from: A R I S T I D E A N T O N A S antonasoffice@gmail.com

to: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>

date: 13 August 2012 12:57

subject: Re: [-empyre-] screen and desire/stepping out of the frame

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FOUND IN THE EMPYRE SOFT SKINNED SPACE [ http://www.subtle.net/empyre/ ]

Dear Johannes,

Yes, I believe that Badiou usually disregards facts; he privileges events; he disregards norms in order to prioritize the exceptional: his concept for the "fact" is always repre-sented as part of a finished archived past. His "event" as the exception to any such archiv-ing: it would always stay open to an undeter-mined future. Nevertheless any exception is linked to the norm it overcomes. Outside the game, outside the frame Badiou finds the field of exception as the one that concerns politics. I do not agree. I think that it is more challeng-ing to invent norms, not exceptions. The cul-ture of gaming may help to understand this remark and orient towards this direction new concepts of the political.

Excuse me for delaying my response. I am still considering your questions. They are not easy to answer. I try to suggest an urgent constructive awareness towards new commu-nal norms; we may enter a phase where the political may be again identified to inventions of the normal; it seems that this will be the political task for tomorrow. We used to under-stand the political as a simple attitude of re-sisting the hegemonic. The hegemonic struc-tures are less and less visible. Norms cannot anymore be stabilized through the function of a state, the state legislative platform seem already more and more old, unpractical and dysfunctional. Most governments cannot even act anymore within the field of their laws. Pressed by the banking system, the states succumb to demands related to the value of the citizen; the states cannot react anymore to a barbaric "lessez faire".

From another point of view norms are pro-duced everyday, mostly related to the Internet and its cultures; such Internet norms create already a multitude of different communal spaces through shared platforms; the plat-forms function out of the Internet as well, be-ing thus always determined within the net, within this live archive. A multitude of cluster-like platforms will be controlled consciously or will be constructed as an uncontrolled ar-chipelago of platforms. Controlled and un-controlled formations can here exchange their meanings if we insist on a closer view to them. "Common platforms" will not define

areas accessible to all. Common plat-forms at the contrary are meant here as isolated spaces for communities, func-tioning towards a specific goal or into a given protocol. Common platforms may be considered as heteronomous structures: one will have to accept their rules or leave them; they can only be accepted or re-fused. One will be able to chose other heteronomies, different rules: a multitude of platforms can be accessed deliberately. But we cannot refuse the platform system by keeping our position on the platform; and if we leave the platform we will be soon included to another one. One may chose deliberately among other cluster-like systems but - while entering them- we shall immediately be limited to their own rules. Their complex world will be formed as an accumulation of heterogeneous matter marked by "free choice" between heteronomous structures. Nevertheless one will only accept fully a protocol by re-sponding to it. There is no in between po-sition in the Internet. Protocols will be less and less discussed; the ability to chose among them will be the user's sole pos-sibility: and choosing was never the syno-nym to freedom. Freedom will form more and more impossible tasks tomorrow. A user may have the possibility to chose: enter the realm of different platforms or stay out of them. This will be the function of freedom tomorrow. We will be able to accept some protocols or refuse them. Their norms will be formed as applications or they may have the structure of games. We can already chose among some of them and participate to their prescribed systems, following the rules they propose or responding to their open questions. Protocols can be created through differ-ent procedures but they form always given systems we can only camp into. Protocols make the differences between platforms; but the protocols will not be questioned concerning their rationale or concerning their concepts. The protocols structure communal schemes; they can form dys-topic systems of control or places of rest; they can also organize creative proce-dures or they can structure commodities. They cannot guarantee qualities of the future societies but they are building any-way already the societies of tomorrow; the consciousness about this process will be crucial in order to imagine and invent dif-ferent political agendas.

Some crucial questions will be: how those small scale structures, seemingly subor-dinated to the state, or how the big scale

structures that overcome the limits of states will function together as a multiple, conscious political system? Without any control of the users -only able to chose among given struc-tures and live quietly inside them- or after a conscious decision or a democratic emanci-patory decisive intervention by the people? How can such an intervention take shape within the given Internet culture? How does this archipelago of protocols can have a con-trolled geography installed by common deci-sions and not by "undetermined" factors?Leaving this formation of the archipelago of independent protocols to an "open" and "free" procedure drives already the world towards a tricky situation. Freedom risks to be under-stood as a technical problem concerning the possibility of participation to given structures. Another form of the "freedom of the Internet" is needed; it will have to deal with a concept of politics within an archived world; it will have to deal with facts. Cluster-like structures pro-duced "spontaneously" organize a galaxy of predetermined worlds. The time of a user re-sponding to a system of games, contributing in a system of applications and acting within predetermined platforms forms the political field of tomorrow. The western concept of citizen will perish, the concept of identity will look more and more perverse; the era of the user seeks for its constitution and its political values.

