Looking at the contemporary state of the design discipline, it’s safe to say that we’re observing a boom of new practices which are making the field return to an open, collaborative, system-oriented approach: flying drones which create temporary wifi networks in isolated areas; DIY construction kits; manufacturing at home through personal 3D printers; a Wikihouse with open-source plans that can be replicated, improved and updated anywhere; and countless other examples. These unconventional projects respond to a need of “going beyond” the traditional flow of making things, and are representative of the deep transformations occurring in industry. With an incredible amount of interesting stories coming from forward-thinking collectives to individuals, from hackers to artists and activists, the term design has come to embody only a fragment of what is being produced —our aim with Adhocracy is to bridge that ideological gap and spark the discussion for an updated definition of what design means.

The collaborative nature of human culture is by no means a new element. Arts like cooking, weaving, and tool-making are examples of timeless fruits of the human civilization, and testaments to our capacity as social creators. It has been through indiscriminate collaboration, spontaneous tinkering, and gradual evolution that varieties within each of these arts spawned. This flux in authorship has been the status quo for millennia, and has created generations of creative production, expressive of the culture in which they’re born, instead of the creative genius of single individuals. A crucial difference in methodology was also the focus on technique and process instead of the final object —a focus in the making, rather than the made—, and a personal relationship between creator, user and object. The latter has changed dramatically with the advent of serial production and industrial scale design.

Crafting Neighborhoods. URBZ, Made in Şişhane

Drone Shadow. James Bridley

Things get interesting when we realize that there are now more tools than ever before, bringing more people together from all four corners of the world, in order to create more things and more variations of those things, in an apparently spontaneous way. This ad-hoc methodology is made possible by self-organized communities and the new communication methods which have emerged in recent years. The results are often out of the left field in their creativity and impressive in their accomplishment, whilst fundamentally democratic and empowering. This way of thinking was born and remained strictly the domain of the coding world for decades, where commodities can be replicated perfectly and infinitely, without taking away value from the original. This spawned the open-source movements alongside the hackers and crackers who would take code apart to rebuild it. What we are seeing are these elements of open-source ideology — so far strictly limited to the digital world — spilling into the analogue world of things. What will happen when you can design, draw and print your own idea easily or personalize mass produced objects, taking them apart and remixing them? What will happen if we go beyond, and instead of objects, we design, draw and print our ideal cities?

Imagine. Pedro Reyes

A key to understanding the repercussions of this shift is to understand the motivations behind the rise of a new DIY movement, an ideology revitalized with the introduction of massive collaboration and information sharing made possible by the internet– we are seeing the emergence of Do-It-With-Others(-For-Yourself). Design critic Avinash Rajagopal points out how a 2006 analysis of this phenomenon by historian Paul Atkinson indicated four categories of do-it-yourselfers. “Pro-active DIY, which is the manipulation of raw materials or original compositions, motivated by ‘personal pleasure or financial gain;’ Reactive DIY, which is ‘mediated through the agency of kits, templates or patterns, … where the motivation might range from occupation of spare time to personal pleasure;’ Essential DIY, which is ‘carried out as an economic necessity or because of the unavailability of professional labor;’ and Lifestyle DIY, activities undertaken as emulation or conspicuous consumption, ‘where the use of one’s labor is by choice rather than need.’ DIYers of different categories live in a symbiotic relationship with one another, in a rhizomatic, multilayered web of relationships.

Adhocracy will analyze and interpret these kinds of relationships, surveying the causes and effects of their success or demise. We wish to make the New Museum* a live laboratory —a platform where different creators, collectives, and projects can mix and remix ideas, giving them the space to interact and the voice to collaboratively show the effectiveness of open-source and free design… “free as in free speech, not free beer” as coined by Richard Stallman.

—–
This text “An Ad-hoc Revolution” was written by Elian Stefa and Ethel Baraona Pohl as a curatorial statement for Adhocracy and first published on The New City Reader #01 [Istanbul edition] “Agenda”. Adhocracy is one of the two main exhibitions at the inaugural Istanbul Design Biennial, curated by Joseph Grima with associate curators Elian Stefa, Pelin Tan and Ethel Baraona Pohl.

/// *After being exhibited in the Galata Greek Primary School for the First Istanbul Design Biennial, Adhocracy will be exhibited at The New Museum in New York City from May 4th to July 7th 2013.

/// You can see the Adhocracy Reader [the catalogue], co-edited by Vera Sacchetti, Avinash Rajagopal, Tamar Shafrir and Benan Kapucu and designed by Folder [Marco Ferrari and Elisa Pasqual] following this link.

“Dear Radioactive Friends, today I have done a terrible thing for a theoretical physicist, that is, to introduce a new particle that nobody will ever be able to see.”
—Wolfgang Pauli, 1930s

It’s been said that we are a geological force. Over the short history of humankind we have learned to transform materials from the biosphere to our convenience. Technicians have been trained in the art of transforming rocks into square-shaped hills for us to inhabit. Communication technologies have also contributed to the formation of new landscapes on our planet’s surface. Recent efforts in science have attempted to develop design methods and tools towards an integrated biologically-engineered environment, and synthetic biology is emerging as a promising field towards a soft and evolutive process of integration with nature. We are now able to engineer matter itself. But according to astrophysics such matter and all visible matter in our immense universe scarcely represents four percent of what’s out there. The remaining is dark to us. Indeed it’s called dark matter.

