Structuring Media

via BoingBoing: Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom

2009-01-30T12:31:00.000-08:00

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article4022091.ece?print=yes&randnum=1233293019614

Bruce Sterling and "Bruno Argento" sound off on 2009 (Hint, they are the same guy)

2009-01-30T10:01:00.000-08:00

from the SEED magazine

Bruce Sterling:

If science is discredited, why should mere politics have any intellectual rigor? Just cobble together a crazy-quilt mix-and-match ideology, like Venezuelan Bolivarism or Russia's peculiar mix of spies, oil, and Orthodoxy. Go from the gut — all tactics, no strategy — making up the state of the world as you go along! Stampede wildly from one panic crisis to the next. Believe whatever is whispered. Hide and conceal whatever you can. Spy on the phone calls, emails, and web browsing of those who might actually know something.

If that leads you to a miserable end-state, huddling with the children in a fall-out shelter clutching silver bullion, then you can congratulate yourself as the vanguard of civilization.

So 2009 will be a squalid year, a planetary hostage situation surpassing any mere financial crisis, where the invisible hand of the market, a good servant turned a homicidal master, periodically wanders through a miserable set of hand-tied, blindfolded, feebly struggling institutions, corporations, bureaucracies, professions, and academies, and briskly blows one's brains out for no sane reason.

We can do better than this:

Bruno Argento:

I am a futurist — Italian "Futurismo," 100 years old in 2009, is arguably the world's oldest futurism, after all — so I will venture to predict something that seems to me obvious: Eight years late, the 20th century has finally departed us this year. It will never return.

The "true" 20th century — the Communist century — began in 1914 and ended in 1989. We are now in the true 21st century.

After 1989 we enjoyed a strange interregnum where "history ended." Everyone ran up a credit-card bill at the global supermarket. The adventure ended badly, in crisis. Still, let us be of good heart. In cold fact, a financial crisis is one of the kindest and mildest sorts of crisis a civilization can have. Compared to typical Italian catastrophes like wars, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes, endemic political collapse — a financial crisis is a problem for schoolchildren.

Documentary on Architecture in China

2009-01-27T12:02:00.000-08:00

China According to China

An interesting interview of 5 or 6 Chinese architects coming to terms with the realities of working in China today.
Section 2: "Speed" with Ma Qing Yun and Section 5: "Architecture" with Ai Wei Wei, are particularly interesting.

At the intersection of Typological and Topological Form

2009-01-27T11:48:00.000-08:00

Design portfolio from the 16th Century

Mayan Glyphs

2008-11-20T19:58:00.000-08:00

i've become fascinated in mayan glyphs.
just an amazing graphical system.
cracking the maya code

Seed Magazine

2008-11-18T12:56:00.003-08:00

Some interesting presentations here

Henry Markram, Greg Lynn, Natalie Jeremijenko, etc.

Situated Advocacy

2008-11-18T12:50:00.001-08:00

The book I worked on with Benjamin Bratton + Natalie Jeremijenko has been released and can be downloaded as a PDF here.

This would be funny if it wasn't so damn true...

2008-11-13T14:51:00.000-08:00

As my roommate and fellow SCI_Arc grad Ji observed:

There is a considerate difference between our class and the current thesis class. When we were finishing up school, the big decision was whether to try for a design-oriented firm and sacrifice a good salary or go with a more conventional architecture firm and get paid a decent wage. Now, with the economy the way it is, the thesis students are thinking: well, I guess I will just have to start my own firm straight away...

...and take a weekend job at Fry's to make ends meet.

(Maybe there is a silver lining in all this)

Death Note

2008-11-11T10:56:00.001-08:00

I've really been enjoying this show.
Very dark, but strangely "satisfying"

death note on hulu

More from Zizek

2008-11-11T10:42:00.000-08:00

Pseudo-naturalized ethnico-religious conflicts are the form of struggle which fits global capitalism: in our age of 'post-politics', when politics proper is progressively replaced by expert social administration, the only remaining legitimate source of conflict is cultural (ethnic, religious) tension. Today's rise of 'irrational' violence should therefore be conceived as strictly correlative to the depoliticization of our societies, that is, to the disappearance of the proper political dimension, its translation into different levels of 'administration' of social affairs: violence is accounted for in terms of social interest, and so on, and the unaccountable remainder cannot but appear to be 'irrational'... The proper Hegelian dialectic reversal is crucial here: what looks at first like the multitude of 'remainders of the past' which should be gradually overcome with the growth of a tolerant multiculturalist liberal order is all of a sudden, in a flash of insight, perceived as this liberal order's very mode of existence - in short, teleological temporal sucession is unmasked as structural contemporaneity. (In exactly the same way, what, in the realm of 'really existing socialism', looked like petty-bourgeois 'remainders of the past', that eternal excuse for all the failures of socialist regimes, was the inherent product of the regime itself.)

Welcome to the Desert of the Real, pp 133-2

2 years and $60k later...

2008-11-08T00:37:00.001-08:00

My academic portfolio can now be viewed online:
link

Radiohead - No Surprises

2008-10-13T21:24:00.001-07:00

Such a strange, wonderful video...

Naom Chomsky William Buckley Debate

2008-10-11T15:47:00.000-07:00

1/2

2/2

Chomsky remarks on Buckley's passing in 2008

Literal Take Me On Video

2008-10-11T15:29:00.000-07:00

karaoke!

Architecture and Ritual

2008-10-08T15:57:00.001-07:00

It is not architecture’s role to fabricate ritual - it can however lend existing ritual a higher degree of coherence, framing it in relation to its often obscured cultural and psychological context.

clinton smackdown on weeny fox news guy

2008-10-01T00:19:00.000-07:00

ok, i'm not in any way trying to make this a political blog, but this is just too damn funny...

