Machinic Entanglements
Let’s play a game. Let us imagine for a fleeting moment that the Viennese architect Adolf Loos, was not a maniac. That his ascetism, and his criminalisation of ornament were in fact an emptying out onto a plane of consistency, that his infatuation with Josephine Baker was masochistic and not hypocritic, and that the elaborate ‘plans’ he drew for the design of her house in 1927 were not to ‘contain’ her, but an oscillation between the limits of his own abjection and a creative intensity. There is nothing to suggest that Loos was a schizophrenic, so this burlesque is crucial to finding any joy with him.
Nihilist Imaginaries
The machinic connotes technological, cognitive, human and nonhuman entanglements in the post-industrial landscape. It also includes the quasi-prosthetic assemblages that have evolved simultaneously as a consequence, and as means for addressing the impact of industrial acceleration. The impact of this acceleration on the landscape is a mutilation of the ‘critical zone’ of the earth’s surface and atmosphere, but also its immunological response. In this respect, machinic assemblages are part of the symbiotic complex of life on this planet.
The Planetary Archive
In this paper I explore two arguments on writing in the contexts of communication and of artistic expression, and their implications for inscriptive practices in architecture as an academic field of enquiry following the developments in Generative AI. The first draws on the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his contestation of writing as communication, but also Richard Coyne’s take on Derrida particularly with respect to the prefix arkhē, in architecture with its rootedness in archive. The second draws on another French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his determination of cinema as a form of writing, and Tom Conley’s notion of writing with images in his reading of Deleuze.
Capricious Imaginaries
While Byron is keen to develop an argument on Gothic from the works of authors like H. G. Wells, in her analysis, the texts are as much gothic horror as they are science fiction. In this paper I will be expanding on Byron’s essay by illustrating how in Wells’s War of the Worlds, machinic hybrids form part of the Gothic landscape, and how these narratives map, or specifically ‘graft’, the disciplines of architecture and geography unto each other. Further, the paper attempts to satirise contemporary invasion narratives through a recasting of Wells’s War of the Worlds. The paper concludes with a discussion on territorial thinking, and what it terms capricious imaginaries - or false mappings.
Legendary Darkness
This paper begins with the post-cybernetic subject in Nick Land’s essays ‘Meat’ and ‘Cybergothic’ with specific interest in his invocation of Charles Marlow, the seaman sent to find the central character, Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’. It develops a postcolonial take on the zombie horde, first by returning the gaze onto Conrad/Marlow and exposes the nineteenth century Europeans in the West and Central African littoral as alienated-undead (literally and metaphorically) in the Marxist sense. Following this, it then discusses the parallels between post-cybernetic subjectivity and its alienated predecessors through an analysis of Richard Matheson’s ‘I Am Legend’. Finally, it closes by commenting on the inevitability of the zombie/zombification as a metaphor for contemporary subjectivity in the wake of the subject sacrificing its intelligence for the cognitive expansion of the machinic.