idea journal: interior technicity: unplugged and/or switched on E-Book

• Herausgeber: Spurbuchverlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: idea journal
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 427

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Interior Technicity: Unplugged and/ or Switched On invites reflection on how interiors have always been augmenting entities and how they continue to be so—in other words, extending, facilitating and consolidating bodies within socio-cultural environments. Rather than seeing an interior as an 'inside' in opposition to a world beyond, it asks what modes of 'folding inward' have equipped and enabled the spatial environment? Technicity—the world of tools and technical objects that extend and mediate memory, as Bernard Steigler (1998) describes it—has never been what inside-ness, in its sheltering of life, keeps at bay; mediation is from the start technical, indexed to inscribing practices rich in temporal and embodied implications. By this reading, interiors have always been augmented and augmenting (in the sense of the Latin"augmentare": to increase, enlarge, or enrich). This IDEA Journal issue considers this mode of 'folding inward' as a condition of an interior'sspecificity. Whether it be a small structure such as a tramping hut or a tiny house, a large complex interior environment such as an airport or shopping mall, handmade with local materials such as Samoan fale, or the result of manufacturing processes assembling artificial and prefabricated elements as in the case of a spacecraft, boat or train, interiors are augmented, mediated, generated or embellished by technologies. The effect of these technologies is not neutral; one's experience of an interior is significantly influenced by the affective resonance of its technologies.

Leseprobe

interior technicity:unplugged and/or switched on

vol. 17, no. 01

2020

the journal of IDEA: the interior design + interior architecture educators’ association

idea journal

vol. 17, no. 012020

interiortechnicity

idea journal

interior technicity:unplugged and/or switched on

vol. 17, no. 01

2020

the journal of IDEA: the interior design + interior architecture educators’ association

vol. 17, no. 012020

interiortechnicity

03

frontmatter

about

IDEA (Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators’ Association) was formed in 1996 for the advancement and advocacy of education by encouraging and supporting excellence in interior design/interior architecture education and research within Australasia.

www.idea-edu.com

The objectives of IDEA are:

1. Objects

3.1 The general object of IDEA is the advancement of education by:

(a) encouraging and supporting excellence in interior design/interior architecture/spatial design education and research globally and with specific focus on Oceania; and

(b) being an authority on, and advocate for, interior design/interior architecture/spatial design education and research.

3.2 The specific objects of IDEA are:

(a) to be an advocate for undergraduate and postgraduate programs at a minimum of AQF7 or equivalent education in interior design/interior architecture/spatial design;

(b) to support the rich diversity of individual programs within the higher education sector;

(c) to create collaboration between programs in the higher education sector;

(d) to foster an attitude of lifelong learning;

(e) to encourage staff and student exchange between programs;

(f) to provide recognition for excellence in the advancement of interior design/interior architecture/spatial design education; and

(g to foster, publish and disseminate peer reviewed interior design/interior architecture/spatial design research.

membership

Institutional Members:

Membership is open to programs at higher education institutions in Australasia that can demonstrate an on-going commitment to the objectives of IDEA.

Current members:

AUT University, AucklandCurtin University, PerthMassey University, WellingtonMonash University, MelbourneQueensland University of Technology, BrisbaneRMIT University, MelbourneUniversity of New South Wales, SydneyUniversity of South Australia, AdelaideUniversity of Tasmania, Launceston and Hobart University of Technology Sydney, SydneyVictoria University, Wellington

Affiliate Members:

Affiliate membership is open to programs at higher education institutions in Australasia that do not currently qualify for institutional membership but support the objectives of IDEA. Affiliate members are non-voting members of IDEA.

Associate Members:

Associate membership is open to any person who supports the objectives of IDEA. Associate members are non-voting members of IDEA.

Honorary Associate Members:

In recognition of their significant contribution as an initiator of IDEA, a former chair and/or executive editor: Suzie Attiwill, Rachel Carley, Lynn Chalmers, Lynn Churchill, Jill Franz, Roger Kemp, Tim Laurence, Gini Lee, Marina Lommerse, Gill Matthewson, Dianne Smith, Harry Stephens, George Verghese, Andrew Wallace and Bruce Watson.

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publishing

© Copyright 2020 IDEA (Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators’ Association) and AADR (Spurbuchverlag) and authors

All rights reserved.

No part of the work must in any mode (print, photocopy, microfilm, CD or any other process) be reproduced nor – by application of electronic systems – processed, manifolded nor broadcast without approval of the copyright holders.ISSN 2208-9217ISBN 978-3-88778-916-9

Published by Art Architecture Design Research (AADR): aadr.info. AADR publishes research with an emphasis on the relationship between critical theory and creative practice. AADR Curatorial Editor: Dr Rochus Urban Hinkel, Melbourne.

IDEA (Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators’ Association)ACN 135 337 236; ABN 56 135 337 236

Registered at the National Library of Australia

idea journal is published by AADR and is distributed through common ebook platforms. Selected articles are available online as open source at time of publication, and the whole issue is made open access on the idea journal website one year after its date of publication.

idea journal editorial board

Dr Julieanna Preston, Executive Editor, Professor of Spatial Practice, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

Dr Anthony Fryatt, Program Manager, Bachelor of Interior Design (Hons), RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

Dr Susan Hedges, Senior Lecturer, Spatial Design, School of Art and Design, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

Dr Antony Pelosi, Senior Lecturer, Interior Architecture, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Dr Luke Tipene, Lecturer, School of Architecture, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Professor Lois Weinthal, External Advisory Member, Chair of the School of Interior Design, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

cover image

Photograph and video by Linda Matthews

online publication editor

Dr Antony Pelosi, Senior Lecturer, Interior Architecture, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

copy editor

Dr Christina Houen, Perfect Words Editing

design + production

Jo Bailey, School of Design, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

correspondence

Correspondence regarding this publication should be addressed to:

Dr Lynn Churchillc/oidea journalInterior ArchitectureCurtin UniversityGPO Box U1987Perth 6845Western Australia

[email protected]

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interior technicity: unplugged and/ or switched on: provocation

Interior Technicity: Unplugged and/ or Switched On reflects on how interiors have always been augmenting entities and how they continue to be so—in other words, extending, facilitating and consolidating bodies within socio-cultural environments. Rather than seeing an interior as an ‘inside’ in opposition to a world beyond, it asks what modes of ‘folding inward’ have equipped and enabled the spatial environment? Technicity—the world of tools and technical objects that extend and mediate memory, as Bernard Steigler (1998) describes it—has never been what inside-ness, in its sheltering of life, keeps at bay; mediation is from the start technical, indexed to inscribing practices rich in temporal and embodied implications. By this reading, interiors have always been augmented and augmenting (in the sense of the Latin ‘augmentare’: to increase, enlarge, or enrich).

This idea journalissue considers this mode of ‘folding inward’ as a condition of an interior’s specificity. Whether it be a small structure such as a tramping hut or a tiny house, a large complex interior environment such as an airport or shopping mall, handmade with local materials such as Samoan fale, or the result of manufacturing processes assembling artificial and pre-fabricated elements as in the case of a space craft, boat or train, interiors are augmented, mediated, generated or embellished by technologies. The effect of these technologies is not neutral; one’s experience of an interior is significantly influenced by the affective resonance of its technologies.

This issue builds on existing scholarship on the topic of interiors and technology, with special mention of the 2012 issue ‘Special Effects: Technology and the Interior Experience,’ Interiors: Design, Culture, Architectureedited by Anne Massey and John Turpin. In doing so, contributions expand knowledge on the topic by addressing these questions:

How do interior technologies bear out their allegiances to various forms of political and economic assemblages while making (seemingly) life better, more efficient, more productive, and more comfortable?

How do interior technologies serve to meet the minimum standards of human welfare relative to air, light, water and well-being as outlined by United Nations Sustainable Development Goals?

What new blended realities and spatial possibilities are being instigated by innovative uses of photogrammetry, virtual reality, augmented reality, laser-scanning, machine learning, and remote sensing?

What cultural references, positions and implications do interior technologies offer?

What influence do interior technologies have on privacy, safety and well-being?

What is the aesthetic signature of an interior technology?

What is the materiality of an interior technology? What happens at its boundary or edge condition?

How do interior technologies, especially overlooked, antiquated, unorthodox or ingenious spatial contraptions confirm, challenge or speculate on what we understand or assume an interior to be?

In a broader context, what is the significant impact of rapidly advancing and widely accessible information and social technologies that are driving the revolutionary upheaval through all that can be conceived as ‘interior’?

How do new mediations between environments, bodies, technology and media, including biofeedback, performative actions and affective gesture, sensory and atmospheric production, challenge or expand our understandings of interiors?

How are interiors implicated in a shifting relationship [convergence?] between bodies and technology.

reviewers for this issue

Suzie AttiwillMary Anne BeecherRachel CarleyFelipe CerveraMaria CostatinoChris CottrellCarl DouglasJill FranzChon HarahSusan HedgesRochus HinkelJondi KeaneLaurence KimmelTed KruegerGini LeeLinda MatthewsBelinda MitchellJacquie NaismithTheron SchmidtDianne SmithMark Taylor George ThemistokleousLuke TipeneJiang Mei Wu

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in this issue

08 introduction: interior technicity

Julieanna Preston

13 the dividual interior: surveillance and desire

Katie Braatvedt

29 learning from mars; or, facing our shit

Lydia Kallipoliti

Jestin George

51 inside the architecture of closed worlds, or, what is the power of shit?

Luke Tipene

68 locative atmospheres: practices in networked space

Kate Geck

82 re:bodying the virtual: a bilateral excavation in virtual interior(s)

Remco Roes

Alis Garlick

94 binding matters: reflecting on the affectivity of a light projection

Isla Griffin

107 catoptric theatres: on devices of atmospheric staging

Izabela Wieczorek

131 unspecified project: scenes of digital media practice in spatial design

Carl Douglas

Susan Hedges

Rafik Patel

Nooroa Tapuni

149 virtually unseen: new digital understandings of reclaimed space

Linda Matthews

170 swipe inwards: the technicities of care in a psychiatric precinct

Laurene Vaughan

Melisa Duque

Sarah Pink

Shanti Sumartojo

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187 ‘silvering (slowly)’: augmentation, age, and mattering

Carl Douglas

Sue Gallagher

Rafik Patel

Nooroa Tapuni

Emily O’Hara

205 the paleotechnology of telephones and screens: on the ecstatic permeability of the interior

Kris Pint

221 the one and the multiple

Müge Belek Fialho Teixeira

Frederico Fialho Teixeira

237 memory in suspension: chinatown lost and found

Linda Zhang

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introduction

julieannapreston

introduction: interior technicity

Julieanna Preston

Executive Editoridea journal

Welcome.

It is my great pleasure to introduce the newest issue of idea journal.

Readers will notice some significant changes to the journal since the 2017 issue Dark Matter. In 2019, the IDEA Board appointed me to lead a new editorial team and commissioned us to envision three issues to be published over the course of three years. Over the past twelve months, the editorial team has been engrossed in several interconnected journal specific initiatives prompted by IDEA’s desire to increase the journal’s ranking and profile internationally, expand its readership, update its visual identity and respond to contemporary issues specific and associated with interiors and interiority.

