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HELSINKI

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HELSINKI

AN AESD MEDIA PRODUCTIONLONDON - ROTERDAM - TREIGNAC

AESD COURSE IN ARCHITECTONICS

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments. 7

Foreword. 9

Introduction. 11

Course structure

/ Unit 1 - Demolition. 13 / Unit 2 - Baricades. 14 / Unit 3 - Urban Fluid. 16 / Unit 4 - Decadent Interface. 16

Material. 17

/ Demolition. 18 / Baricades. 24 / Interflow. 32 / Dacadent Interface. 48

Appendix 1. 63

Appendix 2. 73

Spatial categories from social sciences. 77

Index. 79

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Contributors to the book:

Henna HyvärinenJaakko PallasvuoJarkko RäsänenJohan LindströmJohn ColenbranderLinda ReifLukas HoffmannMaziar AfrassiabiOkan YildirimSakari TervoSam BasuSarah GeratsShahin AfrassiabiSépànd DaneshTatu Engeström

Facilitators and partners:

KuvataideakatemiaAgency for Economy and Space DevelopmentNew International SchoolTreignac ProjetLens PoliticaCity of Helsinki

With thanks to:

Ilse RossanderLiz MurrayMaria Hirvi-IjäsMinna LangströmNina Toppila

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FOREWORD

This book is the outcome of a course designed by AESD and presented at Kuva Art Academy in Helsinki in May 2009.The collaborative project questions individual artistic practice. Why would we want to collaborate? What does it mean to collaborate? What kind of knowledge is produced or experience facilitated? These questions are present in the book. Does collaboration erase our individuality? What is this individuality anyway? In terms of art it is a humanist idea, the idea of the author and the autonomy of the artwork. We know that our individual practices are always in relation to something else. Ideologically we ally ourselves to various positions when we choose. Those positions are not vacant and are formed already. It is true that the new allegiances modify what was there in the first place. We are collaborating even when our collaborators are not present. Authorship, autonomy, singularity in art is contingent. At worst these notions lead to the commodification of experience. The questions we asked ourselves in making this book were:What is the status of the material in each instant in relation to the four concepts outlined in the course structure? The material in the book exposes a discrepancy between modes of knowledge i.e. rational research and recording methodologies v artistic intervention. Does this fact have a bearing on the idea of art as knowledge production and as transparent outcomes of methodologies? We are suggesting a practice that involves a relationship with other artists, or acknowledges this relationship and is aware of the context in which this reciprocal relationship is instituted. Can the book reflect this reciprocal relationship? We are building a context here. It can become the context in which the works of the individuals evolves. Can the ideas introduced here be communicated so as to facilitate a new approach to practice? Can the group be replicated? The book is a vehicle for the continuation of the collaborative project. It needs to be put to use. A knowledge environment is created. In the process of making this book the question of how to build up team dynamics is forgerounded. Peter Marcuse (urbanist) says: following from Lefebvre’s ‘the right to the city’, we must own the city of the future. In order to own the city of the future we must imagine it. To begin with we must first expose, propose and politicize.

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We need to identify the characteristics of the oppressive regimes of the city.In this instance we institute a new political body, a new social praxis.The book constitutes a real political engagement. We define this political engagement in the following way:To be political in the city means to institute a new political body. That will be our proposed definition.This political body comes about as a result of this collaborative project.The book asks the question: what is my relationship to the city?We begin by questioning our own practices.The motive of art is to reconfigure the nature of experience. What is the practice of that new political body? The book is one possible answer to this question.

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INTRODUCTION

All art comes into being in its imagining of the city. This imagining occurs at a particular intersection. What is this intersection? Is it the art school? The studio? The gallery? In theory? A conversa-tion? In art magazines? The assumption is that no matter where, this place will have been framed already and of course in turn frames production. This framing determines the nature of the work of art’s necessarily economical engagement with the poli-tical as well as being an indicator of the ambition and scope of the producer/citizen. Another way to think about this framing is context. The terrain of production in art is like a map. Where you start from is always already mapped out, maybe not always in great detail or in depth. Any work is already framed by ideologies that impose a preconfigured pattern and condition a set of out-comes. To open this frame imagining must expose this intersection to other connections. The city is not just steel concrete and glass but the very way in which we receive and produce information, conceive of expe-rience, a platform from which we project our longings and desires and even imagine a relationship to nature. The city is a frame of mind.

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COURSE STRUCTURE

AESD COURSE IN ARCHITECTONICS

AESD presents a course designed and based on studies and research carried out over the past two years. We attempt to develop a deeper appreciation of the relationship between art, design and architecture through a process of research led by examining both approaches from the oblique and little explored paradigm of ‘demolition’. Demolition as concept allows for artistic approaches to be applied to architectural research and analysis. The reverse is also true. ‘Demolition’ facilitates an examination of the relationship between art methodologies and architectural thinking.Participants are asked to prepare a short presentation, either of their own work or of some subject they are interested in which will be included as part of the research of the course. In this way all participants will be engaged with each other as peers. This process anticipates the emergence of an embedded practice that would embrace the social space as the space of regenerative action.

Unit1 - DEMOLITION

The subject of architecture is approached from its exterior. The usually secondary or ignored discipline of HYPERLINK «http://www.aesd.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=32&Itemid=47»demolition is taken as a core concept from which to understand the flows of our rapidly changing built environment.Although there is increasing awareness and recognition that buildings can be revitalized rather than demolished during urban restructuring, yet demolition is more than just taking down buildings and it involves structural changes within communities formed by previous demolitions and building practises. Why does long term design i.e. post war housing lead to early collapse of its social and physical structure?