You insist on my "call to deliberate forming norms"; I feel better to only propose an in-vestigation with examples of norms; there is a need to see how those example function. In Athens I proposed it some years ago; it would be easy to act towards this research. The state cannot handle the empty city. A controlled system of legalized occupancies, organized via Internet, can show new exem-plary functions for the ruin of the modern city center.

We would not have to think of social / politi-cal negotiations necessarily, even if these may also announce a promising field. We may elaborate the system of a city as an already bankrupted system that will never function as it did before. I believe this is the challenge for contemporary cities (Athens is the first). In the cities we can play-test with different proposals by allowing them to occur in some terms and follow their evolution. The state, the municipality or a third public structure will permit and will also stop the function of the controlled occupancies of the empty parts of the cities. Neighborhoods of functions can be formed as sharing systems. The urban space can be redefined via the Internet when this

system of open research field makes sense. It will not be installed in order to stabilize the most prominent communal practices but in order to always propose new.

I believe that we cannot engage governments to such a procedure but in any case the exist-ing authorities will have to accept small com-munal actions inside given frames; we need a local collaboration between governments and the Internet; we need local authorities to use the Internet as part of its constructive power; the aim will be not to destroy completely the citizen of the past in order to install a commu-nity of users; how can a part of the political tradition of the west be saved while we enter this new phase of the post network politics? Formed as protocols and accepted temporar-ily some examples of controlled heteronomies can be installed and constantly observed by a democratic control system. The concept would remind the idea of renting out parts of the city under strict conditions. In this case it the renting out strategies will concern com-munity structures; the authorities may al-low the space to be used temporarily as in a play-testing phase: the play-testing views towards the concretization of a protocol; the permission for a controlled occupancy would be an acceptance of the first draft of the ur-ban protocol. An urban protocol will have the structure of a game, consisted as a series of rules. The city of Urban Protocols will be a field of research that will use empty space in the cities in order to implement examples of communal strategies. An archipelago of such urban protocols could present the vision of a future city.

Gaming seems to be the key structure through which smaller or larger invented plat-forms will be transformed to systems of ac-tion; this will be done after the failure of the state system of today as a political dystopia we cannot predict or it will get organized into that may lead to different futures. Thank you for your questions, Johannes, they ask for a shape of imagining a new political vigilance concerning the ruins of the contemporary city.

All best wishes

A R I S T I D E A N T O N A S

Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2012 21:09:39 +0100

From: J O H A N N E S B I R R I N G E R

To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>

Subject: Re: [-empyre-] screen and desire/stepping out of the frame

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FOUND IN THE EMPYRE SOFT SKINNED SPACE [ http://www.subtle.net/empyre/ ]

Dear all

How to track back from the psychoanalytic to the political philosophy (or architectural phi-losophy) that Aristide, to my surprise, brought up here in the discussion on Monday?There may very well be close connections, too, between the two, but it took me a little while to ponder Aristide' commentary on how "the architectures of gaming are character-ized by the limits of the game, the structures of its interior space and the concepts of its exterior...." and what he critically made of the distinction between the screenic (if that is how he read our discussion via Badiou and B's divide between facts and events) and the ac-tion, acting, building, forming interaction etc beyond the screen. We have not really dis-cussed visions of the beyond the screen yet, or have we?

