rheomode

a research practice working at the intersection of architecture, technology, art and ecological pedagogy

August 6, 2022 • 17:01 0

GEOPOIESIS

This year on the seminar programme of the MA Environmental Architecture, we approached our usual study material in a more speculative mode, through a series of world-building and worlding fictions workshops. We imagined worlds more or less similar to our own (and researched our own planet’s biology, geology, meterology, cultures, environmental disputes, land forms, systems, etc as the basis for our fictions.) Although many of these worlds were superficially very different from our own, all inevitably resonated with it. Some worlds appeared to maintain relatively stable homeostatic ‘plateaux’. Others were undergoing systemic changes. One narrated the final months and weeks of an Earth, as it was slowly ejected from its orbit in the solar system.

We coined ‘Geopoiesis’ as a heuristic research concept, to map and discuss both our own work, and a wider field of related ‘world-building’ and ‘worlding’ practices. We conceived of ‘world-building’ in relation to collective political imaginaries, and ‘worlding’ in relation to the construction and performance of political subjectivities.

A quick survey of the geopoietic field might include, in no particular order: science fiction, fantasy and counter-factual fictions, IPCC reports, Green New Deal proposals, Gregory Bateson/Felix Guattari’s Three Ecologies, Benjamin Bratton/Strelka’s Terraforming programme, Arturo Escobar’s pluriversal politics, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s ‘bringing forth of worlds’, Donna Haraway’s multi-species worldings, and the Zapatista call, recently repeated by the Red Nation, for ‘a world in which many worlds fit’.

Some of our references are poetic and nebulous. Others synthesise the peer -reviewed work of innumerable contributors. For example, the future scenario planning and world-building models developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), contain significant quantitative data analysis, combined with all kinds of qualitative evidence and interpretation, in for example both its SSPs: Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (which build a series of five scenarios based upon an increasingly diverse range of voices and disciplines), and also its RCPs: Representative Concentration Pathways (which describe four scenarios based on estimated increases in radiative forcing by the year 2100 (compared to pre-industrial levels) ranging from 2.6 to 8.5 W/sqm).

The IPCC world-building exercises are significant artefacts. Still problematic? Yes, of course, but nonetheless incredibly impressive pieces of trans- and multi-disciplinary thinking, managing with relative transparency and clarity a manifold of methodological, epistemological and practical difficulties of staggering complexity. Importantly, the work of the IPCC is increasingly resonant with the demands and framing of the Just Transition/Global Green New Deal movement. Indeed, this MA EA Geopoiesis project here springs out of our work on Green New Deal in recent years, which asked : What kinds of world-building imaginaries might we need to develop, if we are to grow a Global GND Dialogue that can mediate the future scenario models that we have from the IPCC, through the needs of situated social movements that are increasingly engaging in local environmental disputes that have systemic planetary implications, and are simultaneously imagining alternative socio-ecological futures around the planet? Moreover, how should we even think about the models of planetarity presented to us by NASA, the IPCC, Google Maps and so on, which themselves platform out of the networks of remote sensing satellites, laboratories, vast data sets navigated through machine learning and algorithmic analysis, and ultimately metabolised through the labour of innumerable workers, technicians, scientists and observers of all kinds around the planet? What other potential configurations are latent in the affordances of these stacks and platforms? We know that the contradictory world-building ideologies of neoliberalism– nationalism and globalisation – are in crisis, while the environmental emergency demands a new kind of multi-scalar, multi-perspectival and multi-species planning wisdom-within-ecological complexity. The Geopoiesis project is thus one of Re-Imagining the Project of Planning.

Filed under: ecology, Green New Deal, research, teaching, , , , , , , , , ,

March 23, 2022 • 19:31 0

An Introduction to Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind

It was a pleasure to return to the Pari Centre for New Learning (even if virtually) to present this introduction to the thinking of ecological anthropologist Gregory Bateson.. There will be a Pt 2 continuation of this, early in 2023.

Filed under: ecology, research, teaching, , , , , , ,

February 18, 2022 • 13:27 0

Take Back the Land – Green New Deal Landscapes

Happy to have co-authored with my colleagues Godofredo Pereira and Christina Geros a chapter ‘Take Back the Land’ based on our work on the MA Environmental Architecture programme at the RCA London, in the new AD issue ‘Green New Deal Landscapes’ edited by Jose Alfredo Ramirez.

I will be discussing this at the book launch hosted by the Architectural Association (AA) London on Wednesday 23 February 2022

https://www.aaschool.ac.uk/publicprogramme/whatson/green-new-deal-landscapes

Filed under: ecology, Green New Deal, research, teaching, , , ,

January 18, 2021 • 09:51 0

The Design of Scarcity translated into Greek

It was wonderful to find out that a local independent Athenian activist publisher – https://topovoros.gr/ – has translated The Design of Scarcity into Greek recently… this joins the 2018 German translation of the 2014 original published by Strelka.

Filed under: ecology, Green New Deal, research,

October 14, 2020 • 14:28 0

Bartlett/UCL MA Architecture Seminar 2020-21: Green New Deal/Green New Dialogues: Towards a World in which Many Worlds Fit

Among my various teaching positions is a decade long post at the London’s Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), where I have the pleasure to run an elective seminar each year for a selection of MA Architecture Students, broadly titled The Ecological Calculus. I attach this years reading programme below

HT6 Green New Dialogues – Towards a world in which many worlds fit.

Dr Jon Goodbun 2020-21

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.

Given the emerging scale of the environmental transformations that we are still now only in the early stages of, demands for a new planetary project of ecological planning are being raised from many quarters. These demands call for rapid and fundamental changes to the global supply chains and processes of production that feed our transportation, energy, food, manufacturing and production systems. Questions of planning confront us at every scale, from the implementation of the recommendations of the UN IPCC, through the measurement geopolitical resource flows through new international solidarities, to emissions management and carbon sequestration, land use changes and so much more. As these demands hit the ground within specific historically and geographically determined conditions, they become inseparable from questions of environmental justice, questions of ownership, and questions of social management. The need for both critical reflection and multi-dimension design research in architecture, urbanism, landscape studies and design activism is clear.

This double demand, for climate justice AND for an urgent ecological reorganisation and decarbonisation of the global production, have been articulated in different ways through practically all of the various Green New Deal proposals to have emerged in recent years.

The first Green New Deal was proposed in 2008, in a joint paper written in the UK by a group from the UK Green Party and the New Economics Foundation, called the Green New Deal Group. This group has expanded and continued to produce new work to this day, including the introduction of a Green New Deal Bill (unsuccessfully) to the UK Parliament in 2019, by Green MP Caroline Lucas and Labour MP Clive Lewis, and which fed into the manifestos of both the UK’s Green and Labour Parties manifestos in the 2019 General Election. In the same year in the USA, the Green New Deal Resolution was put to the US House of Representatives by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and to the Senate by Senator Ed Markey, a platform that was also later adopted by the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, and which is now strongly influencing (albeit with resistance to its more radical aspects) the emerging manifesto of likely Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

Almost all of the Green New Deal papers have three main components in some form or other, perhaps most clearly laid out in the 2019 Green New Deal for Europe report put forward by Yannis Varoufakis and the DiEM group: 1. Green Public Works: a broad green transition, decarbonisation and job creation programme organised around an environmental justice agenda, 2. a new democratic, legal and institutional infrastructure for delivering this and achieving a just transition, and 3. an Environmental Justice Commission with a global remit.

There were problems with the GND proposals as they stood in 2019. The adoption of a political imaginary from 30s depression-era US history might resonate in that region, and maybe UK/Europe, but it could easily be a problem in the rest of the world. Similarly, it was not clear how the demands for the growth of a new green infrastructure in the world’s richest nations would not actually reinforce an extractivist flow of mineral resources from the global south – such as lithium, cobalt, copper etc – and intensify some of the most environmentally problematic practices on the planet, almost invariably involving the exploitation and desecration of indigenous lands and peoples. In short, the GNDs, for all of their intentions otherwise, invariably articulated themselves through national concerns, and frequently risked unleashing a new green colonialism.

The defeats sustained by the green left (Corbyn and Sanders) across Europe and North America and beyond through 2019 and into 2020 might well have been expected to have sunk the renewed interest in a Green New Deal agenda before it could really get going. But that has not been the case. There are several reasons for that.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus, was identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. The first victims of the disease that it causes – COVID-19 –, have now been traced back a month earlier. By April 2020 the World Health Organisation had declared it a pandemic and it had spread around the world, placing large sections of the global economy in an uneven shutdown. In fact, the uneven pattern of infections, deaths, and changed spatial and labour relations, revealed that a pandemic is never simply the product of a mass of viruses, spreading through a neutral space and affecting everyone equally. It is rather, the result of what happens when our normally obscured environmental architectures of social relations act as a discriminating exposure infrastructure for pathogens and pathologies of all kinds.

The evidence is clear that the death rates for working class ethnic minorities from COVID-19 are quite disproportionate. Being poor and black is, it turns out, in terms of medical statistics, a pre-existing condition. But the death and serious infection rates for ethnic minorities under COVID-19 are simply amplifying what we have already long known – that environmental change, breakdown and crisis, ALWAYS play out through the class, gender, race and neo-colonial structures.

Arguably today the single most important development as the GND has moved beyond a green infrastructure and solutions-based discussion, towards the broader dialogue now maturing into a multi-scalar counter-hegemonic political project, has been the productive and critical engagement of indigenous communities across the Americas and beyond with the GND question. This is certainly in no small part due to the fact that Ocasio-Cortez was already recognised by these communities as a ‘Water Protector’, through her activist work at Standing Rock in opposition to the oil pipeline across Sioux lands, which preceded her standing for election to Congress.

The Indigenous Environmental Network called for any GND to work within their Just Transition framework, cautioned against using the language of ‘stakeholders’ rather than ‘rights holders’, and strongly criticised the adoption of REDD+ (simplistic reforestation to offset emission) and the use of a language of zero-emissions, which they argue is always ultimately the language of a carbon trading ‘green’ capitalism.

Meanwhile revolutionary indigenous activists The Red Nation –  published their response, the Red Deal, stating that:

‘it’s not the Red New Deal as it is the same ‘Old Deal’ – the fulfilment of treaty rights, land restoration, … ours is the oldest class struggle in the Americas: centuries long resistance for a world in which many worlds fit… The Red Deal is not a counter program to the GND. It is a call for action beyond the scope of the US colonial state.’

The environmental racism revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic has helped to feed a massive new wave of struggle around #blacklivesmatter and #antifa, in parallel with an unfolding political and economic struggle over the repercussions – both positive and negative – of the lockdown of economic activity. For those now fighting for a just recovery, and those who want to use this moment to restructure and rebalance the global economy, have found in the GND a set of ready made positions to align with.

However, there are fundamental problems regarding the very possibility of planning and justice. We need to somehow plan these changes, but we need also need to totally reimagine the very possibilities of planning, as a part of the problem is our ideas about planning themselves, or rather, the very fact of our attempting to plan anything, especially regarding ecological systems. When goals are set by an instrumental conscious purpose based upon a necessarily partial viewpoint, and unmediated by a wider eco-systemic awareness, all kinds of pathologies play out. The great lesson of radical cybernetics was not ‘how to control ecological systems’ but rather that we can’t control ecological systems. We can steer a boat, but we can’t steer an ocean…

This seminar will review the key documents that have emerged regarding the Green New Deal in recent years, and the wider global discussion, in particular looking at responses from indigenous communities and the Global South. In particular, we will take up the Zapatista demand – rearticulated by The Red Nation – for a ‘world in which many worlds fit’ as the key framework for articulating a Green New Dialogue…

Week 1: Designing in the End Times

UN IPCC Summary Report:

Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C approved by governments

https://www.ipcc.ch/2018/10/08/summary-for-policymakers-of-ipcc-special-report-on-global-warming-of-1-5c-approved-by-governments/embed/#?secret=eJtf6gbbVS

Jon Goodbun interview with Caliper Journal:

https://caliperjournal.online/TOM-LEMON-DR-JON-GOODBUN

Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis, 2018

(Available free online at https://manifold.umn.edu/read/untitled-5f0c83c1-5748-4091-8d8e-72bebca5b94b/section/5cd42c2a-f2fe-4d41-89ae-cb891dc634b5)

Secondary

Zadie Smith, What Do We Want History to Do to Us? 

What Do We Want History to Do to Us?

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/02/27/kara-walker-what-do-we-want-history-to-do-to-us/embed/#?secret=Afm2aMWtRZ

Week 2: The Green New Deal: Problems and Possibilities

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Naomi Klein and The Intercept:

https://theintercept.com/2019/04/17/green-new-deal-short-film-alexandria-ocasio-cortez/

DiEM, A GND for Europe/A Blueprint for Europe’s Just Transition:

https://www.gndforeurope.com/

Why Race Matters When We Talk About the Environment, An interview with Dr. Robert Bullard

Why Race Matters When We Talk About the Environment

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/why-race-matters-when-we-talk-about-the-environment/embed/#?secret=i4SVi3EsMf

Secondary

Labour for a GND:

https://www.labourgnd.uk/our-vision

Green Party: What is the GND

https://20for2020.greenparty.org.uk/articles/gnd

Jon Goodbun, ‘Green New Dialogue’, in Making Futures. Berlin, 2021 (prepub)

Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen and Thea Riofrancos, A Planet to Win – Why We Need a Green New Deal

Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin, Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal

Ann Pettifor, The Case for the Green New Deal

Week 3: Climate Justice and Indigenous New Deals

Ghassan Hage, Is Racism an Environmental Threat? Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017

The Red Nation, The Red Deal

https://therednation.org/2019/09/22/the-red-deal/

Indigenous Environmental Network, Principles of a Just Transition

Just Transition

https://www.ienearth.org/justtransition/embed/#?secret=soAvjFwgmC

Secondary:

Jon Goodbun, On the Possibility of an Ecological Dialogue

Jon Goodbun: On the Possibility of an Ecological Dialogue

https://www.making-futures.com/jon-goodbun-on-the-possibility-of-an-ecological-dialogue/embed/#?secret=RdscQlg8vg

Week 4: A world in which many worlds fit

Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2018

Matt Broomfield, How a Revolution Really Feels: Rojava 8 Years On

How a Revolution Really Feels: Rojava 8 Years On

https://novaramedia.com/2020/07/17/how-a-revolution-really-feels-rojava-8-years-on/embed/#?secret=cQqHG0Y78M

Donna Harraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.  Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2016

Week 5: The Production of Nature

Martin Arboleda, Planetary Mine – Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. London: Versos, 2019

Jason W Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Versos, 2015

Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism.  Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2016

Secondary:

Jon Goodbun et al, The Design of Scarcity. Moscow: Strelka, 2014

Week 6: Responses from architecture and design schools: contributing to a Green New Dialogue

Leopold Lambert, Futurisms Introduction for Funambulist Issue 24 

https://thefunambulist.net/articles/futurisms-introduction-leopold-lambert

Billy Fleming, Design and the Green New Deal

Design and the Green New Deal

https://placesjournal.org/article/design-and-the-green-new-deal/embed/#?secret=mpbyDEFkem

AALU discussion: How do we confront a world on fire? – Design and The Green New Deal on a Warming Planet

https://www.aaschool.ac.uk/publicprogramme/whatson/session-6-how-do-we-confront-a-world-on-fire–design-and-the-green-new-deal-on-a-warming-planet

Secondary:

The Green New Deal Superstudio: An Open Call

https://www.wconline.com/articles/93214-the-green-new-deal-superstudio-an-open-call

The Architecture Lobby, Statement on the Green New Deal

http://architecture-lobby.org/project/t-a-l-statement-on-the-green-new-deal/

Filed under: ecology, Green New Deal, research, teaching,

July 3, 2020 • 14:21 0

ARCHITECTURE AND ENVIRONMENTALISM BEYOND THE PANDEMIC

Back in April I was interviewed by Tom Lemon regarding some of the effects of the Covid virus from a perspective of environmental architecture for the online journal Caliper. It has gone live today here: https://caliperjournal.online/TOM-LEMON-DR-JON-GOODBUN

Filed under: ecology, Green New Deal, research, , , ,

August 9, 2019 • 14:50 0

On the Possibility of an Ecological Dialogue

This is a short piece that I wrote for the Making Futures and Climate Care summer schools in Berlin’s Floating University and Haus der Statistik, running summer 2019, On the Possibility of an Ecological Dialoguechairsinmudfloatinguni

Filed under: ecology, research, teaching

December 4, 2018 • 02:52 0

RIBA Research Medals

 

I’m very proud to have supervised Dr Kostas Grigoriadis on his PhD on ‘The Epistemology of Designing with Functionally Graded Materials’ at the #RCA– winner of the #RIBA Research Medal for Design and Technology.  See RIBA Journal and RIBA Medals.

Many congratulations also to my own PhD supervisor Professor Murray Fraser on winning the Annie Spink award for teaching.

Filed under: research, teaching

November 30, 2018 • 01:52 0

Its Own Metaphor: Ecological Calculus and the difference that makes a difference

IMG_5057

 

Existential Territories: The Chemical Sign
by RCA School of Architecture

Are alternative modes of existence possible?

What form will they take?

Every architectural proposition embodies a form of sociality. Architecture is nothing if not a set of proposals for organising human attention, habit and ritual. Far from being a mere response to pragmatic needs, architecture is – and perhaps has always been – a tool for the construction of subjectivity.

An architectural project implies a model of the human character, a specific distribution of the innate and the cultivated, the desirable and undesirable, the normal and the pathological. At the same time, the relationship between subjectification and architecture is neither straightforward nor mechanical. The future’s infrastructure is a site of political conflict between financial, legal and semiotic forces. Today, the attempt to secure the fruition and dominance of certain models of human character through disciplinary institutions – the school, the hospital, the asylum, the barracks – has been supplemented by diffuse systems of control that act at scales that we do not recognize as architecture. And yet, as many have argued, contemporary forms of power have never been more impersonal, infrastructural and architectural.

Existential Territories is a series of events that will explore architectures capacity to propose alternative forms of existence. Territory is a term that refers to the exercise of power over a defined space. The existential aspect refers to way that the abstraction of design enters into a relationship with affective micro-political investments and semiotic processes. An existential territory is what binds a power over territory to a power over the soul while also pointing to the excess of life that resides within and beyond any system of power.

If the emergence of capitalism has charged architecture with the task of naturalizing social asymmetries, the existential territories series sets out to challenge existing models of human character and sociality including the normativity of gender roles, class construction, and labour exploitation, and perhaps rethink our agency as writers and architects.

Our second Existential Territories symposium, the ‘chemical sign’, will explore the limits of the concept of subjectivity by examining the way that chemicals, pathogens and microbes influence and transform what we mean by ‘human’.

SCHEDULE

Welcome by Adrian Lahoud,
Dean of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art

Jon Goodbun (RCA),
Its Own Metaphor: Ecological Calculus and the difference that makes a difference

Hannah Landecker (UCLA),
The Food of Our Food: Medicated Feed and the Industrialization of Metabolism

Anna Tsing (UCSC),
Plantationocene: Life in Past and Coming Ruins

Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernandez Pascual (Cooking Sections, RCA),
CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones

JON GOODBUN (RCA),

Its Own Metaphor: Ecological Calculus and the difference that makes a difference

‘…thinking in terms of stories does not isolate human beings as something separate from the starfish and the sea anemones, the coconut palms and the primroses. Rather, if the world be connected… then thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all mind or minds whether ours or those of redwood forests and sea anemones. Context and relevance must be characteristic not only of all so-called behavior (those stories which are projected out into ‘action’), but also of all those internal stories, the sequences of the building up of the sea anemone. Its embryology must be somehow made of the stuff of stories. And behind that, again, the evolutionary process through millions of generations whereby the sea anemone, like you and me, came to be – that process, too, must be of the stuff of stories.’ — Gregory Bateson (Mind and Nature, 1979) —

‘The atom… is nothing more than a relation’ — Frederick Engels (Dialectics of Nature notebooks, 1870s) —

Any attempt to think through the relationality of ‘The Chemical Sign’ begs a triad of questions: A sign of what? In relation to what? For what? In this paper I will sketch a series of attempts to approach these questions over the history of systems and process theoretic philosophy, and the critical significance of this question for an extended ecological politics today.

There have been a number of engagements with chemical and biological semiosis – Heinz von Foerster’s Biological Computing Lab at the University of Illinois which operated from 1958-1976, and contemporaneously Stafford Beer’s experiments with information processing in pond ecosystems, Gordon Pask’s work attempting to teach chemical systems how to learn in projects such as ‘How to evolve an ear’, and Humberto Maturana and Fransisco Varela’s recursive conception of cell autopoiesis. Earlier work, such as Alexandr Bogdanov’s tektology and experiments with blood transfusion, and Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ speculations upon the meaning of metabolism in Moritz Traube’s protocell labours, also provide important insights. Most importantly, I will focus upon bio-anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s use of C. S. Peirce’s concept of abduction as the basis of an epistemology of pattern and perception.

Bateson first set out his conception of three ecologies in his 1968 position paper for a conference on ‘Human Adaptation’ which he had called through the Wenner-Gren anthropological foundation. Bringing together an small and unlikely mixture of biologists, anthropologists, Marxists and cyberneticians, Bateson wanted to test his thinking on the nature of the relation between informational-semiotic and material-energetic systems, a task which would consume his final decade in an attempt to propose a new kind of meta-science: a qualitative discipline organised around an ecological aesthetics. Bateson never completed this project, yet it remains a critical one for us today.

HANNAH LANDECKER (UCLA),

The Food of Our Food: Medicated Feed and the Industrialization of Metabolism

In 1934, nutrition scientist Clive McCay warned that children were being raised with an attitude to growth that he called “the butcher’s philosophy”: the desire to bring animals to market weight quickly and efficiently.

This talk excavates the butcher’s philosophy of the twentieth century and its consequences for the chemical landscapes of life in the twenty-first. While there has been some appreciation of the addition of antibiotics and hormones to feed as growth promoters, given worries about these as adulterations of the end-product that is milk and meat for human consumption, the systematic remaking of animal feed since the turn of the twentieth century has gone under-appreciated. This paper traces the science of the “animal as converter,” with metabolism and feed efficiency as work objects in the effort to make more with less. Vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fungal enzymes, short chain fatty acids, arsenical medicines, anti-oxidants, and many other substances are part of this story, many of which were also then used in human food fortification and engineering. As a result of the focus on feed efficiency in the science-industrial effort to promote growth, what we know about many of these elements is confined to how they affect growth, a positive knowledge that has obscured the many other questions one might ask about how these nutritional components affect animals, microbiota, environments, and humans.

This paper argues that a more systematic history of agricultural feeding points not toward the industrialization of discrete foodstuffs or activities (cows, farming), but toward the industrialization of metabolism: a major re-articulation of the metabolic interrelations of bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, and humans, in which flows of matter between organisms changed profoundly. The industrialization of metabolism has produced what we might call the anthropocene of, or in, the cell, a set of consequences that now register in terms of genome instability, physiology and metabolic dysregulation. Both philosophically and practically, this perspective allows us to ask what constitutes flourishing in the legacy chemical landscapes of growth, and to think through experimental and epidemiological approaches better equipped to take account of the historically-specific metabolic landscapes of human development and health.

ANNA TSING (UCSC),

Plantationocene: Life in Past and Coming Ruins

Landscape structure matters in constituting the Anthropocene.

This talk discusses the connections between the plantation form—a mode of modular simplification in which ecological complexity gives way to genetic homogeneity—and the “feral proliferation” of pests and pathogens. Modular simplification and feral proliferation work together, spreading the environmental dangers of the more-than-human Anthropocene. Attention to landscape morphology offers a necessary “horizontal” dimension to the discussion of “vertical” carbon circulations that have defined attention to our planet. Furthermore, the plantation form is not a matter of the amassment of individual human acts, the most common way of understanding environmental problems; instead, it directs us to infrastructures and assemblages. The plantation is both an allegorical form for reflection and a material structure that has reshaped our world. For those familiar with my earlier work: yes, there will be fungi. Pathogenic fungi, which gather, transform, and spread from plantations, form the heart of the descriptive material for this talk. Fungi are always good to think with.

ALON SCHWABE and DANIEL FERNANDEZ PASCUAL (Cooking Sections, RCA),

CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones

CLIMAVORE investigates how to eat as climate changes. In the case of tidal zones, the project has been specifically tackling the detrimental effects of salmon farm pollution in the Isle of Skye, Scotland. After two years of research and fieldwork, the project materialised first in a site-specific installation to gather cross-disciplinary knowledge and challenge the way in which corporate intensive farms ‘perform nature’. As a response, each day at high tide, the new structure works as an underwater oyster table to activate filter feeders in the polluted shores of the island. At low tide, the structure emerges above the sea and functions as a dining table for humans, with tastings of ingredients that clean the water by breathing: seaweeds like kelp or dulse, and bivalves like oysters, clams, scallops and mussels. Through a series of ongoing public workshops, it is activated in collaboration with local stakeholders, residents, schools, politicians and researchers. Aiming to divest away from salmon farming and develop a new cultural imaginary based on alternative aqua-cultures, a network of local restaurants has also been established as active agents in the process: each replaced farmed salmon with a CLIMAVORE dish. The long-term project aims to look at other understandings of ecology and water monitoring to consolidate human and other-than-human inhabitation on the liminal space of the coast. The tidal zone becomes then a space of opportunity for discussing the spatial construction of the ocean and its shores.

 

Filed under: ecology, research

October 18, 2018 • 16:03 0

HT6 The Ecological Calculus

The Ecological Calculus

Dr Jon Goodbun

HT6 seminar at Bartlett, UCL, MA Architecture


In order to understand our place in the world today we need to understand the nature of systems – ecosystems, social and cultural systems, technical systems, spatial systems, material systems, biological systems: systems which in their dynamic and networked assemblages operate as what has been called world systems. The global economy is a mangled nest of interconnected complex systems. Our bodies and minds are a part of this, and are sympoietically produced within this, even whilst they are also constantly autopoietically re-producing their own conditions of emergence: this is the double internality of the human condition. Everything that we make, do and think changes the nature of these systems, and of ourselves, in subtle and not so subtle ways… sometimes reinforcing, sometimes undermining, sometimes transforming, sometimes bifurcating existing systems. One characteristic of complex systems’ behaviour is that they are hard to predict, hard to plan… and yet we have to manage under that condition, and we have to make choices and value judgements even whilst we lack a total cognitive mapping of our current or future possibilities. Thus every ecology (ecology is another word for a nest of complex systems) is always a political ecology. And it is in the nature of our thinking to not really understand them, to not intuitively grasp complex systems. As architects, urbanists and designers we study and co-produce important parts of these systems. The production of space – material and cognitive – is a key part of the constant reproduction of these world systems.
In this seminar we will review a series of key texts drawing upon ecological theory, cognitive science, science and technology studies and explore their often complex co-development with thinking about architecture and cities.


Each week we will approach these texts through a given dialectical frame:

affordance/abduction

entropy/order

empathy/alienation

analogue/digital

pattern/matter

planning/emergence

which together outline a new ecological calculus: an epistemology of pattern and perception.


Dr Jon Goodbun trained as an architect, and is a researcher, practitioner and educator at the RCA (MA Environmental Architecture), the University of Westminster (Msc Advanced Environmental Design), and the Bartlett (MArch). His research focuses on the intersection of ecological theory, cybernetics, cognitive science and urbanism. He is experimenting with informal teaching with Rheomode and Derailed. Recent publications include Scarcity: Architecture in an Age of Depleting Resources (Wiley) and Design of Scarcity (Strelka). He can be found online at www.rheomode.org.uk and twitter: @jongoodbun

Filed under: ecology, research, teaching

About

Dr Jon Goodbun is based in London and Athens, where he runs Rheomode, a small experimental research studio working at the intersection of architecture, technology, art and ecological pedagogy. He is the Theory Lead on the MA Environmental Architecture programme at the Royal College of Art in London and contributes to both the MA Architecture and MA Landscape Architecture programmes at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL London.

 

As both a design studio tutor and a history/theory tutor, over two decades he has supervised some of the best students of their generations, winning practically all awards available, including two RIBA Research Medals, a RIBA Silver Medal, Wallpaper magazines’ ‘Worlds’ Hottest New Talents’, and innumerable other industry and institution based prizes.

 

He has published widely and is currently working on a book ‘The Ecological Calculus’, which builds on his doctoral thesis ‘The Architecture of the Extended Mind’. 

 

He is involved in a number of initiatives and projects at the intersection of ecological thinking, environmental architecture and experimental pedagogy, and runs the occasional nomadic school Derailed Lab, which uses very long distance train rides as site of personal reflection and a collective eco-political expression.

 

He is currently focused on setting up ‘rheomode’ spaces for short courses and collaborators-in-residence, aimed at developing a new kind of ecological learning context, adjacent to, but distinct from, his more mainstream academic teaching and research.

 

Many published works can be found at https://rca.academia.edu/JonGoodbun.

Info

Contact

You can reach me:
.
jcgoodbun (a) mac.com

Twitter Feed @jongoodbun

  • RT @MarinaPurkiss: I remember seeing news footage of Nigel Farage’s Brexit march consisting of about 30 bellends and a whippet… But no Bri… 2 days ago
  • RT @defendthearts: Come and lobby the HEC! Happening now! We cannot pause for this 'deal' #UCUrising #EballotVoteNo #NoCapitulation #OurUCU 2 days ago
  • RT @defendthearts: UCU members! What's the 'deal'? 🤔Nothing binding on USS🤔 😴Terms of reference for future negotiations so loose any emp… 2 days ago
  • RT @RcaUcu: The pay offer is not good enough, we already rejected it 6 weeks ago. “offers” on workload, casualisation and equality gaps are… 2 days ago
  • Brilliant.. Burrough’s Playback method for creating new realities twitter.com/jmrphy/status/… 3 days ago
  • RT @jmrphy: In 1972, the London Scientology Center (pictured below) moved out of 37 Fitzroy Street. Then the Moka Bar moved out of 29 Frit… 3 days ago
  • Why isn’t there/ hasn’t there been a call for an NBS - National Building Service? For building infrastructure, schools, hospitals etc..? 6 days ago
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