, the political, social, monarchical operator: la Mairie de Paris. On the other side, BKK, where two stories of time are still plausible… Like an urbanism for Schrödinger’s cat, it is simultaneously dead and alive, a contingency, a place of parallel stories… exuding the possibility to navigate in their frictions, the crib of their folds, and of generated possibilities, without subscribing to the one or the other as the unique mode of existence… The jump has been made… One year ago… Le pari(s) de BKK... Could it be only a 14-hour flight, a glass of whisky, three meals, two movies, some writing and half a drawing away…? A normalised distance… linear… almost disappointing… inasmuch as one carries one’s psyche in one’s baggage… and the distance travelled will not metabolise its dependencies…. Notes 1) In Dan Simmons’ novel Hyperion, the transdoor is a vector of physical translation. 2) The city is covered by CO+CO2 particles that filter the light through spectral frequencies of grey, creating a glossy, luminous, vaporous, pheromonal, hideous, shaded, transpiring, cottony, rugged, dirty, hazy, suffocating, hairy grey atmosphere that both reveals the degree of pollution and wraps the city in an extremely sophisticated coat, as the witness of ambivalence to the situation. 3) On the one hand, the bottom-up, under the freeway… a self-organised, ‘messy’, excessively rustling human zone, where frictions and encounters are intrinsically implemented, embedded… a potential of adaptability, transformability, tolerance and indeterminism… from the shapelessness of the city to human pathologies and improvisations… where everything is dedicated to the logic and illogic of the swarm… in the dynamism of the exchanges, in the smelled, swallowed, digested, shitted substances, in the confusion between the taste of stir-fried food, the fragrance of rain on asphalt… the dirtiness and the beauty in the hell of human energies and vitalism… On the other hand, the top-down, the freeway… a disseminated downtown dedicated to its own representation, its self-satisfaction with its emergence in the sky, which embodies the running of the financial ideology through multiple condominiums of personal social ‘successes’, stacked and disconnected from each other… both alive and dead: alive through the endlessly upward high-rising of the city, with numerous sites under construction, symbolising the activity, working potential and efficiency of the economic model; and simultaneously dead for the same reasons, especially when the condos are completed... then working as financial products more than as actual living places. The freeways, organised as a gigantic, octopus-like network floating in the urban tissue, are the ‘horizontal’ line separating and distinguishing these two types of human habitudes of self-representation or social strata… enabling a myriad of connections, flirts, touches, caresses, and collision points between the two. 4)‘Subject’ here refers to a subordinate, as in a king’s subject. 5) One hundred high-rise buildings are currently planned and/or are under construction in Bangkok. 6)‘Capitalism is nearly indifferent to the contents of the stories of which it enables the circulation. The money-narrative is its canonical story because it brings together its two properties: it tells us that we can tell any stories we like, but that the stories’ profits must return to their author, or at least to those who convey their narratives (green washing, social washing, security washing).’ Jean-François Lyotard, Instructions Païennes (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1977). 7) Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, vol. 7, L'éthique de la psychanalyse 1959-1960 (Paris: Seuil, 1986). 8) Paris is used like a beta development zone for the luxury industry. International magazines often depict Paris as a place where people on the street look like fashion models, provoking the Paris Syndrome: a transient psychological disorder encountered by tourists visiting Paris, and Japanese visitors in particular. It is characterised by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, or hostility from others), derealisation, depersonalisation, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia and sweating. See ‘Paris Syndrome’, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome.
Yona Friedman®
A case study from radicalism to idiotcracy
At cross-purposes
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 the exhibition Non Standard[6] at the Pompidou Center). Their work was expunged of all its pathogenic elements, the sources of disorder, incompleteness and political and social unpredictability[7] 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[8] 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,[9] 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[10] 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”[11] 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,[12] 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[13].”
[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.”
[3] Cloud, the Serpentine Gallery, London, 2013
[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
[6] 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.
[7] 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.
[8] 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.
[9] 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.
[10] Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet, Dialogues, Paris, Flammarion, 1999, p. 69
[11] Cf Bataille
[12] Expérience – ‘an architecture des humeurs’ / New Territories / Le Laboratoire, Paris 2011
[13] 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.
…The Science, the Neurobiology at the service of the collect of ‘Malentendus’ (mishearings-misanderstandings), between atavism and vitalism…
[13] More on / http://www.new-territories.com/blog/architecturedeshumeurs/
Reclaim Resi[lience]stance//....R2 LOG 25 / 2012 / Introduction I am an imposter. They told me so... finally... it’s out... What am I to do now with the life of agreable 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 Coupland 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 surveillance19 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 apparatuses24... 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. [4] Ibid., 19. [5] Aldo Rossi, L’architettura della città [The Architecture of the City] (1966; repr., Macerata: Quodlibet Abitare, 2011). [6] “Cause I’m a criminal/ You’re goddamn right/ I’m a criminal/ Yeah, I’m a criminal.” Eminem, “Criminal,” The Marshall Mathers LP, compact disc, © 2000 Aftermath/Interscope. [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
(Science) Fiction, Ecosophical Apparatus and Skizoid Machines New-T / R&Sie(n) / AD 2011 / with Stéphanie Lavaux, Toshikatsu Kiuchi & Stephan Henrich “Animism, vitalism and machinism as a way to rearticulate the need to confront the unknown in a contradictory manner” “In power games, [apparatuses could be considered] relationship strategies supporting types of knowledge and supported by themselves“. – Michel Foucault, Dits et Ecrits, tome III, Paris, Gallimard, p. 299 , 1994 We are immersed in a period that is vibrating,(1) but ultimately lacking momentum. Since the 1960s, time’s arrow has lacked a definite course. Unsure which way to go, it has vascillated between the moral conservatism of the baby boomers and the forward thrust of Gucci-style consumption. Leaving behind its Galilean scrutinising of the future, an exploration of inaccessible worlds that only Science (fiction) from the heights of its certitude could drive, Science (fiction) has slipped into the meanders of our digital society. The false footsteps of Bibendum (the Michelin tyre man) in the dirty dust of the moon that day in July 1969 marked an end to our entropic flights of fancy. The books of Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and others, while marketed as speculative fiction, were in fact live broadcasts; the funhouse mirror that the genre tended to create, between the space of the imagination and the space of our daily lives, expanded throughout a universe of plausibilities. It melted into the news, in all its social dimensions. Astonishingly, Science (fiction) has shifted neither forward nor rearward, but into the here and now. The unfolding scenarios it follows to manipulate our reality are becoming true transformation tools and paradoxically strategic levers to grasp the wobbling of our post-digital societies: our choked mass-media culture. But the main interest of this sudden in vivo ‘matrix immersion’ lies in the anxieties it provokes. Instead of Science (fiction) remaining a domain for positivist and determinist propaganda, it should nourish the seeds of our own ‘monstrosity’: our own loss of control amid indeterminism, chaos theory(2) and biogenetics, as a force striking alliances with harpies and earthly creatures, the Faustian Dark Side and the Sturm und Drang. Against the ‘rationalist wigs’ and the works of Hegelian spirit, we must open up to a world where even fears become fable, as lovely as they are carnal.(3) We have to negotiate with the fold of the instant, the invagination of the thought of the future, and live in a present that is like an asymptotic bend in time, between back to the future and tomorrow now, between dream time and the day after.(4) Under these paradoxical conditions, where the notion and perception of time are crushed on the surface of immediacy, how can we believe that architecture can only be constituted by fossilised avatars, blind cadavers exquis of naive and positivist values,(5) as well as ‘quotational opportunism’ disguised as global entertainment? To reclaim the scenarios and substances that condition architecture and reveal the contradictions and fantasies that drive our societies, we need, on the contrary, to draw on this vibrating, disquieting and voluptuous temporality.(6) Architecture is not something to be thought or produced for later, like the standard bearer for a morality. It can only be negotiated live, in its contingency on a situation and its solubility in a set of givens. This critical and territorialised attitude is in sharp contrast to macro-cynical flights of fancy (the market creates the form!) and their remake of ‘international architecture’(7) (in New York, Paris, Berlin, Shanghai, Singapore and so on); it instead launches, processes and reactivates the concept of a throbbing,(8) complex(9) and unfinished(10) ‘localism’. Our tools for the codification and transformation of territories do not work through an ideal projection, but through a local inventory: a mutant and tangible biotope, issued from the generalised bankruptcy of urban thought(11) and its deception. This ambiguity gives rise to our unstable and unique scenarios. The folded rhizomes of Guattari and Deleuze were a point of fusion and arborescence to attain a plateau,(12) a terra incognita, to break out of the grip of those who declared that they had discursive, pedagogic and linear authority. That made it possible for us to escape from Promethean dreams, millenarian apostles and cynical moralists, and walk gaily over the many and multiple dustbins of the last century, unburdened of the confusion of ‘progressivist’ mythologies, in the voluptuousness of a quotidian cataclysm. (Science) fictional(13) architecture is not a cultural remake of the Altered States(14) variety for the elite. It has nothing to do with a nostalgic idealisation of the world in a ‘museum soap bubble’, nor a New Age utopia with its cautious moral presuppositions. Recognising the new principles of reality, it is a space of confrontation, ceaselessly investing itself in new procedures for the reprogramming and re-scripting(15) of existence, here and now. By necessity, it confronts its emergence, its Gestalt, and can only be negotiated in the visible spectrum: that is its political and operational condition. It generates processes of transformation that take the risk of critical positions and mutations,(16) on the razor’s edge. There can be no pleasure in announcing the ‘infocalypse’. We can only harvest its often strange fruits. The following apparatuses have to be considered as a few paradigms to approach and touch narrative and subjective protocols. Machines have been always pretending to do more than what they were programmed to do. It is their nature. Their behaviour alternates phantasms, frustrations and fears inspired by their own ability to break free and threaten us.(17) The blurriness between what they are supposed to do, as perfect alienated and domesticated creatures, and the anthropomorphic psychology we intentionally project on them, creates a spectrum of potentiality, both interpretative and productive, which is able to re-‘scenarise’ the operating processes of the architectural field. Machines are a vector of narration, generators of rumour, and at the same time directly operational, with an accurate efficiency of production. These multiple disorders, this kind of schizophrenia, could be considered a tool for reopening processes and subjectivities, for re-‘protocolising’ indeterminacy and uncertainties. In this way, machines become agents of blur logic, of a reactive and reprogrammable logic. As in Alice in Wonderland, where Lewis Carroll used mathematics to confuse a little girl’s perception, such apparatuses, including ‘bachelor machines’,(18) stretch a line of ‘subjectification’ to organise ‘repetitions and anomalies’,(19) by developing paradoxes that are able to re-complexify and de-alienate the edges of the truth system; in order to reinvert the logic of meaning and turn it into a vanishing point. It seems to make strategic sense to evaluate architecture’s degree of reality on the basis of its ability to tell stories and in this way enlarge the dimension of its physicality. In a sense, we should consider the structure itself as a fragment of a scenario, as a MacGuffin: the point where and from which speeches, strategies, scientific protocols and power games articulate stories and agendas. Misunderstandings, in this sense, produce artefacts – in ‘the garden which forks nowhere’’ – and apparatuses can be considered as generators of ambiguities and knowledge, where non-shaping emergent protocols contingently reveal the conditions of emission and are revealed by them, as in a Situationist strategy.(20) The ‘machinism’ presented here should be considered a preliminary spectrum, from a speculative self-organised urbanism (Iveheardabout)(21) to a digestive physiological experiment (thegardenofearthlydelights).(22) Within these endpoints are a stochastic machine with a predictable uncompletion (Olzweg),(23) an industrial milling machine for ‘anthroposophic’ transactions (waterflux),(24) a hydroponic bacteriological Hitchcockian ‘Rear Windows’, (I’mlostinParis), a standing up machine – a Darwinian evolution from an André Bloc house to its extension – (broomwitch)(25) and, last but not least, a pure chimera hybrid bio-robot – the mechanical ghost of a wild forest, where cold war degrades nature (heshotmedown).26 Their ‘schizoid –machinism’ agendas are both products and vectors of paranoia.(27) Yet, they also help us to renegotiate a relationship with the arrow of time; some of them are directly producing reality, here and now, as an industrial factual protocol; some of them are fictionalising our practice, by reformatting the protocol of production, for a tomorrow reality; and some of them are used as a speculation to magnetise a point in the future. Without certainty that our history will pass by this point, some of the machines are developing their own necrosis: their predictable death, even their unreality, to bring an intrinsic process of erasing in their emerging nature. In this way, these apparatuses appear through an architecture that seems to come from a transitory strategy: from an operative, fictional and speculative scenario, which rearticulates the relation of a situation with an environment and eventually its own un-reality, re-questioning the values of its identity. ‘’L’auteur est ce qui donne à l’inquiétant langage de la fiction, ses unites, ses noeuds de coherence, son insertion dans le reel ‘’–Michel Foucault, L’ordre du Discours, Paris, Gallimard, 1971, page 30‘’ Notes 1) Stanley Kubrick wrote the script for A Clockwork Orange (1971) during the filming of the last scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey in order to simultaneously visit NASA’s last Galilean projection and its broken-mirror opposite, a sort of morning-after following an excess of hygienist, positivist narratives. Contemporary history has proved the accuracy of his schizophrenia. Ever since that two-fold production, we have been caught in this stopped time, with no past and no future, a vibrating and unstable time, enjoying Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, between heaven and hell. This re-dating of the Big Bang, ‘the day the universe stood still’, to 1967, introduces Postmodernism and Deconstruction as pure residual artefacts, collateral consequences of that vibration. 2) Over the course of time all systems become progressively disordered as they approach their final state of total equilibrium (the second law of thermodynamics). In order to track our environment, physical sciences born out of the study of turbulence, vibration, disequilibria and probability have taken the place of the linear sciences where things are viewed as following a quantitative and determinist path. 3) One percent of the 3,000 polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in Svalbard are hermaphrodites, with a vagina and a penis. The conditions for survival at the North Pole, including Soviet nuclear waste materials carried by the Artic Stream and the carbon effluence of the Gulf Stream, have allowed us to observe the first natural mutation. 4) See Bruce Sterling, Tomorrow Now, Random House (New York), 2003. 5) How can we reconcile the need to save the Amazonian rainforest and at the same time our fascination with the bulldozer (a sort of caterpillar with beetle pincers) that is cutting it down? This dual attitude protects us from ecologist alibis, primitivist dreams of purity and of the Heimat, as well as from becoming enslaved to the mechanisms of the tabula rasa. Architecture consists of revealing these two contradictory dimensions in their constant tension. 6)‘Yet this landscape of terror is also, as in Bosh, voluptuous and nearly infinite in irony. Reminding us that hell is full of laughter, we could call this cataclysm where everything bad is foretold in dark humour, a black utopia.’ See Mike Davis, Dead Cities and Other Tales, New Press (New York), 2002. 7) One could suspect that the ‘Be global and forget local’ attitude is nothing but a passport for the ones who can afford to...hire ‘a Koolhaas’ or ‘a Nouvel’ to become integrated into the World Corp. But, why not? The vulgarity lies in their duplicity. They may be in Lagos, at Prada or at a floating Pavilion, yet they want to lecture us about political consciousness. 8) Dust and pollution in Bangkok, mosquitoes and Nile River Virus in Trinidad, ‘hairs in the Snake’ and ‘bovine heat’ in Evolène, the bush scorched by sun in Soweto are the human and territorial raw materials that condition the local scene. Contrary to what Plato writes in Parmenides, where he doesn’t trouble to hide his distaste for what he considers as ‘ignoble elements’ – the lowest layers of being – materials like hair and dirt are no less constitutive elements of urban economies, even if they issue from bankruptcy and city planning. 9) Complexity comes from the entropic dimension of a system, between chaos and chance. Another aspect comes from its situation between two different and even contradictory states. Complexity is not driven by autonomy, but by reactivity, and cannot take into account all that surrounds it. It is in this sense that disturbances of identity, stealth and hybridisation become modes of operation. This is reflected in our own indecisiveness, our inability to choose between options and make do with them. 10) Consider how Jules Verne completed Edgar Alan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Poe’s last, enigmatic phrase leaves the reader perplexed and frustrated: ‘But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, far larger in proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.’ (last sentence of Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym). In Jules Verne’s sequel, Le Sphinx des Glaces (The Sphinx of the Ice Fields), he wrote: ‘No! These were physical facts, not imaginary phenomena … This massive shape (the shrouded figure) was nothing but a colossal magnet… whose power produced effects as natural as they were terrible.’ (Le Sphinx des glaces, 1897,Paris, paragraph 15). Poe’s novel was published in serial form purporting to be an authentic report from an expedition to the South Pole that never actually took place. The piece is disturbing, a source of endless questions, and prefigured Poe’s own death. The fact that a half-century later Verne brought it back to life to bring the story to an end reveals the oppositeness of the two men’s attitudes: the former scripts and opens the narrative in its non-finitude, while the latter plans and encloses it within the same operational modes as urban planners, full of Fourièrist swindles and scientism. 11) On the contrary, we have to handle contradictions like that of the island of Tuvalu in the South Pacific. Because of its low altitude and changes in the oceanic water level (due to global warming), a plan for its evacuation has been formulated as an objective given. 12)‘This is what the people of Stateless had in common: not merely the island itself, but the first-hand knowledge that they stood on rock which the founders had crystallised out of the ocean – and which was, forever, dissolving again, only enduring through a process of constant repair. Beneficent nature had nothing to do with it; conscious human effort, and cooperation, had built Stateless … the balance could be disturbed in a thousand ways …. All that elaborate machinery had to be monitored, had to be understood. … It had one undeniable advantage over all the contrived mythology of nationhood. It was true.’ See Greg Egan, Distress HarperPrism (New York), 1995, pp 171–2. 13) Fiction differs from utopia in that it does not seek to be right. Why would we seek to be right when there are so many people who carry the banner of morality? They are legion, as dangerous and common as criminals. 14) A Ken Russell film where research into chemical hallucinogenics ends in a polychrome and simian apotheosis. 15)‘What’s the scenario? A constantly mutating sequence of possibilities. Add a morsel of a difference and the result slips out of control, shift the location for action and everything is different. There is a fundamental gap between societies that base their development on scenarios and those that base their development on planning.’ See Liam Gillick, ‘Should the future help the past?’ in Five or Six Previsions, Lukas and Stenberg, Ltd (New York), 2001. 16) See R&Sie’s AquaAlta 1.0 and 2.0. Amid laguna pollution, technological suspicion and hybrid mutation, this project is a critique of relational mechanisms, on the tangible ground of political reality; it is not a \techno-nostalgic’ or ‘cocaine-digital’ immersion. 17) As the Golem did to its own creator, the Rabbi Loeb. 18) In the sense of Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. 19) In the sense of Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1968, Paris, PUF 20) See Guy Debord, La société du spectacle, Buchet/Chastel (Paris), 1967. See also Guy Debord’s and Constant Nieuwenhuys’s Declaration d’Amsterdam in 1958, Internationale Situationniste, numéro 2, Amsterdam. 21) “Iveheardabout”, the first experiment in 2005 of R&Sie(n) about self-organisation with computation, robotic and politic apparatuses, sponsorised by Paris, MAM, Antwerpen, De Singel, Tokyo, MOT 22) Thegardenofearthlydelights: distilling-sublimating-drying-extracting devices. 23) Olzweg: a stochastic machine. 24) Waterflux: Prototyping scale 1. 25) Broomwitch : Transport and standing up machine. 26) Heshotmedown: A chimera robot. 27) In both senses, ‘critical paranoia’ and pathological paranoia.
