"by the bootstraps" lecture, 2009

7/31/2019 "By the Bootstraps" lecture, 2009

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HEARST LECTURE SERIES SPRING 2009

CALIFORNIA POLYTECHNIC STATE UNIVERSITY

SYMPOSIUM

COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE AND ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN

RESEARCH PRACTICE

SAN LUIS OBISPO


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CONTENTS

JEFFREY INABA : CLAB

BY THE BOOTSTRAPS

MATERIALS (IN) ARCHITECTURE

ADAPTATION

MEDIA ARCHITECTURE

ED KELLER :

RAVEEVARN CHOKSOMBATCHAI :

LISA IWAMOTO/CRAIG SCOTT :

BEATRIZ COLOMINA :

STEPHEN PHILLIPS : INTRODUCTION10

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26

38

44

54

THE EXPERIMENTMARK WIGLEY :70

PREFACE

Q&A

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BY THE BOOTSTRAPS:

ED KELLER

Introducing Ed Keller:Assistant Professor Douglas Jackson:

Douglas Jackson: Okay, architecture is perhaps

unique among other disciplines in that it is also acultural enterprise, a cultural practice if you will. So

while as a discipline it maintains and even benefitsfrom history, a tradition, a body of knowledge that is insome sense bounded and its resulting inertia resists

change. This potentially entrenched and dogmaticinstitution is also contested, confused, challenged,

enriched, enlivened, and ultimately liberated by thesimultaneous need to keep abreast of and remain

relevant to the culture that sponsors it.So in contrast to the preponderance of individuals

and practices that safeguard the disciplines interest

in what it already knows, architecture also requiresprovocateurs, individuals and practices that research

areas of knowledge beyond the presumed boundariesof the discipline, that produce work that challenges

the status quo with new ideas, knowledge and visions,

and in so doing, continually seek to engage in ever-shifting culture.

For the last 15 or so years that is precisely what arenext speaker, Ed Keller, has done. He is the founder of

the Mediascapes Masters degree program at SCI-Arc,a program he coordinated and taught between 2007and 2009, and which explores significant emerging

relationships within the technology, software, media, filmand game spaces to produce new content and ideas in

an R&D environment.Ed also teaches at the Columbia University

Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation andPlanning, where he was acting director of the advancedarchitectural design program in 2000 and 2001. He is

the co-founder ofAUM Studio, an architecture and newmedia firm whose work includes residential projects

in Europe, award-winning competitions, expandedcinema and locative media projects, and media and

technology research and consulting.AUM Studios workhas been shown at the MAK Center, New Blood, TELICGallery, and at Beijing Biennale. In 1997 he founded

a,Chrono, an R&D firm that has designed and produceddigital media projects, film scripts and architectural

competitions, has worked as a primary developer oncomputer games and continues to develop high-def

digital projects and soundscapes. Kellers work and thework ofa,Chrono has been exhibited at the Pixel Gallery,The Kitchen, iMage Architettura in Movimento, and

the ISEA. In 1994 he founded Basilisk.com, an onlinejournal covering architecture and new media theory,

which he edited until 2003. He is currently working onKino-Mind

, a book exploring temporal models in cinemaand architecture. His essays on culture, technology,


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film and architecture have been published in

books, including Four Lines, Beyond Form, TheState of Architecture in the 21st Century, and

Beyond Post-Modernism, and also such journalsas PRAXIS,AD, Film Philosophy, LeonardoOnline,Zapp, Ottagono, Space,Scroope,

Architecture,ArchRecord2, Parpaings, Precis,ANY, Metropolis, and Wired. Additionally, AUM

Studios work appears in journals includingMetamorfosi, Construir, andArchitectura e Vida.

Please join me in welcoming Ed Keller.

Ed Keller: Thank you for that very nice

introduction, and thank you very much to CalPoly and to Stephen for the invitation. The

title of the talk today is By the Bootstraps I have looked for an image of Baron von

Mnchhausen, but I couldnt find a good one.So Im using this still fromAndromeda Strain, agreat B sci-fi movie from the early 70s about an

alien life form which a group of scientists haveto attempt to communicate with. It is perhaps

the best camp vision of research that cinemacan provide. And now Ill jump straight into

screening a movie that some of my SCI-Arcstudents made this past spring. Obviously these

guys were shooting with a very very high-speedcamera.

