From time to time, I discover an interview, an artist, a dreamer, or another non-conformist take on reality that I find worthwhile transcribing.
I prefer to make such transcripts manually, by listening, pausing, and reflecting. Like drawing by hand.
And also in the resulting text, it is possible to give some sense to that rhythm of reflection.
In this post, a transcript of the conversation with artist/architect Peter Cook on the benefits of drawing by hand, on buildable or non-buildable ideas, on utopia or reality. I started transcribing around 11:15 in this video which also contains beautiful artwork.
Somehow, I would like to grow old like Peter Cook…
In drawing
You can decide upon almost anything
How to make a building that can go from solid to transparent without a window?
From solid
to slightly permeable
and then translucent
More translucent
Completely transparent
And then back again
I don’t think any of the work is utopian
The notion of utopia, the notion of the ideal perfect objective is not in my mind
I think that a lot of these drawings are buildable
A lot of Peter Cooke’s work and insights throw me back to my own architecture studies in the 70ies when we were allowed to design buildings that did not have to be buildable.
In the same way, his utopian/reality paradox is central to the ideas I developed as part of The Scaffold, a transdisciplinary learning studio for the Never Normal. The studio gives permission to play with ideas that are not necessarily buildable but that unlock some other kind of less cognitive insight.
I was one of the twenty lucky ones to be invited to an exclusive studio visit of Belgian and internationally renowned top-artist Berlinde De Bruyckere. She represented Belgium in the 55th Venice Biennale. The studio visit was organized by the Flemish Art Magazine HART.
Still from MO.CO interview video, Berlinde preparing with grace “to Zurbaran”, from 2015
“Born in Ghent, Belgium, in 1964, where she currently lives and works, Berlinde De Bruyckere was deeply influenced by the Flemish Renaissance painting. Drawing on the legacy of great European masters, religious iconography, as well as on ancient mythology and traditional culture, her work rests upon the dialectics experienced between images of current affairs and the breath of universal and timeless parables. By experimenting with malleable materials, like wax, fabric, or animal skin, Berlinde De Bruyckere built a unique body of work, simultaneously identifiable and moving, at times also unsettling, that translates into the flesh of sculptures the paradox of ‘sublime weakness’ posited by Lao-Tzu. Working both as a painter and a sculptor, her hybrid forms with human, animal, and plant features, bear an envelope, a diaphanous skin, or a bark under which quiver very dainty veins, a sap that ceaselessly flows and witnesses the hope contained in the miracle of each life.” (Quote from the MO.CO website)”
School corridor – Studio Berlinde De Bruycker – Picture by Petervan
Her studio is based in an old refurbished school building in the working-class neighborhood “Muide” in the port area in the north of the Belgian city of Ghent. This is also the area where she was raised: her father ran a butcher’s shop 100 meters from the school. Over the years, she and her husband transformed the classrooms into different art studios.
I managed my expectations for the visit upfront. Maybe at best, we would meet the artist during the welcome, and maybe the visit would only last one hour.
Welcome to Berlinde De Bruyckere studio – Picture by Petervan
Great was my surprise that Berlinde was there from start to finish, including during the lunch afterward. She was very approachable and hungry for questions about her work and her practice. During lunch, Berlinde was sitting in front of me, and I felt like we had an interesting conversation about her and my art practice.
The setting was quite exclusive: we could see work (in progress) that she was creating for her big upcoming exhibition in June 2022 in Montpellier, France.
Detail TRE ARCANGELI, 2022 – Berlinde De Bruyckere – Picture by Petervan
During the group conversations around the TRE ARCANGELI, there was a sentence/question that touched me:
WELK BEELD KAN JE TROOSTEN?
WHAT IMAGE CAN COMFORT YOU?
TRE ARCANGELI, 2022 – Berlinde De Bruyckere – Picture by Petervan
Also, the conversation about working with a team was full of insights that for sure are also applicable to corporate teams. In this particular case: how do you empathically communicate failure to the team, and decide as a group that the work done does not fit the concept and that we have to start from scratch again?
I will come back later in another post about the meaning or “concept”, about conceptual art, conceptual business, and conceptual curation.