Can designers explore ways of understanding and interacting with dark matter? To what degree is it feasible to modify visible matter and even address challenges unreachable within our current production model? Although seemingly audacious, to address dark matter is a substantive hypothesis, and speculating on its potential for design could help unlock the confines of design and its subsequent realities. After all, no one took Fritz Zwicki very seriously when he first suggested the existence of dark matter back in 1930s.

The Genetic Manipulation of Known Matter

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would.
You see?”
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

Engineers dabbling with biology, and designers exploring future materials isn’t speculation, but real current practice.[1] The frontiers of design have been made possible by the confluence of technical advances and increasing collaboration between different knowledge fields. Today, bio-engineered design products are tested in laboratories, as designers become accustomed to interact and exchange ideas with biologists, material scientists, biological engineers, and even bio-programmers.

We’ve arrived at the stage where we can manipulate the very stuff life is made of: the cell. Formed by molecules of atoms joined by energy, further broken down into configurations of protons, neutrons, and electrons, living things are made up of the same chemical components as non-living things; and they all obey the same physical and chemical laws at the macroscopic level. Astronomers refer to this as ‘baryonic matter’. In looking to dark matter, we step into the little-known world of ‘non baryonic-matter‘.

Dark Matter as the Rule in the Cosmos

The Photopic Sky Survey. A 5,000 Mp photo of the entire night sky stitched together from 37,440 exposures.

“The rotation velocity curves of stars in galaxies, the behavior of galaxies in clusters and super- clusters, and the lensing effects of galaxies and galactic clusters on photons reaching us from the most distant parts of the universe, all indicate that the universe contains predominant quantities of non-luminous matter whose influence is felt only through its gravitational effects.Yet despite 65 years of study the nature and origin of this dark matter remains unresolved.”
—A.D. Ernest [2]

The cosmos is mostly formed by dark energy and dark matter. Although virtually imperceptible, it is believed that dark matter constitutes approximately 83 percent of all matter in the universe. Dark matter pulls things together, generates attractive gravity, and even suggests new particle species. To understand the largest structures in the cosmos we should understand the structure of its smallest particles, going from outer space to inner space, as if taking the journey suggested by the Eames’ film Powers of 10. Although most matter in the universe is dark, we only perceive its gravitational effects. Matter as we know it is just a thin network of threads connecting clusters of dark matter. Within these nodes dark matter accumulates and galaxies are formed.

Nobody knows exactly what dark matter is made of. The Cold Dark Matter hypothesis posits that they are ‘weakly interacting massive particles’ (WIMPs) because they can pass through ordinary matter without any effects, yet they have mass. A few hypothetical WIMPs have been suggested including neutrinos, axions, and neutralinos. A neutrino is an electrically neutral elementary particle that is able to pass through ordinary matter almost undisturbed. Neutrinos have a minuscule, but nonzero mass. Axions are particles with minimum mass that would have been produced abundantly in the Big Bang. They have been proposed to explain why the neutron is electrically neutral. Neutralinos are massive particles – they may be 30 to 5000 times the mass of a proton.

Invisible Forces. Anhony de Vicenzi.

Scientists are already exploring the occurrence of these particles, deep underground and way out in space. A good example is the CERN particle physics laboratory, situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border, with the Large Hadron Collider tunnel located one hundred meters underground in the region between the Geneva airport and the nearby Jura mountains. There is also the Lake Baikal Neutrino Telescope, now being constructed for deep underwater neutrino research. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, is the largest neutrino telescope in the world and there, a team of pioneering researchers have buried thousands of sensors miles deep into the ice at the bottom of the earth, all in an attempt to catch the rare neutrino, from atmospheric and astrophysical sources, crashing into atoms of ice.

Recent theoretical proposals reveal interesting paths: one physicist in the US has calculated that dark matter could arise in a simple generalized quantum theory of gravity.[3] Other theories, like Maxim Pospelov’s, posit bubble-like structures called domain walls which could be detected with a network of magnetometers situated strategically around the world.[4] If such propositions prove feasible new observations about dark matter could be found, inviting input from different disciplines – design being one of them.

Daya Bay Neutrino Facility. China. Pic: Roy Kaltschmidt, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

A Spaceship for Schrödinger’s Cat: Designing with Dark Matter

Is it feasible to design with dark matter? Is it possible to interact with and even manipulate things we are not able to see? Designing perception might be the first place to start. Artist Neil Harbisson has already pointed to new ways of exploring perception, by wearing a device that allows him to hear colors. Following Maxim Pospelov’s suggestion, we could start by searching for devices that expand our range of perception of the matter spectrum. In the same way that François Dallegret proposed the Astronef 732 Space City in 1963, to study the reactions of younger generations to conditions of extreme crowding in relation to speed, in the future it might be feasible to propose testing human reactions to dark matter.

The first step would be an open research platform linking all the efforts carried out individually by different disciplines. Transdicisplinary workshops and spaces could be established taking advantage of new forms of fabrication already practiced by community biology labs like GenSpace or bioCurious. CERN already has an internship program allowing a 3-month artist residence. This new collective creativity could imagine new devices in order to experiment with matter at a quantum level, from quantum biolasers to models of new interstellar stations constructed with non-carbon materials and quantum displacement by means of teletransportation. These labs could explore methods for building at distant planets with no terrestrial materials and evolving forms of human cyborgs adapted to such conditions.

