Burying the Past | Metropolis Magazine | November 2002

Burying the Past | Metropolis Magazine | November 2002:

"Since October 2001 the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has thrown out nearly 50 percent of its examiner collections of patents dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. Three things are being lost: a filing system, a specialized drafting technique, and a historical record of invention. And the history of an entire design medium is being destroyed."

"The patent examiner's former classification system contained almost 500 classes of technology, each with hundreds of subdivisions. It allowed researchers to easily learn the history of a patent and compare it to other similar designs. "Seldom does an invention come along that is as out of the blue as the first lightbulb, or electric motor, or laser," Rabin says. "Most are incremental improvements that fit in or between other similar patents. Being able to quickly span a decade or so of similar work in a matter of an hour provides an inventor a context and history he can't find anywhere else, and usually results in a better invention."

Unfortunately the computer system that will replace the paper library functions much the way a search engine does on the Web. Rabin explains, "You fish around with some selected words and hope the patent you are seeking (the one that may mean trouble for your invention) has the same words that you have chosen to look for it." If a match doesn't come up, a researcher is out of luck.

Three-quarters of the patents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century contained beautifully lithographed drawings made by artisans that specialized in patent drafting; now their work is vanishing from public view forever. Beyond the delicate line quality and light and shade on display in, for example, Edison's 1893 patent for the Electric Locomotive (a recycling bin find), some of the patents, like R. S. Kibler's Continuously Variable Transmission, from 1936, were meticulously colored. The USPTO keeps a complete set of pristine patent drawings in the very same Iron Mountain facility as Corbis's collections. But the patent examiner's collection was a working one. Generations of examiners have added notes, new findings, and thoughts to the patent sheets, often in handwriting that can be dated by the style of its scrawl. This enabled each new examiner to see what his past colleagues thought of the invention, providing an invaluable picture of patent history. The black-and-white low-resolution scans available online at www.uspto.gov omit not only those notes (now lost forever) but the sheer beauty of the line quality, color, depth, and shade of the drawings.

"To save everything would," Rabin says glumly, "take a K-Mart"--about 75,000 square feet--to house the 6.5 million patents, which average 16 pages each. But he is doing his part via www.edisonsark.org, a Web site that includes color scans of the patents he has found, thus at least preserving the documents as they should be seen. For Rabin "the dilemma is how to preserve these patents and show what's being lost."

Iron Mountain

NPR : A Los Angeles 'Hotel' for Internet Carriers

NPR : A Los Angeles 'Hotel' for Internet Carriers: "And like the guests in a regular hotel, these networks can get to know each other. So if one telecom company needed to link up with another, it's much easier when they're under the same roof. That can be particularly helpful in the event of a disaster like the December 2006 earthquake that struck Taiwan, severing critical undersea fiber optic cables. Most voice and data traffic into and out of Taiwan was slowed or halted, and connectivity to and from other Asian countries was drastically reduced. Getting to the bottom of the ocean and repairing the cables has taken months. But places such as One Wilshire were able to re-route some of that Internet and voice traffic through their facility within days. Some observers says the role carrier hotels play in the Internet's ability to cope with disasters, could make them an attractive target for terrorists. Could 'carrier hotels' like One Wilshire be targeted because of their importance in global communications? And what if an earthquake or other natural disaster hit Los Angeles, disabling this critical site?"

Unique US home with Cold War Ambiance

Unique US home with Cold War ambiance

BBC News

For those of us who remember the destruction of the Berlin Wall more clearly than the Cold War that preceded it, it is a chilling lesson in just how real the fear of nuclear annihilation was.

The Cold War warriors did not do things by halves. These Titan 1 missile bases took two-and-a-half years to build and were the most extensive, complex and costly ever constructed by the US Air Force that ran them.

...

Built to withstand a nuclear blast as close as 1,000m away, every room was either mounted on springs or a cushioned floor to protect from vibration.

In the domed control room, there are still springs on the ceiling, from which the early computer equipment was once suspended.

