Interview / Francois Roche, Zack Saunders / sweet dreams are made of this / Version 4

sweet dreams are made of this

Zack Saunders: I heard about… I think it was an exhibition… somewhere in Venice? Anyway, they said they were architects, but they spoke not of walls or roofs, but rather of new relationships between human beings and technology… not of folded or convoluted space, but of power struggles and resistance itself… or something like that. Could you tell me about it? I heard you were there too…

François Roche: It’s a Plato grotto, at Bembo Palazzo, at Biennial Venice 18, a shadowing theatre, a kind of Dorian Gray glitch which reports an inaccessible strata… where computation was/has been/should have been involved in post-politic, post-feminist, post-democratic… in a stuttering time…

A grotto, as a resistance, through the masochism recognition of the defeat, as the last sign of a workerist strategy to infiltrate (b)data, to de-alienate the managerial storytelling approach of the post-capitalist age… in a schizophrenic logic, digital and analogue, anthropo-technologic, human and machinist… in their simultaneous and contingent pathologies and lines of escape…

… It proceeds by variation, expansion, conquest, recycling, adapting, capturing, embracing, tweaking… It is a connection to sexuality, Anima Mundi, photomorphogenesis, Terra Mater, affairs of cities, artifice, machines and bits… like a thousandth plateau… It means discovering continuous areas of intensities, pulsating all by themselves, and evolving by avoiding being directed toward a culminating point or external end, a little war machine, an automatic pistol of combinations, associations… assemblage in vivo that’s a lot more incisive than innovation in vitro… It operates like so many “dream machines,” pitted against the methods, messianisms, and mercantile theories of happiness, the natural state privatized and re-primitivized, symbols, progress. When everything has once and for all suddenly descended into ‘anything goes,’ the deep freeze, urban guerrilla warfare, and the rest of the whole shemozzle, there remains that sixth sense, nerve endings and defensive reflexes.

#digitaldisobediences is not only a manifesto, but an inter-zone…

ZS: Whether or not “they opened a new W@lmart-T@rget-P@nera-St@rbucks nearby,” is the criteria by which our built environment today is judged (at least in my homeland of America)… Oh, and whether or not a fat-assed SUV can park there or not is a crucial item on the checklist. So, why cling to architecture as a flagship; why, when the time it takes to build a building is not even close to being in sync with the speed and pulse of its time, when the public generally lacks the vocabulary with which to describe, identify and even appreciate something with artistic or intellectual merit, why is ‘architecture’ still a relevant topic?

FR: Well… don‘t forget the long tradition of the “tractatus” from Leon Battista Alberti to Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, as a method to design and construct with the right proportion, with the Beaux-Arts references, in the Greco-Roman organization of space and the division of tasks. Modernism was, with its 5 points, a legitimate pursuit of the control of space, both private and public. However, two recent periods exorcised this long top-down authority of means and meaning… The first emerged as the collateral effect of the barbarity of the Second World War, with the birth of so many experimental groups, such as GEAM, GIAP among others. Let’s also remember that David Georges Emmerich, an Auschwitz survivor, and his early association with Yona Friedman, led to a re-questioning of the legitimacy of the architect, the bottom-up self organization of the “creative unemployed,” to quote Constant, and principally the “discourse of the master.” The second period, which is still too close to be fully understood and analyzed, is the emergence from the digital (r)evolution of the mid-‘90s, a period of some 10 years lasting until its first class burial in 2005 at the occasion of the Architectures non standard exhibition at the Pompidou Center… As the opposite of the perspective diagram of Bruneleschi-Alberti, which was re-organizing a representation of society with humanism as an alibi, and the vanishing point as the modus of master-planning and surveying, this proto-digital period—initially intending to conquer, appropriate, caress and corrupt new tooling methods, situations 
and processes which was made possible by the democratization of computers—was opening “again” Pandora‘s box of dream, nightmare, illusion, fiction and reality… de-alienating the managerial/official storytelling by insiders, workerism and operaist strategies… re-composing the full chain of production and the division of tasks, with a permanent shift or drift in design and fabrication processes, renegotiating the posture-position of the architect, and mainly developing a format of “resistance-resilience,” if I may quote Log 25 which was published later in 2012. The proto-digital was perverting the ancient order, the post-modern rotary club, and the merchandising of design.

