Author-Matter

Sara Marini, Angela Mengoni
Author-Matter

The etymology of the word author refers to an act of creation, an act of augmentation, from the Latin verb augere. Author instantiates creation, the expansion of the pre-existing. In 1967 Roland Barthes declared the death of the author in his famous essay to state once more that the crisis is that of the author as a single subjectivity and as a term that condenses prestige, undermined by the de-subjectivation strategies of automatism, fortuity and fragmentation of the historical avant-gardes, as well as by the machinic act and by the reproducibility of the second avant-gardes.
Fifty years after Barthes’ paradigmatic formula, this lack of authorship appears to be a successful brand. The tensions between the anomie of matter, the law that establishes authorship and the economy that makes the work possible, invoke discordant perspectives. Artists make the self-destruction of their work the real work, and appeal is made for the demolition of architectures, whether by a recognised author or not, in order to re-design, or better still, re-claim the territory. Artificial intelligence consolidates its logics and its design by progressively shedding human ingenuity. The space of criticism becomes, finally, increasingly ephemeral. However, there is an acceptation of criticism that is, rather than an individual ‘signature’, an exploration and explanation of how design makes theory.
The binomial author-matter seeks to mark these tensions and contradictions: the featured term author is maintained to underline the persistence of that prestigious subjectivity, at the very moment when the rhetoric of “matter as an author” promises other forms of authorship.

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Bohumil Hrabal
Just in Time

Brief excerpt from Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, London 1990, pp. 1-2.

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Andreas Angelidakis
Democracy of Gold. (Click Autobiography of an Internet Architect

I live and work in Athens. I trained as an architect, and I switch roles between artist, curator, architect and teacher. My multidisciplinary practice often focuses around the internet. I often start with an existing building, producing models, films, ruins, installations or alternative histories, blurring fact and fiction, smoothing out the borders between the real and the virtual.
What I learned from my years of ‘pretend architecture practice’ is that the internet changed the way we design as well as the way we experience design. The internet changed design by replacing it with a Google search.
I was invited to the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement in Geneva, and that brought back strange Geneva memories. Demos Bar is a modular seating system upholstered in gold leatherette, arranged either as a hangout area or a punctuation device between spaces. I made a Gold Demos for Geneva, like the bars of gold that had recently evaporated from the nearby Swiss banks.

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Philippe Rahm
Climatorium. Architect as Meteorologist

Architecture is the art of building climates.
Men inhabit invisible air and not visible walls. The purpose of architecture is the void space we enter and not inaccessible walls. Through its own knowledge, architecture modifies a section of natural climate, sweetens a certain amount of the earth’s atmosphere, anthropising a natural space.
The whole breadth of architecture is to elaborate thermal, hygrometric, chemical and electromagnetic measurements. Architect must design climates rather than geometrical shapes.
The Climatorium, a 3500 square-meters building, is the visitor centre of Taichung Central Park in Taiwan. The architecture of the Climatorium itself, its constructive mode, assumes and reveals the role and primary climatic mission of architecture.

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Jonathan Pierini
What Will I Do Without Eurydice?

CFSE? is an installation caught between two and three-dimensional planes based on research around the mechanisms of typo-graphic writing with the aim of transforming a question of language into a living space.
The long-term objective of this inquiry is to question the validity of two narrative models – the cyclical one of mythological narratives, and the linear one of historical time – with respect to contemporaneity, understood both as a historical and as a post-digital communication condition.
The awareness of an inevitable coexistence of narrative structures and related writings in the contemporary world is assumed as an operating condition and as a subject matter at the same time.
This simultaneity implies the coexistence of different authors, corresponding to as many roles as are defined on the basis of the subject’s possibilities with respect to the configurations of the device.

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Pippo Ciorra
Anonymous Work. Kindergarden-House by Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo

The text aims to present a critical reading of a recent work by Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo. The chosen project is the rehabilitation of a former kindergarten into a single-family house in Mazzarrone (CT). The text is organized in a series of critical layers. The first layer is focused on Grasso Cannizzo’s design attitude: i.e. the project’s meaning and its role vis-à-vis the author’s previous production. The second tries to “position” her work within the (critical) space and time of the last fifty years of Italian architecture. The third investigates the relations between Grasso Cannizzo’s design approach – namely the Mazzarrone project – and the leading theme of this issue of “Vesper”, that is the author-matter couple. The possible conclusion discussed in the text is that Grasso Cannizzo may be considered as an exemplary case of 21st century authorship, where the author’s profile is entirely reshaped by a radically different socio-anthropological, cultural and artistic context compared to the 20th century.

