From small
through medium
and big
to extra large*:
a reader in incremental scales.
from understanding our individual position to working in and with the world.
By Céline Condorelli
This reader is structured in incremental scales, from small to extra-large via medium; this structure takes its cue from Rem Koolhaas’ book S, M, L, XL started in the field of architecture, but which has been a very influential work much beyond it, to art, design, and spatial or cultural practices. What is meant by this is that the following series of references, texts, projects, films and websites address issues and suggestions that start from ourselves as individuals, beings or bodies in the world, and gradually expand towards the larger scale, to how to be and act with the world. This is both a way to order this material in a comprehensible and accessible form, and a suggestion for understanding a particular way of being and learning that always starts from the particular and the personal -before or until it can address the larger issues that may confront one’s work and interests. We can only understand the world if and when we understand where and how we are in it, where we are looking from.
This reader comprises material of varied natures, some very theoretical texts and others that are more casual in tone or just conversations, some are texts, other films or projects, websites and even a few buildings- some of these items take only minutes to go through, while some other requires some hours of concentration. No difference is made between types of references or materials (between texts and films for example): this is a choice to make no separation between theory and practice and just consider all as works in and of themselves, that just happen to take place in different mediums. People address similar problems and issues in their work and life from different angles and through different languages, and I feel this list reflects this.
Lastly most of these works are online and include the urls to access them- those that aren’t online are included in the document itself.
This reader was originally put together for the students of Birmingham City University, on the request of Ruth Claxton and Stuart Whipps.
* (in hommage to Rem Koolhaas)
1. Charles and Ray Eames, Powers of Ten
2. Soda Zoo
3. George Perec, Species of Spaces
4. Yvonne Rainer, Hand Movie
5. Bas Jan Ader
6. Jan Verwoert, I can, I can’t, Who cares
7. Martino Gamper, 100 chairs in 100 days
8. Derek Jarman’s house in Dungeness
9. Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style
10. The Work Office
11. Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions pp. 229-233
12. Guy Debord, Theory of the Dérive, (from Society of the Spectacle)
13. Bik Van Der Pol
14. Hannah Arendt, The crisis in culture
15. John Baldessari Sings Sol Lewitt
16. Florian Schneider, Collaboration: The Dark Site of the Multitude
17. An Architektur, On the Commons: Public Interview with De Angelis and Stavrides
18. Gordon Matta-Clark, Day's End
19. Alison & Peter Smithson, The Economist Building
20. Dan Graham, Theatre, Cinema, Power
21. Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer
22. Michel de Certeau Walking in the City, (from The Practice of Everyday Life)
23. Diderot et D’Alembert, Encyclopédie
24. Sean Snyder, Disobedience in Byelorussia: Self-Interrogation on “Research-Based Art”
25. Temporary Services
26. Anarchitektur
27. Dziga Vertov, Man with the Movie Camera
28. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
29. Rikrit Tiravanija, The Land
30. Alain Resnais, Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues also die)
31. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Image Music Text
32. N55
33. Centre For Land Use Interpretation
34. Dan Graham, Rock My Religion
35. Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace
36. Chris Marker, Junkopia
37. Adaweb
38. Denise Scott Brown, Learning from Pop
39. Chris Marker, Sunless
40. They Rule
41. Michel Foucault/ Noam Chomsky, Human Nature: Justice versus Power
42. Elgaland and Vagaland
43. Dziga Vertov Group, Letter to Jane
1.
Charles and Ray Eames, Powers of Ten
(1977)
Powers of Ten is a 9 min scientific film essay, narrated by Phil Morrison, produced by Charles and Ray Eames as part of their ongoing effort to integrate science and technology in everyday life, and make it more interesting and accessible to the wider public through art and design. In nine minutes, the film takes its viewers on a voyage from a picnic in Chicago to the edge of the Universe, zooming out to cover ten times as much space every ten seconds. Then the camera returns to the picnicker, narrowing in on his hand by powers of ten until it focuses on a tiny quark within one of his cells.
This film is conceptually very simple and yet opens up extremely complex issues of exponential growth and the appropriate units to define it, but also how questions of scale fundamentally articulate our understanding and relationship to the world.
2.
Soda Zoo
Sodaconstructor is a construction kit for interactive models using masses and springs. By altering physical properties like gravity, friction, and speed, curiously anthropomorphic models can be made to walk, climb, wriggle, jiggle, or collapse into a writhing heap.
3.
George Perec, Species of Spaces(1974)
(London: Penguin, 1997) Originally published as Espèces d'espaces (Paris: Galilée 1974)
Species of Spaces is a wonderful meditation on the world around us. Beginning with a contemplation of the space on the page before him, Perec gradually moves outwards to look at the bed, the bedroom, the apartment, the apartment building and so on, until he reaches the Earth itself and then, once again, space. It’s an endearing combination of the comprehensive addresses that small children are inclined to give themselves and a serious scientific undertaking in the literary mode. In being forced to look so closely at the things that surround us, it’s impossible not to notice those things that we’ve taken for granted. It is also a brilliant example of how structures are invented to articulate and order ideas as a way to work.
pp.5 to 80
most of it is accessible here: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HUjYoKnUbl8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=perec+species+of+spaces&hl=en&ei=7eE2TITVJoPFsgbdwMnvBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
4.
Yvonne Rainer, Hand Movie (1966)
6:17, b&w, silent
Rainer's first film, Hand Movie, was shot by fellow dancer William Davis when Rainer was confined to a hospital bed, recovering from major surgery and unable to dance. The resulting five minutes of footage is a sustained close-up shot of Rainer's hand against a grey background as it stretches and contracts, bends and points, performing the kinds of everyday, quotidian movements that characterize her pioneering minimalist choreography.
http://www.ubu.com/film/rainer_hand-movie.html
5.
Bas Jan Ader
In 1975 Bas Jan Ader disappeared under mysterious circumstances at sea in what would have been the smallest boat ever to cross the Atlantic. His body was never found.
Much of Ader’s work centered on the simple act of falling. Fall I (Los Angeles), 1970, documented in black and white, Conceptual-style photographs, finds the artist sitting in a chair atop the roof of his California bungalow. In the sequence that follows, he inexplicably loses his poise, awkwardly rolls down the roof and plummets into the bushes below. Similar pieces find the artist biking into a canal, Fall II (Amsterdam), 1970 and loosing his grip on a tree branch, Broken Fall (Organic), 1971. By removing these perilous moments of action from any motivating context, Ader invites two almost mutually exclusive possibilities for interpretation. The first focused on the irreducible physicality of his performance; the artist, in experiencing the corporeal threat of a particular situation, offers his body as the finite producer and bearer of meaning. That is, in the Modernist- Materialist tradition of “it is what it is,” the body becomes the ultimate interpretive measure. Although Ader was unusually guarded in speaking about his work, he pointedly denied this perspective as his sole intent: “I do not make body sculpture, body art or body works. When I fell off the roof of my house or into a canal, it was because gravity made itself master over me.”
6.
Jan Verwoert, I can, I can’t, Who cares
(2008)
Curatorial framework for the exhibition Sheffield 08: Yes No and Other Options
And extract from the pamphlet released during the exhibition:
Exhaustion & Exuberance – Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform
Centre for advanced visual studies at MIT (2008)
A previous version of this essay was published in Dot Dot Dot 15 at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève.
“One thing seems to be sure: after the disappearance of factory work from the lives of most people in the Western world, we have entered into a culture where we do no longer just work, we perform. We need to perform because to do so is what is asked of us. When we choose to make our living on the basis of doing what we want to do, we need to get our act together, we need to get things down, in any place at any time. Are you ready? I ask you and I am sure that you will be as ready as you will ever be to perform yourself, do things and go places.”
I can, I can’t, Who cares
Jan Verwoert
How can we address the current changes in our societies and lives? Some have said that we have come to inhabit the post-industrial condition. But what could that mean? One thing seems to be sure: after the disappearance of factory work from the lives of most people in the Western world, we have entered into a culture where we do no longer just work, we perform. We need to perform because to do so is what is asked of us. When we choose to make our living on the basis of doing what we want to do, we need to get our act together, we need to get things down, in any place at any time. Are you ready? I ask you and I am sure that you will be as ready as you will ever be to perform yourself, do things and go places.
Who is we? This group is ever expanding. It is us, the creative types who have created jobs for ourselves by exploring and exploiting our talents to perform small artistic and intellectual miracles. It is us, the socially engaged who create communal spaces for others and ourselves by performing the roles of interlocutors in and facilitators or instigators of processes of social exchange. When we perform we create concepts and ideas as well as social bonds and forms of communication and communality. Thereby we create the values that our society is supposed to be based on today. The Deutsche Bank currently sum up their company philosophy in a simple slogan (formulated in a symptomatically a-grammatical international English): A Passion to Perform (you have a passion for something but never to realise an end through actions. wisdom of grammar). So which side of the barricades are we on then? Where do the barricades stand today, anyway? We are the avant-garde but we are also the jobslaves. We serve the customers who consume the communication and sociability that we produce. We work in the kitchens and call centres of the newly opened restaurants and companies of the prospectively burgeoning new urban centres of the service society. To offer our services we are willing to travel. Being mobile is part of our performance. So we travel, we go west to work, we go north to work, we are all around, we fix the minds, houses and cars of those who stay in their offices. What do we feel about ourselves and our lives? Are we happy? Are we in charge? What pain and what pleasure are we experiencing in the lives we have created for ourselves?
I can’t
What would it mean to put up resistance against a social order in which performativity has become a growing demand, if not a norm? What would it mean to resist the need to perform? Is ‘resistance’ even a concept that would be useful to evoke in this context? After all the forms of resistance we know are in fact usually dramatic performances themselves. Maybe we should rather consider other, more subtle forms of not performing, of staging as the Slovakian conceptual artist Julius Koller called them ‘anti-happenings’. What silent but effective forms of unwillingness, noncompliance, uncooperativeness, reluctance or non-alignment do we find in contemporary culture when it comes to inventing ways to not perform how and when you are asked to perform?
Can we ever embrace these forms of non-performance in art and thinking as forms of art and thinking? Or do we always find ourselves on the other side of the barricade, together with the performers and those who want to get things done and get enraged by people who stand in our way by being slow, sluggish and uncooperative. After all is not uncooperativeness the revenge uncreative people take on the society of the creative by stubbornly stopping it in its tracks? Have you
ever found yourself screaming (or wanting to scream) at an uncooperative clerk behind a counter: “I haven’t got time for this.” – only to realise that, yes, he has time for this, an entire lifetime dedicated to the project of stopping other people from getting things down? These people work hard to protect society from change by inventing ever new subtle ways to stop those in their tracks who want to revolutionise it. Are they the enemy? Or are they today maybe the strongest allies you may find when you want to put up defences against a culture of compulsive performativity?
