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