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Research Journal
Andreea Iliescu
Soundscapes of Resistance
Andreea Iliescu 245953
Worlding within the Ruins of Racial Capitalism
Tutors
Dele Adeyemo, Ibiye Camp and Damaso Randulfe
MA Architecture Royal College of Art 21/22
Research Journal
ADS 2 Black Horizons
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RCA 21/22
Andreea Iliescu
Abstract “Soundscapes of Resistance” proposes to work at the intersection between underground rave culture and the oppressive logic of surveillance happening in the Amazon fulfillment centre.
This happens in light of the recent events taking place in Amazon fulfillment centres in the USA, where the first Amazon Labour Union was achieved in April, 2022 in Staten Island, NY. However, the success was short-lived, for in May, 2022, in a different warehouse in Phoenix, Arizona, less than 50% workers voted to form a union as a result of Amazon’s counteracting propaganda against workers’ unions.
Learnings from Rave Culture 1) TEMPORARY SPACE - disrupting and reconfiguring space for a specific time and duration. 2) OPACITY AT DIFFERENT LEVELS - the idea of secrecy and concealment by distributing the sensible (what is seen or not seen, what is heard and not heard, what is felt and not felt etc) 3) SOUND as a driving force in defining how space works and is produced.
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Building on the genealogical relationship between post-industrial landscapes and countercultures of resistance, I take three key learnings from rave culture and apply them in the warehouse typology to effectively disrupt the surveillance and put Amazon workers in a position to negotiate with the company with the ultimate aim to achieve a union. The project proposes a coreography of micro-strategies of resistance which are to be implemented in different warehouses over a period of two weeks in order to effectively form unions across the network.
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Contents RCA 21/22
Introduction
Andreea Iliescu
Studio brief
Project Overview Amazon Underground rave culture Precedents and references Jill Stoner, Towards a Minor Architecture Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space Michel de Certeau, Absenteeism, La Perruque Revital Cohen and Tuur van Ballen, 75 WATT Jenn Nkiru, Black to Techno Soundscapes of Resistance Methodology Employed Mediums Spatial strategy
Research Limitations Future applications and project relevance Appendix Bibliography
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Narrative structure
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Studio brief RCA 21/22 Soundscapes of Resistance
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Ever since the plantation and new-world slavery crystallised the structure of racial capitalism, ‘whiteness’ — 'the ownership of the Earth forever and ever', to use W.E.B. Du Bois famous formulation — has dictated the production of global-world-space, with architecture acting as the instrument that gives form to this world. Before carbon replaced renewable forms of energy as the primary resource sustaining human existence, black life was the world’s inexhaustible resource for exploiting the produce of solar energy. The seemingly-endless supply of kidnapped Africans who were transported to plantations in the Americas drove Europe’s industrial revolution. In practice, black slaves were employed as intelligent machines, transforming relatively small amounts of energy derived from renewable food crops, into an array of complex and repetitive industrial functions. The enslaved black body became a powerful technology that possessed the ability to think and reproduce itself. Yet, as Cedric Robinson highlights in Black Marxism, a radical thought and practice produced by the oppressed emerged in the sites of colonial exploitation.
This year, ADS2 will analyse the ruins of racial capitalism as a means to understand the role of modern production and consumption cycles in producing space. In departing from a study of the spatial logics of supply chain capitalism, each ADS2 project will seek to develop a spatial strategy for a specific territory, spatial product, or infrastructure of ruination. Learning from the global south and drawing on black, indigenous and other– than–human epistemologies, students will engage in the collective development of a new paradigm for architectural production, which explores the possibility of multispecies life through non-extractive practices of worlding.
Andreea Iliescu
ADS2 21/22 Black Horizons: Worlding within the ruins of racial capitalism
Dele Adeyemo, Black Horizons, film still
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Introduction In the spatial proposition I have decided to focus on one moment in this global network :the global typology of the fulfillment centre warehouse. The decision for the project has been made in light of the recent votes in one warehouse in NY staten island in April 2022 when the first Amazon workers union was achieved in the company’s 27 years of existence. However, this success was shortlived – for a few weeks later in another warehouse in Phoenix, Arizona workers did not manage to unionize, as less than 50% of the workers voted YES as a result of Amazon’s propaganda and pressure against forming a workers union. Thus, what is happening in these warehouses is an urgent pressing question: Amazon is an efficient model for the planning, control and policing of the spaces, which prevents workers from unionizing. Subverting the balance of distribution of power in these spaces would allow the workers to be in a position to negotiate for the bettering of the working conditions. As an architect, I have conducted a detailed spatial tudy of how the Amazon warehouse typology is designed and works. The architecture of the warehouse is not comprised only of the walls, floor and roof of the building itself; but rather, it is a complex ecology of systems of surveillance that has to do with very efficiently designed patterns of use – human and non-human actors, workers and machines that generate an ultra efficient system for the functioning of the global network.
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Underground rave in abandoned power plant, London
Andreea Iliescu
This year I have been studying the Amazon phenomenon – a complex networked architecture that is not confined to a specific site, but a global network of logistics, distribution and cycles of consumption.
Amazon warehouse celebrates Prime day
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Considering the uneven power relations of the space, where workers are monitored through AI, not allowed toilet or lunch breaks and are forced into intense working conditions, the aim of the project is to propose a distributed intervention across multiple warehouses over a period of 2 weeks. By deploying the architectural technologies of Amazon in a way that reverts power relations they allow for a temporary disruption which effectively stops the cycle of production for a short time, thus putting the workers in a position to negotiate. The proposal is a 21st century strike, that is global, that is networked and that fosters new modes of spatial production.
1) disrupting and reconfiguring space for a specific time and duration hence, (temporary space), 2) opacity at different levels - the idea of secrecy and concealment by distributing the sensible (what is seen or not seen, what is heard and not heard, what is felt and not felt etc) 3) and sound as a driving force in defining how space works and is produced.
I have borrowed Jill Stoner’s concept of minor architectures – “minor architectures are lines of escape through the majority rule of architecture’s myths. They reveal the latent externalities within architecture’s enclosures, weaken its status as visible object, break the stable identity of the architect subject and expose the nature within.” ‘Minor architectures are, in fact, opportunistic events in response to latent but powerful desires to undo structures of power.’ They are intentionally ‘improvised, fractional, stripped of decoration and even of grammar.’ The project comes from a strong desire to undo structures of power; therefore, the proposal is based on opportunistic events since I have these AI surveillance technologies here, I propose to revert and alter them to give architectural agency to the workers.
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Moreover, the typology of the warehouse is historically connected to another kind of event: underground raves which have their origin in 1980s Detroit – a post-industrial landscape. Now – underground raves are a means to revert power relations by engaging people in complex operations of finding secret locations and temporarily altering space without authorities finding out. Thus, building on the genealogical relationship between underground rave culture and post-industrial landscapes and global economies (which effectively is the context of how Amazon has emerged as a global phenomenon), I propose to use the following 3 main attributes which characterize rave culture and use them to intervene within the pre-existences of the Amazon wh in order to produce other spaces:
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Amazon surveillance and robotics in Fulfillment Centres (from left to right): KIVA Robotics, Surveillance Cameras, Robotic Arm, Amazon PRIME Scout
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Research Questions The project proposes to pose the following research questions:
How can the architectural analysis of the warehouse typology inform an effective disruptive strategy to allow for the conditions of Amazon workers to unionize? Temporature analysis at a rave
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What spatial consequences does the historical relationship between post-industrial landscapes and underground rave culture have on Amazon workers’ union?
human-machine systems, Detroit Institute of Arts
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The conveyor belt system, which knows to send each bin to the correct packer.
Amazon.com, Inc. is an American multinational technology company which focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as “one of the most influential economic and cultural forces in the world”, and is one of the world’s most valuable brands.It is one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
Amazon has earned a reputation as a disruptor of well-established industries through technological innovation and mass scale.As of 2021, it is the world’s largest online retailer and marketplace, smart speaker provider, cloud computing service through AWS,livestreaming service through Twitch, and Internet company as measured by revenue and market share.In 2021, it surpassed Walmart as the world’s largest retailer outside of China, driven in large part by its paid subscription plan, Amazon Prime, which has over 200 million subscribers worldwide. [20]It is the second-largest private employer in the United States.
Ref. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)
Amazon -
An overview
Amazon also distributes a variety of downloadable and streaming content through its Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Music, Twitch, and Audible units. It publishes books through its publishing arm, Amazon Publishing, film and television content through Amazon Studios, and has been the owner of film and television studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer since March 2022. It also produces consumer electronics—most notably, Kindle e-readers, Echo devices, Fire tablets, and Fire TVs. Amazon has been criticized for customer data collection practices, a toxic work culture, tax avoidance, and anti-competitive behavior.
