deliberated representation seems to be one of the most performative features of media-exposed cultures. propoganda airs on the most silent and the loudest of channels simultaneously. if propoganda can create opinion and market, why can't it create particular need for particular architectures? and why can't those particular architectures, as reified physical sediments, in turn be one of the channels, amplifying and reinvigorating the wave of propoganda...and ultimately, the authority behind it. can someone really explain, solely on the basis of purely architectonic grounds, why there is a need for AZP's architecture, as one single example, or any other now relevant architecture?
and how architectural relevance is justified merely by the purely architectonic and its local indexical aftermath that ergonomically can't be performatively subversive? horizontality or verticality...they would only be able to be performatively potent by virtue of being representationally valent. representation, then, is the gravity field in which mute performance can find its voices. imagination, then, is on the outside and the inside, on par with "reality".
what's so scary about a theoretical framework that it deserves scare-quotes, namh? isn't it a good thing to reflect on your own practice and consider its political implications?
Wow! this is getting interesting. Welcome back noctilucent! As usual, your input is intriguing. I would agree with you that deliberated representation is an important performance in contemporary architecture, no matter how tricky it may sound. And that is how architecture may actually become relevant beyond providing some physical infrastructure for human activities. For example AZP's shopping in Istanbul could be an example on how a well tested and replicated envelope type (the IKEA box) can be challenged to produce alternative community performances. Or how the bamboo-clad social housing in Madrid may be a new form of representation for some local underclass... I do not think that either example amplifies the regime of authority behind the project. On the contrary, I do not know enough about the local situation but neither project strikes me as close to the conventional types... Hence their relevance, claimed or not.
What I mean by re-presentation is not necessarily some sort of iconographic resonance, or soma applied language of to the building, but what Aplomb and Emilio refer to when they write "we can see the difference between the way one architect or another facilitates or restricts the movement of bodies". True, the architect does not really dictate much of the program , and it may be that "the invention of the lock or the card reader system may have had more direct effect on restriction or control of access and thus on the politics of the envelope". That is part of architecture, but architecture is more: one of the most relevant roles we have is to determine the way in which security control, circulation or environmental performance are experienced by the people. Do we feel like a herd of sheep going into lanes is the airport, or do we feel as if we will be flying to the sky in a magic carpet?
Even if the general organisation of the building is "dictated by the building program and the entity or corporation or bureaucracy that inhabits and controls access to the structure and thus its inhabitants" and architecture has a limited capacity to privilege fleeting human encounters rather than protracted ones still has a certain power by "re-presenting" the performance. I do not deny the importance of the lock of the performance, but in the way we design them, we affect the way they are used and we make collective, political statements...
This is why I consider that 'affect' is also a form of representation, and why I believe that, following Latour, representation is not necessarily the construction of a fake world, a theater, but the way the real world is aprehended, and objects introduced into a political discussion... Re-presentation in sciences is the fidelity in which an explanation adjusts to the facts of reality...
The utopia of the pure "performance", is precisely the discourse "pragmatists" have been proposing for a few years, where facts, engineering etc entirely determine architecture, just like economy use to determine politics not so long ago. Now that we need to retrieve a way into politics, I find interesting that one of the pragmatists is looking at politics and representation, as a new edge to the discipline.
I wasn't claiming they weren't relevant, although i think that the discussion is a relevant one. Precisely because of present day concerns regarding performance and equity..
But agfa, you asked if they had claimed relevance
As for my use of the quotes around theoretical was due to the fact that i believe it is less a theory or theoretical framework than a post-rationalizing of their own work using poltics as a context..
That is part of architecture, but architecture is more: one of the most relevant roles we have is to determine the way in which security control, circulation or environmental performance are experienced by the people. Do we feel like a herd of sheep going into lanes is the airport, or do we feel as if we will be flying to the sky in a magic carpet?
Alba, I do agree with that, and it's why I did not portray the architect as totally a bystander in, as you put it, "re-presenting the performance": I would even say that what you describe is the true power of the architect. (It also reminds me of Vincent Scully's quote on the old and new Pennsylvania Stations in NY: “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.”)
But at this point I should probably also read the Volume article by AZP...
Emilio. this is exactly what I mean by representation, and I believe this can be politically charged in a new way, although as everybody has already pointed, this is not the only political performance of architecture. I like your contribution very much.
I also agree with agfa8x that the fact that AZP developed this theory as a post-rationalisation of his own practice it is actually a merit. I means he is practicing and thinking at the same time. I have send you a copy of the log text Nam, I hope you have seen it and we can move out of AZP's lecture and into the real question, which is the formulation of an envelope theory.
I think that the texts underlines the problem, but I am not sure that the examples he is using are yet pointing a direction. I am not sure whether pointing in a certain direction is possible in a micropolitical approach.
I am missing the involvement of someone who can criticise this approach from a more radical perspective. AZP's formulation may still be too pragmatic, too neutral... Is it possible to make a more consistent approach? Where are the criticals in this debate?
Perhaps the best way of furthering this debate is to ask all of you involved in this debate to post examples of envelopes of different sorts that produce politcal effects of some sort. Shopping centers you know, city halls, train stations, skyscrapers, housing blocks... Performing as environmental devices, devices of social integration or exclusion and devices of political representation. It would be good to see if we can collect a few interesting examples to illustrate the debate.
agfa8x,
I am intrigued about your inclusion of the term "memes" in an earlier post. I guess this refers to Dawkins and the way a culture replicates itself... I have not come across this concept often in the architectural discourse, but I have an interest in it. Could you see memes as a possible function of re-presentation?
yes, delivery of content, associations, in the aspect of architecture as media.
namhenderson; I fail, or would fail to see this as being purely on architectonic ground. AZP's language and logic is rife with embedded figurative thought. in fact, much of this "materialist" thought operates on analogical grounds where "material" is the abstracted analogical deduction of material...thus allowing one of, (what is in the first-order an absurd) coinage of the "intelligence of a material".
albatross, there is always an authority behind anything authored. and this: "we can see the difference between the way one architect or another facilitates or restricts the movement of bodies". is hardly representational as it is presentational. an index is the most self-oblivious of signs being the aftermath, the skidmark, of casuality. i'd say even that the index is the most ghostly yet paradoxically the most assued of signs, the sign of no deliberation, no knowing consciousness, but of necessity and law. it could be elevated to being representation by meshing it into the more open network of associations. this requires intermediacy, deference, transfer from one media to another...etc
noctilucent,
I wonder why do you believe that the "intelligence of material" is an absurd. I thought that materialism is precisely the recognition that there is an intelligence in materials that challenges hyleomorphism, the classical western idea of an inert material upon which humans impose a form. I think AZP's text is actually pointing towards the unleashing of this "intelligence of material". If you look at his description of the vertical envelope, you will see that the iconic high-rise is not what he is interested in. Some other descriptions such as the spherical and flat-vertical are much more bound to a sort of figuration of social structures, and there is where I believe it gets more tricky... I am not sure what I think about those parts of the text, but I like the attempt to bring the figurative and the materialist together.
