240 241VI VI

K ELLER E AST ER LING & MICH A EL WA NG

IN CON V ER SATION

Information Infrastructures

Keller Easterling & Michael Wang in Conversation. Information Infrastructures. White Zinfandel VI 2015.

FOXY PRODUCTION New York

242 243VI VI

M.W.We are both interested in information systems

that condition contemporary life. These networks are, in fact, the ‘medium’ within which the contemporary subject is suspended. As an artist, I am entering into these systems to define new spaces for artistic intervention—as new media. As an architect, what draws you to these informational infrastructures?

K.E.I am trying to see not only buildings, but the matrix in

which buildings are suspended. I’m not necessarily turning away from buildings. I want to have skills to handle both things—both the object form and active form, which is something like the spa-tial equivalent of a software. The space itself is an information system. I always refer to Gregory Bateson (see Steps to an Ecology of Mind) who often talked about a man, a tree and an axe as an information system. The relationships between objects in space, in my view, are information. Whether or not there is an attendant digital system or any other abstract system—whether or not it’s coded with sensors—information is latent in the arrangement. I often use the example of mid-century suburbia, like Levittown. There are objects there, but what’s much more obvious is the information system in which those objects are sitting. It’s an almost agricultural system of multipliers that decides the form that an object will take. There’s nothing digital there. Yet, at the moment, when we talk about space as an information system, we have to overcome the automatic conceptual hurdle that an information system is a digital system. I don’t need AirBnB to make architecture dance. In my view, it’s already dancing. Latent in the arrangement is a disposition or propensity.

M.W.This makes me think about the relationship

between scientific thought and technology. Nature isn’t made up of information until it’s interpreted. Science gives an order and gives a representation that sits on top of that nature. I think what’s interestingabout the close connections between science and technology is that technology will quickly take that information and make it operative. In my work Differentiation Series, I collaborated with a stem cell researcher who was developing what she called

“recipes” to coax artificially produced stem cells to differentiate on cue. She and other researchers were developing increasing numbers of these recipes. Ultimately, the idea was that they could develop enough of these recipes to create any cell in the human body, at any time, from these cells that had this pure potential. And what was interesting about this was that even while they were mapping out the scientific knowledge around the very process of cellular differ-entiation, they were simultaneously creating a tool in the service of, say, medical technology: how to create a liver cell from a skin cell that would match a unique individual’s DNA. Many of the systems I engage with are these areas where a human actor has the poten-tial to exert an influence within an arena that formerly wasn’t accessible to human manipulation. Nature itself—with some of these tools and information systems—becomes something that can be modified

MW & KE

Carbon Copies2012-318.38 tons CO2, paper, canvas, graphite,colored pencil, acrylic, nylon, plaster, steel,aluminum, cement, waxInstallation view

INFO INFRA

FOXY PRODUCTION New York

244 245VI VI

or controlled at both a minute and macro level. I think that these new domains also have the potential to become spaces with new aesthetic effects, some perhaps the outcome of artistic acts.

K.E.And I am often trying to train my eye to detect the

information system latent in nature. Someone like Gregory Bateson, who I really admire, could observe any group—members of Alcoholics Anonymous, groups of dolphins, groups of any-thing—and see within the group an information system as well as a temperament. He saw the capacities for violence or aggression or tension in the group. Genetic material is a perfectly good model for architecture, where complexity comes through the interplay of simple things—four bases and the potential relations between those. While architecture often still longs to taxonomize the object, many other sciences have moved past taxonomizing the object, to working with modes of interplay. In my discipline, I’m trying to develop a comfort level with idea that the goal of design itself might be the generation of interplay. Rather than going to a place and saying, ‘Here is my master plan for your city,’ the designer would identify linkages or counterbalancing components that develop an ongoing interplay.

M.W.What’s important about the kind of information

systems you’re talking about is that they are always composed of replicable units, like nucleobases. What’s interesting about these replicable units is that—if you fragment something apparently whole into units that are limited, repeatable, known and can be arranged in different ways—suddenly the small scale operation at the scale of a unit, or a sequence of units, becomes an entry point where a small operation has the potential to reverberate throughout the system. In your writing, you describe interventions like the ‘multiplier,’ which seem to that take advantage of the reproducibility of a code.

