Philosophy of Technology Writings

A series of blog posts responding to writing prompts for a philosophy seminar focused on interrogating contemporary relations with technology at The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), instructor Jake Matatyaou, 2015

Week 2 (Technology has come to define our reality, but does this conflation estrange us from our agency? – Air France Flight 447 and Technological Hubris)

The Athenian potter sits beside his table and spins a ball of clay. Working with his hands, he and his hunched back sculpt the gelatinous ball between his fingers, or perhaps he uses a tool. In any case, his act of creation is most immediate. It is wholly of his doing. The reality played out before him is his to witness.

Two millennia later, Pierre-Cédric Bonin is piloting an Airbus A330 of Air France from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Unlike his ancient brethren, he sits at the helm of an assemblage of several million parts. In the course of 4 minutes and 20 seconds, the actions of his crew and their machine alike will have led to the deaths of 228 people.

Abnormal atmospheric conditions having left the aircraft’s autopilot briefly nonoperational, Bonin and his colleagues failed to comprehend the communications their systems attempted to indicate, subsequently delving the craft into a stall (essentially an aeronautic fall from the sky). The pilots’ actions had become so predicated on electronic confirmations that reality itself emerged an essentially pliable thing. In this discrepancy of judgment, Flight 447 found itself estranged from any situational verity. Though automated warnings continuously belted “Stall” for nearly 54 seconds, it seems that the crew was utterly incapable of any conciliation with reality, a state on which they had vested such faith in a proper ‘symbiosis’ with technology. The warnings never even acknowledged by the crew, it appears they felt their machine incapable of failure. Disaster was a supposedly untenable outcome, shrouded in the blurry mist of hubris.

That the final words of Bonin’s copilot (“Fuck, we’re going to crash! It’s not true! But what’s happening?”) belie a disbelief in their impending fate that indicates the awkward interface between contemporary man and his technology which caused a perfectly functional jetliner to plummet into the Atlantic (in the final horrid irony of the crash, had the pilots just let go of their controls, their Airbus would have self-corrected and regained steady flight).

Pierre-Cédric Bonin did not have the agency of the Athenian potter in terms of his dependency on technology. His was (and ours is) a state of being into which the crafting of “truth” and the realities of the world have been conflated with various circumstances both within and beyond human control to an extent unknown to the ancient craftsman. Given this problematic porosity in what constitutes essence or truth for our cybernetic time, the lessons of Flight 447 harp to ever larger dialogues between man, his agency and the integral parameters which implicate both.

Week 3 (Cain’s Stone, Man’s Misregistered Technology)

On a precursory search through the bowels of Google, a biblical curiosity emerges. While neither Christianity nor Judaism strike any mention of the murder weapon with which the infamous allegory of Cain and Abel unfolds, several millennia of depictions firmly attest to the presence of a tool, be it a stone, bone or stick (see above GIF of the results I have compiled). What is it about the narrative of the story which possesses these many renditions to infer their fratricidal arms? People have killed others with their bare hands, after all.

Most curious are the temporal conditions with which these portrayals either feature prominently or obscure altogether their weapons. Paintings showing the act in progress nearly ubiquitously include an object, while those framing the subsequent aftermath omit any such annotation. In the former cases, the tool itself becomes somewhat a distraction, a method by which Cian enacts his sacrilegious act. Is the parable not more importantly to deal with one man’s transgression against another than the object (the technology, we might say) through which he exerted his will? This serves anecdotally to detail the human distraction with technology, a vicarious folly along which the quest for how has become conflated with the succulence of what.

Stanley Kubrick’s humanoid ape raises his bone like Cain his fist (clenched tightly to its weapon or not) as a military satellite dances across the darkness of space. These are as much their material things as they are manifestations of the human will, whether that be malicious or benevolent. It is, after all, the cold hardness of the stone which drew the multitude of artists in the lineage of Cain’s heinous act to empower him with a tool, an external thing with which he brought down his own brother. Our bearing to this object in terms of its capability to unleash such power is so ingrained into our worldly comprehension that it seems untenable to imagine innocently another materialization of the circumstance between the brothers.

This misregistration between the physicality of our intentions’ manifestations (our stones, our trowels and our computers) and the psychological drives which enable them is the unwieldy gap by which technology overtakes us, the point at which the ability to do and the reasoning to do so become indistinguishable. This instance of material cum ideology (in whatever form it may be) seems to emerge in the technocratic slippage of Cain’s transgression, man’s warring and a myriad of other problematic interactions. It shines as pertinent that we reevaluate the methods by which we as physical beings and as thinking entities enact our agency in the world.