But does it have to take other people to make you stop performing? When and how do you give up on the demand and need to perform? What could make you utter the magic words ‘I can’t’? Does it take a breakdown to stop you? Do the words I can’t already imply the acknowledgment of a breakdown, a failure to perform, a failure that would not be justifiable if your body would not authenticate your inability by physically stopping you? How could we restore dignity to the ‘I Can’t’? What ways of living and acting out the I Can’t do we find in art and music? Was that not what Punk for instance was all about? To transgress your (musical) capacities by rigorously embracing you incapacities? To rise above demands by frustrating all expectations? When the Sex-Pistols on one of their last gigs, when it was practically all over already and the band simply could no longer get their act together, Johnny Rotten turned to the audience and asked “Do you ever feel you have been cheated?” Would that be a question to rephrase today? If so, how? There are ways of confronting people with the I Can’t that put it right in their face. But maybe there are also other means of making the I Can’t part of a work, of putting it to work, means that art and and poetry have always used, namely by creating moments where meaning remains latent. To embrace latency goes against the grain of the logic of compulsive performativity because it all about leaving things unsaid, unshown, unrevealed, it is about refraining from actualising and thereby exhausting all your potentials in the moment of your performance. We have to re- think and learn to re-experience the beauty of latency.
What is the time?
Performance is all about the right timing. A comedian with a bad sense of timing is not funny, a musician useless. Career opportunities, we are told, are all about being in the right place at the right time. Finding a lover to love maybe also is. Is there a right time for love? Stressed out overworked couples are advised these days to reserve ‘quality time’ for each other to prevent their relationship from loosing its substance. What is quality time? “Is it a good time for you to talk?” people will ask you when they reach you on your mobile. When is a good time to talk? We live and work in economies based on the concept of ‘just in-time-production’ and ‘just in time’ usually means things have to be ready in no time at all, urgency is the norm. ‘I haven’t got time for this!’ the just in time producer will shout at you when you are not on time and make him wait.
To be in synch with the timing of just in time production you have to be ready to perform all the time. This is the question you must be prepared to answer positively: Are you ready? Always. Ready when you are. As ready as I will ever be. Always up for it. Stay on the scene. Porn is pure performance. Impotence is out of the question. “Get on the fucking block and fuck!” is the formula for getting things down. Frances Stark recently quoted it to me when we talked about the culture of performance. She got the sentence from Henry Miller and included it in one of her collages.
What happens when there is a lapse of time, when time is out of joint. Are we not living in times now when time is always radically disjointed as the ‘developed’ countries of the first world a pushing ahead into a science fiction economy of dematerialised labour and virtual capital – while it at the same time pushes the
‘developing’ countries centuries back in time by sourcing work out to them and thereby also imposing working conditions on them that basically date back to the days of early industrialisation? Sometimes the time-gap doesn’t even have to span centuries, it might just be years as some of countries of the former East (like Poland for instance) are rapidly catching up to the speed of advanced capitalism, but still not rapidly enough. Migrant workers bridge this gap in time. They travel ahead in time to work in the fast cities of the West and North. Yet, they face the risk of any time- traveller as they loose touch with the time that passes while they are away. Will they ever find back into their time or learn to inhabit the other time of the other country. How much time-zone can you inhabit? Who is to set the clock and make the pace according to which all others are measuring their progress? “Que horas sont a Washington?” sings Mano Chao and it may very well be the crucial political question of this moment.
I can
But would to embrace the I Can’t mean to vilify the I Can? Why would we ever want to do that? After all the joy of art, writing and performing freely lies in the realisation that you can, a sense of empowerment through creativity that in ecstatic moments of creative performance can flood your body with the force of an adrenaline rush. And then living out the I Can is not just a cheap thrill. To face up to your own potentials might be one of the most challenging tasks of your life if not even your responsibility. Giorgio Agamben speaks about the pleasure and terror of the I Can in this way. He refers to an account by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova who describes how it came about that she became a writer. Standing outside a Leningrad prison in 1930 where her son was a political prisoner, another woman whose son was also imprisoned, asked her: Can you write about this? She found that she had to respond that yes, indeed she could and in this moment found herself both empowered and indebted.
Today it seems most crucial to really understand this link between the empowerment and the debt at the heart of the experience of creative performance. In what way are we always already indebted to others when we perform? In what way is it precisely this indebtedness to others that enables us to perform in the first place? Could an ethics of a different type of performance – one that acknowleges the debt to the other instead of over-ruling it hectically to improve the efficancy of performance – be developped on the basis of this understanding? How could we perform differently? Freely? In his film Theorema Passolini draws up a scenario of unleashed performativity. A factory owner hands over the factory to the workers. His obligations to work haver thereby come to an end. In the villa of the factory owner a young man arrives, he has no personality or features except for the fact that he is a charming lover. He sleeps with all members of the family and leaves again. Disconnected from work and freed by love all family members start to perform: The son acknowledges he is gay and becomes a painter. The daughter decides to never move nor speak again. The mother cruises the streets and sleeps with strangers. The housemaid decides to not commit suicide, instead she becomes a saint, starts to levitate and cure sick children. The factory owner himself decides to take his clothes off in the main train station and walk off into a nearby volcano. All of these actions remain uncommented and they are presented as all having the same value as they are equally possible and the possibility of each of these performances does not nivellate or relativise the possibility of any other. Passolini thus describes a situation where the end of work and the arrival of work creates the possibility for a radical co-existence and co-presence of liberated performances which are not forced under the yoke of any single dominant imperative to perform in a particular way. How could we create and inhabit such a condition of undisciplined performativity?
Who Cares?
To recognize the indebtedness to the other as that which empowers performance also means to acknowledge the importance of care. You perform because you care. When you care for someone or something this care enables you to act because you feel that you must act, not least because when you really care to not act is out of the question. In conversation Annika Eriksson recently summed this point up by saying that, as a mother when your child is in need of you ‘there is no no’. You have to be able to act and react and you will find that You Can even if you thought you couldn’t. Paradoxically though, the I Care can generate the I Can but it can also radically delimit it. Because when you care for yourself and others, this obligation might in fact force you to turn down offers to work and perform for others, in other places, on other occasions. When the need to take care of your friends, family, children or lover will come between you and the demand to perform, to profess the I Can’t (work now, come to the event ..) may then be the only justified way to show that you care. Likewise the recognition that you are exhausting yourself and need to take care of yourselves can constitute a reason to turn down an offer to perform and utter the ‘I Can’t’. So from the I Care both the I Can and the I Can’t may originate. The I Care is the question of welfare. In the historical moment of the dismantling of the welfare state this is a pressing question. In a talk Jimmy Durham cited two people he had met in Italy as saying: “We are liberated. What we need now is a better life.” Maybe this is indeed the question: How do we want to deal with the potential of living life caring for yourself and others by negotiating the freedom and demands of the I Can and I Can’t in a way that would another form, another ethics another attitude to creative and social performance possible?
7.
Martino Gamper, 100 chairs in 100 days
(2007)
“This project involves systematically collecting discarded chairs from London streets (or more frequently, friends’ homes) over a period of about roughly two years, then spending 100 days to reconfiguring the design of each one in an attempt to transform its character and/or the way it functions. My intention is to investigate the potential for creating useful new designs by blending together stylistic or structural elements of existing chair types.
I see this as a chance to create a ‘three-dimensional sketchbook’, a set of playful yet thought-provoking designs that, due to the time constraint, are put together with a minimum of analysis. As well as possibly making one or more designs that might be suitable for mass production, I intend to question the idea of there being an innate superiority in the one-off, to use this mongrel morphology to demonstrate the difficulty of any particular design being objectively judged ‘the best’. I also hopes my chairs illustrate – and celebrate – the geographical, historical and human resonance of design: what can they tell us about London, the sociological context of seating from different areas, and the people who owned each one? The stories behind the chairs are as important as their style or even their function.”
8.
Derek Jarman’s house in Dungeness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Jarmanhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/stml/sets/72157594228986876/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/angusf/sets/656542/
9.
Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1981
Exercises in Style, written by Raymond Queneau, is a collection of 99 retellings of the same story, each in a different style. In each, the narrator gets on the "S" bus (now no. 84), witnesses an altercation between a man (a zazou) with a long neck and funny hat and another passenger, and then sees the same person two hours later at the Gare St-Lazare getting advice on adding a button to his overcoat.
10.
The Work Office
The Work Office (TWO) is a multidisciplinary art project disguised as an employment agency. Informed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the Great Depression in the 1930s, TWO is a gesture to "make work" for visual and performing artists, writers, and others by giving them simple, idea-based assignments to explore, document, or improve daily life in New York. From a temporary central office, TWO's administrators interview, register, and hire employees; assign, collect, and exhibit work; and distribute Depression-era wages to employees during weekly Payday Parties.
11.
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: selected stories & other writings(1962)
Borges is probably one of the most influential writers of the XXth century, and Labyrinths perhaps the most important book he wrote… This little gem of a book is a actually a disparate collection of short stories, parables and non-fiction essays. What it highlights is one of Borges major projects: the blurring of these boundaries, between fact and fiction, reality and irreality. Of particular delight is (to mention one) the story of The Library of Babel.
http://books.google.de/books?id=wtPxGztYx-UC&lpg=PR5&ots=yypr1PYkL0&dq=Jorge%20Luis%20Borges%20labyrinths&hl=en&pg=PR5#v=onepage&q&f=false
12.
Guy Debord, Theory of the Dérive (from Society of the Spectacle)
(1958)
“Théorie de la dérive” was first published in ‘Internationale Situationniste #2’ (Paris, December 1958). One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: "drifting"], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.
In situationist texts, a dérive is an attempt at analysis of the totality of everyday life, through the passive movement through space. It is translated as drift.
French writer and Situationist Guy Debord first theorized this concept in his studies of architecture. The original concept was the exploration of a built environment without preconceptions, to refuse to limit legitimate discussion to architectural styles or residential percentages, but to discuss the reality of actually inhabiting the environment.
13.
Bik Van Der Pol
Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol work collaboratively since 1995. They live and work
in Rotterdam.
The experience of art for Bik Van der Pol is a collaboration with the public: others enter into the work and, making use of it, they complete it. Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol do not restrict but rather funnel engagement by means of the form they give the work: a library, a public picnic place, an evening outdoor hang-out.... The conditions they set up for art experiences to happen make their art a gift: 'We can be very precise in the staging of our work, but we have no control...we'd rather let it go and hope that the articulation gives enough.'1 Their openness allows for a true exchange: reciprocity without prescription. The gift that is their art is offered unconditionally, without obligation or payment. Come experience without accountability. Yet it is just because they give their art generously with no fixed expectation or goal and because they give it with clear intention informed by a 'continuous optimism and trust in the function of art as a catalyst for change', that manifold, reciprocal effects are set in motion.
