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Retroactive Manifestos
Many manifestoes have been written during the last century by architects wanting to lay claim to new territory for their practice. Some of the ones that come to mind are the Futurists in Italy, the Constructivists in Russia, and French architect Le Corbusier who was seen in Russia as the prototype of the New Man who would emerge from the social revolution, capable of bridging the gap between science, the arts, and technology. The main inspiration for their manifestos was the machine age which would change everything, to the point of putting in question their own profession. Le Corbusier, for example, proclaimed that the environment of the future would no longer be built by architects but by engineers taking their clues from airplanes, cars and ocean liners.
Years later, writer/architect Rem Koolhaas observed that very few buildings were ever built on the basis of these manifestos, while across the ocean the great metropolis of Manhattan had spontaneously emerged in the absence of any intellectual discourse whatsoever.
When Le Corbusier first laid eyes on New York City he was overcome with jealousy that everything he had conceived of in his mind was already realized (mostly by engineers who typically aren’t prone to write about such things), and he went on to publicly decry the skyscrapers as too small and corrupted by decorative facades that were painfully at odds with his modernist vision. In an attempt to do New York one better he presented his baffled American hosts with a superior alternative: horizontal skyscrapers!
A few decades later, Rem Koolhaas is fascinated by Le Corbusier’s rage, as well as the ambivalence felt by Salvador Dali, who is more shocked by New York than the New Yorkers are by him. Both men were preceded by Sigmund Freud who visited the New World in 1901 and declared America “a gigantic mistake”. Rather than fessing up to his own envy, Rem sets out to write his career making book “Delirious New York”, which includes a hilarious chapter on the city’s jealous European visitors. In a characteristic master stroke, he conceives of the book as a retroactive manifesto, which allows him to become the self-appointed “ghost writer” for the unsung heroes who built the city and in the process claim some of Manhattan’s glory for himself.
To Koolhaas’ generation the machine age had long since become common place. He was more interested in the city as a “social condensor” and proclaimed that “the culture of congestion is the culture of the 20th Century.” As opposed to the earlier manifestos that didn’t seem to foster any results, the book started his career, but like the architectural thinkers before him, it would still take many years before his own buildings would be realized. By that time the ever growing congestion he foresaw went hand in hand with widespread consumerism. And before long the computer age was threatening the status quo of established institutions which started to increasingly reach out to “starchitects” for final architectural affirmation of their once undisputed place in the scheme of history. Indeed, by the time the internet rolled around,once again everything began to change, and there was hardly any intellectual discourse to reinforce the major engineering feat that would accomplish this.
During World War II one early pioneer of the internet, Vannevar Bush, was coordinating 6000 scientists for the application of science to warfare. Looking ahead he advised his team of scientists that once the fighting had ceased they should turn their attention to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering repository of knowledge. Two decades later scientist Douglas Engelbart started a research program at Stanford, which was also funded by the military and devopted the augmentation of human intellect by using computers. This research led him to the all-important invention of the mouse.
Who signed these men’s paychecks is ultimately irrelevant. What counts is that they provided us with the backbone of the current internet – a feat of computer engineering and collective genius that was even more seminal for human progress than the buildings of Manhattan rising from the grid into the skies, stacked around gravity-defying elevator shafts.
Thinking about this, it struck me that, since its inception, much of the writing and thinking on SpaceCollective can be looked at as a retroactive manifesto for the internet, which - like Rem Koolhaas’ book – might allow us to share some credit for its collective genius after the fact. This certainly isn’t an uncommon strategy for those who call themselves futurists, nor is it contradictory to taking a proactive stance. Just look at (engineer) Ray Kurzweil who extrapolated the historical equation of Moore’s Law into his far-reaching Singularity theory, which may once again change everything.
Many of us on this site advocate a similar revolution of consciousness, based on the ever increasing connectivity of the internet and the collective genius from which it has emerged.
In this context, one could argue that the dismay about New York its esteemed visitors from Europe felt at the time was at least partially due to the fact that no individual could lay claim to its inception. Both its grandeur and its failings seemed like the spontaneous outcome of an emergent event. However, no matter how much Le Corbusier had once exalted the role of anonymous engineers in the age of modernity, the fact that no single genius, like himself, was present at the city’s birth, ultimately proved counter-intuitive to his decidedly European mindset.
I have often wondered to what extent the complexity and connectivity of our time is still capable of producing and nurturing the individual genius attributed to the likes of Le Corbusier. Over time I have met a fair share of people the world has endowed with genius status, but these days I can’t help but feel that there is something truly antiquated about the concept.
