Category: Late Capitalism

Siege Engines, Mother-boxes, Stub-makers and Iceberg-ticklers

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A week or so ago, Ryan of Adaptive Path conducted a long, looping interview with me over IM where we covered the above and beyond.

Of course, this was meant to be something punchy, level-headed and action-packed as a promotion for their upcoming MX event, where people want to hear about the business-like practicalities and opportunities of ‘design thinking’ etc.

Instead they got something that Peter accurately described as ‘DVD-extras’, and I’m pretty comfortable with that.

For me, at least, and YMMV of course – crispy, crunchy blue-shirt and chinos bullet-points don’t do it. Design, invention and making comes out of play, punning and rambling on – generative, diverging and looping and splicing.

I’m very glad that Ryan decided to do the interview in IM, rather than emailing me questions that I could respond to as if in an exam. It’s a fun mess, that I’m glad to say Peter returned to and found a seed of something to advance further himself: the influence that our new ability of visualising shared behaviours has on our old ability as a social species to flock.

I’m hoping that my talk at MX will have a little more discipline to it, but still have enough DVD extras there for people to pick out and run with. If you register for MX, then use the discount code AP have given me: “MXMJ”, you’ll get 15% off the
registration price…

“The Earth is becoming unearthly” – Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett

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Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

Bldgblog
Bartlett
23.1.08

RAW NOTES:

Free software and access = no obligation so feeds enthusiasm ?like sunlight or vitamin c?
(He speaks very fast in a NE USA accent this is not going to be a transcript)

Archigram x Ballard x Philadelphia x depression x claustrophobia = start of bldgblog

A catalogue of enjoyment.

Changed his life.
> Map of climate zones in europe projected in europe 2071 from the guardian
How do design climate-appropriately for a rapidly changing climate? What is site-specificity in this dynamic context?

Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett

Refs “solastaglia” cf. Collision Detection (http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2005/12/solastalgia.html) – climate-change melancholy. Losing a homeland without moving anywhere
Will future pharma companies sell you pill to combat climate change
Obsessed by the fact that the earth is becoming unearthly
Showing projected maps of the future coastline is in some senses “adventure tourism”
Be aware of the risks of showing these images – might be exciting rather than prohibitive

Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett

Quotes from “The Drowned World”
> Shows billboard architecture
Could climate change refugees be clinging to billboards on the hammersmith flyover?

Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett

> Battleship island, japan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashima_Island

> Bannermans island: private home of the world’s biggest arms dealer at the time of the spanish-american war

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bannerman’s_Castle

Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett

Rumour was that he used faulty cannons as rebar-the thoughts of turning weapons into architecture is exciting
> Island fortress of the coast of india
> Maunsell towers off whitstable – influence for archigram
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunsell_Forts

Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett

Texas tower off the coast of new jersey – post-war
http://www.radomes.org/museum/documents/TexasTower.html

> Oilrigs by statoil
– Man standing on the seabed
Costs about the same as flat in downtown manhattan / camden designed by rogers
The premium offshore oil-rig market could be tapped into
Dubai terraforming
– The thing that you don’t realise is the scale
Dubai is very disappointing, very boring. Invest that much money and all you can come with is dumb homes for sports-stars? That much hubris, time, money and slave labour? And that?s all you come with? Islands in the shape of a palm tree?

> Artifical reefs – what if archigram had been active in this area?

Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett

– Looks remarkable looks like chinese armillary spheres- jesuit astronomy instruments
– The reef has a brand on it.
– In 300yrs when this is a “quote/unquote” a natural object – someone will find a logo.
– Sovereign control of undersea structures: there is a feature under the sea between china and japan. Japanese are cultivating coral in order to grow an island so that they can make the territory claim.
What do artificial islands imply for the future of sovereign territory: is the future of colonialism reef science?

George Perec: worms/table/epoxy
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Users-Manual-Georges-Perec/dp/0879237511
China Mieville: slow sculpture
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/sciencefiction/0,,1312147,00.html
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/demolition-sculptures-or-sandblasting.html

The evolution of the landmass of north america >california is not solid ground – it is “the remnants of islands, former continents, lost indonesias”

Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett

Google Earth: Ron blakey geology maps
http://tinyurl.com/223rmr

San andreas fault is itself an assemblage of microfaults

Taipei 101 is activating the surface of the earth – causing minor tectonic faults – is it a long term weapon?

The interaction between architecture, weight and the earth’s surface could be further explored
The more people move to LA and build, the safer it will be to live there. The anti-taipei101. Pin the earth down.
We could be massaging the tension out of the earth surface with traffic.

A view to a kill – christopher walken and “terrestrial weaponisation”

Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett

US military: “Earthquake Array”

Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett

The us military is the real Archigram.

Modular, portable cities, temporary structures, flexible autonomous cities
Dungeon instancing/sharding: in WoW – what are the implications of that for architecture. If you had billions of dollars and very nimble stagehands you could perhaps achieve this effect in the physical world. If I walk into the same building 5 mins later to you? Is it the same?

Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett

Subterranea Brittanica
http://www.subbrit.org.uk/
Where have all the trapdoors gone? Why doesn?t pret-a-manger have trapdoors?
Border tunnels – hidden entrances in cargo containers on the border. Crosses through sovereign space into a store front in mexico. “The border is filigreed with this sort of thing. Landscape experiences that are not available to you if you are law-abiding”
Ground-penetrating radar – non invasive archeology

Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett

Underground cities could be faked? if you hack the GPR?
Biking under london from bethnal green to whitehall – in the 80s?
Urban exploration: burgeoning
Michael Cook/toronto: interview on bldgblog
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/drains-of-canada-interview-with-michael.html
Different tunnel technology sound different – you can almost sonically-navigate around

Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett

From underworld to offworld
Mars rovers are the landscape photographers of the future
The new landscapes of the sublime are off-world
Kim Stanley Robinson: comparative planetology is a new thought process for humans.
We’re exporting a earth-centric template onto the other.

Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett

> Columbia hills complex of mars of memorial sites for dead astronauts
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4143223/
“Mars is becoming earth through our melancholy”
Mars analogue site is being constructed on earth: mars conditions and appearance.
We are making mars like earth and earth like mars, either deliberately on a small scale like this or accidentally on a large scale through climate change :

These are interesting times – “The Earth is becoming unearthly”

Malaccamax

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Is a new word I learned today from Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian, in his story about the global container transport system.Malaccamax, from Wikipedia:

“Malaccamax is a naval architecture term for the largest ships capable of fitting through the Straits of Malacca. A Malaccamax ship is defined to be, with 18,000 TEUs, of 300,000 DWT, 470m long, 60m wide, 20m of draft. The restriction is caused by the shallow point on the Strait, where minimum depth is 25 metres.

A post malaccamax ship would need to circumnavigate Australia, use the Lombok Strait, or use the proposed yet-unbuilt Kra Canal.”

Also – must go and order “The Box” by Marc Levinson.

From Burkeman’s piece:

“Under a bullet-grey sky this week at Felixstowe, Britain’s largest container port, it is easy to grasp why nobody pays much attention to the transport system that provides us with 95% of all imported goods. Where ports once seethed with life – the shops, tradespeople, pubs and brothels dependent on regular passing crews – Felixstowe, with its strict security controls, feels virtually abandoned. The mountains of containers, painted in browns, blues, oranges and greens, make for a desolately beautiful landscape. And the giant gantry cranes, which sweep the containers up and on or off the waiting ships with balletic grace, are mesmerising to watch, except that there is almost nobody there to watch. The few drivers and crane operators present on the quay are following the instructions of a computer that has calculated the precise order in which the containers should be moved and stacked for maximum efficiency, so that a single container’s journey from ship to waiting lorry is as short as possible and no truck ever drives anywhere empty when it could be carrying something. In Rotterdam, Europe’s busiest port, the scene is even ghostlier: the vehicles moving the containers from the stacks on the ground to the waiting cranes are driverless, piloting themselves even through thick fog using infra-red technology.

The desolation is only interrupted when the sheer vastness of the process seizes the public imagination, as it did last November when the world’s largest cargo liner, the Emma Maersk, arrived at Felixstowe carrying 45,000 tonnes of Christmas gifts from China. Crowds lined the port’s security perimeter to study the vessel, which is half a mile long and was stacked 200ft high, although even then people failed to grasp the speed with which the industry operates. “We were getting calls from people two weeks later asking if she was still in port,” says Rachael Jackson, a spokeswoman for Felixstowe port, which handles more than 40% of Britain’s import-export cargo. “But if we did things at that speed we’d never make any money. She was gone in 24 hours.”

To Do List

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Reposted from Bruce Sterling’s Viridian List, BP’s Lord Browne in Fortune magazine on why humanity better start with it’s GTD:

“Build 700 nuclear stations to replace fossil-fuel-
burning power plants, or increasing the use of solar
power by a factor of 700, or stopping all deforestation
and doubling present efforts at reforestation. Achieve
all three of these, and pull off four more equally
large-scale reallocations of capital and
infrastructure, and the world would probably stabilize
its carbon emissions.”

Ay yi yi.

The Grim Meathook Future

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Beachboys of Bethlehem by Banksy, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

Joshua Ellis, republished by Jim Rossignol:

“Feeding poor people is useful tech, but it’s not very sexy and it won’t get you on the cover of Wired. Talk about it too much and you sound like an earnest hippie. So nobody wants to do that.

“They want to make cell phones that can scan your personal measurements and send them real-time to potential sex partners. Because, you know, the f*cking Japanese teenagers love it, and Japanese teenagers are clearly the smartest people on the planet.

“The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherf*ckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherf*ckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another.

“Of course, nobody really wants to talk about that future, because it’s depressing and not fun and doesn’t have Fischerspooner doing the soundtrack. So everybody pretends they don’t know what the future holds, when the unfortunate fact is that — unless we start paying very serious attention — it holds what the past holds: a great deal of extreme boredom punctuated by occasional horror and the odd moment of grace.”

Meatspace is the place

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From a blistering K-punk on Live8 (which includes a reference to “Teleo-Marxism”- awesome!), comes a line that I plan to pull out of it’s current K-punkian context and transplant to the field of tangible/embodied interaction design to drop as much as possible:

“In addition to anything else, to ignore the crucial functioning of the meat in the machine is poor cybernetics.”


I want to be invited to a college design crit as soon as possible just to be able to say that.