K.E.In architecture, one of the chief ambitions is to create

a singular and unique object. That is an artistic pleasure of many people in my discipline. I do not wish to disturb that artistic pleasure at all. I admire it and love it and do it myself, but I’m also trying to identify potential artistic pleasures in manipulating the repeatable formulaic space that has made the discipline of architecture feel completely disempowered. As unlikely as it may seem, I am wondering if this really repetitive, really formulaic space is unbelievably empowering to us. The perfect, unique, little object form might do something—just like it might be significant to rush up to one Levittown house and fix it up. But wouldn’t it be more powerful to exploit the existing dispositions within those organizations?

M.W.For me there are two stands you might take,

and they’re not necessarily exclusive. One is to look for places where you might actually design the system from the ground up, or design some unit that repro-duces to form a system from the ground up. The other is to look for a unique way of occupying existing

MW & KE

Jeff Koons, Diamond (Blue), 2005-06, Carbon Copy2012-7.64 tons CO2(Certificate)

Takashi Murakami, Chaos, 1996, Carbon Copy2012-2.3 tons CO2(Certificate)

INFO INFRA

FOXY PRODUCTION New York

246 247VI VI

systems. I tend to fall more towards the latter, looking for ways to occupy systems differently, to access a system in order to produce a new aesthetic effect from within that system.

At the same time, I often bring together two systems that may not clearly overlap already. This sometimes requires inventing a new system, or a common unit, that allows these two systems to interact. In Carbon Copies, I brought into alignment two global systems: the carbon cycle and the art world. The atmospheric carbon released through the production of a work is a kind of shadow of a work—an index of the hand of the artist. Today this “hand of the artist” is augmented or replaced by the indus-tries, fabricators, curators, and shipping companies that can all play a role in the production of a work. The ‘carbon copies,’ small-scale versions of the works scaled according to the carbon footprints of the original works, make this invisible index—the work’s carbon footprint—visible. But it is the sale of these copies, a transaction mediated by the contemporary art market, and the subsequent purchase of certified carbon offsets, which re-links the art world and the atmosphere. The purchase of carbon offsets erases the carbon emissions of the original works. The gestureof “erasure,” which I inherited from Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, is translated onto the scientific-economic apparatus of ‘carbon offsetting.’

K.E.I’m fascinated by what you were talking about—

bringing two systems together. I’m interested in organizational change: ‘if I push A here, C and D will change.’ I might think about changing a street by saying that it would be great if the train stopped there ten more times, because then there would be foot traffic that went from that train to another thing. You’re thinking in terms of sequences, actions, and consequences. I understand why some architects might not find aesthetic pleasure in the field of operations towards which I’m gesturing. But I find aesthetic pleasure in the idea of tricking or manipulating an organization in a way that amplifies a change through it. You cheat the cheaters through their very means.

M.W.I have recently asked myself why I have chosen

global systems as space in which to work. I think it has something to do with a feeling of homelessness. That it is, in fact, precisely these systems, operating often at a global scale, that condition lived experience. Only within that context can I even begin to find some sense of placedness or sitedness. I feel like there might be an architectural equivalent here. The tradi- tional relationship between the building and its site now exists in an expanded context. The contextis now being conditioned by all of these infrastructural parameters: the kind of matrix that you describe.

K.E.In Extrastatecraft I don’t talk a lot about what to do,

I don’t give a prescription. I rather provide a way of thinking about how to do it—how to encounter a space and begin to see

MW & KE

Global Tone2013Digital photographDimensions variable

INFO INFRA

FOXY PRODUCTION New York

248 249VI VI

potentials to be manipulated. In Extrastatecraft, I write about manipulating the free zone formula by mapping an edited version of its incentives back onto the city instead of the exurban enclave. In that case, the urbanist knows what happens when you take that incentive and you put it in an urban context. The urban matrix has the power to rein in some of the concentrations of authoritarian power in the zone, to bring some more oversight and safety to labor. It’s a little bit like the systems-interactions you are talking about, where you know the qualities of the matrix or the medium in which you’re transplanting some other urban desire.

