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Revenge of the Thing: Objects as Media, Pt. 1, SCI_Arc

[09.2007]

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The Revenge of the Thing: Objects as Media, Pt. 1
Benjamin H. Bratton ! SCI_Arc, Fall 2007! Cultural Studies Seminar
   
Quotes

"(a) Those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance."

-- Jorge Luis Borges, The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, in La Nación, February 1942

"The warehouse floor is filled with!oddly shaped or remarkable objectsa matched set of four, dark blue Porsche 911's, a complete prefabricated California ranch-style house, bins of chilled horsemeat, Persian carpets, diplomatic mail bound in sisal twine and sealed with red wax, bear testicles, museum art exhibits, cases of explosives."

--Barry Lopez, About this Life: Journeys of the Threshold of Memory (New York: Knopf, 1998), 81. As quoted in Easterling, 2006

"The initiative that emerges in the open market the notion of the intermodal, the idea of seamlessly integrating one system with another became the central ambition of design in the last half of the twentieth century. The resulting global infrastructure for moving matter and energy money and goods is the accidental avant-garde of a new global politics of ecology."

--from Bruce Mau, Massive Change

"It is said that at the end of the rainbow there is a pot of gold. Where that end is, however poses a problem, since it is different from every observer. The rainbow is actually a distorted virtual image of the sun. Nevertheless, it looks like a real object. Could it be that similar distortions apply to other "real" objects?"

-- from "Endophysics of Our Rainbow World"
Otto E. Ro)ssler, Peter Weibel. from The World from Within - ENDO & NANO, eds., Karl Gerbel, Peter Weibel, Veritas-Verlag, Linz, 1992, pp. 13-21.

"the fatal relation with things, with appearances, can be rediscovered, but if it is, today that discovery will be in conflict with aesthetics, with art."
       
--Jean Baudrillard, proto 33


Overview

How is human mediation condensed into the humble everyday objects with which we surround ourselves? As they connect people across vast distances, from production to consumption, how is the movement of things itself architectural? We harvest things, shape them, wear them, display then, connect with them, throw them away, and stack them in landfills. Their lifespans are global careers across multiple continents, through multiple gateways: the debris of globalization.

This seminar is of particular interest to architects looking to understand how to design links between virtual and physical spaces, as well as those interested in linking the scales of architectural and product design.

We trace Modern theories of the humble object (commodity fetishism, totem, fetish, industrial mass-production), to expanded contemporary fields of objectscapes (Appadurai, Stiegler, Galloway), to Deleuzian notions of assemblage. We will study contemporary object-centric design practices (Droog, Boym, Bourriaud) as well as  critical projects for the redesign object lifecycles (Jeremijenko, Braungart.) Finally, we examine the computational intensification of  object performance (pervasive computing, RFID).

The seminar is open to Mediascapes students, and others interested upon instructor approval.

0. Things, Assemblages, Logistics, Interfaces, Aesthetics

"We wish thee also well aware of this:
The atoms, as their own weight bears them down
Plumb through the void, at scarce determined times,
In scarce determined places, from their course
Decline a little- call it, so to speak,
Mere changed trend. For were it not their wont
Thuswise to swerve, down would they fall, each one,
Like drops of rain, through the unbottomed void;
And then collisions ne'er could be nor blows
Among the primal elements; and thus
Nature would never have created aught."

--Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 1 BC

A. Things

"A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than "table-turning" ever was.

The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value. For, in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, &c. Secondly, with regard to that which forms the ground-work for the quantitative determination of value, namely, the duration of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour, it is quite clear that there is a palpable difference between its quantity and quality. In all states of society, the labour time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development. And lastly, from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form."
           
--Marx, "Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof"


1. The (Pre-)/ Modernity of Things, September 13

Some Thematics: Lucretius: epicurian atomism ---Emile Durkheim, totem --Sacralities: word/ book, transubstantiation, kabba, !Subject, object dialectics: Kant, Hegel, Husserl--Michel Foucault: classification and the order of things.--Karl Marx: commodity fetisism--Jacques Lacan, Slajov Zizek: desire and  object.--Walter Benjamin: the angelic futurity of things, mechanical reproducibility.