In summary of my talk today: I want to deal

with a few general questions about research,and then show you examples, three projects

that Ive been involved with, and two otherprojects by filmmakers and writers.

I believe that the ambition of research is

to discover the unknown and to consider the process,nature, and consequences of this unknown, and to consider

theoretical, technical, and methodological problems asoriented towards the production of knowledge; obviouslyresearch aims at the production of knowledge, but really

more specifically the production of thought. In my opinion,if research is done with enthusiasm, it produces a kind of

conundrum immediately. It depends upon mixing the knownwith the unknown, and ultimately generating a value out of

that unknown, and that value always ends up with quite a bitof known and predictable in it again.

So how do we maintain the balance between what weexpect research to produce, what it does produce, and


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how we preserve ultimately that unknowability in it,once we convert it into something thats usable? There

are epistemological consequences to what one canknow. Im going to show some somewhat humorous

examples to start with, to illustrate the problem of theperturbation of value systems. Epistemological models

have flaws, e.g., the kind of amusing chestnuts one willhear: we know what we know, we know what we dontknow, the problem is we dont know what we dont

know. Thats related back to the question of how oneactually operates within epistemological models when

doing research, because they drive what one thinksone is looking for, and then ultimately when one finds

something, what one thinks can be done when bringingit back into reality.

This scene is from The City of Lost Children [Caro &

Jeunet], a fairy tale in a lot of ways. Very intelligent in theway that it thinks about multiplicity and what it means to

actually know something, and what the consequencesof knowing that thing might actually be. Now obviously

were dealing with the question of methodology, whichis not just the way that you work with something (the

way that the characters on screen augment themselves),but also the surrounding theory, and the way that theoryfeeds back into the construction of method. This is one

of the key issues that Im interested in talking abouttoday. It ties back into anti-theory, or the end of models,

potentially, not as philosophical positions, but as purelytechnical consequences of technology change, which

Ill try to get to at the very end of the talk.One of the questions that comes to mind is how

we can escape the labyrinth of false epistemologies,false statements of problems. In the early 1990s I

came across a really funny publication released byRE/Search called Pranks. This edition came to mind

when I was preparing for the talk today. I realizedtheres a good connection, or a substance in theconnection between the question of research, the

value thats produced in research, and the prank,because it gets one to the point where one starts to

question what a value is and how one can maintainsome sort of openness in what it produces.

The original title of RE/Search publications wasSearch and Destroy. This was a term that was used byV. Vale, the founder, to brand his first fanzine, which he

founded as part of the Punk Movement in 1977. Andthat subsequently became RE/Search in the 1980s.

Of course he chose that title to evoke the Vietnamera military term search and destroy or seek and

destroy or S and D, and I quote:

The idea was to insert ground forces intohostile territory on special missions to targetenemy forces and withdraw immediately

afterwards, a strategy that was thought tobe ideally suited for counter-guerrilla / jungle

warfare. The complementary conventionalstrategy, which entailed attacking andconquering an enemy position, then

fortifying and holding it indefinitely, was

known as Clear and Hold or Clear andSecure.

Obviously you can see the question of research asoriented towards search and destroy or towards clear

and hold as a kind of sub-theme thats percolating inthe background here. The term search and destroywas permuted by John Brunner in his 1975 sci-fi

classic Shockwave Riderinto sanded, and this was

slang for, in his world, teen-age riots. It was co-optedand recuperated then as a term of resistance by Iggy


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Pop and the Stooges, and by Henry Rollins [whosetattoo we saw just a moment ago] during the Punk

Movement. So there are cultural, political, and evenmilitary implications for the term research, which can

connect on a more abstract level to the idea of it as apractice that not only discovers systems that integrate

in a liminal way to pre-established knowledge, butthat then radically re-invent systems. [Here we see the

great cover for Pranks, the journal that had such aninfluence on me.]