Week 4 (Camera + Face: Xavier Dolan)

Barely 25, Xavier Dolan’s five films (I Killed My Mother, Heartbeats, Laurence Anyways, Tom at the Farm and Mommy) demonstrate a procedure of cinematic depiction in which portraiture and the subtly surreal overtake the spectator’s visual experience. This mechanism is deeply rooted by a technical methodology in that Dolan’s intricate camerawork and choice of cuts engage the viewer through the tool of the camera in order to achieve a closer experience of the essence of the film. In a unique aptitude, this transaction between audience and screenplay allots cinematic performances both formal and character-driven to function simultaneously at propelling the film as a creative act, begging from us a dialogue and discussion around it. To a degree rather extreme, Dolan’s camera defines for us (his audience) the innate understanding of what we see before us in its concision and finesse.

In two short scenes, we find precise examples of this technological engagement interlinking content, meaning and viewer. In the first, from Heartbeats, we gaze upon a troubled friendship, a man and a woman on a couch gazing across a party onto a mutual friend in whom both have developed a fascination (01). As the camera pulls out (02), it is as if Dolan extracts us from the intimacy of the conversation, ultimately delivering us to the object of their collective gaze (03). As the camera drifts through vignettes of the party (04-06), we find ourselves within the heads of the character, lusting as well onto the untenable demigod the pair has created for themselves. Focusing on the face of each, the film details briefly a series of images which compare the objectified view each holds about their mutual fascination. Here, the camera guides us, quite literally inferring us towards particular readings, meanings and postrationalizations. The film itself gains an unbreakable agency in this investment, becoming the proprietor of a particular interaction within society. As we entrust to it our gaze, the images of the film willfully craft for us a reality by their terms.

In these ways, Dolan’s achievements in terms of the camera’s technique leads to a deepened definition of the apparatus, as well as our position relative to it. The camera no longer merely depicts, but in the skillful hands of the director becomes a definitive scribe of reality. We are lulled gently into complacency with this state, gradually enabling Dolan to pose us within (or utterly extremal to) to the psyches of his characters.

This point stands only more resolute in the wake of Dolan’s latest film, Mommy. Filmed entirely in 1-1 aspect ratio, we must accept this work as a wholly intentional creation on the part of the director. Through the camera, as if to extend through an encoded image of what its mind envisions, Mommy alters the inherent formal qualities of the cinematic image (most noticeably in its indifference to widescreen formatting) so that we are placed squarely before the film. While some have pondered this as a move harping to the default representational proportions of “Instagram generation”, Dolan himself admits the aspect ratio’s ability to compose the portrait.

Where we see a man skating across a bridge (01), Dolan initially distances us from our subject (02) so that we stand unable to connect with him fully. As if having proven our devotion in our abstinence from the character, the next scene (03) basks us in a completely frontal portrayal of the young man, only to relieve us of this confrontation as we gradually follow him on his skateboard (04-05). Always somewhat aloof, his crafted performance spinning a shopping cart about a parking lot (06-10) begins to shift the resolution and fidelity with which we connect to the character.

While he at times appears central and comprehended, we are never quite indulged in a comfortable empathy with his actions. He drifts side to side in the composition as if to destabilize our ability to access him. We become the very society the film pits this character against. His juvenile angst becomes in the eye of the camera and the hand of Xavier Dolan the nearly physical divide which bars us from full sympathy. We, as quite literally is true, are more than ever reminded of our positions, gazing and judging this young man as if we somehow have the right to do so. Because many of Dolan’s films are about the societally dejected, this conjecture stands to identify the precarious relationship of the audience to the work of cinema. In the particular case of the director, the medium of transaction for these interactions is the camera itself. It and its image plane become the sole methods by which we are able at once prudently and indulgently to access (or to be obscured from) the characters and their situations.

Week 5 (The Internet’s Eerily Resurrected Pasts)

One sits and one writes, just as we do here. This quotidian action of inscription serves the age-old human desire to embroider the world with the memory of a human presence. With each word, stroke of paint or pan of a recording camera, an ever greater definition is achieved in the cultural production of our society. As we look back on the works of the past to make what we can in our cerebral facsimiles of the realities our ancestors faced, we must accept that each act of inscription we engage in today is just that: an action, a conscious and methodological imprint of a moment in human time pressed upon a chosen medium to carry beyond the conspicuous present what it can of our existence.

It is for these reasons that certain characteristics of the internet have become such strange phenomena. It seems that never before has such an amassment of human cataloguing so precariously gathered a myriad of our activities; and for what ends? Our tweets, blogs and news articles enter the vapid space of the web upon publishing, drifting thereafter among a myriad of other societal flotsam. It is as if the internet has become the psychosomatic detritus of our age. Through the glare of the screens on our monitors, laptops and cellphones, this testimony to the productive capital of mankind time and time again exemplifies a petrified and often simulated engagement with our own past.