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Rimini Protokoll
Nachlass. Pièces sans personne

What remains after we are dead? How can memories be staged?
The German word “Nachlass” corresponds to the whole of the material and immaterial goods left by a deceased person. It’s composed of «nach» (after) and the verb «lassen» (to leave).
n 2017, Stefan Kaegi/Rimini Protokoll accompanied eight people who for different reasons have decided to prepare their farewell. In collaboration with the stage designer Dominic Huber, they built eight spaces. Inside the protagonists tell, in their absence, the story of what remains when they are no longer there. The contribution presents the full text of the work.
“Nachlass” offers eight positions on what heritage and legacy mean today. How does our legislation affect the configuration of individual estates? What are the historical insights that seem important enough at the beginning of the 21st century to be preserved for future generations? What do we want to pass on to the people we love, and what do we want to leave for the society we live in? The eight protagonists guide the readers to the point where the baton is passed from generation to generation and to the borders of our very existence.

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Marko Pogacnik
A Network of Discordant Alliances. The Epistolary of Giancarlo De Carlo

The Archivio Progetti of Iuav in Venice preserves a large body of correspondence documenting the extensive contacts and friendship network that Giancarlo De Carlo was able to form during his long career. The bequest consists of over two thousand items in the personal correspondence alone, to which must be added letters grouped in separate batches relating to his professional activities, those drawn up as director of “Spazio e Società” (1978-2001) and, finally, correspondence related to the ILAUD, an international school that he directed from 1976 to 2003. This already significant body of documents is complemented with correspondence in connection with his role as a member of the MSA – that he directed from 1955 to 1957, a period during which he also worked as editor at “Casabella Continuità” – and with his involvement with Team X, from the CIAM conference in Otterlo in 1959 until their last meeting in 1981.
In this regard, the collection demonstrates De Carlo’s scrupulous care in managing his dense network of correspondents as part of the construction of his public image.

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Francesco Urbano Ragazzi
Kenneth Goldsmith’s Hillary

At 10am on 10 September 2019, Hillary Clinton made a visit to the iconic Venetian Teatro Italia. The balcony of this former movie theatre – which in 2016 became a supermarket – has been transformed into an exhibition space. Here Kenneth Goldsmith printed out all 62,000 pages of Clinton’s emails at the center of a violent political debate between 2015 and 2016. They still are the most controversial and important political documents in recent history. The duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, who curated Goldsmith’s exhibition, operates on the press review generated by the event, transforming it into an automatic poem.

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Gundula Rakowitz
Destination Istanbul. The Anti-Authorial Journey of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky states that her authorship is not limited to a decisive invention, like the Frankfurter Küche, but is rather a life journey, opening up to new experiments towards accomplished civil design. Her anti-authorial journey starts from Vienna, then Frankfurt and in 1930 with the May Brigade she is in the Soviet Union, that she leaves with her husband Wilhelm Schütte in 1937 for Istanbul. Invited by Bruno Taut, she returns in Turkey in 1938, where she puts into practice the notions she acquired on school architecture during her experience as a nomad architect. The first project is the Tower for the Turkish Republic Day on the Karaköy bridgehead, a Simmelian theme: bridge and door. In 1940 she returns to Vienna, working for the Resistance to Nazi-Fascism, but already in January 1941 she is arrested by the Gestapo and released only in 1945. Her journey continues even after, starting again from Vienna in search of ethical principles that command aesthetic principles.

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Maria Lonardelli
Maria Lai. Trickling Away in the Work

Maria Lai (Ulassai, 1919 - Cardedu, 2013) holds a place of prominence in the Italian artistic research of the second half of the 20th century, her imaginative genius propelling her work towards the innovative community practices of the new millennium. While deliberately keeping a distance from international art circles, Lai developed a universal idiom which expertly combined the language and traditions of her place of origin, Ogliastra, with a new globally understandable lexicon in which Sardinia becomes the metaphor for a condition of personal and collective insularity. This article examines the selection and manipulation of some of her preferred materials interpreting them as emblematic of a stance that affirms, on the one hand, the anonymity of the artist’s hand, and, on the other, the choice to embark on a path of deculturation and unlearning in order to define a research territory free from identity and language bias.