Amazon Fulfillment Centre, Phoenix, Arizona, USA.
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Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos from his garage in Bellevue, Washington,on July 5, 1994. Initially an online marketplace for books, it has expanded into a multitude of product categories: a strategy that has earned it the moniker The Everything Store.It has multiple subsidiaries including Amazon Web Services (cloud computing), Zoox (autonomous vehicles), Kuiper Systems (satellite Internet), Amazon Lab126 (computer hardware R&D). Its other subsidiaries include Ring, Twitch, IMDb, and Whole Foods Market. Its acquisition of Whole Foods in August 2017 for US$13.4 billion substantially increased its footprint as a physical retailer.
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Unsafe working conditions RCA 21/22
The company's fulfillment centers employ hundreds of thousands of people, offering pay and benefits that are competitive versus other retail-industry jobs. But the work can be grueling, some staff don't stick around long, and there are growing efforts to unionize this modern blue-collar workforce.
Cummings said injuries are common among her colleagues, and she often experiences close calls. A few weeks ago, a pin sticking out of the conveyor belt tore off one of her work gloves, almost taking her hand with it. She also said some packages that drop on to her conveyor belt from the chute are either too large to be on it or improperly packaged, so the package’s contents burst open on the belt, which she said recently injured one of her colleagues.
Andreea Iliescu
Is Amazon a difficult place to work?
Rina Cummings has worked three 12-hour shifts every week at Amazon’s gargantuan New York City warehouse, called JFK8, on Staten Island since it first began operations in late 2018. As a sorter on the outbound ship dock, her job is to inspect and scan a mandated rate of 1,800 Amazon packages an hour – 30 per minute – that are sent through a chute and transported on a conveyor belt before leaving the facility for delivery. “There are days I say I’m just at the mercy of God,” said Cummings. She said the only changes Amazon implemented after the high injury report was published was to install video monitors around the warehouse that tell workers safety is the company’s number one priority. “There has been no real change. There are still injuries. They were saying the report is not accurate, but it’s just a way for them to avoid responsibility,” she said.
“People get fired regularly,” she said. “It just takes two or three write-ups, depending on the severity. You can get fired for anything.”
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When packages, especially envelopes with liquid, burst on the conveyor belt, Cummings often has to stop the belt to clean up the mess, but is still expected to hit her hourly rate. She’s been written up once for missing her rate because several of these incidents happened in the same week.
A worker sorts through items and places orders at the Amazon fulfillment center on Staten Island.
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Amazon workers protesting against working conditions, Arizona, USA Amazon warehouse pickers in Fulfillment Centre in Milton Keynes, UK
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Illustration alluding to Pete David, Amazon warehouse worker who died of a heart attack at the fulfillment centre in Phoenix, Arizona Picker in the Amazon Fulfillment Centre in Staten Island, NY
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Surveillance Technology Andreea Iliescu
Amazon warehouse workers have criticized management's use of technology to closely monitor their productivity. They could look to past examples of unions addressing similar concerns, says UC Berkeley researcher Lisa Kresge.
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Courtenay Brown works in a giant refrigerated section of the Avenel, N.J., Amazon Fresh warehouse, sometimes 10 hours a day, making sure groceries find their way to the right delivery truck. Brown, 31, said she is measured by a metric that calculates the amount of items her team loads to trucks along with the number of people working that shift. Amazon, which keeps tabs on workers through the handheld scanners they use to track inventory, regularly presses her to move more items with fewer people, she said. There are cameras everywhere. “They basically can see everything you do, and it’s all to their benefit,” Brown said. “They don’t value you as a human being. It’s demeaning.”
Amazon workers being surveillanced, author’s own
The tech giant uses those scanners, along with computers at workstations and software developed to track their performance, to a degree that critics say is unlike any other company. High-tech monitoring presses warehouse staff to meet onerous metrics and can lead to injuries, workers and regulators have said.
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That sentiment, that Amazon’s culture of surveillance constitutes inhumane working conditions, has become fuel for unionization efforts to organize hundreds of thousands of workers at the country’s second-largest private employer. Union organizers who spoke with The Washington Post pointed to strict productivity goals and high-tech monitoring as major factors in driving employees to seek representation.
Workers behind the union efforts have focused significant energy countering the company’s tracking — something they also say stymies their efforts to organize. A tracking device like those that workers in warehouses have to wear to monitor their output. Photograph: Venice Biennale
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Amazon surveillance technology, author’s own
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A team of Amazon workers has forced the technology giant to recognise a trade union in the US for the first time. Workers at a New York warehouse voted 55% in favour of joining the Amazon Labor Union. The group is led by former Amazon worker Chris Smalls, who made his name protesting against safety conditions at the retail giant during the pandemic. Mr Smalls' victory marks a major defeat for Amazon, which had fiercely fought against unionisation. However, in Alabama, where Amazon was facing a separate union drive, the company appeared to have fended off activists in a tight contest in which challenged ballots could yet overturn that result. Together, the two elections mark a milestone for activists, who have long decried labour practices at Amazon, the country's second largest employer.
Amazon has already poured resources into fighting the unionising efforts, which it sees as an obstacle to business flexibility and warehouse efficiency.
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Amazon Labour Union(ALU)
Officials have said the company offers competitive pay and benefits and believes it is better to work directly with workers. In meetings about the vote, representatives questioned union leaders’ ability to win more in contract negotiations. Amazon said it may challenge the results, citing the timing of a decision by the National Labor Relations Board to sue the company last month alleging unfair labour practices in New York. As part of its statement, it shared comments by two of the country’s most powerful business lobbies also raising objections, including a letter from the National Retail Federation to congressional leaders that called for an investigation of the matter.
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Mr Smalls emerged from the vote count looking tired but jubilant, and popped open a bottle of champagne he was handed by supporters. "We did whatever it took to connect with these workers," he told the crowd, recounting an against-the-odds campaign that started with "two tables, two chairs and a tent" and relied on an online fundraiser for money. https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2022/0503/Amazon-union-losesStaten-Island-vote-after-earlier-success#:~:text=The%20staff%20
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The first Amazon Union (ALU) was formed in April 2022, when Jeff Bezos travelled to space and two workers in the warehouse of Staten Island (NY) managed to sign people up and inform them about joining a union to help protect their rights considering the diffcult working conditions in Amazon fulfillment centres. As such, in the 28 year history of Amazon, the first Union appeared this year and it was a hard and collective effort because the company was doing everything to counteract the workers through anti-union propaganda. Chris Smalls, a former Amazon employee who got fired because in 2020 he conducted a walkout in the Amazon warehouse as a result of the lack of PPE and covid protection equipment, was the person responsible for forming the first ALU. He then got fired and he managed to fight for the union to be opened later this year with the help of a good friend who was still working In the warehouse. They spoke to people, organizing zoom and meetings outside of the closest bus stop in staten island where people were commuting home.
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Mr Smalls said he was undaunted by the challenges ahead. The 33-year-old had worked for Amazon for more than four years before the company fired him in 2020, after his coronavirus protest, citing quarantine violations. He established the Amazon Labor Union last year, calling for higher pay, stronger medical benefits, anti-discrimination policies and better leave among other changes. The 2,654 to 2,131 victory gives his group the right to negotiate a contract with Amazon for the roughly 8,000 workers at the Staten Island warehouse.
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"There's no doubt in my mind we're going to be successful in that one as well," he said.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2022/0503/Amazon-union-losesStaten-Island-vote-after-earlier-success#:~:text=The%20staff%20at%20
Organisers said Amazon made critical mistakes ahead of the vote, such as pushing to reverse policies relaxed under Covid, including allowing workers to keep their mobiles with them while working.
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His team is also behind a second union campaign at a smaller warehouse in the same industrial park, which is scheduled for a vote later this month.
Amazon workers at a warehouse on New York City’s Staten Island overwhelmingly rejected a union bid on Monday, dealing a blow to organizers who last month pulled off the first successful U.S. organizing effort in the e-commerce giant’s history. This time around, warehouse workers cast 618 votes – or about 62% – against the union, giving Amazon enough support to fend off a second labor win and raise questions as to whether the first victory was just a fluke. According to the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees the process, 380 workers – or 38% – voted in favor of the grassroots union. Turnout was 61%, with about 1,600 workers eligible to vote, according to a voter list provided by Amazon.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2022/0503/Amazon-union-losesStaten-Island-vote-after-earlier-success#:~:text=The%20staff%20
A short lived victory A separate election held last month gave the ALU a surprise victory when workers at a different Staten Island facility voted in favor of unionizing. That was a first for Seattle-based Amazon in the United States.
