Human Organisms

Like the rings of a tree, architecture stratifies in strange ways to form a neat timeline of people and place. An American small town, the downstreets of the main come up towards the tail of the gilded age, the Old West-ish main nestled between a two story canyon. Extending beyond are the post-war boom years, when the nostalgic childhood homes spring up on wide-squared grids of streets, each plot of two car garage going on in sequence until it just sort of... ends. Far enough into the Sisyphean black hole of uncovering their timeline and you’ll find old ownerships, old locations, packed-up and sold farms and businesses, that dot the landscape beyond the borders, a demand fired once and never again. Maybe children find the old field, or hunters down an old logging road and there’s a large square hole in the ground where the foundation of a farmstead used to be dug, in a five acre rectangular clearcut being taken over by shrubby trees and tall grasses. The forest too, young and brambly, even further journeys afield beyond the tangle of two lane highways and small outpost-towns dotting the colonial interior being required to escape the five o’clock shadow land shaved and cleared day after year after decade.

For the children of these towns, video games descended as if from Heaven. In 1979, few except the hardliners of DT Suzuki’s bastard societies could even find Japan on a map, and those who could scarcely could without making a crack referring to Pearl Harbor. By 1990, Japan was a promised land. They still couldn’t find it on a map, but they knew it was some fairyworld, where technology (in this context meaning toys) were “years ahead” whatever that means.

Meanwhile in Japan, that aforementioned technology was developing a world of its own. In LaMarre’s The Anime Ecology, he puts forward the thesis analyzing the narratology of what was exported to the west as “anime” - a truer descriptor than exists in Japan, for the wide umbrella of a certain form of media that developed as an expression of technology itself. As consumer electronics grew an entire interlinked world of devices and appliances, so too did media grow to include it. What happened at the arcade connected to the television, to the DVD, to the internet, to the home game console, to the plastic merchandise, and from this there grew a genre native to this tangled web of mediums, that of the broad world of otakudom. 

Another decade later and this culture began to slowly trickle across the Pacific ocean into America. First through the usual pan-pacific channels, video pirating networks catching signals in San Francisco (Otaku no Video took care to find one), snippets of conversations in Hawaiian bars with the loneliest member of a company outing, and then backchanneling around the Ring of Fire’s Japantowns, via the internet. The connection to Japan is incidental, anime could have emerged from any nation in the world, had that nation been the pioneers of the ecology LaMarre identified. It was thus via the rhizomatic spread of this network of devices and appliances over the globe, that a peak of saturation was reached where the things native to the network become memetic upon it. Otaku culture was uprooted and planted in the now firm soil of online, where it was only a matter of time for it to propagate to the now very deeply dug Earth of the United States. Christopher Poole copied the source code for the imageboard and the rest...

In a strange way, you can track the spread of techno-media by what is loved and where. Media often comes secondary in popular consumption, to the technology available for it. Media after all is only good as long as there’s a digital slot for it to plug into. Many histories could be written here, the deeply buried fungus of post-Soviet Source Engine culture, the last video store in the world, where a fat teenager dances to nightcore in raccoon eye 2007 makeup, the Bay area pseudo-cultures of media, its fandoms, and its discourses...

Architecture and subject are unified in this dance between each other, where they mold each other into a complementary organism. Like a termite mound or ant colony, footsteps make “elephant paths”, where the concrete is skipped in favor of a shortcut through the dirt. At the same time, behavior adapts to environment, as is written about with the brutalist redesigns of college campuses often being in order to engineer social environments away from any social interactions and towards a sort of collected-solitude among the students. 

Things that are built always come after the fact of their causes - to look around and see the stock exchanges crop up around maritime western Europe, you would find yourself already under the well-dawned sunlight of capitalism. Processes form fruiting bodies, akin to mycelium, from their actions beneath the surface. The human subjects within this substratum simply cause the emergence of the fruiting bodies, the architectural manifestations of their already-present actions.

