The role of Archinect’s series Cross-Talk is to bring forward the positive aspects of the polemic and allow for the resulting conflict to bring to life an otherwise still and comfortable climate of creativity—if there can be one. Cross-Talk attempts—if to only say that it did—to allow text the freedom that the image has accepted and embraced. Cross-Talk attempts to force the no, to contradict itself, to anger, to please and then anger again, if only to force a stance, to pull out the position of the self, of the discipline and of the hour as a means to begin and maintain conversations moving forward. 

The Beheaded Medusa: From politics to curation, architecture and the petrification of process.

"The mind has compartments holding opinions and modes of judgment which conflict when they come together; that, in fact, is why they are separated; compartments, therefore, which require attention, and one is particularly conscious of anything that mixes them up."

William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity

No More Taste, Now What?

In the new age, there will be no taste. There will be no judgment or method of discerning between good and evil, authentic and faux, real and virtual. There will only be the senses and the constant bombardment of stimuli. We will deploy legislation like salve onto the skin, and regulatory measures will exist only when inevitable. Everything will flow together, bound only by proximity, and in precious moments when things develop stronger relations, from such intimacy will spark out the flame of momentary participation and labor. Otherwise, all things are there own without fear of absorption or depletion or assimilation. Of course, there is but one threat: should anyone seek immortality in such a system, all hell would break loose. 

R.Wurlitzer

I begin with a manifesto:

I hate everything that is Old; I belong to the New and anything that is not new is dead. It does not matter what kind of thing it might be; the old is both that which is ancient and that which is uncool. All things that have existed for long enough to be owned or to be used or to be utilized or to be enslaved or be disseminated are old. All that which exists in multiples, which has been multiplied or copied or reproduced or legitimized performed reenacted or 3-D printed is old. Almost everything is old, and I spend much of my time being angry. Images are always old. Ideas are made old by printing and posting and sharing. The very act of living is rendered old through the filter of social media platforms and their extending portals of access, the screen is the ultimate mirror through which the moment and all that is of the moment can be sequestered processed defragmented and aged. The instantaneous-old. And that which fills me is Volcanic Destructive Dumb Anger. This is the anger that is sometimes referred to as, The Restlessness of Youth. As I have heard it called, the Rebellion of the Proletariat. What is the Post-Post-Modern, the Hype-Beast, the Fashion Police? What it is, without name or label, is the truest instinct of survival in an age of constant reproduction and suspicious landscapes of formless obscure things - hate everything, doubt everything, and survive.

The very act of living is rendered old through the filter of social media platforms and their extending portals of access, the screen is the ultimate mirror through which the moment and all that is of the moment can be sequestered processed defragmented and aged.

This is not my manifesto; it is the one encoded into the feed. It exists in the machine of production that is at the core of our modern aesthetic sensibilities- stay fresh, stay weird, stay ahead of the curve. Our taste, our curated consumption, is at once a careful construction. As we intake particular products and objects and images there is a secretion of traceable information that begins to trail behind our - not always, but usually- digital path through the matrix of availability. As this excrement of data grows it begins to take on very physical and material qualities. Thus the shell of identity is created, and you, and I, continue on our way with the speed of shellfish or snails or a clam. This shell we can also call the profile or the diagram of the new human, quite literally flattened into threads of your clothing and embedded in the fibers of your mattress. This shell, like Keisler's Endless House, is made up of the unknown-everything, the minerals of your sweat and multivitamins, the powdered stuff of moondust and dandruff. This is the architecture of experience, the shell made by consuming other things that once fragmented and digested leave a tiny bit of themselves in the walls. How architecture comes to be solidified is perhaps the greatest economic and political process of our time, at once material and immaterial, physical and digital. It implicates architecture as not simply an object of consumption but as a byproduct of it. In this sense architecture is entirely governed by taste but taste is no longer an applicable term for what today can only be described as a metabolic exercise that is not determined by perception but rather occurs by pressure: the continual forces of influence that are funneled through media platforms have become the ebb and flow of compulsions that begin somewhere in the Amazonian algorithm and end full-circle in our shopping cart. 'Taste' is a terrible word for describing an incredibly complicated process of mediating aesthetic pleasure, depersonalized experience, post-digital schizophrenia, and mysteriously human whims. Architecture, for clients and designers and its innumerable willing and unwilling participants, is a coagulation of our consumption patterns. Political iconography is the waste-product of oil drilling and our attachment to Instagram; it is the product of the incredible mobilization of raw materials and labor as much as it is simultaneously a new conductor of information. 

