The Job: Please Mind the GAP (Part 2)

Please mind the gap. Introduced in 1969 on the London Underground, the same year as the 1^st edition appeared titled The Job, William S. Burroughs. Both acts as a warning to passengers to take caution while crossing the gap at various levels. However as a word of caution you first need to identify them, as gaps only become visible by means of what surrounds them.

Word and text is not the same thing in the same way that space and void could be opposites similar to the experimental view vs. perspective.

I find the explanations of William S Borroughs technique to the word as a serious of objects and the cutting and pasting of text fascinating. He’s projected idea of delivering a twisted or dystopian vision to his audience on the real “event and sound” by showing a movie. Using their doubt and lack of confidence to the original detail Borroughs convinces his audience that he, the director are god by letting them doubt themselves as they believe in his image of reality…as he holds the truth, captured for all to see. Their voices of rebellion will not be heard even if they speak as those around them will doubt them.

 It’s either doubt yourself or be in doubt by others…

 It’s about controlling perception from within an individual. Burroughs presented a book that had to be read as a metaphor of a metaphor of a metaphor. Although he tries to convince his interviewer that he’s after more clarity for all to see in his writings…he doesn’t mean a word of it. He’s playing from within, and he knew it.

The world is an experiment for some and without the mass image words and illusions of another kind remain in the order of day in the artist’s way. Writers’ weather they aim to be seen as an artist or not the public might perceive it differently and Burroughs  took no shame in the fact that once he’s tricked  or convinced the audience that he was wrong. Burroughs words was one of these not be seen or confused with an end product but instead to be seen as an order or an experiment to achieve logic and to prove a point, which came prior to him suggesting solutions on how to save the world from the bourgeoisie way of controlled thinking, teaching and accumulation.

He was by no means completely insane and no one ever suggest this, the world would rather brand him by his previous book titled “Junky”…but then I’d imagine Burroughs  will take this as a compliment. He analysed the world of a certain time, in our case it’s historical but nevertheless one that still replicates the basic connections and condition between the complicated DNA of cultivating control.

Burroughs never aimed to give his hierarchy a formula to a solution as he admits “it dangerous” but in the end he realised there’s no escaping the machine as it stands…he realised he’s been absorbed by the silence. The only solution would be cut off the machines “supply and demand” from the proletarian line which feeds the bourgeoisie.  If all fails it’s simply because you’ve been taught the wrong values by your parents…and to see or realise or escape these principles which you can’t…well then… take drugs (but do make sure it’s the right ones). He goes into great depth about the right drugs and shows he still cares about he’s own theory from the Chapter 1 interview “not to be judged” which is why he back it up. He realises he still haven’t escaped the machine and that he’d still be judged by an audience with “distorted values”.

He hates the idea of a family and the woman. And as woman remains the key to nurturing and teaching their young by making them disciples of the machine. For that reason he most probably hates gardening as it paints the same picturesque image of family life. He’s solution is not one to change the way of thinking to the masses but to change their chemical or molecular body structure either physically or chemically. He’s not highlighting the machine as the problem to be changed but insinuate that people are the problem as they need to change first in order to change the machine instead of the other way around. After all it's a problem created by people.

If Burroughs was a god he’s solution would be to stop the human reproduction cycle and family completely. Produce them artificially and let boys be raised by their fathers and girls by their mothers…as parents influence their young by injecting them with the same virus of words imprinted on their artificial parental DNA for survival or need…most probably confused with tradition. This was inevitable and is impossible to stop…hence” screw humanity”.

Burroughs takes on the role of a child throwing a tantrum in this book. Maybe he knew this which is why the books start with a quote from the diary of a six year old. He’s in a state of being the dominating child displaying toxic behaviour instead taking the lead role as that of the controlling parent. The display of toxic behaviour acts as the solution that will influence those around him to the point where the only solution is to stop all human reproduction. Even his arguments remains structured in a childlike fashion by saying “I’m serious but here’s a joke for you” in his satirical writing style, whilst being cleverly artistic on the words as an object hidden within the text itself. Word and text is not the same thing.

