DISCRETE SIGNALS - Detecting Ambiguous Territories and Bodily Actions
EXTRACTION
Global affects and local negotiations
DISCRETE SIGNALS | Detecting Ambiguous Territories and Bodily Actions
This publication catalogues the research activities of the second, third year and guest students in Unit 2+3E during the fall semester 2017/18. This research has been framed by a focus on sites of extraction and material affectiveness, their impact on environmental aesthetics and the development and our experiences of architecture. As one of six design units within the bachelor programme of the Aarhus School of Architecture our unit has an approach that shifts between each student’s individual project development and architectural skills, through investigation and experimentation, collaborative project investigations and production. The intention is for on-going collective dialogue that unfolds around the units focus where design is understood as a research practice, based on investigation and experimentation rather than prescriptive methods. The unit involves multiple actors and embraces uncertainty as well as challenging conventions. In this context this document is conceived as a vibrant collective catalogue of the student’s production where their different methodologies interact and contrast.
3 EXTRACTION: considered as the process that separates a substance from one phase into another, aided through the use of specific in situ tools [technology]. The complexity and operation of the tool depends on numerous material and immaterial factors: the matter to ‘pick up’, the environment where it operates, and the politics that promote such activities. The activity of extraction takes many forms throughout human history, yet the focus, informed by specific politics, has always been on transforming the environment to obtain matter that has some specific value. The first sites of extraction, a mine, dated over 43000 years ago, was located in Swaziland, where the indigenous peoples develop techniques to extract hermaite (red ochre) for use in rituals, human and animal body decorations. From the same period in Hungary the discovery of flint was used by the local peoples to produce tools and weapons. In approximately A.D. 36 the Roman Empire’s aggressive expansion of its silver extraction process produce “unequivocal evidence of early large-scale atmospheric pollution by this [lead] toxic metal”. Additionally techniques like hushing were developed to extract raw materials with hydraulic power from the earth. Tools supporting human (in)habitation (aqueducts and tanks) are now used to collect and convey water to unveil precious minerals concealed in the bedrock. Territories within our environments were becoming exposed to a punctual exploration of its resources for economic purposes. The students have sort to unfold questions like: What is the form and affects of a material flow expanding from a given site of extraction? What about the emerging economy impacted by recent mutations of capitalism? How do these complex relations (between economic activity, the domestic, macro and micro politics) challenges our social relations? How is this reflected in the relationship between the body and space? How are/can bodily intentions, enacted through the threshold of a tool, leave particular traces and residues? What we use to consider a likely cause and effect relationship between production and social, as well as the body and space in the past, needs today to be investigated and reconsidered through new languages, discourses and forms of imagination. In this regard, EXTRACTION is our fertile laboratory for exploration where matter is at stake in the process of aesthetics, practices, spaces and territorial production. The research activities have unfolded across three distinct phases that define the structure of this catalogue.
Chapter 1: Atlas of Destruction and Opportunity (Phase 1) Operating like detectives with a common agenda, the Atlas constructed in this phase was a collective attempt to investigate and reveal, map, analyse and define the territorial extents of sites of matter extraction. These territories were understood as an ambiguous mix of specific material configurations, economic and social values, and immaterial flows. The Atlas unfolds the specific ways matter is currently extracted, the configuration of the local situations, mapping of the multiple flows of influence, and catalogue spatial situations which are produced as a result of the material extraction. Chapter 2: Tool Aesthetics: Bodily Actions and Material Situations (Phase 2) This phase was characterized by research into the local sites of exchange between a landscape (in transformation), the human body (in action), and the devices that enable the extraction of valuable matter. Dependent on the human body as an apparatus for action, the tools of labour employed in complex material/immaterial extraction process, define a threshold between our human bodies and our unstable material world. These tools or devices reconfigure matter, (the tools themselves a product of reconfigured matter), through specific and repeating actions. While efficiency may be a key characteristic of these tools, many tools and extraction devices are embedded with their own pleasure and perversions. Beyond their supposed efficiency by-products, side effects, and resultants are unavoidable. We cannot just zap dust away … Expanding from a day-excursion to the Faxe Kulkbrud and a specific exhibition venue at ‘O-Space’, the research experimented with the imprecise and interconnected boundaries between landscape-human-matter through the design and production of a tool that suggest alternate, disruptive, interventions refocusing the spatial experience embedded in matter transformation. Chapter 3: Tactics of Disturbance (Phase 3) In this phase the students became agents of action, disturbance, interference, and/or subversion, through experimenting with specific spatial tactics speculating on many possible future scenarios for the Faxe Kulkbrud. Mobilizing the knowledge developed in the previous phases each student developed an infrastructure that speculates on the environmental, social, political and economic futures for Faxe Kalkbrud and the surrounding town(s). These infrastructures speculate on the kulkbrud and town as an interacting ecosystem of agents and mechanisms.
Semester Tutors: Fabio Gigone Angus James Hardwick Tina-Henriette Kristiansen