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2003 snapshot of the magneto-dynamic surface of our sun

On Architecture's use and abuse of [models of] life Ed Keller All living things need an atmosphere around them, a secret circle of darkness On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Nietzsche Rorschach's skin was sixty percent superconducting carbon nanotube. Rorschach's guts were largely hollow; at least some of those hollows appeared to contain an atmosphere. No earthly form of life would have lasted a second in there, though; intricate topographies of radiation and electromagnetic force seethed around the structure, seethed within it. Charged particles raced around invisible racetracks at relativistic speeds, erupting from jagged openings, hugging curves of magnetic force strong enough for neutron stars, arcing through open space and plunging back into black mass. Occasional protuberances swelled and burst and released clouds of microparticulates, seeding the radiation belts like spores. Rorschach resembled nothing so much as a nest of half-naked cyclotrons, tangled one with another Blindsight, Peter Watts

I'll start with an observation that I consider necessarily axiomatic: there is nothing that is not natural. Everything and anything is 'nature.' It seems to me that we face two related problems as we wrestle with the implications of this renewed definition of nature. The first, how we define the limits of life, when pursued with rigor, then establishes the framework for the second: how we define the limits [aspirations... capabilities...] of architecture. Indeed, as our models of the boundaries of life change, all other disciplines fall into a cascading realignment. Recognizing as living what we thought previously inanimate adjusts our grasp on the 'performance' of design. Thus the limits of life are always haunted by collapsing epistemelogical horizons, the limits of our perception, and our conceptual power: whether layperson or expert, we find ourselves all to some extent absentminded observers, using eyes which look but do not see. 1 Let me offer an example.
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Walter Benjamin and Le Corbusier are ghosting around here somewhere.

On Architecture's use and abuse of [models of] life Ed Keller, April 2012 TARP NOT NATURE Pratt Architecture

A morphogen is a chemical gradient which governs the formation and growth of cells. It works as a kind of 'field condition' to activate specific genes as the intensity of the morphogen changes. This gradient then impacts surface tension and local mechanical properties of cells- governing growth as much as DNA. Thus each of these systems has a life- and together they amplify to create another layer of life. Nevertheless, we usually think of life as the highest standing wave, the meta-pattern which hovers halolike over all the substrate layers of information. But given the right eyes [millenia deep, perhaps] these fleeting patterns of data become fluid tectonic layers, moving with an intelligence that we can barely sense, given their temporal horizons. Perhaps better then to say 'natural, as not natural' when discussing the limits of life, or the limits of architecture- using this turn of language to recognize the inclusive status of all things, which express registers of information flow that simply can't be classified as either living or not. The 'as not' implies both/and. 2 Models like these are often leveraged though shaky, pseudo-scientific parodies of mimesis: this looks like that, or we can make it look so, therefore it must behave like [for example] a gradient morphogen, yes? But the question of translation becomes a bit more complex when we step back and remind ourselves, like Wile E. Coyote, that we are implicated in this redefinition of life. Perhaps it would make more sense to find, in a veritably hyper-fictional manner, the 'turing morphogens' in political systems, thus unraveling the implications for a collective agency which can or cannot see itself in a broader context. One might recall Cronenberg and Ballard when thinking takes such a turn, as they have so well rehearsed this. But unfortunately within architecture, we seem to keep trying to make the 'deformations' [pace Kipnis] rather than the 'informations'. 3 Similarly, to properly grasp the issues at stake in contemporary biopolitics, we have to look to the limits of life. Individual or collective? Mammal, bacterial, viral? Crystalline, magnetic? Economic, cultural? Each system has enough feedback loops to be classified as a complex and living super-organism. The biopolitical seems at first to be constituted by the relation between humans as socio-economic beings, via instruments of techno-political agency. But a coruscating quasi-life plays just as much a role in this biopolitical landscape, and has just as much to do with the power [potency] any agent has to be an autonomous being. Microbiomes constituted by bacteria and virii in each human [we are walking bioreactors] are modulated by big pharma: cows don't have a corner on the market for an abuse of antibiotics at the behest of an industrialized flow of morphogens at a global scale. So in a baroque and indirect manner the field is set for some kind of battle between competing models of life. I've sided against those who would argue for the bio-mimetic, at least when they do so uncritically. I could cut them so much more slack, though, if only they'd evidenced [for example] the insight and criticality we find in

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I refer obliquely here to Agamben's use of the phrase 'as not'. See his The Time That Remains. See Kipnis' distinction comparing the work of the deformationists [crudely speaking, the Eisenmanians] with the informationists [Tschumi et. al.]