The examples that are given in Pranks were a

kind of breath of air that filled one with energy andmade it clear that a kind of radical optimism of the

will along with a pessimism of the intellect couldstill engender things in the world in the face of what

Ill call an increasingly atemporal present. Some ofthe other people that Im going to show examplesfrom, like J.G. Ballard, are dealing with that question.

There are others who were involved in Pranks: JoeColeman, the Billboard Modification Front, San

Franciscos Situationist offshoot group Point Blank,Survival Research Labs; there was a kind of rebellious

enthusiasm and a ferocious sense of humor and adifferent vocabulary of methods involved in each ofthese projects. And of course, I imagine each of them

as a research project.So where is this leading, aside from a coincidental

use of the title? The prank is connected to laughter,and through laughter Bakhtins writing about Rabelais

[these drawings of uncertain authorship [slides]purport to illustrate Rabelais Pantagruel] illustrates

the idea that certain kinds of method could produceunanticipated knowledge. As Bakhtin says:

The Renaissance conception of laughter can be

roughly described as follows: laughter has a deepphilosophical meaning. Its one of the essential

forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole,

concerning history and man. It is a peculiar pointof view relative to the world as seen anew, no less

and perhaps more profoundly than what is seen

from a serious standpoint. Therefore laughter is justas admissible in great literature, posing universal

problems as seriousness. Certain essential aspectsof the world are accessible only to laughter. (from

Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin)

This idea of the production of unanticipatedknowledge such that the reintegration of unanticipatedknowledge can maintain its value, its unknownness,

is one of the key concepts in research. And theetymology of research leads us to another term,

recherche, the reinvestigation a deeper andtemporalized study. The question of method versusmethodology comes up and we can compare the

deductive, the inductive, and the abductive forms of

reasoning on these lines.Were familiar with deduction, moving from thetheory to the example, and with induction, moving

from example to the theory and inferring probableantecedents, but in abductive reasoning, one choosesthe hypothesis that would, if it were true, best explain

the relevant evidence. Abduction, as Charles Peirceputs it, is knowledge of the relation that conditions

cause and effect and hence is the creation of new

knowledge. Ill read you a brief quote from Uwe Wirthon Peirce:

In Peirces lectures on pragmatism in 1903,

abduction, deduction and induction becomeinteracting aspects with different epistemological

functions. Deduction determines the necessaryconsequences relying on logical provable

coherence between premises and conclusion;

induction is aiming at empirical, provable

coherence between the premises and experiencein order to derive a probable generalization, yetinduction only classifies the data, while abduction

furnishes the reasoned with a problematic theoryexplaining the causal relation among the facts

not just the theory but a problematic theory. For

an abductive suggestion which synthesizes amultitude of predicates, deduction can draw a

prediction which can be tested by induction. (fromWhat is Abductive Inference? Uwe Wirth, Frankfurt

University)So arises the key problem for research in design, and


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in philosophy: how to think outside of thought itself, orset thought against itself. A thinking form is the term

the filmmaker Jean Luc Godard uses apropos his ownwork. Architecture is just one of many thinking forms,

according to a definition like Godards, and thought,in this case, is not what you or I think individually,

but more generally, what is thought. Borges said thatwe should speak about thinking the way we speak

about rain: we look outside and we say, Its rainingtoday, and Borges suggested we could say, Itsthinking today. This idea repositions subjectivity in

relationship to thought, and it also repositions whatthought itself can do and what the responsibility

of thought is. Any practice then, whether social,economic, political, even purely material would be

understood to have thought embedded within it.John Rajchman has approached this problem in

another way in a text on Michel Foucault:

In his last conception of his work, Foucaultconnected his art of seeing to the ethico-political

choice one makes of determining which is the

real danger. The choice of trying to see just whatit is that we have to struggle against in order to

free ourselves (and free ourselves from ourselves).And this freedom is dangerous, since we can never

have in advance a determinant or complete picture

of it. For, as a thinker and seer, Foucault wasconcerned with a situation, prior to the possibility

of deductive normative reasoning, where one seessomething must be done without yet knowing

what. A space not of deduction but of questioningand analysis is thus opened up between the choice

one makes and what one does, in which one tries

to conceive what the danger is which one does notyet fully see, but in relation to which one must take

action. It is ones responsibility to this thing thattroubles, but which one cant yet describe or name,

that requires one to work to change oneself. Ones

work is the attempt to change ones way of seeingand living in relation to those specific dangers one

does not yet know what to do about. [...]The central concept in Deleuzes own analysis

of the role of thought in film is the concept

ofdesoeuvrement. In response to Godardsprognostication of an end to film theory, he says

the concepts of film are not given in film. There

is a sort of filmic unthought from which film triesconstantly to free itself and so open itself to other

ways of thinking and showing.

