The anatomy of technology. These drawings come at the cyborg from the other direction, rather than introducing artificial parts to animal bodies, they introduce animal bodies to technology. They’re both horrifying and familiarizing, at least these inscrutable shells conceal ‘guts’ like ours.
Illustration by Mads Peitersen
Academia is the research arm of capitalism in yet another way, workplace satisfaction.
“Despite the injustice and impracticality of the arrangement, large numbers of young people continue to present themselves to the meat grinder of doctoral study. Most fall away, but a sufficient number persist, and of the persisting few, only the tiniest fraction take advantage of tenure to refuse steadily mounting demands. These are questions that corporate managers have been examining for decades with a keen sense of envy. How to emulate the academic workplace and get people to work at a high level of intellectual and emotional intensity for fifty or sixty hours a week for bartenders’ wages or less? Is there any way we can get our employees to swoon over their desks, murmuring “I love what I do” in response to greater workloads and smaller paychecks? How can we get our workers to be like faculty and deny that they work at all?”
So maybe I am not the first person to say this, but I continue to appreciate the use of history to make claims that might otherwise sound a bit too extreme. IE, one can say:
The involvement of the government in the psyches of its citizens has grown far beyond what a naive—or rational—person might think of as the domain of mental health.
Or, an author can say:
The involvement of the government in the mental health of its citizens has grown far beyond the involvement that was common prior to the 20th century.
Less electric, perhaps, but quite true.
I really have more archival gems than I can handle right now, I just churned up a super fun internal report on how a HUD grant for a bunch of “city slicker intellectuals” was fruitful because it allowed “associates and fellows a chance to avoid going out into the world and doing real work. It allows them to do intellectual exercises while they blithely say ‘we’re escaping the from the academic world ivory tower world.’ “
I told ya, gems.
In 1950, Leon Festinger published his study of small group formation and influence using the “ecology” of Westgate Housing, built in 1946 for married veteran students at MIT. The study of small group formation and function was one of the earliest psychological studies of proximity and informal social behavior. Posted in honor of all camp-like student housing built after World War II.
Yes, that is a moving truck.
And yes, those are screened porches. I wish we had those.
Leon Festinger, Social Pressures in Informal Groups: A Study of Human Factors in Housing (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1963, c1950), 2.
Posh, perhaps even ironic, what does it mean to wait for social services in a space that could be in 2001 Space Odyssey? Brave New World? It recalls the Apple Store or IRobot?
Social Services Center by dosmasuno arquitectos
Anyone else remember these?
![Of these invisible borders, it’s interesting to see the split between north and south Jersey show up in the later maps of cell phone, texts, and mobility. No wonder it’s so hard to have Jersey pride, when your state is pulled by two major cities outside its borders. PS: A bit spooky to see the data collected, analyzed and visualized.
theatlantic:
The Invisible Borders That Define American Culture
One of the clearest regional differences in the U.S. can found by tracking the words people use to refer to soft drinks, which is in fact the map you saw at the top of this story. Pop or soda, or even Coke, these small linguistic differences are not as small as we might think. While “soda” commands the Northeast and West Coast (green) and “pop” is in between (black), “Coke” reigns in the south (turquoise). These small distinctions can often act as touchstones for larger cultural differences.
Read more. [Image: Samuel Arbesman]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m33cl9VdDM1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
Of these invisible borders, it’s interesting to see the split between north and south Jersey show up in the later maps of cell phone, texts, and mobility. No wonder it’s so hard to have Jersey pride, when your state is pulled by two major cities outside its borders. PS: A bit spooky to see the data collected, analyzed and visualized.
The Invisible Borders That Define American Culture
One of the clearest regional differences in the U.S. can found by tracking the words people use to refer to soft drinks, which is in fact the map you saw at the top of this story. Pop or soda, or even Coke, these small linguistic differences are not as small as we might think. While “soda” commands the Northeast and West Coast (green) and “pop” is in between (black), “Coke” reigns in the south (turquoise). These small distinctions can often act as touchstones for larger cultural differences.
Read more. [Image: Samuel Arbesman]
Despite myself, I’m enjoying Kracauer’s comment about a bourgeois “arrogance, which creates sham oases for itself, keeps the masses down and denigrates their amusement” thus allowing for the illusion that the bourgeois “are still the guardians of culture and education.” Though he predicts that eventually when all classes are forced to sit down at the same cultural table then variety will disappear, and we will all be addicted to distraction. AKA the internet?
Sigfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces” translated by Thomas Y. Levin in New German Critique, No.40, (Winter 1987): 93.
Theodore Porter’s discussion of mechanical objectivity has a certain appeal when studying the social, political and intellectual context of linguistic formalism in architecture and urbanism. Particularly so when we look at the early 1970s, a time when the field felt itself to be in crisis. I am arguing that the turn to rule-based design strategies, whether cookbooks or grammars, was in part a response to a public that was increasingly losing faith in the ability of architects to solve the problems of a mass, urbanized society. Porter frames mechanical objectivity—basically rule-based reasoning—as a tool for producing authority if not producing truth. Hence, formalism stands as a “technology of trust”. The conclusions that result may be impoverished, but they are the kind of conclusions that appeal to a wide audience. Porter writes:
“Where a consensus of experts is hard to reach, or where it does not satisfy outsiders, mechanical objectivity comes into its own… it has a powerful appeal to the wider public. It implies personal restraint. It means following the rules. Rules are a check on subjectivity: they should make it impossible for personal biases or preferences to affect the outcome of an investigation. Following rules may or may not be a good strategy for seeking truth. But it is a poor rhetorician who dwells on the difference. Better to speak grandly of a rigorous method, enforced by disciplinary peers, canceling the biases of the knower and leading ineluctably to valid conclusions.”
Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: the Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, 1995, 4.
See also MoMA’s holding of one of Eisneman’s rule-based drawings for House IV from 1975:
