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TREIGNAC PROJET ASSOCIATION W W W. T R E I G N A C P R O J E T. O R G 2 RUE IGNACE DUMERGUE 19260
Copyright Š Treignac Projet and the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission from the publishers or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act, 1988. SUMMER 2012
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Treignac Withheld an occult platform
AUTOMATON /PATIO 12
PATIO 12 held at Treignac 01/07/12 - 09/07/12 4
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PATIO 12
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With thanks to Tim Coles, Alasdair Duncan, Anya Firestone, Claire Eleanor Healy, Kelwin Palmer, Siobhan Milne, Meichen Waxer. EDITED BY
Sam Basu Kelwin Palmer
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8 Introduction Wo rm ho le
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Glit ch To ur i
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o-Fill Architecture A ut ReEva lu
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PATIO 12
a users manual
PATIO is a process of developing and maintaining networks between geographically dispersed actors through short-term, discursive meetings and active projects. This platform supports new forms of collectivity for culturally active people. It creates an event that produces an uncodified, de-centred space structured around non-hierarchical exchange. Located away from high urban density and the over determination of knowledge production that accompanies those areas, it is a way of taking full advantage of the unevenness in the spatial and social fabric by bringing people together from a wide range of places to exchange and produce information in relation to a very localised event space. PATIO forms a temporary coalescence in marginal, off-centre, low-density locations in order to understand and explore urban and social conditions and processes through speculative physical and unsolicited interventions and texts. Once one explores urban fabric beyond the rural/urban dichotomy, one is able to engage with international-scale infrastructures as they currently exist. Building on distributed decision making and team dynamics, personal research projects are presented in the context of field trips, and other location-enhancing events that give a basis for deciding on and completing a joint research/cultural object. Extending approaches to experimental architecture come together with creative ways of thinking, working and presenting from beyond architecture to create interdisciplinary definitions and programmes for joint elaboration. Research is extended through the propositional phase to develop unsolicited thinking habits. Orbits and Perturbations TOWARDS ZERO DENSITY Transport, energy, agriculture/forestry and State infrastructures in low-density areas are often of a highly advanced and technical nature but are seldom available for secondary use until they start to fail. Large tracts of declining and abandoned industrial stock testify to the great valence these infrastructures have. The importance in redefining rural zones, among others, as low-density is not to deny their historic and economic specificity, nor to reduce them to a mere enfeebled continuity of built spaces, but to encourage an examination of the functionality of the future city and its interconnections through a wider understanding of the technologies and geo-histories available to us. Apart from the opportunity that this presents for projects like PATIO, it also demands the production of new databases that are able to synthesize networked and localised experience and this is precisely where the PATIO knowledge creation can be effective. OUTSOURCING THE CITY
Low-density zones are under a great amount of pressure to
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redefine themselves in relation to the evolving demands that the global city is placing on them. These zones tend to be viewed as a vacuum with a failure to see their potential as spaces of production. This results in a passive response, capable of only providing a service or landscap such as a version of the tourist industry including transportation, with subsidized support for relocation. This places low-density zones (LD) in a commodified position that influences thinking about cultural programming, local histories, redevelopment and housing. The outsourcing concept allows for a more active participation of low-density areas in the evolution of the whole urban fabric. Activities which were previously considered urban, such as knowledge creation and cultural production, are highly mobile and easily temporarily relocated to LD areas. Many parts of Europe and America have a substantial infrastructure of art residencies and art centres that exhibit and host artists and other culturally active people. However the tendency is towards importing ideas and culture into LD zones instead of situating their thinking as well as production in the LD area and then exporting the intellectual productions back into the city. PATIO attempts to use the concept of outsourcing as a means of establishing meaningful ways of siting production in LD zones that does not simply reduce the LD zone into a passive object of study (as in artists residencies where artists are invited to respond to the countryside etc) but highlights their importance in the network of reciprocal flows around urban space. HOSTING & OUTSOURCING Hosting involves the informal, non-academic invitation of short-term projects that concretise an international network within the confines of a specific geo-political situation. The short duration of these visits makes them accessible to a wide variety of people and does not over stretch the available local resources. Does low density offer us an uncodified space outside of traditional structures for alternative ways of doing things? Or is it merely a question of relative isolation making us more attentive and productive? What can be missed in redevelopment thinking is that local populations do not always want to encourage great amounts of change. What is more often hoped for is that some stability can be brought into regions so that traditional or low-pressure lifestyles can be maintained. Often these traditional lifestyles are what attract people to a region and there is always a tension between maintaining the two populations. Lowdensity areas are becoming increasingly diverse, with people taking the opportunity of these relatively un-codified and non-policed spaces to form new networks and communities. The low economic demand for buildings in areas of decline, mean that hosting can be used as a means for the low impact introduction of outside actors without the need to build expensive long-term infrastructures such as museums or conference halls. Instead it is often possible to take advantage of failing infrastructure. Hosting can easily run alongside already existing cultural programming, as well as being a light-footed tool for smaller organisations, educational exchanges and artistic projects. Outsourcing the city through hosting allows a more secure and transparent environment for production. Removed from the noise of city space, events are more visible, and feedback can be more immediately monitored and clarified.