With this introduction to some of the intrigue thats

endemic to research in my mind, I want to showa couple of projects, five research projects. Eachoperates in a different manner: three of the projects

are from work that I myself have been involved with,and two have been conducted by other authors: Jean

Luc Godard and J. G. Ballard.The first project, Hypnagogue, is a project that I

worked on between 1995 and 2000, in collaborationwith Perry Hall, artist, painter and musician. This wasa trailer that we put together for this project back in

96 or 97. This collaboration was realized in severalforms. We assembled it as an interactive film, which

was deployed on CD-ROM, we installed it as a galleryshow, also as a live performance in places like The

Kitchen, and we performed it as a kind of a videocine-roman in the vein of Chris Markers short film, La

Jete. There were over 30 paintings, there were eight

digital spaces that I constructed in SoftImage andrendered out as the site of the project, over 80 sound

environments, written text, and live actors. The projectwas an exploration of the experience of synesthesia

[when one smells a sound or hears something thatone can see.] We were looking for a set of rigorousways to test that experience digitally. We brought all

of the paintings and sound environments together, wehad a skeleton narrative that allowed one, if interested

in narrative, to follow right through the project, andwe did allow non-linear navigation, so one could

essentially explore any environment or could follow itas kind of a game, as a kind of a puzzle.

Im showing you just the trailer now, and outtake

stills from the project here. Usually when I screenit, it takes about an hour to show the whole project,

and if one were playing it as a game its about a ten-


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hour solve time. It has a number of puzzles built intoit which nominally fulfill the function of a computer

game. At the time we of course were inspired byproto games like Myst, which were extremely stilted,

somewhat childlike, but nonetheless harbingers ofa new kind of media experience. So we followed the

interactive model that we saw in games like that. Inthese stills you also see the paintings that we were

setting up as environments to navigate.The first filmic example that I want to show you is

from Jean Luc Godard, Id like to talk a little bit about

his filmAlphaville. InAlphaville theres a juxtapositionof a kind of already given reality of computer

technologies in the 60s, and infrastructures, controlsocieties which are overlapped with a hyperfictional

parallel world that hes constructed, a kind of distanceviewing, actually, in my opinion, of where we aretoday. Godard observed at one point that he didnt

see the need to distinguish between narrative anddocumentary, since we dont do so when we listen to

music, and obviously hes pursued this hybrid workin most of his film output. Whether its in films like

Sympathy for the Devilwhich is a documentary film inpart about the Rolling Stones recording Sympathy forthe Devil, intercut with a whole series of meditations

on race relations in the 60s, or Pierrot Le fou, aroad movie which uses a lot of crosscuttings and

destabilizations of narrative, but also a meditationon the problem of the French-Algerian relationship

and the problem of mad love andamorin general-a precognitive instantiation ofWild at Heartor

Natural Born Killers. So Godard has a kind of jadedhumanism, and the question is: whats he trying tointuit with his research project?

Ive used this next passage as an introductionto some of my design studios in the past few years,

most of them dealing with the problem of post-empiredesign or post-empire urbanism and technology:

Sometimes reality is too complex for oral

communication... But legend embodies it in a formwhich enables it to spread all over the world...

That voiceover from Godards filmAlphaville,spoken as the camera pans across nondescript

post-war middle class high-rise residential towers,

identifies two kinds of global systems. The first isthe wildly proliferating Hollywood myth-machine,

which is able to colonize most of the world asAmericas most visible export, and which Godard

satirizes directly in his film, by creating Lemmy

Caution [E. Constantine] as a doppelganger ofBogart; and second, the global space which began

to coalesce as the world recovered from WorldWar II, when urban centers were rebuilt and global

networks of capital and materials intensified.

