Sanford Kwinter & Marrikka Trotter (November 2, 2018)

I'm gonna meander just a little bit the way you get into a pool which is what a conversation is so I made some notes a few an hour and a half ago about this America and I have been dancing around trying to find some common ground and I'll explain why we didn't and how not finding common ground was a very profound form of common ground so I wrote here a couple of notes I say it's the nature it's the nature of conversation that it has neither a beginning nor an end but is actually always a kind of a filling in of a middle I've known Marika for example I thought since 2003 but it turns out it's maybe ten years ago at Harvard it was in the context of a course I don't know what what the course was on actually I don't remember it but what I do remember and I really mean this it's not just a conceit for the for this particular occasion is that it was a very intense conversation and it was particularly marika with whom that conversation in that classroom was taking place it had to do at that time with a whole bunch of stuff in which Marika knew better than I did and that was to do with things like the movements and aesthetics in the 1990s relational aesthetics agonistic whatever there is a gonna stick forms of agonistic democracy of goodness thick democracy agonistic agarose participation etc so it I have to say that particular course and of course I don't remember what it was but I remember its form it was a game changer for me because it changed the way I taught pretty much thereafter now I know if any of my students are in the room today they're gonna say no that's not what you're doing kwinter but the truth of matter is I know I'm lecturing like a fool right now because it's basically as I have limited amount of time and a sense of anxious or urgency about how much there needs to be downloaded in order to begin to change the general ecology that will make it possible to have some conversations of a certain kind again but having said that it was a game changer for me because I began to consider how knowledge is produced how it's circulated how it's exchanged in the context of an older idea which I picked up actually as a high school student from Gregory Bateson and in Bateson's wonderful book written sometime in the mid 1960s or possibly early 1960s it was called steps to an ecology of mind he posits the idea of a meta log which is really just a dialogue with the word meta in a way added onto it to produce an extra dimension what is the meta log well the meta log basically is a dialogue about a topic but it is meant also to embody and to address the actual exchange to the conversation and the form of the conversation itself well how does he do that I was a student of literary you know literary theory and studied literary form etc and everybody was experimenting with literary form virtually throughout the 20th century I thought well exactly how is that happening here in his meta logs and when I went back and looked at them I realized that it was something fascinating going on and it was that he would have these conversations with his young daughter for those of you who know them and and they began when she was 8 years old she says and what I noticed is that the eight-year-old was the one who was bringing the insights to the table and it was his role and he must have been 50 or 60 at the time he would basically unfold them and it was there's the interesting thing in a conversation and that's the interesting thing the most interesting thing I would say these days that can happen in a classroom the most famous concept the most famous conversation that they had was based around the following idea she says to him at the age of eight she says daddy why do things so often get in a muddle of course it's a great topic for Bateson in fact I'm pretty sure she never said that he just told her to say that or he made it up but of course the question is is the muddle vs. tidiness of course it allowed him to bring up the I you know to bring in the whole idea that he was interested in in cybernetics and psychology you know more or less the idea of the second law but he comes up with this idea that it's because there's a lot more ways for things to be in a muddle than they are for them to be tidy so I thought number one I said now I'm getting it because they were very sloppy kind of exchanges but the muddle and tidiness thing I thought might interest Marika that's number one or maybe it shouldn't interest all of us as a kind of a set of polarities with which to think about what it is that architects do and all the places in between full on tidiness and full on useless muddled all the different places where one can find shall we say illumination or shall we say insight or penetration into what we don't know about reality okay so I won't go on here I'm really wasting a hell of a lot of time but one thing that was important about my about what I discovered about what it meant the dialogue the meta log is is the idea that a conversation to take place there has to be differences they are sort of the foundation of the meta log and Bateson of course was primarily in life interested only in differences he famously described or defined information as the difference that makes difference but in any case that there the problem between tidiness and muddle is also one of how differences are organized and how we adopt a certain posture toward them so murrica eyes we started to we try to have a few beginnings of conversation on the telephone last week to see if we could come up with a kind of a thing that we would that we would engage in collectively today we asked ourselves how do our arguments that's to say the the things that we share our similarities how do they differentiate how do they become different