The Post-Ontology, Blobby Architecture & Homogenised Identities

Mark Jarzombek speaks with Adam Peacock

The following video and transcript are edited from a conversation held via video link at the Vigeland Museum in Oslo, on 6th September 2021 as part of PRAKSIS residency 18, Perfection/ Speculation.

2021

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Extended transcript

Adam: In your 2016 book Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age, you study the developments of technology from the early 20th century to today, describing today’s body as an ‘onto-crust’; a thin interface containing the human, in constant, passive interaction with a large, complex socio-political online influence, the ontology. Can you say a bit about your background, and tell us what motivated you to explore and write about the post-ontological age?

Mark: I am an architectural historian, but I also have a training in philosophy and cultural studies. I was on a year's sabbatical in 2015, and everyone asked, what are you going to write? As I sat down at my local coffee shop every Monday to Friday to order coffee and tea and breakfast, I had absolutely no idea. I just started writing the book, and I think it came out of my frustration at the time, which now seems a long time ago, because in the digital era things change so fast.

In those days, coming out of MIT, you heard a lot about the Media Lab, and optimistic talk about smart cities, smart cars, smart this and smart that. As much as it was wonderful, something about that optimism struck me as wrong. It didn’t match with the reality on the ground when it came to questions of bodies and ontology. There are many sociological studies about how the digital world is affecting our relationships with friends, communities and so forth; that's already a well-established zone of discussion. I thought there was a question we had missed: not the question of how we are as social beings, but how we are, from a traditional ontological standpoint. The modernist idea that we have, or should have, a fixed, stable ontology and idea of self with a capital S—something located inside me that I’m more or less responsible for—seemed to be under attack in the digital world. That is not necessarily good or bad; however, via ransom-wares, cyber-wares, cyber wars and so on, a new type of ontology is being created. I wanted to figure all that out, and that’s how the book came about.

Adam: I’m curious to know how an architectural historian comes to be exploring ontologies. How is it relevant to the discipline and study of architecture?

Mark: That’s a good question. I really haven’t figured it out yet—maybe this conversation and some of your questions might help me. The digital ontology question is not asking us to make new types of architecture. The "blob architecture" of the world tries to get us to locate ourselves in new spatial ontologies, but digital ontology is not asking us to make blobby things—that would need high-end computers—it simply asks us to build normative houses. So it’s not necessarily producing an aesthetic; instead, it likes normativity.

That’s the problem with the digital world: it wants you to go about your normal life so it can study it better and make it more predictable. It likes predictable predictability, because if we just keep on doing the same things we’re doing, it's easier to market commodities. So it becomes extremely boring; we make the same old stupid houses all over again. I do think there are ways in which we can explore our shiftiness, if you will, in relation to this ontology, in a spatial way, but that quality is more visible in the domain that we might call artworks, or media environments.

Adam: Might it be that architectural design as a platform needs to modernise beyond the design of the built environment and the civilisation around us, and take into account the spaces we occupy online? Maybe this ontology you describe is a new form of architecture. Instead of studying local geographies, the focus is the geography of human ontology. At what point does architecture as a discipline evolve or morph into a larger philosophical post-disciplinary space? Do you think that we need a new form of architecture?

Mark: It’s quite possible that we do, because I’m not sure how far the guys at MIT have got on the toilet issue, for instance: the scenario where you go to the bathroom and the toilet will send you an app based on analysing your shit.

Adam: Great!

Mark: In other words, we can imagine instruments that are not just there to do something right, but to analyse us continuously. They speak back. We can imagine buildings analysing us in ways that will inform us about our individual selves better than we know ourselves. The problem of post-ontology is that sometimes your idea of who you are is exported into environments that know you better than you know yourself. You would never have considered analysing your shit every day, unless you were sick or in hospital.

Adam: You use this analogy of shit, which I think is wonderful, but it’s only a small aspect of who we are, even though it might say quite a lot. Now that there are so many ways of gathering our online data and analysing it, we’re already at a point where corporations know more about us than we know about ourselves. For example, I think your book describes a situation in which online data identified someone’s pregnancy before she knew it herself, based on her patterns of consumption.

Mark: Exactly. We complain about government interference and so on, but AT&T, one of the largest corporations in the world, buys vast quantities of data and sells it to other corporations. Billions of dollars are spent in this industry. There is a lot at stake in data beyond health or well-being.

Adam: What do you think about the potential for corporations to learn more about us and sell us more, via the rapid evolution of genetic and biotechnologies, with their ability to sequence the human genome. Could you imagine a situation where that might occur?

Mark: Absolutely. It's probably already happening, in some lab somewhere that no one knows about. These things are extremely hard to monitor and control, and I can definitely see this as a future.

Adam: Is the rapid development of technology that's taking place in the US West Coast, in Silicon Valley, likely to outstrip the establishment of ethical policy that will ensure that it’s safe and beneficial to wider society? During this residency in Norway, we have been exploring Norwegian ethical perspectives on bioscience and genetic technology. Because Norway is very much a social state, it only wants to allow applications of biotechnology that are perceived as beneficial to everybody. In comparison, US policy seems highly permissive, with corporations driving decisions about the technologies that may be deployed. Related to this, I think your book discusses pharmaceutical companies' sponsorship of medical education in the US.

Mark: I think what Norway is doing is very noble. But the truth is that it’s going to be a dying nobility. Once the cat’s out of the bag, there will be no way to put it back. On the literal subject of pets such as cats, I seem to remember Northern Ireland was the first country to require that all dogs have chips put into them, and now many other EU states require dogs and cats to be chipped so that they can be tracked. So firstly it's dogs and cats, and then maybe cows and horses, and then it's humans. Does a dog really want to be tracked? No one's asking the dog’s permission! We may ask when we should put the brakes on this, but the train has already left the station. We can weep some ethical crocodile tears, but basically, the post-ontological world doesn’t care. The ethical response is a very human and natural one for many of us—for me too, I’m not denying its validity. I’m just saying that it's like ambulance chasing. It always comes after the fact of something that's already happened.