Vast black tanks loom in side chambers. They held diesel fuel for the generators and drinking water for the staff of about 25 who lived underground for days at a time.

They would have been sealed in for weeks after a nuclear attack. The round surface air vents in the ceilings could be snapped shut at the flick of a switch. The escape tubes, sealed at the bottom by heavy iron lids, were filled with tons of gravel to slow the progress of any invasion force.

The atmosphere is cool down there, regardless of the temperature on the surface. The drab green and cream paint is peeling in places; pipes and vents snake everywhere.

...

It never came. But the last base commander, Colonel Clyde D Owen, told me they were constantly aware of just how much destructive power they had.

He said he would never forget the first time he was brought through the tunnels to see a giant Titan missile in its silo, describing it as "an awesome sight".

...

Eventually, hundreds more silos would be built, scattered across America's quiet backwaters.

...

Some of these underground warrens are now owned by water companies and storage firms. Others have been turned into homes.

Of the rest, many were abandoned with their silo doors open and have slowly filled with water, prompting illegal night-time visits by extreme scuba divers.

Bari Hotchkiss, who is selling Larson Site A on internet auction site eBay, says he has been approached by a company interested in turning one of the 160-foot missile silos into an artificial reef.

An entrepreneur and amateur historian, he bought the complex on a whim in 1998. Ideally, he would like to see it turned into a children's summer camp and educational facility.

It is an admirable aim - though for the moment the base still feels haunted by the ghosts of Armageddon.

Talk about reprogramming.

Notes on Dutton, Street Scenes of Subalternity

Not sure how all this is directly relevant, nor how I even found it, but there are reverberations, and it sure gets the blood up, if nothing else.
Its also VERY LONG.

"Meanwhile, back in the PRC, things were different. Once the chairman
shuffled off this mortal coil, the curtains lifted on a new party performance
called economic reform. In sharp contrast to previous party
efforts, economic reform unleashed market forces, opened China to the
outside world, and introduced the benefits and vices of globalization to
the Chinese people. For this, the reform program received widespread
applause. But as the clapping dies away, one begins to wonder whether
reform has bought off or merely postponed the same kind of crisis that
turned "big brother" Russia into a very poor cousin. Indeed, as Rupert
Murdoch's Star TV beams in 1960s reruns to an ever eager Chinese
audience who are ordered not to watch, one is left wondering whether
other types of 1960s reruns are also about to be aired. Maybe the 1960s
show that sent shivers down the spine of the mayor of Philadelphia is
about to be relayed to China.

The streets of China aren't burning . . . yet. But the endless caravans
of rural migrants heading for the cities in search of work and wealth may
well have their own plotlines to add.

In conditions reminiscent of those outlined by Marx in his description
of the formation of the European working class, tens of millions of
would-be proletarians are now streaming into the cities of China in
search of employment. As they reach their destination, some find jobs
but most find their lives increasingly circumscribed by ever tightening
laws against vagrancy, prostitution, and hooliganism. Under these circumstances,
the odor of the backstreet begins to reek of social unrest.
For the Marxist, this is the smell of the backyard furnaces of revolution.
For me, I guess, there is the whiff of a different form of sedition.

While Marxists look to the macrolevel story, sifting through the tea
leaves of change to discern the beginnings o f a revolutionary class, more
localized street-level divination suggests something else. That "something
else" tells of more intimate and private rebellions. It is a story line
straight from Brecht, for it is not about revolutionary heroes but antiheroes.
It is in the lives of these often "resourceful, humorous nobodies"
that one begins to recognize a form of backstreet biopower that leads to a
kind of resistance very different to that imagined in Marxist dreams." 63-64


"Biopower is an interesting expression. It forces us away from grand
homologies and makes us attend to the seemingly insignificant. It introduces
a new concern for the interstices of government that turns, in so
many ways, on microlevel "ways of doing things" that produce calculable
outcomes for government. From social security to public security, government,
it seems, is about the disciplining of the everyday. Moreover,
under the Maoist-inspired mass-line local security systems, such disciplinary
forms appeared to operate everywhere. Indeed, the picture being
presented would be a perfect image of totalitarianism but for the fact that
it is less than "total." As we shall see, ordinary people have their own
forms of "disciplinary technologies" that can, and do, run counter to
those of government. In other words, just as there can be no display of
power without resistance, so can there be no deployment of biotechnology
without a struggle." 64-65