This estranged relation to the very cultural tapestry of our lineage finds perhaps its most pronounced state in pages such as memorials and testimonials. A CNN page of commemoration from 2002 lists alphabetically the nearly 3000 individuals lost on September 11. We gaze at the faces of several thousand victims, their faces re-rendered not in muscle and bone but pixel. Time’s indifferent progression marks itself in their pixilation and blurriness, as if to indicate that these, like the very memory of those they infer, have faded gradually with the passing days. For some, links for pictures have even expired. Less profundity and more electronic malfunction, these instances illuminate a glitch-laden recapitulation of the past. On another page, an archive from Syracuse University records the students lost on Pan Am Flight 103, bombed over Scotland in 1987, their vestiges now recollected and represented as ordered and inscribed. Picked from the fields around Lockerbie, a tattered postcard from Stonehenge remains as an electronically reproduced memento to the otherwise momentary evidence of an immensely traumatic human event . Not unlike the broken pages of a disintegrating manuscript, these instances char away at the supposed reliability we invest in this medium of historical inscription.

What are we to do? As the subjects who gaze upon these things, we enact a primordial role of remembrance. Be it for the losses or celebrations society has forthright endured, this fairly new electronic medium offers a highly problematized relationship between our subjecthood and role of these artifacts. Whether the picture of a face lost one morning fourteen years ago or the eerily familiar vacation postcard whose delivery prematurely arrived in a bucolic Scottish field turned scene of absolute horror, the increasing collision between the instances of the past and the ongoing present (through the internet) seem to serve conflicting roles – one of emotive recognition or conference and the other of physical, yet immaterially digital, testimony. How is one to memorialize – to gaze upon what has come, has been and has gone – when even the most entrusted medium is equally liable to deterioration? In the land of a pixilated archive, what are the ramifications we encounter with ever intensifying proximity to the past, albeit at times with a decreasing level of digital fidelity?

Week 6 (The Image is not Really What We See, Nor Should It Be [The ‘Glitch’])

We sit at our desks and wait as a glowing yet pale light flashes back at us. Their glares dancing across our faces like some phosphorescent ballet, we gaze across thousands of pixels, all aligned in such perfect manners that we see in them what appears as images, representations of real objects flattened and re-rendered in a version deliverable onto our devices. But these things are merely what they appear to be. In reality, their digital interpolations involve a series of calculated steps which transcode visual information into algorithmic data, eventually projecting it through the medium of colored dots onto our monitors.

By and large, we take this translation for granted. That we might infer one correct reading of the image is a privilege we entrust to the consistent functionality of our machines. This complacency with the “proper” representation has proven rather productive for those interested in glitch art. Theirs is an investigation rooted in a certain defamiliarization between the digitized object and our role as the subjects to its depiction. Unraveling the trajectory of digital encoding, these series of work disentangle the exact object and its representation, finding between these states a productive space for both reinterpretation and reevaluation.

Los Angeles-based Adam Ferriss’ “Man with the Pith Helmet” is particularly interesting in these regards. What at first appears to be a scene at a beach, something all too familiar with the more banal side of YouTube-as-digitized-family-vacation-junkyard, gradually decouples itself. By tweaking encoding times and alignments of the brief video’s red, green and blue color channels, the traditional narrative and linear progression of the footage is questioned, thereby challenging us to reinterpret our exact relationship with the scene. Where color and time no longer necessarily entitle the forward unwinding of a tape (And why would they still have to, in the digital world?) we find a space of uncertainty and unencumbered freedom. Fathers and sons toss back and forth beach balls which no longer reach their targets at truthful intervals; families stroll apart in the multiplicitous space of their monochromatic renditions. The forthright verity we expect from a video recording beguiles us in its circumscription to this estranged revival. The uncanny takes us aback. Though subtle, Ferriss’ work hijacks the technological process of the facsimile, of the complacent copy, to the ends that we no longer have the option of accepting in the digital what we see at face value. Traditional imagery quickly finds itself lacking the sturdiness of its bygone portrayals. What the computer might see as mere dots of red, green and blue, our eyes are provoked anew to comprehend.

This is the precise end at which the technological inscription of our reality offers fertile space for a self-realization of complacency. What we may have never seen on a beach scene is laid bare before us. A newly democratized, unapologetically decoupled interpretation of the otherwise unremarkable video instills in its audience the promise of novelty, a reprieve from the ordinary such that the eye may see unexpectedly through technology what it previously had held as improbable, untenable or withdrawn.

Week 7 (The Horrifyingly Destabilized Grid of Red Desert, read through Windows and Ships)

I went a bit over this week. I became really interested in reading Krauss’ analysis of the grid as a device of Modernist artwork through the lens of Antonioni’s Red Desert. It seems that both have a kind of congruence between their dialogues with space, depth and how these factors situate us as inhabitants of a built world. The latter almost offers a corollary in which the endgames of the grid are taken to their furthest degree, in particular when read through the reference of the window which Krauss indicates in symbolist painting.

In as much as the window marks a moment of exchange between two spaces in the form of a frame or cropping, it seems just as equivocal that Rosalind Krauss might make the issue one of grids. In her indication of the proto-Modern employment of the grid (in the form of mullions along a window), we encounter a capricious dialogue around the grid which is in many ways as deeply situational as it is spatial. The grid of the window in Krauss’ symbolist analyses rely on an external reading of depth, orientation and subjecthood which properly account for the definition of the viewer in the piece.

