To this end, a surplus of "borrowed" constructs from external discourses will help to clarify this exegesis of Tokyo. Interwoven discourses such as film theory, pure (martial) strategy, and cartography will assist in articulating the range of displacements and erasures subtly operating within every metropolis, to expose/lay bare these operations with precision. Not a mere exegesis of shadows, this research seeks to identify technologically-driven erasures common in the post-machinic city (Tokyo). The temporal, cultural, and chronological boundaries of Tokyo will act as a natural frame to theses external discourses.
Stealth Tectonics is derived from the aesthetics of disappearance, of the endless displacements generated technology; it posits a mutable and deliberate relation between what is revealed and what is concealed, where one appears as opposed to where one is projected (both positionally and conceptually). In that any urban in(ter)vention is both tectonic and technological (low-tech and no-tech still addresses technology), there exists the possibility of embracing the impermanence of durations within the strategy of making. Not an obscuring architecture, it should be a sophisticated response to aesthetics of disappearance. Stealth Tectonics engage assemblages and techniques of concealment and erasure derived from (stealth) technology (insofar as all technology is stealth technology). As a blend of near-parallel research trajectories, the research implied by this terminology can attempt to define what must remain hidden in the metropolis.
The impermanence of images has a striking affect on the architectural responses situated within it; changes in ownership, political and economic re-adjustments, removals and replacements each consprire to re-write the city daily as a scene of transformational strategies, where the scars and memories of the past are preserved through displacement (to alternate sites or the slippery terrain of memories).
Exploration of systems of projection can be expanded to include recent film theory (already a projection of a projection, a telescoping of theories), which emphasize who is casting the projections, why project, and what is concealed in this endeavor. The interrelation between optics and occlusions will inform this drift/search for untried representations of the metropolis, through disappearances. These may lead to an architecture of gazes, of trajectories, to a hydraulic or thermodynamic view of Tokyo as envisioned by the contemporary urban nomad.
Examination and elaboration of these possible multiple systems of projection require a sensitivity to the type and degrees of distortion (both mechanical and conceptual) possible within. This is not meant as a critique, but as a further definition of possible techniques. As every act of mapping or projecting will inherently contain distortions, these occurrences can be sustained, erased, or enhanced Traditional techniques can be grafted or superimposed onto non-traditional techniques, artifacts, or discourses to generate unforeseen original contributions, in a process analogous to "minor" building strategies in Tokyo.
Mapping, like our conception(s) of the metropolis, engages multiple scales/amplitudes of meaning. The development of an individual system of projection should engage as many of these multiple levels as possible. Once completed, it can be revealed that the systems of projection generating this map must first be directly mis/read as a literal choreography of strategic forms, as a means of producing a new design vocabulary, and as a means of displacing our previous conceptual frame/point-of-view. From the completion of this research, the primary distinction between immersion and representation can be raised, as each generates a different Tokyo.
All laminar flows become unstable after a specific velocity; the smallest deviation from a line toward a vertiginous motion defines the construct of the "clinamen". This term, borrowed from hydraulics, is perhaps a more appropriate construct for speculative design research in the metropolis - as the origin of a radical transformation, it is both event and space. Linear trajectories, clinamens, voids, and erasures are simultaneously architectural and epistemological tools, in that knowledge is an intersecting of fields, flows, and terrains.
Absolute essences are here supplanted by transitory images across an indeterminate frame. The urban nomad (simultaneously Benjamin's "flaneur" and Poe's "Man of the Crowd"), in his endless wanderings, traces in this disappearing metropolis a futile cartography. The permanence of ruins gives way to transient situations; the static and bounded space surrenders to the virtual space of technology; spatial and temporal constructs collapse in the unflinching presence of the machine. The images of the city appear constructed to "diffuse" the metropolis through a deliberate suspension of perspectival laws and positional multiplicity - in these streetscapes there is always the sensation of being "underneath" or "between" spaces; the viewer is continuously established in a floating relationship with the implied depths of volume encountered when inhabiting shadows (physical and gestural).
To inhabit and dwell in those domains unnoticed (and therefore considered unoccupiable) within the metropolis is the late 20th century condition - according to Shin Takamatsu, it relies on a sensitivity to the atmosphere of places. The difficult quality of atmosphere is a crucial but underemphasized aspect of architectural space within the metropolis- ambient spaces implicate an atmospherics of architecture (architecture as the precipitation of ideas). Though the role of atmospheres (plus terrain and opposition) in traditional Japanese martial strategy is primary, it connotes an alternate reading in the design process - engendering atmospheres that acknowledge the necessity of disappearances within the metropolis. Just as shadow and light are conditional boundaries of countless potential spaces, so too the complex interrelation between light/shadow in post-machinic neon streetscapes makes further demands on the occupation of shadows - or the region where multiple shadows overlap and intersect.
One possible technique is dictated by Musashi: "in strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close, and to take a distanced view of close things...the gaze is the same for combat and large-scale strategy..." but (frequently) adds "...it is impossible to write about this in detail...". If architecture is not a type of writing (but the acceleration of disappearance) then this strategy could operate to inform the act of building explicitly.
But the metropolis can never be reduced to a screen - it remains uncancelled, it surrounds, it allows the projection of cinematic image. The reframing of the city, by tracking its disappearances, will utilize perspectival distortion as violence against man-centered panoptical space (the fixed p.o.v. is abolished by a skimming gesture - the drawing of lines). These lines that intersect with discrete terrains can be read in the metropolis at every level, and at every level they engage the act of stealth/concealment.
In Tokyo, the performed dance of darkness, Butoh, is informed by the writings of Artaud and celebration of the concealed/suppressed raw and primal conditions of urban life. Pure atmosphere and gesture, it is a spectacle of disappearances played outside conventional boundaries. Butoh can be read as the inhabiting of (striking/emotional) gestures unwoven as figural gestures (as lines of stealth); it challenges the metropolis founded on enduring absolutes by inscribing its opposite into the very spaces of Tokyo.
"with the irregularity of the elliptical space, defined by surprize and an unpredictable variation of frequencies, it's no longer a question of tension or attention, but of suspension, disappearance, and departure from duration...dimensions vanish in the reduction of straightness or of a straightaway, which would be only the speed of a geometric trajectory. The will to carry out whatever is possible...has led to a new atrophy of the instant...by destabilizing the instant, a contingent phenomena, the standards are abrogated...the diversifying of speed also abrogates the sensation of general duration..." (Virilio).
Advances in (stealth) technology are frequently derived from the military - this timeless strategy (of concealment) supplemented by current boundary of technology: compressed time recognition combined with deliberate positional mis-information. Every technology creates analogous space(s) that negate and erase; in this studio shadows in the electro-mechanical landscapes of the metropolis are as significant as those cast by volumes. As a consequence of technological interruptions in the late 20th century metropolis, bounded and static spaces are replaced by a hydraulics or thermodynamics of form. As technology operates as a pure vehicle for erosion (for erasure/dissolution), it accelerates the possibilities of disappearances.
These deliberate strategies of negation are frequently manifested as concealment strategies (intentional or otherwise), though other avenues (may) exist at both the level of forms/spaces/events and at the level of conceptual operations lying behind the city. This framing of the metropolis could generate unexplored/unclassified (proto)types of space: the manifold space, distortional space, white noise, fractured space, spaces of erasure, spaces of concealment, dissections, erosional space, dislocation/mislocation space, unfolding space, implosion space, etc. resulting in a post-industrial landscape of desire and rupture that condenses and foregrounds the latent possibilities of these spaces within every metropolis, redefined by its negations.