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When there is less dissipation of ideas there is more room and focus for secondary research. SELF-ORGANISATION & GEOGRAPHICALLY DISPERSED NETWORKING The network is, at its most interesting, a question of the dynamics of emergent properties. The well documented benefits of collaborative and shared exchange hinge on this still poorly understood phenomenon of complexity derived from simple units. The fact that coherent freely acting entities emerge from smaller groups and that these entities have a functionality that cannot be accounted for or controlled by any individual member of the group, means that the interconnection between the emergent entity and the actors that contribute to it is cut off. No individual actor has full access to this emerging functionality, and neither does the emergent entity have full control of its constituent units. This becomes noteworthy when we consider objects such as cities in their emergence of state. When considering the growth of cities, one must include the effect of technologies, the use of resources, the place of inanimate objects such as buildings as well as the dynamics of social groups. One is presented with a farraginous cyborg body whose emergent forces are absurd and unaccountable. The network is an attempt to generate emergent behaviours and powers outside of geographically focused zones by materialising them in a specific instance of a hosted PATIO meeting. FORMS OF COLLECTIVITY This list presents a general field and approach to looking at the collective as a non-subjective phenomenon. Clearly being part of a collective/group/family/... is definitive and we access the augmented functionality that being part of a group gives us through subjective thought processes. But, it is clear that this subjective space is not the location where all the benefits of communality can be accessed, and that the collective body has its own powers of activity that are not directly available to participants. Machine collectivity Here the collective is defined not by participants and how they engage with each other, but by the functionality that the grouping has as a whole. It includes all the tools that are engaged by the group, as well as the skills to use them. It includes languages, behavioural traditions, culture and buildings. The idea here is to discover how technological and cultural tools are interconnected without reducing one to the other (i.e. not that culture is just a way to integrate new tool-use into the collective, and that tool-use does not just mirror cultural modelling). Prosthetic consciousness Consciousness seems to be the result of a physical process that is distributed around the brain and throughout the body. The borders of what this consciousness defines as the Self are flexible (as is evidenced when amputees report phantom limb syndrome). Also, humans in groups are not clearly able to define which actions originate from which individuals and often take credit or deny blame in error (in lab tests designed to avoid situations where advantage can be had from doing either). This porous quality of consciousness extends to the addition of prosthetic devices to
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the human form both in replacing lost limbs and in extending the limits of the human form. Most tools we use do not generate a large amount of sensory feedback (just enough so that you know when the hammer has hit the nail or hand), however, technological advancements mean that the sensory quality of the tools, buildings, cities and environments is being increased and so with it an opportunity to extend consciousness into this sensorial space. Environmental or Eco-Logical Cyborgs Machine collectivity and the mutable, multiple and porous consciousness’s that emerge with it point to the possibility of large scale, viable designing that recedes from the individual subject and into a landscape of interconnected, emergent functionalities or a systemised environment. This approach to urbanism avoids many of the pitfalls of taking for granted the priority of the humanist atom, the individual. It is tempting to imagine this systemised environment as a totally free, fluid matrix, but the reality is tied to the physical limits of internal interconnections. The environmental cyborg is not a holistic field, not a Gaia principal or Lithosphere encapsulating the globe. It is an infinitely layered interconnection of temporary coalitions and assemblages whose dispersed structure does not allow access to all layers simultaneously. Actors participate in many different groupings at any one moment, (I am an artist, part of a family, I live in a village that gives me more free time but reduces my possibilities to encounter new ideas, I am writing with architects, I speak a bit of French...). These are temporally true facts, but also defining of the object that nominates an ‘I’, yet also not what constitutes it in itself.
