The action is the form. Victor’s Hugo’s TED talk = Действие есть форма. Выступление Виктора Гюго на конференции TED

STRELKA

КЕЛЛЕР ИСТЕРЛИНГ

ДЕЙСТВИЕ ЕСТЬ ФОРМА ВЫСТУПЛЕНИЕ ВИКТОРА ГЮГО НА КОНФЕРЕНЦИИ TED





3-е издание (электронное)








Москва «Стрелка Пресс» 2017

KELLER EASTERLING

THE ACTION IS THE FORM
VICTOR’S HUGO’S
TED TALK





3-rd edition (electronic)








Moscow Strelka Press 2017

УДК 72
ББК 85
    E12


      Easterling, Keller.
E12 The action is the form. Victor’s Hugo’s TED talk = Действие есть форма. Выступление Виктора Гюго на конференции TED [Электронный ресурс] / K. Easterling. — 3-rd ed. (el.). — Electronic text data (1 file pdf : 43 p.). — М. : Strelka Press, 2017. — System requirements: Adobe Reader XI or Adobe Digital Editions 4.5 ; screen10".
          ISBN 978-5-9903364-6-9
          Space is a technology. Buildings and the cities they inhabit have become infrastructural — mobile, monetized networks. For the world’s power players, infrastructure space is a secret weapon, and the rest of us are only just beginning to realize. If Victor Hugo came back to give a TED talk, he might assert that architecture, which he once claimed had been killed by the book, is reincarnate as something more powerful still — as information itself. If this space is a secret weapon, says Keller Easterling, it is a secret best kept from those trained to make space — architects. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs in economics, the social sciences, informatics and activism are developing what might be called spatial software as a political instrument to outwit politics as usual.

УДК 72
ББК 85

      The source print publication: The action is the form. Victor’s Hugo’s TED talk / K. Easterling. — Moscow : Strelka Press, 2014. — 43 p. — ISBN 978-0-9929-1461-5.


ISBN 978-5-9903364-6-9

© Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, 2014

Microwaves bounce between cell phones. Credit cards — all 0.76 mm thick — slip through the slots in cash machines anywhere in the world. Computers synchronise. Shipping containers calibrate the global transportation and production of goods. Nearly identical buildings and urban arrangements proliferate globally. All these ubiquitous and seemingly innocuous features of our world are evidence of global infrastructure.
    The word “infrastructure” typically conjures associations with physical networks for transportation, communication or utilities — a hidden substrate or binding medium. Yet the technologies comprising these networks consist not only of underground grids of pipes and wires or tangles of fibre-optic cable on the bottom of the ocean, but also pools of microwaves beaming from satellites, atomised populations of electronic devices and shared technical platforms. Far from hidden, infrastructure is often the overt point of contact and access, where the underlying rules of the world can be clasped in the space of everyday life.
    Making another, perhaps more important observation, buildings, and even whole cities, have become infrastructural technologies. From the fields of repeatable suburban houses and traffic-engineered highways of the mid 20th century to the malls, resorts, golf courses and big-box stores of contemporary culture, repeatable formulas make most of the space in the world. These buildings are not singularly crafted enclosures, but reproducible products — spatial products. The discipline of architecture is only responsible for a trickle of the world’s spaces while a fire hose blasts out the rest. A familiar confetti of brightly coloured boxes nestled in black asphalt and bright green grass tells elaborate stories about Starbucks coffee, Beard Papa cream puffs and Arnold Palmer golf communities. This all too visible cartoon of abstract logics shapes most of the space in which we are

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