August 2007 Archives

Boredom is a provocation. But what kind of provocation is it?

It is not the existential state of eternal ennui or depression-- if it were, it would act like the dejected robot Marvin in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It means more than just the impetus for change. The Morrisseys and of the world capture the drudgery of it. Here's what Siegfried Kracauer wrote about it in "Boredom:"

But although one wants to do nothing, things are done to one: the world makes sure that one does not find oneself. And even if one perhaps isn't interested in it, the world itself is much too interested for one to find the peace and quiet necessary to be as thoroughly bored with the world as it ultimately deserves.

Boredom's definitions over the last 2000 years include acedia, dejection, depression, sloth, laziness, immobility. We characterize it in the same manner as melancholia, tristesse, ennui, annoyance and wearisomeness. La Rochfoucauld wrote, "l'extrême ennui sert à nous désennuyer" (extreme boredom serves to distract from boredom). Séan Healy notes the paradox, asking, "How could an extreme form of something distract one form a lesser form of the same affliction?" In English, Byron first noted bores (someone suffering from ennui) in Don Juan, where he wrote, "Society is now one polished horde, Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored." Charles Dickens invoked boredom in his 1852 novel Bleak House, after which Healy distinguishes British boredom from the continental form: sullen and private as opposed to continental boredom's virulence and destruction.

It has its own typology: situative boredom (waiting for someone or taking a train), the boredom of satiety (too much of the same thing), existential boredom and creative boredom (in which someone is forced to do something new or different). Situative boredom, the momentary ennui presented by a certain state of things, can be shaken off by action. Lars Svendsen writes, "To the extent that there is a clear form of expression for profound boredom, it is via behaviour that is radical and breaks new ground, negatively indicating boredom as its prerequisite." He notes the example of Alberto Moravia's novel, La Noia, in which the narrator's father's boredom "that does not require anything else to be assuaged than new, unusual experiences."

Søren Kierkegaard, tongue firmly-in-cheek in that very Danish way, analyzed the genesis of boredom and its effect throughout history. He presupposes boredom as the root of all evil, "ruinous" for man: "The effect that boredom exercises is altogether magical, except that it is not one of attraction but of repulsion." The impetus to build grows out of this boredom: humanity grows so bored, it builds a boring tower.

We can trace this from the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, so Eve was created. From that time boredom entered the world and grew in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone, then Adam and Eve were bored in union, then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille, then the population increased and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of building a tower so high it reached the sky. The very idea is as boring as the tower was high, and a terrible proof of how boredom had gained the upper hand. Then the nations scattered over the earth, just as people now travel abroad, but they continued to be bored. And think of the consequences of this boredom! Man stood high and fell low, first with Eve and then the Tower of Babel. Yet what was it that stayed the fall of Rome? It was panis and circenses.

Martin Heidegger continues along the path of Kierkegaard's existential dissection of boredom. He studies boredom in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics as part of his continual exploration of Dasein (existence). He directly relates boredom to the passage of time, for in German, the word for boredom is Langeweil, literally "to have long time." Heidegger derives his consideration of it from the notion of a "profound boredom;" its relation to time is key. Boredom leads to time, time leads to boredom. Within such a frame, boredom is the "fundamental attunement" and at that, an objective and subjective hybrid. It is a tricky concept since "we do not understand boredom in its essence," writes Heidegger, perhaps because it has never become essential to us. "Perhaps that very boredom which often merely flashes past us, as it were, is more essential than that boredom with which we are explicitly concerned whenever this or that particular thing bores us by making us feel ill at ease." He suggests not going out of one's way to make oneself bored, but rather learn "not to resist straightaway but to let resonate... only by not being opposed to it, but letting it approach us and tell us what it wants, what is going on with it."

Boredom is not only time's passage but an ideological reception. It converges with conceptual art in Brian O'Doherty's 1967 Object and Idea in his characterization of "high-boredom and low-boredom art." High-boredom art relies heavily on exhaustible optical effect, such as with op and Pop art. Low boredom art, the realm of artists like Donald Judd and Robert Smithson, does not force itself onto viewers and outside of the gallery. In fact, the sculptor and critic (a.k.a sculptor Patrick Ireland) writes, "It tends to fade into the environment with a modesty so extreme that it is hard not to read it as ostentatious." Though he notes that the distinctions of boredom may sound arbitrary, they are useful because they uncover some of the main concerns in art of the sixties, "to the ironies they conceal, to the techniques which they are executed ... and to the 'mimicking' of the machine, which in the last few years has constituted a new orthodoxy of unfreedom and freedom." Computers don't help, either, for machines reduce the role of chance as a "built-in variable to the most sophisticated--and literally most stupid--of machines, the computer."