"An entirely different picture of the art of struggle in this era of global
maneuver emerges in these diminutive and modest forms of resistance,
which belie the Marxist message of revolution. Indeed, the artful subversions
of the sly dominate and work to ensure that government is not the
only thing generating "calculable outcomes." Here, one discovers a form
of "sly civility,"to steal a line from Homi K. Bhabha, that reveals
through its shadowy forms Michel de Certeau's "art of the weak."'
"Sly as a fox and twice as quick, there are countless ways of making
do," proclaims de Certeau as he lists innumerable examples of the heterogeneous
tactical plays on life by the antiheroes of this more modest
form of rebellion. From a stolen word to a stolen wallet, these are the
petty thieves of the everyday whose actions are crouched just below the
threshold of the label "rebellion." My concern, then, is not with the
political dissident whose words we all too readily know and whose voice
we hear so clearly. Rather, it is with those whose words are whispered or
whose contempt is articulated just out of earshot. Their words are mere
murmurs, for should they be otherwise, it would be an open declaration
of war on a "strategic field" that could only result in failure. A guerrilla
war of the everyday is going on just below the surface, requiring, it
seems, far more subtle forms of maneuver and resistance." 65


"A society," writes de Certeau, "is composed of certain foregrounded
practices organising its normative institutions and of innumerable
other practices that remain minor. The former practices he labels strategies
while the latter he names the tactic. While a strategic field of government
emerges out of "monotheistic" panoptic power, de Certeau quickly
adds that "a polytheism of scattered practices survives, dominated but not
erased by the triumphal success of one of their number." The "tactics of
the weak" come into play through these latter "subjugated" forms of
power or even through the "exchanges" opened up between them and
triumphant power. If power trades time for space, then resistant tactics
will always attempt to "turn the tables" and trade it back again. Thus the
prisoner in the cell has "all the time in the world" to map the cracks in
the wall that offer the opportunity to escape, for, as Catherine Ingraham
notes, even panoptic power must blink." 65


Wang's promise grew into a museum project that transformed his
tiny house into a shrine. Much to the chagrin of the local party officials,
the "very small museum" (xiuo xiuo bomuguun) he established was a success;
it led to the founding of a magazine (aptly named Contenlporary
Cultural Relic) and to the formation of an international communist
alliance. (See figure 1.) Like the rhetoric of Polus that Socrates so sarcastically
labeled his "museum of ornaments," Wang's museum was a "turning
of the tables" on the official Mao. It resurrected a Mao obsessed with
cultural revolution, a Mao as excessive as the badges that are pinned to
the chest and tell the Mao story. Wang's efforts spike the drinks of the
teetotaling homogeneous party accounts of Mao by mixing a more
potent radical otherness into the cocktail. This is champagne Mao, and
one we readily recognize, for it is on the surface of every badge ever
made in his image. It is a Mao who trades on the sacred, the erotic, and
the excessive. It is this other Mao who, quite by accident really, reveals
the scandal of both the chairman and the party's selective history of him.
The party, it seems, may set the strategic field, but the procedures within
that field always leave room for tactical maneuvers that can undermine it.
Yet de Certeau's account of tactics is remiss in at least one respect. It
fails to adequately recognize that the government of the strong plays its
own tactical games. In other words, tactics are not "of the weak," but
are "anybodies." Indeed, it is their very promiscuity that gives them protean
life." 66


"This is pure tactics. Nowhere is this subtle rewrite
more graphically demonstrated than in the theme park of revolution constructed
in Mao's home village of Shaoshan." 68


"the party has its share of problems with pirated copies
that would not only steal their thunder but will also steal their logo." 69