Having this opportunity to be in direct and close contact with a professional artist is super inspiring, and it influences my own work and practice in the following ways:
Focus: no distractions, silence, solitude
Professionalism: time for reflection, and discipline of doing the work, every day
Attitude: the combination of integrity, modesty, subduedness, stillness, respect
The value of a concept
To go as far as one wants
Making a group that is forced together
Showing its scars and wounds
The blanket is a metaphor for our failing society
Still from MO.CO interview video
When you leave the show and you feel that the themes are tough, it’s not easy to find words that express what you, as a spectator, felt about the show.
But you should leave with a feeling of hope
I will come back in September on this feeling of hope, or rather our longing and yearning for hope and excitement.
It all started with Vankatesh Rao’s “Future Tables” post last week, with the subtitle “We don’t want future visions, we want future tables”. Venkat introduced the concept of “temporal potential groove”.
I added the following comment to his post:
“I enjoyed this one very much. You have written so much about time that my feedback may sound trivial. Anyway. I felt attracted to “temporal potential groove”. It made me think about grooves in vinyl records. About remastering to improve the dynamics of output. Music in general as a scheme of bars, tempo, etc. About the grid and snapping to the grid in music and other software. Also about furrows on land, and riverbeds. And how we could learn to unsnap from the grid, groove, riverbed, etc to find new paths that are not defined by the “table”.”
Just a couple of days later, I had my monthly catch-up call with Josie Gibson, and we started a lovely conversation about vinyl records.
Yes, for those who remember, vinyl records “sound” different. It is an analog sound. It has a warmer, more human touch to it. We are so used to listening to compressed, streamed, digital music that listening to really high quality sound/music is an experience that many of us don’t have any real experience with. Neil Young wrote a whole book about it and the lack of HD sound was the reason for him starting the Neil Young Archives.
But besides the sound quality, there is also quite a difference in the experience of consuming music.
Sometimes, the pickup stylus jumped out of the groove, jumping to an unexpected part of the song or even the album. There was some sort of enjoyable unpredictability.
You were also supposed to listen to the whole album (or at least one “side” of the vinyl disc) in one non-interrupted session.
Also, we lost the patience to wait, to be comfortable with the in-betweens, the no-groove areas between the songs.
There was at some time the notion of a “concept album”, where all the songs of the album belong to a coherent concept/narrative, instead of a compilation or sequence of greatest hits or unrelated “singles”
As we discussed, we made parallels to the way I curate learning experiences, where the value is in the coherence of the narrative and associated speakers, and not just a list of individuals taking the stage for their standard pre-canned talk. My ambition is to take people out of the groove, to discover parallel worlds and options.
Josie coined the term “Parallel Grooves”, obviously T-shirt material! I should seriously consider hiring Josie as my copywriter 😉
Mock-up T-Shirt with image from DALL-E
The vinyl groove is one metaphor.
We could also consider the riverbed: by putting obstacles in the riverbed, we can change the flow of the water, we can divert the flow.
Or waterfalls. Josie spoke about “the language of waterfalls” and what happens when you put a big rock at the top of the waterfall and how the language of the waterfall changes.
Image generated by DALL-E
Serendipity is my companion these days, and as I was writing this post, I bumped into this image of Cameron Falls in Alberta, Canada:
Cameron Falls in Alberta, Canada has crystal clear water on normal days, but when abnormally heavy rainfall hits the region, a phenomenon happens. Sediments called agrolites are released into the water and make the river look pink or red when light hits it. Seen on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/auckee
Or the metaphor of furrows in a field.
Here is my uncle Hubert plowing a fresh field with his tractor. Ask him how difficult it is to steer the tractor out of the furrow.
But what if he could plow not only the land but also a river or a waterfall or all of them? You would get a very nice metaphorical representation of my idea of curation.
Image generated by DALL-E
People think they are in the groove, but they aren’t. Or they don’t know what else exists out of the groove.
“They don’t know what they need, but they know what they yearn for”
(another copy by Josie)
What seems more interesting to me is to surf that yearning and go to a place in a different dimension you don’t even know existed.
“You were looking for “X” and but I let you discover “Y”
(Josie)
Parallel Grooves in other words.
Guess what?
Parallel Grooves will be part of “Studio Interventions”, one of the three studios I am launching after the summer together with a brand new Petervan Studios website
Here is the latest update on Petervan Studios. The previous update already goes back to June 2021.
The family is good. Somehow, we managed not to get infected by the virus. We all got boostered and respected safety measures to the max. Most of my time, I spent home in my studio and only came out for some grocery shopping, some visits to art exhibitions, and delivering the taxi service to my daughter’s school and horse stables. Zero travel since October 2019, but I cannot say I miss it.
At this moment, it looks like we are getting out of the woods of the 5th Covid wave, and measures in Belgium are getting relaxed. Partying is allowed again as of 18 Feb 2022.
More importantly: my father is still alive and kicking, and he celebrated his 90th birthday in Sep 2022!
What else?
The Bricks Project
For those who remember, this is my “zen” project. Drawing bricks in silence. Many bricks. 8,255 Bricks at the time of writing this post:
Exhibitions
Since the last update, I visited the following art exhibitions:
Luc Deleu, De Singel, Antwerp, Aug 2021
Drawing Art, BOZAR, Brussels, Sep 2021
ING Laughing Art, ING Gallery, Brussels, Sep 2021
David Hockney, BOZAR, Brussels, Oct 2021
Masculinities, FOMU, Antwerp, Nov 2021
Re-Collect, FOMU, Antwerp, Nov 2021
Rinus Van de Velde, Tim Van Laer Gallery, Antwerp, Nov 2021
Train Modernity, KMSK, Brussels, Nov 2021
Fabrice Samyn, KMSK, Brussels, Nov 2021
Pop-Art, SMAK, Ghent, Feb 2022
Chaos, Alex Vervoordt, Wijnegem, Feb 2022
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Zeno X, Antwerp, Feb 2022
David Claerbout – The Close, Brugge, Feb 2022
Luc Deleu inspired by Buckminster Fuller
Detail of painting by Rinus Van de Velde – 2021
Hippie Elias (Self portret) by Etienne Elias – 1970
Fabrice Samyn – Detail from Eve&Adam – 2018
Still from The Close – David Claerbout – 2022
Outdoors
Weather did not treat us well. My recollection is one of all shades of grey and lots of rain from August 2021 till Feb 2022. Only the beginning of Sep 2021 was decent. But I have some nice winter fog pictures from my strolls and bicycle rides:
Horses
Astrid made a lot of progress in horse-riding. She won the 2nd price at a local dressage competition, and she also enjoys jumping a lot.
Talking about Astrid, in Dec 2021 she celebrated her 16th birthday. Where has the time gone?
Traveling Without Moving project
Travelling without Moving (TWM) is a series of essays documenting my mental and philosophical journey in 2020-2022.
The main outline was published in November 2020, and in the meantime, several episodes have been released. Since the last Petervan Studios update, I published one more essay on “Studios”.
There are a couple more in the pipeline, but I have a hunch that these will morph into The Scaffold project (see later in this post).
Since July 2019, I publish every month a Spotify List with new releases combined with some oldies from the 60ies, 70ies, and beyond. Search for “Petervan Ride” and select “playlists”. Subjective selection of course, as driven only by my personal taste (or lack thereof).
Here is the latest Ride from Feb 2022, still being populated as we publish this post.
I suggest you play it in shuffle mode, it enhances the surprise experience.
My Art Practice
I did not produce much artwork. I was very focused on a work-project that required all my attention and focus. I shared most of my recent art work via my Facebook page, or on this blog under the heading “Sine Parole”. Some “highlights” if I can say that about my own work:
Professionalisation of Petervan Studios Art Practice
As from March 2022, I will focus on the professionalization of my art practice. I have hired a coach to help me with that. We are working with a digital archiving platform with an API that is steering the show & tell of my analogue and digital artworks. There will also be an integration with a shopping environment, and an online VR exhibition environment. There is also a brand-new website for Petervan Studios in the making. This new online environment will also become the home for a new project, working title “The Scaffold”, see below
Freelance Projects
I have been deeply involved and committed as architect and head of design of an 100% on-line learning expedition running from Sep 2021 till Feb 2022. We just landed the closing session. We still want to produce a “scrapbook” that documents the journey by end Feb 2022. The experience came in two chapters. The first chapter was a technology refresh on digital identity, infrastructure, VR, Robotics, Web3, and UX. The second chapter was about developing a practice of innovation for wicked problems, and how to design for emergence in complex adaptive systems.