M.W.The tabula rasa is a myth, an ideal. There

is always a context in which a zone is inaugurated. Doing this within existing urban space is not necessarily so different in this sense from building on greenfield land, but forces a more conscious grappling with context.

K.E.And potentially forces another legal context, which is

one of the most powerful differences. The free zone provides many exemptions from law, but in a city, law would be in place, potentially, to protect labor. Even better, those incentives could be designed to provide a counterbalancing offset—to give the city something in return. The city could make a better bargain with investment. The designer would not only be offering a mas-ter plan of the outlines, shapes, and volumes of the city. They might identify potential counterbalancing linkages that poten-tially protect against concentrations of authority.

M.W.How would that differ from something purely

regulatory—say something like the low corporate tax rates that have made London an effective tax haven for multinationals?

K.E.In many of the spaces I look at—you’re getting an invis-

ible, abstract advantage that’s measured in econometrics. You’re getting a tax break, the freedom to own property, or cheap labor. You’re getting all those things that allow you to chisel bottom lines and so on. What I am suggesting is that what might be traded is not just percentage points of tax, but spatial variables. Let’s say a designer puts tax incentives in interplay with the need for transit, something that is a physical component of urban space. An urbanist knows what that does. They know how that changes the chemistry. It’s like a drop of hydrogen peroxide. You know what dialing up transit does in a city. What I am advocating for is making spatial variables part of those bargains in ways that leverage more for urbanity.

M.W.It’s also the desire for the advantages of

working outside of a national or state-defined context, but as you say also, ultimately in the service of which-ever states would foster those advantages, or at least that’s the rationale. Do you see those same kinds of advantages being brought into a closer integration with the rest of the state, rather than keeping the zone ostensibly discrete and of another jurisdiction?

K.E.I’m suggesting that those incentives return to the rule of

law, as opposed to some extrastate authority or parastate authority. So many of the zones long to be like a city with a mirror-tiledskyline. The trick would be to use that desire for a city to return the zone to the existing city.

M.W.And to the city within a state. When I speak

of homelessness, I also mean statelessness.

K.E.What do you mean when you’re talking about

homelessness?

M.W.When I talked about homelessness, I was

trying to understand why I am drawn to these systems that operate on a global scale, and I think it has something to do with the falling away or dilution of something like nationality, to begin with. But I think it gets to a finer grain than that. It has to do with the way we occupy information systems today, which triggers a feeling of displacement or suspension. Trying to understand and more fully experience these systems may in fact be a way of finding a new sense of place within the very systems that generate displacement. Mapping our multiple positions within the systems that create a sense of uprootedness might be a way of getting at a new sense of being at home in the world.

K.E. That’s very interesting. I have no idea what it feels like to

feel identified with something, I just don’t know what that must be like. Not that one doesn’t have family and city but—

M.W.But increasingly not. Increasingly families are

splintered and people move more than ever. There are ways of occupying cities anywhere in the globe that feel more and more similar, or there are many different ways of existing that are not necessarily tied to unique physical places anymore.

K.E.You’re always making a bargain between one place and

another. So much of the world’s labor is moving around the world, making a bargain between one place and another. Corporations are re-locating outside their country and still trying to massage all the legislation at home.

M.W.Bodies/products move as quickly as informa-

tion and capital around the globe.

K.E. It’s funny how little I think about it in personal terms.

I suppose I think so little about home. So I may be even more homeless than you, because I don’t even think I deserve a home.

MW & KE

M.W.So what does it mean then to return the zone to

a state, which is taking something that nearly aspires to statelessness, and giving it an identity, a national identity, and putting it in the context of the particular legislation of that state?

K.E.Well, I guess I’m thinking that the zone returns to a city.

I’m thinking in an idealistic way, perhaps, about all of the power and diversity of a city, as an urbanist. So I think of cities as things which, yes, are inside of state, and yes, provide safety for their members, because everyone is looking, everyone is part of it, no one is excluded—that is a fundamental power of the metropolis.

M.W.An existing city should have a more

stable population.

K.E.Urban diversity can be more stable. It’s more diverse

because it’s a big mongrel, and if it is big enough it can overwhelm warring binary forces. It cultivates more than just two groups hating each other. Lots of groups hate each other, so it’s strangely more stabilizing.