The city makes itself known as an organism in this sense. A history can be drawn of every settlement, of the flows which birthed it, as process confluenced upon a single point to create the thing now standing, the brick and mortar like tracks in the grass, concrete markers of what the patterns were, what shape they took, what was done here.

It’s then in further evolution that the next generation subjects exist within. The feudal castle gave birth to the haunted house and we found an empty-space to channel our dead and demonic. The downtown gave birth to a generation of flight, emptiness, and then return as those now suburbanized returned to make the metropolitan center fitting to their folksy sensibilities and commercial economic life. The historical record, the skeletons of now-dried up riverbeds are then terraformed by each subsequent generation of floods to make a process of accumulation - one that can be seen in the term in Ancient Near Eastern archaeology (perhaps others, but I’ve only studied ANE) - “tell”, referring to the layers of civilization past that lies beneath the streets of every city living or dead in the region, buildings and streets almost always retaining the exact locations as old with each fine layer of compacted detritus.

It’s these tells, like rings of a tree, that give the story of a place. The story of an organism, of a wide flat plain eroded into glacially shifting canyons by the ever-changing floods raging down from the mountaintops.

Lightning in a Bottle

Snow is falling, gentle fat flakes from a white haze of sky onto the gentle ebb and swell of hills rising from the intercontinental tundra. The sky is northwards forever. I look up into it in reflection, sipping black coffee before the great window-wall of the building. Jutting from the ground, the facility emerges from permafrost jagged and glass-like. All black, except for the square end of the shard that opens up to a great glass wall, where light pours in from the north over the snow and sun, into the brut office constructed for me. 

Preservation is a watchword of the day. I’m all alone on a highway, six months previous, listening to the radio. I was where the hosts are rounding about to months ago, not that I would be allowed to speak of it. I pull into a gas station where soggy paper blows across the winter slush to my feet, crunching under the salt and sand, my own lips touching cold metal with a instant guilty bite as my tongue touches refrigerated cold. I finish it halfway back into the city. Research trips are always unpleasant, hoping to get a good nap in under the city lights to wash the taste of the nation’s white-primitives out of my mouth.

There’s an email to attend to once I get back to the office. Helvetica, 12 point, as is standard. Some place use arial, not that anyone except I can tell the difference, cultured deeply as I am into those little advantages not afforded lightly. I get another sip of coffee, looking over the carefully typed paragraph, somewhat between a memo and an order. Preservation, preservation. Information as well, keeping it safe though is talked about far more than gathering it these days. In my apartment I have an image of a dozen or so men in outdoor gear standing in some distant location, smiling, holding their equipment. It’s all obsolete now, the few suckers who get shanghai’d down to the south pole, the last frontiers where it hasn’t all been mapped out like the rest, at such a pace to busy entire buildings in cataloguing it.

I was once taken on a trip to see my friend, northeast of the city, where the money lives. He was old, not even American despite being here for generations to monolinguality, buttoned down in a banker’s suit. The structure was underground, inside a sort of Versace golden recreation of a hellenic villa, windowless, marbled stone, polished reflective on all side of me. Here there was only ink black and every shade of gold between yellow and brown. Security was immense, men were standing guard equipped in the way of soldiers outfitted fresh every six months, on the cutting edge of laser-rimmed eyes piercing me as I was led past a flank of submachine guns into vaults, vaults within vaults that he could only show me on a computer screen on a mahogany desk that itself was buried deep as though it were as precious as the interior’s contents.

We produce ninety-eight degrees of heat every second we live. In abstract, we produce exponentially more. I browse the halls of a server dungeon, glassy sheer surfaces in a winning battle of their heat against the super-frozen water pumping through their veins. I sit in a plane and look down upon the world where smog coats the city palpably, a fog thicker than fog, heat islands and car exhausts pumping out radiating waves of our heat into space. If there is life on the moon, we’re like a lover to them, burning to the touch, nestle up against us in the cold night, lord knows we’re putting off enough heat to forget the big empty beyond.

