Entr’acte

Avant-Gardes in Performance

Series EditorsSarah Bay-Cheng, University at Buffalo, The State University of New YorkMartin Harries, University of California, Irvine

Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde: On the Abuse of Technology andCommunicationBy Arndt Niebisch

Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic ModernityBy Adrian Curtin

Entr’acte: Performing Publics, Pervasive Media, and ArchitectureEdited by Jordan Geiger

Entr’acte

Performing Publics, Pervasive Media, and

Architecture

Edited by

Jordan Geiger

entr’acteCopyright © Jordan Geiger, 2015.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2015 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN®

in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the abovecompanies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the UnitedStates, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Entr’acte : performing publics, pervasive media, and architecture / Edited byJordan Geiger.

pages cm — (Avant-Gardes in Performance)Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Public spaces—Social aspects. 2. Technology—Social aspects.I. Geiger, Jordan, editor.HT185.E58 2015303.48′3—dc23 2014036232

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Integra Software Services

First edition: March 2015

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978–1–137–43394–7

ISBN 978-1-349-49280-0 ISBN 978-1-137-41418-2 (eBook)DOI 10.1057/9781137414182

For Miriam

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Contents

List of Figures ix

Foreword xvSarah Bay-Cheng and Martin Harries

Acknowledgments xvii

Preface: Mise-en-scène 1Paul Virilio in Discussion with Jordan Geiger

1. Entr’acte, Interim, Interstice: Performing Publics andMedia across Scales of Time and Space 7Jordan Geiger

Interval 1Supranational

2. Cloud Megastructures and Platform Utopias 35Benjamin H. Bratton

3. “Hello! My Name Is Sophia,” I Am Going to TweetDemocracy, Google My College Degree, and 3-D PrintMy House! A Speculative Piece on the Neo-Republic ofHyper-Individuals in the Near Future 53Nashid Nabian

4. Entr’actions: From Radical Transparency to RadicalTranslucency 73Ricardo Dominguez

Interval 2Interurban

5. The Hypercity That Occupy Built 87Jonathan Massey and Brett Snyder

viii C O N T E N T S

6. Image Cities Spectacles: Imagining a World Class AfricanCity 105Mabel O. Wilson and Mario Gooden

7. Crowd Choreographies 127Omar Khan

8. Growing the Seeds of Change 137Elke Krasny

Interval 3Transindividual

9. Looking into Nature: Learning and Delight in aSTE[A]M Park 157Brenda Laurel

10. (Unofficially) Enacting the Commons 173Malcolm McCullough

11. Between Plateau and Mirror: A Sound and ProjectionField for Daniel Lanois’ “Later That Night at theDrive-In” 185Adrian Blackwell and Eduardo Aquino

Afterword 213Keller Easterling

Notes on Contributors 217

Index 221

Figures

1.1 Still from the 1980 film The Social Life of Small UrbanSpaces, by William H. Whyte, showing time-lapsecamera and daylight washing across Seagram Plaza.© 1980 Municipal Art Society 14

1.2 Video still from YouTube, Michael Jackson flash mob,Embarcadero Plaza, San Francisco, 2009. © 2008 the Hero 15

1.3 Boal workshop at Riverside Church in New York City,May 13, 2008. © 2009 1.equalityisforall 16

1.4 Production photo: The Builders Association, SuperVision, 2005. © 2005 The Builders Association.Photo by dbox 17

1.5 HeHe, Nuage Vert, Saint-Ouen, France, 2008.© 2009 HeHe 19

1.6 Eric Paulos, Participatory Urbanism: carbonmonoxide readings across Accra, Ghana, 2006.© 2008 Eric Paulos 20

4.1 This image captures the Mexican president’s websiteresponding to an Electronic Disturbance Theater(EDT) Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD) actionand the visual outcome of the gesture: “Error 404 NotFound” on http://www.presidencia.gob.mx/. Theaction-image above is from a 2014 distributedperformance on the Mexican president’s website inresponse to a Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD)action by Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 andartist Ian Alan Paul. Web browsers around the worldparticipating in the performance sent mass pagerequests to the server of the Mexican President

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Enrique Peña Nieto, filling the site with error logswith lines of text drawn from Don Quixote,communiques from Zapatista communities, CriticalArt Ensemble, as well as a text authored by RicardoDominguez. One example, a quote from DonQuixote, manifesting as an HTTP Error 404, “ ‘http://www.presidencia.gob.mx/The fault lies not with themob who demands nonsense but with those who donot know how to produce anything else,’ was notfound on this server.” This image also foregrounds theidea of an action taking place in front of a curtain, ofbeing a type of entr’acte—not as hidden code, but as atransparent gesture. Also the history of ECD in thestyle of EDT starts with actions in 1998 against andon the Mexican president’s website and in support ofthe Zapatistas 74