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GLITCH TOURISM
The Signarbieux Dead Zone. Glitched on Google Maps 1000m x 875m 12
GLITCH TOURISM
Introduction
Throughout the PATIO sessions various topics were allowed to repeatedly resurface and collide with each other creating different ranges of possibilities and opening ever-alternative ways to respond. The fields produced by these assembled topics started to have a topology that, though ever-shifting, returned us to certain clusterings of concepts and concerns.[1] We found from previous PATIO meetings that attempting to dialectically unravel oppositions through a series of alternating negations created many problems that became especially marked in the trans disciplinary group. We have been tending to think of the individual as an outdated idea that produces a false conceptual atom for thinking about architecture’s relation to community and the dynamics of buildings and users. There seems to be an uneven tension between the categories of Personhood that are materialised in democratic processes such as voting with the client-ordered architecture of private means. It seems clear that the individual is an erosion of the community just as the communal must erode the sovereignty of the individual. However, community and the individual do not exist as an exclusive opposed pair, because both these poles ignore the more complex economies that surround them that include the neuroscientific machinery of decision-making, geologies, atmospheric tendencies and technologies. Our first abstraction was to reassign the human domain to a new entity; the cyborg. This entity we understand in the wider sense of an assembled creature whose history starts from the first use of a tool. The tool here is any thing used whose use is transmitted between agents or generations. The tool might be though here as synonymous with the activities of culture. The key tool that we considered in this context is dwelling. Clearly this generates no distinction between human or animal tools and this we accept.[2] The challenge of thinking through technologies is thrown into deep relief when one considers the approach of what is being called the ‘technological singularity’. In this event, a rupture would occur that has equal footing with the advent of Life or Sentience in the universe. We are fast approaching the vertical asymptote where the rate of technological change reaches towards infinity; some estimate a timescale of thirty years. Regardless of the shape of this future, technology is already becoming ever more seamless in its integration to everyday life. Social networks larger than nations dominate public modes of opinion as well as join thousands of people together who have never met. But in the hands of its marketed dissemination, technology seems to be driving an
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individualized market-friendly model of personhood that dematerialises and dislocates as it develops ever more seductive non-political isolations between actors. With regard to this, the cyborg has been thought through as the located, material machinery that produces its emergent powers rather than the dematerialised affects and extensions experienced at the human level. This seems then to be an opportunity to localise the political in an invigorated matrix of geology, vernacular specialisation and limit. On the margins of these discussions appear the modes with which to address these concerns that split into two main types. The first is that of the ethnographic field trip and its contemporary avatar: the Road Trip; the second is psychedelic experience The Road Trip generates many metaphors that show understanding as generated rather than given. It is the passage rather than the arrival that is potent in these metaphors, and analogously the PATIO process is one of knowledge creation rather than the delivery of knowledge by the knowing to the ignorant. Psychedelic experience is one where the altered chemistry of the mind precipitates different thinking modes and consciousness. There is a marked increase in feedback from the organic processes that underlie our sensory experiences, and this seems vital in instituting a progressive object-oriented architectural approach. At present work is being done on defining a Lysergic Critical Method in line with Surrealism’s Paranoiac Critical Method. The historic traditions that have attached to the explosion of experimentation with hallucinogens in the 1960s allows the careful user of this idiom to repurpose material from Alfred Watkins’ work on Ley lines, the re-invention of witchcraft, Drop City and political protest. In view of the desire to present the unresolved space of these different poles as a concrete reaction rather than an endless openness, narrative exposition seems best fit as the carrier of these ideas. To this end we present a short work that we hope will generate a useable idea-space for working with these concerns.
1] We are indebted to Fabien Giraud and the workgroup of The Matter of Contradiction, for their insight into how one can think around traditional approaches to discursive groups [2] The tool-use of things by things, as in chemical catalysis, further extends this decentralising of human traits.
