infra

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Debord: "The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images." And as such, here's a moving image that drives this spectacle, the movement of the iPad within society, its efficiency, its quality, its effect. What spectacular optimism! Life changes in accordance to technology. Here we are. Devices affect behavior, change movement, make things possible. The qualities the video implies: richness, directness, warmth, connectedness. And I buy this optimism, or at least I'm leaning into it, like the way you sit up and might pull your chair up a little bit closer when you hear an sharp argument that hits home.

Architecture enables shelter, enables light; artificial lighting comes and liberates the structure from a necessary porosity. windows are still desired, but not strictly necessary. Air conditioning and artificial climate regulation systems are invented and liberate the building, enable the construction of a free plan in which anything can happen. The isolating glazing unit, even more so, defers performance to the exterior edges of the building, clears out a central space. And maybe there's a little bit of time in which parametric/'calculus'-oriented geometric architecture steps in and attempts to reify change within architecture, a transposition of the plasticity of form found in physics, and mathematics, onto architecture.

And next? What's next? What do I do when architecture is slow, is heavy, resistant to change? Materials cost money, and the movement of material costs money. But material movement is now more explicitly generated by things that are immaterial, objects dictating our movement, like the reach of a memorized music score onto the musicians of an orchestra, or a dancer's body flexing in accordance to a choreographer's thesis. And more and more believing that the core driver of architectonic interaction -- that is, the human movement that is itself architectural within a structure -- can be generated via these mental images alone, the shaping of the overlays of logic upon which you navigate a city changes the city itself, etc. And these overlays of logic are generated via technology, explicitly computing technology, a radically personalized computer that you sleep next to, wake up to, take to the bathroom.

The next step, which is also the hardest one to express/describe/display, is to argue for an infrastructure that is the base system of an architectonic/circulatory/programmatic usage of a space that is expressed as a superstructure. The protruding buttons of a computer user interface that exist in opposition to the thin, flat, overlapping panes of windows are the molecular, atomic, even subatomic elements of interaction that eventually design GPS units intuitive enough to allow people to get 'lost' within a city. Vast enterprises of dynamics of interaction, such as Facebook, or email, or Google Chat, or Twitter, are at their core founded on the epsilons of movement, the finger twitch and subsequent mouse click that acts as the positive feedback to enable a continuation of activity. (For example, look at Zynga's Farmville. Farmville! For a bit, there was a point at which the number of people logged in and playing daily was more than the entire population of France!)

It seems obvious and even too simple, in retrospect, in 2011, after a decade of Google, half a decade of Gmail, and four years of the iphone. How would it be otherwise; how would these technologies not change the way you navigate a city, structure your journeys, formulate your life? And why wouldn't other infrastructural details shape an architecture? And this needs to be obvious -- that is, the success of this new architectural dynamic comes from a perception of these infrastructures as obvious, not exotic but internalized, part of the ground on which you walk. The Internet is 'nothing new'. Computers are fun, but 'nothing new'. Email is 'nothing new'. Soon, iPhones, iPads, Android devices, other tablets will disappear from the realm of the fun gadget -- The moment that your iPad is tossed on your touch or thrown into your bag to be used later is the moment that it enters into the realm of a valuable, rich, loamy, creative casual negligence. Out of this casual interface with technology comes an interaction that is alchemic, maybe because these operations are perceived not to come from 'technology' but from a process of living itself. Devices become transmutative, silver transforms into gold, usage morphs into structure, movement fills into a volume, habit solidifies into architecture, itself.

and so on and so forth and so on and so forth.