TED - Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world

[Video - Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world by TEDtalksDirector on YouTube]

In this recent TED talk by game designer Kevin Slavin on the impact of mathematical algorithms on our lives. Here he argues that the increasing complexity and co-implication of the autonomous algorithms we have created to help run our everday lives is rapidly outstripping our ability to read or control them.

These are the physics of culture. And if these algorithms, like the algorithms on Wall Street, just crashed one day, went awry, how would we know? What would it look like?

Particularly interesting is his discussion of the idea that architecture itself has become 'subject to algorithmic optimisation' according to a 'machine dialect' which, as in his example of the 'destination control elevator' with no buttons, is built to the measure of the 'bin packing' algorithm written to run it, rather than to the needs of the humans intended to use it. Further, it is not merely the man-made environment but the Earth itself and the natural landscape that are subjected to this new 'co-evolutionary' force.

Brilliantly Provocative!

Vertical Expectations - The Shard of Glass

[Video - Vertical Expectations by Simolab-Creative AV on Vimeo]

Expected to reach completion in 2012 the architect Renzo Piano's glass Shard at London Bridge will stand unrivalled on London's skyline at an imposing height 1,017 ft or 310 m. By that time it will be the tallest building not only in the UK, but also in the whole of the European Union.

In this brilliant new film Simona Piantieri of Simolab combines a visual document of its construction with a balanced cross section of expectation and critical opinion concerning the aspirations, architectural or otherwise, that seek expression through the construction of this improbable edifice.

So ask yourself again...do Crystal Palaces Cast No Shadows?

Great work!

Architecture & Utopia: Once composed...

[Video - Architecture & Utopia by Patrick Bobilin on Vimeo]

In this short film artist Patrick Bobilin offers his own novel take on the architectural manifesto: "a manifesto between lovers in search of a reasonable paradise in the twenty-first century while living in the shadow of the structures and ideals of the nineteenth".

Inspired by the writings of Le Corbusier, Manfredo Tafuri and Siegfried Giedion who concerned themselves with the programmatic realisation of utopia, the female lover of Patrick's film poses the following question:

"Would utopia be composed of buildings? Once composed, would those buildings cease to be utopic?"

In the wonderfully poetic passage that follows his female lover elaborates on the aspects of everyday life that elude or exceed the neurotic concerns of an obsessive architectural programme.  As the aritst succinctly put it in a brief email exchange "things have changed but the buildings remain the same. Is the solution to rebuild, or is the solution to reorganise history?"

Shot in Chicago the film takes in the monumental forms of its 19th century skyscrapers before moving on to poorer outlying suburbs. When I asked Patrick about the project he told me that the writings of Walter Benjamin had been a significant influence, particularly Benjami's writings about Berlin, Paris and Baudelaire.

As for Patrick in his attempt to articulate his "own history of architecture", it is precisely by means of the experiences of others that we are able to distantiate ourselves sufficiently from the cities we already know, almost all too well, in order to be able to frame them anew. To this end another's writings, concerning other cities at other times, offer a compellingly affective route to the accomodation of these other experiences.

In this way the issues of gentrification, segregation, lack of civic responsibility and the loss of community that Patrick sought to explore were able to manifest in a way that may not have been possible before. In Patrick's film it is also key to the development of this new urban imaginary that these experiences are given another voice; that of his female lover.

Further details of Patrick's works can be found on his website: http://patrickbobilin.com/

Utopia London?

[Video - Utopia London Trailer by Utopia London on Vimeo]

In this new documentary Tom Cordell attempts to tell the story of the London he grew up in and the Architects who built it. As he explains:

I grew up in the London of the 80s and 90s and it's still my home. I've always been drawn to the excitement of its post-war landscape; concrete and brick textures, unadorned clean lines, neon glow and dark shadows. And most Londoners my age that I know feel the same - the modernist city is our landscape. Yet all our lives we have been told that the same urban spaces are ugly – symbols of a failed, arrogant technocracy. While we're comfortable celebrating 60s pop culture, many people still hate the buildings of that time.

Worryingly, while I had once thought that popular taste would catch up with the urban building of the 50s, 60s and 70s, it's now under attack. Major symbols of that time are being destroyed - often with gruesome delight on the part of the wreckers. We urgently need to defend what is left before it is all gone.

So this film is an attempt to understand both why I am so drawn to these cityscapes and also why some hate them so much.