For the union, Monday’s defeat will surely sting. A second labor win was expected to fuel more organizing at the nation’s second largest employer, and cement the power and influence of the ALU. But despite the momentum after the first win, it was unclear whether the group would be able to replicate its success. Organizers said they had lost some support at the warehouse after filing for an election in February because they directed more energy to the nearby facility that voted to unionize last month. There were also fewer organizers working at the warehouse – roughly 10 compared with the nearly 30 employed at the other warehouse. Some experts believed part-time workers, who organizers say the smaller facility relies on heavily, would potentially offer less union support because they might have other sources of income outside Amazon. Kate Andrias, professor of law at Columbia University and an expert in labor law, said it can also be harder to organize part-time workers because they “have less of a stake in improving the workplace” and “may be less likely to have strong relationships with coworkers.”
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The few ballots that were challenged by either the company or the nascent Amazon Labor Union, which led the organizing effort, were not enough to sway the outcome. Both parties have until next Monday to file objections. The ALU is weighing whether to object, said Seth Goldstein, a union attorney who provides pro-bono legal assistance to the group.
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The spatial proposition is undoing the logic of the Amazon wh typology to allow for a temporary disruption and reconfiguration of these spaces based on these 3 learnings from RAVE CULTURE: temporary space, opacity, sound etc. I have designed a multi-scalar strategy based on microinterventions that allows for effective planning and delivery of a 21st century Strike that allows workers to be in the position to negotiate with the company. My role as an architect derives from 2 key references: “Towards a minor architecture” by Jill Stoner and Henri Lefebvre’s production of space, which enable me to inscribe my project in the context of the studio: racial capitalism and last year’s topic of logistics.
1) OPACITY AND CONCEALMENT: a) the first surveillance technology in place is the wristband – which is equipped with an ultrasonic device that tracks workers movements and lets them know where to pick the products from. I counteract this by hacking the wristband to allow for a digital reconstruction of the space in real time so that workers can see where line managers and surveillance robots are located in the space; this enables them to have access to information which is only available to managers. Also, the wristband performs another important function: all the interventions are designed into a MANUAL OF ACTIONS FOR A GLOBAL AMAZON STRIKE, which will be circulated and distributed among
2) SOUND: a) a reconfigured seating space in between the storage racks, which allows for pockets of privacy thus forming an audio-visual barrier. Workers can effectively meet there to have a secret chat or to use the phone because they are not allowed to otherwise. By removing some of the boxes and reconfiguring the rack otherwise I can allow for this pocket of privacy to take place. b) There is a voice recognition system in place which listens to keywords that workers say (which allude to the idea of forming a union). Most notably, the keywords are: strike, living wage, revolt. When workers are heard to say these words, they are laid off from the job. I thus propose to hack this system through reverse speech so that the system pronounces these words itself. When connected to the Amazon scout robots (which patrol
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REPORT OF INTERVENTIONS:
b) by hacking the surveillance in the stowing area, workers can shift position of objects on shelves. Amazon functions by efficiency; as opposed to a regular warehouse which stores products by category, Amazon mixes categories up in the same shelving unit in order to allow for more efficiency if the same product can be found on multiple shelves, the worker (picker) can get to the closest one more rapidly. By effectively disrupting this efficiency of storing products, I can interfere with this ultra efficient model and thus allow for a form of strike where each worker alters the order of the space temporarily.
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Microstrategies of resistance
the floor to ensure it is clear), I can allow for a different type of spatial reconfiguration through sound: robots effectively forming a barricade and blocking the warehouse doors to disrupt deliveries – thus effectively altering the network that AMAZON is based on – which includes not only warehouses, but also shipping routes, delivery workers and the homes of the consumers. By effectively disrupting this, I can interfere with the efficiency and therefore delay delivery times. 3.
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TEMPORARILY ALTERING AND RECONFIGURING SPACE:
b) Ultimately, the overall coreography showing how these moments are intertwined and connect with one The 5 micro-strategies and their sequence in the overall coreography. another. The actors in the space (human/nonhuman, AI, machines) are shown in the space during a working day. This is followed by the disruptions that I am proposing to illustrate the impact that my strategy would have in the space of the warehouse.
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a) KIVA robots transporting stowing racks and cones. A spatial strategy that is networked at different scales: during a 12 hour shift, a worker moves the cone 50cm once a day on their way to the workstation. Then another one moves another cone 1m to the right – in order to disrupt the effective functioning of the robot as a form of striking; a form of sit-in in order to bypass the controls and limitations imposed by Amazon to unionize.
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There are a few types of facilities that make up the vast network of Amazon’s warehouses: Crossdock Centers. Containers from foreign vendors can be held at a crossdock facility until more stock is needed at the fulfillment center. Fulfillment Centers. Sortation Centers. Delivery Stations. Prime Now Hubs. Prime Air Hub.
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Plans of Amazon Fulfillment Centres: 1) Plymouth, 2) Arizona, 3) New York.
Amazon’s massive Distribution Networks in one giant visualization.
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The big Fulfillment Centres can be as long as the size of 6 football pitches. The typology I have chosen to focus on is, however, the length of 2 - I was interested to work at a more manageable, human scale in order to give agency to the workers and focus on empowering them through my architectural agency so as to foster new modes of spatial production.
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2.Cones obstructing KIVA Stowing 5.Amazon Scouts forming barricade upon hearing Alexa
(voice recognition sysem)
1.Wristband connecting workers across the wider network Stowing
Stowing
Reception
Reception
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Shipping
Picking and Packing Picking and Packing
4.Reconfigured seating space (audio-visual barrier)
Conveyor Belt System
Conveyor Belt System
3.Reconfigured object display on shelves Storage
Loading and Unloading
Storage
Amazon Fulfilment Centre, Plymouth
Loading and Unloading
Amazon Fulfilment Centre, Plymouth PROPOSED INTERVENTIONS - Overall Coreography
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Shipping
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Underground Rave Culture
“Respect due. Good music speaks for itself. No Sleevenotes required. Just enjoy it. Cut the crap. Back to basics. What else is there to add?”
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- Kodwo Eshun,
More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction
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Cover and Fig.1 ,Moog DFAM & Mother-32 synthesizer, author’s own
Since I moved to the city of London, I have been fascinated by how former power plants, factories and warehouses have assumed a new function — the club- diametrically opposed to their original industrial use: dissipating excess energy through affective and physical work without obvious utility, such as dancing, the chemically accelerated depletion of dopamine and serotonin stocks as a result of the intake of psychotropics, and nonreproductive sex. Nowadays, we live in an energetic surplus so far beyond our requirement for survival and reproduction that the vast majority of human activity is devoted to pursuits that fall under the categories of ritual and ceremony: the seemingly irrational sacrifice of time and resources for no obvious gain other than leisure.
A Tale of Three Cities The story of how electronic music emerged as a worldwide movement is a tale of three cities, specifically Detroit, Chicago and New York, with their corresponding techno, house and garage genres. Detroit, in particular, is the place where techno music was born in the 1980s – a city hit hard by the fall of the automobile industry. In a landscape of abandoned buildings and vacant houses, the techno aesthetic took shape, drawing inspiration from the promised hope of innovation, the technologies of the future and the utopias of science fiction.[12] As a result of unemployment of the working class, techno appeared as a form of resistance against industrial collapse, with gatherings hosted in the sanctuary of former power plants and warehouses. In effect, the industrial workers who had been laid-off from their jobs were taking over the means of production and making something for themselves [13] – this time, transforming their former workplace into a space of leisure and hedonism through machine-made sounds and dance. Detroit: Ruin Porn, Machine Soul City.
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How did the industrial typology of factories, warehouses and power plants lead to the programme of ‘the club’ to occur in the first place? What was historically so particular about these types of buildings that allowed their transformation into nightclubs? In order to answer these questions, we need to go back to where it all started.
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“It is the emptiness in the city that puts the wholeness in the music. It’s like a blind person can smell and touch and can sense things that a person with eyes would never notice. And I tend to think a lot of us here in Detroit have been blind: blinded by what was happening around us. And we sort of took those other senses and enhanced them, and that’s how the music developed.” - Derrick May [14]
[14] Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journery through Rave Music and Dance Culture, p. 12.
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Detroit: Ruin Porn, Machine Soul City - a landscape of abandoned buildings; Albert Kahn was the architect of Detroit, having designed the Henri Ford Company.