The first problems of infrastructure, informationscience, highways, social housing on a mass scale,

and systemic architectures in general emerged inmacro-urban assemblies as the embodiment of

such systems.Alphaville is tracking this.In the case of the contemporary global city,

the intensification of this relationship has produced

a more radical set of bifurcations, a monolithictemporal construct of parallel realities. Such a

redefinition of the concept of ambience todayis extending into a new realm - The time of the

institution, which organizes this monolithic memory

structure on a political and cultural level - contrastsdramatically with the time of the individual subject,

which is filled with myriad unpredictable details.Similarly, the time of the built fabric of the city

provides an archetypal and shared memory which

spans all cultures, while the individual subject intheir chance encounters creates an absolutely

unique memory which then cascades into theurban form itself in many ways. (from Ed Keller,

Post-Empire studio brief)

Godard was surveying these phenomena and trying to

get a fix on what the consequences were for humans.The second example, which is partly filmic and

partly literary is J.G. Ballard, who, as I imagine many

of you know, passed away quite recently. Ballardsproject was similarly an attempt to index the hidden

relationships between infrastructure, technology,

the biopolitical and different models of time. Hismethod is itself a meticulous rehearsal of the points


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of intersection between bodies that are achieving anew inchoate awareness as they navigate a landscape

- the boundaries of which theyve only dimly sensedpreviously. As Vaughn, one of his characters, actually

says in Crash,

Its the future, Ballard, and youre already part of it.

For the first time, a benevolent psychopathologybeckons towards us. For example, the car crash

is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event... thatmediates ...with an intensity impossible in any other

form. To fully understand that, and to live it- that is

my project.

And of course, thats Ballards project, in general,whether hes doing it in experimental films, [this clip is

actually a short film that the BBC produced, directedby Harvey Cokliss] or when hes doing it as a writer,

in texts like The Drowned World, which predicts apost-cataclysm devolution of human intelligence aslong dormant DNA awakens paleolithic memories in

neuronal time, which humans gradually gain access to

due to changes in their environment, or in Memoriesof the Space Age, a collection of short stories which

chronicles a future amnesia and erasure of sense thatcan be linked to his observation that the 20th century

witnessed the death of affect. This amnesia in some ofhis novels and stories is a direct result of technologiesthat open human horizons and place them in contact

with flows that even millions of years of evolutionhave not been able to trigger, or that have been lost

to an atavistic past, and are only recuperable viacatastrophes or the emergence of global industry,

highways, and infrastructures. They yield a muchdeeper kind of cosmological anabatic movement ashis characters are heading upstream, into jungles that

index geological and macro-historical time.When discussing Ballard and Crash, one recalls

images or clips from Cronenbergs film adaptation ofCrash, but the clips Im showing you here are from

the 1971 BBC short, made as a kind of researchdocumentary in advance of the completion of

the novel. This work, along with the 1970 AtrocityExhibition show, was conducted as a rehearsal, a fact-


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finding expedition that ultimately yielded Crash thenovel.

Crash is an extrapolation of the themes that Ivealready mentioned from Ballards earlier work, but

in this case the instrumentalities that create accesspoints to these alternate regimes of time are not an

environmental change, theyre human technology,industry, the flow of capital, and through thetechnology and the energy flow in highways, cars,

fuel production, culture, they achieve a fusion withthe machinic phylum. Ballard dealt with the erosion

or imbrication of time, charting a path across theentropic landscapes of suburban, infrastructuralized,

car park landscapes of London and Heathrow likeMoorcock, Keiller, Smithson, stalkers in the zone.Next, there are two recent projects that Id like

to show from our office: SUTURE was an installationwe did in Los Angeles in 2005-2006. While we were

working on this project, a passage from GeorgioAgambens writing captured our imagination. This

project was an expanded cinema piece Im goingto show you a clip in the background here for a few

minutes. While we were reading Agamben, we werethinking about the transhistorical time that Ballardtries to index in his writing and films, and were

thinking, can we engage that through another way,through gesture and material, through technology,

infrastructure and landscape instead of narratives?Heres is the passage from Agamben that we wereinterested in. He says:

Every image, in fact, is animated by an antinomicpolarity: on the one hand, images are the reificationand obliteration of a gesture.... on the other hand,

they preserve the dynamis intact [as in Muybridgessnapshots or in any sports photograph.] The

former corresponds to the recollection seized byvoluntary memory, while the latter corresponds to

the image flashing in the epiphany of involuntary

memory. And while the former lives in magicalisolation, the latter always refers beyond itself to a

whole of which it is a part... The gesture... opensthe sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of

that which is human... [and] is communication of acommunicability. (from Means Without End, Giorgio

Agamben)

So we wanted to try to capture that idea of the

gesture, and we wanted to extend the idea of thegesture outside of the domain of the human, beyond

the physical gesture that we all make, to infrastructureconsidered as gesture, to materiality and differentscales and textures of materiality.

SUTURE proposed a way of working withcollective intelligence [both the groups of viewers

interacting with the project, but also the arrays of

media as autonomous, rule driven bodies in thenetwork itself] by setting up an expanded cinemainterface in which remixes of the material would takeplace, based in part on user interaction - pressure

sensors in the floor of the gallery and on rule sets forrecombinative mixing, in moments where no viewers

were interacting.We were interested in reconfiguring the concept of

suture, a key term in film theory, in order to propose

a new cinematic & architectural body created throughthe visitors ambient reediting. Instead of the narrative/

semiotic framework, the concept of suture emergedfrom as developed by Kaja Silverman, we presented

an interface to manifest it purely through gesture,material, and cinematic-haptic fields. We tracked

gestures and materials at scales beyond the human,encompassing urban situations, infrastructure, andlandscape. Desert spaces, transit spaces, and more

distant abstract points of view - such as satelliteorbits over the earth - established another scale in

the footage. We wanted to say that it was possibleto understand gesture in the landscape, gesture in

material systems, in energetic systems, and to reapplythe concept of suture devoid of narrative content,

by witnessing this suturing that takes place in thelandscape itself.

We catalogued hundreds of shots, most of which

we took ourselves, some of which were samples fromother films. Here are a few shots of the installation,


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heres one outtake which actually, by chance,included a clip from Hitchcocks Vertigo.

The way this was working, there were twoscreens, each screen played back up to four tracks

of video and audio simultaneously. They crossfaded,based on the bangs, when one hit pressure sensors

on the floor. There was a third projector that projecteddown onto the floor, which was part of the sound

environment, which also responded to people walkingthrough the gallery space and indexed all of thechanges that were taking place. We would cut from

close up, to medium shot, to long shot. We wouldcut from materials to gestures, and we would cut so

that we sped up and slowed down the footage andcrossfaded it at different rates.

There was an elaborate categorization of thefootage to control crossfades, but beyond that initialsorting of the media, we had no idea of how it was

going to be remixed. [This is what it looked likeduring the daytime in the space.] You can see the two

screens on either side, the pressure sensors in themiddle, and the third projection on the floor.

Now the second project that Ill show you is acompetition that we did in 2006. This was an invitedcompetition [that Jeffrey Inaba also participated in]

for a vertical garden for the Schindler House in LosAngeles. While I present this, Im going to briefly

sidestep and touch on an older dispute vis a vis formand representation and technology. In this project,

the quote from Godard: film as a form of thoughtcame up for us. Another passage from Godard came

up as well: not a good image, just an image, whichDeleuze famously rephrased to say: Dont have agood idea just have an idea. Of course, you can

interpret these kind of one-liners in a number ofdifferent ways, but the way that we were reading it, we

were thinking: Okay, dont think in advance what agood image is, just make sure you produce an image,and similarly for Deleuze: Dont think in advance

of what good is, whether its a good idea or a good

concept, a good value, but produce ideas.So we tried to drive at that. We were trying to

use geometry as a way of pursuing this, perverselyenough. Now geometry is a mode of thinking, not

simply control of spatial definition. In logic andmathematics, a formal system consists of two

components: a formal language plus a set of inferencerules or transformation rules. This should sound

a little bit like the induction/deduction/abductionthematic that I was bringing up earlier. Before I talk

about our project, though, I want to mention anhistorical example thats related to the problem ofgeometry of process, of formalism and representation.

