# Maslennikov Kitchen Factory

The Maslennikov Kitchen Factory is situated in Samara in the center of Russia and presents the curious characteristics of adopting the shape of the Sovietic Hammer and Sickle.
This building is currently in the middle of a preservationist battle confronted to its potential destruction. In the case of its destruction, it would be interesting to look at the footprint the building would have leave, in the way of a monumental ideological stamp.

# ARCHITECTURES OF JOY. A spinozist reading of Parent/Virilio and Arakawa/Gins’ architecture

Site of Reversible Destiny - Yoro Park by Arakawa & Madeline Gins

ARCHITECTURES OF JOY.
A spinozist reading of Parent/Virilio and Arakawa/Gins’ architecture
By Léopold Lambert (December 2010)

In the middle of the XVIIth century, Baruch Spinoza revolutionized theology by proposing a tremendous change in the definition of God. From the classic transcendental vision of a God creator, he introduced an immanent vision of God creature. Some architects might stop their reading of Spinoza’s Ethics here and consider the whole theory as an external element from their practice. However, this immanent theology envisions the world in such a way that architecture can creates itself based on this vision and celebrates it in composing what we will call, an architecture of joy. The first part of this short essay will attempt to concisely envision Spinoza’s Ethics, the second will present the difference between joyful affects and sad affects, and the third and last one will try to elaborate relationships between this philosophy and the architectural projects designed by Claude Parent and Paul Virilio in the 1960’s on the one hand, and those built by Arakawa and Madeline Gins in the last ten years on the other hand.

Spinoza envisions God as the infinite substance composing the universe. This substance is an infinite amount of infinitely small parts which develop external relations with each other and thus compose bodies. The ability of those bodies to maintain the effort of persisting in their own beings is called conatus and composes the essence of things. Those bodies have then the ability to encounter and affect each other and thus increasing or decreasing their power of action. That being stated, we can observe that Spinoza is not only a rebel against religion but also against the paradigmatic philosophy of his century; the Cartesian philosophy. In fact, in the second book of his Ethics, he demonstrates the following proposition: The Human mind does not perceive any external body as existing, except through the ideas of the modifications of its own body. In other words, a mind knows itself only via the encounter with other things which is in complete contradiction with Descartes’ I think, therefore I am , in which a mind knows itself by thinking. Spinoza, on the contrary could have states something like “I encounter, therefore I am.”

From there, Spinoza distinguishes four modes of perception in his Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding . In order to focus on the proposed topic here, we won’t even evoke the first one, “arising from hearsay” that is negligible. In fact, in his class for the University of Vincennes about Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze – who appears between the lines in this essay- does not even talk about this first mode of perception that he personally calls kinds of knowledge. Those three remaining modes of perception are establishes as following:

- The first one is empirical. It implies only the experience of shock between the extensive parts of respective bodies and thus provides what Spinoza calls inadequate ideas. Deleuze, in order to illustrate this mode, uses the example of the wave. In the first mode of perception/knowledge, one can only experience the shock of the wave against his body. In other words, it provokes a knowledge of effects without a knowledge of causes.
- The second one is both empirical and rational. It involves the composition of relations between the bodies. In the illustration of the wave, one can position his body in such a way that the relations of the wave compose in a harmonious way with the relation of one’s body.
- The third one is strictly rational. It implies a perception of the essence of a thing or, following what we wrote earlier about the essence, the understanding of the mechanisms of perpetuation of a body in its being. It is indeed an understanding of causes and this way can be defined as adequate ideas.

From there, the purpose of this essay becomes probably clearer and one can distinguish the role that the second mode of perception can play in architecture. However, it is still too early in this text to evoke this question as the Ethics itself has not been yet deployed.

The first part has in fact established Spinoza’s theology/cosmology and the different modes of perception of it; nevertheless, the second part needs to develop veritably what makes Spinoza calls his book Ethics. In fact, one more reason for his Cherem from the Jewish Community is that he establishes a fundamental distinction between a religious moral and an individual ethics. The good versus evil both determined transcendentally are replaced by the good versus the bad which are, on the other hand, determined by the accordance or the discordance of relations between parts composing bodies.