Heat destroys energy, practically speaking. Not truthfully of course, energy cannot be destroyed, but it’s obvious what’s meant. After heating, it spirals off, careening through the void to nothingness, until we eventually hit the terminal cold, where all is still particles floating isolate in nothing. I think about it often. My body radiates heat beneath my quarterzip into the arctic air and I think about it, the permafrost melting and all I see... that Windows XP screensaver, the one that simulates flying through space with white dots on a black background? I can’t stop watching the center. We use a proprietary linux build here, but I can’t stop looking into the face of terminus.

When I’m home, in a minimally appointed home, snow is falling outside, in gentle crystalline flakes. Every one is a unique sparkle of art that shows brilliant under a microscope. Every one hits my upper-floor downtown window and melts from the radiance of heat inside my apartment. The pattern is destroyed and the energy is lost to the void. I sit in an Ikea couch and watch the city blurred as my vision focuses on the window, only a scant reflection of the dim lights I have burning at this time of night. My computer is vibrating along the floor across the carpet. The heat can be heard in the walls. I look to my Rothko and back to the window. I am alone.

Travis & Bubbles Buried in The Jungle

A spectre floats over a niche online community, a lost work desired. Lost media is strange in this same way always, the very absence of the thing at the center of all discourse being the function of it, producing desire through a quest to search for it. Such often produces narratives of memory from it, spurning out its own niche of psychologically identified tales, such as shown in the Candle Cove fiction.

In particular, I’d like to make a case study of Go For a Punch or Saki Sanobashi, an either fictitious or so obscure as to practically fictitious eroguro anime from the pre-internet years of otakudom. Supposedly a lost short animated film that was found by a 4chan user on the Tor internet, it depicts schoolgirls trapped in a bathroom - nine of them, one with a white hime cut -   killing themselves after some drama occurs which drives them to suicide by methods such as braining themselves on the plumbing fixtures.

Its eluded its searchers since it was rumored to exist, to the point of developing schisms as the conflicting desires of the search go in different directions. Fanart is produced, making the thing exist if not as a VHS tape from the 1980s, then as a product of a search for the absent.

Eroguro typically works from the premise of Saki Sanobashi. Girls are divorced from the usual purity associated - the main character identified as having the anti-subtle hairstyle of a white hime cut - and left to be brutally torn open in the raw desert. The bathroom is never found, the parents withheld from the girls, searching, hoping to find them. The bathroom now forms a pocket of the wilderness, knives and animalism taking hold of the girls as their bodies become primary once again.

Quite a bit of pornography works on this basic storyline, of the Id’s total triumph. Pornography first begins with an exaggerated performance - the acting of porn isn’t so much a fault as it is the purpose, a foundational act to what occurs, where armor is rendered into metal bikinis and plumbers into greasy dago studs, performance being raised to a hyperreal intensity of itself. The gendered performances are embodied more fully than normally possible, by constructing a hypergender above and beyond the typical performance. A man becomes Delaney’s Hogg, his usual affirmations of the raw and brutal nature of manhood raised to the extremes of the concept. A woman becomes a whore, her costumes remade into slutty recreations of the old mask, more vibrant, colorful, flashier, showing more skin. A third gender is constructed often as well, in the strange space where it’s always implied in normal life. What is simply a weak man normally becomes a sissy and a cuckold, a lesbian becomes one of the boys in her musculature and possible hermaphroditism.

Hypertrophy is of course never neutral. The particular line taken can vary wildly depending on what is seen as the particular components to be hypertrophied in this process known often as “corruption”. Some darken the skin, plumpen the lips, exaggerate the curves and muscles and genitals, add tattoos, destroy the body or mutate it beyond human form, colonize it with insects or wicked technology... all of these paths being taken depending on the interpretation of what the performance is before the corruption begins. The interpretation of the nurse, as an play of matronly love, or as a play of disciplinary control, or etc, will all set up different pieces to become hypertrophied in the making-sexual of the performance.