4.2 Ricardo Dominguez and US Border Patrol,photograph by Brett Stalbaum, cofounder ofElectronic Disturbance Theater 1.0 and 2.0. This is areal-time/real-place/real border patrol performanceinvention by Ricardo Dominguez at the UnitedStates/Mexico. The gesture was composed by simplystanding, smiling facing east at the border wall, andwaiting for something to happen—we did not have towait very long 78

4.3 Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab,Transborder Immigrant Tool in operation, 2011.Shows working tool and screenshot from Nokia e71,directing user to a water cache in the Anza-BorregoDesert. Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) 79

4.4 Transborder Immigrant Tool billboard campaign,2010, San Francisco, CA. Produced by ElectronicDisturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab and presented byGalleria de la Raza, San Francisco, CA. Design byElectronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 members RicardoDominguez and Amy Sara Carroll. The billboard wasa prototype for a series of billboards to placed at theUS/Mexico border 80

4.5 Transborder Immigrant Tool by ElectronicDisturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab testing the

L I S T O F F I G U R E S xi

design for an installation project for the Museum ofContemporary Art, La Jolla, CA. Photograph byElectronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab 83

5.1 The Occupy Sandy response wove together physicaland virtual networks while capitalizing on theindividual strength of each system 88

5.2 A diagram of the Occupy Sandy response. Adaptedfrom Adam Greenfield’s “A Diagram of OccupySandy” on Urban Omnibus 97

5.3 Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Sandy respectivetimelines. The diagrams parse usage patterns of eachevent’s online activity 100

6.1 Between Joburg and Dreams, summer 2013, by SabrinaBarker, Rashad Palmer, and Sumayya Vallay. Photocourtesy of Columbia University GSAPP GlobalAfrica Lab 115

6.2 Gladys and Geoff on Bree Street, summer 2013, byEdward Molopi, Meagan Murdock, and TiffanyRattray. Courtesy of Columbia University GSAPPGlobal Africa Lab 116

6.3 Delayed Topography, spring 2012, by AikaterinaPetrou. Photo courtesy of Global Africa Lab 118

6.4 Bring Your Own Broadcast—BYOB, fall 2012.Courtesy of Tanya Gershon and Matthew Wang.Photo courtesy of Global Africa Lab 120

6.5 The Hackers’ Circus, spring 2014. Courtesy of FiliposFilippidis. Photo courtesy of Global Africa Lab 122

7.1 Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette competitionentry illustrating the expansive matrix of follies asattractors for crowd movement 132

7.2 Lacaton and Vassal’s Palais de Tokyo excavates theexisting Beaux Arts building to expand the space ofoccupation, leaving it in a state of incompletion 135

8.1 El Campo de Cebada, seats made from reused wood,Madrid 2014. Photo: Elke Krasny 138

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8.2 El Campo de Cebada: A space for play and for debate,music and conviviality, sports and recreation, Madrid2014. Photo: Elke Krasny 140

8.3 El Campo de Cebada, a system of irrigation for thegrowing plants, Madrid 2014. Photo: Elke Krasny 148

9.1 Symmetry. This overlay illustrates a fundamentalgeometric principle. The participant is prompted touse their finger to trace lines of symmetry in the wild iris 163

9.2 Nest. This rotted tree trunk has often served as ahabitat for nesting songbirds. I have superimposed aphoto of the most recent nest over the trunk itself; thenest image serves as the AR overlay. The nest had eggsuntil the day before I photographed it; we suspect alocal fox 165

9.3 Surprise lilies. This overlay, on a science tour, revealswhat the plant looks like when it is blooming. Thissort of overlay allows us to play with time and seasons 166

9.4 Spirals. This overlay might be part of a math tour. Itwould hopefully pique the interest of the participantwho may not know that there are different kinds ofspirals based on different mathematical constructions 166

9.5 Uplifted perch. Photo by Rachel Strickland (Oakland,CA, 2010). “The Social Lives of Urban Trees”(work-in-progress title) is a collection of experimentalvideo portraits that will explore the forms andqualities of public spaces created by individual trees,while using cinematic techniques to visualize andlisten to the trees’ own perspectives regarding theirenvironments and various other inhabitants withwhom they share the territory. Rachel Strickland(spontaneouscinema.com) is a San Franciscofilmmaker and media artist, with a background inarchitectural design and a fascination with thecinematic construction of place 167