Whether this be the chiaroscuro of Redon’s The Day or the architectural poché, accentuated in its lengthy perspective, in David Friedrich’s scene from his own studio, subtle hints of situation and direction infer our instantiation within the illusory space of the canvas. The window in these conditions rightly accepts its ability to place us inside or outside a space, to frame for us what we see from that space and to demarcate our relationship with the interiority of that space. This nearly mythological narrative provides the spatiotemporal circumscription within which we easily cast ourselves. With a tone perhaps more authoritarian than the seemingly endless canvases of Malevich or Mondrian, these devices adequately provide a scaffolding against which we can calibrate our position. In framing and situating, these punctures properly annunciate a directionality (either outward or inward) between the interior existence that explicitly defines us as humans (capable of executing architectural intent) and the outside world thus “never shaking our certainty that the landscape continues beyond the limits of what we can… see” (Krauss 63).

Following this, it seems as though the erasure of this mechanism through the modernist aesthetic cannon elicits a kind of experiential stasis, however secretly centripetal or directional the subtle touches of a Mondrian painting might resist. This is no more perfectly rendered than throughout Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964), in which a bewildered mother spends most of the film’s runtime aimlessly wandering the industrial docklands of Ravenna. In particular, the tectonic choices on the part of the set designers in regards to the family’s house address this estranged condition of Modernity.

We see the actress stare through a window onto a cargo yard, a scene in which both otherwise dichotomous conditions of interiority and exteriority are made equivalent through the similarities between boatyard fog and fluorescent lighting. What little perspective we hold (which in this case points us out from roughly the center of the frame in which Monica Vitti stands towards the boatyards) is undone by the semantic implications of motion in the docked ship. This incongruence between the perspectival frames of the image itself knock us far off kilter, achieving with different technique a similar flatness to that which we might find in the lines of Mondrian or the squares of Malevich. A mere hint of a reflection anchors us slightly but with little certainty towards the untrustworthy steadiness of the scene we gaze upon.

Further on, Vitti stands before a chalkboard, unable to draw for her child a simple picture. As if symptomatic to the representational indifference of Modernism, her feeble scribbles amount to something neither figural nor anthropomorphic, and thus utterly foreign to her infant son. Her house echoes this disdain for the material reality of humanity, framing for her only the gradual passing of the ships at port. Of course, these colossal vessels are surely piloted by seamen, but the window divulges no such facts. With distance and abstractly framed croppings, these windows begin to achieve something quite akin to the universality and indiscretion of the grid, as if to present autonomous compositions rather than pictorial and material framings of a world of verity and tactility.

Theirs is a space of reduction and question, deeply problematizing Krauss’ prescription that windows allow us to infer our position. Although we see in them the daily movements of human life and industry, the windows [as with almost all the compositional elements] of Red Desert make unsure the presumed relationship of landscape and frame. Does the landscape truly extend beyond the reaches of the sill? Interestingly enough, it seems rather noteworthy that the mullions against which Krauss supports the symbolist fascination with the window are gone in Antonioni’s crafted world. Their inference of dimension and regulation gives way in absence to mere punch through wall (though little is done to indicate the depth of the architectural poché this might traditionally rely on), the sheer flatness of which only further frustrates the readings of depth and content in their scenes. One might take up a difficult task to imagine a terrain of much variation from what we already see. An endless canvas of fog and ocean awaits beyond the walls of Vitti’s life in the film, as if to suggest that the industrialization of Modernity has equivocated the world inside and out as Mondrian did his grids.

The reduction of the family’s house through the contemporary practices of building has nulled the necessity of depth and interiority in respect to the outside world. The wife finds no reclusion in her home because there simply is no space in which she might encounter difference. Fog and white paint, blue railing and the hull of a ship find themselves completely collapsed in reading through the nearly transparent box of Modernism. Thus, Red Desert serves productively to critique the ambivalence of the grid, to indicate that the formal device itself has ramifications, both ambivalent and sinister, vastly greater than its material character. The Minimalist project and the abstract compositions of Malevich or Mondrian alike therefore hold a kind of ethical debate through which medium specificity is leveraged against the meaningfulness of humanity in its lush, fleshy glory of representational prerogatives. Monica Vitti awakens into the somnambulistic prison of industrialization, forever cast to wander spaces and landscapes too compressed to comfortably give her stance.

Where the investigative ends of the Russian constructivists sought to uncover new ways of seeing, Antonioni offers a response which laments the authoritative filter with which these new eyes perhaps flatten our world. Content, meaning and heterogeneity are the unfortunate bystanders of this encounter between reality and its flattened depiction. Estrangement, it seems, found its grave in the late Modernist tendency to rely on its methods to an extent at which complacency in fact reemerged. This empty space is the spatial realization of the grid’s homogenizing regime. The overtly inconclusive nature of Red Desert’s windows both engage and fracture Krauss’ proposed profit in the grid. Far from freeing the pictorial plane in the unsure intersection between spirituality and rationality, the grid has come to a moment of formal melancholy where neither end is defined enough. Vitti remains, as do we, wandering endlessly amid the fog in search of something both uncertain and unperceived, for the landscape before us both refuses to offer a position on which we might stand.

