Sponsored Content - A Glossary for Post-Digital Architecture

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Manifesto

://SPONSORED CONTENT:// A Glossary For Post-Digital Architecture CRITICAL PRACTICE MANIFESTO DAWA PRATTEN

Dawa Pratten

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Contents

Intro 4 Glossary 6 16

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Introduction Post-Digital x Surrealism

Dawa Pratten

Post-Digital does not allude to an end to the ‘digital’, rather it looks towards its state of ubiquity; to the point where the ‘digital’ is assumed, common-place, uninteresting. Post-Digital announces a point of bifurcation in human cultural evolution: a child born today is likely to be photographed, recorded and shared on social media before it has seen its first sunset. It will not know a world where communication is limited by distance, a world where all information is not immediately available. For them the ‘digital’ will be expected, and for those who mean to move forward in this post-digital age, our fascination should not lie with the spectacle of new technological marvels but with its wider effects on our society and culture.

For architecture, Post-Digitalism requires looking beyond screens and augmented realities wallpapered across base structures; beyond instillations and incisions that shout our latest mastery of technology. This manifesto’s intent is to examine the cultural change affected by the overlapping of worlds, by the explosion of communication that heralds the death of distance. With location layered upon location, we create hyper-realities and pluralities; our technology manifests as a saturation of reference, and stripping of context. What governs the underlying programming of the interfaces we have all learned to love, the lenses by which we access these simultaneous realities and realms? Built on marketing strategies and capitalist ideologies, what insidious undercurrents are forming the foundations we build our many lives upon?

The technology creating these conditions may be new but some of the outcomes are familiar. The surrealist movement aimed

“to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality”1 through any method that would allow the unconscious to express 1. Tate. (2004). Pietà or Revolution by Night 1923. Available: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ernst-pieta-or-revolution-by-night-t03252/text-display-caption. Last accessed 15.05.16.

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itself. In the same way, post-digitalism requires us to resolve the contradictory conditions of reality upon reality, but towards allowing what to express what, so to tackle one, what can be learnt from the other?

Post-Digitalist artist Theo-Mass Lexileictous, observing the way we use language in social media networks, coined the phrase #postdigitalistautomaticwriting. This was in reference to the surrealist act of automatic writing: an attempt to express oneself through writing, whilst avoiding the filtering of one’s thoughts. An automatic response to writing associated with the unconscious. #postdigitalistautomaticwriting is the act of writing online where one combines tags, random words, fragmented phrases and sentences towards a new form of communication. Each tag, line and verse is isolated and contextless. It functions as a filterless way of curating thought through writing, meaning derived through weight of numbers, as collage rather than montage.

A Post-Digital Manifesto could not be written conventionally. To begin to talk about the post-digital, one must begin to write postdigitally. This essay responds to #postdigitalistautomaticwriting adopting aspects of its form of writing to better narrate the changes undergone by culture - and therefore architecture. As such, this essay exists as a glossary, as a motif, indexing and defining terms within the domain of the post-digital, post-digitally, for your use and dissemination, because, after all:

“The dialectic is an amusing mechanism which guides us / in a banal kind of way / to the opinions we had in the first place.�2 2. Tristan Tzara. (1918). Dada Manifesto. Available: http://www.391.org/manifestos/1918-dada-manifesto-tristan-tzara.html#.Vzj6VJMrJE4. Last accessed 15.05.16.

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Glossary

@ Tags//: symbol, U+0040

Symbol dating back to 1345. A locator in emails: user@host. Locates users on social media platforms such as twitter. Has permeated the English language.

# Tags//: tag

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Pound Sign, Number Sign, Hash-tag.

Denoted direction for conversation.

Indexes information

Attention Span Tags//: attention, span, smart-phone, goldfish

Context

Tags//: sharing, saturation, re-tweet, viral, pin

Context, within the frame of the post-digital, has been lost to our love of speed. “Speed creates pure objects. It is itself a pure object, since it cancels out the ground and territorial referencepoints, since it runs ahead of time to annul time itself, since it moves more quickly than its own cause and obliterates that cause by outstripping it.”13 The immediacy and availability of information has meant that information has no location and location no vernacular. As soon as something of perceived value comes into being, it is shared, passed into the virtual, which has no Cartesian bounds. Authorship is lost as the information moves like a virus through our networks and systems. Picked up by others, admired individually, the object is chosen by someone else, catalogued and indexed on pinterest boards, blogs, 3D Warehouses, before being reapplied into the world at some far-removed point without the necessity for a similar purpose or meaning.