I am not well read in Badiou, so cannot reply to a concern with [his] events and facts. But I take it that Aristide worries about cities (and the troubled times in Athens, Greece) and is looking at architectures through the lens of gaming cultures (and games of course would involve screens, desire and fantasy). Or, pro-posing that architecture and its discourses are significant sites for a public production of knowledge and poliitics? In terms of a media archaeology (or anarchaeology, as Zielinski called it at one point), on screens and tech-nique, function, and fantasy, it actually strikes me as remarkable that architects, after World War II, invited philosophers to address this need for public production, for new build-ing (reconstruction after a traumatic war and after a period of horrendous fascism), and for new terms to discuss dwelling and living ("Education through Form," "Man and Space" were some of the titles of the Darmstadt Col-loquia in thew 50s). I am reading a book on the reception history of the Bauhaus (Jeffrey Saletnik/Robin Schuldenfrei, eds., Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism, London 2009), and one of the chapters mentions how Bloch, Adorno, and Heidegger addressed the architects in the 1950s and debated ideas of ornament and function.Curiously? and thank you, Scott, for your in-

cisive comments on the mass ornament in your recent post, and for bringing Nathalie Bookchin's 'mass ornament' video to our at-tention?? I found an intriguing passage from Adorno commenting on the ornament: In his speech, "Functionalism Today," Adorno breaks down the distinction between orna-ment and function, pushing it through a histor-ical dialectic. Function, he argues, is not only external but is first and foremost a matter of immanent, artistic function, within the logic of the work itself. What was once functional can become, internally, unncessarym superfluous, and ornamental, when its logic is no longer necessary to internal coherence. The func-tional and the functionless are historically in-tertwined. Adorno then writes of the ornament as "scars of superseded modes of produc-tion." the non-functional [external?] is given new credibility as the "sublimation" of function (cf. Bauhaus Cosntruct, p. 64).

The "democratic drama," invoked by Scott, and in extension the Blochian utopia of a home that we cannot find, a game we can-not play. can now indeed be critiqued at be-ing played out at the "limits of contemporary exhortations for self-performance as self-improvement" - am in understanding you correctly, Scott? But is then fantasy (gaming culture, Batman?) our hope for non-useful innervation? I think not, and as I was try-ing to suggest earlier, I worry that interactiv-ity is precisely not what we can assume to bring greater participatory freedom or provide stronger political affect.

Aristide wrote me saying "Badiou always dis-regards facts, and privileges events; outside the game, outside the frame is the field of ex-ception and there is the field of what interests politics for him. I do not agree. I think that the most difficult thing is to form norms, not exceptions. I think the culture of gaming may help towards this direction."

How are we to understand your call to deliber-ate forming norms, are you thinking of social/political negotiations, for example about how we want to live, how we engage local govern-ments or communitarian projects, how we might screen banks and our security forces who screen us, how we become pirates and vote for the Pirate party, how we occupy ur-ban space or share rural space, how we de-bate [?] fantasy archiectures, etc? How is gaming related to politics in your view?

respectfully

J O H A N N E S B I R R I N G E R

Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2012 11:08:32 +0300

From: A R I S T I D E A N T O N A S

To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>

Subject: Re: [-empyre-] stepping out of the frame to play around

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FOUND IN THE EMPYRE SOFT SKINNED SPACE [ http://www.subtle.net/empyre/ ]

Dear Johannes,

[ ... ] The architectures of gaming are char-acterized by the limits of the game, the struc-tures of its interior space and the concepts of its exterior. We may enter the political struc-ture of the question through a reference to Alain Badiou’s distinction between fact and event, e.g., in Peut-on penser la politique?, a relatively late text (1985) by the writer of Be-ing and Event. Thus, in Badiou’s description, we encounter a voluntary rupture introduced between the two notions of “fact” and “event”. The rupture is presented through Badiou’s definitions of these notions; I suggest that we could shape this distinction in relation to the way we conceive duration: an “event” stays alive in the present time, “immediately” pro-jected to the future. A “fact” is presented as an accomplished, ended time: always en-closed inside a dead representation, a fact is necessarily already formed; for Badiou neces-sarily uninteresting, finished. We can already raise an objection: to “reject” a “fact” and in-sist with such emphasis on a definition of poli-tics through the event could be, I believe, an impetuous act. Badiou, though, gives form to this exact rejection of a bureaucratic concep-tion of the fact. His dichotomy between fact and event, even if announced here with a par-ticular, new emphasis, has a profound philo-sophical past. It seems ”from a specific point of view” problematic but it cannot be neglect-ed. This past glorifies in a long bibliography a type of “open durations”: unaccomplished facts are sometimes “idealized” in their way to form unfinished structures, considered open, living promises.

