392 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
bining them in a new arrangement (Burroughs, 1982), thus generating new meanings
and opening up for new conceptual possibilities. William Burrgoughs’ investigations
during the 1960s in books such as The soft machine, The ticket that exploded and Nova
express abundantly illustrate the possibilities of the cut-up method.
The sheer vastness of information on the Web is an invitation to use it as stuff
upon which to perform creative operations, mutations – random or otherwise – towards
the generation of new meanings. Device hypertext cut-ups acknowledges having its
roots in Gysin and Burroughs’ cut-ups, but as a method, it can be more than cutting
and pasting, it may be linking serially, googling, chatting, blogging, a combination
of these, etc. Device hypertext cut-ups experiments with information on the Web as
an approach towards conceptual and methodological development.
A Google search on the subject of architecture and information society brought up a
number of sites, from which extracts were selected and pasted into a Word document.
The extracts were randomly shuffled. Below are a few of the formulations that came
up through that exercise. The propositions arrived at through the above-described
method are presented here in an edited version, where discontinuities and repetitions
are edited out. The unexpectedness of some formulations comes about through a
random combination of text fragments. Upon that, layers of selection, editing and
interpretation are superimposed. The statement that the architectural discipline seeks
to close the gap between the basement and the sunroom (the very first formulation to
come up through this exercise) may sound banal at first, but it also demonstrates the
potential of this approach to combine disparate categories into assemblages, in this
case linking an abstract entity (the architectural discipline) or cognitive practices
(one may expect words such as teaching, research or design to follow the expression
to close the gap between) to concrete architectural spaces (the basement and the
sunroom). Here are some of the other propositions the exercise produced:
A study programme that models design through information.
Tools that can be used to formulate design as a comprehensive view on information.
Design research by using the Web, which delivers a vital form of cross-cultural com-
munication and which is charted in paths from information to architecture, so as to
create intelligent sites.
Snapshots of design information science: aggregated architecture of computer games,
museums, electronic global village, information systems, wired cities and movies – broad
components of global culture.
How could we model design through information? How paths can be created that lead
from information to architecture? Etc. Despite being tentative, or maybe because of
that, these statements open up avenues for conceptual investigations – in this case
starting off with an exploration of the issue of architecture and information society
- and for the development of new methodological tools which combine operations
such as hyperlinking, googling, cutting and pasting, etc.
Device 6: Interconnectivity<>Blur
Steven Johnson describes the development of the contemporary media space into a
densely interconnected system which undermines hierarchical organisations. As an