Re-visiting Derrida’s Pharmakon. We examine how demolition relates to and is different from the textual work of deconstruction by looking at ideas of interpretation within semiotics and beyond.

Hollow cities A case study on the city as military target

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Against psycho geography. Non-architects, often reduce the study of architecture to texts and documentation, which have no bearing on architectural practice. From Defoe, The Flaneur, and the Situationist International, the differences between responding to architecture, and producing a viable architectural response are investigated.

Unit 2 - BARRICADES

The instances of the barricade, both in social upheaval and in military planning, serve to show that cities have the capability to act as spontaneous, self-reorganising structures. This rapid seismic shift in the flow patterns of an environment, require different explanatory models. The physically built world must be described in terms that can account for volatility within social, political and power networks.

Internal-transportation. An AESD concept, internal transportation is a method of regeneration and renewal of sites. It entails a process of on-site replacement of parts and structures governed by economical considerations and the self-renewing capabilities of available materials.

Internal-transportation entails a process of on-site replacement governed by economy and the self-renewing capabilities of the materials and building parts. Buildings are increasingly designed to facilitate their disappearance. Every structure resists inherently the forces of gravity thus implying its own collapse. The tension that is built in this process of resisting decay is an existential defect of architecture. But architecture is also a counter-measure against social gravity such as theft, enemy attack, public space, climate etc...

In this course defensive architecture will be examined through examples of fortress-architecture and neo-fortress style building such as gated-community housing.The history of defensive architecture shows that not only it was a drain on the tax-payers money, but it also stimulated enemy attack thus forcing the states to expand their fortresses by building rings of defense that demanded more man-power to stand guard and thus increased their weakness.Barricades and slums. Organic building which, implies a close relationship between body economy and materials at hand are modes of inhabiting through defense. Barricades are the most

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efficient micro-fortresses within a globalizing world. They are easily dismantled and they feed on crumbling architecture and imply the need for a dynamic creation of social space.

The implied death (demolition) of architecture is a reality that is being streamlined and improved by technological, logistical, political and social innovations. Initially the idea will be to synchronize this process of self-renewal to man’s (user, inhabitant) own death or recovery.

The reciprocal reinforcement of inhabitation of the body by its shel(ter) and the shelter by the body, guaranteeing the flow of data (materials, tissue, information).

Immortal death. The merging of agency with structure and data-flow will lead us to Immortal death.

Total immersion in data, would tend to disintegrate the self. A relation with the body, the brain, and time and space insures the integrity of our identity. Both the physical body and the social body rely on our experience of self or will. So the dream of immortality through the extension of human processes through electronic media instead of flesh and blood, may well result in another death. It is not the immortality of the gods that approaches, but the immortality of an inanimate object. If wills can be extended, as when making the fingers of an artificial limb close on an object, then perhaps consciousness already has a migratory quality that will allow it to adapt to a new projected location. The possibility arises that consciousness will eventually reject the body as its natural host. Transfer promises both electric immortality and the opening up of the totally meaningless void of our excessive bodily existence. The data field becomes a virtual graveyard where complete sets of multi media data of the dead interact. The library, acting as the RAM part of the prosthetic sphere merges with the necropolis. This is the new model for the future of libraries and graveyards. (see article and course, redundant bodies)

This process will be investigated and future models will be developed in order to facilitate thinking and practice along the line of this envisioned reality.

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Unit 3 - THE URBAN FLUID

The reintroduction of demolition in the discussion of architectural objects allows us to examine politics, power and the built environment. The concept of INTERFLOW is introduced, in contrast to FLOW, as a method of examining city structures.

Interflow. A case study on Asian street usage

Redesigning Charlois. A case study on the shifting district of Charlois in Rotterdam

Travel Sickness. An examination of the effects of channels and flows on a global scale

Unit 4 - DECADENT INTERFACE

The body is introduced as a surface upon which consciousness is simulated. The effects of new technologies on conceiving the limits of the human body are examined in relation to a universal, ever expanding skin.

Death as a cover-up. Is the basic unit of humanity the individual, or the body? Is the ‘individual’ a modern imposition upon the ‘body’? Was Foucault right? What are the implications of such ideas for community and collectivity?

Networks. Is the Internet the only model for interconnectivity?

Interface. How will the next generation of interfaces affect our relation with the private and public space? How will social relations develop within the context of technological proliferation? How does the body adapt to these new technological strategies?

Libraries / Cemeteries. An examination of the public space and the effects of technology upon the concept of the individual. In this section, previously studied concepts by AESD, which resulted in the article; redundant bodies will be applied to the example of the library and cemetery in the western city.

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MATERIAL

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DEMOLITION The approach to understanding the city, in which we participate and are subjected in, is blocked by a blind spot in the practice of architecture. Ever since Vitruvius delayed his dedication of his founding work on architecture to Augustus, so as to allow him to finish with the work of establishing an empire, architecture has divided itself off from the often-violent act of clearing that must precede building.Demolition proceeds and defines the possession of land and building, carving the histories that attach to place and regulating the disputes that qualify city life. It is not simply the end moment of an individual building nor a simple technical phase in the proper work of design, but a vital term in understanding the fluid nature of our built environment, and the ways in which it is manipulated. Approaching architectonics from its exterior allows us to examine the disjointing of demolition as architectures inaugurating act. There have been numerous attempts to recuperate demolition into building design. Cedric Price included instructions for the demolition of buildings as well as being a member of the National Institute of Demolition Contractors. A grade X has been suggested for buildings considered eyesores to schedule them for disposal. However these proposals sidestep the disjunction and power that is carried in this phenomenon in the city as a whole.Today urban form is influenced by the internationalization of investment, production and consumption beyond the traditional control of states. This disembodied impact of the tendency to globalization, registers on the built environment through both accelerated building programs and baffling razing exercises. Demolition strategies are used to bank land safe from the threat of unwanted tenanting, or to create regeneration opportunities. The short life-length of the modern building has been a spreading steadily. The twenty-two-story Gillender building, built in 1897 was demolished twelve years later to be replaced by a larger more

