The Curse of the Placeless : Part 01

The curse Of the Placeless

You enter a dusty pink room.

A large olive leather couch sits there, off-centre.

The circular Terrazzo table, slightly smaller than expected allows two dull green ceramic pots to share it’s pride of place. 3 succulents are settled comfortably inside. A textured white linen throw completes the corner. Frosted Glass baubles clinging to delicate brass fittings descend from above. Tiny white mouldings run across junctions.

A dull beige floor and it’s accompanying dull beigeon-beige-on-beige rug completes the room.

An Orange Neon sign informs you emphatically, ’Dreams come true’.

You drift into a roughened white bedroom.

A bulbous dark pink bed occupies centre-space.

The dark chocolate exotic open veneer panelling offsets soft undulating walls, sanded down to its’ tiniest pore. A Dramatic Gold rug is carefully / casually thrown across the centre of the Arabescato floor. A black-on-black textured wall leads out of your sight, featuring a black-onblack artwork by an unnamed artist, perfectly matching the shade of the veneer.

A Rug from the last Maison-et-Objet populates a ‘Feature wall’

You stumble into a Striped Bathroom.

A black and white diagonal marble pattern stretches across the room. 3 mirrors populate its 3 expansive walls. A monolithic stone washbasin is centred on a monolithic stone countertop. A roll of towels in soft pink inhabit the concrete shelf below. A vase in white ceramic holds a silk flower to complete the countertop.

Provocatively cropped pouted lips announce that you are, without a doubt, in a powder room.

You walk out into an airy Balcony.

The minimal white textured wall holds slender black steel fittings, forming slightly bevelled edged rectangles. Ribbed glasses form infills in the panelling. A large leafed Monstera in a rope basket offsets a strategically placed Jeanneret copy. A Large black and white Chicago Art Deco photo in a large black and white frame lies propped against a corner of the strip of pattered cement tiles.

You feel a distinct sense of Deja-vu.

You’re a bit Disoriented.

Is this someone’s Home?

Is this a Hotel in Ibiza?

A Dentist clinic? A Sneaker store ?

A health and wellness Gym? A high-street mechanic shop?

You shake your head.

You’re in a soft pastel Delirium.

Welcome to the Placeless.

Placelessness 1.0

Much has been said about the ‘Placeless-ness’ of the generic Airport, the Mall, the Retail space.

By trying to be something for everyone, they became nothing for anyone.

Placeless places are designed to recede into the background, to not spark conversation or engagement, to fade away before they are noticed. They aim to subscribe to lesser, and push themselves further into the background, so as to be an indistinguishable, homogenous, mildly comforting backdrop to our lives.

This used to be relegated to functional spaces, Airports and Malls, the backdrop was mildly disconcerting but usually bearable. We expected so less from these spaces, that their ubiquitous presence created some misplaced sense of comfort. This McDonaldisation of space was initially limited to these detached realms of metal, glass and endless sanitised counter-tops.

We usually left all this behind when we entered the ‘Real’ world. We eventually came Home, went to School, visited the Dentist, or immersed ourselves at Work.

Everything is familiar, everything is known, everything is predictable.

Spaces that are copies of other spaces eventually lull us into a soft Delirium.

We experienced this Delirium as Placelessness 1.0

But the Delirium followed us Home.

Placelessness 2.0

Placelessness 2.0 is the merger of the screen with our built world. C4D generated renders of crisp terrazzo and soft dusk lighting now frame our expectations from reality. We then manifest interior experiences that complete the illusion. We suspend ourselves from reality in a way that extends our online aspirations to the offline, officially making us Placeless.

We cannot be bothered by nuances of locality, relevance, personality, autobiography, craft, ethics, climate, ecological footprint or livelihood.

Reality only interferes with our expectations of Reality.

Welcome to Analgesicland.

Colours are bold, but not too bold.

