Posted on July 5th, 2011 in of interest, peripherals and tagged architecture, art, mobility, nature, slowness, theory, walking
“Remember that project you did in grad school about the super slow mobile architecture that traveled around the earth?” Meredith asked me recently.
After some digging, I found the very much out-dated web documentation in my archives and thought it was interesting enough (for me, anyway) to put back online. In 2001 I was a graduate student at University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. One of the many courses I took outside the architecture school was a studio taught by Samantha Krukowski in the now defunct Convergent Media program. I ended up spending quite a bit of time in Convergent Media because 1) they were doing really interesting and cutting edge projects with digital tools, 2) the tools weren’t an end in themselves but a link in a creative process chain that stressed media translation between the analog and digital, and 3) the students and faculty there were in many ways much more sympathetic to my own artistic sensibility than the architects.
The Auto-Extraction Project gave me an opportunity to go deeper with some of the theoretical architecture research I was discovering through a speculative investigation of a hypothetical mobile architecture. As the explanatory text explains:
The Auto-Extraction Project is conceived of as a mobile architecture of restriction whereby the individual participant physically removes his/herself from mainstream culture/society by embarking on a hyper-slow journey around the earth. The structure of this mobile architecture consists of a compact, individual habitational cell equipped with austere sleeping, bathing, and cooking accommodations. Suspended from a high mono-rail-like track, the cell hovers above the ground a mere 9 – 12 inches (variably) and travels at a constant rate of approximately 10 feet per hour in perpetuity; the route which the track follows is remote and rugged, rarely passing through regions of significant human inhabitation.
There’s a good deal more documentation of the project here.
Posted on November 2nd, 2010 in collaboration, project news and tagged activism, architecture, art, civil discourse, democracy, participation, theory
During the course of our work for Manifesta 8 (as Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum), Bassam El Baroni and I were invited by Markus Miessen to contribute a postscript to his latest book The Nightmare of Participation, which is the final installment of his trilogy of books on participation. (We commissioned nOffice, an architecture studio comprised of Markus and partners, Magnus Nilsson and Ralf Pflugfelder, to design both an architectural intervention and a display system for two projects in two separate exhibition spaces.) The book has just been released by Sternberg Press, and I’m happy to present our postscript below:
Postscript (from The Nightmare of Participation, Markus Miessen)
By Jeremy Beaudry and Bassam El Baroni
A nightmare is an iconic representation created by your mind. The idea of the icon is that it visualizes a situation that you cannot, in your conscious mind, imagine to be worse or more powerful. In sleep, the subconscious shows you something that your waking mind cannot elaborate on; it cannot construct a more difficult, horrific icon. The familiar and the plausible is often taken to such an extreme as to be terrifying, or problems that have no solution are presented. You become trapped in an endless cycle.
To wake up from a nightmare is to reach the threshold of realizing that you are in fact dreaming. You cannot escape the nightmare from within the logic of the dream itself; you must exit the dream world. Crossing the threshold of realization, you begin to understand that you are a character performing a role within a staged play—the dream—that you are watching. You observe this character, who is you, doing that which only a moment ago was natural and inevitable according to the logic of the nightmare. Escaping this logic, your conscious mind moves out of the dreamscape and into consciousness as the artificiality of the scene is revealed… the lights, the cameras, the props, the other actors, the monster who is not real, but rather, merely a huge animatronic puppet.
In the nightmare of participation, political subjects become caught in the logic of an iconic participation, a representative participation that has been exaggerated to the point of hollowness. The power of this participation is the power of the mesmerizing icon: It sustains the nightmare that we cannot wake up from, and it compels us to go on playing our assigned roles. Why has participation become a nightmare? The history is longer than we can tell here. Start looking a few decades back, to the 1980s, when the Western political model of participation as a legitimizing force emerged—a significant step in the evolution of late capitalism’s political theater. It is participation as instrumentalized political practice. Participation becomes a scripted scenario of liberal democracy, into which you insert the necessary actors, props, lighting, cameras, and mechanized monsters. Wake up!
A Worst-case Scripted Scenario of Participation! Imagine: the United Nations decides to build a new headquarters for the twenty-first century and beyond, a structure that truly can reflect the diversity of cultures and nations that comprise the global community. They invite architects, designers, and theorists from literally every corner of the world in order to participate in a design charrette to envision this pinnacle of world architecture. We might circumscribe the nightmare of participation in this scenario with the following: What is expected from the non-Western participants, such as the architect from Mozambique, or the interior designer from Oman? What are they supposed to contribute? Their heritage? Where does the premise for their participation come from?
Does the fact of their being from these places mean that they will actually think in terms related to where they are from? Is their otherness embodied so neatly, so simply? Or is difference not so evident as it used to be, and what if it were? What if they were so different that there was no common ground at all?
If these eager participants do represent a non- Western, non-modernist sphere, will they actually be acknowledged or seriously considered? Will anyone give a damn about their contributions if their alterity doesn’t meet the standards of acceptable difference?
Surely, many voices are represented—it is the UN afterall!—but what happens next? Representation is iconic and the icon can only deliver substance to a subconscious. What happens next? Nothing happens because no one wants anything to happen. We must want something to happen, and then state it in clear terms. We don’t want a representation; we want the thing itself. To wake up from the nightmare, a mechanism needs to be devised that does not function iconically, but practically. There is plenty of antagonism preloaded into the scenario above by reason of the nature of constructed difference. Difference was and is constructed by humans, but to get over difference we must construct a mechanism that exists in the world of consciousness, one that can reckon with the complexity of life. We need to leave antagonism behind for the sake of antagonism and move toward constructing solutions. Antagonism is a criticality applied from outside of the system, a criticality that is pessimistic and does not reciprocate. It only listens in order to consume and circulate that feedback within its own critical machine. Wake up!
