a quick "Publication", some Guilt, and Design.

notes from a workshop at KRVIA, Mumbai. July 25 - 27, 2007.
(links are in the text below)

The first part of this workshop (with mostly 2nd and 3rd year architecture students) was an exercise to "document" a room, or more precisely, to "publish" it, online. The staff room at KRVIA was selected. A one-day "upload" of the room followed, using various informal methods that could be described as interviews, interventions, digitization, specification, and so on. This process was free of pedagogic or moral guidelines, done swiftly, with the student groups making their own decisions on institutional secrecy, "need-to know", private property and personal space.

The website of the "exported" room is here.

This database, which is a kind of inversion of the classic "village study" or site-analysis that you do early in architecture school (and perhaps later as a planning professional), tells us various things, among other things that were self-censored and are absent. But what kinds of usefulness or pleasure now lie in this collection, this "room"? What are we able to "judge"? If there is a threat here, is it to privacy, to the institution, to decorum, to architectural education, or to architecture itself (if everything can be "exported", what does architecture hold, what do walls do)?

In the beginning, we had made the "science-fictional" proposition that everything, every physical property, is technically-speaking transferable between desiring agents. From this location, we claimed, we could see the "blockages": thresholds of law, money, morality and so on, in a different light... perhaps both as weaker and more present.

But what happened here? This is a real staff-room with existing power relations, not a fantasy of "open source" or ubiquitous technologies. We recognised through discussion that students are already, ubiquitously, able to make public their views of faculty, their thoughts and pictures, on orkut and facebook. So what is the effect of this constant leakage on the institution itself? What about other leakages, such as in KRVIA's case, the transfer of course material and faculty to a competitor? To put this question differently, we could ask: what is the relationship between information, in general, and its architectural setting?

The reverse question could be: what relationship can we posit, for example, between a complete and intimate knowledge of what goes on inside apartments in Borivili, and an architectural, or housing policy? What are the limits to gathering such "internal" information, and using it? What is the distance between those directly affected, and those "outside"? What is the time needed to assimilate this information? What are the threads that run between the archive and the "solution"? These questions lie at the heart of architecture, design...and perhaps other forms of "thinking for others". It is a complex question with multiple and contingent answers, that we may want to find our own way through (and later, think about the way this is taught).

In the second part of the workshop we tried to turn our cloud of data, images and stories back into a form that could re-enter the room... to turn this then into a "design" question. A different set of tools and skills was now required, and we saw the groups become more or less confident as the problem inverted itself. After recognising that any architectural solutions (such as models for a new staff-room) could be easily dismissed, a more direct intervention was proposed: gifts. The "gift" is a way to extend the architectural design challenge to something broader: how do we use our information to decide what someone can use, or may want?

The collection of gifts to the room is here.

Now this is not the ephemeral gift of "relational art" or the exchange gift of "primitive economies". It is a modern gift, unsolicited, presumptuous, using appropriated funds, loaded with the hope of good interpretations, and the fear of rejection. Here it is also a kind of compensation, a perhaps futile bid to compensate for the violence of data-gathering on the previous day. We recognise that this collection will have over-and under-compensations, projections, and "mistakes", but perhaps even the most literal gifts may have complex effects, and responses beyond what we know. Kausik now has to live with his "all-time favourite artwork" as a thing on his desk. Elsewhere doors have been unlocked, photos arranged, mirrors placed, and self-monitoring suggested, among other things.

The gift, like architecture, is a many-sided thing. But it is architecture's basic instinct of shelter "from the elements" that is in question here. Do we reinforce our shelters, in times of inevitable exposure? Or do we find a contemporary equivalent to the glass facade... the promise of transparency, that gives nothing away? We can say it all depends on the "context", on information we gathered in various ways, but then we know also that the context is running away from us, too big and too fast to follow, drowning us in a wake of information...on what points do we freeze the rolling images, which averages do we consider, where do we draw the line?
Meanwhile, our little online room and its offline gifts are both real, and will stay as provocations... and we can continue to think about them.

 

Acknowledgements:

Sanjay Bhangar for rapid web development, and Shaina Anand for sharing her work with the students. And ofcourse, to all the students at KRVIA, for all their work and thoughts.