Image from Constant’s New Babylon: the hyper-architecture of desire [google book] By Mark Wigley¹

Expanding upon a micro-thought from a panel discussion

“#IFP09 thankyou Thomas Malaby for showing me Constant’s New Babylon: a post-monetary configurable architectural mesh http://bit.ly/2Rv1Gr” – @aquarious

The tweet above implicates multiple layers of private property that mesh the various networked but self-fashioning aspects of a typical public realtime hypertext exchange these days. The layers of exchanged property include Twitter (messaging), Bit.ly (shortlink), Facebook (social web), Google Books (content publishing) and related software (browsers, apps, OS, etc.) to render social media towards public communications.

These private and corporate accumulations of virtual cultural capital derived from user contributed content add value well beyond their physical capital which comprises the workforce, server farms, bandwidth, energy and even brand identity, all subsumed as value commodities optimized for self-fashioning and auto-meshing. The notion of this hypertext broadcast evokes the antagonism between the private property of the communication transported by publishing tools and the public nature of the participants and their expressions. The binary boundaries of labor theory models have been blurred between distinctions of…

• public/private
• property/commons
• production/consumption
• exploit/contribute
• work/play
• oligarchy/democracy
• self/group
• asymmetrical/egalitarian
• physical/virtual

Indeed, new language is required to express the hybridity and mutation invoked by the social forces of emergent design technology.

History has presented us with examples of imaginary objects and structures that prefigured our contemporary conditions. In pondering Constant Niewunhuys’ New Babylon as the ultimate imaginary object of urban architectures, there is also Bush’s Memex as the ultimate imaginary object of knowledge consoles. These future-minded design studies arrive out of creative practice and military research disciplines, respectively. But they share a common perspective on the destiny of humankind as a networked and reciprocal society.

Indeed, the Memex already serves as a de facto historical artifact of a proto-hypertext pre-digital device to foreshadow the Internet. By synthesizing the virtual of knowledge networks towards a metaphorical or rhetorical architecture eventually built as the Internet, perhaps the digital memex, maybe the virtual New Babylon, a layer of self-fashioning protocols and exchanges emerged that sit between physical transit and everyday life. Vannevar Bush imagined his Memex microfilm knowledge console as the liberation from libraries, towards exchangeable and reconfigurable knowledge media. He extended self-enrichment through participatory scholarship with the promise of technology to overcome the limitations of physical media and the requisite bureaucracy to manage it. He imagined the basis for the internet before the digital computer and the network were fully conceived and implemented. Meanwhile, before the digital network engendered hyperconnectedness and hyperfragmentation as intrinsic structures and conditions of hypertext knowledge distribution systems, Constant Niewunhuys appears to have applied a parallel idea of hyperarchitecture to the basis of a futurist society built upon a “unitary urbanism.”

The post-monetary vision of Constant’s New Babylon envisages an architectural mesh of “infinitely reconfigurable spaces”² where a post-capitalist society of self-fashioning actors thrive beyond commodity exchange in the conventional sense. We wonder if the physical architecture of humans will eventually evolve into this rhizomatic, multi-layered, multi-dimensional, network of cellular or atomic structures that represent and disseminate information or embody and interconnect human habitats across the Earth in a uniformly neural network pattern. This pattern resembles the visual forms of the digital network, our understandings of neuroscience, biochemistry and atomic physics. Is it the eventual but wholly natural state of human society?³

The cellular design affords the infinite and reconfigurable mobility of capital and commodity exchange of all sorts across the boundaries of time and place. Humans may eventually construct a habitat that resembles a web of interconnected self-regulating, post-national, post-regional communities who thrive on unfettered commodity exchange, beyond scarcity, beyond the immaterial. Labor and value creation in this kind of a post-monetary urban planning concept depends on an individual’s accumulation of knowledge credentials, artifacts of cultural production and the distributed economics of emergent peer-to-peer micro-transactions — peer production.