Whole Universe. Chris Morris . Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Quantum mechanics theory has demonstrated that the crossroads between physics and consciousness at atomic levels can be applied to all; even the entire universe.[5] It is possible that new unimagined devices collectively created, could lead us to start perceiving and manipulating neutrinos and other subatomic particles, and from there start programming atoms, just as today we are able to program cells. Sculpting dark matter at an atomic scale would lead us to configure new atomic patterns, which could allow us to rewrite laws of physics. And once we’ve developed new habitats in distant planets, we would be able to go there through wormholes excavated in dark matter traveling at entangled states accompanied by Schrödinger’s cat.

—–
[1] We’re talking about transdisciplinary teams dealing with things such as protocells, bacteria, fungi and even DNA cell manipulation and creating of new biological systems from scratch.
[2] A. D. Ernest. A Quantum approch to Dark Matter. http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0406139.pdf
[3] Jon Cartwright. Dark matter could come naturally from quantum gravity. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2009/apr/21/dark-matter-could-come-naturally-from-quantum-gravity
[4] Lisa Grossman. Earth may be crashing through dark matter walls. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23094-earth-may-becrashing- through-dark-matter-walls.html [link viewed on February 3th 2013]
[5] Bruce Rosenblum, Fred Kuttner. Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness. Oxford University Press 2011.

—-
— This post originally appeared as an article at Volume 35. “Everything Under Control”. Archis, April 2013.
— Head Pic: Inmaterials. Data between visibility and invisibility. Onformative + Christopher Warnow for Weave Magazine

More resources:
The Cosmic Web. Miguel Angel Aragón Calvo.

”The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle [...] We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.”
—Michel Foucault

It is not a coincidence that we have used a quote by Michel Foucault to close a post about ships as heterotopias and now, we’re quoting him again to write about a project built in the way of a boat hull, which questions our current concept of “progress” and the premise that the best is yet to come. Gautier Duthoit presented his project Landship for the Think Space competition in 2012 and it is a critical review on how technique has become one of the main instruments of progress, omnipresent in our society; it has become our environment. As he clearly points:

In an imperceptible way, technique has been sacralised. “It is not technique that enslaves us but the sacred transferred to technique” [J. Ellul] The transfer has generated an expansion of thought allowing mechanised time to dominate human reflection time. The acceleration of reality [P.Virilio] inhibits the sensation that time flies, when associated with efficient consumerism, the world is unable to find any form of rest. The idea is not to resist progress but to take a break in order to assimilate it. It is necessary to question the philosophical and political notions concerning progress. What is progress today, on an environmental, economic and political level? It is important to raise awareness of the impact of progress, which leads us to search for clever endings or a limit to things.

To develop the project, Duthoit’s research was focused on the concepts of anti-image and anti-object as means to raise awareness of the impact of progress. To do so, the leitmotif of the narrative is based on the concrete ships, especially the remnants of the Mulberry Harbours, a seawall composed by ships in the surface and enormous concrete caissons [called Phoenix] that was filled with water or sand and sank in order to break the deeper currents.

The remains of the harbour off Arromanches.

A pair of Phoenixes at Portland Harbour.

The Mulberry Harbours are the perfect example to develop the inherent contradiction which lies on the difference between the expected lightness of a ship and the stongness of the Mulberries, which were created to provide the port facilities necessary to offload the thousands of men and vehicles, and tons of supplies.

So, it is interesting to discover how can this project can become a critic of progress based in technology, as we’re witnessing in the current times. The narrative of the Landship project is like a dérive from such big and solid structures to a remote and isolated object, which in a provocative way refers to the concept of “island”: In the same way as a wrecked Phoenix Breakwater is also to be seen, broken in two, in the Thames estuary, the Landship is land-piece surrounded by water, but not the kind of oceanic island described by Deleuze, as an object lost in an endless extension of a uniform element. In Gautier Duthoit’s project, the complete absence of urban fabric becomes the context of the project, which differs from the context as much as it is a part of it, and in a Deleuzian sense, it serves as a reminder that the earth is still there, under the sea, gathering its strength to punch through to the surface. According to this, Duthoit says about his project and quoting Deleuze again, that it neither is a “New world” but an alternative critique of the existing world. It is an artifice, part of a larger ensemble: the lakes borders, the continents borders.

“The history of dreams is still to be written. Dream participates in history.”
—Walter Benjamin.

This concept of borders and the melancholic monumentality of the project reminds also the No-Stop City by Archizoom or more closely, some of the projects by DOGMA, such as A Simple Heart, based on the divergence between the scale of architectural form and the urban dimension. DOGMA idea of enclosing an area of an existing tertiary district by means of an inhabitable wall can be deeply related with Landship, where the strong presence of “the perimeter” embodies the limit and allows the visitor to experience and play a part in the limited and closed environment. At the same time is thought provoking to think why do we need such solid limits in the middle of the sea. Can we think about the notion of archipelago proposed by Oswald Mathias Ungers in 1977, when he proposed an archipelago of dense urban artifacts surrounded by a forest that would gradually replace existing [vacant] portions of the city? And if so, are we allowed to think about Landship as a small piece of a wider project?

The use of the grid as a main element of the design also connect with Ungers and DOGMA projects. We can read what Duthoit wrote about Landship’s grid:

The tangle of borders put the vessel in relation to different scales and different places. It becomes the consecration of utopia, a heterotopia as defined by Michel Foucault: a real place where other spaces are connected around it. This “topia” is defined in contrast with the context through a basic figure that insures the projects’ clarity. The grid is used as the main architectonic structure; its geometry is altered by its relationship with other basic architectural elements that appear to be an exception to the uniform grid.

