Fictionalising Ecology
Federica Zambeletti:
Hi there, and welcome to the second season of the Architectures of Planetary Well-Being podcast. The Architectures of Planetary Well-Being is a podcast exploring the interconnection of our social and ecological systems. Season two of the podcast is curated under the heading Between Us, presented by the re:arc institute and KoozArch. Between Us is a series of intimate conversations shared between two critical practitioners operating across architecture, art, curation, illustration, design, and literature. Across generational and geographical space, their discussions will move through shared aspects of practice to reach infinitely larger and more pressing issues on and around the roles of cultural practice for planetary well-being. The conversations are intended to provoke still more responses and further discussions, from micro to macro, with and led by emerging and further underrepresented communities. The guests chosen for these conversations are innovative thinkers and practitioners who we believe remain committed to the critical reframing of their disciplines and their attendant discourse.
These intimate yet wide-reaching exchanges aim to reflect the need for interdisciplinary conversation and unsiloed imagination in order to attempt the realization of a more just, caring, and restorative world.
Today, we're going to hear from architect and artist, Lawrence Lek. In conversation with the mixed reality architect, Leah Wulfman. You'll also hear from me. My name is Federica Zambeletti. I'm the founding editor of KoozArch, and I joined Leah and Lawrence on this exchange. To introduce them both, Leah Wulfman is a self-titled carrier bag architect, educator, game designer, digital puppeteer, and occasional writer. Trained as an architect, Wulfman has been assembling hybrid, virtual and physical spaces in order to prototype new relationships to technology and nature, as well as challenge normative ideologies so often reinforced by technology and architecture. In addition to mixed reality installations that play with and emphasize the physical, material basis of everything digital, they're presently working on a research series focusing on gamified environments, interactions, and materials.
Lawrence Lek is an artist exploring the myths of technological progress in an age of artificial intelligence. Drawing from traditions of assemblage across architecture, cinema, and sound, Lek employs vernacular media, including video games, electronic music, industrial products, essay films, and digital animation to develop interconnected worlds that interrogate concepts of AI, its capacity for consciousness, and the emergence of post-human identity.
I would like to start from the title of re:arc's podcast, which is Architectures of Planetary Well-Being. As practitioners who operate within the realm of the virtual and engage in world-building, how do you define and approach the term “planetary” in your reciprocal practices?
Leah Wulfman:
Hey, good morning. Big questions. Wonderful questions. And I would say my practice is predominantly directed towards experiments with mixed reality, and I see that as I teach, but I also have my own practice in which I kind of address and bridge current gaps existing within design methodologies used in digital and physical spaces and with objects. And I often refer to what I do as non-binary tech. And I think maybe a good way to start to tackle this question is just by explaining: non-binary tech, in multiple ways, is misusing—and basically an evolving pursuit of physical and digital play—but misusing high and state-of-the-art technologies. And within that, I just want to say non-binary tech also is quite personal. So my pronouns are they/them, and that's also within planetary thinking—I think, to some extent, always thinking that the singular is also always plural. So there's not merely an “I”; there's always a “we” involved. There's a kind of collective thinking involved and a collective participation involved.
And that's just to say within broader personal and politics, I think of the local as always being planetary, that there's necessarily no distinctions in the way we operate today. And on the scales of technology, there's planetary computation that's leading to things… That’s planetary skins, which is like planetary-scale sensing apparatuses. And I would just want to say that's almost—and I have a background as a mathematician—so that's almost beyond what we think of as the three-body problem or chaos theory from on Henri Poincaré, or beyond the Butterfly Effect, which we think of as the sheer local of the butterfly’s wings that create the cause-and-effect that could cause the tornado of the world over. But we're seeing that stock markets are literally tied and reciprocally influencing stuff, from the digging for minerals by human hands or by machines and open-pit mines and quarries across the globe, and changes in landscape being literally forecasted in real time.
So I think to some extent, it's also a question of ecologies and technologies being inevitably bound with one another today. And a lot of my work actually stems from just that question too—but almost like that… If we even think about extinct species or just species, death is literally almost an act of design by some person. Some people literally designed this all. And so I would say, it's a weird success or failure of design in that I'm thinking, as it pertains to my practice, in my teaching, the personal planetary politics are always there, and that's because I can't and I won't separate the personal from the political, or the will to teach from the will to share in conversation or expand our ways of knowing and being in the world.
And so I think it's like, there's no more here or there, there's no remote or in-person or streamed or unnoticed, if we're thinking about planetary thinking today. There's also the insistence on the digital and the physical as being separate to begin with. I see them as entirely intertwined, so calls for planetary thinking—also because the Cloud is not just something that is ephemeral, it's something that is with which data is stored. Data centers literally affect the weather. Data usage affects global ocean temperatures. And if we are looking at the laptops that are in front of us, the rare earth minerals that are in front of them or, say, the metals that are in Tesla batteries have very real material ramifications that affect people and landscapes everywhere. The thinking that's necessary if we're thinking about the planetary is to think just beyond binaries. So, a big part of my practice is doing that. And we tend to separate, oftentimes, here from there or digital from physical. But I would say, within the realm of collective well-being and planetary well-being as we go into the future, it will require us to think beyond binary and require us to think maybe more imaginally towards plurality.
