Lunch 13

1 Adapted from "The Beginning of the Cree World," as told by the Saskatchewan Indigenous Cultural Center, http://www.sicc.sk.ca/ archive/heritage/ethnography/cree/ origin/oral.html.

To begin, a trickster tale1:

The Algonquin Cree of North America tell the story of Wisakedjak— commonly anglicized as “Whiskey Jack”—who angered the Creator by allowing men and animals to fight, spilling blood on the clean surface of the newly created Earth. The Creator warned Wisakedjak that if the bloodshed continued, he would be punished, but Wisakedjak didn’t listen: he was having too much fun. The fighting went on, and the bloodshed continued, and gore and entrails were splattered all over the place.

The Creator gave Wisakedjak one more warning, but to no avail, and finally He had had it. He sent all the waters of the world to wash the Earth clean, an oceanic flood that drowned everyone and everything except for an Otter, a Beaver, a Muskrat, and Wisakedjak himself—all four of them bedraggled and clinging to a stray scrap of wood in the middle of an all-consuming sea.

Cool-headed and ever the silver-tongued charmer, Wisakedjak convinced all the animals in turn—first the Otter, then the Beaver, then the tiny Muskrat—to dive to the bottom of the sea and bring him a piece of the old Earth, the drowned Earth that had once been dry. From this he made a small island, and from there, remade the world.

Marc Miller

“Tactical Frivolity ”: A Conversation with Artúr van Balen

The

“Explore

Inflatoborder

Rosa Cristina Corrales Rodriguez, Shannon Ruhl, Donna Ryu, and Michelle Stein

Grafting

Margaretha Haughwout

Ryan Roark, Laura Salazar, and Weiwei

On Friday the 13th of October 2017, the lunch editorial board put out the following call for submissions:

The STATE of THINGS is VERY SERIOUS.

The water is rising, the ice is melting, the forests are on fire, and the land is sinking. The storm is coming! The oceans are ACID! The fish are DYING! Trash is circling and circling in the widening gyre. Every day is a new catastrophe, we’re rushing toward a precipice, we’re out of time, we’re out of luck, we screwed the pooch, dropped the ball, botched the delivery, broke the system, went hurtling down the road of good intentions —we’re sorry, officer—

In design, we’ve been trained to respond with Solutions. So we’ve scaled up, we’ve made maps, we’ve run the numbers, we’ve analyzed the data, and aha! we found the answer: a 40-story apartment building made out of responsive mushroom bricks that cleans the air, collects stormwater, and hooks into a regional transit system to create a network of disruptive makerspaces that in turn will get to work on solving poverty.

Are there other forms or prototypes you’re currently working with, or have you focused recently on the cube shape alone?

A: Ha, yes, it would seem I’m a bit stuck in inflatable cubism. This started in 2012, when we were invited to a Spanish art activists festival in Barcelona called Cómo acabar con el Mal (“How To End Evil”). There was a general strike happening at the time—the whole city was on strike against austerity measures. We made this inflatable cube, and when the riot police came, we threw the cube against the police line. They bounced it back at the crowd, and suddenly there was this involuntary moment of play. We had put them in a kind of decision dilemma, in which they had only a limited number of choices. They could throw the inflatable back, creating a condition of playful interaction; they could try to destroy it, making them look rather foolish and aggressive for attacking a balloon, or they could "arrest" the balloon, which they actually tried to do. They attempted to take the whole balloon and try to squeeze it into the police van. So the cube created this empowerment of the protestor, a flipping of the coin, in which the protestor gained authority over the interaction. We transformed the archetype of the aggressive, stone-throwing protestor into a more empowered, positive actor. Spanish social movements picked up on this, and it became a huge success. We repeated it again later in Berlin.

The cube is one of the most basic shapes to make. It’s very easy to reproduce, helping us to expand the scope of action through decentralized production. People anywhere can follow a few online tutorials and easily create their own. But we’re still updating the cubes,

The Trouble with Alaska

Katie Kelly and Anna Morrison

From the outside looking in, Alaska has been characterized by any number of terms and categories: arctic, wild, frozen waste. The trouble with Alaska is that it cannot be defined simply. “The central paradox of Alaska,” as John McPhee wrote, “is that it is as small as it is large—an immense landscape with so few people in it that language is stretched to call it a frontier, let alone a state.”1 This vastness creates space for contradictions, which, like cracks in pavement, spread wider with each freeze and thaw until, like the potholes in every Alaskan road, they become too large to veer around.

As its native people were collectively labelled “Native Alaskan” despite their differing languages and ways of life, the Alaskan landscape itself has been treated as one simple tract of land. Far from it. Place your hand in front of your face and you will find, perhaps to your surprise, that they are the same size. Do the same with Alaska and the “lower 48” and you will find that it would cover an entire fifth of the US, making it three times larger than Texas. (Alaskans like to mention this with an air of pity.) This land, defined by boundaries indifferent to the waters, contours, or people they cross, leads one to question at what scale Alaska can be understood, and what effect statewide policies have had on the diverse land they govern.

Over 12,000 years ago, the Bering Land Bridge allowed the Tlingit people to cross into Alaska from Siberia. In the 2,000 years that followed, the Athabaskan, Aleut, and Eskimo people settled parts of the

See Andres Jacque, “Grindr Archiurbanism,” LOG 41 (2017): 74-84.

