Architectures of the Unforeseen: Essays in the Occurrent Arts

245 Pages·2019·9.156 MB·English

by  Brian Massumi

Architectures of the Unforeseen

Architectures of the Unforeseen
Essays in the Occurrent Arts
Brian Massumi
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
The author would like to acknowledge the generous support of
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Earlier versions of portions of chapter 1 were published in “Interface
and Active Space: Human– Machine Design,” in Proceedings of the
Sixth International Symposium on Electronic Art (Montreal: ISEA,
1996), 188–9 2; and “Becoming Architectural: Affirmative Critique,
Creative Incompletion,” in The Innovation Imperative: Architectures
of Vitality, special issue of Architectural Design (UK), ed. Pia Ednie-
Brown, Mark Burry, and Andrew Burrow, vol. 221 (January– February
2013): 50– 56. Earlier versions of portions of chapter 2 were published
in “Flash in Japan: Brian Massumi on Rafael Lozano- Hemmer’s ‘Amodal
Suspension,’”Artforum International (New York), November 2003: 37;
“Floating the Social: An Electronic Art of Noise,” in Reverberations:
Philosophy, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Noise, ed. Michael Goddard,
Benjamin Halligan, and Paul Hegarty, 40–5 7 (London: Continuum,
2012); and “Espresar la conexión, arquitectura relacional / Expressing
Connection: Relational Architecture,” Vectorial Elevation: Relational
Architecture No. 4, ed. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Mexico City: National
Council for Culture and the Arts, 2000), 183–2 08 (a bilingual English/
Spanish translation by Susie Ramsay). Chapter 3 was published as
“Making to Place: Simryn Gill, in the Artist’s Words Refracted,” in
Here Art Grows on Trees: Simryn Gill, ed. Catherine de Zegher, on
the occasion of the 55th Biennale of Venice, 185– 237 (Sydney/Ghent:
Australia Council for the Arts/MER, 2013), reprinted by permission.
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25 24 23 22 21 20 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction vii
1. Form Follows Force
Greg Lynn 1
Enter Process • Getting Topological • Gotta Love
It • Force, Field, Nature– Culture • Multiply and
Vary (Cloud and Blob) • Folding in Architecture •
The Biomorphic Hypothesis • Toggling Potential
• The Continuing Problem • The Body Topologic •
Abstract Surface • The Architecture of Body-E vents
• Abstract Expressionism of the Body • Surfacing
Design: Intricacy in Action • Body- Cursor • Recursive
Filiation and Outside Alliance • Beyond the Blob Guy:
The Composite Paradigm • A Final Question
2. Relational Architecture
Rafael Lozano- Hemmer 79
Stretching the Body
Techno- Solstice • Local–Global • Distancing the
Body • The Amoebic Reality of Relation • City
of Words • Material Quality of Thought •
Infraphenomenal • A Promiscuity of Levels •
Changeability • The Medium Is the Meiosis
• Cultural Domain • Cultural Act • Culturability
• Beyond Interactivity • Expressing Relation
Floating the Social
Three’s a Crowd • Something like Language •
Language to the Third Power • Sea of Noise, Crest
of Words • Words upon Words • Constitutive Limits
• Language: Caught in the Act • Sociability •
The Social Death of the Personal • The Rise of the
Quasi- Public • A Quasi- Directness of Expression
• Sociability Giganticus • The Determination of
a Quasi- Mind • Coda
3. Making to Place
Simryn Gill 149
This Place? • Places of Stone • The Bad Citizen •
Little Nothings • Just Nosing • Small Epiphanies •
An Alibi • The Art of No Reason • A Procedure for
Living • It’s Not “About” • Making to Place • Peeling
a Room • Floating-S pecific Art • Living beyond
Biography • What Is Winning in Art?
Concluding Remarks
Immanence (Many Lives) 171
Notes 185
Bibliography 201
Index 207
Introduction
These essays are not “about.” They are writings-w ith. What is
perhaps peculiar to them in relation to other practices of writing-
with is that the impetus behind them was felt as an impact, at
once contingent and obligatory: anything but a well- reflected
choice to enter into well-m annered dialogue. They had more
the tenor of a fortuitous encounter tantamount to a capture:
a latching to an alien creative practice of my own process of
philosophical concept-m aking, at very particular points of con-
tact. Points of contact is not the best way of putting it, because
it connotes two already-m ade forms rubbing up against each
other and sharing something of their contents across a bound-
ary. What I am talking about is at a very different level, the level
at which things are in the making: where what they can do and
where they can go is a pressing, open question. This is the level
of unruly constitutive problems, using the word “problem” in
the positive sense of a galvanizing tension imparting an impetus
for a process to take shape. A constitutive problem energizes a
coming trajectory with formative potential, but not without also
lacing it with imperatives acting as enabling constraints that will
orient its unfolding without predefining it. A region of problem-
atic overlap is a better way of putting it than a point of contact.
Two processes, strangers to each other, can intimately overlap
in a problematic that is constitutive for both, without coming in
