Opinion 15: Soft Authorship: Permeable Data

By Hugh Matthews

Figure 1: Bundanon by KTA projects (2024)

To see a landscape as it is when I am not there’

(Weil, via Hélène Frichot 2018)

Who talks about authorship & environment?

Authors are scarcely to be trusted on the subject of authorship, yet there seems no-one else to be read on the issue. The contemporary idea of authorship in architecture derives from the Latin augere, ‘to increase, originate, promote’, defining a history involved with the dissemination of clarity, expertise and centralized knowledge, all notions which periodically become antiquated within the critical lineage of the discipline. Control of the episteme nevertheless remains a well established pursuit for young architects who aspire towards a certain framework of expertise; ‘to have read and examined all the authors’ (Alberti, 1443). Today, a student in Architecture may be offered similar advice when addressing a pointed reference in crit or studio. Yet in a contemporary culture now perpetually re-authoring vast information environments across time and space, the work becomes more like breathing an atmosphere which we ourselves have adjusted. It seems apt that the point of reference should begin to become obscure, and the margin of known and unknown should increasingly inhabit a shared territory of intelligence. The trajectory of what constitutes authorship in the contemporary moment presents an increasingly edgeless, endless, permeable phenomena of environment (Fig.1). Authorship is a concept softening into a potential age of diaphanous information. 

The thought of authorship as an expanded environment appears permeable to the work of theoretic enquiry. The recent 2023 Journal Oase #113 on Authorship, has sought a redefinition in contemporary terms to ‘imagine the concept of the author as a space of possibility’, whilst Princeton’s Discourse: Authorship of 2020 has proposed ways in which we might understand a ‘shifting role of creativity’ as impetus for architecture’s production. As the field searches for new ways to untether the distant maker from the immanent artifact made, a thinning surface to authorship strains with potential for transparent collaborative overlays. Diffusion and shift emerge not only as the key themes facing the problem of authorship in cultural production, but as the thematic attributes underlying the phenomena of mediated information and the ecological crises which define our time. Architectural discourse has the potential to address and expand on authorship nuances, identifying potential blurs, softenings and diffusions around the vital margins of architecture and its adjacent techno-cultural environments.

Figure 2: Bundanon by KTA buries (2024)

‘Bury, Follow, Bridge, Project’ 

(KTA via Bundanon Trust, 2024)

Where Modernity Leaves Us

The work of the Melbourne architect and ‘2023 AIA Gold Medallist’ Kerstin Thompson, captures unique narratives that manifest regional forms of authorship. By nature of generational influence, Thompson has developed an eloquent mode of spatial expression recognisably diffuse with shifting temporal inspirations. She speaks with poetic arch-modern clarity recalling Robin Boyd, whilst noting plural post-modern diversity learned from Edmond & Corrigan, and an emergent ecological collaboration with the landscape architect Fiona Harrison as a critical contemporary influence. Working through descriptive intersections of such complementary ideas, Thompson’s practice ‘KTA' has evolved to produce a string of significant civic projects spread across the country now-known as Australia. 

The Bundanon Art Museum project of 2023 in Dharawal ‘deep valley’ Country, NSW, represents a critical attempt in KTA’s development, integrating the language of the practice around the Bundanon Art Trust’s brief for a resilient regional art store/gallery and visitor accommodation. The responding inscription of the territory begins with KTA’s generative aphorism: “Bury, follow, bridge, project’, recounted by the Trust as a guiding statement in the collaborative project to shelter a regional collection through geothermal/solar energy, flood and bushfire. The terms of place become diverse spatial instruments; ‘bridge/project’ expressing KTA’s modernist tendency through an elevated black steel veil of accommodation reaching out to claim space, and bury/‘follow’ revealing the ground as author in subterranean concrete, skylit for a storage space and gallery. The hybrid structure produces complex effects of authorscape draped across the territory, a connecting bridge and a retaining cavern of contrasting tectonic languages, reduced to the barest terms of environmental immanence. Where the gallery mass and artbridge canopy approach an intersection, each gives way to the deep, elemental drama of falling ground under weight of radiance (Fig. 2). In moments of clarity, the work begins to dissolve distinctions between design language and place, inviting the vast Bundanon ecology to permeate its syntax with breathing space between considered forms.        

Contemporary modes of spatial authorship are gradually learning to operate with and beyond the inherited epistemologies of modernity, notably legacies within western cultural thought which have sought to distinguish systems of human knowledge from the material pedagogies intrinsic to the environment. The near limitless intelligence expressed within a landscape is being critically retraced and recovered from the picturesque categorisation of a ‘natural world’. Theorist and author Helene Frichot has identified this emerging issue in her prescient 2018 thought experiment ‘Creative Ecologies’; with particular reference to the mid 20th century archaeologist Maria Reiche, seen scaling a ladder in the act of surveying the inscribed Nazca Desert of Peru. The figure appears suspended within a matrix of atmospheric histories, emergent knowledge systems, present technologies and aspirant visions. Frichot sees the seer productively entangled with the technologies and cultural instruments of her ‘immanent critique’, unfolding the delicate labor of knowledge with fascination for each radical potential of a world extended beyond. 

As the seer hangs precariously in a space between witnessing environment and authoring knowledge, Frichot sees her inhabiting a crisis all too familiar within the structures of architecture, where significant works have begun to question distinctions of ‘field’ and ‘incident' typical of a latent ‘Modern’ perception towards environment. Need our future human apparatus break the horizon of the umweldt (the perceptual environment-world) it will inevitably arrive to witness? How might our perceptual relationship with knowledge expand in new ways across techno-imaginary-environments to convene an increasingly seamless passage?