Week 8 (Dimitris Papioannou’s “Inside”)

It seems that much about network society has to do with a certain kind of a flattening – a projection or a delusion of the intricate variables of life onto a virtual plane. This plane curates an extreme entanglement between these forces to the extent that the individual items no longer remain recognizable. Whether this is found through the impermanency of Price’s “Fun Palace” in terms its architectural space erasing the designation of function and program (as Wigley postulates) or, less literally, in the in the “blurred boundaries between media and public” indicated by Varnelis (150), it uniformly serves the purpose of intermixing the previously desperate elements of contemporary life. One might posit that this has contributed greatly to the aesthetic interest in the blur, the gradient field and the continuous surface over the past decade, and yet each of these examples serves as a kind of ideological graveyard to which ideas expire. As is all too often the case, the architectural dead end of the network logics is a space of dilapidation and complexity for its own sake. These often halt at the moment of creation for the network, leaving the human being to become the unwilling (or at best unknowing) participant in the game.

A riper catalyst for the engagement of the network can aptly be found in something like Greek choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou’s “Inside” (2011). Rather than a mere image of the network culture, this theatrical exploration explicitly directs itself around several of the pertinent notions within the ideology of network to the ends that both actors and spectators to the event seem to emerge anew in their subjecthoods. Redefined within the boundaries of a network society, these interactions are mutated, warped and subsequently reproduced through the mechanism of the performance. To analyze the foundations of a few of these moments is to clarify through a fluid yet decisive medium (the performance) the characteristics we find ourselves in reaction to within our own networked society.

On a theater stage, thirty actors perform the monotonies of a typical domestic lifestyle. Neither the sheer quantity of actors onstage at any moment nor their individual motions are of much importance to the performance. Rather, each portrays a completely ordinary facet of the daily life which faces any contemporary member of Western society. As these various interactions play out, the overlap of their simultaneous juxtapositions begins to reveal an eerie condition by which all emerge not exactly distinct but more blurred, more contemporaneous.

Precise architectural manipulations to the set design begin to explicate themselves in terms far more personal to the human condition within space than the verbose proposals of colossal space frames or geodesic domes. The simple act of opening a door, when interposed with itself, becomes a moment of temporal overlap at which begins to explore the relation we hold with space itself. Perhaps, the network society in which we reside is better engaged through the extreme overlap of space itself.

If truly “unmoored self” of Postmodernism has rehashed itself into a condition where “the shards of the subject take flight, disappearing into the network itself”, then we might wonder if Papaioannou’s piece begins the reconstitution of these multiplicitous actions. In their revival, we suspend time to contemplate how the wholeness of their ensemble flattens the space of the room, which itself has been altered in perspective to appear more broad (again the horizontal integration of the variables in life produces almost a pure image). Their superposition is indifferent to the fact that the cast hosts thirty individual actors. In the space of the network society, these are quite literally rendered identical. Their costumes hint at this mass intersection, producing commonality and question. Who does what, where, when? Within much precision, nothing can be determined, because the sheer revelation of the variable and skewed actions precludes the exact isolation of one within the network.

Also intriguing is the use of the video screen as backdrop to the piece. Beyond providing simple ambience to the scenes, this tactic allows the specific overlay of the digital, the architectural and the organic. We might briefly suspend our temptation to label its function as purely representational. In so doing, the screen proposes a more symbiotic relationship between the human characters and their digital interface. Beyond reminding us of the story’s timeframe through the use of night and day shots, the screen behind the room engages a more emotive role in union with the actors. Whether by malicious control or benevolent correspondence, the changing hue and gradient intensity of the screen and its images begin to elicit something beyond simple reminder. They act as catalysts, the networked connection between those who inhabit the apartment in any given time and the larger context. The screen might be recast as something which more than simply displaying images in this case takes the role of expressing the feelings of the characters.

By and far, “Inside” is something which begs to go further than its material reaches. That the catalogue for the show would list its location as “in a room set inside a theatre in the center of the city” adds further evidence of the play’s ambitions in engaging the networked condition of humanity. No longer diasporal moments of differentiated lives, these are the intertwined motions of several identities. Intermixed, they prove a convincing portrait of the networked condition.

Week 9 (We think as the machine instructs us, but what does the machine do?)

