Golem Reloaded: A Teatime Utopia

Lecture by Georg Flachbart, mind(21)factory for Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Design Stuttgart, at the conference GameSetandMatch II - On Computer Games, Advanced Geometries and Digital Technologies, held at University of Technology Delft on March 31, 2006

"Never predict anything that has not already happened."
_Marshall McLuhan

PART ONE _ In Defense of Ambiguity

Good afternoon, I'am Georg Flachbart, a relative of Golem. The following lecture is a shortened and modified version of my contribution to the GSM II conference book. Due to the fact that the conference takes place in this historically hyper-significant area, I decided to 'misuse' this unique chance and pay homage to Herrn Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, and his benchmark book "Praise of Folly" which holds - with its sense of ambiguity and self-parody - both the lock and the key to modern Western esprit:

"Erasmus, for all his tortuous subtlety and waspish irony, produced an extremely intelligent and articulate response to what was perhaps the fundamental value-shift in modern European history. In a world suddenly bereft of its medieval moorings, a new and intoxicating vision of man's potentialities had opened up." (A.H.T. Levi)

Let me first make a short remark: The Greek word for folly "moria" sounds like the name of Erasmuse's best friend Thomas More. So the Greek name of Praise of Folly, Morias Enkomion, was a pun on More's name and it meant both 'Praise of Folly' and 'Praise of More.'

To beginn with: In the preface to the exhibition catalog Latent Utopias - Experiments within Contemporary Architecture- curators Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher have made the following ambivalent diagnosis:

"Every time needs its utopia(s). A society that no longer reflects its development is uncanny, a monstrosity. However, utopian speculation is rather dubious today. In recent years the very notion of progress and the ambition to project a future has itself come to be regarded as monstrous. Utopian thinking seems naive, dangerous hubris."

This statement automatically provokes two questions: 1) How to live without utopia(s) and not be a monster? and 2) How to talk utopia(s) and not be a monster? Well, there is an easy answer to that one. No matter what we decide we will in both cases be monsters. So given this no-win situation, I would say let's take up the provocation of Latent Utopias and, for a while, try to project a future, risking, of course, being regarded as naive, dangerous, and monstrous.

So here comes my teatime utopia, which too is both 'Praise of Folly' and 'Praise of More':

One day a group of universal upgraders decided that they should do something to help the people in Graz 8020 - the disadvantaged left bank of the River Mur. The upgraders were very kind persons and cared for the people of 8020, but they became very sad because the people there had to work hard all day. Then one of them remembered an old story. The story said that a Golem, a kind of technological infrastructure that makes life easier, could be made out of a lump of clay.

"Gosh! That's what we too should do!" said the universal upgraders in unison. "We too should create a Golem to help the people in 8020 with their work. Then the grownups will not be so tired at the end of the day. And the children will have time to play."

Enthusiastic as they were, they immediately hurried up to the director of the steirischer_herbst Festival in Graz to make a project proposal to him. "Well, how much will a Golem cost?"wondered the director. "Having a Golem will not cost much," they said in unison again. "A Golem will not eat, drink, or work for money. It's not a voracious monster as you may assume, it's a pure technological infrastructure." Then a big smile came on the director's face, and he approved a low-budget to them.

Once out on the street, one of the upgraders cautiously asked, "But how can we make a Golem?" -- Nobody knew. So they began asking all the great thinkers they knew in the city, "Do you know how to make a Golem?" From door to door and store to store they went, asking, "Does anyone know how to make a Golem?"

After a series of unsuccessful attempts to learn how to make a Golem they eventually met a material girl. "Look you fools," she said wrily, "a Golem must be made of the sticky clay from the bank of the Moldavka River. Make the face, hands and feet out of clay. Roll it over on its back. Walk around the form of clay from right to left seven times and shout, All you need is Love! All you need is Love! Which is, by the way, another term for distributed intelligence - the key code to modern times, capito? Then the material girl disappeared.

"Sounds quite easy", said the universal upgraders when she left. But after a while they became very sad again. "There is no sticky clay in the bank of the Mur River", they said. "Hmm, how about pasteboard?", asked one of them. "Right you are, pal!", they said in unison again and immediately started designing a Golem.

Later on, they learned to their great astonishment that creating a Golem was primarily not a physical procedure, but rather a highly advanced meditative technique. So by chanting the appropriate letter arrays together with the letters of the Tetragrammaton, a part of the holy book Cabbala, they were able to form, part by part, a spiritual image - a utopia - of an upgraded urban space in Graz 8020: a high-spirited networked city based on the high-performance information technology infrastructure for open, distributed and heterogeneous application environments. In short: a shapeless shape – a Golem. (Yiddish goylem, Hebrew golem = something shapeless)

So once the conceptual framework had been completed, this spiritual image was transferred to the virgin pasteboard in order to animate it as a Golem - exactly a Golem- Trap, which the people of 8020 should enter and, in so doing, free themselves of both physical and psychical constraints.
In a word, alter their traditional mind-sets in order to get ready for intensive networked life.

