After witnessing a tape of the film "Blade Runner" over 200 times, "bald spots" appear through wear. It is at these points that the city and the narrative are interrupted by an all-encompasing white noise static:
"My mother? Let me tell you about my mother .... @^Uù?ÛÉ^pP" ☨©zzzzzz hhhhhhhhhhhhh"
The prosthetic city is Los Angeles 2019: 35 years after the olympics, a victim of countless "retrofitted" urban strategies. From the film it is clear that as objects, incidents, and spaces within the city are lost or disappear (into the "static" of nega tion), the question of their duration and destination are raised. If they are reconfigured or recede into the mottled and weathered background textures of the (every) city's multiple (formal, conceptual, electro-mechanical) landscapes, clearly a city can be defined by its negations rather than its institutions. It is the static that defines this city.
Michel Serres, in his enigmatic text The Parasite, indicates the aesthetic necessity of static, of parasitic interruption, as a consequence of the role of these interruptions or negations in information theory and literature. The excluded third assumes a dominant position, challenging all dialectics. To acknowledge the presence of this "static" as a terrain (which is anything but static), existing simultaneously with the conventionally presented metropolis, is the first step to forming a strategy of in habiting this territory. Not the mere dwelling in corporate shadows and derelict spaces, it implicates a strategy of making that is the "other" of the capitalist mode of production.
The noise-city appropriates everything external to it; the static city exists to absorb. The bleak metropolis in "Blade Runner" operates as antagonist; it is a city of maximum density and saturation, whose focused, pressurized atmosphere is as tangible a component as the building-machines and crowd trajectories. The ascetic space of modernism is here contaminated with and distorted by palpable atmospheres of continuous rain, smoke, steam, haze, and fog. These contaminations blend into the mottled text ures, rendering the architecture as further precipitation (as a percipitation of ideas). These atmospheres surround and penetrate the machine-ruins (as futuristic ruins, they operate as false memories - the very thing that allows replicants to live) - false memories to cover the discrepancies created by static/absences. These concealing atmospheres, coupled with the strong precedent of film noir's suppression/negation/seduction by shadows, generates a dense environment of unstable memories and desire - i n the absence of a single certain reading, they invite projection (for the blade runner, projection of suspicion - for the replicants, projection of fear). The predominance of vertiginous space and non-neutral shadows merely extend from these projections , even into the most derelict spaces of the noise-city.
The unexplored possibility of constructing an alternative/nomadic form of design research extends from the awareness of noise as a possible virtual space or territory. This alternative promotes an undervalued marginal and discrete strategy of making, on e informed by this critical frame of the (post-olympic) city. As the noise on the tape merely exaggerates the oversaturation of forms by images (a recombinant viral contamination), so too the relation of noise on the city of Atlanta foregrounds the mutab le 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-t ech still addresses technology), there exists the possibility of embracing the impermanence of durations within a strategy of making.
To inhabit and dwell in those domains unnoticed (and therefore considered uninhabitable) within the metropolis is the late 20th century condition - according to Japanese architect Shin Takamatsu, it relies on a heightened sensitivity to the atmosphere of places. The convention of shadows of negation are redefined by the presence of noise - both are absences that invite projection. Just as shadow and light are conditional boundaries of countless potential spaces, so too the complex interrelation between light and shadow in the drenched neon streetscapes makes further demands on the occupation of shadows - or the region where multiple shadows overlap and intersect. All disappearances can be read/reconfigured as strategic; therefore architecture in the m etropolis is strategic disappearance, into noise.
Though the volcanic building forms of "commerce" re/present the total commodification of the body (replicants) by capital, one alternative is already presented: the "Eye Works", Chew's laboratory for genetic design of eyes. Not the sanitary and uniform space of corporate research and development, it is a dense and disordered example of the concept of "nomad science" as presented in Deleuze + Guattari's Nomadology. It opposes both the conventions and methodologies of sanctioned research in favor of its "other". The workshop of the individual designer (though obviously still retained at a distance by the Tyrell Corporation) is manifest in the space of the individual - here it is not corporations that design, it is individuals. The reinstatement of this antiquated mode of design research (not production) is rejuvenated as an alternate practice that calls into question the viability of accepted design conventions. As such it too operates as noise within the larger schema of late capitalist production.
"Blade Runner" presents us with the genetically-damaged toymaker J.F. Sebastian, who has also been appropriated by Tyrell Corporation, though he is also free to inhabit and design in his own marginal space. "My friends are toys...I make them", though by adding deformities in the process he both sanctions his own and normalizes this future possibility. This alternative deviant practice points towards the possibility of sustaining unique individual design trajectories outside of normative parameters (tho ugh it remains unclear whether this fringe activity will be able to interrupt the notion of commerce, to truly develop into the space of static).
In Tokyo, a "noise-architect" named Kei'ichi Irie has developed such a theory: "computer crash by design". Not content to merely master off-the-shelf design software, he pursues the threshold of collapse and accident by driving his custom-designed sub-r outines with the explicit intention of forcing a crash or failure, for it is in these accidents that the true possibility of design software is achieved. By capturing the represented artifact at the point of software crash, he has developed a design voca bulary that cannot exist outside this methodology and technology. Unlike conventional design that transplants pre-modern techniques to post-modern technology (digital pen replaces quill), it is an unusual celebration of the existing limits of this techno logy (a computer crash cannot be simulated by any other media - yet). It is a powerful reversal: turning an apparent disadvantage into the cornerstone of a new strategy. His work makes little distinction between the size of the project; chair-design and city-design differ only in the mechanics of their subroutines (designed so that these subroutines will overwhelm and obscure the main routine, to produce design from noise). These accidents, breaks, and interruptions certainly puts him in the realm of d eveloping an architecture fit for the emergent noise-city.
The San Francisco-based group named Survival Research Laboratories have developed a neo-Roman gladiator performance, where mechanical dinosaurs fight to the death for the scant food/fuel supplies located within the performance space. These performances are significant both in their ironic celebration of violence at the expense of conventional research and as pure nomadic research practice. No performance is repeated, no site is re-used. The leaflets they distribute during their performances (usually b y cannon shot at the audience) offer such wisdom as: "call the truth an insult to avoid accepting it as fact", "do anything wrong to get public approval", "demand unearned rewards", "obey harmful suggestions from your own mind", using business/propogandis t methodology but inverting the message. By utilizing the discarded scraps of the defense industry and silicon valley, they are able to reanimate such debris into thoughtful performance activities - a parasitical strategy from within the margins. As pr ophets of the noise-city, they merely take what others perceive as worthless and inscribe it with meaning through hard work.
These examples are predominant within the film "Blade Runner" itself: budget constraints dictated the re-use of almost every piece in a multiplicity of positions, which accelerated the intersecting mottled textures of the city. As the rough text/ures of the city become "overinvested" (repeatedly supplemented), the original gestures become lost beneath numberless layers of superimpositions and "surgical" insertions obscuring the original form(s) of the city into the distortions of memory. The city (as b ody) becomes prosthetic - it exists through the erasing of lines, and this action duplicates the complex discursive relation between body (locus of desire) and technology (displacement of desire). In a derelict world, where only marginal persons exist, m arginal design research practices become the norm. In the space between today and this apocalyptic future, the unexplored possibilities of inhabiting noise as a deliberate strategy of making remains a rhetorical question.