"In this way, language is transformed into a
variable code for the marking of different bodies, times, and positions.
The dexterity and speed of re-marking the body illustrates the nature of
the tactical lives these people live. But flexibility of meaning isn't always
to be found in the quick turn of phrase. It is also about remarking the
landscape to highlight one's own values and aspirations. While thieves
marked the body, it was always the party that marked the ground on
which these bodies walked." 70


"...one could not think of going home or going out without "going red," for virtually every
street name demanded it...some 475 streets were renamed to include the
word revolution. Between the "Red Sun" Roads and Study Chairman
Mao Alleys, one could not help but think revolution when thinking about
where to go." 72

"At the height of the cultural revolution, the street
on which the Soviet embassy stood was renamed and the embassy was
given a new number. Their new address: 1 Oppose Revisionism Road,
Beijing." 72


"They are the migrants who populate the cities but for whom the city
will always be a foreign place. They are despised as uncultivated or uneducated
tramps, or as morally unworthy streetwalkers. They are marked
out not only by overt signs of difference, such as the tattoo, but by a
series of less visible birthmarks. The way they dress, their speech patterns,
their dialects and customs all mark them out from city people.
With one designation, one Chinese character, they are marked as the
eternal undesirable. That character is liu and it means "to float." In combination
with other characters, liu marks out the social lepers of Chinese
society." 74


- This is almost reading like a textbook of ways to articulate social change (dubious types of change, to be sure) within legal petri dishes
or fabricated realities. Quite a bit sounds spatial, even quasi architectural. Scary. It also sounds weirdly like MODERNISM (I mean the arch kind).

"Two separate and unrelated acts of
government ensured this stilling of city populations. The first act symbolized
the type of mobile city life that was to be left behind, while the
second flagged the stable, static, socialist life to come. Both acts were
designed to halt the movement of people and things and to set in place a
regime of perfect calculation.
Act one of this two-part performance began at ten o'clock on the
morning of 10 June 1949 when the head of the newly formed Shanghai
Public Security Bureau led a team of 400 police and garrison troops
down to the Shanghai stock exchange. After surrounding the building
and calling on the occupants to come out, the police immediately arrested
238 of the occupants as speculators and registered the rest as suspects
before sending them home. The chaotic and fluid world of shares and
speculation came crashing down. A registered, stable life, not the floating
world of the share, would, in the future, determine one's fortune and
fate. A new equity came to displace old (in)equities! This alternative
vision of the future was unveiled a few months later.
This second act began in September when the Social Section of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party passed an edict instructing
all workplaces to establish personnel security sections to monitor, survey,
and register all staff and workers. This was the final brick in a wall that
surrounded a social arrangement known as the work-unit system. The
panoptic quest of the work-unit security forces could only succeed, however,
if these units supplied what Mauss, in a very different context and
with a slightly different meaning, referred to as a system of "total services."
Local work-unit-level party committees, therefore, developed a
system to provide for virtually all of life's material needs. As a consequence,
the concept of the main street, of shopping precincts, and of city
life as we know it began to fade into memory, and as these things waned
the work unit spread into most areas of life.
So it was that hidden behind compound walls that designated their
jurisdiction, work units set about establishing a labyrinth of small institutions
to provide for life's needs if not its pleasures." 76


"That dream imagined an "algebraic society" of registers (of
workers) and (work) units that would make everything visible and measurable.
The dream of a mathematically calculable socialism seemed but
a few sums away." 77
And this sounds like algorithmic architecture. I'm just sayin' sounds like.