Initial Brainstorming Thoughts: What is a machine? A machine is an assemblage (look up the Deleuze definition [maybe not him?] from history of ideas) of technologies which function to an end. An aircraft combines a infinitely deep tree of parts and tools, all individual and unique, to the end that a tube of metal propels a group of people through the atmosphere from one destination to another. In this way of thinking, the machine must be understood from standpoints both genealogical and pragmatic. What combined to make the machine? What does the machine function to do? Maybe a machine can be less a metallic thing with motors and apparatuses and rather people themselves can become a machine. When people forgo their rationalities and begin to engage a complacency with process, they cease to be humans and become cogs in a machine, as the trope goes. Let's interpret the machine less as a kind of collection of parts and more as a series of relationships between those parts. What causes them to interact? As each grinds against its neighbor, the collective hum of their vibration amounts to a collosal tonality. At this point, those who composed the machine are beyond the control of altering its behavior (think Air New Zealand 901, MH17, Korean Airlines 007, Iran Air 665). The machine entitles a certain kind of deadly determinism.

If we trace the word “machine” backwards, through the Latin“machina” and eventually to the Ancient Greek “μαχανά” (“makhaná”), we find aslight transition in the meaning of the term from our concept to something morealong akin to “means” or “way”. That this has much congruence though remainsever so minutely askew to our terminology has immense semiological ramifications.I pose this example of linguistic evolution as a kind of catalyst for adiscussion about our relationship with machines.

As our conception of the word in our own timeframe hasrepurposed “the machine” as a specific material entity or system rather than animmaterial methodology, we encounter its potentially complacent nature. Thismachine, whatever it be, no longer privileges its pragmatic reason for beingbut instead foregrounds the physical solution it delivers. Rather than mowingthe lawn, we encounter the lawnmower.

This slender dichotomy elucidates the problematicinteraction between the user and the machine in an era where the complexity ofthese mechanisms has far outreached the ley human ability to comprehend them.Though the intention and the solution for cutting ones lawn (those being thewill to cut the lawn and the lawnmower itself) present a fairly unabridged stepof logic and are thus harmless, more intricate machines create substantial riskthat we might overlook the goal for which we employed the machine itself infavor of becoming lustfully lost in its bare material identity.

In many ways, these immensely complex machines in our agerely less on the whole they produce and more on the individual interactionsbetween their various parts. Thus, a “machine” as we might know it has adistinctly distracting identity. That in 1972 three Eastern Airlines pilotsrammed a perfectly functional widebody jetliner into the Florida evergladesover a malfunctioning lightbulb in the cockpit is symptomatic of this literallycluttered quality of perception. The machine itself, in a broader sense, hasreoriented the preoccupations of the human gaze. It seems this is often in thedirection of the minute, while the macro goes unnoticed.

Are societies not in a way much like machines? It thereforeappears that we ourselves have become individual tools within the machine, insome regards. Our continuous daily actions seem to feed a cyclical reificationof the systems we live within. This characteristic of cluttered complexity,taken in a more abstract sense, allows us to shift the definition of machineryto something more metaphysically applicable, a description which might even beapt enough to encompass vast human interactions.

In so doing, we turn the machine logic back on itself and see how the shift from μαχανά to machine is emblematic of a transition in which we trade agency for ability. As Adolf Eichmann forwent his humanity to become a cog in the Nazi machine of extermination (though some contest if he had any to begin with), we constantly risk misinterpreting the necessity to engage a task through a material or systematic mechanism (the lawnmower) for the very need we attempt to serve (mowing the lawn). If we were to shift the discussion of a machine back towards its pragmatic endgame, we would find ourselves above its temptations, beyond its material fetishism.

This, it seems, is more than sensible in a time where weourselves in a variety of roles or performances [see Butler reference] act astools within their prospective machines, the super-assemblages of which defineour society as we know it. Our sensibilities, identifications and historiesthemselves are tied indefinitely to these processes, so it seems more thanprudent that we attempt to address the parameters which define us.

Sources referenced above, various examples of machines, bothin the material and metaphysical senses that function to produce ends which we might find rather unappealing, most of which hinge on our complacency, negligence or downright ignorance…

Week 10 (The Plastic Necessitates Intense Genealogical Inquisition)

Something slipping, rippling through form and identity – the idea of plasticity illicits such connotations. A flux-like, indefinite blob is perhaps the most notable image this indeterministic state of being may conjure.We have nothing to fault for this trope. The oblong nature of a gelatinous massassumes whichever transitional characteristics we demand it inherit. Catherine Malabou goes so far as to reference the “transformative attacks on the individual” which leave the subject “someone else, an absolute other, someone who will never be reconciled with themselves again” (Malabou 2).

Ever so, to what degree do we owe credence to the sourcematerial of a plastic transformation? What is our inherent responsibility to anobject for which we find definition an increasingly unsure task? Givenplasticity of identity, the nominal delineation of what something is (as far aswe name it as such) has perhaps become our greatest grasp around the ‘truth’ ofan object. We reside in a world in which a disperse set of variables hasrendered the notion of identity rather null, merely murky water through whichthe image of verity is distorted, blurred and made illegible. Everythinginvariably comes from something else in the form of image and replication.