Lawrence Lek:
Yeah, no, thanks Leah. I think actually it's interesting for me, because I don't think I've ever used the term “planetary” myself. “Planetary” presupposes that the world is defined by earth as being a planet, a planet that can be treated as a totality, and that's like a product of kind of blue-marble images and ecological world consciousness, I feel. I don't know. For me, personally—and the idea of world building is… Obviously it has the sci-fi ramifications and so on—but for me it's about a subjective placement or perspective, or basically it's really about a personal point of view, whether that's in terms of an existential narrative or what Donna Haraway would call a situated point of view. Because I feel, actually, to be critical about the idea of a planetary-scale infrastructure and things like that, I can't help but feel—obviously, there's the sublime potential and the ecological responsibility of a shared consciousness—but I can't help but feel somehow that it is also part of a larger modernist project to create equality out of what has clearly massive regional difference.
When I was a student—what does architecture mean in specificity? I was much more drawn to kind of vernacular adaptation as opposed to modernist, generic systems of design. And so, as I formed these in my own projects like CGI world and narratives, it almost hasn't emerged… Almost accidentally. It's always really about, basically, a nomadic or wandering perspective within a world that hasn't been designed for that individual. So I think it's really healthy for design broadly, as a field, to engage with holistic points of view with planetary computation and all these sorts of things. But for me personally, the world-building is always much more a personal world that of course you need to create. You need to externalize that somehow, in my case, through virtual worlds and set design in films and so on. But yeah, it's always really to communicate a individual point of view or even story or journey within that.
LW:
As you say this, I twice taught a class that's all on trash and recycling and kind of it's leading to a project. But basically, thinking about story, space—and just the question of storage too, which operates from maybe a student's desktop all the way up to what we think of as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In order to have these conversations, you actually have to think and collapse digital and physical worlds, and that is a world-building potential in and of itself—just to undo the separations that we have to deal with and have been passed down and constructed.
But so, the students basically start by… Assignment one is that they have to make an assemblage out of the contents of the recycle bin. And that's the recycle bin, like the physical trash bin, but also the recycle bin on their desktop. And so the assemblage literally asked them to work in a mixed-media manner and most of them are coming from architecture backgrounds, so they immediately go to perspective in that world-building. So I'm also interested, Lawrence, about what you mean by that personal perspective.
But we all think about then questions of automation, how we sort information, storage, color, how we can even decipher the world of trash. But then that stems... I took them to this exhibition by this artist, Robin Frohardt. She’s trained as a puppeteer but also filmmaker, and her whole exhibition was this thing called the Plastic Bag Store, taken from that… vasic world-building can start from literally anything, like one piece of a gum wrapper, versus we think of it as something where it has to be so overarching sometimes.
So she recreates an entire grocery store from reuse plastic bags. And within that, she makes a bunch of puppet films, but it stems from this idea that she got into where classic archeology—because after 50 years or so, things start entering the material record or the archeological record, and we have to contend with them as artifacts. So how do we understand these as artifacts, whether we're with them or separated from them?It's just an amazing thing, where one of the films she repackages this idea of “the dump” and the way it has operated in single-use plastics, which are new plastics. Originally, they were thought to be sustainable, but then they enter a framework where single-use plastics became a thing that was designed along with planned obsolescence. And so she considers, what if there… On Greek pottery, she does an act of world-building that they actually told us about these single-use vessels. So she imagines, basically, these Greek vessels being capitalized upon, people drinking out of them, and then throwing them in the ocean and they accumulate. But basically, just saying, in order to think about these such things, we always have to think in other landscapes. And James Carse has Finite and Infinite Games. He has this thing that we always think of nature… It is only because we nature as a resource versus a source that we even have this concept of trash to begin with, because we were always othering and seeing ourself as separate. I'm just curious in terms of how you define the personal perspective within that also for yourself, Lawrence.
LL:
I don't think I've ever tried to define it, but I feel… I guess it's a way to just navigate a terrain of uncertainty. I guess with early virtual world projects, I would actually think of them more as surveys of the existing, or landscape drawing or something like that. So of course, like you're saying, sometimes it veers towards the perspectival. But for me, I think the world-building thing—it's something that acts as an accumulation of media. For me, it's sound, video, maybe games, sometimes or physical installs. So, I don't know—I feel my instinct is to just think of things not biographically, but materially, in terms of things I've experienced. Because I think one thing that I found quite hard to bridge between, always, was huge concepts, like planetary-scale infrastructures and things like that, and my own lived experience—basically of being like, okay, I encounter a street at night.
