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| Stephen Perrella - Hypersurface Architecture - MM8#2/3 - Title Page | Next Page | |
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| This article is a transcription of a talk at Doors 2.The next page will take you to the Doors of Perception @Home conference. | ||
| S t e p h e n P e r r e l l a | ||||
Hypersurface Architecture | ||||
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The current condition calls for critical interpretations of space-time/subjectivity. Here, I offer an argument with a hypersurface geometry. A hypersurface is a new theory of liquid-embodied architecture to displace the nostalgia and re-realization being carried into the spatial conceptions of new-media technology. We shouldn't think cyberspace with conventional assumptions. Hypersurface delimits reductions assumed in biases prevalent in disciplinary categorisations. Epistemological thought hasn't produced what it promised prior to its entry into cyberspace; there are only further degradations to come. It is not a matter of deciding to go into cyberspace. We are always already in it, before the literal condition. An understanding before dichotomous assumptions is a way to inhabit the world. This is not an argument for the creation of art in cyberspace, rather, it is a matter of rescuing art from its superfluous role in relation to architecture. Hypersurface comes after deconstruction, but continues the critique of Cartesian assumptions embracing anti-humanist/anti-logocentric discourses after May '68. Further, it is the receipt and re-deployment of the architectural telegrams sent in the 60's by the group Archigram. (Their dream was of a city that built itself unpredictably). . . Hypersurface architecture is a way of thinking about architecture that does not assume real/irreal, material/immaterial dichotomies. It is to consider an architecture prior to those assumptions, that entails a condition also prior to the assumption of a split between body-subject/building. To think this architecture is not an act of construction or deconstruction but a nearly self-generating between-state. The generation of it occurs in an interplay and interaction between the delimited forces, energies and desire/life in substance (Deleuze) and language (Derrida). The architectonic translation of surface is structure/substrate. HYPER regards reconfigured manifestations of subjectivity/desire not over and above but as a having-risen-within. Hyper-surface is the delimited combinatorics of bodies/building as an interactive substrate configured by intersubjective digital praxis. If the hypercommunications of virtual culture/capitalism were exhumed from the non-space of VR and set into play within the substrate of an architectonic of hypersurface, the resultant distortions, disfigurations, and radical abstractions left open to interpretation would effect not only a return of the repressed of Western discursive logocentrism but new forms of intersubjective interactivity. Prior to any empirical dealing with technology, we are already televisual. But let's do the work to recover that condition, as it has been covered over by the rational tendencies that have been at work since the beginning of Western Culture. . . In a post-Christian world where transcendentality is bankrupt, we face, as Arthur Kroker describes it, a culture in recline that wishes to be replaced by technology. It seems as though technology in this condition that many theorists have suggested, to cover over death, isn't working (nihilism). So we have to exist in such a way to replace transcendentality. We must become information and to do so we must enter language, (technological practices assure this). As an architect, I am interested in the spatial conditions of what will be the play of that language. In this lecture I will refer to a series of Screenal Economies that currently may lead us to the threshold of becoming information. | |||
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