This website is built like a book and offers a very survey of their work:
14.
Hannah Arendt, The Crisis in CultureFrom Between past and future: Six Exercizes in Political Thought, The Viking Press, New York (1961)
“That the capacity to judge is a specifically political ability in exactly the sense denoted by Kant, namely, the ability to see things not only from one's own point of view but in the perspective of all those who happen to be present; even that judgment may be one of the fundamental abilities of man as a political being insofar as it enables him to orient himself in the public realm, in the common world these are insights that are virtually as old as articulated experience. (...) Therefore taste, insofar as it, like any other judgment, appeals to common sense, is the very opposite of private feelings. In aesthetic no less than in political judgments, a decision is made, and although this decision is always determined by a certain subjectivity, by the simple fact that each person occupies a place of his own from which he looks upon and judges the world, it also derives from the fact that the world itself is an objective datum, something common to all its inhabitants.?(...) At any rate, we may remember what the Romans the first people that took culture seriously the way we do thought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.”
Text as separate .pdf document
15.
John Baldessari Sings Sol Lewitt
(1972)
In Baldessari Sings LeWitt he sings 35 of Sol LeWitt’s conceptual statements each to a different tune. It’s a hallmark of his work, from the earliest to the most recent, that even viewers who might be unwilling to consider it as serious art, or perhaps as art at all, can still understand his humour and his approach. That long-present quality is something the Baldessari sees as deriving from an interest in pulling away from a more cloistered idea of art practice. “What would happen if you just gave people what they want?” he recalls of his early thoughts on the matter. “And I think the other thing that’s informed my work a lot was teaching. I did it just to support myself, but then it fitted back into my art, in that I realised that art was about communication… you wouldn’t be a closet artist. I thought: ‘Why not? What’s wrong with communicating?’ ”
16.
Florian Schneider, Collaboration: The Dark Site of the Multitude
(2005)
Collaboration is one of the guiding terms of an emergent political sensibility in which certain collectivities and mutalities are being redefined as modes of affectual politics. Collaboration, literally, means working together with others, especially in an intellectual endeavour.
The term is widely used to describe new forms of labour relations within the realm of immaterial production of varying areas, but though significantly present there is very little research and theortical reflection on it. What is at stake is the very notion of establishing a new understanding of the term ‘together’ within a dynamic of ‘working together’. The problem is, that most often collaboration is used as a synonym for cooperation, although etymologically, historically and politically it seems to make more sense to elaborate the actual differences that shift between the various coexisting layers of meaning. In contrast to cooperation, collaboration is driven by complex realities rather than romantic notions of a common ground or commonality. It is an ambivalent process constituted by a set of paradoxical relationships between co-producers who affect each others.
1. An indecent proposal
As a pejorative term, collaboration stands for willingly assisting an enemy of one's country and especially an occupying force or a malevolent power. It means to work together with an agency or instrumentality with which one is not immediately connected -- for instance the French Vichy regime in the 1940s, which collaborated with the German occupiers.
Collaboration as a traitorous cooperation with the enemy provides a counter to what management theory since the 80s has been promoting as team-work: The act of subjugation of one's own subjectivity under the omnipresent control regime of a group which has conceptually replaced the classical role of the "foreman" as the disciplying force. Rather than by repression, efficiency is increased by the collective identification of small groups of co-workers.
Meanwhile various research studies have shown that often teams make the wrong decisions, especially when the task involves solving rather complex problems. This insight is even more staggering since rapid technological development and global availability of intellectual resources increase the pressure on individuals to exchange knowledge within and between groups.
Teamwork often fails because of the banal fact that the internalized modes of cooperation are characterized by the opposite of sharing knowledge: In order to pursue a career, one has to hide the relevant information from others. On the other hand it also refers to the fact that joining forces in a group or team increases the likelihood of failure much more than the likelihood of success. Awkward group dynamics, harmful externalities, bad management practices are responsible for the rest.
2. In Praise of mutuality
There is more and more evidence that shows that working together may also happen in unexpected ways. Instead of exerting an alleged generosity of a group, where individuals are supposed to pursue solidarity, it may be the reverse: a brusque, in principle, ungenerous mode, where individuals are relying on each other the more they go after their own interests, mutually dependent through following their own agendas.
Such a paradox of "friendship without friends", as Derrida pointed out in a different context, characterizes contemporary forms of collaboration. Collaborations are black holes within knowledge regimes. Collaboration produces nothingness, opulence or ill-behavior. It does not happen for sentimental reasons, charity nor for the sake of efficiency, but for pure self interest.
For instance claiming transparency within what is called "information society" reveils as hypocrisy: the emerged and yet emerging new information and communication technologies replace conventional strategies of walling off knowledge from the public by intellectual property regimes and digital rights management that grant or refuse access to immaterial resources through operations in realtime. The concept of individual rights has vanished as well as the logics of inclusion and exclusion. It applies to both, the so called real and virtual space, knowledge as well as border regimes.
Against the background of a postmodern control society collaborations are all about exchanging knowledge secretely and apart of borders. The escape agent, human trafficker or "coyote" - as it is called at the US-mexican border - supports undocumented bordercrossings that want to make it from one nation state to the other without the usual paperwork. The "coyote" as an allegory of collaboration is permanently on the move, only temporarily employed, nameless and anonymous, constantly changing faces and sides.
The "coyotes" motivations remain unclear or do not matter at all. It is a postmodern service provider par excellence: There is no trust whatsoever and this does not even create a problem. The conceptual insecurity overrules the eventual financial aspects of the collaboration and triggers a redundancy of affects and percepts, feelings and reactions: Those who do not need the coyote's support are hunting and demonizing it; those who depend on the coyote's secret knowledge and skills are longing desparetely for it.
Nevertheless the collaboration between the "coyote" and the clandestine immigrant refers to the certain amount of illegitimacy that is inherent to any form of collaboration. It stands for the attempt to regain autonomy amidst a society of control.
While cooperation happens between identifiable individuals within and between organizations, collaboration expresses a differential relationship that is composed by heterogenous parts which are defined as singularities: out of the ordinary, in a way that produces a kind of discontinuity and marks a point of unpredictability, even if deterministic.
This is revealed in post-fordist production, "affect industries" as well as networking environments in general. People have to work together in settings where their efficency, performance and labor power cannot be singled out and measured on its own, but in each case refers to the specific work of somebody else. One's own producing is very peculiar but generated and often also multiplied in networks that are composed of countless distinct dependencies constituted by the power to affect and to be affected.
In respect of such excessivity that is essentially beyond measure, collaboration relates to the mathematical definition of singularity as the point where a function goes to infinity or is in certain other ways ill-behaved. The concept of singularity once more distinguishes collaboration from cooperation. Furthermore it refers to a notion of precariousness that is emerging these days and that can been seen as the crisis that goes along with this rupture or the transition of modes of working together from cooperation and collaboration.
The nettings of voluntariness, enthusiasm, creativity, immense pressure, ever increasing self-doubt and desparation are temporary, fluid and appear in multiple forms, but refer to a permanent state of insecurity and precariousness that becomes the blue print for widespread forms of occupation and employment within the rest of the society. It reveals the other face of immaterial labor that is hidden behind the rhetoric of cooperation, networking, and clustering.
In contrast to cooperation, which always implicates an organic model and some transcendent function, collaboration is a strictly immananent, wild and illegitimate praxis. Every collaborative activity begins and ends within the framework of the collaboration. It has no external goal and cannot be decreed; it is strict intransitivity, it happens, so to say, for its own sake. Cooperation necessarily takes place in a client-server architecture. It follows a metaphorical narrative structure, in which there is a coherent assignment of every part and its relation to another. Collaboration on the contrary presumes rhizomatic structures where knowledge grows exuberantly and proliferates in a rather unforseeable fashion.
The relationships between collaborators can be understood as from peer to peer. Peer-to-peer computer systems or "P2P-networks" appeared on the internet in the 1990s and created a revolution of the conventional distribution model. Such networks are designed to enable people, who do not know each other and probably prefer not to know each other, to exchange immaterial resources like computing time or bandwidth as well as relevant content. Their anonymous relationships are based on an irony of sharing even in a strict mathematical sense: due to lossless and costfree digital copying the object of desire is not divided but multiplied.
Finally, collaborations are the sites of revolutionary potential. In the last instance collaborations are driven by the desire to create difference and refuse against the absolutistic power of organization. Collaboration means to overcome scarcity and inequality, as well as to struggle for a freedom to produce. It carries an immense social potential, as actualization and experience of the unlimited creativity of the multiplicity of all productive practices.
17.
An Architektur, On the Commons: Public Interview with De Angelis and Stavrides
(2010)
As Italian economist Massimo de Angelis argues, capital accumulation “must attend to the needs of a variety of social actors and groups, and at the same time make sure that these needs, desires, and value practices, manifesting themselves in terms of struggles, do not break away from its ordering principles, but, on the contrary, become moments of its reproduction.”
This contestation has two possible ends: the first is, as De Angelis clarifies, that social cooperation—which, as social beings, we cannot avoid—including the creation of sociality at work and in the home and in all forms of cultural or activist knowledge-production, becomes an alien force under the laws of market competition; the other is—as he argues in his conversation with the editorial collective of An Architektur—that the very fact that we are social beings, that we possess an ability to produce commonness, and not only common goods, needs to be understood as a contradiction within capitalism’s own relations of production, especially as this relates to its need for enclosure and scarcity.
18.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Day's End
(1975)
Gordon Matta-Clark's artistic project was a radical investigation of architecture, deconstruction, space, and urban environments. Dating from 1971 to 1977, his most prolific and vital period, his film and video works include documents of major pieces in New York, Paris and Antwerp, and are focused on three areas: performances and recycling pieces; space and texture works; and his building cuts.
19.
Alison & Peter Smithson, The Economist Building
St James, London
(1959-1964)
The Economist Building (actually a cluster of 3 buildings concieved as a micro-city) is widely recognised as one of the great triumphs of 1960s architecture. The modest development based on the tower and plaza format, achieves rare elegance and structural logic, while showing great consideration for its sensitive location amongst the 18th Century streets of London’s St James. Despite the radical proposals for building put forward by its architects throughout the post-war era, it is this rather conservative building that is their greatest legacy in the city. In 1988 it received Grade II listed status and is an enduring monument to its architects’ rigorous and determined style.
http://designmuseum.org/design/alison-peter-smithson
More about the building here:
http://www.postwarbuildings.com/buildings/the-economist-buildings
20.
