| nib.com architecture texts - Theory |
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| decoi |
decoi@easynet.fr |
| architects | 19.05.02 |
| FROM AUTOPLASTIC TO ALLOPLASTIC TENDENCY |
Notes on Technological Latency
Latency
In The Transparent Society, Gianni Vattimo suggests that contemporary cultural production relies no longer simply on shock but on an effect of sustained disorientation - almost a suspension of shock. 1For Vattimo the effective event/work is one that endlessly differs/defers cognitive assimilation, marking a shift which I will here characterize in psychological terms as trauma2 (the mind struggling to comprehend a lack). The term latency3 is used within psychology to describe the lack of incorporation that attends trauma - that it is founded on an insistent yet unassimilable event - which I will here consider in terms of the effects engendered by/in a digital medium.
Vattimo's text is concerned with the cultural effects of technical change, tracking shifts in the base "psychologies of perception"; here I will extend this to a consideration of architectural production/reception in its attempts at incorporation4 of a new technology.
Vattimo's insight suggests a quite marked shift in cultural aptitude - a sharp contrast to Gombrich’s Sense of Order, for instance, (subtitled ‘a study in the psychology of decorative art’ circa 1960) in which he continually asserts that cognitive disorientation cannot be tolerated and will quickly be grounded by a representative prediliction (the mind short-circuiting the difficulty). Gombrich is certainly fascinated by artworks and patterns that confound perception, but he seems to allow that this can only be a momentary disorientation before the mind exerts an order in absentia, as if this were somehow a preordinate and natural 'representative' capacity of the mind. Vattimo’s suggestion that the effectiveness of strategies of shock seems to be giving way to « softer, more fluid » modes of operation, fluid in their dissolution of representative certitude, corresponds to current strategies throughout the arts. These I'd characterize as being ones of precise indeterminacy, as precisely calibrated forms of disorientation, which Gombrich, for one, might struggle to account for.
Such thought has been provoked in large part by my attempt to register the bewildering effects of William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet, where he asks his dancers to ‘represent loss’, ‘sustain the reinscription of forms’, ‘capture an absent presence’, etc - strategies of sustained and deliberate absenting. Articulating this in terms of trauma draws from Heidi Gilpin’s suggestive essay ‘Abberations of Gravity’ where she characterizes the charged effect of disappearance such dance engenders in terms of trauma, as "the staging of that which does not take place" (Forsythe), a traumatic absence. But having worked with the Frankfurt Ballet in their production of Sleepers' Guts and having witnessed the creation of Eidos/Telos I realized that both production and reception, which for Forsythe are very much extensions of one another, are traumatically implicated in that both operate with no a priori, no representational dictat. "We work free of idea," he suggests, preferring an open processural creative drift to the determinism of ideological constructs. The creative process, that is, is highly implicated in the resultant effect - it embraces disorientation in its very process - a crucial aspect in such strategies of cultural latency.
As we begin to operate in a fully electronic creative environment in architecture, which offers the possibility of quite open-ended and fluid creative processes, such strategic yet non-linear creative strategies of dis-incorporation seem prescient. The psychological shift hinted at by Vattimo, that is, requires not simply the incorporation of a new technology, but a quite fundamental re-evaluation of the very manner of cultural creativity and receptivity that it engenders.
Shock
Shock has long been considered the modus operandi of the Modernist arts, writers from diverse fields (Heidegger, Benjamin, Barthes, etc) all accounting for the effectivity of art-works in terms of ‘the shock of the new’ and the dis/re-orientating wrench that it engenders. For Benjamin this marked the shift from 'aura' to exhibition-value of art-works: henceforth art would no longer derive its meaning by being somehow replete with pre-ordinate significance, but in its capacity to actively reorient cognition through its interrogation of extant cultural pattern. His prognosis seems with hindsight to have been an accurate one: that art has moved off its pedestal to come into much more direct contact with the world, deploying new genres of effectivity - most significantly (for Benjamin) as strategies of shock.
