Rose Frawley, Digitally Man Dwells

Rose Frawley

Digitally Man Dwells A Reinterpretation of the Poetic Home for the Post Digital Age.

AAD Dissertation Studio 3 2019–20

Extracts from Rose Frawley, Digitall Man Dwells. A Reinterpretation of the Poetic Home for the Post Digital Age

Dissertation Studio 3 The Conquest of Joy Tutor: Aleks Catina

School of Art, Architecture and Design London Metropolitan University 2020

Cover image: Martha Rosler, Balloons from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home c. 1967-72, MoMA

Fig. 2 Raimund Abraham, The Elements of the House, New York, 1972. (Translated from German).

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The House as Poetry Practically speaking, the home is a mere shell which shelters beings from the inclement forces of nature. In a similar way to the mole, etching its burrow out of the earth, the homo faber, or human maker, utilises nature to create something stable and robust: the man-made home. It is through the act of making and subsequent stability from nature that makes human life possible before dwelling exists.

Gaston Bachelard positions the house in ‘the corner of our world’.6 Yet, before the house was reduced to a mere component, it was at one point our first and entire universe. Through the infant’s eyes the house is a realm of novelty, in which she/he develops, through sensory experience, a catalogue of firsts totally unencumbered by a perception of risk. When in 1972 Raimund Abraham composed his poem ‘The Elements of the House’, he might have done so through child-like eyes rather than those of an experienced architect. The poem lists, in a very elementary form, a diverse range of encounters and experiences. Written at a time when architectural practice began to face criticism against the modern movement’s obsession with technology and with buildings as ‘machines for living’, the poem emphasises on a phenomenological reading of the house.7 The elements listed are devoid of the conventional physical attributes that typically make up a house; it is decidedly non-architectural except for its arrangement on the page. It is formatted to list the elements in four regularly spaced columns, perhaps alluding to the ancient Greek temple. Further obscuring a typical reading of the house Abraham describes the house as the junction of the elements. By situating the house in this way, it becomes a scale-less entity: offering no sense of edge or boundary. Similar to Bachelard’s dialectical concept, the poem illustrates the home as both an element among all others as well as the sum of all elements becoming a receptacle of sorts.

Through this ambiguity, Abraham emphasises that the building fabric does not make the house. Instead, the house is uniquely situated at a meeting point where the complexities of human life, ritual and nature are amalgamated. The activities and sensations that the house provides become this structure and this facilitates poetic dwelling. The poem quite strikingly ends with the word infinity, which could be interpreted in many ways. On the one hand, the house could represent infinite possibilities for intersection: that the final word acts as a notional full stop capturing everything else imaginable. On the other, however, the word infinity – as an element of the house – removes the confined or limited characteristic, thus leaving open the idea that the house is not a container of elements or even necessarily a physical building.

6 Gaston Bachelard, Mark Danielewski and Richard Kearney, The Poetics Of Space (New York: Penguin Books, 2014). p.26.

7 Le Corbusier and John Goodman, Toward An Architecture (London: Frances Lincoln, 2008). p. 151.

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The Problem of Technology By interpreting Heidegger’s theories on being, it can be surmised that in order to simply dwell one must be at peace or harmony with the world and all nature, but to dwell poetically one must have the freedom and choices to live well. The house offers a place to do this, but this is not enough to determine it to be a home. Only the freedom to enact individualistic rituals and to shape the domestic environment facilitates the kind of poetic dwelling that Heidegger describes. Thus, the house that offers ritualistic liberties is the poetic home. The introduction of technology potentially presents a problem for the poetic home. There is a scepticism in Heidegger’s writings on this topic, stating that technology blocks poetry.8 The concern primarily being that the state of human existence might alter so drastically, as a result of technology, the characteristics that were once deemed inherently human might cease to exist. This critique resides in an understanding that modern technology exposes the essence of beings. When coupled with the home, a place of retreat and privacy, the juxtaposition of the revealing nature of technology threatens the privacy of the home. Evidence of this in contemporary life is increasingly present through the various modes of smart technology.

Taking Heidegger’s basic assertion of Dasein as not just being-in the world but being-there, a more precise meaning can be determined whereby humans are conditioned by their involvement in the world. By not merely being present, the action of being engaged in a society is matched with Arendt’s thoughts on the politically active individual. The problem that technology presents here is that if factors that can be organised or ordered in the home, as they are in the public realm, they can potentially be controllable. From a political sense, this controllability in turn offers up the possibility of a form of totalitarian supremacy which may not be immediately visible. As already established, the criterion set out for poetic dwelling is freedom, then by removing this liberty the poetic ceases to exist. In order to overcome this, Heidegger implies that interpreting technology metaphysically and anthropologically, whereby human’s relationship with technology is meditative, co-existence is then possible. By maintaining contemplative thought, poetic dwelling can continue to flourish.

8 Martin Heidegger and William Lovitt, The Question Concerning Technology, And Other Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977). p. 30.

