RC15
City and Urban Infrastructures Lab Axiomatic Earth
Godofredo Pereira, Samaneh Moafi
Students Prutha Chiddarwar, Luxi Deng, Kailun Fan, Shan He, Shucheng Huang, Yanti Jiang, Ziyang Jiang, Bingqian Liu, Longning Qi, Haochen Wang, Jian Wang, Xinqi Wang, Zeqing Wang, Zhiwen Wei, Qinhe Yi, Bolin Zhang
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2015
Project teams A Common Sun Kailun Fan, Yanti Jiang, Ziyang Jiang, Bolin Zhang Seismic Grounds Prutha Chiddarwar, Luxi Deng, Haochen Wang, Qinhe Yi Crude Line Shan He, Shucheng Huang, Xinqi Wang, Zeqing Wang The Grand Canal Bingqian Liu, Longning Qi, Jian Wang, Zhiwen Wei Thanks to our critics and consultants Ross Exo Adams, Nick Axel, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Peter Bishop, Jacob Burns, Eray Çayli, Mehran Gharleghi, Maria Giudici, Richard Goodwin, Saleh Hijazi, Beth Hughes, Platon Issaias, Sam Jacoby, Adrian Lahoud, Guillem Pons, Andrew Porter, Francesco Sebregondi, Vicente Soler, Eyal Weizman
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Research Cluster 15 focuses on resource extraction and its influence over the urban. It does so to address the ways in which urbanisation is increasingly affected by the a-signifying semiotics of techno-scientific classifications and financial operations. We are concerned with two extreme forms of extraction at the same time: a material one, incessantly surveying and classifying the earth’s underground to its minute biologic scales and whose aim is the extraction of precious materials; the other, a financial one, much smoother, abstracting both the Earth and the extraction machines themselves in its game of producing surplus-value from differential relations between abstracted quantities. We argue that today the urban is increasingly affected by the multiplication of these extractive machines. However, the relation between urban form and its affecting forces is perceptually vague. In both cases, neither the consequences of a stratigraphic section through the underground, nor the effects of variations in the graphs of high-frequency trading, evidence a direct causal relation to urban development. Yet we claim they increasingly do so, as the whole Earth has become an object of capitalist axiomatisation, whose consequences mineralise in urban forms. Forms that even before achieving material consistency are already being traded, bundled or sold as future values. Identifying a continuity from the sensing of underground oil reservoirs to the millisecond mutations of trading opens possibilities for political reimagination. Be it problems of resolution deficits or noise, be it disputes between different modes of classification or alternative profit strategies, the realisation of every axiomatic cannot but allow the reinsertion of a problematic. In this sense, techno-scientific tools can be harnessed, to political effect. These are tools that carry a power from which alternative urban imaginations might be derived: allowing different modes of seeing or measuring, they do not simply present an improved perspective over the world. Instead they present a different world, and thus allow the formulation of different problems. They open the possibility of a different aesthetics and of a radical reformulation of the politics of inhabiting the Earth. From this possibility our cluster begins, looking at techno-science and its abstraction of the Earth as a possibility for the invention of political constituencies and new subjectivities.