Pan's concert

2008-09-23T13:49:00.000-07:00

"She was frankly disappointed when [Pan] proved to be slighter in stature than her Alobar, and she could barely keep from sniggering at his foul tangles of wool and his silly tail. Even his stench failed to measure up to Alobar's description of it, striking her as more locally naughty than universally nasty. It wasn't until he began to pipe that Kudra got some sense of Who (or What) He Really Was.

At first, his playing, too, seemed slight; it was so simple, careless, and primitive that one had to sympathize with Timolus, who, judging the music contest between Pan and Apollo, had unhesitatingly awarded the prize to the Apollonian lyre, thereby establishing the tradition that critics must laud polish and restraint, attack what is quirky and disobedient, a tradition that endures to this day. Had Timolus not hooked Pan off the stage so quickly, had he possessed the - what? the honesty? the humility? (Timolus, after all, couldn't play shit) the nerve? to actually listen to Pan, to respond with something more genuine than his preconceptions, he might have been affected, as Kudra began to be affected, once she stopped smirking at his obvious lack of formal training and quit comparing him unfavorably with the flutist, Lord Krishna. Pan's song, because it served no purpose, was above all, liberating. It was music beyond the control of the player's will or the listener's will; the will, in fact, dissolved in it (which may explain why it was politically necessary for Apollo, with the compliance of Timolus, to drown it out)... Kudra felt that at Pan's concert she was on less than solid ground, yet, as unsteady as that ground might be, she was driven to dance upon it."

- Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

Free floating in the sewers of architecture

2008-09-09T14:55:00.000-07:00

I graduated from SCI_Arc on Sunday, flushed from the institute out into the real world. Wish me luck!

The jury for my final review was nothing short of amazing:

Tom Mayne
Sylvia Lavin
Neil Denari
Emmanuel Petit
Craig Hodgetts
Hernan Diaz Alonso
Benjamin Bratton

The review was, in a word, contentious. Sylvia Lavin and I just don't seem to have common ground.

Zizek on Toilets

2008-09-02T20:29:00.000-07:00

my two favorite songs right now

2008-08-24T11:42:00.000-07:00

(alternate versions...)

Big Ideas, Don't Get Any, James Houston

Bjork at Coachella, All Is Full Of Love

Live is Life!

2008-08-19T18:39:00.000-07:00

as the final credits roll...

Laibach

and another one, more scary...

from our good friend rob

2008-08-19T11:59:00.000-07:00

"I've been watching the Olympics sporadically. Who even knew there was such a thing as synchronized diving? I'd already read articles and watched a couple of documentaries on the Bird's Nest and Water Cube--though as much as I enjoy the design, I can't help noting that from the air the Water Cube resembles nothing so much as a quilted mattress. I caught the beginning and end of the opening ceremony. The 2008 drummers were a not altogether flattering look into the soul of the Chinese regime, which I guess we're supposed to call authoritarian rather than totalitarian these days, and the spookiness of the spectacle was only heightened by the rictuses the drummers were instructed to display after they seemed too intimidating in the dress rehearsal. But the moment that most got to me was the Red Army soldiers raising the PRC flag. They'd been made up with some goo that made them positively glisten. It was the perfect counterpart to the '36 Olympics' Aryan ubermenschen.

Did you notice how during the start of their opening ceremony coverage, NBC peppered the script with phrases like "great leap" and "long march" that have enormous resonance in recent Chinese history, but used the phrases utterly out of their historical context, an inappositeness that was especially jarring considering the human suffering caused by the Great Leap Forward? So now we know (1) the Olympics are not just a small step for China, they're a great leap, (2) it's been a long march for China to these Olympics, and (3) NBC's writers are brainless hacks. Only the last of these is an insight that's likely to stay with us."

Solaris Highway Scene

2008-08-17T13:16:00.001-07:00

Mao, Monkey forever

2008-08-13T19:01:00.000-07:00

Text for the SCI_Arc 2008 Thesis Catalog

heurme(neu)tic formations
or the productive space of the creative impasse

The Memorial to Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China (constructed in 1977) is the final resting place of the embalmed body of Mao Zedong. It supports an ongoing ritual of public visitation to this body – a ritual with profound implications for the larger symbolic order of contemporary Chinese culture. This thesis explores the possibility for reformulating the memorial and the visitation ritual in relation to its physical and cultural-symbolic context. In particular, it seeks to re-direct Tiananmen Square towards its original, most radical (and perhaps idealized) conception as a post-enlightenment political formation; a pure, oceanic space, outside of history, perpetually restructuring itself in the contingency of its daily inhabitation.

This thesis starts with the presumption that the problems posed by the Mao Zedong Memorial are in many ways too big for architecture. As such, it has embraced and attempted to stay honest to what might be described as a schizophrenic design process (operating through multiple, and at times contradictory personalities). In doing so it poses a deeper question that must be asked of any conceptual architectural project: how and at what moment – without sacrificing the intellectual dimensions of the project – does the designer make the transition from objective observer to one who is complicit with the narrative of the design? In this sense, the thesis evolves into a deeply personal project, seeking to understand and make productive the impasse between my own sense-of-self and the external ecology of architectural, socio-political and philosophical discourse.

3/4 Review Continued

2008-08-13T09:16:00.001-07:00

Dynamic Diagram/Visualization/Simulation of embedded sensor network in Tiananmen Square. Scripted in processing, with help from Roland Snooks. Sorry for the terrible quality...