As for your comment on the "presentational" vs "re-presentational", is an etimological question. I am using re-presentation in the Latourian sense, which is the sense AZP uses it, judging for the quotes. The problem of the "presentational" that you are proposing is that it looks as if the materialisation of the artificial, an architecture in this forum, seems to appear automatically, unmediated by opinion, politics, cultural context... this is what Latour refers to as "acheiropoietic", which is matter of fact, natural, scientific, unquestionable etc... That is the opposite of the idea of a "matter of concern" which Latour proposes and AZP applies to the building envelope.
In that sense I do not think that the indexical is external to an idea of representation. The difference between the index as a sign and an icon, is that in producing or reading a "thing" -to continue using the Latourian terminology- you may decide to use a figure or an image "of the dynamic object" (Peirce) or to select certain indexes whose choice is contingent to the agent of production or interpretation. To say that indexical operation is "self-oblivious...., the sign of no deliberation, no knowing consciousness, but of necessity and law" reminds me of the radically pragmatic positions that AZP himself, Lynn, MVRDV and Speaks used to support a few years back, where things emerged magically out of processes seemingly neutral and scientific, where the inputs of the market and the community converged magically into a seamless product that meant nothing.
I think that we we are seeing now is a correction of those trajectories in order to be able to claim a more powerful role for architecture...
as for the issue of re-presentation vs. presentation, I do not mind use whatever you prefer as long as we all know what it means. I suggest to keep to the Latourian discourse because is implicit in the text we are commenting, but we can go back to Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger to try to elucidate the term. Another interesting reference in the AZP's text is to "non-representational theory" from Thrift...
I said absurd in the first order, in the first instance. All anthropomorphisms are absurd in the first instance, syntactically with the reversal of conventional object and subject: intelligence being conventionally identified in the observed rather than the observer. Absurd need not carry a negative nuance for the intention of this statement was to underline the usage of figurative language (which is always conventionally absurd, in the first instance) built around the analogy (of course, convention itself might have been at one point an absurd reversal of a prior convention, such as the case with optics and reversal of subject and object of light), contrary to the scientific language built around the index which the tone of materialism certainly alludes to. The intention in calling it absurd, therefore, was to highlight the fictive, even theatrical (being that the stage/site of material patterns and laws becomes the stage of intelligence rather intelligence being embodied bodilessly and solely within the observing mythical- mythical not being used with its negative connotation-consciousness) conjecture of “intelligence on materials” and not to dismiss it per se. As such, ‘materialists’ combine the parallel bi-locational procession of inward procession of thought, a deliberate choice of operation, with the outer glamour, in the faery sense, of the imperative ipso facto appearance of matter. Perhaps when materialists start talking symbolism and “some sort of figuration”, its not an external contradiction, not an eccentricity, so much as a fissure of confession in the glamour and an owning-up gesture of belonging to the tradition of cultural and emotional avatarism.
RE: presentational and representational. Dictating body motion and reaction, as expressed in such a matter of causality, operates indexically by virtue of being an effect apropos a cause. What representational value this might have is besides your point i.e. restricting the movement of body, which presents itself as it is and not as it represents. Restriction of movement, rather than will or imagination (which manifests in representation), involves an indexical situation involving bodies in a field of physical limits and voids. To profess anything besides, and to link body to imagination while still carrying this imperative tone of causality, is actually simply to involve oneself,unwittingly (and that’s where it errs, in its lack of self-awareness) in figurative language, essentially mystical (and we’re not talking fiction=falsehood), which the materialists do whilst, on par, insidiously rejecting explicitly figurative thought. See the tension involved in a materialist description of what is beyond materialism…materialism itself being a discourse formulated in a language beyond materials? To deliberately con-fuse presentational and representational modes is merely a materialist way of interpreting the above mentioned fissure within materialism itself when encountering its own inherent, and not merely residual, symbolic modus operandi (an analogical one). Of course, boys always wear their wounds as their self-interpreted signs of their self-assumed strengths. To my mind, there is a justification and a need for representation to mean, simply and complexly, representation. A need to create avatars that, in spite of all neurotically secularizing tendencies, will always harken to the imagination’s right to mythopoeticize. Those who try to find their Answer through mimicking should at least recognize the religiosity of the act in which they still partake of rather than telling us that religiosity is in that, the object, which they mimic. Yes, that’s what pisses me off about ‘material praxis’ and all other self-mirroring manifestos, not material praxis itself but the unethical stance it has towards owning up to its own representational and symbolic proclivities. Once one owns up to such, then one can be liberated from that somber monomaniacal servitude to a subject matter and to one kind of rhetoric. One can truly then inhabit her own bilocationality without being so deadly serious about it. Consequentially: The built environment might consequentially resonate representatively, Projectively: it might be birthed representatively; but it can never be simultaneous with representation. In spite of all the dust in our books and speckles on our webpages, the built environment falls into the same pit of anxiety from which we always try to re-emerge with a new philosophy, namely the epistemological anxiety of relating the thing to our knowledge of that thing and, in the more basic ontological vein, the anxiety of coming to terms with what it is to exist.
You may cite whomever you wish to cite, latour, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Foucault…what you do, from that standpoint is inconsequential to what I wanted to say above, rather than perhaps to what you want to say, and im not being bitchy but simply signaling a sensing of ridiculous impasse in this rhetoric of politics before architecture or architecture before politics or architecture as politics and the chicken as the egg. It’s the position you situate yourself in within language, culture, time and imagination before all of those as well as actually being a bit more case-specific. There is a far too secure limitation to this rhetoric of variegated sameness within difference materialist metaphysics of non-metaphysics that it draws around itself, a weird combination of optimism in self-annihilation, an odd cybernetic Catholicism, in style, worshiping Darwin, in content (which is, from another viewpoint, an inversion of the allure of the index cloaking the imperishable symbol mentioned above). This rush towards ‘morphogenesis’, towards ‘material praxis’, towards a positivistic quantification, is a rush towards the further atomization of selfhood until it is rendered completely isolated within its cloak of necessity and silence. That would be the expression of the most expressionless way of deferring the notion of ending and death. If I am simply an atom identified via its location within a field of other atoms and via its valence towards other atoms, then my death is simply unimaginable; I have exorcised all ideas of my death, the confessional imagination that is founded on the idea, understanding/misunderstanding, mythical avatars of death, I would have exorcised all such vestiges of my end, imagination itself really, and would henceforth be able to conduct my quantifiable producing/consuming self in a quantifiable capitalist machine of a society. And my growth and demise would be merely a matter of increasing and decreasing valence. If Futurism called for hell, Materialists are happy with Purgatory.
And another viewpoint: We enjoy a spinozatic god with intertwining braids fusing materialism, divinity, commonplaceness, technology, artifice and nature into One Self-Overflowing substance/soul….. fine, but there are other gods. More interestingly, what does it take to become, be formulated as, a god, the ritual?…again, the concern with that act of mimicking than the mimicked.
