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The Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research Laboratory was founded in September 2004 at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. By 2004 many teachers and students at the Bartlett were working with some aspects of virtuality but the full scope of the research was often contained within the hermetic unit system. AVATAR is conceived as a cross unit research group and agenda that explores all manner of digital and visceral terrain, its augmentation and symbiosis. AVATAR also has a dedicated Masters Programme for students. Over recent years AVATAR has grown into an international research collaborative centre. It attracts students from around the world and a critical mix of cultural, aesthetic and social agendas are encouraged.
AVATAR is fundamentally interested in research concerning the impact of advanced technology on architectural design, however it also contributes to discussion on issues such as aesthetics, philosophy and cybernetics.
Technologically, AVATAR concerns itself with virtuality (exploring fully immersed, mixed and augmented environments); Time based new media (film, video and film theory), Nano and bio technology (micro landscapes and architecture, ethics, sustainability and ecology) including reflexive environments and cybernetic systems.
Philosophically and artistically, AVATAR is convinced that the new technologies prompt a re-evaluation of Surrealist spatial protocols and tactics. Also it believes that Alfred Jarry's proto- surrealist poetic pseudo science of 'Pataphysics and its idea of the 'Clinamen"- the swerve (chance) has great import on what we do. The choreography of digitally enabled chance allows us to create architecture of blossoming possibility where events are fleeting, exceptional and particular.
Narratively and aesthetically, AVATAR considers itself uniquely skilled and positioned to posit new aesthetic systems and codes of representation for architecture, interior design, multi media design and graphic design.
Generally, it is at the forefront of international architectural discourse and is constantly working to uncover the new architecture of the Twenty - First Century. AVATAR's practice is neither anti-intellectual nor Luddite, it looks everywhere and excludes nothing in its search for new paradigms of practice.
The most important paradigm shift sustained by the new media and technology with its consequent ubiquity is that of the liberation of the user from the stylistic and spatial dictates of aesthetic fascists like architects, politicians and planners. As this Century progresses this tyranny will become less and less legislated. The ability of users to configure spaces that are mnemonic, high and low coded, personal and transmittable is swiftly accelerating. Music appreciation, for example, has become a evolving virtual terrain, music collections can be invisible, remixed, shared, distributed around rooms as invisible but aural graffiti, play listed to infinite satisfaction. Geo tags can be left all around the world to offer insight, polemic, warning and delight. We can make the traces of our lives readable as a new social archaeology. Obviously the great paradox of our Age, the prospect of surveillance, always makes us consider the ethics of careful, wise and informationally safe digital space.
Plectic Architecture -Towards a Theory of the Post-Digital in Architecture
Definitions:
Firstly it is important to stress that "Post-Digital Architecture" is not an architecture without any digital component. Indeed it an architecture that very much is a synthesis between the virtual, the actual, the biological, the cyborgian, the augmented and the mixed. It is impossible, anymore, to talk of Digital Architecture as a binary opposition to normal real world architecture. Cyberspace has insidiously insinuated itself into our existence, at every scale and at every turn.
Murray Gell-Mann defines "Plectics" as the "...the study of simplicity and complexity. It includes the various attempts to define complexity; the study of roles of simplicity and complexity and of classical and quantum information in the history of the universe, the physics of information; the study of non-linear dynamics, including chaos theory, strange attractors, and self-similarity in complex non-adaptive systems in physical science; and the study of complex adaptive systems, including prebiotic chemical evolution, biological evolution, the behaviour of individual organisms, the functioning of ecosystems, the operation of mammalian immune systems, learning and thinking, the evolution of human languages, the rise and fall of human cultures, the behaviour of markets, and the operation of computers that are designed or programmed to evolve strategies - say, for playing chess, or solving problems." (1)
If we start to think of the architecture in this book as the first stirrings of a Plectic post-digital Architecture, then Murray Gell -Mann's, mid nineteen eighties definition, of "Plectics" seems a suitably broad umbrella within which to situate it. Such terrain can include a variety of complex sub cultures of architecture that are all composed of differing degrees of the digital, the virtual, the biological and the nanotechnological, interaction and reflexivity without banishing the more off piste and often less fashionable investigations, propositions and researches. Above all these architectures seek to simplify, amplify or facilitate and make visible the complex entanglement of contemporary space. The etymology of "Plectics" talks of braiding together. Gell-Mann's description of Plectics resonates with current architectural concerns. "It is important, in my opinion, for the name to connect with both simplicity and complexity. What is most exciting about our work is that it illuminates the chain of connections between, on the one hand, the simple underlying laws that govern the behavior of all matter in the universe and, on the other hand, the complex fabric that we see around us, exhibiting diversity, individuality, and evolution. The interplay between simplicity and complexity is the heart of our subject.
