Ignite Toronto 4: Tim Maly: Happy Birthday, “Cyborg”! from Ignite Toronto on Vimeo.

photo credit: kirainet

This’ll be the last explicit post about Cyborgs and Architects for awhile (here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5). Having set up and then blurred a division between adapting people for the environment and adapting the environment for people, I’d like to point out some examples along the sliding scale between these two attitudes.

1. Nadya Vessey, temporary mermaid.

   New Zealand’s WETA workshop built a mermaid suit for Vessey, a double leg amputee. I love everything about this story, especially the way it offers a glimpse of a future where enhancements are not merely restoring human capabilities but opportunities for creating whole new kinds of bodies, bringing aesthetics to cybernetics.

2. Steve Mann, pioneer in wearable computing.

   You can see the evolution of his setup here. He has also done a lot of interesting work and activism around ubiquitous surveillance.

   I remember in 1996 trying to convince a bunch of skeptical law students that wearable computing would change the way they practiced the law.

   Now they all have blackberries.

3. Kevin Warwick, cybernetic homesteader.

   In 1998, Dr Warwick had a chip implanted under his skin that let him control the building. The experiment brilliantly illustrates the blurring between architecture and cybernetics. Neither the smart building, nor the implant chip are worth anything on their own. But networked, the result is something special.

   His research continues.

4. Kisho Kurokawa, metabolist.

   In 1972, his capsule tower was built. A explicitly modifiable structure, the intention was that the capsules would be replaced and updated over time, creating a long lasting building through its very mutability and flexibility.

   Here was an environment that would grow and adapt to its users. Sadly, it seems like the maintenance part didn’t go as planned and now the whole structure faces demolition.

5. Minoru Yamasaki, modernist.

   Yamasaki is the architect of the destroyed WTC Towers, but I’m picking on him here for the disastrous Pruitt-Igoe public housing project. A lot of ink has been spilled about what went wrong, but in the end, the environment that had been constructed failed dramatically, becoming a symbol for the failure of the well-meaning but flawed modernist “machines for living” mentality.

   “I never thought people were that destructive,” lamented Yamasaki.

6. Albert Speer, Nazi.

   Perhaps one of the leading examples of the idea that architecture can control people, Speer designed the Zeppelinfeld, the enormous stadium featured in The Triumph of the Will. Nazi architecture was predicated on the idea that it should not only serve the people, but also influence their mood and behaviours.

   For a smaller scale (and more benevolent) take, see also police commissioner William J. Bratton and the fixing broken windows theory.

All of: Cyborgs & Architects

photo credit: ElDave

In 4 Jonah poked some holes the Architect half of the division I’d set up. I’d like to spend 5 looking at the Cyborg’s story.

In the first two Terminator movies, Arnold is cast as the classic cyborg, a nearly unstoppable man-machine. Incredibly durable and adaptable, he takes freely from his environment, arriving in the present literally naked and acquiring the equipment he needs along the way. He is supremely self-reliant.

Except.

Except that in order to show up in the present, there needed to be a working time machine. In order for him to even exist, there needed to be Skynet and enormous factories full of vats connected to assembly devices.

This is the invisible infrastructure of cyborgs.

Sometime in the 90s until 2006, the U.S. Army replaced “Be All You Can Be” with “Army of One”. Advertising for the campaign featured hardcore-looking soldiers with all sorts of high tech gear. The implication being that to join the Army of the 21st century, was to become a stupendous badass. (Sure there was some noise about the “one” being an acronym for “Officers, NCOs, and Enlisted” but who listens to acronyms?)

They certainly are. Consider the infamous Black Hawk Down incident. 18 U.S. soldiers died. Between 130 and 2,000 (that is not a typo) Somalis died. Brutal.

The U.S. Army is probably the most cybernetic military force, in their tendency to prefer increasingly high tech solutions to combat problems.

But a high tech military is supremely reliant on the support staff and logistics that comes with deploying and maintaining the equipment. The logistical operations of the army are dizzying in their complexity. Just getting all of the gear needed into the field is an overwhelming (and expensive) proposition.

The fact is that cybernetic beings can’t be self-reliant. It takes an enormous amount of institutionalized medicine and technology to make a working cyborg. The moment to moment self-reliance of the cyborg can be seen as a kind of infrastructural debt that must be paid back either at another time or by someone else. That someone else can be a willing participant, as in the crew of technicians building and maintaining Robocop between mission, or a victim, as in the hapless bikers who give Arnold the clothes he needs in Terminator.

In the penultimate issue if Warren Ellis’ run on Iron Man, Tony Stark has just taken the Extremis serum and is discovering his new powers.

“Maya, I can see through satellites now,” he says.

Which is all well and good. So long as there are satellites.

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photo credit: slworking2

Impromptu guest post! I’m taking the liberty of reposting this comment about 3 by Jonah from still crapulent.

This cyborg-architecture tension relies on defining architecture as a discipline dealing only with static structures, however. I’m (clearly) not up on my architectural theory, speculative or otherwise, so I don’t know to what extent this definition has been problematized, but it seems to me to be deceptive.

Why must we restrict “architecture” only to stationary built environments? Why do we think of the camper van primarily as a vehicle, as opposed to a building? Are there other productive ways of thinking about architecture and mobility? It is certainly relevant to thinking about the architecture of temporary structures, or does it somehow cease to be a matter of architectural consideration when it becomes a collapsable, portable building?