Dan Graham, Theatre, Cinema, Power
(1983)
In his essay, Theater, Cinema, Power, Dan Graham analyses the development of the theatre into an enclosed architectural form, linking it to the codification of laws of perspective and the political emergence of the bourgeois city-state in the European renaissance. Graham looks specifically at the hierarchies at stake in the arrangement of fixed seating, and the Baroque stage’s deep perspectival illusionism, which determined a privileged, ‘ideal’ viewing point and draws a macrocosmic parallel with the position of the Ducal palace looking over the public plaza. The last section of Graham’s article makes a reverse analogy with the position of then president Ronald Reagan, who, beginning as a film actor, now “plays ‘himself’and speaks the views of power” on an all-pervasively theatricalised world stage.
First Published in Parachute (Montreal), no.31 (Summer 1983). This essay came directly out of Graham’s work on the cinema, particularly as an attempt to trace its origins to class-based theatre architecture. In addressing the broad theme of architecture and power, this essay continues many of the arguments Graham raised in “the city as Museum” which was published slightly earlier. But more importantly perhaps, this essay is also a piece which inscribes itself in his larger body of work, using text as a medium and the magazine as a format.
Text as separate pdf document.
21.
Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer
(1934)
In his groundbreaking essay "The Author as Producer" Walter Benjamin suggests an aesthetics of production. Okwui Enwezor introduced the text as follows: "On April 27, 1934 Walter Benjamin delivered a lecture at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris. In the lecture, "The Author as Producer", Benjamin addressed an important question that, since, has not ceased to pose itself, namely to what degree does political awareness in a work of art becomes a tool for the deracination of the autonomy of the work and that of the author?"
Text as separate pdf document.
22.
Michel de Certeau, Walking in the City, (from The Practice of Everyday Life)
(1984)
Certeau's most well-known and influential work has been The Practice of Everyday Life. In it, he combined his disparate scholarly interests to develop a theory of the productive and consumptive activity inherent in everyday life. According to Certeau, everyday life is distinctive from other practices of daily existence because it is repetitive and unconscious. In this context, Certeau’s study of everyday life is neither the study of “popular culture”, nor is it necessarily the study of everyday resistances to regimes of power. Instead, Certeau attempts to outline the way individuals unconsciously navigate everything from city streets to literary texts.
Perhaps the most influential aspect of The Practice of Everyday Life has emerged from scholarly interest in Certeau’s distinction between the concepts of strategy and tactics. Certeau links "strategies" with institutions and structures of power, while "tactics" are utilized by individuals to create space for themselves in environments defined by strategies. In the influential chapter "Walking in the City", he describes "the city" as a "concept", generated by the strategic maneuvering of governments, corporations, and other institutional bodies who produce things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole, as it might be experienced by someone looking down from high above. By contrast, the walker at street level moves in ways that are tactical and never fully determined by the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts or meandering aimlessly in spite of the utilitarian layout of the grid of streets. This concretely illustrates Certeau's assertion that everyday life works by a process of poaching on the territory of others, recombining the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products.
http://www.ubu.com/papers/de_certeau.html
And the chapter on walking here:
http://books.google.de/books?id=wtgXosbfgh8C&lpg=PR1&dq=The%20cultural%20studies%20reader%20By%20Simon%20During&hl=en&pg=PA126#v=onepage&q&f=false
23.
Encyclopédie Diderot et D’Alembert
(1751-1772)
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (English: Encyclopedia, or a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts) was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements, revised editions, and translations. The Encyclopédie was one of the very first attempts to document the world in its entirety in an encyclopedia. The Encyclopédie is famous above all for representing the thought of the Enlightenment. According to Denis Diderot in the article "Encyclopédie", the Encyclopédie's aim was "to change the way people think".
The Drawings are available here:
http://diderot.alembert.free.fr/PLANCHES/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopédie
24.
Sean Snyder, Disobedience in Byelorussia: Self-Interrogation on “Research-Based Art”
(2009)
Sean Snyder’s “Disobedience in Byelorussia” attempts to reconstruct a series of interrogations he once experienced on a flight to Israel. Placed in the position of having to justify his profession as an artist to an El Al security officer, Snyder was forced into a series of frank admissions through which his relationship to his own practice and to the mechanisms of the art word were laid bare.
25.
Temporary Services
Temporary Services is Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer, and are based in Illinois and have existed, with several changes in membership and structure, since 1998.
“We produce exhibitions, events, projects, and publications. The distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to us.”
An extraordinary resource and fascinating project.
26.
Anarchitektur
The journal An Architektur was founded at the beginning of 2002 continuing the work of the architecture collective freies fach – a group that had sought, since the mid 1990s, to assess critically the restrictive reconstruction of Berlin and the relevant political and economical conditions through actions, exhibitions, and small publications.
An Architektur is the exercise of discursive architectural practice. “For us, both the critical analysis of spatial relations and the visualization of their inherent socio-political conceptions offer a possibility of political agency. In monothematic issues, socio-political criteria are applied to concrete examples and questions of space and architecture.” An Architektur exposes the wider social and political implications of topics which tend to be discussed too introspectively only within the domain of architecture as well as their effect on and relevance to everyday life.
http://www.anarchitektur.com/
27.
Dziga Vertov, Man with the Movie Camera
(1929)
Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera is a stunning avant-garde, documentary meta-narrative which celebrates Soviet workers and filmmaking. The film uses radical editing techniques and cinematic pyrotechnics to portray a typical day in Moscow from dawn to dusk. But Vertov isn't just recording reality, he transforms it through the power of the camera's "kino-glaz" (cinema eye). Vertov's rich imagery transcends the earth-bound limitations of our everyday ways of seeing.
Vertov was a working-class artist who desired to link workers with machines. His film opens with a manifesto, a series of intertitles telling us that this film is an "experiment," a search for an "absolute language of cinema" that is "based on its total separation from the language of literature and theater." Vertov desired to create cinema that had its own "rhythm, one lifted from nowhere else, and we find it in the movements of things." For Vertov an emphasis on the psychological interfered with the worker's "desire for kinship with the machine." And as a peoples' artist, Vertov felt that the peoples' cinema must "introduce creative joy into all mechanical labor" and "foster new people."
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/vertov.html
and the film is here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2809965914189244913#
28.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
(1972)
“Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he?describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars?does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity?than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. In the lives of emperors?there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the?territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall?soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of?emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odour of the elephants after the?rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes?rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they?are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us?the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax?of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies' protection, offering in?exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It?is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us?the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene?has spread too far to be healed by our sceptre, that the triumph over enemy?sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo's?accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to?crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites'?gnawing.”
A wonderful read and an endless source of inspiration.
More here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/18789131/Calvino-Italo-Invisible-cities
29.
Rikrit Tiravanija, The Land
(1998)
Initiated in 1998, the land (more direct translation from Thai to English would be, the rice field) was the merging of ideas by different artists to cultivate a place of and for social engagement. Though initially the action to aquire the rice fields were initiated by two artists from Thailand, the land was initiated with anonymity and with out the concept of ownership. The land was to be cultivated as an open space, though with certain intentions towards community, towards discussions and towards experimentation in other fields of thoughts.??The land and its topographical environment (landscape) as it now stands, was cultivated through the philosophy and argicultural technique of a Thai farmer by the name of Chaloui Kaewkong. The ideas around the cultivation of the topography which is 1/4 earth (mass) and 3/4 water (liquid), is based on the composition of the human body.
30.
Alain Resnais, Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues also die)
(1953)
Les Statues meurent aussi was commissioned by the literary review and publishing house, Présence Africaine, which was set up in 1947 in Paris as a quarterly literary review for emerging and important African writers. Founded by the Senegalese thinker Alioune Diop, it housed the writings of some of the most important francophone thinkers in the latter half of the 20th century. Having emerged so soon after the new French Constitution of 1946 had declared a “French Union”, Présence Africaine’s publications signalled a new, post-colonial status for French and francophone thought, embracing what was then a key notion: that of négritude. It is this notion that the second half of Les Statues meurent aussi engages with most deeply, and perhaps most controversially, especially as it strives to connect the death of the statue with the rise in the commercialisation of African art for the pleasure of the colonial classes. Indeed, it is against the backdrop of a France that had so recently lost its colonial power, but which still retained many of the quasi-Manichean distinctions between white, Western culture and black, African culture, that (and in spite of their claims to the contrary) Resnais and Marker’s film projected its passionately anti-colonial, anti-racist, even anti-capitalist audio-visual collage. It is little wonder then that such a film should have been censored until the late 1960s, by which time it might have lost some of its topicality, but none of its political vigour.
part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5Pb9nykjQApart 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWU09XM5Hl8&feature=related
31.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies,
(1957) Seuil, Paris,
then translated into English: The Eiffel Tower, and other mythologies (1997), University of California Press: Berkeley.
Roland Barthes, in his 1957 book Mythologies, argues exactly this: that no language use can be separated from structures of ideology and power. Barthes often claimed to be fascinated by the meanings of the things that surround us in our everyday lives. Mythologies contains fifty-four short journalistic articles on a variety of subjects. These texts were written between 1954 and 1956 for the left-wing magazine Les Lettres nouvelles. The fifty-four texts are best considered as opportunistic improvisations on relevant and up-to-the-minute issues rather than carefully considered theoretical essays, and in this way they provide us with a panorama of the events and trends that took place in the France of the 1950s. Although the texts are very much of and about their times, they still have an unsettling contemporary relevance to us today.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/4612523/Mythologies-by-Roland-Barthes-as-selected-and-translated-by-Annette-Lavers
32.
N55
N55 is a Copenhagen-based Scandinavian art collective which was founded in 1994. All of N55's work product is freely accessible; their books, manuals, manifestos and images can be seen online and are not copyrighted. Most of their written work is accessible in N55 Book.
33.
Centre For Land Use Interpretation
Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.
The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research and education organization interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface, and in finding new meanings in the intentional and incidental forms that we individually and collectively create. It was founded in 1994.
“We believe that the manmade landscape is a cultural inscription, that can be read to better understand who we are, and what we are doing.”
Neither an environmental group nor an industry affiliated organization, the work of the Center integrates the many approaches to land use - the many perspectives of the landscape - into a single vision that illustrates the common ground in “land use” debates. At the very least, the Center attempts to emphasize the multiplicity of points of view regarding the utilization of terrestrial and geographic resources.
34.
Dan Graham, Rock My Religion
(1982–84)
55:27min, b&w and color, sound
http://www.ubu.com/film/graham_rock.html
35.
Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace
October, Vol. 100, Obsolescence. (Spring, 2002), pp. 175-190.