9.6 A haunted vision of a potential post-anthropocenetree. This overlay image was designed by Char Davies:“Tree pond,” “Osmose” (1995). Digital still capturedin real time through head-mounted display (HMD)

L I S T O F F I G U R E S xiii

during live performance of the immersive virtualenvironment “Osmose” 168

11.1 Plan of Sound and Projection Field. Drawing byspmb/Blackwell 186

11.2 View of Toronto’s City Hall and Nathan PhillipsSquare from above, with Sound and Projection Fieldinstalled. Photo by the authors 188

11.3 Elevation of carpets, projectors, and the main sunkenstage, looking north toward City Hall. Photo bythe authors 192

11.4 View looking southeast from the podium of CityHall. Photo by the authors 193

11.5 View looking north across the reflecting pool from theelevated walkway. Photo by the authors 194

11.6 View of projectors reflected in Nathan PhillipsSquare’s reflecting pool. Photo by the authors 202

11.7 Elevation of the stage and hanging mirror. Photo bythe authors 202

11.8 View of the audience and mirror. Photo by the authors 205

11.9 Frontal view of the horizontal projector showing afilm by Jennifer West. Photo by the authors 206

11.10 View for up projectors with viewers lying downwatching a video. Photo by the authors 206

11.11 A down projector with viewers standing and dancingon the video image. Photo by the authors 207

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Foreword

Sarah Bay-Cheng and Martin Harries

Despite the many acts of denial and resistance embodied in the phrase“death of the avant-garde,” interest in experimental, innovative, and polit-ically radical performances continues to animate theatre and performancestudies. For all the suffered attacks upon tradition and critical institutions(or perhaps because of them), the historical and subsequent avant-gardesremain critical touchstones for continued research across media anddisciplines. We are, it seems, perpetually invested in the new.

Avant-Gardes in Performance enables scholarship at the forefront ofcritical analysis: scholarship that not only illuminates radical performancepractices, but also transforms existing critical approaches to those perfor-mances. By engaging with the charged phrase “avant-garde,” the seriesconsiders performance practices and events that are formally avant-garde,as defined by experimentation and breaks with traditional structures,practices, and content; historically avant-garde, defined within the globalaesthetic movements of the early twentieth century, including mod-ernism and its many global aftermaths; and politically radical, definedby identification with extreme political movements on the right and leftalike.

When we proposed this book series, we wanted not only to challengethe prevailing discourse of terms like “avant-garde,” but also to exam-ine critically the ways that formal innovations, experimental works, andnew discourses revise our understanding of the avant-garde and perfor-mance. Jordan Geiger’s Entr’acte: Performing Publics, Pervasive Media, andArchitecture presents an exciting and original challenge to the conceptsof performance, media, and the avant-garde by bringing the discoursesof architecture and urban space into conversation with cultural and per-formance theory. Working at the intersection of digital technologies,architecture, and performance studies, Geiger and his contributors offeroriginal perspectives on the ways that technologies (digital, material,

xvi F O R E W O R D

and organizational) are transforming our relation to physical space and,subsequently, to each other. In the midst of an industrialized culturethat increasingly conflates consumption and production and increasinglyimbricates humans and their digital objects, Geiger introduces a criticalbreak—the “interval”—as the means to consider how architectural, oftenurban, formations alter our social spaces and practices.

That he adopts his central term entr’acte not only from the theatre butalso from René Clair’s iconic avant-garde film Entr’acte (1924) affirmsa conceptual continuity between the mediated performances of the his-torical avant-gardes and contemporary subjects as seemingly disparate asarchitectural views rendered from the scale of satellite imagery and chore-ographed crowds on the ground. Just as the Dadaists and surrealists of1920s Europe sought to define new vocabularies and imagery to articu-late life in the midst of technological transformation, so too do Geiger andhis contributors here renovate (to use a building metaphor) our concep-tions of space and time as performances altered through computationaltechnologies. As Geiger observes in his introduction, connotations of theinterval aligned with linkages and gaps “underlie much of what becomesnow the discourse around human-computer interaction (HCI) and physi-cal space” (p. 12). He thus proposes the entr’acte “as a model public space”and critical framework to understand the eroding distinctions betweenmaterial and virtual, public and private, people and things. He remindsus that the theatrical origin of the entr’acte was itself an event defined byits media, architecture, and society, that theatrical and performatic publicspaces have always been connected.