Specifically, the iconoclastic controversy during theByzantine Empire in the 8th and 9th centuries. I would

suggest that something similar to this controversy istaking place right now in architecture in the current

debates over the value of diagramming, scripting,code: contemporary research modalities which we areall familiar with, to one degree or another.

One of the hallmarks of the iconoclasticmovement was to deny the holiness of religious

images. During the 8th and 9th centuries, the use ofsuch images was prohibited. But icons were restored

to worship by 843. The reason for this is that the iconshares a likeness Im reading you a quote from oneof the Dumbarton papers on the Byzantine: the icon

shares the likeness and therefore the sanctity of thesacred person portrayed. It is believed that through

veneration, an icon image becomes a window throughwhich the worshiper gains access to the sacred figure

portrayed. We can apply that concept not only toicons but to diagrams, to all of the different, abstract

ways of thinking that we work with when were actuallyusing generative processes to make form. This is oneof the ideas that we wanted to test in the competition:

we wanted to think through the process of generativedesign on a number of different levels, constantly

testing to what degree it was functioning, to actuallytransport a real value system, or an identified essence,if you will, from one stage of the analysis, to the next

stage of the analysis, to the next. We recognized

this as a particularly recondite way of thinking andconducting the process, but so be it. Now this also


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is a question, and a problem thats beenreiterated throughout history obviously in the

iconographic controversy, also in the conceptof life of forms in art [Focillon], and in different

ideologies, cultures and religious contexts ofwhat an appropriate representation would be,

and what would be communicated through thatappropriate representation.

So we did a very basic site analysis, wegenerated a series of fields and lines of sightand intensity, and we developed a set of scripts

in Maya and GenerativeComponents (GC) thatdeployed geometry across that initial envelope

on the site. Then we added a set of scriptsin GC which morphed between triangular,

pentagonal, hexagonal geometry, and iteratedthe panels in different densities. This is what itwould look like with video projected onto it. We

used Surface Evolver, Rhino and GC to developa kind of an integument, a continuous surface

that would connect the tiling system as a thinconcrete wall that would function as structure

and as a substrate for the vertical garden. Wedeveloped this as a continuous minimal surface,so the topology of this surface was adjusted

according to things like proximity to the newbuilding, plant types, light conditions, and so

forth.We thought of the plants as a kind of

neural network on the site, a kind of flexibleintelligence. To deploy the garden across this

surface, we ran a script once again to analyzethe geometry to determine which plants wouldfit according to angle of the surface, the light

conditions, the humidity and so forth. And weworked with a landscape consultant to again

deploy those materials across the project.So every system living or non-organic would generate a kind of spatio-temporal field

which would include both the thresholds of

engagement with the landscape, the wall itselfand the husk of the Schindler House, if you

will, reaching out into Los Angeles and setting up a kind ofautonomous trans-temporality where the organic life and

media systems we proposed for the project would connectback out into the city and work as a set of formal axioms

at the molecular scale, at the living scale, and at the macroscale in the city.

So to conclude, whats at stake in these projects?The process or even the very possibility of thought itself. We

wanted to create something logically and formally rigorous,


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and also savagely beautiful, and in some mannerencapsulate and encode the boundaries of process

itself and of course, make an argument for certaintechniques and modes of thought that would connect

our practice as designers to a realm outside the given,outside the already thought, and assist architecture

in its role as a conduit for a trans-historical time andconsciousness. All these examples and conceptual

armatures orbit around the main theme of this paper:not only what constitutes research, but what kind ofthought can emerge through research. I would like

to conclude by pointing out some paradigm shiftsthat are taking place in the world, to question what

might be urgent to research today, and ask whatcontemporary technology advances might be doing to

our idea of how research can be conducted.Chris Anderson, editor at Wiredmagazine,

recently wrote a piece called The End of Theory: The

Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,in which he argued that exponentially increasing

datasets, combined with exponentially increasingcomputational and search powers, would obsolete

any model within decades or even only years. I quotehere at length:

The models we were taught in school about

dominant and recessive genes steering a

strictly Mendelian process have turned out to be aneven greater simplification of reality than Newtons

laws. The discovery of gene-protein interactionsand other aspects of epigenetics has challenged

the view of DNA as destiny and even introduced

evidence that environment can influence inheritabletraits, something once considered a genetic

impossibility. In short, the more we learn aboutbiology, the further we find ourselves from a model

that can explain it. There is now a better way.Petabytes allow us to say: Correlation is enough.