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elaborate structure. New infrastructures based on information are putting renewed pressure on the internal dynamics of cities creating the conditions for a re-structuring of the old industrial models.Demolition is the unthought in architecture and an active force of life in the city. It is the structural gap in architecture without which architecture cannot exert its power. In this sense demolition’s significance is both as benign agent of renewal, and coercive force ever widening he gap between us and our past.The incessant restructuring of the city body through demolition, constantly interrupts the formation of neighborhoods as they challenge and intersect with laid out, managerial council zones. However, the spectacular moment of a building’s destruction is only the surfacing endpoint of an evolving set of tensions that show themselves in differing ways in the architecture and activities of its users.Living in buildings is a political and disruptive activity. The act of building is not to acknowledge or accentuate the potentiality of any site, but to sustain the symbiotic connection between mapped out ideologies and concrete structures. This leads to the abandonment of the idea of Site. We need now to understand the experience of flow and movement that takes its place. Nothing can escape this dynamic, wherein Architecture negotiates and maps out a terrain which then immerses the resulting social space in banality in order to preserve itself.

In light of these observations, we must redefine the notion of disaster. The plea for the urban to be primarily a benign social space is also a plea for averting disaster. But the defining terms we have inherited no longer seem sufficient to describe the world. The difficulty now is that knowledge is no longer disseminated in the traditional way and the nature of knowledge has changed. It has become information. Data flow. We return to the body, merging data with soft tissue. This transformed flâneur cannot be extricated from the city that produces it. Similarly disaster must evolve to meet the new demands placed on it.

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BARRICADES

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When we use the definition of the barricade as a spontaneous and fluid structure emerging as a temporary spatial barrier which defines the zone of opposition, the barricade becomes the v/focal point of critical assembly within public space. We could say that the barricade defines the extreme purpose of public space; the event that combined civic or military forces of tension gathers enough momentum to claim and define this space.

This temporary claim of public space attempts at a physical, social and mental adjustment of the existing order.

Architecture of social collisionPublic space transforms with the construction of the barricade into a political space. The neutrality by default is temporarily postponed as it becomes a space for negotiation by confrontation. This space is defined by the sharp division which the barricade creates. The barricade is the distortion of public space into a strategic arena by transforming the urban infrastructure. The fluid nature of the barricade follows strategic patterns of attack, defence and retreat. It is in this sense a dedicated system. Dedicated to its sole purpose of creating the conflict zone to defy, control or challenge.

The barricade is the architecture of social collision in the sense that it re-defines by alteration the function, design and experience of space. It temporarily changes the urban setting while disturbing the daily pulse of the city. These changes are aimed at establishing new social codes.

The use-value of a barricaded street depends on the strategic properties of the urban lay-out and architecture. Prime locations provides full control of access while at the same time rich in building supply for construction. The barricaded street must always offer an emergency back door.

A doorway becomes a cover, the roof provide opportunities for observation and attack an alley becomes the escape route, a sign post becomes a weapon while the pavement provides material for construction and attack.

A different kind of user-awareness is required as a result of the sudden shift from neutral space to conflict zone. This imposed function creates a new dynamic within the city-scape, it becomes a kind of

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staged setting with a clear role for each actor where every movement is directed and monitored for its effect on the situation as a whole. In this setting the barricade exposes the body to conflict as it marks the centre line of potential violence. An intensive interaction takes place between the body and its behaviour in space, as the senses are fully focused on the immanent dangers. The barricade provides some kind of protection but its main function has evolved from the practical to the political. Contemporary barricades are constructed to define an area of temporary control. Control could be exercised by locals, criminals, protesters, fanatics, police, army or the occasional artist. The location of site is the road surrounded by buildings which becomes partly the absorbent of tension. Because the façade and the interior of the architecture, which in case of sudden upheaval, can be used as target of frustration or anger. Windows will then be smashed, walls vandalized and shops looted sometimes culminating in setting fire to the building while the complete interior can be stripped for personal or construction use. At that moment the architecture is turned inside out.

The sensitive bodyA barricade can as easily be constructed as removed. Materials range from burning tires, cars, waste containers, public transport vehicles, building materials to the most basic of all; the human body. The body ranks as the ultimate materialization of the barricade. The human barricade is the most versatile when it comes to flexibility of location. It is of course also the most sensitive in terms of protection. The most famous human barricade is the Chinese man who single handedly tried to stop tanks advancing towards the Tienanmhin square in Beijing . In retrospect it is possibly a fact that the bags which the Chinese man was carrying gave, in a clumsy way, literally more weight to his action. It is almost if he was without them he couldn’t have done what he did. The shopping bags became a kind of supportive element while he walked straight into history. His action followed the exact pattern of “ a spontaneous and fluid structure emerging as a temporary spatial barrier which defines the zone of opposition.”

The radicallity of that moment, soft tissue against metal, symbolizes on a micro-scale the essence of the barricade, a test of strength which forces the opposed parties to reveal their real position.