how do they diverge when we apply them to our different or diverging objects of concern and difference which is to say that you know Marika you know I was with her for virtually the entire time in which she was doing her PhD at Harvard as a if not an amino series at times certainly as well you know a part director I know there was a commonality of commitment to a certain framework of ideas but there's a difference in generation which increasingly fascinates me especially as I watch now if I may say this i watch Marika looking around in order to engage the theoretical and shall we say the philosophical questions that architects need to ask and need to embody in their work and how to connect them to what is around one so we agreed that instead of speaking about our past and the conversation that we shared back then though it would actually try to converse about how we seek to attach our thought to the present so murrica is interested in a number of ideas I'm not going to say what those are or a number of she's interested in a certain kind of work and in order to frame a conversation that we had that was going absolutely nowhere I suppose opposed that maybe Marique I said maybe you are interested these days in coming up with a framework of understanding that comes up for an accounting for dissonance in the world and I'm interested in remote consonants which is to say the patterns that connect well I'm interested primarily in patterns but the primary patterns which connect even where their connection is not apparent and needs to be built so I'm going to pass this off to Marika so I would say okay so I actually like the idea we talked about this so we were like okay you can do dissidents and then all do remote continents but then I was like but I kind of like remote continents continents better remember I refused to stay with dissonance but then I thought there is one way that I'm still okay with dissidents so and that way is I am interested in and committed to and passionate about architectural work that generates distant dissonance in relation to the status quo okay so that is actually what I would i look for so that kind of dissonance I'm okay with I'm also interested in architecture that never resolves the expressions or manifestations of dissonance that occur would not happen so things objects or design approaches or even even things as superficial as patterns or textures that fail to resolve in and of themselves because they cannot resolve relative to everything else around them so yes dissonance in that way but I'm also committed to an architecture that has a more you know that word who is it that used it I can't remember now maybe Plato someone old synteny the notion of synteny so senator knee synt oh and why don't you just tell us what that word oh yeah so basically it's this okay so it's this it's a it's a it's a it's a kind of harmonious set of relationships that is constantly and sort of fragile II established but the way that it's usually used is in relationship between what we know to be possible and what we are able somehow to negatively imagine maybe the reuse to loses the term the virtual and to kind of establish a kind of back and forth kind of fragile shifting harmony between those two things so that's the kind of remote consonants that I would be okay with is a remote consonants between architecture that is dissonant relative to the world around it but nevertheless is trying to establish a harmony with things that we might that we might not yet be able to imagine right because that's that's what architecture does that's what makes architectural matter in the world say it again what does because that's what I was about to ask you know what makes it matter know just say it's simply for everyone what makes it matter what makes it it's one of the ways in which we get to connect existing modes of imagination in the world and images of things or imaginations of things or even kind of vague outlines of things that we can't yet comprehend that we can't yet imagine okay so I totally agree with you on that one thing but I'm a challenge which I'm gonna challenge you on one thing and this is that you haven't named any names and you haven't been specific and you haven't given us any absolute descriptions yet neither but given your given your sketch your first sketch about the status quo and the need in some ways to counter it with with dissonance I would ask you to explain how your position today differs from the ideology that drove what we came to call deconstructivist architecture and you know in the in the 90s I would also at the same time want to ask you to acknowledged or to explain what you mean by status quo because it seems to me what is different in those days is that there was a very firm conventional and orderly framework that deconstructivism at least could affect to be challenging and dismantling whereas today when I look at the status quo I don't know where to look you have to direct my attention to it if it's an architecture if it's in our world around us it seems full of noise conflict hostility etc etc it seems to me one would not be immediately impelled to add to it or one would actually lose one's signal if you like against the background of that noise that one might actually seek different so we say features like harmony or euphony or whatever orders from that yeah what's a hard word it's a hard word to go back to okay no one wants to go back precisely to order but you know let me just say another thing is that what is the context for architecture you have to say what it is what you meant by status quo the other thing that strikes me is that we are looking at very different conditions of what provides the background for how we think of making forming and organizing today which is precisely the crisis