However he does make valid points but nothing more straightforward than what’s already been said in books like the “Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Freiderich Engels. On his artistic abilities as a writer he’s brilliant and well ahead of competition at the time. Burroughs is an artist whether he’d turn in his grave for me saying this or not. He considers techniques of discovery and exploration to the word mixed up with other scientific formulas and thoughts to paint a new sea of text within reality, driven by his formed hallucination techniques.

People fear what they don’t understand and fear is a form of control. As mentioned in the beginning “it’s either doubt yourself or be in doubt by others…” thus the fear of rejection. Rejection = Death

Burroughs had an interesting view on silence (not death) but he said the obvious, that: "anyone who prays in space is not there". He’s giving into space, the silence of the world’s words…the invisible text as explained in my previous article titled “The Job: Space Age Experiment I – II”, which highlights the invisible ink thus creating a sense of silence to a page.

However by indicating to the world a message of HOPE that these “invisible blanks” within his work represents another future and that they’ve not been written yet…although it might seem already printed.

We hear it every day…”please mind the gap”...perhaps Burroughs could've written or inspired that line to mock society with a scotoma, where the mind chooses what it wants to see. To help us to recognise the gaps and to remind us to play an active part in writing our new futures whilst were on a daily journey to enslave our souls within the machine.

The Job: Space Age Experiment I - II (Part 1)

This is an experiment...

If I die…then it was in good faith in the name of experimentation and education. Why will I die you might ask? Well for one I'd be experimenting with Boroughs theories and I've read a book and what seemed to be described as a rather “dull read”….turned out to be my best read so far. It contains the DNA and processes of Burroughs and his works. 


The cut and paste technique (Experiment I) and the hallucinations which shapes his world and visions in many parts of this book,  informs us of his solutions to changing the molecular and chemical structure of humans to improve the world.  Hence Experiment II…getting high and reading it again, whilst causing a spasm to the machine as I'd be out of order for a short while...thank you very much. After all this is education on the Burroughs level.

After reading the book for the 1^st time I knew I had to get onto other readings but I've done it twice again. Not because I'm as thick as a strawberry milkshake but because every time I read it there was a different reason for experiment. He’s projected idea of delivering a twisted or dystopian vision to real time users…does works by the way. He’s admitted that this technique was discovered from the process of drug use (not addiction) that he can now control without it… 

If Boroughs took a clean sheet and glued the selected words on the paper, the story he’d like to express to all would be clear, you’d end up with a final product consisting of nothing more than a white sheet with a few words or sentences spread along with large amounts of white space surrounding “it”…the “word”…becoming the “object”… which is what the bourgeoisie and governments of this world aim to separate from one another as far as possible…but he goes further. He fills these blank spaces with normal words to ease the reader, only to shock them occasionally. The sea of white is there…and it only struck me when I experimented with his technique of hallucinations to write this 1^st part (meaning I was high)…how else would you understand it? As I said…it only struck me when he highlighted the clue of white space or the importance of ink that should be there in the book in the first place with the following words..".the road without sound is white under the empty moon, stinging like the salt of a child’s tears sexualizing interdependence latterly contingent upon a motionless boat."


Explanation you might care to ask? ..."the road (our path) without sound (meaning irrelevant words/gibberish) is white (the colour that the ink should be, if you could “see”) under the empty moon (your head/mind)… stinging like the salt of a child’s tears (his tears)…sexualizing interdependence (the pleasure of being free) latterly contingent upon a motionless boat (meaning you won’t achieve a thing if you don’t act on the previous clues).

I will do a follow up of “The Job”, where I’d be discussing the book in more detail from my perspective but as this is architecture, were all about experimenting and learning, I have "retyped...and unglued the glued” for you to see the truth from The Job, Interviews with William S Boroughs” as Experiment I-II with the aim of telling the story of what he’d like to say. In essence I’ve taken one sentence from each page and pearl neck laced them together.

Below you can read three chapters in under a minute as a result of Experiment 1 and 2. It’s very interesting and the plot thickens in his typical satirical "straight but bent" humour writing style…more in my next article.

Prisoners of Earth, 83:108

I work for 23 Screwball Department. We got our files on all nut cases and each case is classified.  We intend to destroy the police machine and all its records. To put it “country simple”, we have heard enough bullshit. “Joe” may my flesh rot if this department knows you are talking about it…bleeding profusely he was carried into the lobby where he described his assailant as the “Lamb of god from the beast 666” after three Martinis. It’s the normal process of conditioning people to believe what they’re told.