The process of making-sexual is always alien to the performance itself, as my language thus far has been implying. Yet its always done as a deeper seed of life than the performance itself, a warring triumph of the id over the superego. No wonder then, that defeat is so often eroticized, in the ancient storyline of the feral barbarians overtaking the virginal feminine of the superegoic interior.

And this giving-in process, forms the basis of becoming-sexual, wherein the Id is made to reign over the Superego, the Ego - imagine the drama stylized in the cuckold drama. The weak young man, dressed in the finest uniforms of his place in the world, is shown for what he is - nothing more than a paper tiger. The feminine he courts decides to abandon him and open the door for the feral unknowable, the Freudian correspondence speaking for itself.

The first Death Grips album is steeped in the 1960s. Aside from a few mentions of items like MDMA, samples from surf rock or the first Pink Floyd album underly lyrics regarding a primitivization of the self. The speaker becomes like the man running in the desert in the Beware video, the naked and ungroomed man posing for the cover art. No shock, as the drama of the decade was through the shattering of an illusion of a superegoic order. Without an underlying material reality, the pretending that God wasn’t dead in the barbiturate haze of the post-war era ended with dual attempts, to either continue up and up and ascend to a new plane of consciousness, or to descend, to become feral as Tiger Force in Vietnam, Charles Manson in the desert, the revelers at Altamont and Woodstock and the Summer of Love.

Eroguro provides an interesting confluence in bringing together libido into one act, both sex and violence unified to work upon the body in question. The young girls in Saki Sanobashi, performing purity in their serafuku and traditional hairstyles, have their being worked upon from within. All violence is self inflicted as part of the situation, where the bathroom acts as the greater mechanism of making them become-sexual, the self being hypertrophied in its expense of energy, the act of braining oneself on a faucet no different in function from ahegao’ing while psychotically riding an ugly bastard’s cock.

The question then of desire and its origin is one that’s lead into a maddeningly simple aphorism. Hypertrophy occurs by that within being awakened to overcome the carefully fragile systems above itself, like Agent Orange soaking into organic material and overdriving it to grow itself dead. The identification of desire with the wilderness, as something exogenous to the self constructed in early life, and yet unignorable as being infinitely more primal than it, dovetails - desire is nonconsensual and yet will always be a source of some of the truest embodiments of the self.

A Pattern Language

Minecraft building practice is often surreal and uncomfortable to look at. The game works in 3D space, with the smallest unit available to all construction being a cube. The basic unit of sight is always divided likewise into this individual cubes, which then project their being in six directions from each face. As such, Minecraft constructions cannot have meaningful connections along anything beyond a two dimensional axis. For instance, a single block floating in a void at 0,0,0 can be connected to via adding one to any two of these coordinates. An addition at three creates a strangely jarring effect, where the block is both paired and unpaired, the connection to it is a three step process to add an additional pair of blocks between to connect 0,0,0 with 1,1,1, yet the human eye perceives some vague connection at the same time as the mind interprets a disjunction.

It’s these two factors which create the first jarring element of Minecraft building. Many major projects, the top rated on sites like Planet Minecraft, “epic” castles and the like, suffer from a strange effect where even close up, they look more like magic eye puzzles than buildings, a jarring visual noise of differently colored cubes all arranged in a chaotic soup of shape and color. These buildings form into this way by building backwards. Many of them attempt to imitate real-life styles, which are typically not suited to a world where the smallest practical unit of measure are cubes half the height of a human being, and thus are forced to perform strange operations that result in an unpleasant noise that looks like nothing at all, where every last block of a wall has some addition or subtraction, different blocks are used in conjunction, every single line is some form of a diagonal, items like stairs or pressure plates cover the landscape like a visual vomit...

