Design Ecologies - Volume 4, Issue 1-2, 2015

Displacing the dialectical negativity of traditional or ‘kitsch’ Marxism, accelerationism names a contemporary heresy. The affirmative orientation of the movement seeks instead to strategically harness the capitalist mode of production, and the historical material conditions it has sired, to intensify, destabilize and ultimately exhaust the present neo-liberal deadlock. With its anti-nostalgic, putatively ‘transhuman’ embrace of technical sportswear, biotechnologies and digitally rendered environments, the recent ‘Health Goth’ phenomenon, which first emerged as an aesthetic and social trend centred around an Internet community in 2013, therefore, at first blush, appears quintessentially accelerationist. In the interview-essay that follows, however, we pose a series of questions to Chris Cantino, one of Health Goth’s chief instigators, in a bid to open up further, speculative appropriations of a movement that itself stems from practices of détournement. Whilst acknowledging that the movement may indeed be characterized in accelerationist terms, a characterization that would moreover resonate with Malcolm Gladwell’s notion of the ‘Tipping Point’ as social epidemic, particularly insofar as it is one so overtly enabled and stimulated by the spectacular affect of sportswear fashion, we propose that it nevertheless exceeds this first order of reception, chiefly by eclipsing the accelerationist concept of hypercamouflage.

Power and capital often enslave forms of poetic expression. By standardizing processes they tend to dissolve the original form, intent and true psyche of creative statements. Thinking and acting in a specific, fast-paced, efficient, mechanized or institutionalized rationale many times removes the very human factor or presence, which is scarily displaced by regulatory measures and ideological or capital concepts of a greedy consumerist pseudo-culture. In today’s highly scientific or technological jungle driven by the above, narrative, vision, belief and romance, key ingredients of intellectual evolution, seem to be getting increasingly diluted in a big pile of neutrality and mediocrity led by fat tasteless money. Architecture, which depends greatly on the booming economic landscapes, has found itself in stagnant waters, unable to shift, inspire or propose new forms of tectonic resistance to envision the future and overcome the clichés of reliving its past. It has been for years in a state of latency or safe paralysis, injected with properness, apologetic behaviour, excessive okayness and coolness, losing its once dexterous mind and body. This article imagines a 24-hour ritual, as partly scientific and partly empirical form of practice, and studies ten different fragments of architectural events/artefacts that suggest novelty: identifying specific and fragile tipping points, augmenting, subverting, challenging notions of constructing or deconstructing, and eventually restructuring the existing architectural ‘corpse’, staging its dangerous yet bright awakening. A quasi-fictional flight or daydream across these interwoven landscapes, paralleled to a human body cursed by the illness of preconception and perfection, synthesizes an anxious implicit critique on the current state of architecture, attacking it, to resurrect it from its deep lethargic sleep. Each word or slice becomes a cut seeking to fill its corpus with an eternal bright light and to suggest forms of seeing or conceiving other than the rational. The highly intuitive mechanisms formed by this ritual aim to generate a living manifesto, a way of looking at things with a will to change them. Operation tools transform from literal to metaphorical linguistic concepts and aim to metamorphose the passive architectural ‘object’ into an active container ‘body’ catalysing the restless fluid motions of life: Anatexis.

Architects who apply their generative modelling and scripting skills for creating virtual and prototypical spaces through the usage of algorithms and bespoke coding are increasingly confronted with an application in the real material world. The article suggests computational design strategies leading to architectural and urban for an era in which intelligent material, robotic assistants, smart geometries and changing human habitat converge with demographic, cultural and natural earth data to govern a global rethinking of socio-architectural ecologies. Since the beginning of humankind, our planet Earth has served as feeding ground and shelter. Civilization and industrialization have triggered a verification of territory, ownership, economic wealth and power. Henceforth, ethical rules, societal regulation and intuitive values were partly overridden and replaced. Long-distant transport vehicles such as cargo ships and trains allowed for accelerating the mixing up of goods and technologies. Architects solved industrial and infrastructural problems with new ideas and emerging building types, shaping urban and peripheral environments. A great idea manifested through extensive exchange of cultures and knowledge, however strangely enough climaxed in an ultimate exploitation of our natural resources – a situation we can hardly understand or handle. As a result we are facing a situation of re-scripting our human, urban and architectural ecological system. Thus the article touches upon this very shift starting in the eighteenth century, traversing through the implementation of the Internet, to regulate our physical world and data-autobahns filled with informing bits and bytes. The question is, which questions to ask for the best solution we can offer.