It is, however, a provocation. It needn't just be the state of things changing. Cyberneticist Gordon Pask invoked boredom routines when he created the Musicolour Machine in 1953. It was a machine that accompanied live music with improvised light shows. When the musicians became too repetitive, the machine would get bored and stop responding, requiring the musicians to change what they were doing in order to reengage the Musicolour Machine. (Would that I had a copy of Cybernetic Serendipity at my disposal: I would post some of the images of it.)

 The idea reappears in Cedric Price's Generator (1976-79, not built). This series of cubes, walkways and catwalks could be moved around by a mobile crane on the site. Price's collaborator John Frazer, proposed that the cubes be outfitted with sensors that would report on the use of the components. If the pieces of Generator weren't moved enough, they would grow bored and design their own layouts, which in turn would be handed off to the mobile crane operator to put into place.

The very least you would expect of a system, wrote John Frazer, is that if you kick it, it should kick back. In Generator, Frazer found the germ of an idea that would shift his concepts of computer-aided design toward one where the computer took an active, not a passive role. Here, boredom serves a challenge to use systems differently, to try something different. He was so committed to the sensors and boredom routines of Generator that he continued to pursue aspects of the project in 1989, 1995 and ultimately shortly before Price's death in 2003.
 

Anne Galloway writes in favour of boredom, in terms of it being a slow space for contemplation, against commodification. There is a panoply of possibility for boredom, too, as a button pushing, frustrating, provocation: an itchiness.

It is 11:56 p.m. and Haruki Murakami begins his novel, After Dark, as follows.

Eyes mark the shape of the city.

Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature--or more like a collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city's moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.

The tendrils of night furl and unfurl in his novel about surveillance, forboding, theft and violence in the haunts of late night Tokyo: Denny's, convenience stores, love hotels, basement rehearsal spaces for jazz bands, empty playgrounds. In Murakami's worlds, things are always sad but all is not lost.

After Dark, everything is a jazz motif. Its title comes from a Curtis Fuller song called "Five Spot After Dark," a synchronous encounter that takes four minutes before midnight between a boy named Takahashi and a girl named Mari. James Sanders recently said that without characters in films about cities, the city is nothing. In After Dark, without Tokyo, the characters in Murakami's novel are nothing. With their author and their city, they are motifs and riffs. The novel situates people against each other who can't speak, can't give away the secrets, can't quite bring themselves to take the next step that would bring them one-half step further, save for one moment.

These moves are those of a jazz piece. Indeed, Murakami came to novel-writing from an obsession with jazz and from running a jazz cafe, he wrote in a recent New York Times piece. "When I turned 29, all of a sudden out of nowhere I got this feeling that I wanted to write a novel -- that I could do it," he wrote. He didn't know where to start. "My only thought at that point was how wonderful it would be if I could write like playing an instrument." He's now approaching 60 and still takes inspiration from music, from "Charlie Parker's repeated freewheeling riffs," and the "quality of continual self-renewal in Miles Davis's music."

Murakami never fails me with a mix of simplicity and depth, a jazz piece you know well, a style with which you're acquainted. Like McCoy Tyner's hands, it starts familiar and then you find yourself in a darker place you'd not imagined, wondering how the quiet thunder started and then where it went once it dissipates. "Unimpeded by other schemes, this hint of things to come takes time to expand in the new morning light," Murakami writes in After Dark. The city holds the characters. The notes of the trombone fade. The thunder settles.

Not much has been published about Cedric Price's Generator project. In fact, not much at all has been published about (or by) Price (1934-2003), an architect who understood architecture as that which set the conditions for interaction, as opposed to imposing formal will on a place. He was famous for statements like, "Technology is the answer... but what was the question?" and for suggesting that architecture might not be the right solution to a problem (maybe you don't need a new house. Maybe you need to leave your wife, he suggested). He is best known for two unbuilt projects: the Fun Palace (1963-67), a collaboration with radical theater director Joan Littlewood, and the Potteries Thinkbelt, a mobile university on rails (1965).  Though he avoided personal technology in his office--the fax didn't have paper; the phone was only answered during strict hours--his ideas presaged concepts we're familiar with today, including the Internet and ubiquitous computing.