Parrhesia / Athazagoraphobia Grey strategies / 2003 A piece – folded and refolded – after Dominique Quessada’s L’esclave maître (Vertical, 2002). A text hidden between the pages of a burned French passport, all the better to hide the suspicious words, nastily cutting the flesh of a singularity from that of the pack, separating the architect and architects, two profiles, two morpho-psychological categories, that ceaselessly negotiate their own shaky survival, the Siamese twins of a fertile algorithm: 1&2, 1+2, 1/2 = “t” + “s” = ... 1) The architect is someone who tries to bring out an aesthetic strategy from within the complexities of a society in order to reveal its heartbeat, even if contradictory. The architect shoulders the unshared risk of putting out an unprecedented scenario, thus generating a particular and unique configuration. Wearing neither the halo of a Don Quixote nor the mantle of romanticism, this attitude only emerges after sticking his neck all the way out. You have to give him credit for that. 2) In contrast, architects are gregarious by nature, staunchly corporatist, and incapable of putting out ideas and hypotheses that haven’t been previously validated by their professional environment. Enslaved by this mode of consumption and distribution, they travel in packs so as to assuage the guilt they feel as predators. Since they can’t publicly admit their direct collaboration with the dominant mechanisms, even though they are the latter’s main vectors, architects dress it up with navel-gazing convulsions, fictitious rebellions, whiny subjugation, social emancipations and flights of lyricism. They mask their daily malversation, their cosy arrangements and their ugliness in the same way, with a “Carnival of the Activists” broadcast in prime time and operational modes in soundproofed boudoirs. Architects corrupt discourse, manipulate competition, make morality their banner and social responsibilities into an amulet or agit-prop. They live and breathe the profound hypocrisy of human nature, with which they are consubstantial. Space is their playground, their control and coercion lever. Liberal modernity needed a morpho-psychological profile that transcends their alienation to make others – the innumerable – submit to those who know nothing. We’re there... there... right there... inside... but not only... Architects are also those who metabolize the irreducible novelty of the architect for society as a whole, even if that means the annulment pure and simple of the novelty in question. Thus architecture undergoes a two-fold process where the architect builds architecture individually by tracing ideas, while only rarely able to make them emerge in the strata of the real. There is a real struggle between the creator and those who vectorize or even copy. The latter sew up the new because it is socially non-metabolizable in its raw form. Novelty, the strangeness of things never seen before, is not directly assimilable because it can’t be comfortably consumed. Copying is the role of the “rivals,” the “pretenders”, those who claim to be friends of the person who puts out things never seen before, those who claim to be friends of the architect, except that aside from the cannibalism they practice, the content is conveyed very superficially at best. In short, the imitators come up with a copy that plugs the fissure opened up by things never seen before. Thus there are two kinds of creative activity, creating new things and absorbing them, summarily or maladroitly replicating them, in order to socialize them in a post-consumption universe. The architect works right in the centre of architectural time, in real time, while architects work in the heart of its history, in delayed time. Thus what is called the history of architecture is really a history of this differed time in architecture. It is because they have been transformed into commodities that new things can be reformatted as products and utilized, annulled, employed, socialized, hijacked, tamed and in general manipulated, especially by media capitalism. We can assume that there are two antagonistic impulses in architecture, one critical, putting forward things without always being able to build them, and the other collaborationist, appearing and working with the powers that be, the administration and its techno-structural forces. Torn eternally between resistance and collaboration, architecture has two complementary aspects whose constant struggle drives its zigzag, crabwalk movement in space and time. Thus we can understand its imitative function, deeply rooted in the history of architecture, its treatises, reviews, education and modes of transmission, and recognize it as a necessary evil, or, more precisely, as the other side of the coin which would have no value without it. The imitative function feeds the imitator, sometimes all too well, but more profoundly its relationship with new things is one of dependence, which allows the former to confer a status upon the latter, that of the original in fact. This is the transfer mechanism, the transaction, without which neither could seek to exist. Ambiguity would come rather from the lack of transparency, of visibility of this system of exchange, which is incestuous only in the assimilation of these mimetic icons to new things… whereas they are only their collateral effects… Inversed Nourritures / 2013 / AD-London an architecture of mood, and bad mood / NewT http://www.new-territories.com/blog/architecturedeshumeurs/ When technologies are trapped by Chaosmosis, this increases the schizoid negotiation of double belonging and double membership, simultaneously framed by local instructions on ‘living together’ and, at the same time, a furious need to escape, to anywhere, similar to Dan Simmons’ ‘Transdoor’, opening a double window between the ‘here, but …’ and the ‘but elsewhere’, to escape from the stuttering of the local forces of permanencies and immobility seeking to conserve a supposed ‘authenticity’ – that is, the existing situation – regulated by rules and policies … to stop time … a kind of revived Puritanism driven by society-friendly standards for ‘good behaviour’ and phony eco-friendly attitudes, moralistic totalising scrutiny, recipes for organic health food and over-moisturised soap for a perfect body in the ideal village, like the Truman Show, and in escaping all that, to fulfil irreducible needs like reaching, touching the forbidden, jumping through the only windows that authorise objectionable behaviour in the multiple infra-zones of the doors in electronic machinery (socialising, virtualising, fictionalising, pornoising, criminalising, and gaming the game) … the legitimate need to HOPEFULLY be somebody else, the recognition of a contradictory, Siamese dualism, a symmetrical antagonism between the physical hoax of sedentary statements and the illusion of dematerialised nomadism, a permanent schizoid contingency, naturally intertwined. It seems that our times have invited the two demons to the same cozy dinner party, thus provoking a divorce between the next door and the door after that – a permanent schizophrenia. But this basic and symptomatic opposition imposes itself like a cliché, or more than a cliché – a new standard for ‘life’, or a caricature of life in which on the one hand there is the petrification of the local, and on the other side the artificialised eroticism of the illusory but necessary objective of freedom, like some natural compensation for the stone-edged statement of the former. For example, we could easily spend time in the ‘bricolage-DIY-village-mall’ to buy the perpetuation of what is already existing, to maintain the sclerosis of the environment by adding two limited screws and nails. We could easily buy a condo in downtown Chicago-Bangkok-Shanghai to simulate the happiness of 1950s urbanism transposed into a ‘Peyton Place’ or ‘Pleasantville’ vertical village, including swimming pools, the sports centre, the health-food shop and the security cameras, self-adapting to your shape for the ultimate comfort in sleeping equipment, with trendy ‘flagshit’ design selected by the latest issue of Wallpaper, including the latest ice-cube crushing fridge for your imported 20-year-old island Scotch, like the settings in American Psycho , but eviscerated of any psycho-human dimension, and in both cases meant to compensate for the degree of repressed emotion and sensation by providing a kind of discharging catharsis in the other window, operating in the depths of the network infra-zone, in the intimacy of the keyboard, the endlessness possibilities of personal and collective neurosis-psychosis that renegotiate human pathologies, the multiple identities syndrome, the temptation of insurrection through ‘inappropriate language and attitudes’ no longer tolerated in the physical planetary petit-bourgeois village. This predictable, Manichaean yo-yoing between ‘the next door and another door beyond’ poses as the opposite of post-puritanical capitalism by simultaneously marketing the local and the global. This Siamese business plan traps our free will in a new double mass production of products and desires, from moralistic values about ‘living together’ to scatological, eschatological, compulsive and pathological gimmicks meant to serve as compensation, a transfer of missing parts. In opposition, or just on the side, could we run an experiment in which the ‘village’ is a matrix across multiple doors, articulating the conflict immanent in living together without denying the uncertain, unpredictable nature of this conflict, directly revealing the sophistication or the lack of social contract, of neighbourhood protocols, to be adjusted in real time, articulating phantasm and reality, ugliness and beauty, obstacles and possibilities, garbage and fresh blooms, threats and various forms of protection, technicist prowess and forces of nature, interlocked, in keeping with the vitality of the species inhabiting them. Could we test some experimentation where ‘architecture’ is used as a strategy to subjectivise the real, the daily jingle, to negotiate simultaneously the contingencies of these dual dimension, needs of sedentary and nomadism, of security and risk, of certitudes and adaptations , as the antidote of the ‘model owner’, flattery that caresses human atavism, the weakness where we are most fragile, the ostentatious sycophancy of bogus social status that lies at the heart of the obscenity of the new ‘world condo village’. An Architecture “des humeurs” An Architecture ‘des Humeurs’, a research project initiated in 2010–11 (by R&Sie(n)/New Territories),4 seeks to create a kind of alphabet book of apparatuses, of knowledge strategies, to protocolise a counterproposal. It cannot be developed without re-evaluating all the tools, strategies, processes and the very raison d’être of technologies. As it navigates, it drifts from the psycho-methodology of collecting desires to the mathematics that interpret them as relationships, set-belonging situations, from psycho-chemistry to the logic of aggregation, from the physio-morphological computation of the multitude to C++ operators for structural optimisation as an artefact of a logic of discovery, from bio-knit physicality for the operation of a nonlinear geometry to a robotic process and behaviour, and from biochemical research to robotic design and G-code algorithms for automated manufacture. Being political today is not a lazy fascination with slums, a social-political whitewashing such as was seen at the last Venice Biennale (Common Ground), in perfect symmetry with the mainstream, or the ridiculous PS1 program over the last past years, trying to manipulate neighbourhood interest with a ping-pong table and/or a spiky Smurf to clean the local pollution or a stupid zero Carbon brick as a plagiarism of robotic brick stacking, but without robot, but with green washing propaganda..etc...etc... for the most vulgar program of curating architecture... It means defining a line of conflict, the aesthetics of conflict, a line of resistance and resilience,5 a line of creation that infiltrates the cracks, the interstices between the chapel of power and the self-assurance of the powerful, questioning the order of discourse, human free will, the uses and abuses of mathematics, technological imperialism and necessity, machinist arrogance and the potential of narration to infiltrate and de-alienate the ghetto of expertise and control promoted by power and, at the same time, contradictorily, to work for the emergence of a bottom-up strategy of knowledge by means of computational/DIY urbanism, neither mimicking favelas nor denying science, adopting neither positivism and its mysticism nor its opposite, a regressive nostalgia, but, through a mimesis of their evolutionary vitality with its (un)certain trajectories, human pathology, conflictual apparatuses and contingencies, seeking to achieve a sophisticated and unique assemblage of and for the people that architecture was originally supposed to ‘dominate’. Top Down and Bottom Up How can we reconsider the notion of space, a term used to death by modernity, of a ‘living zone’ understood not in terms of repetitive stereotypes or a modernistic promenade, but as a way to generate multiple singularities, a polyphony of multiplicity, a multitude, where architecture engages and generates empathy, sympathy and, naturally, antipathy as a factor in relationships, a transactional operator, a vector of negotiation between each of us and others to bring back together the ‘elsewhere’ and the ‘here, and yet’, the ‘near and far’, stability and nomadism, the ‘village’ as a secure sensation, a whispering Heimat and at the same time to hear the scream of its intrinsic forces of transformation as its vitality overflows. Looking beyond a strictly scientific and architectural horizon, and reading beyond the usual philosophical benchmarks, it is tempting and, indeed, enlightening to envisage a modus operandi from a metaphorical and strategic angle in which exploring the ‘chemistry of bodies’ often envisaged as an element liable to disturb and alter linear, authoritarian logics, can achieve what we might call aggregations of ‘swarm’6 intelligence. Similarly, it is tempting to look at the relationship of the body to space, and even more, of bodies in their social relations: not just their interrelation within a given cell, but also their intra-relations as part of an osmosis with others. This results in an architecture that plays with conformism and conventions, and instead offers an ‘undisciplined’ conception of production in its articulation of the collective and the political. An Architecture “des humeurs” constitutes the second leg (after I’ve Heard About, in 2005)7 of an architectural voyage (in the spirit of Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516) federating the skills of scientists from a host of disciplines (mathematics, physics, neurobiology, computations, scripts, nanotechnologies,8 robotics). This exploration is an attempt to articulate the real and/or fictional link between geographical situations and the narrative structures capable of transforming them. Specifically, the focus here is on using nanotechnology to collect physiological data from all participants to prepare and model, by means of these ‘moods’ – a (post)modern translation of Hippocrates’ four humors– the foundations of an architecture in permanent mutation, modelled (and modulated) by our unconscious. It is an investigation into an architecture of uncertainty and indetermination. The Architecture “des humeurs” is an interrogation of the confused region of the psyche that lies between pleasure/desire and need/want. It works by detecting physiological signals based on neurobiological secretions and thus achieving a ‘chemistry of humours’, treating future property buyers as inputs who generate a range of diverse, inhabitable morphologies and the relationships between them. The groundwork comes from a rereading of the malentendus inherent in the expression of human desire. 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, breaking and entering into language’s mechanism of dissimulation in order to physically construct its malentendus, including the data that the acephalous body collects that can tell us about its adaptation, its sympathy and empathy, in the face of specific situations and environments. The collection of humours is organised on the basis of interviews with a hundred people that make visible the conflict and even schizophrenic qualities of desire, between those secreted (biochemical and neurobiological) and those expressed through the interface of languages, to make palpable and prehensible the emotional transaction of the ‘animal body’, the headless body, confronted with the mutation of a situation, the drifting of an environment. The protocol was to generate a reactive emphasis of phobia-phylia inputs and to record, using the emitter-sensor-detector feature, the biochemical evolution of the ‘mind’ and read this data as relationship outputs comprising psycho-perturbation and psycho-stuttering as a result of attractor-repulsor emotional contingencies. Mathematical concepts borrowed from set theory are used as a strategic relational tool to extract from these multiple ‘misunderstandings’, a morphological potential (attraction, exclusion, touching, repulsion, indifference) as a negotiation of the ‘distances’ between humans and humans, humans and limits, humans and access that constitute these collective aggregates. This branch of mathematics was founded by Georg Cantor in the late 19th century. Its aim is to define the concepts of sets and belonging (union, inclusion, intersection and disjunction). This theory can be used to describe the structure of each situation as a kind of collective defining the relationships between the parts and the whole, while taking into consideration that the latter is not reducible to the sum of its part (or even the ensemble of relationship between the parts). It is becoming the matrix, the combinations for the relational structure on which an inhabitable space lows for the definition of all the properties of a given situation in relational modes: both the relationships between the elements themselves (residential areas) and those between these elements and the ensemble or ensembles. It describes morphologies characterised by their dimensions and position in the system and, above all, by the negotiations of distance they carry out with the other parts and as multiple artefacts, produces relational protocols, relational relationships and relational aesthetics: protocols of attraction, repulsion, contiguity, dependence, sharing, indifference, exclusion. These relational modes are simultaneously elaborated within the residential cell and on its periphery in relation to the neighbouring colonies. 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 as well. The data obtained from the physiological interview by means of nanoparticles concerns the following issues: familial socialisation (distance and relationship between residential areas within a single unit), neighbourhood socialisation (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). In contrast to the standard-model formatting of habitats, this tool offers contingencies that produce the potential to negotiate with the ambiguities of one’s own humours (tempers) and desires. It enables the mixing of contradictory compulsions (appearances) and even some malentendus: ‘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, oscillating between phobia and philia (claustro-agora-xeno-acro-nocto-socio-neo phobia/philia). The secondary goal of the research, in terms of mathematical development, concerned structural optimisation, defining the structural sustainability of the system as a post-production. The possibility of structure as a logic of resistance,9 emerging a posteriori to become inhabitable morphologies, calls into question the traditional client-architect relationship and offers an alternative way of generating forms. Emancipated from the conceptual logic where the structure is the starting point, the spatial contract takes the place of the social contract. Since it is conceived a posteriori, the structure is reactive, adaptive to multiplicity, as the permanent discovery of new agencies, entities and singularities. Within the framework of this research, François Jouve developed a mathematical process for ‘empirically’ seeking optimisation, by creating forms out of constraints and not vice-versa.10 The structural optimisation algorithm differs from directly calculated structural methods such as calculating the load-bearing structure of a building after it has been 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 French mathematician Jacques Hadamard (to modify a shape by successive infinitesimal steps, to improve the criteria we want to optimise, as a permanent variation of boundaries) and the other from the protocol of the representation of complex shapes by Cartesian meshing through level set (to understand locally what could be the line of the highest or lowest resulting point, if we project the local incremental iterative calculus onto a 2-D diagram, to extract the X,Y position in the space as data to be re-injected into the next step of the calculation.) This strategy of incremental and recursive optimisation (ex-local, local and hyper-local) approaches simultaneously calculates and designs their trajectories, supporting the multiplicity and heterogeneity of physio-morphologies. Following the non-deterministic aggregation of the unpredictable overstacking of desires, the structural branching and coagulation are generated by successive iterations of calculations that physically link the interstices between morphologies so that they can support each other locally and globally. The calculations satisfy precise inputs, including the constraints and characteristics of the materials used, initial conditions, dead load, and the transfer of forces, intensity, and vectorisation of these forces. The third part of the research was to define a construction protocol able to handle complex, non-standard, non-repetitive 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. The key is the development of a secretion and weaving machine that can generate a vertical structure by means of extrusion and sintering (full-size 3-D 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 non-repetitive protocol. This machine, both additive and formative, uses 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 polymerisation, and thus produce chemical and physical agglutination at the time of secretion. The mechanical expertise of this material is made visible (by constraints of rupture induced by traction, compression and shearing, and so on). The mathematical process of empirical optimisation makes it possible for the architectural design to react and adapt to previously established constraints, instead of the opposite. Through the use of these computational, mathematical and mechanisation procedures, the urban structure engenders successive, improbable and uncertain aggregations that constantly rearticulate the relationship between the individual and the collective, between top down and bottom up, and that reactivate the potential for the self-organisation and creativity of the multitude in pursuit of the metabolism developed by Constant Nieuwenhuys and Guy Debord . Through current technologies and procedures we can ‘un-achieve’ what we could call ‘computed slums’: we can re-question and refresh the democratic delegation of power between bottom-up swarm whispering and top-down tooling. Animist, vitalist and machinist, the Architecture “des humeurs” rearticulates the need to confront the unknown in a contradictory manner by means and tools that are normally used to enhance control and prediction, expertise and anticipation. In contrast, it expects to give rise to multitudes in their palpitation and complexity, and the premises of a relational organisation protocol, where the village is a process in progress, a matrix that is not a final product but determined by outputs from the multitude of desires, of malentendus, recognising human pathology as a process of discovery…where Feed Back is acting as a metaphor, as a vehicle of ‘political’ transportation. Notes 1) The title of Félix Guattari’s last book: Chaosmosis: An Ethno-Aesthetic Paradig, Indiana University Press; Galilée, Paris, 1992.. 2) Transdoor is a kind of ‘farcasting’, a kind of ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ carried out in the domestic zone of a basic and banal apartment. Dan Simmons, Hyperion, Doubleday, USA, 1989. 3) Second Life description in the film The Cat, the Reverend and the Slave, by Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita, 2009. 4) The research is organised on several levels: from the physiology of humours to misunderstandings; Malentendus (a word that can be translated as ‘misunderstandings’ or ‘mishearings’); from the misunderstanding of humours to physio-morphological computation; from physio-morphological computation to the multitude; mathematical operators for structural optimisation; the ‘algorithm(s)’; from the ‘algorithm(s)’ to bio-knit physicality; toolings/robotic process; and tooling/bio-cement weaving (material expertise). 5) François Roche, Reclaim Resi[lience]stance, Log 25, Summer 2012. 6) In the sense of the word as used by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt in Empire, Harvard University Press, 2000 7) See Neil Leach, AD Digital Cities, July/August (no 4), 2009, pp 40–5. 8) Nano receptors can be inhaled, making it possible to ‘sniff’ the chemical state of the human body. Like pollens, they are concentrated in the bronchia and attach themselves to the blood vessels. This location makes it possible for them to detect traces of stress hormones (hydrocortisone) carried by the haemoglobin. As soon as they come into contact with this substance, the phospholipidic membrane of the NP (nanoparticles) dissolves and releases several molecules, including formaldehyde (H2CO) in a gaseous state. The molecules rejected by the respiratory tract are detected using cavity ring-down spectroscopy (CRDS). This is a method of optical analysis using laser beams programmed to a particular frequency, making it possible to measure the density of airborne molecules. The wavelength used for the detection of formaldehyde is around 350 nanometres. 9) ‘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 the production of exaggerations … and their existence is the proof of their resistance … against stupidity and vulgarity.’ Gilles Deleuze, Abecedarium , ,1988-9, Video Interview of 8 hours, about his philosophic ideas and concepts in alphabetical order: A like Animal, B like Boisson (drink), C like Culture, D like Désir (desire), E like Enfance (infancy), R like resistance….etc… 10) Shape optimisation (C++ on Linux, developed by François Jouve).