First, we were charged to put the journal on a path to achieve a Q1 or Q2 status, no small task indeed. Our collective investigations revealed that the criteria required an international publisher of merit, open access, a rigorous review process and at least one issue per year and a minimum of twelve articles per issue amongst other less demanding aspects. With the endorsement of the IDEA Board, we secured Art Architecture Design Research (AADR) as the journal’s publisher, Curatorial Editor Rochus Hinkel at the helm. This collaboration prompted the journal to be distributed for the foreseeable future in two different ways: first as an e-pub available to individuals and libraries as a full issue on e-pub platforms such as kindle and iBook, with select articles posted on

cite as:Preston, Julieanna. ‘Introduction: Interior Technicity,’ idea journal17, no. 01 (2020): 08 – 12, https://doi.org/10.37113/ij.v17i01.403.

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the IDEA website, and a year later, the whole issue available on the IDEA website via open access. In addition, the online metadata and cross-referencing markers were refreshed, including using search engines such as Google Scholar to increase and document the citations each article attracts, an important factor in today’s pressures to publish and demonstrate ‘impact’ and ‘uptake’ as research academics. In less than a few months, citation numbers are up significantly. While the journal website portal continues to offer us new challenges, it is proving to be a very useful tool to structure the call, review, revision and production of idea journal.

Our second effort focussed on drawing the journal to the attention of a larger world-wide audience of researchers, students and industry professionals centred on spatial design, interior design, and interior architecture. We extended the journal’s reach beyond the edges of what would be considered a core readership to engage other knowing bodies grappling with similar concerns of space, perception, sustainability, experience, materials, philosophies and technology in culturally specific and diverse communities, geographies, and political circumstances. This initiative arises from IDEA’s commitment to a shared set of values, practices and theories and the rich interfaces these have with other associated disciplines, methods and fields of research.

The changes mentioned above necessitated that the pool of reviewers expand to reflect new aspirations and areas of expertise, a pool that is now in place, doubled in size and actively growing. It also prompted us to refresh IDEA’s commitment to support new and emerging researchers especially with regard to developing critical, reflective and experimental skills to communicate and present innovative design. The forthcoming issues include articles and visual essays from a number of new researchers that have been mentored extensively to bring the text and images to a high standard. In addition, on-going world events remind us again and again of the importance of turning to indigenous writers and makers, a matter that asks us to question our review criteria and processes, become more aware of systemic colonising practices and more open to other world views. These aims are a work-in-progress.

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The IDEA Board also gave us the green light to redesign the journal, which included creating a journal-specific logo, revamping the journal portion of the website, and imagining new possibilities for reading the journal in a totally digital format capable of featuring live streaming, animation, videos and other forms of interactive content. You may also note that while the journal’s name has not changed entirely, it has morphed to reflect its changing focus, expanded audience and ethos. What you see before you is the product of that effort, an effort we could not have achieved without the creativity and expertise of Jo Bailey, our graphic designer, and Christina Houen, our copy editor.

There are three issues in the pipeline: Interior Technicity: Unplugged and/or Switched On(September 2020), Co-constructing Body: Environments (December 2020) and (Extra) Ordinary Interiors: Practising Critical Reflection (September 2021). For those enamoured by statistics, this issue, Interior Technicity, includes this introduction and fourteen articles, four of which are visual essays (Braatvedt, Griffin, Matthews, and Roes and Garlick), and one of which is a hybrid article spanning between research article and book review (Tipene). This issue includes research by a total of twenty-seven authors living and working in UK (1), USA (1), Canada (1), Belgium (2), Australia (11) or New Zealand (11). All articles have been through a double-blind peer-review process; some articles have been reviewed twice after substantial revisions.

We hope you applaud these changes and enjoy the new look and publishing opportunities.

‘Interior Technicity’called for reflection on how interiors have always been augmenting entities and how they continue to be so—in other words, extending, facilitating and consolidating bodies within socio-cultural environments. Rather than seeing an interior as an ‘inside’ in opposition to a world beyond, it asked what modes of ‘folding inward’ have equipped and enabled the spatial environment? Technicity—the world of tools and technical objects that extend and mediate memory, as Bernard Steigler (1998) describes it—has never been what inside-ness, in its sheltering of life, keeps at bay; mediation is from the start

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technical, indexed to inscribing practices rich in temporal and embodied implications. By this reading, interiors have always been augmented and augmenting (in the sense of the Latin ‘augmentare’: to increase, enlarge, or enrich).

Figure 01:What external infrastructure reveals about our insides. Photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SIF-Overhead-Wires-1-Cropped.jpg#/media/File:SIF-Overhead-Wires-1-Cropped.jpg (accessed 20 July 2020).

Like every other journal issue I have edited, the call attracted a variety of topics and responses one could not anticipate. There were twenty-five expressions of interest and a subsequent sixteen complete manuscripts that, after the review process, reduced to fourteen final articles, several of which where collaboratively authored. As the forthcoming articles will attest, articles range from concerns of sustainable responsibility in a world of finite resources, to use of contemporary technology to observe alternative spatial circumstances, advocation of post-humanism and principles of new materialism relative to interior production and unearthing evidence from cultural archives to revision urban

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space and ethnic heritage. New conversations on longstanding concerns of interest to interior researchers linger on the nature of inside and outside bodily boundaries, the multiplicity of creative process and experience, and the interrogation of small yet important interior features in health care environs. Rather than summarise these stellar articles, I encourage you to read further, browse generously, and ruminate deeply.

