Primarily a hypothetical aesthetic terrain, it is but a penultimate realization of the forces of negation lurking within every nascent technology - that is to say, within every (virtual) landscape. The stealth landscape is a post-machinic landscape aest hetic informed by the art of disappearances operating within every metropolis (and its electro-mechanical re/presentation). It is the realm of interstitial projections, where the virtues of concealment and erasure give rise to parallel processes, to mult iple landscapes, multiple codings, multiple bodies. Not a pre-modern notion of verdant pastures, this construct allows the possibility of recognizing the sum of erasures within any (virtual) landscape that overlaps the boundary lines of both the virtual world of technology and the corresponding spaces of immanence within the prosthetic spaces. Once recognized, both body and terrain are reconfigured by the negational tendency of all technology. From this vantage point, cyberspace is not a place but a ne gational atmosphere.
As a landscape, the undecidability (visual ambiguity arising from simulation) of virtual space is initially a question of the (event) horizon [that both bounds and exceeds the eye]. Like other landscapes, the stealth landscape is composed of atmospheres and terrains. The stealth body in the stealth landscape, as the fruition of Futurist agenda of speed and vectorial bodies, generates ambiguities of distance and position. The landscape of negation both slides from beneath and exceeds the pastoral lands cape tradition, as it does the urban tradition.
The black forest of cyberspace deliberately overlaps multiple stealth landscapes: in our metropolis, in our imaginations, in our terminals, in our optics. Negational operations, embraced in a (deliberate) stealth architecture - operations of cloaking, s creening, concealment, negation, suspension, interruption, of "mottled" atmospheric spaces receding into the background of white noise - are clearly evident in the electro-mechanical metropolis - where the stealth landscape is its dominant shadow. In thi s landscape, marginal positions become derelict information-shadow zones that duplicate the vacant/exhausted spaces in the metropolis (or its virtual re/presentations).
Not a physically present bounded and static (Roman) space, nor the idle divergence of affluent programmers, the stealth landscape is a commonplace territorial field for the projection of our own unseen thoughts. Like other landscapes, it is both aesthet ic and accessible. It can be traversed by (virtual ) bodies, the gaze, or pure information. The traditional possibility of the sublime manifest within a landscape points toward the unexplored option of a post-machinic electro-mechanical sublime. In it one can be immersed or dispersed. Privileging simple curves and densities of (Rheinmann) space over the tedious landscapes of nature, (those that have irretrievably lost their dominant status and are now being overwritten/reformatted by the manifestation of stealth tectonics/technology), the stealth landscape presents itself to us as the layers of unseen "others" layered beneath and between visible stretches of textures and forms. In cyberspace, these textures and forms exist as alphanumeric data arrays and implied/feigned space. Both slide into the stealth landscape when they proliferate operations of erasure and negation (the logic of disappearances).
The difficult quality of atmosphere is a crucial but underemphasized aspect of architectural space within the metropolis - the ambient spaces of the contemporary urban landscape implicate an atmospherics of architecture (architecture as the precipitation of ideas). Though the role of atmospheres (plus terrain and opposition) in traditional Japanese aesthetics, architecture, and martial strategy is primary, it connotes an alternate reading in the design process - engendering atmospheres that acknowledge the necessity of disappearances. 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 shadow s - or the region where multiple shadows overlap and intersect. It is in this intersection that the stealth landscape is born.
The idea of landscape is like stealth technology; both engage tectonics, proportions, geometry, textures, depth, and intention. The tendency toward stealth is an ahistoric process; the stealth landscape is a post-structuralist revision of landscape aest hetics designed for new telemetric consumptive gazes. The stealth landscape becomes a radical rewriting of optics (as the rigid reference of certainty) where concealment is the aesthetic value. Bergson argues that the thinking mind subdivides both time and space if they appear as endless continuums, as in the feigned space of virtual technology. The apparatus of the eye does this for us - a taxonomy of gazes unique to this medium could be eventually articulated.
Sun Tzu, places deception at the center of all endeavors. Technology is no longer the extension of desire, but appears as the manifestation of secret processes. - stealth technology is merely an acceleration of forces always already present in the impul se of technology. Stealth 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). Not an obscuring architecture, it should be a sophisticated response to aesthetics of disappearance. The stealth landscape engages assemblages and techniques of concealment and erasure derived from (stealth) technology (insofar as all technology is stealth technology).
