Non Standard Architecture?

(notes on the current exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris)

This sense that digital technology, like alphabetic writing, is impelled

by prior imagining, repressed yet germinal, seems the most powerful
issue here. The projects simply the fact of such emergence, a sort of
chemical staining that reveals the impulse coursing through such
works, in no way limited to techno-rational fidelity. Indeed, it is the
cognitive release of such ‘non-standard’ projects, their technical
imp(r)udence, that seems most fertile, despite the interest in a range
of manufacturing techniques that might finally allow such alloplastic
forms to condense in actuality. Neue Bauhaus techno-rationalism then
appearing as the entropy of such germinal force, imagination planted
within the very ‘thickness’ of architecture’s geometry, pressing from
within its now point-cloud immateriality to new limits of spatial and
manufacturing definition. Such tendency, gorged by digital desire, bursts the spastic collage assemblies of pre-
digital spatiality, precise indeterminacy emerging as a now legitimate creative impulse.

In trying to account for the affect of such ‘indeterminate’ works, I’ve frequently invoked trauma as a now
operative trope in the dis-incorporation they seemingly provoke: the standard and the type indeed atomized into
a cloud of digits now sensed as implicit or explicit expression of ‘algorithmic’ potency. Metaphor tends to
metonymy, content to affect, linearity to processural circuitry. Haptic cognitive circuits infiltrate optic/aural
hegemony. An entire autoplastic mode dissolves into alloplastic imagining: form and process, the entire
creative/receptive environment, become reciprocally malleable (with us). This marks a fully cultural (not
technical) ‘environmentalism’, the full range of the senses cognitively attuned in their aptitude for “inflection” (a
hypomnesic no longer anamnesic modulation). At a local as well as global level, then, in creative and receptive
registers, latency occurs as a form of traumatic dis-incorporation.

Yet if, in the broadest sense, this intuits a shift from topographical to topological imagining, from a fixed formal
capacity to a fluid and transformative one, then one must interrogate any such ‘non-standard’ institution.
Migayrou’s invocation of the Mathematics of the Non-Standard in the title of the exhibition serves (for me) not so
much to tie back to a prototypical topology, as to open the question of the relation of modes of writing and
cognition in a now digital economy, where all manner of inscription (algorithm, code, script, icon, text, etc)
alternates differentially. Indeed, one inclines to suspend a topological figure, a loop or a knot perhaps, over any
attempt at investiture of a particular field! In this one may well interrogate the knot as being at the origin of both
mathematics and writing, a ‘topological’ loosening and tightening of mnemonic praxis that we may now slide
differentially. One ranges from the knotted quipus used by the Inca indians to write and count, or the earliest
forms of pictographic writing which ordered reading signs “as if” on a string, to writing as alphabetic 3-
dimensional knots on a string, or even DNA’s amino acid “knots” in a “rope” of protein. From the two-dimensional
space of writing, to the three-dimensional intersection of the knot, it suffices to merely blur the eyes to reveal the
topological parity…

Mark Goulthorpe of dECOi will be presenting the lecture "Autoplastic and Alloplastic: the Evolution of Digital
Praxis", January 28th at 6:30pm in Wood Auditorium.