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Fig. 3 A political mural in Derry, Northern Ireland. This photograph formed part of the exhibition From Protest to Peace: Murals by The Bogside Artists of Northern Ireland.

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Fig. 4 Drapes from Martha Rosler’s series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home 1967 - 1972.

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Fig. 5 The home as mind from Carlos Bunga’s Nomad drawing series.

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After Home Cyber-polis The home has been always considered as an opposing territory to that occupied by public life. Primarily due to the progression of digital technology, the contemporary home has evolved from a private place to one which incorporates a plethora of public and social roles. To consider this statement, two questions emerge: if the home can no longer be considered a private place, what then has it become?

Secondly, in its new state, can the home still be poetic? The criteria for analysis are the factors which impact poetic dwelling: technology and the political.

Heidegger’s criticism of technology was founded on the notion that the private, poetic nature of the home was diametrically opposed to technology’s revealing characteristic.1 While this critique is valid, determining its relevance for the contemporary home relies on our interpretation of the poetic. The exponential rise of digital technology has generated various means of communication and information exchange. The appropriation of physical media by digital technology offers individuals the freedom of choice on how to engage with information – a freedom that perhaps was not previously available. By returning to the Martha Rosler example, whereby the televised broadcast of the Vietnam War disturbed domesticity, the extent to which society’s relationship with information has changed becomes apparent. The reliance that this generation had on very few forms of media meant that engagement was often beyond public control.

By contrast to today, the ability to filter content and connect with media is an option available which affords greater control over what is viewed and when. Consequently, the imposition on home life does not hold the same weight. This is a crucial point in defining the poetic in the contemporary home. Poetic life is contingent on the individual’s ability to live well with the freedom to do so.

The present interface with digital technology is much closer to the sensory reality imagined by Paul Valéry, an aspiration also shared by André Malraux. Seeking to create a museum without walls, Malraux conceived ‘Le Musée Imaginaire’ – a worldly collection of photographs in a singular book, depicting various artworks from across the world.2 His intention was to provide the means to view art and sculpture from many cultures, but together in one place – a novel concept for its time. By studying these pieces alongside each other, interesting similarities and differences could be drawn to facilitate a modern dialogue between works. From a societal aspect, the reproduction of artworks through imagery in books provided greater accessibility to art and culture leading to greater social equity. The delight and experience of art could be enjoyed from the home without the economic outlay of travelling to many countries. Malraux’s enthusiasm for

1 Martin Heidegger and William Lovitt, The Question Concerning Technology, And Other Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977). p. 16.

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André Malraux, Le Musée Imaginaire ([Paris]: Gallimard, 1949, 2010).

the decontextualisation of art through print reproduction was not shared by many of his contemporaries however, who maintained art should be viewed in the context in which it was created. Retrospectively, Malraux’s conception could be interpreted as a primitive form of the internet. His attempt to democratise the arts through reproduction shares a similarity with the internet’s collation of art imagery, albeit a virtual one.3 As the examples of murals and lodging notices illustrated, the image produces its own phenomenological experience which is not only visual but multisensory. In our contemporary, post-digital society, the requirement for imagery to be used in this way is debatable. In instantaneously delivering the sensory image, the smartphone negates this need to use buildings as a means to cast a message to the public. The wall of the building is now the Instagram feed, projecting directly from one individual to the next and the next. As a sphere that is neither public nor private, the social network operates as a subclassification of the social realm. Arendt claimed that the rise of the social would be to the detriment of the political and private aspects of life.4 Indeed, algorithms and cookies reflect back to the user the digital aspect of themselves. It functions as a highly curated mirror, enticing engagement with offerings that tempt the inner self, not just based on browsing history but also through geographical data What does this say for identity?

The physical world-self is split into multiple parts with its engagement with the online world: the individual assuming a multifaceted avatar each one relevant for different online platforms. The internet of social networks presents a new case for the political realm; a renaissance, as it were, to a cyber-polis. Through her theory on natality, Arendt suggests that the human experiences two births: the first being the physical birth into this world and the second – a birth into the political world whereby you are engaged in action with others through language and speech.5 Perhaps in the contemporary, post-digital age, a third natality might be identified – the birth into the digital. In identifying oneself with an image and username, a new personal identity is formed. Rather than being a birth that happens after the birth into the polis, it is likely that this natality precedes the worldly birth into the political realm. This reinvigoration of the political realm is an unexpected affect of digital technology.

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The instances of virtual galleries is becoming more common, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic. It is

an uncanny realisation of both Malraux’s Musee Imaginaire and Valéry’s home delivery of sensory reality.

4 Hannah Arendt and Margaret Canovan, The Human Condition, 2nd edn ([Chicago]: University of Chicago Press, 1998). p. 44.

5 Hannah Arendt and Margaret Canovan, The Human Condition, 2nd edn ([Chicago]: University of Chicago Press, 1998). p. 9

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