I had the chance to collaborate with professional facilitation and innovation partners, and a collective of “guides” – some really smart people – that helped us shape and deliver the content.
The Scaffold
The learning expedition mentioned above had a great impact on me and the way I look at “events”. I believe I am onto something that may be the start of a new “genre” of learning studios. And I have started talking and pitching to potential partners and investors. Here is the high-level pitch:
The Scaffold is a 100% online learning studio for creating new knowledge based on the passion of the explorer.
The Scaffold can be seen as a form of Pop-Up school and/or an experimentation-based learning playground.
The Scaffold is planned as a three-year research cycle, with cohorts joining an online virtual playground for six-month intensive high-impact expeditions where together with the faculty they will create new knowledge in collaboration.
The curriculum of the expeditions is composed of several interventions, interruptions, and provocations anchored in the reality of a client’s project. The project serves as a vehicle to trigger new and imaginative thinking.
The Scaffold is a “scaffold” for something much bigger, something that could lead to a movement and foundation for better futures.
More about that later, probably in the second half of 2022. I hope to have a first client cohort signed-up by then.
So, in summary, what’s next?
The plan for the coming months is to work/play on:
Professionalizing my art practice
Pitch and realize my project “The Scaffold”
So, that’s it for this edition. If there is something worth reporting, next update is for Sep 2022.
The time that we could organise our companies without acting too much on global evolutions lies long behind us. Leaders understand more than ever that tackling world challenges not only creates a better context for all of us to live in but also presents fantastic business opportunities. It’s why am thrilled to be one of the curators of nexxworks’ Mission NXT program, designed to help leaders turn global trends into opportunities.
For those who are truly passionate about fostering this type of outside in vision, here are five (zero bullshit) books that fundamentally changed and formed my thinking in the matter over the years.
The pandemic showed us that we are completely unprepared to cope with our current deeply entangled world. According to Bratton, we need a “positive biopolitics” and an AI-based instrumentation of the world. He offers a refreshing way of thinking about sensors which is quite different from the worn out song about the surveillance state.
Ann Pendleton Jullian and John Seely Brown – Design Unbound (2018)
Read this if you want to understand how you can design for emergence in the Never Normal. You’ll need your full attention (it’s not a ‘light reading’ project), but in return you’ll receive two volumes of unique and well researched insights to help you better see what is and what can become. This is truly one of the most important business books I ever read.
Latour calls for a third way in climate politics which is left nor right: a path between libertarian globalism, and leftist localism. One that is anchored in planet earth. Read this if you want to get to know one of the most important philosophers of the 21st century.
Jenny E. Sabin and Peter Lloyd Jones – LabStudio (2017)
Sabin and Lloyd Jones tackle the concept of the research design laboratory in which funded research and trans-disciplinary participants achieve radical advances in science, design, and applied architectural practice. The book demonstrates new approaches to more traditional design studio and hypothesis-led research that are complementary, iterative, experimental, and reciprocal.
This real life story of American architect Christopher Alexander designing and building the Eishin university campus in Japan serves as an analogy for the battle between two fundamentally different ways of shaping our world. One system places emphasis beauty, on subtleties, on finesse, on the structure of adaptation that makes each tiny part fit into the larger context. The other system is concerned with efficiency, with money, power and control, stressing the more gross aspects of size, speed, and profit. This second, “business-as-usual” system is incapable of enabling the emotional, whole-making side of human life, according to Alexander, who then goes on to present a new architecture.
After the Unbound-post of begin March 2021, we continue with “Foam”, a way of looking at and reflecting about the world as suggested by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk.
I will not even attempt at claiming to understand Sloterdijk and/or to summarize his magnus opus trilogy “Spheres, Bubbles and Foam”.
I just want to share some tangential thoughts that “bubbled-up” when reading about it.
Foam is organic as in relating to or derived from living matter.
As opposed to inorganic.
Organic/Inorganic is similar but still different than the Analog/Digital or Kairos/Chronos.
It is tangential to human/non-human.
“In geometry, a tangent is a straight line that touches a curve at a single point. So we say that someone who starts talking about one thing and gets sidetracked has gone off on a tangent. The new subject is tangential to the first subject—it touches it and moves off in a different direction.(Merriam Webster)”
Following foam is like driving a road that is not road, emerging continuously.
Foam is about relations.
Between people.
Foam-mates
From general relativity to relativity of relations.
The quality of the relation depends on the viewpoint.
The quality depends on the dispositions and emergent potentials of relations
Foam is an emergence of dispositions and potentials
For a life of play is no genuine human life;
But is it really?
We now have affluence and surplus, for the first time in human history.
Hueneman
Constant’s New Babylon or the Biosphere 2 project come to mind.
You are part of multiple spheres: the bigger ones like “world”, or “earth”, or “continent”, or the smaller “bubbles” like “province”, or “institution”, or “corporation”, and the smaller foam bubbles, as “communities” of influence, attraction, care, intimacy and attention.
It is a fragmentation, but one with soft borders/membranes.
Not splintered like broken glass, but organic and lubricous and smooth like the soap bubbles in the hot tub.
And the assemblage of all this is dynamic, changing and interacting all the time, like a complex adaptive system.
In her 2021 Tech Report, Amy Webb identified more that 100 new signals.
A fragmentation of signals.
A fragmentation of everything, entangled like foam.
Abundance.
Wealth has come to us like a thief in the night
Sloterdijk
How would one design for and in such a system?
Designing space and context for 1000 flowers to blossom, for 1000 bubbles to co-exist…
I have a hunch that Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown may have some suggestions in Design Unbound.
Or check-out “Medium Design” by Keller Easterling, who writes about dispositions of interdependent objects and spaces; or should I say “spheres”?
“Disposition is a latent agency or immanent potential—a property or propensity within a context that unfolds over time and in the absence of a reifying event or an executive mental order.” Keller Easterling
Dispositions and propensities are becoming part of roaring 20’ies thinking.
So are spheres, bubbles and foam.
Because we are hungry for new communities of intimacy and connection.
Next time we’ll talk about “Inappropriateness”, as a badge-of-honor that is.
Huizinga believes play is of all times, and not limited to humans.
Animals play also.
A lot.
It is not “play” as in “game”.
Game – at least finite games – hints at some underlying sense for competition.
This is play without competition.
Play just for the pleasure of play.
Like birds in the sky,
cows in the pasture,
dogs on the beach,
humans teasing each other…
The core message of Huizinga is that play drives culture.
That the disposition of a culture is already embedded in the play preceding it.
By this we do not mean that play turns into culture, rather that in its earliest phases culture has the play-character, that it proceeds in the shape and the mood of play (Huizinga)
Play is irrational.
Play is a voluntary activity.
Play has a tendency to be beautiful. It may be that this aesthetic factor is identical with the impulse to create orderly form, which animates play in all its aspects. The words we use to denote the elements of play belong for the most part to aesthetics, terms with which we try to describe the effects of beauty: tension, poise, balance, contrast, variation, solution, resolution, etc.
Play casts a spell over us; it is “enchanting”, “captivating”. It is invested with the noblest qualities we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony.
The child plays in complete—we can well say, in sacred—earnest.
But it plays and knows that it plays.
Play is a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is “different” from “ordinary life”.
We do not play for wages, we work for them
@Huizinga
The last one resonates well with my current state of being. For me, and especially since my retirement from corporate life on 1 Dec 2020, “work” has become “paid play”, although most of the work in 2020 was “unpaid play”.
But it is play.
In 2017, in my series “Trends for human advancement”, I strongly believed that structure is driving everything, and landed on the phrase:
So, to be able to change, we first need to re-learn to play.
“There is a third function, however, applicable to both human and animal life, and just as important as reasoning and making—namely, playing.”
@Huizinga
This brings me to the insights of John Seely Brown in “A New Culture of Learning”, who quotes Huizinga extensively
I rediscovered John Seely Brown (JSB) when reading “Design Unbound” that he wrote together with Ann Pendleton-Jullian. Much (!) more about that book and Ann’s work and how it changed and formed my thinking in 2020 and ongoing.
Visual/Insight by JSB
JSB talks about a “21st Century Augmented Imagination”, with a better balance between Homo Sapien, Homo Faber, and Homo Ludens
Play, questioning, and—perhaps most important—imagination lie at the very heart of arc-of-life learning
In a world of near-constant flux, play becomes a strategy for embracing change, rather than a way for growing out of it
Play fuses the two elements of learning that we have been talking about: the information network and the petri dish (or bounded environment of experimentation). That fusion is what we call the new culture of learning
@JSB
Later in this series, we’ll also talk extensively about the concept of “Studios”, leveraging the practice of practices that is architecture (again, as so well documented by Ann Pendleton-Jullian in “Four Studios (+1)”)
The key point here that play and critique are indispensable tools and skills for collective learning when integrating game play and game design in the scaffolding of the disposition of imagination.
Next time we’ll talk about “Anxious” one of the states of a post-VUCA world. And what a possible response to that anxiety can be.
From there – in subsequent posts – we’ll leave the road of reductionism and will enter a space where we will mix more abstraction and holistic thinking.
Let’s try something new here: a “mood-scape”, documenting a personal mood/world using words, visuals, and sound. And inviting you to build new worlds by participating on a 1-1 basis. Although “new” is relative: the term moodscape was initially coined in the seventies, and mixing media can hardly be labeled new or novel. But having a “calm” conversation may sound like an anachronism in these times where time itself is collapsing, where time itself has become exponential.
I immediately fell in love with the melancholic, nostalgic, slow pace sound of the album, in my opinion, a perfect soundscape for the disorienting times we live in. There is some sort of homesickness here, knowing deep inside that we have already said goodbye to a golden era, and era that I sometimes refer to as the Bowie-Era.
I added a couple of Clockdust songs to my Spotify March 2020 Ride playlist, and one of the songs happened to sit next to David Bowie’s Lazarus song from his Blackstar album. To make a long story short, I created a sub-set of the playlist, containing the songs that I felt best reflected my March 2020 “Mood”. There is one coming for April as well 😉
I suggest you let it play in the background in shuffle-mode whilst reading this blog post, as I believe it may augment what I am trying to share.
The cover is a picture from Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet), a choreography with costumed actors transformed into geometrical representations of the human body.
There is also this wonderful video testimony of one of the early performances of that choreography
The video sent me back in time – clockdust time – when I was a 6-year old schoolboy. For the very first time in my life, I stood – proudly – in front of a huge whiteboard in the classroom – it was a blackboard with white chalk – and we were invited by the teacher to properly write the letters of the alphabet with white chalk on this blackboard.
It must have been my early creative juices, but I could not withhold myself drawing big white spirals instead of well-formed a’s and b’s, etc. on that black-black blackboard. Result: punishment and the lesson learned that a classroom is not a place for creativity and imagination.
In vain, the seeds were sown, and spirals, spheres, labyrinths, maps, and foams became – with hindsight – an obsession. I love the endlessness, and the recursiveness of these shapes and forms. Especially double, entangled spirals or labyrinths get me going…
This high-end Balenciaga Summer 2020 production, with music from BFRND, is a perfect timestamp of our times. Grim black coats, at times almost German SS uniform like Arial race,… our sleepwalking into fascism. One thinks The Matrix, hard as stone, sharp as a knife, and greyed out faces. Will we take the Red or Blue pill? Blue for sure is the backdrop for what Balenciaga call “Power Dressing”.
Balenciaga Summer 20 reimagines dressing for work: power dressing, no matter what one does as a job. Looks transform a wearer in the way a uniform can. Unlike their archetypes, though, garments and accessories are made using unconventional processes.
They talk about New Fashion Uniforms, Seamless Tailoring, New Trompe L’oeil, Super Plissé, Pillow Parkas, Fetish Gownsn, and Wearable Ballroom dresses.
Models of various career tracks interpret and play on beauty standards of today, the past, and the future.
Enter Masks, a new book by James Curcio, about Bowie and other artists of artifice. I spotted the book in a guest post by James Curcio on Ribbonfarm’s always excellent blog.
The difference between a king and a beggar, a soldier and a murderer remains in the realm of performance, a kind of farcical mummers trick that we agree to play along with, if often unconsciously.
The bulk of the book is about Bowie’s unique conceptual art, his capability to create new coherent worlds and identities. I miss Bowie.
The post and book also refer to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation, apparently required reading for the actors of The Matrix before filming. According to Wikipedia, Baudrillard is “best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as simulation and hyperreality.”
It cannot be happenstance that I find a reference to Simulacra and Simulation in “Design Unbound”, fantastic two-volume work on “Designing for Emergence in a White Water World”, by John Seely Brown and Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian, a print-only MIT Press publication. Chapter 14 is about “World Building”: “much more than just the setting for a story, word building creates coherent contexts that stories become to inhabit”
This is very much avant-garde, feels a lot like Cobra world-building practices like New Babylon by Constant Nieuwenhuis.
I feel like I am drifting into a thin timeline, and time is slipping through my fingers like clockdust. A shaken gravity, with no reference framework, unable to make U-turns, and affront reality with an open mind, heart, and will.
I need a new backdrop, a new backstory to make or break sense. I want to liberate myself from the harness of fixed time and space. An opening-up that leads to more vulnerability – and less power dress. With proximity, intimacy, and closeness – like the closeness and blissfulness that is evoked in “Two Sleepy People” in the March 2020 Mini-Ride.
In that sense, the from/to framing of before and after COVID-19 is misleading. I believe we have to start thinking of ourselves as analog/digital assets whose state is updated in real-time ànd asynchronously, our lives continuously evolving through space and time. We are indeed astronauts, in need of coherent world-building and navigating clockdust till eternity.
I have time. You have time. Both clock-time (Chronos) and experienced-time (Kairos). Ping me if you want to continue the conversation. I’d love to hear where your clockdust has settled these days.
This post is a semi-transcript of a fantastic talk “Space in the mind of a machine” by media artist Refik Anadol. My post is not intended as a literal transcript, but rather as a collection of – often poetic – idea clusters of Refik’s talk. None of the ideas are mine, I just tried to condense it and brush some highlights.
The talk was given on 4 December 2019 at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC). The website of SCI-ARC itself is nirvana for all beauty and art lovers out there, and worth spending a virtual visit of a couple of hours.
The talk was transformative for me, in the sense that it made me realize we truly have entered a new reality and a witnessing the dawn of a new area, full of beauty, poetry, and artistic interventions that create alertness and aliveness similar to the 16th-century renaissance.
After a long intro, his talk starts at 2:46
Criticizing the idea of canvas
Dimensional explorations
Augmented structures
“Design is a solution to a problem; art is a question to a problem” – John Maeda
Humans, Machines, and Environments in a symbiotic relationship
Can a building dream?
“Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward” – Kierkegaard
The data that we leave behind us
Data “dramatization” vs. Data Visualisation
The invisible space of Wi-Fi, 4G, radio signals, etc.
A poetic exploration of invisible datasets
Data Paintings
At a certain moment, Refik Anadol quotes Philip K. Dick, author of the 1968 science fiction book “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, later retitled Blade Runner, and basis for the 1982 initial version of the film.
This inspires Refik Anadol to seed the following insight:
A simulation is that which does not stop when the stories go away
Stories are responsible for our human desire for resolution
But the simulation is only responsible for its own laws and initializing conditions
A simulation has no moral, prejudice of meaning
Like nature it just is
There is some poetry hidden in this abstraction of data
Exploring data sets that have this quality of meditation
The architect as an operating systems designer, a beautiful “speculation”
Finding the moment of remembering
Finding the moment of entering a dream state
“Machine Hallucinations”
Collective memories of spaces
To make the invisible visible
Hallucination narrators
Dream narrators
The Selfies of the Earth
Refik is asking questions that are not just a fancy-fications of a bunch of algorithms
Another rabbit hole bringing together some reflections on creativity, demolition, patrimony, and poetic ruination, as so often in this blog inspired by architectural insights and metaphors.
My attention was triggered by an article in the Jan 11, 2020 weekend edition of De Standaard, a Flemish newspaper. The article was about landscaping, and more specifically “ontharding” (I would literally translate it as “softening”). In this case, softening that what was hardened in the first place. Abandoned and neglected residential and industrial sites, where the soil is still covered by the concrete and rubbish of empty buildings.
It was part of a study supported by the “Vlaamse Bouwmeester”. “Bouwmeester” means “master of building”, “bau-meister”. The term is ill-translated into “Flemish Government Architect” on the official website. The full study can be found here (PDF in Dutch).
The core mission of the Flemish Government Architect is to promote the architectural quality of the built environment. The Flemish Government Architect and his team advise public patrons in the design and realization of buildings, public space, landscape and infrastructure. In addition, the Flemish Government Architect stimulates the development of visions and reflection, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral initiatives. The Flemish Government Architect acts as an advisor to the entire Flemish Government.
In short, the article and the study plea for restoring public space by the demolition of 1/5th of hardened space/surface in the Flemish landscape by 2050.
I had a flashback to “Cradle to Cradle”, the 2002 book that alerted me for the first time to a possible vision of sustainable production and architecture. The idea at that time was that reducing waste was just not good enough, and to be sustainable we needed to add value back into the system. As an evolution, the article about the softening of landscape goes one step further: from reducing waste to creating open space by the demolition of vacancy.
“Sloop geeft blijk van falen” – “Demolition evidences failure”
Dan Hill was/is looking for (open) spaces as well, quoting ex-FC Barcelona football player and current Al-Sadd (Quatar) football team coach Xavi Hernández:
“Think quickly, look for spaces. That’s what I do: look for spaces. All day. I’m always looking. All day, all day. Here? No. There? No. People who haven’t played don’t always realise how hard that is. Space, space, space. It’s like being on the PlayStation. I think ‘shit, the defender’s here, play it there’. I see the space and pass. That’s what I do.”
Already more than 20 years ago, architect Cedric Price was arguing for demolish-able buildings with open re-usable spaces.
Cedric Price’s Fun Palace – inspiration for Centre Pompidou in Paris
OK – I confess – as from that moment I went down the rabbit hole and saw demolition and abandoned architecture everywhere. Like in this recent Guardian article, arguing the case for fully demountable buildings.
“We have to think of buildings as material depots,” says Thomas Rau , a Dutch architect who has been working to develop a public database of materials in existing buildings and their potential for reuse… He has developed the concept of “material passports”, a digital record of the specific characteristics and value of every material in a construction project, thereby enabling the different parts to be recovered, recycled and reused.
But there is also something poetic about abandonment, up to the point where we could consider keeping these ruins and equipping them with sensors to listen to patrimony.
Like menhirs, these abandoned seismic sensors could now just stand there, silent in the landscape, awaiting a future photographer such as Grigoryants to capture their poetic ruination.
Lebbeus Woods was inspiration to Geoff Manough and London-based architects Smout Allen for the project L.A. Recalculated:
Woods depicts an entire city designed and built as an inhabitable scientific tool. Everywhere there are “oscilloscopes, refractors, seismometers, interferometers, and other, as yet unknown instruments, measuring light, movement, force, change.” Woods describes how “tools for extending perceptivity to all scales of nature are built spontaneously, playfully, experimentally, continuously modified in home laboratories, in laboratories that are homes.”
Instead of wasting their lives tweeting about celebrity deaths, residents construct and model their own bespoke experiments, exploring seismology, astronomy, electricity, even light itself.
Seismic Counterweights
From L.A. Recalculated by Smout Allen and BLDGBLOG
Like architects think about (industrial) sites listening through sensors to seismic undercurrents, I started wondering whether we could not use this metaphor to reflect about our organizational structures; structures not only as hierarchical structures but the more encompassing set of system rules and patterns of an organization – I referred to it before as organizational patrimony.
How can we listen to and signal about the pulse of this organizational patrimony? How can we be aware of it, appreciate it, respect it, and build upon it in our rebellious acts of creative destruction?
I imagine a cohort of humans – like a colony of ants – having 24/7 sensors and laboratories everywhere in organizations; in every office, cubicle, meeting room, coffee corner, etc. And I don’t mean robotic sterile sensors feeding AI models. I mean real humans, measuring, documenting and signaling patrimonial changes in the structure of corporate structure, so they can send early warnings of experiments that have become useless and therefore have to be ruinated, or – in the worst-case – signal cases of patrimonial breakdown and demolition. In search of the material depot and passport of our organizations.
Petervan Studios 