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In 1989 Britain, at the height of Thatcherism, the country was more polarized than ever. Margaret Thatcher was about to celebrate ten years of political power and the country was intoxicated on promises of economic mobility and a growing middle class. In London, the wealthy were celebrating lavishly their financial success – for it was the era of the individual. As corporate and financial power began to assert itself, workers unions were smashed. Thatcher’s embrace of rapid neoliberalism impoverished large sections of the UK, creating a permanent underclass through strict austerity and the gutting of industries, especially in England. As a result, when the music travelled to the UK, it did not rise to prominence directly in London, but in the industrial cities in the North of England, most notably Manchester.[15] Despite the political apathy and despair that gripped the country, the cultural soil was right for a new wave to emerge – one fuelled by a deep ecstatic need for freedom and deep macrosocial and transpersonal experience – the phenomenon of ‘rave’ was born. It did not emerge as a response against the status-quo, but rather, it rose organically as a reaction to the political zeitgeist - a culture adjacent to the mainstream, born as an antidote to the alienation
Raves were spontaneous events which occurred in public spaces such as abandoned and derelict power plants and warehouses or outdoors in the fields and forests. There was no real corporate structure operating behind the scenes. Hence, raves demonstrated the human capability to cooperate and used non-vertical power structures and mutual aid in order to pull off complex operations, such as setting up events without authorities finding out about them.
Film Still, Jeremy Deller ‘Everybody in the place’
[15] Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journery through Rave Music and Dance Culture, p. 35. [16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid. [18] Jeremy Deller, Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain, 1984-1992’, 2018.
Nevertheless, after the fall of Thatcherism, authorities started to grant club owners entertainment licenses, since their intention was to interfere with unlicensed raves; this led to the club typology to emerge as a safe haven, where people could be whoever they wanted to be (this time, under legal parametres) . Very much similar to a church, where people support one another and share common values, the nightclub as a typology informally achieved the status of an institution – a place that was validating underrepresented communities (most notably, subcultures, queer and people of colour), thus giving them agency on a social level. As Jeremy Deller brilliantly points out in his documentary “Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992”, the emergence of electronic music and the popularization of the nightclub in the 80s and 90s was, in effect, like the beginning of a new religion.
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and despair that people were feeing. [16]
Having gained momentum and popularity, the music travelled from the USA to Europe – particularly to the UK, where it was defined as a cultural movement.
Andreea Iliescu
RCA 21/22
From USA to Europe
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Thus, the festive moment of a rave celebrates liberation from preestablished order and marks the temporary suspension of hierarchy, norms and privileges. [22] I would argue that this turns the nightlife venue, whether or not licensed, into a space of important political activity, since it allows for a democratic opportunity where people are in control of the powers at play. But what is the freedom happening at an underground rave and how exactly does the sound become a part of that? DJ Lynnee Denise talks about the importance of “moving together”; she argues that tracks that have a particular beat to them that encourage ways of collective movement.[23]
Thus, music - as an embodied experience - acts directly upon and is literally felt by the body. The mere centrality of the body in rave culture is itself transgressive. Binary concepts such as mind/body always entail hierarchy, and throughout much of Western philosophy and religion, the body has been coded as untamed, impure and subordinated to the intellectual and spiritual activities of the mind and soul. Thus, rave culture inverts this hierarchy and celebrates Dionysian principles (emotional and ecstatic) over Apollonian ones (reasoned and structured). [24]
Dancing bodies, Procession towards the rave, Electronic: From Kraftwerk to the Chemical Brothers, Design Museum exhibition, 2020. [21] Brian L. Ott, Mixed Messages: Resistance and Reappropriation in Rave Culture, p.250. [22] Brewster, B., & Broughton, F. (2000). Last night a dj saved my life: the history of the disc jockey. New York: Grove Press. [23] DJ Lynnee Denise, Sonic Refusal, International Lecture Series RCA, April 2021
[24] Brian L. Ott., p.255. [25] Stallybrass, P., & White, A. (1986). The politics and poetics of transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. [26] Reynolds, Energy flash, p.47.
What is more, bodies can, of course, be coded in a variety of ways, and the image of the raving body suggests a second level of transgressiveness. The body is a key site of social control and therefore among the most disciplined sites within any social structure. However, during raves, social control seems to be dismantled; the temporary erasure of individuality furnished by trance, is the loss of self control, and therefore, the pleasure of the body out of control.[25] Ultimately, having spoken about psychotropic technologies, it is crucial not to undermine the role that ecstasy (MDMA) plays in rave culture. Other than being “the love drug”[26], working in perfect harmony with the repetitive beat of the music to induce empathy and a state of ecstasy, what is perhaps the most unique characteristic the drug has with underground rave culture is its desexualizing effect on the male body.
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Underground raves are not scheduled to last for a specified amount of time; rather, they continue until police arrives and ownership of the place is re-established. The co-opting of space and temporary liberation of it from the social structure is central to the transgressive character of both historic, as well as contemporary rave culture. Given the obvious legal issues raised by breaking into buildings or taking over fields, the location of underground raves is kept secret until a few hours before the party. The secrecy surrounding the location also serves to heighten a sense of community by uniting the crowd in specialized knowledge and transforming the quest for the location into a ritualistic pilgrimage – hence why the community at The End got to know one another way before the opening of the venue.[21]
Andreea Iliescu
RCA 21/22
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Underground rave in Leeds warehouse, 2018.
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If rave culture truly flattens hierarchy, promoting communion, then it must somehow disrupt the entire disciplinary apparatus of ‘sexuality’ that serves heteronormative and patriarchal social relationships. [27] Though MDMA intensifies the pleasure of touching and hugging, it largely empties sexual intimacy of its aggressive, masculine content. In addition to having an anti-libidinal effect on its users, MDMA helps efface gendered sexual relations. Since Ecstasy enhances feelings of collective love rather than targeted lust, the majority of users do not discriminate by sex, gender, or sexuality in their intimacy with others. In contrast to commercial club culture, which privileges consumption, sexual conquest, and being an audience, underground rave culture privileges communion, the ecstasy of jouissance[28] , and oneness between the crowd and the music - if only for a night.
Andreea Iliescu
RCA 21/22
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At the RCA, I have developed an experimental multimedia approach to design, with a focus on moving image, animation and alternative worldbuilding. For my thesis project, I am studying sound as a key experiential and spatial phenomenon. As architects, we often take for granted the importance of sound in our proposals, despite that, together with vision, they are the two main senses we use to orient ourselves. Sound has the ability to transcend borders, enhance voices which have been silenced, and strengthen community. Thus, sound is inherently spatial; by this, I do not mean only that setting up speakers has spatial implications, but that sound is a product of its environment.
If sound is another way to communicate, to create new worlds, and to make audiences active agents in change, how can I, as an architect, imagine a worlding process starting from the music factor itself? And
why
electronic music, particular?
in
Relationship to ADS2 Brief Electronic music is rooted in blackness. Black music was a recorded object, particularly in the 20th century when it became capitalism’s mass commodity par excellence. Nowadays, black music is seen as modernity’s counterculture thesis [5] . The emergence of black electronic dance music as a continuum occurred in the concrete social settings, shaped by shifting conditions of urbanization in the US and the UK , as a result of transatlantic musical and cultural cross-pollination.
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The musical backdrop is a distinct strand in the leisure pursuits and activities of particular communities. Music is used as a method to create sense of belonging, therefore, the places where music is made and consumed become very important; there is also a direct connection between space and listening communities [4] – because, ultimately, sound involves developing a practice of listening.
Andreea Iliescu
RCA 21/22
Sonic Agency
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“The thing that I’ve always loved about electronic music is that it’s in motion – it’s malleable. It’s a much more open set of dynamics.”
Andreea Iliescu
RCA 21/22
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- Maryanne Amacher,
Sisters with Transistors, documentary film, dir. Lisa Rovner, 2020.
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Fig.5 Sisters with Transistors, documentary film, dir. Lisa Rovner, 2020, film still.
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underground rave scene My present-day experience - X case study I will now turn my focus towards my own experience in the contemporary underground rave scene. I moved to London in 2018 to start a Part 1 placement; I didn’t know anyone in the city and some friends from Romania connected me to a hub of creatives who organize unlicensed raves - I will refer to them as ‘X’ for anonymity. ‘X’ present themselves as a London-based community of creatives for music lovers and visual arts. They started out as a group of friends with an interest in music and design. They established a network of DJs, producers and designers back in 2016 and ever since, they have been running ‘secret location’ electronic music parties all over the city, outside of Central London. The locations are always released a few hours before the event on an end-to-end encrypted Telegram chat. Although they aspire for discreet and intimate events, all attendees brings friends and the crowd keeps growing; with every new event, the community-base grows larger. They managed to form connections with people all across Europe and have been playing in various locations, most notably in Prague, Berlin and Belgrade.
X Uninterrupted Flow, CNC Projects, Argall Avenue, London (X archive).
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Andreea Iliescu
RCA 21/22
Contemporary
I attended 5 of their events since 2018. The locations have ranged from indoors to outdoors, varying in scale, size and proximity to Central London. The most notable venues have been warehouses, factories and pieces of urban infrastructure. X - X-HOOD, Walthamstow Marshes skate park, London (X-archive).
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X in Paravenue Gallaxy, 3D scan of Paravenue warehouse, Manor House, London. (Paravenue archive).
X with Nicola Kazimir, Hackney Wick Warehouse, London, X archive.
X Island, Walthamstow, London. (close to M25 motorway - X archive)
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Fig.19 X for OPIA Records, Hackney Central warehouse, London, X archive.
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Term 1 Grid System of Worlding: The Anatomy of an Underground Rave
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Andreea Iliescu
“What I hear is what’s occurring all the time, and that’s what music is, essentially. It’s sort of our surroundings, digitized through the human, through either a band or a computer, and probably distilled through sounds which aren’t necessarily correlated to what’s going on at the time, but in effect it’s.. it’s really the same thing. It’s just so abstract.” - Actress (Darren J. Cunningham),
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Teklife/ Ghettoville/ Eski | The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century, Dhanveer Singh Brar
[ 70 ]
Drawing on the literary theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Stoner suggests that minor architectures, like minor literatures, emerge from the bottoms of power structures and within the language of those structures. Yet they too are the result of powerful and instrumental forces. Provoked by collective desires, directed by the instability of time, and celebrating contingency, minor architectures may be mobilized within buildings that are oversaturated, underutilized, or perceived as obsolete. Stoner’s provocative challenge to current discourse veers away from design, through a diverse landscape of cultural theory, contemporary fiction, and environmental ethics. Hers is an optimistic and inclusive approach to a more politicized practice of architecture.
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Jill Stoner
A major proposal for a minor architecture, and for the making of spaces out of the already built. Architecture can no longer limit itself to the art of making buildings; it must also invent the politics of taking them apart. This is Jill Stoner’s premise for a minor architecture. Her architect’s eye tracks differently from most, drawn not to the lauded and iconic but to what she calls “the landscape of our constructed mistakes”—metropolitan hinterlands rife with failed and foreclosed developments, undersubscribed office parks, chain hotels, and abandoned malls. These graveyards of capital, Stoner asserts, may be stripped of their excess and become sites of strategic spatial operations. But first we must dissect and dismantle prevalent architectural mythologies that brought them into being— western obsessions with interiority, with the autonomy of the building-object, with the architect’s mantle of celebrity, and with the idea of nature as that which is “other” than the built metropolis. These four myths form the warp of the book.
Andreea Iliescu
RCA 21/22
Towards a Minor Architecture
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Our answer might be because the book itself is a series of conversations; between many authors, between architecture and fiction, major and minor, inside and outside. It is a multi-authored collaboration in which many voices have their say, none with authority. The minor architect, as Stoner describes her, is an editor, and a book of minor criticism is not written, it is composed.
Stoner’s book reads as a novel, an architectural fiction. It is gentle, brilliantly precise and economical in its use of language. Sentences themselves open up new horizons for architectural reflection, in the manner of poetry.
Andreea Iliescu
RCA 21/22
Why, you might ask, is this book review written as a conversation between two people?
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That makes it sound rather over-literary, a book written by an academic for other academics.
The answer is more subtle than this, for while Stoner’s book offers an implicit critique of the major architectural canon, she does not operate confrontationally. Instead she sidesteps into another territory − that of the 20th-century novel. ‘As Walter Benjamin read the elemental artifacts of nineteenth-century Paris as though they were texts, so can we read elemental fragments of twentieth-century fiction as though they were architecture.’ This act of displacement of architecture into fiction ‘offers nonvisual images of space that the camera cannot reach, and temporal/spatial enactments that lie outside the conventions of architectural representation.’
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If so, why does the title of the book, Toward a Minor Architecture, position itself so directly in relation to the canonical, magisterial text of modern architecture, Towards a New Architecture (Vers une architecture) that Le Corbusier published in 1923? Is it trying to offer an alternative to Modernism’s master narrative and, if so, towards what end?
The real strength of its argument arises from extraordinary and detailed readings of spatial episodes from 20th-century literature (Kafka, Carver, Cheever, et al), which then provide clues for reframing architecture. One of the highlights of these is Neddy Merrill’s swim through suburban swimming pools, retold from John Cheever’s short story The Swimmer. ‘Neddy’s swim is a denial set against and within a matrix of capture: the risk of revealing oneself, the loss of suburban social graces, the possibility of bankruptcy and foreclosure, and the breakdown of his seemingly ideal family structure. He wants to sublimate the private pools into a flowing river, to have these private enclosures take into full account what has happened to him, to remove from these objects their boundaries. Swimming through - that is to say, entering into - a series of private properties, Neddy attempts to draw a fluid line of force, but finds himself blocked by a sequence of ossified, fortified interiors.’
Neddy’s attempt to recalibrate the segmented space of Westchester County is ultimately futile, leaving him trapped within temporal and spatial enclosures and obstructed by architecture. This introduces the central theme of the book − the four central myths of architecture − the myth of the interior, the myth of the object, the myth of the subject and the myth of nature. Stoner meticulously picks these apart, but does not leave architecture in tatters and walk away. Instead, she remarkably emerges with an affirmative, celebratory proposition, which she calls ‘minor architecture’.
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But that would miss the point. For reading this book is easy and compelling, if one suspends one’s disbelief, goes with the flow of writing and submits to where the text takes one. At times one becomes sceptical, for there are some unnecessary overstatements (as in the likening of suburbs to concentration camps), but these are outweighed by the momentum of the argument and its subtle articulation of new architectural strategies.
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Andreea Iliescu
RCA 21/22
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Minor architectures are lines of escape through the majority rule of architecture’s myths. They reveal the latent externalities within architecture’s enclosures, weaken its status as visible object, break the stable identity of the architect subject and expose the nature within. ‘A minor architecture is becoming space rather than being form. It hums along restlessly, turning away from the stale orders of commodity, originality, permanence, and perfection, and towards incompleteness and immanence.’ ‘Minor architectures are, in fact, opportunistic events in response to latent but powerful desires to undo structures of power.’ They are intentionally ‘improvised, fractional, stripped of decoration and even of grammar.’
What then does it mean to be a minor architect? ‘Thus to practise architecture in a minor mode requires not only the partial deconstruction of buildings and the structures of power that lead to their incessant reproduction, but also the deconstruction of the architect/subject. Minor architectures not only register a minor voice upon the major one, they also cause identities to collapse into one another … authorship is put into reverse, and the design process becomes editorial.’
But doesn’t this imply that minor might become major, and all architects condemned to be no more than tinkerers, given Stoner’s definition that ‘a minor architect is a minor destructive character, a tinkerer and hacker, journalist and editor, alter ego and subaltern’? She avoids this position, for she is very clear that minor architecture needs major architecture to exist - they are ‘a mixture with blurring, slippage and overlap. Minor architectures operate within that mercurial, indeterminate state that is the passage from striated to smooth, from closed system to open space.’ The minor architect does not operate by adding new, frozen, stuff to the world but by subtly, sometimes invisibly, reconfiguring what is already there. Stoner’s chosen sites are the American postindustrial landscape of suburban dross and corporate obsolescence. ‘The perceived poverty of these buildings releases us from responsibility to adhere to any laws, covenants or precedents. This is precisely what makes them vulnerable to minor experiments and valuable as another kind of “natural” resource. Open to new intensities, these graveyards of capital are the fields, forests and quarries of our present time.’
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This raises a number of questions (not always answered in the book): ‘How does an architect become minor? What ambitions must be dismantled and what expectations let go? Wherein lies the incentive to be anonymous?’ To which the answer should be: what choice do we have other than to become minor, given that the myths of architecture have failed us so badly?
Andreea Iliescu
RCA 21/22
What is minor architecture?
Ref.
https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/books/acracking-read-toward-a-minor-architecture-by-jill-stoner
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in order to truly achieve change for the Amazon workers, I had to acknowledge that the agency of an architect is limited. As such, I have decided to interfere in an acupuncture manner in the already existing surveillance in the space. By repurposing the surveillance technologies and allowing them to do something other I am transferring my architectural agency to the workers through the Manual of Actions for a Global Amazon Strike.
Andreea Iliescu
RCA 21/22
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“A minor architect is a minor destructive character, a tinkerer and hacker, journalist and editor, alter ego and subaltern. But tinkerers may sabotage as well as fix, and wildfully take apart rather than assemble. Hackers may scramble code as often as decipher it, and editors (to save us from our wordiness) ruthlessly slice the excess away. […]” Research Journal
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- Jill Stoner, Towards a Minor Architecture
[ 80 ]
Henri Lefebvre began his career in association with the surrealist group, from whom he learned Hegel and a concern with dialectical logic. He was the first to translate Marx’s early manuscripts into French, and his book Dialetical Materialism (published in 1938) became the work from which several generations of French intellectuals learned Marxism. Immediately after the war, Lefebvre began to reflect on a new object of study which he called “daily life”. After the publication of Everyday Life in the Modern World, he was drawn to the analysis of urbanism, and wrote several books on the city, including Space and Politics (1972). In the 1960s he became closely involved with the younger school of French architects, and provided a theoretical framework for their work. Finally, the accumulation of these diverse themes led to his major philosophical work, The Production of Space.