Generator (1976-79, unbuilt), sought to create conditions for shifting, changing personal interaction in a reconfigurable and responsive architectural project. It was to serve as a retreat and activity center for small groups of visitors (1 to 100) to the White Oak Plantation on the coastal Georgia-Florida border. Designed for Howard Gilman, the CEO of the Gilman Paper Company and a generous arts patron [1], it followed this open-ended brief:

A building which will not contradict, but enhance, the feeling of being in the middle of nowhere; has to be accessible to the public as well as to private guests; has to create a feeling of seclusion conducive to creative impulses, yet ... accommodate audiences; has to respect the wildness of the environment while accommodating a grand piano; has to respect the continuity of the history of the place while being innovative.[2]

Price developed a scheme of 150 12' by 12' recombinable, mobile cubes with off-the-shelf infill panels, glazing and sliding glass doors; catwalks; screens and boardwalks, all of which could be moved by mobile crane as desired by users to support whatever activities they had in mind, whether public or private, serious or banal.

In order to determine the initial arrangements--menus, as he called them--Price used programmatic research tools: activity questionnaires filled out by Generator's potential users, who then mapped these against requirements for infrastructure, space, quiet or privacy. He used the small, handheld Three Peg Game to determine the original layout for Generator. 
Its rules were simple: take turns with the other player in forming a line of three same-colored pegs (a "mill"), whether vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. The winner is declared when the opponent cannot make a move. "It is usual to play a series of games until one player has a two game lead when he is considered to have won outright," the rules note. From here, in combination with the programmatic exercises, he created what he called menus: arrangements of Generator's cubes, screens and paths that would engage people in unexpected interactions with each other and with Generator as they used it.



Price was particularly interested in the idea that Generator would surprise its users (or for that matter, at least himself). In collaboration with programmer-architects John and Julia Frazer, Generator became "intelligent" with the addition of computer programs and embedded sensors. Each element of Generator would be outfitted with an independent microchip. The sensors would interact with four computer programs that performed a variety of tasks, including keeping inventory, aiding Generator's users to design different layouts, and most powerfully and importantly, getting bored. The boredom routine would run if people did not request changes of Generator frequently enough, or if the parts were not aptly used. It would draw up new plans for Generator, which would be handed off to the social elements of the project.

The social elements of Generator acknowledged that a retreat site composed of mobile, responsive components would prove unfamiliar to visitors without human facilitation. Thus, Price created two roles, "Polariser" and "Factor," to catalyze on-site interpersonal dynamics and logistical requirements. Polariser would encourage people to use Generator in novel ways and facilitate their interactions with each other; Factor would operationalize the desires of Generator's users onsite, operating the mobile crane to suit the menu and handling other human to site requirements. Polariser was Barbara Jakobson, a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and the person who introduced Price to Gilman. Factor was Wally Prince, the operations manager for the White Oak Plantation.

Like many of Price's projects, Generator was never built. After nearly three years of design, the project was stymied by financial turmoil and a feud within the family-run Gilman Paper Company. Moreover, inasmuch as the project served to benefit employees of the company, the workforce did not support the project: the maintenance requirements were too great. Gilman was unable to clear the hurdle and had to abandon the project. John Frazer continued to hope that the project would be revived, suggesting a new start in 1989, again in 1995, and shortly before Price's death in 2003.

Technologically speaking, it must be said that Generator was a notably prescient project. It represents the nexus of architecture and nascent ubiquitous computing. The technical ideas behind Price and the Frazers' collaboration on Generator have still not been largely realized. Yet all of the groundwork was in place for Generator--its flexible program and its elements--before the sensors and programs were ever discussed. The programs were useful for the ways they could unleash unexpected interactions, but without the investigations into the connection of the social and the site and the underlying concepts, the idea would not have endured--an important precept for designers and architects working at the intersection of pervasive computing and design.

What space does drawing occupy within architecture? Does it exist to support the eventual building of an idea? Or is it something more? Basic architectural education places a heavy emphasis on drawing, on translating an idea out of the air and onto the page. The opinion on the matter swings back and forth over centuries. In a time of greater functionalism and technological push, the drawing is a construction document (Mies van der Rohe's drawings, for example). In the late 18th century and again in the mid to late 1970s, it is visionary, a matter separate of construction.

It's a question of the position of paper architecture, unbuilt commissions, competition entries, sketches. Drawing is vital to architecture, in a literal sense. It brings it architecture to bear. It's a form of meditation, of generation. It builds a future vision, yet its medium is divorced from its future construction. Étienne-Louis Boullée in Architecture, Essai sûr l'art (sometime between 1788 and 1798) that building is auxiliary, which makes the constitution of architecture the dominion of design, of paper.

