Non Standard Architecture?

(notes on the current exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris)

This sense that digital technology, like alphabetic writing, is impelled by prior imagining, repressed yet germinal, seems the most powerful issue here. The projects simply the fact of such emergence, a sort of chemical staining that reveals the impulse coursing through such works, in no way limited to techno-rational fidelity. Indeed, it is the cognitive release of such non-standard projects, their technical imp(r)udence, that seems most fertile, despite the interest in a range of manufacturing techniques that might finally allow such alloplastic forms to condense in actuality. Neue Bauhaus techno-rationalism then appearing as the entropy of such germinal force, imagination planted within the very thickness of architectures geometry, pressing from within its now point-cloud immateriality to new limits of spatial and manufacturing definition. Such tendency, gorged by digital desire, bursts the spastic collage assemblies of predigital spatiality, precise indeterminacy emerging as a now legitimate creative impulse. In trying to account for the affect of such indeterminate works, Ive frequently invoked trauma as a now operative trope in the dis-incorporation they seemingly provoke: the standard and the type indeed atomized into a cloud of digits now sensed as implicit or explicit expression of algorithmic potency. Metaphor tends to metonymy, content to affect, linearity to processural circuitry. Haptic cognitive circuits infiltrate optic/aural hegemony. An entire autoplastic mode dissolves into alloplastic imagining: form and process, the entire creative/receptive environment, become reciprocally malleable (with us). This marks a fully cultural (not technical) environmentalism, the full range of the senses cognitively attuned in their aptitude for inflection (a hypomnesic no longer anamnesic modulation). At a local as well as global level, then, in creative and receptive registers, latency occurs as a form of traumatic dis-incorporation. Yet if, in the broadest sense, this intuits a shift from topographical to topological imagining, from a fixed formal capacity to a fluid and transformative one, then one must interrogate any such non-standard institution. Migayrous invocation of the Mathematics of the Non-Standard in the title of the exhibition serves (for me) not so much to tie back to a prototypical topology, as to open the question of the relation of modes of writing and cognition in a now digital economy, where all manner of inscription (algorithm, code, script, icon, text, etc) alternates differentially. Indeed, one inclines to suspend a topological figure, a loop or a knot perhaps, over any attempt at investiture of a particular field! In this one may well interrogate the knot as being at the origin of both mathematics and writing, a topological loosening and tightening of mnemonic praxis that we may now slide differentially. One ranges from the knotted quipus used by the Inca indians to write and count, or the earliest forms of pictographic writing which ordered reading signs as if on a string, to writing as alphabetic 3dimensional knots on a string, or even DNAs amino acid knots in a rope of protein. From the two-dimensional space of writing, to the three-dimensional intersection of the knot, it suffices to merely blur the eyes to reveal the topological parity

Mark Goulthorpe of dECOi will be presenting the lecture "Autoplastic and Alloplastic: the Evolution of Digital Praxis", January 28th at 6:30pm in Wood Auditorium.