Final showdown of the anamorphic kernel

2008-08-12T19:37:00.000-07:00

Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West is perhaps a more elegant and effective/affective version of what Zizek is talking about. that which is background (harmonica's memory of his brother's murder) bubbles forth into the foreground in the final showdown between harmonica and the man in black. as the viewer, one is directly confronted with the raw kernel of the narrative (the memory, the event which defines the structure of the narrative), forcing a (radical) reconsideration of the structure (and also shattering the dramatic tension built up by keeping the kernel in the background, thus ending the movie, and perhaps, as was Leon's intention, the entire genre of the western). the elaborate choreography of the scene can be understood in ritualistic terms as a sort of cinematic preparation for the unveiling of this (totemic) kernel...

and another fascinating moment in the film, as described by Henry Fonda:

and a great BBC documentary on the film
"The traditional gunfight in Hollywood Westerns is linear, in the sense that you have goodie at one end of the main street, like in High Noon, and baddies walking down the street. Leone was much more interested in circles rather than lines: one character comes forward, choreographed to the music, every second of it, another character comes forward, we get a close up of one, a close up of the other, they walk around each other like two dogs waiting to have a scrap. It is like a dance, a sort of military two step."

Zizek on Children of Men

2008-08-12T19:00:00.001-07:00

wish the film lived up to Zizek's observations and really pushed the "paradox of anamorphosis" in the "tension between the foreground and background..."

Cloverfield camcorder

2008-08-12T18:00:00.000-07:00

how the staging of a cinematic experience can be contanimated by the persepective of the viewer, or perhaps, as an alternate possibility, how architecture can be contanimated by the "perspectives" of the site...

The devil speaks fashion

2008-08-12T17:21:00.000-07:00

worth a gander and a ponder...
i imagine this relates to any design discipline, or more loosely, to any expert model of organization, which, if understood in a pluralistic sense (ala wikipedia or the java development, etc.), might be speculated to be the future political model. do we believe in this model, that it is not possible to exempt oneself from certain expert systems, that they are so ingrained in the fabric of our culture, that one cannot participate in culture without being contaminated in some way, indirect but profound? and to what extent can we rely, as designers, on the "trickle-down" economics of style to justify the speculative flights of fancy that play out in the academy and the gallery?

3/4 Review

2008-08-12T13:07:00.001-07:00

w/ Jason Payne and Hernan Diaz Alonso
August 11, 2008
(i'd like to post the recording of the review, but can't figure out how to upload an audio file. tried to gapcast thing to no avail. any suggestions?)

Instead of Science(fiction) remaining a domain for positivist and determinist propoganda, it should norish the seeds of our own monstrosity – our own loss of control and indeterminism, chaos theory and biogenetics – as a force striking alliance with harpies and earthly creatures, the Faustian dark side and the Strum und Drang, against the rationalist wigs and the works of Hegelian spirit, and open up to a world where even fears become fables, as lovely as they are carnal...

...Architecture is not something to be thought or produced 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 territorialized attitude is in sharp contrast to macrocynical flights of fancy (the market creates the form!)...and instead launches processes that reactivate the concept of throbbing, complex and unfinished localism.

- Francois Roche, (Science)Fiction & Mass Culture Crisis, 2003

Love in da Club

2008-08-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

do they do birthday parties?

Fellini's Roma

2008-06-11T17:19:00.000-07:00

The Camera and the Crowd

In La Dulce Vita, at the miracle in the field, and again in Roma, along the highway, Fellini explores the relationship between the spectator and the spectacle, the camera, the crowd and the conflagration of the Sense-Event. In both extended scenes, there is the camera: many cameras with intersecting gaze; there is the crowd: assembled for an event, and producing of itself an event. The crowd surrounds the camera, invades the camera, and the camera invades the crowd, they are one and the same, in co-habitation. The crowd and the cameras together form a pluralistic, mutating perspective. There is the rain, which implies disruption but in fact pulls together, intersects, merges, heightens - the show must go on. The spectator and the spectacle are one and the same, they merge as a dynamic and disrupted complex. The spectacle collapses in this complex - or perhaps achieves its highest realization. The reactive forces find a way to act their activity, to escape the cycle of reactivity. And here we begin to understand the strange power of the crowd, its consumption and totalization within the spectacle and the path for it to explode its limitations, to virtualize and to proliferate - to speak for itself.

Species Activity & The Sublime Abortion

2008-06-11T15:43:00.000-07:00

Let us call for an autonomous band of architects, nomads clammering for, if nothing else, an excess of capitalism - with architecture as the extreme manifestation of this excess. And through this excess let us explore the anatomy of capitalism's contradictions - the cracks and fissures in the institutional edifice where new beauty and new activity might take hold - driving for the fragmentation, multiplication and proliferation of this edifice as a shattered mirror reflecting itself.

We must not confuse the product of culture with its means. Man's species activity constitutes him as responsible for his reactive forces: responsibility-debt. But this responsibility is only a means of training and selection: it progressively measures the suitability of reactive forces for being acted. The finished product of species activity is not the responsible man himself or the moral man, but the autonomous and supramoral man, that is to say the one who actually acts his reactive forces for being acted. He alone "is able to" promise, precisely because he is no longer responsible to any tribunal. The product of culture is not the man who obeys the laws, but the sovereign and legislative individual who defines himself by power over himself, over destiny, over the law: the free, the light, the irresponsible...This is the general movement of culture: the means disappearing in the product. Responsibility as responsibility before the law, law as the law of justice, justice as the means of culture - all this disappears in the product of culture itself...Culture is man's species activity; but, since this activity is selective, it produces the individual as its final goal, where species is itself suppressed.
- Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, p. 137

In history culture takes on a sense which is very different from its own essence, having been seized by strange forces of a completely different nature. Species activity in history is inseparable from a movement which perverts it and its product. Furthermore, history is this very perversion, it is identical to the "degeneration of culture". - Instead of species activity, history presents us with races, peoples, classes, Churches and States. Onto species activity are grafted social organizations, associations, communities of a reactive character, parasites which cover it over and absorb it. By means of species activity - the movement of which they falsify - reactive forces form collectives...Instead of justice and its process of self-destruction, history presents us with societies which have no wish to perish and which cannot imagine anything superior to their own laws...Instead of the sovereign individual as the product of culture, history presents us with its own product, the domesticated man in whom it finds the famous meaning of history: "the sublime abortion" (Nietzche, Beyond Good and Evil, 63), "the gregarious animal, docile, sickly, mediocre being" (Nietzche, Geneology of Morals, 11).
- Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, p. 138

