Reflexive Architecture:
Seven Continua for post-digital architectures

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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Film and Forensic Workshop:
Towards a Documentary Practice

DESCRIPTION: In the age of social media, where content is distributed algorithmically with attention to political or psychological biases, we are immersed in the landscape of post-truth. In this paradigm, the testimonies of witnesses and victims can be easily dismissed as false or subjective, challenging the credibility of journalistic, judicial, or investigative work. Distrust in witnesses who hold differing political views poses a significant threat to the construction of democratic institutions. Critically engaging with the contemporary world requires a transformation in our toolboxes for activism and documentation. As a response to the complexities of the post-truth mediasphere, we need rigorous proximity to victims and familiarity with scientific knowledge, understanding the powerful role that visualization can play in community building and public advocacy during these times.

This Workshop moves away from the traditional ethics of testimony and employs various documentary techniques to directly approach violations against humans or nature. The goal of the Workshop is to develop an understanding of evidentiary techniques such as image analysis, geolocation, OSINT (Open Source Intelligence), and data mining, exploring ways to utilize these tools in investigative filmic facts. We will engage with non-optical moving image-making technologies like AI videos, voice-overs, and found footage, with the final goal of collaborating in groups to produce a vertical film lasting 3-15 minutes. The Workshop will consist of four Sessions, with the final class held three weeks after the third Session, so that the groups of participants have time to prepare and complete their films.

Session 1: Introduction to Forensic Investigations
Session 2: Non-Optical Moving Image-Making Technologies
Session 3: Research and Development
Session 4: Film Production and Presentation

IMAGE: JFK Assassination, 1963.

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.

Music Writing Workshop

DESCRIPTION: An apocrypha, misattributed at different times to Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, and others, states that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture."

This maxim is a provocation against music critics, who would try to express musical sentiments in language as if they could casually translate them through their words. Although the quote hides a romantic notion of the ineffability of musical aesthetics, it is fair in its contestation of the current paradigm of music writing, which either implies easy transparency in the conversion of sonic impressions or relies on a cold, technical, supposedly rational interpretation of music by way of notational parameters. It also acknowledges the first lesson of art criticism: that writing is a form of literature, an art form of its own like any other, to which the critic needs to submit different artworks. Thus, music criticism would be, first of all, a literary practice. The main fault of the maxim is not that music is easy to translate but instead that the difficulty in translating itself can be potentially productive.

This Workshop will provide practical training on how to write effectively and synthetically about music. In particular, we will address pop music, which lacks a common imaginative vocabulary of abstractions, and we will use forms of communication that are amicable to current-day social media, which, contrary to traditional publishing, are ever relevant. Exercises will include short reviews, one-liners, video commentaries, and a longer essay (from the online pitch to the final editing process). The main takeaway from this Workshop should be a deeper engagement with listening and clarification of one's taste and its translation into text. Why do you like or dislike a song that has been just released? How do you transmit the images and feelings it evokes in you to a wider audience, without alienating either the musically trained or the total dilettante? Lastly, how can music writing allow us to better understand the openings between art forms, between media, and between people?

Session 1: Introduction to Music Writing - We will introduce the bulk of the seminar and its schedule and assignments, and talk about comparative aesthetics and the phenomenology of the musical work, or how to effectively translate between artforms.

Session 2: Short Review - We will read and edit the outputs to your first assignment (short review) and compare them with examples of great music writers to understand how music reviews are usually structured and how creative writing techniques can play into it.

Session 3: One-Liners - We will read and edit the outputs to your second assignment (one-liners) and discuss the conditions of critique and judgment of a piece of music, as well as learn to synthesize complex ideas into punchy, forthright, often humorous or dramatic phrases.

Session 4: Video Commentary - We will watch and discuss the outputs to your third assignment (video commentary) and discuss the role of music criticism in the current landscape of low-attention-span, influencer-dominated social media, or how one may or may
not become a music writer in the practical sense, attentive to how freelancing markets work.

IMAGE: Mohammad Salemy, Record Store, 2023

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.