3. Jean Baudrillard (1989). America. London: Verso. 7.

The average attention span in the year 2000 was 12 seconds, since the advent of the smart-phone this has fallen to 8 seconds. The attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds.

Attention Span Tags//: attention, span, smart-phone, goldfish

The average attention span in the year 2000 was 12 seconds, since the advent of the smart-phone this has fallen to 8 seconds. The attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds.

Audience Tags//: stage, global, power

Everyone

Author

Fig 1. ‘Contextless Wealth’. Authors own works,

Tags//: creator, owner,

created as part of The Unstable Cities Think

The creator of content, the original copyright holder. Often lost by the repeated sharing and adaptation of work.

Tank Research Project. Used to apply visions of wealth as a as a wallpaper.

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Avatar (n.)

Tags//: representation, fake, identity

The representation of ones self in another reality.

Avatar (pr.)

Tags//: Peter, Buchanan, Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves, 3-D, space

Peter Buchanan’s favourite film. A Hollywood ‘bluewashing’ of the western genocide of the Native Americans, set in space.

Satellite Lamp

Tags//: light, poetry, dreams, beauty “Satellite Lamps shows that GPS is not a seamless blanket of efficient positioning technology; it is a negotiation between radio waves, earth-orbit geometry and the urban environment. GPS is a truly impressive technology, but it also has inherent seams and edges.”

Highlighting the instabilities in the invisible GPS fields that surround us, this project allows viewers to observe errors in GPS. The intensity of the lamp is tied to the accuracy of its GPS location.

As the co-ordinate of the lamp drifts away from its predetermined point on the earth, the lamp glow and flicker in a beautifully poetic fashion.

Beauty Tags//: value, aesthetics, subjective

Binge Tags//: feed, saturate

Consume media to excess.

Cartesian Tags//: dimensions, reality, tangible

Co-ordinate system. The physical dimensions of ‘space’ in the ‘real’ world. Measurable.

Fig 2. http://www.elasticspace.com/2014/08/satellite-lamps

Catalogue Tags//: endless, useful

By collecting and carefully labelling everything can we understand the world? Is this a futile gesture?

City Tags//: home, workplace, countryside

Metropolis. Humanities greatest achievement, sold to the highest bidder. The natural evolution of an agrarian society. Generic.

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Communication Tags//: shout, louder

The means by which ideas are transferred.

Curate Tags//: navigate, display

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Display a collection to communicate a trend or narrative. Everyone is a curator now.

Definition Tags//: Dictionary, symbolism

The definition for different phenomena varies from one person to another. Accuracy is required when introducing any new material.

Distraction 1: https://31.media.tumblr.com/ bb71cee27700ed4dd684468ce9fd8aaf/tumblr_ inline_n2ahgkGYHg1szcb3x.png

Dreams Tags//: aspirations, subconscious, realities

Dreams suggest alternate realities. A subconscious response to the world you experience.

Escape Tags//: lie, run

There is no going back now.

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Advertising

Tags//: sponsored, content, money, cynical, hidden,

When creative content moved online, advertisers followed almost immediately. Those who did not wish to view adverts however, were soon able to install Ad-Blocking software into their browsers. This led to an arms race between the advertisers and developers to find new ways of hiding advertising within content so that it cannot not picked up by software. Our desire for new content, combined with our newly shortened attention span, has created a population of sheep; easily distracted. We should be unsure of reality and mistrust our eyes.

Advertising has always attempted to influence the way we think.

From product placement and celebrity endorsement to newer tactics like sponsored content; it has evolved to become more subtle and insidious, influencing us without our knowledge.

However with the advent of the Post-Digital it has now evolved to control the interface between the realities we inhabit. Without us knowing, we have allowed unprecedented access into the way we live our lives, to the point where it now controls them.

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Filter Tags//: sorting, yes, no

Automatism

Tags//: automatic, writing, dreams, reality, language, finance

If Automatic Writing was seen by the Surrealists as a method for tapping into the subconscious, then what does #postdigitalistautomaticwriting allow us to tap into? If Architectural language has become a collage or pastiche created by realities layered upon reality, what does this allow us to view? Just as the intersection of dreams and reality allowed for the Surrealists to see the subconscious, does reality upon reality allow us to view our collective subconscious, or is it rather the average of human consciousness? An amalgam of the popular mixed with the profitable? A representation of market forces made corporeal?

