Being @ Home as
Becoming Information
and
HYPERSURFACE Architecture
STEPHEN PERRELLA

The current condition calls for critical interpretations of space-time/subjectivity. Here, I offer an argument with a hypersurface geometry. A hypersurface is a new theory of liquid-embodied architecture to displace the nostalgia and re-realization being carried into the spatial conceptions of new-media technology. We shouldn't think cyberspace with conventional assumptions. Hypersurface delimits reductions assumed in biases prevalent in disciplinary categorisations. Epistemological thought hasn't produced what it promised prior to its entry into cyberspace; there are only further degradations to come. It is not a matter of deciding to go into cyberspace. We are always already in it, before the literal condition. An understanding before dichotomous assumptions is a way to inhabit the world. This is not an argument for the creation of art in cyberspace, rather, it is a matter of rescuing art from its superfluous role in relation to architecture. Hypersurface comes after deconstruction, but continues the critique of Cartesian assumptions embracing anti-humanist/anti-logocentric discourses after May '68. Further, it is the receipt and re-deployment of the architectural telegrams sent in the 60's by the group Archigram. (Their dream was of a city that built itself unpredictably).

Hypersurface architecture is a way of thinking about architecture that does not assume real/irreal, material/immaterial dichotomies. It is to consider an architecture prior to those assumptions, that entails a condition also prior to the assumption of a split between body-subject/building. To think this architecture is not an act of construction or deconstruction but a nearly self-generating between-state. The generation of it occurs in an interplay and interaction between the delimited forces, energies and desire/life in substance (Deleuze) and language (Derrida). The architectonic translation of surface is structure/substrate. HYPER regards reconfigured manifestations of subjectivity/desire not over and above but as a having-risen-within. Hyper-surface is the delimited combinatorics of bodies/building as an interactive substrate configured by intersubjective digital praxis. If the hypercommunications of virtual culture/capitalism were exhumed from the non-space of VR and set into play within the substrate of an architectonic of hypersurface, the resultant distortions, disfigurations, and radical abstractions left open to interpretation would effect not only a return of the repressed of Western discursive logocentrism but new forms of intersubjective interactivity. Prior to any empirical dealing with technology, we are already televisual. But let's do the work to recover that condition, as it has been covered over by the rational tendencies that have been at work since the beginning of Western Culture.

In a post-Christian world where transcendentality is bankrupt, we face, as Arthur Kroker describes it, a culture in recline that wishes to be replaced by technology. It seems as though technology in this condition that many theorists have suggested, to cover over death, isn't working (nihilism). So we have to exist in such a way to replace transcendentality. We must become information and to do so we must enter language, (technological practices assure this). As an architect, I am interested in the spatial conditions of what will be the play of that language. In this lecture I will refer to a series of Screenal Economies that currently may lead us to the threshold of becoming information.

H o u s e . P a r t y . f o r . C y n i c a l . C r a s h . C u l t u r e

In order to arrive as an architectonic of hypersurface it is necessary to throw as house party for cynics. (They include Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Mark Wigley, Jacques Derrida, Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze as well as Arthur Kroker, Tony Fry, Gianni Vattimo, Donna Harraway and Avital Ronell). But this cadre is a cynical group and with my not being a very hospitable host, I must circulate through these thinkers. At various moments, I return their unhomely thoughts to the house party. But their cynical moments are part of the patchwork that comprise the substance of hypersurface.

Being @Home. What is it for an architect to be asking questions regarding home, in the context of the electronic era? Further, what is at stake for a homeless architect to be asking such a question, homeless literally and existentially due to an engagement and dissemination with contemporary digital media? This existential homelessness is both liberative and debilitating and has a great stake in questions concerning architecture.

It remains to be seen how certain assumptions and logics of cultural practices that are in place will unfold as we approach the 21st Century. Such conferences as this become critical moments in determining future considerations while we must remember that the proliferation of new media technologies are manifestations of Western culture's attitude toward what Heidegger has called `productivist metaphysics', beginning with Greek culture.

Indeed, any position about home as it is effected by our contemporary condition maintains a transparent attitude that is symptomatic of being determined by technology. To truly engage the question of home is to understand that questions are already determined by technology. The task of prescribing modes of inhabiting the home of virtual culture must consider the uncanny convergence of the critiques of subjectivity in Western thought from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Deleuze and Derrida, inasmuch as that undoing is occurring precisely because of pan-capitalist enterprises in everyday culture.

Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave. Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy 1962.

Theorists like Arthur Kroker have explained that by mastering nature in our use of technology we attempt to cover over the issue of Death. Being the site of greatest security, the home also serves to cover over that question for there to be a home in the sense it is normally understood. To face up to one's mortality means to be thrown from one's home. But as architectural theorist Mark Wigley remarks, In the end it is only the alien that dwells. (Wigley, AD 114). One is homeless precisely through questions concerning technology brought to bear on the issue of being @home, but on the other hand, one is able to dwell. I will attempt to explore how it is that we may dwell, however problematically, in technotopia.

D w e l l i n g . a n d . H o m e

It is the context of the questions and problematics that I present here that are my current address. This is what it means to dwell in the addressing. But the questions that I will attempt to bring Home are not those of comfort or familiarity, they are uneasy questions that effect a tear, an unheimliche as that which casts us out of the `homely,' i.e. the customary, familiar, secure. (Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 63). This presentation then will entail a double bind, a digging out, an originary strife between an attempt to dwell at Home while at the same time acknowledging it as a violent site. We cannot simply assume that the home is an object that shelters us. Wigley promises that, The alienating space of the home veils a more fundamental and primordial homelessness. To be at home in such a space is precisely to be homeless. (AD, p 98)

On the one hand, man is violent, violating both enclosure and structure (he who breaks out and breaks up) in defining a home. On the other hand, there is the `overpowering' violence of Being, which the familiar space of the home attempts to cover over but which compels a certain panic and fear within it, and inevitably forces man out of it. The endless conflict between these two forms of violence is constitutional rather than simply a historical event. And it is not that one is an act of violence by a subject while the other is an act of violence against that subject. Rather, the conflict between them is the very possibility of the subject's existence, indeed, the existence of any thing as such. Man does not build a home in the same way that man does not build a language. Rather, man is built by the home. But, equally, it must be emphasised here, man is built by its destruction. (Wigley, AD, p111)

It is not the literal home that Heidegger/Wigley speak of here, but the philosophical interior, subjectivity and the manner in which architecture houses the subject. In the post-modem era (Kroker) we may have already been emptied of our bodies and are currently dumping our selves into cyberspace. in embracing the uncanny cultural condition whereby technology has invaded and cooped our ability to dwell, to be at home.

To do this, I must invite home unpleasant company, those who have thought the condition of the unheimliche. Not only as a means to argue for some new courageous disfigured condition of being @home, but for the time being, to pursue an argument that I am having with these individuals whereby I need their work but also must at a certain point reject it. It is a messy and embattled conversation that entails agreement and disagreement, departure and return.