conversations

Tommy Yang

Tai Manheim

Something we found interesting was the medium that your work invokes; not just drawings, but film as well. And it's not just about having a building as a final product, but analyzing the social context. What roles do you see for drawing vs film in architecture?

Tommy Yang

Yeah, I think both have different agencies in our practice. What’s most interesting to me is when the two become combined into what I call 2 ½ dimension drawings. It’s when you actually draw, but also context your own drawing through the act of animation. You can do that in a series of ways: you can make a drawing so thick that it becomes a model, or you can use augmented reality to actually animate a drawing, so you can contest your drawing and also view in different ways. That way you don’t fall into the trap of just doing a drawing, or just doing a film. Both have limits, right? The drawing allows us to view a frame for an extended period of time, while the film allows us to understand ephemeral aspects around the built environment that we either aren't able to draw, or become an ethical problem in deciding how to depict something ephemeral.

An example would be sound; right now, you can’t really draw sound… smells… These are things that we aren’t able to draw, or we try to as designers but hit certain limits, while film actually captures these aspects of the city.

Alana Wu

Would you say that architects, and other designers, should be able to use as wide a range of mediums as possible?

Tommy Yang

Exactly. Being well rounded in mediums, in these tool sets, allows us to actually understand the world around us much more, whether you’re an artist, designer, or architect. Having more tool sets at the tip of your fingers allows you to take in other aspects of the world around you. Your set of tools limits your ability to practice as an artist or architect.

And that's usually the biggest problem, right? It's not that we're not thinking about others; it's because our tool sets segregate us from thinking about others, either being animals and vegetation, or people and race. Many of these mediums have limits, but when you have an array of them and hack into these mediums, you have the ability to challenge that limited thinking.

Tai Manheim

Why do you think [in architecture] that drawings are so dominant over other mediums like film, collage, etc?

Alana

Or do you think that's changing now?

Tommy Yang

I think it's definitely changing because of the world that we’re living in, especially with the pandemic. We never thought of how the pandemic would influence us, as a discipline and a practice. But I think we tend to fetishize the act of drawing, which was probably nurtured through a Western colonial perspective around drawing… which also means that the way we think about drawing are also within this Western canon.

For example, my studio tends to work a lot in the oblique or axon drawing. But within the Western canon, that’s what’s used to draw machines. If you decolonize that perspective, you see that indigenous people have always used the axon and oblique to draw relationships. Oblique and axon drawings were never really about the machine; they were about how people connected with each other in building and experiencing the world.

When we look at buildings, we tend to look at the elevation or perspective. But under the vise of the discipline, which was nurtured during the early 1400s, a lot of our practice became material driven, aesthetic driven architectural design, which led to the monster that we have today, which is around modernism. I think we tend to love our drawings so much, and so it's really hard to break out, but I think it's definitely shifting because of the world we have to live in today.

Alana

I noticed you used the word decolonize; what role do you think architecture has played or is still playing in settler colonialism?

Tommy Yang

It’s hard to think about an architectural practice that decolonizes because we are very much a product of culture. And like many humans, we like to claim territory. Because architecture in the making of the city is about building when you claim territory, it’s hard to say if we will ever reach the point of architecture with a notion of decolonization. If we acknowledge that, we can begin to have conversations around, whose agency are we designing for? What aspects of control are we allowing them to take over? How do we humble our own profession and what contracts are we giving people to design for them or with them? I think there's a long way to go and I don't think there's ever an answer, since we're humans and as humans, we tend to claim territory. Whether it’s people who are Asian, Western, Alaskan… We like to set up borders because we want to feel safe.

And then as we populate and grow, we need more space, so there's always going to be that contestation in spatial practices. How do you negotiate that? The only way that I can think of now is to have a much more engaged practice, where you think about co- authorship between multiple identities. But there's always going to be someone who’ll have a lot more agency. And as we’re humans, if we’re designing for non-humans, there will always be that notion.

Tai Manheim

A great thing about the films is that we hear from people living there, which isn’t commonly done in architecture. Especially with the bastard architecture, where people build temporary structures in their own environments. What could architects learn from these people by going to these areas and actually talking to people, rather than thinking that they know everything?