The Object and the Field

2008-06-04T13:41:00.000-07:00

Tiananmen Square and the Body of Mao Zedong

The history of a thing, in general, is the succession of forces which take possession of it and the co-existence of the forces which struggle for possession. The same object, the same phenomenon, change sense depending on the force which appropriate it.
- Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy

What is Tiananmen Square (as it stands today)? How can we begin to understand it as a manifestation of the cultural and political reality of contemporary China? We might start by saying that it is oceanic. It defined by/in its excessiveness, its openness and its indeterminacy; it is a receptacle for the mobilization of the body-politic. It is composed in the meanderings of the crowd and the systems, overt and covert, that control and orchestrate the behavior of this crowd. It is the site of hyper-surveillance. It is un-centered even as it forms the symbolic center of the nation. It is the seat of power and the diagram of that power, replicated ad infinitum throughout the urban spaces of the country.

The square is subject to a variety of co-existent and at times competing forces. These forces, emanating from symbolic and infrastructural elements placed in and around the square, are both active and reactive, stabilizing and destabilizing, consistent with tradition and a radical departure from that tradition. These forces are encapsulated in the diagram of the site, they define that diagram. In the same sense that the Gothic Cathedral served as a microcosm of the ontological structure of medieval Europe, Tiananmen square operates as a microcosm of the Chinese super-structural reality. The political and cultural imperative of the square and the way in which it represents and broadcasts the authority of that symbolism is dependent on its capacity to operate as a genuine and recognizable microcosm.

Tiananmen square is also the site of the body of Mao Zedong, a phenomenon in itself, replete with its own history of successive possessions and commiserate conformations as a sense-event. Again, it serves both as a stabilizing and destabilizing force in the cultural ecology. The decision to preserve Mao's body and display it in the square must be seen in terms of the Cultural Revolution and the power struggle that followed his death in 1976. Following a series of carefully ritualized events of mourning – and contrary to his apparent wishes to be cremated – Mao's successor, Hua Guofeng announced the decision to construct a monument to house and display Mao's preserved body. This announcement came eighteen days after Mao's death and just two days after Hua's secrete arrest of the radical leftist Gang of Four, primary rivals in the struggle for control of the CCP. Thought by many at the time as politically naive, an empty figurehead subject to the manipulations of various factions of Party leadership, Hua was able to outmaneuver the Gang of Four (and for a time the moderate-reformists led by Deng Xiaoping) by co-opting the symbolic mantle of authority provided by the iconification of Chairman Mao. This move was exemplified by the "Two-Whatevers Campaign" formulating the policy of the Chinese government in the terms of the following statements: "We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave." Hua understood the direct and perhaps indelible association between Mao and the apparatus of state power, that there was no state without Mao. The act of preservation was a symbolic gesture with a far greater reach, implicating and facilitating a systemic concretization of the Party institutions in transition. The state was stabilized in the enduring image of Mao, on display for all to see. This had very specific effects on the diagram of Tiananmen square. Quite contrary to Mao's ideology of the perpetual revolution and, it must be imagined, the overt intentions of the designers, "the building interrupted the continuities of the square. Symbolically, the unending flow of temporal change...was blocked and then truncated. The mausoleum seemed to seal off history rather than enlarge it." In this sense, the monument became a stabilizing force, fixing the agency of the square in history.

Perhaps, however, we should look at preservation of Mao's body in a different light, held apart from the from the impact of the memorial architecture to the square. In a fascinating discussion, A.P. Cheater explores the symbolic implications of the body and the memorial in the context of traditional burial rites, customs, superstitions and propriety, in other words the cultural imaginative of death. In particular, he questions the anthropological narrative implied in Mao's edifice: "Why...is Mao's final resting place...referred to as a 'memorial hall' [jiniantang]? Has it perhaps to do with the ambiguity, in Chinese funerary custom, of permanent preservation of the flesh, as opposed to the bones? Is Mao dead, or alive, or ambiguously neither – the perfect joker defying normal classification, Monkey, forever? In the old taboo of words, has death – at least for Mao – become almost anti-socialist" Who is this 'joker', this 'Monkey, forever'? Perhaps, rather than fixing the iconography of Mao, the preservation had in the long term the opposite effect, enacting a symbolic castration of the organ of state power (Mao) from the body of that power (the state and the CCP), severing the excessive formation of this organ from the fixation of the apparatus of the political and cultural narrative. This freed the state to evolve beyond Mao (as evidenced by the rapid supplantment of Hua Guofeng by Deng Xiaoping and the economic reformists from 1978 to 1982). But perhaps more importantly, it freed the iconography of Mao from its corporeal bind, allowing it to virtualize, multiply and proliferate. Rather than symbolizing a fixed edifice, Mao's body, in its emptiness, suggests an explosive multiplicity related, ironically, to the ontology of perpetual revolution on the one hand, and a rampant capitalism on the other. As one visitor to the memorial commented: "I used to think of Mao as a god. Now I see him as a man just like any other." He is among us, he is with us, he us.