"By trading in obligations, connections, and reciprocity,
work units not only began to cohere as tiny societies but were
able to live up to the production demands of party planners." 77


"The architectonics of the traditional compound house reinforced
patriarchy by ensuring an internal economy based on the hierarchical
ordering of family members. The ordering of rooms in the house hierarchizes
bodies, privileging the central gaze and guidance of the patriarch.
At the same time, its closed nature reinforces the powerful bonds of
interdependence between family members. A floor plan of the compound
house is, in this way, a map of the ethical and moral order of the
Confucian world. Space, symbolically coded and hierarchized in this
manner, makes every home a temple to the family and a "machine" to
train bodies in the art of Confucian comportment." 78

"Those who are not tied into such networks of social relations
are always on the outside, and limits are placed on their action. They are
the people to fear and the ones who remain huddled under the character
liu." 79

"...says Yi Zhongtian, "the day when every single person has a place that will
secure their fate and enable them to have a roof over their head is the
day when there will truly be great harmony under heaven." The opposite
of this, he continues, "is a state of great confusion. "If work units represented
stability, the people of liu are its opposite. Outside of any compound
wall, they signal danger to a society unused to movement. After
all, as Yi goes on to note, "floating or drifting is a form of movement
and movement leads to chaos."" 79

"Above ground, the neon lights and bright window displays
dazzle us. Beneath the surface, however, live the people of liu.
Street Scenes of Subalternity
The "people of liu" are the Chinese subaltern. They are the floating
outcasts of a society that is organized to ensure that everyone has a
place. They signal a challenge to this stability in a way that fundamentally
threatens the Chinese sense of community and self. If chai is the mark
of destruction of the old, then liu flags a fear of what the future might
bring. If chai signals a physical reorganization of the city-space to promote
a consumer-based future, liu signals the underside to this new
more mobile and more class-based society. Economic reform has left the
people of liu-the internal migrants, the poor, the destitute, the criminal,
and the undesirable-more vulnerable than at anytime since the 1949
revolution. Without connections, money, or position these people are
vulnerable both to police harassment and arrest and to popular local
resentment. Theirs is the human rights story all too often ignored in the
West, for it is a tale that seriously challenges the Western approach to the
question of rights." 81-82

- Yeah, that was a little much.

Richard I and the Science of War in the Middle Ages

A couple of random notes on an essay about strategy/tactics in the middle ages, I guess made relevant by the same things that make the military relevant, and also because the Middle Ages seems like a somewhat related (and mentioned elsewhere...?) time period in terms of anything from power structures/state structures to a time of guilds and bandits and networks and nomadology...

- campaigns w/o battle vs. fighting on the march vs. pitched battle

- war as 'strategy of maneuver' requiring mostly effective administration

- the dominance of the fortified strongpoint meant that wars of attrition were dominant (rather than battles) ... leads to the importance of garrison troops, artillerymen (engineers), bowmen, incendiaries [guys tasked with the systematic razing of villages] and foragers.

- a War Machine (Delezue/Nomadology), no?

Portable Halls of Justice Are Rising in Guantánamo

Portable Halls of Justice Are Rising in Guantánamo - NYTimes
But in the five-year effort to prosecute Guantánamo detainees, very little has gone according to plan. So, to be ready for all eventualities, the Pentagon’s new judicial complex is portable — a prefabricated but very high-tech court building surrounded by trailers, moveable cells, concertina wire and a tent city — all of which has been shipped here in pieces that could be unplugged, disassembled and put back together somewhere else.

This year, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates rejected as “ridiculous” a plan to erect a $100 million permanent federal-court look-a-like here. The $12 million “M*A*S*H” set for the age of terror was born.

The centerpiece will be the courthouse, a squat, windowless structure of corrugated metal. Though it will hardly be much to look at, it will be outfitted with the latest in trial technology: a computerized system for digital document display; wiring for hidden translators working in as many as five languages; and a 10-camera automated system to beam video of the proceedings to a press center in an aging aircraft hangar nearby.

One new feature for trials expected to involve classified evidence is a plexiglass window separating the small press and spectator gallery from the floor of the courtroom. At the touch of a button, the military judge will be able to cut off the sound in the spectator section.

The tent city, complete with military cots and a recreation tent, is where some 550 court officials, lawyers, security guards and journalists from around the world are to live for weeks at a time once military commissions get under way, perhaps as soon as this spring.

“If you’re an avid camper, it’ll be great,” said Maj. Chad Warren, the operations officer of the construction unit, the 474th Expeditionary Civil Engineering Squadron.