As Deleuze explains in his class, when I have an encounter such that the relation of the body which modifies me, which acts on me is combined with my own relation, […] my power of acting is increased . This encounter that increases the power of acting is defined by Spinoza as being good and he calls it Joy. As a corollary, any encounter that tends to destroy the relations of one’s body is considered as bad for this same body and thus is called sadness. In the same way Spinoza decided to keep the same terminology (God) than religion in order to show the revolutionary content of his philosophy, he uses the creationist religious example of the Original Sin in his demonstration, in order to deactivate what used to be the paradigm of the religious moral. He affirms that Adam did not do an evil act when he ate the apple, but rather he did a bad act as the relations of the apple were not composing well with his own relations. What is described in the Bible as a divine interdiction to eat the apple is nothing else than Adam’s instinct that the apple may be poisonous for his body.

Since joy results from the harmony of relations between two bodies, joy can be said to be the motor of the persistence of the parts in their being. We have already seen that this persistence is called essence by Spinoza but it also matches with the notion of desire also called appetite. This notion is central here, as it implies the action that is required for the concerned architecture to be activated and to be legitimately considered as Architectures of Joy.

Those principles of Spinoza’s Ethics being expressed, we can now begin to evoke the two architectures we proposed to investigate in this essay.
The first one is the work of the association between the two French architects, Claude Parent and Paul Virilio between 1963 and 1969 under the name of Architecture Principe. In 1964, they established an architectural manifesto that can be summarized by an action of tilting the ground that replaces the paradigmatic assemblage of horizontal plans with vertical ones. They call it, The Oblique Function.

Explanatory diagram by Claude Parent in Architecture principe : 1966 und 1996 . [Besançon] : Les Ed. de l'Imprimeur, 2000.

The previous diagram illustrates the effect of the tilted surface on the body. If we apply a Spinozist reading on it, we can observe that the first mode of perception is necessarily occurring as gravity forces the bodies’ parts to interact with the architectural surface’s parts. However, in the difference of architectures which proceed only with flat floors, in the Oblique Function, gravity imposes an additional effect on the bodies, a directionality. In fact, any movement of the body in any direction will exercise on it, a degree of acceleration. This acceleration will be negative if the body attempts to climb up the surface and it will be positive if the same body attempts to go down the slope.

If we accept to consider as negligible -for the sake of this argument- the effects of a flat surface on the body, we can obviously not do the same for the Oblique Function’s effects. In fact, a negative acceleration imposed on the body creates a fatigue on the body whereas a positive one triggers an exhilaration. One could thus hastily argue that only half of the potential movements on this surface provide a Spinozist joy when the other half provokes sadness. However, this affirmation would be inaccurate as the body in action while conquering –we use the word conquest here in the same way that Deleuze talks about the conquest of colors by Gauguin and Van Gogh - the slope is expressing its power of existence. This last argument is the one that lead us to think that comfort and joy are not synonyms if not veritably antonyms.

In that sense, the Oblique Function, in its experience, requires the exercise of the second mode of perception. On this tilted surface, a body can only persist in its being if it manages to compose harmoniously its relations with the relations of this surface. That is how we can affirm that Claude Parent and Paul Virilio manage to create an Architecture of Joy in the Spinozist meaning of joy. The Oblique Function, being only a manifesto, it is interesting to observe the work –mostly by Parent- that has been built based on those principles:

- The Villa Drusch in Versailles (1963)_
- Sainte Bernadette Church in Nevers (1966)
- The French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1970)
- Claude Parent’s apartment in Neuilly sur Seine (1973)

French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1970) designed by Claude Parent

The second architecture on which we propose to apply a Spinozist reading is the work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins. In fact, despite the fact that their work has been comfortably categorized by critics as having more to do with art than with architecture in the same way than many radical architects, their production is probably the best achievement of a Spinozist architecture.

In order to illustrate this point, we have to start by evoking the notion of the Architectural Body developed by Arakawa and Gins. In fact, in their research of an interaction between the human body and the architectural environment, they establish this notion as a symbiosis of those two entities. The Architectural Body is thus an entity in which the second mode of perception is continuous. Placed in a state of disequilibrium as in Arakawa and Gins’ architecture, the human body keeps re-harmonizing its parts in relation with the architectural parts and thus develops a conscience of its direct environment. Via this process of harmonization, the body learns and becomes both stronger and more skillful.

Reversible Destiny Lofts – Mitaka by Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Photograph by Masatako Nakano.