If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built (more about that later) product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fall-out. Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown... Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a low-grade purgatory... Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than all previous generations together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids. According to a new gospel of ugliness, there is already more Junkspace under construction in the 21st century than survived from the 20th...It was a mistake to invent modern architecture for the 20th century; architecture disappeared in the 20th century; we have been reading a footnote under a microscope hoping it would turn into a novel; our concern for the masses has blinded us to People’s Architecture. Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is essence, the main thing... product of the encounter between escalator and air conditioning, conceived in an incubator of sheetrock (all three missing from the history books). Continuity is the essence of Junkspace; it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness: escalator, air conditioning, sprinkler, fire shutter, hot-air curtain... It is always interior, so extensive that you rarely perceive limits; it promotes disorientation by any means (mirror, polish,echo)... Junkspace is sealed, held together not by structure, but by skin, like a bubble. Gravity has remained constant, resisted by the same arsenal since the beginning of time; but air conditioning - invisible medium, therefore unnoticed - has truly revolutionized architecture. Air conditioning has launched the endless building. If architecture separates buildings, air conditioning unites them. Air conditioning has dictated mutant regimes of organization and coexistence that leave architecture behind. A single shopping center now is the work of generations of space planners, repairmen and fixers, like in the middle ages; air conditioning sustains our cathedrals. (Unwittingly, all architects may be working on the same building, so far separate, but with hidden receptors that will eventually make it cohere.) Because its costs money, is no longer free, conditioned space inevitably becomes conditional space; sooner or later all conditional space turns into Junkspace.
When we think about space, we have only looked at its containers. As if space itself is invisible, all theory for the production of space is based on an obsessive preoccupation with its opposite: substance and objects, i.e., architecture. Architects could never explain space; Junkspace is our punishment for their mystifications. OK, let’s talk about space then. The beauty of airports, especially after each upgrade. The luster of renovations. The subtlety of the shopping center. Let’s explore public space, discover casinos, spend time in theme parks... Junkspace is the body-double of space, a territory of impaired vision, limited expectation, reduced earnestness. Junkspace is a Bermuda triangle of concepts, a petri dish abandoned: it cancels distinctions, undermines resolve, confuses intention with realization. It substitutes hierarchy with accumulation, composition with addition. More and more, more is more. Junkspace is overripe and undernourishing at the same time, a colossal security blanket that covers the earth in a stranglehold of seduction...
Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends...
A fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low, public and private, straight and bent, bloated and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed. Seemingly an apotheosis, spatially grandiose, the effect of its richness is a terminal hollowness, a vicious parody of ambition that systematically erodes the credibility of building, possibly forever...
Space was created by piling matter on top of matter, cemented to form a solid new whole. Junkspace is additive, layered and lightweight, not articulated in different parts but subdivided, quartered the way a carcass is torn apart - individual chunks severed from a universal condition. There are no walls, only partitions, shimmering membranes frequently covered in mirror or gold. Structure groans invisibly underneath decoration, or worse, has become ornamental; small shiny space frames support nominal loads, or huge beams deliver cyclopic burdens to innocent destinations...
The arch, once the workhorse of structures, has become the depleted emblem of ‘community’, welcoming an infinity of virtual populations to non-existent theres. Where it is absent, it is simply applied - mostly in stucco - as ornamental afterthought on hurriedly erected superblocks. 13% of all Junkspace’s iconography goes back to the Romans, 8% Bauhaus, 7% Disney - neck and neck - 3% Art Nouveau, followed closely by Mayan...Like a substance that could have condensed in any other form, Junkspace is a domain of feigned, simulated order, a kingdom of morphing. Its specific configuration is as furtuitous as the geometry of a snow flake. Patterns imply repetition or ultimately decipherable rules; Junkspace is beyond measure, beyond code...
Because it cannot be grasped, Junkspace cannot be remembered. It is flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a screensaver; its refusal to freeze insures instant amnesia. Junkspace does not pretend to create perfection, only interest. Its geometries are unimaginable, only makable. Although strictly non-architectural, it tends to the vaulted, to the Dome. Sections seem to be devoted to utter inertness, others in perpetual rhetorical turmoil: the deadest resides next to the most hysterical. Themes cast a pall of arrested development over interiors as big as the Pantheon, spawning stillbirths in every corner.
The esthetic is Byzantine, gorgeous and dark, splintered into thousands of shards, all visible at the same time: a quasi-panoptical universe in which all contents rearrange themselves in split-seconds around the dizzy eye of the beholder. Murals used to show idols; Junkspace’s modules are dimensioned to carry brands; myths can be shared, brands husband aura at the mercy of focus groups. Brands in Junkspace perform the same role as black holes in the universe: essences through which meaning disappears... The shiniest surfaces in the history of mankind reflect humanity at its most casual. The more we inhabit the palatial, the more we seem to dress down. A stringent dress code - last spasm of etiquette? - governs access to Junkspace: short, sneaker, sandal, shell suit, fleece, jean, parka, backpack. As if the People suddenly accessed the private quarters of a dictator, Junkspace is best enjoyed in a state of post-revolutionary gawking. Polarities have merged, there is nothing left between desolation and turmoil. Neon signifies both the old and the new, interiors refer to the stone- and the space age at the same time. Like the deactivated virus in an innoculation, Modern architecture remains essential, but only in its most sterile manifestation, High Tech (it seemed so dead only a decade ago!). It exposes what previous generations kept under wraps: structures emerge like springs from a mattress, exit stairs dangle in didactic trapeze, probes thrust into space to deliver laboriously what is in fact omnipresent, free air, acres of glass hang from spidery cables, tautly stretched skins enclose flaccid events. Transparency only reveals everything in which you cannot partake. At the sound of midnight it all may revert to Taiwanese Gothic, in three years segue into Nigerian Sixties, Norwegian Chalet or default Christian. Earthlings now live in a kindergarten grotesque.Junkspace thrives on design, but design dies in Junkspace. There is no form, but proliferation...
Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation, we honor, cherish and embrace manipulation...
Superstrings of graphics, transplanted emblems of franchise and sparkling infrastructures of light, LED’s, and video describe an authorless world beyond anyone’s claim, always unique, utterly unpredictable, yet intensely familiar. Junkspace is hot (or suddenly artic); fluorescent walls, folded like melting stained glass, generate additional heat to raise the temperature of Junkspace to levels where you could cultivate orchids. Pretending histories left and right, its contents are dynamic yet stable, recycled or multiplied as in cloning: forms search for function like hermit crabs for a vacant shell... Junkspace sheds architectures like a reptile sheds skins, is reborn every Monday morning. In previous building, materiality was based on a final state that could only be modified at the expense of partial destruction. At the exact moment that our culture has abandoned repetition and regularity as repressive, building materials have become more and more modular, unitary and standardized; substance now comes predigitized... As the module becomes smaller and smaller, its status become that of a crypto-pixel. With enormous difficulty - budget, argument, negotiation, deformation - irregularity and uniqueness are constructed from identical elements. Instead of trying to wrest order from chaos, the picturesque now is wrested from the homogenized, the singular liberated from the standardized.Architects thought of Junkspace first and named it Megastructure, the final solution to transcend their huge impasse. Like multiple Babels, huge superstructures would last through eternity, teeming with impermanent infill that would mutate over time, beyond their control. In theory, each megastructure would spawn its own sub-systems, and therefore create a universe of rampant cohesion. In Junkspace, the tables are turned: it is subsystems only, without superstructure, orphaned particles in search of framework or pattern.
All materialization is provisional: cutting, bending, tearing, coating: construction has aquired a new softness, like tailoring...The joint is no longer a problem, an intellectual issue: transitional moments are defined by stapling and taping, wrinkly brown bands barely maintain the illusion of an unbroken surface; verbs unknown and unthinkable in architectural history - clamp, stick, fold, dump, glue, shoot, double, fuse - have become indispensable. Each element performs its task in negotiated isolation. Where once detailing suggested the coming together, possibly forever, of disparate materials, it is now a transient coupling, waiting to be undone, unscrewed, a temporary embrace with a high probability of separation; no longer the orchestrated encounter of difference, but the abrupt end of a system, a stalemate. Only the blind, reading its faultlines with their fingertips, will ever understand Junkspace’s histories...While whole millenia worked in favor of permanence, axialities, relationships and proportion, the program of Junkspace is escalation. Instead of development, it offers entropy. Because it is endless, it always leaks somewhere in Junkspace; in the worst case, monumental ashtrays catch intermittent drops in a grey broth.
When did time stop moving forward... begin to spool in every direction, like a tape spinning out of control? Since the introduction of Real Time? Change has been divorced from the idea of improvement. There is no progress; like a crab on LSD, culture wobbles endlessly sideways... Junkspace is draining and is drained in return. Everywhere in Junkspace there are seating arrangements, ranges of modular chairs, even couches, as if the experience Junkspace offers its consumers is significantly more exhausting than any previous spatial sensation; in its most abandoned stretches, you find buffets: utilitarian tables draped in white or black sheets, perfunctory assemblies of caffeine and calories - cottage cheese, muffins, unripe grapes - notional representations of plenty, without horn and without plenty. Each Junkspace is connected, sooner or later, to bodily functions: wedged between stainless steel partitions sit rows of groaning Romans, denim toga’s bunched around their huge sneakers...Because it is so intensely consumed, Junkspace is fanatically maintained, the night shift undoing the damage of the day shift in an endless Sisyphian replay. As you recover from Junkspace, Junkspace recovers from you: between 2 and 5 am, yet another population, this one heartlessly casual and appreciably darker, is mopping, hovering, sweeping, toweling, resupplying... Junkspace does not inspire loyalty in its cleaners... Dedicated to instant gratification, Junkspace accomodates seeds of future perfection; a language of apology is woven through its texture of canned euphoria; ‘pardon our appearance’ signs or miniature yellow ‘sorry’ billboards mark ongoing patches of wetness, announce momentary discomfort in return for imminent shine, the allure of improvement. Somewhere, workers sink on their knees to repair faded sections - as if in a prayer - or half-disappear in ceiling voids to negotiate elusive malfunction - as if in confession. All surfaces are archaeological, superpositions of different ‘periods’ (what do you call the moment a particular type of wall-to-wall carpet was current?) - as you note when they’re torn.Traditionally, typology implies demarcation, the definition of a singular model that excludes other arrangements. Junkspace represents a reverse typology of cumulative, approximative identity, less about kind than about quantity. But formlessness is still form, the formless also a typology... take the dump, where successive trucks discharge their loads to form a heap, whole in spite of the randomness of its contents and its fundamental shapelessness, or that of the tent-envelope that assumes different shapes to accomodate variable interior volumes. Or the vague crotches of the new generation.