@morphous MUTATIONS / 2000 NewT / Frac Orleans I had to admit defeat. Something wanted it that way. I, too, was just an instrument. The world was nothing more than an infinite interweave of instruments. The respite had only lasted for as long as the mirage that it was.Les Racines du Mal, Maurice G. Dantec, Série Noire, 1995 Sites and territories nurture identities, preconditions and affects that architecture and urbanism have continuously restrained and eradicated. The architectural object, having claimed authority for four centuries1 has the power of unparalleled destruction of modernity to maturity. But in so doing it signs its own limits and end. The numerous ‘aesthetic orthodoxies’ born in the antechamber of reason and the wastedumps of ideology have now not only become unworkable but are also criminal in their discrepancy with society. Judging each operation on the validity of hypotheses within an enormous assortment of ever increasing facts and artefacts is not an easy task. Signs and referents are not pre-given, like a symbolic reference, but have to be discovered in real time, on the ‘real site’. If architecture did not know or could not substitute for the modern culture of breaking in a culture of place, more attentive to what it was bulldozing, it is that the verse was already in the fruit. In short, a genetic error... The horizons of the world of perception, of corporeality and of place have only too rarely been the mediums of a production. Territorialising2 architecture does not mean cloaking it in the rags of a new fashion or style, which would be just as out of such and separate from the styles and fashions already consumed. Territorialising architecture in order that the place gains a social, cultural and aesthetic3 link means inserting it back into what it might have been on the verge of destroying, and extracting the substance of the construction from the landscape (whether urban or otherwise), whether a physical, corporeal substance within it, or climates, materials, perceptions and affects. This is not historical regression, nor modern projection, but an attitude that affirms itself by what it doesn’t belong to, outlined against a razor’s edge, in permanent equilibrium. It is a process that is renewed at each new place, allowing for an in-situ attitude rather than just another aesthetic code. From that a radical displacement of our function can be born. To identify that which characterises a place is already to interpret it and to put forward a way of operating on it. But linking being to its ecosystem can only save linking the body to the body of architecture. This process of reactive mimesis is not a simulation of the ‘exquisite corpse’ game, a visual avatar, disappearing and camouflaging itself with an ecological alibi. Its ability to take hold of a territory without subjugating it depends on the unclear identity that develops within it, on the transformation it operates, on the gap of its implementation, on the ambiguity of the network of extraction/transformation that the materials have come from. This antidote to the separated,4 autonomous body, this ‘live’ production process could not operate were it not nourished by these active materials: ‘there are the images of materials ... sight names them and the hand knows them’.5 In order that these ‘barren’ propositions do not add, subtract but rather extract, and in order that the object of architecture can spur on the real, like a contorted alterity of the territory in abeyance, we should, perhaps, shift the origins of architectural referents into a precondition that states ‘there is’. We had spent several years looking for the instrument that would enable us to explore the minimal act, somewhere the not-much and the just enough, where the territorial change stemming from architecture would be steeped in prior geographies, where the development can work its way in, and embed itself in what it was supposed to dominate, to exacerbate issues of mutation and identity. We were after an instrument that would enable us to introduce strategies of hybridisation and mimesis in the "here and now" of each particular situation. In view of the many different manipulations of history, involving morality and heritage alike, geography and cartography — and not the tracing, as Deleuze and Guattari 6 remind us — have always seemed more operational to us. But to contrast the already existing site with its future, in an encounter between the image of the exposed context and the image (in photomontage) that embraces the architectural project, like the demonstration of a processing economy, was not enough for us. We were missing the grasp of the process, in the breakdown of successive hypotheses. Despite formulating hybridisation scenarios (Fresnoy, Magasins Généraux, House in the Trees, Berlin, Sarcelles…), the medium was lacking. The mutations not only never appeared in the movement that had given rise to them, but, even more so, the documents, in the final analysis, could, by virtue of their isolation, be re-interpreted as decontextualized artefacts. The processes of distortion, originating from morphing, and here presented by serial tapes or elsewhere on videotapes, stem from this dearth and open up a field of possibilities. Over and above a fascination with the technological tool, and with the contrived metamorphosis that it creates, we are exercised by its revelatory and operational function.The more "deceptive" the morphed movement seems, the more inert in its transformation, the more the urban and architectural project seems to be dominated by the prior situation. The more the morphing can be read in its artifice, the more the projection seems, this time around, to be deterritoralized. Unlike an instrument of representation, morphing thus reveals the degree to which the hypotheses are decontextualized, and in an on-going back-and-forth between deduction and induction, a re-reading of the successive phases will validate or invalidate the relevance of the choices, in a making with to do less strategy 7.It is no longer a matter of contrasting the project with its context, like two distinct hypotheses, but of linking them together by the actual transformation process. The project is no longer the issue of an abstract projection, but of a distortion of the real. The blank page and the empty screen cannot be. This software calls for a body, a generic physical matrix.The skin 8 of the photographic, cartographic image is transformed and metamorphosed by aspiration (Aqua Alta in Venice), by Scrambling (Farm in Swiss), by Overflow (Restaurant in Japan), by Extrusion and Contraction (Tave House and Maido Museum in Reunion Island) by folding (Soweto museum in South Africa), by growing Pilosity (Tower in Paris), by shearing Territory (House Barak in France and Rotterdam urbanism)… And the pixels, fractal fragments of the real, are put back together again in a series of genetic mutations. The context is no longer idealised, conceptualised or historicised, it is rather an underlayer of its own transformation. This is a political difference. The virtual instrument paradoxically becomes a principle of reality. A few words of explanation : Morphing lies at the root of a software which makes it possible to merge image A with image B by means of a topological shift of salient dots. With the "Warp" technique, which is a variant of this process, it is possible to produce this alteration, but without being aware of the resulting B. Image A can thus be easily manipulated, and distorted, when it comes into contact with a programme and a scenario, but it cannot side-step its own matter, it own physicality, by resisting it. And it is this amorphism that is involved here. Presenting the conditions of a hybridisation and a transformation that are paradoxically static and which, by virtue of the mobility/immobility that they create, reveal at best the various issues of prior identity and geography. It is tantamount to producing a critical state both on the "territorial development" processes but also on the use and misuse of technologies. Doing nothing is to raise questions and problems, alike. Doing things on the map, by way of these "@morphous Mutations", is like trying to do things from the negative angle, without the preformatted and accepted skills. The model already in place obliges us to switch our skill towards other arenas (social mechanisms, political economics, and territorial challenges). This process thus opens up areas of investigation likely to extricate us from the dictate of modern projection (medium and alibi of 20th century architecture), which has muddled the programme with the declaration of functions.To make the architectural object ambiguous, and to force it out of the real, is to question our own perception 9. Nothing seems more pertinent to me than an architecture that straddles such ambiguities. The binary structures of the predominant thinking about heritage/modernity and servility/domination have, happily, imploded. The transformations of the body and its sexuality, using silicone and collagen, as a diametric opposite of the Metropolis Cyber-Robot, are the lead-in to this. The contemporary prosthesis is made of flesh, and the functional outgrowth made of artificial skin is re-formed. The body is not denied, but exacerbated and hypertrophied.Technology thus enables us, by way of these "@morphous Mutations", to involve processes and write scripts which reactivate the concept of "localism", not to serve up dishes again that have got cold, and museified models, but a thrilling localism, made up of contradictions 10 and respect, and reactive membranes, in an elastic topography.Identifying what characterises a place by these new tools is already tantamount to putting forward a new operational method. So there's not much point in doing a whole lot more. Notes 1) Brunelleschi’s perspective geometry is responsible for this, in the rationalisation of instruments of production and the domination of architecture on the site. The rule of visual representation is thus substituted for corporeal perceptions. 2) See the notion developed by Felix Guattari in his Schizophrenia Analytic on ecosophy, that architecture has ‘imploded’ and is condemned to being pulled and torn in every direction. 3) In sense attributed to it by M Maffesoli, Du Temps des tribus, 1988, ‘History can promote a morale (a politics), the space will favour an aesthetic and exude an ethics’. 4) See Augustin Berque’s La Théorie du paysage en France. 5) Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves, 1942. 6) "The rhizome is quite different, map and not tracing… If there is a contrast between map and tracing, it is because the map in its entirety is oriented towards an experiment to do with reality. The map does not reproduce a subconscious that is closed in on itself, it constructs it." Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux, Les Éditions de Minuit, Collection Critique, 1980. 7) "Making with to do less", R, DSV & Sie. P, L'Ombre du Caméléon, IFA/Karédas, 1994. 8) "These tear the body within and seek a hole to escape through, it throws its hands on to the body and they vibrate under the fingers ; it pushes them towards the joints, towards the cavities of the belly and throat, it crushes them there, its fist digging into the skin, which, bespattered with blood beneath, turns cold." Pierre Guyotat, Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats, L'imaginaire, Gallimard, 1967. 9) L'Hiver de l'Amour/The Winter of Love, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paysage/Landscape nº2, R, DSV & Sie. P. An installation on the stairs. The fitted carpet was laid, the height of the steps slightly altered, and the carpet relaid. A study to do with the dissociation of the senses, between what was perceived (the treads) and felt (a moving topography), March 1994. 10) "How to live by following — not without fascination — the bulldozer's passage in the Amazonian forest and campaigning for its protection… while remaining on the razor's edge. It is with this terribly human dimension that we must work. An admittedly schizophrenic attitude, but one which preserves us from the snares of the clear conscience, environmental activism and destructive forms of extremism." Lecture at the Pavilion de l'Arsenal, F. Roche, 1997, Mini-PA. Making with to do less / 2001 ICA / London Throughout the productive spheres including medicine science and the arts, sexuality today is clearly confronted with problems of transformation and hybridization, from silicone to artificial muscles, from sexual transformation, to changes of identities, from biotechnology to underlying eugenism. The integrities defined by modernity have imploded. The body has become a programmable instrument in vitro, a shell injected with collagen. At the antipodes of the Cyber-Robot of Metropolis, the contemporary prosthesis is made of flesh, and the functional excrescence is recomposed in artificial derma. The body is not denied, but exacerbated, hypertrophied, and the skin is not any more an element of covering, of protection, but like a reactive surface to the environment. The human body and its bodilyfunctions would thus have become the physical attributes of an individual choice, not of an evolutionary adaptation from the constraints in opposition to Darwin's ideas. To quote one of the main idea of Houelbeck in the elementary particle's book, the human being could therefore be the first animal species to organize his own conditions of mutation,. From these possibilities which alternate with ambiguity, Science Fiction and reality, morality its limitations and beyond, emerges these biogenetic mutations which assimilate our evolution to those of avatars, and our ability to believe that architecture can still consist just of bodies, identifiable like slices of chorizo in a pizza. The processes of distortion, originating from morphing, and here presented by serial tapes (or elsewhere on video tapes), stem from this dearth and open up a field of new possibilities. Over and above a fascination with the technological tool, and with the contrived metamorphosis that it creates, we are exercised by its revelatory and operational function.The more deceptive the morphed movement appears, the more inert its transformation, the more the urban and architectural project seems to be dominated by the prior situation. The more the morphing can be read in its artifice, the more the projection seems, this time around, to be deterritorialized. Unlike an instrument of representation, morphing thus reveals the degree to which the hypotheses are decontextualized, and in an on-going flux between deduction and induction, a re-reading of the successive phases will validate or invalidate the relevance of the choices, in a making do with less strategy. Like a chemist having to reproduce the experiment to read it again and understand it, this empirical and random process, is built on reaction and folding on the support. The skin of the photographic, cartographic image is transformed and metamorphosed in one and the same shell. In one and the same matter, it undergoes manipulations akin to folding, extrusion and scarification. The pixels, fractal fragments of the real, are put back together again in a series of genetic mutations. These grafted manipulations, like images of subcutaneous piercing , operate on several registers, several identifications. It is a process of degeneration, a topological cyst, a code of tribal recognition, an exacerbation of hyperlocalism where the city is assimilated to an organism- the context, here, is not idealized or conceptualized, but substrate of its own mutation. The virtual instrument would thus become paradoxically a principle of reality, and architecture escapes from abstracted projections to be assimilated to a distortion of reality in situ. A reasoned and logical process for the identification of Sainte Bernadette (Virilio-Parent) / AA School 2009 The difficulty in identifying Sainte Bernadette, or at least the possibility of mistaking its identity as a result of dodgy – purely analogical – interpretations, requires us to redefine Sainte Bernadette by that which it is not. The logic of belonging, based on the recognition of forms, is no more operative here than the logic that consists of confusing Rauschenberg’s white monochrome with Malevich’s, or even worse, the white silence of John Cage. In Sainte Bernadette what is given to us to see is not reducible to the remnants of the memory of the Todt line. The logic of identification, the logic of belonging to a circumscribed ensemble deemed “identifiable”, which would typically make it possible to determine the nature of an object is a trap when it comes to Sainte Bernadette. Claude Parent’s “Bloc” (with Virilio’s initial complicity) is unnamable. It is a trap set for those who confuse their own perception with the “explicit” re-cognition of the object itself. This singularity operates by virtue of a hiatus between its perceptual and functional properties whose relationship is conflicted and even paradoxical. This is the source of its incomparable resistance to being what it appears to be. The theater of interpretations is complex but also misleading. Is this a metaphor, in the sense of a stylistic device, which serves as a bridge between two worlds? Is this an imitation in the era of technical reproducibility, in Walter Benjamin’s terms? Or is this a mimesis, in the original sense, which reveals hidden reality? Is this an illusion, or even a phantom that borrowed its reality from the body of another and poorly chose its host, or a poltergeist trying to warn us...? In contrast to this logic of certainty, this determinist (Boolean) logic that deceives us, we could describe Sainte Bernadette by appealing to math and trying to use a fuzzy logic protocol, incorporating degrees of uncertainty so as to avoid reducing its possible truth values to simply it is/is not what it appears to be. In other words, an algorithm based on Zadeh fuzzy logic operators can reflect contradictory hypotheses of identification. Here the function (fzappearance) allows the building to be or not to be what it seems to be (the Boolean values 0 and/or 1). Thus whether: - It is officially declared as being what it seems to be / fzDeclare (the “official” principle having emanated from the military sphere.) Or if: - It was built by a military engineering unit / fzEngineer (counter-example: the Casbah and the Battle of Algiers). - It was or should be used as part of a military strategy / fzStrategy (counter-example: Ken Adams’ monolith of the man with the golden gun, Pana Gna, Thailand) - It was built of monolithic poured reinforced concrete / fzMimicryStructure (counter-example: Edison’s 1907 solid concrete house) - It resembles what it seems to be / fzChameleon (counter-example: Swiss Bunker, a mimeses of the landscape and not a fortress) We can write the formulation so that: -fzapparence = Zadeh_OR(fzDeclare, Multiply_AND(fzEngineer, fzStrategy, fzMimicry, fzChameleon)) Given - fzappearance = max(fzDeclare, min(fzEngineer, fzStrategie, MimicryStructure, fzChameleon)) For Sainte Bernadette the values are; fzDeclare = 0 (false), fzEngineer = 0, fzStrategy = 0, fz MimicryStructure = 1, fzChameleon = 1) / Given fzappearance = max(0, min(0,0,1,1)) / fzappearance = 0 We can assert therefore that according to the modes of belonging attributed to the members of the family of what it seems to be, this building cannot be equated with that family (value zero) and remains other than what it seems to be. 1) Rauschenberg made this white monochrome by deliberately erasing a drawing by de Kooning. 2) The Todt Line, named after the engineer Fritz Todt, in charge of building of the Atlantikwall. 3) Andre Bloc, le monolithe fracturé, Catalogue of French Pavilion, Biennale of Venice 1996, F. Migayrou 4) To name 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).” Stéphane Mallarmé gre(Y)en / 2010 (a history of local operative criticism) NewT … that seems to pretend to be a history of the stuttering position between Green and Grey, between chlorophyll addiction, the dream of an ideal biotope, re-primitivized, re-artificialized, in pursuit of the lost paradise, the lost Eden Park, a story for little boys and girls to put their fears to bed and … the Grey, the deep Grey, which never appears in the visible spectrum … (“The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he did not exist,” said Baudelaire ) … an antagonism of stealth forces, an embedded demon: mixture of contradictory human desires emerging from the mud, from permanent, unpredictable, and irreducible conflicts … factor of domination and servitude, destruction and emergences, which fireworks an unlimited source of arrogance and illusion, through which the notions of success and failure depend on a kind of absurd Pendulum of life and death, which, as an Infinite unstable movement, caresses the boundaries of them both … polymerizing ugliness and beauty, obstacles and possibilities, waste materials and efflorescence, threats and protection, technological phantasms and the revenge of nature into a knot, into a process of becoming, a never-ending movement … the Grey—where we glide into this silky, strange sensation that scares you and caresses you … that scares you and caresses you … Faced with the autistic, blind, deaf, and mute violence of our technological, industrial, mercantile, and human servo-mechanisms, we are at the crossroads where nature reacts … with violence and without warning, in a faltering of the original chaos … in mutiny against the organization of men … Gaia seems to take revenge (Katrina, El Niño, Cyclone Jeanne, Tomas and Nargis, the Xynthia storm, Ewiniar typhoon, Indonesian and Japanese earthquakes, collateral tsunamis all the way to Fukushima … 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 a rebellion armed with infernal force … Nature is not an ideological “green washing” 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 that get 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 thought he could take without giving anything in exchange, without transaction … war has been declared … nature’s revenge is not a bedtime story for innocent minds … our bellicose enemy operates openly … in the light of day … ultimate arrogance … How can we reveal the conflict between strategies of “knowledge and domination” of the first and the monstrous and wildly beautiful destruction of the other … as the field of an unpredictable battle, disconnected, cleared of all the greenish moralism jumble and its post-capitalism lure … ? … To help us feel this ambivalence, this permanent disequilibrium, where contingencies are the main factor in emergences, let us navigate in this history of “gre(Y)en” … … From a physiological early simple dualism “shadow & light” in 1990 where Neuschwanstein Grotto is f®ictionally adjusted to Playtime mirror reflection, weakly connecting a cavernous, dark, humid, sensorially-primitive atmosphere with its schizophrenically antagonist and twin brother, crystalline, cold, luminous, dry, technologically-blind as the recognition of an impossible stuttered dialogue, to … a “Growing up” for chlorophyll energy and entropy in 1993 which will collapse and strangle a fragile “chicken legs” house, wrapped and dominated masochistically by the danger of its own predictable death, if the maintenance is not ritualized by the owner as a permanent conflict against the structure’s destructive strength and his need to survive … to a blur petrochemical “Filtration” in 1997, with 5000m2 of plastic stripes floating in the trees, on the edge of a seasonal tidy wild river, carrying nitrate and insecticide plastic bag residues that the farmer abandoned on the bank of his field, waiting for this rising of the water as a depolluting natural service, in charge of erasing the trace of his chemical addiction, and paradoxically back to the visible spectrum when the river is low again, hanging from the branches … the “Filtration” layer reveals through the concentration of the plastic wasted in the canopies an aesthetic countryside planning coming directly from its human managing … to a traveling to the weird … “aqua alta 1.0,” in 1998, sucking up the disgusting viscous over-polluted liquidity called the Venetian Lagoon, to use capillarity’s water forces of the contaminated to infiltrate, literally, the building emergences from these lagoon substances, to … “aqua alta 2.0,” the Venetian bar in 2000 at the Architectural Biennale of Venice where “conventioneers” could refresh themselves by drinking “in live” the lagoon soup, but depolluted through a military purification machine to test in the condition of the Biennale; the schizophrenia between green-washing rhetoric and repulsive digestive paranoia sprung from doubts regarding the reliability of the cleaning engine, that people promote as an efficient technology (for others) … to “shearing,” in 2001, as a simple stealth private House, organizing a simulacrum of its own impermanence and apparent fragility, unfolding in the countryside, but using for the whole envelope the authorized petro-chemistry non-biodegradable fabric spread and disseminated in nature to preserve planted young trees from being destroyed by rabbits, in an agriculture industrial logic … to “Dustyrelief,” in 2002, for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bangkok, where the dust of the city and the residue of the traffic jam (carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide) dressed her skin and her biotope, as the recognition of public transportation failure in the “greynish” equatorial eroticism, where this special fog of specs and particles becomes the traces of hypertrophic human convulsing activity, as a second adaptive nature, through a bottom-up unpredictable un-mastering un-planning city aesthetic. Without delegating power to autocratic and aseptic technocratic experts at the place of the chaotic emergences of the multitudes, the aleatory rhizomes, the arborescent growth are at the same time a factor of her transformation and her operational mode. The non-hygienic intoxicating urban chaos is the sign of its human vitalism, as permanent vibration between Eros and Thanatos … the invisible but breathable substances are bred, attracted by electrostatism machine to “skin” the hairy freak, exacerbating a schizo climate between indoor (white cube and labyrinth in an Euclidian geometry) and outdoor (dust relief on topologic geometry) … and … and in a second step collecting the particle substances, dropped down in the monsoon period, through drainage systems … to create on the side the tea pavilion extension directly coming from the compacted particles brick produced “by” the failure and the beauty of the city … to the … “mosquitosbottleneck” scenario, in Trinidad, 2002, trying to negotiate with the infestation of the Nile Virus carried by mosquitos, the recognition of this disease as an objective paranoia triggering strategies for safety, in a weekend residential house. The fragile net, through a Klein bottle apparatus, preserves, protects, but also disjoins the living of the first in resonance with the death of the other. And the sound of their agony, buzzing in the double trapped membrane, becomes the proof of the efficiency of the system, preserving human against nature, against its offensive biotope, protected and surrounded by the theatre of its own barbarity … to the buffalo Machismo no-tech Machinism in “HybridMuscle,” in 2003, Thailand, as a local mammal muscling power station, lifting with gears of a two-ton steel counterweight, transformed in a battery house, transformed first into an electricity plug and connections and secondly in pneumatic rubber muscles movement of leaves in elastomer membrane to wind the suffocating hot sweaty climate … as a endogeneous-exogeneous storytelling … to the “greengorgon,” in 2005, as phasmid morphologies, embedded in a wood, which feed the confusion between artificial and domesticated nature … where all the outdoor surfaces are dedicated to vertical wet swamp recycling the inert grey water … as a purification plan infrastructure, rejecting only clean liquidities in the Léman Lake … to the “Mipi,” in 2006, a PI Bar in the temple of cognitive science, the MIT-Cambridge campus, as an extension of the Media Lab, to experiment through urine therapy absorption, the immunotherapy of the individual human production, including a schizoid balance between disgusting and healthy effect … to a stochastic machine that vitrifies the city, in “Olzweg,” 2006, starting the contamination from a radical architecture museum in the pursuit of Frederick Kiesler endlessnesslessness. This smearing is done through the industrial glass recycling (mainly French wines bottles), swallowed and vomited through a process of staggering, scattering, and stacking by a twelve-meter-high machine. The random aggregation is a part of this unpredictable transformation, as a fuzzy logic of the vanishing point. The machine works to extend the museum and collect “voluntary prisoners” wrapped in the permanent entropy of the graft, testing the glass maze through its multiple uncertain trajectories, to loose themselves and rediscover this heterotopian, non-panoptical sensation of their youngness, using if necessary PDA on RFID to rediscover their positioning … the opposite of an architecture that petrifies, historicizes, panopticalizes … to the “waterflux, ” in 2007, for a scenario scooping out hollows in a full wood volume by a five-axes drill machine with 1000 trees (2000m3) coming directly from the maintenance of the forest around the location of extracting-manufacturing-transformation, as a anthroposophic logic, where technologies and machine are territorialized from the site, endemic to a situation and its mutation, reactivating accessorily local forest economy … to the “gardenofearthlydelights,” in 2008, a toxic garden in a new green house in Croatia, on the site of an old Middle Ages Apotiker Franciscan monk medical plantation, protected behind a restricted area, but able to be tasted and tested through a distillation de-concentration machinism process, and bar … only by voluntary desire, in a similar way to the Japanese “Fugu” physiological and psychological effects … with an “at your own risk” protocol, and where ecosophy is considered as a global interaction, porous to the human body, as a Gaia exchange, a chain of interaction and dependences … articulating life and death and its knitting paranoia … to “Heshotmedown,” in 2008, for a tracked biomass machine penetrating into the (De)Militarized Zone, the DMZ, between North and South Korea, collecting the rotten substances, the superficial coating of the forest in decomposition, and bringing back this material to plug all the external surfaces of the ballistic-like building, for a natural eco-insulation, through the fermentation of the grass and the heat coming from its chemical transformation. Full of land mines, the DMZ is a restricted zone, where North and South never stop playing the Cold War. The machine collects the ingredients of this pathological period and recycles them for productive use, from a highly dangerous no-man’s land abandoned since the end of the war (more than half a century ago), which come back to its natural wildness, with the reappearing of elves, wizards, witches, and harpies, and some new vegetal species. Legends and fairy tales are transported out of the deepness of the forest, as in a Stalker experiment to touch the unknown … to “I’mlostinParis,” in 2008, as a laboratory for bacterial culture, called the “Rhizobium” agent, cultivated in 200 beakers, for its potential to increase nitrogen percentages without the chemical manure of the substrate of each plant, after the re-injection of this substance into the individual nutritional aeroponic system … for a Rear Window minimum distance to the conservatism and “petite bourgeois” nature of a Parisian neighborhood, the opposite view on a closed courtyard … this Devil’s Rock emergence is constituted by 2000 ferns from the Devonian period, technologically domesticated to survive in the actual “regressive monarchic French period” … to a paranoiac system, the “TbWnD” (the building which never dies), in 2011, an alert detection or a marker of our past/future symptoms: a Zumtobel laboratory on “dark adaptation” and on solar radiation intensity detection, covered by phosphorescent components (“Isobiot®opic” oxide pigment made from raw uranium) working as a UV sensor and detector to indicate and analyze the intensity of the UV rays that touched the area by day (including on humans and all other species). 