Keller Easterling, The Action is the Form: Victor Hugo’s TED Talk (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2012)
The new giant [global urbanism and infrastructure] is also the secret weapon of the most powerful people in the world. It cannot be petted or tamed, but it can be manoeuvred and exploited. Doing so requires a political art—an art found in what was presumed to be an artless background. p.10-11
Yet, looking more closely at the familiar field of mass-produced suburban houses, the organisation embodies a distinct activity that is very apparent. The developer is not making 1,000 individual houses, but a kind of agriculture of houses—1,000 slabs, then 1,000 frames, 1,000 roofs and so on. The house, as seen in pictures or stitched into needlework, is akin to [Marshall] McLuhan’s content [the medium is the message]; it distracts us from what is really being made. The field of houses is enacting a propensity to organise all activities across a population of houses. It privileges these repetitive activities and renders the act of making an individual house into a marginal gesture. What is really being made is something like a protocol or a non-digital spatial software that is both shaping and generating the activity of making houses. The relative changes in this organisation are, as Bateson would say, “differences that make a difference”. The organisation is doing something, and changes within it constitute information. If we focus only on the house, this larger process remains a kind of ghost or ghostly giant in the background. The architect who has only been trained to make enclosures will always rush to design the single house, so as to have something to show, only to be outwitted by the equivalent of McLuhan’s media or [Victor] Hugo’s reanimated giant [with a thousand heads and a thousand arms]. p.23-24
Technologies influence the desires of social networks that reciprocally shape them: humans develop the computer but the computer, in turn, changes the way that humans think. Humans design the technology for the suburban field of houses and that environment, in turn, shapes human interaction. p.28 (Technological tools desensitising people such as with mapping tools)
Active forms might describe the way that some alteration performs within a group, multiplies across a field, reconditions a population or generates a network. The designer of active forms is designing not the field in its entirety but rather the delta or the means by which the field changes—not only the shape or contour of the game piece but also a repertoire for how it plays. p.39
The toggles of active form are always, and have always been, present in any design. It is an artistic choice whether or not to use them—whether to place object form in relation to another set of potentials—like the ball on the inclined plane. Active form may partner with and propel object form, determining how it travels through culture with time-released powers. p.39-40
Dispositional techniques (especially the sneaky ones, like exaggerated compliance or gifts that cannot be refused) may fuel the architect’s traditional role in making object form, but they also open onto a vast pasture of alternative practices in which the non-digital software for how an urban space performs over time. p. 54