Junkspace can either be absolutely chaotic or freighteningly aseptic - like a bestseller - overdetermined and indeterminate at the same time. There is something strange about ballrooms, for instance: huge wastelands kept column free for ultimate flexibility. Because you’ve never been invited to that kind of event, you have never seen them in use, only being prepared with chilling precision: a relentless grid of circular tables, extending towards a distant horizon, their diameters preempting communication, a dais big enough for the politburo of a totalitarian state, wings announcing as-yet unimagined surprises... acres of organization to support future drunkenness, disarray and disorder. Or car shows.Junkspace is often described as a space of flows, but that is a misnomer; flows depend on disciplined movement, bodies that cohere. Junkspace is a web without spider; although it is an architecture of the masses, each trajectory is strictly unique. Its anarchy is one of the last tangible ways in which we experience freedom. It is a space of collision, a container of atoms, busy, not dense... There is a special way of moving in Junkspace, at the same time aimless and purposeful. It is an acquired culture. Junkspace features the tyranny of the oblivious: sometimes an entire Junkspace comes unstuck through the non-conformity of one of its members; a single citizen of an another culture - a refugee, a mother - can destabilize an entire Junkspace, hold it to a rustic’s ransom, leaving an invisible swath of obstruction in his/her wake, a deregulation eventually communicated to its furthest extremities.
Where movement becomes synchronized, it curdles: on escalators, near exits, parking machines, automated tellers. Sometimes, under duress, individuals are channeled in a flow, pushed through a single door or forced to negotiate the gap between two temporary obstacles (an invalid’s bleeping chariot and a christmas tree): the manifest ill-will such narrowing provokes, mocks the notion of flows. Flows in Junkspace lead to disaster: department stores at the beginning of sales, the stampedes triggered by warring compartments of soccer fans, dead bodies piling up in front of the locked emergency doors of a disco: evidence of the misfit between the portals of Junkspace and the narrow calibrations of the old world. Traffic is Junkspace, from airspace to the underground; the entire highway system is Junkspace, a vast potential utopia clogged by its users, as you notice when they’ve finally disappeared on vacation. The young instinctively avoid the Dantesque manipulations/containers to which Junkspace has condemnded their elders in perpetuity. Within the meta-playground of Junkspace exist smaller playgrounds, Junkspace for children (usually in the least desirable square footage): sections of sudden miniaturization - often underneath staircases, always near dead-ends - assemblies of under-dimensioned plastic structures - slides, see-saws, swings - shunned by their intended audience - kids - turned into junkniche for the old, the lost, the forgotten, the insane... last hiccup of humanism...Like radioactive waste, Junkspace has an invidious half-life. Aging in Junkspace is nonexistent or catastrophic; sometimes an entire Junkspace - a department store, a nightclub, a bachelor pad - turns into a slum overnight without warning: wattage diminishes almost imperceptibly, letters drop out of signs, air conditioning units start dripping, cracks appear as if from otherwise unregistered earthquakes; sections rot, are no longer viable, but remain joined to the flesh of the main body via gangrenous passages. Judging the built presumed a static condition; now each architecture embodies opposite conditions simultaneously: old and new, permanent and temporary, flourishing and at risk... sections undergo an Alzheimer-like deterioration as others are upgraded. Because Junkspace is endless, it is never closed... Renovation and restauration were procedures that took place in your absence; now you’re a witness, a reluctant participant... Seeing Junkspace in conversion is like inspecting an unmade bed, someone else’s. Say an airport needs more space. In the past new terminals were added, each more or less characteristic of its own age, leaving the old ones as a readable record, evidence of progress. Since passengers have definitively demonstrated their infinite malleability, the idea of rebuilding on the spot has gained currency. Travelators are thrown in reverse, signs taped, potted palms (or very large corpses) covered in body bags. Screens of taped sheetrock segregate two populations: one wet, one dry, one hard, one flabby, one cold, one overheated. Half the population produces new space, the more affluent half consumes old space. To accommodate a nether world of manual labor, the concourse suddenly turns into cashbah: improvised locker rooms, coffee breaks, smoking, even real campfires... The ceiling is a crumpled plate like the Alps; grids of unstable tiles alternate with monogrammed sheets of black plastic, improbably punctured by grids of crystal chandeliers...
Metal ducts are replaced by breathing textiles. Gaping joints reveal vast ceiling voids (former canyons of asbestos?), beams, ducting, rope, cable, insulation, fireproofing, string; tangled arrangements suddenly exposed to daylight. Impure, tortured and complex, they exist only because they were never consciously plotted. The floor is a patchwork: different textures - concrete, hairy, heavy, shiny, plastic,metallic, muddy - alternate randomly, as if dedicated to different species...The ground is no more. There are too many raw needs to be realized on only one plane. The absolute horizontal has been abandoned. Transparency has disappeared, replaced by a dense crust of provisional occupation: kiosks, carts, strollers, palms, fountains, bars, sofas, trolleys... Corridors no longer simply link A to B , but have become ‘destinations’. Their tenant life tends to be short: the most stagnant windows, the most perfunctory dresses, the most implausible flowers. All perspective is gone, as in a rainforest (itself disappearing, they keep saying...). The formerly straight is coiled into ever more complex configurations. Only a perverse modernist choreography can explain the twists and turns, ascents and descents, sudden reversals that comprise the typical path from check-in (misleading name) to apron of the average contemporary airport. Because we never reconstruct or question the absurdity of these enforced derives, we meekly submit to grotesque journeys past perfume, asylum seeker, building site, underwear, oysters, pornography, cell phone - incredible adventures for the brain, the eye, the nose, the tongue, the womb, the testicles...There was once a polemic about the straight line; now the 90-degree angle has become one among many. In fact, remnants of former geometries create ever new havoc, offering forlorn nodes of resistance that create unstable eddies in newly opportunistic flows...Who would dare claim responsibiliy for this sequence? The idea that a profession once dictated, or at least presumed to predict, people’s movements, now seems laughable, or worse: unthinkable. Instead of design, there is calculation: the more erratic the path, eccentric the loops, hidden the blueprint, the more efficient the exposure, inevitable the transaction. In this war, graphic designers are the great turncoats: where once signage promised to deliver you to where you wanted to be, it now obfuscates and entangles you in a thicket of cuteness that forces you past unwanted detours, turns you back when you’re lost. Postmodernism adds a crumple-zone of viral poche that fractures and multiplies the endless frontline of display, a peristaltic shrinkwrap crucial to all commercial exchange. Trajectories are launched as ramp, turn horizontal without any warning, intersect, fold down, suddenly emerge on a vertiginous balcony above a large void. Fascism minus dictator.
From the sudden dead-end where you were dropped by a monumental, granite staircase, an escalator takes you to an invisible destination, facing a provisional vista of plaster, inspired by forgettable sources. (There is no datum level; you always inhabit a sandwich. ‘Space’ is scooped out of Junkspace as from a soggy block of ice cream that has languished too long in the freezer: cylindrical, cone shaped, more or less spherical, whatever...) Toilet groups mutate into Disney Store then morph to become meditation center: succesive transformations mock the word ‘plan’. The plan is a radar screen where individual pulses survive for unpredictable periods of time in a Bachanalian free-for-all... In this stand-off between the redundant and the inevitable, a plan would actually make matters worse, drive you to instant despair. Only the diagram gives a bearable version. There is zero loyalty - and zero tolerance - toward configuration, no ‘original’ condition, architecture as has turned into a time-lapse sequence to reveal a ‘permanent evolution’... The only certainty is conversion - continuous - followed, in rare cases, by ‘restoration’. That is the process that claims ever new sections of history as extensions of Junkspace.
History corrupts, absolute history corrupts absolutely. Color and matter are eliminated from these bloodless grafts: the bland has become the only meeting ground for the old and the new...
Can the bland be amplified? The featureless be exaggerated? Through height? depth? length? variation? repetition? Sometimes not overload but its opposite, an absolute absence of detail, generates Junkspace. A voided condition of frigthening sparseness, shocking proof that so much can be organized by so little. Laughable emptiness infuses the respectful distance or tentative embrace that starchitects maintain in the presence of the past, authentic or not. Invariably, the primordial decision is to leave the original intact; the formerly residual is declared the new essence, focus of the intervention. As a first step, the substance to be preserved is wrapped in a thick pack of commerce and catering - like a reluctant skier pushed downhill by responsible minders. To show respect, symmetries are maintained and helplessly exaggerated; ancient building techniques are resurrected and honed to irrelevant shine, quarries reopened to excavate the ‘same’ stone, indiscreet donor names chiseled prominently in the meekest of typefaces; the courtyard covered by a masterful, structural ‘filigree’ - emphatically uncompetitive - so that continuity may be established with the ‘rest’ of Junkspace (abandoned galleries, display slums, jurrasic concepts...). Conditioning is applied; filtered daylight reveals vast, antiseptic expanses of monumental reticence and makes them come alive, vibrant as a computer rendering... the curse of public space: latent fascism safely smothered in signage, stools, sympathy...