of nature and now I know this was a topic that you addressed a lot in your PhD in in in you know through the 17th 8th wherever 18th and 19th century nature is perhaps today's dominant problem how does architecture of dissonance help us develop shall we say a connection to nature or a connection to the problem of nature that well let's just say that is God they're illuminating a healing even to use that kind of a term or restorative or simply productive and and producing shall we say hope or joy or what or else it may be like how can dissonance be used today to fight dissonance well I don't know the dissonance is really the problem that the world faces today so I guess I would say that first so you say we have a surplus of euphony no I did so who'd know I euphony would be great it would be awesome to have a surplus of euphony I think what we have instead is a surplus of a feeling like an imagination a cultural imagination that's trapped in a mode of disengagement and helplessness and actually that's where I think dissonance is useful so dissonance as some kind of conflict or some kind of struggle or some registration of the fact that nature itself is far from harmonious but instead contains moments of a resolution that can be capitalized upon or expanded upon to produce new possibilities in the world and that those things don't happen when everything is ordered and organized but they instead happen when systems are right I'm like I'm using your own language here when systems are very close to the edge of chaos over there far from equilibrium that those that actually those are the moments that not only already exist as opportunities for us in the world but that we as part of the production of nature can also invent so we can actually make those spaces and that's and the reason and by the way that's different from I it would be horrible to go back to deconstructivism so I know I'm with you there it was horrible the first time yeah yeah it was bad it was bad so I don't want to do that I don't want to be associated with that project but I tell you how I'm just associating myself it's exactly in the way in the way that you said so if if the project of D constructivism was based on the idea that there was a a dominant system that could then be deconstructed that could then be taken apart and that somehow that work of taking apart was itself sufficient to challenge the system nowadays because of all the fuzz and all the noise and the the obvious multiplicity that we recognize existing in in what surrounds us today so maybe the status quos not such a great term but let's say our environments plural it seems ridiculous to assume that any fixed structure that could be dismantled would ever would ever be a worthy opponent for the architectural imagination I think the architectural imagination is much better engaged in those glitchy moments in that mess than it is in systematically taking apart something that that of which the taking apart would be such a stable process that it could be registered as such all right so that so it's I think it's completely different ok so it's a wonderful and attachable concept shall we say the problem or we could even say the ontology or the epistemology of the glitch I dropped that word into the historical ether here since I know that everything at sci-arc immediately gets integrated circulated etc etc so anyway what is the glitch well how can we think about the glitch the glitch in some way attaches to certain aspects of a reality that we still need to properly describe and connects them in ways that are that can be put at the service of human being let's say and of human existence now I would say let's figure out how that can be done and let's figure out how that would work if it's true now I'm gonna I see David rhew turned up and I can never I can never not what is the word here I left their address the presence of I want to talk about a generational problem here and I mean because there's it's a what we all we all think of we all tend to think these days generationally I know that to be the case for Marieke as well and it is increasingly painfully the case with me I met a couple of notes this morning and I'm going to see if I can put it together here in a coherent way because it's a maybe a contentious version of history or an account of what happened in the last twenty years which may offer openings for practitioners of all ages and of all generations I point out here I said especially because we were going to talk about ontology which is a little bit the theme of the course that we're teaching together and I write ear that ontological interests in and I use the term here template activities and properties and what I mean by that template a template simply is the idea that there would be a kind of a schema that can generate that can generate [Music] material substance shall we say form which was the dominant mode of theorization shall we say an understanding in architecture for at least a couple of decades maybe for decades but interest in these template activities and template properties gradually seeded at the end of the 1990s as software interfaces be abstracted experienced and stunted user intuition by substituting its own arbitrary mechanisms of generation for those formerly experienced as connected and continuous within the physical world or within nature itself and even though the first generations of generative architecture that's to say that template type architecture let's say that goes back to the formalisms right out of Colin Rowe and the manipulations and in many cases also the glitch ontology zuv Peter Eisenman and other and the next generations of those types of formalists and at the same time I say and within the very same movement concern with and capacity to sense the connective