“After rehearsing these few salient features of today’s art criticism, I must say on the contrary that for our situationist comrades, for Constant and myself, the three-dimensional explorations in question here can in no way be an object of enthusiasm, as they are but scattered elements on the path toward a future construction of ambiences, a unitary urbanism.” – Guy Debord⁴

Leave it to Guy Debord to take all the fun out of sci-fi fantasy.

Footnotes

1. via Google Books
2. Thomas Malaby at #IPF09, The New School
3. Think Powers of 10, by Charles and Ray Eames, which illustrates a repeating pattern of nature’s architecture from atom to cosmos.
4. Constant and the Path of Unitary Urbanism on Google Books

MEMEX TWO POINT OH

It only just dawned on me. These status-tweet-feed conflations I’ve been following and fueling — this is the MEMEX that I’ve been talking about on these pages. Maybe not MEMEX 1.0 — our trails comprise not only encyclopedic knowledge and book knowledge — they also encompass our communication and social context all wrapped up in knowledge. Social networking is contemporary knowledge machined into media trails.

Whatever “social networking” becomes, Twitter today, who knows tomorrow, we can still be sure that Vannevar Bush was one of the first to fantasize about the business of socially mediating knowledge through machines via exchangeable, reconfigurable machine-readable media (i.e. beyond books and paper).

The #IPF09 Internet as a Factory and Playground Conference at The New School, conferred by Trebor Scholz, discusses the notions of value creation in the networked wealth of a distributed and highly creative, productive, efficient human at work. Vannevar Bush has not been mentioned at the sessions I’ve attended, but a new discovery included Constant’s New Babylon project, perhaps the architectural parallel of the Memex.

Sporting provocative bullet points, this essay may not be new news, but it speaks refreshing truths while standing the test of time.

» Download essay [PDF]

This scholarly paper by was originally presented as a talk for the conference Mobile Communication: Social and Political Effects, held on April 29-30, 2003 in Budapest, and is collected in Mobile Democracy: Essays on Self, Society and Politics. We’ve come upon this text during regular research in pursuit of an interesting range of academic treatments concerning critical viewpoints of mobile media and electronic culture. The “Global Nomads in the Digital Veldt” essay stands out in the collection for its succinct expressions that thoughtfully document complex social changes in deceptively simple terms. Despite the arcane literary device in the title, the writing is downright accessible and the core message articulates a cogent framework for thinking about mobile technologies and society.

Meyrowitz’s use of the Veldt to encapsulate his message is regrettable. He plays off Marshall McLuhan’s coinage of “global village,” contrasting it with a reconceptualization of cyberspace as a primordial hunter-gatherer society. We agree with the idea, and we can even visualize the metaphors. But we’re belly-aching on the word-play, the sprechen-spiel. Perhaps it feels hokey and detached while attempting to persuade us with trite McLuhan soundbyte style textual imaging. Our cover image◊ might suggest our frustration with attempts to photo-illustrate the idea of a global nomad in the digital veldt. We also succumb to the tendency to pepper titles and blurbs with metaphors that amuse with clever yet esoteric cultural literacy for readers — something catchy that sums up an idea with a wordy picture.

Even for an academic paper, however, the reference is unnecessarily obscure, and diverts readers away from the simple elegance of his central point. That said, his word choice motivated us to conduct some cursory research into the term veldt, and so we sidebar now in order to reveal subtle ironies that redeem his transgression. Our electronically nomadic research trail begins with the Wikipedia→, jumping off to a copy of the Ray Bradbury short story→ of the same title, off to a quick cheat using a study guide→, and ending up at veldt.com→, which upon closer look, manages to poetically reinforce Meyrowitz’s metaphor. When you perform a View Source on the empty page, you discover the anonymous author’s epitaph embedded as a comment in the HTML source code:

veldt.com is dead.
old, useful content may come back to life, when i find the time.
i may post at veldt.vox.com
but no guarantees.

it’s not been all that fun, blogosphere.

