Reflexive Architecture:
Seven Continua for post-digital architectures

Instructors: Neil Spiller & Derek Hales
Program: Workshop
Credit(s): 2
Date: October 31st, November 14th, December 5th, December 19th, January 16th, 30th, February 13th, 27th
Time: 14:00-16:30 ET

Enroll – 435 USD

DESCRIPTION: Reflexive Architecture is a synthesis between the virtual, the actual, the biological, the cyborgs, the augmented, and the mixed in the context of built worlds. Above all, such architectures simplify, amplify, or facilitate and make visible the complex entanglement of what Deleuze & Guattari termed “the chaoids or the daughters of chaos: Philosophy, Science, and Art.” It is this transdisciplinary reflexivity that this Workshop explores. The Workshop is structured at a slow-pace with breaks between Sessions to recognize the time participants need to remobilize concepts for their worldmaking practices.

Participants will be asked to respond to numerous smaller provocations, making works toward a substantial polemical work over the 6-month duration of the Workshop. Philosophical and technical software workshops facilitate the application of media/software concepts in post-digital worldmaking practices. The Workshop is geared towards those interested in establishing a postgraduate studio practice situated between drawing, modeling, prompting, scripting, coding and prototyping – both rapid and diegetic.

This Workshop is split into two strands: One, oriented towards architecture’s visionary mode, is set against the backdrop of cybercultural tendencies in reflexive architecture proposed by Neil Spiller in his 2002 issue of Architecture & Design magazine at the millennial turn including the exegesis of his visionary work Communicating Vessels; another strand detours and swerves through the strata of such worldmaking proposed in Derek Hales’ assimilation of the Deleuzian technical object as objectile, offering a philosophical-technical orientation centered on a guided hands-on encounter with software and hardware. We address the rather vexed question of toolsets and technical rigs practically. While assignments can be completed with mixed-media, simple image-editing tools and a scanner, advanced toolsets and workflows, both closed-and open-source software will be discussed in some considerable detail.

Through our first strand, participants will learn of reflexive architecture as originally pioneered by Spiller in a 7-point manifesto of continua: Space, Technology, Narrative Semiotics and Performance, Cyborgian Geography, Scopic Regimes, Sensitivity, and Time. This visionary orientation features guests with experimental practices relating to the developed themes. The second strand reconstructs this reflexive architectural proposition after web3 with which the reflexive architectural vision might be actualized anew in a visionary mode of worldmaking and practical engagement in making speculative hard/soft/wet-wares for fictive materialities.

The Workshop offers both an engagement in the construction of media systems and a philosophical engagement in the future of drawing and technical objects. The visionary worldmaking mode will be underpinned by the philosophical development of the Deleuzian concept of objectility, relating it to the process-orientation of Whitehead and Simondon. We will do this by reanimating notions of an analog audio visuality from the practice of Simondon’s construction of a television and Kittler’s building of a synthesizer and loose these amidst the assemblage of digital infrastructures of web3, NFT worldbuilding, and emerging metaverses, as we reconfigure instances of the seven continua of a post-digital reflexive architecture.

Session 1
Context: Introducing seven continua for reflexive architecture: Space, Technology, Narrative, Semiotics, and Performance, Cyborgian Geography, Scopic Regimes, Sensitivity, Time.

We will revisit these continua throughout the workshop, conducting philosophical research using mythopoesis (original myth-making through higher imagination) and technogenetics (the intertwined relationship between the origins of humans and technology).

Description: Reflexive Architecture as a technoecological niche

In this Session, we will explore the rapid expansion of the XR metaverse, a digital universe that combines augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), and web3 as a technical assemblage. We will provide a practical introduction to constructing n-dimensional worlds and give an overview of SOTA (state-of-the-art) XR workflows. Participants will begin working with Houdini for 3D object-tool production and integrate this within Unity, understanding Unity’s structure and logic for scenographic design in XR events and Houdini’s procedural logics.

Pre-requisites:
Install Unity and Houdini.

Tools:
Unity & Houdini

Outcome: Participants will create and import a procedurally generated L-System organic model tool into Unity as a Houdini Engine asset. The object produced will be a procedurally generated flora, such as a botanical vine with fruiting bodies growing on a trellis or similar structure. This object will inspire the visionary landscape for reflexive architectural ideas and be integrated with other tools and systems in future tutorials. Inspiration will come from the visionary landscape in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which will be discussed in the next contextual Session.