In metaphor, Michel Foucault identifies the body as an“inscribed surface of events … a volume in perpetual disintegration” (Foucault83 / major shoutout to Jake for Thinking the Time of History). This seems aptin capturing the responsibility we invest in the plastic outcome. To wipe theobject of its inheritance – to reference without citation – is paramount tocommitting disservice against history. This act of nominal erasure (becauseeven in the tree we find Daphne when we recall her tale, when we speak andannunciate her inherently maternal presence, even in absence, to the object).Given the diverse transitions through which the finite elements of our world(the tools, technologies, images and cultural artifacts) assemble anddisassemble along their lifetimes, this etymological patricide (to forget or toignore the reference) is equal to fraud, to negating the existence and materialpresence something once had. It is to rid ourselves of the responsibility toacknowledge that, for instance, what once began as a benevolent scientificintrospection into energy and the atom lead to the most horrendous weaponmankind ever saw, the atomic bomb.

Foucault’s concept of genealogy proves complementary, if notcrucial, as a kind of framework within which we might see the characteristic ofplasticity to be a catalyst between iterations, the combinatory tissue thatallows disparate chronological moments to appear interwoven, related and thussubsequent as they truly are. This temporality is key to plasticity – it has asmuch to do with subsequence (ramification or consequence would also be apthere) as it does with transformation between discrete forms. To morphplastically is ultimately tied to the forward path of time. As such,genealogy’s role to “expose a body totally imprinted by history and the processof history’s destruction of the body” recalls the lost, recompiling some ofwhat plasticity has expunged (Foucault 83).

It is the smallest attempt to “make whole what has been smashed” in at least its earnest work to trace why things have become as they are (Benjamin 392). We utterly owe the material ramifications of our progression (through aptitudes, tool sets and metamorphoses) to a reclamation of their prospective pasts. If we are to forgo our investigation this fluid dispersion down the stream of history and time (like a droplet of food coloring in a thrashing river), we risk finding ourselves in the present for unknown reasons,becoming lost and ultimately neglecting the etymological justifications (in a genealogical sense) for the current moment we inhabit. To what degree does the plastic nature of things necessitate this evaluative inquisition?

Week 11 (Let’s Not be Overbearing in Our Definition of Reality)

A little girl counts the pedals of a daisy. Her innocent voice stumbles nonsequentially across the numerals until it crescendos when the flower lays bare. Suddenly, a militaristic chant overtakes the scene. From off-screen, it guides us along a nuclear countdown at the end of which the frame is overtaken by an atomic explosion. Zooming on the naïve eye of the toddler, we presume that all has been obliterated. “We must either love each other, or we must die”, we hear spoken over a post-apocalyptic blotch of pure blackness. While today this may seem ghastly in the context of a presidential campaign advertisement, the material reality of 1964 largely permitted it, if not outright condoned the hysterics of Doyle Dane Bernbach’s infanticidal masterpiece “Daisy”.

I find this anecdote particularly exemplary and intriguing not because I villainize president Johnson or consider Cold War America intentionally hyperbolic. On the contrary, it was their very perceived reality that lead so many Americans to contemplate with such surety the potentials of nuclear demise. After all, reality is shockingly relative, a malleable state that is in constant redefinition during the transcription between the present and the past. As a kind of cultural environment, it becomes an all-encompassing totality whose power rests in habitualization. This totality is distinct in its negation of everything it precisely is not. It seems unproductive to expect anyone to imagine any reality other than their own, and yet this very tact is what propels forward the plastic nature of progression. With every cultural act (every artifact of the present which we place into the world, be it a painting, book, conversation or building), we engage this incessantly running definition of all things.

We must be aware that every environment, precisely because it can be identified as such (a singular entity), is a tool for authorship and conditioning. Each is a reality set adrift in the world with a prerequisite definition which we ought to remember is an operable condition – that is to say, things are the way they are because we allow them to be that way. That silver did not tarnish before the Industrial Revolution serves this hypothesis. Man’s grasp over reality has become so complete and inescapable that the condition of being is no longer something brazenly served to us clear of connotation but a curatorial product of various cultural, political and historical forces. Total environments are thus the deterministic mechanisms that compel us to see reality in a particular way, often not by our own fruition.

If we look back to the cultural instantiations of these conditions, something like the Musée des Confluences demonstrates this totalitarian repression of possibility. Where the entire quest for an individual, recognizable approach to architecture is a synonym for the eradication of alternatives, in each pliant manipulation of the project Coop Himmelb(l)au only eliminates the possibility of another maneuver, and, although this is an inherent condition of any architectural production, we must be overtly cautious of cultural constructions which approach such a totality. Rather than freeing our experience through exuberant form, the environmental curation of the building as an experienced environment (presented to us as if it were the “default” or “only” response to the site, program and constituency) only subjects us to its singular identity. All other possible identifications are repressed in favor of the set laid forth in the project solely by itself.

