Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

382 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy

The picture shows Private England looking down passively at a naked Iraqi detainee
as she holds a leash strapped around his neck. In an interview to the New York Times,
she explains how she forced him to crawl down a hallway for “approximately six hours”
(Zernike K, 2004). Pointing at a photograph of a pile of naked prisoners, she states:
“picture 000015 was basically us fooling around” (Zernike K, 2004). Noteworthy here
is not only the strategic and calculated nature of the depicted abuse, or that the
methods employed require a development of skills and a set of abilities and training;
but also the sheer detachment – these actions are about the torturer “fooling around”,
not about the tortured. It is a scene from Burroughs’ Naked Lunch – Dr. Benway’s
programme of Total Demoralisation.
The fact that the Abu Ghurayb pictures have come to the public eye may lead us
to perceive this raw brutality not only as a condition intrinsic to torture, which has
been common place in military prisons, but also as something pertaining to the use
of the electronic medium: the will to document (with digital cameras) and broadcast
(on the Internet) the events in question is in itself a display of detachment. We are
drawn to the power of new information media and not only the events conveyed by
them – Marshall McLuhan ́s “the medium is the message.”
Documentation can at anytime be turned into evidence, as the Abu Ghurayb abuses
attest to. Digital cameras and third generation mobile phones expand the presence
of the public eye in time and space and disclose new relationships between public-
ity and privacy. Using his mobile phone, a victim photographs a mugger as he tries
to rob him. The picture is used as evidence by Stockholm Police in building a case
against the mugger.
Coming into play is a form of self-consciousness induced by viewing/playing and
broadcasting as punitive devices or as mechanisms for narcissistic exposure of personal
events. The emergence of cultures, in which virtually every individual is potentially
a local recorder and broadcaster with access to the required means (third generation
mobile phones, digital cameras, computers or other electronic devices) for activating
those practices, is an imminent condition. In being publicised through broadcasting
and viewing/playing – operations of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation

• the digital images in question change their symbolic meaning. The images before
  and after publication are very different entities.
  The controversy about the publication in the Daily Mirror of fake photographs of
  British troops torturing Iraqi prisoners points to the autonomy of the image, which
  for want of a fact, finds a referent in the “authentic” pictures of the abuse by Ameri-
  can prison guards at Abu Ghurayb. Those counterfeit images reveal the media system
  looping back onto itself, making news out of news.
  Operations performed on information become a subject of study in themselves
  besides (but not independently of) the content of information. A question, which may
  be raised in this connection, is whether such cognitive operations (that is, operations
  performed on information) can be treated as transformative tools in creative prac-
  tices, such as architectural, landscape and urban design. Could cognitive operations,
  as described here, be integrated in architectural education to a degree that parallels
  “established” design methods dealing with phenomenological, compositional, material
  and programmatic conditions, amongst others? Could such cognitive operations be
  seen to interact with and transform the design methods in question?
  What are the implications of those practices and of an intensified publicity to