biopolitics in space

I have to agree more than anything else with Christopher Hight when he points out that:

"Architects have not worked through the implications of such Post-Frodist social organizations constructed through biopolitical operations rather than humanist representations. to so so engage such territories requires architects and urbanists to renovate their understanding of spatial complexity and heterogeneity."

Christopher Hight in Space Reader: Heterogeneous space in Architecture, 2009 p. 27

building as a thing

the dinstinction between "object and thing" was at the core of the lecture hosted at the Sociology deperatment of Goldsmith's college where a diverse audience of architects, designers and Social Scientists where gathered to follow an ANT methodological approach to Rem Koolhaas' design process. I didn't get exactly the arguments cause all of them where so obvious... I suppose for the social scientists and the ethnographers to understand the process of an architectural project was some kind of revealing... Yes, I will agree with the distinction between the object and the thing, between a symbolic understanding of a build project and its understanding as a multiplicity but however as an Architect I would expect to see such a distinction in the way occupants inhabit spaces. I had my conclusions and I have to admit this kind of "synergies" between different fileds could only be constructive.

oh! and it is something else... the really annoying fascination of Architects with the trendiness... they feel guilty if they use words that somehow have been used before and mark a theoretical exploration in architectural design... and this is happening due to the fact that architects approach theory in a fragmented fashion and not as a continuous transformation of concepts and ideas...

thirst for servitude!

"I hear myself experiencing what might have been, what could have happened, if it weren't for this bunch of alienate cretins that you!

- you! there in front of me, were so willing to identify with

if it weren't for that fear, that pathogenic fear of the unknown of anything really unprecedented and new, that you hide behind and use as an excuse for your own passivity- and thirst for servitude!"

as Deleuze would remarkably asked "Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?"

I've heard about! Francois Roche

His talk at the Tate on 26th of October will be postponed

complexity

"A theory of complexity that abandons either the single or the multiple in favor of a series of continuous multiplicities and singularities is one way of escaping the definition of identity through dialectic contradiction"

"Complexity is the provisional unification of disparate components without totality or wholeness"

"the most difficult task for the moment is the development of a discourse of complexity that avoids an appeal to conflict and contradiction without drifting into reactionary discourses of wholism and emergence"

Greg Lynn in Blobs. Folds, Bodies and Blobs

create a new domain

“The goal-orientated approach that the management books advocate is to find a need and fill it. We don’t get many new ideas out of that because if you ask most people what they want, they want just what they have now, 10 percent faster, 10 percent cheaper, with 10 percent more features. It’s kind of a boring way to predict the future. But if we look at the big hitters in the 20th century, like the Xerox machine, like the personal computer, like the pocket calculator, all of these things did something else. They weren’t contaminations of existing things. They weren’t finding a need and filling it. They created a need that only they could fill.”

Alan Kay in Predicting The Future, Stanford Engineering, Vol. 1, No. 1, Autumn 1989

Un jour, peut-être, le siècle sera deleuzien

machinic assemblage | creolization | the remix

we build an "experience economy". Reading lately a series of articles by Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky came across with this:

" Mono-reality... something like that. It's boring. Again, the D & G connection about multiple situations occurring simultaneously - reflects the "post post modern" scenario - it's not about "deconstruction," but reconstruction - of building a new vision of how we can live and think in the info ecology we've built for ourselves. And so on, and so on, and so on..."

found here

Dj Spooky + Sussan Deyhim: Azadi (The New Complexity) by Dj Spooky

thoughts on Constructivism

this is not an elaborated explanation of the terms constructivism but it is more a clarification of the term that nowadays bifurcates in two.

from one side we have

the Social Constructivists that support the view that reality is always social mediated and mind-dependent and

Radical contructivists that argue that mind-independent entities exist and they are knowable.

thus

[Social] Constructivism is concerned with the social construction of reality

[Radical] Constructivism is concerned with the construction of reality

however it will be really dangerous to support that view that the social reality is mind independent

Manuel Delanda will clarify this point: "in the case of social ontology though this definition (of mind independence) must be qualified because most of the social entities, would disappear althogether if human minds cease to exist. In this sense social entities are clearly not mind independent but [as he adds later] the reality is conception-independent" (Deland 2006, p1)