M.W.An existing city is not purely populated

by temporary labor that comes and goes as the market demands.

K.E.This ideal “city” provides this diversity and tolerance and

oversight and intelligence as opposed to an isolated, ex-urban enclave with workers off in dormitories and a confused sense of who has any oversight or what laws are in effect or if there are any.

Still, the idea of importing components of the zone could also be incredibly dangerous to labor and others in some places. It depends on the city or the state, and there are places wherelabor is treated better in a free zone outside of it. Those are very grim situations.

M.W.This brings to mind standards such as fair

trade standards. Universal standards are another phenomenon you address in Extrastatecraft. In my work I’m always looking for what is, for lack of a better word, a “universal” unit that will have a larger effect within the system of which it is a part. It is through this unit—which must in some way be accessible to appropriation—that I locate a space for artistic inter-vention. When you write about these universal standards you describe a list of standards that is growing almostexponentially. What are the implica-tions of this proliferation of standards?

K.E.ISO, the group that I was writing about, makes technical

standards, but they also develop management standards which are not at all technical or don’t necessarily offer any binding parameters.They are written in managementese, and they treat everything

from environmental thinking, to corporate social responsibility, to education, to government, to urbanism. There are management standards for cities. ISO aspires to universal contact through these management standards, and they are successful because these standards have no content and are largely meaningless.

M.W. On the one hand, many of the management

standards you describe feel like the rationalization of the irrational, but at the same time, technical standards have very tangible effects, like the stan-dardization of the shipping container, which has completely transformed what the world looks like. A very specific unit and object form has transformed the shipping industry, changed what ports and even cities look like, and re-routed the dynamics of international trade.

K.E. Technical standards differ from management standards.

Technical standards specify a single detail as a multiplier with potential population effects. Architects can design multipliers where what one is designing is not the thing that identifies as a building, but a detail that can multiply. It’s like thinking about designing the relationship between elevator and structural frame. You design that relationship that is so contagious that it changes urban morphology.

M.W.The outcome of a standard is often unpredict-

able. The shipping container was certainly designed for more efficient logistics, but the scale at which you can trace its effects would probably have been impossible to predict.

K.E.With a contagious detail, you know something about its

epidemiology, and you can deliberately design it to travel in a cer-tain way, but the design of it is never finished. For some architects this can be a crisis. But I think it’s powerful. It’s time-released. It initiates an unfinished process.

M.W.Today, much of design is taking place in

the digital sphere. And yet many digital services—which seem to proliferate and circulate more quickly than physical products, or designed objects— have a very real impact in the physical world. The physical and spatial world takes on an additional layer of information, forming what is often called “the Internet of things.” It’s tracking a package, but it’s also Uber, through which suddenly this latent infra-structure of private cars was activated in a very short span of time by simply adding and offering access to a layer of primarily location-based information to connect riders and drivers. And to see that system race around the globe is pretty interesting. This was simply about the design of a certain interaction and a certain exchange of information, but with clear spatial effects.

INFO INFRA

FOXY PRODUCTION New York

250 251VI VI

MW & KEINFO INFRA

KE In my design work with students, we work on projects

like this, where the considerations up to now have been, ‘let’s design an app for that’. With the dominance of digital informa-tion systems, often it’s an app that is considered in advance of physical space. I was just leading some students to think about the Google Self-Driving Car. The thinking begins with a technology: the car will be rationalized and it will solve problems, save energy and the cars will go more efficiently. But the one thing that’s left out of that equation is a spatial variable—how big cars are. From an urbanist’s point of view—someone who has studied highways and studied why highways become congested—the Google car potentially generates another chapter of highway congestion. And you actually already see it in Uber. Uber is showing what could happen with the Google car, if everybody treats a car as the way to commute.