We may let down a history of this idealized “living duration” that is introduced together with the origins of philosophy (an obvious reference to the pre-Socratic philosophers could find its place here); this is not the time to be exhaustive regarding texts that insist on this trope by conceiving strategies of unac-complished time; in a Lessing short text on unaccomplished access to truth for example, or more emphatically in longer citations we locate Bergson’s “idealized duration” or even many texts “in political art history” of the Situ-ationist literature. Living duration changes

names in the theoretic bibliography but we can grasp at once its consistence as a unified moral strategy. A plethora of references lead to opinions that share this concern to negate the stability of a dead fact. This extreme at-titude names the end of a process and in the same move refuses to accept this same end as part of the process. Inevitably, an event is inscribed in a trace field. If not, it is an event that does not happen. It is the possibility that the event might leave traces that construct it as a possibility of happening. The “possibil-ity of tracing” structures the duration of an event. The event would then be a chance to trace; the fact would be a mark occupying an already traced field. Nevertheless, we can-not understand an event without a trace and a trace without an event. Idealizing the event and demonizing the fact can be understood as honoring extraordinary circumstances and as a call for extraordinary political action. Fur-thermore, the “political” is always precariously refounded while revisiting the normative char-acter of a community.

A particular “inhabitation of becomingness” together with an immediate symbolic power detected in an action, could describe the definitive force of an event. I believe that through this concept we move again into the idealization of a living structure compared to a demonized lifeless one. The trace in a con-dition of passive reading crystallizes the dead and the disappointing. A long story connects the roots of philosophy to Heidegger’s Dasein and to Deleuze’s readings of Bergson. We could underline the necessary coexistence of these constructed opposite poles: we could argue that Badiou’s “fact and event” are de-fined only when the one refers to another, in a circular way. They are related in a complex manner. We could argue that thinking is nec-essarily a potential reactivation of “facts”; we will thus keep the distinction between fact and event in effect, in order to think again about this dichotomy and revisit, in the same time, a city and a video game structure. The game itself can be the place where an event in the Badiou's sense can never happen. But what would be the consequences of such an re-mark?

A R I S T I D E A N T O N A S

P O P U L AT I O N O FF R A G M E N T S

A N T O N A S o f f i c e

Negri writes: “The concept of multitude intro-duces us to a completely new world, inside a revolution in process” [ http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/space/multitude.htm ]. We notice that the the “duration of change” rep-resents structurally the exact opposite of the multitude as presented by Hardt and Negri. This is the reason this quote of Negri seems contradictory. We could claim that their re-marks in many levels of their recent texts are characterized by the paradox of a “succeeded deconstruction”. An accomplished decon-struction field or its form seems to haunt the “multitude”. We believe that an accomplished “deconstructed field” gives an idea about the opposite of any “revolution in progress” or any deconstruction; the accomplished view of a multitude of already deconstructed powers names only a political problem, it is not the answer to a problem; it shows the limit of any political understanding of deconstructive strat-egies; if an accomplished deconstructed field is an accurate description of the multitude, if the multitude could be defined as an accom-plished deconstruction we are to reinvestigate about the fragmented city in a different level. If deconstruction was a strategy that would detect the hegemonic and if it worked as a parasite to deform it, to edit or transform its changing views, the multitude begins its life after a decision that our field of action has no obvious hegemonic structures; the multitude can be better described as a disappearance of the hegemonic than a field where a revolu-tion in process is possible; the elements that form the multitude seem to be juxtaposable, not contradicting one another, never opposed; in this structure the political would have to be reinvented. We try to figure out the conse-quences of such a silent acceptance of the end of deconstruction. The multitude cannot describe a “revolution in process” if we accept that the possibility of juxtaposition replaces the work of deconstruction. If deconstruc-tion structured polemic attitudes as interior works within the codes of every utterance, the multitude proposes an exterior description of things. An indifference about the internal functions of the structures of the “multitude” is one of its most characteristic aspects.

The Population of Fragments is the name of a project undertaken by the ANTONAS office in Athens. It deals with the condition of the city today and its aspects that could be general-ized concerning functions of the post network urban conglomerations. Scarcity and this post network condition create in Athens an open field for research that can investigate and ex-periment different common structures.