The only thing that gets even more complicated than the physicalization of architecture is how we describe it. Today the discipline has shattered into a million techniques for describing a million possible realities and to maneuver through this endless landscape of new aesthetic expressions, and formal representations mean to form new ways of seeing and experiencing architecture. It is not by chance that with each passing year young architects move further into spaces of exhibition with increasing attention shifting towards the ambiguity of the installation, the magical interior, the alluring space not to be inhabited- you must understand, please, we beg of you: what is here is not a prospective building, or a project-to-be-realised. These are explorations in self-reflection and mastication; we need to see what stuff we are made of. 

By now it must be clear that the architect in the gallery space is not a temporary pit-stop on the way towards full-build, that the architectural exhibition is not simply a way to mark time- no, this is surgery, it is dissection. The new architect is in a frenzy to tear the electrical circuits from the walls, to delaminate the grain from the wood, to hack away from the stucco down to the pixel. What we are looking for is dead meat- sooner or later you find the tumor and with much joy, extract, destroy, repair. 

On November 6, 2016, or rather, the morning after, there was heard from deep within the national rift a voice which clamored, How did we not see what had always been looming in the distance? Interestingly it is exactly this question which has revealed American politics to be primarily interpreted through vision- it is first and foremost a game of optics, and only subsequently one of phonetics or linguistic logic. At some point perhaps America did gather around the radio and each house had a father that did the careful work of explaining to his nuclear bubble children the definitions of words like Nazi and Atomic Bomb and revenge. But images have always been better and faster at doing that job, of educating us. The composed colors of our national flag, our first lesson in color theory. We have all been trained in the visual arts of national domination and aggression, the stars on the flag are not powerful because they signify states in union but because they read as star-shaped bullet holes through which the impending void can be seen, and we all collectively sigh because we are on the advantageous side of the American veil. 

Aesthetics of Babel

In 2016 the Republican National Convention was held in Cleveland, Ohio. It was during that specific convention that the party would officially nominate Donald Trump for President and Indiana Governor Mike Pence for Vice President. More importantly, on a wayward C-Span camera a remarkable visual drama unfolded. A woman's homemade pink flag bearing the words, No Racism No Hate appeared on national television for approximately 8.64 seconds before immediately being shrouded by a larger more compelling national fabric. Here, if we had watched closely, we would have recognized that her flag was inadequate and even dangerous not because of its color or its hand-craftedness (and therefore its total state of belonging to the individual and the individual's hand that made it)  but because there were literal and legible words inscribed into it. Her linguistic slip was a clear faux pas within an event and upon a stage where words and literal language were being deliberately obfuscated. Her flailing momentary message read like a glaring pornographic scene within which each insignificant character had engaged in such specific arrangement that the copulation of form and meaning might converge, it was too intelligible too easy too explicit. 

Upon her obscene sign was flung the red white and blue flag, so that its austere stripes and shapes might smother the erotic act of literacy, that it might undo whatever sensuous and sensorial consequences such displays often have upon viewers, readers, any who might still remember the act of interpretation and divination- that might still be able to read the signs that tell us exactly what they mean. 

THE NEW DIAGRAM

Five months before the Republican National Convention, Stephen Colbert the popular late night talk show host led his audience through a hilarious comedic bit that we might here call, The New Post-Literal Diagram. Here I might provide for you three consecutive images where we see his progression, chalk in hand, leading viewers from point A to point B to the emergence of a glaring swastika as the clever and ingenious punchline of his joke.  

Hilariously, the diagram results in a total inversion of traditional modes of reading: whereas the relationship between points might have been previously where we seek information, it is rather a mere substructure of connections, which while absurd and even random, provide the architectonic support for the resulting image.I'll figure this out! He cries, and the audience laughs with him, we are all in on the joke! We are all not reading what we can obviously read; it is a collective act of picture-making and schizophrenic image-seeing. There is no logic here by which we might arrive at the same image again. To communicate this joke or this diagram outside of the carefully constructed theatre in which its form is delivered would be impossible. 

