An investigation into the mutable design of time and space, layer upon layer of excess, balanced in reduction. This is an exploration of critical issues in theory in Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design (IAMD) at OCADU, and studio practice in the School of Interior Design at Ryerson University (RSID), 2014. The documentation herein is a translation of events and discourse that does not necessarily reflect nor express the views of the institutions, but is an axial point from which a dialogue could reveal infinite degrees of concepts at once synchronous and divisive.

This is Unofficial.

By the very act of stating this is 'Unofficial', we have bestowed authority to this collective site of hyperthought. Through a phenomenon of parthenogenesis, this is no less official than it is unofficial. A blog in action, it assumes the modern guise of the Bildungsroman with the intent of 'becoming'. The most exciting part of the plot is in the aura of being immersed in the magic: one-part art of the suspension of disbelief, and one-part science in the method of learning in the highest form - experience. The aura, then, burns deeper in the flesh, is more tangible than the physical essence of the words on paper, text on screen, speech in writing, as media trans- codes/trans- mits/ trans- verses/ trans- cends/ trans-pires into connecting axes within a system of thought.

January 10 2014

IRN600 Studio launch: Incite. Inspire.

Crowd assembles in studio. Project is introduced. Challenge: using an existing site, design a turn-of-the-century industrial warehouse for adaptive re-use in the context of contemporary settings and communities, and for the future. A graphic image of Shepard Fairey's own adaptation of his iconic presidential poster that was in turn adapted as an official campaign commodity is shown, illustrating the re-imaginings of HOPE in the wake of #Occupy Wall Street. A comparison of pictures from the Paris riots 1968 next to the Occupy movement 2011 is strikingly similar. The concept being introduced is inspired by Chantal Mouffe’s theory of Agonism.  Agonism, according to Mouffe, is a liberal democratic ideal of politics (the arena of democracy at a level of representation) and the political (the social interaction and behaviours of the individual), whereby democracy constitutes a pluralism of ideals and communities. Where consensus may rule by a margin of popular votes (thus dominating by majority), Agonism allows for opposition and varying points of view.

“Antagonism is struggle between enemies, while agonism is struggle between adversaries…for ‘agonistic pluralism’, the prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions from the sphere of the public, in order to render a rational consensus possible, but to mobilize those passions towards democratic designs.” (Mouffe 2009:102-103)

 Fairey's work- a reconstitution of street art transcribed into the multi-genesis of poster art- reframes the positioning of power and the displacement of social discourse from the urban fabric to the digital sphere (twitter, internet) in a tradition of propaganda, or the aesthetics of politics. The events that transpired on the 17^th of September 2011 was the live synthesis of a community that evolved in the digital no-space of a social media mechanism that, in turn, was generated from a traditional print publication intent on countering the effects of its very existence (AdBusters). Thus, a simulacra was borne: “What is our one demand?” the provocation declared, with #Occupywallstreet as the forum a few months prior.

In Jean Beaudrillard’s The Order of Simulacra, he posits graffiti as a form of expression devoid of information, without message, grafted on to the city. The superficial function of the graffiti-sign is to mark out the territorial limits of the inscriber’s domain, yet by proliferation, the amassing of territorial claims in the graphic re-surfacing of the city creates the Deleuzian rhizomatic body: “Curiously, moreover, graffiti turns the city’s walls and corners, the subway’s cars and the buses. Into a body, a body without beginning or end, made erotogenic in its entirety by writing just as the body may be in the primitive inscription (tattooing)” (Beaudrillard 1993: 82). Graffiti embodies the adversarial conflict of the disenfranchised proletariat, dismantling the psychic and physical space of law and order in the republic. Fairey, a master of transcending class and semiotics through media manipulation, slips from the vernacular to the institutionalized form of advertising, playing with messages in hypercontextualized code, breaking through the boundary of commodified media. Where graffiti contains no message, it compensates in meaning; inversely, advertising transmits mass messaging, yet is meaningless. So what to make of this re-make of HOPE? Perhaps we could look into the words of Fairey himself:

“Obviously, just voting is not enough. We need to use all of our tools to help us achieve our goals and ideals. However, I think idealism and realism need to exist hand in hand. Change is not about one election, one rally, one leader, it is about a constant dedication to progress and a constant push in the right direction”.

His recruiting ad format is indeed about the message toward the 1% as well as the 99%: a call-to-arms to engage in the debate and seek reform. Like Mouffe, Fairey recognizes the importance of inclusive dialogue, knowing full-well that there will never be a final solution, but the continued progress toward a resolution while respectful of oppositional points of view is the highest form of plurality.

Presenter picks up a brick used earlier to demonstrate the indigenous material qualities of the warehouse. Closes with a final challenge: Will you use the brick to break windows, or to build?

Note: Shepard Fairey’s HOPE V2 is a revised version of the adaptation version. For more information on the dialogue between Fairey and a lead organizer of Occupy, see link below

Baudrillard, Jean

1993. The Order of Simulacra. Symbolic Exchange and Death Sage Publications 50-86

Fairey, Shepard

http://www.obeygiant.com/headlines/occupy-hope-v2  <accessed January 30, 2014>

Mouffe, Chantal

2009. The Democratic Paradox. Brooklyn, NY: Verso books, first published by Verso 2005.

Ballerina and the bull image: http://breakingcopy.com/the-poster-art-of-occupy-wall-street/   AdBusters June 2011

I am just a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy

Everything I say has come before

Assemble into something into something into something

I don’t know for certain anymore

  -NIN, Copy of A, 2013

Behind the manuscript of The Task of the Translator, 3-cycle x7 re-generative algorithm of Walter Benjamin

The Task of the Translator by Walter Benjamin – a prelude to the translations of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs de mal originally translated from French into German – has been translated again from Benjamin’s version into English in many variations, perhaps almost as often as Baudelaire’s epochal oeuvre. Benjamin’s own reflections of his task in transcribing Baudelaire position his inextricable ties to the content as an inescapable condition of inhabiting language, thinking within the structure, a being in, versus translating through language as a vehicle to carry and transport meaning. He advances the idea that translators have a tendency to reify meaning within a context of language suited to the translator’s means of communication, a law of nature first exemplified in the naming of things in scriptures of religion as the first testament to a method of control and commandment.

Herein lies a paradox Benjamin reflects upon in his treatise: the meaning of a piece of literature changes with the variables of fidelity and license: the accuracy of translated words is not mutually exclusive from the embodied spirit of meaning. Further, not all works of literature possess translatability, such as the translation of a translation. 

The following is a transcript of Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator, originally published in 1923. The text is formulated through a process of inputting the complete text into a translation program (Google Translate) starting from English, transferring text into 3 successive translations, returning to a base translation (English version 2). This process was repeated 7 times, with the final re-generative version (English version 7) re-constructed with a final interpretation.

As the software is based on a linguistic algorithm intended to translate words into the most prevalent context and use of the time, the words are in constant flux; no translation will ever be the same.

Key generator: 

Input to Google translate: English2 to Korean

English5 to Moari

Text in Bold is the final interpretive analysis of the translation in the following excerpts.

-February 11 2014

Try art appreciation and the recipient. Art is not the answer , the science and the foundation of the spiritual life of the people. When I was a student still , and not an agreement , the browser you can imagine.

If one tries to appreciate art, the recipient will find that art is not the answer – nor is science – as the foundation of the spiritual life of the people. When I was a student, you can imagine that the browser, or interface to all the data available at the time, was not a source of agreeable information.

Society, and we do not know the source? The difference can be sufficiently described in the prior art and the situation. In addition, you may think that to speak for the "right" . "He's in the book" What information ?

This raises big questions: Where did Society come from, and how do we not know the source? Perhaps the art of the past and its context or situation can be sufficiently described as the difference in what is knowable and what is found. In addition,  you may think that if “He’s [Society] in the book”, there is given authority, a “right” to exist (in the past, present and future). But what information is being transferred?

Otherwise translation . Users translator understood the money Szhhhoklhhazr Hiabaih Trgommshmot was two .. I then offer legal with the opportunity to continue to us all , and all for the idea and the first Cihshalh , given the size of the prototype of the problems that many people are familiar with the report , however , the import, for example, still on life? . At the time I did all milisoume.anamnisi . Moreover, in order to get some of them to look into the culture. The ability Hiahlk Vicirthhumr well .

Gift (hibah) (Arabic)

Szhhhoklhhazr= dzhokhar = essence (Persian)

Shemot – Names (Hebrew)

milisoume.anamnisi – talk remembrance (greek)

Perhaps it is otherwise known as translation. For example, the translator of information understood that money was both information and confirmation of translatable existence: it was the ‘name’ (shemot) of a “gift” (hibah), and the “essence” (Dzhokhar). It then offered the first legal right for all an opportunity, and the idea (inspiration) to continue. However, given the size of the initial prototype of this system, the problems of which many people are familiar with in the reporting of such, it questioned the values – for instance – was the import of society still on life? At the time of the written reports, it noted the all-importance of “talk remembrance” [oral tradition], moreover to encourage the tradition, and to look into the talk-remembrance culture. The ability to “Hiahlk Vicirthhumr”, or talk truth well*.