I sit down in my room and open the window and light a sigarette. There is a young woman who lives in the chateau above the garden. The new way of thinking is the thinking you would do if you didn’t have to think about any of the things you ordinarily think about if you had no work to do nothing to be afraid of no plans to make. The training is often interrupted with nausea, a springlike pressure around the forehead, cold shivers alternating with hot flashes. “Well chicken I think you’ll live”.

I look out the glass wall and that post card fjord explodes in my brain green and pink and blue. The brain artefact has a built-in mechanism that prevents it from solving problems and that mechanism is The Word. Dualism is the whole basis of this planet – good and evil, communism, fascism, man, woman, etc. As soon as you have a formula like that, of course you’re going to have trouble. Any life form that gets stuck with outmoded built-in artefact is doomed to destruction. So are the Hippies…chickens can live so without the head nourished from tubers and guerrillas will destroy every vestige of the old economy based on mass production and consumption.  The American dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. An essential feature of the Western control machine is to make language as non-pictorial as possible, to separate words as far as possible from objects or observable processes.

The jewel striking twelve concentrates of otherness with orifices bitter perspectives. The road without sound is white under the empty moon, stinging like the salt of a child’s tears sexualizing interdependence latterly contingent upon a motionless boat. The words used have no referent; they absolutely intend to start a nuclear war.

Three Frogs, 111:122

Words are loaded with hidden meanings…we don’t know enough to know. The most prudish people and “respectable” people who regards Bosch’s paintings with unconscious admiration; no one could really take them seriously anymore: Dust of the dead gods “Killed While Cleaning Their Guns”…

I don’t dwell on torture, woman are a perfect curse. Normally such information lies dormant, but in Oxford experiments it has been activated. I think that the whole anti-sex orientation of our society is basically manipulated by female interest, what we call love, but rather what we might call recognition.  The whole human race is crippled in childhood. Nations and countries is merely an extension of the biological family and I don’t see the need for family at all. Now, if you could produce artificial beings, you could produce them at a reasonable age, and you won’t have all this infancy.

Yes, it seems to me very desirable. You can almost judge the importance of a discovery by the efforts made to suppress it…the apomorphine treatment for drug addiction in another.

4 Academy 23, 125:137

Oh, unquestionably the most important point of control is inside the soft machine. Children should be paid to go to school and drugs are one of the ideal power devices. Western authorities won’t come out into the open with what they’re doing but they can keep young people under continual threat of police search or action.

I think it is necessary to establish the difference between different drugs and hallucinogens, between addicting and non-addicting drugs, perhaps altering the molecular structure of certain cell groups in the body. Under the influence of mescaline, I have had the experience of seeing a painting for the first time, and found later that I could see the painting without using the drugs. Recently, a Cambridge dentist has extracted teeth with no other anaesthetic than music through headphones….anxiety is treatment of the consciousness-expanding drugs to normalize metabolism.

Cannabis serves as a guide to psychic areas which can then be re-entered without. I am able to achieve the same results for cut-ups and fold-ins of my texts to thin in association blocks, instead of words.  Thus youth is deliberately led into these dead-end channels which are then made criminal by act of Congress or Parliament. The press says that cannabis is habit-forming. It’s not habit-forming and no ill effects resulting from its use have ever been established.  Just tell the machine to enforce all laws by whatever means and the machine will sweep us to the disaster of a computerised police state.

To bring drugs into perspective I would suggest that academies be established where young people will learn to get really high…high as the Zen master is high when his arrow hits a target in the dark…high as a karate master is high when he smashes a brick wall with his fist. . .high. . .  weightless. . .in space.

This is the space age.

Time to look beyond this rotten radioactive planet.

Steroid Cities

French novelist and critic Marcel Proust best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu once said “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

For me the voyage is only one ingredient to an encounter and encounters are key to remember and returning an experience or for that matter storing it as a memory. Everything in live will always be an encounter. The ethics of an encounter helps us to understand something central to the analytical experience be it a city or not. The potential for reaching out and across to the other. The potential for reaching out from Las Vegas and across to Dubai as a comparison.