pattern across the manifold of experience was dimmed to the point of becoming almost fully disconnected it seemed to me that my generation was for historical refor by historical happenstance if for no other reason actually was in the position to define the territories of production and that's to say that architecture tended to draw cues from the systems of wealth from the systems of thought let's say that we're being generated within the city within the field essentially by by theorists whereas the age today it seems that theorists are seeking to take their cues from production as if they were looking at what is around and trying to come up with a theory for it I don't know I would just I would I would dispute that a bit I if I if I'm at all representative of my generation that is which I probably am I would say if I may say this this is I don't mean this in no demeaning way you're a perfect abstract example of an emerging theorist and we can look at you as a case study is this the meta log part it is it is it is alright so what I would say I understand what you're saying so guys what he's saying is what he's saying is that in his day people started with a philosophy and found things in architecture that might they tried to make the architecture match fort or let's just say it was meant to transmit intuition from thought into physical experience and today we wonder whether or not the opposite framework is in play and we are looking at physical experience and somehow trying to express it in thought systemic thought if it is in fact possible so so I guess my my I'm a little uneasy about that because although I understand what you're saying so you're saying we're basically starting with with the work that's out there the work that's available available to us and trying to find a way to make it meaningful I guess what I would say is I I think the role of theory is to neither try to illustrate I you know rich or valid a philosophical or ontological ideas with architectural examples I don't find that particularly productive nor to simply try to create alibis or our meanings for things that are already in the world I think the role of theory is to seize on those little those little moments like the and they can be super tiny they can be just bits of projects they can be sort of hesitant steps in one direction that can be a moment here a moment there a design decision here an aesthetic effect there across the spectrum to seize on those things that represent what I would say is a fundamental potential of architecture and that is to radically insert difference in the world yeah it was beautiful that was beautiful so now I get to interpret you I don't remember which particular group of mystical Christians it was but they believed in angels it seems to me like what you're telling me is a story again I hear about angels you remember they used to say things like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin but the area idea that angels that if you could get a bunch of angels to dance on the head of the pin that'd be pretty damn small angels and you're suggesting in fact that being an out man sounded like a Heidi Gary in here but since we're playing with this idea of ontology that being in fact can reveal itself at the very very smallest scale that you could find in fact an architecture that was a micro architecture that's to say a moment would have been your term at which that's to say or a difference that could make a difference and it could be found at the microscopic scale and then it would be potentially I suppose scalable but it would have to find its way I assume into expression and thought let's say in language etc is that what you would say and that when you say that the search today is now with a microscope and no longer shall we say with a computer as it was in the 80s and 90s and science or before that let's say longview the telescopic if we're thinking about the infinite versus the infinitesimal or the large and continuous versus the discrete then I would say yeah I see more potential at the moment in the small in particular than I do in the large and smooth and the general but what I meant actually by finding these moments is not necessarily restricted to scale like there are projects and I kind of deliberately staying away if you could say something you could say it it's time how many we got yet so right now you can you can start letting people know the kind of things that attract your interest I see no downside to that of course you can also decline I don't know I'm feeling I'm reticent about this right now all right stay out of trouble yes but but but there are projects where overall project seems pretty bound to existing conventions and so that I'm like yeah but then there's like some little problem with it there's some little ear resolution with it that doesn't seem to belong to the existing system of architectural thought or imagistic thought or the known right and so it doesn't necessarily have to be something that's actually small it could be something that's diffused across the entire project but something that's not jiving something that is to use a phrase from Siemens so the class that we've been teaching on ontology we've been basing on the thought of job a Siemens own and his notion of individuation where he defines a process of individuation as a process in which things fall out of phase with themselves or they fall out of step with themselves and I find that to be really exciting so how how do you things assuming that we can agree for a minute that architects are interested in the production of things and it's a focus on objects of focus on things how can things how can we add a bit of agency to those things how can we motivate them to keep acting on our behaves and to also then have them turn