If and when the trials begin, they will be held under a set of rules created especially for trying terrorism suspects. And now they will be held in a setting created especially for terrorism suspects.

Architecturally, it is beyond state of the art. “It’s something new,” Professor Lederer said. “We do not normally design courtrooms that can be folded up and shipped.”

‘The Kite Runner’ Is Delayed to Protect Child Stars - New York Times

‘The Kite Runner’ Is Delayed to Protect Child Stars - New York Times:

"LOS ANGELES, Oct. 3 — The studio distributing “The Kite Runner,” a tale of childhood betrayal, sexual predation and ethnic tension in Afghanistan, is delaying the film’s release to get its three schoolboy stars out of Kabul — perhaps permanently — in response to fears that they could be attacked for their enactment of a culturally inflammatory rape scene."

"...issues stemming from the rising lawlessness in Kabul..."

"...warnings have been relayed to the studio from Afghan and American officials and aid workers that the movie could aggravate simmering enmities between the politically dominant Pashtun and the long-oppressed Hazara.

In an effort to prevent not only a public-relations disaster but also possible violence, studio lawyers and marketing bosses have employed a stranger-than-fiction team of consultants. In August they sent a retired Central Intelligence Agency counterterrorism operative in the region to Kabul to assess the dangers facing the child actors. And on Sunday a Washington-based political adviser flew to the United Arab Emirates to arrange a safe haven for the boys and their relatives.

“If we’re being overly cautious, that’s O.K.,” Karen Magid, a lawyer for Paramount, said. “We’re in uncharted territory.”

"...grappling with vexing questions: testing the limits of corporate responsibility, wondering who was exploiting whom and pondering the price of on-screen authenticity."

"In late July, with violence worsening in Kabul, studio executives looked for experts who could help them chart a safe course. Aided by lobbyists for Viacom, Paramount’s parent company, they found John Kiriakou, the retired C.I.A. operative with experience in the region, and had him conduct interviews in Washington and Kabul."

If film productions are effectively little states-within-states, like Easterling's tourism model, then this is what happens when such a network has unforseen crossover with a different, regional/cultural network. The walls breach. Oops.

But more importantly, imagine the "stranger-than-fiction team of consultants" that you would send to reconnoiter this problematic crossover snaring your global network. Would it ever, ever include an architect?

No, we have made ourselves useless, dead weight, in the hard-hiting mobile-operator class of disciplines that get things done in the world's most unique, difficult, and critical places.

Lacuna Force 5.

Roche/Lavaux Etc in Log 10: I've head about...(a flat, fat, growing urban experiment)

In issue 10 of Log, Francois Roche and Co. (R&SIE(N) +D, whatever that insane, swollen acronym stands for now) propose I've heard about: "a fractal structure made quite literally of contingent secretions. Its architecture is based on the principles of random growth and permanent incompletion. It develops by successive scenarios, without the authority of a plan. Its physical composition renders the community's political structure visible."

According to them, the project is a politically charged response to "The contemporary city's developmental tools," which "manifest the tyranny of tightly scripted, deterministic procedures - planning mechanisms based on predictability." Ok, so I'm not such a big fan of the scripting as such a literal response to the repressiveness of of contemporary urbanism. The rhetoric, and the fact that it chooses to move through a political/legal framework to embed a utopian condition within the ever-present interstices of the contemporary urban fabric, however, are fascinating.

They want to alter, to loosen, the script that is driving contemporary development. And they want to do it specifically to counter the extant power structures: "There is no reason to believe that the "everything under control" operating modes that condition the production of urban structures are capable of reflecting the complexities (the intertwining of issues and relational modes) of a mass media society, where the multitude of citizens is gradually taking over the republic's centralized authorities." Again, I think the rhetoric is good, even if the scripting solution seems somewhat flat in response. A Script, however, might be the right idea. But the kind of script I am thinking about would contain more looseness, inherently, than a computer script. Why, in a quest for looseness, would you begin with something so rigid as a computer script? A theatrical script, for example, has so much for flexibility, room for penetration and interpretation? Also, it would begin to embody a multitude of subjectivities, rather than sort of erasing subjectivity entirely (which I would argue their algorithm is ideally trying to do). They say they want to proceed without "the authority of a plan." Now we need to begin to distinguish between a script (any kind, computer or otherwise) and a plan.