My love of shaping a journal issue happens very much in the same spirit of catalysing a temporal event. Admittedly, I actually enjoy the editing process and thrive when author’s words are refined to be sharp, poetic, insightful and informed by creative work as well as scholarly research. To do this withauthors, reviewers, an editorial team, and a publisher is a very rewarding collaborative activity that exceeds the hours of searching for stray punctuation marks, missing references and correct verb tense. Thank you to the IDEA Board for trusting this team to bring the journal through this transformative phase. Huge kudos to Susan Hedges (AUT), Luke Tipene (UTS), Anthony Fryatt (RMIT), Antony Pelosi (VUW) and our external advisor Lois Weinthal (Ryerson) for the hours of reviewing, editing, networking and corresponding. Congratulations to all the authors of this issue, for your patience, openness to critique and willingness to be part of idea journal’s next fresh life.

Julieanna PrestonExecutive Editoridea journalAugust 2020

I am forever grateful for what life in Aotearoa/ New Zealand brings. With roots stretching across the oceans to North America, Sweden, Wales and Croatia, I make my home between Kāpiti Island and the Tararua Ranges, and in Te Whanganui-A-Tara/ Wellington. I acknowledge the privilege that comes with being educated, employed, female and Pākehā, and the prejudices and injustices that colonialism has and continues to weigh on this land and its indigenous people. I am committed to on-going learning and practising of Kaupapa Māori.

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the dividual interior: surveillance and desire

katie braatvedt

visual essay

Katie Braatvedt

Independent Researcher0000-0002-5780-1066

abstract

In his much-discussed short essay, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control,’ Gilles Deleuze described a fundamental shift in power that occurred in the 20th century. Previously, Michel Foucault had argued that human behaviour was controlled by ‘enclosed systems’ of power: the family, the school, the factory, the barracks, the prison and the hospital. These comprised what Foucault considered a ‘disciplinary society.’ Deleuze argued that Foucault’s ‘enclosures’ are in crisis, and that the current system is instead a control society, effectively governed by a single entity, the corporation. In this society of ‘ultra-rapid forms of free-floating control,’ people are reduced to data points. For Deleuze, individuals are ‘dividuals,’ and masses are data. This visual essay investigates the implications of control society on domestic space, exploring how digital applications and appliances, social media, and surveillance combine to form a dividual interior. Virtual space not only records and stores, but folds back into physical space, as images of domestic life online influence our perception of the built environment. The domestic interior, therefore, translates back and forth between the virtual and the real, each gathering information and informing the other.

cite as:Braatvedt, Katie. ‘The Dividual Interior: Surveillance and Desire,’ idea journal17, no. 01 (2020): 13-28, https://doi.org/10.37113/ij.v17i01.379.

keywords: Deleuze, interior, domesticity, surveillance, data

the dividual interior: surveillance and desire

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visual essay

introduction

The domestic interior, like much of contemporary urban space, leaves digital traces of inhabitation collected from credit cards, smart appliances, phones, laptops and household utility usage. These traces produce patterns of behaviour and consumption, a digital residue, which accumulates into a detailed record. Virtual space not only records and stores, but folds back into physical space, as images of domestic life online influence our perception of the built environment. The domestic interior, therefore, translates back and forth between the virtual and the real, each gathering information and informing the other.

surveillance

In his much-discussed short essay, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control,’ Gilles Deleuze described a fundamental shift in power that occurred in the 20th century.01Previously, Michel Foucault had argued that human behaviour was controlled by ‘enclosed systems’ of power: the family, the school, the factory, the barracks, the prison and the hospital. These comprised what Foucault considered a ‘disciplinary society.’ Deleuze argued that Foucault’s ‘enclosures’ are in crisis, and that the current system is instead a control society, effectively governed by a single entity, the corporation. In this society of ‘ultra-rapid forms of free-floating control,’ people are reduced to data points.

For Deleuze, individuals are ‘dividuals,’ and masses are data.

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visual essay

Figure 01: Collage from photographs taken by Julian Braatvedt of his fridge, sent via Facebook Messenger, August 2018.

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Figure 02: Screenshot taken at 15:15 August 13, 2018 on insecam.com.

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The ‘smart home’ is an example of the spatial implications of control society, representing a kind of dividual interior. This data-rich environment emerges gradually through numerous small exchanges of privacy for convenience: Google Nest home thermostats help consumers use less energy; Microsoft is developing counters that recognise foodstuffs and display recipes; mattresses are available that monitor sleep patterns. Less obvious than these high-tech appliances are apps that monitor domestic chores, step counts and period cycles. There is potential for both applications and appliances to betray their inhabitants: will health insurance premiums be linked to the number of steps taken on a Fitbit, the number of calories taken from a fridge? In Honeywell, I’m Home, Justin McGuirk argues that smart homes are designed not for the consumer, but for the corporation to gather as much data as possible.02He predicts that, in the near future, all of these devices will cooperate in one large data harvest. By quantifying the minutiae of life, control society nudges us toward a desired norm in small ways that accumulate into a restrictive mould. These modulations, as Deleuze describes them, are decentralised and pervasive.

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Figure 03 (left and below): Screenshots taken between 14:30 and 15:00 August 13, 2018 on insecam.com.

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Figure 04: Collage from photographs taken by Wilson Ong of his kitchen, sent via Facebook Messenger and other images found on ‘flatmates wanted’ listings on Trade Me, August 2018.

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Beyond the meta-analysis of dividual data, there is the potential for more targeted breaches of the dividual interior. For example, insecam.com live-broadcasts thousands of hacked home security systems worldwide. An endlessly refreshing stream of domestic videos can be flicked between or observed at length. The illustrated screenshots from one 30-minute hack show two men working at a dining table and then, unexpectedly, two women making the same dining chairs into ad hoc beds and falling asleep.03This series demonstrates not only that domestic spaces are no longer traditionally private, but also that the lines between residential and commercial space are blurring.The dining room is used for eating, working and sleeping.