M.W.Or if everyone follows a rational decision-

making process of planning a route as Google would. What is often lacking from journalistic descriptions of the Google Self-Driving Car is the necessary renovation of the whole infrastructure of roads that it would require, because the way that people drive is so different from the way that an automated car would drive, at least given the general constraints of existing technologies. Computer vision can’t recog-nize the highly variable appearance of roads in the same way that people can. Or, conversely, self-driving technology would rely, at least in part, on something like Google Maps, which doesn’t neatly map onto reality for a number of reasons. I think that’s an inter-esting place, where the design of the object, the car, will in fact require the renovation of the system it was originally designed around, the roadway infrastruc-ture. This in fact relates to my work: I am often design-ing components of a system (even “art objects”) that must be designed, often recursively, in relation to the design of a larger system or structure.

K.E. This is a perfect example of “do you see the information

residing in the digital information system,” or “do you see the information residing in the spatial information system.” As urbanists we would say that just releasing these very intelligent Google cars onto the interstate highway is actually dumb and primitive. It’s not smart. To avoid repeating another episode of interstate highway congestion, it would be smarter to increase the amount of switching in the system. So in the same way that the number of circuits in an electronic system makes it smarter, the ability to move from one kind of system to another, from one kind of organization to another, makes an organization smarter. It’s like having more computers on the Internet. What makes the spatial system smarter is being able to upshift or downshift to different modes of transportation. So if my car takes me to a com-muter rail, then suddenly the system starts getting smart. It’s not clogging the highway with huge numbers of cars, but facilitating smarter switching between transportation systems with different capacities. Rather than clogging the highways with all the com-muters in their cars, the car is switching to transit with a different capacity. Suddenly the switches make the system smarter.

M.W.Challenging what it means to optimize a sys-

tem is really interesting. I think that the problem I see right now is just the way these technologies always need to be monetized, which concretely effects their design, their use, and their spread. On my way here I looked up directions to get from my apartment to your apartment, and I immediately saw that the fast-est way is by Uber, because that was being pushed to me. Whoever owns the key to these information systems is always promoting their particular business model—if it’s Google, it is still primarily to direct you to ads. Everyone’s trying to own as much of that atten-tion space as possible. The model requires an ulterior motive—why push you towards public transportation, when there’s probably less Google ad revenue there? Of course there are plenty of paying businesses that will likely appear on your map along the way.

K.E.Some of my students have been playing around a little bit

with the Google bus, the white buses for Google employees in the Bay Area. The proposed bus networks didn’t go all the way from Palo Alto to Mountain View, but instead conveyed passengers to a switch point with a higher capacity.

M.W.You’re speaking as an architect, as a designer,

and so there’s always going to be—correct me if I’m wrong—some parameter of, in this case, efficiency that is a design driver. That points to the difference in how I look at these systems. As an artist, I’m looking to draw something that is in excess of the better func-tioning of the system. For me, I think that’s particularly relevant in the case of the relationship between something like artistic practice and the art market. There’s so much work that has been understood, in an apparently critical tradition, as grappling with the market. And yet for the most part, many of these artistic projects seem to actually be concerned with the mutually assured growth of art and the market. In light of that, I’m often interested in places where inefficiencies are created, or certain operations emerge out of market dynamics and yet follow a built-in program of negation. Operations that function in excess of the market’s desire to grow. Architecture, as well, is an aesthetic discipline, so there must also be a place for something that is beyond efficiency. What is your understanding of this dimension in relationship to your thinking in Extrastatecraft? What might that excess be in terms of the infrastructure of extrastatecraft?

K.E.I think about information-rich situations as desirable.

More information looks messy, robust, complicated, filled with difference and contradiction. There is not a desire for the univer-sal but rather different kinds of organizations grinding against each other. That looks smarter to me. I’m suspicious of universals or elementary particles that normalize everything. In Extrastate-craft, I am relying on the irrationalities and excesses of urbanism

FOXY PRODUCTION New York

252 253VI VIFOXY PRODUCTION New York

254 255VI VI

PREVIOUS PAGEGlobal Tone2013Digital photographsDimensions variable

as a way to reduce some concentrations of power. It’s not a Marx-ist position. It’s closer to Gabriel Tarde. It’s more about conta-gions, irrational contagions of desire that exist in social situations. These seem powerful to me. Reliant on excess, novelty, irrational-ity, fiction, and obfuscation—they are non-modern.