Tommy Yang

What we can learn from bad architecture isn’t the construction technique itself, but around how physical infrastructures are a social agreement between people, and that is the key to actually understanding the knowledge behind these construction techniques. They also understand that public space is temporary, so they don't claim public space; they set up in a public space for the time being, then move or shift. To me, that’s the key. Designers sometimes fetishize these things or design for them, which usually fails drastically, because they’re social agreements between people. It’s anthropological and ethnographic. When you begin to understand that type of social agreement, you can acknowledge it by allowing space for others to agree to take over a certain amount of time in your building design or urban planing. That's why you see a lot of them in certain areas in New York, Los Angeles, and even here in Pittsburgh, which is much more controlled. For example, the night markets, where vendors create temporary installations to vend, make, or celebrate… and then they pack up and leave. It’s temporal and becomes a ritual of the people, rather than being static, top-down, and controlled.

Alana Wu

Because that happens in public space, what role does thinking of space as public vs private play in architecture?

Tommy Yang

I don't think there's a good form of public space anymore, but it occurs in the banal things of the city, like the sidewalk. No one has the ability to claim sidewalks; they’re this kind weird, interstitial space between cars and our building fronts. Is it the building fronts or the cars that own the sidewalk?

Jane Jacobs talked a lot about the sidewalk; the sidewalk is the most democratic space of the city, where strangers mitigate with each other. We trust strangers to not stab us on sidewalks, therefore we use and hang out on sidewalks… again, it’s a social agreement that we can maintain as strangers and come together to use it as a passageway, to vend, have green parts, etc. What's so scary around the pandemic was when our sidewalk spaces became a scary zone where people actually did that, so then it showed up in our media. It begins to contest our notions around the public.

But because it is the public, it allows for people to get pushed and shoved. Leaving this to the public, not having a top-down surveilled public, means that there can be accidents or villains. That's the commons. The Commons isn't this pretty place where we hold hands; the Commons is where multiple identities can actually come together, good and bad. It's always this mitigation between strangers; to trust a stranger is the most public thing you can do in the city.

Tai Manheim

As architects, we often try to control everything, such as the sidewalk. How do we need to change as a profession and discipline to allow for the freedom of the commons and for people to use the streetscape? Is it even an architectural problem, or is it a political problem? How much agency do architects have in making these spaces?

Tommy Yang

If we're thinking about controlling the things that will happen, architects don't have that agency. But we do have the agency of designing how our building meets the ground; we create sites of vision towards public spaces like sidewalks. There’s a sense of control, but also a notion around community, since the interiors can bleed out to the exterior. When you don't treat the sidewalk or streetscape as part of the ecosystem of your building, you create interstitial spaces that are not nurtured by the community, so they become leftover spaces that can become problematic, or opportunistic spaces for people to hang out and linger in. The problem with giving the architect or client too much agency is the lack of public space or the inability to linger on the street or sidewalk. Being unable to linger in front of certain buildings, since you’ll get kicked out or arrested, has made our democratic spaces into private spaces for big developments

It’s always a kind of mix and match. Giving the people who own or live in the building the ability to see out gives them the control to say “the sidewalk is part of our building”.

But to also leave enough space so people can actually hang out on a sidewalk is key, so these issues depend on policy. A lot of policy makers, activists and grassroot leaders should become part of our design conversation when talking about rethinking urban design, so we can think about the hidden infrastructure or problems that communities might be facing that we tend not to think about. Because making huge public spaces, right? Grabbed commons are never the answer. You’ll have huge public spaces with trees, bikes, all of that… but it still fails the community because it's not an agreed, shared space between people.

Alana Wu

How much do architects interact and collaborate with urban planners or city government?

Tommy Yang

It depends on your practice. I know great architects who work with policy or have planners who look at policy inside of your firm, so they consult with each other. There are also architects who just say, “All I do is residential. I just make buildings and work on interiors.” There's a huge array across the board, but to the expense of my own bias, I feel like there’s not enough of engaging others in our conversation.