But in considering the effects of a profligate and radical new productive electronic media that rapidly infiltrates all aspects of the current cultural field - an "art in the age of electronic de-production", as it were - one senses a general dissipation of shock-effectivity. For it seems that different patterns of cultural registration are emerging, engendered by an electronic medium which reconfigures the field subliminally. For shock implies reference for it to be effective, the resulting dis-orientation figured consciously as a strategy of reactivity (frequently as a strategy of re-orientation, also). But much contemporary work, in its genera(c)tive profligacy, disenfranchises comprehension in an absence or over-abundance of evident reference, the trace of its coming-into-being ‘digitally’ indeterminate.
The ensuing disorientation differs from that of shock in its very indeterminacy: no longer is it simply a strategic dis/re-orientation, but it acts as a suspension of the possibility of orientation. It does not rely, that is, on a memorialized circuit for effectivity - in fact, quite the inverse - it stimulates through its very denial of incorporation. Frequently this seems to take the form of/as an endless transformation of the same, engendering a range of effects propitiated in the struggle for an endlessly absented comprehensibility. Here I'm thinking of art-works such as Michel Saup's 'Supreme Particles' - an endless reconfiguration of two floating objects distorted sharply by an improvisational violinist who responds to each distortion as a new reading event - a quite hallucinogenic patterning-in-time which sends the mind reeling spatially in its continual reconfiguration. Such works, that is, evidently 'work' according to an entirely reconfigured psychological circuit.
Trauma
Psychological accounts of trauma are varied, but generally it is characterized as stemming from a moment of incomprehension or cognitive incapacity. At a moment of severe stress, for instance,
there is a frequent shut-down of the conceptual apparatus (as if for protection), which creates an anxiety of reference. Cathy Caruth, who has written extensively on the relations of trauma and memory, suggests that "in its repeated imposition as both image and amnesia, the trauma thus seems to evoke the difficult truth of a history that is constituted by the very incomprehensibility of its occurrence." p.18 'Freud, Moses and Monotheism' in Unclaimed Experience by Cathy Caruth The Johns Hopkins University Press 1996.
Trauma, that is, develops not as a direct response to (a) shock, but through the very inability to register it conceptually - through the absence of its assimilation and the struggle of the mind to account for this cognitive incapacity. "While the traumatized are called upon to see and relive the insistent reality of the past, they recover a past that enters consciousness only through the very denial of active recollection. The ability to recover the past is thus closely and paradoxically tied up, in trauma, with the inability to have access to it… an event that is constituted, in part, by its lack of integration into consciousness."
Freudian psychoanalysis is effectively predicated on trauma in its belief that neuroses are constituted as unconscious traces which are palpably 'there' but repressed or forgotten, inaccessible to the conscious mind (the very conscious/unconscious divide was posited by Freud to account for this). Psychoanalysis then sets itself the task of recovering such traces for consciousness, permitting their assimilation and comprehension: it works by re-establishing representative linkage and causal lineage. In positing trauma as a now effective cultural trope, one would then be working against the Freudian grain and against any simple causal sequence, creative or receptive, posing the question of "how one might learn to write the way the Wolfman spoke." Forsythe seems to me a creative practitioner who operates in just such manner, working with primary memory which he never seeks to entirely recover for consciousness: there is no ideological incorporation.
What seems incontestible is that the representative indeterminacy that resides in trauma is no longer, as Gombrich might have it, intolerable: modes of productivity and receptivity increasingly seem to operate in an indeterminate (electronic) milieu where absence is deployed with cultural effectivity. 'Understanding' here seems to be replaced by 'effect'. My interest is to speculate on the relations of trauma to the patterns of creativity propagated by digital technology, in order to counter the re-incorporation of electronic technologies within traditional ideological frameworks.
Transformation
Evidently such technical development may be considered through a variety of conceptual frameworks (psychological (Freud/Fenenczi), philosophical (Derrida), art historical (Benjamin), etc), but perhaps most simply as the apparent break-up of representative strategy. This shift I'd characterize as moving from a notion of origin to one of transformation, the most evident effect of which is to implicates time in an activated sense. The link with electronic production seems evident here: that as we enter a mode of creativity that implicates time in multiple ways, to the extent that the generative patterns of creativity are left as indeterminate traces of transformative process - transformation displaces origin and disperses its vertical legitimacy to a now limitless electronic horizon. In this the notion of trauma seems redolent: cognition searching restlessly for an endlessly absented referent.