*translation unavailable – phonetic cues and context of previous texts provided the interpretation

Do not open, but the best way to Japan and elsewhere. Therefore, the only source of employment , although the law and the facts of the situation to hear . So now we can see the natural logarithm of the background is extensive. Life Unmetaphorical Mlavitzirot Amnotophilosofih Institute. But less accuracy and bias in the blood, and life is good . In some cases, you can manage your life. History of philosophy of life, the life of the evidence. In this case , I cry. Yahoo is a good translator rays. Another of the west go Modcnbhiim Sabrbaufn flowers.

Money (as a metaphor for information) does not always open doors, but may be the best way globally, to Japan, and elsewhere. Therefore it may be the only source of employment, although the law and the facts of the situation are still awaiting to hear evidence of this. So now we can see the natural logarithm of the background to this is power of information is extensive. I am not a philosopher in the institute of life unmetaphorical: but if there were less accuracy and bias in the blood, life would be seen in the light as being “good”, and In some cases, a method to manage your life. The history of philosophy teaches thus, that life is the evidence. In this case, it saddens me to think that my browser of information (Yahoo) is a good translator like the rays of light on a dying flower of the West.

The concept longest life expectancy Nalhlbali . The relationship between the life and the sky in the first, but not too much memory , and there is no place for a simple Lhufiabtnoah last Slhmtra Ablhtooh . The results are expressed purpose of life , of all things , I want to value life , and the results , and finally, the representative of the country at the end. Finally , because of the relationship between the translation Mrczhttzogh . You can expect to see signs of ambiguous emotional power , in other places, and I - .. Also Aiumshalh central question about the relationship between the expression Hsfhuhayntgrtzih Diamond ' s purely Chinese Foreign and communities past and all I wanted to do in the past.

The concept of the longest life conceived as the relationship between life and the universe is the first order: detached from memory; without place for simplicity, the last. Life expresses its purpose in the result of all things: I want to value life, and its beautiful results, and finally, be a representative of that country at the end, embodied in the relationship of meaning and translation. When in this mode, you can expect to see ambiguous signs, that of emotional power in other places. The central question about this relationship is sought between the expression of the past and present (foreign Chinese communities of the past seeking reconciliation imagined as saying: “All I wanted to do remains in the past”).

I want to get the word of this article " Rksfh new Hihsimohok history and , before that," [F ] For more information and Slhmhakr , I Hlkbtaurih traditional style at a glance. Fitness Slhgrsh Sbohsfh English and not only to the concept of used to do it soon , includes model ? In fact , this style is now open the book, and a deep connection with the money left over. I Anshuhumology other . Domyoto where young voice. I'm writing a dry paper 's lead author Hiamgmh delete it . Too bad , and the problem of the application. With regard to the process of obtaining the address forgot to make many , and power.

At a glance, history may be the traditional style. The “new history before” is not only a concept but in fact includes the model of information as the new style now opening the book to a deep connection; commerce is left out, leading to humanology as the “other”. The young voice of the words I write dry, and the paper’s lead author deletes it. This is the problem of the application with regard to the process of the new history, obtaining the one place but forgetting to address the power of many.

Well , to record the sound so high and simply known , without the Japanese should aftonoito.exakolouthei .. Cleaning. And it is not alone in the back, and the extent and impact of the document Llachnaksr Binadmion Hhistoriutlveniih Slhsibot between the two languages ​​, the word and grammar - .. Language problems and the desire the same language in the sense that the perfect job is not to remove the target to restrictions on the language and concepts of the world use . The story shows how such a little fruit and focus on this kind of disease, " to" , usually as an introduction to the report of Htoohorhok .. And the Holy Spirit , and the screen saver Alhfitoh a translator ?

aftonoito.exakolouthei – self continues

To record a thought well, the Japanese look to heights simply known as the continuous cleansing of the self (aftonoito exakolouthei – self-continues, Greek). And the process is not without problems: back and forth, the extent and impact of the document between the two languages of words and grammar, there arises the problem of language in the desire for the perfect sense of the same language, the intent is not to remove the target to restrict the language to concepts of worldly use. Yet the story shows how such a little effect will focus on this kind of disease: is it an introduction, a report, scriptures of the Holy Spirit, the screen-saver as translator?

