# Data Fossils by Tobias Jewson

Data Fossils is the last project of the series about the RIBA President's medals projects. It is a project designed by Tobias Jewson for Liam Young (from Tomorrow's Thoughts Today) and Kate Davies' studio at the AA.
This very interesting project dramatizes a near future where digital data would be biocomputerly archived (fossilized) within organic tissues and mineral substance. In this latest case, Tobias introduces the geological constitution of monumental earth archives in Iceland, offered to far future archeologists.

Here is his text:
In the digital era our information no longer takes the form of the physical, but that of a electronic file stored in ‘the cloud’. Our collective history is quickly effaced from this fragile and ephemeral domain, a computer crashes, formats are quickly obsolete, a hard drive is lost and all is gone. With our attachment to physical objects and mementos becoming increasingly superseded by our relationship to information, what will we leave for future generations?
The project employs design speculation as a critical tool to explore the potential ways in which architecture and landscape may respond to our ever evolving digital fascination. ‘Data Fossils’ has evolved as a series of fictional scenarios grounded in technically rigorous physical and computational investigations. Real techniques have been developed for encoding digital information in the physical world at both individual and collective scales.
Advances in biocomputing are allowing the possibility of storing data in living, physical forms. As the division between our bodies and the digital becomes increasingly blurred, the bone’s ability to remodel itself, in response to stress, can be hacked to provide data storage. Polyps of calcified binary code become written onto our skeleton, recounting our digital identities- a poet’s finest sonnet is read like Braille through his skin; an Internet glutton’s hoarded browser bookmarks cripple his every movement, our remains become an archaeology of memories.
Our collective history can be deposited in columns and strata of earth – where once archivists trawled the library stacks, data geologists now roam the Icelandic landscape. Hoards of machines traverse the lava deserts, scraping loose sand from the surface, and under immense heat transforming it into elaborate glass like geometries, within which our recent internet activities are encased. Topsoil blown by the harsh arctic winds soon gathers in the lee side of these immense structures, the grounded geological layer sprouting grass and moss.
Over time, habitats will grow in the glimmering hollows as fields of data slowly reverse Icelandic soil erosion. Local Islanders read the growth of this landscape from afar, whilst archaeologists look close ,using advanced MRI scanners, searching for insights into our past. And while tourists might flock to see history in the making archaeologists will read the dull fragments of frozen silica as records of our digital pasts.

Software application developed to encode data inputs in physical artefacts.
Software application developed to encode data inputs into the calcifying strucutre of our bones.

Archaeologists decode skeletal remains to bring back a dead poets lost works.
The informational glutton is bogged down by spam and excessive downloads.

Illegal immigrants conceal their data, and copy and paste new identities.

Like climate records trapped in ice cores data archiving can also become a geological process.
Software developed for the realtime growth of data geology from live twitter streams.
Software application developed to encode data inputs into structural building elements.

The machines use the immense heat of burning thermite to fuse sand into intricate data forests of volcanic glass.

Schematics of data archiving machines and physical experiments with thermite glass making.
Experiencing the informational landscape.

Data archeologists deciphering one of the oldest areas of the informational landscape.

People pilgrimage to this area known to hold the last data relating to flurry of internet activity from the day Michael Jackson died.

# Thrilling Wonder Stories 2 at the AA

Liam Young (from Tomorrow Thoughts Today) and Geoff Manaugh (from BLDGBLOG) are organizing the second episode of the Thrilling Wonder Stories, a symposium gathering "mad scientists, literary astronauts, digital poets, speculative gamers, mavericks, visionaries and luminaries to spin stories of wondrous possibilities or dark cautionary tales"

The symposium will occur at the AA on November 26th (this Friday) and will be released live online on the AA's website

Participants are:

• Alex Rutterford
• Ant Farm
• Antony Johnston
• BERG London
• Dunne and Raby
• Gavin Rothery
• Geoff Manaugh
• Jeff VanderMeer
• Joep Van Lieshout
• Johnny Hardstaff
• Jorg Tittel
• Julian Gerighty
• Nicola Twilley
• Paul Duffield
• Rachel Armstrong
• Splash Damage
• SPOV
• The Why Factory
• Ubisoft
• Will Self

# Manual of Decolonization by Salottobuono

The Manual of Decolonization is a book created by Salottobuono in the frame of the research Decolonizing Architecture (already evoked here) lead by Eyal Weizman, Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal. This research starts with the scenario of successful negotiations between Palestinians and Israeli that would lead to the suppression of colonies established in the West Bank and the application of the Right to Return for Palestinian refugees. However, the project does not necessarily implies a total withdrawal of Israeli but rather investigates propositions that annihilate the asymmetrical military that characterize colonies. In this regard Salottobuono propose ten steps of "decolonization" that would actually change the status of the settlements into the architecture of a pacific cohabitation.
In fact in 2005, when the Gaza strip had been decolonized by the Sharon administration, the strategical aspect of this decision implied a strategical decolonization by the Israeli State. In fact, the totality of buildings were destroyed in order for Palestinian not to be able to appropriate them. The only buildings that remained were Synagogues that were obviously destroyed by the Palestinian in front of the cameras that daily feed the hate and fear between the two People.
The process of decolonization proposed by those collectives is therefore crucial in the attempt of a durable co-existence if the negotiations lead to agreements at some point.

Manual of Decolonization: printed edition available on the AA bookstore's website.
Salottobuono
with Decolonizing Architecture, Haudenschild Garage, Barbara Modolo, Manuel Singer, Alessandro Zorzetto.
more on Salottobuono's website.

The introduction text to the workshop and exhibition Decolonizing Architecture can be read here.