Where are we now? As Burroughs or Bowles said about the Interzone of Tangiers, there “is nothing left to spoil anymore…” The digital has come back as a system of control, simultaneously developing a superficial, naïve jiggling methodology to mask its content (in a neolibertarian parametricism), computation and robots are used for decorative “Christmas” exhibitions, as Coder le monde actually… At the Pompidou Center and in parallel institutions, academia engage in the using/abusing of tooling in a purely formalist way, detoxified, sterilized and lobotomized… the Anglo-Saxon spots for wealthy lazy Asians… for cashflow purposes. It’s time to announce the defeat of the digital in terms of a re-questioning of the thinking and the making within the post-capitalist age… Architecture plunges again into a system of tractatus, repetition, plagiarism and “déjà vu”… waiting in a sleeping mode… the next trans-door… the next singular synchronicity…

As a small conclusion… I would like to end with the Gottfried Semper case where he simultaneously designs the opera in Dresden for the King in 1841, and few years later designs the barricade for the May uprising in the same city… This schizoid condition could be used as a tractatus… to resolve the dilemma of your question…

ZS: What makes S/he persist? Why not withdraw completely? Isolate him/herself? Paul Kingsnorth said it’s OK to do so; he points to the simplicity found in the relationship between the scythe, the fields of tall grass that are to fall in its wake, and the bearer of the tool itself as a source of personal happiness; one which simultaneously provides an escape from and an alternate to the maddening routine that modern day life has become…

FR: Well, you already answered the question… perhaps better than I could myself… Don Quixote is without a windmill here… the deamons, the Mugwumps are still present, unidentifiable though they may be…

In fact S/he developed a territory of fugitivity… a crack which is, I could admit, shrinking in the time of ‚now.‘ The “trans” condition and appearance is not a coquetry of the 90s, but is instead a strategy by which to question historically the system of masculine-feminine domination, and its organization of power… organization of fiction distributing an organization of power. Architecture, by nature, by genetic pathology, develops techniques and apparatuses of violence, and this is why, in the deregulated space of post-capitalism, architects dream to work in an illiberal political regime… all to the advantage of the techno-structure, but with a performative cynical asymmetry of a top-down approach. It started with the patriarchal vision of the architect, which corresponds to the normative political heterosexual system of representation of domination-submission. Sex, space and power are co-substantial as Paul Preciado described in Porntopia. The hetero-violence in the sexual relation to such systems became naturally mapped in urban planning, in architecture, as a physical construction of the political- and gender-charged fictions of those relations… where tooling and apparatus are directly used and abused as a strategy of design which assumes and reinforces this politic asymmetry. This masculine hetero-violence has been petrified in buildings and in cities themselves… developing out of a laziness that is reinforced by the norms of our environment… to re-question, in the pursuit of #metoo, a relation of desire which is not condemned by servitude and domination, in sadistic habitudes, to transform intrinsically the way we could talk about cities, walls, porosities, frictions, flux and bodies… S/he was a precursor to this… too early perhaps…

It is difficult to be listenable when the mainstream is cynically making the décor of this violence manifest (Nouvel in Abu Dhabi and Hadid in Azerbaijan… among so many others)… where architecture intentionally masks the regression, the amnesia, the ignorance… of this violence…and how to consider the digital which has been mainly used these last 10 years as an extreme kind of clownery to erase the real political condition of the privatization of the world…

S/he in fact, in this “here and now” situation, should neither quit nor commit suicide… but rather should clone him/herself…

ZS: When you resist the air you breathe, is resistance still a vital act I wonder?…
 I currently reside in the midst of what you might call a typical American sprawl-scape, with no fields of grass to mow and no sheds within which to house and care for one‘s scythe. Millions live in similar conditions, and we are left to walk in an orderly fashion over manicured lawns and through homogeneous seas of asphalt paving as we roam our “geography of nowhere” (Kunstler, 1993)… except that ‘nowhere’ is actually ‘here,’ ‘there,’ and is slowly becoming ‘everywhere’…