What excites me about Cordell's project is the way the tensions he describes resonate with my own interests in the subject of urbanism, and my personal ambivalence toward the city to which I remain attached. Undoubtedly Cordell's attachments are different from my own. Growing up in the fringe of London's northern commuter belt I have always felt like an outsider or stranger in London. As Georg Simmel would have had it in his influential essay 'The Stranger': I am 'the man who comes today and stays tomorrow - the potential wanderer, so to speak, who although he has gone no further, has not quite got over the freedom of coming and going'. If we accept this supposition of a propensity toward wanderlust, the real riddle of the stranger then would be to find out what makes him stay? While I am yet to visit many of the the sites appearing in Cordell's film, I wonder if the draw they have for him bares any similarity to that which I've felt toward the Barbican Estate ever since I stumbled upon it on a walk through the City a couple of years ago. 

Situated near the heart of London's central business district, the Barbican appears as an anachronism on the City's changing skyline. Perhaps there is something quixotic in the image of this outmoded Brutalist fortress of concrete, squaring off against the City's new champions of commerce rising to the east; palaces of commerce armoured in glass and steel, more ethereal in appearance, or more wraith-like depending on your view.

At the same time the Barbican is an island of urban life in a sea of commuters. I've often imagined it declaring independence from the rest of the city, or else turning feral in the vein of Ballard's book High-Rise. In my imagination it is more a ship waiting to set sail than an island. Over the last couple of years several of the pedways that reached out from the estate have been severed as the surrounding area has been redeveloped: the gangplanks are going up, all we're waiting for is the hoisting of the mainsail and we're off down the Thames in search of booty off the Docklands main.

While it is extremely unlikely that architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon or the LCC ever entertained thoughts of the Barbican as a Pirate Utopia, it is interesting to consider the extent to which the buildings they created have preserved or compromised the Utopian Egalitarianism that informed the earlier work of planners and architects such as Patrick Abercrombie and John Foreshaw, embodied in the County of London and Greater London plans of the 1940s:

[Video - The Proud City: A Plan for London (Public Domain Video) hosted by Utopia London on Vimeo]

Despite the harsh modernism, the uncompromising functionalism, or even the brute concrete hostility of many of the sites that were intended to embody these ideals, I'd like to suggest that it is their enduring influence on London's urban imaginary that continues to draw us to them. As Cordell tells us:

I began to contact the people who tried to change the city, and my narrative thread continued to shift around as the filming went on. And what I found was that the power of the buildings came from the vision they were meant to serve - and that it's this vision that so polarises opinion. They symbolise an attempt to build a fair, open society, and their existence frightens people who have rejected these values.

The film will be screened by DoCoMoMo in London on the 14th of December and followed by Q and A with director and architects. The film is also available for purchase on DVD from the Utopia London website.

Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space

Back in May the Royal Academy of Arts held a symposium entitled Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space. I was incredibly disappointed not to be able to attend so I was particularly pleased when, in addition to the mp3s available above, videos of the event were posted by static tv on behalf of The London Consortium.

As indicated by the title of the symposium, each of the lectures are broadly structured around the distinction between the inner and outer operative in the fiction of the late British writer J.G. Ballard. What many of these discussions emphasise in their exploration of Ballard's work is the permeability of those barriers and thresholds ordinarily supposed to mark that distinction in each of its many guises.

By way of example we might consider the violent short circuiting of the libidinal economy of the individual and functioning of the capitalist market economy affected by the penetration of the skin by twisted metal staged by the auto 'accident' in Crash.

Below I offer a selection of the lectures that I found most interesting.

[Video - Ballardian Architecture 1 - John Gray by static tv on Vimeo]

In the first discussion philosopher John Gray draws on Ballard's interest in celebrity culture and surveillance to pose the question as to whether we can expect there to be genuinely public spaces anymore. Gray explores the implications for political economy by way of a comparison with Guy Debord's theorisation of the spectacle in his 1967 book Society of the Spectacle.

[Video - Ballardian Architecture 2 - Nic Clear by static tv on Vimeo]

In this second lecture the Bartlett's Nic Clear delivers his paper 'J.G. Ballard is an Enemy of the Architectural Profession'. Developing themes explored earlier in the issue of Architectural Design that he guest edited back in 2009, the lecture is offered as an exploration of new modes of architectural representation that are intended, in this case via the writings of Ballard, to stage an encounter between the architectural discipline and its outside.

An earlier interview outlining the development of this project, and featuring videos produced by his students in the course of his Ballard inspired 2007-08 programme for the Bartlett's Unit 15, can be found on the Ballardian website here.