Required Readings:
Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects

Suggested Readings:
Karl Marx, "The Capitalist Character of Manufacture"
Marx, "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof"

"The fouring, the unity of the four, presences as the appropriating mirror-play of the betrothed, each to the other in simple oneness. The fouring presences as the worlding of the world. The mirror-play of the world is the round dance of appropriating. Therefore, the round dance does not encompass the four like a hoop. The round dance is the ring that joins while its plays as mirroring. Appropriating, it lightens the four into the radiance of their simple oneness. Radiantly, the ring joins the four, everywhere open to the riddle of their presence. The gathered presence of the mirror-play of the world, joining in this way, is the ringing. In the ringing of the mirror-playing ring, the four nestle into their unifying presence, in which each one retains its own nature. So nestling, the join together, worlding, the world."   

-- Heidegger, "The Thing"


2. The Modernity of  Things, Sept. 20
Some thematics:  Francis Ponge, voice of things.--Freud, lacan, fetish object--bauhaus, gropius--Martin Heidegger: Enworlding, The Thing, Standing reserve.

Required Readings:
Martin Heidegger, "The Thing"
Walter Gropius, "Program of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar"
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of  Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture"

Suggested Readings:
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957)
Francis Ponge, The Voice of Things (1974)

B. Assemblages
 
"The French terms of both agencement and dispositif used by Deleuze and Guattari are usually translated as assemblage. An assemblage is a "site at which a discursive formation intersects with material practices" (Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observor, p. 31) It is "simultaneously a machinic assemblage and an assemblage of enunciation" (D+G, Thousand Plateaus, p. 504)?"Concepts are concrete assemblages, like the configurations of a machine, but the plane of immanence is the abstract machine of which these assemblages are the working parts." (What is Philosophy?, p.36) Assemblages are passional, they are compositions of desire . There is no desire but assembling, assembled desire. (according to Brian Massumi, Deleuze and Guattari substituted the term assemblage for the term desiring machine because of persistent subjectivist misunderstandings of the latter term as developed in the Anti-Oedipus.)

?" Machines are social before being technical" (Deleuze, Foucault, p.39) Deleuze goes on to say, that for Foucault, at least, "there is a human technology which exists before a material technology." "...And if techniques -- in the narrow sense of the word -- are caught within the assemblages, this is because the assemblages themselves, with their techniques, are selected by the diagrams." ....For a material technology to be even possible, "the tools or material machines have to be chosen first of all by a diagram and taken up by assemblages. Historians have often been confronted by this requirement: the so-called hoplite armies are part of the phalanx assemblage; the stirrup is selected by the diagram of feudalism; (cf. Lynn White Medieval Technology and Social Change ) (see war) the burrowing stick, the hoe, and the plow do not form a linear progression but refer respectively to collective machines which vary with the density of the population and the time of the fallow...

Technology is therefore social before it is technical." ?..."a technical element remains abstract, entirely undetermined, as long as one does not relate it to an assemblage it presupposes. It is the machine that is primary in relation to the technical element: not the technical machine, itself a collection of elements, but the social or collective machine, the machinic assemblage that determines what is a technical element at a given moment, what is its usage, extension, comprehension, etc.It is through the intermediary of assemblages that the phylum selects, qualifies, and even invents the technical elements. " (Thousand Plateaus, pp397-8) ?Hardt and Negri's gloss on Deleuze's reading of Foucault (!) describe the dispositif and the diagram as a series of abstractions. (Empire, pp 329-330) "In somewhat simplified terms, we can say that the dispositif (which is translated as either mechanism, apparatus, or deployment) is the general strategy that stands behind the immanent and actual excercise of discipline. At a second level of abstraction, the diagram (or virtual design ) enables the deployments of the disciplinary dispositif."!!
    