A few weeks ago I came across a thread initiated by Wildcat who posted an article from MSNBC which posed the question: Does groupthink harm diversity and innovation?
In response, Mushin Schilling states that “the answer to the title is NO. This is still coming from the premise that there are these creative geniuses who, after deep thinking, come up with something brilliant whereas innovation, I'm sure, nowadays comes from groups of creative people, loosely interconnected, that openly share their ideas and then someone happens to put formerly unconnected things together in an innovative way...”
Shortly after, Wildcat happens upon another response in the form of a Kevin Kelly article about Brian Eno’s “Scenius” concept:
As a filmmaker, I work in an extremely collaborative medium, and the same can certainly be said for a musician like Brian Eno, who is a music producer for other people’s bands before he is a solo artist or for that matter a futurist.
Without wanting to bother the reader with my personal biography right now, let me just mention that I once had a film group that was very much opposed to the creative hierarchy imposed by the French Cinema d’Auteur with its relentless focus on the director, often at the expense of actors, writers, cameramen, production designers, effects supervisors, composers, etc. There were five of us, including Jan de Bont who started out as a cameraman and went on to direct Hollywood blockbusters, and, as it happens, the above mentioned architect Rem Koolhaas. We made a series of successful short films in each of which one of us would alternate as star, director, writer or cameraman, and we even published a number of manifestos about our democratic ambitions for the medium. Though our ideas proved very controversial at the time, this collective effort started our careers, and most of us have continued to pursue collaborative working models whenever possible.
Before the French auteur theory got hold of America, Hollywood revolved around a studio model that drew from a vast roster of in house talents who identified with the studio’s distinct sensibilities and were collectively responsible for Hollywood’s Golden Age.
In today’s Hollywood, the sole organization that has enjoyed a golden decade of its own is Pixar, whose computer animated movies have consistently been highly rewarding, both creatively and at the box office. At Pixar, all creative people share in the company’s successes, and it’s in-house animators, writers and directors all work together to assure the best possible outcome for every one of its pictures, regardless of their final job description on any particular production. It helps of course that the company is fully entrenched in the digital culture which provides mutual access to everybody’s networked computer, and a strong Silicon Valley pedigree in contrast to a backwards film industry which hasn’t been able to figure out the magic that makes Pixar one of the most critically acclaimed film studios of all time. Clearly, this success story is a shining example of the collective genius that is deeply ingrained in the digital age.
Every expression of the collective genius described above revolves around emerging technologies, from the elevator and the mouse to HTML and animation software. And in almost every instance, it concerns collaborations between engineers, developers and interface designers who create the tools, which consequently become a medium that generates new content. To stay close to home, even as we contemplate Wildcat’s notion of a polytopian mind habitat, Spacewaver’s call for a new mind, or SpaceCollective’s early references to a collective consciousness, we all know that on some level we are contributing to a retroactive manifesto for the world transforming powers of the internet itself, whose system is our essential idiom of expression. As proper heirs to Marshall McLuhan, to whom I referred in my last post, we have reached a stage where the medium and the content it promotes are deeply intertwined. Or to put it differently, one could say that our discourse is rooted in both the tools we have been handed and the future tools we desire.
Right now the tools that encourage “scenius” are scattered all across the web, from Twitter and Tumblr to Facebook, Friendfeed, etc. A collaborative open source tool - Google Wave -which will allow users to edit each other’s content is on the way, and there no doubt is a lot more to come, and even more to be desired in the pursuit of our game changing ambitions which have been stirred by science and technology.
But thus far, no single online platform is properly equipped to harness the true potential of our collective genius. So it’s up to each of us to individually cobble things together, which luckily is something the internet excels at. In fact, no infrastructure that went before it has ever been as jury-rigged as the worldwide web and its unwieldy contents. Part of its emergent genius is that hardly anybody ever seems to know which online initiatives will fly and for what exact purpose. The people who ended up developing Flickr set out to create an online game (The Game Never Ending), Twitter was initially perceived as a quirky fad, Craigslist was a small email community featuring local events in San Francisco, while MySpace morphed from a virtual storage space into a social network with a completely unexpected emphasis on music and Facebook was born from a prank.
In this context, it is of interest to mention the soon to be launched Cargo platform, which was spawned by SpaceCollective and produced by founding members Folkert & Josh (check out SC’s now much emulated card-look and Folkert’s SC Gallery).
The initial release of Cargo is a creative publishing platform where users can present their multimedia content and create personal networks, "following" whoever they want. But in the near future it hopes to offer many functionalities that will allow people to easily create their own scalable communities and collaborative work spaces, and continue to evolve into an all-encompassing compendium of the latest web technologies.