The best practical example of this is the

shotgun gene sequencing by J. Craig Venter.Enabled by high-speed sequencers and

supercomputers that statistically analyze the

data they produce, Venter went from sequencingindividual organisms to sequencing entire

ecosystems. In 2003, he started sequencing muchof the ocean, retracing the voyage of Captain

Cook. And in 2005 he started sequencing the air. In

the process, he discovered thousands of previouslyunknown species of bacteria and other life-forms.

If the words discover a new species call to mindDarwin and drawings of finches, you may be stuck

in the old way of doing science. Venter can tell you

almost nothing about the species he found. Hedoesnt know what they look like, how they live,

or much of anything else about their morphology.He doesnt even have their entire genome. All he

has is a statistical blip a unique sequence that,

being unlike any other sequence in the database,must represent a new species. This sequence

may correlate with other sequences that resemblethose of species we do know more about. In that

case, Venter can make some guesses about theanimals that they convert sunlight into energy

in a particular way, or that they descended from

a common ancestor. But besides that, he has nobetter model of this species than Google has of

your MySpace page.

One of the profound implications of this observationis, of course, the obsoleting of models in general,something that many commentators on Andersonsarticle pointed out. However, that said, the implications

cannot be ignored. Research takes place in an utterlydifferent landscape of information exchange today,

with increasingly unpredictable consequences.I would argue that we dont lose the concepts

of theory and of models entirely; we need NEW

conceptual models; and I ask: could they be arrays,fields, agents, swarms, the multitude? Designers

have been sporadically aware of the advances thatwere made in the middle part of the twentieth century

in applied mathematics, and information and systemstheory. These models were available from the 1940s

onward, and indeed had an impact on corporatearchitecture, military organization, on the Metabolists,and many others but only in the past decade has

it been possible to easily simulate the behavior ofcomplex systems on a desktop computer.


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Of course using these tools to represent whatactually happens when we live in and use space

is not a new paradigm; these concepts have beenwell rehearsed. However the computational tools

we have today are very cheap, powerful, andubiquitous, functioning as real game changers for us

as designers. But what is at stake? Not just technicalcontrol; not just representational models of systems;

but models of historical time, and of our ability asagents to participate in potentially new ways in thereworking of time itself. This would be the project for

research, perhaps: to literally rework the fabric of time.So Im going to leave you with one concluding

image here, the mapping of all of the flights aroundthe world, which is data thats accessible to you, and

which artists like Aaron Koblin, using Processingharvested to create extraordinarily beautiful maps.There are two issues invoked here: one of them is

the question of maintaining the possibility of thoughtitself through a process. And the second would be to

look forward to paradigmatic disintermediations anddisruptions in technology, which are changing the way

that we will be able to maintain and sift through data.Right now data is available to you and to me thathistorically has never been available. The way that

we can represent it in this case is being handled witha tool thats an open source free tool Processing

[www.processing.org]; which doesnt just generate apretty image, but it creates a visualization of a certain

pattern in that data, using a connection thats opensource a kind of a pipe, to use the term that Yahoo

has used, a kind of an open API if you will, to useanother nomenclature of our time which will give usaccess to data which we never really have had access

to before. There are a whole series of fundamentalparadigm shifts here regarding how we do research

and how we recognize the production of valuethrough research. And indeed, how we understandthe value of any model that we might bring into a

research practice in advance, which I think is actually

critical to the discussion today, whether weredoing research in architecture, in media design, in

technology or in mapping systems across the face ofthe planet. Thank you. (applause).

"by the bootstraps" lecture, 2009

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