Junkspace is post-existential; it makes you uncertain where you are, obscures where you go, undoes where you were. Who do you think you are? Who do you want to be ? (Note to architects: you thought that you could ignore Junkspace... visit it surreptitiously, treat it with condescending contempt or enjoy it vicariously... because you could not understand it, you’ve thrown away the keys... but now your own architecture is infected, has become equally smooth, all-inclusive, continuous, warped, busy, atrium-ridden...) JunkSignature™ is the new architecture: the former meglomania of a profession contracted to managable size, Junkspace minus its saving vulgarity. Anything stretched - limousines, body parts, planes - turns into Junkspace, its original concept abused. Restore, rearrange, reassemble, revamp, renovate, revise, recover, redesign, return - the Parthenon marbles - redo, respect, rent: verbs that start with re-, produce Junkspace.Junkspace will be our tomb. Half of mankind pollutes to produce, the other pollutes to consume. The combined pollution of all Third World cars, motorbikes, trucks, buses, sweatshops, pales into insignificance compared to the heat generated by Junkspace. Junkspace is political: it depends on the central removal of the critical faculty in the name of comfort and pleasure. Politics has become manifesto by Photoshop, seamless blueprints of the mutually exclusive. Rabbit is the new beef. Comfort is the new Justice. Entire miniature states now adopt Junkspace as political program, establish regimes of engineered disorentation, instigate a politics of systematic disarray. Not exactly ‘anything goes’; in fact, the secret of Junkspace is that it is both promiscuous and repressive: as the formless proliferates, the formal withers, and with it all rules, regulations, recourse. Babel has been misunderstood. Language is not the problem, just the new frontier of Junkspace. Mankind, torn by eternal dilemmas, the impasse of seemingly endless debates, has launched a new language that straddles unbridgable divides like a fragile pedestrian designer’s footbridge... coined a proactive wave of new oxymorons to suspend former incompatibility: life/style, reality/TV, world/music, museum/ store, food/court, health/care, waiting/lounge. Naming has replaced class-struggle, sonorous amalgamations of status, high-concept and history. Through acronym, unusual importation, suppressing letters, or fabrication of non-existent plurals, they aim to shed meaning in return for a spatious new roominess... Junkspace knows all your emotions, all your desires. It is the interior of Big Brother’s belly. It preempts people’s sensations. It comes with a soundtrack, smell, captions; it blatantly proclaims how it wants to be read: rich, stunning, cool, huge, abstract, ‘minimal’, historical. It sponsors a collective of brooding consumers in surly anticipation of their next spend, a mass of refractory periods caught in a Thousand Year Reign of Razzmataz, a paroxysm of prosperity. The subject is stripped of privacy in return for access to a credit nirvana. You are complicit in the tracing of the fingerprints each of your transactions leaves; they know everything about you, except who you are. Emissaries of Junkspace pursue you in the formerly impervious privacy of the bedroom: the minibar, private fax machines, pay TV offering compromised pornography, fresh plastic veils wrapping toilets seats, courtesy condoms: miniature profit centers coexist with your bedside bible...Junkspace pretends to unite, but it actually splinters. It creates communities not of shared interest or free association, but of identical statistics and unavoidable demographics, an oportunistic weave of vested interests. Each man, woman and child is individually targeted, tracked, split off from the rest.. Fragments come together at ‘security’ only, where a grid of video screens disappointingly reassembles individual frames into a banalized, utilitarian cubism that reveals Junkspace’s overall coherence to the dispassionate glare of barely trained guards: videoethnography in its brute form.
Just as Junkspace is unstable, its actual ownership is forever being passed on in parallel disloyalty. Junkspace happens spontaneously through natural corporate exhuberance - the unfettered play of the market - or is generated through the combined actions of temporary ‘Czars’ with long records of three-dimensional philantropy, bureaucrats (often former leftists) that optimistically sell off vast tracks of waterfront, former hippodromes, military bases and abandoned airfields to developers or real estate moguls that can accomodate any deficit in futuristic balances, or through ‘default preservation’Š (the maintenance of historical complexes that nobody wants but the Zeitgeist has declared sacrosanct). As its scale mushrooms - rivals and even exceeds that of the Public - its economy becomes more inscrutable. Its financing is a deliberate haze, clouding opaque deals, dubious tax breaks, unusual incentives, exemptions, tenuous legalities, transferred air rights, joined properties, special zoning districts, public-private complicities. Funded by bonds, lottery, subsidy, charity, grant: an erratic flow of yen, euros and dollars (´Û$) creates financial envelopes that are as fragile as their contents. Because of a structural shortfall, a fundamental deficit, a contingent bankruptcy, each square inch becomes a grasping, needy surface dependent on covert or overt support, discount, compensation and fundraising. For culture, ‘engraved donor bricks’; for everything else: cash, rentals, leases, promises, chains, the underpinning of brands. Junkspace expands with the economy but its footprint cannot contract... when it is no longer needed, it thins. Because of its tenuous viability, Junkspace has to swallow more and more program to survive; soon, we will be able to do anything anywhere. We will have conquered place. At the end of Junkspace, the Universal?Through Junkspace old aura is tranfused with new luster to spawn sudden commercial viability: Barcelona amalgamated with the Olympics, Bilbao with Guggenheim, 42nd with Disney. A shortage of masters has not stopped a proliferation of masterpieces. ‘Masterpiece’ has become a definitive sanction, a semantic space that saves the object from criticism, leaves its qualities unproven, its performance untested, its motives unquestioned... Masterpiece is no longer an inexplicable fluke, a roll of the dice, but a consistent typology: its mission precarious, most of its exterior surfaces bent, huge percentages of its square footage dysfunctional, its centrifugal components barely held together by the pull of the atrium, dreading the imminent arrival of forensic accounting... The more indeterminate the city, the more specific its Junkspace; all Junkspace’s prototypes are urban - the Roman Forum, the Metropolis; it is only their reverse-synergy that makes them suburban, simultaneously swollen and shrunk. Junkspace reduces what is urban to urbanity...instead of public life, Public SpaceŠ: what remains of the city once the unpredictable has been removed... space for ‘honoring’, ‘sharing’, ‘caring’, ‘grieving’ and ‘healing’... civility indicated by an overdose of serif.In the third Millenium, Junkspace will assume responsibility for both pleasure and religion, exposure and intimacy, public life and privacy. Inevitably, the death of God (and the author) has spawned orphaned space; Junkspace is authorless, yet surprisingly authoritarian... at the moment of its greatest emancipation, humankind is subjected to the most dictatorial scripts... from the pushy oration of the waiter, to the answering gulags on the other end of the telephone, the safety instructions on the airplane, more and more insistent perfumes, mankind is browbeaten to submit to the most harshly engineered plotline... The chosen theater of megalomania - the dictatorial - is no longer politics, but entertainment. Through Junkspace, entertainment organizes hermetic regimes of ultimate exclusion and concentration... Concentration gambling, concentration golf, concentration convention, concentration movie, concentration culture, concentration holiday. Entertainment is like watching a once hot planet cool off: its major inventions are ancient: the moving image, the roller coaster, sound, cartoons, clowns, dinosaurs, news, war. Except celebrities - of which there is a dramatic shortage - we have added nothing, just reconfigured. Corpotainment is an gallaxy in contraction, forced to go through the motions by ruthless Copernican laws. The secret of corporate aesthetics was the power of elimination, the celebration of the efficient, the eradication of excess: abstraction as camouflage, the search for a corporate Sublime. On popular demand, organized beauty has become warm, humanist, inclusivist, arbitrary, poetic and unthreatening: water is pressurized through very small holes, then forced into rigorous hoops; straight palms are bent into grotesque poses, air is burdened with added oxygen - as if only forcing malleable substances into the most drastic contortions maintains control, satisfies the drive to get rid of surprise. Not canned laughter, but canned euphoria.... Color has disappeared to dampen the resulting cacophony, is used only as cue: relax, enjoy, be well, we’re united in sedation... why can’t we tolerate stronger sensations? Dissonance? Awkwardness? Genius? Anarchy? Junkspace heals, or at least that is the assumption of many hospitals. We thought hospitals were unique - a universe indentified by its smell - but now that we are used to universal conditioning we recognize it was merely a prototype; all Junkspace is odor-defined. Often heroic in size, planned with the last adrenaline of modernism’s grand inspiration, we have made them (too) human; life or death decisions are taken in spaces that are relentlessly friendly, littered by fading bouquets, empty coffee cups and yesterday’s papers. You used to face death in appropriate cells, now your nearest are huddled together in atriums. A bold datum line is established on every vertical surface, dividing the infirmirary in two: above an endless humanist scroll of ‘color’, loved ones, children’s sunsets, signage and art... below a utilitarian zone for defacement and disinfectant, anticipated collision, scratch,spill and smudge... Junkspace is space as vacation; there once was a relationship between leisure and work, a biblical dictate that divided our weeks, organized public life. Now we work harder, marooned in a never-ending casual Friday... The office is the next frontier of Junkspace. Now that you can work at home, the office aspires to the domestic; because you still need a life, it simulates the city. Junkspace features the office as the urban home, a meeting-boudoir: desks become sculptures, the workfloor is lit by intimate downlights. Monumental partitioins, kiosks, mini-Starbucks on interior plazas: a Post-it universe: ‘team memory’, ‘information persistence’; futile hedges against the universal forgetting of the unmemorable, the oxymoron as mission statement. Witness corporate agit-prop: the CEO’s suite becomes ‘leadership collective’, wired to all the world’s other Junkspace, real or imagined. Espace becomes e-space. The 21st century will bring ‘intelligent’ Junkspace: on a big digital ‘dashboard’: sales, CNNNYSENASDAQC-SPAN, anything that goes up or down, from good to bad, presented in real time like the automotive theory course that complements driving lessons...Globalization turns language into Junkspace. We are stuck in a speech-doldrums. The ubiquity of English is Pyrric: now that we all speak it, nobody remembers its use. The collective bastardization of English is our most impressive achievement; we have broken its back with ignorance, accent, slang, jargon, tourism and multitasking... we can make it say anything we want, like a speech dummy... Through the industrialization of language, there are too few plausible words left; our most creative hypotheses will never be formulated, discoveries remain unmade, concepts unlaunched, philosophies muffled... We inhabit sumptuous Potemkin suburbs of weasel terminologies... Abberant linguistic ecologies sustain virtual subjects in their claim to legitimacy, help them survive... Language is no longer used to explore, define, express, or to confront but to fudge, blur, obfuscate, apologize and comfort... it stakes claims, assigns victimhood, preempts debate, admits guilt, fosters consensus. Entire professions impose a descent into the linguistic equivalent of hell: condemned to a word-limbo, inmates wrestle with words in ever descending spirals of pleading, lying, flattening, bargaining ... a Faustian/satanic orchestration of the meaningless...Intended for the interior, Junkspace can easily engulf a whole city. First, it escapes from its containers - linguistic orchids that needed hothouse protection emerging with surprising robustness - then the outdoors itself is converted: the street is paved more luxuriously, shelters proliferate carrying increasingly dictatorial messages, traffic is calmed, crime eliminated.
Then Junkspace spreads, consuming nature like a forest fire in LA... The global spread of Junkspace represents a final Manifest Destiny: the World as public space... All the resurrected emblems and recycled ambers of the formerly public, need new pastures. A new vegetal is coralled is for its thematic efficiency. The outing of Junkspace has triggered the professionalization of denaturing, a benign ecofacism that positions a rare surviving Siberian tiger in a forest of slot machines, near Armani, amidst an arboreal Baroque... Outside, between the casinos, fountains project entire Stalinist buildings of liquid, ejaculated in a split-second, hovering momentarily, then withdrawn with an amnesiac competency... Air, water, wood: all are enhanced to produce hyperecologyŠ, a parallel Walden, a new rainforest. Landscape has become Junkspace, foliage as spoilage: trees are tortured, lawns cover human manipulations like thick pelts or even toupees, sprinklers water according to mathematical timetables... Seemingly at the opposite end of Junkspace, the golf course is in fact its conceptual double; empty, serene, free of commercial debris. The relative evacuation of the golf course is achieved by the further charging of Junkspace. The methods of their design and realization are similar: erasure, tabula rasa, reconfiguration. Junkspace turns into biojunk; ecology into ecospace. There is only a 31% difference between ecology and economy; in Junkspace they have already merged, it is an ecolomy. The economy has become Faustian; hyperdevelopment depends on artificial underdevelopment; a huge global bureaucracy is in the making to settle, in a colossal yin/yang, the balance between Junkspace and golf, between the scraped and the scaped, trading the right to despoil for the obligation to create steroid rainforests in Costa Rica. Oxygen banks, Fort Knoxes of chlorophyll, ecoreserves as a blank check for further pollution. Junkspace is rewriting the apocalypse; we may die of oxygen poisoning.
