Toolbox!

What with neologisms, repurposings, redescriptions, etc, it is very hard to keep a standard operating vocabulary to aid us in clear communication. I for one fully believe in the value of vocabulary in opening up, and alternately closing down our capacity for thinking. New words are extremely valuable for thinking about new things. The following is a list of words that I find very useful for thinking, I call it my toolbox. The definitions I offer (the purposes of the tools) are of course controversial and may be unfamiliar to you. For instance, Rorty's use of the words Liberal and Irony are unusual (and especially with Liberal, politically suspect), but because I find them very valuable for thinking I have included his definitions here. If you have dispute with one of my definitions, please voice your alterations and elaborations!

Apollonian View - encompassing, summarative perspective, as if seen from above

Canalization - physical manipulation of human activity by architecture

CPA - continuous partial attention, distracted, pluralized state of awareness

Cybermancy - treating computers and other electronic devices as magic

Cyborg - a cybernetic organism

Demystification - the clearing of an imaginary dimension from the understanding of the world

Digital Derive - surfing link to link on the Internet

To Dwell - to live in awareness in such as way as resembles making

Ecosystem - a complex, responsive system of base material factors, biological factors, and abstract (social, mental, aesthetic, systemic, ethical) characteristics that has flexible boundaries and a structural metabolism

Epistemology - examination of how we know

Geolocative - making use of one’s precise spatial location

Hegemony - power – or more specifically embedded power, and usually representing the dominant ideology

Idea - an abstract construction in the mind that either represents something in the world or attempts to give an explanation of it

Image - a metaphoric representation

Individuation - separation of the individual from the world as an isolatable thing

Informational Shadow - digital representation or counterpart of a physical reality

Interpenetration - the phenomenon of the tight interconnectedness of all things, both materially and causally

Intersubjectivity - collaborative creation of self, other, and world through discourse and agreement

Irony - acceptance of the contingency of one’s versions of truth, that truth is a way of speaking (from Rorty)

Liberal - a person who thinks that causing pain to others is the worst thing that we do (from Rorty)

Logos - understood through logic of language

Mythos - understood through intuition and enactment of ritual

Myth - a loading of experience of world with an imaginary / psychological dimension that seriously changes our perspective of it

Narrative - a sequential, rhythmic way of structuring our understanding of things usually depending upon causal relationships and familiar plot devices

Phenomenology - the rigourous philosophical interrogation of our confrontation with the world / a systematic approach to describing things-in-themselves

Plurality - acceptance of different customs and worldviews, within limits set by humanistic principles

Poesis - bringing forth, poetically

Mixed Reality - the zone between virtuality and physicality, in which they are blended in various proportions

Virtual Reality - the realm of engagement and interaction in which phenomena are simulated

Readiness-to-hand - close relationship with those aspects of world for which we have instrumental use

Absolute Space - that space which is directly measurable and useful for technology

Relative Space - that space which is directly tied to time

Relational Space - that space which contains value; social and mental space

Mind/Body Split - tendency to think of the mind as somehow separate from the other bodily functions

Subject / Object Split - tendency to separate the thinking self from the world as a way of viewing it

Table operations - moving narratives, ideas, myths, images around as if seen from above on a table

Trace - residue of something that has come before

Technis - bringing forth, instrumentally

Webgaze - perspective from 'within the Internet'

Heidegger's Dwelling

In Heidegger’s Building Dwelling Thinking (1951), he sets up a tension between dwelling and technology. Simply, he says, in dwelling we save the earth rather than mastering it. Mastering the earth, on the other hand, as he outlined elsewhere in The Question Concerning Technology (1953), is the domain of technology and the science that serves it.

Heidegger says that to dwell is to safeguard the essential unfolding of the fourfold, or quadrature. This fourfold he describes as consisting of the earth, the sky, the mortals, and the divinities. This is frankly obscure. I think it would not be doing too much violence to the Master’s thinking if I was to substitute ‘that which we know as heavy’ for the earth, ‘that which we know as light’ for the sky, ‘that which we know as being of the human finite condition (both physically and temporally specific)’ for the mortals, and ‘that which we know as unknowable’ for the divinities. To dwell is thus to safeguard the unfolding of these things: to aid this unfolding by thoughtfully living through them. If I was to rephrase Heidegger’s notion of dwelling in terms that are more accessible, I would say that it was equivalent to “living in awareness” – in awareness of the quadrature as I have described it.