On Architecture's use and abuse of [models of] life Ed Keller TARP NOT NATURE

Focillon's The Life of Forms in Art. This could create a launching platform for a claim for the proliferation of the vegetable monstrosity of form- regardless of whether it is found in the zebra's stripes, the twists of ornament in the book of Kells, or in the speculative examples we find in Peter Watts' novel Blindsight [op. cit.] Let's say that we found a good balance between the production of form for form's sake, and the investiture of that form with the je ne sais quoi that makes it sing- taking it beyond, to become a mode of thought. But, even were we able to find that sweet spot between the raw and the cooked- why then would it be appropriate to leverage these renovated models into a design process? Or in other words, didn't we learn anything from Foucault's investigation of genealogy? 'Genealogy, consequently, requires patience and a knowledge of details and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material. Its "cyclopean monuments" are constructed from "discreet and apparently insignificant truths and according to a rigorous method"; they cannot be the product of "large and well-meaning errors." In short, genealogy demands relentless erudition... It opposes itself to the search for "origins." Why does Nietzsche challenge the pursuit of the origin [Ursprung], at least on this occasion when he is truly a genealogist? First, because it is an attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities, because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession. ' 4 This idea of the capture is connected directly to a contemporary set of revelations that the massive addressability of IPV6 might enable- both in the post-apophenic patterns that datamining renders visible to us [it's not that everything looks like something else, but ultimately that everything IS everything else], but also in the spectacular losses of individual agency and capacity to grasp the self, which the current social media landscape creates. 'Emergence is always produced through a particular stage of forces... "Effective" history differs from traditional history in being without constants. Nothing in man- not even his body- is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men. The traditional devices for constructing a comprehensive view of history and for retracing the past as a patient and continuous development must be systematically dismantled.' 5 From this we should draw an explicit idea of a politics: not post-human, because as we've been told, we might never have been human- but certainly outside the limits of life as we've known it. How can we constitute a politics using architecture

Nietzsche, Genealogy, History; M. Foucault, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews 5 ibid. 'The analysis of Entstehung must delineate this interaction, the struggle these forces wage against each other or against adverse circumstances, and the attempt to avoid degeneration and regain strength by dividing these forces against themselves. It is in this sense that the emergence of a species [animal or human] and its solidification are secured "in an extended battle against conditions which are essentially and constantly unfavorable.'

On Architecture's use and abuse of [models of] life Ed Keller, April 2012 TARP NOT NATURE Pratt Architecture