Tai Manheim

One thing I loved about your lecture is that you focused on your family and background. Usually lectures just focus on their work, but family and where you’re from is so important to your work. Could you expand on that? Also, how could architects and architecture students bring their background into their work more?

Tommy Yang

I tend to focus on my family or familial history in my own lectures because I'm trying to acknowledge my own biases, and to make myself vulnerable in that I think a certain way because of this, and I don't expect everyone to understand this.

Not everyone has the same history or story, but to be able to acknowledge your own story inside of your own practice is key, because then people who have familiar stories can begin to relate or bridge. For me, the most important aspect, especially in teaching, is that you create that safe space for students with similar stories to bridge that type of network with you, and use that to become the best Rem Koolhaas in 20 years, or to shift their own practice and things the way they want to do it because of their own history. To be able to acknowledge that is powerful, especially as a student in taking ownership of your story and using it as a platform to create things. That way, you don't strip yourself down to become the perfect architect who wears black all the time. You allow yourself to grow into the professional that you're meant to be, which makes you a more resilient designer in the face of calamities. You’re not just another robot of 100 designers who does the same thing, who wears the same thing and who only knows how to draft. You want to become a designer with an array of tool sets to deal with the large overarching urban problems we're facing today. You need to actually own the tool sets and don’t become a slave of the tool sets.

Alana Wu

What if it's the reverse scenario, where you design for a community that has a completely different background from yourself. Should you try to limit how much personal identity goes into that work?

Tommy Yang

Exactly. If you begin to acknowledge and understand your own story and biases, you can begin to be careful. Around people who have different stories, you can actually listen in and hear their stories, you can actually look and see how they live. Then you begin to correct your biases, to build a relationship. You don’t want to go in not knowing your own biases, and then intervene in ways that interrupt or destroy communities. In many cases, designers go in with great intentions, either being sustainability or social justice. But we need to first correct our own biases, since social justice means different things for populations in China or Europe, than in America. America, Europe, Africa don’t think about race the same way. When you begin to understand how we’re embedded in certain ways of thinking and biases, then you can begin to unpack them through relationship building, trust building, community engagement, and actually hearing the real story from that community. You need long term conversations and dialogue with communities. Our design processes might have to change from this capital driven design meant to get a project done into longer spans of relationship building where designers have to become stewards of community before proposing large scale design.

Tai Manheim

A lot of architecture studios try to engage the community, but are there for one semester and then leave. There have been issues with CMU, for example, with communities where they tried to do a well-intentioned studio, but after they take the community’s input and time, they just leave and the community gets nothing. How can we change that relationship in both the profession, and our studios? Is there a way to create a sustained relationship between the school and communities?

Tommy Yang

It's different for each professor, but I think ethical research is a good way to talk about that type of relationship, along with understanding the contract that you're giving communities. If you're doing community engagement, you might be looking at how you do an ethical IRB so you can be a steward of the community that you're engaging with, who knows what you're doing and what they can expect out of you. When you’re holding studios and reviews, giving the space on campus for those stewards to come into the campus, and be one of the reviewers. You're giving the stewards the agency to critique the work that you're doing, so the voice of the community can begin to contest the way we draw, or sections, the materials we want to use, and just humble our methods of design. You have to actually go talk with community members, gather their stories, and then regurgitate their stories through the act of design. And then ask, “is this what you were talking about?” You need to listen to critiques or advice from community members to correct your own design.

Alana Wu

Because it takes a lot of time for that to happen, do you think it'd be best if architects only design for communities that they either came from or are similar to where they came from?

Tommy Yang

I think it's not the question of designing for a community that you come from, but your skill sets in engagement, relationships building, and trust building. You should also be having a diverse set of our designers, who have different backgrounds, on your team. I was talking to a colleague from Wisconsin, and she said “whenever I go and visit and give public talks, all these Asian students flock and ask me all these questions” because there's a lack of Asian faculty at that university. If you're not giving space for Asian faculty or designers, or black faculty or designers, then you won’t have that type of voice inside of your school and you’ll continue to do the things you do, without ever contesting due to the lack of another voice as part of your team. Collaborative work projects in school are great because then you contest with your peers, get angry at each other, yell at each other, then you begin to understand that your way of thinking is not the only way of thinking. The fun part is when you can agree to disagree, then use that disagreement to nurture architecture, product design, art, performances, etc.