[Video - Ballardian Architecture 3 - David Cunningham by static tv on Vimeo]

In David Cunningham's presentation he compares Ballard's writing on space and place with those of his friend Iain Sinclair and the Anglo-German writer W. G. Sebald. In doing so he argues that, contrary to the "hunger for memory and place" of Sinclair and Sebald's writings, Ballard's provide a "profoundly urban, no-turning-back aesthetic of futurism and rawness", embodied in the architecture of Brutalism and the new forms of social interaction it might seem to promote.

The end of session panel discussion above features Gray, Clear and Cunningham answering questions from the floor on the subjects of time, the uncanny, sentimentality and social networking.

[Video - Ballardian Architecture 7 - Chris Hall by static tv on Vimeo]

Chris Hall was one of the first online writers to discuss Ballard's work in his essay 'Extreme Metaphor: A Crash Course In The Fiction Of JG Ballard'. In this discussion Hall uses a reading of 'The Terminal Beach' to explore Ballard's use of particular types of architectural structures as metaphors for those aspects of ourselves that we try to repress. In doing so he develops the psychogeographic themes in Ballard's writings hinted at in Cunningham's discussion.

[Video - Ballardian Architecture 9 - Dan Holdsworth by static tv on Vimeo]

The lecture by British photographer Dan Holdsworth departs from the format of critical appreciation established by the speakers above. Having participated in the Crash: Homage to JG Ballard exhibition at the Gagosian gallery the previous month, Holdsworth reads passages from Ballard's works that resonate with the sparse and sometimes inhuman images suggested he captures through long exposure photography.

[Video - Ballardian Architecture 12 - Claire Walsh by static tv on Vimeo]

The closing speech of the symposium was made by Ballard's long term partner Claire Walsh. Naturally this offers a fascinating glimpse into the authors private life and the more guarded facets of his character.

The full set of videos can be found on the static tv while recordings of the sessions are available on the Royal Academy of Arts site here.

Architecture for Everyone

[Video - Our Urban Playground by Chocolate Films on YouTube]

The short documentary above was created by a not-for-profit production company in South London called Chocolate Films. In addition to their commercial work they are notable for their community and educational outreach programme. Their film promotes a partnership between RMJM architects and The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, launched in 2008, and called Architecture for Everyone.

The film begins by highlighting the need for creative and community based solutions to architectural problems in the inner city where space is at a premium. I particularly liked the climbing wall on top of the sports hall at the Salmon Youth Centre in Bermondsey. Althought the film focuses on sports architecture in London, the Architecture for Everyone scheme is actually intended to encourage youths from inner city areas across Britain to take an interest in architecture. In doing so the scheme hopes to change those areas "from the inside out" by fostering community links and supporting diversity within the architectural profession as a whole. To help achieve this they have set up a programme of workshops in major cities across the UK. In 2009 they were also able to send six British youngsters to study architecture at Harvard University in the United States.

Seeing the film I was struck by what a fantastic opportunity this provides for the youngsters and communities involved. For further details you can visit either The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, or Architecture for Everyone who also have their own blog.

Cities of Stories...

[Video - This Is Where We Live by 4th Estate on Vimeo]

While reading the art blog Lines and Colors a while ago I came across this excellent stop-motion animation. It was produced by Apt Studio in 2009 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Harper Collins imprint 4th Estate. 

The film immediately caught my imagination as the small character, animated on the pages of Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, escaped the book's pages as the closed upon him, and stepped out into the bustling intertextual metropolis beyond. That figure is of course the reader. Bauby himself was not able to share the privilege of escaping his own story. Having suffered a stroke in 1995 he was afflicted with a rare condition known in his native France as 'maladie de l'emmuré vivant'. A literal translation into English would be 'walled-in alive disease'. Otherwise completely paralysed, Bauby's only means of communicating his life story was by blinking his left eye. As his transcriber repeatedly read the alphabet aloud Bauby would blink to signal the letter he intended them to write. Proceeding in this way the book took ten months to complete. Bauby died two days after its publication in 1997.

Watching the film I was reminded of Ludwig Wittgenstein's analogy between language and the city in his Philosophical Investigations:

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

Wittgenstein's reason for making this analogy was to undermine the idea that a language, or our grasp of it, need be complete in order for us to use it meaningfully. For Wittgenstein it was sufficient that we are able to successfully navigate the elements of the language we do have in order to convey meaning. With regard to the city, would London be any more or less complete, any more or less navigable, once Renzo Piano's Shard has been built? And what about after its demolition, perhaps to make way for a new tower? We might need to stop and get our bearings of course. But there would be plenty of other sign posts and landmarks around to help us...unless everything changed at once. With regard to either language or the city, we generally get on fine making do with what we've got. He goes on to suggest that "to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life". Likewise with the city. So what form of life does the city in the film support?

