384 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
In being publicised on the Web the event is cast as a story, as a documentation,
as a case, as data, etc. This re-territorialisation is not only about how the event is
represented, how its is framed, how it is linked, but also about the fact that it can
be played back, downloaded and stored by people with an Internet access in their
PC. Besides being part of a decentralised and uncoordinated archive network, people
are in a position of recasting and republishing the event in question. As events are
re-territorialised, it could be said that architectural and urban spaces are themselves
re-contextualised by the same operations.
Moving away from a defensive position which states that creative activity starts
where control stops, a publicity/control device consists of infiltrating surveillance
practices and using them as tools in building accounts on urban conditions and public
spaces and articulating new programmes.
What types of maps can be drawn that illustrate new conditions of publicity cre-
ated by the proliferation of devices such as digital/video cameras and third generation
mobile phones? How can representations be developed, which extend themselves
through both physical and virtual spaces?
We are presented here with a twofold conception of a representation. On the one
hand Bourdieu’s abstract space or abstract map (Bourdieu, 2000, p.2): as a repre-
sentation that outlines a field for an investigation of practice (e.g. surveillance),
which that very investigation seeks to deconstruct. On the other hand, the map is
not only a cognitive tool constitutive of representations, it can also be taken as a
creative mechanism as in Deleuze & Guattari (1980), an enabler of multiplicities and
connections. A publicity/control device explores this tension between the urban as a
cognitive construct and as an object of manipulation.
What study programmes can be developed, built around the appropriation of
surveillance material or in the extensive use of documentation and broadcasting
techniques, which create new conditions of publicity? This is not a frivolous conniv-
ance with surveillance and control practices; it is rather an attempt to inhabit such
practices and to insert creative operations like viruses into their core.
At the other end of the spectrum, the same technologies that can be used for
surveillance and control can also be employed for creating spaces free of control.
Recent studies show how mobile phone texting and conversation are used by teenag-
ers for dodging the surveillance of their parents. (Rheingold, 2002)
Facing urban trends, media and information cultures from the angle of exacerba-
tion of control, both as centralised and decentralised systems, a study programme
could direct its focus to mechanisms and (information) technologies with the poten-
tial of generating spaces free of control. Building such an approach into a design
methodology may imply the introduction of unprogrammed spaces or unprogrammed
devices which undermine design – that is, a space free of control is necessarily a
space that escapes manipulation by architects.
During the academic year 2006-2007 I have, together with my colleagues at Depart-
ment 2 [The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture], implemented
some of these ideas, in the first instance in a workshop where students were asked to
develop conceptual statements about emerging conditions of publicity and territoriality
in the city of Copenhagen, through the making of models and artefacts. One group of
students, took a shopping mall as a point of departure, extracting an object from its
environment, namely a shopping bag. This object was transformed – an operation of