It is worth exploring further this notion of symbolic castration and its relation to the Sense-Event. Slavoj Zizek frames this in his conflation of Psychoanalytic and Deleuzian conceptualization of the production of autonomous symbolic meaning: "'Symbolic Castration' is an answer to the question: how are we to conceive the passage from bodily depth to surface event...how are we to articulate the 'materialist' genesis of Sense":

The universe of Sense qua 'autonomous' forms a vicious circle. We are always-already part of it, since the moment we assume towards it the attitude of external distance and turn our gaze from the effect to its cause, we lose the effect. The fundamental problem of dialectical materialism is therefore: how does this circle of Sense, allowing for no externality, emerge? How can the immixture of bodily drives give rise to 'neutral' thought, that is, to the symbolic field that is 'free' in the precise sense of not being bound by the economy of bodily drives, of not functioning as a prolongation of the drive's striving for satisfaction? The Freudian hypothesis is: through the inherent impasse of sexuality...Sexuality is the only drive that is, itself, hindered and perverted, being simultaneously insufficient and excessive (with excess as the form of appearance of lack)...[The] capacity of sexuality to overflow the entire field of human experience so that everything, from eating to excretion, from beating up our fellow man (or getting beat up by him) to the exercise of power, can acquire sexual connotation – is not the sign of its preponderance. Rather, it is the sign of a certain structural faultiness: sexuality strives outward and overflows the adjoining domains precisely because it cannot find satisfaction in itself, because it never attains its goal...

How, then, do we pass from the state in which "the meaning of everything is sexual," in which sexuality functions as the universal signified, to the surface of the neutral-desexualized literal SENSE? [capitalization added] The desexualization of the signified occurs when the very element that coordinated (or failed to coordinate) the universal sexual meaning (i.e. the phallus) is reduced to a signifier. The phallus is the 'organ of desexualization' precisely in its capacity as a signifier without signified. It is the operator of the evacuation of sexual meaning (i.e., of the reduction of sexuality qua signified content to an empty signifier). In short, the phallus designates the following paradox: sexuality can universalize itself only by way of desexualization, only by undergoing a kind of transubstantiation in which it changes into a supplement-connotation of the neutral-asexual literal sense.

One can see how Mao (and the body of Mao) function both prior to and through this transubstantiation, as the "coordinator of the universal (sexual) meaning" and the "operator of the evacuation" (of that sexual meaning), that Mao is phallus par excellence.

Swarm / Counter-Swarm

2008-05-22T11:07:00.000-07:00

The terrorist network operates as a swarming sytem: its action is initiated through the convergence or focusing of a distributed network onto a single point in space and time, spontaneously, unexpectedly marshaling relatively sparse resources to produce an act of resonating terror-disruption-shock. This is emblematic of the super-structural reality of the Empire, as conceived by Hardt and Negri:

Perhaps the more capital extends its global network of production and control, the more powerful any singular point of revolt can be, simply by focusing their own power, concentrating their energies in a tense and compact coil, these serpentine struggles striking directly at the highest articulations of imperial order. Empire presents a superficial world, the virtual centre of which can be access immediately from any point across the surface. If these points were to constitute something like the new cycle of struggles it would be a cycle defined not by the communicative extension of the struggles but rather by their singular emergence, by the intensity that characterizes them one by one. In short, this new phase is defined by the fact that these struggles do not link horizontally but each leap vertically, directly to the virtual centre of the Empire.^¹

The first reaction to the swarm-based terrorist acts (9/11, etc.) was the reification of extreme certainty within the context of absolute uncertainty. President George W. Bush: "This is a world that is much more uncertain than in the past...even though it's an uncertain world, we're certain of some things...We're certain there are madmen in this world, and there's terror, and there's missiles and I'm certain of this too."^² The intent here is to crystallize the uncertainty of the enemy (who's location, capabilities and intentions remain unknown), and the fear which this uncertainty inevitably generates, into the rhetoric of certainty as a strategy to mobilize an overwhelming response. As is to be expected, this response was and continues to be inherently misdirected, overly blunt and ultimately ineffective (Bin Laden remains at large, there were no weapons of mass-destruction in Iraq).

Recently, a more nuanced approach has emerged, operating within the territory and strategy of the terrorist. Counter-terrorism agencies are beginning to deploy non-hierarchical approaches, learning as it were from the enemy:

In New York City, as many as 100 police officers in squad cars from every precinct converge twice daily at randomly selected times and at randomly selected sites, like Times Square or the financial district, to rehearse their response to a terrorist attack. City police officials say the operations are believed to be a crucial tactic to keep extremists guessing as to when and where a large police force presence may materialize at any hour.^³

Thus the swarm has emerged as a primary tactic for deterrence in the post-9/11 condition and in the war against terrorism. Through the convergence of multi-layered security networks (both physical and virtual) at different points and at different times (randomly, or in response to some non-determinant calculus), it becomes possible to disrupt the territory in which the terrorists operate. The fundamental assumption is that the terrorist network (or any covert movement) inherently lacks the resources (both materially/financially and in terms of their social-cultural legitimacy) to accommodate repeated failure. Swarm deployment on the part of a legitimate^⁴ institutional structure increases the likelihood – or perhaps more critically, the perception of the likelihood – that a terrorist act will be countered by an overlapping convergence of emergency personnel, en-force. It attempts to shift the odds, forcing the terrorists to either gamble at a game they cannot afford to lose, or desist and thus concede their only real avenue for meaningful action.

This emerging dynamic – swarm / counter-swarm (SwCsw) – can be seen in everything from celebrity media-propaganda to methodologies for environmental activism and regimes for controlling systemic diseases (immunodeficiency syndromes, metastasized cancer, etc.), from battlefield operations to tactics playing out on the football pitch – which is to say it is not simply the product of policies of re-militarization in the face of terrorist threat. We argue here that it is in fact endemic to the conditions of the globalized Empire, that this is a central, defining power structure/relationship, with the capacity, as machinic-phylum, to instigate new stratum of institutionalization, regimentation and other material and cultural formations. And most importantly, that this dynamic can be employed not just in relation to perceived threats, but as an (architectural) strategy within the context of the city, as a source for the imagining and enactment of new modes of participatory engagement with the city.

1Hardt and Negri, “Marx's Mole is Dead!”