The references of this evocative project can be endless and can drive us to several fields. At first instance, is a response to the challenge proposed by Think Space to revisit the Blur Building, which was based on the symbolism inherent to the idea of “gave the site back to itself disguised as architecture.” But looking at the drawings, we can also think on John Hejduk projects, Archizoom’s experience on amplifying its surface values or the work by OFFICE Kersten Geers David van Severen, and their nostalgic vision of the world.

In the same way as Aldo Rossi wrote about the “objects of affection”, situated between the list and memory, Gautier Duthoit wrote:

Through its composition and its combination of limits, Landship appears as speculative fiction with a poetical dimension: a piece of land balanced under the water level by an archaic technique. The simplicity and the architectural abstraction leaves room for interpretation and imagination. Too often imagination has been considered as a secondary force or as a way of evasion. “The importance of imagination on the human psyche has not been emphasized enough. Generally, we tend place reality in first position, but how can Man create if he doesn’t feel what we could call the “possibility function”. To take action we must first imagine” (G. Bachelard).

From Odilon Redon‘s mysterious and evocative drawings to the surrealist symbolism of René Magritte‘s paintings; Duthoit project is full of poetry and symbolism too in terms of representation. We can’t avoid to remember this poem:

“I try
to manifest the presence
of the horizons
my eyes become earth
projected fragments
of a weithless body
without dimension
without possible modulation
in space or time.”

—Raimund Abraham, 1973

—–
Landship by Gautier Duthoit was awarded with an honorable mention at Think Space Past Forward 2012 competition. More info: Think Space

THE SPECULATIONIST. A VISION FOR THE FUTURES.
Daniel Fernández Pascual

Every time a building is branded with a shiny marble sign hanging from its façade, saying ‘Sigmund Freud lived here’ or ‘Pablo Picasso spent 3 months in this house’, I resign myself to believe it. These retro-futurist attempts of gentrification by revealing the ins and outs of a building could also inspire new modes of ‘conflict tourism’ in these days of crisis. The same messages could mutate into ‘3,000,000 € of public money were spent here’ or ‘nobody has been living in this house for 4 years 3 months and 23 days’ or ‘5 people have so far been evicted from this site’. This is the kind of morbid news that contemporary urban residents or visitors would like (need?) to hear.

The Speculationist consists of making a layer of information visible and accessible to the general public, in order to track Spanish politics through the built and unbuilt environment. In this sense, we could read authoritarianism and non-democratic decisions through authorship shaping actions and architectural objects.

Even though some of the world-leading achievements in architecture prototypes in Spain have come out of public competitions linked to obscure processes of governance, we are assisting to a time in our Post-Guggenheim era where Architecture urgently needs to stop being instrumentalized for political propaganda. If real estate speculation has been concerned about the prices of the futures more than ever before in the history of Spain, we, unpersons inhabiting unbuildings amidst unlandscapes, need to know. We need to know what processes led to the construction of the countless buildings without content (and superb envelope) that surround us. We need to know who decided what. When did this and that happen? Buildings need to communicate with us, and teach us updated political transparency as we navigate the streets. Facts about overbudgeted constructions, incidental policy changes and embezzlement of public money could be easily advertised over any façade thanks to AR, in order to read an untold everyday history of the city and its (our) rulers. Ironically, iconic architecture could serve us to disentangle authority and authorship by imagining a new alter ego of democratic living space.

The Speculationist is an Orwellian application of Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, which could promote the implementation of more socially sustainable building and planning practices. A veritable shift in landscapes of power can finally happen thanks to the exposure of information to a more aware pedestrian-eye. By tracking practices that have been commonly use in city-making, new alliances will emerge towards a collective construction of consensual space.

—–

This essay has been written by Daniel Fernández Pascual for the fanzine Orwellian, a limited edition of 50 hand numbered copies that was produced for the presentation “Augmented Reality with dpr-barcelona” at the Apple Store Passeig de Gràcia [Barcelona], held on February 28th, 2013.

>> To see the Augmented Reality interactions, please follow this link directly from your mobile device and then point your mobile device at the header image in the post [tagged with a smartphone icon]. Interaction by dpr-barcelona, Augmented Reality powered by Aurasma.

NOSOTRAS.
Paco González

Era un día frío de febrero. Al tocar la pantalla, pude ver en la oscuridad. La sostuve bien alto y pude iluminar por completo el cuarto que parecía bajo su luz un lugar extrañamente atractivo. Me parecía saber exactamente cómo era sentirse antes en una situación como esa, en soledad por un instante, sin mirar a la pequeña pantalla.

Al principio no la usaba mucho. Incluso concentrándome completamente no era capaz de usarla en todas sus posibilidades. Ahora notaba que estaba perfectamente diseñada para que quedara acogida en una de mis manos, como si de una extensión natural se tratara.

Cada uno de los mensajes que enviaba y recibía a través de las pequeña pantalla estaba escrito en un lenguaje novedoso que había sido diseñado previamente para poder comunicarse:

@julia, ¿estás ya despierta?

Fuera, a través de los altos ventanales, el mundo parecía aún más frío. Abajo en la calle, el movimiento de las personas fluía sin apreciarse intención alguna en sus trayectorias, excepto en aquellas que sí la modificaban al atender a sus pequeñas pantallas.
Pantallas con las que acceder a cualquier tipo de medio, prensa, película, libro, programa, juego, información, conocimiento o entretenimiento. Recordaba que al principio sólo se podía escuchar, después también ver y más tarde tocar. Incluso ahora en ocasiones la pequeña pantalla te sugería lo que estabas a punto de hacer.