Of course, the language issue is to establish Huaftron little time. So, in some ways , the development of faith, lose the bone built sound capabilities . We can not do it , but Zcilarichot fruit , and the structure of the body , no doubt , the Slhhhlta good work. I want to be one of these houses , and changes in the source Slhhistorih Bauoiroat

Of course, the issue concerning language is to establish oneself in the Hereafter in such little time we have. So, in some ways, the development of faith is lost in the sound bones of the built (fabricated) structure. If this is the case, we cannot do it: we cannot bear fruit if the structure of the body is without doubt, and the soul of good work. I want to  be one of these structures in the language of time, one of these many houses that change in the spirit of history, from the source.

Google Translation accessed February 01 2014, Chrome + Explorer browser

Edited February 02 2014, Word document

The site Kotaku has posted updated bug problems that have been fixed in the virtual life game, the Sims http://kotaku.com/pregnant-sims-can-no-longer-brawl-and-other-amazing-s-1506014739

Here are some favourite excerpts to help you through your virtual life:

-Reduced the urge for neat Sims to put away fire pits

-"Become Enemies with Child" wish no longer appears

-Sims can no longer "Try for Baby" with the Grim Reaper

-Fixes a bug that causes Sims to teleport off of some of the new beds in SP01

-Mac Only: Swimming in a pool inside a high rise building will no longer cause a Sim's plumbob to become invisible

-Pregnant Sims can no longer "Brawl."

-The Murphy Bed has been made less lethal [interior designers: take note]

The Verge (verge.com) continues to relay the adaptation of the rules into a form of poetry, sample as follows:

"There used to be an issue that caused relationships to break
when traveling to Egypt, China, or France,
and one that made people disappear from the world
when exiting the carpool on their way to work.

Once, you might have walked on water
to view paintings placed on swimming pool walls —
not anymore."

See Patchwork, by  Joel & Jessica Dueck

Remix Theory: Eduardo Navas and meta-jazz, meta-space

Part I

In Navas’ 2012 book Remix Theory, Dub music is given precedence as the precursor to rap and hip hop, embracing the recorded sample and re-contextualizing it into a new form (until now, I did not know that the origin of the word Dub was meant as double [Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins], or “doubling”, as in tape to tape). The idea that rap music was the first explosion of Remixing in popular culture to seriously supersede Dub music is arguably true, given the developments of the growing infrastructure of the recording, distribution and consumer networks pervading mass media and industry capital. But the sampling culture in modern North American entertainment had earlier forms of remixing in the era of bebop jazz improvisation, whereupon the culture of jazz was predicated on learning riffs from live performers, and street credibility was and is earned through the adaptation of a well-known standard. Even standards of legacy that commanded reverence were not immune to brilliant counter-points of nursery-rhymes as Charlie Parker often inserted (Three blind Mice in Cole Porter’s In the Still of the Night [Koch, Lawrence. 1988. Yardbird Suite: A compendium of the music and life of Charlie Parker, p.246. Ohio, Bowling Green state University press), or cross-overs of a Stravinsky symphony opening http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWotpIy0uTg in a Parker jazz solo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdITTYUk2i0. The ontology of jazz music itself is often cited as a hybrid fusion of African rhythm and American bandstand genres, enabling a fluid transformation of musical narration within a boundless framework that bebop jazz thrived on. Thus, jazz music reinvents itself into a simulacra of musical events, scribing its own history in the telling of its own origins in an unmediated form of improvisation, no longer resembling the shadow of its roots through its enactment. In this way, modern jazz could be viewed as the postmodern deconstruction of American music prior to 1936 (credit to Charlie Parker’s explosion onto the jazz scene at age 15) in the same way Navas describes Remix theory:

“. . . Remix is a discourse that en-capsulates and extends shifts in modernism and postmodernism; for if modernism is legitimated by the conception of a Universal History, post-modernism is validated by the deconstruction of that History.

“Postmodernism has often been cited to allegorize modernism by way of fragmentation, by sampling selectively from modernism; thus, metaphorically speaking, postmodernism remixes modernism to keep it alive as a valid epistemological project” (Navas 2012:4).

