FOREWORD
Ellie Abrons
THE FOLLOWING IS TRUE…SORT OF
IMAGE INTERMISSION
EPISODES IN PAINTING SOFTWARE
COMMAND AND CTRL
A HISTORY (OF OUR PLANET)
IMAGE INTERMISSION
EVERYTHING IS SOFTWARE Part I
EVERYTHING IS SOFTWARE Part II
BUILDING A DUMB ROBOT
NOTES ON HASHTAG ARCHITECTURE
ANOTHER ALLEGORY OF SIMULATION
IMAGE INTERMISSION
DRAWING ANOTHER PLANET STRANGER THAN FICTION
Let’s begin with a typical weekday morning: an alarm rings on my iPhone X, running iOS 12.2 and the integrated ‘Clock’ application; the Nest, a ‘smart’ thermostat, kicks on the heat at 7:00am—the time I’ve selected through the proprietary interface; I use my wireless speaker’s custom software to stream the morning news; I check my email and social media feeds; I get a sense of the day’s events by browsing a collection of calendars, all online and many shared over the network with colleagues and partners; I respond to an urgent message that arrives through Slack, a cloud-based, collaborative communication application; I quickly deposit a check to my bank account using their mobile application; I ‘call’ a ride using Lyft, a rideshare company and transportation network accessed by software, and head to the office, arriving by 8:45am.
With each passing day, our experience of the physical world is further shaped by digital interfaces. From personal objects to household fixtures, from buildings to cities, physical things are increasingly connected to digital networks—sensing, recording, communicating, and learning. For architecture, this imbrication has altered our understanding of ‘The Digital.’+1 Conversations regarding the role of computation within architectural design and production are expanding to an interdisciplinary discourse on broad concerns brought about by digital ubiquity. If earlier conversations focused on digital design, parametricism, or digital fabrication, today we’re considering architecture’s role in the formation of our algorithmically-driven and pervasively-networked society and culture.⃞2 There is an urgency to these dialogues, as each day we fold more of our lives into networked technologies that don’t simply reshape our surroundings, but also reshape us—as designers, users, and citizens. If the advent of the digital in architecture initially centered on computer-aided design objects, today we must contend with a digitally-enabled environment that connects all physical things to each other and to us. We live within a digital ecology that defines not only how we work, but increasingly how we think, behave, and relate to one another.
The dominant mode through which we experience this vast digital ecology, and thus our everyday world, is software. Lev Manovich, a leader in the emerging field of software studies, summarizes software’s totalizing force when he writes “[It] has become our interface to the world, to others, to our memory and our imagination—a universal language through which our world speaks, and a universal engine on which the world runs.” 3 Software is a computational medium that translates code (accessible to
When I was 10, my dad worked in desktop publishing. He’d occasionally bring home CDs with some software he was working with and would install it on our family computer. My favorite pastime was playing with programs like Adobe PageMaker, Macromedia Flash, and Jasc PaintShopPro to make shapes and animations and print out my results. I wouldn’t get a video game system until two years later, so for me, our family computer was the primary device for playing and drawing. Creative software was my introduction to the world of computing. By the time we got a dial-up modem installed, I was the one teaching my family how to surf the net.