On first sight the figure of the reader emerging from Bauby's book appears to be a kind of flâneur; a solitary stroller out to botanize on textual asphalt, to paraphrase Benjamin's assessment of Baudelaire. Without any particular commitment or care the flâneur is free to take each story as they please: the consummate consumer then; more a biblio-tourist than a bibliophile? Not perhaps an ideal friend. 

On the contrary, the reader the film celebrates would be the bricoleur rather than the idle flâneur. Both are consumers but only the latter remains passive in that act; merely a roving eye (?). True the bricoleur may also read selectively, 'poaching' what they want as they go. Their distinction is their inclination to creatively re-combine their pickings in order to create new narratives. Moving around the city those stories are put into circulation. They find new audiences, new storytellers, and can generate affects beyond the scope of the imagination alone. In this way the film can be read as a condensation of the practices of walking and reading explicated in Michel de Certeau's book The Practice of Everyday Life, and an allegorisation of the 'tactics' constitutive of both.

What I particularly like about the film is the way in which it suggests that the city is more than just infrastructure and architecture. Amongst other things it is a place where stories are developed and shared. Following Wittgenstein's cue I suggested above that to imagine a city is to imagine a form of life. I wonder to what extent concerns over form of life would inform the daily work of urban planners and architects? And also, where might we look to find the architectural equivalent of a dead language?

Throwing stones at glass houses?

[Image - 30 St Mary Ax by Urban Orienteer]

I'd like to begin Urban Orienteer by tracing the series of discoveries, thoughts and events that have influenced my current collaboration with Mark at Dancing Eye. The working title for the project is 'In the Shadows of the Crystal Palace'. Here Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace serves as a motif in our exploration the ambivalence in Western democracy's valorisation of transparency as an ideal. Formulated as a question: "What happens when the demand for transparency is realised only asymmetrically, and when a desire for control on behalf of the authorities gains autonomy over and against citizens' demands for accountability?" The simple answer: "read the news!"

Consider concerns over police brutality following G20, the British police's deployment of Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT), their use of spotter cards to help identify and track particular individuals, and their classification of otherwise lawful protestors as domestic extremists. More mundanely there is also the pervasive use of CCTV in British towns and cities. What these developments seem to intimate is an interest, at the local and State level, in maintaining, if not a monopoly of violence, then at least a generalised condition of what economists refer to as information asymmetry. If there has to be a divide between the authorities and the rest, then let it be transparent. Increasingly the glass divide is replaced by the two-way mirror. One response has been the formation of FIT Watch; a group who attempt to redress the balance by publishing their own spotter cards of FIT operatives and literally watching the watchers.

Our own reaction is an attempt to explore these issues at the level of ideology. In doing so we hope to counter apathy, and the belief that there is no alternative, by suggesting through art how this situation came about, and provoking others to explore how can we change it. At present Mark and I are working to produce a series of posters for screen-printing. My personal favourite so far is titled 'Crystal Palaces Cast No Shadows':

[Image - Crystal Palaces Cast No Shadows by Urban Orienteer and Dancing Eye]

The decision to create posters came about after Mark and I visited the Tate Modern's Red Star over Russia exhibit, featuring examples of Soviet propaganda on loan from the David King Collection. Mark and I were keen to explore ideas in a visual way, originally to form part of a special edition of Dancing Eye devoted to the theme of War. At the same time I also discovered Mike Holliday's article on the Ballardian website about J.G. Ballard's obscure 'Court Circular'. What caught my attention was not so much the 'Court Circular' itself as the fact that Ballard's intention had been to 'advertise ideas'. In a further two part essay (Part1, Part2) Rick McGrath asks this crucial question of Ballard: "what exactly is he trying to sell?" Applied to our own case this question raised conceptual difficulties we were unable to resolve at that time. What if, in the process of criticising war, we were inadvertently advertising it, perhaps even glamorising it? Further considerations outlined below led us to postpone that project and refocus our efforts on a concern for personal freedom in relation to processes of commodification and diffuse application of techniques of control.

In recent months Mark and I have been experimenting with montages of digital photographs that I've been taking for the project. Back in November we had the opportunity to exhibit three of our test images (pictured below) at the Chocolate Factory studios in Wood Green. The occasion for this was their annual open studio event.