2as quoted from Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real,

3Eric Schmitt and Thom Hanker, “U.S. Adapts Cold-War Idea to Fight Terrorism”, New York Times, March 18, 2008

4A problematic definition in itself, subject to redefinition at least in part by the terms under discussion in this text

Embedded Agency - formulation of an idea

2007-11-15T00:22:00.000-08:00

***i'm going to skim the surface here, much will be left unsaid. please let me know what is unclear and i will elaborate***

the images (see previous blog) are an important thing. the obey sticker - urban tagging, informal proliferation; the berlin wall - transformation of symbols/shifting understanding of the landmark; the public billboard - agency through communication.

the idea is to create some kind of tag, informally deployed in the urban space of Jerusalem. it would be more than a just a sticker (a signifier). it would have a technology/connectivity component. basically it would be a processor, a transceiver, a small amount of memory (512K - 1G to start) and a power source. Networked, these would become a distributed dataspace and source of bandwidth.

as simple as this?

The network would aggregate in the urban space according to some collective, emergent logic (think OBEY), filling in dross space most likely (like OBEY). they would construct a distributed, anonymous data/communication haven. with sufficient aggregation, they activate, and start broadcasting, providing access to anonymous bandwidth. people can tap into this, communicate through it and store data on it, setting up new relationships between the populous and the urban space.

first of all, this offers a new way to conceive of landmarks in an urban space. The aggregation of these nodes would create some kind of effect on the urban landscape, on particular zones in the urban landscape, opening up new niches for socio-cultural interaction, allowing for pollination across existing cultural divides, setting up a space for the reconsideration of the collective narrative and contested history.

more importantly, and much more speculatively, the network presents the possibility of the becoming and evolution of socio-cultural "shields" in the contested urban landscape. If the network could become sufficiently essential to the social-biological functioning of people, to everyone in Jerusalem, Israeli and Palestinian, it would become impossible to dismantle (think about the lack of potency of the government in the face of the worm in Shockwave Rider) The government, the defense forces, the suicide bombers, anyone, really, would be dissuaded from destruction because they might risk crashing this distributed network, embedded in the urban fabric. blow up a bomb in the wrong spot, the whole techno-social system blows up in your face. of course, this brings up all kinds of issues - but design issues - which is a good thing...

immediate questions come to mind:

do people know these tags have this embedded technology while they are proliferating them? or do they come online at some date, with some event, according to some rule...?

how is this bandwidth used? is it a bad thing that a terrorist can use it to communicate/plot? how do you interface with this network (mobile devices, on the internet, through human interface (sight, touch, gesture, inhabitation, etc)?

what do these things look like? do they do anything other than network/memory? do they have some kind of signage like OBEY?

and on and on...

pamphleteerism - agency through interface

2007-11-08T22:26:00.000-08:00

I am progressing into a new mode of design. The goal of this project has now become the creation of a pamphlet outlining the strategies, techniques and program for a technosocial campaign in Jerusalem. Not of protest or activism, this campaign seeks a deepened interface between the virtual and the physical, the mediascape and the urban fabric. The larger goal is the discovery of new sources of collective agency in the landscape of contested history.

Iterations of the evolving pamphlet will exist here:

mediascape wiki, jordan_Pamphlet

a sea of eyes, an actuated minimalism

2007-10-27T13:07:00.000-07:00

The Sea of Eyes is a virtual projection, a digital, realtime representation of a shifting perceptual reality. The eye has its own, very rich contested history and exists here as a diagram, a metaphor and a reflection of itself. The eye is disembodied and in this way abstracted, objectified, particularized. The image is undermined as a purely representational device. The user is compelled to see more than just themselves; they are thrust into the full range of (contested) narrative landscape. There is no stable ground, either in the physical here-and-now or in the virtual construct (in a "suspension of disbelief"). The user oscillates between the two, aware and yet fully engaged, inhabiting the interface as much as anything. In this reciprocal hybridization, new modes of interaction, beyond contest/consensus, are implicated.

agency in multiplicity

2007-10-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

It is important to be clear about what is meant by contested space. It is not about contest; contest is the process by which contested space is packaged, constrained, delimited, framed, turned into content, embedded with the marks of power-domination. Rather, contested space contains the many layers of history, points of view and positions that surround any thing/idea/understanding. As a construct, contested space is fundamentally ambivalent, a dataspace representing the range of intellectual, emotional, political negotiations and divergences. It does not frame this dataspace in any way, but remains smooth, fluid, amorphous, isotropic. This raises the question of interface. What are the characteristics of an interface into this dataspace such that it can be embedded with (transient, self-recursive) meaning/organization - that it can be folded onto itself - without introducing contest/consensus as a mechanism of control and definition? In other worlds, can an interface be conceived which allows agency without disrupting multiplicity?

memorial minimalism

2007-10-24T13:39:00.000-07:00

Case Study: Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2005)

I said all along that I wanted people to have a feeling of being in the present and an experience that they had never had before. And one that was different and slightly unsettling. The world is too full of information and here is a place without information. That is what I wanted...

...I was against the graffiti coating from the start. If a swastika is painted on it, it is a reflection of how people feel. And if it remains there, it is a reflection of how the German government feels about people painting swastikas on the monument.
- Peter Eisenman (interview transcript here)

Many great images of the project here.

Eisenman takes the position that minimalism is necessarily in contemporary memorial-making. For him, the introduction of content by the designer always leads to sensationalization.