The sensitive body unmasks the real political intention behind the tanks while at the same moment providing those in power the event to probe the will and desire of its subjects.

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INTERFLOW Unlike road use in the West, the streets of Howrah, the poorer, ol-der twin to Kolkata, are used by all levels of society and all modes of transport. The pricing out of poorer users from the road infra structure has not happened here, and so a type of chaotic flow pattern develops in which lorries, rickshaws cows and street dogs twist around each other in a fashion more akin to water poring from a tap than the limited linear motion of Paris or L.A. The linear flow of western streets comes from a simplification of the possible uses of these structures. Not so in Howrah and many other Asian streets. The road is all things from market to bedroom, from place of employment to conduit for refuse.

In October, one of the main festivals in this part of West Bengal is the Durga Puga. As part of these celebrations, temporary temples are thrown up all over the city; in schoolyards, parks, courtyards and any piece of land that can reasonably hold a group of sta-tues and an audience. With the enormous pressure on the city from its incredible density of population, often there is very little land available especially among poorer groups. The solution is to build the temple across the road with the stage separated from the participants by the road. All roads in Howrah are busy without exception. Only in these streets is the capacity for a structure to accommodate the intersection of so many different uses, tested so thoroughly.

The improvement of the flow of traffic could be easily implemen-ted by instituting the exclusions that are taken for granted in the West. But perhaps that would be missing the real point of what lies beneath all this apparent chaos. That is to see the street not as a flow system, but as a differential of intensities. It would be a mistake to marginalise the structural complexity of the street be-cause of its physical simplicity. The complexity of the interactions that take place on its surface indicate an incredibly sophisticated, invisible yet concrete, structure. Streets are not simple objects with disorganised users, but ultra complex constructions. These Indian streets operate no Western style exclusions to be able to function, and as such cannot be controlled from outside.

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On a bigger scale the super-imposition of these temporary struc-tures creates urban spatial ‘tags’ along an organic pattern this di-vides the road as the space between such platforms like virtual checkpoints.They become the temporary re-organization of public space be-cause of the repetitive pattern and strong articulation. the sym-bolic message is one of liberation rather than oppression. Durga embodies the warrior aspect of the Goddess Devi representing a sacred feminine force. It is for this content that the platforms are freely absorbed in the existing urban fabric and daily use.

The extremely complex structure of the Howrah roads highlights the following point: to see the street not as a flow system, but as a system of interflows. it is the super-imposition of intensities which creates the differentials of flow. These platforms are the architectural versions of the interface between the real and the metaphysical. Compared to the Indian use of space the western ‘differential of intensities’ has a remarkably low degree of inten-sive utilization of roads. This monochromatic program dictates li-mited possibilities within clear restrictions.

Each discreet element enhances the differential of potential inten-sities. More elements create higher complexity of relations with ever-newer narratives. The interflow is the result of any differen-tial. The intensity depends on the potential of this differential, like the difference between 220 volts or 360 volts. We can say that there is no interflow without this differential.

There is a distinction between ‘interflows’ and ‘flows’, which is to do with intensity and also directionality of the differential.

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Architecture in the space of flowsInterflows as primary material of designNew architectures of interflowsUrban fluid topographiesA new modernityFields and ObjectsUrbanism without ArchitectureFlexible accumulationExacerbated differencesThe space of interflowsThe network societySimultaneity in time and spaceGlobal infrastructuresDispersion and concentrationThe everyday experience of interflowsFrom interflow to placeA global sense of placeEffects of recognitionAbstraction and control of spaceA response to interflows Dwelling in mobility

Crowd phenomenaStandardization and differenceLandscapes of standardizationPeripheries: the multiplication of standardsStandards as mediums of exchangeNew urban regionsDigital landscapeAnalogue landscapeMobile subjectsMobility as social capitalThe attributes of the crowdThe modern crowd

Mechanics of movementTunnels, bridges and flyovers Escalators Technological landscapesFlows of cultural signsSurface aestheticisation

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The interflow accommodates demolition as well as building and in fact sees these in a discrete conjunction and as conceptual models describing different aspects of the same process.To build is to contain death, to safeguard against and to fix li-quid desire. This process accelerates and the buildings become desexualised organisations of that same desire. But the desire to build is also the desire to protect against externalised forces, those very forces that are co-opted in the process of building and wait in the wings to strike at the axis of sublimation, nature, un-nature, a cascade of self-evidences that support the logic of architecture.The interflow has no discernible structure. It is temporary, it is contingent and it is manufactured. The interflow is the fluid caco-phony of an intense new world. It is desire intensified and youth-ful.The barricades, where the first murmuring of this desire were extinguished once before, were still too much beholden to that other embodiment of fear that had first the house of god and then the office complex at its constitutive core.

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DECADENT INTERFACE

The extending technologies, from telescope to dialysis machine, the peg leg, to glasses, increase the reach and experience of the body. They maintain or amplify the sense of self that is reliant on the combined effect of the senses. What the entry into the new seas of data will allow is the total loss of the body. Our corporeal existence, though essential for the generation of our feeling of consciousness, (along with the brain and social conditioning) falls away with increased connection to technology. Many theorists and scientists are tackling the obstacles of merging the human consciousness and Will into an inanimate framework. It would have immediate applications not least, of which would be the final transferal of consciousness on the point of the body’s failure. But before that point is reached the digitization of knowledge opens up another possibility for data sorting. The represented material can be manipulated and organized with vastly greater complexity creating new unforeseeable tiers of information. With the ability to instantly word-search all texts, one can examine different frequencies of references, cross-reference people as they appear in all moments of their lives, or chart the qualities of blue in European painting. This will totally transform our notion of understanding and the individual. Could you become Oppenheimmer, redesigning the atom bomb more efficiently to explode in your virtual desert, or live an infinite number of variations of an infinite number of existences, forever?