Navas explores the DJ culture of mixing as a cut+paste of samples, first as a turntablist method of scratching, dropping riffs and intermixing records, and second as a MIDI sampling of bits, parts and sounds from electronic recordings. Perhaps the most street cred is traditionally reserved for the old-school DJ who is able to perform not two, but 3 turntables at once, as witnessed in the ‘90s when Derrick L. Carter came to play at the former Industry night club, and again in Toronto 2006, as Kid Koala remixes the classic Moon River into an eerie feedback of analog- and technologic soundscapes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhbrYI48MGI. The performance becomes an embodied improvisation of recorded sounds pushed through traditional scratching and sonic tactility. That same year, (Matthew) Herbert performs a live set of instrumental, vocal, recorded and staged sounds, and layering in live mixes of sounds generated in real time, sometimes contextually produced, and others arbitrarily integrated. Stage performance becomes improvised again and is co-created (while orchestrated from a central conductor), a materialization of music from otherwise dematerialized events doubled and retrieved through recordings http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IKA0GyJYQM. This is derived specifically from Herbert’s personal manifesto of creation:

2. Only sounds that are generated at the start of the compositional process or taken from the artist’s own previously unused archive are available for sampling. – taken from P.C.C.O.M. - personal contract for the composition of music [incorporating the manifesto of mistakes]  - http://dev.matthewherbert.com/about-contact/manifesto/

The commodity of live performance in music therefore becomes the experience of time, and even more to the point, the live event of the present. 

Part II

Meta-space

The design of space has a multitude of contextual factors, influences, limitations and cultural indicators to contribute to the formation, development and use of an environment. A space becomes place through the live enactment of socio-spatial communication through senses – tactility, vision, acoustics, olfaction, and taste. Interpretation of sensory input into elements of design: line, shape, form, colour, texture, and experiences begin to emerge: compression, fluidity, wonderment, curiosity, humility, private and public exchange…. Interior design in its own right is a remix of ideas, taking an existing structure or demarcated area within a set of given parameters delineated from the architecture, landscape, or ritual of space. Interior design becomes a violation, an interference, a cut, a paste, a burning of old, a graft of new. Parasitic architecture as a subcategory? Interior design is parasitic in entirety. Invasive, pervasive, turning the experience of architecture inside out, whereby the exterior is but a shell of the corporeal salience of space. The design of interior space is the axial interaction of multiple forces from which program, function, psychological and physical engagement continually reformulate actions and ends, unifying and dispersing the individual experience with the collective. The design of space is then based on the transference of physical properties into relational phenomenology, entailing the psychology of space as the dominant force overriding the 5 strategies Lynch classically defines as the parametric order: Paths, Edges, Nodes, Landmarks, Districts (Image of the City, 1960). What, then, are the boundaries that define the limits of space beyond the physical?

In short, there are no boundaries or jurisdiction to contain perceived space, as it ties back to the experience which stratifies the event prior-and post affect. Similarly, the design of space in an existing structure – or the oft-cited adaptive re-use strategy – has no boundaries to delineate its effects within a fixed zone of program. Where does public space begin, and where does private space end? How does mobile technology affect the relation of place? How do open-programmed, multi-use facilities change in form, shape, function and desire, without a template to anchor ritual? Space becomes much more than a variable of a finite void to be filled, but rather a parametric volume of modular responses. A miasmic ether, space becomes a network that reformulates and assembles multiple nodes of sensory and design input activated in performative presence to create an event, as the DJ intersplices layers of sounds to create a time-based interaction as producer (designer), apparatus to synthesize and choreograph the samples (materiality and program), and the audience to develop an experiential relationship (the inhabitants). 

Part III

Networks: Knocking. Redistributing. Reforming. A system rewritten to combat hierarchical structures too massive, pyramidal, static and terrifying. This is what Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker posited in their essay Protocol, Control, and Networks (Grey Room 17, Fall 2004, pp. 6–29. © 2004 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology) as a means of subversion in recognition of decentralized terrorism, a form of file-sharing BitTorrent mobilization, perhaps more achievable in resolving the entropy of James Maxwell's apocalyptic war of polar forces in micro states than in total fission. "Life is a sort of counterpower" (Galloway 24). Life and all things living is a model of an inverse order to entropy to counterbalance the amassing of energy unattainable. Perhaps it is because - in all its randomness - the living quotient of the individual is the singular entity, atomized yet unquantifiable, not equivalent to the law of averages. If life truly is analog, then it cannot be measured.

Zooming out to a larger, more comprehensive scale, the relations of the micro to the macrocosm of networks, people / units are nodes, and I will posit places as nodes as well. No longer defined edges or boundaries, nodes are the juncture points of culture that define as boundaries are dispelled. As is space: space as a political boundary is fluid, as culture is no longer defined by set boundaries of contrast.