How is it that we might approach this landscape of cultural creation with our minds towards enticing potential states of being for ourselves and others rather than singularly prescribing one particular mode? Daisy counts her pedals and finds herself within a mushroom cloud because the people of her time saw no other alternative beyond the blinding fear they felt reality proscribed for them. How might we resist this reoccurring fate? When we forthright know the totality and prowess with which a constructed environment might influence its inhabitants, what responsibility do we owe ourselves to consciously check the degree to which we orchestrate the will of others?

Week 12 (Technology and Our Fragmented Self)

The existence of every human before the invention of the camera was defined by a stark singularity with the world. For each of our pre-photographic ancestors there was attributed only one identity, solidified in no more than one place at any given time and bounded strictly by the body. Considering even the longstanding tradition of portraiture in the arts, no medium has with such fidelity reproduced the essence of being as photography. While imitations of the human countenance span the history of Mankind as such, it seems distinctly problematic to identify another medium which has so brilliantly re-rendered what once was, resurrecting in that act a moment of the bygone past in such vivid precision. This quality is the reason for which we locate in the photograph the truest testament to reality of any representational medium.

In the proliferation of such facsimiles across the 20th century (and through its exponential acceleration in the age of social media), we have created a myriad of “selfs”. Today, we instigate various incarnations of ourselves across innumerable platforms, fragmenting the experience of our passage through life in an infinitesimally subdividing set of technocratic rostra. This is not to indicate that all these locations of our selves are inherently digital, but rather to contemplate the possibility that our subjective relationship with the self has drifted far from where it once rested. We leave a trail of incomplete personas in our wake, each attuned to its platform yet strikingly devoid of wholeness and totality. Whereas the traveler of the past sought out his acquaintances over great distances and lengthy voyages because they as corporeal human beings were the only available versions of themselves the traveler knew, the contemporary human knows a variable set of interactions with his or her companions along which a sizable spectrum of wholeness can be ascribed. Does it suffice anymore to encounter the actual physical rendition of a person, or have we so distributed the qualities and characteristics of the human identity that the entirety of a friend or loved one is beyond procurement?

To surmise this observation, we might quickly survey two extremes of this condition, each accompanying a distinct end or interpretation for the contemporary fragmentation of the self. First, we see a seating chart compiled by the Wall Street Journal in the aftermath of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17’s destruction over the Ukraine. We gaze across a cartoonish plan of the 777 and are presented with the names and in many cases images of its passengers. This is, of course, a most forthright of fragmented forgeries provided to us through the “exactitude” of the photographic reproduction. Each face “looks” back at us smiling or staring off into whichever seized moment the newspaper was able to capture during its own perusing around the internet. In that much, the relationship we enter with the page is both estranged and splintered at once. Although we know well that the faces we gaze at are in fact those of a 298 people who died some months ago in a horrific and unfortunate war crime, we cannot help but fall victim to the supposed veracity of the medium. They appear lifelike and compiled, as if electronically sat on their flight once again in a journey to an untenable destination. The article makes for itself an alternative reality, if only for an instant, in which the stark supports of the photo and graphic allow it to rebuild an airliner, reanimate lost souls and make obscure the ghastly truth of an untimely reality.

In what we might see as a more productive rumination on the current state of the self, a series of photos from Ryan McGinley’s “I Know Where the Summer Goes” capture singularly isolated people against immense natural backgrounds, often blurred or exposed beyond their immediate legibility. Forgone the familiar registration of a horizon or the individual recognizability of the human face, these images accurately capture the moment we currently share with ourselves. We stand, we tumble, alone along an immense backdrop of indetermination and fuzziness. No subjects retain enough light to capture the fullness of their face, and so the cunning mimesis of the photograph is rendered null. Though they retain the ability to be read as humans much like ourselves, we are unable to specify them as extant individuals. The body a form becomes almost more a vacant stand-in or icon. As we ourselves encounter our identities much estranged and spliced between a variety of media, these people are intentionally obfuscated from our comprehension. They are not ruthlessly revived and commoditized, if only in pixels, like the passengers of MH17, but rather hidden and presented almost as a mirror to ourselves. Not cynically lost in a sea of self-similar entities like a Gursky iamge, the McGinley works belie a pointed lamentation on specificity and control. The man runs down a sandy dune through the footprints he just made coming up, and yet without specific recognition of his identity and motivations, we are starved of the specifics whence he came. Purposefully ignorant, we too wonder a barren dune in winding search for the self.

In what state have we found the self? In both cases and throughout the qualities mentioned, the sheer pervasiveness of the human capacity in and through late Modernity to reproduce its countenance and traits of personality (whether that be through profile pictures, personal descriptions or Polaroids) has variably radiated the precise location of reality and identity into an unknown vector of entropy. Is it enough to sit and recompile the loose ends, making what we can of our identity, or is it due time that we recontemplate the subjecthood of the self? Are we not really what we always thought ourselves to be, now set askew in the world of technological mimesis?