If data is the new oil, the home is the next Texas. – Joseph Grima‘Home is the answer, but what is the question?’04

Joseph Grima argues that the domestic interior is a site of ‘virtual encounter between everyday life and global economic infrastructure,’ with the house evolving from a ‘sanctuary from prying eyes’ to a ‘geo-tagged broadcasting studio.’05For Grima, the house has been entirely financialised; its primary function is to accumulate value on the market, and behaviour within it is collected by devices, translated into data, quantified, and sold back to us.

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Figure 05: Screenshots of various search queries in Pinterest reveal the repetitive aesthetic of the online house’s rooms, February 2019.

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desire

Kurt Ivasen and Sophia Maalsen argue that, rather than replacing disciplinary forces, control society functions in conjunction with disciplinary society in a complex combination of discipline and modulation.06They argue that individuals are datafied into dividuals and then reassembled into individuals, who are controlled by both fluid modulations and traditional institutions of power.

In the same way that Ivasen and Maalsen argue there is a risk of overstating the decline in the disciplinary forces described by Foucault, there is a risk of oversimplifying the house’s function as a factory producing data. The domestic interior still functions as an individual’s territorial space: it is physically lockable, sheltered from weather and subject to interior decoration by its inhabitant. However, this physical interior exists in constant dialogue with a corresponding digital interior.

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Figure 06: Collage from photographs taken by Wilson Ong of his house, sent via Facebook Messenger. August 2018.

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Figure 07: Collage from photographs taken by Wilson Ong of his house, sent via Facebook Messenger. August 2018.

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Social media platforms, such as Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest, are aspirational online interiors. As Alexandria Lange states in Edited Living, ‘the house that might result from a series of Pinterest pins would be home as a series of events, stage sets for performing particular tasks with maximum beauty.’07Lange observes how images on Pinterest boards circulate in a closed loop, resulting in a homogenous aesthetic across digital platforms that directly inform a global homogenisation of interior design. In lieu of a physical permanent house, the Pinterest Board becomes a substitute space to curate idealised domestic interiors collaged from decontextualised stills.

Figure 08: Soul Beauty, ‘Stanky Breath=Not Cute,’ published January 9, 2011, YouTube video, 03:53.

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Figure 09: Perspective drawing of the augmented interior, drawn by the author, 2019.

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As data is absorbed by the smart home, and imagery is absorbed by consumers of social media, a passive interchange between the virtual and the real emerges. Beyond this digital/physical osmosis, however, exists a far more active engagement in digital domesticity, as content creators willingly perform online. The YouTube video, ‘Stanky Breath=Not Cute’ has almost 336,000 views.08Strikingly intimate, this video depicts a woman in her bathroom demonstrating how to use a tongue scraper. Voluntary breaches of personal privacy are normalised and neutralised by a saturated media environment.

Perhaps as individual data points, these banal details are benign. It is only when it is reassembled into a legible whole that the digital interior is suddenly powerful and terrifying. As architects we can choose to ignore the virtual and stubbornly plough forward, constructing ‘monuments to a lost physicality’ as theorist Mark Wigley described the profession in a recent interview.09Or we can resist it in practical ways, for example, by introducing digital blackout curtains in the form of faraday mesh and radio jammers into the physical interior.10Deleuze argues that ‘there is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.’11Opportunities exist in the blurred spaces between interior and exterior, virtual and real. Productive outcomes must begin by understanding that the contemporary interior is inextricably linked with digital space. Understanding that to watch, to be watched, to consume, and to perform are intimate desires succumbed to in our intimate spaces. Understanding, also, that in the cold glare of the algorithm, this public domesticity is endlessly recorded.

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notes

01 Giles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control,’ October59 (Winter 1992): 3–7.

02 Justin McGuirk, ‘Honeywell, I’m Home! The Internet of Things and the New Domestic Landscape,’ E-flux Journal64 (2015), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/64/60855/honeywell-i-m-home-the-internet-of-things-and-the-new-domestic-landscape/.

03 ‘IP Cameras: By Rating,’ Insecam, accessed August 13, 2018, http://www.insecam.org/en/byrating/?page=8.

04 Joseph Grima, ‘Home is the Answer, But what is the Question?’ in SQM. The Quantified Home: An Exploration of the Evolving Identity of the Home, from Utopian Experiment to Factory of Data, ed. Space Caviar (Ennetbaden: Lars Müller Verlag, 2014), 12-27.

05 Grima, ‘Home is the Answer,’ 12-27.

06 Kurt Iveson and Sophia Maalsen, ‘Social Control in the Networked City: Datafied Dividuals, Disciplined Individuals and Powers of Assembly,’ EPD: Society and Space37 no. 2 (2019): 331–349, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818812084.

07 Alexandra Lange, ‘Edited Living’ in SQM, The Quantified Home: An Exploration of the Evolving Identity of the Home, from Utopian Experiment to Factory of Data ed. Space Caviar (Ennetbaden: Lars Müller Verlag), 226-231.

08 ‘Stanky Breath=Not Cute,’ Soul Beauty, YouTube, published January 9, 2011, video, 03:53, https://youtu.be/8TAJo7MM1dQ.

09 Mark Wigley, ‘Are We Human?’ interview by Marrika Trotter, Sci-Arc Channel, YouTube, November 13, 2017, video, 13:43, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43lDV6_jJd8.