Tai Manheim

Could you talk more about your studio and how it thinks about engaging with the community or student identities, etc?

Tommy Yang

My studio isn’t focusing on community engagement. It was against my ethics, since I don’t know if I'm only staying for the year. What I'm focusing on is learning to see and hear through field work, from the outside in and the inside out. My students are all doing individual projects so they can begin to see their biases through the act of drawings. Sometimes you become lazy, and you end up not drawing something, but you have to question why don't you draw certain things? Why do you want to draw other things? Why do you become blind to certain things inside of the city when you're doing field work? By learning about your own way of thinking and looking at the city, you can begin to contest the conventional ways of architectural thinking and make corrections to your biases.

I had a conversation about sidewalks, like, why don't you draw your sidewalk? There are people sitting on the sidewalk, there's someone playing the trombone on the sidewalk, but you’re erasing them from reality when you say, “I'm not going to draw you” or “I'm not going to show you in my video.” But you can help that by using a wide series of tool sets.

Alana Wu

As fields, how often do design and architecture interact when it comes to education?

Tommy Yang

I don't know about here at CMU, but when it comes to discourse, public interest or community engaged design, across the nation, or even globally, there has been a kind of seminal knowledge of thinkers who actually comes together. And interestingly, like, I've been finding it so awkward and weird, where like, like, oh, like, your professor was my professor like, 10 years ago, to do the same thing. And, you know, and like, you know, in that person's like, currently in Taiwan, right, like, it's, like, awkward, but then it's like, oh, that's so cool. Because then you're like that person, the person I'm talking about is like, doing like, product design and doing like the the hawkers. So and stuff, whereas I'm much more of an archetype.

I don’t think cross disciplinary interaction on multiple levels happens between design and architecture at institutions because we’re limited by the tool sets we have and our ability to communicate. There's still work to do, but I think there's much more multidisciplinary thinking than when I was in school that also pushes the boundaries of the creative realm. It happens because students want it now. For example, why are we still designing bathrooms for men and women, why don’t we have inclusive bathrooms?

It’s always been taught in architecture school that you need this square feet for men and this square feet for women, but students are realizing that we actually have a critical problem we’re not addressing and ask if, “can we do this?” Which pushes the faculty or the designer to rethink some of the things they were embedded in.

The notion of inclusive bathrooms never showed up in the canon until like 2012. That was when my instructors realized they were segregating people using bathrooms and the use of bathrooms is part of the right to a city; you shouldn’t have to look this way to use the bathroom.

Students are hungry to push for these types of conversations, pushing their instructors to rethink the way they make things. Rethinking our own processes is key.

Alana Wu

Does this process just take a long time, as each new generation comes in and challenges the past generation?

Tommy Yang

Yes. Because we are humans, the way we think is always going to shift. During the Civil Rights Movement, everyone just thought they were angry colored people, angry women, angry queer folks on the streets. But when we look at it many years later, we think, “yeah, that needed to happen for sure.” With time, thinking is always going to shift, and because we're bad people, there will always be someone we're leaving out of the conversation. We have to accept that and then correct those mistakes.

We need to think about cross dialogue and try to figure out who we're leaving out for the conversation. That goes back to accepting and understanding our own stories, and the underpinnings of what we don't know. For me, I can talk about the Civil Rights Movement from a queer and Asian perspective, but I can never talk about it through a black perspective. By understanding what you don’t know, you become less susceptible to erasing someone else's story.

Tai Manheim

In school, it’s not just teachers teaching students, it’s students teaching the teacher as well. What do you think you’ve learned from your students this semester, or in past semesters? Has your way of teaching changed from when you first started, based on student feedback?

Tommy Yang

I learn more from my students than I ever teach my students. There are a lot of things they’re going through that I’ve never gone through, like starting school during a pandemic. I learn from their ways of learning, and their underpinnings and stories.