To sum it, ‘materialists’ material is as religious and semiotic as any other ruminating imagination.
actually i didn't take bilocationality from your site or your good self. i woud have cited otherwise. but its fun to coincide. for me, bilocational is [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Xps7isi8M
]a personal matter of pathos[/url]
tori: Lately I'm into circuitry, what it means to be made of you but not enough for you.
And I wonder if you can bilocate, is that what I taste, your supernova juice?
You know it's true- I'm part of you.
[sic]
To ERr with SuperGlue™
Bilocation Syndrome
Going into Eclectic Shock/Therapy
Surgical Double Theater
Waiting Room: Anxious, Reading, Liszt
Operation a Success; Patient Dead
Malpractice Case: Houses
Eternal Wrest
Let me just respond to a few of your assertions, nocti, cause that’s what you say I do anyway…but frankly, I don’t have time to respond to all of your verbosity.
As such, ‘materialists’ combine the parallel bi-locational procession of inward procession of thought, a deliberate choice of operation, with the outer glamour, in the faery sense, of the imperative ipso facto appearance of matter. Perhaps when materialists start talking symbolism and “some sort of figuration”, its not an external contradiction, not an eccentricity, so much as a fissure of confession in the glamour and an owning-up gesture of belonging to the tradition of cultural and emotional avatarism.
Yes, that’s what pisses me off about ‘material praxis’ and all other self-mirroring manifestos, not material praxis itself but the unethical stance it has towards owning up to its own representational and symbolic proclivities.
But does material praxis and those who talk about it really do that? At this point, I'm going to bring in Marx, since we are in the arena of politics, and another concept besides bilocation: inversion.
(all italics mine)
"Thus, in contrast to Hegel, Marx argues that it is material praxis, the means and relations of production, that constitutes reality. Marx employed the concept of praxis to emphasize actual human experience and to solve the dilemma between the passivity of materialism and the speculation of idealism. Reality for Marx is created out of the things that humans do, out of their experience of production. But the perception of reality as been inverted since the time of primitive communism - the contradictions and oppressions within the different economic systems have been successively hidden through different ideologies. In the capitalist system, the market is a prime mechanism through which the inversion takes place and ideology is created. The ideology (read avatar) of the market is individuality, equality, and freedom; the reality of the capitalist system is class, inequality, and oppression."
"Marx thus posits a dual process of ideology. On the one hand, false consciousness is produced individually through alienated praxis; on the other hand, false consciousness is the result of not owning the means of ideational production. The first proposition identifies the location of the process of ideology within the experience of the individual and their conscious reflection on that experience; the second posits that the process is located in the superstructure of society" (hmm, maybe we are talking about bilocation after all...)
Kenneth Allen The Meaning of Culture
So materialists are already talking about "symbolism and some sort of figuration", and they are sometimes talking about them as inverted means of oppression. Thus, "...in Kant, praxis is the application of a theory to cases encountered in experience, but is also ethically significant thought, or practical reason, that is, reasoning about what there should be as opposed to what there is." (Philosophy Dictionary)
It would appear to me that (some) materialists do not insidiously reject explicitly figurative thought (reasoning about what there should be). They just want to know when this thought is being brought upon them, as oppressive as any religion, avatars being sneaked in through the back door.
I've started reading the AZP article, and already I feel good about bringing in Marx:
"It (the envelope) materializes the separation of the inside and outside, natural and artificial and it demarcates private property and land ownership (one the most primitive political acts)."
Also, as I suspected, AZP is using this notion of re-presentation, "the
ancient political role that articulates the relationships between humans and nonhumans in a common world."
or:
to be a delegate or spokesperson for; represent somebody's interest or be a proxy or substitute for, as of politicians and office holders representing their constituents,..."I represent the silent majority"
as opposed to:
typify: express indirectly by an image, form, or model; be a symbol
there can be a kind of 'materialism' of figurative thought, i think: foucault's discourse, deleuze's abstract machines. Latour's nonhuman assemblages explicitly include the figurative.
Difficult to get back in now... Too many questions and too little time.
I suspect that now there are some interesting differences in the debate.
I may be wrong but I believe this is nocti’s core message, despite the other tangents, and I believe that is shared by everybody, even if with different nuances. I am not sure though whether your comments refer specifically to AZP’s text or to the discussion here:
"Yes, that’s what pisses me off about ‘material praxis’ and all other self-mirroring manifestos, not material praxis itself but the unethical stance it has towards owning up to its own representational and symbolic proclivities."
“It’s the position you situate yourself in within language, culture, time and imagination before all of those as well as actually being a bit more case-specific. There is a far too secure limitation to this rhetoric of variegated sameness within difference materialist metaphysics of non-metaphysics that it draws around itself, a weird combination of optimism in self-annihilation, an odd cybernetic Catholicism, in style, worshiping Darwin, in content (which is, from another viewpoint, an inversion of the allure of the index cloaking the imperishable symbol mentioned above). This rush towards ‘morphogenesis’, towards ‘material praxis’, towards a positivistic quantification, is a rush towards the further atomization of selfhood until it is rendered completely isolated within its cloak of necessity and silence.”
Are you criticizing AZP’s text (I assume that is what you are referring to) for rushing towards quantification and material praxis etc, or for drawing on mimicking, representation and the imperishable symbol? I am intrigued by you reading of the text as a “combination of optimism and self-annihilation”. Let me think about that, I may end up agreeing with you… In what I certainly disagree is that we necessarily need an avatar, a parallel reality, -is that what you mean by bilocation?- in order to keep our demons alive. This is going back to the notion that we actually need a utopia, for the sake of our psychological and political sanity. It is actually the rejection of ideology and utopia as effective political tools what interests me more in the text; the possibility to redefine the politics of architectural practice beyond those two avatars. In the face of going back to utopias etc, I actually quite like cybernetic Catholicism… the braiding of artificial intelligence and images!
To be more case-specific: when you are designing an airport, there is probably very little you can dictate about body motion once the transport, logistic and security consultants have finished with their specs. However, it is very different if the roof is a curved shell, or a rectangular box with skylights, and there are several effects associated to that form, experiential, affective, political, symbolic… Those are the ones that have to be delivered by architecture “simultaneously” with representation.
I believe that this possible hybridization of materialist and figurative thought is what Emilio and agfa8x are both posing, with some interesting references. The question is, Emilio, do you see a role for ideology to play in the politicization of architecture today?