5000 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 coming from ozone weakness (industrial pollution / CO2) combined with the paranoia coming from the last century’s scientific ignorance or criminality, developed by the exploitation of the characteristic of some natural element … to several escaping, coming first through a utopian protocol “an architecture des ‘humeurs’,” in 2011, with a self-organized... ...urbanism conditioned by a bottom-up system in which the multitudes 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 bioscience, 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 information about individuals’ adaptation, sympathy, empathy, and conflict, when confronted with a particular situation and environment … to adaptions to the “malentendus” of this result, to an endless process of construction through “machinism” un-determinism and unpredictable behavior with the development 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 comprised of successive geometrics according to a strategy of permanent production of anomalies … with no standardization, no repetition, except for the procedures and protocols, at the base of this technoid slum’s emergence … and … last but not least, the last experiment, the “hypnosisroom,” in 2006 (Paris) and 2012 (Japan) … using a hypnosis session for a star-gate effect, in the pursuit of the Somnambulist feminine political movement, from the first half of the nineteenth century, using hypnosis (called “magnetism” at the time) in an attempt to develop spaces of freedom, an egalitarian, un-racial, un-sexist social contract, that could not be perceived and explored without travelling through this layer … at the opposite end of the impossibility (or difficulty) of modifying the mechanisms of the real, tangible, political state of the world … this pre-feminist movement sought, on the contrary, to create this suggestive, immersive, and distanced layer of another social contract … Although demonized and treated as charlatanism, 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,” Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire, 1858. 2) Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” as the first scenario of Bachelor Machines 3) Neuschwanstein Castle and its artificial romantic grotto were commissioned by Ludwig II of Bavaria as a retreat and a homage to Richard Wagner. 4) Playtime (1967) is a movie by Jacques Tati that portrays a glass-cold-deterritorialized futurist urbanism. 5) A machine using both ozone and ceramic system to create drinkable water, without the right from Italian authorities to call it “Natural Venice Water.” 6) We could spend more time on this project / This scenario in Switzerland is located in La Fauchère near Evolène (Waterflux). We won a competition ten years ago for a centre for glaciology and geology (Le Cairn), initiated by the foundation La Maison des Alpes. You need sometimes ten or 20 years in Switzerland to complete a project, so it is still running. We did the entire studies for the construction, and now we are in the time of fund-raising– the budget is 15 Mio. The building will be erected at around 1’500 meters above sea level in a mountainous area where – 20 years ago – the location was covered by a glacier. It will look somehow like a cocoon and be made entirely of wood. A five axes drill machine will scoop out hollows within the wooden volume as if it is an ice cavity. So you could say that one natural element, the glacier, will be substituted by another natural element, the pine. We want to understand how we can cut the material and how we can shape the architecture by extracting, by cutting out through a sophisticated technological process of transformation which use the material directly from the situation. The building is monstrous in a way, as a Rabelaisian building – talking about this chimera or this kind of stuttering between existing nature, primitive nature and how the technology could transform them both. So we intend to log trees from the nearby forest with a machine and bring the wood to a village at the bottom of the mountain. For this project we are not designing a special machine, but are using a tremendous CNC machine driven by computers. So we will come back with roughly 180 elements, each of them unique and singular and will reassemble them on site, as a topological Lego, with branches outside to maintain the illusion of the snow in a warming environment period to a topological shape similar to the melting ice cavern, indoor, as the dilemma of the glacier disappearing, as a schizophrenia. The Val d’Hérens, the valley where Evolène is located, is a region with potential seismic activity, with earthquake risk, so we also try to invent a possibility to project this dangerousness onto the building: But in fact we reinforce in appearance the fragility of the multiple stacking elements in equilibrium. The wood we are using is absorbing through the variation of its thickness, depending on location in the building, the structures, the insulation, the waterproofing. Some of indoor space are frozen at -10°C interior, like an attempt to keep the frozen fragments of a lost paradise, “what was the alpine mountain” before the changing of climate, as a sanctuary. As usual in Swiss project, architect has to convince the people to avoid a petition against it. So last year I was in front of 1500 people, and the mayor predicted to me that it will be my last day in the village.” But I came with a mask, this kind of pagan mask that local people are traditionally using on “mardi gras” (Fat Tuesday), at a carnival, to historically exorcise the winter period and jump in the spring vitalism. They wear masks, they scream, they even beat each other up in the street, in a multitude of Bibendum Michelins, filled by grass in a hessian fat suit, running through the streets, as a ritual, as a ceremony of middle age grotesque behaviour. So before the votation, I justified the building insofar as it could exorcise the global warming, testing a line of illogic and subjectivities to argue and articulate the monstrous design. And surprisingly, people, all from this mountain, reacted strangely positively and collectively adopted this interpretation as a plausible one, confusing the mask, the exorcising, and the design… with a high degree of logic and illogic. I was in this case the ideal architect speaking about science but in a pataphysics way, articulating the true and the false, the reason and the madness and mainly the forbidden, where ghosts, witches, wizards, and yetis of the mountains were part of the common sharing knowledge. 7) The Gaia hypothesis is a bio-geo-chemical scientific theory. It states that the earth, including the biosphere, is a dynamic physiological system that has operated in harmony with life for three billion years. 8) Stalker (1979) is a movie by Andrei Tarkovski. It takes place in a kind of after-war interzone where a protocol or ritual has to be strictly followed to avoid waking up the forces nobody knows … 9) A 1954 film by Alfred Hitchcock about voyeurism, relations within a neighborhood, phantasms, and realities … 10) Devil’s Rock is in the United States. It was used by Steven Spielberg as the alien meeting point in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). In the movie, Richard Dreyfus reproduced Devil’s Rock in his own livingroom by destroying, in a lucid rage, a small decorative neighborhood garden in order to get enough material, soil, plants, and mud to build it. 11) From the discovery of the properties of radon by Pierre and Marie Curie, to the plutonium after-effects of the Little Boy atomic bomb. 12) In Spinoza and Negri’s senses. 13) A French word that navigates between “mishearing” and “misunderstanding.” "The last laugh..." / 2015 (soliloquy of the avatar New-Territories) I am neither a wax doll enslaved in a ventriloquist show, nor a kind of toy for post-pubescent children, nor a Voodoo effigy pinned on his door to exorcise demons, nor a photoshoped golem, nor a failed creature of Mary Shelleys twisted imagination... I know, what I am not and that list is long. I am even less the interpretation you make of me: „I am New-Territories, architect, a French both native and immigrant.“ No, my genetic map is Caucasian, Negroid, Asian, and my nature is "both": a transgender, born like Hermaphrodite, I have both sexes and multiple sexualities. I had to go through numerous plateaus of human stupidity, or the only existing BGTG in cabarets, playing the clown at "chez Michou" (sometimes with talent). But, in these days, I must admit, I am tired of being with New Territories for so long. I sent them my decision, irrevocable and definitive, to leave my position, so they no longer use me as their stooge, as their scapegoat, for hide and seek-sex, like an undercover agent... Making me, muddle trough their small problems of the architects... I do not agree anymore with their work, with which they subjected me... it must be possible to escape! I can no longer suffer from the manners and views, they appropriated. In tune with the postmodern charade “Helsinki Guggenheim”, the "Chicago Architecture Biennial" acted as a trigger: assisting the Carnival of Activism, wears Prada, the 'left', and obviously, agitprops in charge to save the planet, misery and Willy... but in the end, however, beforehand, all those that did not correspond to them became a "persona non grata"… which were the occupants, part of the daily routine at the social-centre down-town or rather in front of the Biennial / get the bastards out, these filthy, fat and ugly bodies, with their filthy rubbish-filled shopping carts, all this should disappear... cleaned up... to be among us… permission was granted after passing the super-private-club-silver-class-premium security check... among us, we were allowed daub ourselves with the silly words of outrageous stupidity, from our ingenious flag-bearer Joseph Grima... the human bullshit distillery... and assisting the clownery, stupefying to the fullest at their facebookish, selfish (shee) representation, white, in accordance with the previously agreed 'reac' discourse, pseudo-ecolo trade fair, stroking the mayor’s testicles without worrying that he closed all psychiatric hospitals in the city... among other weapons... the moralizing sperm jet of good conscience of lobotomized grandmothers... paired with the pathological talkativeness and verbiage of those… those who claim to act on the world’s misery, but without coming to terms with it... without ever looking in its eyes... so much they are afraid of... in the depths of “simulacred” museums, which act as a principle of exclusion, if not to say treason... (I would have liked to live as the avatar of Bourdieu, but he did not want), in a room where "the good taste of the dominant social class" is played and dramatized... her glamour... sexy, with Store Front and Fake Frida Kahlo (FFK) as peroxide-blonde master of ceremony and... fairly harmless. Yes, precisely the same... I decided to leave François Roche and all those mother’s boys... let them go under in their self-adulation, in the middle of their cultural soundproof Bunker, "champonyzed", and what now is an orphan. Fate is sealed. My suicide belongs to me... guilty... to reach the void of the dark zone... in the states of souls... ‘The Ex-Avatar of New-Territories’ / 2015 ---------------------------------------- FRENCH PART Processus d’identification logique et raisonné de Sainte Bernadette (de Virilio et Parent) / AA school / 2009 La difficulté d’identification de Sainte Bernadette, ou du moins la possible méprise de son identité, comme une suite d’interprétations hasardeuses ou purement analogiques, nous obligent ici à requalifier Sainte Bernadette par ce dont il ne s’agit pas. La logique d’appartenance, de l’ordre de la reconnaissance des formes n’est pas plus opérante que celle qui consisterait à confondre le monochrome blanc de Rauschenberg [1] à celui de Malevitch, pire encore au blanc silencieux de John Cage Ce qui nous est donné à voir, n’est pas réductible, à la rémanence psychique de la ligne Todt[2] La logique d’identification, la logique d’appartenance à un ensemble circonscrit, dit ‘’identifiable’’, et permettant de statuer sur la nature de l’objet est précisément sur Sainte Bernadette un piège. Le ‘’Bloc’’ [3] de Claude Parent (avec la complicité préalable de Virilio) ne peut être nommé [4]. Il constitue lui-même le piège tendu à celui qui confondrait sa propre perception avec la re-connaissance ‘’explicite’’ de l’objet lui-même. Cette singularité opère via un hiatus entre ses propriétés perceptives et fonctionnelles, au travers de leur relation conflictuelle voir antinomique. Et c’est de la que réside son incomparable résistance, celle de n’être pas ce qu’il parait être. Le théâtre des interprétations est complexe, mais aussi trompeur : Est-ce une métaphore, au sens d’une figure de style permettant de passer d’un monde à un autre… est-ce une imitation, dans l’ère de la reproductibilité technique au sens de W. Benjamin… ou est-ce une mimesis, au sens premier, de révéler la réalité cachée... est-ce une illusion, voir un spectre, comme une chose qui emprunterait sa réalité au corps d’un autre, et qui aurait mal choisi son hôte, ou un Poltergeist, qui tenterait de nous avertir de… A l inverse de cette logique de certitude, de cette logique déterministe (Booléenne) qui nous abusent, nous pourrions, pour qualifier Sainte Bernadette, s’essayer aux protocolex mathématiques de la logique flou (fuzzing logic), intégrant des degrés d’incertitude afin de ne pas réduire la condition de son état au seul fait qu’elle soit ou ne soit pas ce qu’elle parait être. Soit donc un algorithme, basé sur les operateurs de logique floue Zahed qui puisse rendre compte des hypothèses d’identification et de leurs contradictions. Soit la fonction (fzapparence) qui permet au bâtiment d’être ou de ne pas être ce qu’il semble être (choix Booléens 0 et/ou 1). Soit si : - Il est déclaré officiellement comme étant ce qu’il semble être / fzDeclare (le principe ‘’officiel’’ devant être émis par la sphère militaire). Soit si - Il a été construit via une ingénierie militaire / fzIngenieur (contre exemple ; la Casbah et la bataille d’Alger) - Il a été ou sera utilisé dans une stratégie guerrière / fzStrategie (contre exemple ; le monolithe de l’homme au pistolet d’or par Ken Adams, Phang Gna Thailand)) - Il a été construit par un procédé de coulage monolithique de béton armé / fzMimicryStructure (contre-exemple ; maison en Béton massif d’Edison en 1907) - Il ressemble à ce qu’il semble être / fzChamelon (contre-exemple ; Bunker Suisse, mimétique au paysage, et non à la forteresse) Nous pouvons établir la formulation tel quel : -fzapparence = Zadeh_OR(fzDeclare, Multiply_AND(fzIngenieur, fzStrategie, fzMimicry, fzChamelon)) Qui se décline en : -fzapparence = max(fzDeclare, min( fzIngenieur, fzStrategie, MimicryStructure, fzChamelon)) Pour les valeurs de Sainte Bernadette / fzDeclare=0 (faux), fzIngenieur=0, fzStrategie =0, fz MimicryStructure = 1, fzChamelon=1) / fzapparence = max(0, min(0,0,1,1)) / soit fzapparence = 0 --------------------- On peut soutenir que par la même, et selon les modes d’appartenance des membres de la famille de ce qu’il semble être, ce bâtiment ne peut être assimilé à cette famille (valeur 0) et reste étranger à ce qu’il semble être. [1] Monochrome blanc de Rauscherberg qui est constitué de l’effacement volontaire d’un dessin de De Kooning) [2] Ligne Todt, du nom de l’ingénieur Fritz Todt, en charge de l’Atlantikwall ou mur de l’atlantique [3] F. Migayrou, André Bloc, Le monolithe fracturé, Catalogue du Pavillon Français, Biennale de Venise 1996 [4] ‘’Nommer un objet, c'est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance…qui est faite de deviner peu à peu : le suggérer, voilà le rêve... Il doit y avoir toujours énigme…il n'y en a pas d'autres d'évoquer les objets (sans les nommer)’’ S. Mallarmé Strategies grises / 2003 Une écriture pliée et repliée à partir de « L’esclave maître » de Dominique Quessada, Vertical, 2002 Un texte, caché entre les pages d'un passeport Français carbonisé pour mieux dissimuler une parole suspecte : une parole qui dissèque méchamment la chair de la singularité de celle de la meute, entre « l’»architecte et « les » architectes, entre deux profils, deux types morpho-psychologiques qui ne cessent de négocier leur propre survie, leur propre précarité, sorte de frères siamois d'un algorithme noué : 1&2, 1+2, 1/2 = « l’» + « les » = ... 1) « l’» architecte est celui qui, va tenter de faire émerger une stratégie esthétique, au creux des complexités d’une société afin d’en révéler les palpitations, même contradictoires. « l’» architecte prend seul le risque de l’émission d’un scénario inédit, générant ainsi une configuration particulière et singulière. Ni auréolée de Don Quichottisme, ni drapée de romantisme, cette attitude n’émerge qu’au travers d’une prise de risque individuelle. On ne peut que lui en faire crédit. 2) A l’opposé, « les » architectes par nature grégaires, inféodés à un mode corporatiste, ne peuvent émettre d’idées, d’hypothèses que si celles-ci ont été préalablement validées par leur milieu professionnel. Asservis à ce mode de consommation/diffusion, ils se déplacent en meute, pour mieux diluer leurs propres culpabilités de prédateurs. Ne pouvant revendiquer publiquement leur collaborationnisme direct aux mécanismes dominants, bien qu’ils en soient les principaux vecteurs, « les » architectes l’habillent de convulsions nombrilistes, de rebellions feintes, d’asservissements plaintifs, d’émancipations sociales et d’envolées lyriques. Par là même, ils en masquent les malversations quotidiennes, les arrangements de salon et leur laideur : « Carnaval des activismes » en Prime Time et modes opératoires dans les boudoirs insonorisés. « les » architectes corrompent les discours, manipulent les concours, la morale leur sert de porte-étendard, et les responsabilités sociales de gri-gri ou d’agitprop. Ils vivent et transpirent la profonde hypocrisie de la nature humaine, ils en sont consubstantiels. L’espace est leur terrain de jeux, leur levier de contrôle, de coercition. La modernité libérale avait besoin d’un profil morpho-psychologique qui transcende son aliénation pour mieux la faire subir aux autres, aux innombrables, à ceux qui ne savent pas. Nous y sommes…là…là même…au creux…mais pas seulement… « les » architectes sont aussi ceux qui métabolisent la nouveauté irréductible de « l’ » architecte pour l’ensemble de la société, fût-ce au prix d’une annulation pure et simple de la nouveauté en question. Ainsi l’architecture est-elle engagée dans un double processus où « les » architectes participent collectivement à l’obscurcissement et à ce que l’on pourrait appeler l’oubli de soi de l’architecture, alors que« l’ » architecte construit l’architecture individuellement en traçant des idées…mais ne pouvant que rarement les faire émerger dans les strates du réel. Il existe donc une véritable lutte entre celui qui crée et ceux qui vectorisent, voir copient. Ces derniers suturent la nouveauté parce qu’elle est socialement non métabolisable à l’état brut. Cette nouveauté, cette étrangeté de la chose inédite est inassimilable directement parce que celle-ci n’est pas de l’ordre de ce qui se consomme aisément. Copier, c’est alors le rôle des « rivaux », des « prétendants », ceux qui se disent aussi l’ami de celui qui émet la chose inédite, ceux qui se disent ami de « l’ » architecte ; à ceci près qu’en dehors du cannibalisme qu’ils opèrent, le contenu n’est véhiculé que très superficiellement. Les imitateurs fabriquent alors une copie qui bouche la fissure de ce que cette chose avait provoquée. Cette activité imitative compose avec le politique, ce que la chose inédite construit contre lui. Il existe donc deux versants de l’activité touchant à la création ; celui qui consiste à créer la chose et celui qui consiste à l’absorber, la répliquer sommairement ou maladroitement pour mieux la sociabiliser dans un univers de post-consommation. « l’ » architecte se trouve au centre du temps de l’architecture, en temps réel, et « les » architectes au cœur de son histoire, en temps différé. Ce que l’on nomme l’histoire de l’architecture est donc en fait une histoire de ce temps différé de l’architecture. C’est parce qu’elles ont été transformées en marchandises, que les choses inédites reformatées en produits peuvent être utilisées, annulées, employées, socialisées, détournées ou apprivoisées, en tout cas manipulés – par le media-capitalisme notamment. On peut ainsi supposer à l’architecture deux pulsions antagonistes : l’une critique qui émet ces choses sans pouvoir toujours les construire et l’autre collaborationniste qui se profile et se conjugue avec les forces techno structurelles, politiques et administratives. Toujours située entre résistance et collaboration l’architecture possède ainsi deux faces complémentaires, alimentant dans la lutte permanente qu’elles entretiennent, son mouvement et son déplacement dans le temps et l’espace à la manière d’un crabe sur la plage (en zig zag). On peut donc comprendre la fonction imitative, fonction profondément ancrée dans l’histoire de l’architecture, des traités, des revues, des enseignements et des modes de transmissions et l’admettre (faut-il encore l'identifier là ou elle apparait) comme un mal nécessaire, mieux comme l’envers de la pièce de monnaie, qui n’aurait pas de valeur sans sa présence. La fonction imitative nourrit l’imitateur, parfois grassement mais plus profondément elle entretient avec l’original, la chose inédite une relation de dépendance qui va permettre de lui attribuer un statut : celui justement, de l’origine. Et c’est là que s’opère le transfert, la transaction sans laquelle ni l’un, ni l’autre ne peuvent prétendre exister. L'ambiguité viendrait plutôt du manque de transparence, de visibilité de ce système d'échange, qui n'a de véritablement incestueux que l'assimilation de ces icônes citationnelles à des choses inédites...alors qu'elle n'en sont que les effets collatéraux... TE(E)N YEARS AFTER merci à l’ange noir, « Sie... » _Biotopes 1990-1995 1) Entropie / 1991 L’urbanisation du XXIe siècle couvrira 50% des terres de la planète pour 80% de ses habitants. Sorte de continuum d’activités humaines, sans début ni fin, sans centre ni périphérie. Cette surface uniforme, grise d’enchevêtrement de réseaux, de pavillonnaires, d’illusoires « espaces verts » et de quelques totems sera l’héritage du XXe siècle. Certes, notre grande clairvoyance nous aura poussé à protéger quelques fragments noyés dans ce tissu, par ici quelques hectares de forêt amazonienne, par là un Rockefeller Center, Pigalle, le Zoo de Londres... Et face à cette urbanisation proliférante, quelques territoires vierges en réalité inhabitables : vallée de la mort, océan Arctique, Grand Erg occidental et j’en passe. Rappel des faits : il fut un temps où la cité s’ancrait là où le topo pouvait contenir, défendre, alimenter la vie. Un contrat d’urbanité reliait le développement de la cité à sa sécurité et cimentait le contrat social. L’occupation foncière était de fait une jouissance protectrice, un droit à la vie. La cité, par son autonomie défensive et politique, instaurait avec la nature des rapports d’altérité et de dépendance. Mais l’équilibre précaire entre ces deux états distincts, la ville et l’en dehors de la ville, n’a pas pu résister au nouveau concept de territorialité de l’Etat-nation. L’unité géographique de la cité ne se superposant plus à celle politique, elle n’avait plus de raison de la contenir. Le principe d’équilibre rompu (cité/nature) signait simultanément la mort de l’une et la naissance de l’autre, du glissement de la cité à la ville, de l’unité limitée à celle extensive. L’entropie devenue planétaire, nous assistons à la recherche d’un nouveau point d’équilibre, thermodynamique, où les formes d’enchâssement, d’aspiration réciproque et de gaspillage entre nature vacante et densité humaine ne font que commencer. En 2050, 80% de la population mondiale sera urbaine. Une nouvelle culture urbaine est à développer et ce n’est pas tant l’opposition entre la ville et son en dehors qui nous intéresse que la nature même de la ville dans ce nouvel écosystème de frottements contingents. 2)« Mimesis » / 1992 ...