I’ve had to correct myself many, many, many times, throughout the semester. I'm a queer Asian man who has a very biased way of thinking, especially around engagement and race. Sometimes it becomes a little bit dangerous, because some students just want to be a great designer, and that should be okay. I constantly have to correct myself; not everyone can become a community engaged architect who uses architecture for activism. We can’t all be that. We need a well rounded ecosystem of architects; some Bjarke Ingels and some Rem Koolhaas, and then we need some activist architects. That variety allows us to grow and contest with each other. If suddenly all architects become activists, you’re not going to be able to push certain things in the making of the city. We need breadth.

If your student wants to become the best architect ever, how do you reframe your own ways of teaching and looking at the world to nurture this new architect who’s going to become the best builder of a city, rather than stripping another student to think the way I think. It’s good that they also challenge my methods, which can become outdated; the use of film has been done since the 1960s. That's why I've recently moved into animation. How come animation artists can impact people so much and architects not so much? How come we watch Studio Ghibli movies and they’re embedded inside of our souls… and go to the studio and make a building that doesn’t do anything besides sit in our portfolio.

That's why this semester we're focusing on the accessible image, like animation or comics and rethinking how we make our cities. I’m working with a wide array of students with diverse backgrounds and trying to teach them how to look, because many students here are international, and it’s difficult to engage in a foreign landscape. I'm constantly grappling with how to help them understand why cities are the way they are.

Tai Manheim

Do you feel that students in your second year studio are resisting or having to adjust to the process of just seeing and being in a place? Most scientific studios are just going in to take measurements and photos, but you're emphasizing something beyond that. Do you feel like your students were able to just immediately embrace that, or was there an adjustment period?

Tommy Yang

They’re still adjusting. There’s been a lot of, “how does this relate to architecture, again? Am I just becoming another anthropologist?” I have to sit down and talk with them about why it’s important, how most of the time buildings are used differently than the function we designed them for, how to understand urban patterns, and how those can become inspirations in urban design; actually going into the neighborhood and seeing problems, but also the opportunities.

For many designers, we need a problem to solve, so we map to see problems. We don't map to see the great things that are happening, even if they’re in small, interstitial spaces. By mapping the good things happening in the neighborhood, you bring in nuances as you think about architecture. For example, you can think about how communities have been resilient for a very long time, even in the face of the pandemic, in the face of racism and then draw from that. This creates a much more integrative but transformative and radical architecture.

It’s been a process of asking questions for the student, which is good because you have to question these things before you can begin to understand them. If you don’t question, you'll never find an answer, and you won’t have any capacity to actually think and imagine new things.

Network Culture

Mark Stanley

inter·punct joins Mark Stanley for a breakfast interview discussing culture and politics in the late-postmodern. This interview was published as a stand-alone issue. Download PDF.

For additional information and to view Mark’s full lecture, visit the CMU School of Architecture website.

i•p: You presented a broad array of work, far more modes of expression than most lecturers. This made us wonder if you see yourself as wearing many hats - for instance, if you act as a curator for exhibition work and as a critical designer with the futurology institute - or if you see yourself as an architect in all of your projects?

Mark Stanley: I like to think of myself as a cultural producer more than anything. I think architecture and architects are good at that anyway; they know more than they let on about cultures, about things that happen inside of architecture, about things that architectures cultivate or throttle or modulate inside of them. That’s probably my favorite way to think about it. So when I’m taking on different modes, I’m usually not thinking about it differently; I like to not make distinctions between the types of work I do. I get that other people do like to do that, so any kind of steerage or categorical framework around my work – and this is the only reason I would do it – would be to try to be understandable to different audiences. In this lecture, I just wanted everyone to know that I wasn’t completely crazy, so I showed some work up front to demonstrate that I’m a designer too, before getting into something I was way more interested in, which was to try to open up some cultural juice, some political frameworks, some programmatic thinking around what happens in the world and in architecture and how they can be allied with each other.

i•p: Is the idea of medium something you have resolved going into a project, or is it a process that influences the articulation of the end product?