The Holocaust memorial is a case study and a foil for the re-conceptualization of the landmark (of which memorial is exemplar). The effort is to understand the relationship of the landmark to content/narrative and to speculate on the potential of the landmark to be responsive, context specific, and ultimately, deployable or perhaps, ubiquitous.

recursive dots

2007-10-14T18:59:00.000-07:00

here is the output from a simple processing code. not sure how this will play into the jerusalem project, but i love the aesthetic. two iterations using the same control parameters (with a random variable modulating number of branches and angle of repositioning):

contested histories

2007-10-12T13:32:00.000-07:00

The lesson of Wikipedia is one of contested histories. Under the surface of each content page exists a world of contention, negotiation, politics, intervening identities. The edit history pages are a catalogue, a genealogy of vacillation, and in this sense remain inherently ambivalent. The content pages "pop out" from this body of contention, digested, calcified (at any given moment), framed, ready for consumption and proliferation. This emergence is inherently violent (like any birth); it stems from utility and yet contains within itself all of the marks of power-domination:

The relationship of domination is no more a "relationship" than the place where it occurs is a place; and, precisely for this reason, it is fixed, throughout its history, in ritual, in meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations. It establishes marks of its power and engraves memories on things and even within bodies. It makes itself accountable for debts and gives rise to the universe of rules, which is by no means designed to temper violence, but rather to satisfy it. Following traditional beliefs, it would be false to think that total war exhausts itself in its own contradictions and ends by renouncing violence and submitting to civil laws. On the contrary, the law is a calculated and relentless pleasure, delight in the promised blood, which permits the perpetual instigation of new dominations and the staging of meticulously repeated scenes of violence.
- Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History

Notes from Desk Crit with Gregory Thorpe (10/12/2007):
- remapping wikipedia: the landmark as the "content page" of the urban landscape - i.e. an act of control/ repression/ reframing/ consensus/ etc. - packaging of culture and the urban space - it is an architecture of controlled history.
- the alternative to this, what does it mean to have an architecture of contested history?
- in this effort, I necessarily take a position of ambivalence
- in that case, how do i reinsert myself (back) into the system/process?
- here is the critical issue of authorship in the open-source/ ambivalent mode of cultural production..., in fact this defines what art IS/has become.
- sine wave video editing as a tentative example
- re-define existing landmarks or create new ones - or both?
- using processing to diagram patterns of landmark use, both in physical and virtual terms
- indexing landmarks - news feeds, placeblogger, overlaying different perspectives as a generative process
- hyperlocal vs. hyperglobal data feeds

the ecology of wikipedia

2007-10-05T11:19:00.001-07:00

Evaluating the verifiability of wikipedia:
http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/

Re-linking identity with content:
http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/

seems inevitable that i would end up here

2007-10-04T22:22:00.000-07:00

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

entering the edit wars

2007-10-03T12:26:00.001-07:00

1) Diagramming a Wikipedia page, understanding the degrees of freedom offered on the surface (the content pages themselves) and in the subsurface (the underlying discussion/history pages).

2) Understanding the Wikipedia community in terms profiles, relationships, hierarchies, definitions - the Edit Wars and the politic of Wikipedia.

3) Specific interventions - understand the implication of the beans-up-the-nose warning - and the ethical considerations of flamers - is it possible to fold Wikipedia back on itself without engaging in a useless expenditure of "energy." I'd like to push the limits of content embedding in Wikipedia, see what is retained, what gets pulled down. But I also don't want to engage in gratuitous disruption, to "wildly de-stratify" the construct, that seems utterly counterproductive. Sock puppets, Trolls, Vandals, Self-Promoters, these are useful examples, perhaps all the more useful when transfered to other venues, but in the context of Wikipedia they seem a bit played-out.

4) Tracking specific webpages - both created and existing - visualizing change through animation/video of refresh screenshots.

* this is an evolving post, directed at friday's review, and an overall effort to coalesce the research strings into a venue and a directive for design.

learning from flaming fuckwads

2007-10-03T04:06:00.000-07:00

"People will play World of Warcraft for 80 hours a week.
There's no difference between that and playing Wikipedia
for 80 hours a week.  It's even more fun because of none
of the characters in World of Warcraft think they're what
they are.  People on Wikipedia, some of them think "hey,
I'm contributing to the sum of human knowledge."  You can
fuck with those people, that's extra bonus time.  So, 80
hours a week on Wikipedia, who cares, that's pretty cool,
that's pretty neat.

So it's not a waste of time to these people, and they're
right.  If they're able to successfully screw with an
article, a lot of people will see it.  I'd buy entirely
that the Penny Arcade theory, which was normal person,
plus anonymity, plus large audience, equals flaming
fuckwad.  That's the mirror that Wikipedia is presenting
to us, and I think that we can learn quite a bit from
it."

-Jason Scott, The Great Failure of Wikipedia
(audio)

make yourself a (B)ody (w)ithout (O)rgans

2007-10-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

"You don't reach the BwO by wildly destratifying...Staying stratified -- organized, signified, subjected -- is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times."

- Deleuze + Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

the network surface and its clumps

2007-10-01T21:53:00.000-07:00

OK, this is the final general/metaphorical/metaphysical post until after friday's crit. It was written earlier today, as a result of conversations with Aurthur, and thoughts spun off of his intriguing blog, trapped in the green box.

I'm interested in this notion of the "network surface." It is really provocative and no doubt accurate visual metaphor, and yet it seems deeply pessimistic. It paints an image of an undifferentiated landscape of data; a liquid film spreading out over human thought and culture.

It is apparent that the network surface has the capacity (particular with the introduction of Web2.0) to fold back onto itself, clumping around particular, often transient nodes. This clumping is more or less what I mean by patterning. I'm thinking of DNA, which is nothing more then a linear array of data, most of which is junk. This is obviously limiting, and yet the organism has created all sorts of strategies - from the physical folding of the DNA chain, to chemical messenger pathways - to link disparate elements of the genetic code. This give the genetic content the capacity to jump out of the constraints of the physical/chemical structure of the code and cross-fertilize, an essential feature of any adaptive, self-referential, intelligent system.