That leads us to the main purpose of such an architecture for Arakawa and Madeline Gins which consists in a adamant refusal to death. In accordance with the XVIIIth century French physiologist Xavier Bichat who stated that life is the ensemble of functions that resist death , they undertake to architecturally train the body against the continuous degradation of human tissues.

One could not be more wrong to associate this enterprise with the Modernist belief for potential healing characteristics own by architecture. Indeed, what Arakawa and Gins calls Reversible Destiny is an absolute refusal towards the modernist comfort that triggers a process of weakening for the body and decreases its power. On the contrary their architecture challenges the body, put it in danger and leaves it without any other alternative than to react to this delicate situation. In this regard, this architecture is profoundly anti-paternalist and own some clear emancipative characteristics. It releases the exact same Spinozist freedom, when he writes A thing is called free which exists from the necessity of its nature alone, and is determined to act by itself alone .

Spinoza describes death as the change of belonging of a body’s parts to another body. The parts do not persist in their being anymore and they start to populate one or several other bodies. The goal of Arakawa and Gins is therefore to maintain this persistence as long as possible via a continuous conquest of joy as we have been defining it earlier in this essay. Describing the condition offers by the Bioscleave House (Life Span Extending Villa), Madeline Gins has this evocative sentence: Everyday, you are practicing how not to die.

Bioscleave House by Arakawa and Madeline Gins

In the Proposition II of the Book III in his Ethics, Spinoza writes no one has hitherto laid down the limits to the powers of the body, that is, no one has as yet been taught by experience what the body can accomplish solely by the laws of nature, in so far as she is regarded as extension . This way, he asks a fundamental question which can be formulated this way: What can a body do? The question that the Oblique Function and the Reversible Destiny ask is not different in any way. Acknowledging their common ignorance with Spinoza, those radical architects attempt to create an environment dedicated to the Spinozist Joy, only condition for the beginning of an answer to this question.

# Moving Things by Brandon Morse

Here is a poetical monument to engineering. Brandon Morse creates videos of structures submitted to a series of forces which deforms them and make them collapse for some of them. It makes me think of the softwares that the Pentagon uses in order to simulates destruction of buildings as Eyal Weizman pointed out in his last work: Forrensic Architecture. (in this lecture, the targeted buildings were the one in Iraq which were hosting important personalities to assassinate for the US Army.)

see Morse's work Moving Things

found on PYTR75

# The obsession for decay in A Zed and Two Noughts by Peter Greenaway

I just rewatched A Zed and Two Noughts by Peter Greenaway (1985) and I am still amazed by the depiction of the two main (twins) characters for decay.
In fact, in this film, they set up a series of biological observation devices that photograph very three seconds an organic body in decomposition in order to compose a accelerated cinematographic piece of its complete putrefaction.
Greenaway actually introduces very quickly in the narrative this obsession as the first sentence pronounced in the film by those characters after the death of their two wives is: "How fast does a woman decomposes ?".

# Metropolis by Giorgio Agamben

The following text is the transcript of an audio recording found on dytopolitik. In it, Giorgio Agamben interprets Michel Foucault's chapter in Discipline and Punish about the shift from an exclusive urban scheme based on the leprosis management to a disciplinary urban scheme based on the plague management. In fact, according to Foucault, the sovereignty on life itself has been replaced in the XVIIIth century by a biopolitical sovereignty that consider life in its anatomical and biological dimensions in order to both ensure its power and maintain them in a state of continuous work production.

Metropolis by Giorgio Agamben

Many years ago I was having a conversation with Guy (Debord) which I believed to be about political philosophy, until at some point Guy interrupted me and said: 'Look, I am not a philosopher, I am a strategist'. This statement struck me because I used to see him as a philosopher as I saw myself as one, but I think that what he meant to say was that every thought, however 'pure', general or abstract it tries to be, is always marked by historical and temporal signs and thus captured and somehow engaged in a strategy and urgency. I say this because my reflections will clearly be general and I won't enter into the specific theme of conflicts but I hope that they will bear the marks of a strategy.

