prototyping-times/visceral-facades/visceral_facades.ipynb

In [5]:

import re
with open("Visceral_Facades.txt") as f:
    text = f.read()

tt = re.split(r"\n+", text)

In [12]:

with open("visceral_facades.lua", "w") as fout:
    print ("text={}", file=fout)
    for i,p in enumerate(tt):
        ep = p.strip().replace('"', r'\"')
        print (f'text[{i}]="{ep}"', file=fout)

Now with textwrap

In [13]:

with open("Visceral_Facades.txt") as f:
    text = f.read()
tt = re.split(r"\n+", text)

import textwrap

WIDTH=41

for i,p in enumerate(tt):
    p = p.strip()
    lines = textwrap.wrap(p, WIDTH)
    for line in lines:
        print (line)

Visceral Facades: taking Matta-Clark's
crowbar to software.
Architecture was the first art of
measurement of time and space. Ancient
megalithic structures such as Stonehenge
are the ancestors of the machine you are
reading this text on. Whereas computers
build up from the scale of electrons
rather than that of giant lumps of stone
and the tasks they complete are abstract
and changeable, rather than specific and
singular, they both remain physical
instantiations of abstract logic into
which energy is fed in order to produce
results to one or more of a range of
potential calculations embodied in their
structure.
Nowadays, as films such as Die Hard and
novels such as Gridlock are so keen to
show us, buildings and telecommunications
are profoundly interrelated. As
architecture is caught up in the mesh of
the 'immaterial', of security and
communications systems, of gating and
processing (think of an airport) its
connection to its originary development
as geometry realised in synthetic space
becomes ever more apparent. The
proliferation of special effects that
effect consciousness of time and distance
and the perception of the environment in
a context where maximum stratification
combines in the same device with maximum
fluidity, is presented as an abrupt break
with an older style of architecture
wherein power can be deciphered by the
maximum possession of space.
In a short story, Tangents, science
fiction writer Greg Bear introduces four-
dimensional beings into a three
dimensional shape: something which he
likens to looking at fish through the
corner of an aquarium. The shape that
these fourth dimensional beings appear in
is a normal, two storey house. The house
is gradually, neatly, Swiss-cheesed by a
series of cones, columns, and spheres as
the dimensions intersect.
Possibly, this might be the kind of
effect you'd worry about if you'd invited
Gordon Matta-Clark around to your home.
An artist who trained as an architect,
Matta-Clark was born in New York City in
March 1943 and died in 1978. His most
prolific period, between 1971 and 1976,
occurred within a rich context of
experimental and anti-commercial
dematerialization in both art and
architecture, (although certainly within
the field of 'authorised' architecture,
much of this work remained on a
theoretical and propositional basis).
Matta-Clark carried out his
investigations of architecture and space
through performance, drawing, sculpture,
photography, video, film and material
interventions known as 'cuttings'.
One action carried out in 1974,
Splitting, involved taking a simple
detached wooden house in Englewood, a New
York State dormitory town, and bisecting
it. The house, already slated for
demolition, is cut exactly in two, from
the roof, down the walls and through the
floors to the raised foundation of
building blocks. In the short film which
documents the process a shard of sunlight
streams through the split, effacing the
wall, energising the new structure. The
next stage is to take the rear half of
the house and, supporting it on jacks,
gradually knock away the upper surface of
the foundation at an angle of five
degrees. The back of the house is then
tilted away from the other half of the
structure back onto the now sloping
foundation. Throughout the film, Matta-
Clark can be seen working away at the
building. A scrawny longhair in jeans and
boots doing with a simple toolkit the
serious structural re-adjustment that
only the most deranged of do-it-
yourselfers can dream about.
Another short film, Conical Intersect,
made in 1975 documents an intervention
which is even more reminiscent of the
transdimensional interference of
Tangents. Made during the Paris Biennial
in the area of Les Halles, tellingly
close to the construction of the Centre
George Pompidou - a politically inspired
scheme reminiscent of that other artiste
démolisseur, Baron Hausmann - the cut
probes into two adjoining seventeenth
century 'mansions'. Appearing from the
outside as a series of receding circles,
the cut punctures the building at the
fourth storey and moves upwards towards
the sky. When the outer wall goes
through, the film shows the trio of
people working on the hole perform a
brief can-can on a soon-to-be-demolished
section of floor.
In a 1976 film, Substrait (Underground
Dailies), Matta-Clark explored and
documented some of the underground of New
York City. Grand Central Station, 13th
Street and the Croton Aqueduct are filmed
to show the variety and complexity of the
hidden spaces and tunnels in the
metropolitan area. Somewhat reminiscent
of the ultra-dull documentaries made by
the Canadian National Film Board in the
same period, this film develops an
intimate concern with the material
qualities of the structures under
investigation, and perhaps provides for
the New York sewage system a precursor to
the geek art of the internet. It is