10 See Space Caviar project, RAM House, www.spacecaviar.net/ram-house/.

11 Giles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control,’ October 59 (Winter1992): 4.

acknowledgements

Thank you to my supervisor Dr Dorita Hannah for your continued encouragement, support and inspiration.

author biography

Katie Braatvedt completed her Masters of Architecture Professional (Hons 1) in 2019 from the University of Auckland. Currrently teaching at AUT and practising at Stevens Lawson Architects, she has also previously worked at 31/44 Architects in London and WeShouldDoItAll in New York.

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research paper

learning from mars; or, facing our shit

lydia kallipolitijestin george

Lydia Kallipoliti

The Cooper Union

0000-0003-2035-3295

abstractThe intent to inhabit Mars carries many self-contradicting intentions, especially given our clear plan to extract Martian resources, domesticate the planet, and transfer the ideological framework of establishing territory in a newly found space free from jurisdiction. To that end, research into sustaining human life on Mars is highly problematic. Interplanetary habitation is arguably an escape from Earth. The latent narrative is defeat; that is succumbing to the climate crisis, while making alternative plans for a selected privileged population. Nevertheless, research into life on Mars forces us to face our shit on Earth, where resources for sustaining all forms of life have been abundant. Not until recently have we been mandated to consider their finite worth or replacement, or deal with the excessive waste we generate as a by-product of our daily production processes. On Mars, where every resource for sustaining life is precious and rare within a fully enclosed life support, waste becomes integral to our survival. This view from afar, in the words of Claude Levi Strauss, changes our viewpoint on how to retain and recycle waste. Arguably, it is not only insightful for Mars-based habitats, but also for helping in altering daily patterns of dealing with waste and the climate crisis on Earth.

This article presents LIFE ON MARS, a research-design project investigating closed-loop life-support living systems for Mars as giant living machines of ingestion and excretion. It is neither a complete project, nor a ‘solution’ to extra-terrestrial inhabitation. LIFE ON MARSlooks at the minimum use of in-situ resources avoiding extraction, as well as the regenerative properties of Earth-based biology and our ability to engineer and tinker with resources through the field of synthetic biology. The project also brings to light emergent forms of habitation in extreme interiorisation and the problem of sustaining life in a sealed interior when the exterior world becomes prohibitive. In this format, it is presented as an inquisitive visual narrative, which raises both existential and scientific questions for further exploration.

Jestin George

University of Technology Sydney

0000-0002-8225-827X

cite as:Kallipoliti, Lydia and Jestin George. ‘Learning from Mars: Or, Facing our Shit,’ idea journal17, no. 01 (2020):29-50, https://doi.org/10.37113/ij.v17i01.375.

keywords: life support, inhabitable digestive machines, excrements, colonisation, closed-loop

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outer space and the problem of dominion

Is the action of the body separable from its technology, and how does the technology determine new forms of political action?01

There is something alluring about the emptiness of a blank planet; an uninhabited vast terrain, where every step demarcates the tempering of an endless unforgiving world. As Michael Marder argued for the desert, Mars, as much as it is a real planet afar, is also ‘an invention, a creation of emptiness in the plenitude of existence, an introduction of barrenness into the fecundity of being.’02The intent to inhabit Mars carries many self-contradicting intentions, especially given our clear plan to extract Martian resources, domesticate the planet, and transfer the ideological framework of establishing territory in a newly found space free from jurisdiction.03As space archaeologist Alice Gorman writes:

of all landscapes, perhaps space alone can claim to be a true ‘wilderness’… Interplanetary space was a real terra nullius, the land belonging to no-one. It was, nonetheless, a powerful associative landscape, central to diverse cultural beliefs, creation stories, mythologies and scientific enquiry.04

Since the conception of the Mars Excursion Module (MEM) in a 1964 NASA Study, the Martian astronaut, standing firm, masked and geared over a territory unfriendly to the physiology of humans, propagates the

iconography of the heroic settler extending human life through the galaxy; though with clear effects when placed next to the fissures of terrestrial history.05When looking at Mark Watney, Ridley Scott’s fictional character (played by Matt Damon),06who was left behind on Mars to grapple with the vast barren landscape of the red planet, there are clear associations between the astronaut and Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, The Wanderer,a painting that defined the Romantic Period and the iconography of the sublime.07This visual narrative of the explorer as the inevitable victor of a free terrain is entirely subordinated to the burdened history of colonisation, where conflicting groups of power structures are established in their demarcation of dominion. Colonising Mars can therefore not be detached from the power dynamics of relentless capitalism. In recent years, Mars has been envisioned as a tourist destination, while the journey to the red planet has been largely commercialised and popularised. Along with Donald Trump’s recent consent to and encouragement of colonising Mars,08private companies like Virgin Galactic, Mars One, and SpaceX are leading research, commercialisation and technical innovation in space exploration, while the military is questioning the commitments of the original Outer Space Treaty, put into force by the United Nations in October 1967.09These ‘new developments present an ever-growing challenge in defining the laws that govern space, raising myriad questions, and rendering a treaty created decades ago obsolete.’10

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So, as we find ourselves in a world of increasingly complex and contentious scientific and technological advancements, how do we evaluate and explore the premise of space travel and Martian living? How do we engage critically and meaningfully with life on Mars, not explicitly as a feat of science, technology and engineering, but also as a complex cultural, spatial and anthropological territory? Could we then rethink architectural and living modalities in a different way? Such

Figure 01: Artist’s conception of the Mars Excursion Module (MEM) proposed in a NASA Study in 1964. Aeronutronic Division of Philco Corp, under contract by NASA. First presented in Dixon, Franklin P. (June 12, 1964). ‘Summary Presentation: Study of a Manned Mars Excursion Module,’ Proceedings of the Symposium on Manned Planetary Missions: 1963/1964 Status. Huntsville, Alabama: NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center p. 470.