MS: It’s a little of both. There are moments along the way where you have to basically risk a claim and say, “Okay. I know I’m going to make 21 agents in this project”. That happened in the Manhattan Project 2.0 really early on. I just said, “I really want to spread the deck on this project. I want to make 21 agents. Some of them are going to be built things, some are going to be people, some will be non-human actors, and some are going to be government entities, but I know 21 is the right number.” Just because it’s larger than 20 and less than 22, it’s an odd number, it’s a multiple of 7 and it just seems like the right number. So there are moments like that, but there are also moments along the way where things start to emerge: structures, ways of organizing things. For example, there were three governmental entities: The Agency of Airborne Information, the Bureau of Techno-Nature, and the Institute of Simulation and Actualization. So those three became main organizers in the project to gather the other eighteen agents around them, which was not a concept I had at the beginning but one which emerged through the development.

i·p: You talk about this idea of Network Culture, where urbanity is synonymous with connectivity — but what does that mean for the new rural? How do these ideas apply to the 2016 election, one of the clearest urban-rural divides in recent history?

MS: The 2016 election was this recalibration moment between the urban and the rural. People who had always been rural and had never engaged in what we think of as the city suddenly had all this agency in everything because they were connected to the network. They had been snapped – at least behaviorally and socially – into an urban condition. The election map is a sea of red with blue points on it where all the cities are. Every time there’s a city in a county, that county turns blue. We know that cities align with democratic left-leaning politics. Why is that? Because there are simply more people in a space together. They have to get along together, even if they don’t like each other, and become citizens next to each other. But in a rural place, that’s not the case. I grew up in a very rural place, which is just an entirely different life experience. After a while, a lot of political ideas that don’t involve other people appeal to you a lot more. The 2016 election cycle was interesting because the people in rural places which presumably had no agency to change the politics of the nation in any serious sense tapped into this really high-powered agency across social media. And now we’re learning a lot more about other non-human agents that had a hand in that too, like Russian bots. “Where’s the rural now?”, I think you said. Well, I’m not sure it exists anymore. I mean, what are the statistics about cell phones — there are 9 billion cellphones on the planet and 7 billion people? Is anyone really disconnected anymore? And if they are, do they really register on the global culture? Maybe that’s one fairly irresponsible way of looking at it, but if we just allow ourselves irresponsibility for a moment, sometimes it gives us new ways of thinking about everything.

i•p: There’s an idea in policy debate of inherency versus solvency; inherency being the statement of the status quo and solvency a much more pragmatic call to action. A lot of us struggle with this space between just raising awareness about an issue and dictating a solution, and we wonder how you reconcile the two within your own work as you bridge the gap from very human-related practical solutions to extremely speculative projects.

MS: It’s a good question; a difficult one. I think that it’s easy and common, not only in architecture, but in creative and policy disciplines all over, for people to identify the problem and then want to solve that problem. And I think people are increasingly dissatisfied with that in the 21st century, because everything is so complicated. Everyone knows that there’s not a simple solution to what you’re talking about, but one doesn’t also need to throw up their hands and say, “Oh, there isn’t a solution to this problem”. I’m far more willing to go that route in my own life and work—to admit that there might not be a simple fix for an issue. Can we cope with that? Is that ok? Are we going to live on, and how? What can we do now? I mean, the problematics of the Anthropocene are that way. There’s some middle ground between the two things that you floated, between inherency and solvency — I really like the words — between illuminating, observing, or framing something, and offering some kind of approach to operate on that thing.

I like to think about it as agency. It’s not just observing and framing, nor is it just proposing a simplistic solution and coming up with all the “right” design approaches. It’s somewhere in the middle where you’re an agent — you know about both. That’s why I like working on sets. I always produce 5s or 7s or 21s because one thing just doesn’t cut it for me. And I find myself encouraging students to do that a lot too. On the one hand it’s a tactic to try to keep the discourse wide, but on the other, it’s how you gain an audience for the work. When you present one thing, it’s easy to destroy that thing. That’s the culture of architecture review, seek and destroy. See thing, find hole in thing, destroy thing. But if you produce three things, then it’s harder to do that. Or if you’re dissatisfied with the politics in a project, spread the deck across political approaches that are responsible for different flavors at different levels so that no one arrives and is completely alienated with your own political approach. If you have a robust approach, you allow the project some flexibility within the range of what’s possible, while also not forgoing making claims yourself. You don’t have to be apolitical and say “oh I’m just observing things”, you don’t have to be completely decisive and say “this is the right thing to do”, but provide a range in which you can leverage your own agency. It’s more in the spirit of what actually happens in the world.