3. Assemblage

Some thematics: monadfoldingemergenceformlessness--cybernetics

Readings:
Constantin Boym, Curious BOYM (2002)
George Marcus and Erkan Saka, "Assemblage"
Couze Venn, "A Note on Assemblage"
John Phillips, "Agencement/ Assemblage"
Manuel De Landa, "Assemblage and Totalities, "Assemblages Against Essences"
Richards and Alderman, Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers

"(An office at the London School of Economics, a dark Tuesday of February at the end of the afternoon, before moving to the Beaver for a pint. A quiet but insistent knock is heard. Student peers into the office.)

Student Am I bothering you?
Professor Not at all; these are my office hours anyway. Come in, have a seat.
S Thank you.
P So! I take it that you are a bit lost?
S Well, yes. I am finding it difficult, I have to say, to apply Actor Network Theory to my case study in organisations.
P No wonder it isn't applicable to anything!
S But we were taught! I mean! it seems like hot stuff around here. Are you saying it's really useless?
P It might be useful, but only if it does not "?apply' to something.
S Sorry are you playing some sort of Zen trick here? I have to warn you: I'm just a straight Organisation Studies doctoral student, so don't expect! I'm not too much into French stuff either, just read a bit of Thousand Plateaus but couldn't make much sense of it...
P Sorry. I wasn't trying to say anything cute. Just that ANT is first of all a negative argument. It does not say anything positive on any state of affairs.
S So what can it do for me?
P The best it can do for you is to say something like: "When your informants mix up organization and hardware and psychology and politics in one sentence, don't break it down first into neat little pots; try to follow the link they make among those elements that would have looked completely incommensurable if you had followed normal academic categories." That's all. ANT can't tell you positively what the link is.
S So why is it called a "?theory', then, if it says nothing about the things we study?
P It's a theory, and a strong one I think, but about how to study things, or rather how not to study them. Or rather how to let the actors have some room to express themselves.
S Do you mean that other social theories don't allow that?
P In a way, yes, and because of their very strengths: they are good at saying positive things about what the social world is made of. In most cases that's fine; the ingredients are known; their numbers should be kept small. But that doesn't work when things are changing fast, and, I would add, not, for instance, in organization studies, or information studies, or marketing, or science and technology studies, where boundaries are so terribly fuzzy. New topics, that's when you need ANT for."

-- Bruno Latour, "A prologue in form of a dialog between a Student and his (somewhat) Socratic Professor" (excerpt)


4. Actor Network Theory

Some thematics: Punctualization --Actor/actantblack box after humanism translation generalized symmetry quasi-objects enrolment.

Readings:
John Law, "Objects, Spaces, Others"
Bruno Latour, "Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Door"
Hugh Crawford, "Interview with Bruno Latour"
Bruno Latour, "Third Source of Uncertainty: Objects too Have Agency"
Bruno Latour, "On Recalling ANT"
Bruno Latour, "ANT: A Few Clarifications"


C. Logistics
 
Figure Two: Storage is display. Organically evolving kinetic sculpture creating a physical icon of logistical flow. The cell structure of the spreadsheet and the data it manages is a general aesthetics of organization and calculation. It can even design space.  TNT Logistics, "Warehouse," location unknown. 2006.

Globalization the geo-political condition, the blockbuster spectacle- depends on good logistics. So do its metaphors. The "flat earth" is a "space of flows" governed by decentralized "empires" near and far, real and hypothetical. Imagine if you will, precious and prosaic commodities moving across hemispheric trade-zones in days, people transiting back and forth from continent to continent in hours, and critical terabytes of data flashing across time-zones in microseconds. The reality of this condition is in that such things objects, people, information- are in their natures intrinsically fast, but because the landscape of logistical pathways and gateways through which they move integrates them and communicates them at incredible speed. If Modernity is fast, and Supermodernity faster still, it is because it has better logistics.

Logistics is a practical science of mobilization. It organizes and choreographs the integration of people, things and data across vast geographies and incongruous systems. Logistics is not primarily interested in why people and things are going where they are going, but rather in how they get there and how their routes might be ideally configured. Intermodal protocols --such as those that link inventory software in Buenos Aires to physical cash in Los Angeles to a shipping container in Lima to an RDC in Riversideare chains of connection that are both physical and linguistic. That is, these links are simultaneously signifying events that are also technological media and that are also culturally boisterous, denotative artifacts. Logistics stitches these switches and gateways into an interconnected landscape of courses: a mad dance traced through multiple economies and geographies every second of every day. Human societies may be mobile, but they are frozen compared to the career of things.