ventures require rigorous interdisciplinary research, which is exceptionally challenging, given the highly specialised knowledge forms that need to crossbreed with each other. Such crossovers, setting common foundations across disciplines, require the development of new shared types of language. During the Macy conferences, held in New York City from 1946 to 1953, the fields of systems theory, cybernetics, and what later became known as cognitive

Figure 01: Artist’s conception of the Mars Excursion Module (MEM) proposed in a NASA Study in 1964. Aeronutronic Division of Philco Corp, under contract by NASA. First presented in Dixon, Franklin P. (June 12, 1964). ‘Summary Presentation: Study of a Manned Mars Excursion Module,’ Proceeding of the Symposium on Manned Planetary Missions: 1963/1964 Status. Huntsville, Alabama: NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center p. 470.

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sciences, as well as computer science, were born in open source thinktanks.11Similarly, interdisciplinary research asks scientific practitioners to exercise scenario development and speculation; tools which are outside the territory of their scientific methodologies. It also asks architects to investigate the full spectrum of life, in all its living systems, materials and components, as a complex intertwining of overlapping ecologies and the way they unfold in space and in time. In this way, the notion of a spatial environment takes on a new role. Instead of being the inactive, static, and historicised context of an architectural object, the environment quite literally becomes the object of design itself.

Here, we present LIFE ON MARS, a research-design project investigating closed-loop life-support living systems for Mars, commissioned by the Design Museum in London for the exhibition Moving to Mars (2019-2020). In its first iteration, this work was born out of a two-week intensive research investigation by a team of architecture students, professors and consultants from the field of genetic engineering. It is neither a complete project, nor a ‘solution’ to extra-terrestrial inhabitation. Yet, it offers a solid research-based scenario development for perceiving such a future and for asking pertinent questions to help us to explore critically and meaningfully the premise of Martian living. LIFE ON MARSlooks at in situ resources available on Mars, as well as the regenerative properties of Earth-based biology and our ability to engineer and tinker with resources through the field of synthetic biology. In this format, it is presented as an

inquisitive visual narrative structured by four points, which raises both existential and scientific questions for further exploration.

Exploring Martian living is almost too big to fathom: from the technological aspects of supporting human life to the social and psychological impacts of a life experience that is drastically altered—both physically and mentally—to the questions around longevity and renewability of resources. This work neither attempts to answer these massive topics, nor offers holistic solutions. Instead, it provides ground for imagining possibilities with the technologies available today and uses this speculative design to ask questions about what it would mean to develop a digestive machine for living on Mars, and how the research could provide alternative routes of thinking for life on Earth.

On the one hand, research into sustaining human life on Mars is highly problematic. Interplanetary habitation is arguably an escape from Earth itself. The latent narrative is defeat; that is, succumbing to the climate crisis, while making alternative plans for a selected privileged population.12On the other hand, research into life on Mars forces us to face our shit on Earth, where resources for sustaining all forms of life have been abundant. Not until recently have we been mandated to consider their finite worth or replacement, or deal with the excessive waste we generate as a by-product of our daily production processes. On Mars, where every resource for sustaining life is precious and rare within a fully enclosed life support, waste becomes integral to our survival.

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Figure 02: LIFE ON MARS. Lydia Kallipoliti with Jestin George (Genetic Engineering Consultant) and UTS students Beau Avedissian, Ka Hou Cheang, Dorsa Fahandezh, Jialu Huang, Mariam Mesiha and Isabella Wells, Sydney, 2019.

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This view from afar, in the words of Claude Levi Strauss,13changes our viewpoint on how to retain and recycle waste. Arguably, it is not only insightful for Mars-based habitats, but also for helping in altering daily patterns of dealing with waste and the climate crisis on Earth.

point 01: bodies unpacked

When and if Mars is inhabited, it will be contaminated. It will, by default, no longer be the pure wild territory. Any type of colonisation is also an infection, a blending of substances, species and materials either of biogenic or abiogenic sources. The minute a human body enters a closed-loop life-support system of any given space habitat, this capsule is compromised in the flawless operation of its feedback loops, as history has proved.14In colonising a territory, inevitably

we exploit, extract, restrain, clear, build, pollute, infest and infect, crawling all over the ‘found’ ecology of any given terrain, let alone an entire planet. On Earth, colonisation has exploited Earth’s people and resources. But how do we view and investigate the colonisation of a lifeless planet? As tech entrepreneur and Aboriginal Cabrogal woman Mikaela Jade proposed, ‘Will the first humans on Mars be considered colonialists or First Nations?’15

Relevant to the trope of human explorers invading infinite uninhabitable lands, colonising Mars begs the question of where the body is located in this process; not as a figure seen from afar in a desolate landscape, but as a corporeal physical entity, which is no longer outside the biological preserve of the planet.

Figure 03: Human Footprint. Feedback diagram of biomaterial and bio-metrical output by Lydia Kallipoliti and Bess Krietemeyer for the exhibition Closed Worldsat the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, 2016.

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As a machine of ingestion and excretion, but also as the primal operator of labour and daily tasks, the astronaut is at the same time an experimental subject inside a larger experiment and the monitoring agent of the experiment itself.

The Martian explorer, therefore, is a scientist and a guinea pig wilfully inserting their body into the premises of the experiment and offering it as a testbed for further trials. In this light, bodies are no more than expressions of change, carefully mapped and monitored. Within the premises of closed-loop habitats that will ensure survival, bodies are reorganised, unpacked, and distributed in space to yield other resources. This type of dissemination requires a radical shift in our relationship with our bodily excrement and our relationship with our own shit both literally and figuratively.