On the flip side, walking houses, floating castles, fortresses on wheels (baba yaga’s chickenleg house, the castle in the sky, howl’s moving castle, etc.) abound in myth, fantasy and sci-fi, but what about modern cruise ships, themselves larger in size and occupancy than the majority of stationary buildings one encounters? Or a space station, which is necessarily mobile, or for that matter, any large (existing or projected) space cruiser? Vessel v. domicile? The Nostromo? The Death Star?

Obviously in –many– of these cases there is still the an imbalance in the issue of investment of effort/resources/capital at work, but it hardly applies across the board, or at least applies variably enough as to complicate the dichotomy being set up.

On a non-terrestrial, or further a non-resource-providing plane, need the homesteader not be nomadic?

Quite right.

I still think there is still some room for me to make a parallel between the self-reliant cyborg and nomad v. the infrastructure reliant building-dweller and farmer. After all, most of Jonah’s examples are pretty fantastical. Sort of edge cases for the blurry line between self and environmental intervention.

But I can’t really have it both ways, can I? Not given that I spent 2 calling the extremely nomadic Apollo program an example of architectural thinking.

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photo credit: estherase

As I conceive it, the conflict of cyborgs and architecture is the story of nomads and homesteaders, recast in very 21st century terms. Cyborgs are fundamentally mobile. They are individuals who can go anywhere and adapt easily. Architectural artifacts stay put. So to, the people who depend on and must maintain them.

There has been a deep distrust between these groups for as long as there has been agriculture, I imagine.

The morality story of the ants and the grasshopper is a lesson about the importance of an architectural kind of hard work. The ants, one of earth’s other infrastructural species, are cast as the hard-working foresightful protagonists. The grasshopper, failing to anticipate the future, dies in the snow.

Here are some alternate versions of the story: 1) When the winter comes, the grasshopper leaves for warmer climes, returning with the spring. 2) The grasshopper is actually a locust and a horde of them descends on the ant stores, stripping all the food before moving on to the next place. When winter comes, the ants starve in their empty corridors.

It’s Ranchers vs Indians, Romans vs Barbarians, Farmers vs Swarms, Europe vs Gypsies, Bees vs Bears, Ottomans vs Bedouins, Locals vs Tourists.

To built a home, to run a farm, this is a capitally intensive project. You invest an enormous amount of effort into moulding a stretch of territory to your particular plans. You have to wait quite some time between the sowing and the reaping. Ant-like patience and foresight are your watchwords.

To be a nomad requires a a different kind of watchword. You arrive at a patch of land, use it, and then leave it to regenerate. Foresight is the ability to know when to move, where to go, and when to come back.

Small wonder that sparks fly when there is an encounter between these approaches. Homesteaders don’t want the nomads exploiting all that investment in seeds, roads, sewers, policing. Nomads were planning to pass through and now there are fences, tunnels, and dudes with Tasers.

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photo credit: KayVee.INC
In the 1960s NASA was still entertaining the idea that humans might actually go to space and, you know, stay. While they were designing and building rocket ships — little bubbles of earth to carry us up — they were pondering an alternative. Rocketships and moonbases are a fundamentally architectural approach to the problem of space travel. What if instead of making a human-friendly environment IN space, we adapted humans TO space? If you make the people more durable, you don’t need to build costly space craft, you don’t need to terraform planets and moons. You can stay as long as you want.

The cyborgs envisioned by NASA don’t look like the chrome gods and monsters of the 1980s. It’s the 1960s and the tools being investigated are plastics and drug regimens. Finding ways to make people breathe slower but think faster. Changing biochemistry to maximize efficiency throughout the organism. Forget food pills and DDT, this was true better living through chemistry.

Meanwhile, in the popular culture, super villains were busy building increasingly elaborate infrastructure to mirror their plans for world domination. Moon bases and volcano bases. Everything is very base-like. These are very cold-war fantasies. Very architectural. You will KNOW we were here because we will LEAVE MONUMENTS (and blow up yours).

Matt Jones points out (click on that link, you won’t be sorry) that this is changing. A lot of today’s villains get by without secret bases. They jump straight to blowing up our stuff without having the decency to build stuff of their own for us to hit.

Asymmetrical warfare is very cybernetic. Every guerrilla needs to be very mobile and adaptable. And what do they do when they strike? They blow up buildings and knock down monuments.

Sure, Al Qaeda has secret cave bases, but the bastards keep abandoning them. These are camp sites. The Nazis had official architecture.

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photo credit: MSH*

As part of the Cultural Theory program, I took a university course called Cyborgs. This was in 1999 and it was cutting edge to give a presentation with my partner contributing her half through IRC projected on a screen. (It’s the future now, so people project Twitter #hashtags.) It was all very interdisciplinary and one of my classmates was a visiting student from the architecture school.

I don’t remember his name but I do remember his extreme revulsion at the very idea of cyborgs. It wasn’t personal revulsion, it was professional. Architecture — as he understood it — was the process of altering our environment to suit people. Cybernetics was about altering ourselves to suit the environment. The very notion of cybernetics was a threat to his practice and livelihood.

We talked about a lot of other stuff. We considered the portrayal of cyborgs in fiction, the glistening mutilated bodies of countless sci-fi thrillers. We read about the many mundane ways in which we were all already cyborgs, relying on glasses and birthcontrol and other technological interventions to survive and function. We drew in feminist theory and cultural anthropology and whatnot.

Years later, it’s that angry opposition of cybernetic and architectural thinking that has stuck. It strikes me as a useful conceptual tool.

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