Trauma, like shock, then needs to be thought of in terms other than those of simple debilitation (even in medical terms trauma functions as a strategy of survival). In trauma the very lack of cognitive assimilation from which it derives produces a variety of effects, such as an immediate compulsion to account for that lack (a stimulus) coupled with a heightening of bodily awareness; as if the very absence of cognitive assimilation dispersed thought throughout the sensorium. Trauma, that is, tends to stimulate neglected modes of cognition as an intense ‘sampling’ of experience as the mind deploys its full cognitive capacity to account for the unfamiliar pattern.
This raising of the body to a cognitive level, a chemic as well as optic mode of thought, metonymic as much as metaphoric, Forsythe characterizes as a proprioreceptive mode of production/reception, "a thinking with/in the body ". The current generative environment, in which ‘the image becomes primary’ (develops a life of its own, begins to lead creative endeavour) dislocates familiar patterns of comprehension and the referential strategies they seem to imply. The turmoil this engenders for determinate creative strategy - both productive and receptive - then poses profound questions for cultural (and not simply technical) activity. Most essentially, perhaps, it forces thought back within the body, interrogating the privileging of the senses in relation to conceptual thought, loosening the hegemony of optic sense (on which the linear, causal, memorialized representative circuit largely relies).
Autoplastic / Alloplastic
Drawing from Ferenczi’s analyses of trauma, one might characterize this as a shift from an autoplastic to an alloplastic mode of operation. Autoplastic is defined as a self-determinate operative strategy, and alloplastic as a reciprocal environmental modification. Classically in trauma autoplastic response is predetermined by the inertia and indifference of the environment: "for trauma to have effect, no effective ‘alloplastic’ action, (that is, modification of the environmental threat) is possible, so that ‘autoplastic’ adaptation of oneself is necessary."
If, then, trauma becomes culturally operative, we might then characterize it in these terms as a shift from an autoplastic to alloplastic mode, both in a productive and a receptive sense. Creatively we operate within an alloplastic ‘space’ as one begins to work in a responsive, conditional environment, sampling and editing the proliferating capacity of generative software: it is a transformative creative medium, by its very nature. But increasingly this also extends even to physical contexts, which through the (over-) deployment of electronic systems, become interactively malleable, our very determinacy being placed in flux. In the new electronic environment there is a reciprocal negotiation between self and environment - an interactive 'allo-plasticity'.
Asked what his ideal theatre might be, Forsythe suggested that it would be an indeterminate architecture in which the surfaces themselves would ceaselessly reconfigure, even the floor offering differential resistance and support impelling the dancers to continual recalibration and requalification of movement strategy. The physical plasticity that such suggestion implies need not be taken literally (although this is the point of departure for the Aegis project described below), the essential challenge being the more general one of deploying alloplastic strategies in both creative and receptive registers.
Parametric Process
The developmental process of the Paramorph was accompanied by the creation of customized parametric models of geometric constraint (Mark Burry at Deakin University) - ie as 'elastic' models of precise descriptive geometry. This effectively embeds a geometric property into a descriptive model as a sort of inviolable genetic code - in this case that all surfaces be describeable by straight-line geometry (therefore as derivatives of hyperbolic paraboloids) - which then informs the various reiterations of the form that we apply. No matter how we distort the form (here 15 hoops were controlled by 157 variable parameters) the surfaces are always derived from straight-line description (and hence can be fabricated by straight lengths of extruded aluminium). In fact, the model allows us to facet, rule or nurb the surface offering transformative reiterations of the form, each self-similar but different.
Again here we have created not so much a form as the possibility of (a) form, embedding specific parameters which are latent within a quite open creative system. It is this latent 'forgotten' character which, we feel, gives the object a "precisely indeterminate" quality, and which stimulates yet denies incorporation. The form seems fluid but is highly constrained, the tension of which can be somehow sensed viscerally. The form derives from and propagates the absenting psychologies of trauma, preferring an open and speculative transformative process to a reactive ideological determinism.
If such forms seem to offer a fluid potentiality for both production and reception, it will be in the liquification of the linearity of extant 'design' processes that is most suggestive of modes of fluidity to come...
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