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IMMORTAL DEATHTotal immersion in data however, would tend to disintegrate the self. A relation with the body, the brain, and time and space insures the integrity of our identity. Both the physical body and the social body rely on our experience of self or will. So the dream of immortality through the extension of human processes through electronic media instead of flesh and blood, may well result in another death. It is not the immortality of the gods that approaches, but the immortality of an inanimate object. If wills can be extended, as when making the fingers of an artificial limb close on an object, then perhaps consciousness already has a migratory quality that will allow it to adapt to a new projected location. The possibility arises that consciousness will eventually reject the body as its natural host. Transfer promises both electric immortality and the opening up of the totally meaningless void of our excessive bodily existence. The data field becomes a virtual graveyard where complete sets of multi media data of the dead interact.

13.05.2009 11:04 tervetuloa 14° Welcome WE HAVE BEEN WORKING 56 (days without LTIs) 127 (days without fire) xxx

31.08.2009

23:55 tervetuloa 15° Welcome WE HAVE BEEN WORKING 166 (days without LTIs) 237 (days without fire) xxx

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‘‘ I think it was a building for the harbour workers. There was a sauna and communal showers inside. Also a really good looking cafeteria with these dried up decorative trees that had dropped all their leaves on the floor. There was an industrial kitchen there with these huge walk-in freezers. Some offices and basic stuff like that. And the surveillance room with monitors and a box of vhs tapes. When it was vacated all the doors were closed and barricaded kind of, but some kids/junkies/homeless people broke in through the windows. Some people had been living there but they didn’t break anything. Then I think it was trashed for the first time and then they nailed shut the first story windows. However, there was a way to access the building from the roof that they forgot to block, so some kids just climbed to the roof and went in that way. I heard they broke lots and lots of stuff, because when we went there a few weeks ago everything was in order, and now I hear there is like 150 000 euros worth of damage. Almost all the windows broken etc. and something about them throwing the cafeteria tables down the stairs’’.

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FROM DEATH TO INFINITY DATADeath 3. The undetectable disappearance of buildings will harmonize with man’s own deaths.Death 4. The body will become a platform for mechanical extension and substitution by means of prosthetics. A continual process of transformation will subjugate the organic parts of the body. This will cause a postponement of death and will finally render the concept of death defunct.Death 7. The perpetual death of production will dissolve the individual into a collective continuity. Nothing will produce difference; everything will be a continuation or extension of the same. The form of knowledge will evolve in three stages:Knowledge in SpaceInformation is transferred to the data storage system from within the social body as private and folk knowledge.Information FlowThe digitized body of knowledge erases the spatial quality that knowledge previously acquired, to become information. Information is essentially promiscuous and self-generating. Instead of the need for knowledge, we have the need to leave information behind. The depositing of knowledge is as important as acquiring it. There will be information hygiene. The biggest concern is to make sure that information flows, the important thing is forgetting.Infinity DataAs interfaces approach perfection, information will expand the limits of the body until the body becomes a meaningless division. The body merges with other bodies in a seamless flow of data. These bodies are shapeless temporal agglomerations of data.FROM DECADENCE & DEATH TO ORGASMIC DATAAn excessive, supra data level will carry information that can produce effects of will. An orgasmic data flow will appear which will transcend the hierarchy of informational logic, and abstract the fuzzy connections in a hyper fluid pattern-discerning process. Information itself will exhibit purpose and Will. This will mark the moment of mutual insemination between biological and synthetic intelligence.A third generation cemetery will merge with the library, fusing the avatars of the deceased and living in liquid data. The past and the future, as well as an ever-expanding set of hybrid time frames, will participate in the orgy of data proliferation.

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APPENDIX 1

1 Pharmakon sets up an opposition (medicine and poison and many more) in itself; its meaning is ambivalent truth can not tolerate ambivalence, but without its cloak of language (inhering oppositions) it is invisible (impossible) (- or theological - but that defeats the project of philosophy). (From an email exchange with Michael Klega 2009)

2 The urban-dead zone is a vacuum, which stretches the centre, the sacrificed space an economical and political graveyard, the zone of controlled decay. The urban-dead zone is a sustained emptiness as the fulfilment of a diminishing life. This is an architecture of an arrested psyche.

3 The city as a building site is not only occupied by building contractors but in this case also by students. Their building is at this point occurring under the skin of the city. Materials are being shifted, passed on, observed, space is being measured by the body: inner-transportation.

4Where exactly is the political threshold of this fluidity. The city is only a place of dispositions. It is neither a place of origins nor the myth of the status quo.

5The notion of the manifesto of course belongs to a time when it was still possible to form groups with a single purpose and/or shock. Used now it comes across as slightly ironic. In a world that emphasizes the individual as the locus of experience and sees authenticity as a market dispensation the manifesto can only come across as a histrionic gesture not without a whiff of tragedy not to say altogether comical. «The contemporary manifesto is the user terms» - that’s an interesting point. I still think that user terms are closer to ‘necessary evil’ in a similar way than some laws: people have to commit to them but asap they break them. Organized activism, petitions etc. instead are nowadays more common than ever, and I think they have more to do with the concept of manifesto.

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6i) Compared to other applications of live transmissions the material produced by web-cams lack the temporal editing (i.e. also the multiple camera setup used in live TV-shows) AND it can be made openly available, unlike that of surveillance cameras.

The minimum amount of editing - which means basically locating the recording device and adjusting it’s parameters - puts raw data flows in opposition in the overall context of audiovisual information: they lack classic narrative structure, nor are they temporally fragmented as «reality» footage when it’s used as rhetorical tool like in TV news inserts. It is comparatively objective one could say.

ii) Speaking of local vs. global, raw data applications are capable of mediating locality. They are information intensive transmissions packed with local details. Internet has originally been structured to mediate useful (in the widest sense of the word...) information. The mass of unessential and unfocused details that are essential for experiencing the «spirit of place» of a particular place, a local experience, is considered as unwanted noise from the point of view of classic telecommunication.

IF we would have raw data flows - let’s say web cams - tagged on online-maps, they would bring the maps closer to physical reality. And the time when «to see is not necessarily to be seen» closer...

Summa summarum: Web cams are political in many ways.

7A practical idea: a web cam view on a place (an extension of visibility) would be shown on a screen at the place. I mean: a web cam’s view on a place would be shown on a screen that actually is there, on the location u know. The photographs capture unplanned moments within urban architecture. Perhaps these are architectural failures, or examples of redevelopment by its users?

8In our discussions about Helsinki we have often attributed the quality of dead-ness to the 3 areas surveyed. What does it mean for an area to be dead? It could just as well present an opportunity. In this case for an architectural firm as well as some property developers. What about the citizens? The presence of a so called dead zone within the city is of course indicative of potentiality, in relation to the dead zone the rest of the city is rather fixed and uninspiring.

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9The dead zone should not be seen only as a negative space.

10During the mapping the observer becomes part of the mapped site.The narrative of the site merges with the narrative of the observer.

11The urban environment consists of large objects like infrastructure and buildings, which constitutes the spatial arrangement and order. Like the way the drain is ‘embedded’ into the bigger structure tells us something about hierarchy. The drain was there first while the cobbles and stone slabs are draped around the drain. This information is both trivial and essential.

12The urban dead zone is the vacuum, which is left to fill the centre; the sacrificed space as the economical and political graveyard. These spaces inform us about the mechanisms of the urban. its success and failure.The lack of «critical mass», essential for any urban ensemble to succeed, maintains failure.

1313.05.2009 11:04 tervetuloa 14° Welcome WE HAVE BEEN WORKING 56 (days without LTIs) 127 (days without fire) xxx 31.08.2009 23:55 tervetuloa 15° Welcome WE HAVE BEEN WORKING 166 (days without LTIs) 237 (days without fire) xxx

14buses bus 16 arrival: 11:11 11:15 (drives to stop, turns into 14B)

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depature: 11:19 arrival: 11:26 depature: 11:35 arrival: 11:50 depature: 11:35 ... bus 14B arrival: 11:09 depature: 11:13 (turns into 16) arrival: 11:22 11:32 (drives to stop, turns into 16) depature: 11:35 arrival: 11:44 depature: 11:50 arrival: 11:54 depature: 12:03 ...

15cars black volvo S60 2.4 ( IMY - 189 ) arrival: 11:09 depature: 11:35 people guy in brown jacket entering hernesaari area: 12:23 leaving hernesaari area: 12:26 by car (HGI - 536) woman on bike entering hernesaari area: 12:28 leaving hernesaari area:

16PUHOS is an old shopping centre located between forests, habitation buildings, and a new shopping centre called ITAKESKUS as the name of the geographic area.

17«We are trying to figure this space out»

18You will always end up with is a series of fallible assumptions and inadequate representations. The representations of these spaces will always show something else. They will show the representation, that it is framed in a certain way, in a particular context and as a translation in as much it is a movement from one thing to another. The city is not the only referent but is a cipher through which a particular moment i.e. the

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moment of the work comes into being. Not that these are works only about art but that the multi-layered event of the work is a series of deferrals and postponements. Much like the city itself.

19The reciprocity of two identical spaces, shopping malls, which acts as two poles like + end -, presents an interesting case. One non-space is replaced by another non-space. This process of spatial redundancy is the enactment of optimization of capital and political flow. Architecture is the means to achieve this optimization. The existence of an object, like Puhos shopping centre, becomes the presentation of our deepest desires, actions and thoughts, but the one object cannot exist without the other.Puhos and Itakeskus are connected by the same processes, which made them possible, demolition---barricade---interflow.

20This place becomes very much about your own body made of flesh, constant fighting with the clean environment of steel and white concrete.

21«Another difference between art and science is that science is often too slow. Because art at its best is not dependent on formal principles, a primary condition for participation in the discourse. Thus science looses a lot of time constructing the conditions for it to be taken serious to be able to just draw a simple conclusion. On the other hand maybe artists are too quick with their conclusions. When art follows this trajectory, there is a danger that it solidifies into design.»

22«The contemporary manifesto is the user terms which one has to agree before using, lets say, Google sites or Facebook.»

23«I still think that user terms are closer to ‘necessary evil’ in a similar way than some laws: people have to commit to them but as soon as possible they break them. Activism, petitions etc. have more to do with the concept of manifesto.»

24«I just noticed that there are 2 videos with people in them!! But their presence is so tangential to the view. They are passing. They are in fact missing. That is both an attitude exemplified by the camera and a response to the space captured on video.»

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25«This place becomes very much about your own body made of flesh constantly fighting with the clean environment of steel and white concrete. It leads me to the question about humanity. Objects may have some kind of humanity in them. I refer to the photos of the swing and the thing that hangs in the tree. They are really important sculptures in this place because people who live there are walking by them every day. If I think of the word «Itakeskus», I think of concrete = white, shopping mall = spaceship, and the thing that was hanging in the tree: I think it’s something you put bird food in.

26...and on the border of that big thing filled with people and indoor fountains we found a little theater. One of these extremely unparticular places, one of these hopeless borders to pass by. Places that need a soundtrack not to become something else. A place not meant to stop in and music not meant to be listened to- what makes it intensely theatrical once you do. The whole place acted very theatrical. It’s not just us becoming events.

...

Interviews

Group of three people having drinks and watching the sunset over Länsi-Pasila on the rocks of Itä-Pasila.

J: So, you all live here in Itä-Pasila?(everybody): No, no...(somebody): I live in Alppiharju.J: Well, in that case this all went wrong straight from the beginning...Girl: But I have lived in Itä-Pasila 17 years of my life!J: Really! Well, then I ask you only, briefly, since you’re almost like a local resident.Girl: Okay!

J: Do you think that something is isolating Itä-Pasila from other parts of Helsinki - is it isolated?Girl: Isolated? No way! We have the trains here, and there’s a lot of offices here - but on the other hand a lot of people live here too. Nowadays maybe more pensioners and such, but there was a lot things going on in the 80’s.J: Yes - so you think that Itä-Pasila is like, seamlessy part of Helsinki

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surrounding it?Girl: Definitely.

J: Is there anything, like, that feels like it’s collapsing or breaking down around here? E.g. buildings or parts that have been abandoned somehow? Or like that would feel like the needin Itä-Pasila renovation - parts that have just been left alone or forgotten?Girl: Well yes, yes... There is quite a lot of private and rented apartments mixed. You notice that some of them have been renovated. I mean these houses where people live in. And Itä-Pasila has been built in a way that cars go down and people go up. But you notice that the foot paths (the up) could be made a little nicer looking.J:But no dying parts in Itä-Pasila otherwise?Girl: No, no! There even came this new tram line and everything.

J: Well, about these traffic connections?Girl: Yes, there is the railroad, Mäkelänkatu and two different trams go also through Itä-Pasila, numbers 9 and 7. I think that’s quite a lot of traffic. J: So people go through Itä-Pasila, or, where are they going? Do people work here or do they go elsewhere from Itä-Pasila to work?Girl: I think that before, when I was a kid, people used to work more in this neighbourhood. Nowadays they only live here and travel quite a long way for work.

J: The next question is a little strange one... Let me think. Do you see those escalators there? Are they really on 24hrs like somebody told me? Girl: Yes, I think so.J: Aren’t they rather useless anyway?Girl: Well at least drunkards can get from Alko to the bar easily.J: I also mean these triumphs of modern technology - have they emerged around here too? Like any urban screens for advertisements or such?Girl: No, but I remember in 1998 when there was this huge EU meeting here in Messukeskus, they built a lift there in front of it. J: Is it still there?Girl: Yeah. It’s there on the front of Messukeskus - like where the bridge goes to the library.(somebody): There is also an elevator by that road over there...Girl: Here is a lot of elevators, but they have always been here, since Itä-Pasila was built in 1975. But that was only built for the EU meeting.J: So the elevators go between the car level and the pedestrian level?Girl: Yes.

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*

Acquintance of mine - i just happened to hear that he was living in Itä-Pasila on my way to interview the locals.

J: Is there something that is degenerating in Itä-Pasila?Tuomas: Well the houses are a bit deteriorated.J: How come?Tuomas: You see it. Everything is cracking and exfoliating and tilted a little bit.J: Is it everywhere then?Tuomas: Not everywhere. For example there is renovation going on over there. Deeper in Itä-Pasila. In Käs√∂√∂rinkatu.

J: Do barricades exist in Itä-Pasila? Like is there something that prevents something coming in Itä-Pasila, like junkies, or that prevents something from going out from here? Or...Tuomas: Well inside Itä-Pasila there are no bars as such, so there is not much disturbance. But it is difficult to tell people how to come here. It is difficult to navigate here.

J: Interflows! Are there connections? Is Itä-Pasila a crossroads? Are there streams? Besides the traffic which has already been mentioned I mean. Tuomas: Well here live only families mostly. Couple of drunkards maybe. Not much going on here, except Itä-Pasila is full of children.(somebody): But it’s a social crossroads too - all the somali people!Tuomas: Yes, maybe. The number of migrants in the neighbourhood is higher than average.

J: Decadent interfaces? I mean technology between people and their surroundings, like elevators, escalators, urban screens, parking meters?(somebody): The Pasila galleries! (= graffiti wall nearby, at the end of the railroad tunnel leading to Toukola from Pasila)Tuomas: And then there is quite a lot of greenery around the block where I live.

*

Mini-interviews about parking spaces:

J: Are there enough parking spaces in Itä-Pasila?Man: Well, it could be better.J: But there is this huge parking hall? Isn’t it working?

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Man: I’ve tried to go there a couple of times, but it’s terribly difficult, there is not enough road signs.

*

J: Are there enough parking places in Itä-Pasila? You have apparently managed to get your car here fine?Man2: Yeah... Well...J: Like, have you ever tried the parking hall?Man2: Yes! I have lived here for a long time. I used to keep my three cars in there. But in the evenings you can get your car here outside.

...

Transcript from video shot outside Itäkeskus shopping centre

no one here can love or understand me oh what hard luck stories they all hand memake my bed and light the light i’ll arrive ...

‘‘your face tarjoaa ripauksen luksusta jokaiseen päivään suomalainen design näkyy your face-mallistossa laadukkaina materiaaleina hyvänä istuvuutena sekä ajankohtaisina värivalintoina uusinta uutta your face-myymälöissä edustaa upea monipuolinen ja naisellinen juhlamallisto sekä helppo ja trendikäs kesämallisto nyt on lupa hehkua tervetuloa your face-myymälään piazzalle löytämään oma tyylisi toukokuun rientoihin hey ladies just face it tule nordea shopiin itäkeskuksen stockmannille palvelemme sinua sijoitus- ja korttiasioissa joustavasti tavaratalon aukioloaikojen mukaisesti tervetuloa asioimaan nordea shopiin itäkeskuksen stockmannille rajala proshoot kuva- ja kamerakauppa tule passikuvaan passikuvat viisitoista euroa rajala proshoot tervetuloa rajala proshoot’’

...stepping out everyone can see my face all the things i can’t erase from my life everybody knows standing out so you won’t forget my name that’s the way we play this game of life everybody knows

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APPENDIX 2

Agency for Economy and Space Development (AESD), what is it and why?The artist stepping into her studio will have the notion that through her work she can change her world. What she makes will make it impossible for the world to be the same again.I read somewhere recently that a new research based practice has been emerging in the past decade. I think what the writers meant was that what drives this new practice is an interest in the social space as material as opposed to say the figure or domestic life. If this is what the writers meant then what is new about this ‘new practice’? It amounts to only a change of focus. The production of objects and images as ciphers and indexes of reality go on as befits an economy of deferral.We asked ourselves the following question: How would the objects and images be affected if the conditions in which they emerge change?To answer this question it became evident that a collaborative process needed to be put in place and given form.What if it’s not art?The biggest problem in our time is that grand unifying narratives turned out to be naïve. What we were left with seems equally problematic. We are interested neither in an absolute space nor in a relative or relational space.It seems that the new word is definitely ‘Practice’. It can encompass much wider agendas than ‘Art’ could in the past. There are now artists who work very close to disciplines that seemed incompatible in the distant past. It would be hard to tell the difference if it wasn’t for the fact that they present their work in galleries and not on television for example. Art is anything you want it to be though there are rules that cannot be transgressed. Openness of outcome is one of these rules. The artwork has to be inconclusive or work around the possibility of closure to allow the viewers to bring their own experience to it. Statements are shown to be didactic or ambiguous once brought under the category of art. This has often been mistaken for the viewers taking presented elements and making up any meaning they like. It’s not the same thing. In the one, intention and management of significatory layers lead to dialogue where difference is recognized, in the other meaningful gestures paradoxically create relativity and confusion.Enough of this. AESD is a collaborative organ. This means that we discuss al-most everything. But we live in different cities so we are dependent on new technologies to be able to work together. It also means that data is the material we work with, texts and images. We would like to go further and work with the stuff data is made of. In the process something happens

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to the material, which is not that different from working with say bricks or paint. However, we don’t aim to build. On the contrary, our aim is to reconfigure the flow of data in order to undermine its informational character, to materialize a new relationship with the social body. What does all this data do? We didn’t set out to work with data. This came out of an interest in spatial con-figurations; in thinking that this was the definition that brought many aspects of the social space into focus. We needed new concepts or needed to reconfigure old concepts to adapt to our new way of working. We were drawn further and further into a new and unfamiliar space that is predominantly conditioned by new technologies. Our conclusion that ‘real space’ was only an extension of data now seems inevitable.

...

New International School (NIS) responds to the over bureaucratization of art education and contends that art education is the very practice of art in emergence, and cannot be formalized or contained by external concerns to those practices.NIS is first of all a mobile coalition of artists whose interests among other things, is in examining the limits and limitations of art as it is practiced in economically buoyant zones. The marginality of locations is not seen as a subject for artists and other specialists to comment on or react to, but an opportunity to re examine their own practices in an expanded understanding of context and engagement.The projects are structured around loose, international groupings of individuals who act as peers. This international outlook of the group retains a multi-voiced relationship with all of its locations. The mobility of NIS is dependent on the individuals who take part and influence the schools mutability with their involvement. The groups work in discursive units, building knowledge environments and advancing collective intelligence. Geographic variations within the unified global context and the non-uniformity of economic systems can be closely examined through its distributed collaborations. NIS hosts and supports knowledge building and is a participatory community.

...

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The Treignac Projet is an off centre, peer-initiated organisation, directed towards collaborative activity within the arts.The project is modeled on the University rather than the regional Arts Centre, where research and teaching, auto-administration, and academic independence, all come together through the efforts of a network of Peers.The project revolves around a studio research program, seminars, a schedule of shows, and publications. A mobile arts research group with a volatile membership forms the core paradigm.The development of the site in association with AESD, is itself the topic of architectural and artistic activity and includes an engagement with its location and its effect on the local area.

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SPATIAL CATEGORIES FROM SOCIAL SCIENCES

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INDEX

Itäkeskus22 top, 27, 37, 39, 45, 46, 48, 55 top, 57, 60, Itä-Pasila21, 22 bottom, 23, 29, 35 bottom, 36, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 58, 59, 61Hernesaari18, 19, 30, 31, 33, 35 top, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, Kalasatama24, 54, 55 bottom,

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This book is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specificaly the rights of reprinting, re-use of illustrations, pictures, recitation, broadcasting, reproductio on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in data bases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained.

Contents: contributors to the bookLayout and cover design: Sépànd Danesh

www.aesd.nl

www.newinternationalschool.org

www.treignacprojet.org

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