A confusing reading... A Thousand Plateaus but I really liked getting carried away by chapter six, "How do you become a Body without Organs?"
Deleuze and Guattari were way too abstract so I broke it down to what I'd like to get from it. I came up with two ways to look at it:
1. The body is the Mind
2. The body is our Posthuman Body
If 'body' means the Mind, the imposed limitations (the organs which need up keep like eating and excereting) must be removed in order for the mind to advance. We must become non-material.
Paying attention to human evolution, our physical evolvement hasn't been significant. We've gotten taller, stronger and live longer, and our brains have grown in size and capacity. We must physically evolve, in the same way we've imposed evolution on other biological matter.
Our technology is developing fast and our minds can forsee the possibilities of becoming posthuman. But by being limited in our current physical state, we limit our mind to achieving those possibilities.
I think it is fear.
If the BwO is the body, we must rid the body of its physical limitiations in order to survive in most environments.
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Plantwall
The point is again to adapt ourselves to nature. If we've figured out no-soil, drip irrigation systems for plants to grow and live indoors, what can we learn to alter about our energy and life sustaining abilities? What can we do without and what can we harvest impactless from the System?
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Otto Karvonen
Urban Space Occupation Kit
An example of public space for private use. The idea of using any available space is odd because of our programmed way of accepting our activities to be designated to spaces. The essence of our activities are the same, we may only go about the process of doing it differently. Why should our activities be enclosed and private if we are doing the same things? For many it is an issue of privacy and
safety.
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R. Buckminister Fuller
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
The important concept mention in the Manual which we pay no attention to is 'synergy.' Coined by Fuller, synergy means we can not understand the whole by understanding it's parts.
Earth came with lots of room for error to allow for her ignorant inhabitants to evolve. As we've evolved, Earth's room for error has slowly shrunk. We are at a point were we have learned much about all the parts and micro ecosystems that create our greater ecosystem. We have also figured out how our behaviour has messed up a beautifully self-contained environment which recycles and regenerates on her own, but we still don't fully understand the whole system and ultimately we pose as a threat to new ecosystems we may inhabit in the future. The reason being that we are programmed in our ways of living by hastey consumerism and capitalism and 'unnaturally' we will take these erroneous methods with us.
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We have an urge to build. Nature is treated as a side-order, becoming an attraction and a marketing tool. At one point we came from nature, now we package and sell what is left of it in holiday safari trips. Why do we disregard nature as a habitat for humans and immediately build? Why should nature be reduced to symbolism, poetics and abstraction in products, art and architecture? Like ubiquitous computing, why are we not thinking ubiquitous habitation where 'we' are inferior to nature, just as the computer is inferior to human biology? How do we seamlessly occupy and integrate with nature without disrupting it?
What is a natural habitat? If systematically built-up—as a molecular gastronomist builds food—would a built environment with a base of nature (as processed as it may be) be possible and would it integrate with us naturally?
What is architecture? Our activities define architecture; architecture facilitates our activities. A space to rest, a space to cook, a space to love, a space to learn. Must all spaces be built? Can we define our activities in open space? Does that space become architecture for our activities?
Summer 2006. Grant and I were apartment hunting. We tapped into someone's personal wifi at the corner of Idaho and 9th. Though homeless, we found a homebase in an unfamiliar city, returning to that location throughout the day. That corner of 'public' space morphed temporarily into 'our' space, creating an invisible home for our homesearching activity. Can that space be defined as architecture? What if like wifi, we can tap into Earth's electromagnetic fields for our activities?
What limits our activites on Earth? What defines our activites as Earthlings?
Earth-mineral base.
Gravity.
Photosynthesis.
Spirituality.
Emotions.
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One of my favourite artists is
Mary Mattingly.
Her visions of the future can be seen as either post-apocolyptic or as alternatives for future planetary colonizations.
An article I recently read by Seth Roberts, professor at UC Berkeley Psychology department, touched on 'Stone Age' diets as a healthier eating habit to maintain weight and healthy sleep—basically cutting processed foods and eating foods in their natural state. If a 'Stone Age' diet is proven to be healthier, would other aspects of Stone Age life improve our chances of not screwing up the next planet we inhabit?
The initial purpose of 'architecture' was as shelter from the elements. It was a cave and then a simple tree hut made of four branch columns holding a roof of leaves. Maybe that's way too basic to regress to, but with the possibilities we have today in terms of new fabrics and new materials as various skins to protect us from heat, cold, rain and ice, wearing our shelter like a snail is not impossible. Networking and communication technologies are already being built into our garments, such as NASA's gloves with sewn remotes for rovers, therefore wearing our work, play and networks is definately not impossible.
100% snail is probably too extreme and impossible for the way we have set up our societies to function, but building less is possible and changing our ways is inevitable. Overtime, we should not be altering the natural state of our environment, but should instead mess with our own evolution. We will die and be continuously replaced by new generations which will further evolve to adapt to their planet. The natural planet should always be there.
This method is the extreme opposite of what we are living right now. And as Fuller argues in
Operating Manual to Spaceship Earth over specialization will kill a specie if it's environment changes from what it has adapted itself to. I guess that's something to think about.
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Our daily forecast right
here.
What we tend to forget is the System, and how it is placed and functioning perfectly to allow for human life (humans in our current state of evolution). Reading the numbers on the intensity of the weather outside should make us reconsider screwing up the next possible home we set up because we don't have many other livable planets pinned on the map.
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