any way to resemble each other in form or even sharing content.
Practices do not share content. They fashion their own, recipro-
cal to their singular taking-f orm. They may perturb each other
or attune, interfere or resonate, cross- fertilize or contaminate,
but each will ultimately incorporate the formative potential in vii
viii INTRODUCTION
their own problematic way, so that the overlap is also a forking.
This is what Deleuze and Guattari call aparallel evolution: the
intimate art of keeping a formative distance.1
Both the niceties of conversation and the agonism of debate
are anathema to this: they are mediations. They presuppose con-
stituted terms entering into interaction in the capacity of what
they have been, from the perspective of where they now stand.
Aparallel evolution, on the other hand, is an event. It stages a
relation that sweeps its terms up into its own dynamic perspec-
tive, from the immediate standpoint of how they might now
mutate. This may well involve dialogue (as it has with the essays
in this book), but only as a condition for the shifting into gear of
a process surpassing dialogue’s conventional communicational
function.2
My own work has been in aparallel evolution with the three
practitioners written-w ith in this book for varying durations. In
the case of the first two, the duration is long, very long. A chance
introduction to pioneering digital architect Greg Lynn in the
mid- 1990s riveted my attention to the problem of the abstract
as a practical issue. The virtual, in Proust’s formula taken up by
Deleuze, is “abstract yet real.” So what, practically speaking,
is its mode of reality? How can a design practice avail itself of
that reality not only as a resource but as a force, for its own
creative process? Given that the digital is in no way synonymous
with the virtual, understood in terms of formative force, what
exactly is the relationship between them? In what way does
the dynamic form in which a design process incorporates the
abstract reality of the virtual as a creative growth factor change
what we can think and say about form-g eneration? How does
it change what we mean by form in the first place? What is the
relationship between a design process that alters what we mean
by form and the design products that emerge as a result of that
alteration? May a process availing itself of the reality of the vir-
tual contrive to carry the charge of the virtual into its product?
In what (dynamic) trace-f orm? Under what conditions may a
product convey into the world at large the abstract but real
formative force from whose impetus it emerged, from within a
particular precinct of practice? Thinking this knot of questions
through Lynn’s architectural design practice, goaded on by his
INTRODUCTION ix
rallying cry of “animate form,” impelled my work in directions
it might not otherwise have taken. It enabled it to gestate con-
cepts it might not otherwise have birthed, as it followed his pro-
cess in aparallel accompaniment over many years, punctuated by
intermittent discussions and crossings of paths as well as more
concerted overlaps such as a two-w eek studio residency at his
offices in Venice, California. I cannot purport that the encoun-
ters inflected Lynn’s trajectory in return. The fact that the inflec-
tion remained virtual on one side, however, in no way detracts
from the abstract reality of the processual encounter. The think-
ing that oriented Lynn’s coming into his own practice had a phil-
osophical virtuosity, evidenced in his writings of the 1990s. In
its emergent stages, his work was in intimate relation with the
kind of process- oriented philosophy that also moves my work.
It was too absorbed in following through with the impetus of
that encounter, pressing it into the invention of its own practical
dynamic, to need a second hit of it. What it needed was to spin
its own formative line and tangle, leaving my process to similarly
spin off, orphaned by Lynn’s while irreversibly correlated to it,
a wasp in the abstract embrace of an intimately distant orchid.
Encounters actually unmet, non-e ncounters of the virtual kind,
are also events, after their own manner.
In the case of Mexican-Canadian digital-media artist Rafael
Lozano- Hemmer, the inflection has at times gone both ways, and
the duration is even longer, beginning at the end of the 1980s.
My early work on the politics of everyday fear formed part of
the background for one of Lozano-H emmer’s works, discussed
in chapter 2. A young Lozano-H emmer had actually had a hand
in the fear project as a member of the collective that formed
around the project in its embryonic stages. Later work of mine
on amodal perception factored into a subsequent project of
Lozano- Hemmer’s, also analyzed here. Collaborative encounters
happened.3 The problem that Lozano- Hemmer’s work crystal-
lized for mine concerned the distinction, already mentioned,
between interaction and relation. Here was an “interactive art-
ist” vehemently repudiating that label, insisting that what he
was really doing was “relational architecture.” And here was
an artist whose early projects were held up as a paragon of site-
specific art claiming that they were anything but site- specific,