i•p: You fielded a question yesterday about your interest in big tech. Our context is people who talk about the current socio-political culture have a strong aversion to that kind of over privatization of inherently public services. You reframed it as needing multiple approaches, but where do you stand on the politics of that question?

MS: I think there are still key moments in the whole spectrum of the growth of these giant tech companies that are alarming or appropriately “it-should-gross-you-out”. Elon Musk flew his own pretentious electric car into space. I usually find excitement in those moments when other people are thinking “That’s terrible”. But that one in particular, I thought, “Come on you can’t — you’re not going to fly the Tesla car into space, right?” There are moments like that where I do get critical and freaked out by people like Elon Musk, but for the most part I really think there’s not a lot of difference between him and other actors at his level. Trump’s one of them, Oprah’s another one… to a lesser degree, but in some ways, Dennis Rodman going to North Korea is another version of that. These actors are positioned in such a way that their image is prolific enough and their capital high enough to do these things.

Before the 2016 elections, I was one of those people who was—on a cultural research level—enjoying Donald Trump’s run for President, not because I liked his politics or because I thought he would be a good President (of course), but just because it was a special time in history when reality television was colliding violently with national politics. That was so interesting to me that culture was coming together to concoct a moment where Donald Trump, of all people, could run for President. And then he won, which put me and just about everyone else on the plantet into this existential crisis about what was going on around us, and I started to feel super sullen and guilty because I had been enjoying that half-fictional moment, and then it came to pass with all it’s violence. Since then I’ve gone through a period of adjustment; it has changed the tone of my work somewhat. And am now starting to recover into some middle ground between just rampant enjoyment of the crazy, gross culture around me and some critical encounters with the ways that it has serious ramifications that are now coming to bear on things.

To go back to the tech company question, it’s just a difficult one. I don’t think there is a right answer. If Facebook is able to track and quantify me in ways that I might not be comfortable with, even if policies emerge to better protect my privacy online, the proverbial cat is out of the bag… you’re not going to do something to “fix” that massively complicated issue, that’s going to make it all “right” again. I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier about needing to find ways to be an agent within it. In some ways (and it’s okay with me if others are less pessimistic than this) we’re all just fucked now, we just have to learn how to live with it — not just live with it, but live within it.

i·p: Earlier you speculated that these things just are, and people need to come to terms with it the hard way. Is this a belief that is restricted to your work or is it a personal political ideology?

MS: I think that living in the 21st century is about complicated relational structures and that it often refuses simplicity and clarity. We can think about early postmodernism as splintering the identity and subjectivity of everyone — as in suddenly I was able to do and be all sorts of different things, ironically completely opposed to the cultural moment that came before it. If we then cycle past the early 21st century, past 9/11 and so on, identities get extruded through all of these hyper-digital modalities and splinter even more. So, it’s hard to say what one should be up to. I just think the smarter you can be, and the more available you can be to things around you, then the better for you and the better for everyone else. Most of the work is trying to scratch that itch: what can I see around me that I’m interested in culturally and politically and how can I use it as a spatial thinker? Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I don’t plot things out strategically as much as people think I do. I see things around me and get obsessive about them, and I just do work. Sometimes, it spills out as 5 machines that do funny things on a landscape, sometimes it spills out as 21 agents within a science infrastructure and governmental entity. It just depends on what the situation is and how I think I can best operate there. That’s just my general ethos on things. I feel like I’m on the earth to do that, and that’s just what I’m doing. And I run into problems: I run into disciplinary structures that don’t like that, and into audience gathering problems where either no one’s interested in it for various reasons or people are wildly interested in it for reasons I didn’t expect. But I’m just doing what I think I should do, what I value as an architect and spatial-cultural producer. ·

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