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Valerio Paolo Mosco
The War of Captain Terragni

Lieutenant Giuseppe Terragni was called to arms in September 1939. He was among the first to leave on military duties before Italy was even at war – which it entered a year later, in August 1940. He left surreptitiously, with a discretion bordering on carelessness, the day he learnt that his Danteum project was temporarily shelved. He spent his long training period – which would lead to his departure for Yugoslavia first and then for the Soviet Union – in Cremona, Caprino Veronese and Nettunia, shuttling between the different barracks, and Como, where several projects and especially opportunities for other assignments had been left on the table. He left convinced that he could handle military duties and professional ambition at the same time. He was not wrong: the year following his departure was indeed one of the most productive of his life.

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Mieke Bai
Challenging and Saving the Author

Starting from a discussion about the notion of authorship as conceived by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, the author proposes a re-examination of the authorial instance and its redefinition through an example from her own artistic production: the video installation Don Quijote. Sad Countenances (2019). The artwork highlights crucial aspects of a multiple authorship that is exposed to anachronic (or, in the author’s terms, ‘pre-posterous’) regimes of temporality. Indeed, the work involves a plurality of authors in its conception, realization and curating, and at the same time it highlights the bond between the originating authorial instance and the present. The interweaving between Cervantes’ Quijote and the traumatic events of his biography finds a link with the present time through the forms and materiality of the installation. The short circuit between the original author and a later resumption of his work by a collective authorship leads to the proposal of some identity features for a general rethinking of authorship.

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Francesco Bergamo
In Unknown Lands. Epistemology, Representation and Design in the Age of Intelligent Machines

The contribution aims to investigate the contemporary modes of the project most subject to digital technologies, in the light (and especially in the shade) of the notions of author and matter, which must be partially redefined on the basis of attempts to represent and govern big data, artificial intelligence and the infrastructures that host and transmit them.
The human species has been the main catalyst of the transformations of planet Earth during the last two millennia and, especially since the 15th century, human interventions have often been mediated by transcriptions of projections of mental images on physical media, i.e. drawings and project texts. Today, however, the complexity of artificial intelligent systems is once again challenging the possibility of drawing maps of the territory, and therefore the representation itself. It is therefore necessary to identify epistemological and methodological strategies to investigate what seems increasingly obscure to us, even running the risk of sinking into chaos to identify emergencies and trace new discourses.

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Alice Leroy
Unnamed Unmanned

The French artists Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni have been collaborating since 2007. Their work, at the crossroads of the history of science and media archaeology, deals with the measurement of time and matter, as well as with the genealogy of scientific technologies. Exploring the new media landscapes, Giraud and Siboni’s work questions the nature and experience of images in the age of computing systems and machine vision, that is an age where technologies have gone beyond the limits of human sensory capacity. Starting from their first collaboration, Untitled. La Vallée Von Uexküll (2009-2014) – the measurement of phenomena and frequencies which are situated beyond the capacities of human perception –, and going to their latest production, The Unmanned (2014-2018) – a history of computing systems and machine intelligence –, this essay intends to trace the scope of non-human and object-oriented ontologies in their genealogies of technologies. It sustains the hypothesis that with their film series, Giraud & Siboni suggest alternative narratives for the history of sciences and technologies: these narratives of machine vision and computing systems tell the gradual destabilization and the decentering of the human being in a technological universe which progressively gets rid of him or her. It is as if with the advent of machine sensory capacity and intelligence, the human figure had become a witness of its own decentering, if not of its own absence from the world.

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Irene Cazzaro
Matter Takes Shape. Intrinsic Forces and Stochastic Equilibria According to Alan Turing

Turing’s essay on morphogenesis (1952), of which here are reported – for the first time in Italian – the most useful paragraphs for a general understanding of the model he proposed, is a fundamental contribution on the relationship between matter and author: in fact, it examines chemical-biological processes in which form springs from the interaction between substances called “morphogens” that constitute matter itself, whose homogeneity is altered by disturbances naturally present in it or in the surrounding environment. It is therefore not necessary to presuppose a demiurge that gives it a form. The Turing model, born with the aim of demolishing the teleological argument, has in time assumed great importance not only in the natural sciences, but also in the humanities and in the generation of artifacts (see recent developments ranging from digital graphics to design and urban morphology), precisely because of its ability to describe and simulate processes based on the self-organization of matter.

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Alan Turing
The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis

Translation by Irene Cazzaro of an excerpt from Alan Turing’s essay, The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, 1952.

