Dip Unit 19 Yr 4: Nicholas Adams, Kyle Fulton, Robert High, Kristian Kristensen, Maria Law, Oliver Moen, Tim Norman, Mandi Tong. Yr 5: Neil Charlton, Charlotte Erckrath, Linnea Isen, Dominique Laurence, Peter Nilsson, Alan Pottinger, Richard Vint. MArch: Christian Kerrigan.
Smearing Architecture If we see our interaction with digital technologies and their peculiar landscapes as smears, then the more advanced a technology the more easy it is for us to smear them across virtual and actual geographies. We smudge our smears across space-time across the landscape and through machines. Where they are fleetingly registered, classified, filed, transmitted or erased, reconstituted and retransmitted. These tools for augmented bodies are not passive. They coerce, trick, titillate and pull us towards and between them. As technology’s flow forever on, our smears encounter less and less friction. Our researches concoct technological slime, that allows us to slip and slide through the landscape. Yet our traditional architectural design and discourse offers little of the porosity that we currently require. Unit 19’s aims are to explore, polemicise and develop architectural ideas and solutions that understand the digital smear in all its aspects. These include the virtuality continuum, ecology and sustainability. The new ecstatic architectures will be biotechnical, cybernetic, fleeting and be much concerned with facilitating information flow. They will be crucial to forcing and penetrating the smear connecting the distal body to enable specific actions and vectors. That is to say, they will act as transitory conduits allowing swift reconfiguration of some or all of the technological, fleshed and digital, paraphernalia of the smeared body. These architectures and landscapes will interact through us and us through them.
Neil Spiller and Phil Watson
Top and middle: Alan Pottinger. Bottom: Neil Charlton.