\nWow. Honestly I fell into architecture by accident and coincidence. It happened perpetually. I didn\u2019t want to find a profession through vocation or through somebody who saw the light, I just found my job by mistake\u2026. I thought my job should\u2019ve been something else- I was studying science and was supposed to be a physician, but I discovered I was not as much of a value of what I expected. Architecture is a perfect zone for dummies who are pretending they are not. In fact, it\u2019s a refugee\u2019s area for psychopath\u2026 moving in a crack of logic, which stutter simultaneously arrogance and weakness\u2026in a schizophrenic ritual\u2026 Spreading perversity, obscenity as an aesthetic simulacrum\u2026of values\u2026in a Sacher Masoch contract and dependences. In fact discovering this field of forgery, where discourses and processes are scrounged to other fields, as professional chicken thieves\u2026 I started to be intrinsically interested by this ontological failure, as a protocol of discovering the rules and potentials behind what appears on the surface of appearances.<\/p>\n
I now assume this uncomfortable position situation which came by knocking on the wrong door- a permanent and cyclic drifting ritual of enjoyment-dejoyment.<\/p>\n
On discovering his voice as a designer<\/strong> After 20 years of intensive works and attitude, he decided to quit his position as a suicide last year. We did an homage exhibition in Swiss, where he explained the reason why\u2026<\/p>\n On starting his own firm<\/strong> But at this origin\u2026 it was Paris in the nineties with my friend- it was before the French became perfect petit-bourgeois\u2026but mainly before the Beaux Art system launched its enterprise of plagiarism and copism. Without sentimentalism, or nostalgia, it was a period of \u2018\u2019the Immateriaux\u2019\u2019 of Jean Francois Lyotard at Pompidou Center\u2026so magically transcendent and na\u00efve.<\/p>\n On his research<\/strong> How can anyone talk decently about ecology without taking into account filth and trash? You know Plato in his fictive Dialogues between Socrates and Parmenides denies that things he says are dirty have an essence\u2026 things like menstrual blood, perspiration and even hair under armpits!<\/p>\n I\u2019m interested in bringing things like that back into the contemporary world, whether they\u2019re refined or not. You can learn more about people by looking into their garbage can than into their fridge. Technology isn\u2019t all on the level of MIT\u200a\u2014\u200aI know because I\u2019ve often collaborated with them. It shouldn\u2019t be shut up in a hygienist trip, a purified and positivist cognitive relationship that follows on from Auguste Comte. Technology is also about confronting what the world spews up, making it visible but also putting it back into the cycle as a raw material- even if it has a repulsive dimension. You know, ironically, when Fukushima blew up, there wasn\u2019t a single Japanese robot capable of going inside the wrecked reactors. All the ones they had could only prance about in front of the public, they were useless in a critical zone.<\/p>\n Bangkok is a getaway destination. It\u2019s not forever but it carries over from the mid-90s when we worked in South Africa with the ANC. We were in Soweto in tandem with Mandela\u2019s team, using our first computers equipped with topology transformation software. What does it mean to be assigned to a territory, dependent on it and held hostage by it? What does that kind of relationship to territory entail? It isn\u2019t just the polis in the etymological sense\u200a\u2014\u200athe city\u200a\u2014\u200ait\u2019s also the state where there are zones of apprehension, appropriation, of fear and hostility and sexuality too! The fold of Euclidian geometry worked as a support for activism, at the end of Apartheid\u2026 that\u2019s what aesthetics are. A sophisticated play of synesthesia at the service of saying and feeling. Topology is about B\u00e9zier curves, differential equations, asymptotic systems. It folds in and out as Artaud said, before Deleuze. It isn\u2019t just geometrical, it has to do with the folds of the soul too. Another one of our little projects under way is about testing platforms for crowdfunding. We\u2019re launching the first architectural project<\/a> via Kickstarter. By the time this