"The city's making suffers from a deficit of democracy and the abuse of tools that date back to a time when the reason of the few presided over the destiny of the many." Here I would disagree a little: I'm not really sure a deficit of democracy is the real issue, and I don't necessarily agree that an open, pluralistic, effectively statistical solution is a valid one. I think the planning power that used to reside with "the reason of the few" has now shifted elsewhere. Its just a different few now, one that maybe seem for palpable, or at least less obvious, at first glance. Rather than proposing a fantastically democratic process as the cure-all (a solution which, in situations like the WTC competition, have proven to be useful addenda rather than driving forces), I would argue that locating these new centers of power (lacunas...states of exception...infrastructural incubators) and engaging them (as architects) is the solution. This engagement can be sincere or subversive...

Their solution espouses contradiction and seems to fear prediction above all else. In essence, "it seems to be a city." That's a strange statement to make considering that they just railed against cities as products of antiquated, autocratic planning. Which would suggest that maybe they are going after only the aura of unpredictability, which would make the use of scripting fitting, yet basically a kind of didactic, ironic postulation.

Some of the other stuff is wonderfully seductive. Evocative statements and tantalizing propositions.

- "Something shapeless grafted onto existing tissue, that needs no vanishing point to justify itself, but instead embraces a quivering existence immersed in a real time vibratory state, in the here and now."

- "...comes out of the ensemble of its individual contingencies...ceaselessly subsumes premises, consequences, and an ensemble of induced perturbations. Its laws exist in the substance of the place itself, with no input of memory."

- Not so sure about "the end of grand narratives...a suspicion of all morality...the urgent need to renew democratic mechanisms...fiction is its reality principle." Can all these statements even work together? I'm never sure at what level of intentional obfuscation, or all-out contradiction, to read their work at. Isn't this a grand narrative...

-Hmmm: "Does it have a moral law or social contract that could extract us from reality, protect us from it, or prevent us from living there? No. The neighborhood protocol...does not escape the risk of being in this world." What is reality here? A soup of pure lawlessness? And what is a neighborhood without a social contract, or even but a social contract?

-"It is a zone of emancipation, produced so that we can keep the origins of its founding act eternally alive, so that we can always live with and reexperience the beginning." Weird creation longing, no? Anyway, with its externality and being rather than becoming it is starting to sound a little like the nomadology of Deleuze's war machine (though I am not sure I could tell you what that means yet...)

-"the public sphere is everywhere...drive by postulates that are contradictory but nonetheless true." Contradictory made true simply through the smoothing of statistics, of mass aggregation?

-"The world is terrifying when it is intelligible, when it clings to some semblance of predictability, when it seeks to preserve a false coherence."

-The "Generative Schemas" read like a sort of legal contract stipulating the form of randomness to be used. I like that it seems primarily based on reading human secretions. I think I like that it is essentially structural (essentially architectonic) in nature. I like that it is self-reflexive. So basically, I am interested a lot in this long technical contract (which I will not retype here) which is most certainly not a computer script, but leans closer to an actual script (which I think would sound too old-school for them). To a rudimentary legal framework or nascent social contract.

-Basically, what I am saying is, I think they just wrote a new set of protocols linking a restored, worshiped individual human agency with a "group" (machines) that flawlessly translates the desires of this agency into a giant, perfect and imperfect diagram.

Also, the Volume interview with Francois Roche (especially weird because he refuses to have anything but his hands photographed) is available here:
http://www.new-territories.com/columbia%20interview.htm


Note: this interview drew out (for me) a long comparison with what Daft Punk (also French) has accomplished by turning themselves entirely into robots (or animation, or blurred photos, or bags over their heads) and erasing their human existence (except for one blurry image from the 90s) in the public eye.
See the Visual Components section of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daft_Punk