Who knows, from the site’s versatile templates a colony of Polytopian mind habitats may suddenly emerge, which – like the skyscrapers of Manhattan rising from its urban grid – will one day merit a retroactive manifesto of its own.
Years later, writer/architect Rem Koolhaas observed that very few buildings were ever built on the basis of these manifestos, while across the ocean the great metropolis of Manhattan had spontaneously emerged in the absence of any intellectual discourse whatsoever.
When Le Corbusier first laid eyes on New York City he was overcome with jealousy that everything he had conceived of in his mind was already realized (mostly by engineers who typically aren’t prone to write about such things), and he went on to publicly decry the skyscrapers as too small and corrupted by decorative facades that were painfully at odds with his modernist vision. In an attempt to do New York one better he presented his baffled American hosts with a superior alternative: horizontal skyscrapers!
A few decades later, Rem Koolhaas is fascinated by Le Corbusier’s rage, as well as the ambivalence felt by Salvador Dali, who is more shocked by New York than the New Yorkers are by him. Both men were preceded by Sigmund Freud who visited the New World in 1901 and declared America “a gigantic mistake”. Rather than fessing up to his own envy, Rem sets out to write his career making book “Delirious New York”, which includes a hilarious chapter on the city’s jealous European visitors. In a characteristic master stroke, he conceives of the book as a retroactive manifesto, which allows him to become the self-appointed “ghost writer” for the unsung heroes who built the city and in the process claim some of Manhattan’s glory for himself.To Koolhaas’ generation the machine age had long since become common place. He was more interested in the city as a “social condensor” and proclaimed that “the culture of congestion is the culture of the 20th Century.” As opposed to the earlier manifestos that didn’t seem to foster any results, the book started his career, but like the architectural thinkers before him, it would still take many years before his own buildings would be realized. By that time the ever growing congestion he foresaw went hand in hand with widespread consumerism. And before long the computer age was threatening the status quo of established institutions which started to increasingly reach out to “starchitects” for final architectural affirmation of their once undisputed place in the scheme of history. Indeed, by the time the internet rolled around,once again everything began to change, and there was hardly any intellectual discourse to reinforce the major engineering feat that would accomplish this.
During World War II one early pioneer of the internet, Vannevar Bush, was coordinating 6000 scientists for the application of science to warfare. Looking ahead he advised his team of scientists that once the fighting had ceased they should turn their attention to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering repository of knowledge. Two decades later scientist Douglas Engelbart started a research program at Stanford, which was also funded by the military and devopted the augmentation of human intellect by using computers. This research led him to the all-important invention of the mouse.
Who signed these men’s paychecks is ultimately irrelevant. What counts is that they provided us with the backbone of the current internet – a feat of computer engineering and collective genius that was even more seminal for human progress than the buildings of Manhattan rising from the grid into the skies, stacked around gravity-defying elevator shafts.Thinking about this, it struck me that, since its inception, much of the writing and thinking on SpaceCollective can be looked at as a retroactive manifesto for the internet, which - like Rem Koolhaas’ book – might allow us to share some credit for its collective genius after the fact. This certainly isn’t an uncommon strategy for those who call themselves futurists, nor is it contradictory to taking a proactive stance. Just look at (engineer) Ray Kurzweil who extrapolated the historical equation of Moore’s Law into his far-reaching Singularity theory, which may once again change everything.
Many of us on this site advocate a similar revolution of consciousness, based on the ever increasing connectivity of the internet and the collective genius from which it has emerged.
In this context, one could argue that the dismay about New York its esteemed visitors from Europe felt at the time was at least partially due to the fact that no individual could lay claim to its inception. Both its grandeur and its failings seemed like the spontaneous outcome of an emergent event. However, no matter how much Le Corbusier had once exalted the role of anonymous engineers in the age of modernity, the fact that no single genius, like himself, was present at the city’s birth, ultimately proved counter-intuitive to his decidedly European mindset.
I have often wondered to what extent the complexity and connectivity of our time is still capable of producing and nurturing the individual genius attributed to the likes of Le Corbusier. Over time I have met a fair share of people the world has endowed with genius status, but these days I can’t help but feel that there is something truly antiquated about the concept.
A few weeks ago I came across a thread initiated by Wildcat who posted an article from MSNBC which posed the question: Does groupthink harm diversity and innovation?
In response, Mushin Schilling states that “the answer to the title is NO. This is still coming from the premise that there are these creative geniuses who, after deep thinking, come up with something brilliant whereas innovation, I'm sure, nowadays comes from groups of creative people, loosely interconnected, that openly share their ideas and then someone happens to put formerly unconnected things together in an innovative way...”