5. Expanded Fields of Things

Some thematics:  epigenesis--global scapes and the social life of things protocol theory flat earth metaphoricsSearch fields and search ontologyeconomicss of the boxoutsourcing and insourcing

Readings:
Benjamin H. Bratton, "Introduction to Speed and Politics"
Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy"
Manuel Castells, "Space of Flows"

Suggested Readings (Choose at Least One)
Garfinkel and Rosenberg,  RFID: Applications, Security, Privacy (2005)
Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller (2006)
Alex Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (2006)
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998)
Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence: Global Architectures and its Political Masquerades (2007

Pervasive Computing makes every object into an interface, even if it's not an interface, but adding computational capacities to objects can demand that their forms become interfaces in new ways.

PC works at multiple scales and topologies, according to central and decentralized architectures.

PC complicates the anthropocentric scale, reifiying it and dissolving it at once.

PC dissolves the room. No arch program + comp program all at once. One does not lay on top of the other without molesting it and mutating it.  Room organized program by plan, now organized by field and surface, aperature.

PC mediates between singular and plural scales, between building and city. Mediates responsiveness between multiple ecological scales, of which the building performs as an artificial aggregator of forces. Its responsiveness can be toward maintaining statis and equilibrium no matter what enivornmental variation, or introducing permanent variation no matter what env equilibrium.

PC makes parts of the city that were visible invisible, and parts that were invisible visible. Security and privacy are no longer about direct visibility but camouflage, a PC arms race of irony and display.

PC will make already networked ubiquity into more de jure/ de riguer procedure of fabrication of self and identity, both actively and negatively.

PC will  generate anecdotal, fanciful, and mythological explantaitons of CS and these will in turn drive both UE desing but CS itself.


6. Ubiquity and an Urbanism for Things

Some locales: FedEX, Memphis; Dubai Logistics City; Googleplex, Lenoir, NC; UPS, Knoxville; One Wilshire; Varese/Corb/Xenakis

Readings:
Adam Greenfield, Everyware: Dawning of the Age of Ubiquitous Computation (2006)

Suggested Readings:
Neil Gershenfeld, When Things Start to Think (1999)
Kazys Varnelis, "The Rise of Network Culture" (2007)
Paul Valery, "On Ubiquity"


D. Interfaces
 
Figure Eight: Control Room of the IESO, Ontario-based electrical power distribution, and NFP clearing house. An interface of interfaces; images become infrastructure, infrastructure becomes images. Words into button, devices into words.

Interface: (a.) The site at which independent and often unrelated systems meet and act on or communicate with each other. (b.) boundary or point common to two or more similar or dissimilar command and control systems, sub-systems, or other entities against which or at which necessary information flow takes place. (c.) A threshold point between two abstract systems that governs and joins the conditions of exchange between those systems (such as a border between countries.) (d.) An active membrane that conjoins programs, mediating interplay, interpenetration and inclusion, and/or enclosure, discretion and exclusion. (e.) an instrument enabling intentional action at distance through a network.

An interface is any point of contact between two complex systems that governs the conditions of transference and exchange between those systems. A steering wheel is an interface to a car, a car is an interface to a city, a city is an interface to social and economic proximities, etc. But interfaces disclose different things depending on where you stand, and how you may access them and they may access you.  When I travel, the airport is an interface to another city, but to the person receiving me on the other end, the airport is an interface that produces people, in this case me.

The interface is a site of difference, of reconcilable and irreconcilable contact, an "across" where translation and transformation, the transitive objectifications performed between plural systems, are rendered in the contingencies of difference and repetition. The incorporation of spatial practices into the solidifications of subjects and objects cannot be reduced to the internal, genetic generation of organic essences. It is dependent precisely on the interiorization and exteriorization of that which it does not and cannot contain. The interface is a condensation, a concentration of the programmatic potentiality of these points of contact. The interface conjugates binary grammars of the "trans": inside/outside, same/other, subject/object, in the same way the singular body produces space in the mimetic image of its own embodiment of it. The effective performance of the interface depends not on the reason of these grammars of the "trans," but on their practicality, even the designed fiction of their oppositions, to mediate between unlike systems.