Open Montage (OM) is an interactive video project problematizing the position of the moving image in contemporary network culture. Digital communication systems afford the possibility for user experience designers to reflect on a weakening of hierarchical narratives of power and representation; yet, the tendency towards an unthinking remediation of prior (televisual) media types and hierarchies persists. As a consequence of new, yet often aesthetically primitive communication design formations manifesting online, it is argued that tactics of image assembly and montage must be developed to afford users a wider and more expressive range of visual language building communication tools. If the interaction design imperative is not to suspend but encourage disbelief as a condition in the user, how can this be approached as a design problem?

This article develops the notion of ‘tipping points’ with respect to the gaps and slippages in my architectural practice, and the consequences when considered in terms of projecting for architecture as opposed to the production of architecture. It adopts as a ‘starting point’ the insecurities of the discipline and the predominance of ‘models of’ architecture conceived as a ‘problem-solving’ exercise. It adopts a sceptical reflection on the premise of the discipline, and the value of its product – suggesting that the perpetuation of positions to justify a product merely exacerbate the impossibility of practice. The ‘objectification’ of the discipline is contrasted with the potential dynamics of ‘projection’ – exploring a shift in emphasis towards ‘projecting’ as a means to enable complex and dynamic ‘models for’ architecture. This shift is investigated through my ongoing design research that moves within the contradictions, translations and uncertainties of historical and projective slippages of ‘reconstructions’ and ‘parts’ of houses. My projects speculate on the contingent opportunities of inhabiting an open sequence of a ‘problematic situation’, rather than the singular limitations of a ‘solution’ to a ‘problem’. My research moves towards considering the liberating potential of acknowledging that contradiction is the architectural project, rather than perpetually conceiving of contradiction as an obstacle to be repositioned or removed by the construction of an architectural product. This shift in emphasis is considered as an open sequence of ‘tipping points’ that continue to evolve within the contradictions of practice as models for projecting architecture, rather than a singular ‘tipping point’ that simply reconstructs the same model of architectural product in different terms. The tipping point in my research is ultimately an acknowledgement of the (im)possibility of practice – the inherent contradiction in projecting an architectural project that by necessity is initiated by the belief in a transformative and ameliorative quality to ‘projecting’, but also necessarily without the capacity to articulate what that quality is.

The way we understand and use emerging technologies will always be informed by a set of tacit philosophical assumptions, psychological mechanisms and techniques of governance. The discourse surrounding 3D scanning, a technology on the verge of becoming ubiquitous, is one of veracity and accuracy: the scanner is treated as an immaterial camera obscura and an ultimate facilitator of objective knowledge. This article discusses a design-research project that dismantles such assumptions and recuperates notions of noise, multiplicity and ambiguity within the point cloud. This is supported by a deconstruction of the ontological and epistemological foundations (such as representationalism, atomism and essentialism) on which the ‘realism’ of the scanner is grounded. Referencing to post-structuralist theory, theoretical physics and science studies (and to Karen Barad in particular) the article formulates an alternative onto-epistemological framework that instead emphasizes the material nature of knowing and notions of becoming and multiplicity. Equally, while revolving around and always returning to 3D scanning technology, the article extrapolates its findings towards a critical analysis of contemporary modes of governance. Central to the argument is a process of physical prototyping exploring a phenomenon called ‘edge noise’: these are ‘ghost points’ in a 3D scan created by mixed measurements at the edge of an object. The multiplicity of these faulty and fictional measurements is explored as a productive schizophrenic condition that dismantles the reductionist logic of point cloud filtering. More crucially, this edge noise is then reverse-engineered, enabling the designer to actively and precisely create this edge noise using algorithmically controlled perforated screens. Finally, the article discusses two architectural design projects that implement the developed edge noise algorithms and unpack its philosophical, technological and political considerations. These projects propose an approach towards the point cloud that, rather than treating the scanner as an immaterial and realist conveyer of truth, involves it as the designer’s and observer’s creative complicit in the very forging of phenomena.

Far away and over the River lie the Maritime Complexities, where laws of exuberance and pleasures of imagination are so gloriously made manifest, at the heart of which exists the Vista Land. A place of curiosity, invention and combination. ‘This curious device’ is an enquiry into something of the extraordinary ingenuity, discovery, mutation, enlightenment and joy that evolved from the Maritime Complexities. An abundance of information at all scales, given shape, a spatial infinity. A place that also grew dark over time, a dark mirror with which to see our times. Of abundance appropriated and misused, of hope become cold, frozen by myriad small orthodoxies.