CartReflexive Architecture II:
Seven Continua for post-digital architectures Instructors: Neil Spiller & Derek HalesProgram: WorkshopCredit(s): 2Date: October 31st, November 14th, December 5th, December 19th, January 16th, 30th, February 13th, 27thTime: 14:00-16:30 ET
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: Introducing seven continua for reflexive architecture:
1- Space 2- Technology 3- Narrative, Semiotics and Performance 4- Cyborgian Geography 5- Scopic Regimes 6- Sensitivity 7- Time.
We will revisit these continua through philosophical research, using mythopoesis (original myth-making by means of higher imagination) and technogenetics (the twisted relationship between the origins of humans and technology). In this Session we will explore the rapid expansion of XR metaverse (XR Metaverse refers to a digital universe that combines elements of augmented reality AR, virtual reality VR, mixed reality MR) as a technical assemblage, we will provide a practical introduction to the construction of n-dimensional worlds.
Session 2: Many areas of rich potential for architectural experiments have been left fallow, and the surreal processes by which augmented and mixed realities actualize remain under-explored. Spiller’s Communicating Vessels exemplifies the designing of relations across continua in a body of drawn work that has an interwoven lexicon of objects, things, and spaces developed cybernetically involving a referential, reflexive relationship with itself and the contexts (geographical, psychological, and imagistic) in which its worlds form in complicating mythopoetic, mythotechnical, and technogenetic ways. Technical discussion on open standards (openUSD) and protocols and the possible worlds of the open-source and proprietary software and ecosystems of the metaverse.
Session 3: This Session will open with a presentation on works through which the first phase of reflexive architectural concepts has been explored by other students and researchers. Particular attention will be given to the notion of the split-site and how this was deployed as a reaction to the problems of architecture and cyberspace as perceived at the turn of the millennium and in relation to XR continua. This Session externalizes the individual project ideas of participants, which can go on to be developed further.
Session 4: In much of late 20th- and early 21st-century digital architecture, with its limited concern for technical virtuality, the initial promise of technical objects as objectiles has led to preoccupations with form/content at the expense of reflexive creativity. In this Session, the Workshop prepares for its winter break by focusing on creative methodologies intended for confronting the infinite blankness of XR (Extended Reality) continua and remobilizing the objectile across a split-site and in pursuit of prototyping fictive materialities in speculative hardware and pataphysical computing or the science of imaginary digital solutions. The last hour of this Session will be dedicated to reviewing participants’ proposals for their final projects.
The final four Sessions of the Workshop, starting in January 2025, are project-based and necessarily led by responses to participants’ research. In design academy, the exposition of worldmaking is limited to a summary ‘crit’ in which an exegesis of a work is provided with an untimely sense of its finality. Instead, we will retain an openness to the chaos of the works of our participants as prototypes for other prototypes and, through our responses to such ongoing series of worldmaking, draw out a sense of the relation between a revisiting of Reflexive Architecture’s Seven Continua and mythopoetic and technogenic processes of worldmaking.
Session 5: The basis of this first of our final Sessions is that the encounter with visionary and speculative architectural works is constructed as onto-political, frequently in tensile relation with the polemical discourse on architecture and imagination. Interspersed between presentations from participants on the memory palaces of their chunking engine prototypes will be a selection of works from the archives of visionary architecture.
Session 6: Responses to the research of participants guide this Session. We ask that participants to complicate our opening discussions on reflexive architecture’s Seven Continua through encountering the uncertain and ambiguous sense of time in their work.
Session 7: In this session, the participants will be asked to complicate our previous discussions on non-diegetic prototyping by encountering chaos, slipping, and sliding between continua.
Session 8: The final Session of the Workshop focuses on redesigning reflexive continua, inviting participants to consider their work’s mythopoetic and technogenic processes.
Through workshopping of worlds and subjectivities, we will shift away from systems of judgment to question the individuation of worlding, from concluding back to the beginning to something conducive to emergent reflexive frameworks of drawing, constructing, and building prototype speculative worlds teeming with machinic life.
IMAGE: Frank Lloyd Wright, Falling water, 1935.
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