ça procède par variation, expansion, conquête, traversée, recyclage, adaptation, imitation, capture, baiser, modification... C’est un rapport à l’animal, au végétal, au monde, au politique, à l’artifice, en ligne de fuite. Une petite machine de guerre, pistolet automatique de combinaisons, d’associations beaucoup plus importantes que l’innovation, machine de rêves, en butte contre les méthodes, les messianismes, les utopies factices de bonheur, l’état naturel, les symboles, les progrès quand ils sont illusoires. Quand tout a basculé pour de bon dans n’importe quoi, le grand froid, la guérilla urbaine et tout le bordel, reste un sixième sens, des terminaisons nerveuses et des réflexes de défense. ...ça ne prend pas le maquis, ne fait pas de la résistance. C’est un principe de réalité qui ne cherche pas à avoir raison contre le quotidien du désordre mais marche gaiement sur ses décombres, ça vit au grand jour ...ça bricole, recycle, recompose en tous sens historiques, ça fait rêver ce qui existe, ça n’invente pas, ça vibre dans la forme des histoires et des langues locales, petits contes, provisions de fables et récits obtenus par collage de dernière minute. Rêve de matière, de climats sociaux, de terrains vagues et d’intimité rehaussée. C’est méchant aussi, pas vraiment prêt à plier et à se taire. Et puis c’est naïf et plein de trouvailles, obligé de se frayer un chemin à travers le monstrueux dépôt du bric-à-brac social… 3)Habiter / 1993 Etat des lieux : une porte cochère, un premier code, de l’espace public à l’immeuble. Un deuxième, quelques mètres plus loin, l’entrée du bâtiment N°1, de la copropriété à la cage d’escalier. Au quatrième, c’est une porte-blindée-trois-points-serrure-Fichet, syndrome maladif de la sécurité, un premier motif de solitude. Isolé du monde, dans la bulle de survie, étanche, climatisée, insonorisée, il ne reste plus qu’a faire gueuler la T.V, seule fenêtre ouverte sur l’extérieur de cet abri, deuxième motif de solitude. Et dans cet ennui, on se prend à rêver du temps où l’escalier inhalait la cuisine de la concierge, du temps où le bruit de la rue nous parvenait encore, du temps ou le voisin du dessus s’occupait de nos insomnies, du temps ou l’architecture participait à la sociabilisation des groupes humains et non à leur atomisation, du temps ou les nuisances, les odeurs, les bruits, les conflits, les frôlements inscrivaient nos propres sensations dans un processus d’échange. L’évolution du logement ne s'est limitée qu’à la surdéfinition et à l’individualisation de son espace et de son confort. Du tout à l’égout antique, à l’innervation XIXe (eau et gaz à tous les étages), de l’hygiénisme début du siècle à la surenchère « crise pétrolière » (isolation phonique, climatique...) de l’hypertrophie télématique à la pizza à domicile, l’acte d’habiter s’est orienté de gré ou de force vers une fonction réduite, utérine, du replis sur soi, dans la négation de l’en-dehors. L’architecture, en participant à ce processus d’atomisation, n’a fait que le radicaliser. Pas étonnant que dans ces conditions la T.V. fasse un tel tabac. Face à cette dérive « carcérale » et à cette glaciation fonctionnelle, il serait légitime de réévaluer l’énonciation architecturale de la domesticité au regard des espèces corporelles qui l’habite. Pour exemple, qu’on se souvienne de la coupe sociale d’un immeuble XIXème ou se côtoyaient l’artisan et la famille du concierge au rez-de-chaussée, les riches bourgeois au premier, les petits bourges au second, les commerçants du rez-de-chaussée au quatrième, les pauvres au cinquième, et le chat sur le toit. Ou deuxième exemple, qu’on se souvienne de l’activité sur la terrasse haute, séchoir à linge… La fonction habiter est une fonction de complexité, fonction d’interface entre soi et le monde extérieur, d’usage et d’échange. A trop vouloir mettre en scène une fonction de repli, fut-elle livrée aux dernières technologies du confort, on a oublié son rôle de médiation. C’est dans le mythe entretenu de la propriété indivisible que naissent les tireurs-barres-années-soixantes. Le bruit les dépossédant de leur bien et le contrat d’isolation rompu, aucun garde-fou collectif ne peut enrayer le fusil à pompe. L’empilement de logements ne peut servir de ciment social, fut-il de béton. Aux architectes alors de proposer des lieux intermédiaires de la domesticité, ni totalement dedans, ni totalement dehors, d’offrir des lieux qui puissent servir comme antidote à la délocalisation télématique, à l’illusion d’autonomie, des lieux rechargés de corporalité, de frottement, d’échange transitif entre l’individu, le groupe et son environnement (autre que la cage d’ascenseur…). Le système de production du logement n’a privilégié qu’un stricte rapport privatif (y compris en location), flattant le citoyen là où il est le plus fragile (sur ce sentiment de propriété) et minimisé de fait, pour des ratios de rentabilité, toute interface entre la rue et la cellule. (Les systèmes d’aides ne font qu’accentuer cet état de fait en indexant le crédit au seul critère de la surface privative). Le logement s’est donc à la fois atomisé dans l’espace et dans l’usage, sur un mode commun d’isolement. Réhabiliter ce concept de voisinage, de mixité, de bruits, de nuisances, c’est certainement réenclencher le premier atome de la collectivité. Il suffirait simplement que l’architecture domestique évite de superposer au contrat social un contrat spatial factice. 4) L’ombre du caméléon / 1994 Je connais des gens qui sont nés avec la vérité dans leur berceau, je ne leur ressemble pas. Certains détiennent un credo, une mission, une pensée, d’autres la plagient dans une idéologie de faussaire. Je ne suis ni des uns ni des autres, je m’intéresse aux chemins multiples, complexes, où l’architecture ne se draperait plus de son autonomie princière et se nourrirait enfin des territoires qu’elle était sensée dominer. Mais loin d’être fier de voir au milieu des aveugles, je tiens pour peu de chose la faculté de voir si celle-ci n’est pas partagée. Les architectes ont invariablement incarné la domination de l’homme sur la nature, de la ville sur l’écosystème, du plein sur le vide. Le territoire n’a finalement été, au mieux qu’un objet trouvé, au pire un alibi, corvéable à merci, et notre métier semble s’être isolé, égoïste et nombriliste, limité à des exercices de style et des querelles de chapelle. L’architecture, née dans le berceau des utopies, ne s’est jamais débarrassée de sa gangue perverse, auréolée de prédiction progressiste et de futur meilleur... L’histoire existe Enfants des années 70, « d’après la bataille », orphelins des maîtres-penseurs, que nous reste t-il à produire dans un monde qui n’est pas fait pour nous ? Nos réquisitoires, condamnés à être déformés, récupérés, détournés par cette génération « qui-a-pris-la-parole », passent inaperçus. Aveuglée de ses combats perdus, elle se refuse à en décoder les exigences et la substance, et par le brouillage qu’elle entretient, instrumentation de son propre pouvoir, elle ne fait que retarder sa chute. Le siècle à venir ne sera pas le sien. Mais à vouloir reconstruire un univers qui ne soit pas emprunté, ni par ceux qui « savent », ni par ceux qui simulent, la marginalisation, si l’on n’y prend garde, nous guette. Dans un système qui n’a de souci que son propre miroir, peu se doutent que l’objet d’architecture ait à ce point implosé, inutile donc de s’accrocher à ce qu’il fût ou à ce qu’il devrait être. Situé à l’intersection d’enjeux politiques, de tensions économiques, territoriales et sociales, aiguillonné par de constantes mutations technologiques et industrielles, il est irréversiblement condamné à être tiraillé et déchiré en tous sens. Et pourtant rien ne justifie qu’on prenne le parti éclectique d’un tel état de fait, dans la revendication aveugle du chaos généralisé. Bien au contraire, celui-ci appellerait à l’exacerbation de choix éthico politiques qui puissent réinvestir des processus de sens et inverser le gaspillage auquel on assiste. Que la lecture des lieux et des milieux devienne l’essence même de l’acte. Que les credo, les individualismes soient contorsionnés, infiltrés, enchâssés sur et contre ce qu’ils s’apprêtaient à détruire. Que les effets de style savamment ressassés soient à l’écoute des équilibres territoriaux préalables : de l’ordre du climat, du vent, de l’usure et des saisons, des pleins et des vides, du temps et de la matière première, dépouillés. Que finalement nous apprenions à en faire MOINS pour faire AVEC. La nostalgie est une arme Il nous faut réinventer une architecture, animiste, sensuelle, primitive, politique, antidote aux aveuglements d’une modernité bavarde, à la fois optimiste et lucide face aux constats d’inquiétude d’une planète en feu. Réinventer une architecture, nullement pour relancer un style, une école, une théorie à vocation hégémonique, mais pour recomposer, dans les conditions d’aujourd’hui, l’énonciation même de notre métier. Les paysages, fussent-ils urbains, périphériques, naturels ou labourés ont des codes topographiques, affectifs, climatiques. C’est à travers ces lieux et ces milieux qu’il nous faut opérer. Evidemment, leurs constitutions ne se livrent qu’à ceux qui prennent le temps d’y rester, parfois même d’y vivre. Le « code génétique de la territorialité » n’est pas une recette à estampiller, un label politically correct, pour yuppies en mal d’idéologie mais un processus de contact à renouveler sur chaque expérience. Rendre visible N’y voyez rien de bucolique, de gentiment écolo, d’alibi végétal, la graine à la main. Ce processus d’infiltration nécessite des moyens d’intervention qui soient à l’échelle des territoires empruntés, ainsi qu’une rééducation de notre raison d’être. Ce plaidoyer pour une architecture du temps et de l’usure, des sens et du sens, à la fois humaine et territoriale, n’aurait pas de matière si nous ne pouvions l’enrichir de nouvelles compétences entre la cartographie, la géologie, la reconnaissance raisonnée des préalables et l’évolution des technologies afin de produire non pas de cette cuisine réchauffée et stérile des académies, fussent-elles « contemporaines », mais de fruits et de légumes frais, de viandes et de poissons frais, une architecture sur le tranchant de l’art-et de l’histoire-de ce siècle. Par un emballage photosensible aux proximités, par une refonte de sa fonction première, elle limiterait ainsi sa « vocation » d’isolement, pour se plier aux variations des climats, des atmosphères, des topographies et des usages dans un réquisitoire transformiste. Moins est une possibilité Lancinante est cette nécessité de se tenir proche de ce qui nous redonnerait le sens des responsabilités, à l’égard de notre propre survie et dans un sentiment de fusion avec les éléments. Le monde aristotélicien des apparences, des artefacts, ne serait-il pas finalement tout aussi valide que celui des idées et des concepts. Il nous suffirait simplement de composer avec ce réel, qui reste malgré tout notre seul abri, dans une intercession entre nos propres désirs et ce qu’ils étaient censé dominer. 5) Situations / 1996 Je me souviens des dernières paroles de Guattari fin 1980 qui associait cette décennie aux années de l'hiver et de la glaciation. Il est mort avant de voir celles qui suivaient, ou l'individualisme voire même les petites lâchetés en sont le fond de commerce. Boursouflement de l'ego manipulé par les institutions malades qui nous font marcher sur les frêles béquilles de la reconnaissance inutile. Génération des soi-disant années glorieuses, née sur les barricades, qui fière de son échec idéologique s'accroche aux rênes du pouvoir et du discours, moralistes et obscènes. Que de manipulations dans le reflet d'un miroir déformant qui nous ghettoïsent un peu plus chaque jour. Otages des labels, des primes au succès, des cocktails et des baisemains. L’architecture, rien d’autre qu’une société d’élégants sympathiques sirotant non sans cynisme la coupe de leur propre inutilité. Et si nous assistions schizophrènes à notre propre relégation. Et si finalement nous ne servions plus à rien ? Et si finalement tout notre petit outillage nourri sur les expériences de ce siècle était déconnecté, en roue libre, académisé et instrumentalisé ? Les architectes n’ont jamais eu à leur disposition un arsenal (c’est le cas de le dire) de formes et de codes esthétiques aussi développés et multiples qu’aujourd’hui. On comprend donc la fascination de produire son bâtiment au firmament de l’esthétique (qu’elle soit déconstructiviste, moderne, écolo, industrielle et j’en passe) sans s’apercevoir que la nécessité de faire de l’architecture est ailleurs que dans les énièmes problématiques de style. Les bateleurs et badineurs en tout genre n'ont jamais été aussi puissants que dans le brouillage qu'ils alimentent à relayer ces objets labellisés culture comme caution de leur propre importance, otages des codes des marchés publics et de leur fausse transparence, à la fois dans leur attribution et dans leur montage. En dernier maillon de la chaîne de production, on nous invite à dessiner les « programmes programmés », verrouillés, sans que nous puissions remettre en cause leur validité, leur situation et leur coût, leur inscription territoriale et humaine. Kidnappés par un milieu de professionnels du bâtiment, instrumentalisés par les institutions, l’architecture et l’architecte ont rarement-en France-été aussi serviles. Remontons le cours du temps. Mimesis Par pure nécessité représentative, l’architecture a besoin de formes et de signes. Qu’ils soient contingents à sa propre histoire ou puisés en temps réel, dans le vivier d’une société, ils obéissent dans leur mise en scène à des lois syntaxiques prédéterminées : « Du bon usage de la forme pour architectes vertueux ». On ne compte plus les petits et grands traités, les méthodes édictées en bible de la composition et du style (aujourd’hui évidemment remplacés par les revues de l'autopromotion) qui donnent à construire ces mêmes signes avant de donner à penser. L’imitation étant la courroie de transmission de l’acte de bâtir, fait de ces signes et formes admises, les mouvements esthétiques ont toujours statué sur leurs propres référents, ceci afin d’en ériger les canons à suivre. Opérants, parce que symboliques, ils en creusaient d’autant plus la capacité de formulation qu’ils en étaient constitutifs (de l’ordre des modèles antiques, de leur imitation renaissance à leur détournement maniériste, aux modèles modernes et prémodernes, du paquebot transatlantique aux ouvrages métallurgiques, des mythes « fonctionnels » au postmodernisme et finalement à la fascination du chaos...). Cela n’a été en fait qu’une affaire de digestion, de permutations successives à partir de référents et artefacts liés en temps réel aux contacts d’une société et réintroduits dans le champ spécifique de l’architecture. Il était un temps où le métier de l’architecte s’opérait en mimésis de ces « signaux précurseurs ». Le relativisme des cultures, la crise des grands récits progressistes, le pied d'Armstrong dans la poussière en direct live un certain juillet 1969, l’indéterminisme et la fin des entropies humaines nous ont laissé sur le carreau, orphelins. Le mythe embryonnaire du réseau, de l’interactivité, du « multimédia » et de la délocalisation ne parait pas se nourrir de ces mêmes signaux élémentaires faits de références visibles. D’un métier asservi « aux règles de l’art », sur catalogue, avec quelques recettes en poche intrinsèquement porteuses de sens, nous plongeons dans une ère qui ne se laisse plus coder ni décoder. Sans lexique, ni manuel, l’architecte ne peut plus se livrer aux arrangements savants « des volumes sous la lumière », son écriture tourne à vide. Les signaux ne sont plus donnés a priori comme références symboliques mais à découvrir en temps réel, en chevauchant à cru un animal convulsif. On comprend dans ces conditions la tentation de se replier sur un microlangage et de substituer à la perte d’un catalogue collectif ses propres obsessions personnelles. Mais Cette « liberté », si elle ne passe que par la célébration d'un individualisme « créatif », ne sera qu’un avatar de plus dans la longue litanie des erreurs de la modernité. Quand les signes viennent à manquer, leur profusion factice, de l’ordre des simulacres, semble d’autant plus suffocante. Et si nous nous laissions dominer plutôt qu’asservir. Et si le réfèrent était non pas inscrit sur les tables des lois mais, ici et maintenant, sur le site même, sur le territoire même du projet. Et c’est au travers de ces substances mêmes des lieux et des milieux qu'une pensée sur la ville peut émerger. D’avant-garde en avant-garde hégémonique, dans une succession de messages prophétiques, l’architecture a ainsi toujours rêvé d’un monde en décalage total avec son cadre de production et paradoxalement s’est le plus souvent asservi dans les actes à celui-ci ainsi qu’aux seuls critères d’un savoir technico-économique nécessaire à sa fabrication. Cette schizophrénie entre l’idée et l’acte explique en grande partie l'échec patent de nos villes. Ce malentendu, qui nous rend sympathique dans nos convulsions psycho-nombrilistes, a tellement brouillé les pistes qu’il nous est difficile de discerner, à la lecture de la production, ce qui reste de la prétention sociale et humaniste. Si l'architecture n'a pas su ou pas pu substituer à la culture contemporaine de l'effraction une culture du lieu, plus attentive à ce qu'elle « bulldozerisait », c'est que le vers était à l'origine dans le fruit. Une erreur génétique. Les nombreuses « orthodoxies esthétiques » nées des poubelles des idéologies et dans l'antichambre de la raison sont non seulement devenues aujourd'hui inopérantes mais aussi criminelles au regard de leur décalage avec la société. L'imitation, courroie de transmission du savoir architectural donc, n'a plus d'autres repères que la surconsommation, l'abus du design et du réfèrent culturel autoréférentiel et consommé. Mais l’éclectisme de surface n’est que le travestissement d’un académisme qui n’a de cesse– malgré sa profusion–de déterritorialiser l’architecture. A la culture de la forme, il faudrait substituer une culture du lieu, en extraction de ce « il y a », et l'on s'apercevrait que le monde des apparences est tout aussi valide, pour y puiser nos matières, nos substrats, que celui de la culture et de son propre spectacle. Mais Chronos mangeait Depuis peu, quelques nouveaux outils numériques apparaissent (je ne parle évidemment pas de l’informatique omniprésente dans toute agence et école sur des bases de conception 2D qui n’ont eu comme utilité que l’accélération des processus de production et leur représentation… et comme tare cette même utilité). Le numérique qui m’intéresse est celui qui ouvre des champs d’investigation propre à nous extraire de la programmation moderne (support de l’architecture du XXe et qui inféode ce même programme à la l’énonciation des fonctions). Introduire comme paramètres l’intensité des flux, les liens, les climats, les proximités, la territorialité dans toute sa complexité, les devenirs sociaux comme un scénario à écrire et donc à construire… Ne sont-ils pas plus légitimes que le mythe fonctionnaliste qui, quoi qu’on en dise, ne cesse de mourir et de renaître ? La fonction est aujourd’hui ailleurs. Car identifier par ces nouveaux outils ce qui caractérise un lieu, c’est déjà avancer un nouveau mode opératoire, inutile d’en faire plus. Qu'il nous faille en effet aujourd'hui, sur chaque opération, statuer sur la validité des hypothèses au sein du gigantesque bric-à-brac de facts et d'artefacts qui s'amplifie quotidiennement n'est évidemment pas chose aisée. Ni régression historique, ni projection moderne. Cette attitude s'affirme par ce à quoi elle ne veut pas appartenir et se profile... Territorialiser l'architecture, ce n'est certes pas la draper des oripeaux d'une nouvelle tendance, par nature tout aussi décalée et « séparée » que celles qui viennent d'être consommées. Je me méfie aussi des bonnes consciences qui fleurissent sur le terrain de l'écologie. Il y a Te(e)n Years After tant de monde pour porter le drapeau de la morale, ils sont légions, aussi nombreux que les criminels, et la préservation de la planète leur sert d'étendard. Je préfère les chemins complexes, multiples, forcement mauvais diront certains. « L’herbe, ça ne produit ni fleur ni sermon sur la montagne, ni porte-avion mais en fin de compte c'est toujours l'herbe qui a le dernier mot. Elle comble les vides, pousse entre et parmi les autres choses. La fleur est belle, le chou utile, le pavot rend fou, mais l'herbe est débordement ». C'est de cette herbe dont Miller parle que j'aimerais me constituer. Et Chronos mangeait ses enfants Territorialiser l'architecture, afin que le lieu retisse un lien social, culturel, et de fait esthétique , c'est l'enchâsser dans ce qu'elle Te(e)n Years After s'apprêtait à détruire, c'est extraire des paysages (fussent-ils urbains ou non) la substance d'une construction, non seulement au regard des climats, des matières, des perceptions et des affects mais aussi des espèces corporelles qui l'habitent. Notre projet recyclage sur Sarcelles de l'immeuble 48 qui permettait d'amorcer des processus d'auto-construction, en capitalisant ce que l'on appelle abusivement le temps libre, en est la tentative. Notre société ne peut plus reproduire exclusivement un modèle d'habitat issu des années 60, du temps du plein emploi dans un montage de pure consommation immédiate. Le concept de l'habitat social n'est pas un produit statique mais fonction des climats sociaux et de leur évolution. Que nous soyons aujourd'hui à un carrefour où le temps n'est plus donné à priori en prêt bancaire sur 20 ans mais à construire, à capitaliser en temps réel, n'est pas sans remettre en cause le système de production. Te(e)n Years After Que chacun puisse accéder à l'édification de son « home », dans une structure familiale évolutive et incertaine, est incompatible avec l'idéal clé en main développé en France depuis l'après guerre dans le logement social. Induire une proportion d’inachèvement dans un bâtiment, c’est on s’en doute un peu contradictoire avec l’image que l’on projette sur notre fonction. Territorialiser l'architecture, ce n'est pas non plus le doux et dangereux rêve de la cabane primitive dans la forêt-noire chère à Heidegger, rêve de pureté et de « Heimat » dont les dérives ne peuvent nous échapper. Sur le cadavre des idéologies, rien ne pousse. « Celui qui aime les plantes ne devrait pas être foncièrement mauvais » dit le simple d'esprit ou le maoïste désabusé en quête de récits de substitution, mais « Là où ça sent la merde, ça sent l'être » nous répond Artaud . Te(e)n Years After Et c'est cette dimension humaine, terriblement humaine, avec laquelle il faut œuvrer. Une attitude schizophrène certainement, mais qui nous protège des pièges de la bonne conscience, du militantisme écolo comme des extrémistes destructeurs. Comment vivre en suivant, non sans fascination, la trace du bulldozer dans la foret amazonienne et militer pour sa préservation ? En restant sur le fil du rasoir. Territorialiser l'architecture, ce n'est pas non plus se servir abusivement des expériences du Land Art pour justifier d'une énième colonisation de ce qu'il nous reste à conquérir, l'en dehors de la ville. Substituer aux cultures agricoles des environnements dits « paysagers » ne serait-ce pas une douce et coupable ironie ? Les seuls jardins du monde contemporain que je connaisse sont les friches et les champs de maïs, les vignes au centre des bourgs de la côte chalonnaise -c'est là d'où je viens- les rizières en plein Tokyo et les micro jardins associatifs et Te(e)n Years After maraîchers dans le Bronx à New York, un tissu mixte, métissé, né de la superposition de l'agriculture et de la ville, de la friche, du débordement et de l’ordre comme antidote à l'entropie urbaine. Les expériences d’art végétal, de Néotu Vert, qui fleurissent ça et là en France, particulièrement dans les parcs de châteaux, en sont le versant petit marquis et le contre exemple. La matière, un préalable à la forme Les horizons du monde de la perception, de la corporalité n'ont que trop rarement été le support d'une production. L'univers de la perception s'est asservi au monde du visible, comme une hégémonie de l’œil. La représentation codée de l'architecture ne pouvant en représenter que la superficie, elle en a simplement limité le réel. Relier l'être à son écosystème ne peut faire l'économie de relier le corps au corps de l'architecture. Saisir un territoire sans Te(e)n Years After l'asservir tient tout autant de la reconnaissance d'une pensée de la situation que de la pertinence du choix de la matière. De cette double identité, métissée, issue des filières d'extraction/transformation et de leur localisme, de leur voisinage, l’on pourra alors se rendre compte que la ville est une plante qui a besoin de terre, de ciel et de substances . Que la pensée d'architecture, pensée de survol, pensée de l'objet en général se replace dans un « il y a » préalable, dans le site et sur le sol du monde et l'on s'apercevrait que le toucher n'est pas sans affect, sans mémoire, sans corporalité : matière, chaude, froide, attractive, répulsive, moite, sèche, coupante, douce, d'usure et de mémoire..., comme antidote au corps séparé, au corps autonome. Avec du vide, un dépouillement, de la nature, comme l’exacerbation d’une réciprocité, de ce qui était historiquement dedans (la ville) avec Te(e)n Years After ce qui était en dehors (la nature), pour nous émanciper de ces décennies de gaspillage. Dans un corps entrelacé, noueux, qui doute et suspecte ses propres référents, issus de notre surconsommation d'images. Sur des liens fragiles entre les fragments éparses de notre fin de siècle et dans une attitude qui ne se veut ni messianique ni repliée, mais de guérilla et de désir entrelacés. Et Chronos n'avait finalement plus rien à se mettre sous la dent, pas même un Caméléon s'affirme par ce à quoi elle ne veut pas appartenir et se profile ainsi en équilibre permanent, en principe réactif de pertinence et non de style. Territorialiser l'architecture, ce n'est certes pas la draper des oripeaux d'une nouvelle tendance, par nature tout aussi décalée et « séparée » que celles qui viennent d'être consommées. Je me méfie aussi des bonnes consciences qui fleurissent sur le terrain de l'écologie. Il y a tant de monde pour porter le drapeau de la morale, ils sont légions, aussi nombreux que les criminels, et la préservation de la planète leur sert d'étendard. Je préfère les chemins complexes, multiples, forcement mauvais diront certains. « L’herbe, ça ne produit ni fleur ni sermon sur la montagne, ni porte-avion mais en fin de compte c'est toujours l'herbe qui a le dernier mot. Elle comble les vides, pousse entre et parmi les autres choses. La fleur est belle, le chou utile, le pavot rend fou, mais l'herbe est débordement ». C'est de cette herbe dont Miller parle que j'aimerais me constituer. Et Chronos mangeait ses enfants Territorialiser l'architecture, afin que le lieu retisse un lien social, culturel, et de fait esthétique, c'est l'enchâsser dans ce qu'elle s'apprêtait à détruire, c'est extraire des paysages (fussent-ils urbains ou non) la substance d'une construction, non seulement au regard des climats, des matières, des perceptions et des affects mais aussi des espèces corporelles qui l'habitent. Notre projet recyclage sur Sarcelles de l'immeuble 48 qui permettait d'amorcer des processus d'auto-construction, en capitalisant ce que l'on appelle abusivement le temps libre, en est la tentative. Notre société ne peut plus reproduire exclusivement un modèle d'habitat issu des années 60, du temps du plein emploi dans un montage de pure consommation immédiate. Le concept de l'habitat social n'est pas un produit statique mais fonction des climats sociaux et de leur évolution. Que nous soyons aujourd'hui à un carrefour où le temps n'est plus donné a priori en prêt bancaire sur 20 ans mais à construire, à capitaliser en temps réel, n'est pas sans remettre en cause le système de production. Que chacun puisse accéder à l'édification de son « home », dans une structure familiale évolutive et incertaine, est incompatible avec l'idéal clé en main développée en France depuis l'après-guerre dans le logement social. Induire une proportion d’inachèvement dans un bâtiment, c’est on s’en doute un peu contradictoire avec l’image que l’on projette sur notre fonction. Territorialiser l'architecture, ce n'est pas non plus le doux et dangereux rêve de la cabane primitive dans la forêt-noire chère à Heidegger, rêve de pureté et de « Heimat » dont les dérives ne peuvent nous échapper. Sur le cadavre des idéologies, rien ne pousse. « Celui qui aime les plantes ne devrait pas être foncièrement mauvais » dit le simple d'esprit ou le maoïste désabusé en quête de récits de substitution, mais « Là où ça sent la merde, ça sent l'être » nous répond Artaud. Et c'est cette dimension humaine, terriblement humaine, avec laquelle il faut œuvrer. Une attitude