From this emerges another strangeness, where the buildings become totally divorced from the meaning of their structures. Walking around many of these structures, one sees anvils as fences, pressure pads as tables, etc. Very few of these techniques create the desired effect, where again, the builder has worked backwards to fit the square peg of their intended design into the round hole of the world of Minecraft.

Few structures break this mold, the ones that do being instructive. 2B2T bases as they’re called carry this torch, one seen in singleplayer creations only a rare few times in projects such as Lumina Nocturnale. The game builds itself more akin to real architecture here, where the formations of the game inform the buildings created - notice the simplicity of lines, and the at least basis in economic utility of the layouts. All 2B2T bases are built at the very least with often clumsy to use dupes, if not through brute force collection of masses of resources.

Architecture is never rootless, as these examples show. Minecraft buildings either form out of the game or are an attempt to form a structure into the game, but either way, are processes of emergence from within the game’s systems. Architecture always works by this negative process of formation, where strands are drawn together by subtle hands.

Every style shows this, with the style of practice emerging over time as the manifestation of the needs, akin to the unconscious formation that any other organic structure, such as a tree, river, or ant colony takes. The motte & bailey emerged in a society built in the ruins of an empire, where the old roads still connected but there was no central hegemon or a throne of a hegemon to vie for, leading to disparate settlements with horizontal relations to each and thus always at the risk of banditry and war. Contemporary glass & steel rectangles came about as cities grew in density of capital, transportation by train and car allowed for urban density to become vasty wider, leading to more horizontal segregation among activities. Office towers were born, in neighborhoods that became single-purpose destinations for work in things which exist in the cloud - literally in the sense of modern computerized work, or figuratively, in the nearly identical tasks performed on typewriters before the internet.

A game’s architecture similarly will show everything there is to know about its mechanics. Minecraft is a game of manipulating the world and a lot can be known about a person by the nature of their base, from the utilitarian complexes of Feed the Beast players, to the isolated projects of builders, to the vast grinding-hubs, all of it shows particular ways the individual chooses to impress upon the world. Other games work similarly. Shooter games like Quake and Counter-Strike are worlds of hallways, corridors divided by doors and corners, a theatre of experimentation on sightlines. Mario 64 levels are wide flat planes with a series of playground like simple machines on them, for the player to use the simple movements and run and jump upon them. Examples could be made going on and on, in how this reading-backwards can be used to divine the mechanical foundation of what created a static structure.

Architecture exists here - not in the experiments and grand designs of individual architects, the privately commissioned mansions of the wealthy, cutting edge experiments of artists, but in what emerges. What practically forms the common home, workplace, farm, etc, the layouts that emerge from society. Artistically constructed architecture always has a problem of being more like statues that human beings happen to exist in, much in contrast to the world of architecture that emerges from the process of living itself. It’s in examining this, the character of architecture as the emergent language of a society imagined as an organic being, that architecture begins to reveal its power to teach about the hands that made it. 

Glass Half

It was the first term of Obama, under a frigid sunlight, maybe those doldrum times where March stagnated with slush half frozen and half-thawed beneath unseasonable shoes and craggled tires. I pulled up to the house under pleasant circumstances, situated as it was in plot once cleared for farming, now left to overgrow with waving grass and the slow sprinkling of rust flecking off abandoned tools. The house, wood, was the sort of building that only ever enlivened as it decayed, slumping down comfortable-like to become more of a hobbit hole as the elements heaped dirt and time upon it, giving it the air of an old man well deserving of rest, dispensing poetic words from a heap of blankets and sweaters.

In the living room, a couch looked the same, the figure in it slumped like a smoothed rock in cloud-like pillows. Upon it - a Windows Vista laptop, wireless mouse resting on the cushion under her hand, rapidly moving across the screen. Two Internet Explorer windows were open, each covering about three-quarters of the screen, one on Facebook’s home page and the other on Bejeweled. Noises glittered around over the sound of crushing and matching atop strangely bland images of distant planets.