Te impulsaba a coleccionar copias de momentos y experiencias en texto, imágenes, audio o video que eran sustituidos cuando no olvidados, pero nunca borrados. Siempre registrando lo que tu voz interna te sugería. Durmiendo o en vela, trabajando o comiendo, en el interior o en el exterior, tanto en el baño o la cama. Amistades, comportamientos y expresiones, tu propio cuerpo, nada quedaba sin la posibilidad de ser coleccionado.

En cualquier momento y lugar era posible saberse capturado, sin ni siquiera saber por quién o desde dónde, pero asumiendo instintivamente que al igual que tú capturabas esos momentos, otros podrían estar capturándote en los suyos propios.

Todos esos registros se procesaban en un palimsesto infinito de datos, memorias guardadas y reproducidas cuantas veces fuera necesario en un sitio inconcreto e ilocalizable. Incapaces de modificarlos una vez se procesaban, nuestros pensamientos, emociones y experiencias registrados, mostraban la mayor parte de lo que hicimos y pensamos, tejiendo patrones que nos describen y definen individual y colectivamente. A nosotras, pequeñas pantallas.

— 1984, George Orwell.
Remezclado por Paco González. Agradecido una vez más a Ethel y César de dpr-barcelona por darme la oportunidad de salirme del registro habitual. Dedicado especialmente a @sarok y Cápsula Orwell: “For the future, for the unborn”.

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This essay has been written by Paco González for the fanzine Orwellian, a limited edition of 50 hand numbered copies that was produced for the presentation “Augmented Reality with dpr-barcelona” at the Apple Store Passeig de Gràcia [Barcelona], held on February 28th, 2013.

>> To see the Augmented Reality interactions, please follow this link directly from your mobile device and then point your mobile device at the header image in the post [tagged with a smartphone icon]. Interaction by dpr-barcelona, Augmented Reality powered by Aurasma.

THE POST-IDEOLOGICAL MAN
Léopold Lambert.

Too often when we evoke the work of George Orwell, we refer only to his two masterpieces, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) which are the least autobiographic of his writings. It results from that an over-emphasis on the literal symbols of those two books. People see video-surveillance cameras in the street and they invoke Big Brother like if it miraculously put a spell on them. Those cameras, however, are only the spectacular part of a much broader biopolitical system that administrates and normalizes behaviors and desires.

Orwell’s own life is helpful here to determine potential means of resistance to such processes. Whether his books are simply inspired by his life, like for Burmese Days (1934), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Coming Up for Air (1939) or frankly autobiographical like in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) or Homage to Catalonia (1938), his narratives humbly offer us a testimony of uncompromising courage.

The post-ideology I am evoking in the title of my short text has nothing to do with the one our era chose for itself in a delusional or diverting attempt to declare “the end of history”. In that case, the post-ideology is an ideology itself. The example that Orwell gives us lies more simply in a systematic suspicion of any form of organization that has instigated a sort of moral tribunal within itself. That is why, for example, he always remained at distance of any form of communist or anarchist party even when he was fighting for the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) during the Spanish Civil War. During the latest, he enrolled the militia “because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do”[1].

We are far from the self-proclaimed post-ideology that ambiguously creates a dangerous relativism to avoid the difficult question of ethics[2]. When he left for Spain, Orwell had no doubt that fighting against fascism is the only thing he has to do; for him it is “common decency”[3]. The evidence of such a fight comes from his systematic refusal to compromise with his ethics, to the point that he could not possibly satisfy himself to write as a mean of resistance. When he decides to experience the life of the poorest in Paris and London, when he examines meticulously the life conditions of Lancashire working class or when he engages himself to a civil war in another country than his, writing is only a way to report retrospectively. Writing is never a substitute to fighting for him, on the contrary of what many of us are often telling ourselves. The post-ideological human is the one that does not need ideology to give him (her) excuses not to think and fight.

—–
[1] Orwell, George, Homage to Catalonia, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. P6
[2] The notion of ethics here has to be understood in an extremely distinct way from the one of morals.
[3] Orwell, George, Homage to Catalonia, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. P50

—–

This essay has been written by Léopold Lambert for the fanzine Orwellian, a limited edition of 50 hand numbered copies that was produced for the presentation “Augmented Reality with dpr-barcelona” at the Apple Store Passeig de Gràcia [Barcelona], held on February 28th, 2013.

>> To see the Augmented Reality interactions, please follow this link directly from your mobile device and then point your mobile device at the header image in the post [tagged with a smartphone icon]. Interaction by dpr-barcelona, Augmented Reality powered by Aurasma.

I HAD A DREAM.
Evangelina Guerra Luján.