And of course, you can reverse-engineer like a gum wrapper and be like, okay, it's part of massive industrial supply chain and things like that. But I don't know. For me, it's hard to define, but this phenomenal or existential or perceptual basis for making things is what I'm instinctively drawn to, I suppose, as much as theoretical ideas.I'm actually interested in going back to this idea of waste. Obviously, it has a huge relevance in terms of e-waste, technological waste, recycling, and so on. Infrastructurally, there is a huge waste in computing: inefficient processes like using more energy than is needed, trash bins of prototypes that are never used.
But what is waste, mathematically? So what do I mean by that? To me, I have an image of the process of mathematics as something quite pure, but the practice of mathematics is something that involves a lot of working out, a lot of dead ends and calculations and so on. So, I just wonder, could you help me understand how would you define waste mathematically? Is it this kind of entropic byproduct of trying to create some perfect calculation, or do you see it as something more material?
LW:
I think it's like a want for purity, in a way. As if we can design things so seamlessly, but it's like, that's actually not how the world works. If we look at ecosystems—the most nurturing ecosystem, to some extent, is where death is a part of it. There's literally the fallen needles for the evergreen that's all around, but that's not calculated within the pure mathematics of things. There's an interesting history even to the number zero—that even certain concepts, being beyond certain cultures, but within, so ingrained with other cultures. So there is a fundamental difference, even, in the mathematics of just perspectives from one culture to the next, from human thinking to ecological thinking, that I think it's basically… It's a miscalculation more than anything else. It's like we have to build so much waste within a system to get it to function quite right in a way, nowadays. I'm just thinking in the US, half of our food is put to waste or we build in systems that make people sick or animals sick. And I think that's just a byproduct of, actually, we think things work like clockwork, but that's a huge method of oppression on other people, but also on other parts of the planet, as we think about it.
So yeah, I think that's a really, actually, wonderful question. I think if anything, it's potentially a miscalculation in the way that things actually operate in the world.
LL:
No, it's really interesting. Because I can't help but think as well, with systems design, you have built-in redundancy, so you design a system to operate at 150% capacity, assuming that it will never be like that. But the line between a redundancy, buffer, waste, and excess—I think they're all different points on the same spectrum, presumably. It's super interesting.
In terms of my work, it's not specifically dealing with waste and ecology as a phenomenon, but I'm just very interested in how these global issues are treated in a design sort of way, as if their problems can be designed away. But yeah, it's a much bigger issue with designing for excess and to what extent that can be deliberately designed away. Or what is the level of waste that will always be present in any functioning system—whether that waste is half the food is thrown away or death is part of the system. You, with your teaching students, can go into this question of entropy, and then you get some meta-level meta-design stuff. How do your students face with that? It requires really sophisticated post-design, I guess.
LW:
It's also a question of newness to some extent, too. I think this happens also in the context of world- building to some extent, and that's a little bit of the gum wrapper of some sort, of Wrigley’s or whatever background story that you can glean from objects out in the world that exist already. We've both backgrounds in architecture and I've historically taught mostly in media art and architecture. So it's interesting just thinking about how much we're designing anew each and every time.
And I love this idea that even when we're meant to deal with trash and contend with trash, and we take students—and this is a course I taught twice as a seminar course, but it could have easily been a studio—we take them to the Goodwill outlet which, basically here it's called The Bins, but it's all sorts of organization and sorting methods that then throw everything into a bin. It's after you've gone through all the Goodwills out in the world, and then it's all the things that are left over before they're basically trashed or given out and sorted to different facilities to be sold. So it's either trashed or sold, and they're kind of gleaning this kind of last question of value. So it's really interesting because we go there, students then sort through all the bins, find their own sorting methods for these—which is something that makes one sound, right? So different ways of thinking about how you can understand trash through a human lens, but also even questions of machine intelligence. How do we actually understand? And of course, that's only by immersion, and then Goodwill outs are amazing, because then everything is paid for by weight. So we all end up all putting our stuff in one shopping cart and then just leaving and pay 50 bucks for 15 students for all their stuff.
I had a friend who came—he's a painter from Germany, who said in order to… “In our school system, we had to go to the concentration camps to contend with our history.” And he said, "I think anyone that's involved within material worlds and cultures today should have to go to the dump." And so within the art and architecture context, that any point of education to some extent or anything that we do in the world, has to contend with what's already there and what we're producing actively. So within that, we always think of architecture and world-building as something that we start fresh, oftentimes. We start from a story. That story or that design leads to another part of the story. But ultimately, there's already stories and histories everywhere. So I just find it really interesting because within an architecture context, just going through the practice of dealing what's already there—from putting found objects within models and not necessarily designing everything anew, because we're always taught to design everything anew. So I think it's also just a rethinking of the way we engage the world today.