Likewise, if the parts of a complex system or the various aspects of a complex situation, all defined in advance, are studied carefully by experts on those parts or aspects and the results of their work are pooled, an adequate description of the whole system or situation does not usually emerge. The reason, of course, is that these parts or aspects are typically entangled with one another. We have to supplement the partial studies with a transdisciplinary "crude look at the whole," and practitioners of plectics often do just that." (2) It is this transdisciplinarity and reflexivity that architects can often offer.
Understanding the Architectural Design of Architectural Design
Such an architecture must also address itself to the issue of the many epistemological unknowables in our world. Plectic Architecture cannot be developed, as one would conduct a series of scientific experiments: objective and sacrosanct. Firstly we must establish an understanding of the activity of "design" and the "ontology of designer". Plectic Architecture can be nothing if not a second order cybernetic system and its designers nothing if not epistemologically observing and acting conversational dynamos. Second order cybernetics, often known as the cybernetics of cybernetics, is a relational subject; it never excludes the observer or the observer of the observer of a system. We must understand that everyone's worldview is different and we construct this worldview by interacting and building, in short having conversations with people, objects and ideas.
Language has a propensity of inaccuracy, for personalisation, for misconstruing, misreading, for relativity and it is emotively subjective. Scientists perceive themselves as fighting against this ontology of language and ask us to believe in objective and ubiquitous language to describe its allegedly ubiquitous knowledge. It is here that Science's biggest error has been made and it is here that poetry through its acceptance of the ontology of language has bloomed. Glanville et al (1998) narrows this problem down to the denial of the concept of "I" in scientific reportage. "To pretend that what is written is written without a writer seems to me to profoundly and intentionally misrepresent what is going on, at least as I understand it.... Rather, it is that the I needs not to be excluded, for to exclude it is to create an epistemology that we cannot sustain. Without the I there would be nothing to report and no one to report it." (3)
The practice of architectural design has in the twentieth century has been seduced by this impersonal way of documenting and describing science- denying the "I". Architectural discourse camouflages this lacuna with the myth of the hero architect, visionary genius and beneficent form giver. This approach has through out the years fostered a Modernist mistrust of narrative, decoration, symbolism and anyone or anything seen to be "self -indulgent" or of expressionist personality. This stripped down architecture has been reductively honed down to almost nothing- a ubiquitous plainness. All that distinguishes one building from another is a 450 mm zone of cladding, produced by a limited number of cladding manufacturers. One cannot preordain the way architecture is seen, observed and interacted with. I argue that the nuances that architecture delivers can only be personal and personally mnemonic, to the observer/user- in short a movable feast, a radical constructivist mind dependant reality- a nomadic science.
When I design I make space by putting things together, creating void from mass and mass from void. When I put things together I like them to do more than one job - to be multivalent. I might like an element to be structural, decorated and change in position related to a predetermined algorithm and that algorithm might be able to fluctuate in time changing its criteria and optimisation logistics. I might construct narratives about the whole or the pieces that allow me to develop deeper and more resonantly complex semiotics. I might like to take the view that my work is part of the "Modernist Project" and that its functionalism includes its symbolic nuances. The conversation between my work and the user/viewer of it (and the ability/ or inability of the observer to understand and decode my intentions) should be able to evolve in all manner of associations and hierarchies, some considered by me and others not.
These internal (to me) and external (to me) conversations are all languages and Meta languages, which are a rich broth of symbiotic interaction between me, my inspirations, my architectural lexicon and idiosyncrasies, my intent and the observer/users preoccupations, memories and formal associations and intent. These systems are ascalar universes of discourse. Cybernetically, a universe of discourse denotes the entire set of ideas, notions, concepts that are potentially useable in a specific domain of discourse. Gordon Pask's Conversation Theory seeks to describe the parameters of conversations. A conversation is circular, but not always verbal, it happens when one observes and one can talk of conversations within conversations. Coversations with humans and also machines and our reflection on them define who we are. This is second-order cybernetics.