based on models of life that are no longer even marginally considered to be truly alive? [Or perhaps, alive, as not alive.] 6 Our hopes for a political framework change when we recognize that we've always been somewhere between the living and the non-living. There may be ways of recuperating this: Schrodinger saw aperiodic crystalline structure as a lattice from which the different temporalities of 'life' could proceed; 7 the time and agency of quasi-life was always at the root of Ballard's obsessions- whether via a creeping malaise propagating [perhaps from outer space] in The Crystal World, or the 'natural' systemic tendencies of the highway, the flow, the wreck, in Crash. Agency is refigured, over and over, always formally invested, and always across the expansion of the terrain that whatever we insist on calling life after the 'crash' might still be moving through. The biopolitical and epistemelogical implications are profound. What is a flat ontology? A crisis of the anthropocentric, yes, but it remains only a shift in point of view until we bring our design faculties to bear upon it. Then, a flat ontology becomes both a toolkit and an essential provocation for curiosity. Keenan and Weizman's work on forensics [Mengele's Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics 8] is a staging of these connections between quasi-living systems, which we can recognize in the apparatus of war and its aftermath- and the jurisdictional and legal mechanisms which we activate, when with the patience and rigor Foucault called for, we conduct our genealogies across all scales and with both empathy for and detachment from our subjects. 9 Perhaps Guzman's pellucid film Nostalgia for the Light- a documentary on the Atacama desert in Chile, and its suitability both as a perfect site for telescopes looking at ancient galaxies, but also a site used for the burial of countless bodies of political prisoners, victims of Pinochet- perhaps this is one of the better examples of what happens when one flattens all ontologies and claims not that humans are the frame to apprehend all, but that humans somehow can take their place amongst the weirdness of a vast universe, neither reduced to less than nothing nor megalomaniacally expanded. What does it mean to show the women who have searched for the bodies of their lost families across the Atacama desert- and in the same film show the seemingly
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In the search for a xenopolitics, there are lessons to be learned from models of orthogonal or oblique life; elsewhere I've quoted Markus Schmidt at length, riffing on his idea that XNA could be ' ... a novel information-storing biopolymer invisible to natural biological systems..' See his Xenobiology: A new form of life as the ultimate biosafety tool. 7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F 8 "In 1985, the body of Josef Mengele, one of the last Nazi war criminals still at large, was unearthed in Brazil. The ensuing process of identifying the bones in question opened up what can now be seen as a third narrative in war crime investigationsnot that of the document or the witness but rather the birth of a forensic approach to understanding war crimes and crimes against humanity. " From the Sternberg Press description of the book. http://www.sternberg-press.com/index.php?pageId=3&cat1=100 9 Other bodies of work come to mind: the films of the Quay Brothers, within which all things have a life of their own; Herzog's ongoing set of documentarian projects such as Lessons of Darkness, which both claims to be a bit of science fiction as well as an archive of footage shot of the first Gulf War; and the hyperfictional grimoire Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani, which joyfully conflates rewritings of Apocalypse Now and The Exorcist with Deleuzean thinking and Persian numerology. And H.P. Lovecraft.

On Architecture's use and abuse of [models of] life Ed Keller TARP NOT NATURE

unearthly pursuit of astronomers gazing at events billions of years old? It could mean that we are both at-one 10 with the celestial flows, whilst we atone for acts taken on this earth: we are at play in the fields. It is a child's game, war [or time], a game played with pieces on a vast board. 11

I had wanted to end this meditation by referencing Solaris, by Lem/Tarkovsky/Soderbergh. But I often do that, so this time it seems more fit to end by citing Peter Watts once more. At a certain point in Blindsight, Watts characters attempt to figure out what Rorschach [a vast spaceship AND an alien entity?] wants and can do. Is it living? Can a tangled nest of cyclotrons be alive? They realize that life- at least the form they are dealing with- doesn't need DNA; the alien agents, instead of autonomous beings, are the honeycomb and the larger system surrounding the agent takes on the role of the 'bee' [riffing on Darwin as Watts points out in his endnotes], thus inverting the usual causal relationship and shifting the locus of what we usually would recognize as genetic and epigenetic landscapes. One aspiration for architecture might then be to expose the boundaries and points of connection, to diagram these places where the epigenetic becomes the genetic, and vice versa ['Here, time turns into space...'] and to propose interventions which would become tools for our thinking in that space between. Not tools to convert linear time into nonlinear, but tools to ask the question. 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law... Love is the Law, Love under Will.' 12

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Pace, again, Jeff Kipnis. See his text on Libeskind's machines in Restructuring Architectural Theory, ed. Diani and Ingraham 11 Heraclitus, fragment 52 12 'Yoga for Yahoos and Yellowbellies', A. Crowley NB: This notorious quote appears often, but invariably the second line is left out, thus implying that 'anything goes, man'. I include the second line here to provoke and delight the reader. http://deoxy.org/annex/8yoga1.htm

On Architecture's use and abuse of [models of] life Ed Keller, April 2012 TARP NOT NATURE Pratt Architecture

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