LL:
No, totally, I think this idea of digital reuse is really crucial. Just going back to this garbage waste analogy, a field trip I did years ago. I went to a combined heat and power plant. Basically, they just burn stuff for energy. And I think when I realized that my old paradigm, my naive paradigm that you put stuff in the recycle bin and then magic elves sort it into different piles… And then that evaporated. They just take it in a truck and they just burn it, which is the lowest common denominator, when plastic goes back to being basically the hydrocarbon being burnt for energy.
When you are saying with the clothes, you take out the Gucci shoes or whatever and what's left after all the and even after the Goodwill jeans are gone, it's like the lowest potential economic value state of material goods in that clothing cycle that then gets, presumably, either gets shipped off somewhere else or burnt for energy. So I guess just, conceptually, I find this idea of the waste and trash in this entropic cycle fascinating as well, but also in how it relates to value. Because in my own work as a digital artist as well, I totally agree. If you spend three weeks making a teapot, you're going to make sure that bloody teapot is in every single shop because your emotional investment gives you an insane bias. Or if your friend made it, you're like… You're not going to tell them, “I'm not using your wonderful prop.” So I think that somehow, this… Or actually, not giving away that old T-shirt with loads of holes that is clearly seen, should go, but you're just so bonded with it.But I feel like as a digital sculptor as well, this idea of the value of the digital object as well, and the waste and trash, it's like—do I upgrade my hard drive or do I just delete that folder? How possessive you are over your digital property now that we don't have much material property—that, sometimes, is the best we can do. It's a really interesting kind of value judgment as well. And it's also, I feel… Part of the reason I personally turned to so much digital making was that I just didn't have space in the studio. Or you graduate, and all of a sudden you don't have any fabrication facilities. It's hard to buy a piece of plywood. You just have to take everything on a trolley on the train. So it's like overnight, all of the ways of making that you're familiar with just go up because you're just not eligible as a former student. I guess I'm really of a generation that saw this idea of having a laptop practice, basically, from being a laptop bedroom musician to being bedroom artist and then a slightly kitchen table artist, as well.
I feel somehow, just anecdotally, that makes me really just treat my possessions, as well as digital trash, quite in a precious way. Come to think of it, me and a lot of digital artists I know, we're digital hoarders, because you never know when you might need that asset that may be that teapot. I think this culture of making—now just talking about it and thinking about it— is I guess really different, I suppose, from other forms of fabrication or even practice. The fact that I've got a hard drive full of stuff and that's a portable studio or resource as well. This is obvious, but somehow I've never thought of it in relation to planetary waste. But clearly, it's related.
LW:
Well, it's also interesting because you're saying in terms of you all being digital hoarders too. And, we all are. There's so many folders on my Google Drive that are unsorted—so many screenshots that we've taken that I think, to some extent, it could become also a practice of starting to take note, in terms of taking one image a day. Why is that important? And what actually is brought to the top within this question of digital hoarding? Because it's almost far too easy, too. I love Brian Droitcour, the author who started Outland. He has this essay, too, which makes me think of it when you say it, Lawrence, where he says, “the folder that is the recycle bin and the folder that is maybe something that I'm working on my desktop are very adjacent actually. I just have to pull one to the next, but they're also both for storage purposes. What does it mean when I just flush one, right? It seems like it's very seamless and very easy within that. Yeah, this question of even how we start to organize our digital hoarding and what rises to the top becomes really an interesting question when we do actually think about it as trash, too.
LL:
No, totally. And I was actually just thinking, because I'm sure that the recycle bin as a computing function was clearly invented at like Xerox PARC or something, and Steve Jobs stole. It was something like this. It was clearly invented at some time. It reminds me, just conceptually, somehow the recycle bin is like a global undo to undo a mistake. But I'm sure again, as a digital creator, when you install Photoshop, a new one, I think you automatically get 10 levels of undo, and I always up that to a hundred or something.
But I think somehow, that anxiety, that I'm like… You can't just keep on undoing it back forever. I can't remember what was the thing I was thinking… Honestly, one thing, I was 3D-printing. It was 3D-printed and somehow in my head, I thought I could undo a physical object, something that I messed up and I couldn't. And I was like, that is so messed up because you realize... How should I say that… It's not that everything is non-fungible, but everything is undoable and clearly, ecological crisis is pretty much the pinnacle of undoableness, right? So yeah, exactly. So the optimist is like, “No, we've got 50 undoes left,” and others are like, “Everything's fine,” and other people are like, “Actually, we've got none.”