Session 2
Context: Many areas of architectural experimentation remain underexplored, particularly the surreal processes through which augmented and mixed realities actualize. Spiller’s Communicating Vessels exemplifies the design of relationships across continua. It involves a reflexive relationship with contexts (geographical, psychological, and imagistic), creating worlds that complicate mythopoetic, mythotechnical, and technogenetic narratives. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, introduced briefly in the last Session, is discussed further as an inspiration for visionary works, including Spiller’s, as it collapses narrative worlds and cryptographic images.

Description: Perspective, projective geometries, and projection as process

Participants will work with virtual cameras, lights, and materials to understand the problematics of games and virtual film production. We will explore how film and game production converge and how 3D assets are interoperable in reflexive architecture and XR workflows.

Tools: Houdini, Unity

Outcome: Participants will gain an understanding of SOTA XR database logics and how standards converge to structure software and interfaces in post-disciplinary ways. They will work with virtual cameras, lights, and materials in Unity, export assets from Houdini, and deform objects and textures to create decaying fruit images. There will be an option to work with textures in Adobe Substance Designer.

Session 3
Context: This Session presents works exploring reflexive architectural concepts, focusing on the split-site and pataphysical chunking engines. These were deployed in response to perceived problems in architecture and cyberspace around the turn of the millennium. The Session externalizes individual project ideas that Participants can develop further.

Description: Tracing allegorical shadows
Participants will trace found objects using particle systems and generate procedural terrains as allegorical landscapes. They will create scenes within a collective project, map a camera source to an in-world object as a live surface, and explore shadows, optics, movement, and the space between object and surface when split across continua.

Pre-requisites: Install Zig Sim Pro on iOS and ZigSimTools for Unity.

Tools: Houdini, Unity, TouchDesigner, ZigSimPro, ZigSimTools for Unity

Outcome: Participants will trace surfaces of objects using particle tools, map sensor data into the XR environment, project live sensor streams into a virtual environment, and use smartphones as MR-enabled input devices.

Session 4
Context: In much of late 20th- and early 21st-century digital architecture, technical objects as “objectiles” have often preoccupied form and content over reflexive creativity. In this Session, we prepare for a winter break by discussing creative methodologies for confronting XR continua and remobilizing the objectile across split-sites in speculative hardware and pataphysical computing.

Description: Working with volumes and soft bodies
Participants will work with volumetric approaches and procedural techniques in Houdini to generate clouds, fogs, and swarming soft bodies. These assets will be integrated into Unity landscapes.

Tools: Houdini, Unity, GyrOSC

Outcome: Participants will create a mist for Unity landscapes using a voxel system and manipulate ephemeral structures. They will generate positive feedback loops between landform masses across multiple continua using external inputs and prototyped events. Smartphones will be used as environmental sensors triggering virtual environment events in Unity.

Final Four Sessions
Starting in January 2025, the final four Session are project-based, led by Participants’ research. Rather than concluding with a summary, we will maintain openness to chaos and worldmaking, revisiting Reflexive Architecture’s Seven Continua and the mythopoetic and technogenic processes of worldmaking.

Session 5
Context: This Session centers on encounters with visionary architectural works, constructed in tension with polemical discourse on architectural creativity and imagination. Participants will present their chunking engine prototypes while exploring archives of visionary architecture.

Description: Chunking engines and splatting the split-site

Participants will prepare scanned objects using point-cloud data and manipulate them in Houdini using various XR development strategies.

Pre-requisites:
Access Lidar camera apps on iOS and a 3D object database.

Tools: Photon, Polycam, Houdini, COLMAP

Outcome: Participants will manipulate point-cloud data, understand common problems with Lidar scans, and work with Gaussian splats to extract data from scanned objects.

Session 6
Context: Participants will explore the ambiguous sense of time in their project work and complicate discussions on Reflexive Architecture’s Seven Continua.

Description: Reflexive events across split-sites

Participants will compose multiple scenes in Unity, working with in-world scenes, levels, and reflexive events across continua.

Tools: IOS, GyrOSC, MaxMSP, FMOD Studio, Unity

Outcome: Participants will prototype interactions between split-sites across virtual and actual continua.

Session 7

Context: Participants will encounter chaos in this Session, slipping between continua.

Description: Scenes, gates, and mappings across continua

Participants will design complex split-sites in Unity, focusing on object interoperability and real-time generative media systems.

Tools: TouchDesigner, Unity, Madmapper

Outcome: Participants will design complex reflexive virtual-actual split-sites, understanding commercial software and FLOSS tools.

Session 8
The final Session focuses on redesigning reflexive continua, inviting Participants to consider the mythopoetic and technogenic processes in their work. The workshop will explore worldmaking and the individuation of speculative prototype worlds.

IMAGE: Frank Lloyd Wright, Falling water, 1935.

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Enroll – 435 USD