Big data may support this, but I suspect it reinforces what the largest paying bidders will want to find ("Claims to Objectivity and Accuracy are Misleading" - Boyd+Crawford, Six Provocations for Big Data 2011). An example of the Deleuzian Dividual shows how this has come to be a reality, in the many semblances we have taken on in quantifiable terms. Consensus / referendums, anyone? We will require passwords to passwords, at which point the number of our identities will be reduced to an even smaller presence as the ordering systems divide and become sequenced to smaller degrees.

We've been dealing with a different view of binary and post-structuralist idioms, but it resonates in the substrata of design and planning tools, the micro-undetected mechanisms that eventually materialize matter into our world of physical space and interactions. An example of two types of software (now both owned by the same company) that influence the way things form and take shape are samples of ghosts in the machine: CAD and MAYA. Here are some thoughts on the approaches to constructs built in these systems. (Full disclosure: I am fluent in CAD and am familiar with its corollary systems of NURB-based applications it has more recently incorporated, and yet I have never worked in MAYA).

Boundaries and networks – a reformulation of particles, disassembled from the monistic CAD programs, solidifying objects into one comprehensive entity fundamentally based on the XYZ UCS (Universal Coordinate System), a language in a 3D Cartesian point system of infinite space. Maya: particle-based node system, each node having unique characteristics that are bound and influenced by adjacent nodes, creating surface textures, flowing distribution effects and atmospheric presence. CAD unifies, stratifies, engineers the fixed inert point to the nth decimated degree of absolute singularity, borne from the quantified field of Boolean structure, whereas Maya disperses and re-applies the algorithms of NURB (non-rational unified B-spline) configurations in non-Euclidian bio-mimicry. The Maya system is still, undoubtedly, a construct, a facsimile of natural forces, but it is the difference between holding a sheet of glass in hand versus sifting sand; neither CAD nor Maya being the purer, nor purest, each having a set of applications worthy of integrating into the life construct in counterbalance to resistance.

Epilogue

http://www.radiolab.org/story/153809-rules-set-you-free/ (start at 9:58)

"You have a position which has never occurred before in the universe...and this is what is known as the 'novelty'" - Frederic Friedel

Friedel posits that there are 10⁷⁸ atoms in the entire universe, but in the game of chess, there are 10¹²⁰ possible game scenarios. A game which is defined by strict rules of engagement, within a grid of 8x8, stratified in a computational method of strategy, yet has the potential for the equivalency of greater infinite choice than the reality we can know: this is the power of recombinant networks, constantly reformulating relations, power struggles, relationships within the territory of space and accepted definitions of boundary, whose outcome is infinite. The concept of the game inside the board layout is akin to the design within, the interior of space, the strategy of recombinant formulation in constant play within the confines of a regulated box: it has limitless potential to cut open the divide of inside and outside, private and public, containment and platform. Physical and psychological data are exchanged and inverted in the digital physical debate of dominant communications, and more recently, a return to metaphysics as a form of investigation is on the rise again (Karen Barad’s Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter 2003 investigates agential realism as a technique to incorporate non-human entities as a consideration of quantum physics which may influence the outcomes of what we look for in such experiments, citing the surge in experimental metaphysics research in the U.S.). Thus, the discipline of interior design, or design of any inhabitable space that incorporates a relationship of 0+1, a being inhabiting more than the body, is a relationship of the physical + virtual, the visible + metaphysical, the geometric + the spiritual, the experience + the collective and individual memory, dispelling the myth of what is contained within architecture becomes the confines relegated to what we formerly knew as interior design.

We are in constant flux, assembling, dispersing, knocked into an aligned construct, dispelled into mist, but perhaps we are all moments in the long tangled string of history, each a particular moment coming together as an event of space to be designed as we see fit, that gives each an opportunity to be, as Friedel states, living in the novelty. 

Starbucks redux:

fake storefronts in Wuxi China have been criticized for their, well, fakery. The storefronts are merely ploys to attract potential buyers of real estate in the area renowned for forgeries.  Unfortunately, the stores are empty, when in fact, the real attraction would occur if they were truly outfitted to be unique replicas of the original, thus becoming an original experience based on its simulated extreme.

http://kotaku.com/stroll-down-one-of-the-fakest-streets-in-china-1498517972

Apple:

http://gizmodo.com/5822918/fake-chinese-apple-store-looks-amazingly-real//all