Rules for an Endless Architecture
April, 2018
1. Exaggerate
MFG: Take a problem we face in the world, exaggerate its conditions and propose a radically visionary solution. For example, take the energy crisis or rising sea levels, problems we face in the 21st century that many people understand as the exposition for the myth. Analyze the qualities of the situation and use those qualities, exaggerate them into a new fantastic or horrific world in the future. For example, “In the next 50 years, rising sea levels will displace all but 20% of Manhattan.” Once one builds the world through the exaggeration of certain things in the problem, the result is a proposal that use the impossibility of the problem as the synthesis and catalyst of its own speculative world.
2. Blur
Rem: (PCM) Blur the line between tool and application. Again, PCM refers to an alternative epistemology developed by the surrealists in the 1930s which rejects the existence of objective logic in favor of desire and unconsciously uncontrolled behavior. Mix up somewhat recognizable form, eyelashes, legs, breasts, machine parts, food, etc., in a composition which will serve as a means of entry for the viewer into the painting, but more importantly, into their own unconscious. Rem uses this method in Delirious New York where he imagines the city as an epistemology of desire. Modern tools have fundamentally changed the city: gravity has been mitigated by complex structures, beauty replaced by cosmetics, and time made elastic by subways, cars and buses. These tools function for the analysis and construction of reality; a reality in which tools and the object of their application are no longer so clearly separated as is the same for our own perception of reality; the subject and object not so clearly delineated.
3. Lie
Hirst: Take an existing history and invent an alternative route in its narrative. Take one myth or fragment in history and invent a new fiction within that story which acts as a “lost” piece of history to give it a strong sense of possibility. Then, fabricate the evidence for the story, in this case, that an Egyptian Pharaoh lost irreplaceable artifacts of the ancient world to a storm while transporting the pieces on a treasure barge across the Indian Ocean, by creating all the evidence.