HauntedGeographies

78

/ / / / / /MonkeyGone
ToHeaven

design | elsewhere | nonspace

77

/ / / / / /Neo
Geography

It’s all about Geography.

Cribbed this off Rhizome and I’d love to see the show. Nato Thompson, one of the editors of ‘The Interventionists’, has just curated Experimental Geography with iCI in New York.

Interestingly, he notes geography’s unique ability to contain and understand hybridity. Many ‘inter-disciplinary practices are still finding their feet’ and burgeoning discourses are temporarily flying geography's flag of convenience.

geography

76

/ / / / / /DesignAs
OpenWork

Whilst conducting some exploratory research I was reminded of the wonderful work of Dré Wapenaar. It confirms that Dunne & Raby’s (oft cited) categories of ‘affirmative’ and ‘critical’ design, still have some currency.

wapenaar | critical design | itinerant | geo-justice | taz

75

/ / / / / /Gelatin
TheBThing

I love this Gelatin project— did they or didn’t they?

!!! For a start, I can’t even hyperlink to their site, for whatever reasons!!!

Google: gelatin.net and it’s the second one down
Scroll down to The B-Thing.

This is an artefact caught in a claustrophobic web of relationships, now petrified and deified.

They built a temporary platform (allegedly) on the 148th floor of one of the Twin Towers, a piece of chewing gum marked the occasion. They documented the event in a book, ‘The B-Thing’, something that nowadays would be considered ‘hostile reconnaissance’.

I first came across the book back in the Spin days, just after 9-11 when it was studio currency. It has since become an extraordinary object, taking on a life of its own.

design | hyperstition | gelatin

74

/ / / / / /Mining
Hyperstition

I really like this term, hyperstition. As far as I can work out, it’s a neologism that emanates from the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit (CCRU)— a now defunct group that was connected to the Philosophy Department of Warwick University. Nick Land, Sadie Plant and bunch of PhD students (KPunk / Steve Goodman et al) doing their own thing in the mid to late nineties. (see also: Kodwo Eshun / Orphan Drift)

Essentially the CCRU read hyperstition as the way that ‘fictions make themselves real’— a birthing process that seems close to Maturana and Varela’s bringing forth of worlds. As narrative flows traverse the real-and-imagined some coalesce and harden. In addition, there appear to be certain practices (ritual, writing or design) that seem to catalyse and speed up these phase transitions. The CCRU piece on Burroughs is typical. Highly esoteric and at times reading like a piece of pulp fiction, it essentially explores writing’s ability to intervene and program reality.

I suspect that my use of this term is somewhat at odds with its original intent and I’m guilty of perverting its original meaning, undertaking some ‘concept engineering’ of my own. It seems that the CCRU had a very nuanced understanding of reality and that fiction was never meant to be ‘opposed to the real’. Equally, hyperstition was not an exercise in post-modern ‘ontological skepticism’, where everything is fiction and nothing is real. They were more positive, more hopeful, interested in nurturing multiplicity and over-producing the real— generating critiques of ‘authorised’ reality and deregulating ‘One God Universes’.

Alas, having been weaned on The Bomb and St John, my imagination has turned out somewhat apocalyptic and nihilistic. There is an aspect of hyperstition (the monkey on the shoulder) that scares the ‘big-jesus’ out of those who hold the universe to be rational. Post-modern thumb nosing, hinting at the absurdity of reality, a ‘horror’ that makes more sense as a fiction, a game or a joke.

I think this is why I prefer to talk about the ‘real-and-imagined’ as a compound, refusing to define individual elements as either ‘real’ or ‘fictive’— leaving the whole thing to vibrate as a ‘undecidable’. It provides a place of refuge and a space to breath, a buffer from essentialist worldviews and those who pedal panoptic gods. There is respite in these border spaces. The kind of critical utopias that emerge through Marions erasures, or perhaps, even via Augustine’s apophatic bracketing.

Tinkering the term further— as a graphic designer, I make no excuses for the fact that I am intoxicated by the power of words and their ability to terraform. This is when typography becomes a machine to live in, quite literally, a place to inhabit. Lacan famously spoke about words that engendered the ‘world of things’ and Wittgenstein how our universes are delimited by language— cosmological narratives and fictions.

The expansion and contraction of hyperstitional territories is fascinating— geography, ‘writing the world’. It is interesting to read metaverses and mixed realities through this lens too. Experimental places that prototype experience and effectively operate as speculative geographies.

As the ‘trial separation of bits and atoms’ draws to a close and we rediscover medieval notions of reality, the boundaries between the real and the virtual collapse. Technology, particularly locative media, is creating a ‘denser now’, an ever-growing complex tapestry of links and associations— sentient landscapes, data shadows and information auras. In the light of this, it’s interesting to view hyperstition in terms of osmosis and reality leakage— a process by which trespasstory objects effortlessly dance across the real-and-imagined. A contemporary real-time ‘Atrocity Exhibition’, recombinant narratives, where not only historical figures, but chimerical objects of every shape and size interact to generate a plethora of fictions.