Figure 3: Bundanon by KTA follows (2024)

‘Am I solid in the eyes of the wind?

(ML Buch, 2023)

Soft Author, Agentic Environment

The worlds we imagine through collective creative practice become increasingly reflective of those landscapes and technologies which we corporeally inhabit (Fig.3). Yet where modern utopian conceptions have fictionalized technology as an extension of a super-human, super-earthly potential, we now see mediated visions challenge the bifurcation of human and superimposed technology; ‘Are we human’ without our technologies of making? (Colomina & Wigley, 2016) Or might we reinvent ourselves perpetually within them?

Technologies of media production provide a vital space of experimentation, wherein contemporary authorship explores an expanded field. An author may dissolve into witness, as through passages of the 2023 eco-documentary ‘Songs of Earth’, where Nordic artist Margreth Olin casts scanning drones along the crystalline ice sheets of the Briksdalsbreen glacier, in a gesture of personal biography. The critical thickness of film media provides Olin an implausible cinematic intimacy with the rockfaces of the Oldedalen valley, a vast, flattened visual space invoked to critique her solitary human figure as ‘small in a big world’ (Olin, 2023). The author is seen gradually dissolving into nature, as a breath infusing thought, inhaling her territory through emergent technologies: Poetry, Data, Ecology, Space. A Nordic sense for environment has been echoed in the abstract post-human soundscapes of experimental musician ML Buch, with her 2023 work ‘Solid’ identifying issues of anthropocentrism and material scarcity which remain critical problems of spatial practice. Buch offers sonic treatments of space, echoing herself with haunted ecological mantras ‘melt algal bloom’ ‘bladder, flower, womb’ reverberating in her midst. Buch finds a new voice in insecure terms, her eco-gloom conveying conscious modes of inexpression. In the sonic midst of cavernous questions, the human author is rendered as a drifting, itemized component within a liminal field / hyperobject of artifacts beyond agency. Where Buch shapes sound as a transient reconstruction of space, her work begins to question how synthetic ecologies might train our response to agentic environments beyond the individual. Shared and diffuse modes of human agency are foregrounded in contemporary works which reconsider authorship as a developing field of environmental enquiry. Constructions in celluloid, data, soundscape and architecture provide reciprocal mediums for an ongoing contemporary climate of experiment, an urgent remaking, reshaping and rethinking of the ways in which a new relationship with technology might evolve as a critical mediator of our place within ecologies. 

Figure 4: ‘Bundanon by KTA bridges (2024)

 ‘Riding the faders’ 

(Easterling, 2021)                                        

Authorscape Traject

The softness of environmental authorship is sensed in the hardest corners of architectural technocracy, where designers now learn to live and produce amongst the farms, clouds and streams of data’s impending deluge. Authorscape emerges where analogous ecologies give way to atmospheric immanence. A new art of filtration washes information through the transparent streams of architecture’s production ecology. In ‘Medium Design’, theorist Keller Easterling has observed culture abandoning ‘objects and outlines’ for more emergent liminal processes, ‘riding the faders’ of received and contingent conditions. The paradigm imagines a practice of design production complicit with a state of accelerating diffusion, each channel mediating layers of political, social and cultural information across vast exchanges between material and immaterial realities. In the latent causality suspended between data influence upstream and down, ‘all that is solid melts into media’ (Berman, 1982). As architecture learns to fade, the translation of artifact to image becomes a critical question of releasing soft authorship through cascading co-productions (Fig.4, Bundanon by KTA bridges, 2024). 

The negotiation of artifact to image may soon produce a particular language of fused obscurity between subject and context through the overlay of the image. The visual identity of soft authored production may reside in the complex array of filters and films layered to thicken an apparent space of light. The post production of material work which prepares it for image dissemination may simultaneously soften many distinctions to suit the liminal field of moderated filterspace for which it is intended. Will soft images move across the medium more readily? In the case of a building, an image which subdues line and dynamic, may soon constitute the near dissolution of architecture’s evidence. Yet with the artifact rendered as a kind of displaced voyeur, hovering amidst unmeasured, a-hierarchical digital surrounds, the authorscape may soon propagate a certain kinship between the artifact and image maker as creatures of alike transience. 

The notional meaning of authorship is seen evolving with the speed and profusion of the surrounding information environment. Whilst the latency of modernity lingers in specific incidents of technology, culture and place, an emergent ecological synthesis seeks out creative worlds in techno-coalescence with agentic environments. It becomes critical that authorship continues to understand and consider the limiting fictions of its autonomy, as a measure to extend the potential imagination of collective worlding. 

-

Citation:

Alberti, L B (1438), De re aedificatoria, Florence

Avermaete et al (2023), Oase 113: Authorship, Oase Foundation, Rotterdam 

Berman, M (1982), All That is Solid Melts into Air, Verso, UK  

Buch, ML (2023), ‘Solid’ in ‘Suntub’, 15 Love, Copenhagen 

Bundanon Trust (2024), Bundanon Built Architecture, Bundanon Art Museum, Bundanon

Easterling, K (2021), Medium Design, Bloomsbury, London

Frichot, H (2018), Creative Ecologies, Bloomsbury, London

Matthews, H (2024) Photograph Figures 1,2,3,4, Bundanon Art Museum, Bundanon

Olin, M (2023), Songs of Earth, Speranza, Oslo

Ponce de Leon et al (2020), Discourse: Authorship, Princeton University Press, Princeton

Van Schaik, L (2021), Kerstin Thompson Architects: Encompassing People and Place, Thames & Hudson, London

Wigley, M, Colomina, B (2016), Are We Human?, Lars Muller, Zurich

-

Image credit:

Hugh Matthews