We use the term population of fragments and not the one of “multitude” in order to avoid a quick reference to the literature we already mentioned; nevertheless we owe much to it. We name our population of fragments and not any multitude in order to show directly our point of view that prioritizes the problems of the disappearance of the hegemonic and invests at it towards the concepts of the po-litical it implies. We elaborated experimental strategies that would enter the city with some proposals for new communal functions based to a change of what we conceive normally as its public sphere. A key word for those works is the concept of Urban Protocol.t

U R B A N P R O T O C O L S

A N T O N A S o f f i c e

The concept of Urban Protocol names a strat-egy concerning the condition of Athens today. It would serve as an experimental pseudo-methodology that faces the condition of the city. The Urban Protocols are meant to in-troduce legal temporary occupancies of the abandoned city center that will be accepted and controlled by a municipal authority; the purpose of an Urban Protocol would be to es-tablish cluster-like mikro-legislative construc-tions with communal functions. Urban Proto-cols are formed as systems of rules. Using a video game terminology we may say that the Urban Protocols are “play-tested” in the city, performed and improved via Internet. The system of rules they represent could be trans-formed and re-established easily.

A first example of Urban Protocol was pro-posed by the Antonas office with the “Athens Terraces” project. The major part of this pro-tocol was consisted by the legislative unifica-tion of the terraces of typical Athenian blocks; an existing, typical athenian block’s terrace is now divided to the number of buildings that form it. The protocol of a unified block would construct the communal representa-tion of a unified legislative entity, the field of the block’s terraces. This unification may ex-tend to other neighboring blocks or can be repeated elsewhere in the city. The unification can also be enriched by a covering system of sophisticated canopies. The project proposed a reuse of the existing metallic grids of the city for its cover. It can also include photovol-taic surfaces that could produce electricity for common use of the block’s inhabitants.

A second example of Urban Protocol was proposed by the Antonas office with the “Ur-ban Hall” project. An area of the city was an-nounced as open to a systematic change of function. The municipal authority or a select-ed voted board would be responsible for the programmatic change of function. A division of time makes here possible a the coexist-ence of different functions in the same space. The “Urban Hall” can become an open air public hospital for a month or program a mu-sic scene or a theater space depending to the decisions of its board.

The Urban Protocol challenges the relation between the city and the Internet; the concept

of user would function better for its perfor-mance than the one of citizen. Nevertheless its most sophisticated part would have to deal with the relation between user and citizen. Its most challenging legislative part is ruled by the relationship between the Internet and the state; the Internet is understood as the quick functional basis for the formation, installation and function of an Urban Protocol.

Why could a city like Athens needs Urban Protocols in order to enter a phase of a new function? Scarcity made obvious that alterna-tive initiatives were more welcomed than any bureaucratically conceived systematic action in the city. Nevertheless the initiatives can-not form a frame for a city change. The Ur-ban Protocol would be the name of legislative schematization of urban initiatives. It function as an invitation to think the city in a different scale within the relation between a crucial municipality board and a power given to Inter-net users in order to operate in the city field.

The concepts of “provisional”, “improvisa-tional”, “guerrilla”, “unsolicited”, “temporary”, “informal”, “DIY”, “unplanned”, “participatory”, “open-source”, used abundantly in Athens during the last years are also used for exam-ple in this year’s participation of the US pavil-ion; those concepts do not only name a trend of not canonical architecture. Architecture seems to propose its own end if we forget its power to produce programs. An uninterest-ing lessez-faire will be the result of such an idealization of the free initiative. A city was conceived as a system of coexistence and its legislative system is already old. The Urban protocol could be first and foremost the call for a new legislative phase for the city of the future. Athens is only a good example.

T h e P O P U L A T I O N O F F R A G M E N T S i s a n a r c h i v e o f p r o j e c t s d e a l i n g w i t h

c o n t e m p o r a r y A t h e n s b y t h e A N T O N A S o f f i c e . H e r e i s o n l y p r e s e n t e d a

s m a l l p a r t o f t h e w o r k e d i t e d f o r t h e G r e e k P a v i l i o n o f t h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e

b y A r i s t i d e A n t o n a s a n d K a t e r i n a K o u t s o g i a n n i . T h e p a r a l l e l “ r e f e r e n c e

p r o j e c t ” w i t h s o m e Q R r e f e r e n c e s p l a c e d i n s e l e c t e d p a r t s o f t h e p r i n t e d

m a t t e r w a s o p e r a t e d b y t h e K e r n e l g r o u p : T h o d o r i s G i a n n a k i s , P e t r o s M o r i s

a n d P e g g y Z a l i .