Woof

Evan

How do you know if someone is an architect? They’ll tell you. When perusing profiles on a dating app, how do you know if someone is an architect? They’ll tell you: fountain pen, straight ruler, set square, office building emoji.

Dating apps play an ever-growing role in the social spaces of the contemporary world, yet their relationship to architecture at large has been barely mined. From Tinder and OkCupid to Grindr and Scruff, the implications of these virtual social spaces increasingly play out in very real material places. They sexualize ordinary life, provide new kinds of intersubjectivity, and extend far beyond the frame of a smart phone screen.1

While dating apps saturate the contemporary world, they have a much deeper history interwoven with the expansion of digital media and its effect on hetero- and homo-social relations. In 1965, two Harvard undergraduate students, Jeff Tarr and Vaughan Morrill, developed the 1

Where cities, saunas, homes, and sex clubs once provided the few places where non-heterosexual identities could be expressed, dating and hook-up apps have embedded every space with erotic potential. Though historically rooted in technologies of geolocation and surveillance, can the subversive use of dating apps to create novel digital relationships offer us potential modes of anti-capitalist engagement with which to counter the power structures inherent in the architecture profession?

fig. 3

3

Eric Fritts, "The Kuleshov Effect: Understanding Video Editing’s Most Powerful Tool," Videomaker, July 21, 2015, https://www.videomaker. com/article/c10/18236-thekuleshov-effect-understandingvideo-editing%E2%80%99s-mostpowerful-tool

4

Caroline O’Donnell, Niche Tactics: Generative Relationships Between Architecture and Site (London: Routledge, 2015), 137-153.

imbued with temporal meaning: the black scene in the first example is assumed as a linear jump forward in time, when it could have been a step backwards chronologically that the audience was hitherto unaware of. Ultimately, the way in which the scenes were presented—linearly in sequence—caused the audience to imbue even a solid black screen as not only chronologically, geographically, and narratively significant, but significant in a particular temporal, spatial, and narrative direction.

The relationship of presentation to ideation is exactly what Lev Kuleshov noticed when analyzing his audience. In a now-famous experiment, Kuleshov assembled a montage of actor Ivan Mousjokine making a facial expression. Prior to each shot of Mousjokine’s face were three other shots: one of a bowl of soup, one of a girl in a casket, and one of a woman lying down (fig. 3). To the audience, Mousjokine was seeing the soup and reacting with dismay, seeing the casket and reacting with sadness, seeing the woman and reacting with lust.3

Several sources site that the audience “raved about the acting,” and that they were astounded by Mousjokine’s “subtlety and range.”4 In each case, however, the actor’s face had remained exactly the same. The audience had ascribed an emotion to his expression based on what was shown in the preceding shot, even though the shots were otherwise unrelated. Not only that, but the audience had assumed that the expressions were due to the preceding shot, and not a prescient reaction to the following

“A Mass Outpouring of Love”: A Chat with Planet Earth II: Cities Producer Fredi Devas

The Editors

Kirk (L): While ideas of urban ecology and the urban wild have been discussed in the scientific and design communities since the 1970s, the long-standing tradition within nature documentary films has been to intentionally remove all elements of civilization and the human, in order to capture the wonders of the natural world in their pure and untarnished form. So I find it actually quite revolutionary for a platform such as Planet Earth, arguably the most influential nature program of the past 20 years, to break away from the expectations of its viewers and to present its plant and animal subjects in such an anthropogenic context. The city is presented to global mainstream audiences as an equally rich and dynamic habitat for any number of vibrant ecologies. Can you talk about this decision and what drew you to producing this particular episode?

Fredi (F): Well, my background is in desert ecology, actually, and the challenges animals face living in extreme xeric environments. So when I was brought on to the Planet Earth II team, I think everyone was quite keen that I should work on the desert show. But when I heard there would be an episode exploring cities, I really jumped on that, because I feel that it’s an incredibly important issue to talk about. How does the human species relate to wildlife given that over half of us now live in the urban context, and that that context, as you mentioned, has only recently been described as a potential habitat for nonhuman species in the first place?

Who Framed Us?

I was once thrown out of my office on Gordon Square by Hollywood. The teams of chunky men, divided between hanging around in clumps or shifting things urgently, took up residence, amidst imported hay bales and cans of paint. A period movie, a comedy version of Sherlock Holmes, was being filmed and the detective—or rather his body double—had to fall from an upper window on the neo-Georgian terrace. He falls out of a window and lands on a pavement, not the pavement that I walk on every weekday, which is of York Stone and suitably consistent with the heritage aims of the area which has led the Hollywood location scouts here in the first place. Laid across this pavement are two meters of fake pavement, sitting atop the usual one, darker in color, raising it a couple of inches off the ground. Perhaps it has a more uniform color, and it has not been stained by chewing gum and municipal bleaches and so provides a more pleasing impression to the audience eye that will drift over it for a fraction of a second. Maybe it is a softer surface—a cartoon pavement that won’t damage the stuntman as he falls in the place of the actor. Perhaps he will even bounce, off-camera. It looks like a cartoon pavement. No modulations. Flatly there. It is mobilized for a moment, for as long as it takes to make the stunt happen.

Of course Hollywood manicures reality. It irons out the wrinkles and paints over the blemishes. Never more so than now, with all the computerized and digitized work during production and postproduction that is a key part of all culture industry filmmaking. In doing this, it constructs a hybrid world of actual and virtual impulses. In doing