Today, I’m still dependent on software for creative work, but also for communicating, shopping, navigating, banking, and almost all other daily tasks. I’m sure you are, too. It certainly feels like our planet runs on a seemingly infinite variety of software applications. Most industries rely on software for its precision and speed, others for its ability to automate and organize tasks. Almost everyone uses email, wi-fi, and Internet browsers. In fact, it is becoming quite difficult to find an electronic object that doesn’t use some kind of software. + 1 We live in a world where newer car models use onboard computers to optimize traction control on slippery roads and home HVAC systems use software to schedule heating and cooling periods. Examples of software’s various roles are everywhere and at every scale: it manages world economies and tracks movement of all things around the planet; it sets your morning alarm and pushes notifications to your phone. But all of that still sheds little light on the subject. In all its manifestations the fickle thing eludes specificity. We know it facilitates most of our daily actions from the micro to the macro scale, but what on earth is it? Is it just code and algorithms? Where does it begin and end? Unfortunately, those questions are out of the scope of this book and my own expertise. Defining software has evolved into an ontological problem better suited for philosophical texts, which this book is not. Nevertheless, many of the observations included here are heavily annotated with references from authors actively pursuing this ontological quandary. ⃞ 2 What this book provides instead is a loose interpretation of software’s cultural effects; a kind of provisional definition resulting from critical analyses of it in action. Moreover, these observations come from the point of view of architectural design, a field so deeply saturated with digital applications that work itself is increasingly synonymous with specific programs. Architecture in this context becomes a prototypical discipline entangled in acts of translation between applications, file formats, machines, and interfaces. Establishing this perspective allows for a
nals its demise. Though the company remains a leader in broadcast graphics until the early 2000s, it certainly does not become a household name. Photoshop, on the other hand, does, and Adobe becomes the de facto software developer for most digital creative fields: image editing, digital painting, graphic design, publishing, and digital printing. Quantel ceases to exist in 2015. 6
2006
NEW YORK, NY. As a follow-up to his famous Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, art critic Brian O’Doherty writes Studio and Cube, an analysis of the spaces in which famous 20th-century artists produced their work.▧ 7 His primary concern is how the artist’s studio influences the production and exhibition of the work itself. He asks: how did the gallery become the ubiquitous “white cube”? What happens when a studio space becomes a work of art?
O’Doherty analyzes studios belonging to some of the most famous artists of the 20th century—Rauschenberg, Warhol, Rothko, Mondrian, among others—and concludes that the space in which art is produced inevitably and necessarily has an effect on the work. Sometimes it reflects the author’s neuroses; other times it provides a larger, more concep-
“While we are indeed ‘being digital,’ the actual forms of this ‘being’ come from software.”
– Lev Manovich+ 1
“Interfaces determine user behaviors by projecting illusions that are apparently neutral and have evidently good intentions, such as clearing a path through a darkly unknowable space for the movements of the will.”
–
Ryan Kuo
Is software political? And if so, what parts of it are political? Historically, software has eluded critical scrutiny due to its complexity and opaqueness; computers are typically regarded as black box instruments that reveal only what is helpful for users. Yet, as we are fully aware, software pervades all aspects of daily life from the time our alarms wake us up to the last email we send out. Given this reality, the power dynamics at play between computer programmers, technology corporations, and users must be a part of contemporary discourse on the subject. These power dynamics constitute what I call the politics of software: a flux of sovereign relationships that exists throughout the digital milieu. Its participants range from ideological figures (your Steve Jobses, Bill Gateses, Elon Musks, etc.) to GUI designers to end-users. Most of us will undoubtedly fit in the last category since, as software users, we continuously hand over a lot of power to interfaces. Sometimes this takes the form of lengthy user agreements or privacy statements, but more often than not the exchange of sovereignty in the digital realm takes place at the point of purchase: when we select which tool to use. The decision to choose one software over another is a political decision that inevitably shapes the products we make. How then should architects and designers who work primarily with software engage digital tools on a political level, beyond the technological or the representational?
For many in design professions and design education, work is synonymous with specific brands of software. As Lev Manovich points out in Software Takes Command: “the new ways of media access, distribution, analysis, generation, and manipulation all come from software. Which also means that they are the result of the particular choices made by individuals, companies, and consortiums who develop software.”⃞ 2 These choices, I argue, result in discrete allegiances, user groups, and a kind of blind faith. For example: while most users do not need to know exactly how image editing software manipulates image kernels, they
POSTDIGITAL (HUMAN-CENTRIC AGGREGATES)
POSTORTHOGRAPHIC (SILICON-CENTRIC AGGREGATES)