FR: Going beyond what has already happened… the creation as a resistance—to quote the famous discourse of Deleuze at the FEMIS—we can now unfold the parrhesiastases epilogue. It will happen back stage, ‘off stage,’ behind the wall, the curtain. And someone, on the wall, is telling you about it. What happens there, behind the wall, is horrid, disgusting, repulsive, offensive… obscene. However, it will be him/her who will be accused of obscenity—the one who tells the story, who reports it. And that’s where obscenity is located or found… Its distinction from intimacy is that it belongs to everyone. It is because you ‘see’ it that it is obscene, because you recognize it… and indeed we always shoot the messenger. The obscene is looking at you. The scene of course is off-scene and if it stayed off-scene it would not be considered off-scene (obscene). It is because of that transcript that the obscene is reached. Although, if you can ‘see it’ it’s because you know it, you know that place, you have been there but you do not want anyone to know about that, although it is clear that they all know as well. Obscenity is a trigger for the imagination (like what happens off-screen in a film, often more powerful than what we are given to witness) and it turns the ‘victim’ into one that is simultaneously guilty. It is on this wall, on this frontier, that freedom of speech is at stake, it collapses on the other side, but it remains ambiguous here. Looking now at how the laws evolved regarding that matter, we understand the society we now live in much better. For if these matters begin with self-censorship, they are then controlled and implemented by governments through the apparatuses of law, quite quietly, at first imprecisely, clumsily, almost innocently, as an administrated legal management of the self-censorship doctrine—one that nowadays is reaching deplorable proportions with the self-policing of social networks, and the latest offspring of cultural hegemony. The obscene is turned inside out, showing off its own guts. But what is the object of repulsion here? It is not the totem, but the act, the weakness of the act; surrendering to it… that is condemned. Can the obscene exist without its implied condemnation and subsequent punishment? The laws only reveal their own weaknesses toward it. Their difficulty in framing what is to be condemned as obscene is almost touching, refusing to name what is nothing else than the bourgeois moral code itself, the society Freud studied from within. And transgression only eats its very definition. We can have exceptional authors who flirt with these boundaries, but don’t we know the exception confirms the rule?… We should rather imagine a society which would deal differently with objects and aesthetics of repression, such a society would probably then not rely solely upon the consumption of goods and information—or as we see it today, upon nothing at all, for to consume is a satisfying act in itself, and does not in fact need a product to be consumed—as its main structural social binder, in a strategy of political fiction as defined by Althusser. Let us go together behind the wall for a little while, and see what is there… secret, hidden, concealed, kept behind… In the crypt… Beyond this obscene and psychotic cavern, the mythomaniaS project (2011–16, by New-Territories) refers to the last research of Foucault, mainly about the notion of ‘’parrhesia,’’ a strategy of discourse, attitude and form which re-evaluates the ethico-political approach facing social conformism. Foucault developed this concept through the transfiguration of Baudelaire, through the posture of alteration by cynical philosophical decay, with the figure Diogenes among others, and through the method of “estrangement” as a displacement of Ginsberg‘s values. The Diogenes agenda, as an aesthetic research of the being, has to be understood, according Foucault, as an intentional enterprise of falsification of ‘the habit and currency.’ Organized around the celebration of human-beast, or the beast- human, the critical and performative borderline is used as a weapon to corrupt the repetition of the conventional routines and discourses to operate, ultimately, a strategy of transformation, of transfiguration of what is politic, of what we should consider as politic. It’s about ‚to make visible‘, or to reveal, the singular dimension, through the contingencies of the arbitrary constraints, inside of what is considered as universal, necessary and obligatory… Architecture is used in our systemicism as a paradigm of disobedience, to paraphrase the essays of Henry Thoreau or La Boétie, as an experiment of what should not have been revealed, able to help us to get back our voice, our scream, through what Foucault defines as the “truth” which cannot emerge in another way than through an alterity, an otherness, both extreme and radical…

ZS: The title, sweet dreams are made of this, is obviously ironic as it relates to the work of New-Territories and its sister studio M4, which ranges from writings and films to installations and buildings, interlaced with elements of narrative and architecture, dream and reality, submission and resistance even, like a complex tapestry. One such work entitled Coitus Interruptus, part of the mythomaniaS project, was recently shown in Venice at the #digitaldisobediences exhibition… or so I heard. How does one begin to think in terms of mythomaniaS?

FR: There is a reality principle that doesn’t seek to be right against the daily disorder, but walks gaily over its ashen ruins. It doesn’t illustrate destruction or violence, but is a state of things, a palpitation between Eros and Thanatos. It isn’t there to reproduce what is, or to eliminate its existence, its precondition, its affects… “Nostalgia 
is a weapon,” wrote Douglas Coupland in Generation X. The word still circulates, the sentiment too, we’re going to have to wheel it out again, push it into the very heart of whatever situation, like a hesitation of time’s arrow, here and now, here and elsewhere, elsewhere but not just anywhere, avoiding the futurist past as much as the positivist future…

Quite the opposite…

And anyway, why would “it” be more moral, why would it have some right over the whole collection of good wishes and good consciences? There are so many people who are happy to carry morality’s flag… their legion, as numerous and powerless as petty criminals.

