Posted by Steve Dietz on October 30, 2004 10:02 PM
City As Interface
Below are my introductory remarks to the panel on City As Interface panel with Sandi Buckley, Jeffrey Huang, and Marcos Novak, at the Informal Architectures Symposium..
Jef, who works with his partner Murield Waldvogel, talked about their Swiss House project, which is an example of architects' move to design space "in between" exclusively bricks and mortar and exclusively online (powerpoint image of this idea, left).
Sandi presented part of a remarkable paper based on her extensive research, "The Architecture of Mobility: Remapping the Tokyo Urbanscape," with Japanese "keitai" (mobile phone) users, which provided a real-world analysis of "being and not being with" and how new patterns of "collective assemblages of beings" challenge the architectonics of urban spaces.
Good moring.
When we talk about the informal, the temporary, the ephemeral, the performative; when we talk about the unbuilt and the invisible; mobility and nomadism, these are terms and issues that are "native," so to speak to so-called new media. I do not claim any primacy for new media, but I do think that many new media works foreground these issues in ways that are useful to examine.
My second point is that the natural state of the contemporary city is hybrid. It is both physical and virtual. Not one or the other but both. I do not valorize the virtual alone, but especially as computing moves out of the box and into the environment, mobile and ubiquitous, it is impossible, I would argue, to adequately analyze the city without including the virtual.
Finally, if one thread of Dan Graham's work for the past 30 years has been a response to and subversion of corporate architecture--and the the social corporatism that it stands in for, I would argue that we haven't seen anything yet, compared to the potential corporate control of the invisible architectures of the city.
In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino writes:
The Great Kahn contemplates an empire covered with cities that weigh upon the earth and upon mankind, crammed with wealth and traffic, overladen with ornaments and offices, complicated with mechanisms and hierarchies, swollen, tense, ponderous. 'The empire is being crushed by its own weight' Kublai thinks, and in his dreams, cities as light as kites appear, pierced like laces, cities transparent as mosquito netting, cities like leaves' veins, cities lined like a hand's palm, filigree cities to be seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness.
The city has always been a site of transformation: of lives, of populations, even of civilizations. With the rise of the mega city, with the sprawl of the edge city; with the advent of 24 x 7 rush hours; with the inexorable conversion of public space into commercial space; with the rise of surveillance; with the computer-assisted precision of redlining; with the viral advance of the xenophobic, the contemporary city is weighted down. Like Calvino's Kahn, we can dream of something more. Not some something planned and canned, like another confectionary spectacle. Not something that performs change on us like an operation. Something that will transform with us. Something that can respond to our dreams.
Dan also said about his work that it "always mimics the surroounding urban architecture but tries to make it utopian and pleasurable."
The invisible city does not exactly mimic or mirror the megacity but twins it. It is the electromagnetic, hertzian spectrum that flows ceaselessly with data about and from and between us, but which is almost always activated by the interfaces of commerce and government - cell phones, surveillance cameras, marketing databases, navigation systems that will alert us to a nearby sale.
Can we, however, hack this invisible city as a kind of mod of the physical city, which reverses the panopticon, which accesses the future, the past, the distant, the present, the communal, the individual, the temporary, the performative, the informal in marvelous ways? And in a way that is both visceral and real.
Jeff Huang, Sandi Buckley, and Marcos Novak will each present research, projects, speculations that are or can helps us imagine proposals, which, to borrow Andrea Philips's assertion, sometimes are the best way forward.
Sandra Buckley has a PhD in East Asian studies from Yale University. She has held positions at East Asian Studies, McGill University (Canada), Japanese Studies, Griffith University (Australia), Centre for Arts and Humanities SUNY Albany. Currently she is an Adjunct Professor at McGill University and a resident scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Dr. Buckley has extensive experience working at the interface of the Humanities, Visual Arts and Architecture. Her most recent project on mobile technologies explores the significant shifts in perceptions of inter-relationally, community, urban space and architectural design driven by the emergent practices of new urban cultural movements. Dr Buckley has worked extensively to develop strong and effective networks of both scholars and graduate students through her commitment to creating flexible and experimental forums for the production and circulation of interdisciplinary knowledge痴. Her book publications include the Rutledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture and Broken Silence: Voices of Japanese Feminism. She is a founding co-editor of the University of Minnesota series Theory out of Bounds. She has published extensively in areas of contemporary Japanese and Asian popular culture, comparative gender studies, and new media technologies and cultural practice in Asia. Dr Buckley has also worked extensively in collaboration with artists to create projects that refuse the boundary of theory and practice and promote a shared space of knowledge and cultural production.
Jeffrey Huang is an associate professor of architecture at Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, in the area of digital media and information design. His teaching and research explores the vision of bringing the physical and virtual environments together. He investigates the possibility of combining physical and information architecture to support new practices and experiences of everyday activities, such as learning, working, debating, expressing, meeting, encountering, discussing, trading, gossiping, flirting, judging, pretending, conspiring, punishing, bartering, shopping, dating, playing, creating, rating, polling, voting, recommending, and amusing. In partnership with Muriel Waldvogel, Huang leads the design studio Convergeo which develops and implements interactive visual language and embedded interfaces. Recent projects include the Swisshouse in Cambridge (2001), the Digital Agora in Washington DC (2002), and the Smart Store in Helsinki (2003). He is the recipient of an ETH Friedrich Traveling Fellowship, GSD Dean痴 Research Grant, Swiss National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, Tozier Scholarship, Harvard Provost Innovation Grant, and project grants from Microsoft Research, McGraw-Hill, Citadon, Lombard Odier, and the International Design Center for the Environment. Huang received his diploma in architecture from the ETH Zurich and his master痴 and doctoral degrees from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, where he was awarded the Gerald McCue Medal.
Marcos Novak is a transarchitect, artist, and theorist. He exhibits, lectures, and conducts workshops worldwide. His writings and designs have appeared in over twenty languages. He pioneered the development of architecture for cyberspace and virtual space and of the algorithmic generation of architectural designs, created some of the world's first architectural and artistic virtual spaces, and originated such internationally recognized concepts as 斗iquid architectures,� 渡avigable music,� "transmodernity," 鍍ransarchitectures,� 鍍ransvergence� and many others. He is a participant in the Metamorph exhibition at the 2004 Venice Biennale for Architecture, where, in 2000, he also represented Greece. He has been nominated for several prestigious awards, including the World Technology Network Award for the Arts, and the Chrysler Award for Design. He is allied with CAiiA and the Planetary Collegium. He is Professor at UCSB, where he is affiliated with the CNSI (The California NanoSystems Institute), MAT (Media Art and Technology) and Art.
Jef, who works with his partner