# The architecture of Jean Renaudie

Architecture is the physical form which envelops human lives in all the complexity of their relations with their environment.

Jean Renaudie, 1968

In my opinion, Jean Renaudie is one of the very best French architects of the last fifty years. His two housing complexes in Ivry sur Seine near Paris (see previous post) and in Givors near Lyon are two very successful examples of architecture becoming urban in an era (50's-60's) that created what is now famous as the French suburbs catastrophe. In fact, those two housing complexes are extremely interesting in the fact that they embody a real urban density, mix several social levels, organize urban life on a multitude of storeys, blur the limits between private and public areas and supply a little piece of garden to every apartment. This architecture is full of episodes, surprizing moments of beauty in an urban artefact/landscape full of hideaways.

In order to know more, I recommend Irenee Scalbert's book: A Right to Difference at AA Publications

The following photographs and plans are excerpted from this book.

# Francois Roche's lecture in the AA

This Thursday, Francois Roche (R&Sie(n)) will be giving a lecture at the Architectural Association entitled Ecosophical Apparatus and Skizoid Machines (using Guattari's terminology). This lecture accentuates the launch of R&Sie(n)'s new book called BIO[re]BO[o}T that gathers the Paris based office's work on machines and schizophrenia in architecture.

# Rendering Speculations organized by Tobias Klein and Ricardo de Ostos

On May 7th, Tobias Klein (see previous post) and Ricardo de Ostos are organizing a symposium at the AA about digital representation of architecture with architects such as Lebbeus Woods or Marjan Colletti but also graphic artists Andrew Jones and Julian Oliver.

Rendering Speculations

Date: 07.05.2010

A Symposium coordinated by Ricardo de Ostos (AA INTER 3/ NaJa-DeOstos) and Tobias Klein (AA First year Studio/ Horhizon)

Rendering Speculations is a day-long AA event in which seven invited guests, from a variety of different fields including architecture, conceptual art, video gaming and interface design, will discuss the topic of speculative visualisation and virtual design. Highlighting a variety of disciplines and approaches, the event seeks to locate architecture as a magnifying lens through which digital visions and speculations are imagined.

Speakers include:

Nigel Coates – architect, founder of NATO and head of department at the Royal College of Art, whose work pursues a narrative-driven architecture

Marjan Colletti – an architect and teacher at the Bartlett UCL, who explores digital architecture and representation

Andrew Jones – digital painter and ‘techno-mystic visual pioneer of digital art’

Julian Oliver – New Zealand born artist who works with augmented reality and interface design

Lebbeus Woods – American architect and educator whose work envisions experimental constructs and the question of the individual in society

Plus other guests to be confirmed

# (UN)WALL /// Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture

Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture is the final AA 1972 thesis of Rem Koolhaas, Madelon Vreisendorp, Elia Zenghelis, and Zoe Zenghelis. It elaborates a narrative of a walled city within London similarly to the Berlin situation at the time. This city, like West Berlin, is considered as a shelter that people access and thus become voluntary prisoners of architecture. The condition of the "liberty" here is paradoxically the imprisonment.

Here is the text supplied by the MOMA which owns the original drawings:
These drawings come from a series of eighteen drawings, watercolors, and collages called Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture. The dense pictographic storyboard reflects Koolhaas's earlier stints as journalist and screenwriter and is intended to be read simultaneously as a factual and a fictional scenario for the contemporary metropolis.

The title of the project alludes to Cold War West Berlin, a restricted enclave encircled by a forbidding wall—in effect, a prison on the scale of a metropolis, and one in which people sought refuge voluntarily. Exodus proposes a walled city in a long strip, with tall barriers that cut through London's urban fabric—an intervention designed to create a new urban culture invigorated by architectural innovation and political subversion. Here Koolhaas and his collaborators use collage to create vivid scenes of life within these visionary urban confines.

The Museum of Modern Art

# Passages through Hinterlands LECTURE

Following the two former posts about the RIBA winners and the Passage through Hinterlands book, here is an event related to them. Wednesday 9th December, Ruairi Glynn (of Interactive Architecture) will be giving a lecture at Bartlett at 6:30PM with this years’ President’s Silver Medal Winner, Nicholas Szczepaniak, the Bartlett’s Christian Kerrigan and Ric Lipson, AA’s Adam Nathaniel Furman, AA DRL’s ‘Shampoo‘ Group and RCA’s Jordan Hodgson.

picture: Chris Kerrigan's graduate project

# RIBA Presidents Medals Student Awards 2009

RIBA Students winners 2009 have been announced and are visible on the President's Medals website. Like every years projects reach a very high degree of representation which still seems to be an important point in Great Britain schools' pedagogy for which architectonicity serves narration.

projects on picture: Nicholas Szczepaniak (University of Westminster)/Silver medal, Selvei Al-Assadi (London South Bank University), Stephen Townsend (University of Nottingham), Pascal Bronner (Bartlett), Paul Durcan (University College Dublin), Wen Ying Teh (AA)/ Silver medal, Biten Patel (University of Brighton), Robert Taylor (University of Sheffield)

# Intensive Fields conference at USC School of Architecture

Dear people of Los Angeles (for God's sake stop saying L.A. when you have one of the coolest name of city on earth !), this event is for you ! On December 12nd, USC school of architecture is organizing a conference called Intensive fields about the very popular topic of parametric urbanism with a bunch of very high quality speakers. I think that this quality is necessary when you deal with such crucial issues as urban design. To reach this scale of design is problematic and any proposal should certainly includes a part of self-contradiction in order to avoid the dictatorial hand of the architect on the city...
I just regret that Chris Lee was not invited to this event since he is tackling this kind of issues for a certain time now with his unit 6 in the AA...

Don't forget to register !