The Production of Space Henri Lefebvre Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live). In the course of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author’s wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith’s sensitive translation precisely captures.
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This book has been instrumental in the development of my design proposal. Lefebvre argues that space is not produced solely by the architect master, but also by people and the way they interact with and within space. Thus, thinking about space as a pre-existing and unchanging container which people fill up and move around in becomes erroneous. For Lefebvre, space is instead produced by people. It is fundamentally social; how people produce space is highly contingent upon when they are producing it. Lefebvre was a Marxist, so the term ‘production’ is not accidental. Thus, his theory allows me to inscribe my project in the context of ADS2 Studio Brief.
Andreea Iliescu
RCA 21/22
Precedents and References
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Andreea Iliescu
“Every society - and hence every mode of production... produces a space, its own space.”
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- Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p.31.
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Michel de Certeau La perruque is a French idiomatic expression meaning work one does for oneself in the guise of work done for an employer, as when one photocopies personal material on the office account, or the like. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau construes the idea as a socio-cultural trope of sorts, in which the socially weak (e.g., those who must work for others) make use of the socially strong (e.g., the bosses) by carving out an independent domain within the circumstances imposed upon them from above.
Other people, however, though lacking a space of their own from which to apply strategies, are not merely passive objects of such subjects. On the contrary, they are active agents, but their mode of practice is tactical rather than strategic. Everyday practices of consumption (including activities like walking or reading) are tactical in that they continuously re-signify and disrupt the schematic ordering of reality produced through the strategic practices of the powerful. The possibility of contestation of the social order, which is created through multiple strategies, is always implicit in the tactical practices of everyday life.
Andreea Iliescu
RCA 21/22
Absenteeism, La Perruque
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Thus, the project uses the technique of absenteeism and stealing a moment ‘hereand-there’ in order to empower the workers and allow them to be in a position to negotiate for the bettering of the working conditions on the long run.
Influenced by the work of Foucault and Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau’s main contribution to practice theory has been to posit practice as the ground of resistance to domination (in addition to the reproduction of power relations). De Certeau distinguishes between two types of practice: strategies and tactics. Strategies are only available to subjects of “will and power,” so defined because of their access to a spatial or institutional location that allows them to objectify the rest of the social environment. “A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as a proper (propre) and thus serve as a basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, “clienteles,” “targets,” or “objects of research)” (1984, p. xix). Strategies thus invoke and actualize a schematic and stratified ordering of social reality.
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Practice As Resistance: Michel De Certeau
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Noting a finding in Marks’ Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers that “A labourer over the course of an 8-hour day can sustain an average output of about 75 watts,” the London-based, Dutch and Israeli design team of Cohen and Van Balen, with<a href=”http:// w w w. a l e x a n d e r w h i t l e y. c o m / ” t a r g e t = ” _ blank”> Alexander Whitley</a>, a Londonbased choreographer and Royal Ballet fellow, reappropriated a production line factory in the epicenter of “Made in China,” the Pearl River Delta, to create their assembly line performance piece and manufacture 40 objects. According to the Marks’ Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, the average laborer can sustain an output of about seventy-five watts over the course of an eight-hour day. Inspired by this finding, Cohen and Van Balen shifted laborers’ actions from the efficient production of objects to the performance of choreography. The designers collaborated with choreographer Alexander Whitley and with workers at the White Horse Electric Factory in Zhongshan, China, to create an assembly-line dance. By placing attention on the process instead of the result, the designers sought to question “the nature of mass-manufacturing products on various scales, from the geopolitical context of labor to the biopolitical condition of the human body on the assembly line.”
75 Watt,
2013 film
Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen. 75 Watt. 2013. Resin, aluminum, electronics, 7 1/16 × 6 11/16 × 13 3/4″ (17.9 × 17 × 34.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Modern Women’s Fund
Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen. 75 Watt. 2013. Video (color, sound), 11 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Modern Women’s Fund
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As an object, 75 Watt looks convincingly like a fully operational modern electronic something or other, but it has no function beyond being manufacturable, or more accurately being mass producible, and most importantly being made in China. But at heart, 75 Watt is a living design performance project video. With regard to its materials, dimensions, and various components the design of the actual object is specific not to any imagined function but entirely serves the production line choreography; the object is not the object.
Andreea Iliescu
RCA 21/22
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RCA 21/22
Andreea Iliescu
Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen. 75 Watt. 2013. Video (color, sound), 11 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Modern Women’s Fund
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Commissioned as part of the Frieze x Gucci ‘Second Summer of Love’ series, Nkiru likens the film’s spiky collage of intersecting narratives and conceptual frameworks, archival references and original imagery, to someone flipping between public access TV stations, or a VHS tape filled with traces of different recordings. With this diversity, Black to Techno’s excavates and explores the unique and total nature of the circumstances that birthed techno: touching on everything from Detroit’s heritage as the home of Fordist automation and the rhythm of the production line, to the influence of the Motown artists, and the city’s groundbreaking icon, Aretha Franklin. Equally alive to the deep history of the African-American Great Migration and to the particular emergence of specific acoustic technologies in the period (and the economic structures that governed access to them), the film offers not a simple origin story of techno but rather a ‘cosmic archaeology’, in the artist’s words.
Research Journal
RCA 21/22 Soundscapes of Resistance
A cursory glance at the history of techno music suggests paradoxes. The product of an intersection of factors and influences resolutely local to a certain time in the urban American Midwest, it soon found a passionate audience halfway around the world, in West Berlin. Embedded in black, working and middle class experience, it became an expression of revolutionary hope and optimism. In Black to Techno, Jenn Nkiru explores the origins and impact of the radical musical movement that originated in Detroit in precisely this complexity.
The archaeology unearths many findings, but chief among them is an idea of techno as a model for the overcoming of alienation, the undoing of oppositions: between the individual and the means of production, body and tool, soul and machine. ‘Techno wasn’t designed to be a sound’, as DJ Jeff Mills once said, ‘It was designed to be a futurist statement’.
Andreea Iliescu
Black to Techno, 2020 film Dir. Jenn Nkiru
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https://www.frieze.com/article/jenn-nkiru-black-techno
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Project development
RCA 21/22
Andreea Iliescu
Employed Mediums Animation
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The digital environment is allowing me to have access to a world which is highly inaccessible for an outsider. Thus, I have used 3D reconstruction as a methodology and testing ground for the narrative. I have studied the warehouse typology and decided to test my interventions in the 3D environment. Due to its boundless potential, the digital environment is allowing me to have accessibility to try out my proposal in space and time.
Sequence of film stills
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The proposal alludes to the organisation of a global Amazon strike - hence, I have been experimenting with the aesthetic of protest. Since techno and underground rave culture celebrate the aesthetic of the machine, fusing man, woman, and technology, I believe the digital environment and the cartoon aesthetic is allowing me to tell the story in a way which connects my two narratives: RAVE and LABOUR.
Human representation is very important in my proposal, since I am talking about people who have systematically been denied rights at the workplace by Amazon. As such, through my architectural agency (by designing the Manual and by representing the workers in the digital environment) I am fostering new modes of spatial production - where the architectural agency is passed on to the workers. Ultimately, the representation of the human body plays an important role in enabling workers to take over and ‘seize the means of production’. The dichotomy between animated and still characters alludes to the rave idea of ‘the body (seemingly) out of control.”
Research Journal
Soundscapes of Resistance
Andreea Iliescu
RCA 21/22
Aesthetic choices
Soundscapes of Resistance
Narrative structure
1. The wristband allows workers to communicate through the network at different levels. It also performs an important function: the one of distributing the Manual of Actions for the Global Strike. Ultimately, it allows workers access to types of information that only workers have access to.
Research Journal
The proposal is centred around a coreography where the oppressive logic of the space is disrupted by the workers. Through my precise instructions, the workers are enabled with new modes of architectural agency in order to (re)produce the space otherwise. The narrative is set as a snowball effect, where each of the individual micro-strategies, seemingly separate experiments, derive from one another and - as a result - cause the following events to take place: A regular working day is shown on a loop, with animations illustrating how the space works. The final output (the film) shows the micro-disruptions: the wristband chat which shows the activist manual of how I intervene in the space; workers are chatting in order to start the strike. The KIVA robot obstructed by the cones is disrupting efficiency of stowing and keeping the robot away from the reconfigured meeting space (secret chat); then disrupting surveillance so that the objects can be rearranged on the shelves. Finally, the ALEXA keywords are effectively disrupting the transport and delivery of goods and services. All these micro-interventions which form part of a global strategy that is networked would happen in the interior in relation to the exterior; being aware that the interventions isolated in only one warehouse wouldn’t mean much if they only happened in one site. However, by proposing this distribution of microstrategies through the activist manual I can achieve a plan for a global form of strike until the workers are in a position to negotiate working conditions. What is more, through this manual I distribute the architectural agency on to the workers by foregrounding Henri Lefebvre’s idea of spatial production. All these micro-strategies derive from the spatial study of how the Amazon wh typology works and is produced. Thus, there are only specific ways to think space that allow for a productive / disruptive actions to happen in the logic of this space.