Beneath the television was a Wii, all bright, with Wii Play, Sports, and Resort attached. Above it, the flatscreen was playing Gaga’s cavorting ritual-like, almost an invitation to her world. The room, white emptiness surrounding power condensed to tiny crystalline gems, a single chandelier in an airline hanger, gold draped from her body, sequin dusted over her skin as she glided inhuman-like in a world between worlds. Gaga was inviting us. I watched on the other side of the couch, wondering where this was the Black or White Lodge - or if that distinction was even real outside the old fashioned morality plays our older siblings grew up on.

Dinner was being put together in the kitchen as the couch was left to my devices. Distant-aunt was busy showing off her petty wins from the Indian casino, passing out little electronic games from her trip through Walmart, her livelihood of crumpled papers all along the passenger side of her Lincoln Town Car. His-sister was at the other side of the counter, papers pushed aside to make room for strange antiques and gadgets found at auction from a nearby desperate liquidation. I ignored the noise and the orange of burning secular candles, to push the cushions aside, hands held together like an Olympic diver, spreading a passage for myself between the cushions, into a dark. The fit was tight, warm and smothering as I progressed deeper, though I never felt stuck. I didn’t notice when the entrance sealed up behind me, all of that covered up with an unconscious knowledge that there was no point in even holding onto a thought of coming back the way I came.

A time - it felt long and I can’t say beyond that - later, I was in darkness, floating amidst the twilight zone spectacles of bioluminescent predators, occult eels and jellyfish, forbidden megafauna, my arms and legs flailing all about myself in dense water. I was propped up by it, suspended. This couldn’t be the ocean, I was neither freezing nor sinking nor crushed, a womblike floating.

Despite this, it was anything but. There were no wombtones to be found amidst the darkness, it was all lunar blue and shadow of nothing, if this darkness was feminine at all, it was in the infertile, witchy sort, the kind girls mature into, not the kind children are beget from.

I’m brought back to life, opening my eyes blearily. I’m wrapped in tundra clothing, of the kind that a human wears until it becomes an extension of their being, turning them into a hulking giant of the Far North. Scattered through the blue interior of the shelter are ancient bones from undersea demigods, the whales we worship, on whose rough skeletons we acquire rocks where myths are glyphed in languages impossible.

I learned to write when they taught me to read the stars. Out here, we don’t need fire. The ice and us had an understanding, as we walked on through lights and countless miles, that by the time we reached our stillness, it treated us like stones. We passed around pipes that put us to deep dreaming sleep, atop the ice sheet, looking upwards to Heaven, an abyss of magic below and the runic roadmap of the celestial firmament above.

When I returned to America, I did it Southerly, from Alaska’s trashiest hideaways - I pretended I was born there - down, down, through the darkest shadows of truck stops and dead hooker motels along the detour roads a few miles inland from the pacific coast. I dodged every major city as I picked up money I didn’t know I had. I made it to LA and emerged into a party, drink in hand, materializing out of a dark corner of a plastic-cum-marble Mulholland manor.

I was ascending a staircase. The stars were in my hand, every constellation seen from the tundra rendered miniature and blown up by the optical illusions of the crystal that vibrated between my delicate palm. The building was all white, lit perfectly, nothing but open, bright, and these little raindrop gemstones of magic above and upon. I was here for the coronation. In a grand white room, a woman we had never met came to us, knelt before an empty throne. The witch crowned her with two stretched palms, clothing her naked body in gold. The woman took the throne and we all circled, vulturous, the courtiers who elected ourselves. Our new queen looked out into the empty white between the throng of bodies we made around her. Our queen looked out into the empty white between the gold and crystal. We clapped. Our suits and dresses, black, made our queen recognize the situation at hand. Our queen gently had her eyes closed with two heavy coins. Our queen dreamed a dreamful sleep and we all took up harps in her name, to play our part.