possible to imagine a film of its travels
through the nets made by a software worm,
being of remarkable similarity.
Some of Matta-Clark's work could have
only been produced by someone deeply
familiar with the strange reality of
realty. In Reality Properties: Fake
Estates he bought up fifteen minuscule
sections of land that had been left over
in property deals, or that teetered just
off the edges of architectural plans
drawn slightly out-of-whack: a foot strip
down somebody's driveway, and a square
foot of sidewalk, tiny sections of kerbs
and gutters. Buying up this ludicrous
empire was again part of Matta-Clark's
project of the structural activation of
severed surfaces. It is also an example
of the idiosyncratic manipulation of
rule-based behaviour to achieve different
ends.
Along with the dematerialised art that
provided a context in which this work can
be sensed, the period it was produced in
was also the peak of minimal art. Whilst
Matta-Clark's work is in part concerned
with formalism, the application of
procedures and the revelation of
structural properties, it is precisely
because his work is formally non-
reductive and purposely heterogenic that
it is profoundly at variance to an art
that was only supposed to speak of itself
and of the immaculate connoisseurship of
its audience. This is an artwork that is
exactly the reverse of autonomous. It is
openly dependent on a network of
coincidences and interconnectedness: on
being seen by chance passers-by; on the
receipt or avoidance of bureaucratic
permissions; on the functioning of
recording devices; on good weather; on
not being discovered when acting in
secret; on the theatre of its enaction
being an oxygenation of the still
smouldering embers of history. At the
same time as it articulates the space in
sculptural terms it also complexifies it
in terms of its placehood, as an object,
and within its social, chronological and
economic contexts.
Knowing that there is freedom in suprise,
it is along this fault line of
rationality and the non-rational that
Gordon Matta-Clark runs his fingers.
Fingers which he also uses to tease
another split - that between art and
architecture. Comparable to his
relationship to minimal art, rather than
partaking in the functionalist urban
sublime of the glass and steel skyscraper
typified in the architecture of Mies van
der Rohe - with its interior opened to
make it more governable - Matta-Clark's
work operates a dis-enclosure of urban
space: its malfunctions, voids, shadows.
The tension inherent in such spaces is
portrayed well by Gilles Deleuze in
describing "any-space-whatever" the half-
urban, half-waste lands often used as
sets and exteriors in post World War Two
films: "Any-space-whatever is a perfectly
singular space, which has merely lost its
homogeneity, that is, the principle of
its metric relations or the connection of
its own parts, so that linkages can be
made in an infinite number of ways" This
tension between particularity and
obliteration found in the European
bombsite translated well into the
conditions in which Matta-Clark worked
out of necessity and choice: buildings
eviscerated by the progress of urban
restructuring.
"There is a kind of complexity that comes
from taking an otherwise completely
normal, conventional, albeit anonymous
situation and redefining it,
retranslating it into overlapping and
multiple readings of conditions past and
present"
As an aside, this too easy lock-down into
textuality implied by the use of the word
'reading' is of his time, (and one
replicated in perpetuity by artists
hungry for the valorising seal of textual
authority) but it rather understates the
multiple sensory affect of the work. It
is this aspect, of working with material
that is in the process of being made
anonymous, generic - yet turning it into
an engine of connotation - that is
particularly suggestive for a context
that, in its apparent dematerialization
seems most likely to resist it: software.
Software lacks the easy evidence of time,
of human habitation, of the connotations
of familial, industrial or office life
embedded in the structure of a building.
As a geometry realised in synthetic
space, it is an any-space-whatever, but
dry-cleaned and prised out of time.
Use of the computer happens at many
levels, both hard and soft. A crucial
difference with how we traditionally
understand architecture, rather than what
it is becoming under the impact of
information technologies, is that
everything necessarily happens at human
scale. That the size, and to a certain
extent the organisation, of people has a
determining effect on the shape of the
building. Conversely, the axiomatics that
channel and produce the behaviour
necessary for use of computers happen at
both human and subscopic scale. The hard
organs of the computer: mouse, keyboard,
modem, microphone, monitor, though all
matched to greater or lesser extents to
human form, all snake back to the CPU.
Whilst what is of interest here is an
investigation of the moment of
composition between user and computer,
and not a reiteration of text-book
schematics, it is worth noting that
simply because they occur at the level of
electrons the axes of software are
impossible to find for the average user.
Just as when watching a film we miss out
the black lines in between the frames
flashing past at 24 per second, the
invisible walls of software are designed
to remain inscrutable. However, the fact
that these subscopic transformation of
data inside the computer are
simultaneously real and symbolic; where
the most abstract of theoretical terms to
be found in mathematics becomes a thing,
allows the possibility of a kinaesthetic
investigation. An investigation that
opens up a chance for dialogue between
the smooth running of the machine and
material that might be thought of as
contamination within the terms of its
devices.
Much of the 'legitimate' writing and
artistic production on information
technology is concerned with expanding
the application of the theoretical
devices used to recognise replication and
simulation, (what constitutes 'the real')
and of those used to recognise
surveillance. These themes, carried over
most commonly from debates around
photography and architecture, are of
course suggestive and in some cases
useful, but in the easiness of their
translation we should not forget that
they are moving into a context that
subsumes them and is not marked by their
boundaries. In acknowledging the distinct
interconnectedness of the symbolic and
material, this is also an approach which
is opposed to the conception of
'virtuality' being taken as the desired
end state of digital technology: taking
virtuality as a condition which is
contained and made possible by the
actuality of digital media.
To provide the skewed access to the
machines that such an investigation
requires we can siphon some fuel from the
goings-on of Gordon Matta-Clark: use
faults; disturb conventions; exploit
idiosyncrasies.
Faults arise in systems when the full
consequences of technical changes are not
followed through before the changes are
made, or are deliberately covered up.
This is an enormous game of hiding and
finding being played by a cast of
millions and one which has wide
ramifications. Perhaps the most crucial
faultlines being traced at the moment are
those around security: the world of
minutiae that compose the integrity of
existence in dataspace and the way it
maps back onto everyday life.
The profoundest restructuring of
existence is taking place at the levels
of the electron and the gene. Technical
complexity, commercial pressure and the
mechanisms of expression management are
blocking almost all real public discourse
on the former. They are less able to do
so to the latter.
Whether radical or reactionary,
traditional political structures have,
either deliberately or through drastic
relevance-decay, abdicated almost all
decision making in these areas to
commercial interests. From a similar
catalogue of stock characters to that of
the artist, the pariah/hero figure of the
hacker has largely set the pace for any
critical understanding of the changes
happening in and between information
technologies.
Picking up a random copy of the hacker
zine 2600 - summer 1996 - the scale and
ramifications of issues being dealt with
in this area becomes apparent. Subjects
covered include: an editorial on the
position of hackers in the legal system
and media; the code of a LINUX program to
block internet sites by flooding them
with connection requests; a list of free
phone carriers in Australia; acquiring
phone services under imaginary names; the
telecommunications infrastructure in
Prague and Sarajevo; encryption; consumer
data security; catching passwords to
specific multi-user computer systems;
passenger in-flight communications
systems; phreaking smart pay-phones;
starting a hacker scene; the
transcription of part of a court case
involving the show trial of hacker,
Bernie S; plus pages of small ads and
letters. (Perhaps noticeable in comparing
the importance of these scenes with that
of art is that the second-order
commentary on the work comes mainly from
the media/legal system rather than just
critics).
The faults identified by hackers and
others, where ethico-aesthetic situations
are compounded under sheer pressure into
technical ones, are implicated in wider
mechanisms. These technical situations
can be investigated from any point or
development within these wider mechanisms
regardless of the degree of technical
proficiency. Cracking open technical
situations with the wider social
conditions within which they occur is an
increasingly necessary task. Doing so in
a manner that creates a transversal
relationship between different, perhaps
walled-off, components, and that
intimately works the technical with other
kinds of material or symbolic devices is
something that remains to be developed.
Tracking the faults, the severed
surfaces, of technology is one way in
which this can begin to be done.
This intimacy, as well as concerning
itself with the cracks and disjunctures,
the faults in systems, can also become
involved in situations where they appear
to be most smooth. For the average user,
the conventions of personal computers
appear secure, rational, almost natural,
if a little awkward and tricky at times.
Like many social protocols, computer use
is a skill which is forgetful of its
acquisition. Perhaps that user can
remember back to when they first got hold
of a machine, when they were waving a
mouse in the air to get the cursor to
move towards them; afraid to touch the
wrong key in case it damaged something;
saving files all over the place; trying
to draw curves in Pagemaker; putting
floppies in upside-down; trying to work a
cracked copy of CuBase with something
missing; learning how to conform to the
machine in order to make the machine
conform to them...
In computer interface design the form-
function fusion is made on the basis of
averages, a focus grouped reality based
on peoples' understanding of a context in
which it is impossible for them to
function unless they develop the
understanding already been mapped out for
them. Perhaps in this context, the user
will always be the ideal user, because if
they are not ideal - if, within this
context at least, they do not conform to
the ideal - they won't be a user.
Interface design is a discipline that
aspires to saying nothing. Instead of
trying to crack this invisibility, one
technique for investigation is to tease
it into overproduction. Why use one
mouse-click when ten-thousand will do?
Why use any visual information when
navigation is perfectly possible with
sound alone? Why just look at the
interface, why not print it out and wear
it? Why read text on screen when a far
better technology is paper? Why use a
cursor when the object you're actually
pointing at can function perfectly well
to indicate the mouse position?
In any other social context, what because
of the arbitrary nature of the abstract
machine appear as protocols, would be
revealed as mannerisms. (Take a fast taxi
through the ruined neighbourhoods of
cyberspace by travelling through
emulators of old computers: punch a hole
in the surface of your shiny new machine
by loading up the black hole of a 1k
ZX81). When the construction of machines
from the fundamental objects of the
hardware: bits, bytes, words, addresses,
upwards are realised to be synthetic
rather than given, or even necessarily
rational - though produced through the
application of rationalisation, logic -
they become subject to wider
possibilities for change. Software as an
aggregate of very small sensory
experiences and devices becomes an
engine, not just of connotation, but of
transformation.
Some of those transformations in
occurrence can be sensed in the sheer
idiosyncrasy of much software. In the
Atrocity Exhibition and other books, J.G.
Ballard mixes flat, technical
descriptions of body positions as they
come into composition with the synthetic
geometry of architecture, automobiles,
furnishings, to produce an investigation
of machined erotics. He continues and
intensifies the Surrealist stratagem of
cutting together transgressed
functionalities in order to regain entry
to the order of the symbolic. To an
objective observer, the transitory point
at which a thigh comes into convergence
with a table also suggests the way in
which the original Microsoft Windows
interface was bolted on top of the old
DOS language. The tectonic impact of two
neural landscapes performs an operation
called progress. The software is tricked
into doing something more than it was
intended for. Instead of dramatic breaks,
hacks and incrementally adaptive
mutations are often the way things are
made to move forward. (For instance on
Apple computers, the desktop is already
being bypassed by the absorption of some
of the functions of the finder into
various applications. From being a
grossly over-metaphoric grand entrance
hall, it has become a back alley). When
they work well they are elegant usable
collages. Often they are botch jobs. In
both cases, the points at which the
systems mesh, collide, or repel, can, at
the points of confused demarcation,
produce secret gardens, car parks, lamps
that fuck.
Idiosyncrasies can also develop when a
software system is applied to a situation
in toto. Perhaps most obviously,
databases. The production of software
dedicated to knowledge organisation and
information retrieval, a field largely
seen as the domain of linguists and
computer scientists, immediately brings
with it a range of problematics that are
at once both cultural and technical. The
technology underlying search engines and
databases - set theory - is based on
creating classifications of information
according to arbitrarily or contingently
meaningful schemes. It is in the
application and development of those
schemes with all their inevitable biases
and quirks that the aesthetics of
classification lies.
Attuned to quantifying; organising;
isolating and drawing into relationships,
particular cases of the possible and
working them till they bleed some kind of
relevance, databases exist firmly on the
cusp of the rational and non-rational.
When the Subjective Exercise Experiences
Scale locks onto the Human Genome
Initiative processing library stock-
holding data: prepare for something
approaching poetry.
Perhaps in some ways sensing into the
future this destratification of
conventions is the architecture of the
internet. This, (almost despite its
position within and between various
political, commercial and bureaucratic
formations) after all, is a network which
functions on a basis of being broken,
continuously finding the shortest route
between nodes: even as a squatter will
always see the empty buildings on any
street before those that are full. At
these shifting, transitory points where
sensoriums intermesh, repel, clash and
resynthesize are the possibilities for a
ludic transdimensionality. Knock through
a wall, and beyond the clouds of brick
dust clogging up and exciting your eyes,
tongue, palate and throat, there's
another universe: an empty,
unclassifiable complex seething with
life.
Matthew Fuller, May 1997
I/O/D

In [22]:

def esc (t):
    return t.replace('"', r'\"')

with open("visceral_facades.lua", "w") as fout:
    print ("text={}", file=fout)
    for pid,p in enumerate(tt):
        p = p.strip()
        lines = textwrap.wrap(p, WIDTH)
        print (f'text[{pid}]={{}}', file=fout)
        for lineid, line in enumerate(lines):
            print (f'text[{pid}][{lineid}]="{esc(line)}"', file=fout)

In [ ]: