The Electric Aborigine
One meaning of the phrase 'people are walking architecture' is disclosed when we carry our instrumentation around with us... eg. the astronaut, or his terrestrial counterpart, the infraneuralelectricaborigine, who carries knowledge sensors with him/her.
The more people who actively try being a social chameleon, the more chance they have of demonstrating the power of an alternative and weakening the power of a controlling system. to demonstrate the alternative means that if an alternative is recognized then it can be used as a lever, a tactic.
Video Notebook
Bonnie Barrett, queen of the San Francisco Sports and Boat Show, and her pet, Ace, rode a one-ton floating rock in the Bay. The rock is powered by the New Chrysler 3.6 h.p. out=board 'Swinger', which can drive the big rock to speeds of 3½ m.p.h.
There is no reality, only response, there is no morality, only situational ethics, nothing is absurd, the motorized floating rock, playing golf on the moon, typhoons in India, million dollar football players, continuous S. American revolution, all part of our total inability to comprehend who we are or what we are doing. Maybe architecture had some function as a gesture of faith, that in the violent situation that man has always found himself in we had to believe that there was some meaning to it all, so we invented systems of meaning, frameworks for action and belief. Is architecture such a framework?
Look at this picture. I feel it has something to do with architecture. Do you? It poses some questions (like Logplug) about reality. The basis of the modern movement is Judeo Christian in that it upholds truth and the search for it formally as an architectural medium. But we know truth to be relative to available information and prejudices. The guerilla camouflages himself and maximizes on available resources in a creative manner; the American army is more of a monument to technology. It's the difference between a portable Videofax and the New York Public Library. Declare moratorium on buildings.
The infamous plug. Plugging-in is a term that has consistently been misused as a description of an architectural style. Plugging-in however, defines an attitude, not a style; a way of thinking that shows a shift in interest from the building to the device. A shift from aesthetics to the way portable hardware restructures our behaviour. The city is merely a giant socketry, and architecture has ceased to carry any symbolic value and has thus become irrelevant except maybe as a technology of containers of some sort. Declare moratorium on architecture.
Here is an aborigine, does she, like the guerilla, have something to tell us about our situation? Her technology was primitive but her lifestyle was complex, full of valuable myths and fantasies and she lived with her environment, not parasitically upon it. OUr architectures are the residue of a desire to secure ourselves to the surface of our planet, if only they were on wheels, or if some slippery substance could be injected under them, our anchors to the planet, like the aborigine's, should be software, like songs and dreams, or myths. Abandon hardware, earth's-surface anchors. Electric aborigine makes for the moratorium on Buildings.
WE ARE ENTERING PRIMITIVE HETEROGENEITY
Notes on 3 projects made in 1970-71, Michael Barnard and David Greene.
THE SOFTWARE MOVEMENT
All 3 projects can be described as a search for the problems confronting architects.
THE INFRA-NEURAL CHAMELEON IS FACING A SOFTWARE BLOCKAGE
Our working base has been the proposition that there is 'a symbiotic relationship between human behaviour and architectural hardware.'
INFRA-NEURLA GUERILLA
The infra-neural network is the result of a symbiotic link between a body and portable hardware. It is the conceptual infrastructure developed out of this link.
SOCIAL SOFTWARE AND STONED STRATEGIES
Proceeding from this we have produced a series of speculations intended to question present-day conceptions of architecture. For instance, it is generally accepted that architects are concerned with the design of buildings and associated subsystems such as Town Planning
PEOPLE ARE WALKING ARCHITECTURE
But for a variety of reasons, buildings become ineffective.
DISORGANIZE SITE-ATTACHMENT AND START WEAVING BEHAVIOUR
and the resulting problems are not solved by concentrated production of buildings of a bigger sort and in larger numbers...
WE MOVE FROM BODY TRIMMING TO MORATORIUM TACTICS
these types of solution ignore the sociological paradigm of the natural environment.
DISSOLVE THE MEMORY OF THE HOME AND PLABAX PORTABLE TYRANNY
Our speculations attempt to bypass the prejudices and lifestyles of straight architecture and capitalized upon by architects educationalists sociologists planners...
All these projects overlap and coverage around 2 points:
1 an interest in the possible influence of minaturized electric hardware of lifestyles
VIDEO IS PORTABLE BODY MIRROR
2 an interest in the way decision making is becoming decentralized (as observed in fashion, dropout cultures, anarchy) and what this may mean in terms of new software.
THE ELECTRIC ABORIGINE IS A SOCIAL CHAMELEON
VIDEO GUERILLA HAS SPECIAL PSYCHIC DEMANDS
BAC-PAC PRIMER ... looking at the world of the mail order catalogue, of Green Shield stamps and all the advertised networks that feed the soul of suburbia. Out of this we generated BAC-PAC MAN who carried Suburbia and the World's Universities in his PAC; who could also be free from the static physical
restraints of these environments...
THE PRIMITIVE INFRA-NEURAL MIRROR TAPE...
INVISIBLE UNIVERSITY AND ALLOTMENTS are rich in SOFTWARE, because it is necessary in the allotment garden to operate and make useful the residue of the straight industrial society. A JUNK esthetic [sic] and ecological searchlight - in the middle of the city that can only at best be described as a monument to obsolete industrial hardware and economics.
ROCKANDROLL HARDWARE LEADS TO OTHER GRASS STRATEGIES
THE INFRA - NEURAL - ELECTRIC - ABORIGINE or people are walking architecture. A MYTHIC synthesis described in terms of the INAE... perhaps through technology we can achieve a highly developed ECO-SENSORY world like that of the aborigine. (The aborigine is considered a PRIMITIVE when he faces our concept of society. Aren't we in a parallel situation with regard to the potential of technology?) WHY doesn't your university know that it is the Xerox machine on the railway platform, or the anonymous handbag has more to do with learning than the local library?
SCREEN FIGHTING MAN
VIDEO GUERILLA
PRIMITIVE MIRRORS? THAT'S VIDEO GRASS
WE ARE ENTERING PRIMITIVE HETEROGENEITY
Mike Barnard and
David Greene
Archigram, Edited by Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron & Mike Webb, 1972 [reprinted New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999]