Yeah, the recycle bin, that's a big band-aid for this anxiety of losing all this stuff, which you probably don't need, anyway. I think that's one thing. On the other hand, I was also reading about how with, obviously, the huge birth of growing amount of machine learning—, he amount of just pure data being made—because obviously now we have data about data and data about data about data—is growing at an exponential rate, as well. And clearly, I can remember the conversation with NFTs and how they're massively bad for the environment because of computation and processing power. Clearly, there's the same thing with storage and Cloud storage. So again, this conversation that we’re having about just hard drives is so 1.0-level. And I feel that this accelerated, exponentially increasing storage and waste, the Pacific Garbage Patches—it's probably not patch anymore, it's a small hill or iceberg, even, that extends below the surface. I think that the increase is—not being apocalyptic—but I think it's just clearly accelerating in a different way. And I wonder what kind of thinking or practice or even teaching can contend with that, I think is an interesting thing. Just in the simple institutional sense of higher education or just education in general, how can we go beyond existing frameworks? Another huge question.
LW:
Yeah, it’s massive. And I was just trying to think as you were saying this… Also because I was like, “oh my God, yeah, you're right.” In terms of making a practice of reducing our data, that pales in comparison to what—just in terms of machine intelligence and robots taking images for one another—there's no comparison between the amount of images that we create in relationship to that. In terms of scale, how do you begin to teach that? I mean now, I'm teaching at the undergrad level. I'm teaching the studio and as well as a research methods course. And just talking about scale, our method into world-building is to design walks, right? Scale can be—I think it also potentially even relates to your work, thinking about a more-than-human perspective too—it's like a little bit of the Marcel Proust quote, not in forms of seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. So the fact that we can see something either because—it's a research methods for first-years—so it's like, what are your interests? What are your obsessions, and how do you start a research project?But for them, that can stem from, one person read a book and they were interested in the way someone wrote in the margins in the ways they're not supposed to, and they graph that into kind of what's happening in the built environment and looking at graffiti and the blotting-out of spaces or kind of changing over a science, but still seeing certain impressions. It can stem from something like that, to something… Someone's obsessed with the color red and they want to search through the built environment for that color. So I think the question of scale is really interesting to begin with. I'm not sure that's something that it's built up. It's like a lexicon that's built up from really basic stuff, but basic stuff that open up worlds, potentially, because all of a sudden, you have one student who's… Here in Salt Lake City, the whole city is organized by coordinates starting from zero-to-zero of the Mormon church. I'm obsessed with actually starting to break open the coordinates.
So, we were having a conversation even about—what if you could lead to a micro-coordinate system, speaking about scales, or macro or micro, such that you can lead someone within the coordinates of the city to… Maybe you're on 600 street and another, you're on 600, 500, but what if then you can start creating a micro-coordinate system such that I can lead someone to a beautiful fallen leaf in autumn time? That's really specific and that can lead them to that. So it's like a question of how we understand scale, but thinking about how other, more-than-human, other people navigate the city. So questions of ability and disability entering into that, life circumstance. But also, that there's an overlay onto the city of even the way a mouse—if we're thinking about E.B. White, Stuart Little, right? He is totally a human in that, but we think about the way he might navigate even just a building, both quantitatively and qualitatively quite different from a human.
So yeah, I think the question of scale is just beginning. I think, actually, worlding and world-building opened up so much in that question, because it's just a starting of saying, we can have different frameworks to things that we see every single day. And I'm curious for you how working with AI and more-than-human perspectives in your work then also start to contend with those points of magnification, or vice versa.
LL:
Yeah, no, it's interesting. I frequently have non-human protagonists in my films, but actually I'm super guilty of anthropomorphizing and personifying them because my main conceit—my main thought experiment, really—is that of course they're like AIs and computer-vision algorithms and so on, consuming a huge amount of data that's not mediated or created by human beings, but at the same time, they're also consuming a lot of emotional content generated by humans.
So my main conceit is that they will generate emotions or ideas of emotions—not purely through their own experiences, but through the inherited experiences of content. They would consume people crying on films or just novels and Marcel Proust novels and all that. I've been thinking a lot about how AIs would reconcile this extreme gap, basically, this huge gulf between… Maybe three-way gulf. On one side of the triangle, there's extreme computational intelligence. On another side, there is extreme, shall we say, emotional immaturity in relation to that super intelligence, and mega consumption of emotional content. So I guess, yeah, the scale question is more a gap between the potential and actuality rather than an actual scale in terms of size or number or scope of things they're dealing with.
LW:
I'm curious—is there some way that you're politically contending with this idea of future, or trying to remap the future with it?