Living in a machine is by no means a new desire. Le Corbusier’s metaphor for ‘machines for living’ in 1924,16as well as Ray Eames and Herbert Matter’s question, ‘what is a house,’17reveal deep anxiety about how industrialisation forges new aesthetic and existential territories. For these authors, the tectonics of assembly/disassembly and the logic of interconnected parts were marking new paths for architectural production. In its time, this view was quite radical, relative to the canonical discourse of machines as vectors of a monolithic anti-humanism.

The ecological crisis of the 1960s and 1970s brought to the forefront a new modernist ethos announcing buildings as ‘performative

machines,’ foreshadowed by the replacement of function with performance. However, this turn was devoid of a tectonic expression and a set of form-giving strategies. Even Reyner Banham, in his best efforts to embrace machinic expression in his ‘Environmental Bubble’ (originally published in Art in America in 1965),18was vigilantly critiqued as the technophile ‘theorist of refrigerators.’19In proposing a sealed interior bubble controlled atmospherically by a tower of air conditioning and heating mechanical devices, Banham’s concerns were mostly hygienic; noxious atmospheric pollutants would be screened out from the domestic interior by regulating its interior climate. At the same time, Banham suggested the word ‘atmosphere’ be read literally;20he argued that atmosphere was not only a condition to be calculated, but also one that needed to be designed, as well as inhabited with the aid of medical practitioners.21

When offset to inhabiting another planet, the question of living in machines raises, more than Earthly habitats, reasons, modes and trajectories for existential change. As anthropologist Valerie Olson reasons, habitation is reconceptualised as a process of transferring and transforming spaces, where dichotomies and distinctions like inside/outside, body/habitat, habitat/environment are systemically transfigured.22

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Figure 04: Body Footprint. Diagram by Lydia Kallipoliti and Beau Avedissian, 2019.

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Figure 05: LIFE ON MARS, Life-Support System. Lydia Kallipoliti with Jestin George (Genetic Engineering Consultant) and UTS students Beau Avedissian, Ka Hou Cheang, Dorsa Fahandezh, Jialu Huang, Mariam Mesiha and Isabella Wells, Sydney, 2019.

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LIFE ON MARSis an attempt to reinvent the engineering flow chart, which is used for portraying regenerative life support systems in arrays of boxes and arrows. If the abstraction of this type of representation were to be removed and the diagram redrawn with further prescriptive detail, it would evidence that machines that convert waste to viable resources are not ‘black boxes’—adjunct apparatuses hidden behind living quarters — but instead, spatial elements with adjustable and complex morphology which could be transfigured to accommodate biological as well as functional needs. For the settlement proposed in LIFE ON MARS, there is no distinction between a machine and a piece of furniture, or an inhabitable space and a mechanical space; instead, machines are profusely lived in and exhibited as vital spatial elements.

The logic of material conversions generates new spatial alliances between a toilet and a garden; a bioreactor and a bathroom; a kitchen and a laboratory; a bed and a virtual reality dome for entertainment. The possibility of converting the output of one space as input for the other generates pairings, which at first sight might seem programmatically unfit, yet forge novel typological and experiential alliances. Overall, LIFE ON MARSsuggests a Martian habitat as a digestive inhabitable machine that captures output and converges it to various usable forms; it also proposes an integrated system where humans, their physiology of ingestion and excretion, become combustion devices and biological parts of the system they inhabit. It is the first iteration of such a complex venture and consequently, not every problem is yet solved.

Instead, LIFE ON MARSaims to embark on new methods and spaces for changing the way we relate to our own shit.

point 03: facing our shit

The handling of our own excrement within a closed life-support system for Mars forces us to look at questions of space colonisation viscerally, via the raw ecology of our bodies and the understanding that recycling is not simply as a statistical problem relayed to the management of feedback loops and flow charts, but also a basic bodily reality affecting the water and air available for survival in this so-called new frontier.

On Earth, cities, such as the beating heart of global finance and culture that is New York City, create an enormous amount of human excrement; piles that we cannot see, nor do we wish to see. Metropolitan environments like New York, which aspire to operate as leaders in their environmental objectives,23export their waste to reach their statistical goals and essentially displace problems of health to less fortunate populations. As reporter and environmental activist, Oliver Milman, writes in The Guardian, a substantial amount of New York’s faeces is expelled to Birmingham, Alabama, causing major methane clouds 900 miles away. The treated sewage—euphemistically known in the industry as ‘biosolids’—travels by a ‘poo train’ to a landfill west of Birmingham, causing what the locals and the mayor’s office call the ‘death smell.’24In Alabama, the avalanche of northern poo is part of a wider concern over the environmental risks for residents, particularly the impoverished and people of colour.

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The dismissal of the environmental concerns of Alabama residents, mostly residents of African American communities, has been reported as a case of civil rights and environmental racism. These relationships of importing and exporting human waste force us to delve deeper into the geochemical affinities between capital and excrement.

While this displacement is highly curated, it transfers the problem to disenfranchised terrains. Therefore, the question of how to handle, retain, pile, decompose and redistribute waste is not simply a technical problem related to the trading of carbon emissions and the Kyoto protocol, but a matter of justice and equity. This is precisely where Mars, the faraway destination for the elite, can potentially become a useful model for handling waste whilst pressing on with technological progress. Retaining waste on site and designing the infrastructure on how to live with our excrement—enclosed in anaerobic digester—is an opportunity that may have long-term environmental and health benefits, despite the upfront cost of investing in specialised digestive infrastructural machines. Indigenous cultures have long pioneered the management of waste without ignoring and expelling it, as recently argued by