The baroque complexities of Junkspace were compensated by the stark rawness of its adjunct infrastructures; parking garages, filling stations, distribution centers that routinely displayed a monumental purity that was the original aim of modernism. Now, massive injections of lyricism have enabled infrastructure - the one domain previously immune to design, taste or the marketplace - to join the world of Junkspace, and for Junkspace to extend its manifestations under the sky. Railway stations unfold like iron butterflies, airports glisten like cyclopic dewdrops, bridges span often neglible banks like grotesquely enlarged versions of the harp. To each rivulet its own Calatrava. (Sometimes when there is a strong wind, this new generation of instuments moves as if it being played by a giant, or maybe a god, and mankind shudders) Junkspace can be airborne, bring malaria to Sussex; 300 anopheline mosquitoes arrive each day at GDG and GTW with the theoretical ability to infect 8 to 20 locals in a 3 mile radius, a hazard exacerbated by the average passenger’s reluctance, in a misplaced gasp of quasi-autonomy, to be disinfected once he or she has buckled up for the return journey from the dead-end of the tourist destination. Airports, provisional accommodation for those going elsewhere, inhabited by assemblies united only by the imminence of their dissolution, have turned into consumption gulags, democratically distributed across the globe to give every citizen an equal chance of admission... MXP looks as if all the leftovers of East Germany’s reconstruction - whatever was needed to undo the deprivations of communism - have been hurriedly bulldozed together according to a vaguely rectangular blueprint to form a botched sequence of deformed, inadequate spaces, apparently willed into being by the current rulers of Europe, extorting limitless euros from the community’s regional funds, now causing endless delays for its duped taxpayers too busy on mobiles to notice. DFW is composed of three elements only, repeated ad infinitum, nothing else: one kind of beam, one kind of brick, one kind of tile, all coated in the same color - is it teale? rust? tabacco? - its symmetries inflated beyond any recognition, the endless curve of its terminals forces its users to enact relativity theory in their quest for the gate. Its drop-off is the seemingly harmless beginning of a journey to the heart of unmitigated nothingness, beyond animation by Pizza Hut, Dairy Queen...Valley cultures are the most resistant to Junkspace: at GVZ you can still see a universe of rules, order, hierarchy, neatness, coordination, poised moments before its implosion, but at ZHR huge ‘timepieces’ hover in front of interior waterfalls as an essay in regionaljunk. Duty free is Junkspace, Junkspace is duty free space. Where culture was thinnest, will it be the first to run out? Is emptiness local? Do wide open spaces demand wide open Junkspace? Sunbelt: huge populations where there was nothing; PHX: warpaint on every terminal, dead Indian outlines on every surface - carpet, wallpaper, napkins - like frogs flattened by car tires. Public Art distributed across LAX: the fish that have disappeared from our rivers return as public art in the concourse; only what is dead can be resurrected. Memory itself may have turned into Junkspace; only those murdered will be remembered...
Deprivation can be caused by overdose or shortage of sterility; both conditions happen in Junkspace (often at the same time). Minimum is the ultimate ornament, a self-righteous crime, the contemporary Baroque. It does not signify beauty, but guilt. Its demonstrative earnestness drives whole civilizations in the welcoming arms of camp and kitsch. Ostensibly a relief from constant sensorial onslaught, minimum is maximum in drag, a stealth laundering of luxury: the stricter the lines, the more irresistible the seductions. Its role is not to approximate the sublime, but to minimize the shame of consumption, drain embarassment, to lower the higher. Minimum now exists in a state of parasitic co-dependency with overdose: to have and not to have, craving and owning, finally collapsed in a single signifier.
Museums are sanctimonious Junkspace; no sturdier aura than holiness. To entertain the converts they have attracted by default, they massively turn ‘bad’ space into ‘good’ space; the more untreated the oak, the larger the profit center. Monasteries inflated to the scale of department stores: expansion is the third millenium’s entropy, dilute or die. Dedicated to respect mostly the dead, no cemetery would dare to reshuffle corpses as casually in the name of current expediency; curators plot hangings and unexpected encounters in a donor-plate labyrinth with the finesse of the retailer: lingerie becomes ‘Death and Survival’, cosmetics ‘The Human Figure’. All paintings based on black grids are herded together, compressed in a single white room. Large spiders in the humongous conversion offer DT for the masses... Narrative reflexes that have enabled us from the beginning of time to connect dots, fill in blanks, are now turned against us: we cannot stop noticing: no sequence too absurd, trivial, meaningless, insulting... through our ancient evolutionary equipment, our irrepresible attention span, we helplessly register, provide sense, squeeze meaning, read intention; we cannot stop making sense out of the utterly senseless...
On its triumphal march as content provider, art extends far beyond the museums’ ever increasing boundaries. Outside, in the real world, the ‘art planner’ spreads Junkspace’s fundamental incoherence by assigning defunct mythologies to residual surfaces and plotting three-dimensional works in left-over emptiness. Scouting for authenticity, their touch seals the fate of what was real, taps it for incorporation in Junkspace. Art galleries move en masse to where it is ‘edgy’, then convert raw space into white cubes... The only legitimate discourse is loss; art replenishes Junkspace in direct proportion to its own morbidity. We used to renew what was depleted, now we try to resurrect what is gone... Outside, the architects’ footbridge is rocked to the breaking point by a stampede of enthusiastic pedestrians; the designers’ initial audacity now awaits the engineer’s application of dampers. Junkspace is a look-no-hands world...The constant threat of virtuality in Junkspace is no longer exorcized by petrochemical products; the synthetic cheapens. Junkspace is like a womb that organizes the transition of endless quantities of the Real - stone, trees, goods, daylight, people - into the virtual.
Mankind is always going on about architecture. What if space started looking at mankind? Will Junkspace invade the body? Through the vibes of the mobile? Has it already? Botox injections? Collagen? Silicone implants? Liposuction? Penis enlargements? Does gene therapy announce a total reengineering according to Junkspace? Is each of us a mini-construction site? Mankind the sum of 3-5 billion individual upgrades? Is it a repertoire of reconfiguration that facilitates the intromission of a new species into its self-made Junkbiosphere?God is dead, the author is dead, history is dead, only the architect is left standing... an insulting evolutionary joke...The cosmetic is the new cosmic.
36.
Chris Marker, Junkopia
(1981)
Chris Marker, John Chapman & Frank Simeone (1981, 6 min)
One day, at the stroke of evening, on Emeryville beach in San Francisco, where unidentified artists, leave, without anyone knowing, sculptures manufactured with items that have washed ashore from the sea.
37.
Adaweb
One of the first web-based art project, which still seems to open up ways to think through working in and with the internet that do not mean just putting work already done online. Including projects by the likes of Jenny Holzer, and hosted by the Walker Art centre, it is unpredictable and a lot of fun to navigate.
38.
Denise Scott Brown, Learning from Pop
Casabella 359–360 Dec. 1971 Architecture Theory since 1968, 2000,
edited by K. Michael Hays
39.
Chris Marker, Sunless
(1983)
"Because I know that time is always time?
And place is always and only place?
And what is actual is actual only for one time?
And only for one place".
T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday (1930)
Sans Soleil is a meditation on the nature of human memory and the inability to recall its context and nuances, and as a result, how the perception of personal and global histories are affected.
“The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.”
Fragments and exerpcts are available on Youtube:
Intro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBIubMBwj6M
Fragment on Japan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiMj3QcB5N0&feature=related
The Year of the dog: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx8i6nCft8o&feature=related
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8240960507863855068#
The script is available here: http://www.markertext.com/sans_soleil.htm
40.
Josh On, They Rule
(2004)
A few companies control much of the economy and oligopolies exert control in nearly every sector of the economy. The people who head up these companies swap on and off the boards from one company to another, and in and out of government committees and positions. These people run the most powerful institutions on the planet, and we have almost no say in who they are. This is not a conspiracy. They are proud to rule. And yet these connections of power are not always visible to the public eye.
They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. http://www.theyrule.net/
41.
Michel Foucault/ Noam Chomsky, Human Nature: Justice versus Power
(1971)
The Chomsky-Foucault debate was aired on Dutch television in 1971. Both philosophers have points in common and points of difference, but seem to be working at opposite ends of the large issue of human nature: most importantly what they say and the way each approaches this question has completely different consequences in terms of action, and leads to fundamentally different ways of being and working, and this highlights how these are inherently political choices. This debate show us how philosophers are also just doing their job, thinking in new ways and digging as profoundly as possible with an equal commitment in philosophy as in politics.
Chomsky argues that a fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work, and that therefore we should concentrate on building a just society where this is possible. Foucault on the other hand, looks right back at the institutions that form what we understand by society and the way we think in the first place, and argues that before we can even imagine what justice may be, we need to question the systems of power that create and maintain our civilisations. Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WveI_vgmPz8
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0SaqrxgJvw
And the complete transcript of the interview is available here:
http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm
42.
Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Leif Elggren, Elgaland and Vagaland
(1992–ongoing)
The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland were proclaimed in 1992 and consist of all Border Territories: Geographical, Mental & Digital. Elgaland-Vargaland is the largest – and most populous realm on Earth, incorporating all boundaries between other nations as well as Digital Territory and other states of existence. Every time one travels somewhere, and every time one enters another form, such as the dream state, one in fact is visiting Elgaland-Vargaland.
Elgaland-Vargaland is a semi-democratic monarchy founded by Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Leif Elggren; the state has a constitution, a royal chamber and a complex list of ministries, as well as embassies and consulates around the world.
43.
Dziga Vertov Group, Letter to Jane
(1972)
The Dziga Vertov Group (French: Groupe Dziga Vertov) was formed in 1968 by politically active filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. Their films are defined primarily for Brechtian forms, Marxist ideology, and a lack of personal authorship. The group, named after 1920s-'30s Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, was dissolved soon after the completion of 1972's Letter to Jane.
Letter to Jane (1972) is a postscript film to Tout va bien directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin and made under the auspices of the Dziga Vertov Group. Narrated in a back-and-forth style by both Godard and Gorin, the film serves as a 52-minute cinematic essay that deconstructs a single news photograph of Jane Fonda in Vietnam. This was Godard and Gorin's final collaboration.