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.