I had a dream. An ordinary dream. Just everyday scenarios with a hint of strangeness in the atmosphere. The difference was sensed in the slow and gravity-free pace of pedestrians crossing the dense city streets of an invented urban territory. On the other side, there was a crowded, extense, plain and gray concrete desert with people making long lines with no purpose, drawing human borders to safeguard, in between, the nothingness. I knew exactly where I was, but it made no difference. Every enclave depicted a copy-paste action in smaller or larger scale. Suddenly I had a thought. I placed both my hands like looking at my palms, entered the inscrutable border between the outside and the inside and traveled through the dunes of my skin. This anatomical drive invited me deeper into the territory of my epidermis. As I walked through the furrows of my skin and deflowered the local botanical gestures placed as mistaken, I received a thriving message. I saw in this unknown landscape every bit of information one needs to know. I sailed the vast wisdom sea manipulating every code, every piece of data of my palms landscape. I watched in the tip of my finger the world trembling in a state of freedom. The Infinite Monument of Knowledge was erect at the intersection of Everywhere and Always. It was pointing at me. I know, you know, she knows… everybody knew, because everybody saw, in the palm of their hands, the absolute everything of all times. It was an exhilarating and trembling moment. I crossed my borders inside-out, and returned to the exterior. I stared at my hands, breathing heavily as I thought “ I knew it…”. As I touched the succinct body of every extension of myself, I transformed the space, its stage, its reality. I created worlds, and imagine new moments, big and small. Frequent, conventional and ordinary turned into rare, exotic and extraordinary. And the source of power was my skin. My hands. My fingers. My tips. My touch. Me.

I was free.
I was free.
I am free.
It is only a dream.

—–

This essay has been written by Evangelina Guerra Luján for the fanzine Orwellian, a limited edition of 50 hand numbered copies that was produced for the presentation “Augmented Reality with dpr-barcelona” at the Apple Store Passeig de Gràcia [Barcelona], held on February 28th, 2013.

>> To see the Augmented Reality interactions, please follow this link directly from your mobile device and then point your mobile device at the header image in the post [tagged with a smartphone icon]. Interaction by dpr-barcelona, Augmented Reality powered by Aurasma.

This text is not ours… but is written by us all. It is a subversion with some updates of the Internationale Situationniste Manifesto [1960] plus minor additions borrowed from Marshall McLuhan, Julio Cortázar, Georges Perec and the Invisible Committee. Even though the resulting cocktail must appear explosive, most of their postulates seem urgent in current days when the management of our cities reveal the consequences of following capitalist guidelines more than equity, social and relational criteria. Such management has had its repercussion in the form, the representation and the human interactions within the city [1]. So, this is arena to take actions, we should realize that in the end the crisis is just a way of governing and it’s up to us to legitimate it or not.

While transcoding implies any loose in the quality on the information due to the transfer between devices or supports, our intention is to generate communicating vessels from such Manifesto to the urban society we are interacting with. In this case, the fragmentary message characteristic of SI provides useful units of atomized information to transcode to contemporary citizens thus facilitating the occurrence of serendipitous connections to strengthen urban networks of dreams, desires, emotions and on site procastination.

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“If you’re bored, you’re doing something wrong”
—Richard Dawkins

The existing system cannot subdue the new human force that is increasing day by day alongside the irresistible development of technology and the dissatisfaction of consumerist imposed uses in our senseless social life.

Distraction in this society cannot be distributed amongst a range of variants, but only rejected en bloc with this very society. The idea of progress has to be suspended until the whole system recover and start pulsing rhythmically with social relations.

What are the organisational perspectives of life in a society which authentically “reorganises production and distribution on the basis of the free and equal association of the prosumers”? Work would more and more be perceived as means for socialisation of vital goods intended to strengthen social mesh instead of enhancing individualism. Thus liberated from all economic commitments, liberated from all the odious debts and responsibilities from the past, humankind will exude a new surplus value, incalculable in money because it would be impossible to reduce it to the measure of waged work. The guarantee of the liberty of each and of all is in the value of the game, of life freely constructed. The exercise of this collective ludic recreation is the framework of the only guaranteed equality with non-exploitation of man by man. The liberation of the game, its creative autonomy, its latent constructive conflict supersedes the ancient division between imposed work and passive leisure.

Under the existing dominant society, which produces the miserable pseudo-games of non-participation, a true civic and urban activity is necessarily. The emergence of the species ludens [humans playing interactions in the streets of the city] as if moving within Constant’s New Baylon would leave behind the bourgeois metropolis and generate a megastructure of relations, affections and dissensions. Sometimes it might be classed as criminality. It might be semi-clandestine. Or it even might appears in the form of scandal.

So what really is the situation? It’s the realisation of a better city, which more exactly is provoked by the human interactions not by increasing infrastructure. A step beyond individualism until reaching awareness of the collective realm:

From
Us
to
our family
our neighborhood
our education
our job
our government
our city
our regions
our planet…
the planet and us within the planet.

Within this scenario every agent formerly known as architect will become a hacker, i.e., inseparably a producer-consumer of total city creation, which will help the rapid dissolution of the linear criteria of expertise. To address such activity it won’t be necessary to go to Academia… at least in the way we are used to do. Everyone will be a designer [from domestic to urban realm] so to interact, with a multidimensional connection of tendencies, experiences, or radically different “schools” — not successively, but simultaneously.

Henceforth, we are attending to an autonomous organisation of the prosumers of the new culture, aside from the political and ideological organisations which currently exist, as we all together can dispute institutions’ capacity to organise anything other than the management of that which already exists.

But institutions cannot prevent what they are not able to imagine. From the moment our collective organisation goes beyond the initial experimental stage and become aware of its critical mass, its most urgent objective should be the seizure of the cities. From there, connected at a world level, subvert the bureaucratisation of cities management now expressing the deep inter-relationship of systems engaged in the conservation and the reproduction of the same obsolete model [even disguised with techno-smart and environmentally friendly discourse].