around and motivate us right so how can we inject imagination into them in such a way that they also inject imagination back into what we believe is possible and ACTA bowl well I think one of those ways is to create these moments of lags or these lags lags like a something that's not something falling out of step something even it could be even as as kind of soft as syncopation let's say but just things that are not aligning precisely and that suggests the possibility of other systems or other organizations that have yet to be brought into the existing system of things mmm and follow the whole thing there but it's also because I was in no because I became too interested in certain parts of it as you were moving along the first thing the the downer in me first has to won't clear a few of the things off the table and I wonder to a degree to the degree in which I recognize resonances and what you say with other things I hear increasingly these days I wonder to what degree some of this is not a reflection of a growing sense of general impotence that people feel with respect to their capacity to transform their their realities or to invent them the other thing that strikes me is that in the best ontology the thing that you refer to as things are understood to actually require one another for their intelligibility and this ultimate and the ultimate example there would be some kind of really write that a really productive ontology would be about figuring out a way in which the matter in the mind can be connected in imaginative ways to the matter of everything else yeah that point here made saving that for the end so I should let us know when we're getting close to the end but I suppose the idea wanted to introduce there was that there can really be no ontology without ecology and that any ontology that doesn't put ecology first is no real ontology at all now I that in a way of course just shut down the conversation I can see from your point of view from your from your expression but in fact I would argue that that is more or less where your left hand is going even when your right hand is looking for microscopic glitches and I mean that's generally speaking in your work well yeah so I mean I guess I'm not I'm not again I'm not arguing for the microscopic and discrete as if those entities could be understood understood outside of a relational system I'm actually interested in them as potential moments for relationships that actually haven't been developed connected to systems that actually haven't been imagined and I do think you're right I think actually one of the main things you said the main thing confronting us today or one of the main things this is kind of crisis of nature and I guess I think of it a little bit differently and maybe sort of in a in a more anthropocentric and problematic way I think it's a crisis of imagination and I think it's a crisis of people feeling as if they cannot change the world around them as if they cannot invent other possibilities from themselves as if they cannot actually imagine other futures and the one the present is telling them is coming I actually think that is the I think it's a problem of imagination and that's why I think it's a super exciting time to be in architecture actually because architecture is one of those disciplines in the world that deals with imagination in a speculative and inexhaustible way in my opinion and and it has to do actually with connecting existing imaginations like the kind of imagination that you would get from like the best client ever right or the kind of imagination that's put on a table by your studio instructors who by the way are the best client you'll ever have to things that no one can yet imagine I gave my whatever that sort of maybe half dismissive maybe half apocalyptic interpretation of what happened in the last 20 years as the generations had to encounter a world full of equipment machines software and the type of crypto and sort of quasi subjectivity that those introduced to say that the quality and the tonality of experience had radically changed in architectural culture and when you talk about imagination I would say that imagination cannot be conceived or constructed outside of that broader a because a neuro ecology or that of how can of what one can expect from experience and what kind of intelligibility one can expect if you like from the you know from from from an architectural practice it isn't to say that architects don't still can you know generate physical things and and have these feedback loops that tell them how these physical things alter and transform the environment and you know change if you like the continual feedback loops but rather what the scope is of architectural imagination today that's to say I feel that it has become cut off if you like from the broader even if it was inarticulate or not fully articulated in past times there was a general positioning of where the architectural imagination placed itself in terms of what it was going to connect its inventions to in the way of creating a whole cosmology whatever happened yeah here's a Cole has said whatever happened to urbanism I would say whatever happened to cosmology and you could say you could build up a cosmology from the glitch but you still have to say I want to do that so yes it is cosmological imagination I suppose that I feel has been interfered with with the rise of well with the rods let's just say from the abstracting and separative function let's say of computational environments it is that's a you know it's a so I'll leave it at that and it back because it seems to me also that some of the things you find most potentially rich shall we say or or disruptive and I mean that in the good sense at least and some people call that good I don't particularly but anyway