Required Readings:
Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things
Anthony Dunne, Hertzian Tales
Lev Manovich, "Friendly Alien"
Jeffrey Kipnis, "On Those Who Step into the Same River!"
Norman Bel Geddes "Streamlining" (1934)
Henry Dreyfuss, "Joe and Josephine" (1955)
Reyner Banham, "The Great Gizmo" "Machine Age"
Gary Randolph, "Use Cases and Personas: A Case Study in Light-Weight User Interaction Design for Small Development Projects"

Suggested Readings:
Bill Moggridge, Designing Interactions (2006)
Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel, The Singular Object of Architecture (2005)
Kristen Ross, Fast Cars Clean Bodies (1996)
Bruno Latour, Aramis (1996)

*Screening: Jacques Tati, Playtime (1967)

The Opacity of Connections, Wait Here, Please
 
Figure Three: All Design is Interface Design.  Jacques Tati's M. Houlot lost in Tativille, the vertiginous, dystopic parody of Modern spatial interfaces. Tati commissioned these sets for his film, Playtime (1967.)
 
At the beginning of Jacques Tati's film, Playtime (1967), Monsieur Houlot, is trying to keep an unspecified appointment. A large blank supermodern vertical wedge among a grove of confusingly similar towers confronts him. He sees no way in. Is there a front? Confused by the lack of familiar landmarks and architectural clues, he zigzags his way through parking lots, dead end corridors and unexpected detours. We follow Houlot's trajectory through a sequence of unhelpful obstacles and are amused at the ultimate failure of this rational space to facilitate anything like an easy connection with his purpose. Every interface he encounters turns out to be an illegible obstacle.
 
Finally he reaches the front door, behind which we assume is the person he is there to see. The door is attended by a little old man in front of an extremely complex dashboard of knobs and buttons. Hoping to let Houlot through, the attendant twists and turns, pushes and pulls everything he can in hopes making the thing work and to alert the receptionist (another interface) of Houlot's presence.  Unsuccessful in making this dashboard to the trick, the attendant signals for assistance. Walking as quickly as he can down the inhuman distance of the corridor steps another apparently higher-ranking attendant. Finally, the second man luckily finds the right combination and this remote control entry way finally gives way and lets Houlot pass. Pass into another pointless waiting room, that is.

The simple ingress has been so complicated, so over-designed that it is barely still able to organize the space at all.  Houlot's simple attempt to "connect" with his appointment is more prevented than enabled by this network of partitions, nodes, apparatuses and pathways.

This opaque dashboard of knobs and wires that ostensibly controls the architecture by opening and closing doors, administering admittance, etc. is of particular interest. In it one form of interface (a doorway perhaps) has been "improved" into the form of another (an array of manipulatable signs and symbols.) There has been a sort of migration of architectural program to the programmability of the dashboard. In theory, the dashboard condenses and simplifies the range of possibilities that one might wish for the architecture, miniaturizing those possibilities of architectural program into a little semiotic technology (door, wall, window, entrance, egress, access, privacy, etc .the primordial functions of architecture, here abstracted and automated. In fact, this transference of one sort of program into another, of an architectural interface into a linguistic/technical one, is anything but straightforward.

A migration of what was an implicit enunciation in the physiognomy/ puncualtiztion  of the space (immanent program as dissimulation of projected program)! now turned back to direclty lexigraphic enunciation in the form of iconic/indexical dashboards.

confusion between screen and screen. Between partitions.. each also framed as if in a display windown for the passing houlot, and again once more for us watching in the border of our own screen.

Later, M. Houlot walks along residential streets near this tower grove and encounters this bizarre scene. A group of people appears to be having some sort of argument party. The man on the right paces and berates the group on the left, who sit impassively and amused. Occasionally seeming to laugh at the oddest moments. Only later does M. Houlot realize that these two groups are not only separated by a wall but also watching televisions on the interior membranes of their confines.