I am close to finishing the articles. Once done I will post some more thoughts an dtry and respond to the essays and posts made above more specifically.
true noctilucent, that is not a very sensitive reading of your proposal, but I am trying to understand waht do you mean by bilocation... Can you please give us a concrete example in the discipline, that we can understand?
a very explicit, and explicit as in very revelatory and not to oppose it to implicit (since to a large degree, i think the difference between explicit and implicit lies in the degree of the observer/thinker's intelligence, imagination and sensitivity), is the myriad of associations relating material to thought, bilocating one in the other and in itself; from the point of view of design intention: bilocating the architect's mind into parallel trains of throught; from the experiential viewpoint: bilocating the visitor in the mundane indexical world of the simple presence of concrete, glass, stone...and in the world of the virtual: associative, reminiscent, historical.
randomly, popularly and generally:
peter zumthor: an architectural syntax of materials 'echoes' (an appropriate word for his poetic, i think) is an imaginary refinement of nature. mineral, water, light, cave, trees...
he thinks in a bilocational manner, one location being in the constructing realm of creation and the other in the imagined realm of the created. mythopoetic, archetypal...he bilocates metaphorically
peter eisenman: his architectural syntax is an integration of human systems as they transform themselves into architecture, be they architectural, linguistic, scientific. he is as interested in the actual material (linguistic or visual) as he is in the internal process of form-ation. he bilocates both analogically in his methodology and metaphorically in his aim. the methodology is tailored to result in particular visual/syntactical/linguistic semblances and vice versa.
in actual fact, eisenman's internality of thought-building inscribed formally is an iconic precedent that paved the way for the solipsistic space of parametric design and for the conception of morphogenesis and phylogenesis. the notion of a mathematical and genetical differentiation of sameness within architecture cannot be fathomed without the preceding step whereby the eisenmanian "Crisis" between architectural form and its associative proclivities had to be resolved through architectural form stealing some very High-Art/High-Science associations for itself while outwardly decrying any outward associations. In other words, the resolution of the Eisenmanian track was through an architectural mythological hypocrisy dividing the stated explicit from the unstated/unstatabe implicit: the bilocation here is subliminally antagonistic: the analogy that favours methodology and therefore could give architecture a genetically and mathematically secure ground contra the shameful but really irrepressible metaphor that favours the gossamer fickleness of appearance, the seeming whimsy of it. now, i believe that the first instance between the created entity and the existing entity within the analogical association, the first moment of analogy (after the index of course), is metaphorical. there must be an intention to elicit some virtual kind of likeness, rather than an experiential sensible kind of likeness, in the mind of the author to appropriate and translate the method of the existing for the creation.
however, this particular post-eisenman lineage's prejudice against the metaphor is so pronounced, that all metaphorical tinges within the analogy are totally overlooked to the extent that the intention of the analogy is overlooked. for this party, the analogy loses whimsy and stops being fiction...fiction and fact collapse into each other and the history of analogy is lost. analogy, and therefore association, is then seen as inherent and not associative. architecture starts to have inherent 'genes' and 'formulas. this latter group bilocates as any other, but it cannot see that it bilocates.
and regarding utopia, of course the creation of utopia requires bilocation but the intention of utopia is not at all bilocational. it favours one location, the utopic ("no place"). a utopia realized is therefore phagocytic, eating away the messy real and replacing it with the ordered virtual. bilocation as it is, however, accepts the disordered, or varied, virtual. its a baroque and complex intertwining of narratives, myths, of the foundation of logic even prior to logic itself...
and when i said: "Perhaps when materialists start talking symbolism and “some sort of figuration”, its not an external contradiction, not an eccentricity, so much as a fissure of confession in the glamour and an owning-up gesture of belonging to the tradition of cultural and emotional avatarism."
i meant to say that this fissure is due to the necessary resurfacing of the irrepressible metaphor even within the minds of the anti-metaforests.
correction :his architectural syntax is an integration of human systems as they transform themselves into architecture
not transform, translate rather.
Feb 24, 09 10:51 am ·
·
noctilucent, what you describe above relates more to schizophrenic situations, i.e., states characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements, rather than to bilocational situations. Perhaps even more schizophrenia-lite. [Or are schizophrenia-lite and bilocation-lite somewhat similar?]
Coexistence and bilocation are not the same thing.
Schizophrenia is a one split.
Bilocation is two of the same.
bilocate: the same existing, acknowledgedly, in two different places.
schizophrenia occupies the same place but in two different, unacknowledging, understandings of place. i meant bilocation really. a mind pursuing a myth while pursuing the construction of reality, feeling orpheus as they design their underground spaces.
bilocate: the same existing, acknowledgedly, in two different places.
schizophrenia occupies the same place but in two different, unacknowledging, understandings of place. i meant bilocation really. a mind pursuing a myth while pursuing the construction of reality, feeling orpheus as they design their underground spaces.
I'm just seeing the mind as 'Virgil' guiding through the virtual and the tangible as two differently defined but interrelated places. when the mind start to fight itself, Virgil divided, then, yes schizophrenia sets in...as in the parametric instance
isn't bilocation (in noctilucent's sense) an unnecessarily binary concept? myth / reality is a fairly polar distinction. Multilocation starts to sound a bit more promising - it resonates with Peter Sloterdijk's propositions about 'air-conditioning': he suggests that we always need to ask where something takes place: what support systems must be maintained in order for any proposition or act to occur.
well... agfa8x, that was also what I originally thought, but now that nocti has explained a bit further, I think he is actually holding a very similar position to most people in this forum; I personally quite like this one:
"and regarding utopia, of course the creation of utopia requires bilocation but the intention of utopia is not at all bilocational. it favours one location, the utopic ("no place"). a utopia realized is therefore phagocytic, eating away the messy real and replacing it with the ordered virtual. bilocation as it is, however, accepts the disordered, or varied, virtual. its a baroque and complex intertwining of narratives, myths, of the foundation of logic even prior to logic itself..."
I found two other pieces of information related to this thread, both in archinect:
1. AZP on "double agenda", on eikongraphia's thread.
"bilocation as it is, however, accepts the disordered, or varied, virtual. its a baroque and complex intertwining of narratives, myths, of the foundation of logic even prior to logic itself..."
i have to confess i don't understand noctilucent's paragraph, albatross. 'utopia realised' is not a valid concept, and virtual/real is not a valid binary.
noctilucent, presuming that by 'real' you mean what deleuze calls 'actual', are you using 'bilocation' to mean simultaneously present in the actual and the virtual? But actual and virtual aren't worlds like heaven and earth that we could bridge bilocationally - they are enfoldings of one real.
Feb 24, 09 9:10 pm ·
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noctilucent is just making it up as he goes along, or, more precisely, he reads my recent syndrome postings (and other posts) and then thinks hard about them and then writes something overintellecualized.
The real answers regarding bilocation selves evidently reside in two places.
pragmatists turning political?
deliberated representation seems to be one of the most performative features of media-exposed cultures. propoganda airs on the most silent and the loudest of channels simultaneously. if propoganda can create opinion and market, why can't it create particular need for particular architectures? and why can't those particular architectures, as reified physical sediments, in turn be one of the channels, amplifying and reinvigorating the wave of propoganda...and ultimately, the authority behind it. can someone really explain, solely on the basis of purely architectonic grounds, why there is a need for AZP's architecture, as one single example, or any other now relevant architecture?
and how architectural relevance is justified merely by the purely architectonic and its local indexical aftermath that ergonomically can't be performatively subversive? horizontality or verticality...they would only be able to be performatively potent by virtue of being representationally valent. representation, then, is the gravity field in which mute performance can find its voices. imagination, then, is on the outside and the inside, on par with "reality".
did they claim relevance? i might have missed that.
I think by the very act of post-rationalizing his own built projects into this "theoretical" framework that yes he did...
aside
noctilucent, is any of what you wrote above closely related to "architecture as delivery of content"?
imaginative
scientific
fictive
Are there architectures that perform assimilatingly? metabolically? osmotically? electro-magnetically? ultra-frequently?
per..........form
re..........present
re..........enact
ars ludi
The arts/skill of public games :o ???
what's so scary about a theoretical framework that it deserves scare-quotes, namh? isn't it a good thing to reflect on your own practice and consider its political implications?
Wow! this is getting interesting. Welcome back noctilucent! As usual, your input is intriguing. I would agree with you that deliberated representation is an important performance in contemporary architecture, no matter how tricky it may sound. And that is how architecture may actually become relevant beyond providing some physical infrastructure for human activities. For example AZP's shopping in Istanbul could be an example on how a well tested and replicated envelope type (the IKEA box) can be challenged to produce alternative community performances. Or how the bamboo-clad social housing in Madrid may be a new form of representation for some local underclass... I do not think that either example amplifies the regime of authority behind the project. On the contrary, I do not know enough about the local situation but neither project strikes me as close to the conventional types... Hence their relevance, claimed or not.
What I mean by re-presentation is not necessarily some sort of iconographic resonance, or soma applied language of to the building, but what Aplomb and Emilio refer to when they write "we can see the difference between the way one architect or another facilitates or restricts the movement of bodies". True, the architect does not really dictate much of the program , and it may be that "the invention of the lock or the card reader system may have had more direct effect on restriction or control of access and thus on the politics of the envelope". That is part of architecture, but architecture is more: one of the most relevant roles we have is to determine the way in which security control, circulation or environmental performance are experienced by the people. Do we feel like a herd of sheep going into lanes is the airport, or do we feel as if we will be flying to the sky in a magic carpet?
Even if the general organisation of the building is "dictated by the building program and the entity or corporation or bureaucracy that inhabits and controls access to the structure and thus its inhabitants" and architecture has a limited capacity to privilege fleeting human encounters rather than protracted ones still has a certain power by "re-presenting" the performance. I do not deny the importance of the lock of the performance, but in the way we design them, we affect the way they are used and we make collective, political statements...
This is why I consider that 'affect' is also a form of representation, and why I believe that, following Latour, representation is not necessarily the construction of a fake world, a theater, but the way the real world is aprehended, and objects introduced into a political discussion... Re-presentation in sciences is the fidelity in which an explanation adjusts to the facts of reality...
The utopia of the pure "performance", is precisely the discourse "pragmatists" have been proposing for a few years, where facts, engineering etc entirely determine architecture, just like economy use to determine politics not so long ago. Now that we need to retrieve a way into politics, I find interesting that one of the pragmatists is looking at politics and representation, as a new edge to the discipline.
I wasn't claiming they weren't relevant, although i think that the discussion is a relevant one. Precisely because of present day concerns regarding performance and equity..
But agfa, you asked if they had claimed relevance
As for my use of the quotes around theoretical was due to the fact that i believe it is less a theory or theoretical framework than a post-rationalizing of their own work using poltics as a context..
you say post-rationalising as if its somehow a bad thing. theory doesn't always come before practice, you know.
Alba, I do agree with that, and it's why I did not portray the architect as totally a bystander in, as you put it, "re-presenting the performance": I would even say that what you describe is the true power of the architect. (It also reminds me of Vincent Scully's quote on the old and new Pennsylvania Stations in NY: “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.”)
But at this point I should probably also read the Volume article by AZP...
Emilio. this is exactly what I mean by representation, and I believe this can be politically charged in a new way, although as everybody has already pointed, this is not the only political performance of architecture. I like your contribution very much.
I also agree with agfa8x that the fact that AZP developed this theory as a post-rationalisation of his own practice it is actually a merit. I means he is practicing and thinking at the same time. I have send you a copy of the log text Nam, I hope you have seen it and we can move out of AZP's lecture and into the real question, which is the formulation of an envelope theory.
I think that the texts underlines the problem, but I am not sure that the examples he is using are yet pointing a direction. I am not sure whether pointing in a certain direction is possible in a micropolitical approach.
I am missing the involvement of someone who can criticise this approach from a more radical perspective. AZP's formulation may still be too pragmatic, too neutral... Is it possible to make a more consistent approach? Where are the criticals in this debate?
Perhaps the best way of furthering this debate is to ask all of you involved in this debate to post examples of envelopes of different sorts that produce politcal effects of some sort. Shopping centers you know, city halls, train stations, skyscrapers, housing blocks... Performing as environmental devices, devices of social integration or exclusion and devices of political representation. It would be good to see if we can collect a few interesting examples to illustrate the debate.
agfa8x,
I am intrigued about your inclusion of the term "memes" in an earlier post. I guess this refers to Dawkins and the way a culture replicates itself... I have not come across this concept often in the architectural discourse, but I have an interest in it. Could you see memes as a possible function of re-presentation?
Professor Aplomb;
yes, delivery of content, associations, in the aspect of architecture as media.
namhenderson; I fail, or would fail to see this as being purely on architectonic ground. AZP's language and logic is rife with embedded figurative thought. in fact, much of this "materialist" thought operates on analogical grounds where "material" is the abstracted analogical deduction of material...thus allowing one of, (what is in the first-order an absurd) coinage of the "intelligence of a material".
albatross, there is always an authority behind anything authored. and this:
"we can see the difference between the way one architect or another facilitates or restricts the movement of bodies". is hardly representational as it is presentational. an index is the most self-oblivious of signs being the aftermath, the skidmark, of casuality. i'd say even that the index is the most ghostly yet paradoxically the most assued of signs, the sign of no deliberation, no knowing consciousness, but of necessity and law. it could be elevated to being representation by meshing it into the more open network of associations. this requires intermediacy, deference, transfer from one media to another...etc
noctilucent,
I wonder why do you believe that the "intelligence of material" is an absurd. I thought that materialism is precisely the recognition that there is an intelligence in materials that challenges hyleomorphism, the classical western idea of an inert material upon which humans impose a form. I think AZP's text is actually pointing towards the unleashing of this "intelligence of material". If you look at his description of the vertical envelope, you will see that the iconic high-rise is not what he is interested in. Some other descriptions such as the spherical and flat-vertical are much more bound to a sort of figuration of social structures, and there is where I believe it gets more tricky... I am not sure what I think about those parts of the text, but I like the attempt to bring the figurative and the materialist together.
As for your comment on the "presentational" vs "re-presentational", is an etimological question. I am using re-presentation in the Latourian sense, which is the sense AZP uses it, judging for the quotes. The problem of the "presentational" that you are proposing is that it looks as if the materialisation of the artificial, an architecture in this forum, seems to appear automatically, unmediated by opinion, politics, cultural context... this is what Latour refers to as "acheiropoietic", which is matter of fact, natural, scientific, unquestionable etc... That is the opposite of the idea of a "matter of concern" which Latour proposes and AZP applies to the building envelope.
In that sense I do not think that the indexical is external to an idea of representation. The difference between the index as a sign and an icon, is that in producing or reading a "thing" -to continue using the Latourian terminology- you may decide to use a figure or an image "of the dynamic object" (Peirce) or to select certain indexes whose choice is contingent to the agent of production or interpretation. To say that indexical operation is "self-oblivious...., the sign of no deliberation, no knowing consciousness, but of necessity and law" reminds me of the radically pragmatic positions that AZP himself, Lynn, MVRDV and Speaks used to support a few years back, where things emerged magically out of processes seemingly neutral and scientific, where the inputs of the market and the community converged magically into a seamless product that meant nothing.
I think that we we are seeing now is a correction of those trajectories in order to be able to claim a more powerful role for architecture...
as for the issue of re-presentation vs. presentation, I do not mind use whatever you prefer as long as we all know what it means. I suggest to keep to the Latourian discourse because is implicit in the text we are commenting, but we can go back to Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger to try to elucidate the term. Another interesting reference in the AZP's text is to "non-representational theory" from Thrift...
from Volume 17
The Politics of the Envelope: A Political Critique of Materialism
Alejandro Zaera Polo
thanks PA
I said absurd in the first order, in the first instance. All anthropomorphisms are absurd in the first instance, syntactically with the reversal of conventional object and subject: intelligence being conventionally identified in the observed rather than the observer. Absurd need not carry a negative nuance for the intention of this statement was to underline the usage of figurative language (which is always conventionally absurd, in the first instance) built around the analogy (of course, convention itself might have been at one point an absurd reversal of a prior convention, such as the case with optics and reversal of subject and object of light), contrary to the scientific language built around the index which the tone of materialism certainly alludes to. The intention in calling it absurd, therefore, was to highlight the fictive, even theatrical (being that the stage/site of material patterns and laws becomes the stage of intelligence rather intelligence being embodied bodilessly and solely within the observing mythical- mythical not being used with its negative connotation-consciousness) conjecture of “intelligence on materials” and not to dismiss it per se. As such, ‘materialists’ combine the parallel bi-locational procession of inward procession of thought, a deliberate choice of operation, with the outer glamour, in the faery sense, of the imperative ipso facto appearance of matter. Perhaps when materialists start talking symbolism and “some sort of figuration”, its not an external contradiction, not an eccentricity, so much as a fissure of confession in the glamour and an owning-up gesture of belonging to the tradition of cultural and emotional avatarism.
RE: presentational and representational. Dictating body motion and reaction, as expressed in such a matter of causality, operates indexically by virtue of being an effect apropos a cause. What representational value this might have is besides your point i.e. restricting the movement of body, which presents itself as it is and not as it represents. Restriction of movement, rather than will or imagination (which manifests in representation), involves an indexical situation involving bodies in a field of physical limits and voids. To profess anything besides, and to link body to imagination while still carrying this imperative tone of causality, is actually simply to involve oneself,unwittingly (and that’s where it errs, in its lack of self-awareness) in figurative language, essentially mystical (and we’re not talking fiction=falsehood), which the materialists do whilst, on par, insidiously rejecting explicitly figurative thought. See the tension involved in a materialist description of what is beyond materialism…materialism itself being a discourse formulated in a language beyond materials? To deliberately con-fuse presentational and representational modes is merely a materialist way of interpreting the above mentioned fissure within materialism itself when encountering its own inherent, and not merely residual, symbolic modus operandi (an analogical one). Of course, boys always wear their wounds as their self-interpreted signs of their self-assumed strengths. To my mind, there is a justification and a need for representation to mean, simply and complexly, representation. A need to create avatars that, in spite of all neurotically secularizing tendencies, will always harken to the imagination’s right to mythopoeticize. Those who try to find their Answer through mimicking should at least recognize the religiosity of the act in which they still partake of rather than telling us that religiosity is in that, the object, which they mimic. Yes, that’s what pisses me off about ‘material praxis’ and all other self-mirroring manifestos, not material praxis itself but the unethical stance it has towards owning up to its own representational and symbolic proclivities. Once one owns up to such, then one can be liberated from that somber monomaniacal servitude to a subject matter and to one kind of rhetoric. One can truly then inhabit her own bilocationality without being so deadly serious about it.
Consequentially: The built environment might consequentially resonate representatively, Projectively: it might be birthed representatively; but it can never be simultaneous with representation. In spite of all the dust in our books and speckles on our webpages, the built environment falls into the same pit of anxiety from which we always try to re-emerge with a new philosophy, namely the epistemological anxiety of relating the thing to our knowledge of that thing and, in the more basic ontological vein, the anxiety of coming to terms with what it is to exist.
You may cite whomever you wish to cite, latour, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Foucault…what you do, from that standpoint is inconsequential to what I wanted to say above, rather than perhaps to what you want to say, and im not being bitchy but simply signaling a sensing of ridiculous impasse in this rhetoric of politics before architecture or architecture before politics or architecture as politics and the chicken as the egg. It’s the position you situate yourself in within language, culture, time and imagination before all of those as well as actually being a bit more case-specific. There is a far too secure limitation to this rhetoric of variegated sameness within difference materialist metaphysics of non-metaphysics that it draws around itself, a weird combination of optimism in self-annihilation, an odd cybernetic Catholicism, in style, worshiping Darwin, in content (which is, from another viewpoint, an inversion of the allure of the index cloaking the imperishable symbol mentioned above). This rush towards ‘morphogenesis’, towards ‘material praxis’, towards a positivistic quantification, is a rush towards the further atomization of selfhood until it is rendered completely isolated within its cloak of necessity and silence. That would be the expression of the most expressionless way of deferring the notion of ending and death. If I am simply an atom identified via its location within a field of other atoms and via its valence towards other atoms, then my death is simply unimaginable; I have exorcised all ideas of my death, the confessional imagination that is founded on the idea, understanding/misunderstanding, mythical avatars of death, I would have exorcised all such vestiges of my end, imagination itself really, and would henceforth be able to conduct my quantifiable producing/consuming self in a quantifiable capitalist machine of a society. And my growth and demise would be merely a matter of increasing and decreasing valence. If Futurism called for hell, Materialists are happy with Purgatory.
And another viewpoint: We enjoy a spinozatic god with intertwining braids fusing materialism, divinity, commonplaceness, technology, artifice and nature into One Self-Overflowing substance/soul….. fine, but there are other gods. More interestingly, what does it take to become, be formulated as, a god, the ritual?…again, the concern with that act of mimicking than the mimicked.
To sum it, ‘materialists’ material is as religious and semiotic as any other ruminating imagination.
nirvana of nuance,
actually i didn't take bilocationality from your site or your good self. i woud have cited otherwise. but its fun to coincide. for me, bilocational is [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Xps7isi8M
]a personal matter of pathos[/url]
or a personal matter of pathos
tori: Lately I'm into circuitry, what it means to be made of you but not enough for you.
And I wonder if you can bilocate, is that what I taste, your supernova juice?
You know it's true- I'm part of you.
[sic]
To ERr with SuperGlue™
Bilocation Syndrome
Going into Eclectic Shock/Therapy
Surgical Double Theater
Waiting Room: Anxious, Reading, Liszt
Operation a Success; Patient Dead
Malpractice Case: Houses
Eternal Wrest
coda?
picky, picky, picky
Let me just respond to a few of your assertions, nocti, cause that’s what you say I do anyway…but frankly, I don’t have time to respond to all of your verbosity.
As such, ‘materialists’ combine the parallel bi-locational procession of inward procession of thought, a deliberate choice of operation, with the outer glamour, in the faery sense, of the imperative ipso facto appearance of matter. Perhaps when materialists start talking symbolism and “some sort of figuration”, its not an external contradiction, not an eccentricity, so much as a fissure of confession in the glamour and an owning-up gesture of belonging to the tradition of cultural and emotional avatarism.
Yes, that’s what pisses me off about ‘material praxis’ and all other self-mirroring manifestos, not material praxis itself but the unethical stance it has towards owning up to its own representational and symbolic proclivities.
But does material praxis and those who talk about it really do that? At this point, I'm going to bring in Marx, since we are in the arena of politics, and another concept besides bilocation: inversion.
(all italics mine)
"Thus, in contrast to Hegel, Marx argues that it is material praxis, the means and relations of production, that constitutes reality. Marx employed the concept of praxis to emphasize actual human experience and to solve the dilemma between the passivity of materialism and the speculation of idealism. Reality for Marx is created out of the things that humans do, out of their experience of production. But the perception of reality as been inverted since the time of primitive communism - the contradictions and oppressions within the different economic systems have been successively hidden through different ideologies. In the capitalist system, the market is a prime mechanism through which the inversion takes place and ideology is created. The ideology (read avatar) of the market is individuality, equality, and freedom; the reality of the capitalist system is class, inequality, and oppression."
"Marx thus posits a dual process of ideology. On the one hand, false consciousness is produced individually through alienated praxis; on the other hand, false consciousness is the result of not owning the means of ideational production. The first proposition identifies the location of the process of ideology within the experience of the individual and their conscious reflection on that experience; the second posits that the process is located in the superstructure of society" (hmm, maybe we are talking about bilocation after all...)
Kenneth Allen The Meaning of Culture
So materialists are already talking about "symbolism and some sort of figuration", and they are sometimes talking about them as inverted means of oppression. Thus, "...in Kant, praxis is the application of a theory to cases encountered in experience, but is also ethically significant thought, or practical reason, that is, reasoning about what there should be as opposed to what there is." (Philosophy Dictionary)
It would appear to me that (some) materialists do not insidiously reject explicitly figurative thought (reasoning about what there should be). They just want to know when this thought is being brought upon them, as oppressive as any religion, avatars being sneaked in through the back door.
I've started reading the AZP article, and already I feel good about bringing in Marx:
"It (the envelope) materializes the separation of the inside and outside, natural and artificial and it demarcates private property and land ownership (one the most primitive political acts)."
Also, as I suspected, AZP is using this notion of re-presentation, "the
ancient political role that articulates the relationships between humans and nonhumans in a common world."
or:
to be a delegate or spokesperson for; represent somebody's interest or be a proxy or substitute for, as of politicians and office holders representing their constituents,..."I represent the silent majority"
as opposed to:
typify: express indirectly by an image, form, or model; be a symbol
there can be a kind of 'materialism' of figurative thought, i think: foucault's discourse, deleuze's abstract machines. Latour's nonhuman assemblages explicitly include the figurative.
Difficult to get back in now... Too many questions and too little time.
I suspect that now there are some interesting differences in the debate.
I may be wrong but I believe this is nocti’s core message, despite the other tangents, and I believe that is shared by everybody, even if with different nuances. I am not sure though whether your comments refer specifically to AZP’s text or to the discussion here:
"Yes, that’s what pisses me off about ‘material praxis’ and all other self-mirroring manifestos, not material praxis itself but the unethical stance it has towards owning up to its own representational and symbolic proclivities."
“It’s the position you situate yourself in within language, culture, time and imagination before all of those as well as actually being a bit more case-specific. There is a far too secure limitation to this rhetoric of variegated sameness within difference materialist metaphysics of non-metaphysics that it draws around itself, a weird combination of optimism in self-annihilation, an odd cybernetic Catholicism, in style, worshiping Darwin, in content (which is, from another viewpoint, an inversion of the allure of the index cloaking the imperishable symbol mentioned above). This rush towards ‘morphogenesis’, towards ‘material praxis’, towards a positivistic quantification, is a rush towards the further atomization of selfhood until it is rendered completely isolated within its cloak of necessity and silence.”
Are you criticizing AZP’s text (I assume that is what you are referring to) for rushing towards quantification and material praxis etc, or for drawing on mimicking, representation and the imperishable symbol? I am intrigued by you reading of the text as a “combination of optimism and self-annihilation”. Let me think about that, I may end up agreeing with you… In what I certainly disagree is that we necessarily need an avatar, a parallel reality, -is that what you mean by bilocation?- in order to keep our demons alive. This is going back to the notion that we actually need a utopia, for the sake of our psychological and political sanity. It is actually the rejection of ideology and utopia as effective political tools what interests me more in the text; the possibility to redefine the politics of architectural practice beyond those two avatars. In the face of going back to utopias etc, I actually quite like cybernetic Catholicism… the braiding of artificial intelligence and images!
To be more case-specific: when you are designing an airport, there is probably very little you can dictate about body motion once the transport, logistic and security consultants have finished with their specs. However, it is very different if the roof is a curved shell, or a rectangular box with skylights, and there are several effects associated to that form, experiential, affective, political, symbolic… Those are the ones that have to be delivered by architecture “simultaneously” with representation.
I believe that this possible hybridization of materialist and figurative thought is what Emilio and agfa8x are both posing, with some interesting references. The question is, Emilio, do you see a role for ideology to play in the politicization of architecture today?