in terms of the glitch that these are glitches that are actually artifacts from these artificial environments ie they are artifacts what that appear on a screen yes or that are being transferred into the material world that appear in various processes of making form or making models or making other yeah but and not in the sandbox right rather in the in the software environment yeah yeah like my yeah like that Xerox I had in class yesterday that didn't print properly and it just it had a yeah so yeah this is these are artifacts yeah you say we use the word artifacts probably only for 10 or 15 years and most people in the room are probably too young to remember there were things that computers produced just glitches really just garbage little moments of garbage that just came from nowhere they were produced by the interactions or the imperfect interactions if you like of embedded languages now it strikes me that you are identifying the transfer or the transposition of those types of shall we say artificial let's just say errors and in a way presenting them in the scale of physical experience as things that we can shall we say learn from or things that can carry us to new extended insights about our destiny yeah and here is where I think the my chroma is is is useful actually because if you're talking about the scale of a pixel or a voxel let's say you're talking about something pretty small or if you're talking about something that it that occurs because you've got an image or a design process this low resolution for example so those are usually small things then you scale up in your leg that's a mess so so yeah maybe there is something that's that's inherently micro or that's an that's inherently a small scale that maybe we can that maybe we can assign a particular value at this moment in time but the reason I think those glitches are productive is precisely because architecture deals with such a collision of different systems different systems of time different systems of duration different systems of understanding the physical world you know and they can get like really technical so different you know each systems that are as basic as HVAC systems versus structural systems versus the systems that are given and various components or panel systems you know doesn't have to be I mean I'm talking about actual physical systems for the most part I guess what I'm trying to say whether systems thank you small that that there that it is a really good place it seems to me it's a really good moment for these glitches to appear and then to be capitalized on right not as moments of garbage actually but just as these kind of eruptions of difference and I am I am committed to difference I am completely unsatisfied all different ways or no but I'm committed to the possibility of difference even when it's ugly and it doesn't matter and it ends up being a detriment to a project or a mistake or you know any of the even even then I still appreciate the fact that it was in the world even for a little bit because it strikes me that one of the consequences of this kind of collective a failure to be able to imagine that we are capable of behaving differently than or making a then how we're behaving now or making a difference in the world all of those things a kind of collective failure of a kind of a gentle imagination come from a kind of leveling fog of sameness that seems to have blanketed our imaginations with too much of almost exactly the same thing so just for the audience because we didn't get there yet where does the concept of remote consonants come from it comes from Arnold Schoenberg's [Music] theory of harmony because you know for those of you who know but the atonal movement many of the composition all the compositions probably for decades sounded like they sounded like noise they were disruptive they were they graded it was very very difficult to intuit the the integrated unity shall we say and the relationships of pattern of tonal pattern that unified the musical the musical events and Schoenberg in his later life here in Los Angeles actually he wrote this incredible book called the theory of harmony he basically revealed to all of us that it wasn't dissonance that he was looking for that he actually pointed he actually worked everything out mathematically such that he believed that we stretch if you like the relationships the mathematical relationships of tone and that the the ear and the brain so to speak would eventually be able to associate them and hear them as is integrated unified and even it integrated music that would actually move us if you like move our inner music and that's directly applicable sorry I don't mean to rush you out of your thought but I'm conscious that we actually have to start questions Oh in a minute and so then of course I wanted to get a last word it the word no guys that's that that's the that's the that's one of the most applicable directly clickable concepts that I can think of into architecture and I'm really glad that you brought it up it's because what are we trying to train people to do in places like CyArk except to design architecture for the future for future ears let's say for future brains but not just any futures not just the kind of dystopian futures or extinct futures right but for futures that we actually collectively decide that we value and want to aim for good last word yeah you

Channel: SCI-Arc Media Archive

Views: 2,689

Rating: 4.7647057 out of 5

Keywords: Architectural theory, Architectural discourse, Difference, Disruptions, Glitches, Gregory Bateson, Status quo, Gilbert Simondon, Imagination, Ontology, Ecology, Nature, Cosmology, Arnold Schoenberg, Serial composition

Id: 7ed7JtoWhdM

Length: 45min 38sec (2738 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 26 2018