This book thus has much to offer both scholars, critics, and artists intheatre and performance studies as well as those working in architecture,pervasive media, and urban space. Entr’acte: Performing Publics, PervasiveMedia, and Architecture brings these related but often distinct discoursestogether, expanding the critical perspectives on contemporary phenom-ena. In this sense, Jordan Geiger’s entr’acte is not only an interval thatdisrupts and reframes our conceptions of mediatized public space andits human-computer interactions, but also offers a timely and essentialintervention in the scholarly discourse of the avant-gardes.

Acknowledgments

The origin of this work was a panel discussion simply titled “Entr’acte,”which I organized for the Performance Studies International Conference“Performing Publics,” held in 2010 in Toronto. Participants at that eventincluded Marianne Weems and Moe Angelos of the Builders Associationtheatre group in New York, as well as my colleagues Omar Khan andMark Shepard of the University at Buffalo. Following this, I had the luckto develop ideas through the teaching of a design studio with graduatestudents of the Situated Technologies Research Group at the Universityat Buffalo’s Department of Architecture. The writing of this first foundform in an article for the journal Leonardo (MIT Press).

I’d therefore like to begin by thanking all the participants in that ini-tial panel discussion, and in particular Omar Khan, who first proddedme to organize the event, and who has been supportive of the topic’scontinued exploration during his term as Chair of the Department ofArchitecture in Buffalo. It is his first prompt that led me to an ongoingand stimulating engagement with performance studies. I likewise bene-fited from the supportive environment for research and pedagogy instilledby former chair Mehrdad Hadighi as well as by deans of the Schoolof Architecture and Planning, Robert Shibley and his predecessor BrianCarter. At Buffalo’s Department of Media Study, Teri Rueb, a great men-tor, colleague, interlocutor, and friend, has my thanks for encouraging thework’s development for Leonardo and a presentation at the SIGGRAPHconference.

Many colleagues in Buffalo and elsewhere have provided support inthe form of direct feedback on the text or else shared working groupsthat have benefited production. Here I’d especially like to thank HadasSteiner in Buffalo; Miriam Paeslack, Kenny Cupers, and Igor Siddiquiwere true companions for our work table at Berlin’s Staatsbibliothek. Thatspot provided a setting entirely perfect for concentrated thought and alsofor necessary intermittent daydreaming on scenes from Wenders. I thankfamily and friends for their words of support and encouragement over

xviii A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

the time of this book’s gradual making, including Jon Geiger and all theEdelists. Alessandra Cianchetta of AWP Paris has been of great help inmy communications with Paul Virilio, as has been Jasmine Benjamin intranscribing and translating our discussion. Javier Arbona, Mimi Zeiger,and Nicola Twilley have offered useful feedback on aspects to Very LargeOrganizations.

At Palgrave Macmillan, I’ve been lucky to be in the capable editorialhands of Robyn Curtis and Erica Buchman. They’ve been sure and steadyguides in this book’s voyage through peer review, contract, and a lightbut reasoned guidance through developing the book’s content for pub-lication. I feel very fortunate for the sharp, detail-oriented, and entirelycircumspect copy editing that Adam Levin offered—at the eleventh hour,no less.

I am beholden to my series editors, Sarah Bay-Cheng and MartinHarries, for their great belief in this project and for their inclusivenessto their series on radical acts and performance. Really, no figure playeda bigger or more pleasurable role in the making of this book than SarahBay-Cheng. She has shown unending enthusiasm for the project from thestart, and provided practical, intellectual, and other kinds of guidance atevery turn. It is a great pleasure and stroke of luck to work with her.

Preface:Mise-en-scènePaul Virilio in Discussion withJordan Geiger

Jordan Geiger: As you know, Entr’acte is a collection that explores thistheatrical construct’s intervals—interstitial times and spaces—as a modelto understand new and ephemeral formations of publics in the contextof new and evolving technologies.

Paul Virilio: You know it’s an old film, Entr’acte . . .

JG: It was René Clair, with a performance by Francis Picabia and music byErik Satie. It may be that?

PV: That’s it—I love it.JG: And in fact there is a wonderful story of the music’s live performance

in which the idea was that the public would hear it in the back-ground, without paying attention, during the entr’acte. But the audiencefrustrated this intention, sat quietly and sought to listen, to understand.

