“Arguably, the ‘souls of our societies’ are drifting into the cloud, routed in physicality via the dispersed architecture of a thousand non-distinct (and often unmapped) server farms. What could ‘collapsing architecture’ in order to platz schaffen (make space) mean for artists working at the intersection of music and architecture today?”
TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Or, escape from infrastructure
“We shouldn’t think, as McLuhan once quipped, that just because we talk about something we are in favor of it,” Critical Media Lab’s Jamie Allen answers, when I ask him if the exhaustive use of the term “infrastructure” has rendered its meaning, well, elusive.
BEAR WITH ME: A Play For Two Webmasters – Interview with Olia Lialina and Kev Bewersdorf
“For me now, there are unfortunately so few people who can master this medium. The play happens during the moment that people were writing a narrative themselves—there was no interface that would make a timeline out of your communication or the story of your life out of your communication.”
BERLIN IN FIFTY DESIGN ICONS: Published by Conran Octopus for the Design Museum
“‘Potsdamer Platz’ looks like a suppurating wound,” wrote journalist and novelist Joseph Roth in 1924 of the major traffic intersection the sits just below Tiergarten.”
EVER ELUSIVE: transmediale 2017 festival magazine
“The program starts from the middle of the current development of forms of agency beyond the human, tracing the elusive relations between nature, culture, and technology. The programmatic sections are fluid, reflected in the structure of this magazine that provides contextual material relating to the month of activities that marks the thirtieth edition.”
INFRASTRUCTURE SPACE: published by Ruby Press
“This book calls for expanding and renegotiating the roles of infrastructure not only as a technical, but also as a political, economic, social, and even aesthetic matter of concern for all, claimed not only as the means for achieving more resilient forms of development, but moreover as a right to a sustainable way of life.”
THE ALCHEMY OF THE WOR(L)D: Some ideas about plausible futures in architecture publishing
“The future of expertise will be defined by people and artificial cognitive systems working collaboratively… architecture, academia and the publishing industry should take note of this, and the sooner the better.”
ARCHIFUTURES: print and digital publication series
Archifutures is a new field guide to the future of architecture.
URGENT CITY: Urban Assets round table
I was a speaker at the round table on the theme of “urban assets” at UrgentCity, an event organised by Amateur Cities and New Generations, comprising two days of workshops and discussions on the vocabulary of urban challenges.
ON LEAVING THE GROUND BEHIND: Essay for Protocol magazine
“Thinking of de Certeau’s remark that “the desire to see the city precedes the means of satisfying it”, we’ve done so – but not in the way those architects who once chose the skyscraper as a tool to satisfying that need might have imagined. It used to be that to stand upon the desired object of the city, the ground, one had to forfeit the top-down, panoramic view of it. Not so anymore. Perhaps though, in our creating of a second, digital ground, the physical ground has lost some of its appeal – despite us having the best view of it that we’ve ever had.”
ARTIST PROFILE: Ingrid Burrington
“I think that one of the reasons that people were very interested in the premise of being able to “see” the internet on the street wasn’t necessarily because they were all that interested in the street, but because of an anxiety that there is nothing to hold in relation to how we live with technology.”
HOUSING CAIRO: book review for world-architects
“This is ostensibly a book about architecture and urbanism. But in a sense it is fitting to describe it as first and foremost a book about language. In recent years it is the language of the informal – both in architectural form and linguistic expression – which has come to dominate discourse on future city-making across the globe.”