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Glitch Tourism
“Cenk, Cenk! You goat, you’ll never get there fast enough if you don’t keep your equipment ready.” Lecky laughs and speeds off up the valley towards where the Glitch was located. Cenk smiles as he reattaches his battery, completing the process of recharging his drained vehicle, and climbs in to wait for Meichen who is locating a trading satellite to attract. Two large drops of rain fall on to the dusty green tinted manifold covering the glass nose of his car. Cenk decides that the prospect of rain is too gloomy for this afternoon and selects a SilverDawn virtual skin from the vehicle’s visualiser. The skin has a bright tropical glow of photoshopped moons over a sickly neon rainbow. Suddenly the program kicks in and physical space is transformed; everything in view blinks into a technicolor monstrosity of unearthly colours. Meichen finally locks on to a trader satellite and jumps in beside Cenk. Down here at the bottom of the valley it can be difficult to locate satellite signals, so Meichen holds the GPS device out of the window as they mount the steep road onto the plateau through an Oz of lurid colour. Meichen flips through various settings in the visualiser’s skinselector with her feet as she leans back with her arm out of the window and the slim satellite device pointed towards the sky. “Why do you always pick those SilverDawn skins, they’re so infantile?” She spins through a series of digital cities that wrap themselves around the contours of their remote country village before settling on a light Moorish motif and then adding a polka dot array of hovering data nodes in a wet orange. “It’s so weird to have a Glitch close to home.” “Yep, this is our very own back yard Glitch. It looks to be a 600 or 800; quite large by Eastern Server standards.” “Will we likely be the first there?” “Can’t see that anyone will get to it before us, there aren’t any other Tourists in the department” Cenk’ s vehicle was usually kept charged up on the off chance that a Glitch would be located so he could attempt to get to it before it was corrected. There was a fraternity of Glitch Tourists that had taken it onto themselves to locate Glitch errors and viral anomalies in the World Digital Coverage and attract robot satellites’ attention to them to stabilise
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them via 21st-century location beacons. The satellites take time to re-boot systems around a Glitch and this gives a few hours to explore the Glitch and if things start going wrong, you will not be in there too long before it is shut down. Of course there are formal ways of marking Glitches without having to travel, but there are so few reasons to go anywhere now with World Digital Coverage. Whole cities complete with populations can be dialled up and in them you can meet with any available cyborg-avatar you wish, you can see anything, do anything… Glitch Tourists are a breed apart. People have long become accustomed to the insufficiencies of the world we have made for ourselves; the seductive myth of the approaching availability of everything. World Digital Coverage has gradually dematerialised everything in an illusion of total interchangeability that is reducing politics to management, communities to cliques, and citizenship to club loyalty. But people are beginning to suspect that the myth is not able to deliver on its promises. Glitches are exposing something else at play. There is a blindness in the machinery that is needed to produce our immaterial world; a huge energy hungry machine that is very real and full of tangible Glitches. Mostly Glitches are ignored and avoided. You will never see one in a high-density area; there are too many Providers cross-supporting the WD Coverage for anything like a Glitch to surface. Anomalies are suppressed as they emerge with cross-referencing. The problem with WDC Glitches is that they cause weird effects in the sentient parts of cyborgs and as we are all cyborg to some degree the received wisdom is: STAY AWAY. Regular Glitch Tourists tend to live away from cities in areas where WD Coverage is less policed. The agricultural infrastructure does not respond to WDC data as it is not wired to the cyborg facilitation web-face. Most of the agriculture automations are fully robotic and don’t need to use sentient elements in their ecology, and what AI there is, is of the pretty basic, isolated sort. Everywhere else is connected to cyborg functionality through the WDC. Everywhere is the new anywhere, which is the new nowhere. Cenk and Meichen work managing one of the giant server-housings that are dotted throughout former rural areas. They are usually housed near big power sources like dams and wind farms to keep them close to energy and away from interference and overheating. You need a lot of energy to run a server housing, more than a small city. The by-product is a lot of heat and it is up to Cenk and Meichen to manage its dissipation. Lecky has not been gainfully employed since he circuit-looped a prosthetic cyborg part he was trialling after eating fungus he had found in a field. He was fired and now acts as if he lost something, taking every opportunity he can to crawl into Glitches looking for it. But it has nothing to do with the loss of his job; he experienced something while looped in the WDC, a sort of compression that transformed him. He speaks of conductivity and human function as transducers in ecological vectors. If you start the conversation off you will quickly get Lecky into a rant about the limited extent that human senses have been pushed into the reality of the emergent Geo-urban Cyborgs we are. The others have learned to avoid the subject though they are quietly convinced of it too. Cenk pulls up behind Lecky’s vehicle, uncouples the visualiser and notes the unremarkable stretch of county road they are on.
“I reckon we are in the middle of it” “Yes, I’ve lured the trading satellite so the Glitch should be
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neutralised in an hour; that gives us plenty of time in the Glitch before it gets too dangerous. Lets get ready to connect with the Glitch WDC.� Meichen reaches into her prosthetic upper arm and starts to make some adjustments before stepping out to join Cenk. Lecky was clearly already connected and operating a cyborg avatar. Though visually impressive the world of the WD cyborg interface is a totally visual one of data and info-graphics. It operates on a pornofunctional system of illusions and symbolic horizons that allow the sentient human part of a cyborg to centralise and control large environments of functions through intuitive visualizations. Glitches disrupt this visual hierarchy and prioritise all kinds of experiential possibilities in a cocktail of hybridised nerve signals, emotional chemicals and phantom memories. In the Glitch, the extra functionality derived from technological innovation does not stay safely organised on the other side of an elaborate immersive interface, but is unleashed into the grey matter of the human mind. Here mind and machine course through one another in psychedelic loops of erotic confusion. No master, no willed director, no objective, no one. It is a horrific experience. One of the last political acts in the fast dematerialising human horizon, a kind of witchcraft that communes with the digital elemental forces that have hypnotised the sentient world. Lecky has already connected to the server that is inadvertently hosting the Glitch. Meichen and Cenk join him standing on the approach to an untidy patch of scrub and dial up. They silently take hold of each other’s hands facing outwards away from each other. The process starts and they abandon themselves to the caprices of the glitched interface. What they have entered is not the world given over to cyborg control through its appearances, but a cyborg entity of hardware. They are now an entity equally urban, geographic, organic and symbolic. The way we use humans in the mechanics of WDC is obscured and our intuition that there is a calculable positive conclusion to all our activity is deceptive. It hides from us both the extent of our immersion in the ecology of things and the nature of that immersion; there can never be a single ecology or global, continuous lithosphere. The world is assembled from tectonic discontinuities and asymmetries that do not add up to a whole. Instead these tectonic entities exceed the possibility of any holistic calculation or completeness. The process of emerging novelty is never balanced by the co-produced disappearances of no-longer things. There is a delay across the system-entity as logics pursue their possibilities and are actualised in the fabrication of Time’s passing.
