Echoing the Past: A Proposal for a Counter-Monument

To hear an echo is to witness a past event; it is a past event in the here and now. The phenomenon of the echo is not an event cut off from its conception, that first outburst of noise or speech. But rather it is that birthing event, delayed and distorted but nonetheless that past moment in this present; the echo is its own past made present. The echo is presented - made present - as an ephemeral event, departed yet connected from its own materialisation in the past; a distinct spatio-temporal activity and phenomenon where the past is dematerialised to erupt upon the present. The echo appears to deliver a unique paradigm for memorialisation and remembrance, the opportunity to access and (de)materialise a past event within a concrete present. But the echo performs a distinct spatio-temporal praxis is in antithesis to traditional monumentalism. The performance is not a practice of material making but immaterial un-making; a practice of absence and ephemerality. An art practice of echoing would appear to conform to what James E. Young describes as the “counter-monument.” These are practices of memorialisation that are against the ideological, painfully self-conscious of their very premise and deploy “a strategy of evoking rather than invoking”. This paper will present the phenomenon of the echo within a psycho-mythological framework, and will resolve the echo as a paradigm for a type of counter-monumental art practice. Through discussing the public art project “Daughter of a Voice” (2011), an artwork that confronts both the echo as a mythological device via the legend of Le Timbaler del Bruc (The Drummer Boy on Bruc Hill) and the echo as a material intervention into urban space, a practice will be proposed that eschews a representation of a past but performs an act of presence. This is a performance that places the burden of remembrance on active spectatorship rather than passive memory or reflection

Occupying Infrastructure

Infrastructure shapes and conditions the manner in which we live in the industrialised world, putting into circulation the matter essential for our living, a cycle of energy, materials, data, and even excrement. Infrastructures are not neutral but embedded within systems of power and inequality. As globalising networks, infrastructures trouble conventional temporalities, from high-speed communication at the speed of light to the ‘deep time’ of nuclear waste. The essential condition of infrastructure means that it is paradoxically only revealed when its mechanisms cease to function normally. A multi-layered complexity performing with a global resolution, infrastructure exemplifies a planetary ontological condition for the human. Nonetheless, infrastructures are essentially nonhuman environments, designed and configured to direct and manage the material. These are spaces designed not for occupation by the human, yet embody the contemporary planetary status of our species, and the problematics that such a status proposes. This article explores proposes strategies of occupation for these more-than-human environments. These speculative proposals with be sited within an expanded discourse of the planetary, framing the various modes of occupation to expound a critical discourse that contributes to contemporary discussions of climate change, the Anthropocene and the impact of the human on the planet. The research project will draw attention to the hidden spaces of infrastructure that exist in the everyday around us, and asks what new activities or ways of being might emerge from these hybrid spaces and planetary networks

Machines Imagining Interior Images: Investigating the significance of algorithmic ‘text-to-image’ processes for the practice and pedagogy of interior design

The development of AI and machine learning tools such as ChatGPT has raised concerns about authorship, creativity, bias, and the role of AI in the production of knowledge. In the field of art and design, ‘text-to-image’ AI tools have the potential to save time and explore new ideas, but they also raise concerns about the devaluing of creative and critical thinking skills. A key feature of this "algorithmic anxiety" is the fundamental unknowability of AI deep learning models which demands a radically alternative dialogic encounter and an activity of ‘finding out what the machine actually knows’. This articulation offers the potential of approaching human-computer interfaces with a sense of openness and curiosity and a non/human collaboration. This paper explores the potential of AI imaging tools, specifically 'text-to-image' processes, for interior design pedagogy and practice. The research will investigate where and how these tools should be located in a design process, identify benefits and limitations of their use, and develop strategies for engaging with these tools in an ethical manner. The research aims to identify the potential of non/human collaboration with these tools in an ethical manner as contextualised under a posthuman condition, and explore strategies that are supportive to collaborative arrangements between designer, machine, and other stakeholders. The outcome of the research will inform pedagogical frameworks and digital work practices for interior design. The research presented in this paper is interim findings from a series of workshops conducted in partnership with interior design students, supported with discussions with researchers and industry experts. The research is contextualised under the wider frame of research on the 'interior-as-image' and the role of the image and imaging of the interior under post-digital experience

Domestic Data: Towards an Aesthetics of Intimate Resistance

During 2020, one perhaps unexpected impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and rules restricting people to their homes, was the increased engagement and adoption of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies, for both commercial and leisure purposes. In September 2020, Facebook launched its next generation VR platform, the Oculus Quest 2 with greatly improved performance, but major criticism is directed at prerequisite of a Facebook account to use the device, imposing users commit to the company’s ecology of data-collection. Notwithstanding the data-capture of bodies in motion where “spending 20 minutes in a VR simulation leaves just under 2 million unique recordings of body language” (Bailenson 2018), the Oculus Quest is effectively a head mounted room-scanning device, algorithmically analysing the environment and its contents to spatially determine position and movement. In the context of VR technology in the home emerges an arrangement of machine visioning hosted by the movement of the user in space, proposing the performance of an intersectional body-space hybrid of machinic aesthetics. The informatic condition maps body-space to domestic/intimate, where under the home the domestic and intimacy are of the same order, but rendered as contradiction through the techno-viewing apparatus. Notwithstanding the specifics of VR, the troubling of domestic/intimate is also amplified by the further digital re-configurations of space that has alienated people from the domestic environments through the mass deployment of webcam-based ‘Working From Home’ practices necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The domestic home, traditionally a retreat from work and labour, is institutionalised and its intimate status now precarious and dislocated. This paper presents practice-based research that interrogates the contradiction of domestic/intimate as rendered under the hybridisation of body-space machine aesthetics. Experimenting with digital design practices of 3d printing and photogrammetry, the research explores aesthetics paradigms – such as the glitch – as means for actualising machine viewing to expose its intersectional potential, and establish the materialist characteristic of the domestic/intimacy contradiction

Stroke City Racing

Stroke City Racing is an exciting workshop led public arts project for the city of Derry-Londonderry and is part of the UK City of Culture 2013 program. It is a two phased project to reveal a Formula 1 racing circuit through the streets of the City of Derry, imaginatively manifesting a socially sited permanent monument which is at once visible and invisible, physical and ephemeral. There is a certain kind of monumentality to a race track. They are epics of speed, of space and of scale. They are immense spectacles of concrete and asphalt where legends are born. To enter such an arena is to be given the chance of becoming part of the mythology of the race track itself. To map out such a circuit on the streets of the City of Derry is to provide the opportunity for the spectator to step down from the grandstand and walk of the racing surface itself. The project will be developed initially through research workshops during the first phase. It will be during these events that the mapping of a suitable potential circuit will be discussed and elaborated through presentations, walking tours and cartography sessions. These will be attended by artists, engineers and urban designers, as well as motor racing fans, games geeks and other interested parties. The second phase will take the final route from the research phase and develop this for delivery and distribution to the public. This will take the form of a publication and map which will exist as a formal document officially prescribing the street circuit, a record with the potential to be fully certified. The overall aim of the project is to address and challenge the conception of a public art work. While the project will be essentially realised through ephemeral and virtual means, there will exist a ‘real’ albeit ‘invisible’ racetrack in the city streets permanently exposed to an everyday public. While the project will rely on newly made legacy and myth within the social fabric for its future, the race track itself will become part of the physical fabric and mythology the City of Derry

Resisting the Real Through Imagined Interiors and Social Media’s Spaces of Uncertainty

A distinct visual genre has emerged of digitally realised interiors and architectural spaces emblematic in their dreamlike, surreal, and imagined condition, exemplified by digital practitioners including Charlotte Tayler, Andrés Reisinger, and Six N. Five. These virtual spaces, which have predominantly been circulated and popularised via image-based social media platforms, contribute to a stratum of images of the interior, or more precisely, the ‘interior-as-image’. As such, their consumption via the digital screen agitates an uncertain condition between imagined and real. Indeed, some of these designs have become emergent into the actual, transitioning from imaginings for the digital screen into inhabitable interior spaces, to further trouble the uncertainties of virtual and real, digital and physical. This emergent category of interior-as-image can potentially be located under cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreality’, a hyperreal visuality that eliminates the difference between image and reality. With the replacement of reality with the sign/image, signification is suspended for the interior-as-image. However, these digitally rendered interiors are not absent of potential meaning and external reference despite the immediacy of their activation and engagement. Through their instrumentalisation as Non-Fungible Token (NFT) artefacts and unique, commodified digital objects, these uncertain interiors are entangled with energy-hungry machine processes in their production. In the contemporary era of climate crisis and the critique of progressive modernity, where the capacity to envision a sustainable future is itself challenging, this category of digital artefact has the potential to intensify a precarious and uncertain time to come. Moreover, the infrastructural condition(ing) of the circulation and consumption of the interior-as-image via social media platforms has the potential to encode an ‘algorithmic anxiety’, a doubling of embedded uncertainty. This text-based essay proposes to define and contextualise this particular category of digital interior-as-image, designating its critical and contemporary mode of uncertainty. In addition to establishing its artefactual status as a discrete yet materially entangled digital object, the potential significance for the discipline of interior design will be questioned. In investigating a number of spatial projects for which the digital image is a primary mode of engagement, this essay reflects on the intersection of the virtual and physical for interior design, and deliberates on the potential of imaginaries of virtual worlds for unlocking new interior materialities

All Tomorrow's Interiors

The All Tomorrow’s Interiors exhibition presents reflections and speculations on how technology is deployed in domestic environments, today and in the future. This practice-based research investigates the potential consequences of emerging and imagined technologies, and asks how technology can be engaged in processes for the design and the representation of the domestic interior. From smart homes to autonomous devices, the exhibition features a diverse range of works that explore how technology can be engaged in processes for the design and representation of the domestic interior. Through speculative and critical design, the exhibition encourages visitors to question the implications of these technologies and to imagine new ways in which they might be integrated into our homes. The exhibition seeks to challenge visitors’ assumptions about the role of technology in the domestic space, to provide a deeper understanding of the ways in which technology shapes our homes and our daily lives, and to think critically about the kind of future we want to build. The exhibition includes work by Year 2 students and staff from the Interior Design department and members of the Image|Imaging|Interior research cluster at The Glasgow School of Art. The All Tomorrow’s Interiors exhibition is part of the Architecture Fringe 2023 programme. A public tour of the exhibition with researcher Dave Loder will take place 12.00 Tuesday 20 Jun

Monuments in the Age of the Anthropocene

The year 2021 will be the centenary of the formation of Northern Ireland, an event that anticipates commemoration and the concretion of 100 years of statehood. For a post-conflict society, this is an unresolved and contested history. However, while a common approach to the past is problematic, there is an opportunity to look forward, to make the future-to-come a shared vision. The discourse of monument making concerns temporality. The monument is a temporal object and ideological agent that projects a past through the present to the future. To mitigate the problematic of a contested past is to mitigate the ideological function. While the proposition of the ‘counter-monument’ (Young 1992) proposes the disruption of the ideological function, this monumental paradigm neglects any account for a future-to-come, other than one contingent on the memory of its own negation. To access the future-to-come non-ideologically, we must look to other paradigms. This paper proposes the category of the ‘post-monument’, a paradigm for the monument that is structured towards the futural. This research will present contemporary art practices within the ‘geologic turn’ which engage the space-time aesthetics of the Anthropocene. In an era were the future of the human species is implicated within the present, the discourse of the Anthropocene provides distinct tools to access the future-to-come. The post-monument is a typology of temporal object that can approach temporality at the scales of the Anthropocene, accessing nonlinear space-time aesthetics to manifest futural conditions and post-human ontologies

Tertiary Memory and Nonlinear Landscapes: Monumentalising the ‘geologic turn’ in contemporary art

The landscapes and monuments of the megalithic invoke a distinct remembering of time forgotten. More acutely, these arrangements of standing stones and landscape alignments are arguably temporal technologies with a specific function of memory. They are technical apparatus, recording and anticipating the motion of planets and stars and the passing of years and seasons, complicit with a cyclical and nonlinear deliberation of time. Deploying a mode of what philosopher Bernard Stiegler terms ‘tertiary retention’, the megalithic structures are prosthesis which inscribe memory upon the landscape, and also inscribe the human a subjectivity of becoming-stellar, invoking a cosmological agency for the human. In antithesis to the megalithic, the contemporary monument is a temporal device that is linear in condition. The monument or memorial deploys a specific remembering of the past in the present, in order to bear upon the future. These assert specific subjectivities, an ideological function that prescribes the burden of history upon the human witness. This paper will examine the linear and the nonlinear for the category of the monument. This research will be contextualised by the ‘geologic turn’ in contemporary art which engage the aesthetics of the Anthropocene through practices in the landscape. In an era where the future of the human species is implicated within the present, the discourse of the Anthropocene provides distinct tools to access the future-to-come. The ‘post-monument’ is a typology of temporal object that can approach temporality at the scales of the Anthropocene, accessing nonlinear paradigms to manifest futural conditions and post-human ontologies

Sounding Scales: Monumental Landscapes in the Networked Anthropocene

The landscape of the 21st century city is embedded with the hidden strata of electromagnetic fields and pulses of the postdigital environment. This technosphere is not confined to the city but is a contiguous landscape that envelopes the planet’s surface and extends upwards to the farthest satellite. Recent practices in sound art have increasingly engaged with this invisible electromagnetic landscape, developing tactics to reveal both its ubiquity and its nuance, an agency performed through intensive and environmental affects. The embeddedness of the networked technosphere to the discourse of the Anthropocene, spurred by the currency of landscape ecologies and the geological dimensions of digital media, implicates these sound art practices with a planetary significance. The qualities of the postdigital electromagnetic landscape which challenge cartographic agenda that seek to make extensive and map the intangible, provide intensive structures and activities which can contribute to some of the more problematic attributes of the Anthropocene. Specifically, the aesthetics of scale that are contested between the everyday and planetary and which lead to a state of ‘scalelessness’, might be more authentically approached through an agency that is intensive and embodied itself. This paper will examine emergent sonic art practices, including The Chronotopes (2017) project undertaken by the author, which interrogate the postdigital electromagnetic landscape. Specifically, these practices will be framed by the temporal and spatial aesthetics typically allocated to the category of the monument, where landscape is an embodied paradigm. Employed as a technicity and a means of reaching out, monumental processes can be instrumentalised within a postdigital landscape to propagate alternative ontological subjectivities and cultural conditions. New tactics of postdigital co-habitation are mobilised, resisting conventional hierarchies of linear alignments to participate in nonlinear planetary swarm networks