M.W.My conception of excess in indebted to

Bataille and the idea of squander. This excess feels especially relevant today when we live in what feels like the closed circuit of the market, in which that which used to be feel truly excessive—like art—sud-denly acquires a value and can be put back in circula-tion in terms of the better functioning of the market. Many of the things we’ve been talking about—the structure and systems of the zone, international standards, the shipping container—all of these have enabled the growth of industries and markets. Some portion of this explosion of energy-as-capital must be squandered to become something other. That’s another reason why I’m drawn to these systems—these systems of capital-production feel like precisely the site at which to draw some portion apart as a squander of productivity. But we’ve become so good at ensuring that any excess is recuperated that there’s very little remainder.

K.E.I know what you mean. It’s not as if symbolic capital

is the unmonetized enhancement to market mechanisms. It is always monetized. Everything is monetized. Every design is monetized. But then you also see ways in which there are parallel markets or bargains with other variables. In rust belt cities, where the failure of the financial system is so spectacular, houses stop being attractive mortgage products that behave like money, and so they become objects again. Mold grows in the pool. It’s a physical thing again. Land banks in the Midwest are trading actual, physical stuff in a gravitational field. It seems like there are a lot of ways of being creative with the remnants—the things that aren’t yet monetized, to keep out in front of the moment when they are monetized.

M.W.Looking for those moments of failure, breaks

and fissures within the system.

K.E.Yeah. That, too, is thrilling to me. It’s the same thrill

of making something of nothing, the thrill of finding a remnant piece of fabric and making something out of it—generating a value or something that has no market.

M.W.That makes me think of Gordon Matta-Clark’s

Fake Estates as remainder.

K.E.That is a spatial variable. Fake Estates is something that

often comes up in work that we’re doing in architecture. Can spatial variables also make risks and rewards much more tangible. Some of the work that I’ve been doing recently is about putting

subtraction protocols in place that put more than one property into interplay. Either one can densify or disappear, or the net result of the interplay between two properties might create a move to high ground in a flood plain. I’m trying to think of ways of making those little gains.

M.W.In the work that I was just showing—a series

called Rivals—I looked at the interplay between rival corporations. I saw that even as rival companies internally view each other as enemies, from another perspective you could see competitors as part a uni-fied phenomenon within a free market system based on competition. Competition becomes a dynamic engine of growth. The work attempts to create a ges-ture in excess of that logic of competition. Using the existing structures of corporate finance and the com-mercial gallery system, I invested the artist fee result-ing from the sale of a work in an equal percentage of stock in two rival companies. I call this a neutered gesture: the investment aims to maintain equilibrium, or at least to hold the scale of competition at a cur-rent constant. It is like answering the capitalist koan

“Coke or Pepsi?” with a request for Coke and Pepsi. At the same time, it’s completely within the normal functioning of the system. It’s a rejection of an activist disposition that would say “no” to both. You can’t say I’m being a bad investor, because it can be a savvy way to diversify a portfolio. But what was important for me what that the investment, however small (the investment criteria was based on a one millionth of one-percent investment in each corporation), was real. The artwork encompasses a real operation within the system of corporate finance that, in a strange way, sits apart from it, by doing nothing to tip the scale in terms of that competition. The works do something while simultaneously voiding the effects of that action. The strategy of neutralization, in this case, is a way of seeing something. It is a gesture that has autonomy. The gesture that sits apart, the gesture that has some strange sense of its delineation or separateness from the system that actually creates it provides, for me, the point of entry through which you can trace the outlines of the system for the first time. That, for me, is what a critical aesthetic project should be, at least in my understanding. It doesn’t change that system, and it doesn’t have something like a multiplier effect, like you’ve talked about, because, by sitting apart, it does nothing. It does nothing other than put the system on display.

K.E. Your Rivals project make me think about how much

I keep learning from Bateson and his views on the inherenttemperaments of different binary relationships. A lot of the work that I have done in thinking about activism has been thinking about how one breaks tense rivalrous binaries—how you neutralize them with gifts of submission, or with doubling, or mimicry. You don’t necessarily pick your battles; you pick your submissions. And in doing so, you can get the upper hand, without even revealing the strategy. It’s potentially incredibly powerful.

MW & KEINFO INFRA

FOXY PRODUCTION New York