schizophrène certainement, mais qui nous protège des pièges de la bonne conscience, du militantisme écolo comme des extrémistes destructeurs. Comment vivre en suivant, non sans fascination, la trace du bulldozer dans la foret amazonienne et militer pour sa préservation ? En restant sur le fil du rasoir. Territorialiser l'architecture, ce n'est pas non plus se servir abusivement des expériences du Land Art pour justifier d'une énième colonisation de ce qu'il nous reste à conquérir, l'en-dehors de la ville. Substituer aux cultures agricoles des environnements dits « paysagers » ne serait-ce pas une douce et coupable ironie ? Les seuls jardins du monde contemporain que je connaisse sont les friches et les champs de maïs, les vignes au centre des bourgs de la côte chalonnaise-c'est là d'où je viens-les rizières en plein Tokyo et les micro jardins associatifs et maraîchers dans le Bronx à New York, un tissu mixte, métissé, né de la superposition de l'agriculture et de la ville, de la friche, du débordement et de l’ordre comme antidote à l'entropie urbaine. Les expériences d’art végétal, de Néotu Vert, qui fleurissent çà et là en France, particulièrement dans les parcs de châteaux, en sont le versant petit marquis et le contre exemple. La matière, un préalable à la forme Les horizons du monde de la perception, de la corporalité n'ont que trop rarement été le support d'une production. L'univers de la perception s'est asservi au monde du visible, comme une hégémonie de l’œil. La représentation codée de l'architecture ne pouvant en représenter que la superficie, elle en a simplement limité le réel. Relier l'être à son écosystème ne peut faire l'économie de relier le corps au corps de l'architecture. Saisir un territoire sans l'asservir tient tout autant de la reconnaissance d'une pensée de la situation que de la pertinence du choix de la matière. De cette double identité, métissée, issue des filières d'extraction/transformation et de leur localisme, de leur voisinage, l’on pourra alors se rendre compte que la ville est une plante qui a besoin de terre, de ciel et de substances . Que la pensée d'architecture, pensée de survol, pensée de l'objet en général se replace dans un « il y a » préalable, dans le site et sur le sol du monde et l'on s'apercevrait que le toucher n'est pas sans affect, sans mémoire, sans corporalité : matière, chaude, froide, attractive, répulsive, moite, sèche, coupante, douce, d'usure et de mémoire..., comme antidote au corps séparé, au corps autonome. Avec du vide, un dépouillement, de la nature, comme l’exacerbation d’une réciprocité, de ce qui était historiquement dedans (la ville) avec ce qui était en dehors (la nature), pour nous émanciper de ces décennies de gaspillage. Dans un corps entrelacé, noueux, qui doute et suspecte ses propres référents, issus de notre surconsommation d'images. Sur des liens fragiles entre les fragments épars de notre fin de siècle et dans une attitude qui ne se veut ni messianique ni repliée, mais de guérilla et de désir entrelacés. Et Chronos n'avait finalement plus rien à se mettre sous la dent, pas même un Caméléon 6) Rumeurs - Belleville / 1994 Jusqu’à hier, rien ne prédisposait à un changement d’état, et l’arborescence des capteurs sur les parois n’avait enregistré, depuis vingt ans, sur les rouleaux des sismographes, que le cycle répétitif des saisons. Un facteur avait dû évoluer, lequel ? Je ne sais… mais le processus de mutation était enclenché. Le métabolisme avait bougé, imperceptiblement d’accord, mais il avait bel et bien bougé. Et pas de ce genre de mutation mécanique version Cyber-robot, accompagnée de grincement d’écrou et de froissement de tôle, non, une mutation ectoplasmique, neuronale. Personne ne voulait y croire, la ville se refusait à y croire. Toutes sortes de contes pour enfants circulaient et se propageaient : lancement d’une campagne de pub pour les uns, manipulations politiques ou arnaque de foire pour les autres… Ces rumeurs nous protégeaient tous de la réalité des faits, fixant ainsi les limites de l’acceptable, du tangible. Que la ville devienne un organisme vivant, constitué de membranes réactives, de derme palpitant, et échappe ainsi au simple amoncellement de matières inertes ne pouvait et ne devait pas être. La rumeur nous en éloignait pour quelques temps encore. _Génétiques 1996-2001 1) MUTATIONS @morphes / 1998 (NewT/ R&Sie(n) / Frac ) Je devais m’avouer vaincu. Quelque chose voulait que cela se fasse. Je n’étais qu’un instrument, moi aussi. Le monde n’était qu’un emboîtement infini d’instruments. Le répit n’avait duré que le temps du mirage qu’il était.Les Racines du Mal, Maurice G. Dantec, Série Noire, 1995 Depuis plusieurs années, nous cherchions l’instrument qui nous permette d’explorer l’acte minimum, entre le pas grand chose et le juste assez, où la transformation territoriale née de l’architecture s’imprégnerait des géographies préalables, où l’aménagement aurait pu s’infiltrer, s’enchâsser dans ce qu’il était censé dominer pour en exacerber des problématiques de mutations, d’identités. Nous cherchions un instrument qui nous permettent d’induire, in situ, des stratégies d’hybridation, de mimesis, dans l’« ici et maintenant » de chaque situation. Face aux multiples manipulations morales et patrimoniales de l’histoire, la géographie, la cartographie, et non le calque comme nous le rappellent Deleuze et Guattari [1], nous ont toujours semblé plus opérantes. Mais opposer le site préexistant à son devenir, dans un face-à-face entre l’image du contexte à nu et celle (en photomontage) intégrant le projet architectural, comme démonstration d’une économie de transformation, ne pouvait nous suffire. Il nous manquait la préhension du processus, dans la décomposition des hypothèses successives. Malgré l’élaboration de scénarios d’hybridation (le Fresnoy, Magasins Généraux, Maison dans les Arbres, Berlin, Sarcelles), le médium nous faisait défaut. Les mutations n’apparaissaient non seulement jamais dans le mouvement qui les avaient engendrées, mais plus encore les documents, in fine, pouvaient par leur isolement être réinterprétés comme des artefacts décontextualisés. Les processus de déformation, issus du morphing, présentés ici par bandes séquences ou ailleurs sur bandes vidéo, relèvent de ce manque et ouvrent un champ de possibles. En deçà de la fascination pour l’outil technologique, et de la métamorphose factice qu’il engendre, c’est sa fonction révélatrice et opératoire qui nous occupe. Plus le mouvement morphé semble « déceptif », inerte dans sa transformation, plus le projet urbain ou architectural, semble se laisser dominer par la situation préalable. Plus le morphing se donne à lire dans son artifice, plus la projection semble cette fois-ci se déterritorialiser. À l’opposé d’un instrument de représentation, le morphing révèle ainsi le degré de dé-contextualisation des hypothèses, et dans un va-et-vient permanent entre déduction et induction, à la relecture des étapes successives, vient valider ou infirmer la pertinence des choix, dans une stratégie du « making with to do less » [2]. Il ne s’agit plus d’opposer le projet à son contexte, comme deux hypothèses distinctes, mais de les lier par le processus de transformation même. Le projet n’est plus issu d’une projection abstraite mais d’une distorsion du réel. La page blanche ou l’écran vide ne peuvent être. Ce soft nécessite un corps, une matrice physique générique. La peau [3] de l’image photographique, cartographique, se mue, se métamorphose par aspiration, extrusion, subit des manipulations de l’ordre du pliage, de la scarification, du boursouflement, du cisaillement…Et les pixels, fragments fractals du réel, se recomposent en une série de mutations génétiques. Le contexte n’est plus idéalisé, conceptualisé ou historicisé, mais substrat de sa propre transformation. C’est là une différence politique. L’instrument virtuel devient paradoxalement un principe de réalité. Quelques mots d’explication : Le morphing est à l’origine un soft qui permet de fusionner une image A à une image B par un déplacement topologique de points remarquables. La technique du « Warp », variante de ce process, permet de produire cette altération sans pour autant connaître sa résultante B. L’image A se voit ainsi manipulée, déformée, au contact d’un programme et d’un scénario, sans pour autant pouvoir échapper à sa propre matière, sa propre corporalité, en faisant résistance. Et c’est de cet amorphisme dont il s’agit ici. Mettre en scène les conditions d’une hybridation, d’une transformation qui soit paradoxalement statique et qui, par la mobilité/immobile qu’elle engendre, révèle au mieux les problématiques d’identité préalable et de géographie, c’est produire un état critique à la fois sur les processus « d’aménagement du territoire » mais aussi sur l’usage et le détournement des technologies. Ne rien faire, c’est poser question mais aussi poser problème. Agir sur la carte, au travers de ces « Mutations @morphes », c’est vouloir agir en creux, sans les compétences préformatées, et admises. Le modèle déjà là nous impose de déplacer notre compétence vers d’autres sphères (mécanismes sociaux, économie politique, enjeux territoriaux). Ce process ouvre ainsi des champs d’investigation propres à nous extraire du diktat de la projection moderne (support et alibi de l’architecture du XXe) qui a confondu le programme avec l’énonciation des fonctions. Rendre équivoque l’objet architectural, et le contraindre à s’extraire du réel, c’est questionner notre propre perception [4]. Rien ne me semble plus pertinent qu’une architecture qui traverse ces ambiguïtés. Les structures binaires de la pensée dominante patrimoine/modernité, servilité/domination, ont heureusement implosé. Les transformations du corps et de sa sexualité, à coup de silicone et de collagène, aux antipodes du Cyber-Robot de Metropolis, en sont le préambule. La prothèse contemporaine est faite de chair, et l’excroissance fonctionnelle en derme artificiel recomposé. Le corps n’est pas nié mais exacerbé, hypertrophié. La technologie nous permet ainsi, au travers de ces « Mutations @morphes », d’engager des processus, d’écrire des scénarios, qui réactivent la notion de « localisme », non pas pour resservir des plats refroidis, de modèles muséifiés, mais un localisme palpitant, fait de contradictions [5] et de respect, de membranes réactives, dans une topologie élastique. Identifier par ces nouveaux outils ce qui caractérise un lieu, c’est déjà avancer un nouveau mode opératoire. Inutile donc d’en faire beaucoup plus. [1] « Tout autre est le rhizome, carte et non pas calque. Faire la carte, et pas le calque… Si la carte s’oppose au calque, c’est qu’elle est tout entière tournée vers une expérimentation en prise sur le réel. La carte ne reproduit pas un inconscient fermé sur lui même, elle le construit ». Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux, Minuit, Critique, 1980. [2] Faire avec pour en faire moins (making with to do less). R, DSV & Sie., L’Ombre du Caméléon, Paris, Éd. IFA/Karédas, 1994. [3] « Ceux-ci déchirent le corps en dedans, et cherchent un trou pour sortir, elle jette ses mains sur le corps et ils vibrent sous ses doigts ; elle les pousse vers les articulations, vers les cavités du ventre et de la gorge, elle les y écrase, son poing creusant la peau, laquelle, éclaboussée de sang par-dessous, se refroidit. » Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats, Pierre Guyotat, L’imaginaire, Gallimard, 1967. [4] L’hiver de l’Amour, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paysage n°2, R, DSV & Sie. P. Une installation sur les escaliers : Les moquettes ont été déposées, les hauteurs des marches faiblement modifiées, les moquettes reposées. Un travail sur la dissociation des sens, entre ce qui était perçu (les emmarchements) et ressenti (une topographie mouvante), mars 1994. [5] « Comment vivre en suivant, non sans fascination, la trace du bulldozer dans la forêt amazonienne et militer pour sa préservation en restant sur le fil du rasoir. C’est avec cette dimension humaine, terriblement humaine qu’il nous faut œuvrer. Une attitude, certes schizophrène, mais qui nous préserve des pièges de la bonne conscience, du militantisme écolo, comme des extrémismes destructeurs. ». F. Roche, Conférence au Pavillon de l’Arsenal, 1997, Mini-PA. 2) Reactive Skin L’ensemble des sphères productives (médicales, scientifiques, artistiques, évidemment sexuelles) se trouve aujourd’hui confronté à des problématiques de transformation, d’hybridation (de la silicone aux muscles artificiels, du transformisme aux changements d’identité, des biotechnologies à l’eugénisme sous-jacent...). Les Les « intégrités » définies par la modernité ont implosé. Le corps est devenu un instrument programmable in vitro, une enveloppe reformatable à coup de collagène. Fonctions et organes seraient donc devenus les attributs physiques d’un choix individuel, non une adaptation évolutive face aux contraintes environnementales (un pied de nez à Darwin !). Et pour reprendre un extrait des Particules Elémentaires : « l’humanité pourrait être ainsi la première espèce animale à organiser elle-même les conditions de sa propre mutation ». Face à ces possibles qui alternent non sans ambiguïté S.F et réalité, conscience, ses limites et son dépassement, face à ces mutations biogénétiques, comment croire que l’architecture puisse être encore constituée de corps intègres, identifiables, comme des pépites de chocolat dans une glace Häagen-Dazs ? Modélisée à partir d’une page blanche ou d’un écran vide, decontextualisée, déterritorialisée, avec un panel instrumental qui s’est finalement substitué au réel (comme système interprétatif et projectif), l’architecture a hélas appris à survivre dans un isolement culturel. Rêve de domination « platonicienne » du plein sur le vide, de l’homme sur l’écosystème, de l’idée sur le préalable. Mais qu’en est-il quand la génétique devient l’une des interrogations génériques et conflictuelles de notre devenir, qu’en est-il quand les outils eux-mêmes (soft et interface) s’éloignent chaque jour un peu plus des géométries descriptives et perspectivistes qui ont dominé la « représentation » de l’architecture depuis plusieurs siècles, qu’elle soit constructive ou fictive ? Impossible de nous cacher encore plus longtemps derrière ces envolées humanistes, fondées sur des soi-disant émancipations sociales ou progressistes qui ont fait les beaux jours de la modernité (et ce qui s’en est suivi). Panofsky, au travers de la cabale entre Galilée et Kepler, nous avait pourtant prévenu : Les architectes sont au mieux conscients de l’influence des outils de mesure qu’ils utilisent, au pire ils en sont otages (n’en déplaise aux derniers anarcho-trotskos drapés de leurs illusions prométhéennes). Néanmoins…dans cet univers incertain, quid de cette révolution instrumentale si elle ne s'abandonne qu’à une pure virtuosité de l'objet. Pour élaborer des stratégies basées sur des processus de mutation, il nous faut en effet déterminer en préalable une matrice, un corps qui puisse les absorber « dans sa chair », à l’image d’un organisme en devenir. On ne tire pas sur une patiente malade pour la soigner, comme l’application médicale d’une Tabula Rasa, on ne la maquille pas non plus avant de l’opérer. Pour éviter la cicatrice, l’incision est légère. Pour que la greffe prenne, les tissus seront compatibles (bien qu’artificiels). Hypothèse 1 : Les softs de déformation peuvent être considérés autrement que comme des joujoux pour clips vidéo de Michael Jackson (Black and White) mais comme instrument d’hybridation. Hypothèse 2 : La géographie peut être considérée autrement que comme un outil de représentation mais être, elle-même, le support de sa transformation et l’interface opératoire avec le réel. 1 + 2 = Hyperlocalisme Ces manipulations greffées, à l’image des piercings sous-cutanés, fonctionnent néanmoins sur plusieurs registres : est-ce un process de dégénérescence, un kyste topologique, un code de reconnaissance tribal, une exacerbation d’hyperlocalisme… « Entre le désordre incontrôlé et l’ordre excessif d’Euclide, il y a désormais une nouvelle zone d’ordre fractal, issu de la situation et de l’analysis situs » (D’après Mandelbrot) Ces deux modèles d’intervention s’opposent radicalement : l’un consiste en la production de formes, raisonnées et admises, issues d’une conception platonicienne du monde et qui viendrait s’appliquer sur le territoire, le dominant afin de se prouver la prééminence de l’homme sur la situation. Et l’autre, l’autre exacerbe une réponse dans le prolongement de la complexité du site lui-même, se replie, en creux, afin de se laisser absorber, voir asservir par l’équilibre préexistant. Le premier est une pure projection de l’esprit, à la portée des concepts et des technologies en usage, l’autre, mutant, nous invite à contrario à élaborer des stratégies à la manière des astrophysiciens dont la principale méthode se résume en ces quelques mots : « A défaut d’avoir des idées, il vaudrait mieux prendre le temps d’observer ». A ce titre, souvenons-nous du flame célèbre de Charles & Ray Eames, « Power of Ten », constitué d’un zoom continu du cosmos intergalactique jusqu’aux cellules du corps humain, en passant par un déjeuner sur l’herbe. Cette cartographie rompt avec les visualisations fragmentaires par échelles successives (entre astronaute, pilote d’avion, urbaniste, architecte, designer, jardinier, dermatologue, généticien moléculaire) Dans cette représentation du monde, le local n’est plus synonyme d’isolement mais relié naturellement au global. Les lieux et les milieux peuvent être réintroduits tel qu’ils sont, comme particules élémentaires d’un principe de réalité, dans un continuum, un zoom qui associe et relie l’ensemble des perceptions physiques. Et c’est en cela que cet outil, issu de l’observation géographique en mouvement, s’oppose radicalement à ceux issus de la lecture historique (qui hiérarchise et momifie), ou à ceux qui feraient de la « projection abstraite et mentale » une quête conceptuelle, exclusivement déterminée et conditionnée par l’instrument qui les modélise. Ce flame fusionne la réalité perceptible du monde à sa conception humaine. Le contexte n’est plus univoque, mais rhizomatique. Cette géographie en mouvement (que l’on peut aisément aujourd’hui introduire dans l’instrument productif de l’architecte) nous permet en effet de saisir et engager en temps réel, « Ici et Maintenant », des hypothèses sur la croûte terrestre sans en réduire la complexité. Ces géographies nous servent ainsi de matrice, d’organisme vivant, sur lesquels sont introduits nos processus d’hybridation. Elles sont de fait un corps mutant, à l’image de l’un des derniers clips de Paul White pour Björk où l’enroulement zoomorphe d’une animation 3D sur un visage (qui n’est pas sans rappeler le film d’animation humanoïde Tron), associe et imbrique virtuel et réel, mais aussi peau, chair et numérique dans un enchâssement ambigu. C’est d’ailleurs cette dimension imparfaite qui nous relie aux technologies, non le fantasme d’une énonciation « progressiste » de plus. Avoir une vision globale, macropolitique, ne nous intéresse pas, elle nous semble d’ailleurs opérer sur les mêmes modélisations que la modernité. Etre asservi instrumentalement à un localisme, c’est pour nous l’occasion de développer une micropolitique, agissante et opératoire. C’est en cela que nous sommes vaccinés contre les virus magnifiquement macrocyniques d’une pensée de la macrostructure et son remake d’architecture internationale (New York, Paris, Berlin, Shanghai, Singapour), pour engager des processus, écrire des scénarios, qui réactivent la notion de localisme. _Intermède Aqua Alta 2.0 / 2000 On peut en parler de la ville du sud, voire même y projeter toutes les fictions, y révéler tous les manques avec les sentiments attendus : culpabilité, cynisme, compassion, humanitarisme, interventionnisme, prosélytisme catho et j’en passe… Nous préférons ici la donner à boire. Absorber de l’eau polluée, c’est percevoir physiologiquement la dépendance du corps au corps social, aux matières premières, aux matières élémentaires. « Et si elle est buvable pour un réfugié du Pakistan, pourquoi ne le serait-elle pas pour des congressistes pleins de bonnes intentions ? Par ces gorgées de Grand Canal, nous expérimentons in vivo les délices d’une aide humanitaire dont nous sommes généralement si fiers ». (D’après Patrick Sourd) C’est donc un lieu d’échanges, mais d’échanges digestifs et aqueux, de substances intestinales, faites de dégoût et de suspicion vis à vis de la fiabilité des technologies. « Là où ça sent la lagune, ça sent la merde et ça sent l’homme, la taxifolia et les hydrocarbures, entre moiteur salée de flagrances estivales et lichens spongieux logés dans le moindre interstice de briques suintantes d’humidité ». (D’après Artaud) Que faire en effet de ce fatras de grands manifestes sur la ville si le regard ne se pose pas en préalable sur les substances qui la constitue : terre rouge à Dakar, bush à Soweto, glace à Resolute, lagune à Venise… afin de l'intégrer comme mode opératoire, hyper localisé. Ce que l’on consomme, avale et absorbe doit simplement correspondre aux règles minima de santé publique, inutile donc de formater les villes sur les mêmes mécanismes hygiénistes, masqués habillement par de fausses prétentions d’émancipations sociales et progressistes. La constitution de la ville et son devenir se situent au creux de cette contradiction et c’est une attitude politique de le reconnaître comme préalable pour intervenir dans les pays en voie de développement. A contrario d’une vision globale qui tente de passer la planète au PAIC Citron, nous nous laissons dominer par la nature physique et chimique d’une situation. Ce projet lagunaire en est l’expression critique. _Jedi 2001... 1) (Science) Fiction & mass culture crisis / 2003 Immergés dans un temps arrêté, vibratoire, nous suivons la flèche du temps qui depuis les années 60 hésite sur le sens à donner à ses aiguilles, entre conservatisme moral des baby-boomers et futurologie consumériste Gucci. D’une anticipation galiléenne, exploratoire de mondes inaccessibles que seule la science (fiction) du haut de sa certitude pouvait alimenter, la (science) fiction a quitté le champ du futur pour s’infiltrer dans les méandres de nos sociétés informationnelles. Les faux-pas du Bibendum, dans la poussière crasseuse et lunaire, un certain mois de juillet 69, ont mis fin à ses envolées entropiques. La littérature des Stephenson, Gibson, Stirling et autres publiés dans les séries d’anticipation, s’inscrit en direct live et le miroir déformant que le genre tendait à créer entre l’espace de l’imaginaire et celui de notre quotidienneté s’est dilué dans l’univers des plausibles pour se confondre avec les news, avec le jeu social. La (science) fiction s’est étonnamment déplacée, ni forward ni reward, mais here and now. Les scénarios de dépliage qu’elle emprunte pour manipuler notre réel deviennent de véritables outils de transformation et paradoxalement des leviers stratégiques pour rendre compte du flottement de nos sociétés post-informationnelles, du shocked mass media culture. Mais son principal intérêt depuis cette immersion dans une matrice in vivo vient des inquiétudes qu’elle alimente Que la science (fiction) ne soit plus le lieu de la propagande positive et déterministe (mais qu’elle nourrisse les germes de notre propre monstruosité–de notre propre perte de contrôle entre indéterminisme, théorie du Chaos, et biogénétique–comme une force pactisant avec les harpies et les créatures de la terre, avec le Dark Side faustien et le Sturm and Drang, contre les perruques rationalistes et l’oeuvre de l’esprit hégélien) ouvre enfin sur un monde où même les peurs deviennent fables, belles et charnelles. Il nous faut négocier avec le pli de l’instant, invagination de la pensée du futur, et vivre un présent comme courbure asymptotique du temps : entre Back to the Futur et Tomorrow Now , entre le dream time et le day after. Dans ces conditions paradoxales où la notion et la perception du temps se sont écrasées à la surface de l’immédiateté, comment croire que l’architecture ne puisse se constituer qu’au travers d’avatars fossilisés, de cadavres exquis aveuglés de valeurs naïves et progressistes, d’opportunisme citationnel comme maquillage du global entertainment ? Pour réinvestir les scénarios et substances qui conditionnent l’architecture et révéler les contradictions et fantasmes qui alimentent nos sociétés, il nous faut au contraire puiser dans cette temporalité vibratoire, inquiétante et voluptueuse. L’architecture n’a pas à se penser ni à se produire dans un temps différé comme porte-drapeau d’une morale, d’un futur meilleur. Elle ne peut se négocier que sur l’instant, contingente d’une situation, soluble dans un « étant donné ». Critique et territorialisée, cette attitude est aux antipodes des envolées macrocyniques (le marché crée la forme) et de son remake d’architecture internationale pour engager à contrario des processus qui réactivent la notion de « localisme » palpitant, complexe et inachevée . Nos outils de codification et de transformation des territoires agissent non à travers une projection idéale, mais sur un état des lieux, un biotope mutant et tangible issu de la faillite généralisée des pensées urbaines et de leur imposture. De cette ambiguïté surgissent nos scénarios, fragiles et uniques. Les rhizomes pliés de Guattari-Deleuze étaient un point de fusion et d’arborescence pour atteindre un énième plateau, une terra incognita, pour sortir de l’emprise de ceux qui déclaraient avoir autorité, linéaire, pédagogique et discursive. Cela nous a permis d’échapper aux rêves prométhéens, aux apôtres millénaristes, aux moralistes cyniques, pour marcher gaiement sur les poubelles -ô combien nombreuses et multiples- du siècle écoulé, débarrassés du fatras des mythologies progressistes dans la volupté d’un cataclysme quotidien. L’architecture (science) “ fictionnelle ” n’est pas un remake culturel, genre Altered states pour quelques happy few, elle n’a rien à faire d’une idéalisation nostalgique du monde dans une bulle de savon muséale, ni d’une utopie new age et de ses présupposés gentiment moraux. Elle est un lieu d’affrontement dans la reconnaissance de nouveaux principes de réalités et s’investit en permanence dans des procédures de re-programmation, de re-scénarisation du réel, ici et maintenant. Par nécessité, elle se confronte à l’émergence, à sa Gestalt, et ne peut se négocier que dans le spectre du visible. C’est là sa condition politique et opérationnelle. Elle génère des processus de transformation qui prennent le risque de positions et mutations critiques , sur le fil du rasoir. On ne peut tirer de plaisir à annoncer l’« infocalypse », on peut juste en récolter les fruits, souvent étranges. Nos projets en sont quelques paradigmes…