interview goes to press we\u2019ll know whether it was just a shot in the dark or a worthwhile means of bringing people together, for exchanges and productions. <\/em><\/p>\n On projects that represent his unique approach<\/strong> We\u2019re like kids swept up in the whirlwind of repetition and replication, postures we can\u2019t stomach. But also\u200a\u2014\u200aand this is how the world has really changed\u200a\u2014\u200awe\u2019re pushed into micro-niches where we remain conscious and capable of action, rare attitudes, hollowed out singularities made possible by the same technologies we spoke of earlier, like production units that no longer have to wait for a permit to do things. There are study groups in architecture that have moved into this workshop mode, they\u2019re busy doing, making things and spreading the word. They compute and fabricate in small units, foxholes for experimenting with operative and discursive strategies. In my own case, we use a fiction\/narration\/scenario that enables us to extract the \u2018mere doing\u2019 and shift it somewhere else.<\/p>\n This is a great age we\u2019re living in and in the end I like being voluntarily in this state\u200a\u2014\u200alucid as to the noxious shifts in arguments but also as to shifts in power zones. And most of all skeptical in the face of the international middle class that worships what is marketable\u2026<\/p>\n We don\u2019t trust their models, but we know that we have to work on the same territory as where they emerge; which is both mined and actionist, in fact operaist or established to quote Negri and Linhart. I brought out a book with Negri in New York in 2013, Reclaim resilience resistance\u200a\u2014\u200ait sold out in three months\u2026<\/p>\n On his aspirations for the future<\/strong> We\u2019ve put three years of work into Computation Crafting, a sort of robot-enabled pathology. And into mythomaniaS, the book for the Chicago Biennial, presenting about fifteen projects, none of them done with a building permit or calls for tender\u2026. It\u2019s a relief to work like this and it shifts the focus. There\u2019s an immediate pay-off in doing, the promiscuity, the proximity with the sciences and word-play: pataphysics.<\/p>\n Getting down into the dirt of Ruskin and the aura of Walter Benjamin, using the same tools designed to eliminate their traces. Getting a rush, technological, computational spleen.<\/p>\n In BKK, the M4 Lab integrates 6 axes robots, kuka R10KR1100, and processes of fabrication including RSI (real sensor interface) program. The analogue inputs are collected through UPD signal and the chain of Processing, Firefly, Grasshopper, Rhinoceros.<\/p>\n We introduced sensors perturbation, in real time, where the trajectory of the nozzle is reacting to the robot\u2019s very noises (machine clicks, Inverse kinematics movement, pneumatic piston\u2026) or other agents as any analogue signal, even the pathologies and diseases able to be transcripted as input. The agents corrupt the programed predictable work and modify in real-time the path of the fabrication, as a stuttering feedback coming from the intrinsic protocol of doing, increasing the intricate meanders of the tool in an ever-permanent inaccuracy of positioning, introducing non-linear processes\u2026 as a way of territorializing technologies, but at the condition to be defined through in deterministic and loophole.<\/p>\n On the future of architecture in the next 5\u201310 years<\/strong> Yes, we are only left with obscenity in order to say, to make, to make-say and make-know.<\/p>\n This is what we offer here \u2026 our pathologies as paranoid-criticism \u2026 <\/em>the obscenity is not so much the subject than the voyeurism apparatus which forces us to look at it, frontally \u2026<\/p>\n In front of the miserabilism of cretinous niches with their hypocritical formulas,[2]<\/a> we have to re-evaluate what we used to call \u201cDesign\u201d[3]<\/a> as a process of synaesthesia, of knowledge\u2026 crossing the multiple conflicts and embarrassing waste of ideology, criminal positivism, voluntary ignorance, performative cynicism\u2026 To secrete from its ambiguity, ambivalence\u2026 even nonsense\u2026 absurdity\u2026<\/p>\n Where some words are definitively \u201csuspect\u201d relative to daily routines: Expertise, Accuracy, Performance, Optimization, Communication, Futuristic, Future, Innovation, Speculation, Improvement, Absolute, Truth, Parametric, Post-Human, Positivism\u2026 as the Grail \u201conanism\u201d and at the opposite, other words are vehicles for some kind of legitimacy\u2026 innocently injected into the daily routine: dirty, filthy, X-rated, explicit, lewd, rude, vulgar, coarse, crude, offensive, immoral, improper, impure, off-color, degenerate, depraved, debauched, lubricious, indecent, smutty, salacious, carnal, lascivious, licentious, bawdy, and Nostalgia, Melancholia, Metaphor, but also scatological, profane, porn, skin, vile, foul, atrocious, outrageous, heinous, odious, abhorrent, abominable, disgusting, hideous, offensive, objectionable, repulsive, revolting, repellent, loathsome, nauseating, sickening, awful, dreadful, terrible, frightful and repugnant\u2026<\/p>\n On advice he would give to his younger self<\/strong> [1]<\/em><\/strong><\/a> \u2026 Bataille in ambush, but also Baudelaire, as a proto-Parnassian, in his battle against Hugolian conventions (Victor Hugo and his compassions for the salon, the boudoir and power), Joyce and his sinthomes, his Guyotat and borborygmi, Artaud and his Catatonias\u2026 and Houellebecq \u2026 contemporary Pornographic Pictura Negras \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n [2]<\/a> \u2026 being not so digital-romantic, not so computation addicted, not so eco-masturbator, not socio-moralist\u2026 but just architects, snaking in the crack of abuse, idolatry, idiocracy, propaganda, self-complaisance, bio-hoax, social network lure, etc. Could we find a crack between the techno-fetishism (post-Palo Alto symptom in the main Anglo-Saxon schools\u200a\u2014\u200afor neo-liberalism propaganda and tooling-idiocracy), and at the other end, the techno-regression (mainly in all European schools\u200a\u2014\u200aSocial Kreisel toy for noisy moralism, visible as a parade, a disgusting spectacle at the <\/em>\u201ccommon ground<\/em>\u201d Biennale)? It\u2019s so comfortable and self-complaisant to choose one of these chapels\u2026 there are many benefices to be blind to or to falsify consciousness and knowledge. But both sides are just the two faces of the same coin\u2026 a Janus-like reciprocity of personal interest\u2026! At the opposite, techno-sciences should no longer be an Object, but a Subject we have to re-appropriate and corrupt, in <\/em>\u201cdemocratic anthropo-technic<\/em>\u201d strategies (not in an Art-Deco bio-design show for dummies)\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n [3]<\/em><\/strong><\/a> Design, at the opposite of its English definition, which lost its validity this last 20 years to be exclusively determined by performance and rules. \u201cDesign is the creation of a <\/em>plan or <\/em>convention for the construction of an object or a system,\u201d to quote US Wikipedia \u2026 In the French definition, it includes the notion of \u2018\u2019dessin\/dessein,\u2019\u2019 meaning, meanings and means, Gestalt and Gestaltung\u2026 <\/em>\u201cLe design est la cr\u00e9ation d\u2019un projet en vue de la r\u00e9alisation et de la production d\u2019un objet (produit, espace, service) ou d\u2019un <\/em>syst\u00e8me<\/em><\/a>, qui se situe \u00e0 la crois\u00e9e de l\u2019<\/em>art<\/em><\/a>, de la <\/em>technique<\/em><\/a> et de la <\/em>soci\u00e9t\u00e9<\/em><\/a>,<\/em>\u201d in a <\/em>\u201cma\u00efeutique<\/em>\u201d process and discovery, as an Ethico-Aesthetic, to quote Guattari.<\/em><\/p>\n Credits<\/strong>: Lab M4 \/ new-territories: Principal \/ Francois Roche, Camille Lacadee\u200a\u2014\u200a\u2014 Partners on M4 scenario \/ Stephan Henrich, Ezio Blasetti, Gwyl Jahn, Danielle Willems, Devin Jernigan\u200a\u2014\u200a\u2014 Colaborators \/ Vongsawat Wongkijjalerd, Daniela Mitterberger, Tiziano Derme, Myrtille Fakhreddine, Agatha Partyka, Katrin Hochschuh\u200a\u2014\u200a\u2014 Institutions Partners \/ RMIT\u200a\u2014\u200aUPENN\u200a\u2014\u200aMichigan Ann Arbor\u200a\u2014\u200aInnsbruck Hochbau\u200a\u2014\u200aColumbia GSAPP\u200a\u2014\u200aINDA Chulalongkorn\u200a\u2014\u200aDonau Festival\u200a\u2014\u200aSingapor Biennale\u200a\u2014\u200aGRAHAM Foundation\u200a\u2014\u200aCNC DICREAM Paris-\u2026<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/modelo.io\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Subscribe-Button-300x57.