Background illustration by Lilli Carré.

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. 

In this installment we hear from Ryan Scavnicky on the topic of Creative Rights & Intellectual Property. Ryan is the Visiting Fellow at the School of Architecture at Taliesin, a producer of theory films with SCI-Arc Channel, and a practicing Architectural Designer with studio TECHNE.

You are having an out of body experience. Yes, you, right now. While reading this article, your sense of self is being pulled outside of your body, hidden, transformed, and regurgitated back to you. Sometimes it comes back as an innocent suggestion (hey iPhone maybe now I actually do mean ‘ducking’!) but more often than not we consider our individuality as impervious from this regurgitation. We don’t think it is happening to us because we don’t use social media much, or its only younger people who have a ‘problem’ (*shakes fist* millennials!). But we’ve always counted our existence - our very being - in terms of our relationships with the world. 

“Architecture is an artificial fact” - Mario Botta 

If you shop online, use a credit card, or have a cell phone, what is billed as a privacy policy is your very ontology leaking out of you, and it is for sale. A vast amount of evidence suggests that these relationships are real whether physical or digital thus bits of automated regurgitation are now - in the most radical sense imaginable - bona fide parts of our very being. This is the strength of the postdigital era of discourse: we are always already digital. 

Faced with this, how are we to understand the greater computational whole as it relates to copyright and plagiarism issues? Who can claim original authorship while texting with autocorrect? To what degree are we to credit human curators who connect with other architects through Instagram’s algorithmic suggestion?  

Digital is no longer enough of a word. We use it in its relationship to a specific architectural discourse about the age most associated with novel computational techniques of form generation, which has now become a history. But there are more exacting terms to be explored. Postdigital is now an umbrella term for discourse that no longer considers the digital to be of architectural consequence - it is inherent. 

Let’s trace the origins of the computer-assisted search back a few years. The first search engine I used was a library computer. While technologically unrefined, searching for a specific book by a specific author meant using artificial intelligence as a tool to help locate a user-defined idea. But what about searching that library computer for a keyword? Is that not collaboration with AI? Is that AI not worth crediting? It is possible that automated assistance is already so internalized that we cannot see a need to give it such credit; we are the author that AI has made us. What is different about Google today? The real danger is that these collaborators go unseen; any claims otherwise is the true fantasy world. But perhaps it is little to do with a new type of searching, and more to do with a misrepresentation of the importance of authorship as a whole. 

Digital is no longer enough of a word. We use it in its relationship to a specific architectural discourse about the age most associated with novel computational techniques of form generation, which has now become a history. 

When looking for a framework to understand this, Chris Abel in The Extended Self suggests one could look to memes. Not the internet meme of today, but the theoretical cultural phenomena. Studies in memetics help open territory that would suggest that everything has always been about forms of copying. From language to music, mathematics to art, all knowledge is evolved reproductions. I like to compare the general idea to Todd Gannon’s “Five Points for Thesis” published in SCI-Arc Offramp. Point number one is truer today than ever before; “Privilege difference over similarity.” Acts of architecture have always been about the mutation of a previous act, and are therefore highly memetic.  

Internet memes are nothing new. They are simply accelerated and highly visible versions of other cultural transmissions. Things like saying “God bless you” after a sneeze, “that’s what she said” jokes or ‘La Macarena’ are all examples of mutated transmission through participation. Like playing “telephone” at the Thanksgiving dinner table, the original sentence is less important than the unimaginable transmutation of that sentence. The internet meme plays inside of this accelerated discursive territory, where yesterday was 10 minutes ago, and where commenting “same” is simply a way of affirming one’s digital ontology - the “God bless you” of my generation.  

At this point, the author isn’t just dead, but it’s possible authorship itself was made relevant by capital’s need to extend ownership to ideas. Being the author means you get the credit; authorship means patents which means property which means ownership. Capitalism is vulnerable to things without authors because they belong to the commons. Because it would suggest the reversal of the tragedy of the commons: that complex things can be reintroduced to the commons and can benefit all through mutual cooperation rather than rivalry. Headless things are as such harder to kill. 

For example, consider the polymorphous leadership of the shadow organization of Marvel’s Hydra, the #MeToo movement, or the substance turned object of Graham Harman’s obsession, the East India Trading Company. So when we ask ourselves what is left of our agency, what is left of our architecture, we end up with something less juridical more metaphysical. Something that, while we are on the topic, Professor Charles Francis Xavier said best: what is your hidden mutant power?