ENDLESSNESSLESS / YALE JOURNAL 2008 e-mail correspondence on 4 months between NewT, Giovanni Corbellini, Alexandra Midal, Benoit Durandin, and a Joker What’s this, green monsters? Which monsters, did you see monsters? I think so (but if I look at them a little bit longer, they begin to look funny)... ...From the paranoia of the two little girls. They are about to perform a productive—and not at all innocent—routine. Never seen that; you mean, like a ritual? Like the reproduction of something itself, out of its own matrix? No, as a little girl myself, I saw them, I saw them, (humming): “... Sometime I’d divide / And burn in many places; on the topmast, / the yards, and the boresprit, would I flame distinctly ...” With this kind of constellation of parallel universes, are you sure it’s a book about architecture? Who said that? What? So this is a book about architecture? Nobody said otherwise. And why not? So paranoia is the key? More than a key, it’s an “apparatus” ... Let’s suppose now that these Hulks were real... But don’t threaten them; they could be like the White Rabbit. Alice’s rabbit? Don’t you know? The rabbit hypnotizes you as he runs away. I’d prefer Snow White mixed with girly Victorian fairy tales. Girls are not paralyzed by the proximity of danger in the forest. Don’t you feel that slight and exciting insinuation of casual sadism? I do! I feel like time is freezing, like being sucked up. Look at their paws! They’re leaving trails everywhere, bloody and green fluorescent footsteps. It looks like—I don’t know what …a passage maybe?— now it looks like letters …I don’t know if… You fools! All I see is a hairball, pushed by the wind. Yes, but it’s pushed by Eolos, the god of winds. “The thought is faster: it runs through everything.” Look at the trajectory; it’s so erratic, full of noises, searching for the next movement, winding and winding and winding, writing on itself. Writing against architecture. Maybe we have woken up the acephalous man, made of bones, guts, and nerves: mesoderm, endoderm, and ectoderm all folded together. Think of it in a paranoid sense, as an apparatus: open to a wide array of interpretations, from self-illusion to freak 3d effects. We could consider this “moment” as the first apparatus, or, more precisely, how strategies of relationships embedded in this moment articulate knowledge and are simultaneously articulated by themselves. The two little girls are looking at the consequence of their own paranoia, which transforms, at the same time, the representation of our reality. By creating a subjective narrative, they articulate the dichotomy between fiction and reality, which forces us to reconsider our relationship to the tangible, material world. We are directly confronting the boundaries of the system, where, from this seemingly scripted confusion emerges an apparatus which reveals the boundarylessness of the self-conscious... This is not so different than deja-vu: when you are convinced you have already lived an identical moment at another time. If you ignore the rationalist approach to this phenomenon—what scientists describe as a breach or alteration in the synchronization of the brain’s hemispheres—deja-vu is actually a shift of perception. And if you buy the idea that it’s an inexplicable collision between many parallel universes, like Henri Bergson—who dedicated one of his rare pertinent essays to the question of Le Souvenir du présent et la fausse reconnaissance —you’ll find elucidated what might be called a weakening of “the function of reality:” you get a momentary unfolding of the person. Something like the famous paradox set up by the physicist Ernst Schrödinger in 1937. He thought up an experiment in which a cat, a radioactive particle, and a mechanism made up of a Geiger counter, a hammer, and a vial of lethal gas were locked in a closed box. If the atom disintegrated during a given time, the counter would be activated, then the hammer, which would break the vial, then the gas would escape from it, and the cat would die. In a space ruled by the laws of classical physics, there is as much probability that the atom would disintegrate as that it would not. According to the laws of quantum physics, two possibilities superimpose one another; the atom is simultaneously activated and disintegrated; the cat is subjected to a state of uncertainty, at the same time both dead and alive. This simultaneity is only completed at the instant when an outside individual observes the interior of the box… This principle, which dominates the subatomic and unknown parts of our universe, implies the co-emergence of two or more worlds simultaneously; so called parallel worlds. No future, no present, no reality? “Pick up the world, you can!” could be the White Rabbit’s motto. It sounds like a Spinozian motto: “The mind endeavors to conceive only such things as assert its power of activity.” Quantum physicists used to explain quanta theories through short stories, fairytales, in a way to transpose what they saw into something else, less astonishing and more accessible. “Four fishes are swimming in a pool, two floodgates open simultaneously on two other pools, at the end four fishes are swimming in the two new pools.” This parable is logical in a quantum sense, pertinent to an established field of research, and accessible to cognition: three requirements for any scientific knowledge. It also reveals the contortions that physicists often have to make themselves to understand quantum properties. They have to reintroduce non-crazy hypotheses (or theories) back into the field of common knowledge (i.e. fairytales), but as a result, those non-crazy hypotheses become transformative in their own right. Quantum physics is about the ultra-small scale. What happens to subatomic particles doesn’t have much to do with the actual world in which we live. I hope the engineer who designed the bridge I cross every morning did it in a very deterministic way... Maybe it is better to hope that our universe is one in which bridges don’t collapse. Unfortunately, we cannot (yet) move from one section of the multiverse to another...However, the split between classical physics and probabilistic/aleatory subatomic behavior seems to be similar to the way we design/transform our environment, but with the further problem that it’s no longer an issue of scale, and therefore these approaches tend to collide. In architecture, the constant requests for deterministic assurances (cost, time, performance, security...) more and more comes out of the increasing instability of programs, tasks, and opportunities. So, the observer (who we might equate with the “external conditions” in architecture) becomes the main character: the one who unintentionally decides if the cat will live or die. Quantum physics teaches us that we can manage this interactive relation only in a very paradoxical way. Should we crossbreed Schroedinger’s cat with Deng’s (which catches mice no matter if it’s black or white )? Hey! Joker – maybe you are just a BInary digiT, not even a bug! bzzzz! Who cares about grasping the split between two worlds that even physicists can’t explain? Asking the question is just a way to shift our egocentric viewpoint. Yes, I’ll eventually go for some laboratory cat’s experimentations... What the hell would we do without cats? They seem to be crucial to the Western world’s thinking! Alexandra is right. Shifting the viewpoint is our main goal. As designers, we dream of that power we fight as citizens. So the schizoid situation between planning needs and unpredictable developments that arise in our contemporary societies is fully embedded in our practice and thinking. Hard sciences are intrinsically counterintuitive (our senses tell us that it is the sun that moves around the earth...). On the one hand, they force us to set up paradoxical strategies, using chaos to produce open and dynamic orders, looking at self-organization as a possible and more effective (and desirable) horizon. On the other hand, we do not have to prove our hypothesis—we just tell stories; science is a big reservoir from which to fish powerful devices, tools, and arguments, in order to construct opinions, to create the conditions that will make our strategies really work... No strategies are ethically good enough to be immune to distortion: Deleuzo-Guattarian theories are used just as well by architects as by militaries strategists, to walk through walls. Science and architecture share the same ambiguous and irrefutable relation to reality. And this relation creates frictions with unexpected results. It’s with those unexpected results that we have to deal, not as prophets (too comfortable) nor outsiders (too reassuring) nor experts (too romantic)… Schizophrenia, paranoia; cats, rabbits, mice—are you undergoing pet therapy? Good idea! We can use animals to feed our personality disorders. Laboratory hybrids or “natural” mutations are both fine. François often talks about hermaphrodite polar bears... So you know the story? [see “Nine Apparatuses: Physiological mutation.”] The five percent of mutant post-polar bears are Houellebecq’s characters—brother and sister, parent and child, female and male—modifying their comportment, adapting their sexuality, renegotiating their link to the environment. They neither deny nor emphasize global climate change; they absorb and integrate the mutation as a new protocol, as a new contract, as a Sacher-Masochian deal. Well, well. Are you sure you want to introduce Sacher-Masoch as a value? Do you want to contractualize with the devil? You can do as much contractualization as you want, but the location of the deal has to be defined. From the peak of the Ras Dashen (the playground of the gods) to the Schwartz Wald; from the dark dancing of Karachi to the fuel gases of Irkutsk (all different kinds of human heat), there are infinite thresholds, entrances, gaps, lost corridors, and hidden passages where this kind of ceremony could unfold—no need to gash my thumb with a razor to ratify the pact. But first I would choose the territory, a topology that we could all agree on, and a defined area where the deal could occur. Not necessarily a comfortable or well-known place; we all know that it has little to do with pain or satisfaction, it all comes down to where the contract will be made, not even the terms, in fact. All you will remember is the place where you made it—the taste of snowflakes on your tongue, or the sweat on your flesh at the contact with the fur. The Sacher-Masoch apparatus is defined by protocols; it contractualizes and defines relationships which then become the frame, the rules of the game, directly dependent on the nature of the contract. But at the same time, as a transitive process, the writing of the contract defines the condition of the instruction, which reveals the boundary between acceptance and erasure, between what is a legitimate result and what you have to re-formulate in case desires shift during the game itself. The Sacher-Masoch deal seems more contemporary than Faust’s, in which the contract calls for you to give up your independence, often in exchange for nothing. We are in a reflexive process of alienation with Sacher-Masoch, a process that invites emancipation at each step of its own evolution. Please come on, where is architecture in these “sturm und drang” speeches? Are you actually focused on anything, or just digressing from nowhere to nowhere? Well, well, you shot me, nasty Joker. But “endlessnessless” comes from this kind of apparatus, an open source system—adaptable and re-adaptable—dependent on the intrinsic and extrinsic mutation of the system. The main question is: how do we develop open protocols, able to incorporate a wide degree of freedom? More precisely: how could the system develop its own generative evolution to absorb and react according to the mutation of the original parameters? From the house in the forest, Growing up, a project from a long time ago, where the growth of the trees slowly weakened and eventually destroyed the house [Figure 1], to the robotic apparatus of I’ve heard about [Figure 2], we always consider design as an open narrative in which the architecture is just one element, one branch of time, a story with the possibility to rewind and fast-forward. The uncertainty of the system is something we strive for, even by crossing to the “dark side,” by revealing the ambiguities of a situation. Look at the opposition between the sponge geometry and Hippodamus’s master plan for Miletus. [See “Nine Apparatuses: Planning and self-organization.”] This opposition is clear: an open system, where the algorithm of growth cannot be reduced to a simplified relationship; and a closed system, coming from architecture, where everything is predictable, forecasted, and frozen. In this case, the sponge doesn’t make a deal with Sacher-Masoch or Mephisto to become what it wants to be, but rather, it integrates the unknown of its achieved shape as a value of its own existence. This way of understanding the sponge changes radically and politically the possibilities of production: it could change the very role of the architect, who would become an alien child of incest between Villard de Honnecourt and Filippo Brunelleschi. This cannot be only understood as a game of “possibles,” even if it has a lot to do with probabilities. We know that even if we can prove the probability that an event would occur, and determine the relation between two states, A and B, we will never be sure that that event is the right and only one that will occur. To be more pragmatic, let’s take two different states of a shape in a numeric process. Let’s say that we have a topology and a function, and that we want to find a way to move from one to the other; we might try to do this through either 3d modeling or programming. If an unexpected or “emergent” event occurs, the function that you conceptualized originally would be totally disrupted (and I’m only talking here about a single input, not even about trying to input two or three relations of cause-effect at the same time, nor even the possibility of when a calculation leads to undecidability or several results). To introduce fictional material into a process is a way to spread “intelligence” throughout the whole system, and it allows us to react at each step, to evolve with the project. Biologists have been searching for decades for the pacemaker in slime molds, thinking that they didn’t have enough information to find it, only to discover finally that there was no pacemaker, that it was the cells themselves that have the ability to decide when to unite and when to separate. In school, we were told that Brunelleschi became the first modern architect when he fired the workers of the Duomo in Florence. Since he was the only one who knew how to build it—and the shared knowledge of the medieval building process was not working anymore—he could hire the same men again for less money, as an “unskilled” workforce. So, modern architecture was born from that act of domination which followed closely the increasing complexity of social, economic, and technical processes; complexity, in this context, refers to stratification on multiple levels (maybe someone remembers Marx and his theory of alienation?). What is interesting today is that such multifaceted relationships between architects and the other social agents involved in urban projects (developers, politicians, builders, users, citizens...) have become unbelievably complex and fragmented, in such a way that vertical control is no longer a viable approach. François is right when he says that, as architects today, we play the role of both Villard and Filippo. The problem is where and when self-organization and control occur. Indeterminate devices, diagram routines, open-ended scripts—these are often strategies to define a set of conditions where we can still be architects, where our specific knowledge still makes sense. You both sound nostalgic for Villard and Filippo. But it is clear that there are no sacrifices we can make to be absolved of the original sin of Modern architecture; the knowledge that made us who we are unfolds only in fascist situations: Dubai and China are now the architects’ paradises on earth... I’m just saying that our aim is to negotiate architectural choices within indeterminate environments and vice versa. Look again, for instance, to that opposition between the sponge and the grid, where the first is the outcome of a self-organized process and the second a simple act of top-down planning. Are we sure that a sponge-like urban structure is more indeterminate that an orthogonal one? It is not just a matter of representation (organic vs. geometric) nor an issue of the design tools we use. A grid (generic) can work as the framework for very indeterminate behaviors, and a sponge (articulated) can trigger very specific local answers. I think that we should take a fractal point of view, with alternating layers (natural/artificial; Euclidean/non-Euclidean; controlled/self-organized) that depend on time, scale, 2d/3d shifts...In other words, to go beyond Villard and Filippo, we have to merge them. Many sources are whispering to us, from Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects to Frederic Migayrou’s analysis of the “dispute” between Henry Van de Velde and Hermann Muthesius, between industrialization series and prototyping as the identification of uniqueness. This debate has re-actualized since the 1980s, thanks to the two bad golden boys, Steve and Bill, who democratized the tools of control and narration. Could we consider this “genetic” period today as a frozen one, a dream of the last retro-future building as a Zaha-homage-vintage-positive-white-future item, pre-designed in the sixties but constructed, strategically, half a century later? I know it’s painful to recognize that the future drifted in an unexpected way, that it’s a lost sensation. The period of now is a time sandwiched between a predictable future which never happened and the unknown of tomorrow which is coming, day after day, something between In the Mood for Love and 2046 by Wong Kar-wai. This sensation of erotic dystopia, of charmed distress, of melancholy—Baudelairian spleen (according to Walter Benjamin)—is a perfect reversal of Modernity’s blossoming, when the lost paradise emerged from the non-distinction between mass production and the production of the mass, when the loss of uniqueness-value opened the door to the over-valuing of repetitions and series, disqualifying anomalies and singularities as illnesses of the system. On the contrary, the spleen of today does not come from this loss of value but from the impossibility of attributing value to uniqueness, definitively lost after the after-death experiment of Modernity. How can we take refuge today, somewhere in a comfortable back room? The conditions of today, here and now, oscillate between Parrhesia / Athazagoraphobia This is not so different than deja-vu: when you are convinced you have already lived an identical moment at another time. If you ignore the rationalist approach to this phenomenon—what scientists describe as a breach or alteration in the synchronization of the brain’s hemispheres—deja-vu is actually a shift of perception. And if you buy the idea that it’s an inexplicable collision between many parallel universes, like Henri Bergson—who dedicated one of his rare pertinent essays to the question of Le Souvenir du présent et la fausse reconnaissance —you’ll find elucidated what might be called a weakening of “the function of reality:” you get a momentary unfolding of the person. Something like the famous paradox set up by the physicist Ernst Schrödinger in 1937. He thought up an experiment in which a cat, a radioactive particle, and a mechanism made up of a Geiger counter, a hammer, and a vial of lethal gas were locked in a closed box. If the atom disintegrated during a given time, the counter would be activated, then the hammer, which would break the vial, then the gas would escape from it, and the cat would die. In a space ruled by the laws of classical physics, there is as much probability that the atom would disintegrate as that it would not. According to the laws of quantum physics, two possibilities superimpose one another; the atom is simultaneously activated and disintegrated; the cat is subjected to a state of uncertainty, at the same time both dead and alive. This simultaneity is only completed at the instant when an outside individual observes the interior of the box… This principle, which dominates the subatomic and unknown parts of our universe, implies the co-emergence of two or more worlds simultaneously; so called parallel worlds. No future, no present, no reality? “Pick up the world, you can!” could be the White Rabbit’s motto. It sounds like a Spinozian motto: “The mind endeavors to conceive only such things as assert its power of activity.” Quantum physicists used to explain quanta theories through short stories, fairytales, in a way to transpose what they saw into something else, less astonishing and more accessible. “Four fishes are swimming in a pool, two floodgates open simultaneously on two other pools, at the end four fishes are swimming in the two new pools.” This parable is logical in a quantum sense, pertinent to an established field of research, and accessible to cognition: three requirements for any scientific knowledge. It also reveals the contortions that physicists often have to make themselves to understand quantum properties. They have to reintroduce non-crazy hypotheses (or theories) back into the field of common knowledge (i.e. fairytales), but as a result, those non-crazy hypotheses become transformative in their own right. Quantum physics is about the ultra-small scale. What happens to subatomic particles doesn’t have much to do with the actual world in which we live. I hope the engineer who designed the bridge I cross every morning did it in a very deterministic way... Maybe it is better to hope that our universe is one in which bridges don’t collapse. Unfortunately, we cannot (yet) move from one section of the multiverse to another...However, the split between classical physics and probabilistic/aleatory subatomic behavior seems to be similar to the way we design/transform our environment, but with the further problem that it’s no longer an issue of scale, and therefore these approaches tend to collide. In architecture, the constant requests for deterministic assurances (cost, time, performance, security...) more and more comes out of the increasing instability of programs, tasks, and opportunities. So, the observer (who we might equate with the “external conditions” in architecture) becomes the main character: the one who unintentionally decides if the cat will live or die. Quantum physics teaches us that we can manage this interactive relation only in a very paradoxical way. Should we crossbreed Schroedinger’s cat with Deng’s (which catches mice no matter if it’s black or white )? Hey! Joker – maybe you are just a BInary digiT, not even a bug! bzzzz! Who cares about grasping the split between two worlds that even physicists can’t explain? Asking the question is just a way to shift our egocentric viewpoint. Yes, I’ll eventually go for some laboratory cat’s experimentations... What the hell would we do without cats? They seem to be crucial to the Western world’s thinking! Alexandra is right. Shifting the viewpoint is our main goal. As designers, we dream of that power we fight as citizens. So the schizoid situation between planning needs and unpredictable developments that arise in our contemporary societies is fully embedded in our practice and thinking. Hard sciences are intrinsically counterintuitive (our senses tell us that it is the sun that moves around the earth...). On the one hand, they force us to set up paradoxical strategies, using chaos to produce open and dynamic orders, looking at self-organization as a possible and more effective (and desirable) horizon. On the other hand, we do not have to prove our hypothesis—we just tell stories; science is a big reservoir from which to fish powerful devices, tools, and arguments, in order to construct opinions, to create the conditions that will make our strategies really work... No strategies are ethically good enough to be immune to distortion: Deleuzo-Guattarian theories are used just as well by architects as by militaries strategists, to walk through walls. Science and architecture share the same ambiguous and irrefutable relation to reality. And this relation creates frictions with unexpected results. It’s with those unexpected results that we have to deal, not as prophets (too comfortable) nor outsiders (too reassuring) nor experts (too romantic)… Schizophrenia, paranoia; cats, rabbits, mice—are you undergoing pet therapy? Good idea! We can use animals to feed our personality disorders. Laboratory hybrids or “natural” mutations are both fine. François often talks about hermaphrodite polar bears... So you know the story? [see “Nine Apparatuses: Physiological mutation.”] The five percent of mutant post-polar bears are Houellebecq’s characters—brother and sister, parent and child, female and male—modifying their comportment, adapting their sexuality, renegotiating their link to the environment. They neither deny nor emphasize global climate change; they absorb and integrate the mutation as a new protocol, as a new contract, as a Sacher-Masochian deal. Well, well. Are you sure you want to introduce Sacher-Masoch as a value? Do you want to contractualize with the devil? You can do as much contractualization as you want, but the location of the deal has to be defined. From the peak of the Ras Dashen (the playground of the gods) to the Schwartz Wald; from the dark dancing of Karachi to the fuel gases of Irkutsk (all different kinds of human heat), there are infinite thresholds, entrances, gaps, lost corridors, and hidden passages where this kind of ceremony could unfold—no need to gash my thumb with a razor to ratify the pact. But first I would choose the territory, a topology that we could all agree on, and a defined area where the deal could occur. Not necessarily a comfortable or well-known place; we all know that it has little to do with pain or satisfaction, it all comes down to where the contract will be made, not even the terms, in fact. All you will remember is the place where you made it—the taste of snowflakes on your tongue, or the sweat on your flesh at the contact with the fur. The Sacher-Masoch apparatus is defined by protocols; it contractualizes and defines relationships which then become the frame, the rules of the game, directly dependent on the nature of the contract. But at the same time, as a transitive process, the writing of the contract defines the condition of the instruction, which reveals the boundary between acceptance and erasure, between what is a legitimate result and what you have to re-formulate in case desires shift during the game itself. The Sacher-Masoch deal seems more contemporary than Faust’s, in which the contract calls for you to give up your independence, often in exchange for nothing. We are in a reflexive process of alienation with Sacher-Masoch, a process that invites emancipation at each step of its own evolution. Please come on, where is architecture in these “sturm und drang” speeches? Are you actually focused on anything, or just digressing from nowhere to nowhere? Well, well, you shot me, nasty Joker. But “endlessnessless” comes from this kind of apparatus, an open source system—adaptable and re-adaptable—dependent on the intrinsic and extrinsic mutation of the system. The main question is: how do we develop open protocols, able to incorporate a wide degree of freedom? More precisely: how could the system develop its own generative evolution to absorb and react according to the mutation of the original parameters? From the house in the forest, Growing up, a project from a long time ago, where the growth of the trees slowly weakened and eventually destroyed the house [Figure 1], to the robotic apparatus of I’ve heard about [Figure 2], we always consider design as an open narrative in which the architecture is just one element, one branch of time, a story with the possibility to rewind and fast-forward. The uncertainty of the system is something we strive for, even by crossing to the “dark side,” by revealing the ambiguities of a situation. Look at the opposition between the sponge geometry and Hippodamus’s master plan for Miletus. [See “Nine Apparatuses: Planning and self-organization.”] This opposition is clear: an open system, where the algorithm of growth cannot be reduced to a simplified relationship; and a closed system, coming from architecture, where everything is predictable, forecasted, and frozen. In this case, the sponge doesn’t make a deal with Sacher-Masoch or Mephisto to become what it wants to be, but rather, it integrates the unknown of its achieved shape as a value of its own existence. This way of understanding the sponge changes radically and politically the possibilities of production: it could change the very role of the architect, who would become an alien child of incest between Villard de Honnecourt and Filippo Brunelleschi. This cannot be only understood as a game of “possibles,” even if it has a lot to do with probabilities. We know that even if we can prove the probability that an event would occur, and determine the relation between two states, A and B, we will never be sure that that event is the right and only one that will occur. To be more pragmatic, let’s take two different states of a shape in a numeric process. Let’s say that we have a topology and a function, and that we want to find a way to move from one to the other; we might try to do this through either 3d modeling or programming. If an unexpected or “emergent” event occurs, the function that you conceptualized originally would be totally disrupted (and I’m only talking here about a single input, not even about trying to input two or three relations of cause-effect at the same time, nor even the possibility of when a calculation leads to undecidability or several results). To introduce fictional material into a process is a way to spread “intelligence” throughout the whole system, and it allows us to react at each step, to evolve with the project. Biologists have been searching for decades for the pacemaker in slime molds, thinking that they didn’t have enough information to find it, only