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Historical tactic, used to discard unwanted information/content.

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Distraction 2: There is no pipe: http://3bp. blogspot.com/-46QoEFSUDmU/Uq7Zuq-C2eI/ AAAAAAAAB7U/CfcxSSH6NnM/s1600/1.jpg

Glitch Tags//: music, error, creation

The aesthetics of failure.

Generic Tags//: Junkspace, everywhere, city

The condition we have evolved into through.

GPS Tags//: space, coordinates, navigation

Global Positioning satellite allow us to trace our movements around the globe. The map and the terrain overlap.

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Hyper-real Tags//: reality, perception, believe

The inability to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. The Matrix stole all its ideas from Ghost in the Shell.

Identity Tags//: self, projection

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In multiple realities you can have multiple identities.

Link Tags//: chain, viral

Provide a shareable distributable link.

Binge on linked articles or artefacts.

Language

Tags//: communication, repetition, proliferation

As Rem Koolhaas wrote Junkspace in 2001, the internet as we know it now, was still in its infancy. Only 41.5% of American households were connected to the internet in the year 2000 whereas 65% of Americans own smart-phones, internet on their person, in 2016. (http://www.statista.com/statistics/201182/forecast-of-smartphone-users-in-the-us/) Koolhaas proclaimed that for Junkspace “There is no form, only proliferation... Regurgitation is the new creativity. Instead of creation, we honour, cherish and embrace manipulation...�14 The effects of the development of the web on the proliferation of junkspace is untold. The ability to proliferate, to regurgitate has increased exponentially. Architectural language, disseminated through the web, has produced a language of contextless reference, a leitmotiv representing nothing but banality, architecture as an automatic reading of a culture built on populism and replication, like a ransom note made from newspaper clippings.

Distraction 3: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ fredini/9522463619/in/pool-3d-print-failures/ 4. Rem Koolhaas (2013). Junkspace With Runningroom. London: Notting Hill Editions. 9.

Marketing Tags//: capitalism,

Tactics by which you convince others to buy your shitty product, whether they want to or not.

Object Tags//: form, aesthetic

Architecture devoid of meaning due to a loss of reference or context.

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Photography Tags//: Instagram, likes, filters

Captures exact depictions of reality, trusted, open to manipulation.

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Ornament

Tags//: wallpaper, semiotics, meaning

“Architecture needs mechanisms that allow it to become connected to culture.”15 Ornament is that mechanism, yet it is clear that current trends in the Post-Digital have only connected ornament to marketability.

Post-Digital architecture is not a digital wash, a layer of interactive displays projected across walls, screens offering windows into other realities. These are but distractions from the reality we face.

Distraction 4: http://staticwixstatic.com/ media/425224_3d2e7f2e5a5940b3a cff7ca156652b97.jpg

Pin Tags//: pinterest, twitter

Add value, promote image.

Repetition Tags//: repetition

Repetition.

5. Farshid Moussavi (2006). The Function of Ornament. Cambridge: Actar D. 5.

6. Farshid Moussavi (2006). The Function of Ornament. Cambridge: Actar D. 5.

Re-tweet Tags//: sharing, popularity, power

Agreeing with something then broadcasting it to your world.

Saturation Tags//: overload, choice,

All information is available from everywhere.

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“It is clear that in a multicultural and increasingly cosmopolitan society, symbolic communication is harder to enact as it is difficult to gain a consensus on symbols or icons. Representational tools are less coded and unable to produce convergence with culture.”26

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Screen Tags//: iWatch, disappearing, 8k, resolution

Window into other worlds and realities. Both getting excessively small and excessively large at the same time, moving away from the human scale towards being able to go unnoticed. Not long of this world.

Semiotics Tags//: symbol, meaning

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The study of symbols and their meanings.

SEO Tags//: google, value, popularity

Search Engine Optimisation. Tactics used to increase visitor traffic on a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine.

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Romanticism

Tags//: escapism, nationalism, identity, belief

As Romanticism was a reaction to the industrial revolution, so too must we face another reactionary shift towards a nostalgic longing for an imagined past as we move through the digital revolution. Post-digital should not be mistaken for this movement, it is the opposite. It is acceptance, the envelopment of our digital selves over our real selves.

Romanticism and nationalism have long gone hand in hand and within the new post digital world it can be seen in the current political climate where Donald Trump has high-jacked the US Republican party through the vague proclamation of “Make America Great Again”, and a viral campaign that has profitied from those who fear the heterogeneity of a multicultural society and utilised viral media to overwhelm opposition.

“We rarely encounter anything that is outside our comfort zone, we only engage with people who share our world-view and we often end up simply being sold more stuff that we already have”.1 7 A response to the problems of Post-Digitalism has the danger of slipping towards nationalism. What is needed is an ability to embrace the influence of infinite context and multiculture without descending into the generic.

Sharing Tags//: swarm, future, viral

Media is spread around the world by sharing and liking online, it spreads like a virus. Sharing is the future.

Surreal Tags//: mind, dream, body

Unlocking the unconscious mind, dealing with multiple realities

Terror Tags//: media, excuse, 24hr news

3264 Americans died in terrorist attacks in America between 1995 and 2015 (2,902 can be attributed to 9/11). 69,071 Americans died from diabetes in 2010. Terror is profitable for 24hr news networks as fear grips like no other emotion. Fear of

7. Boer, R, Minkjan, M,. (2016). The tyrany of the filter bubble and the future of public space. Available: http:// www.failedarchitecture.com/the-tyranny-of-the-filter-bubble-and-the-future-of-public-space/. Last accessed 20.06.16.

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terrorism has spread uncontrollably through the internet, through executions and death being viewed by millions. Terrorism, or rather fear, has shaped our culture and thus our architecture.

Trust Tags//: believe, valuable, breakable

Manifesto

Index

Tags//: catalogue, curate, link, tag

The index is the basis by which we navigate the infinite void that is the internet. It is the foundations by which search engines function. We catalogue and collate all content under vague and often arbitrary names. “What seems strange to an architect is not the arbitrary nature of the categories people seem to apply to architecture - but that the reason for their creation never seems to be architectural.�18 There exists a huge divide between the complex ideas being contributed and they are tagged and curated.

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We trust the means by which we navigate and interact with the many realities we are a part of.

Truth Tags//: belief, false, maybe

Debatable

Distraction 5: Please enjoy 10 painful minutes of Michael Owen awkwardly reading from a Teleprompter whilst riding a fake helicopter round a CGI Dubai for a First Group investment advert. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=xoamtTkQzzw

Twitter Tags//: network, communication, democracy?

332 million people communicating 141 characters at a time.

Ubiquity Tags//: everywhere, always

Power and boredom in equal measure. goes unnoticed

Fig 3. http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-15235576/stock-photo-crying-drunk-businessman-committing-suicide-due-to-the-stock-exchange-crash-conceptual.html

1. Self, J. (2016). What You Should Think About Architecture. Real Review. 1, p14.

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Unique Tags//: value, marketable

Just like everybody else.

Distraction 6: “If only VR was half as good as LSD we might have something” http://hplusmagazine.com/2014/07/31/virtualreality-and-drugs-yes-you-should-get-high-beforeusing-vr/

Representation

Tags//: communication, deception, ideas, meaning

As architects, we are limited by the fact that we are the designers, not the builders. Always there is the point at which ideas must be communicated to others, where we must represent ideas through whatever medium we find most appropriate. Images now, however, are fed through another system of indexing and tagging, distributed farther and farther from their intended destination.

Two dimensional images that can be transported anywhere at any time. “This flattening of space allowed architecture to achieve portability”19

Viral Tags//: marketable, popular Dawa Pratten

Manifesto

Viral videos spread even before the internet was ubiquitous. Now it is a marketing tool even for the average public. They are far too valuable.

Wallpaper Tags//: thin, facade

Skin deep cover for lack of depth.

Zoo Tags//: observe

We can now observe everyone everywhere, all the time.

Fig 4. Authors own work, created as part of The Unstable Cities Think Tank Research Project.

9. Meredith, M, Sample, H (2013). Everything All at Once. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. 17.

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Fiduciary

Tags//: trust, responsibility, regulation

Fiduciary responsibility is where one party holds a legal or ethical relationship of trust with another. In US legal terms a fiduciary is someone who is requires to act in your best interest.

It is ironic that Google’s motto is “do no evil” is it suggesting some form of fiduciary relationship with its user base? If so it would be illegal for it to mislead its uses to allow for greater profit. Yet that is exactly what it has the ability to do.

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Distraction 7: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ Cla2iDmUYAEoWYZ.jpg

Search engines are one of the key ways we navigate the virtual worlds we have created as such the underlying algorithms by which they function should be of interest to everyone. Yet there is no ethical covenant by which they operate.