Now, Heidegger’s description of dwelling is a lot more confusing than this. He both seems to straight up equate dwelling with the Being of humans, what elsewhere he refers to as Dasein, and also describe dwelling as something to be learned, to be developed or cultivated. Further, while dwelling as an activity can be cultivated, it is also a sort of cultivation itself, a ‘caring’ for the world, and thus a making of the world. Dwelling is thus also that sort of being which is similar to making. I would then like to extend my rephrasing of dwelling to “that sort of living in awareness such as resembles a making of the world.” And there I'll leave it.

More on Google Books

About a month back Google announced a major settlement with publishers and the Authors Guild, in which the representatives of the publishing industry agreed that it was alright for Google to be trying to 'scan' every book ever produced, as long as they offered the copyright holders a percentage of the profits made off of the work, as well as payed them a one-time scanning fee. This is a hackneyed version of the actual 134 page agreement, but not inaccurate I don't think.
Now it appears that not everyone is happy about this. A group of interested persons, including the American Library Association, The Institute for Information Law and Policy at The New York Law School, and a consortium of lawyers are now planning on raising their objections to Google's plan. Just to give you an idea of what their knickers are all twisted about, the key words in the debate appear to be things like monopoly and anti-trust.
In my mind the problem doesn't just involve the books thing, it involves Google's position as the sometime owner of content but more often distributor and 'organizer' of content from maps to news to blogs to images to videos etcetera and etcetera. This blog, for instance, although the content belongs to me, is saved on memory that belongs to Google. My email also is all saved on a server owned by Google and is accessed through a program designed and managed by Google. Stepping back a few decades it is as if my filing cabinet belonged to someone else, and also my bookshelf, and also my photoalbum and my vhs collection!
My own very simple formulation of the problem is like this:

Google's mission statement is 'to organize the world's information'.
Organization is a form of control.
Knowledge is power.
Absolute power corrupts, absolutely.

We can trust Google, right? They're basically a philanthropic organization, right? Well, maybe, and no. I think I would not be amiss if I said that history teaches us that it is abject foolishness to trust anyone that has immense amounts of power. Perhaps the founders and executives of Google are in possession of ideals that I share - this is not reason enough to blindly trust them. First of all I cannot be sure beyond a doubt that my ideals are less likely to cause pain and more likely to cause universal prosperity and suffrage than others' ideals. And second of all, Google neither has these goals as its mandate nor is it a democracy (such as the common goals of the group may be upheld) - it is a frankly profit-driven corporation.
So, I think its great that we have a system in place (or at least the Americans do) that allows us to challenge things like this and also that we have people willing and interested enough to challenge them. I only wish that there was greater concern about it circulating. These are very serious issues that need to be attended to with great thoughtfulness and dexterity. The system of information is becoming dangerously unbalanced - kudos to the librarians and to the lawyers for keeping an eye on it for us.

Densification, Technologization, Commodification, Existential Crisis, Phenomenology, Dharma, and Buildings . . . all the good stuff

The truth is that our contemporary world, technologized and structured by the commercial logic of late capitalism, is not conducive to meaningful dwelling, especially not in large urban centres. The goal of inhabiting meaningfully is made problematic by many factors which pull us into a space both intellectualized and also devalued by material justifications and goals. Ontological problems which initially arose out of mechanization and commodification have been exacerbated by the electronic and ensuing digital technology of our age. Space-time compression, the genesis of competing virtual domains (competing both with each other and with the real), and the full enframement of existence within material and economic logic makes our inhabitation of the world increasingly difficult to conceptualize and, indeed, to build for.

This ungrounding of existence partially accounts for the recent resurgence of interest in phenomenological method both in philosophy and in architectural theory and practice. The Husserlian prescription to go ‘to the things themselves’ through an encounter with phenomena presents a potent attraction as we find ourselves pulled from our direct experience of the world by the immense abstract networks to which we are tied and upon which we are increasingly left to rely for meaning. Phenomenology, with its insistence upon direct encounter, opens up alternate routes to meaning which evade the systems of meaning interwoven into our systems of production, consumption and exchange.

