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.17. Lunchbox Laboratory by Futurefarmers + the Biological Sciences Team, National Renewable Energy Lab. Algae is considered a viable form renewable energy with the potential to produce biodiesel. However, the very abundance of it makes it tedious to determine which strains are most productive. Lunchbox Laboratory is a prototype for a research tool that would be distributed to schools to allow young scientists the chance to initially screen a collection of algae strains. Only the most productive strains would reach official labs. Photo Courtesy of Futurefarmers.