Clearly, the proprietor of veldt.com has wandered on to greener pastures, perhaps disenchanted with the promise of online social networks only to find the veldt a hostile playground of disillusionment rather than the abundant network of social connections and benevolent discourse. There is rewarding irony in this discovery when you connect it linguistically with the use of Veld, the low German form of the word, which means, according to Wikipedia, at retrieval:

[...] a place that is generally overgrown or has gone fallow, such as a thicket or a field that has become overgrown from lack of maintenance.

Comparing the term “Digital Veldt” with the vernacular that emerged through unfortunate force of popular lexicon — “blogosphere” — we can’t decide which is worse. In fact, no one has even come close to coming up with a quality term for describing the electronic human condition, and do it with a pleasing aesthetic and semiotic.

Now this diversion aside, it’s still not clear after re-reading “Global Nomads” why the author selected the Veldt to image the lonely wasteland of electronic communications. Despite misgivings with the literary references, the essay still stands as an important discussion of how electronic media fundamentally alters humanity and its societies. We’ll get over our squabbling and get to the point by quoting the core passage of the essay where Professor Meyrowitz states his uniquely succinct observations:

From “Global Nomads”

A key feature of the electronic era is that most physical, social, cultural, political, and economic boundaries have become more porous, sometimes to the point of functionally disappearing. This seemingly simple proposition has far-reaching significance and implications. The relative products, services, and channels of communications have been leaking into each other. While the key change is literally happening “at the margins” of all social systems, the change is not simply something happening “out there.” As the margins change, the contents of all forms of human organization change. As a result, we are experiencing a dramatic shift in our sense of locale, identity, time, values, ethics, etiquette, and culture.

The increasing functional permeability of boundaries — combined with the continued physical existence of most of those same boundaries — explains the contradictory feelings we have in the early 21st century: Many things still seem the same, and yet everything is somehow changed. In our electronic landscape, we have thinner distinctions:

• between here and there
• between now and then (and yet to be)
• between public and private
• between male and female spheres
• between child and adult realms of experience
• between leaders and average citizens
• between office and home
• between work and leisure
• between business and customers
• between users and producers
• between news and entertainment
• between one field or discipline and another
• between different media genres
• between simulated and real
• between copies and originals
• between direct and indirect experience
• between biology and technology
• between marginal and mainstream

Your thirst for additionally succinct world-changing bullet points will be quenched, as the author delivers another set of bullets that further illustrate twenty-first century living. At least scan for the passage where he connects his idea of global nomads to September 11, 2001.

Response

More than any other essay in the collection, “Digital Nomads” provokes us enough to seriously consider undertaking the multimedia production of photo-illustrating all of these bullet-points, a sort of electronic media peer review. Or at least, we’re interested in annotating the quotation with commentary hyperlinks. We’re not through with this one yet. Too many unresolved considerations remain.

Credits

Essay quotations © 2003 by Joshua Meyrowitz.
Photo by Teseum via Flickr. Photo-illustration by mercurious via Creative Commons licensing.

As a professor of media design at Parsons The New School for Design, I was invited on Chinese grant funds to teach a month-long intensive design workshop at the Art and Design Academy at Tsinghua University in Beijing as part of China’s recent national initiative to embrace Western modes of thinking and educational approaches. Tsinghua is one of China’s most prestigious and perhaps well-funded institutions, often compared to MIT as a bastion of brainy, competitive, but brilliant national minds. Judging by the newly opened art academy building designed by American architectural firm, 70 million RMB (US$ 9.3 million) is a small price to pay for a world-class design education facility. Indeed, compared to our cramped quarters at Parsons, somewhat scattered throughout real-estate challenged Greenwich Village, I was afflicted with space lust as I wandered, upon arrival, through a dizzying maze of studios, workspaces, classrooms, offices, galleries, art supply and book stores. The academy even sports a Starbucks-style coffee shop where baristas pull lattes for a fraction of the cost of our all-too-familiar daily grandé. The more I discovered about the Tsinghua Art and Design academy, the more I appreciated how the university, and by-proxy, the Chinese government, invests heavily in the importance of a Westernized (or maybe Globalized) higher learning design education. At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder if America’s investment in our own creative capital could measure up. The last time I checked back home, primary and secondary art education was being eviscerated in favor of test prep education, art college enrollments were flat and the national mood was generally complacent and decadent. Clearly, being here, it is understood that China’s globalizing ambitions imagine itself someday becoming the world’s creative agency, and not just its factory.