The riposte of the revolutionary citizens to these old conditions must be a new type of action. By means of autonomous communes that have been trained in local management of available resources and used to exchange experiences in open source platforms linked to other communities; the next step would be a putsch to the other pillar of the system: the financial framework currently favoring predatory tactics based in speculation and inequity relations between corporations and citizens and also between inhabitants of different regions while leaning their “wellness state” in the spoliation of other regions’ resources. As such financial system is completely destitute of any sensible usage outside our subversive perspective, we find our seizure of this apparatus justified before our contemporaries. And we will have it.

We are resolved to take over financial system, at least in its world-manipulating form, and in contrary favouring the formation of local trade and exchange networks. Given the financial collapses of the beginning of the XXI century, this would be one of the works which would prove most significant in the clarification of a long series of demands and actions. This financial coup d’etat would led to the suppression of the surplus layer of politics interested more in meet the commitments with private corporations and speculative financial actors rather the service of citizens.

What would be the main characteristics of the new culture and how would it compare with essential urbanity?

- Against the spectacle of individual progress, the realised situationist urbanity introduces the recognition of “the other” and its differences as essential step towards collaboration.
- Against preserved education, it is posed learning through direct experience with relational civic interactions, conflict management and “doing with others” strategies.
- Against particularised design, it will be a global practice with a bearing, each moment, on all the available elements. Naturally this would tend to collective production which would be without doubt anonymous (the claim of exclusive authorship would reveal suspicious and works will no longer be stocked as commodities but as means to reach collective goals). The minimum proposals of these experiences will be a revolution in behaviour and a dynamic unitary urbanism capable of extension to the entire planet, and may become the key to access to all parallel universes created by a new conscious observation of all micro-ordinary events of the city.
- Against unilateral art, situationist culture will be an art of dialogue, an art of interaction, an art of conflict as enabling force. The enclosed era of primitivism and isolated design solutions must be superseded by complete communication and open peer to peer tools to reach dynamic equilibrium between opposites in a given urban system.

At micro-ordinary level, everyone will become a coder generating the conditions for its playful existence to insert and work within the urban system of interactions. It will happen that when opening the door and going where the street begins, it won’t appear the already known houses aligned in the moulded sidewalk, but a living forest where every moment “can be thrown like a magnolia and where the faces will born when looking at them”.[2] This violent emotive possession of the streets will provide exciting treasures for those drifters taking the challenge to explore alien quarters and neighbors.[3]

We have just move inside what will historically be the evolutive urban dimension. The role of amateur-professional —of adhocrat— is again a specialisation up to the point of social and mental interaction, when everyone becomes a node in the sense that the new system will remain in the strength of its connections. This task will be slowly filtering into to the society without a permanent division of labour, thus generating activities for which we haven’t invented the names yet.

To those who don’t understand us properly, we say with an irreducible will: “We await the turning point which is the inevitable liquidation of the world of economic progress, in all its fictional forms. Such are our goals, and these will be the future goals of urbanity.”

“It is the business of the future to be dangerous”
—A.N. Whitehead

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[1] Lara Schrijver. Radical Games. Popping th Bubble of 1960s’ Architecture. NAI Publishers. Rotterdam 2009.
[2] Julio Cortázar. Historia de Cronopios y Famas. Afaguara. Buenos Aires, Argentina. 1965
[3] Simon Sadler. The Situationist City. The MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts 1998.

Transcoding Situationism. Updating dérives around SI Manifesto* has been written for the Think Space CFP and will be presented on the 2nd Think Space UNCONFERENCE [22 - 24 February, 2013. Zagreb, Croatia]

The Flak Towers or Flakturm were large concrete bunkers, with anti-aircraft guns mounted on the roof, built during the Second World War by the Germans. According to the documentary Hitler’s Secret Bunkers by George Pagliero, Hitler took personal interest on their design and even made some sketches for it. It has been said that the towers were constructed in a mere six months, due to an urgent need of protection. Taking the Augarten Tower in Wien as the start point for his proposal, Léopold Lambert designed an archive project for the [un]restricted access competition which took place in August 2012 with the aim of re-envision the future of decommissioned military space. Lambert wrote:

This project undertakes to design archives within one of the Flakturm, former Second World War anti-aircraft towers in the center of Vienna. The idea of constructing an archive within a bunker is not a neutral one. The defensiveness of this building allows, both symbolically and literally, to host and protect goods against the alteration of the externality —whether it is time or a more direct antagonism. Many civilizations of the past have been annihilated, not only physically, but absolutely as any form of their production has been also destroyed with them. The recent history would have still seen several tragic examples of ethnical cleansing directly linked to processes of cultural destructions.

We have seen other examples about using bunkers to protect data, but what we find really interesting about this project is that it proposes an archive for books. And we immediately wondered… what if Guy Montag had found himself in front of the Flakturm Archives while he was working?

“There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

In the theater play Almansor that he wrote in 1820, Heinrich Heine made the following tragic prophecy: “Where we burn books, we will end up burning men.” And maybe this is not fiction. Both Ray Bradbury and Heine, were talking not only about books, but about the human condition. As Léopold explains, on May 10th 1933, the Nazis who recently reached the head of the executive and legislative power in Germany burnt thousands of books including Heine’s, which did not fit within the spirit of the new anti-Semitic/anti-Communist policies they were willing to undertake. About a decade later, they industrially killed eleven millions people [including six millions Jews] in what remains as the darkest moment of mankind’s history: the Holocaust.