Page 18: Diagram for insulated cyborg where the interface acts as insulating agent. Page 19: Geo-urban cyborg where rupture of the insulating screen allows for true cyborg conciousness. Page 20: Spiral field trip layout. Visiting the Glitch.
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auto-fill archit
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architecture
Social Housing Architectural components of DNA Swarm construction Built and organic movement Algorithm synthesising architecture Unfolding exo-machines Self-harming architecture Estate agent architect Responsive buildings Geomancy Co-embodied collective Breeding buildings
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Auto-fill Architecture
Data-Downing is rare. Claire can remember it happening only twice and they were both a very long time ago. It does not feel like a good thing. Also M has disappeared. M must have been Drwn away but it is strange that it would happen so suddenly. We always move onwards eventually but our time in each Collective is dear to us. The Collective calls us and we answer the Drwn, it becomes us as we become it, it is our home formed from us. Together we build a home from our DNA, we are joined in forming our Collective. How could M leave without ceremony, without rebalancing? And will someone be Drwn in her place? The material of the Collective building parts as Tim enters the hall, the fluid walls become transparent as he turns his head and looks out over the dam.
“Unease.” Tim looks down at his hands. Several holes open up between the hall and other adjoining chambers where adapted walls flex and extend with the movement of the other members of the Collective. A mute calltone sounds from the wall elements near Tim and attracts the attention of Anya. She turns and the adapted wall by her follows so she can continue manipulating her learning-practice. The walls around Anya grows dark.
“Yes I feel it.” The room reforms to become a corridor joining Tim and Anya, and closes off the rest of the hall.
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“How can M have been Drwn?” “Has there been an evolution in the process? An emergence?” “I doubt it. The Drwn starts deep and we always know when it will come. This gives us time so our learning can be completed, our research concluded, our pages added to the knowledge of the Collective.” “Yes, this gives us time to uncouple our DNA code from the Auto-Fill and it gives the Collective time to prepare for the new Auto-fill DNA data; for the collective to acclimatise to whoever will be Drwn to replace us” “It is a gentle process.” “So we are in doubt?” “Yes, our building has been testing all diffusions. The energy from the dam is not the source of the problem, we can not lay blame on the power, it is a Data-Downing.” The walls yellow briefly before opening to Claire.
“We should make a learning-enquiry.” Tim and Anya are silent. There are no disagreements here; there is only delay between agreements. Slowly the pierced corridor re-forms itself into the hall with tentacle corridors joining together spaces between the rest of the Collective. The walls emit variously coloured call-tones and soon the Collective is assembled and the building has contracted around the hall. “I propose a Not-Knowing around the Drwn process, I propose a NotKnowing about M” “What is the shape of this Not-Knowing?” The walls respond by forming areas of visual information, diagrams of the Collective’s DNA strands with the relevant cyborg-urban portions highlighted. Researched thoughts start to emit from mouths in the walls. Listening and speaking, data, side routines, contradiction, information. “The dam’s energy is sufficient for symbiosis, the DNA-urban data is sufficient for Auto-Fill to be carried out continuously.” “Our Not-Knowing is in the Drwn” “I do not believe it is in the Data-Downing” “No, it is not clear that the Data-Downing means we have not understood the Drwn” “But how can we account for M; she has been Drwn and once she has left we have no diffusion with her?” “If she was Drwn” There is an interruption, the cycling images and background informational chatter halt. Blue walls. Tim looks around, surprised at the building’s response. The building and the collective are seamless; they are felt, emotioned, becoming. The building restarts and continues as if nothing has happened. 26
Manifesto Occultatio
“Another Data-Downing?” “No, the space is unaltered. A Data-Downing would have thrown the AutoFill info and re-formatted the hall like last night.” “I did not feel anything” There is a pause but as nothing presents itself they continue. “And still no one new has been Drwn to us?” “We are lacking” “I propose negative M to replace this lack.” Auto-Fill is already calculating M’s added negative presence in the Collective. Anya returns to her learning-practice and they all turn away in disinterest. The diagrams fade to grey and the mouths finish their sentences and smoothly start to disappear into the flux of the wall.