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Eduardo Roig
How Not to Be a (Modern) Author

Today architecture can be seen as a large technological infrastructure where the various types of architects join in starting from their relocated status. As a consequence of the convergence of computing and communication, architecture and its authors must undoubtedly distinguish themselves for their strong mediation skills. The question of intellectual property and authorship is at present often blurred, lacking an identifiable and up-to-date regulatory framework.
This essay outlines – in the form of a tutorial – a diagnosis of contemporary ecological architecture, by exploring the relationship between the author and the other stakeholders that participate in this hypermediated professional practice. The author hardly prevails but as one more object in the grammar of architecture, an entity whose characteristics have more to do with those of the digital object rather than with those of that modern author Roland Barthes sentenced to death in 1967.

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Sandro Marpillero
Dream-Work

The paper establishes a relation between Freud’s diagram of dream-work and a pre-architectural model/apparatus about the “production of the project.” This model articulates the mental systems of the original Freudian diagram about perceptions, accumulation of memories, their recovery and transformation in dreams, and revision towards waking state’s actions in the world. The physical interpretation of an abstract diagram emphasizes the role of bodily engagement on the part of an author and her/his relationship with materials, whose manipulation both reveals and conceals parameters for transformability. Processes of creative figuration are informed by dream-work’s latent logics, operating through condensation and displacement of memory-traces, establishing with them manifold relations. The phase of architectural dream-work belongs to the first of two stages, corresponding to the “production of the project.” A second phase, the “production of the building,” brings the dream-work’s outcome to a building’s execution by multiple social actors on the construction site, inscribing architecture in larger environmental and psychological flows.

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Ignacio Borrego Gómez-Pallete
Evidence

Evidence, as the trace of nature and authorship on matter. Objects are not only a material substratum, but also a support of evidences of all the events that have happened to them. These evidences are a layer of new accumulated information that turn any object into a unique narrative.
Architecture could be considered a bridge between nature and man’s authorship and its physical condition would thus be trapped within this dual reading. Material that has not been grazed by an author abides exclusively by its reaction to a given physical context. Yet when touched, in a sense it ceases to belong to nature and is transported elsewhere, tied to the hand of the author that shaped it and to the power of that author’s thought.
The identity of a construction does not reside in the material itself but rather in its information. It is informed matter.

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Rafael Lorentz
Factual

The word factual, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is defined as an adjective indicating the characteristic of something ‘based on or concerned with facts’. As in the current use of language, the substantive accompanied by it tends to be interpreted as something evident, non-questionable, close to the concept of truth. ‘Factual information’, for example, would be that based on the report of events that actually took place and whose validity therefore must be taken into account, since it is not subject to interpretation. The adjective, however, finds its root in a noun, fact, from which stems not only the referential quality lent to the object, but also the very base of its legitimacy.
‘Factual architectures’ can be defined as those whose design operations seek legitimacy in the manipulation of real things – those that exist in the realm of experience – presenting itself in the duality of an architecture that is made of facts and at the same time conceived as a fact itself.

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Andrea Gritti
Retrospettiva

Fundamental pages have been written on the contribution of Italian architectural culture to the practical and theoretical development of perspective. Less celebrated are the studies that have recognized the merit of having indicated, in the retrospective, the essential technique of architectural criticism and, in the biographical genre, the ‘geometric plan’ on which to inscribe the historical knowledge of the projects.
Recently, the curators of the Padiglione Italia in the last three editions of La Biennale di Architettura di Venezia took advantage of this marginality to observe, in an original way, Italian architecture and its context. Together with others, these researches have reiterated how historically recent architectures are well grafted in Italy, which, punctuating the territory, reveal a surprising density of quality. So if today there is a retrospective worth looking at, it should be dedicated to documenting this phenomenon and explaining its reasons.

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Nicolas Martino
Sovversione

Subverting is an entirely political issue, as politics – therefore – is the subversion of the author by a multitude of composers, who are today the only producers of wealth. Knowledge increases and grows through collective work and not through the authorship of the individual, just as the overall social wealth produced is the common result of widespread social knowledge. But the author’s subversion in favour of a multitude of composers inevitably knows of resistances, which only political organisation can in turn overturn. As Hans Jürgen Krahl’s prophetic analyses had already intuited in advance of the times.

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Clinicaurbana
Tramoggia

Tramoggia (hopper) is a device consisting of a container in the shape of a truncated pyramid or truncated cone with the smaller base facing downwards, in correspondence to which there is a shutter that activates or stops by falling loose material. There are many functional, constructive and dimensional versions of this ancient instrument. The tramoggia device is taken as the key to interpreting the complex relationship between man and the alpine landscape: it is the design principle of a minute architectural intervention in which the real author is the mountain.

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