Architecture and environmentalism beyond the pandemic

An interview between Dr Jon Goodbun and Thomas Lemon. EDITORIAL NOTE: When we first read this insightful interview, we were struck by the clarity with which Goodbun and Lemon were able to draw threads of connection between COVID-19 and the greater ecological crises of modern capitalism in which architecture is caught. Goodbun identifies in no uncertain terms the absolute necessity of action on environmental destruction even as the world convulses in the grips of pandemic. In this interview there is no disconnect between the reaction of global “disaster capitalism” to COVID-19, and to the environmental crises that come careening towards us. In both cases, capital exploits crisis towards its own ends, enrichment and misdirection from its own complicity. For us, is a chilling reminder of capitalism’s ability to, snakelike, distort its form to internalise and reclaim world-shaking crises as instruments of it’s own perpetuation. This interview is a powerful reminder of the intricate web of connections between capital’s destructive impulses and the environment-worlds that it ravages

On the Romanticism of immersive technological environments : or, dancing with the machines

Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium vom 24. bis 27. April 2003 in Weimar an der Bauhaus-Universität zum Thema: ‚MediumArchitektur - Zur Krise der Vermittlung

On the possibility of an ecological dialogue

The call for environmental justice, and the recognition that the effects of environmental change will be played out through class, gender, race and neo-colonial structures, articulates an essential socialisation and politicisation of what is at stake in thinking through our responses to ecological crisis

Interspace - a proposal for a communicative prosthetic space

Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium vom 24. bis 27. April 2003 in Weimar an der Bauhaus-Universität zum Thema: ‚MediumArchitektur - Zur Krise der Vermittlung

The Labyrinth of the Immaterials

Superhumanity conversations: Jon Goodbun responds to Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, “Spatial Thought” A review of Jean-Francois Lyotard's 1985 Pompidou exhibition Les Immatériaux. Who or what are the Immaterials? What is their nature? What is their culture? And how and why did they come to inhabit a labyrinth on the fifth floor of the Pompidou Centre for a number of months during 1985? What did they do in there? And what did they say? What was the meaning of their occupation of that building, in that city

How Many Ecologies? From Bateson to Guattari and back again

Fifty years ago, 1972 saw the publication of two broadly systems-theoretic books, both of which, by any reckoning, had a significant impact: Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. In this short paper, I extract and summarise some moments from a larger study I am working on, in which I speculatively read Bateson and Guattari (and with Deleuze) together. This is partly an exercise in historically and conceptually unpacking the various brief though significant references to Bateson that are to be found in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings. But it is also a transversal historical speculation, in which I suggest that we can find a much bigger, much more interesting and largely unflagged pattern of responses to Bateson in their work. Extending recent scholarship that has started to re-explore Deleuze and Guattari’s relationship to Bateson, I argue that, in fact, there are no less than three distinct periods of—always a combination of explicit and implicit— engagement. Firstly, in Anti-Oedipus, they acknowledge and work creatively with Bateson’s double-bind concept, even whilst being critical. However, I argue that their engagement with Bateson is much more extensive and interesting than a normative reading suggests. In their second joint work, A Thousand Plateaus, published in 1980, their previously critical concerns about Bateson seem to have abated, and in addition to a couple of short, respectful remarks at a few points in their text, they also acknowledge the concept of the “plateaux” and the “rhizome” as borrowed from Bateson. And finally, a decade later again, in Guattari’s sole-authored The Three Ecologies, the central concept is once again developed out of Bateson, and moreover, Guattari gives Bateson the opening epigraph. I revisit this material not simply out of historical curiosity nor simply to contribute to a gap in the existing understanding of the relations between these important bodies of work. Rather, I argue that reading these texts together today presents significant new openings and new work for us to do, important work pertaining to how we think about ourselves ecologically, and our responses to anthropogenic environmental change and the dangers and possibilities of a conscious political project of ecological planning

On the Romanticism of immersive technological environments : or, dancing with the machines

Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium vom 24. bis 27. April 2003 in Weimar an der Bauhaus-Universität zum Thema: ‚MediumArchitektur - Zur Krise der Vermittlung

The dialogical, the ecological and beyond

In this article Jon Goodbun and Ben Sweeting engage in a conversation about design and its complex relation to communication. They look at the role of dialogue, the dialogical (signifying signs), and the limitations of the dialogical as one considers contemporary processes of cybernetisation and how “asignifying signs” are produced and exchanged within complex systems of all kinds. Prompted by the opening question referring to cybernetics as a general study of information processes, focusing on the production, exchange, and consumption of meaning, not limited to a focus on digital logic, Goodbun and Sweeting revisit a plethora of positions on dialogue including those of Gordon Pask, Gregory Bateson, Ranulph Glanville, David Bohm among others. In so doing, they make clear certain semantic confusions related to terms such as communication vs. conversation, dialogue vs. discussion, and analogue vs. digital, and provide a richer understanding of why these semantic revisions are necessary for the context of everyday design practice. Using examples from their own research and teaching work, they point towards models where an alternative approach to communication that critically acknowledges the complications related to “asignifying signs” can help designers grapple with the ecological crisis in the contexts of politics, research, and education