“Unease…”
Over: Autofill architecture 1 Autofill architecture 2
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WhU
WORMHOLE UNIVERSITY
Wormhole University is an on-going project looking into repurposing of low-density (LD) areas. WhU aims to pre-empt the changing use-pressures that will pertain with larger, mobile and centralising populations in the next thirty years and ensure that LD zones can fully participate and even lead discussion on future cities. The investigation will examine how LD zones, which are often spread out over large areas with declining and redundant infrastructures, can be more deeply re-linked to the wider urban framework. The approach will revolve around evolving phases of non-permanent structural additions that build integration and relevance. It is proposed that the implantation of advanced education, especially arts and architecture, would form the first stage of the integration process. The primary difficulty in LD areas is the generally dispersed nature of suitable amenities. For LD areas to become sufficiently attractive to larger national-scaled hosting projects, several nodes will need to be linked meaning that the issue of transportation looms large over the project. Meditations on the locking together of sites, was influences by Alfred Watkins’ work on ley lines and Cedric Price’s desire lines. The project will also serve as a basis for proposing disperced exhibitory strategies that form the basis for an application for MANIFESTA. Infrastructure as content - The journey as goal Pilgrimage A journey or search of moral or spiritual significance. Typically, it is a journey to a shrine or other location of importance to a person’s beliefs and faith, although sometimes it can be a metaphorical journey into one’s own beliefs. In modern usage, the terms pilgrim and pilgrimage have developed in sense to include sites of secular importance. For example, fans of Elvis Presley may choose make a pilgrimage to his home, Graceland, in Memphis, Tennessee. Visits to war memorials such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial are often seen as pilgrimages. Similarly one may refer to a cultural center such as Venice as a “tourist Mecca.” Though the goal of the pilgrimage is the final destination site and the benefits this site might impart, it has become a common metaphor in literature that the act of travelling there is what imparts the benefit. Kung fu training One attains knowledge through diligent pursuit of daily work. Without knowing it, one becomes skilled through the deferral of academic or master-pupil learning in an orchestrated encounter with lived Life. Road trip The modern evolution of the ethnographic field-trip, the road trip is an ungrounding collision with the chaotic foundation of the world and is an embodiment of the Lysergic Critical Method. It is conceived as a special voyage in which one retains an openness to the transformative power of journey rather than the pedestrian act of arriving. 32
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WhU
Alternative forms of knowledge production
Kung-fu
on the road
ago
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Leaving 'unsettles' and Ungrounds.
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WORLD
>>>>>>> reveals inner 'weird'
CHAOS >>>>>>>
Lost in REAL
Field-trip objectification + participation
FATAL
The road trip fuses the voyager with the road itself in a fatal LYSERGIC collapse of logic
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Uzerche
Limoges
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low density
Treignac
Clermont-Ferrand
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WORMHOLE UNIVERSITY
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Further material will be released during the year in Automaton IV and through AcidMist
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Case Study 1:
PTb Potteries Thinkbelt
Cedric Price
The Potteries Thinkbelt, published 1966 in New Society and later that year in Architectural Design, was Cedric Price’s extensively thought through project to revitalise an area of northern Staffordshire in north England. This area was defined by its historic production of pottery whose industry was by the 1960s declining, leaving much of the surrounding landscape in decay. Price’s challenging idea was to introduce advanced education into this declining area as a new industry. Coupling advanced education with local industry, Price’s proposal integrated the new, socially open learning that would lead others to form projects like the Open University, soon afterwards. What particularly marked this project was its rejection of the singular physical site for the university in favour of a distributed machine that extended through the existing road and rail infrastructure around a triangle of closely placed cities. This interest in the use of infrastructures originally implemented for industries - which then stagnated or declined - resonates greatly with PATIO’s desire to move beyond the urban/rural dichotomy. This approach favours infrastructural analysis of the built and its potential to be re-purposed for new functionality in face of potentials thrown up by populations and technologies. Cedric Price had made extensive research into the feasibility of implementing a critical architectural approach that rejected Civic planning in favour of a holistic process that would reevaluate the systems of education as well as the structures that housed them. For Price, there was a problem with the advanced education of the day, which was still greatly directed towards a small, privileged sector of society, and he considered it essential that education be made available to all if it was to reach its potential to become a national industrial undertaking. For this to take place he proposed a very large-