But I'm still stuck in generalities, so maybe this is no help...

form, content, patterning

2007-09-30T18:03:00.000-07:00

check out this homage/illustration/explanation of Web 2.0:
Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us
Michael Welsh, Assistant Professor In Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University

This clip brings up a really interesting distinction between HTML and XML (first and second gen web languages). To quote Mr. Welsh:

"HTML was designed to define the structure of a web document...form and content became inseparable...In XML, form and content are described separately, allowing data to be exported free of formatting."

As a result of added flexibility, XML allows data to flow more freely from site to site. This produces a far more sophisticated platform for the manipulation of data, one in which content can be organized through patterns of use, and in fact this patterning of content becomes content in its own right, in the sense that it retains its own identity and can be manipulated through further patterning operations. This opens the door to the emergence recursive feedback in the system, creating differentiation in the surface of the network, varying degrees of ossification/plasticity. This strikes me highly similar to network models of biological intelligence: populations of neurons self-organizing through repetitive use to form cohesive (and increasingly repeatable) patterns of thought.

Could we venture to say, then, that when pattern-making become more essential - more present - than content, the internet becomes a sufficient contextual framework for intelligent behavior and self-organization - a language, if you will.

*this post has been edited in response to comments, more elaboration to come.

digital, drifting and the end of history

2007-09-28T17:34:00.001-07:00

sci_arc hosted a provoking lecture from the italian theorist mario carpo wednesday night, titled above.

among the subjects he touched on was the notion of drift in creative production. mr. carpo discussed the nature of writing before and after the advent of the printing press. before, content was subject to progressive change - drift - through intended (editorial) and unintended (mistaken) revisions during the copying process, placing authorship in a constant state of flux. the printing press radically transformed the situation, de-coupling the creative act of writing from the mechanical act of reproduction. as a result, authorship became fixed.

mr. carpo traced a similar transformation in architecture through a treatise written by alberti at the outset of the renaissance. alberti sought to detach the architect from the guild-system and the tradition of the architect as master-builder (exemplified, for example, by the project of Brunelleschi's dome). rather than a collaborative, evolving process of design-build, the architect would take sole authorship of the design. the product, and the final form of the architecture, was a fully realized representation of the building. the builder then would implement (copy into physical form) the construction from these documents. this conception is very much familiar today, institutionalized in the record drawing set / bid contract structure of most projects.

the emergence of the networked society has called into question alberti's model of cultural production. in this environment, drift becomes possible, and is in fact (like the manuscript) unavoidable. open-source software development and the changing landscape of the music industry are prime examples of this emerging condition. for mr. carpo, the techno-centric cult of the individual, a defining characteristic of contemporary practice and discourse, is in its last throws -- glorious as they may be. a new paradigm is emerging: in exchange for giving up absolute authorship, the architect gains access to a far richer cultural vein, a vast network of real-time data, feedback and cultural flux.

is music a donut?

2007-09-25T23:14:00.000-07:00

(open source cinema asks this question when you set up an account)

should music be a product? should it be free? The distinction will be radically blurred as music becomes increasingly customizable and responsive to specific environments. The musician will become a designer, creating the source code for a family of infinitely variable, yet related music. The choice will become whether or not (or to what degree) to release the code.

open-source : research in profiles / profiling

2007-09-24T01:33:00.000-07:00

My research at this point follows two tracks:

The first concerns open-source as a tactic: I will track the linage of open-source environments, from ARPANET to the speculative metagovernment prototype and beyond. The immediate interest is to understand the nature of profiles and profiling through these specific frameworks. The deeper goal is to conceptualize how and to what extent open-source tactics might be employed in the envisioning of Jerusalem 2050.

The second will be the development of an online collaborative space. Consisting of a collection of networked online entities, this space will function as an open-source research probe. The space will begin with some very basic automated linkages between this blog, my del.icio.us catalog and a wiki, and will grow to include more sophisticated, customized networking, visualization and organization tools. The intent is twofold: to take advantage of the expertise of a large network of friends, relatives and colleagues; and to test and experience first-hand the mechanisms of an open-source environment.

several important links

2007-09-24T00:32:00.000-07:00

del.icio.us = social bookmarking (emergent internet organization)

processing.org = data manipulation platform (coding for artists)

metagovernment.org = open-source government (a protoype)

Mediascapes studio fa2007, an outline

2007-09-23T20:53:00.000-07:00

"Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication...
But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world..."
Jean-Luc Goddard

My take on the Mediascape studio:

We will be working towards one or multiple submittals to the Just Jerusalem competition, envisioning possible scenarios for Jerusalem forty years into the future (2050). The date is interesting in that it allows a great deal of visionary latitude and yet enforces a degree of realism and tangibility on the proposal.

We will explore the evolving landscape the city, and world in general, in an effort to understand possible systemic interventions that might bring about a more equitable, workable state-of-affairs in Jerusalem. Central to our approach is the basic assumption that the physical and virtual worlds are converging. The entrée into the project is a study of the practical and metaphysical implications of the profile and profiling. We will track their many dimensions, focusing on the relation to the hybrid physical-virtual network.

Course readings/viewings include the scifi classic Shockwave Rider; movies such as Code 46, Alphaville and Videodrome; and a variety of internet presences. Much more information can be found at the fast growing Mediascapes wiki.

an uneducated manifesto, a starting point

2007-09-21T03:08:00.000-07:00

language is a technology; the internet is becoming a language.

the conceptual power of the computing environment is fast migrating from the box to the network. applications and data are becoming increasingly native to the net and correspondingly independent of the box. computer intelligence is no longer a measure of power - the capacity to compute - but of connectivity - the capacity to engage, structure and reconfigure real-time data.

similarly, the critical debate in architecture must move beyond the blob vs. the box. the exploration of form as an end-in-itself is no longer delivering radical shifts. for the past ten years, architecture has focused on computationally intensive geometry. now, it must engage the territory presented by the network, both as a site for a new kind of architecture, and as a tool for rethinking the nature of design.

(This is only here so i an add it to my profile)