[Image - Installation View of the  Urban Orienteer and Dancing Eye collaboration at the Chocolate Factory studios]

I mentioned above that our first concern had been war. Although this theme is not obviously apparent in our current work, it continues to influence the project. A key inspiration was our discovery of Paul Virilio's writings. Of particular interest was his theorisation of the 'logistics of perception': the idea that war has become increasingly mediated by images, and can therefore be fought by means of them. Remnants from this stage of research are Mark's sculptural embodiments of Virilio's Vision Machine (pictured above). Virilio's notion of the 'vision machine' captures the sense of 'sightless vision' that he associates with devices or systems that see on the user's behalf. An example from the contemporary battlefield would be the unmanned drones used by the US Air Force.

Virilio's general concern is the increasing autonomy these systems gain with regard the user, and the way this can actually constrain human perception and encourage the deferral of responsibility. The recent announcement that US drones unencrypted video feeds have been 'hacked by Iraqi insurgents' is unlikely to have shocked Virilio who considers the 'accident' as integral to technological development. Examples of vision machines pertinent for our own project might include smart CCTV systems and gaze-tracking cameras. The former alerts the CCTV operator to 'suspicious' behaviour while the latter actually watches the eyes and viewing pattern of the operator in order to generate a summary of the footage they miss during their shift. I wonder if, aside from the already documented potential for operator abuse, the new unexpected accidents concerning CCTV might arise from lazy gaze trackers and overly suspicious smart cameras. Perhaps these scenarios have already been explored in science fiction.

Around the time we were reading Virilio we also attended an extremely rewarding lecture on Feral Cities and the Scientific Way of Warfare that had been organised by the Complex Terrain Laboratory. The featured speakers were BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh discussing Richard J. Norton's essay Feral Cities, and Antoine Bousquet introducing his book The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity. A video of the event can be found here. The unifying theme of the evening was the desire to spatially order an environment in such a way as to minimise contingency and achieve control. As such an implicit connection was made between what military strategists attempt to achieve on the battlefield, and what authorities and city planners might try to achieve in the urban environment by means of what has come to be known as 'Military Urbanism'. I recommend Brian Finoki's blog Subtopia to anyone interested in finding out more.

Given the emerging facts regarding asymmetric and network-centric warfare Mark and I felt that our understanding of war had been anachronistic and remained too heavily influenced by presuppositions of symmetry and reciprocity for us to develop a genuinely critical approach at that time. Our emphasis naturally shifted toward an investigation of 'control' as applied to the urban environment and civil population. Anna Minton's book Ground Control came just at the right time in early 2009. This book deals explicitly with the social and psychological effects of heightened surveillance and the privatisation of public space. The strength of the book lies in its tracing the complex interplay of competing interests, whether of the State, local authorities, or private companies, that help shape the legislation facilitating 'control'. In doing so she offers concrete answers to the question "How did this situation come about?"

[Image - Broadate Tower Under Construction by Urban Orienteer]

Of particular interest is the police initiative known as Secured by Design (SBD). With the encouragement of insurance firms this represents the attempt to literally design out the opportunities for crime. Minton argues not only that this initiative necessarily fails, but also that it actually raises anxiety over crime. Minton traces the development of SBD back to Oscar Newman's principles of defensible space that were intended to curb crime in New York during the 70s. Minton highlights the difference between its original context and that of a post-credit crunch UK where the zeal it has inspired for territorialisation, fortification and surveillance might be misplaced. Combined with policies facilitating the privatisation of public space, in financial and commercial areas such as the City of London, Canary Wharf and Liverpool One, and the use of ASBOs to criminalise otherwise lawful behaviour on the part of specific individuals, the net results are suspicion, exclusion and anxiety.  Minton goes on to examine this heightened anxiety over crime that persists despite the evidence that crime is actually falling. Here are brief summaries of her views concerning CCTV and the privatisation of public space.

It is perhaps ironic that the glass facade features so heavily in the new London architecture found in the kinds of private estates Minton criticises. In his book New Glass Architecture Brent Richards noted in passing how, at the beginning of the twentieth century, 'glass became the ideal material to symbolize the incoming new democracy, as monarchy gave way to workers and private domains gave way to public spaces' (p.15). Despite this one of the buildings featured in his book has recently featured in the news not as a symbol of democracy, but rather for its involvement in the overzealous application of anti-terror legislation. This occurred when the journalist Paul Lewis was detained by police under section 44 of Terrorism Act 2000 for taking photographs at 30 St Mary Axe (the Gherkin). A full report and video of the incident can be found here.