This idea is underscored when considering the process of designing many of the identity systems for China’s current national obsession: preparing for the 2008 Olympiad, as it extends its unique culture, language and hospitality to the rest of the world. Typically in the West, design products, such as a visual identity system, are outsourced to a private design agency, through an arduous and competitive design bid process. Rather than become the mother client for its homegrown but nascent design firm industry, China tapped its own universities, in keeping with its deeply historical respect for scholars. Instead of farming out the work to lowest bidding, but hottest design and branding firm, the Beijing Olympic Committee ‘hired’ its own university design professors to create for the Olympics 2008. In particular, the official mascots of Beijing 2008 were conceived and born in these shiny new halls of the Art and Design Academy under the direction of Professor Wu, a high-ranking member of the Party. Although, somewhat insipidly and overly cute by Western standards, the set of five mascots cleverly epitomize cultural memes of China, symbolize aspects of the Olympic spirit, the elements of nature, and even form a language pun in Mandarin, when their names are properly sequenced. They are unmistakably an inside job. Until the court of public opinion meets next summer along with merchandising sales and media ratings, the verdict is out on Fuwa, the Five Friendlies.
During my workshop with a group of 23 second-year Tsinghua Art Academy undergraduates, I easily encountered their reputation to be hard working, competitive, and brilliant. However, I also confirmed some of the stereotypes originating from preconceived notions about Chinese students. These students lacked some of the core conceptual capabilities notable in their Parsons counterparts, especially the ability to think critically and innovate rather than absorb and merely emulate. They also seemed to suffer from an obsession with cute character culture, an influential import from neighbors Japan and Korea.

I knew that I was brought here to broaden their perspectives, and export not only my practical experience working in the New York City interactive design industry, but also to engender an appreciation for original thinking, true creativity, and help them discover more sophisticated design frameworks that extend beyond character artwork. At the same time, I knew that it would be senseless to attempt re-education in my own Maoist ‘Cute Cultural Revolution’ and repress their love for all that is cuddly in favor of an American style hyper-pragmatism as I critiqued their design forms and motifs. Instead, I would need to devise a means to hybridize the decidedly modern but Eastern compulsion to express profound concepts through a cartoon character, with our decidedly post-modern Western fixation with design models that valorize a purity of form in a luxuriously ironic package. Perhaps, the Beijing Olympics offered the ideal opportunity to combine these two perspectives as subject matter for a design project well suited to nurture the advancement of both my Tsinghua students and my own at Parsons. My statistically insignificant dent in the trade deficit with China during this month of export — the precious resource of American ingenuity — would need to return another kind of investment. This exchange had to reinforce my understanding of what needed to be imported back to Parsons in hope of contributing towards preserving, if not reinvigorating, our own national endeavor to lead the world in idea creation.

There’s a giant generation of Chinese artists and designers starting to emerge into the global creative economy. Former Red Guards and victims of the Cultural Revolution, alike, raised these young minds. They possess a passion to succeed where their parents did not, perhaps could not. The US must acknowledge this newly emerging Red Studio in the anticipation of a marketplace of ideas and economies that will only become more intertwined with Chinese-American interests and competition. After the closing ceremonies of Beijing 2008 conclude, and the torch extinguishes, incalculable tons of unpurchased Five Friendlies Olympic junk will probably be land-filled or ‘donated’ to Africa. It may seem a colossal waste of resources on cuteness, but China’s Red Studio will enjoy having penned history’s greatest Olympic mascot, and perhaps most merchandised state sponsored character design.

See Also

Project: Olympic Mobile Visitors Guide ↑