LL:
Yeah, I mean if the question is, is there some intentionality behind trying to alter something? Earlier, I was talking about my thoughts on planetary, and I guess as an artist or as a designer, the teleological question of intention is really such an important point. My intention is to create an experience. My intention is not to create a projected future. But because of the mechanisms I use for world-building, which is technology and thought experiments based on my observations of current reality—of course, these artworks do somehow alter the future, because humans and probably other things, perceive them and, consciously or not, factor them into their future-thinking. So, there's fiction speculation and what acceleration is called “hyperstition,” which is essentially in the realm of self-fulfilling prophecies.So what I think is particularly interesting—with science fiction, at least—is it's not entertainment fiction. It is the case of self-fulfilling prophecies in the sense that, kid grows up, watches sci-fi, gets introduced to the idea of cyberspace, grows up, becomes a, whatever, machine learning engineer, and then invents AI. Obviously, that's a Hollywood narrative, but that is also literally lived experience for a huge amount of people. As the culture of technology influences the practice and, I guess, science and engineering of technology, it's inevitable that we as producers participate in the manufacturing of the future as citizens and as creative producers as well. Obviously, I have an ethical stance on the future, but that for me is not the role of art-making to make that claim. It is for some people, but just not for me personally. How is it for you?
LW:
That's teaching in general, I would say too. I think that's ideally the way work operates, whether we think of that as… I love this piece that was basically… I think she was five or maybe eight years old at the time where, early television, Octavia Butler is watching this—I think it's some sci-fi production called Devil Girl from Mars—and she watches it and she thinks it's so bad. So I think that's also a claim for the bad art that causes and opens up worlds. Because she was like, it was so bad that I knew and I was determined that I could write a better story, and that basically led to her knowing and being able to invest in herself.
So I think there's something in the worlds that she would create—which I think you could claim are some of the most magnificent in science fiction history and were so predictive of so many futures, weirdly enough.
I'm 31, but I've been teaching for five years now. So I pretty much got out of school and started that as a point of practice, and that was just because I wanted to share in conversation. So I think within that, something I would like to say, there's the young child who builds cardboard castles and visions them as full castles. But it's the shift within education that turns that knob off. I always want to turn back on.
The misalignment within education itself that I'm like—actually, I want to be sure that everyone who comes through knows that they have the potential to remap their own worlds. They have the potential to be game designers. They come in as architects, and I think there is interesting remapping going on within architecture education overall—where it's like, how do people get to architecture? And I'd be curious, Lawrence, how you found your way into architecture. Because I didn't go into architecture to begin with. I had to find a different way there for quite a few reasons. But for me, I'm always interested—in how do children know about architecture? For me, I knew about the built environment, I knew about materials, I knew about buildings. That was it. I didn't have any lexicon for architecture at the time when I was younger because I didn't know anyone that was an architect.
LL:
Yeah, absolutely.
LW:
And especially in Europe—I think you find it in some cities in the US, certain people have lexicons or certain communities have lexicons for architecture. And for me, it was just like, youth-wise, when I lived in LA, I'm like how special it would be that they know that architecture isn't something that's out there, that they have to go to Downtown to see a building—but actually there's an investment within everything and everyone in terms of just seeing and understanding and having imagination to the spaces we occupy every day. That is so much, to me, a part of what world-building opens up, is just like… And actually working with interaction and all these things are methods to literally start to have agency and imagination towards literally the houses we live in.
LL:
First, when you were talking about teaching and this idea of speculation—and, clearly, the practice of being a teacher is affecting the future—I was really reminded of something that's quite popular in, I think, anarchist circles in talking about professions. There’s this idea that being a teacher is a practice of self-obsolescence in the sense that when one has been a successful teacher, one is no longer required, because the student has attained a level of mastery that no longer makes the teacher necessary, which I think is a really, A, obviously idealistic and beautiful concept, and I think B, intersects really well with a broader idea about obsolescence and AI, as well, and what is our role as teachers, as trainers. It is literally called machine learning. So clearly, this Marxist, anarchist take is not really applied to AI, because there's much more pressing issues with obsolescence and data and surveillance and so on. But I think this question of self-obsolescence is fascinating as it relates to teaching ideologically and with machine learning. So that's one thing that's more like a thought.When I started architecture school, I was like, “buildings are cool. Architecture, lets you make buildings. I like drawing.” It's pretty basic. I got to say, it's pretty basic. And my wonderful but slightly conservative Chinese parents are like, "That one gets you a job and that one gets you unemployed." So talking about that, I went to good architecture schools, but even from the first week—and this was what took me many, many, many, many years to figure out—two weeks into my first year, and I felt pretty alienated actually. I was like, “I buildings, I like drawing and I just don't get what the hell is going on here. I like cities. I like mythology. I like the idea that Babylon and Ur were built as the first city civilizations. That's really cool.”