1. Spectrum from Postdigital to Postorthographic.
ing knowledge of specific digital processes both virtual and physical. The result of this synthesis is clearly evident in Abrons and Fure’s work with T+E+A+M, but it also parallels the work of artist John Gerrard. Originally trained as a sculptor, Gerrard uses video-game software to produce large scale dioramas of real-world spaces. His pieces are typically sited in politically complex situations, and often allude to imbalances in contemporary power dynamics. Gerrard’s most recent installation, Western Flag is a projected digital simulation of a flag pole that constantly emits black smoke in the shape of a flag. ▥ 12 The scene is austere, yet hyper-realistic. It uses thousands of images as textures mapped on a 3D recreation of the site in Spindletop, Texas. The result is so detailed that passersby might confuse the footage for a live feed of the site.
Compare this to T+E+A+M’s A Range Life project. Materially speaking, both T+E+A+M and Gerrard operate in similar ways. Both explore scenographic effects facilitated by advanced 3D-modeling technologies, such as texture mapping, physical light simulations, and high-fidelity meshes. Both combine site-specific components (photogrammetry) with computational processes (rendering engines) to curate new cultural associations. But where should their work be placed on our postdigital-postorthographic spectrum? I would argue that both practices converge toward center. The complexity of the material effects built from equal parts simulated particles and captured images demonstrates a desire to blend both physical and virtual assemblages to produce something else. At the same time, the projects never relinquish the authority of advanced graphics engines.
1.
IBM’s chess-master Watson, rely on precise conditional statements measured against varied possible outcomes. Being only 29 lines of code long, our bot is neither at the level of Watson, nor does it possess any conversational potential.▤ 5 Nevertheless, it poses a set of questions dealing with architectural rhetoric, critical discourse, and the ephemerality of certain mediums (not to mention discipline-specific inside jokes and other oddities). In a cultural climate where even some world leaders conduct policy primarily through 140-character snippets, 6 what is the future of critical discourse? Must it also adapt itself to an accelerated mode of information dissemination? And do we even want our objects to have conversational intelligence? While it might be quite absurd for a twitter robot, living in the cloud, to pretend to theorize on the discipline of architecture, it does provide a platform from which to talk about what a “smart” object—as opposed to a “dumb” object—really is, and what differentiates real intelligence from weak intelligence.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
– Alan Kay
Alan Kay’s famous soundbite from a 1971 Xerox PARC meeting presents a bizarre chicken-and-egg paradox. It goes like this: which came first, the science fiction representation of the object or the desire for specific objects themselves? In other words, is the plethora of technological advancements a direct result of anthropomorphic inevitabilities or are we simply trying to realize objects, vehicles, and environments we saw in science fiction representations in the mid-twentieth century? Is it possible that media and literature are equally as responsible as engineering for our current architectural reality?
With the rise of Web 2.0, advances in graphics visualization, and their attendant cultural shifts, aspects of contemporary urban life increasingly resemble science fiction. The pervasiveness of app culture and recent factual and fictional examples of artificial intelligence (AI) augmenting the built environment suggest that engineering advancements exist as part of a tight feedback loop between consumer expectations—largely influenced by Hollywood—and scientific discoveries. Therefore, in order to fully understand, historicize, or speculate on the future of interactions between humans and machines, we must look closer at the cycle of fiction-to-fact that typically occurs. Taking the domestic realm as an example, we can identify a series of uncanny, artificially intelligent, technologies which reflect human desires for subservience, assistance, and interconnectedness. Here, AI can serve as a case study through which to analyze the effect of fiction on scientific advancements and their subsequent dissemination into the consumer world, ultimately constituting a history based less on fact and more on media, image, and variable levels of reality.
SCIENCE AND FICTION
“The [computational] Stack is not only a design and engineering program but a political-philosophical maneuver as well.”
– Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
In 1953, Philip K. Dick published a short story in the science fiction magazine, Imagination: Stories of Science and Fantasy. The piece, titled “Mr. Spaceship,” revolves around a military operation to embed a human brain into a spacecraft in order for it to ward off an invading enemy’s military armada. Arguing that having an “intelligent” spaceship with human intu-