I’m sure we can draw many similarities between Las Vegas and Dubai but these superficial similarities will be as unreal as the symbol itself. Instead of drawing on physical properties I believe we have to look at it from psychoanalysis point of view in terms of a sense of place and why. We need new eyes as all that seems real is nothing but a hyper reality.

Prior to its physical existence the urban plan dictated Dubai to be a super city. Today it currently holds true to exactly that. The world largest artificial islands (seen from space) in addition to the largest waterfront, tallest hotel (Burj al-Arab hotel), the first underwater hotel, towers three times the height of the Empire State Building in essence to clear all competition in order to hold the title of the tallest structure in the world. Currently, the Walt Disney World Resort is the number one tourist destination in the world. Once fully completed, Dubai land will easily take over that title since it is expected to attract more than 200,000 visitors daily. Something the Greeks aspired to but have failed miserably lately.

Learning from Las Vegas, 1972 under “Directional Space” Las Vegas was diagrammatically represented with pure images highlighting Las Vegas elements as” space, scale, speed and symbol “all of which forms part of the modernised American dream at the time. Although Las Vegas happened a lot quicker than most other new cities it was the idea beyond “encounter” and commodity that drove the energy within these desert sands. If you look at Las Vegas today it’s only the thriving areas that are still driven by the original idea of an encounter which remains successful. Everything else have been faded in grey, now displaying a huge neon sign to highlight it’s understated iconic status which never was never fully realised to these urban parts to a true symbol or myth within the grain.

The Las Vegas urban grain consist of grids with several civic buildings in it and therefore contain the object/icon building which displays a jewel/neon like quality in contrast with the city backdrop (may I add a backdrop with a secured infrastructure), meaning its framing the vista in addition to the object building terminating the vista at a pedestrian level. This was one of the points highlighted in Complexity and Contradiction.

Dubai’s grain is treated as a serious of jewels, in contrast to Las Vegas. This makes the city layers almost impossible to read and the building fragments become clusters of what a super master plan demands rather than what a city demands. 

However it remains a hollow city of what appears to be a serious of iconic landmark buildings without an emphasis at ‘underpinning infrastructure"...For all we know the backdrop could be in slum status with dressed up surrealistic facades of make believe…similar to the american dream. So as a superficial comparison it might appear to be similar but it's not...its the security in the infrastructure that will always remain one of the biggest differences between the two cities. Dubai will realise this at some point...and spend the next 20 years working on what’s been forgotten in the 1st place and if Venturi could...a book wouldve follwed named "What weve forgotten from Dubai"

Las Vegas cannot be compared to Dubai. They’re not the same. How can one love a place with no history? Dubai is an instant super which becomes an imperative for destabilising illusions of understanding, mastery and the individual agency of one city obsessed with itself….the instant aiming at creating a history and overthrowing all other foundations around the globe in order to become the world’s biggest commodity. It’s selfish but driven by reasoning true to a capitalists system on every level perceivable. Then again even capitalism have become a hyper reality for destabilising illusions of society.

Dubai left me with the sensation of having “your spine plugged into” a second hand account of yet another grand finale performance by a bully. Performances that typically involve an exposition of vulnerability to question what reality is? Where Las Vegas forges a meaning from their anecdotes which sees a conjunction between the analytic session and the theatrical performance with foregrounds of what society coins in terms of “liveliness” associated to each encounter, Dubai aim to be of a challenging and over-turning of such idealized urban forms of human history which shapes the human encounter to a capitalist encounter without remembrance or true renaissance.

Reality vs. Reality

Decay is alive and finality has sunken in. Chaos has a new meaning and students are working again.

Another year end is within easy sight. No more distorted visions! Hip-hip! At a glance my study looks like Santa’s workshop (not far from the capitalist china factories) as the last finishing touches are being steadily applied in order to achieve the best results possible. Well trained hands draw the final lines under the night sky and the smell of burned wood from laser cutting models and glue hangs thickly in the air as the eyes of students tighten from working late night shifts. All is perfect...for now. Next Stop = Who knows?