Digitaldisobediences / 250 pages / at the occasion of Venice Biennial 18 / free download: https://goo.gl/rv3gGY mythomaniaS / free download: https://goo.gl/HWzoF3

Log #25 / free download: https://goo.gl/6x73yA

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#digitaldisobediences ….but Architecture

[gardens of earthly delights]

In power games, [apparatuses could be considered] relationship strategies supporting types of knowledge and supported by themselves.
Michel Foucault, 1994, Dits et Ecrits

We can’t remain satisfied with protest. This historically operative way to challenge the organization of power is now naïve, childish, self-complacent and unproductive.
Should we suspect that digital “art” is meant to be used as a glamorous lure, a blue sleeping pill, to entertain those who produce it, just as turpentine intoxicates the painter, and, for its consumers, to help maintain their belief in the illusion of positivism, progress, emancipation through science and novelty gadgets… Trapped in a post-science world without even knowing it, one already described by Rabelais in the middle of the Quattrocento…


Should we suspect the apparent direct opposites of these Mephistopheleses, the regressive moralists and semiologists who turn their indignation into capital to recoup their 30 pieces of silver, using correct consciousness as a flagship, commoners and common goods as their willing victims, promoting “bottom-up” processes on the condition that they be the masters of ceremony… in their Prada suits… the intellectuals denounced by Chomsky who safeguard the system, its means, meaning and authority,… but nevertheless claim, by virtue of their indignation, the magnificence of their position… of their forgery…
Should we reveal that these two paradigms are simply the Janus faces of the same system… in a symmetrical convergence of interests and benefits? Could we develop a paradigm other than the interplay between the cynic and the clown?


Should we denounce our academic standing as a wasp-like trialophile position of expertise, operating and reproducing the new disciplinary vogue for our daily three obols, the standard rate for courtesans and heliasts at the time of Cleon? Are we trapped in false debates between hereditary abstractions and social formalism, or even, the counterpart of all this, trapped in the empty speeches of gala socialism? Has the empathic penitence of our silence rendered null and void the articulation of our experimentation? Should we denounce the Melian nymphs’ pride and foolishness and subject them to their weak suffering? Should we suspect that, in the amnesty’s aftermath, we will have to pay the fine in exile, drink the conium, or even accept being forgotten in our escapist digital swan song?

How to embody the performative polymorphism and inheritance of our techno-social economies and language, to vectoralize the fiction of identity egotism towards new sortitions of assemblies, at a time when the similitude of appearances is dismissed as “filer à l‘anglaise”? at a time of Computationalism, when space is quantized with subjectivities? Should we suspect that our own graft is, in fact, the suspect, suggest another game, one we could lose… “Try to remember. It was in the gardens at Marienbad….”

These rules of predictable “ANCIENT REGIM” world, in the sense of the division of labor, delegation of power and concentration of data bases, needs to mask their powerlessness, their impotency, through this managerial debate, fake conflict and disputatious storytelling / the computer geek vs. the political clown… defining niches and territories from where they could operate, both of them spreading ‘’the traditional and compliant speech of the masters.’’
We are in the midst of a paradigm shift, to quote Thomas Kuhn, between two inherently incommensurable systems. The old system that uses technology to reproduce and perpetuate top-down processes (which they falsely claim to oppose)… and a new system that needs to discover its potential, its limits, constraints, intrinsic logic… to re-negotiate the scenario of thinking and doing… “””but””” architecture… the means and the meaning, rearticulating “le vivre ensemble” and the “common good”… for protocols more disruptive than linear, more heuristic than deterministic, more anthropo-technological (Sloterdijk) than purely dedicated to accuracy, performativity, expertise, now analyzed as one symptom of the copy-based syndrome…
Digital Disobedience can be described as an alternative frame of thinking about the application of novel tools in our contemporary discourse. Architecture as a discipline is on the verge of a decisive moment: automation and artificial intelligence will bring more change to the entire practice than even the revolutionary introduction of computational tools did in the last quarter of a century. This brings along an entire set of questions, which Digital Disobedience attempts to ask. The answer is not the main issue here, rather the set of opportunities presented in the critical interrogation of our current, and future relationships to novel ecologies emerging in society, economy and technology. How will we, as architects, respond to this rapidly progressing change? Is being docile, in expectance of the best a sufficient position to maintain? The collective of architects on display here refuse to be usurped by a neoliberalist position on computational design and architecture and rather support an idea that fosters a speculative approach to the future. A position that embraces change triggered by technological progress in the methods of materializing architectural entities. A future in which robots and human form novel modes of machines infused with aspects of morality and inquisitive intelligence. A post-capitalist future that embraces the radical change in our social texture triggered by the possibilities of a world governed by deterritorialized entities in which we expand, repurpose or accelerate aspect of our culture and technology for the benefit of our world at large.