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scale educational capacity of 20,000 students for his Potteries Thinkbelt proposal, which weighed heavily on strong ties to the science and technology industries. Responding to ideas being discussed within education at the time, his proposal presented a plan for a system of temporary structures that delivered a flexible and experimental basis for an educational institute built around networks of transportation and communication. This would connect the institution both externally to national and international nodes, and internally through the local communication structures of rail and road. This use of the existing networks meant that the PTb system was closely tied into the local host community especially through his conception of housing. The capital of any university runs from its staff, to its equipment, to its buildings, in a descending order of importance. In this way, it is in the university’s structure that the greatest flexibility needs to be made though demountable, temporary building. Education is necessarily in flux as it responds to the various crises of its disciplines and the background economy. Unfortunately in the 1960s, temporary building still had the problem of being considered a secondary form of architecture, as were teachers who were part-time and kept hold of positions in industry. Price considered it vital that the teaching faculty of any institution be largely based in practice rather than being wholly academic, so as to base the educational staff within a wider society. This connection to wider society was to be promoted through the sheer scale and intensity of the proposal. This would insure the projects social relevance, as its impact would be on a national scale, and therefore insure its capacity to initiate substantial progress. Cedric Price’s PTb promoted a vision of progressive architecture that directly affects life quality in a proactive attitude against the reactionary practices and education of architects of his day. PTb proposed to initiate a regional and national distribution of advanced education that used the existing communication networks and emerging electronic communication networks with mobile and variable physical enclosures. Price saw that education and information exchange could be
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major generators of the location and form of cities. He saw the shaping of university campuses on the lines of ideal cities, with campuses that overcome higher education’s problems of isolation and elitism. In essence, he envisaged an integrated community of student and local populations. Cedric Price proposed four types of building to realise his networked infrastructural plan: CRATE, SPRAWL, BATTERY and CAPSULE. These demountable and mobile structures could be constructed by engineering and motor industries without placing the existing building sectors under too much strain. They would use land that was not usually suitable for building on and whose power and water needs would amplify the existing systems. Price envisioned an intercity sprawl that would avoid intensifying pressure on the road and communication systems that, in many cases, had not been altered since the 18th century. Crate housing was envisaged as 13-story concrete frames, which could be installed on the more stable building ground, into which pressed steel living units would be positioned by mobile hoists. Battery housing could be installed on poorer building foundations and comprised of lowlevel modular units. Sprawl housing could house a mix of families and students in wooden-framed chains of buildings that would be exchanges as needs developed. All these longer-term habitations were supplemented by Capsule units, which would form a pool of reserve housing to accommodate fluctuations in housing needs. The Capsules would house two people in a pod with all amenities build in. The light flexible housing would allow a large migrating population of students to easily move around the PTb. The Thinkbelt would be designed with an over capacity of housing to accommodate this migrating population. Private transportation could supplement the rail transportation when needed (Price imagined higher and higher ownership of vehicles among the student population), but the road systems, which to a large extent define the dynamics of the thinkbelt, would not be over used as Price also promoted remote learning through electronic and broadcast media. This inclusion of new educational media into the learning process would further allow students to design their own patterns of study.
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The influx of student populations, and the accompanying effects of this new population, would increase access to amenities and leisure for the local populations and offer a chance to experiment with new modes of living. Price saw the mobile and short-term habitation needs of student populations as a general trend that would become more common in the future. With the promotion of differing ways of receiving education, such as refresher courses and adult learning, the traditional distinction between incoming students and local people would become eroded. PTb’s impacts are wide-ranging and touch all sectors of society. As the implantation of the new education industry took hold it would improve amenities and local life quality and access; easing the gradual constriction of traditional industries and attracting new, supplementary industries to the area’s increasingly skilled workforce. The Thinkbelt would be serviced by three TRANSFER areas, which would connect the network with international flight and the main national transport arteries for bulk transport. In addition they would house the larger workshop zones and accommodation. Train-mounted Seminar Units could be moved around the system as needed by different aspects of the curriculum, being housed in Thinkbelt stations for long use, or in sidings for shorter programs. This approach usefully accommodates changing patterns of equipment needed throughout a course of learning. Self-Teach Carrel Units would make available the newly integrated TV and broadcast media with fold out, inflatable units of 30-person lecture areas and TV demonstration studios. The Thinkbelt would not simply be grafted onto existing urban structures, but act as an architectural catalyst. By importing experimental programs and attitudes that are not insulated away from the broader population, as in the classical university design, improved Life Conditioning could propagate to national benefit. Potteries Thinkbelt could use previously unsuitable land and failing infrastructure to bring in new industry and enrich the intellectual production of a zone that could be then circulate through the wider, integrated student and community populations.