The project finally came together with our discovery of the Crystal Palace as the precursor for Richard's 'new glass architecture'. The palace was originally designed by Joseph Paxton to house The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London's Hyde Park. Intended as a temporary structure, popular demand led to it being reconstructed three years later, in modified form, on Sydenham Hill in south London. The palace remained there until it was destroyed by fire in 1936. The popularity of the building led historian Jan Piggott to refer to it as the Palace of the People in his book of the same name. The palace remained on Sydenham Hill until it was destroyed by fire in 1936. Continuing this sentiment there is an ongoing campaign to build a new Crystal Palace on the Sydenham Hill site by 2014. All that remains of the original site are a number of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' original dinosaur sculptures in the lower park, and a series of sphinxes that would have guarded the palace entrances on the now empty terrace above. These are overlooked by the Crystal Palace television transmitter.

[Image - Sphinx at Crystal Palace by Urban Orienteer]

Despite the palace's popularity at home its legacy in the history of ideas has been far from unequivocal. For example, in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is To Be Done? (1863) the figure of the Crystal Palace functioned as the imaginary support for the process of modernisation and the socialist utopia to come. Both Dostoyevsky, in his book Notes From The Underground (1864), and Yevgeny Zamyatin, in the more overtly dystopian We (1921), have offered criticisms of Chernyshevsky’s faith in scientific rationality and transparency. The fact remains that the palace also functioned as the ideological support for British imperialism around the world. Hence the Crystal Palace can stand for the attempt to control or neutralise the outside world, either as commodity or spectacle. Speaking at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 2009 (transcript here) the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk goes further to consider the existence of a fundamental human need to 'immunize existence' through creation of and management of interior spaces, whether architectural or cultural. Hence, referring to Walter Benjamin's treatment of the Parisian arcades in the unfinished Arcades Project, Sloterdijk writes:

In the case of the arcade, modern man opts for glass, wrought iron, and assembly of prefabricated parts in order to build the largest possible interior. For this reason, Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, erected in London in 1851, is the paradigmatic building. It forms the first hyper-interior that offers a perfect expression of the spatial idea of psychedelic capitalism. It is the prototype of all later theme-park interiors and event architectures. The arcade heralds the abolition of the outside world. It abolishes outdoor markets and brings them indoors, into a closed sphere.

Sloterdijk concludes by arguing that if modern men cannot exclude the outside through the creation of insulating interiors they subdue it by internalising it. Contrary to what he describes as a 'current romanticism for openness', he argues that 'people can only be outside to the degree that they are stabilized from within from something that gives them firm support'. We are left in the hands of the architects and planners, hoping from within our apartments that someone will come to pay us a visit. In the meantime Sloterdijk's wager seems to be that our 'foam' of 'relatively stabilized personal worlds' will provide sufficient insulation against the symptomatic expression of 'intolerable ecstasy' that we might associate with the happenings of J.G. Ballard's dystopian novel High-Rise. While we find Sloterdijk's diagnosis compelling, his conclusions seem disappointingly Conservative. In future posts I hope to explore Sloterdijk's discussion of Sphere's further. Unfortunately there is little else available in English translation at this time.

To end I would like to propose another approach to the significance of the Crystal Palace by way of its connection, via Paxton, with the Victoria amazonica water lily. While head gardener at Chatsworth House, Paxton was the first Englishman to succeed in getting the lily to flower in captivity. A popular story has it that Paxton's inspiration for the design of his glass houses came from the structure of the underside of the lily's leaf. What interests us here however is not solely the lily's structure but also its means of reproduction. This can be seen in the video below:

[Video - Giant waterlillies in the Amazon - The Private Life of Plants - David Attenborough - BBC wildlife from BBC Worldwide channel on Youtube]

Here we find that the lily's reproduction is necessarily mediated by the beetle. This it traps for the duration of a day in order to avoid self-fertilisation. The beetle is then released from what Attenborough refers to in the film above as its 'beautiful prison', but only after having picked up another load of pollen with which to fertilise the next lily. Here we propose that an analogy can be supposed between the way the beetle supports the reproduction of the lily, and the way consumers mediate exchange and support capitalism in free-market economies.

"What is to be done?"

The project is intended to culminate this summer with the production of a series of around six screen-prints. This will coincide with the release of the next issue of Mark's publication Dancing Eye. We also intend to host our own exhibition featuring a short film and works by other artists.