to discover finally that there was no pacemaker, that it was the cells themselves that have the ability to decide when to unite and when to separate. In school, we were told that Brunelleschi became the first modern architect when he fired the workers of the Duomo in Florence. Since he was the only one who knew how to build it—and the shared knowledge of the medieval building process was not working anymore—he could hire the same men again for less money, as an “unskilled” workforce. So, modern architecture was born from that act of domination which followed closely the increasing complexity of social, economic, and technical processes; complexity, in this context, refers to stratification on multiple levels (maybe someone remembers Marx and his theory of alienation?). What is interesting today is that such multifaceted relationships between architects and the other social agents involved in urban projects (developers, politicians, builders, users, citizens...) have become unbelievably complex and fragmented, in such a way that vertical control is no longer a viable approach. François is right when he says that, as architects today, we play the role of both Villard and Filippo. The problem is where and when self-organization and control occur. Indeterminate devices, diagram routines, open-ended scripts—these are often strategies to define a set of conditions where we can still be architects, where our specific knowledge still makes sense. You both sound nostalgic for Villard and Filippo. But it is clear that there are no sacrifices we can make to be absolved of the original sin of Modern architecture; the knowledge that made us who we are unfolds only in fascist situations: Dubai and China are now the architects’ paradises on earth... I’m just saying that our aim is to negotiate architectural choices within indeterminate environments and vice versa. Look again, for instance, to that opposition between the sponge and the grid, where the first is the outcome of a self-organized process and the second a simple act of top-down planning. Are we sure that a sponge-like urban structure is more indeterminate that an orthogonal one? It is not just a matter of representation (organic vs. geometric) nor an issue of the design tools we use. A grid (generic) can work as the framework for very indeterminate behaviors, and a sponge (articulated) can trigger very specific local answers. I think that we should take a fractal point of view, with alternating layers (natural/artificial; Euclidean/non-Euclidean; controlled/self-organized) that depend on time, scale, 2d/3d shifts...In other words, to go beyond Villard and Filippo, we have to merge them. Many sources are whispering to us, from Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects to Frederic Migayrou’s analysis of the “dispute” between Henry Van de Velde and Hermann Muthesius, between industrialization series and prototyping as the identification of uniqueness. This debate has re-actualized since the 1980s, thanks to the two bad golden boys, Steve and Bill, who democratized the tools of control and narration. Could we consider this “genetic” period today as a frozen one, a dream of the last retro-future building as a Zaha-homage-vintage-positive-white-future item, pre-designed in the sixties but constructed, strategically, half a century later? I know it’s painful to recognize that the future drifted in an unexpected way, that it’s a lost sensation. The period of now is a time sandwiched between a predictable future which never happened and the unknown of tomorrow which is coming, day after day, something between In the Mood for Love and 2046 by Wong Kar-wai. This sensation of erotic dystopia, of charmed distress, of melancholy—Baudelairian spleen (according to Walter Benjamin)—is a perfect reversal of Modernity’s blossoming, when the lost paradise emerged from the non-distinction between mass production and the production of the mass, when the loss of uniqueness-value opened the door to the over-valuing of repetitions and series, disqualifying anomalies and singularities as illnesses of the system. On the contrary, the spleen of today does not come from this loss of value but from the impossibility of attributing value to uniqueness, definitively lost after the after-death experiment of Modernity. How can we take refuge today, somewhere in a comfortable back room? The conditions of today, here and now, oscillate between “dream time” and “day after,” altered states, mixtures of schizoid ingredients, with a pinch of A Clockwork Orange and another from 2001: A Space Odyssey. [See “Nine Apparatuses: The dream time and day after.”] It seems difficult to simplify this reality—to reduce it to a simple game—without considering the vast array of heterogenic tools which integrate speeches, regulations, strategies, scientific protocols, games of power, and stories of self-alienation; talks, non-talks, and misunderstandings of the network, the rhizome of narration, of scenarios, the preliminary enunciation of the apparatus of an architectural item. The apparatus itself cannot be reductively defined as an architectural part, where the input and output become contingent, where ambiguities are articulated as themselves, where the protocols of transformation reveal a condition of production: nothing but Situationist strategies. I’d like to go back to the famous acrimonious polemic in 1914 between Muthesius—who was previously a spy for the German government while working in England at the turn of the century—and Van de Velde. Far from giving the standard romantic analysis of Nikolaus Pevsner (i.e. that Muthesius was good at the beginning and struggled to gain importance as World War I started), I’d say that the co-founder of the Deutscher Werkbund was more an idealist than Van de Velde. Individuality vs. Typology? Pros vs. Cons? Authorship vs. Standardization? I don’t think so! In terms of the economic shift, the latter was more pragmatic— which explains why Gropius, Taut, and many others followed Van de Velde and his ambiguous contradictions— but it is the former who obviously became more historically significant. Besides, the most important part of the debate resides, according to Frederic Schwartz, in the emergence of the notion of the copyright and of the artist, architect, or designer as the legal equivalent of the industrial: “Muthesius invokes a central point of copyright law: the right of the author to have his name appear on or next to his work (or, conversely, to withhold it), even when the work is executed and sold by another party. This was the true polemical gesture of the Dresden exhibition and the source of the controversy which led to the founding of the Werkbund: the central symbol of copyright...” Such fascination today seems to flirt with commercial business. Is there no exit? No, the future is gone, as Ballard claims, as well as the technological potential embodied by it. I don’t think there is any legitimate space left for refuge. Yes or no, the future is gone and will never be. Climatologists are the first ones to admit that they will never be able to make truly accurate predictions, even if they someday own computers as fast as the demon of Laplace. Actually, they prepare themselves for the uncertainty of climatic changes by imagining families of scenarios. These scenarios deal not only with hierarchies, but, more interestingly, with heterarchies of information. As we said, endlessnessless is a tool for narration and uniqueness, not for industrialization or repetition. It includes and produces scenarios of singularity, of anomaly. Endlessnessless redefines the “aura” of things. In a way, this narrative machine, extracted screw by screw from mass industrialization, would develop stories and principles of reality, application scripts, constructive behaviors, impermanencies, and uncertainties. This kind of post-bachelor machine—the union of the T1000 and Picabia’s Ghost —introduces a degree of ephemeral subjectivity into the tangible products of physical transformation. This is one type of ambiguity, but not the main one: in the middle of the enormous potential of prototyping applications, we are, paradoxically, fully and knowingly infiltrated by melancholy, confronted by the difficulty of giving value to “uniqueness.” It’s the lost sensation, spleen, described by Baudelaire, in perfect symmetry; as kids of Tron (computer nerds swallowed by software), we are able to create, with our technology, a prototype, rare and unique, but the genetic reason for this prototype has been digested by a Miyazaki monster and lost in the system of mass desire. It’s very strange that at a time when we could be using computational design in new, provocative, non-standard ways, the intrinsic value of this approach and its production drift and shift somewhere, away from us, into a magnetic black hole. There seems to be some romanticizing going on here, against the rationalism of the Enlightenment Century and the positive aspects of the Encyclopedia. But architecture has always been thought of in this positivist way, as a vector of progressive projection. Are you, on the contrary, regressive? Are you pathologically alienated by your Faustian deal? Do you know the sad story about the mouse dancing provocatively in front of the cat, only to be killed and eaten by it? Apparently the condition of provocation is entirely unintelligible and illogic. It seems like suicide, only with music and elegance (like making a pact with the devil). The spirit of the mouse will survive digestion by the cat…[see “Nine Apparatuses: Causality and dependencies.”] We’re talking about something that appears absurd, to a rationalist point of view—the illusion of the dance of death—but this story is still less monstrous than the causality/dependency explanation—loss of free will, loss of independent consciousness—given by neurobiological scientists. These non-linear trajectories are completely changing the way we think about many scientific and humanist fields. For example, we know now that genetic processes are not based on a linear view of time, but on causalities and a-effects (affects and effects as one thing), all of which can be paused, reversed, and fragmented. Recent research in biology might make us think that there is no “intelligence” other than an absurd one. If you put bees and flies in a bottle, the bees will die after a few hours, exhausted by bumping into the glass, their instinct having told them to go where they see light; on the other hand, the flies will find their way out sooner or later through the neck of the bottle, their apparently erratic and uncoordinated flying being much more efficient than the bees’s. There’s a lot to say about a-effects. Yes, we can determine causal relationships by studying them, but this leads to no real knowledge or understanding. But what we call noise (or tiny music: the ventriloquist-like song of the bacteria in the mouse...) is completely transforming our understanding of physics and social phenomena. Just because a system cannot be replicated, doesn’t mean that it’s unique. Something unique might not actually be part of our factual world. We should talk instead about variations and singularities. Monstrosities, extreme singularities, and anomalies force us to redraw the boundaries of the intelligible world, redefine the norm, ...intelligible unity of the world through his historico-pragmatic vision of physics. Both Mach and Van de Velde were trying to explain anomalies, singularities in the system. As you know, Gropius— probably still under the influence of Muthesius—drew the first logo of the Bauhaus as a cathedral where all artists, scientists, and thinkers could reunite. Quite an eloquent idea, no? I think we can agree that to project means to deal with cause-effect relationships. It may sound like an enlightenment or positivist statement, but it is a condition very hard to ignore. On the other hand, we know that deterministic actions are less and less likely to produce the effects we expect (there is a joke about a TV ad in Italy: some years ago, a spirits firm promoted its product with the adventures of a veterinarian. They didn’t sell one more bottle, but veterinary schools had a lot of new students...). Most architects try to resist the notion of indeterminacy; they see it as a threat to the core business of the discipline, i.e. authorship and formal control over buildings. But reality escapes these architects: it’s no longer possible to rule over the building process in this way. So, in the last twenty-five years, avant-garde architects shifted their struggle against the establishment from the field of language to the field of operations, choosing to explore indeterminate processes, bottom-up techniques, open-ended devices, and interactive protocols. This triggered a conceptual shift that brought proliferation—rather than composition—to the foreground. But proliferation alone is not so interesting. More interesting are the parameters of selection, the conditions with which to negotiate multiples of variations. We all love “non-pedigree” architecture because it requires of us to make intelligent selections, although we hate it in its recent market-driven, global, generic, and repetitive expressions. One of the weaknesses of the “non-standard” approach to design (especially by the Americans) is its seeming lack of direction or, in other words, its search for novelty for its own sake, as an absolute value. It seems that many things produced in this way are simply consequences of technological possibility: answers in search of a question. These architects are like the flies in the bottle, producing large numbers of alternative solutions, waiting for something (critics, magazines, markets, clients) to select the next architectural “real thing.” It’s not so different than what happens in turbo-capitalistic developments in the East: I’ve heard that in Bangkok, they planned to build two different metro lines to serve the same area, waiting to see which one would survive... At R&Sie(n), those anomalies as the main focus of our practice; they’re the most fertile part: no longer part of a purely linear process of cause and effect, but a succession of frozen objects, in different states, made of their own genetic footprints. This way of working allows us to avoid a world ruled only by probabilities. The bachelor machine or apparatus articulated by R&Sie(n) borrows more from the possibilities of machinism as a way to produce for subjectivity; we borrow tools from science and technology for their ability to produce indeterminacy; we instrumentalize the failure of their positivist nature and their structural logic. This brings us back to the starting point of this conversation— the Paranoia of a little girl—and Duchamp’s reading of Xenakis’s and Le Corbusier’s Philips Pavilion, the mystification of the theory of correspondence. Deleuze and Guattari developed a strategy for subjectivity as a strategy of resistance. The subjective and the singular help them—and us—escape from the exclusive determinism of pure computational addiction. I want to talk about real-time, which is related to augmented reality. Some of our friends want to live in an illusion, a perfect simulation to the present. It leads them to believe in the precision, the efficiency, and the honesty of the tools that they have access to. Even if we can’t consider this attitude purely positivistic, it leads to a sort of scientific mysticism, understandable in what it tries to avoid but not in what it generates. The literary approach to this desire is known as “speculative fiction,” which never really works: there are always subtle shifts, small gaps with reality that allow fictions to enter, to create openings, to be instruments of transformation. Pure computational determinism protects its authors from this “risk.” It allows them to refuse speculation because they are afraid of not having full control of it. But speculation is a dynamic object: it’s always in motion; it’s subject to the Doppler Effect. But it can also be real, physical. By its taste and color, you can recognize and understand its shifting. Let’s return to the bachelor machines. The sexual frustration embedded in the machines produces a line of thought which starts with Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future and finds in the dystopia of R&Sie(n) machines a new trajectory. Take Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus or Impressions d’Afrique, for instance. The latter was performed at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris, in 1912. The entire avant-garde, from Duchamp to Breton, attended the show. They were struck by the artifacts; it is no surprise that the sexual nature of technology became such a paradigm in their respective works. One interpretation of the bachelor machine symbolizes pure bliss through both onanism and a sexually liberating, non-repressive sadomasochist pact. The whole range of the bachelor machines borrows from the “coitus-interruptus” process, which has, as its core value, the idea of pure pleasure by preventing the deposit of sperm into the vagina, thus neutralizing the act of reproduction. The energy and tension of the Bachelor’s counter-(re)productivity, as depicted in Roussel’s novels, finds a parallel in Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, even masterpiece. Male on the bottom, female on top; no reunion, no union; they can’t mate; bachelor machines don’t give a damn for cloning or duplication… they crave pleasure, only pleasure! This bizarre rejection of progress and evolution foreshadows a loving sadomasochist relationship between men and machines. What comes next? An historical blind spot of vulnerability and pleasure! Such a legacy is necessary to bring R&Sie(n) machines to life. It is through the power of the mind that orgasm is achieved—the bride and the bachelors of Duchamp’s Large Glass consummate their union mentally or subconsciously: “The subconscious is a factory, a machine for production,” as Deleuze puts it. There’s a genealogy—of sluggish, desiring machines and machinations—from Duchamp to R&Sie(n). For R&Sie(n), the “bachelor apparatus” is a vector of narration, like the Lyre of Orpheus, who goes down into the kingdom of Ades to bring back Eurydice, his sweetheart, and plays music to bewitch the wild animals and the devil. The apparatus creates simultaneously an operative effect and blurred logic. What kind of sound could be played? Stockhausen or Sirtaki, John Cage or Just Like a Woman? Simultaneously, the apparatus builds ambivalences, both in a narrative and procedural mode—as schizoid contingencies—and becomes the vector of a constructive subjectivity. To tell a story about architecture, R&Sie(n) introduces a gimmick, a MacGuffin. The mathematical formula in the movie 39 Steps, for example, is a MacGuffin: a clue from which the story could unfold, only the story then diverges and eventually becomes independent of this clue. The Olzweg machine [Figure 3] is such a narrative device; a starting point for indeterminacy, for aleatory behavior, for the process of losing control in the service of unpredictable shape. The endlessness needs this narrative and operative clue to create the condition of a further step, of an un-achievement, of an “After Death Experience:” the prolongation of the phases of construction. For this, R&Sie(n) apparatuses are stochastic machines, psycho machines, chimera robots, speculative mechanics, anthroposophic systems, de-polluting processes, environmentalist ecosophic devices, paranoiac artificial climates for negotiating with biotope fears… The machine protocols are psychomasomachinistic: they include misunderstandings, “des malentendus,” and frustrations. The level of freedom—the degree of randomization of the behavior—develops as the corruption of the application. The script, the algorithm that drives the machine, is disrupted by internal agents written as “if, then, and while” possibilities and alternatives. But the main purpose of the apparatuses is to reveal and to release the contradictions of a given situation. They do not try to simplify preliminary complexities, but rather they define a strategy of mutation based directly on those complexities. Are they desirable and desiring, in the sense of the “Body without Organs,” from Artaud and Guattari? I hope so... Their eroticization, their sexualization, seeping from the context in which they are embedded, is part of the rhizome, avoiding panoptical unfolding. Like Pessoa, “I’m coming from before the reality.” The apparatuses place architecture in a space between the real and reality; fiction allows us to travel between the two. Do I hear music? The Titanic’s endless song? The nature of the music during the sinking of the Titanic is still up for debate; some survivors heard Nearer, My God to Thee and some others Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Why did some hear the sacred song of death and others the profane rage against the ideal? If you want to know, dear Joker, R&Sie(n) improvises both simultaneously. But don’t be confused; the Lyre is a decoy, a lure. The apparatus itself is a construction: part ecosophic empathy (as the recognition of an original condition); part Sacher-Masoch contract (as a rule of the game); part anthroposophic loop (as an exchange of substances); part heterotopian sensation (as the indeterminate and stochastic behavior); and part dynamic agent or Lyre, to operate the story, from Orpheus’s own hands. Yes, yes, you got it...! The new five points! Is this a nightmare? You are reviving a zombie! You killed me, my friend. “I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!” said the White Rabbit. It’s time for Alice to jump into her parallel universe. Like her, now, we confuse our own paranoia with the unreality of our perception. ---------------------------- endless ---------------------------- 1) William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1611, Ariel, Act 1, sc 2, 195-200. 2) Vedi Giorgio Agamben, Che cos’è un dispositivo, Nottetempo, 2006. “L’ipotesi che intendo proporvi è che la parola ‘dispositivo’ sia un termine tecnico decisivo nella strategia di pensiero di Foucault,’” ivi, 3) There is a genealogy of rabbits that remain to be mapped out from Fibonacci to Lewis Caroll. Its title would be Rabbits never die... 4)“The Lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives signs”, Heraclitus, fr. 93 Diels Kranz. 5)Attributed to Thales; translation: Giovanni Corbellini 6) See Georges Bataille in Denis Hollier, Against architecture: the writings of Georges Bataille, MIT Press, 1989. 7)“Le système nerveux humain est un organe d’aliénation. Il permet d’être autre chose que soi-même”. Voir comment la blastula embryonnaire en s’invaginant successivement produit la structure trioblastique des 3-dermes. René Thom, Morphogenèse et imaginaire, Circé, sous la direction de Jean Burgos, 1978. 8) Henri Bergson, “Le Souvenir du present et la fausse reconnaissance”, in Revue philosophique, Dec. 1908, pp 561- 593. English translation in Mind-Energy. Macmillan, 1920. 9) Baruch Spinoza, Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata, 1661-77, parte III, prop. 54. 10) The first time that Deng Xiaoping used the "cat theory" in public was in 1962, at a meeting of the Chinese Central Committee Secretariat, when discussing the "contract responsibility system" for restoring agricultural production. Curiously, at that time, the first cat was yellow... 11) See Eyal Weizman, “Lethal Theory”, Log, n. 7, 2006. 12) See Steven Johnson, Emergence, Scribner, 2002. 13) Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without architects. An introduction to nonpedigreed architecture, Moma-Doubleday, 1964.. 14) Frederic Migayrou in Architecture Non Standard, catalogue of the exhibition, Centre Pompidou, 2004. 15) Both movies were notoriously directed by Stanley Kubrick, whose first feature was Fear and Desire, 1953, with a team of soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in a fictional war... 16) Guy Debord, La société du spectacle, Buchet/Chastel, 1967; Constant and Guy Debord, La déclaration d'Amsterdam, in “Internationale situationniste”, n. 2, december 1958, pp. 31-32. 17) Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War, Yale University Press, 1996. 18) James G. Ballard, “Back to the Heady Future”, in The Daily Telegraph, 17th april 1993. 19) The demon of Laplace (by the name of the french scientist of the 18th century who created it) was able to know, at a given moment, all the parameters of the particles of the universe. This first demon was followed by others, as the demon of Maxwell at the end of the 19th century. 20) About heterarchies, multiple disorders and scenario: there is a part of the brain called hippocamp. Depressive persons use to have less neurons and interconnectivities between those neurons in this part of the brain. It’s only recently that we are able to scan the activity of the hippocamp and to understand the effect of therapies on it. The fact is that both pills and psychotherapies allow the hippocamp to reconstitute its neurons and their interconnectivities. The consequence of it are quite big, to say it fast it would mean that from Plato, through St. Augustine until all Cartesian and objectives schools of thinking, the distinction between the psyche and the soma was unfounded and untrue. On this topic see Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ error. Emotion, reason, and the human brain, Putnam, 1994. 21) The work of Picabia stay in the shadows of the 20th century, but his kaleidoscopic ghost is always perturbating the hierarchy of values. Here we refer to the exhibition in 1922, “Máquinas y españolas”, at the Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona. 22) Perte d'Auréole or Loss of a Halo, Charles Beaudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris, 1864. 23) Movie by Steven Lisberger, 1982. 24) The black digestive intestine in the movie of Hayao Miyazaki, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away), 2002. 25) Mathieu Aury, “Darwin révolutionnaire? Une lecture politique de Dennett“, in Multitudes, n. 16, 2004, Philosophie de la biologie. English readers could see Daniel C. Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Simon & Schuster, 1995. 26) And in my opinion, the absence of uniqueness does not lead to the idea of the eternal return of Friedrich Nietzsche or cycles, whatever they are. 27) Vedi la mostra “Non-Standard Architecture”, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 10.12.2003-01.03.2004, a cura di Frédéric Migayrou e Zeynep Mennan. 28) Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalism et Schizophrenie 1, L’anti-Œdipe, Editions de Minuit, 1972. 29Auguste de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, L’Ève future, 1886. 30) The famous books Impressions d’Afrique, 1910, and Locus Solus, 1914, by Roussel are part of the bachelors machines corpus delineated by Michel Carrouges or Harald Szeeman etc. 31) MacGuffin is a concept created by Alfred Hitchcock. It’s an item which is used to trigger the intrigue. The importance of the Mac Guffin disappear with the development of the scenario, it s a pretext, an alibi to create the artefact which becomes a movie. 32) Corps Sans Organe, or CsO, is a concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari in Mille Plateaux and Anti-Oedipe. It’s coming from a text of Antonin Artaud: “L’homme est malade parce qu’il est mal construit. Il faut se décider à le mettre à nu pour lui gratter cet animalcule qui le démange mortellement : Dieu, et avec Dieu ses organes, oui, ses organes, tous ses organes… car liez moi si vous le voulez mais il n’y a rien de plus inutile qu’un organe. Lorsque vous lui aurez fait un corps sans organes, alors, vous l’aurez délivré de tous les automatismes et rendu à sa véritable et immortelle liberté. Alors, vous lui réapprendrez à danser à l’envers comme dans le délire des bals musette, et cet envers sera son véritable endroit.” 33) Fernando Pessoa, Anarchism, in magazine littéraire, n. 291, September 1991, 29. 34) Felix Guattari, Les trois ecologies, Paris, Gallilée, 1989 35Rudolph Steiner, Les lignes directrices de l’anthroposophie, 1924. 36) Michel Foucault. Le Cruel et le Froid. Presentation de Sacher Masoch, Gilles Deleuze, Edition de Minuit, 1967. 37) Utopie et Heterotopie, Michel Foucault, lecture for National French Radio, 1966. 38) Comments by Benoit: Of course the result of the apparatus equation is not equal to the sum of all those ingredients; it has more to do with a process of alchemy where the ingredients, when put in contact, transform themselves.