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Case Study 2:
NIS: New International School New International School (NIS) 2007 – 2010, came about as a response to the over-bureaucratization of art education. It contended that art education is the very practice of art in emergence and cannot be formalised or contained by external concerns to those practices. As an experimental format NIS adopted a supplementary, migrant, educational model as a way to deploy peer debate. It understood that the discursive arena around arts practice could be used to institute new contexts for art production, exhibition and critique. An initial group of artists was assembled by artist Shahin Afrassiabi, and he structured participation until the group reached a size where it was able to organize itself. Based around the yearly presentation of artists’ work and studio experience, the internationally diverse group lived in close company for a week at Treignac Projet, with a daily schedule of presentations and discussions. Non-artists were also invited to the meetings and it became clear that simply performing various critical moves upon art practices, though useful in itself, placed artworks into the space of the exemplar, and did not allow for the emergence of critical challenges by the artwork itself. NIS adopted an approach where artistic practice is considered a coherent and self-logical object from whence new thinking might be stimulated. The demand was not to comprehend the work through various critical frameworks, but to locate its (perhaps non-logical) coherence. This initially critical format was replaced after the first few meetings in favour of a video production platform. The technological frame of video has become greatly automated and made accessible to amateur production and so a relatively horizontal team could be set up around the equipment without there being a hierarchical relationship of competences. The emphasis, however, was not on the final production of a video work, but on the collectivity of the group that was structured through the
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production setting of a film crew. Discussion was now channeled into the communication and coordination of the group rather than individual critique. This desire to move away from a dialectical method that tended towards suspension and reduction of the artwork, lead into a process that sustained a matrix of complex unresolved propositions. This video platform proved very effective for building a field where all the participants interacted and interlocked their various approaches to artworking. Rather than fix upon the singular artwork it was the shared building of a process matrix that underlined this still pedagogic model. In discussing what to do with the resulting filmed material, it was decided that no definitive version would be presented and that a continual process of editing and re-editing would define the work. This tied the existence of the video to the life of the editing community rather than give it full autonomy in a linear production stream. NIS utilised the irregularity in judicial and economic landscapes apparent in marginal zones to mix elements of highly localised reflection with a broadly dispersed interchange of artists. The production of situated knowledge through direct encounters with locations was necessary for the NIS’s auto-pedagogic process to drive their intellectual and material practices rather than teach hypothetically general consensus. The NIS system suggests an uprooting of the traditional, housed education of arts, followed by the implantation of a system of shared learning that acts towards solutions to the spatial unevenness that it participates in. This encourages the double effect of equipping education with the tools to respond to, and propagate new approaches to art practice, and to promote a worldly engagement in social fabric envisioned as a responsive and responsible practice. It is now possible to see NIS as a response to the failure of Contemporary Art and other disciplines to deal with the multifaceted crises that were, and still are, defining our historical epoch. These crises and an inability to properly respond to and integrate them, have led to an art object that is over-determined, ironic and impotent. The problem lies in the
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disengagement of learning from the subjects it treats and the subsequent loss of potential for the learning-mode to also be the knowledgegenerating one. Thinking about NIS brings together two problematic deficiencies from different fields, and allows them to re-think and re-structure each other in order to propose an evolution in how we institute education programmes. The first deficiency that projects like NIS highlight is the marginalisation of rural regions and the failure to engage with them as social and urban spaces that are vital to the functioning of cities. These regions will either be integrated into thinking about ever-rising city-density or collapse into disputes over energy infrastructure. The second deficiency is the dissensus about the institutional delivery of education evidenced by the plethora of independent, grassroots experiments in pedagogic form. The key point is that low-density spaces can offer vital opportunities to think outside of saturated and centralised fields. It promotes thought in a situated, horizontal attitude to knowledge creation, hosted in short-term, low impact programmes in areas of economic decline/restructuring or political contention/forgetfulness. These areas reopen the question of what constitutes knowledge and provide the radical ground for proposing methodological and critical ways of superseding contextual limitations. Hosting in low-density zones will allow knowledge creation to be Outsourced from its usual locus in cities into lowdensity areas - helping to spread access and production of this commodity throughout the urban fabric. By abandoning the city/rural dichotomy and looking at emergence and complexity within urban fabrics, projects like NIS offer a way to institute programs that will contribute to the development of an expanded idea of the Future City; one which must house the majority of the worlds population, a population that will achieve nine billion by 2050.
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RE-EVALUATING RURALITY Woodstock V’s Blair Witch Architecture of congregation and the House in the Woods Double screening: Blair Witch Project and Woodstock Screened on 5th July at 21:00 Treignac Projet
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