This crescendo of year end shows would normally be classed as “brilliant” and I’m sure if the Daily Mail had their say like they do on movie posters and books, we would get a better twist on this classification. The array of concepts, processes, drawings, models and free thinking on display are pure and remains true to the future architect’s aspirations. However there is a twist to all of this...as always.

Would the proud owners of their work still be happy and smiling when they move into a paid job, should they be so lucky. Now in the real world, meaning those who are already working within the profession, I would think that most of you look forward to the majority of year end shows, possibly as an escape from your own reality.

“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination…”~ John Lennon

I've found university as a breath of fresh air but I have also found myself caught up between the

boundaries of the professional environment and that of the make believe world...namely university. I have also seen many newly qualified architects coming and going. More than a few struggled to design anything of merit that actually works. Those that have heroically tried to form a design didn’t know where to start and ended up with a “Willy Wonka” booklet made up of “googled” architectural details and photos found on architectural websites. There was no concept, no real beginning and therefore no real end, but there was something. The final something was read by professionals as a miss-mash or should I say “miss match” of other architects work stuck onto facades...is this really happening to architecture? This is not what architecture is about and surely this is not what universities have been teaching their students.

I suppose the reality are that those midnight shifts and the polished end products that we all put so much hard work and effort into...as if it was for a sacred or religious purpose, just isn’t working as a transferring platform from one reality to the next.

Robert Brault once said that one should: “Question reality, especially if it contradicts the evidence of your hopes and dreams”…and this is exactly where I am with this article when I say that reality indicates that... If I was to present work in my portfolio to the equivalent of the real world, I most probably won’t pass or just scrape through and the flip side of this foundation is that, if I did approach my professional career, concepts and designs as expected at university level...I’ll most probably won’t last long.

As the profession remains in a state of recovery (aiming not to sound like a broken record here) and the new architects to be, dare I say...is about to go out looking for work soon... what are we missing whilst being caught between two realities? Then again what you see as real is only defined by your perception of it.

“We see the world, not as it is, but as we are...” ~ Talmud

Chaos has a new meaning and reality is now leaving...but where does it leave you?

(Im)possibility of the Zaha Connection

Architects tend to bring out a more nuanced translation, allowing us to murmur before the first word. This is linked to a sense of what remains always with and yet always outside of language.  

Architectural Speech is always accompanied, necessarily, with the unsaid: an unsaid that is not simply nothing of silence but is rather a persistent murmur of the masses that sees it of yet no meaning or understanding. 

Against the popular trend in architectural theory, fuelled by readings like Jonathan Meades, From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Summer 2008 on Zaha Hadid. The questions are indirect and the ethics might be understood as an alien encounter, a more stringent alterity and this, in turn, raises crucial questions of how it is Zaha approach the other ethically.

These questions are, in indirect ways, picked up through the article and is concerned with questions of relation and, specifically questions of how to conceptualise the Zaha boundary between the self and the social.

In short I suggest our constriction by the dominant concepts in modern architecture and urban form has forced us into a position where it has become all but impossible to think the relation of self and other without being trapped by seemingly common-sense notions of individuality and the naturalization of separateness that it could be suggesting. There’s a preconceived notion of architecture already formed  and an armory of border concepts. 

Just imagine our current timeline to be the equivalent of the mud hut era where change was needed and you might understand Zaha’s thinking for the future….and the rest, waiting for something to happen whilst sitting on the fence.

“Zaha doesn’t explain her work”….errrm…and? Zaha Hadid states : "We create transformative cultural, corporate, residential and other spaces that work in synhroncity with their surroundings"….is Jonatahn Meades completely just picking for a reaction?

Although the beginning of Zaha’s career could be described as a paper performance. It’s exactly those paper concern experiences and sessions that made lines slip from paper to reality as a sensation of dedication and nakedness to one self. The world wonders why Zaha don’t explain her work…why would she, she’s already naked. Fragments of her soul is already laying bare in many cities across the world. 

I call it nakedness as I’m again referring to the Jonathan Meades article stating “Architecture is the most public of endeavors, yet it is a smugly hermetic world.” Zaha is naked. Why does everybody need her to explain the practice to her performance? Step out of the mud hut timeline, stop being part of the audience. Allow yourself to walk into the fluorescent light, wander in its space, get absorbed by its colours and inevitably encountering a new world different from the usual.