In many ways, we might ask ourselves if this is not too close to home when discussing architecture and its diagrammatic revelations that somehow seem to live and exist with utmost strength only in the realm of architects. The joke is good, the punchline is really poignant, but the message is not transferable because the method is not sustainable. The critical techniques of architecture must be able to travel outside the discipline, outside the classroom and outside the same circles of our friendly acquaintances and foes- and into what has been for many years ferociously called the public realm. 

We should be able to carry through in our experimentation the reason for which we endeavor on such strange trajectories in the first place, we are looking at architecture for a reason: not because we are architects, or because we are students of architecture, but because there is an incredibly powerful convergence of political, economic, and social performance at the core of architecture- it is the place where all things meet, where they are intertwined and knotted into structures of physical mass and presence. 

If reading is dead, which I have no authority to claim here, but if reading as we have known it- as the exercise of close and investigative analysis- is no longer a tool in the hands of general audiences (and perhaps it never was) what we are sorely in need of is the ability to carry in our work the message of our curiosity and inquisition. The message has been lost in the medium. We should be able to carry through in our experimentation the reason for which we endeavor on such strange trajectories in the first place, we are looking at architecture for a reason: not because we are architects, or because we are students of architecture, but because there is an incredibly powerful convergence of political, economic, and social performance at the core of architecture- it is the place where all things meet, where they are intertwined and knotted into structures of physical mass and presence. It is only right that we bring it to the gallery to tear it apart, to question its nuts and bolts, to acquaint ourselves again with the stuff that architecture is constructed of. I speak of course not only of materials and techniques but of the endless forces which form architecture- as I have mentioned, if we as consumers are like focal points in an electromagnetic metabolism which operates through a logic of equilibrium, always returning to its source, repeating its cycles over and over again, is architecture not the perfect residue of those interactions? Is it not like the richest of soils at the delta of realities repeating rivers, the perfect place where all passes by and where all returns and where all leave a trace?

This is exactly the time when architecture must be put under the knife, under the sharp blade of criticism- is not the curatorial hand but that of an overzealous but precise gaze? More than ever we need the cut of that prying eye, careful but daring, hungry to find the lifeless calcified edges waiting to be removed. 

THE HEAD OF MEDUSA - A Last Disclaimer for Critical Interrogation

I hate everything that is old because it has been converted into image. I love everything that is new because it exists as image first, and will undoubtedly degenerate to sign. In architecture, we can trace our history from Modernism to Post-Modernism as history from the sanitation of form to its ludic unfolding, but the playful rebellion of syntax and meaning in the Post-Modernists was but another way to run meaning through the ringer. Ultimately, we are now in the age of post-language post-meaning and most importantly, post-reading. We do not read anymore. And if we do we lack the desire to transfer what we have learned. I mean this not as a moral accusation, but as a speculative provocation: can we not transfer and translate our great architectural discoveries into the languages from which these truths have been extracted? Jack of all trades, master of none! I deny your derogatory saying, the architect is a wandering stranger in a strange land, Jack of all trades, Jill of the Hill - from up here I see it all. 

The curator has become a wielder of a powerful critical tool- look here, look because you cannot look away.

If I have tried to argue that architecture is a byproduct of our consumption we must understand that to be a consumer is an aesthetic dilemma and an ontological challenge: you are what you eat, your house is what you eat, your cultural centers are what you eat, your museums and courthouses are what you eat. Architecture is the petrified realization that occurs when we look back upon the serpentine systems of economy and pleasure, a solidification facilitated by our critical tools. I am reminded of the fact that once the Gorgon's head had been removed from the rest of her body, her empty gaze would still turn all living things to stone. The method remained even when its theory had perished. Nowhere else is this more evident than in architecture, where the critical eye, the analytic gaze, continues to reify whatever it looks upon. Thecurator has become a wielder of a powerful critical tool- look here, look because you cannot look away. William Empson, writing on the various techniques used to produce ambiguity in poetry writes that what is needed to find satisfaction in the literary (and as I would argue, in the architectural) is the sense that satisfaction is not "'this is beautiful because of such and such theory', but, 'this is alright; I am feeling correctly about this; I know the kind of way in which it is meant to be affecting me." Oh dear reader, that such messages could be conveyed by the architectural narrative: look at me and feel the stony weight of the world upon your shoulders.