PV: To analyze.JG: An irony. Here in this book, “entr’acte” confronts many themes and

intervals: mobility and race in South Africa; practices of co-gardening;the Occupy movement and its consequences; a rediscovery of the writ-ings of Elias Canetti; buildings designed by satellite vision; tools toovercome national borders; and many others. So the interval is a modelfor imagining a very broad range of public formations with changingtechnologies today.

If the theatrical entr’acte exists in space as well as time intervals,I would like to consider with you the contexts, the givens that appearfixed, but that change in the event. These contexts or givens are action,matter, and form. So my three questions concern action, matter, and form.

Let’s start with action. You have described yourself as revelationary,not revolutionary. It was in an interview with Sylvère Lotringer.

PV: Yes, it is absolutely critical. I very much like that word first becauseof its simplicity. The words “revelation,” “revealed,” and “revoluted”—indeed I think something in the revealed, the “revelated,” explains thecurrent disorder, the disorganization, and moreover the violence in our

J. Geiger (ed.), Entr’acte© Jordan Geiger 2015

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historic moment. We are facing a new historical moment which is alsoa cycle. I think the revolutionary period is over besides, as others havesaid, and that we are facing an extremely important time, as importantas the transition from the Neolithic or Paleolithic, or to the Renaissancefrom the Middle Ages.

JG: But this also touches on a history of calls and indications for theresponsibility of intellectuals, as Noam Chomsky described it 50 yearsago, after the Vietnam War. So still at this historic moment, thiscontrast, this important difference between being revelationary, notrevolutionary—remains very urgent.

If we reflect on the issue of formations of publics under the influ-ence of contemporary information technologies, where do you see theprovocations and agencies to respond to these crises?

PV: I think for a revelationary period, the notion of the prophet is re-actualized, is reactivated. We cannot understand the story, for example,of Judeo-Christianity, without a prophet like Isaiah or Jeremiah. AndI think that today it is not about religious prophets, but civil prophets,who also can affect the religious domain. But a prophet appears rarely.It is an individual who is eccentric to the maximum. And he has agreat influence but also a repulsion, a rejection of his personality ofhis speech. I think something happened to the intellectual class of theentire world. I believe that there are many writers, politicians, but civilprophets and social prophets no longer appear. In a few years, theymight suffer the same fate as the biblical prophets, but it is something ofthis nature. And I know that this is what troubles me in contemporaryliterature: it is repetition, not revolution.

JG: Sometimes in history, the figure of the prophet is someone who appearsas having a gift, given almost genetically. Sometimes, on the other hand,prophecy is practiced, a habit. Where do you see the role and existenceof the prophet now?

PV: This is usually related to the displacement of populations. If we againtake the Bible as a reference, the prophet appears when there is asocial movement—be it in ancient Israel or today the entire world—theprophet reflects a movement that did not take place. The movement thattook place was war, and it is also the war at this time. But the prophetspeaks about other movements, movements of populations, deportation,exodus, etc. Well, he speaks through movement. Today we see the weak-ness of political figures who are incapable; there are no political prophetstoday. There have been in the past and we can talk about the greats likeLouis Antoine de Saint-Just, for example, and many others. But today,there are none. And the movement has taken place in so little time—14years. It is really a historic moment.

JG: For more than 40 years you have been revealing and indicating chang-ing states of time, of speed with regard to space at every scale: on-screen,in the body, at the office, at the airport, in satellite orbit. So the ques-tion: what becomes the ontological and literal state of matter today as

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we watch more and more transformation and exhaustion of planetaryresources—and at the same time the creation of protocols following adesire to live independently of matter? Do we anticipate a new movetoward dematerialization? What is changing?

PV: First, dematerialization starts with deterritorialization. My first bookafter the bunkers was called The Insecurity of Territory (L’insécurité duterritoire) and got into this. I think actually the deterritorialization oflanguage—Gilles Deleuze spoke about this too—is replaced by phe-nomena of acceleration. It is therefore something of the loss of territory,conflicts over borders today related to globalization, that are a form ofthe de-corporalization, disembodiment, the loss of the pulpit. You see,once again a religious reference: just as God took shape through incar-nation in Christ, we are throughout the whole world all contributing toa de-corporalization through deterritorialization.

Disembodiment benefits intensities of flux of all kinds, flows ofdisplacement moving from one geographic point to another, or informa-tion flows that run over the Internet and the media, and through stockexchanges working on differentials of a billionth of a second. All theseexplain such disasters, cracks, systemic accidents. Now we are seeingcracks, systemic accidents in geopolitics.