But I could not square that cosmic, world-building thing with I have to design a room with four walls and so on. Even though, at the same time, I really like drawing and I really like making things, I did not get it. And I could divide my friends into people who really got it, almost on an instinctive level, and people like me, who are just creative weirdos. basically.10 years later, and I realized what's the difference, and it's very simple. It's like, some people grow up in cultured, creative families who talk about opera and design and nice chairs, and some people don't. And that's it. For example, in the first pinup I had—was it crit, right?—my friend... There were these two-tone color scheme, amazing graphics, and I'm like, “Where did that come from?” And of course, I didn't consciously know where that came from, but I could sense there was this insane discrepancy between just their skills and ability to speak that graphic language that I completely lacked. And I think that just greatly frustrated me, basically. I finished 2008, so first big financial crisis—terrible time to finish economically, but good to figure out what you're going to do.
So I was working lots of freelance jobs and doing music and video stuff, because why not? And actually back then, the art-architecture thing, which is much more mature now, was actually much less holistic, basically. The art and architecture intersection was more about meanwhile, urban installations, this popup thing, and less like this weird CG-digital art crossover. I basically didn't really have anyone to talk to and most of my friends doing art stuff, I found through my work as a musician, basically. So my way into art was incredibly haphazard and weird—more to do with friends of friends. I remember one of my best friends who I was in a band with—I was like, "Chris, can you explain Deleuze to me over Nando's?" which is a chicken dinner in the UK. And he did. And I was like, that's great.And somehow… I guess what I'm trying to say is, I had this feeling that something was not quite clicking, but I also could tell that for some people—musicians doing weird AV stuff on one hand, or this weird immersive in-store stuff—I know that, somehow, there was an economy, somewhere, where these works of art or this weird in-between culture were being created, but I didn't have any access to it. And so that took a long time to develop. And I think one day, I was just showing some of my architecture drawings and stuff to a friend and he was like, "Why don't you just call this art?" And I'm like, “That's a great idea.” Because in architecture, you spend so much time debating representation in the real, the medium, and the virtuality, whereas art in general is the representation. It's not a means to an end. That's what you got.
It's not like, are you going to build Mona Lisa after this painting? It's like, no, obviously not. It's a painting.So it sounds so painfully basic, but the products, the detritus, the waste that architects make are waste, because they're a means to an end. Let's win a job, let's get published. It's not the thing in itself. And so for me, it was just a tiny thing. I was like, “oh, yeah, that's kind of how it is.” And obviously that's oversimplifying it. It's kind of how it is. Exactly. And I think some people grow up without this invisible barrier, and some people just have to find where the edges are, somehow. And then now I'm talking in this architecture podcast, so it's great. So it's not like I ever really left. But I do think a very important thing—the final thing I'll say—is the economy, because the economy in which architectural ideas get produced is, in general, in the academy, because there is not much economic scope for an experimental architect to earn a living beyond teaching and practice. And it's been like that for a very long time.
And so I think that's also one of the unique challenges with experimental architecture as a practice as well, because for better or worse as—obviously you know—it's very tied to academia as both a forum and a means of distribution and dissemination in the community, which has its pluses and minuses. What about you? You mentioned earlier that you had a mathematical background.
LW:
Yeah. I could say I was still really vexed. I basically found my way into architecture through woodworking, through the wood shop. Growing up, of course, always into art, math, physics, the whole thing. All my education was multidisciplinary. It was just the way I thought. I didn't think of mathematics as being really different from creativity, to be honest. And I think you could look throughout history, and that actually really aligns. If you look at art history and you look at history of mathematics.Similar to what you're describing a lot of times with your practice, I was always obsessed with spaces and storytelling as it related to those spaces, those materials that were involved. So it was like… I was looking at architecture, but I didn't know it. Speaking to students, I'm like, "How did you get into architecture?" And most of it's through gaming. It's really interesting ,because I think you look at, historically, the myth of how certain folks get into architecture. It's like from Frank Lloyd Wright, he's playing with Froebel blocks. It's like there is something… They're all games, to some extent. And of course everyone went through the period of talking about Legos, right? So it's really interesting. It's like, but what is that for today? Because we go from Froebel blocks to Minecraft, and I think there's some unraveling, still, that needs to be done within that jump.
I went to school for the first semester for honors mathematics, but it was entirely cerebral. So I was like, “ah…” which is interesting in relationship to architecture. So I was looking for, basically, to some extent, how do I make my own path, own major, within the things that I know I'm invested in? I got into woodworking because I literally wanted to make an apple cider press as a kid. Making always facilitated my thinking. Being physical is a facilitation of everything. So I basically got into the wood shop and I was like, here, they’re turning out weird, woodworking pieces and they're talking these concepts over them. And I was like, this is a weird, wonderful marriage of the things I'm into. But they're also… Like you're saying to your friend that described Deleuze to you—it's like, put it through a bandsaw, too. That was a big point of fascination to me, and I just had conversations with people about it. But it was weird because I thought, like you were saying, that you were going into something where it was physicalized.I didn't understand that, literally, we were always practicing hypothetical architecture in order to make potentially practical, make a building. But you're not doing that in school half the time. So it was like… To me, I loved it, because it allowed for freedom in a lot of different ways, and you got to practice in a lot of different ways and gain a lot of know-how of software tools, what have you. But there came a point where I was similarly vexed to what you were saying—where I was like, “oh, so it is...” I think it was this project first year, second semester. So they had basically not kept one professor around who was thought of as being an in-between, experimental, architect-artist, as you described. And so he moved on. They're always put against the modernist or the very… the person that's very practically oriented, in terms of construction. So they're always played off of one another, a lot of times, in architectural education. So it was this interesting thing where he left, and so there was this void where someone who was from history and theory came in and filled the gaps and he was trying to toe the line. And so it was very practical.And then this final project, where it got wild. I was friends, similar to you, with a lot of folks in art. And so I went to this lecture from Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, and they are basically two trans filmmakers and artists who were in a relationship with one another for six years, and they documented their transition. And I basically, to some extent, crafted an architectural response to this description.