Shortly after, Wildcat happens upon another response in the form of a Kevin Kelly article about Brian Eno’s “Scenius” concept:
Brian Eno suggests the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or "scenes" can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: "Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius. Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenius, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you.”
As a filmmaker, I work in an extremely collaborative medium, and the same can certainly be said for a musician like Brian Eno, who is a music producer for other people’s bands before he is a solo artist or for that matter a futurist.
Without wanting to bother the reader with my personal biography right now, let me just mention that I once had a film group that was very much opposed to the creative hierarchy imposed by the French Cinema d’Auteur with its relentless focus on the director, often at the expense of actors, writers, cameramen, production designers, effects supervisors, composers, etc. There were five of us, including Jan de Bont who started out as a cameraman and went on to direct Hollywood blockbusters, and, as it happens, the above mentioned architect Rem Koolhaas. We made a series of successful short films in each of which one of us would alternate as star, director, writer or cameraman, and we even published a number of manifestos about our democratic ambitions for the medium. Though our ideas proved very controversial at the time, this collective effort started our careers, and most of us have continued to pursue collaborative working models whenever possible.
Before the French auteur theory got hold of America, Hollywood revolved around a studio model that drew from a vast roster of in house talents who identified with the studio’s distinct sensibilities and were collectively responsible for Hollywood’s Golden Age.
In today’s Hollywood, the sole organization that has enjoyed a golden decade of its own is Pixar, whose computer animated movies have consistently been highly rewarding, both creatively and at the box office. At Pixar, all creative people share in the company’s successes, and it’s in-house animators, writers and directors all work together to assure the best possible outcome for every one of its pictures, regardless of their final job description on any particular production. It helps of course that the company is fully entrenched in the digital culture which provides mutual access to everybody’s networked computer, and a strong Silicon Valley pedigree in contrast to a backwards film industry which hasn’t been able to figure out the magic that makes Pixar one of the most critically acclaimed film studios of all time. Clearly, this success story is a shining example of the collective genius that is deeply ingrained in the digital age.Every expression of the collective genius described above revolves around emerging technologies, from the elevator and the mouse to HTML and animation software. And in almost every instance, it concerns collaborations between engineers, developers and interface designers who create the tools, which consequently become a medium that generates new content. To stay close to home, even as we contemplate Wildcat’s notion of a polytopian mind habitat, Spacewaver’s call for a new mind, or SpaceCollective’s early references to a collective consciousness, we all know that on some level we are contributing to a retroactive manifesto for the world transforming powers of the internet itself, whose system is our essential idiom of expression. As proper heirs to Marshall McLuhan, to whom I referred in my last post, we have reached a stage where the medium and the content it promotes are deeply intertwined. Or to put it differently, one could say that our discourse is rooted in both the tools we have been handed and the future tools we desire.
Right now the tools that encourage “scenius” are scattered all across the web, from Twitter and Tumblr to Facebook, Friendfeed, etc. A collaborative open source tool - Google Wave -which will allow users to edit each other’s content is on the way, and there no doubt is a lot more to come, and even more to be desired in the pursuit of our game changing ambitions which have been stirred by science and technology.
But thus far, no single online platform is properly equipped to harness the true potential of our collective genius. So it’s up to each of us to individually cobble things together, which luckily is something the internet excels at. In fact, no infrastructure that went before it has ever been as jury-rigged as the worldwide web and its unwieldy contents. Part of its emergent genius is that hardly anybody ever seems to know which online initiatives will fly and for what exact purpose. The people who ended up developing Flickr set out to create an online game (The Game Never Ending), Twitter was initially perceived as a quirky fad, Craigslist was a small email community featuring local events in San Francisco, while MySpace morphed from a virtual storage space into a social network with a completely unexpected emphasis on music and Facebook was born from a prank.
In this context, it is of interest to mention the soon to be launched Cargo platform, which was spawned by SpaceCollective and produced by founding members Folkert & Josh (check out SC’s now much emulated card-look and Folkert’s SC Gallery).
The initial release of Cargo is a creative publishing platform where users can present their multimedia content and create personal networks, "following" whoever they want. But in the near future it hopes to offer many functionalities that will allow people to easily create their own scalable communities and collaborative work spaces, and continue to evolve into an all-encompassing compendium of the latest web technologies.
Who knows, from the site’s versatile templates a colony of Polytopian mind habitats may suddenly emerge, which – like the skyscrapers of Manhattan rising from its urban grid – will one day merit a retroactive manifesto of its own.
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