The nightmare of participation can only end when we wake up to a strange world where we have accepted an order that is not predicated on the same measurement of things. Perhaps this is exactly why we don’t want to wake up from this nightmare. Perhaps to wake up to this strange world where we are truly disoriented is the nightmare we dread the most, and that is why we prefer to live in this recurring nightmare of participation, which we at least know and are familiar with.
In the present volume, the author—as well as his collaborators—has earnestly elaborated on the nightmare of participation in order to propose a series of countermeasures to a “politically motivated model of pseudo-participation.” The tactics suggested are drawn from diverse disciplines and knowledge bases, and they appear in several guises: the uninvited outsider, the crossbench practitioner, the management consultant / systems designer, to recall a few. And while our language here may veer more into the domain of the imaginative for metaphorical effect than Miessen’s, we understand the objective of this project to be a mechanism that moves us closer to the threshold of realization, the line at which we see the nightmare of participation for what it is and find agency to escape the grasp of its iconic power. The call to arms is clear: wake up!
Posted on March 17th, 2009 in of interest, project news and tagged architecture, research, social media, web
I don’t have the energy for Twitter. Or rather, I don’t wish to expend the energy Twitter requires proportional to any value my use of it might return. However, I will continue to keep a regular presence on Twitter without any effort on my part whatsoever! With the help of a server-side cron job and a PHP script adapted from the Booktwo Swotter Project, I will “perform” my dusty ol’ graduate thesis (in real time!) on Twitter. Every two hours, an approximately 140-character fragment of the text will be broadcast for the benefit of any twit — er, tweetie, er twot, er, how’s that? — so why not follow me and enjoy a little piece of Meaning Building: Aldo Rossi and the Practice of Memory throughout the course of your twittiful day?
Posted on November 29th, 2008 in musings and tagged architecture, art, memory, walter benjamin
I recently discovered a remarkable (to me, anyway) connection between my past and the past of Walter Benjamin — or rather, my past as reconstructed in images drawn out of memory and Benjamin’s as recounted in a memoir (of images) of his childhood in Berlin. What we share is a vivid, vital, shadowy architectural space, one which looms somewhat significantly in my intellectual and creative evolution as it seems to anchor both a sense of loss and an aboriginal permanence in the early life of Benjamin the expatriate. Thinking back to his youth in the city of his birth, he writes in “Berlin Childhood around 1900″ (excerpt available) of the loggia, that classically modeled transitional space wavering in between interior and exterior depending upon the relative push and pull of light and dark, warmth and coolness. Here, he remarks on the loggia as memory space:
In the years since I was a child, the loggias have changed less than other places. This is not the only reason they stay with me. It is much more on account of the solace that lies in their uninhabitability for one who himself no longer has a proper abode. They mark the outer limit of the Berliner’s lodging. Berlin — the city god itself — begins in them. The god remains such a presence there that nothing transitory can hold its ground beside him. In his safekeeping, space and time come into their own and find each other. Both of them lie at his feet here. The child who was once their confederate, however, dwells in his loggia, encompassed by this group, as in a mausoleum long intended just for him.
My explicit engagement with architecture and memory began with the above image of a loggia, sketched shortly after returning from a year abroad in Rome as an undergraduate. The loggia held a similar fascination for me as a very particular container of memory, a representation capable of describing the relationship between memory and architecture. (Albeit often suffused with nostalgia and romanticism; it became my task later to problematize such notions and investigate the politics of memory, both personal and collective.) This image led to the construction of other images of architecture — half-remembered, half-invented, part literary, part autobiographical, part who-knows-what — and then provoked me to enter grad school to actually study architecture and understand the role of memory in the practice and theory of architecture. In the preface to my master’s thesis — ostensibly about 20th century Italian architect Aldo Rossi — I recalled this potent remembered architectural image in order to begin an exploration of how we make meaning in the buildings and spaces we inhabit:
Later, there was a time when architecture happened to me and I became conscious of its happening. I remember it. I remembered it. Meaning, I first became conscious of architecture happening to me as it happened to me in my memory. Meaning, the architecture was just an image, but an image of such profound significance that it single-handedly provoked me to embark on what can only be called my “life’s work” — meaning architecture. Meaning meaning. Meaning building. Meaning building. Building meaning. Making meaning out of the memory of architecture.
Curiously, I first noticed architecture as it appeared to me in an image, as a brief flash in my memory. I was a painter; I quickly drew it on paper. Where did it come from? It was familiar yet vague; it was the place I had never been but revisited everyday for the past year. Some ancient loggia in Italy — in Cinque Terre, by the sea? or in Rome, on the bank of the Tiber? (The previous year, I had lived in Rome and studied art and art history.) I became obsessed with the image. I made paintings about it, returning to it, exploring it (at this time I was working in a dingy studio in the midst of a very cold and gray Philadelphia winter).
It’s satisfying to me to unexpectedly share the loggia with Benjamin in this way. Like most young art students, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” was one of my earliest introductions to art theory in general and critical theory in particular (I serve it up to my undergraduate students as well). I’ve found solace and inspiration in the richness of his multivalent reveries; I’ve wandered the streets of Berlin with his words and ideas supporting my own thoughts; I’ve imagined the stalls of Les Halles while thumbing the pages of his Arcades Project; I’ve wrestled with his political philosophy. This latest reengagement with Benjamin is borne of a current video project dealing with the structure of memory and a summer spent in Berlin and small recorded fragments of everyday life, and I find that his words say more effectively the things that I am thinking:
Language shows clearly that memory in not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. [...] (from “A Berlin Chronicle”)