Hues are perfectly desaturated, so as not to affiliate with the jarring saturation of Old Media.

We perfectly synergise with the bevelled comfort of our new-age oracles, our rose-gold iPhones, the tightly rounded rectangles that we experience our world with.

Placelessness 2.0 creates the mental equivalent of chewing on a Digene tablet after a weekend binge. With this comforting merger of the online and offline experience, we soothe over the painful gaseous churning of the real world, and prepare our minds to live in a placeless universe.

Our expectations from physical spaces are increasingly derived from virtual ‘moods’, where the mind and the body crave the same placeless places. Our primate brains crave the same aesthetic continuity between all the worlds we inhabit.

When Designers use these endless buffets of Pinterest and Instagram feeds as fodder for the spaces they manifest, we create a self recursive loop, an endless cycle of selfreferential experiences and environments.

References become Spaces become References become Spaces ad-nauseam.

We are officially Placeless.

We suckle greedily on this selfreferential Ecosystem.

Sharing mood boards create a sort of ‘Aesthetic currency’, a way of sharing a Hallucination. Clients share with us their own version of this loop, and we congratulate each other on finding similar dishes within the infinite buffet.

We term this ‘alignment’.

We congratulate ourselves across the Glossies when our loops are rewarded by views and likes amongst an increasingly homogenous and scrupulously policed “Aesthetic”.

In this world, an exposed concrete surface is ‘Honest’, shows ‘Clarity’ and embodies ‘Purpose’. In this delirium we forget it is one of the most destructive materials on Earth.

Our shared Instagram hallucination is a calming, soothing, analgesic for the harsh acidity we experience when we open our windows. Hashtags like #oddlysatisfying help us cope with the stresses and strains of living in a fast paced, constantly changing, increasingly hostile world.

The “pleasant” imagery becomes the soft pink Caladryl over the burning bites of reality that surrounds us.

Watching painted hands endlessly fold pink slime is a welcome release.

A pleasant montage of images comforts us in a world that hates us.

The Delirium is complete.

Placelessness 2.0 tears down the Designer’s self-inhabited ivory tower of “Taste”.

The democratic infinite buffet of Instagram and Pinterest feeds is now shared with clients and patrons.

International style, taste, Art fairs and Design Expos, deals and benefits of travel are now accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.

A side effect of the flattening power of social media, a square frame, endless Pinterest boards and the newly democratised access to aspirational imagery is the subsequent flattening of our expectations from spaces.

We now inhabit and ( increasingly aspire to inhabit ) spaces that buy into vast, flattened, analgesic landscapes that are common across our homes, workplaces, dentist clinics and hospitality venues.

Cues that begin in the Virtual slowly make their way ‘accidentally’ into the Real.

“The artist's task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns.

Because of the artists, who are selfselected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.”

Terence McKenna

If there is one fig-leaf that Designers can crowd behind, it is the trope of the ‘Creative spark’, or ‘Eccentric quirk’. Surely, there is magical alchemy in the process of dreaming up ideas and then actually building them ?

Designers cast themselves as modern-day Shamans, travelling into the virtual lands with an open, curious mind, and bringing back Ideas that could then populate our world with novelty and other-worldly beauty.

Placelessness 3.0

Placelessness 3.0 is the takeover of the creative impulse by agents operating outside of Human Neurology. These agents are owned now by powerful corporates, and their eccentric output is slowly eroding away the last fig-leaf for the Design Industry.

As contemporary research in AI progresses slowly towards the building of sentient systems that emulate dream-like states, or child-like learning states, we will see a new kind of aesthetic emerging, and a new form of Placelessness.