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RCA 21/22
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The spatial strategy is developed considering existing objects and technology in the space. It proposes opportunistically to alter and shift position and purpose of pre-existences in a way that disrupts and subverts the power relations in the space.
Andreea Iliescu
RCA 21/22
2. The safety cones and the KIVA robots
Research Journal
Soundscapes of Resistance
Having each worker move the cone 50cm to the right on their way to the workstation might sound simple in appearance; but when it is designed as a form of protocol where all workers participate in the proces throughout a 12 hour shift, the strategy thus becomes a coreography where workers are coming together and taking over the space. This is, in effect, an indirect form of sit-in, where the surveillance and productivity of the space are temporarily interrupted.
19th Century form of sit-in in automobile factory
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3. The soundproof booth is a reconfigured seating space in between existing boxes. It is meant to be opaque and uncomfortable; it allows for a secret conversation to be had in order to effectively plan the strike among the workers. What is more, considering that Amazon does not allow their employees to use their mobile phone or talk to one another whilst working, this unit becomes instrumental in the space. I have thus proposed no more than three of these units to be existing at one time . The Manual mentions that the boxes should be cantilevered for better acoustic insulation. Also, this should be reconfigured back to its original state and its position in the warehouse floor should be changed to
Research Journal
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4. Shifting object position on shelves This is effectively a form of boycotting the order and logic that Amazon has in the space. Normally, warehouses store their products by category, while Amazon combines a variety of categories within the same shelving unit. Effectively, this is a question of logistics because it makes distances shorter and thus, allows for productivity to increase. If every worker (picker) shifts the position of one product (that is already labeled, and whose position is registered) one shelf above, it would become a coreography where all workers are contributing to disrupt the order of the space.
Research Journal
Soundscapes of Resistance
Sequence of film stills
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Demonstration - road blockade, 2018
Effectively, this is a classic form of striking usually, people sit down in the middle of the road to stop traffic. Amazon has a voice recognition system in place which tracks keywords that workers pronounce which allude to the idea of a strike. Most notably, these are: line manager, steward, living wage. As such, my proposal is to revert the functioning of the voice recognition system so that it is the one pronounces the words. When Delivery robots hear the words, they shift position and move to block the door. This is an important strategy because it has a life outside of the warehouse, mainly blocking deliveries for a short period of time. The proposal thus has an impact on the wider network.
Research Journal
Soundscapes of Resistance
5. Amazon Prime Robots forming a barricade
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Methdology RCA 21/22
Sound design meeting
Andreea Iliescu
Throughout the year, I have developed a practice of collaboration. Firstly, I am working with a Sound Engineer and Designer - Daniel Brojboiu, who is effectively helping me put together the soundtrack of my final output. What is more, throughout the year I have been interviewing people (rave organisers and attendees) to understand more about the process of putting together such events. This has informed my spatial strategy through the three key learnings I have adopted from rave, such as Sound, Opacity and Temporary reconfiguration of space. However, considering that the project has taken a turn towards the end, I did not manage to get in touch with Amazon workers; however, I have spoken to people writing about logistics , read books and watched documentaries to understand this inaccessible world of Amazon. Thus, through forms of secondary research, I tried to take classical forms of striking and apply them in the logic of the warehouse.
Research Journal
Soundscapes of Resistance
Interview with rave collective organiser (interviewee wished to remain anonymous)
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The project has taken an unexpected turn after the Progress Review in April. Before that, I was focusing on a rave community who squats industrial spaces for underground events. However, I was omitting to talk about the workers. I started the year focusing on liberation and sonic resistance, thus I had to acknowledge that the workers had to be dealt with in the same way as the rave community. Thus, the narrative has shifted towards the workers (particularly considering the surveillance in place in the Amazon warehouse, which would not have allowed for rave communities to come during the night.
The ‘Across the Line’ lecture and workshop were hugely valuable to me - particularly Dr. Charmaine Chua’s input on logistics and Amazonians United. Having spoken to her at the workshop, I was interested to see what it means to ‘seize the means of production’ in an Amazon warehouse: which is a global network, not confined solely to one fulfillment centre or warheouse. As such, the design decision of forming a barricade when lorries are out for delivery implied a very important spatial consequence: that the network would be temporarily interfered with.
I am pleased to be able to continue this strand of enquiry on rave and electronic music, this time outside of the confines of an architecture school - where I can focus on narrative and experimentation without having to respond to RIBA requirements for the degree. I have obtained a collaboration with a sound designer and a software developer in order to continue the AI machine learning experiment I started with in Term 1 (Wekinator, Max MSP). FUTURE
APPLICATIONS AND RELEVANCE
PROJECT
Continuing the research on sound, I think the project can achieve future relevance at a theoretical level on pushing the idea of the body as a sound-making machine. Having studied Kodwo Eshun’s concept of “sonic fiction”, I believe this type of work can help pose the question “what if the DJ would become obosolete?” As for the Amazon project, I believe the idea of empowering the workers should be taken seriously if one intends to achieve significant change. Amazon, as many other tech giant companies, is difficult to put an end to. However, the example of Chris Smalls and the achievement of the first ALU union in Staten Island shows that great things are possible if people work together.
Research Journal
Soundscapes of Resistance
The main limitation for my research was the fact that I am talking about a highly inaccessible world: although very documented, I did not have access to speak to any Amazon worker first-hand. Thus, I had to make do with the available resources and conduct extensive research to understand how the space works for my architectural study.
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Research Limitations
Through this research, I have learned to trust the process and acknowledge that it is good to keep an open mind when it comes to the final output. If I could go back at the beginning of Term 2, I would start producing design iterations earlier. It was very difficult to get into the habit of making proposals after such extensive research.
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When the music travelled to Europe and particularly to the UK, it didn’t go straight to London, but outside in more industrial areas. In the north of the UK, particularly in Manchester there was massive unemployment. AfroCarribean communities (particularly Jamaicans) made their own soundsystems and started the movement purely from their love of music. They weren’t allowed in clubs or community centres, so they had to improvise their own soundsystems at home or find locations in which to host parties. It is interesting to note that clubs were social community gatherings rather than hosting a crowd which was there for the music (until 1988 after the Miners Strike which happened in the mid 1980s and it turned the music scene upside down as a means of protest).
Appendix Andreea Iliescu
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AfroCarribean Soundsystems
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Still from Jeremy Deller, Everybody in the Place
Acid house music was arranged for and performed live by brass bands, the first performances being made in Liverpool and London (there have been other performances since and the music is now in the brass band repertoire). For J.D. the two most important phenomena of the last fifteen years were the miners’ strike and the start of the acid house scene’. The History of the World knits these two events together through two apparently diverging forms of music. Both forms are voices that in different ways dissent from the prevailing political and social order. By bringing the two forms together in this way, Deller proposes an index or typology to the ways in which such dissent is articulated in a wider context. Around ‘acid house’, I have charted a flow that details the influences on acid house and its own development by band (such as the bands ‘808 State’, ‘Gerald’ and ‘KLF’) as well as effect and sensibility (‘E’, ‘Summers of Love’, ‘Media Hysteria’, ‘Free Parties’, ‘Castlemorton’ and ‘Civil Unrest’). Brass bands signal ‘Civic Pride’ and ‘Melancholy’ as well as ‘Deindustrialisation’ and ‘The Miners Strike’, from which it is but an arrow from ‘Orgreave’ and ‘Civil Unrest’.
Jeremy Deller, Map of the World
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The Map of the World
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If the giant free festival and rave at ‘Castlemorton’ * a festival started by the New Age travellers who were fleeing cities to the countryside in the UK because they couldn’t see many future prospects for themselves relation to nomadism, traveling soundsystems etc). Castlemorton, in 1992 led directly to the bringing of the Criminal Justice Bill to the statute book – in such a way that codified the particular dissent exemplified by the way of life that Acid House stood for – so did the 1984– 5 miners’ strike exemplify the response to the Conservative Party’s aim to close the coal pits and smash union power; a response that could also be measured by the survival of brass bands at a time that the pits were closing. In a sense this work and, by extension, Acid Brass, also act as a direct overture to the event The Battle of Orgreave 2001 (a re-enactment of a particularly pivotal clash between the striking miners and the police during the 1984–5 miners’ strike).