I would like to start from a banal consideration on the etymology of the word metropolis. As you know, in Greek, metropolis means Mother City and refers to the relationship between cities and colonies. The citizens of a polis who left to found a colony were curiously called en apoikia: distancing/drifting away from home and from the city, which then took on, in relation to the colony, the character of Mother City, Metropolis(1). As you know this meaning of the word is still current and is today used to express the relationship of the metropolitan territory of the home to the colonies. The first instructive observation suggested by the etymology is that the word metropolis has a strong connotation of maximum dislocation and spatial and political dishomogeneity, as that which defines the relationship between the state, or the city, and colonies. And this raises a series of doubts about the current idea of the metropolis as an urban, continuous and relatively homogeneous tissue (2). This is the first consideraton: the isonomy that defines the Greek polis as a model of political city is excluded from the relation between metropolis and colony, and therefore the term metropolis, when transposed to describe an urban fabric, carries this fundamental dishomogeneity with it. So I propose that we keep the term metropolis for something substantially other from the city, in the traditional conception of the polis, i.e. something politically and spatially isonomic. I suggest to use this term, metropolis, to designate the new urban fabric that emerges in parallel with the processes of transformation that Michel Foucault defined as the shift from the territorial power of the ancient regime, of sovereignty, to modern biopower, that is in its essence governmental.

This means that to understand what a metropolis is one needs to understand the process whereby power progressively takes on the character of government of things and the living, or if you like of an economy. Economy means nothing but government, in the 18th century, the government of the living and things. The city of the feudal system of the ancient regime was always in a situation of exception in relation to the large territorial powers, it was the citta franca, relatively autonomous from the great territorial powers (3). So I would say that the metropolis is the dispositif or group of dispositifs that replaces the city when power becomes the government of the living and of things.

We cannot go into the complexity of the transformation of power into government. Government is not dominion and violence, it is a more complex configuration that traverses the very nature of the governed thus implying their freedom, it is a power that is not transcendental but immanent, its essential character is that it is always, in its specific manifestation, a collateral effect, something that originates in a general economy and falls onto the particular (4). When the US strategists speak of collateral damage they have to be taken literally: government always has this schema of a general economy, with collateral effects on the particulars, on subjects.

Going back to the metropolis, my idea is that we are not facing a process of development and growth of the old city, but the institution of a new paradigm whose character needs to be analysed. Undoubtedly one of its main traits is that there is a shift form the model of the polis founded on a centre, that is, a public centre or agora, to a new metropolitan spatialization that is certainly invested in a process of de-politicization, which results in a strange zone where it is impossible to decide what is private and what is public.

Michel Foucault tried to define some of the essential characters of this urban space in relation to 'governmentality.' According to him, there is a convergence of two paradigms that were hitherto distinct: leprosy and the plague. The paradigm of leprosy was clearly based on exclusion, it required that the lepers were 'placed outside' the city. In this model, the pure city keeps the stranger outside, the "Great Confinement": enclose and exclude (5). The model of the plague is completely different and gives rise to another paradigm. When the city is plagued it is impossible to move the plague victims outside. On the contrary, it is a case of creating a model of surveillance, control, and articulation of urban spaces. These are divided into sections, within each section each road is made autonomous and placed under the surveillance of an intendant; nobody can go out of the house but every day the houses are checked, each inhabitant controlled, how many are there, are they dead etc. It is the imposition of a grid upon urban territory surveilled by intendants, doctors and soldiers. So whilst the leper was rejected by an apparatus of exclusion, the plague victim is encased, surveilled, controlled and cured through a complex web of dispositifs that divide and individualize, and in so doing also articulate the efficiency of control and of power.

Thus whereas leprosy is a paradigm of social exclusion, the plague is a paradigm of disciplinary techniques, technologies that will take society through the transition from the ancient regime to the disciplinary paradigm. According to Foucault, the political space of modernity is the result of these two paradigms: at some point the leper starts being treated like a plague victim, and vice versa. In other words, there emerges a projection onto the framework of exclusion and separation of leprosy, of the arrangement of surveillance, control, individualization and the articulation of disciplinary power, so that it becomes a case of individualizing, subjectivating and correcting the leper by treating him like a plague victim. So there is a double capture: on the one hand the simple binary opposition of diseased/healthy, mad/normal etc. and on the other hand there is a whole complicated series of differentiating dispositions of technologies and dispositifs that subjectify, individuate and control subjects. This is a first useful framework for a general definition of metropolitan space today and it also explains the very interesting things you were talking about here: the impossibility of univocally defining borders, walls, spatialization, because they are the result of the action of this different paradigm: no longer a simple binary division but the projection on this division of a complex series of articulating and individuating processes and technologies.