Should Zaha been seen as a commodity. No. She’s like us, wandering through Georgian Streets, grim Noddy town cottages set in a maze of alleys…what you’re not seeing is the neon reflection on the rippling puddles. 

http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/zaha-hadid

Love among the ruins

Architecture is our love among the ruins of beauty…but what is beauty? What gives a building that quality within an ocean of lights? If you knew the answer would it be the same for everyone? Beauty and beauty has never been the same and when separated or formulated they have nothing to do with being beautiful. A child growing up might think that the glass towers of London or New York are beauty, where a person of wealth could be thinking that the old corrugated roof sheets on a shack is beautiful.

A building might posses a certain beauty, but why? Our minds always analyse. We analyse information by means of our senses. By hearing, seeing tasting, smelling and touch we learn to control the dimensions we are within at any moment in time. We learn what’s good and bad about life, maths, work and death. Everything becomes a calculated risk, when will I die? How much does that weigh? Would it cost less? Even shopping centres now tell me how much I’d be paying for a millilitre of milk in comparison with its equally “cow-ish” friend next to it on the shelf. “Calculated Risk”, yes replay it in your mind…it’s also beauty.

If this is exactly how the human mind functions then I’m asking the question whether everything we agree or disagree with remains a weighing up exercise of positives and negatives. If calculated risk remains the essence of how we open up our minds to processing and answering life important decisions, where does beauty fall? Beauty doesn’t fall under the previous mentioned state unless a paradigms shift occurs and shift towards personal style.

No, beauty won’t let you starve, die, love or hate someone. Beauty won’t influence your life’s direction and final choices.  However beauty still needs to be defined. Even though we might agree with the dictionary description of beauty, the reality remains that none of you would actually be in any agreement with what you’ve read. That because you all will have a different perception and influence to what beauty really is.

Beauty becomes…

Beauty is not a constant and in some cases non existent. It gets formed by your senses. You only believe it because right now, you are here and it’s only because you’re here that there’s beauty. Beauty is a pattern formed, sanded and smoothed into a unique shape within your mind for only a limitless period of time. Historically the cave paintings to our primitive homosapiens species were defined as “Ooo-oo” meaning beauty. Then one day baroque was beauty, then the Renaissance then came modernism, post modernism and today…it’s different again. It’s a new generation. A different perception. A new sense of beauty. But even back in the renaissance period all the renaissanceians would have had a different idea and perception of beauty perceived within their fellow masses. In the same way beauty are unique to an individual it’s also true to a culture.

Really I’m saying that beauty are never the same, have never been and yet it’s defined as one and the same in all dictionaries around the world as being the same thing. As this is true what could the one be that makes beauty equal, realistic and true? Well it’s the above…thus beauty is equal to what is true and untrue at the same time.

Our minds calculate our way of life. But it also calculates the invisible of what it can’t see. As the human form, nature and all other natural non man made things are to a certain nation also discovered or undiscovered to us. All calculations are an endless sea of dots. Dots on the one side versus dots on the other side. If you were to spread these invisible dots into equal parts and distances across to each other to the golden ratio, you will define it as beauty as that would be the natural order of you, me and nature…as an object within an object. The very parts we can not control but makes up our very essence. We naturally believe in the natural order of dots. It doesn’t matter how you spread it. As long as it remains within the order of “your” perceived ratio within “your” order of acceptance, only then you’ll have beauty associated to yourself, culture, timeline or future building. It’s within the natural order then that we define beauty across ourselves, our neighbours, cultures and history.

Beauty is now…it’s you. NOW…BREATH…and it’s changed itself again, just like the ruins we love for eternity. 

po10c : potency

I've been hosting my blogs on my own website www.heinivanniekerk.com since the beginning of time but have now decided to do all my future blogs under the new title po10c.

Why po10c you may ask? In this case Potency  (pharmacology), should now be seen as my measure of the activity...of a drug namely architecture within my biological system and as an offset to measure of how I could dilute the substance/subject. For the purposes of my po10c blogging experience this will be used to describe my approach to architecture and how I see new things.