JG: You describe exactly what this book is about. It is this great confluenceof global influences at all planetary scales, and at microcosmic scales ofthe body. I ask myself more and more what is changing in the statusof physical matter and of the body as something has changed with theaccelerating proliferation of mobile phones, of place-based sensors, ofwireless networks. The matter of architecture, of the city, and of ourbodies change[s].

PV: Quite. I’m amazed, for example, by people walking around withan object in their hand—there’s nothing like it—that contemporary,unbearable gesture, to constantly have something in the hand. Thereis something inhuman in it. The human hand is free.

JG: But it is also a kind of visibility of the technology. There are hundredsof occasions and places, where technology can sense our movements,our financial actions, whatever, without being visible. That’s moredisturbing, isn’t it?

PV: Yes, absolutely. It’s astonishing to see how much the visible is impov-erished.

Architecture is a second body, a sheathing, a skin. The naked bodyneeds clothes and it always needed it to function and survive againsttemperatures, but also as social representations to others. There hasalways been a need for both clothes and architecture—not just the housebut also the city: the city is a cladding of the social body just as the houseis a cladding of the familial body.

JG: We’re almost back at Marshall McLuhan, the extension of the body . . .

PV: Exactly. This was also the body in the habits, in gowns for example.I’m thinking of the seventeenth century, these dresses that were in the

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form of a corolla flower. Women and men, but especially women ofcourse—dressed in volumes of flowers, lace around the rear ends. Whenyou see a woman of the seventeenth or eighteenth century, that is anarchitecture, you see the kind of character I’m talking about.

JG: We’re talking about a kind of costume, so we’re back at theatre. If youagree, I would like to ask a third question then, now regarding form.Roles of form change in the context of today’s architecture and urbanismdiscourse. We observe the talk of new technologies that permit us torealize previously unimaginable forms. This can veer to a case, in myopinion, of technophilia and of a techno-fantasy, which is dangerous.

But at the same time, be it at Tahrir Square or at the highway tollplaza, which grow obsolete with new information infrastructure, forms ofperformance change. Forms in the city and in architecture. Yourself, youforesaw this whole shift in your essay “The Overexposed City,” whereyou described these changes already 30 years ago. Forms here in thiscontext refer to physical space but also to our expectations. I know archi-tects who are engaged with the themes that you introduced in “TheOverexposed City,” but who are convinced that physical formal issuesare no longer relevant. In my opinion, form matters, but is no longer tobe thought without its interstices. Where are the interstices and what isthe status and service of form today, in your opinion?

PV: Interstices are accidents. The concept of accident and substance: thesubstance is what is, and the accident happens. And so I think the inter-stices are unfortunately currently only accidents and accidents of allkinds. Before my depression I started to write about Fukushima, a bookthat has not been forthcoming. I published a book called The OriginalAccident if you remember, and I wanted then to talk about the integralor systemic accident, as bankers describe it. For me, this is where welocate an opposition to any substance, since the accident happens to thesubstance. For example, the mountain is the substance, the avalancheis the accident. Or the earthquake is the accident, or the tsunami is theaccident of the sea. So I think we have to interrogate what is the contem-porary nature of the interstice, as an accident and no longer as a willedthing, I would say.

It is no longer ours to rest, to be quiet, to keep silent, or to listen.We are no longer listening. And architecture is an interstice. Painting isan interstice that opened up Paleolithic history, Neolithic history, etc.Think of the birth in the cave—because it is a birth, almost all art wasborn in the caves—and architecture is the rest. I think the intersticewill arise on the day the concept of accident will have been rethought.Thought in a positive sense. I wanted to conclude this [Fukushima]book, called “The Integral Accident” (I prefer the “integral” to “sys-temic”) with a dialogue. This was to be with the bishop of La Rochelle,a man with whom I have discussed much, an intellectual. I thought todiscuss the original sin, the original accident, mortal sin, Apocalypse.

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I recall that the Apocalypse means “revelation.” I wanted to talk withhim about this, the accident in the history of the church, which endswith the apocalyptic revelation in relation to the accident in the every-day history of the Earth, in materialism, in what interests us in thisdialog.

JG: The accident also appears collective. There is the accident that is madedeliberately and one that was found, which was created and built by us,together . . .

PV: Ah yes, the integral accident is a collective accident. Moreover, today,the city is no longer seen as an accident. The overexposed city is anintegral accident, but I would say it is not considered an accident but asuccess.