Adam: I’m going to read a quote from your book that we’ve enjoyed, and I'd love to discuss it with you. “Old-fashioned, dial-up computer connections, developed in 1989, used to hiss and growl when they were turned on to let you hear them working—to let you know that the connection was being made and tested. “Engineering at work.” We came to understand the growl as a connection that was both powerful and fragile at the same time. That was old school, driven by the need to disconnect you from one life and connect you to another—through your carpal tunnels. The engineer wanted the user to feel, acoustically at least, the hard labor that the computer was preparing to do on the human’s behalf. It was off or on. The growling computer was the last great hurrah to the modern world of ergonomics.”

Mark: I wonder when the growl last growled—when was it closed off?

Adam: That’s a good question. You still hear of people using fax machines, so I bet that dial-up connection still exists. I wonder if we could apply that analogy to human beings and the physical or post-ontological effects of digital developments—say, the plumped lips and Kardashianisation of identities, the homogenisation of identities? Are we being homogenised? Are we being guided towards the needs and wants of new media and marketing in a coordinated way?

Mark: Ontologically, we often want to smooth-tooth that discussion into some sort of VR idea of the simulacrum in reality. However, algorithms are basically not designed to be smooth, they’re just designed to extract particular sets of information from you, like an x-ray. They just sort-of say, I only need three bits of information from you: I need your blood count, your sex and your gender, and then I’m good, I'll take that information and put it into some specific data string. The algorithm doesn’t care about your hair colour, or whether you’re bald or wearing a striped shirt. The post-ontological basically doesn’t care if you’re fake or real. From its perspective there’s no such thing. It just wants to know specific information about you. Other algorithms will want to know if you’re bald, or have blue or purple eyes, and other still algorithms want to know if you wear a striped shirt or purple underwear. But these algorithms don’t talk to each other and that’s the great advantage we have, because in the post-ontological, these algorithms are nonsynchronous from each other. They’re not Bluetooth. They want us to stay in their hidden, silently noisy, greedy world of algorithmic "misunderstandings".

So, when you go to the doctor, they will have one software dealing with information about your blood, one for your heart rate, one for your skin and so on, but these softwares don’t talk to each other; that’s how they’re designed. So the post-ontological actually allows all of us to be Kardashians, we just may not have the inner courage to do it. It has transcended the modern critique of the Kardashians—that we often see them as being fake, or being a symptom of a certain type of malaise, when in reality, the post-digital sees all people like that: for the post-digital, we’re all Kardashians. That’s why I like your drawings, because in a certain sense data is like an x-ray. An x-ray is not interested in your flesh; it’s only interested in your bones. Data is looking for a "sweet spot" somewhere between the normative world and the non-normative world, and it tries to construct that through social engineering, as best it can. The algorithmic world is like a collage or a cubist world. It doesn’t see the body as a whole thing.

Adam: Are we being homogenised as identities in a post-ontological world? Are we being guided towards the needs and wants of new media and marketing?

Mark: Well, I would say yes, in a sense; we’re being homogenised because the data world likes image homogeneity. It likes us to be predictable, whilst keeping the algorithms ever evolving to account for new consumption patterns. It’s looking for a type of sweet spot between the predictable self and an unpredictable world, and it tries to construct that through social engineering as best it can.

Adam: Let's transplant Gustav Vigeland into the present and imagine he was defining the idealised body today. How do you think his updated sculptures might tackle representing the post-ontological brain or the definition of bodies as onto-crusts, or deal with the concept of onto-exhaust?

Mark: That’s a good question! What I love about Vigeland’s sculptures is the way they’re sort-of bloated. They are granite and they weigh tons, but they have a weird quality, as if they’re filled with too much air, and it gives them a slightly cartoonish look. That refusal of the aesthetic norm is part of their brilliance. Maybe today he might not work with granite but with rubber or other substances that have a certain strange porosity to them, things that are reflective of the digital algorithm.

In art-world terms, it could be interesting to think about humans as being triangulated, but by a thousand cuts. That’s how the post-ontological world sees us: it cuts us in a thousand different ways, like an insanely complicated cubist collage. Maybe there is some way to do that artistically. On one hand, the triangulation involves some very predictable things: your race, sex, gender, height, maybe your location and so forth. It's not asking what clothes you’re wearing or what toothpaste you’re using. Each of the cuts is only asking for a specific set of inputs, but there are thousands and thousands of these cuts in play all the time in relation to our bodies, relating to the worlds of medicine, banking, government, the corporate and consumer spheres, and so on. The process cuts us in a thousand different ways, but we don't experience it as wounding or cutting, and that’s where the post-ontological comes into play, because we live ontologically, not post-ontologically. We only rarely experience the post-ontological: for example, when someone steals our data and does something bad with it, and then we go, "Oh my God, I didn’t know that I was being monitored". Well, wake up, man, you are—it’s just that you don’t feel it. That’s the trick of post-modernist post-ontology: it's that our bodies are not designed to feel these cuts operating on us. So, how do we make this manifest in our architecture or  our works of art? It's a fascinating question.

Adam: That is indeed a hugely fascinating question and one that we are going to continue to explore. I’m looking forward to share with you what we’ve made here. Thank you so much for talking with us.

Mark: Well, thank you, Adam, for the invitation and for the chance to chat with you. I hope we can meet in the flesh, and I look forward to seeing more!

You can find more on Mark’s research at https://www.markjarzombekprofile.com