The simple social act of gathering around the light at night to commune has been so "improved' by modern media technologies that the simple proximity of neighbors becomes an insurmountable distance, defeated by partitions now both architectural and informational.


E. Aesthetics
 
Figure One: George Legrady, still from "Pocketful of Memories," interactive installation at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2001 Display is storage. Active catalogue of supply, demand and the valuation of interchange between objects and their economies. Visitors are asked to place something from their pockets into a large scanner that generates a constantly growing visual database of the objects that happened, by chance, to make their way to this one location in Paris. Here an indexical aesthetic, a diagram of the means of one medium (a database) comes to signal that of another, a warehouse shelf.

What is the picture of the "assemblage line?" What is its profile? Can these networks be visualized, and given iconic or even indexical resolution? And if they do , do these icons, and indexes change how they work?

In addition to its work as a complex of networks --variously invisible or hypervisible, anonymous or over-identified, embedded or ephemeralpartitions, and protocols that form a emergent infrastructure of global flux and flow, logistics is also a rhetorical and stylistic system of affect.  Logistics draws the unlikely arcs of things from here to there and from there to here, but can do so only to the extent that it successfully performs as a narrative aesthetic (less an aesthetic of logistics, than logistics as aesthetic) The tracing of ideally configured routes of flux produces many complex images of movement and connection. Such pictures of logistical flux (architectural, organizational, cinematic pictures) can take on an effective life of their own, and their relative grace and beauty in turn elaborates a aesthetics of logistics of the multiple cultural economies that they mediate.

Readings:
Nicholas Bourriaud, postproduction (2005)
Lucy Bullivant, Responsive Environments: Architecture, Art and Design (2006)
Jacques Ranciere, "archipolitics"


F. Futurities

The interface begins as a diagram, visualization or map of the assemblage line, and as the underlying networks themselves become increasingly computational, it becomes an instrument for the piloting and manipulation of those networks.

Global digital logistics tends to disembed architectural program from its contiguous location in a given site (such as an assembly line) and radically disperses the assemblage line that produces our everyday things, and does so according to the programmatic affordances of software and architecture.

The computational intensification of individual interfaces within these trajectories allows both greater speed by which such trajectories move, both enabling and enabled by other global mobilities of capital and people, as well as new programs. This "Moore's Law" of single interfaces in the assemblage line (and also of a given node in a network) has qualitative as well as quantitative effects on the performance of the total system, and the social connections it can support and govern.

This acceleration of the computational intensity of each node in the network, and of the network's circulatory capacity as a whole allows for a radicalization of other economies of mobility.  However, more mobility also means less contiguity of interfaces, less visibility of the assemblage line, less visible conditions of program, and an increased reliance on designed diagrammatic narratives about those disembedded chains of association, production and consumption.

This in turn demands visual resolution: representational media that give descriptive, diagnostic and projective coherency to the dispersion of interfaces and their impact on our lives. It provides a market for images of program.


10. Lifecycles and the Parliament of Things

Some projects: cradle to cradle! Natalie jeremijenko and where things come from.. chris Jordan!dingpolitik! the morality of hardware!the parliament of things!landfill lust!the opposite of koyanisqattsi..SPIME politics!.

Readings:
Braungart and McDonnough, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking How Things are Made (2002)
Harvey Molotch, Where Stuff Comes From (2003)
Bruno Latour, "dingpolitik"

Suggested Reading:
Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, ed. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (2005)

Assignments Key Words *
Recycle project, see Boym!find objects from....
Toy District, Elysian Park, Home Depot, Your House, Supermarket, IKEA
stickers plants flowers, hoses pipes....
exhibit at SCI_arc and telic.

Catalogs and Sites
McMaster, Uline, Airlines, Alibaba, Sears, eBay, Quartermaster, Medical,  Etc.

--Four Groups Each Makes Their Own "Cups System" assembled from things
fom everywhere.

--Find an anti-aesthetic (a la Boym's Sears Project)

--Do exercise with images and with objects;  go back and forth.

*Don't worry all this to be explained in manic detail in class.

 

Tags: sci-arc, culture industry, physical media

Published: 09.23.2007

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