And of course, it was deeply personal, but it was weird because, upon performing it in a way—in terms of, you get up in front of the pinup, there's the pinup behind you, you talk through the work—it was so strange to me because everything I was saying was not deeply personal, but it went on to win an award, the project. But it was just so weird, because it was a complete disconnect and it was just disjoint. Because there was no actually conversation about the really real stuff about it. It was all conceptual. And I was like, but what about, actually, the way it was about basically how architectural thresholds could—if you think about thresholds, like passing from one building to the next or inside, outside doors, changes in heights, temperatures, all these things—could respond to a threshold with people. So that could range from emotions to literally transitioning in your life.
And it was just weird because I was like, “oh, here we are, and we stand up in front of this and we perform it.” But even beyond the fact of it being a hypothetical project, you're not dealing with the actual conversation that's had. So I was really turned off, because I felt almost sick from it, the performance of this hypothetical building. I was kind of tired of the review format, presentation style, the jury format, even though I actually got a really funny comment about the project. But yeah, so it was just coming out of that, I wanted to actually make a project like you're saying, where there was no void between the experience of it and the conversation of it. From there, I began collaborating with an artist. Federica, you said you found this project. I'm like, “How did you find this?” Because it's in the treasure trove.
But it's interesting because it's my first full-scale building project, but it was all sonic, and you have the filmic pan that cuts between the sections of the building and reveals it as it goes through. So I ended up interpreting a building and its state and its history, and then putting that out as a floor plan that you walk through sonically. You would sit in the wall sections and would be quiet, and then you would move into the spaces and there would be almost like animated blurs of sound that were animated through the space. So everything from someone filling up the dishwasher, to doing the dishes, humming, using utensils, all these things from everyday entered into it. So I felt like it was an actual architectural response that someone could just walk into an experience and it was at full-scale. And that, I saw, as the point that my practice actually started in a lot of different ways, because it was physicalized. You had to move through it one-to-one. And then, I knew that a lot of the conversations that were most important to me were actually not being had in architecture. I came out of it being like, “I want my work not only to be understood by just anyone walking through it and being able to give a response, but I want it to literally be able to be like… a child could walk into it and we could have a conversation.”
I'm thinking also about John Berger's Ways of Seeing BBC documentary—which is just so wonderful— where he's engaging children and they have no filter. So they're just going off on what they think of about what they're seeing in paintings. So I am like, wow, I would love that to be possible. And of course, when you do the whole pinup and jury, could you imagine a child being there? I would love to, but, out-of-place in those sorts of scenarios. So I was like, “oh, I want to remap that.” And that was a big part of why I got into game engine work. And of course, it was my first time coding, but then from there, it basically stemmed into a point where I'm like, “oh, there's all sorts of realities.” If we're talking about virtual reality, augmented reality, that's one of many.
LL:
And I think when you realize, at least for me, that the architectural thing is experiential, rather than strictly material is, I think, what makes everything click.
FZ:
Well, thank you. I think we can pass on to question number two. No, I'm just joking. Thank you so much, really, to the both of you. It was an epic ramble running through your practices, your approaches, and just an ongoing mind flow. So Leah and Lawrence, we are extremely grateful. I had a lot of fun when you were talking about how you got into architecture. For me, it was like, I loved physics and I loved art. “What's in between those two? Okay, architecture, buildings. Let's see how that goes.” Well, we find ourselves all here, and I think it ended well in exploring architecture in very different forms. So kudos to that.
Alright, we hope you enjoyed that incredible exchange between architect and artist practitioners Lawrence Lek and Leah Wulfman. Of course, you can find more information on both speakers and the rest of the series in the show notes on the re:arc institute website and on the digital platform KoozArch.
All episodes of the podcast, all equally insightful, can be found through Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to yours. I'm Federica Zambeletti, this has been Fictionalizing Ecology of Between Us, the second season of the Architectures of Planetary Well-Being Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us and stay well, happy, soft and strong.