It is clear that book burning is not reduced to the physical object, the main purpose of totalitarian governments which have ended burning books is to burn ideas and ideals. The books which advocated ideas have to be suppressed in order to substitute thinking. In most of the cases, the books destroyed are irreplaceable and their burning constitutes a severe loss to cultural heritage, as happened with the obliteration of the Library of Baghdad, the burning of books and burying of scholars under China’s Qin Dynasty, and the Nazi book burnings, among others, as we can see on this list of book-burning incidents. About this issue, Léopold Lambert explains that in 1992, at the beginning of the three years long siege of Sarajevo, the Serbian army deliberately bombed the National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina thus destroying more than a million books, including many unique documents precious to Judaism and Islam. The attack on Bosnian culture was fundamentally complementary of the thousands of assassinations —very often by snipers— of the Bosnian people themselves during these three years of war [1992-1995] as the latter was based on the supremacist will of a culture over another.

These dystopian but real events are the main driving force behind the idea of creating the Flakturm Archives. The will to store books within a gigantic bunker constitutes, of course, a literal gesture of protection for the books, but more importantly it influences the imaginary of its visitors on the importance of the books physicality and spatialization. The main concept behind the Flakturm Archives also reminds us about different references; from Umberto Eco’s labyrinthine medieval library which at the end of the book The Name of the Rose is burned and totally destroyed, to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [Chapter 4], where the so-called “memory hole” is used to burn any book or written text which is inconvenient to the regime.

The drawings of the Flakturm Archives can be also related to Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione, with its enormous vaults with stairs and mighty machines. Richard Wendorf wrote about Piranesi’s ruins that they are visual reminders of a monumental past, a past so present that contemporary sensibility must accommodate rather than attempt to obliterate it. Léopold Lambert’s project has this kind of sensibility: he’s reminding us a terrible past with its wars and libricides, but at the same time, proposing new ways to avoid repeating the same mistakes. He ends saying:

The Flakturm Archives are designed, not to diffuse the violence contained within this military structure, but to attempt to reveal it. War architecture —military structures or buildings which have been partially destroyed— has indeed this value; it expresses the violence which lies within each building, it reveals the systematic oppressive power through which architecture subjectivizes the bodies. Once this violence expressed, one can begin to actively adapt to it and appropriate it. The playfulness that the building proposes through its experience is a direct consequence of such appropriation. In this regard, the archival space is constituted by the inside world that is hermetically contained by the bunker tower. Its vertical organization of open slabs, complemented by the numerous stairs, offers to the body a terrain that can only be appropriate through efforts. This dimension of the project allows a global interest on the physicality of things, whether the latter are humans, books or architecture.

It is also interesting but not strange if you know Léopold’s blog The Funambulist, that he choose the flakturm in Augarten, the only one with the round plant, which is also a clear reference to the panopticon.

The panopticon is based on the principle that visibility is a trap and the person becomes a object of information, never a subject in communication. It can be say that the project Flakturm Archives is a panopticon in reverse. The different levels, bridges and platforms allow the possibility of infinite and endless views of the books. Paraphrasing Foucault, here the books are the object of a kind of surveillance and induce the feeling of an immanent state of conscious and permanent visibility. But what we understand about this project is that this principle works in reverse: beside the powerful structure of the military architecture of the Flakturm, there is also the power of people taking care of the books.

Foucault stated that “The Panopticon is a marvellous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power.” Maybe this is the kind of “power” we need in the current times, to avoid the manipulation of knowledge. The same manipulation which has been part of human history, that is so contradictory that we have been able to see how a dictator as Saddam Hussein [a political figure who was anything but democratic] wrote several essays about “democracy” and how his politically perverse speeches were the promises of freedom and security which masked the reality of repressive regimes. Only the access to books, to knowledge and the free exchange of history and ideas, will allow us to learn how to not do the same mistakes again… or at least, to try it.

We want to write this post as a brief homage to “all the writers and citizens who struggled to salvage the manuscripts, which still speaks to the strength of dialogue, even in book-burning times.”* Because as Ray Bradbury wrote, “There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”

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* Quote taken from the article Burning Books: Sarajevo’s Library Twenty Years on and the Fragility of Cultural Heritage.

[1] Header picture taken from Flak Towers in the Augarten.
[2] The complete project Flakturm Archives can be visited on Léopold Lambert’s web-site.
[3] All the projects presented at [un]restricted access competition has been published here.
[4] More info about the Flak Towers on the book The Flak Towers in Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna 1940-1950 [Schiffer Military Aviation History] by Michael Foedrowitz.

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Resist people who seem invincible.

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Resist any idea that contains the word algorithm.

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Resist the idea that architecture is a building.

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Resist the idea that architecture can save the world.

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Resist the hope that you’ll get that big job.

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Resist buying an automobile of any kind.

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Resist people who are satisfied.

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Resist getting big jobs.

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Resist taking the path of least resistance.

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Resist the growing conviction that They are right.

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Resist the idea that you need a client to make architecture.

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Resist people who tell you to resist.

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Resist writing what They wish you would write.

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Resist assuming that the locus of power is elsewhere.

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Resist any idea that equates architecture and ownership.

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Resist the thought that life is simple, after all.

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Excerpt taken from Lebbeus Woods, Resistance Checkpoint 

caption: “Neomechanical Tower (Upper) Chamber”

Thanks to Steven Holl and Domus for bringing up again Lebbeus’ ideas of architecture and resistance.

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