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\nI was deeply influenced, as a DNA by Deleuze\u2026still alive at this period. I went one time to this seminar, afraid and curious… I became a symptom or collateral effect of the French theory, post-structuralism in vivo, between semiology, digression, languages, libido and tragedy of knowledge as a strategy of power, in the sense of Spinoza not Donald Trump. In this voluntary \u2018jeopardizing me\u2019 I was pushed and pulled in the comet tails of Marxism-Workism\u2026 as a grid of analysis, dispute, dialectic, bad faith, rhetoric, and skepticism to any system of representation or propaganda\u2026 As a possible line of escape, we started to develop an Avatar, as a de-Identification of our own portrait, but more important as a character able to act and react independently\u2026of us.<\/p>\n
\nFirst of all, nowadays the place where you\u2019re based hasn\u2019t got much importance, either to validate or invalidate the work you produce. You can be anywhere, so long as you\u2019ve got a good web link and the technologies that enable you to produce and access means of interacting. Living in a capital is not an obligation, nor is it the only way of staying in touch. Paris has become a sad museum\u200a\u2014\u200aI couldn\u2019t stay there any longer. As for Bangkok, in spite of the current political r\u00e9gime, which I\u2019ve spoken out against to the point of compromising a project, it\u2019s a city that stinks of life\u2026 and it smells good!<\/p>\n
\nOur office- meaning Camille Lacad\u00e9e and myself as partners, with a fluctuating team of 4 to 7 collaborators- work at street-level in Bangkok. Our most recent project consisted of removing a slum built on poles the accumulated mud composed\u200a\u2014\u200aamong other things\u200a\u2014\u200aof human shit that ran down the poles. There was no drainage system so we had to shift all this crap using robots, putting a small bookshop back in place of it. You can find the working script on the \u2018net.<\/p>\n
\nWell, we all live with contradictions. I have a vague recollection of the bad blood that was said to exist between Victor Hugo and Baudelaire. To sum it up, Hugo was accused of using the hardships of the people as a stage for his own act, and that\u2019s what\u2019s happening right now! Prime-time TV news is a corral, full of snippets rounded up by cynical and clever little Hugo-ites! Baudelaire, on the other hand was a pre-Parnassian poet nursing his own downfall, the ultimate commitment, a pathological antidote to idiocy. There\u2019s something obscene about it, obscenity as the anti-venom to idealism. Something interesting and pornographic too. Laura Kipnis has written some good things on the same subject. Contemporary pornography as the last-stand space for transgression and what is possible. Maybe obscenity is something we have to face again in order to transgress. Transgress what, you say? Transgress the sleeping sickness, the \u2018dumb-ifying\u2019 as Deleuze called it, the unspeakable stupidity of repeating things over and again. What we need is a catalyst that will enable us to get up like the Golem out of the mud of general merchandising, the cult of objects, fictions, managerial storytelling, the routine of Facebook and the selfie.<\/p>\n
\nYou don\u2019t have to dress up as William Tell and kill your wife like Burroughs did to create via an inter-zone, Tangiers for him\u200a\u2014\u200a Bangkok for us. Here, you can do things in XXS mode, just negotiating \u2018in the street\u2019 with the neighborhood. I set up a robot in the street, plugged it into a public power source and built a small fabrication experimentation in exchange-mode with locals, with the micro-economies, the people concerned and without delegation from the territorial authorities.<\/p>\n
\nWhat else could we do than to oppose this system\u2019s obscenity, the obscenity[1]<\/a> of our pathologies \u2026 generated by this very system, affected by an impossibility to<\/em> the world, facing these multiple disorders \u2026 to say, to make-say<\/em> and make-know <\/em>\u2026 that we as well are pathogen elements \u2026 of this very disorder, but in a critical mode, activist, solitary \u2026 to produce with this repulsion \u2026 this rejection \u2026 in a metabolized loop \u2026 constitutive of the obscene chain \u2026 of these little tales.<\/p>\n
\n\u2026To be a girl.<\/p>\n