Fig 5: Shanghai Waigaoqiao Number Three power station as seen in reality vs as seen on Baidu Maps http://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-street-view-baidu-total-view

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Possible Futures

Dawa Pratten

If the world has become post-digital - something I believe to be self-evident - then there is no turning back. We are too dependant on our multiple realities, too in love with the opportunities we have been afforded. A retreat to the picturesque, to a romantic nostalgia of a greater imagined past, is never a possibility. The change to our world has been too great. Short of some catastrophic event, the advance of technology will continue unabated.

Fig 6: Previous visions of the future. http://www.vidilab.com/media/k2/items/ cache/649c1b234f9e05214b0a8859fe37993f_XL. jpg

The stunning accomplishment of Capitalism is its ability to harness new technologies. The telegram and railways allowed for the movement of goods and information around the world at ever increasing speeds, cementing its position as the definitive global economic model. With the advent of the digital, and now Post-Digital age, the model has expanded its grasp on information.

Goods can now be virtual. The post digital describes a point by which we assume the digital, its point of ubiquity, we do not understand how the interface works and do not care. We simply wish to use it. By inserting themselves at the intersection between our mind and the many realities we access, corporations are now the gatekeeper between our minds and our virtual bodies, controlling and influencing the flow of information between the two. Our public space has been privatised. All that was left was our mental space. Now they have access to both. This is the result of post digitalism.

Design ideologies are iterative. They evolve out of one another and as the speed and ease of communication has increased, so too does the rate of iteration. However, this process has been hijacked. This is not just a recent problem. Ideologies has always been pushed and marketed. Since the dawn of advertising the value of one ideal has been pitted against another to extract the most value. However, now that search engines and algorithms govern how we navigate our realities, the endless sources of inspiration available begin to form a saturation of context. Within this quagmire, corporate interest fuels the selection process. The

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popular is elevated to the point that culture is stifled by capital interest.

There appears to be two results of this phenomena. In one direction the generic populist expression of style that has lead to the banal creation of generic culture and therefore generic city.

Or, isolated echo chambers which have helped a resurgence of nationalism and political upheaval amongst the developed world.

Two extremes utilised for profit.

The solution would be for each person to design their own interface between these realities. A simple way to imagine one solution would be for everybody to create their own search engines, based on their own personalities not on the marketing algorithms of Google. However, this is obviously not an option as the construction of such systems is so vastly complex and expensive. So what then? Could there be some sort of search engine that allows users to fully customise their operation. A sort of framework that allows user freedom. There are several open source bases for people to utilise, however, the skills necessary to operate them are still beyond the reach of all but a very minute few. This would also ask the question, who designs the framework for customisation? It is simply another interface that is designed by someone with their own specific motives and does not solve the initial problem, merely adds another layer.

If one cannot take control of the ways in which we navigate the many worlds we inhabit, what agency do we have left as users?

If a return to a Pre-Digital world is not an option, are we resigned to function merely as cattle being farmed by corporate interest; placated by the security blanket of filtered content and echo chambers of our own interests? We are sold the same things over and over again at predictable stable rates.

What is needed is an architecture that understands and communicates the chains by which we have unwittingly become

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bound. If representation is the point to which architects truly have control of their ideas, then new modes of representation are required.

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Style is “just the how, never the why”.10 Post-Digitalism has created a style where volume of information and semiotic reference is applied as a motif to simulate the idea of an aesthetic.

If this is the how, then the why is that this wallpaper is a pastiche driven by popularity and aimed towards marketability.

A surreal bent on this approach would help to highlight and dissolve this relationship. We must masquerade within the confines of this condition. If the post digital is an accepted condition, then the architect must find ways to manipulate and piggyback off these forces - as a new tool for design, as a way to instil any ideas that are not based on promotion. If the channels through which we communicate have been commandeered, then we must battle against the codifying of our representations. To break this cycle, a misuse of representation, indexing and media is required. Can we “use and misuse references and signals in order to produce other meanings and value systems?”211

A subversive misuse of advertising, of sponsored content and celebrity endorsement is required. We must negate the influence of corporate governance over which we hold no sway by misusing their tactics against them, a false flag re-imagining of architectural language to disrupt the proliferation of the populist generification of architecture. To make people question truly what they are viewing so as to better understand how they are being manipulated.

10. Self, J. (2016). What You Should Think About Architecture. Real Review. 1, p16.

11 Meredith, M, Sample, H (2013). Everything All at Once. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. 175.

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