Design is a second order cybernetic system and Gordon Pask was first to stress the relevance of cybernetics to architectural design. Pask also introduced the notion that the architectural profession might start to use computers as surrogate architectural assistants.
'One final manoeuvre will indicate the flavour of a cybernetic theory. Let us turn the design paradigm in upon itself; let us apply it to the interaction between the designer and the system he designs, rather than the interaction between a system and the people who inhabit it. The glove fits, almost perfectly in the case when a designer uses a computer as his assistant. In other words, the relation "controller/controlled entity" is preserved when these omnibus words are replaced by "designer/system being designed" or by " systematic environment/inhabitants" or by "urban plan/city". But notice the trick, the designer is controlling the construction of control systems and consequently design is control of control, i.e. the designer does much the same job as his system, but he operates at a higher level in the organisation hierarchy.' (4)
Every designer is different and feels that they have something original to bring to their world, solving a problem in an original or idiosyncratic way. No two designers are the same, no two designs the same, no two sites are the same and no two observers or users are the same (and all change over time and have varying durations). These facts have led me to view the world as exceptional, as particular, as a series of cybernetic personal and conversational mnemonic events. My design work within this blooming tapestry should do nothing more than exploit this systematic paradigm and create poetic moments in its interstitial spaces.
So post-digital design must attempt to be immune to sophist arguments of style and good taste. It should rejoice in the particular and the "I" who and whatever is the "I" (We must remember that objects can now become "I" to a growing extent.)
Above all post digital design is relativistic, glocal, ascalar and constructed from a genius loci that does not just include anthropomorphic site conditions but also includes deep ecological pathways, mnemonics, pychogeography and narrative.
The Continuums of Architectural Composition at the beginning of the Twenty-first Century
The experience of contemporary designers is one of positioning their work in relation to seven continua. These are:
1 Space- there is a continuum of space that stretches from "treacle" space standing in a field, no computer, no mobile phone, no connectivity whatsoever to full bodily immersion in cyberspace, along the way between these two extremes are all manner of mixed and augmented spaces.
2 Technology- Like space, technology ranges from simple prosthetics (the stone axe) via the Victorian cog and cam, to the valve, capacitor, logic gate, the integrated circuit, the central processing unit, the quantum computer, the stem cell, the nanobot and a million states and applications between and beyond.
3 Narrative, Semiotics and Performance- An architect or designer can chose whether their work operates along a continuum that ranges from minimal engagement in quotation or mnemonic nuance in relation to the history of culture or the contemporary world or embraces the multiplicity of the complex and emergent universes of discourse that we inhabit and engage with it daily. A design might conjure new conjunctions of semiotics as a way of re-reading them. It also might integrate itself with human and cultural memory and it might be reflexively and performative (in real time or retrospectively)
4 Cyborgian Geography- A designer now can posit work, which operates in all manner of mixed and augmented terrains that are subject to all manner of geomorphic and cybermorphic factors and drivers.
5 Scopic Regimes- Architecture can exist at all scales, it all depends on the resolution of the scope that one chooses to use- continents, oceans, cities, streets, rooms, carpets, micro landscapes and medico landscape are all part of this continuum
6 Sensitivity- A designer might decide to make objects, spaces or buildings whose parts are sensitive that pick up environmental variations or receive information. These sensors therefore can make objects and buildings that are influenced by events elsewhere or indeed are influential elsewhere.
7 Time- time is the most important of these continua. All the above six continua can be time dependant. Therefore designers can 'mix' the movement of their spaces buildings and objects up and down the other six continua. So a design might oscillate the spaces within itself with varying elements of virtuality over time. A design might use different technologies at different times in its existence. A design might perform complex mnemonic tableaux at certain points in its life cycle. A design might demand of its occupants the use of different lens with which to see other than anthropocentric phenomena or spaces. A design might coerce the occupant to be aware of environmental conditions in other locations that change. A design might change the sensitivity of objects over time, dulling them sometimes, making them hypersensitive other times.
