october 2014
Critiques
An interview with David Joselit
Architecture after the ‘Era of Art.’
An interview with Jeffrey Schnapp
Doing history in real time.
A conversation with Benedict Clouette
Searching on unstable ground.
by Lydia Kallipoliti
A giant storage container of merchandize, data and waste.
By Nicole Lambrou
Measuring the human condition.
november 2014
Projects
By Leigha Dennis
A photo essay on the other kind of storage.
by Garrett Ricciardi and Julian Rose of Formlessfinder
An in-house, open-source wiki, an architect’s data and graphic standards, a product catalog and materials database, and a visualizer.
By Emily Abruzzo and Gerald Bodziak
Gaming, surveillance, and the new, optimized city.
By Jochen Hartmann of the Network Architecture Lab
Open mushware.
coming soon
Debates
The Search Engine
The idea of being online is in danger of extinction from redundancy. The Internet has become the principal site of construction, defense, storage and dissemination of new knowledge and social identity alike. Facebook’s population will soon eclipse that of China, and its holdouts nonetheless have well-formed electric selves in the servers of the NSA. As our physical world is increasingly tapped, scanned, streamed, imaged and mapped in realtime, the province of offline is a shrinking territory.
In each wave of digitization—the archival, the social, the physical—the evidence of its arrival and its path to maturity are the same: search. For David Joselit, the “Epistemology of Search” defines our era of image saturation and ubiquitous connectivity. It is where format trumps content and innovation. As we invite new search engines into our homes to monitor behavior, into airspace to fight our wars, and into our bodies and the objects around us to analyze our chemistry, the spatial, legal and ontological calculus of this contemporary digital metabolism begs further historical and theoretical inquiry.
‘The Search Engine’ asks what unnamed search engines have existed and where have they been hiding: prognostically, where might they be found, and prescriptively, what should they be? What are the forms, protocols and methods of today’s search engine? What are the limits of their imagination and how do they limit our own? What are the implications for aesthetics, spatial understanding and cultural forms, and what are the attendant opportunities and responsibilities for architecture theory, design and research?
Guest Editor: Troy Conrad Therrien
Cover Photo: OLIKTOK radar station, part of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line. Photo: TSGT Donald L. Wetterman, via Wikimedia Commons.
LABORATORY SERIES. No.15. Left: Diagram of the Stanley Milgram Experiment. Conducted at Yale University in 1961, the experiment examined the relationship between obedience and authority. The test involved two actors, one test subject and an electroshock generator: the experimenter (the figure of authority), the teacher (the test subject) and the learner (the accomplice). In this scheme, the experimenter (E) would order the teacher (T) to administer fake electric shocks to the learner (L) for every wrong answer in a series of questions, increasing the voltage each time. Two thirds of all participants (i.e. teachers) administered the highest 450 volt shock. All others continued to 300 volts. Photo: Wikipedia
Right: Advertisement recruiting subjects for the Milgram Experiment on memory. “I set up a simple experiment to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.” – Stanley Milgram Photo: Wikipedia.