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Castlemorton Festival
This anti-rave law was a response against festivals such as Castlemorton, where the Conservative government prohibited squatters, travellers and ramblers to access public spaces and to organize gatherings of more than 100 people, criminalizing music made out of ‘repetitive beats’. In effect, this law was enforced to disenfranchise people and deny them the right to access public space. As a form of resistance, there were a variety of actions that people took – most notably, musicians such as Autechre who released an EP where the tracks had only non-repetitive drum sounds; people were protesting in public spaces such as Parliament and Trafalgar square, taking over the areas and playing their music for days until the police interfered.
Research Journal
Soundscapes of Resistance
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, 1994
Castlemorton Festival, 1994 - the biggest free rave festival in the history of the UK
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At the 1993 conference, Michael Howard, who had become Home Secretary, announced details of the new Criminal Justice Bill. Despite protests and discord against the bill, the opposition Labour Party took an official line to abstain at the third reading, and the Act passed into law on 3 November 1994. The law is still in place today and it classifies a rave as “a gathering on land or in the open air”, where amplified music is played; “music” is defined by “the emission of a succession of repetitve beats.” The English electronic duo Autechre have responded to the law with their EP, AntiEP, comprised of 3 tracks: Djarum, Flutter and Lost where each track is played from a succession of 64 different drum sounds as a means of protest. The Criminal justice and Public Order Act, 1994
A primary motivation for the act was to curb illegal raves and free parties, especially the traveller festival circuit, which was steadily growing in the early 1990s, culminating in the 1992 Castlemorton Common Festival.[1] Following debates in the House of Commons in its aftermath,[2] Prime Minister John Major alluded to a future clampdown with then Home Secretary Ken Clarke at that year’s Conservative Party conference.
Research Journal
Soundscapes of Resistance
Also known as the ANTI-RAVE law, The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It introduced a number of changes to the law, most notably in the restriction and reduction of existing rights, clamping down on unlicensed rave parties, and greater penalties for certain “anti-social” behaviours. The Bill was introduced by Michael Howard, Home Secretary of Prime Minister John Major’s Conservative government, and attracted widespread opposition.
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‘Make Techno Black Again’ Activist, rhythmanalyst and producer DeForrest Brown, Jr.’s work includes theoretical research, writing, curating and artistic production.
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Image Archive He explores the links between Black experience in industrialised work systems and Black innovation in electronic music. He expresses sonically as Speaker Music and argues for a critical reconsideration that techno is Black Music that sounds technological rather than music being made with technology.
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Soundscapes of Resistance
Img.1,2. Live Performance at Camden Arts Centre, September 2021. Fig.3. Delusion of Innovation Graphic.
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Img 1,2,3. Programming, testing and displaying of an Audio Spectrum Analyzer in Processing 4.0, early day experiment, author’s own. Experiment was displayed at the Ugly Duck exhibition - WORLDING: Beyond Racial Capitalism. The Analyzer visualizes the frequencies of the sounds played by the DJ.
Img 1. Shoom was the first club in London to obtain a 24 hour entertainment license back in 1986. After generating a digital model of the space through photogrammetry, I programmed it to be audioreactive. The club was iconic for acid house, therefore the beat it is dancing to is a famous song by Frankie Knuckles. Author’s own.
Img. 2 Study of the Roland Tb-303: exploded axonometric, instruction set and testing sounds to understand how it works and what each button does.The Roland was initially intended as a Drum Bass Line for guitar players, but it failed as a product; however, in the hands of DJs and music producers it was valuable because it was generating distorted alien-like drum sounds, which created the unmistakable beat of acid house. Author’s own.
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Testing beats in Ableton LIVE Suite 11. Understanding interface of software and beginning to experiment with making rhythms. Early day experiment, author’s own.
Documenting FOLD, an underground electronic music club in Canning Town, London with the LEIKA BLK 3D Scanner. \
First attempt at a Transepistemic Cosmogram. The map of London is overlaid with an Audio Spectrum Analyzer playing Autechre’s Flutter (AntiEP, Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, 1994). Author’s own.
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Bibliography
FILMOGRAPHY Black to Techno, dir. Jenn Nkiru (2019). Everybody in the Place, dir. Jeremy Deller (2018). Fiorucci Made me Hardcore, dir. Mark Leckey (1999). Jungle Fever, BBC2 Documentary (1994). Mikrohaus… “Mikrohaus, or the black atlantic?” Video, dir. Toney Cokes (2006 -2008). Sisters with Transistors, dir. Lisa Rovner, (2020). The Last Angel of History, dir. John Akomfrah (1996).
EXHIBITIONS All that is Solid Melts Into Air, Manchester Art Gallery, 2014. Electronic: From Kraftwerk to the Chemical Brothers, Design Museum, 2019. ICA: Current Transmissions, Institute of Contemporary Art, 2019. ICA: Nine Nights, Channel B, Institute of Contemporary Art, 2021. Night Fever: Designing Club Culture, V&A Dundee, 2021.
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Brewster, Bill, CLUBBED: A Visual History of UK Club Culture (London: Face37; First Edition, 2018). Eshun, Kodwo, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet Books, 1998). Haq, Nav, RAVE and its Influence on Art and Culture (London: Black Dog Publishing Ltd., 2016). Hook, Peter, THE HACIENDA: How Not To Run a Club, (UK: Simon & Schuster Ltd., 2009). Henriques, Julian, Sonic Bodies (London: Continuum Books, 2011). Jones, LeRoi, Black Music (Macgibbon & Kee, 1831). Kries, Matteo, Eisenbrand, Jochen, Rossi, Catharine and Serulus, Nina, Night Fever: Designing Club Culture - 1960-Today (Vitra Design Museum, 1st edition (2018). LaBelle, Brandon, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (Continuum, 2010). LaBelle, Brandon, Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2018). Reynolds, Simon, Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture (London: Faber&Faber, 2013). Reynolds, Simon, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (London: Faber&Faber, 2011). Singh Brar, Dhanveer, Teklife/ Ghettoville/ Eski – The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century (London: Goldsmiths University Press, 2020). Scoates, Christopher, and Wright, Will, Brian Eno: Visual Music (London: Chronicle Books LLC). White, Joy, Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City (London: Repeater Books, 2020).
Esteve Castello, Pol, Night Club, Scenes de Nuit, <https:// scenesdenuit.ch/scenes/nightclub> [accessed 11th April 2022]. Hubzin, Ivica, Return of The End Soundsystem, DJ Mag, < https:// djmag.com/node/4405> [accessed 13th March 2022]. Kalliala, Martti, Club Ruins, Flash Art, < https://flash---art.com/article/ martti-kalliala-club-ruins/> [accessed 13th March 2022]. Reidy, Tess, I Sleep Where You Danced: What Happens to Nightclubs after They Close Down?, Vice, < https://www.vice.com/en/article/ nn9an8/the-people-who-sleep-in-the-places-you-used-to-party-in> [accessed 13th March 2022]. Thomas, Katie, This is The End, the Club that Changed London, < https://djmag.com/longreads/end-club-changed-london> [accessed 13th March 2022]. Taylor, Jerome, The Last Dance: The End opens its doors for final time to host party to end all parties, The Guardian, https://www. independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-last-dance-the-end-opensits-doors-for-final-time-to-host-party-to-end-all-parties-1452288.html [accessed 14th April 2022].
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NON-PRINT
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LECTURES AND CONFERENCES
Andreea Iliescu
One in the Other: DeForrest Brown, Jr./ Speaker Music, Camden Art Centre, London, 10th October, 2021. The Otolith Group: Hydra Decapita, Tate Britain, London, 1st September 2021, 31st October 2021.
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RCA International Lecture Series, Sonic Refusal, DJ Lynnee Denise & Luke de Noronha, April 2021. RCA International Lecture Series, Across the Line, Charmaine Chua, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, May 2022.
PODCASTS Assembling Black Counterculture: Techno at the End of the Future EP:1 London, Camden Art Audio <https://podcasts.apple.com/us/ podcast/assembling-a-black-counter-culture-techno-at-the/ id1513931064?i=1000536982118> [accessed 30th December, 2021]. Radio Alhara, Sonic Space, Beyond Palestine w/ Elias and Yousef Anastas, Failed Architecture <https://open.spotify.com/ episode/2C4vLXEWg9CLYtBcUoNCRs?si=682345f867b74cd2> [accessed 30th December, 2021].
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Vision of Sound: Episode 1 – Jeremy Deller’s Vision of Sound, Georgina Cook, <https://open.spotify.com/ episode/62zJKofpF0Yt2NmFqnFpeP?si=503d2916f2704dbe> [accessed 30th December, 2021].
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