I am close to finishing the articles. Once done I will post some more thoughts an dtry and respond to the essays and posts made above more specifically.
true noctilucent, that is not a very sensitive reading of your proposal, but I am trying to understand waht do you mean by bilocation... Can you please give us a concrete example in the discipline, that we can understand?
a very explicit, and explicit as in very revelatory and not to oppose it to implicit (since to a large degree, i think the difference between explicit and implicit lies in the degree of the observer/thinker's intelligence, imagination and sensitivity), is the myriad of associations relating material to thought, bilocating one in the other and in itself; from the point of view of design intention: bilocating the architect's mind into parallel trains of throught; from the experiential viewpoint: bilocating the visitor in the mundane indexical world of the simple presence of concrete, glass, stone...and in the world of the virtual: associative, reminiscent, historical.
randomly, popularly and generally:
peter zumthor: an architectural syntax of materials 'echoes' (an appropriate word for his poetic, i think) is an imaginary refinement of nature. mineral, water, light, cave, trees...
he thinks in a bilocational manner, one location being in the constructing realm of creation and the other in the imagined realm of the created. mythopoetic, archetypal...he bilocates metaphorically
peter eisenman: his architectural syntax is an integration of human systems as they transform themselves into architecture, be they architectural, linguistic, scientific. he is as interested in the actual material (linguistic or visual) as he is in the internal process of form-ation. he bilocates both analogically in his methodology and metaphorically in his aim. the methodology is tailored to result in particular visual/syntactical/linguistic semblances and vice versa.
in actual fact, eisenman's internality of thought-building inscribed formally is an iconic precedent that paved the way for the solipsistic space of parametric design and for the conception of morphogenesis and phylogenesis. the notion of a mathematical and genetical differentiation of sameness within architecture cannot be fathomed without the preceding step whereby the eisenmanian "Crisis" between architectural form and its associative proclivities had to be resolved through architectural form stealing some very High-Art/High-Science associations for itself while outwardly decrying any outward associations. In other words, the resolution of the Eisenmanian track was through an architectural mythological hypocrisy dividing the stated explicit from the unstated/unstatabe implicit: the bilocation here is subliminally antagonistic: the analogy that favours methodology and therefore could give architecture a genetically and mathematically secure ground contra the shameful but really irrepressible metaphor that favours the gossamer fickleness of appearance, the seeming whimsy of it. now, i believe that the first instance between the created entity and the existing entity within the analogical association, the first moment of analogy (after the index of course), is metaphorical. there must be an intention to elicit some virtual kind of likeness, rather than an experiential sensible kind of likeness, in the mind of the author to appropriate and translate the method of the existing for the creation.
however, this particular post-eisenman lineage's prejudice against the metaphor is so pronounced, that all metaphorical tinges within the analogy are totally overlooked to the extent that the intention of the analogy is overlooked. for this party, the analogy loses whimsy and stops being fiction...fiction and fact collapse into each other and the history of analogy is lost. analogy, and therefore association, is then seen as inherent and not associative. architecture starts to have inherent 'genes' and 'formulas. this latter group bilocates as any other, but it cannot see that it bilocates.
and regarding utopia, of course the creation of utopia requires bilocation but the intention of utopia is not at all bilocational. it favours one location, the utopic ("no place"). a utopia realized is therefore phagocytic, eating away the messy real and replacing it with the ordered virtual. bilocation as it is, however, accepts the disordered, or varied, virtual. its a baroque and complex intertwining of narratives, myths, of the foundation of logic even prior to logic itself...
and when i said: "Perhaps when materialists start talking symbolism and “some sort of figuration”, its not an external contradiction, not an eccentricity, so much as a fissure of confession in the glamour and an owning-up gesture of belonging to the tradition of cultural and emotional avatarism."
i meant to say that this fissure is due to the necessary resurfacing of the irrepressible metaphor even within the minds of the anti-metaforests.
correction :his architectural syntax is an integration of human systems as they transform themselves into architecture
not transform, translate rather.
noctilucent, what you describe above relates more to schizophrenic situations, i.e., states characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements, rather than to bilocational situations. Perhaps even more schizophrenia-lite. [Or are schizophrenia-lite and bilocation-lite somewhat similar?]
Coexistence and bilocation are not the same thing.
Schizophrenia is a one split.
Bilocation is two of the same.
is bi-location enough locations?
bilocate: the same existing, acknowledgedly, in two different places.
schizophrenia occupies the same place but in two different, unacknowledging, understandings of place. i meant bilocation really. a mind pursuing a myth while pursuing the construction of reality, feeling orpheus as they design their underground spaces.
bilocate: the same existing, acknowledgedly, in two different places.
schizophrenia occupies the same place but in two different, unacknowledging, understandings of place. i meant bilocation really. a mind pursuing a myth while pursuing the construction of reality, feeling orpheus as they design their underground spaces.
actually you can also multilocate, beauty and the beast theme multilocates in countless hollywood movies.
Professor Aplomb;
I'm just seeing the mind as 'Virgil' guiding through the virtual and the tangible as two differently defined but interrelated places. when the mind start to fight itself, Virgil divided, then, yes schizophrenia sets in...as in the parametric instance
isn't bilocation (in noctilucent's sense) an unnecessarily binary concept? myth / reality is a fairly polar distinction. Multilocation starts to sound a bit more promising - it resonates with Peter Sloterdijk's propositions about 'air-conditioning': he suggests that we always need to ask where something takes place: what support systems must be maintained in order for any proposition or act to occur.
asexual reproduction isn't monadic, just efficient, and it is usually triggered environmentally (due to an abundance of nutrients, for example).
even athena erupts contextually.
isn't bilocation an example of the kind of philosophical idealism that AZP is countering with his speciation of architectural form?
well... agfa8x, that was also what I originally thought, but now that nocti has explained a bit further, I think he is actually holding a very similar position to most people in this forum; I personally quite like this one:
"and regarding utopia, of course the creation of utopia requires bilocation but the intention of utopia is not at all bilocational. it favours one location, the utopic ("no place"). a utopia realized is therefore phagocytic, eating away the messy real and replacing it with the ordered virtual. bilocation as it is, however, accepts the disordered, or varied, virtual. its a baroque and complex intertwining of narratives, myths, of the foundation of logic even prior to logic itself..."
I found two other pieces of information related to this thread, both in archinect:
1. AZP on "double agenda", on eikongraphia's thread.
link
May double agenda be a variation of bilocation?
2. GSD seem to heve got the recipe from AZP's text, and invited Sloterdijk and Latour together. I notice that agfa8x is already tuned in...
link
before things get too carried away here...
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02568a.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilocation#cite_note-mcevilley-4
"bilocation as it is, however, accepts the disordered, or varied, virtual. its a baroque and complex intertwining of narratives, myths, of the foundation of logic even prior to logic itself..."
Gosh, that sounds just like Quondam.
i have to confess i don't understand noctilucent's paragraph, albatross. 'utopia realised' is not a valid concept, and virtual/real is not a valid binary.
noctilucent, presuming that by 'real' you mean what deleuze calls 'actual', are you using 'bilocation' to mean simultaneously present in the actual and the virtual? But actual and virtual aren't worlds like heaven and earth that we could bridge bilocationally - they are enfoldings of one real.
noctilucent is just making it up as he goes along, or, more precisely, he reads my recent syndrome postings (and other posts) and then thinks hard about them and then writes something overintellecualized.
The real answers regarding bilocation selves evidently reside in two places.
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