Interestingly, the texts of Buddhist philosophy, dharma, with their emphasis upon mindful presence, present a corollary to phenomenology seen in this light. Buddhist scriptures, for the most part written 2500 years ago, caution against the dangers both of material ensnarement and intellectual abstraction. This anticipates Husserl's response to the continuous clashing of idealists and materialists in their various incarnations throughout the history of Western philosophy that his school of phenomenology was intended to be. Dharma, in a way actually similar to phenomenology, offers us a way to reconnect with the basic problems of dwelling. And (interesting to an architect interested in using phenomenology in architecture), dharma has two distinctive building types associated with it intended to serve its practices: the Buddhist temple and the monastery.

And Buddhism in China is booming. In response to the collapse of Marxist ideology, to increasing economic prosperity (and disparity), and to technological enframement, the Chinese are flocking to religion. Currently the practice of choice for 10 million Chinese people, Buddhism is the fastest growing religion in the People's Republic of China. This is a sea-change for a country that not so long ago villainized all religion. During the years of the Cultural Revolution, for example, the beautiful Jing 'An Temple in Shanghai operated as a flour mill. Tellingly during this period the images of Buddha were replaced with images of Chairman Mao. Now, however, it has been restored to its original purpose, one of a total of 30 temples in Shanghai restored and renovated during the five years between 2001 and 2006.

As China rapidly develops and its population moves en masse to the city, Buddhism is rapidly gaining popularity. Both Buddhism and urban density are growing, simultaneously. But Buddhist temples and monasteries have traditionally been spacious places of respite from the world, sites of quiet and secluded practice. It is as of yet unclear how these sorts of buildings will be incorporated into the megacities of tomorrow. They may remain as focused centres of retreat, their sacred precincts defiantly empty in the midst of rapid development. On the other hand, temples could scatter, and, adjusting to the changing spatial economics, find themselves in unexpected locations such as old office spaces 23 floors above grade. Could we imagine a monastery adjusted to fit the 20^th through 25^th floors of an office tower, right above an IT company and below a PR firm, the lotus pond and bamboo grove on the roof accessed by elevator? I don’t see why not, but the metamorphosis of the typology would present a serious challenge.

Continuous Partial Attention

As our gaze loses focus, does it become more empathetic?

Google Wants To Give You Some Money

I posted here back in November about the settlement that had been reached between Google and representatives of the 'print industry'. I find this to be totally amazing: essentially in this deal, which still requires in-court approval, we are witnessing, as if it was being played out for us in a play, the final crisis of the take over of print media by digital media. Now all we will have left is the end-game, the tidying up of loose-ends, the denouement.
See the New York Times here for the most recent news. Google is making a monumental attempt (ironically using large-scale printed advertisements [its a bit like slapping someone with their own hand, no?]) to contact all copyright holders. Why? To give them some money.
Google, as part of its mission to organize all of the world's information, is intending to scan everything that was ever published in print-media. So if you've ever published anything, they want to give you some money, both a) right off the bat for the right to scan, and b) every time someone pays them to read it.
Of course, the really big thing we should be aware of here is: if print media has fallen, both absorbed by and also made obsolete by the digital, what's next? What exactly is going on here?
Go to the article for more information.

St. Francis as Cyborg

After he found that people would not listen to him, the Catholic saint, Francis of Assisi, preached to the birds instead. Iconographically in Catholic art he is often represented with birds and / or with a wolf. His hand and his temples are also usually depicted as displaying the bloody evidence of his stigmata. The image above is actually based upon an iconic image of St Francis (which I found on the internet through a Google search, but cannot for the life of me find the author!). I have always been attracted to images of St. Frank. Although I am aware that this is not entirely rational, part of this attraction has to do with his relationship to animals - he seems compassionate towards and, of all of the saints that I am aware of, more in touch with 'nature' (by which you could read a more progressive characterization such as 'the larger ecosystems of which he is a part', if you like, but saying things like that gets so damn awkward). This painting wants to address the issue of how our changing relationship with technology changes our relationship with 'nature'. Embedded in this is also a question about representation and how it relates to power and control, which is why I chose to also include the photorealistic representations of animals alongside my rather rudimentary acrylic sketches.