It is necessary to conceive (of architecture) in order to perform it... It is this production of the mind, it is this creation that constitutes architecture that is of consequence to us: the definition of the art of production and bringing to perfection of any building. The art of building is thus but a secondary art that, in our opinion, would be suitably belong to the scientific components of architecture. [5]

Architectural drawings generate new reality by stealth. The nature of drawing reinforces that architecture doesn't need to be built in order to create or occupy social reality, a mode of interaction, a way of life. Drawings provoke and maybe seen "for what is potent in them rather than what is latent," [1] that is, for what is performed instead of than what might be read.

The verb "to draw" (according to the OED) derived from traction and attraction and was used in Old English (c. 897). Over a period of 400 years, it came to connote many other things, including the marks left by tangible items. By the 1300s, "to draw" meant tracing a line across a surface or cutting a furrow with a plow; by the 16th and 17th century, it referred to delineation and construction. From the activity came the concept of the drawing as a discrete object, "The arrangement of the lines which determine form."

James Smith addresses the performance of drawing in his expansive, 1816 tome, The Panorama of Science and Art. He writes, "Drawing, strictly speaking, includes only the art of forming the resemblance of objects by means of out~lines; but it is usual to call those performances drawings, where only a single colour, as Indian ink, is employed to produce shades."[2] Drawing maintained this strict definition stayed for nearly 150 years. The Museum of Modern Art would define drawing as "a unique work on paper" [3] in 1944, adhering to the single-color definition until 1964, when the museum expanded its description to include pastels and watercolors, and in 1971, papiers colliers and other collage forms. [4]

Alberto Pérez-Gómez, following Boullée, writes, "In a manner of speaking... the drawing is the architecture, a priviledged [sic] vehicle for expressing architectural intentions: intentions that are poetic in a profound traditional sense, as poesis, as symbol making." From the height of architectural modernism, Walter Benjamin saw the generative in a functionalist view of architectural drawing in his 1933 article, "Rigorous Study of Art." He noted the "marginal" status of architectural drawing and the way in which such drawings exclude all but practitioners of the profession, thanks to their specificity and jargon--their function as a tool for architects. (How is this different today, one has to wonder.) Nonetheless, he sees the drawing as more than just tools of instruction, but as a space for imagined experience. Benjamin writes,

As regards the images themselves, one cannot say that they re-produce architecture. They produce it in the first place, a production which less often benefits the reality of architectural planning than it does dreams... There are various indications that confirm the specificity of this world, the most important one being that such architecture is not primarily 'seen,' but rather is imagined as an objective entity and is experienced by those who approach or even enter it as a surrounding space sui generis, that is, without the distancing effect of the frame of the pictorial space. Thus, what is crucial in the consideration of architecture is not seeing but the apprehension of structures. The objective effect of the buildings on the imaginative being of the viewer is more important than their 'being seen.' In short, the most essential characteristic of the architectural drawing is that 'it does not take a pictorial detour.' [7]

It is Robin Evans' conception of architectural drawing as a distinct, particular, and generative act that so strongly resonates with architects and critics. He likens drawing to literary translation, in which the translator moves a text from one language to another without alteration: yet in the act of moving, "things can get bent, broken or lost on the way." [8] The drawing is the translation from one language to another, carrying the idea of a building into the space of communication. Evans elaborates, "for architecture, even in the solitude of pretended autonomy, there is one unfailing communicant, and that is the drawing." What differs for architects vis-à-vis painters and sculptors, however, is the fact that the architect does not work with the direct medium of endeavor.

Two possibilities emerge from this concept. One is that architecture is only what the architect directly touches and manipulates. In this way, the architect relinquishes the broader reach of architecture in the social, political and economic spheres--a fairly limited depiction of architecture's nature. The more interesting possibility (which interests Evans) speaks to the notion of translation and transmutation. In this manner, drawing brings architecture into existence: "The subject-matter (the building or space) will exist after the drawing, not before it. [...] it is not so much produced by reflection on the reality outside the drawing, as productive of a reality that will end up outside the drawing." [8]

And so, architectural drawing is not just documentation for future construction. "What goes out is not always the same as what goes in," Evans writes. Beyond this, it is realism is stood "on its head." Returning to the importance of drawing as potent, we can consider how it gains this power. It's potent, not latent: performed, not read. The act, the action creates this reality through "an enormous and largely unacknowledged generative power: by stealth."[8]