This was the procedure, then, through which the Golem could be reloaded in each of them and help the people in Graz 8020 to overrun their adversaries in Graz 8010 -the prosperous right bank of the River Mur. And the result they achieved was good. A good no-place. A real utopia - ready-made for the sterischer herbst exhibition, which opened on September 30, 2005 in Kunsthaus Graz and was called City Upgrade: The High-spirited Networked City.

The universal upgraders were very proud of their work, secretly cherishing a strong conviction that a new kind of architecture - heterarchitecture -, which they proposed, could help accelerate the process of our automating liquid logic - 1 and 0 at once -, a necessary prerequisite for competing ways of life in the Age of the Global Net - the age of difference, ambivalence and extreme openness. In short: the age of Erasmian ambiguity.

PART TWO _ Living in the Age of the Global Net

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." This quote by the pre-eminent mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead implies that a threshold moment in evolution can be surpassed only once humans have been able to automate increasingly complex tasks. This quote is also the motto of IBM's new perspective on the state of information technology: the Grand Challenge. IBM believes that we are at this very threshold right now in computing. We believe that we are at this very threshold right now in thinking, too - in thinking the postmechanical paradigm “Net.

We live in the Age of the Global Net, whether or not we are inclined to accept it. Living in the Global Net means living in dynamic open spaces. There is a permanent draught. If we don't perpetually keep on the move, it can get pretty cold. That's why living in the Global Net calls for permanent activity - interactivity. A net only makes sense if there are many nets at once. At its heart, a net is an ambiguous entity. In a net, a) everything is intertwined – 1; b) a net is empty - 0. In a word, a net is a mixed reality environment, dominated by liquid logic; a place which -is nowhere in particular but everywhere at once-, -as William Mitchell lucidly stated a decade ago. So it seems that in the ultimate limit, there will be no choice but to go to quantum parallelism in which 1 and 0 are literally present at once. So it seems, furthermore, that in the near future our life will take place in between â-in places between and around identities - our psychical constraints.

So if we do not harness and automate the liquid logic of quantum parallelism, running 1 and 0 at once, we will, in the long run, be incapable of taming the exponentially increasing complexity of the Global Net and thus of surpassing the next threshold moment in evolution. That way we will be incapable of keeping up with computing in the future, notably with next-generation quantum computing, based just upon 1 and 0 at once, which will increase computational power by astronomical amounts.

There is a menace, then, that our thinking will be sucked into the black hole of networked complexity, while computing will not. So the basic question we face today is the same that was already raised by Félix Guattari: "How to produce, tap, enrich, and permanently reinvent our subjectivity in order to make it compatible with the Universe of changing values?" - or the Multiverse, as we would prefer to say, referring to David Deutsch -the Oxford guy who first had the idea of a quantum computer.

In their benchmark book Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari fully attest the liberating impact of capitalism. Capitalism - not unlike schizophrenia - defines itself by a process of decoding and deterritorializing all traditional codes and territories of power, and it unleashes unprecedented social dynamics. The only problem is, Deleuze and Guattari argue, referring to Karl Marx, that this process of decoding and deterritorializing does not go far enough, that capitalism is not, so to speak, schizo enough to keep pace with its own dynamics. So to retain control over what goes on, capitalism sets itself immanent limits, generates new codes, new re-territorializations, new divans, new tattoos, and, in so doing, castrates itself in a double-sense:

1) it becomes anti-productive: codes turn up only where saturated bodies reign, sitting comfortably on divans as -instances of anti-production- par excellence, and

2) it becomes anti-democratic: it excludes - entirely against its own original interests - the majority of others from direct access to institutional power games.

Thus, by setting the old democratic principles of -œliberty and equality for all- aside, capitalism generates, instead of competing adversaries (games), new enemies, a new antagonism (real-life wars). So the question today is still the same as it was in the 19th century: Is there a possibility of accelerating the liberating process of decoding and deterritorializing, which capitalism unleashed, without falling again and again back into the archaism of generating codes, axiomatics, re-territorializiations, identities, divans as anti-productive and anti-democratic instances par excellence?

A question that Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche were first to raise for us, a long time ago. For Marx, by the way, the solution was communism, for Nietzsche schizophrenia -a state of permanent frenzy in nothingness (no-place, nonlocation -in terms of contemporary architecture).

