The Art of Experiment

Post-pandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st Century Architecture and Design

Rolf Hughes, Rachel Armstrong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138479562
• eBook ISBN: 9781351065481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

A handbook for navigating our troubled and precarious times intended to help readers imagine and make their world anew.

In search of new knowledge practices that can help us make the world livable again, this book takes the reader on a journey across time—from the deep past to the unfolding future. The authors search beyond human knowledge to establish negotiated partnerships with forms of knowledge within the planet itself, examining how we have manipulated these historically through an anthropocentric focus. The book explores the many different kinds of knowledge, and the diversity of instruments needed to invoke and actuate the potency of human and nonhuman agencies. Four key phases in our ways of knowing are identified: material, strengthening, reconfiguring and extending, which are exemplified through case studies that take the form of worlding experiments.

This pioneering work will inspire architects, artists and designers as well as students, teachers and researchers across arts and design disciplines.

1

INTRODUCTION

Rolf Hughes and Rachel Armstrong

1.1 Overview

To establish the best ways for knowing how to sustain and develop life, The Art of Experiment: Post-pandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st-Century Architecture and Design looks at the spectrum of different kinds of knowledge that have shaped our world and examines what sort of knowing we need to navigate the rapidly unfolding near future. The book is being completed in the midst of a climate emergency and the COVID-19 pandemic. Such conditions underscore the catastrophic blindness of human exceptionalism and the urgency of reconceiving and reordering the ways we think and live. More agile forms of knowledge are urgently needed to make possible lives-worth-living for all terrestrial species, not just the human animal. While this book does not propose an overview that will satisfy historians of science, philosophers or professional epistemologists—nor even a solution to the present existential crisis of our species—it looks to expand our ways of knowing and practices that seek to increase the habitability of the planet for humans and nonhumans, resulting in an anticipated increased biodiversity and cleaner oceans and atmosphere. Aiming to catalyse our enchantment with our world and its (re)enlivening, we explore the ontology of knowledge and its various expressions by considering the world’s deep history. In this sense, we necessarily engage notions of understanding that exceed the unique status of knowing attributed to disciplines that humans have refined over centuries, setting the scene for different modes of inhabitation that are relevant to these turbulent times.

Our present anthropocentric desires, expressed in imperialist language, submit our planet to neocolonising attitudes, anthropocentric values, welfare abuses of nonhumans, industrial exploitation and highly partial interpretations of events. The consequences of our human exceptionalism and dogged anthropocentrism are profound. Subordinating our world to a restricted interpretation of events, we impose devastating regimes that disregard the complexity and freedoms of the living realm. As a result, we face immense challenges of our own making, challenges that now characterise the Anthropocene, an epoch that has arguably been in gestation for around 500 years.

Our present ways of knowing made new sense of a highly piecemeal understanding of reality that dates back to classical times. Initially proposing to improve conditions for humankind by understanding how God’s household (Fuller, 2011), or Nature, worked, the strict formulation and regulation of these findings within laboratories meant they were highly ritualised, exclusive, reductive, object-oriented, human-centred, hierarchical, updatable and resistant to external influences. The world that sprang from this tightly controlled canon of Enlightenment knowledge gave rise to the Industrial Revolution, advanced machines and modernity. The learning we have subsequently acquired is a potent resource that is divided up into specific territories. Separated by disciplinary walls and defended by institutions like universities and royal societies, scientific knowledge has become subject to professional consensus, which decides which participants are fit to practise or hold authority over specific canons of understanding.

A way of thinking that we might characterise as having been colonised has kept us in these established knowledge silos, generating narrow perspectives with repeated blind spots and oversights in our understanding of the world. Even when we are encouraged to talk to each other and cross-fertilise our perspectives, the resultant hybrid practices are appreciated as cross-, multi-, inter-, trans- and even postdisciplinary practices. Having served their purpose, they are subsumed again into the familiar knowledge traditions that, critically, lack an ethics and mature tool set for making a transition from the modern Industrial Era toward an ecological era of human development, or Ecocene.

In search of a new tool set of knowledge instruments that enable people to make the world livable again through negotiated partnerships with nonhuman agents, we consider that many different kinds of knowledge instruments are needed to invoke and acknowledge the potency of nonhuman agency. To achieve this goal, we examine four key phases in the origin of thinking, each of which plays a key role in our ways of knowing: material, strengthening, reconfiguring and extending.

Material knowledge

Exceeding our epistemological understanding, we search for primordial knowledge within the nonhuman realm. Starting with the birth of the universe and the strangeness of its fundamental particles, we explore the Great Enfolding of matter that produced our world and its life forms. Viewed through the lens of contemporary science, we propose a new set of relations that suggest that knowledge resides within nature. Not presently recognisable in human terms, the forms of knowledge sought here occur through the intra-actions of matter (Barad, 2007), comprising decision-making processes so tiny and strange they do not readily map on to anthropocentric concerns and may have already generated nonhuman civilisations that we have simply overlooked. This potent decision-making potential of matter is not separate from us but constitutes our flesh and enables the human brain, with its particular kind of intelligence, to come into being.

Strengthening knowledge

Looking to the events that first separated people from the natural realm, we examine the origins of human exceptionalism in Western traditions through the privileged status conferred on human thought that structured the world in its own image. To strengthen the realm of human thought, we consider Aristotle’s knowledge instrument, the Organon, which helped develop the science of reasoning, or logic, by organising forms of knowing into different categories, generating a tool set for reason and relation and inviting us to give an account of what we see and learn.

Reconfiguring knowledge

Marking the advent of modern knowledge, the radical separation of the mind—or spirit through God—from matter and the laws of nature positioned humanity at the apex of evolution. Formalised through new ways of knowing, Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum proposed the “correct” method of acquiring knowledge of nature’s particulars through a new science that was configured by an entirely different method, order and process of advancing experience than ancient wisdom. Such empiricism took the form of an intellectual pursuit, encoded and enacted through the rarefied material actions of machines. Making possible the Industrial Revolution, its extreme abstractions heightened the divisions between human and nature, culminating in the climate crisis. This section, however, explores the movement of research into its “dark continents”—areas of knowledge-generating practices which had hitherto largely evaded science’s military-industrial spotlight. This chapter focuses on art and design practices and their relation to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, describing alternative ways of knowing as a counterpoint and alternative configuration to the Enlightenment’s increasing alienation from nature.

“Most of us will never apprehend this real mathematical world of blinding light, stuck as we are in the compost heap of a lesser realm. Instead of generating facts, our social worlds are defined by the sweat of our experiences, half-baked ideas presenting to be fully-formed facts, gossip, cultural conditions, outrageous doctrines and funky faith. The secondary world of appearances.”

(Akomolafe, 2019, para. 12)

Invoking the more-than-human realm in the quest to secure the ongoingness of our own species and all life on Earth, this section seeks ways of extending our knowledge so that our collective actions increase planetary enlivening. Looking to the uncategorisable expressions of the natural world that could not be contained by rationality—such as angels, monsters and Animalia Paradoxa—a more holistic viewpoint and tool set are sought that are fit for the challenges of the ecological era. Adopting a new materialist perspective, whereby nonhuman entities possess agency, the Organa Paradoxa is introduced: emerging paradoxical tools capable of engendering different modes of understanding that can realign human and natural power structures through values that establish a new kind of livability. Capable of retelling the story of our planet, these new knowledge instruments enable humanity to play a humbler, yet more critical role in coconstituting our worlds.

Worlding case studies

Exploring the process of worlding through performance, creative writing and the production of artefacts, worlding experiments that explore the themes of monstering, the inner life of nonhumans and an expanded notion of what it means to be human are described based on explorations conducted by the Experimental Architecture Group (E.A.G.).¹ The implications for an expanded realm of knowledge decentre the human figure around which the known universe is organised and offer new terrains for discovery. Such insights require new values, actions, exchanges, politics, economics and ethics, so that we can remake our worlds in a manner that both enriches our own understanding and is beneficial to many nonhuman others in ways that increase the overall liveliness of the living realm. Since understanding exists not in isolation but in relation to other events and agencies, the ground rules for unfolding knowledge within these realms enable the process of human development to respond to a rapidly changing and increasingly turbulent world and exert qualitatively different effects in the short and longer terms.

This book therefore describes a journey of understanding that exceeds the knowledge of humans and reaches out both into the deep past and forward into an ongoing and increasingly vigorous future.

Acknowledgement

We acknowledge all members of the nonhuman, terrestrial realm—past, present, future—that contribute to the spiritual, emotional, creative, physical and mental well-being of all creatures. Paying our respects to the many who are not like “us,” we appreciate their myriad, invisible actions and investments made in our world, which make every part inhabitable and beings like “us” possible.

Note

1   The Experimental Architecture Group (E.A.G.) was founded in 2017 by Rachel Armstrong, Rolf Hughes and Simone Ferracina to bring artistic and design-led experiment into juxtaposition with the technological repertoire of “living technologies.”

Bibliography

Akomolafe, B., 2019. What climate collapse asks of us. The Emergence Network. Available from: www.emergencenetwork.org/whatclimatecollapseasksofus/ (accessed 19.09.19.).

Barad, K., 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina.

Fuller, S., 2011. Humanity 2.0: What It Means to Be Human, Past, Present and Future. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, UK.

2

MATERIAL KNOWLEDGE

Rolf Hughes and Rachel Armstrong

2.1 Primordial

One view of knowledge—that it is formed through the processing and contextualisation of “information” (Murphy, 2006; Shannon, 1948)—is conventionally recognised as an exclusively human endeavour. By considering the more-than-human realm, we examine the inevitability of knowledge as a fundamental capability of our present reality. Told through the story of the Big Bang, the material and informatic story of the universe—acquired through an appropriate range of knowledge instruments—establishes the conditions of knowing through the very nature of our universe’s fundamental particles.

Big Bang origin of the universe

It is impossible to say what existed before our present reality. Quantum theory, which explains nature according to the behaviour of matter and energy on the atomic and subatomic levels,¹ proposes that our universe sprang from quantum foam, a state of existence filled with quantum energy and fluctuations where fundamental building blocks of matter blink in and out of existence for fleeting moments (Wheeler and Ford, 1998). Fourteen billion years ago, a singularity in this matrix occurred. All the matter and energy in the known universe was contained in this point, where energy and matter were indistinguishable from one another. This hot, dense point rapidly inflated, producing an expanding space filled with primordial particles—quarks and electrons—whose ancient chemistry can only be found today in cathedral-sized particle accelerators. Within a few millionths of a second, these specks aggregated to create neutrons and protons, which within another few minutes combined to form the first nuclei. As the universe continued to cool, electrons became trapped in the orbits of the first nuclei, around 380,000 years later, to form the lightest atoms: helium, hydrogen and lithium. When they condensed as clouds of gas that collapsed in on themselves 150 to 200 million years after the Big Bang, the process of nuclear fusion was initiated to form hydrogen and helium, which made up the first stars. Burning through their fuel sources, they began to create heavier elements—like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, aluminium, manganese and iron—in an energy-producing process called nucleosynthesis. Once they contained too much matter, they could not withstand their own gravitational force and they collapsed in on themselves again, resulting in supernovae, which generated atoms heavier than iron that required huge amounts of energy to form, such as silver, gold and uranium. Scattered throughout the universe during the ensuing explosion, they gave rise to the chemistry we are familiar with today. In these initial acts of material enfolding, where particles became atoms, information was generated. Contextualised, valued and expressed as material “knowledge,” the decisions made by this vigorous matter resulted in the production and destruction of worlds.

Everything is entangled

The importance of framing the nature of matter through a quantum narrative is that the atoms that make up our reality are formed as collectives, or “ecologies,” of different kinds of particles, which are folded into spatial associations with each other. The most characteristic features of mind are demonstrated by such lively matter, where numerous highly rudimentary “choices” are made within the oscillating nature of entities like electrons from moment to moment. This fundamentally alters the subject/object relations at the heart of Western philosophy, since the compound origins of bodily matter are now only relationally distinct, rather than objects existing as isolated entities. This endlessly entangled realm draws on the fundamental chemistry of the universe and is described by David Bohm as the Implicate Order (Bohm, 1980), which describes the nature of reality and consciousness in particular as an immense, coherent whole. Proposing that agency is not an inherent property of a singular object but the outcome of dynamic forces, Karen Barad has coined the term intra-action to describe the ongoing negotiations ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Material knowledge
• 3 Strengthening knowledge
• 4 Reconfiguring knowledge
• 5 Extending knowledge
• 6 Worlding case studies
• 7 Conclusion
• 8 Epilogue
• Index