I suppose there could come a point when hyperstitional artefacts get networked, one big promiscuous mash-up, where realities collide and events are knowingly and unknowingly tied to each other. Metaverses, mirror-worlds, games and AR (even desktop bio engineering) collide and hyperstion becomes nested and scalable. Waves and waves of emergent trans-reality feedback loops— networked fiction.

design | hyperstition | ccru | terraforming | fiction

73

/ / / / / /MappingThe
LabourOfBelief

‘(T)he scriptures can be understood as narratives about created objects that enable the major created object, namely God, to describe the interior structure of all making.’

Elaine Scarry — The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World.

I’m still only two-thirds through this extraordinary book— having already journeyed through the anatomy of torture and war, the relationship of loss and imagination; and the ‘weaponry’ of belief. It is a wonderful analysis of the components of creativity.

The quote above is my haunted geography. It eerily reflects the ‘actors’ at work in this blog, the ever-shifting territory of: stuff, fiction, loss, and identity— in short, design. The book particularly resonates, as Scarry draws heavily from Hebrew and Christian sources. It echoes my own personal bio(geo)graphy.

The trajectories of: stuff, fiction, loss, and identity are fascinating. If you organize these artefacts one way, you could arrive at theology, do it another and you get design. Likewise, certain patterns could quite easily open up into science fiction.

The chapter on the structure of belief I found particularly poignant; God, the ‘bodiless voice’ or ‘the wounder’, is consistently mediated either by weapons or through acts of violence. Throughout the Old Testament the ‘unseen’, disembodied voice, becomes present through extreme modifications to the human body. In the New Testament a shift in imagination and perception occurs, and body modification becomes more benign. However, as God descends ‘to the underside of the knife’ (swops sides), Christ becomes the ‘weapon’, the conduit and the primary medium. The ‘actants’ have not changed; they have just re-aggregated; the empty cross confirms a commitment to the grammar of violence. As Scarry says: ‘the weapon becomes the primary sign and summary of the entire religion’.

Which brings me onto Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus Chapel in Germany. It may be obtuse to align Zumthor’s chapel with Scarry’s thesis, but, somewhere I sense a pattern— I want to bring the two together and complete the diagonal.

I think I’m reading the chapel’s burnt-out core as a ‘Lazarus Taxon’, a vibratory object that dances across the real and imagined. Such slippery artefacts begin to set up a grammar of loss, an idiosyncratic collection of synecdoche: phantom limbs, cosmonaut dogs, Marilyn Monroe with Paul Tibbets, ‘insectoid psychosis’ and obscure gaps in jazz records; all these things leave a residue.

The Bruder Klaus Chapel is deeply poetic. For a start, it was actually built by its congregation, essentially a piece of collaborative media. Local farmers assembled the wooden sub-frame before the concrete sleeve was poured. However, what I find most interesting is the scarification of the inside and the un-making that lies at the heart of its construction. The building has remembered how it was made, and these memories have become petrified echoes. It is the void that now testifies.

Scarry also talks about the agonizing labour of sustaining belief. Zumthor’s chapel is a beautiful synecdoche. It speaks about the ‘trace’ of faith, and the exacting pressure of artefacts. The implacable wall of doubt that perpetually lies in ones peripheral vision and the haunted geography of belief.

It is a theatre of war.

design | scarry | zumthor | weapon | lazarus taxa | fiction

72

/ / / / / /Edge
2008

Really hate doing these posts, dead lazy (posts about posts)— sorry! For now check this out. The 2008 World Question Centre from Edge. I spent most of last night blowing my mind and being scared, its great. They purposely seem to have located their question somewhere between science, philosophy and religion.

‘When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that's faith.
When facts change your mind, that's science.’

They asked a ton of clever people: ‘What Did You Change Your Mind About in 2007?’

edge | speculation

71

/ / / / / /Friday
Stuff

Street Art 2007 should interest a few of you. Although I’m not sure about the term ‘Street Art’; or what it’s become? Really nice to see Nick Philips of Anarchic Adjustment (old skool) in the role call and the very cheeky line: ‘Open Studio: for life, not just for Christmas’!

The mighty AndyH sent this from semi-retirement in Spain. Now this is great.

design | artwankers | algorithms

70

/ / / / / /Grafik
YearReview

It was nice to get picked up in the Grafik end of year review. Although, I’m not quite sure what’s happened with the front cover (SEA must have finished their tenure). I’ll expand upon the notion of mobile phone as reality loom in future posts.

grafik magazine | design | reality loom

69

/ / / / / /LikeFacesIn
Sand

KPunk has just posted this beautifully nuanced piece here.

mindfulness