What a 'robust democratic life' today needs -argues Chantal Mouffe is 'the possibility for antagonism to be transformed into agonism'. By which she means that in democratic societies, while conflict cannot be and should not be eradicated, neither should it take the form of a struggle between enemies (antagonism), but rather between adversaries (agonism)" -just as in a social game. So what we urgently need to realize democracy - she concludes - is a vibrant agonistic public sphere, thanks to which democracy can be kept alive and deepened-. In short, a multiversal game environment.

This conclusion, however, automatically raises a very pragmatic question: How can such a 'vibrant agonistic public spher' be created with the least investment of capital we can afford so that access to worldwide knowledge and, eo ipso, institutional power games could be granted to all?

At least for us, naive monsters, referring to Prometheus, the answer might be quite simple: by Reloading Golem, that is, by a further increment in the liberating dimension of technology, not ideology. In other words, by designing and constructing a new kind of architecture 'heterarchitecture ', in which real space (1, OFF-line) and virtual space (0, ON-line) are coherently superposed, thus obeying the rules of quantum mechanics (1 and 0, OFF and ON at once) rather then classical physics, the impact of materiality (including computer hardware) could exponentially be reduced and investment of capital minimized. Architecture as a quantum object. Architecture as an enabling platform that does not prescribe any kinds of spatial experiences, but enables them all.

At its heart, it is an architecture of the AND (ei en di) which also functions as an AND (ei en di). A genuine interface between the real and the virtual 'a dynamic open space, an enabling platform. A place of permanent frenzy in nothingness, a place of production desirante sans cesse or, in more common words, a place of ceaseless innovation and change, which today is, by the way, prerequisite no. 1 for sustainable economic growth. No stasis, no divans. 'A place' as Elizabeth Grosz put it in a nutshell - 'related to other places but with no place of its own'. An architectural schizo- a no-place (outopos). For only no-place is the good place: eutopos -happy, fortunate, good place. (Thomas Moreâ's neologism 'utopia' is the result of two different fusions from Greek roots: outopos ' no-place and eutopos - good place.) It is also the place where quantum properties begin to emerge in our social (macro)world on its way from the Either-Or- to the And-Society.

So the challenge for architects today is to make use of these properties in order to conceive buildings as good no-places – places between faces and interfaces (Graz 8020 for instance), helping liberate the schizo (source of ceaseless innovation and change) in each of us from psychical constraints (identities) in much the same way as high-performance information technology does with physical constraints.

Conclusion

By conceiving architecture as a quantum object which can be in two states at once (real and virtual, 1 and 0, OFF and ON), numerous 'vibrant agonistic public spheres' - good no-places, i.e., utopias - could be created, providing people of all ages with the capabilities and skills necessary for competing ways of life in the Age of the Global Net 'an age of Erasmian ambiguity. Thanks to that, the liberating process of decoding and deterritorializing based on the old democratic principles of liberty and equality for all, which capitalism unleashed with its disruptive energy of ceaseless innovation and change, could be accelerated. So what we obviously need to achieve Democracy Realized is simply a) more capitalism – capitalism against capitalism, and b) less architecture – architecture against architecture.

Welcome to the realm of quantum schizo, where the medium is the architecture and myself means many selves -at least two: 1 and 0. Welcome to Utopia- Graz 8020.

PART THREE _ Closing Remarks

The project City Upgrade: The High-spirited Networked City I was involved in, initiated in 2004 by ORTLOS Architects Graz, has been an attempt to automate an 'increasingly complex task' of collaboratively developing and designing a project by switching from the principle of individual to multiple authorship as both the creative source and driving force. By higher orders of information input, the findings of this synergy of research and design should help initiate and influence urban development concepts in more sensitive and inflected manner than it would be possible within the framework of industrial modernism based on the binary code -either 1 or 0.

What we universal upgraders tried to attain was to 'reinvent our subjectivity' as a very collectividual (1 and 0 at once) in order to make us better compatible with the Multiverse of changing values and, in so doing, 'surpass a threshold moment in evolution', at least in evolution of thinking architecture and urban planning.

For this purpose, A.N.D.I., A New Digital Instrument for networked creative collaboration, has been developed: an open-source platform for creative on-line collaboration, allowing the team members to work jointly on the project on an equal basis at every stage of the project following the principle of distributed intelligence: everywhere at the same time and nowhere in particular.

Our A.N.D.I.-based collaboration had been working well as long as the tracking of individual inputs was possible. When this aspect had been omitted, there immediately appeared 'ego-centric noise' that made a constructive collaboration impossible. There is, of course, still a need for us to 'retool' and 'reeingineer' our Selves in order to cope with this new, open-source approach to innovation. And we hope to manage it during the next two project years. The END (i en di).

Thank you for your kind attention.

(The "teatime utopia" fairy tale at the beginning is loosely based on http://www.ced.appstate.edu/projects/fifthd/legend.html and http://home.ripway.com/2004-6/126883/Folder%20Name/index.html)