How is one to digitally disobey? Would the ultimate disobedience be to automate design, to automate intuition? While the profession would decry the idea of automating intuition anathema, to a laymans eye such intuition has already been automated. Turing-complete neural networks are able to intuitively (a justifiable term as even their programmers do not fully understand the logic of their working) synthesise everything from Monet to Shakespeare, creative works that would be impossible to describe with conventional programming. To a philistine, Van Gogh might appear to have been automated. ArchFakely proves poor architectural writing has been automated in a literary project that has no aspiration to be read, as no-one reads the text of the data-set on which it is modelled anyway. As cultural content is generated faster than we could ever consume it, and content that does make it to an audience is consumed instantly, do we really find pause to absorb its meaning? Is digital disobedience this acceleration? The the skimming of latent-space in order to shift from “computational design” to the “computational derive” through a snowcrash of endless difference? Have machines already learned to model the tastes and desires that might guide this meander? Is digital disobedience a reluctance to be spoonfed? A resistance to the state of the art? After forgetting how to code and critically engage with the machines that generate their visual culture, will architects forget their own canon? Will fake histories emerge, channeling popularly held belief and melting what was once thought to be immutable historical fact into a toxifying generative adversarial goo?


This is a shift from imposing our will/intention on, or within, the systems of computation, to embracing the dissolution of the binary distinction of the intuitive and systemic. While computational design seeks to embed intuition into the self-organizing algorithms of complexity theory, this is being superseded by the emergence of a computational intuition – ‘what kind of subjectivity the heuristic bits dreams?’ Rather than computational architecture’s attempt to shift from invention to pseudo-orchestra on, this shift/glitch questions the subjective/objective division established between architect its technological matrix. Is this a symptom of a wider blurring of digital/material, robot/human, emergence/intuition, process/artefact, where these participants all interact on the same plane, rather than considering the robot as either the slave of savior, or vice versa?
‘’Libidinal Economy’’ of J.f. Lyotard as well as ‘’Capitalism and Schizophrenia’’ of Deleuze-Guattari, as the ‘’#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics’’ of Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, as well as ‘the specter is still roaming around’, one of the first books of Zizek, are describing the hiatus, the hypo_crisis situation of lefties, drinking red wine at the e-flux carnival, during the performative election of oval room populism… As actor of the world of today, in the zeitgeist of absurdism and cutting edges daily announcement of new gadgets, new saving energy, new electric car, new Viagra, new climate threads and ignorances, using sciences, paradoxically, as a new obscurantism… in post-human, post-queers, post-dummies… for permanent ‘’newspeak” propaganda… what means to be an architect… in terms of apparatus, knowledge and strategies of knowledge, re-articulating fabrication within specific organization of the ‘’means of production’’ which re-question the know-how, the will and the process, in another distribution of task-power, authorship, bottom-up strategies, in term of trespassing “the true and the fake, the rigor and madness, and… the forbidden(1)”.

Did somebody say me break!

Bangkok, New-York, Melbourne, Athens, Stuttgart, March 2018

Francois Roche (New-Territories), Ezio Blase – Danielle Willems (MÆTA DESIGN), Matias Del Campo – Sandra Manninger (SPAN), Roland Snooks . Benoit Durandin . Stephan Henrich . Gwyll Jahn (ide.ai)…

Few words: Socio Parade Moralism Vs Workerism / Oedipal Haptic Vs Blind Machines / Symbiosis Vs AutoPoesis / Heuristic Vs Linear / Disobedience Vs Compliance /Artfact Vs Determinism / Disruptive Vs Causal / Psychotic Vs Compliance / Singularities Vs ‘deja vu’ / Pataphysic Vs AI / Anomalies Vs By-product / Necrosis Vs Permanence / Ecosophy Vs Ecology / Artfacts Vs Expertise / Paradigms Vs Paradigms / Paranoia Critic Vs Voluntary Servitude / Profane Vs Institutional / Gafa Big Data Vs Democratic Social Contract / Digital_Analogue Vs Digital_ Fetshism

In power games, [apparatuses could be considered] relationship strategies supporting types of knowledge and supported by themselves.
Michel Foucault, 1994, Dits et Ecrits

1) Michel Foucault ‘’The Order of Discourse’’ / 1971