I remember Genoa 2001: I thought it was an experiment to treat the historical center of an old city, still characterized by an ancient architectural structure, to see how in this center one could suddenly create walls, gates that not only had the function of excluding and separating but were also there to articulate different spaces and individualize spaces and subjects. This analysis that Foucault summarily sketches out can be further developed and deepened. But now I want to end on a different note and concentrate on a different point.

I said that the city is a dispositif, or a group of dispositifs. The theory that you referred to earlier was the summary idea that one could divide reality into, on the one hand, humans and living beings, and, on the other, the dispositifs that continuously capture and take hold of them. However, the third fundamental element that defines a dispositif, for Foucault too I think, is the series of processes of subjectivation that result from the relation, the corpo a corpo, between individuals and dispositifs (6). There is no dispositif without a process of subjectivation; to speak of dispositif one has to see a process of subjectivation. Subject means two things: what leads an individual to assume and become attached to an individuality and singularity, but also subjugation to an external power (7). There is no process of subjectivation without both these aspects.

What is often lacking, also in the movements, is the consciousness of this relation, the awareness that every time one takes on an identity one is also subjugated. Obviously this is also complicated by the fact that modern dispositifs not only entail the creation of a subjectivity but also and equally processes of de-subjectivation. This might have always been the case, think about confession, which shaped Western subjectivity (the formal confession of sins), or juridical confession, which we still experience today. Confession always entailed in the creation of a subject also the negation of a subject, for instance, in the figure of the sinner and confessor, it is clear that the assumption of a subjectivity goes together with a process of de-subjectivation. So the point today is that dispositifs are increasingly de-subjectifying so it is difficult to identify the processes of subjectivation that they create. But the metropolis is also a space where a huge process of creation of subjectivity is taking place. About this we don't know enough. When I say that we need to know these processes, I am not just referring to the sociological or economic and social analysis; I am referring to the ontological level or Spinozian level that puts under question the subjects' ability/power to act; i.e. what, in the processes whereby a subject somehow becomes attached to a subjective identity, leads to a change, an increase or decrease of his/her power to act (8). We lack this knowledge and this perhaps makes the metropolitan conflicts we witness today rather opaque.

I think that a confrontation with metropolitan dispositifs will only be possible when we penetrate the processes of subjectivation that the metropolis entails in a more articulated way, deeper. Because I think that the outcome of conflicts depends on this: on the power to act and intervene on processes of subjectivation, in order to reach that stage that I would call a point of ungovernability. The ungovernable where power can shipwreck in its figure of government, the ungovernable that I think is always the beginning and the line of flight of all politics.

Transcribed and translated by Arianna Bove from audio files.

Translator's notes:
(1) allontanarsi is the verb used in the original;
(2) tessuto: material, cloth, woven fabric;
(3) citta franca is so called because it is exempt from feudal tax (franca = free, nice idiom: farla franca, 'getting away with it');
(4) ricade sul particolare: falls onto but also hangs and incumbs on;
(5) These reflections can be found in Michel Foucault's Lectures on Les Anormaux, given at the College de France in 1975, specifically this issue is treated on 15th January, Lecture II. The 1975 lectures are published in English by Verso as The Abnormals (London: 2003), in French by Gallimard (Paris: 1999) and in Italian by Feltrinelli (Milan: 2000). Excellent stuff;
(6) Funny how in English there is head to head and face to face, but no body to body. The Leviathan;
(7) assoggettamento;
(8) the usual conundrum: capacitá in Italian.

# Sådan Set Er Byen by Anne Haaning and benandsebastian

Sådan Set Er Byen is a new work by benandsebastian (see their manifesto for boiteaoutils) and Anne Haaning. It is a short and beautiful film inspired by the poem Det (It) written in 1969 by the Danish poet Inger Christensen.