In other words it is the negotiation and understanding of these continua that will give us the opportunity mentally, physically and virtually to create post digital Plectic architectures. Whilst the description of the continua are necessarily relatively simple the manifestations of post-digital Plectic architecture is extraordinary and infinite. It is important to illustrate some its spatial potential.
It is also important to note that I do not include sustainable criteria in my continua for two reasons, any design work done in the twenty -first century must be sustainable in some way and secondly that sustainability should be embedded in all the seven continua - they cannot exist without issues of sustainability and indeed ethics.
For millennia the simple act of building has been in essence one of destruction or at very least ecological truncation and rearticulating. Things and relationships are lost and others formed. A post digital Plectic Architecture needs to buck the entropic trend and it needs to be smart enough to comprehend and respond, if required, to the myriad of natural and artificial ecologies within which it sits. Architects need to also understand that architecture must be bedded into a landscape of ecology that far exceeds the boundaries of any specific site, country, and continent and it is the spatial manipulation of the relationships in these ecologies that their architecture resides. Architects must understand, appreciate and design within the subumption imperative of flora, fauna, machines and networks and their architecture capable of husbanding the forces of bio- chemistry, virtuality, movement patterns, the seasonal and diurnal and even millennial perturbations, accommodate and rearticulate slow and abrupt phase changes of sites and landscapes.
The following projects are a knot of positions utilising the continua described above and are gleaned from work conducted by the AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) group at the Bartlett, University College London. I present them here as harbingers of the future for Plectic Architecture.
Rebooting Natural Ecologies.
Since the Industrial Revolution bulk manufacturing processes have polluted and torn the delicate interrelationships of the natural world. Those natural relationships set in particular fitness landscapes, geomorphic and economic conditions can create local rituals, cuisine and indigenous variations of animals and plants. Massimo Minale's project is situated in the French Carmarque and aims to optimise the indigenous fish populations. He does this by using four differently scaled sonic devices, each type used in varying clusters to guide fish to various aquatic environments that suit the various stages of their life cycle - all within the water bodies of the Carmarque. The project has diurnal, seasonal and yearly time cycles. It was inspired by Minale's earlier research into micro sound. Under the skin of the musical note lies the realm of micro sound, of sound particles lasting less than one-tenth of a second. Recent technological
advances allow us to probe and manipulate these pinpoints of sound,
dissolving the traditional building blocks of both music and more
importantly architecture into a more fluid and supple medium. Whole sites,
from the rasping drone of a car's exhaust to the flicker of a fly's wing,
can be granulated down into points, pulses, lines
and surfaces. Particle densities evaporate and mutate into one another giving
birth to fluid landscapes, spanning across continents.
Harnessing the Growth Imperative.
Christian Kerrigan's work is predicated on the fact that if one puts metal corsets around growing trees it encourages timber to grow that has a higher density and therefore it can be more effectively used to construct things. This extreme bonsai technique can utilise other technologies such as nanotechnology that can create within sections of trees, a sort of Purist compositions of objects growing and harvestable as yet unseen. In short the project harvests the growth imperative of trees, particularly a yew tree copse (the subject of an extensive technical treatise), to grow a ship. This was a project that had a two hundred year life span as the copse/ship/launching pier grew. This achieved he then sought to understand and choreograph the effect that a radical brief change would have on his system. So if we said around year one hundred and fifty, the ships use became of no use but we needed to harness our system to excavate an obelisk, how might this be achieved, using the partially formed ship's timbers? How would the system rearticulate itself to achieve new ends So from a theoretical point this project is about a synthesis of the natural and the artificial and the potential of an architecture of parts that makes another architecture- An architecture before an architecture fuelled by the natural power of growth.
1 Gell-Mann, Murray, 'Plectics' In John Brockman (ed.), The Third Culture, Simon and Schuster, 1995
2 Gell-Mann, Murray, 'Let's call it Plectics' Complexity, Vol. 1, no.5 1995/96.
3 Glanville, R,Sengupta, S, Forey, G. 'A(Cybernetic) Musing: Language and Science in the Language of Science' Cybernetics and Human Knowing, Vol 5, no.4, 1998, pp 61-70
4 Pask, Gordon, 'The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics', Architectural Design, 1969
Professor Neil Spiller
Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory
Vice Dean
Director AVATAR
Bartlett School of Architecture
University College London