Human collaborator : thebusridelab

Text prompt : Imagine a Sofa made by Bees { AI engine : Midjourney Beta }

Human collaborator : thebusridelab

Text prompt : Imagine a Hand-Axe using Indian Craft { AI engine : Midjourney Beta }

Human collaborator : thebusridelab

Text prompt : Imagine an evening Gown made with Insect Compound Eyes { AI engine : Midjourney Beta }

Human collaborator : thebusridelab

Text prompt : Imagine a Cockroach Couch { AI engine : Midjourney Beta }

Human collaborator : thebusridelab

Text prompt : Imagine a Secular Monument for Communal Harmony in India { AI engine : Midjourney Beta }

Human collaborator : thebusridelab

Text prompt : Imagine a Gopuram Spaceship { AI engine : Midjourney Beta }

Human collaborator : thebusridelab

Text prompt : Imagine a Reptilian Kathak Dancer Costume { AI engine : Midjourney Beta }

Tools like MidJourney and Dall.E show us the tip of the iceberg in terms of machine visualisations, and text-toimage generation.

As AI powered visualisation tools emerge and get deployed across platforms, influences from this realm will sculpt more real world experience than ever before. Placelessness 3.0 also infects the visualisation of new landscapes like the Metaverse, the latest instalment in a long lineage of virtual “Second-worlds”.

While these tools are currently being used to create 2 Dimensional environments, we can extrapolate quite quickly how they will soon be creating completely Alien and unfamiliar worlds.

What would a Human feel like in these environments? Would it make you feel safe?

Would we crave the Nostalgia of the Old in an increasingly unfamiliar world?

As tools evolve to create, simulate and sustain evolving virtual worlds, our expectations from the physical and the virtual become increasingly blurred.

The sense of Novelty and “Otherworldliness” of the current AI powered landscape will settle down into a new version of Placelessness, where Humans and Machines dance elegant tangos in new simulated spaces together.

What is the role of the Human “creative instinct” within an environment of endless Novelty ?

When you live in Disneyland where would you go to witness Spectacle? How long will a Human be allowed to produce a novel idea when his AI counterpart is able to work 1000 times faster ?

AI powered Art will map our cities, AI powered music will put us to sleep, AI powered medicines will keep us healthy.

Placelessness 3.0 will complete the Delirium.

What will culture demand from Design and Architecture, when we live in multiple realities ?

Beyond extending our services into the virtual realms, and designing homes for the rich and famous in both the Finite physical and the Infinite virtual, where would we draw our sense of meaning and validation?

Placelessness 3.0 is an unending buffet of Novelty. It will feed the Designer’s Novelty obsession with an infinite buffet of Bacchanalian proportions.

Placelessness 4.0

Placelessness 4.0 is a landscape that is inaccessible to un-augmented Human Neurology. The speeds are too great, the novelty is un-computable, the mental requirements are just too great.

Imagine a hyper-speed LSD trip, powered by Algorithms that can compute experiences at multiple times the speed of the Human brain.

This landscape will need to be slowed down by magnitudes to even be glimpsed, let alone inhabited.

Placelessness 4.0 will be a world parallel to our own, with different values, sentient beings, unknown intelligences and a completely new metaphor for evolution. The evolutionary cycles within those worlds will make our Darwinian notions seem prehistoric in comparison.

The Placelessness 4.0 will exclude us from it’s confines, and we will be forced to deal with the detritus it spews out time to time.

We see glimpses of this world in the Algorithmic Stock Market, where microtransactions are being executed within microseconds. Some estimates place the amount of Algorithmic stock trading at 65% of the total US stock trade.

When this Stock Market blips, nobody knows why. It is a world separated from ours by blinding speeds.

If we have to create agency in these Alien worlds, and use it’s unique grammar to be inspired, or even just be relevant, we will have to drop the dog-like fixation with ‘Aesthetic’ and the soft power that we assume it buys us.

Design and Architecture may have to play with these powerful tools and create more equitable processes, deploying our energies into working towards fixing a Broken Planet.

WHAT DO WE DO NOW?

WATCH FOR SEASON 2 : THE CURSE OF THE PLACELESS. COMING SOON TO A PLACE NEAR YOU.