Sådan Set Er Byen

a film by Anne Haaning and benandsebastian

assistants: Christine Bjerke, Marie Erstad, Rasmus Myrup Mortensen

soundtrack: ‘Junkspace’ by Isambard Khroustaliov

Narrator: Jan la Cour

‘sådan set er byen’ is inspired by and constructed around the poem:
‘Det’ by Inger Christensen
copyright © 1996 Inger Christensen, v. forlaget Gyldendal
translation copyright © 2005, 2006 by Susanna Nied

# Basento Viaduct by Sergio Musmeci

The Basento Viaduct is a bridge built in 1969 in Potenza (Italy) whose structure is assured by a continuous surface that minimize its area while maximizing its structural function.
Its engineer, Sergio Musmeci thus managed to create a magnificent concrete surface whose aesthetics directly derived from its optimization. The beauty of this bridge also emerges from the experience for people to walk on this surface as a second functional layer.

found on La Periferia Domestica (see also on core-form-ula)

# Burden of Dreams by Les Blank

I recently wrote an article about Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, the great constructive achievement it constitutes and the probable difficulties the film crew probably encountered in order to achieve this construction process. Burden of Dreams is a 1982 documentary by Les Blank that illustrate those difficulties and the continuous struggle for Herzog to achieve his movie in one of the most remote place of the Amazon forest. The movie actually show Herzog, extremely bitter, talking in a very intense way, about the absolute counter-harmony of the jungle and the obscenity of constant fight and survival struggle of its elements.

# Arena of Speculation

Arena of Speculation (Critical conjecture on the spatial futures of Israel-Palestine) is a remarkable platform about the Palestinian territorial struggle which include several articles on the topic but also various interviews including two acquaintances, Alessandro Petti (from Decolonizing Architecture) and Yazid Anani (from Birzeit University near Ramallah).
This website is also focusing on the Palestinian Right to Return and strategies on its application.

Its authors are :
- Ahmad Barclay
- Nina Kolowratnik
- Tashy Endres

# Stadium Tower in Detroit by Kendra James

Last May, I published two of the three projects (Another Dance Macabre and Underground City) from Thomas Leeser's studio in Pratt Institute that I wanted to show; here is the third one.
Stadium Tower in Detroit is a project narrated by Kendra James who proposes a monument to Detroit's status of "ruin-city" by erecting a frenzied building hosting a bunch of various sizes stadium and a car-park race track.
This project is the expression of the non-thaumaturge power of architecture and thus an invitation to sublimate problems rather than trying to solve them.

# Radio documentary programs about Hannah Arendt on France Culture

French speakers (listeners) would be happy to know that the radiophonic program Les Nouveaux Chemins de la Connaissance (on France Culture) just released five hours of discussions about the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt mostly about Totalitarianism and the "banalization of evil".
Eichman cannot be excused by his role in the Nazi bureaucracy nor can he be expelled from the man kind (which would be too easy for humans) but rather has to be put in front of his responsibilities, as a human who committed true horror.

# Great Construction Processes in Cinema: Andrei Rublev & Fitzcarraldo

Two movies, so far (there are probably a lot of other potential ones), have deeply moved me for their extensive dramatization of a process of construction within their plots. Those two films are Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky (1966) and Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog (1982).

The first one depicts a fragment of life of XVth century Russian icon painter Andrei Rublev. Nevertheless, Tarkovsky dramatizes this life by lingering on surrounding events for which Rublev is only an influenced spectator. The most significant of them is the construction from A to Z of a bell for the local cathedral and is filmed extensively by the Russian director.

The second film is one of the most famous of German director Werner Herzog's and introduces a passionate character of Fitzcarraldo who undertake a tremendous challenge involving a steamship and the native population of the Amazon Forest in Peru. I won't reveal what this challenge is about in order to save this amazing surprise for people who would not have watched it yet, but here as well, the process of construction is extensively visible.

Those two cinematographic episodes recount the deep fascination one (and especially a designer) can have in the contemplation of a work in progress which transforms mater into a designed assemblage. The beauty, here, is not in the finalized object but rather in its process of construction that also had to be achieved, to some extents, by the two films' teams.

# A Marxist reading of Capitalism's crisis by David Harvey at the RSA

In April 2010, David Harvey gave a lecture at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (London) about his Marxist reading of Capitalism's contradiction that inevitably led to the current economical crisis. In the following video, his speech is being illustrated by a great series of drawings by RSA Animate. The result is a vivid and concise discourse that needs to be absolutely watched !

Thanks Nora.



See the video of the lecture at the RSA

See the videos of David Harvey's class at the City University of New York, offering around 30h of close look to Karl Marx's Capital.

# 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.