It has been a pleasure to be at UiS in collaboration with Eric Dean Rasmussen and all the folks at the Greenhouse! I have been exploring Stavanger, learning about the fascinating research that the Greenhouse conducts and facilitates, and working a bit manically on projects of my own.
My first week here I traveled to Italy to attend a symposium on “Artificial Natures,” hosted by the Ideal Spaces working group (Ulrich Gehmann, P.I.), a project supported by the European Cultural Centre, and organized as a part of its exhibition for the 2018 Architecture Biennale in Venice, a city I had never visited but is arguably one of the most naturally beautiful and “artificially” maintained spaces in Europe.
The exhibit was beautifully designed and housed in the Palazzo Mora. It consisted of a series of six different environments that ranged from conventional garden spaces to terraced cities rendered with 3D simulators to complete abstractions. These images were projected on a three-part, floor-to-ceiling screen, with a console positioned in front of it. Selecting one of the control blocks from the console and setting it in the center prompted the exhibit to shift environments. The visuals were impressive, immersive, organized around a single-point perspective—and the music, by Alexander Kadin and the Experimental Tone Studio Odek—was especially stunning. A full description of the exhibition is detailed on the Ideal Spaces website.
Three of the six environments & the console
The first day of the symposium included a discussion of garden spaces and utopian architecture by Yulia Leonova, a discussion of the history of elemental design by Christoph Müller, and culminated with a demonstration, in partnership with Guy Shalev of Microsoft Garage (Israel), of an Augmented Reality depiction of Tel Aviv as a garden city, using the MS HoloLens.
3d model of Tel Aviv as a Garden City, me pretending to be a savvy HoloLens user, & a screen projection of the HoloLens overlay
The afternoon conversations involved the usual attempts and failures to define nature but resulted in some really cool ways of thinking about artificiality, including the distinction between “created” and “generated” art; the untrustworthiness of plants, and the persistence and adaptability of bats.
The second day of the symposium was jam-packed with presentations on a variety of fascinating topics: nature and Soviet constructivist architecture (Ksenia Malich); 3D models of a desert utopia, comprised of sponge-like architecture and repeating patterns (Arthur Goldyuk); a critique of the “smart city” aesthetic (Dani Ploeger); memory, memorial, and nature in the Tejas Verdes torture center of Chile (Karen E. Bishop); remediating memory in the Eastern Philadelphia Penitentiary (Sam Olshin); using City Engine to simulate natural and built environments (Mattihas Buehler); architectural history (Diego Repetto); and environmental pollution on the coast of Tuscany (Livia Stacchini).
I was particularly intrigued by Dani Ploeger’s “Post-Apocalypse Smart City Lagoon,” an important provocation that made use of QR codes on the trash cans of Venice to call attention to global pollution. Ploeger tagged over 200 garbage cans in Venice with his codes. Although these codes employ the same “smart city” aesthetic that dominates the marketing of the Venice Biennale, they do not lead to self-congratulatory visions of a well-regulated and hyper-rational metropolis. Instead, scanning the QRCs leads to images of trash cans floating in a post-apocalyptic watery expanse. This presentation was also fantastic for its close reading of Thomas More’s Utopia. I had not recalled the way that More describes trash removal in that text, but Ploeger’s reading highlighted it. It is, in short, pushed out of sight and its removal outsourced to slaves—a blueprint for the modern era’s treatment of natural resources and its shameful and continued use of exploitative labor. A full description of the project can be found on Ploeger’s website.
Images from Ploeger’s “Post-Apocalypse Smart City Lagoon”
I was also completely impressed by the work of Matthias Buehler of vrbn.io, who presented work he designed with City Engine and vrbn.io’s own proprietary code. He showed models he had made of Brazilian Favelas and design work he had collaborated on for the film industry, but his model of a refugee camp south of Iraq was flat-out stunning, not only because it was exquisitely rendered and designed, but because it showed the space and scale of the camp, its implications for surveillance, for human rights, for human rights abuses, and its uneasy and precarious situation in a desert ecology. I followed with my presentation of the Literary Field Guide App, a collaboration with Scott Svatos, my design partner (and life partner) and was delighted by the feedback and conversation it provoked.
Designed flora from Matthias Buehler at vrbn.io
Finally, Livia Stacchini’s Master’s research on the Solvay Company’s production of Baking Soda, was fascinating. This company’s manufacturing of sodium bicarbonate has the unfortunate consequence of bleaching the surrounding beaches. Ironically, these white beaches, because they look like beaches of the Caribbean, have become a popular tourist destination, even as the water remains unsafe to bathe in. As she so beautifully put it, Solvay “makes products to clean interior spaces while polluting natural spaces with toxic chemical byproducts.”
While there is a lot to think about—an overwhelming amount, actually—a few clusters of research emerged fairly clearly: 1) the utopian impulse within desert spaces 2) the artificiality of gardens and parks 3) the role of infrastructure 4) the challenges and opportunities for memorializing history through natural spaces.
There is no doubt much more to explore along all four of these lines. The presentations of Tel Aviv as a Garden City, for example, when presented next to a 3D model of a desert refugee camp, requires further nuance and conversation in regard to colonization, access, and ecological and environmental ethics in terms of resource management.
The symposium concluded with a conversation about future plans, and I look forward to seeing where the working group will head. In the meantime, however, I am delighted to back at the Greenhouse at UiS.