Not merely the desire to decrease its visual presence while increasing its potential threat, the advent of deception, concealment, and stealth within (military) strategy is a continuous trajectory from ancient treatises. Traditionally, advances in (stea lth) technology are frequently derived from the military - timeless strategies (of concealment) supplement the current boundary of technology: deliberate positional mis-information equates with time (surprise). It is also a deliberate negation of form by form - though the stealth aircraft may be visually seen, its threat of instantaneous presence (a negation of distance time) is a distillation of suspense. Here, as in architecture, maximum precision creates maximum uncertainty. Cybernetics tells us tha t information is quantified by its uncertainty - uncertainty assumes a recurring dominance.
Every technology creates analogous space(s) that negate and erase; 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 metro polis, bounded and static spaces are replaced by a hypothetical thermodynamics of form. As technology operates as a pure vehicle for erosion (for erasure/dissolution), it destabilizes the stasis of these spaces and landscapes - it accelerates the possibi lities of disappearances.
By privileging information (over force) as the true commodity of information, it points toward a radical rethinking of the contemporary urban, critical, or electro-mechanical landscapes in relation to the process of stealth (and derivatively an architect ure derived from stealth tectonics) and information. If every reading is a misreading, and the value of information lies in its uncertainty, then of course the traditional values of architectural discourse must be suspended in favor of exploration of the se "others"/"doubles" of architecture.
Stealth technology, which emphasizes minimal areas of appearance through distortion (especially the ability to appear as many things from multiple positions) places a greater reserve in the concealed, in the collapse depth of disappearance. The ability to appear as many things from multiple vantages implies a radical perspectivism (one without absolutes), as a discrete strategy of building. It contains a parallel desire not to appear at a distinct position, but to hold many (false) ones, or no true one . Thus the strategy of stealth (the desire for negation/disappearance) encoded in technology becomes tectonic strategy of making/intervening in the stealth landscape.
The tendency of technology to diminish in size, to seek its own oblivion, is manifest in stealth technology. The graceful curves and invisible/absorbent materials of this technology point toward both a new vocabulary of curved/faceted spaces and plates, and concave/convex spaces that correspond to concave/convex ideas. A traditional vocabulary of voids must not be equated with the erasures of technology (or the aesthetics of disappearance). These absences resist a simple taxonomy; the stealth landscap e could generate unexplored/unclassified (proto)types of space: the manifold space, pressure gradients, modal space, oscillations, distortional space, white noise, fractured space, spaces of erasure, spaces of concealment, dissections, erosional space, di slocation/mis-location space, unfolding space, implosion space, and countless unnamed others. It corresponds to a geometry founded not on absolutes, but impermanent durations and sections. As the concealment or disappearance of things is necessary to re cognize identities and histories, it is clearly a crucial component of any metropolis, one worth examining.
The modern landscapes are themselves each a multiplicity, written by gestures and vectors, by gazes and desires, simultaneously. These multiple frames provoke a metafiction (discourse piled on discourse, similar to superimposing multiple languages), one that lacks a map. The motions of the virtual body write gestures into the site. Into the discourse of the body (anticipated in literature and virtual space, only belatedly in the simulated city of the media), a slow erosion of the tenuously integrated subject leads to a liberated "nomadic" drift or "skimming motion" through the stealth landscape(s), whereby the master narratives are partially erased and overwritten by the isolated turbulences generated in the post-Oedipal metropolis. The inscribing of the dashed lines of hurried trajectories and information flows slipping between plates and screens generates a possible web-matrix of frictionless glides, a map of desires created by tactile surfaces of alphanumeric arrays, a map that is equivalent to th e stealth landscape. It will be a disjointed map, one full of voids and dragons, inviting the projections of our own (sub)conscious desires.
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. Note: 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. Within these intersections, cognition of the stea lth landscape will be founded on instantaneous shifts from the distant to the immediate point-of-view.
The line is a diagram of relations (hence it is a primitive machine); so to is the electro-mechanical gaze of virtual bodies in cyberspace. Discourses of the directional gaze and optics is crucial to the study of disappearances - e.g., disappearances of historic figures (and history), or of objects within the urban landscape. As our eyes draw invisible lines with the gaze, and the gaze is always already framed by alternate lines/borders, there are great possibilities of conflating this condition with t he architectural necessity to draw lines. These lines can operate only at the surface level, but more profoundly in the transforming metropolis. The laws of perspective, of rational alignment, can here be disregarded in favor of other (stealth) geometri es. There also exists the possibility of replacing the tyranny of the medusa/panoptical gaze (as referent) with more precise non-hierarchical tracings of the flows and turbulences that define the unseen stealth landscape.
Though it is difficult to reconstruct a brief history of the erasure of the subject in the face of negational technology, exploration of discrete occurrences of loss, absence, and the forbidden are crucial first gestures of constructing stealth landscape s - those landscapes that incite or provoke bodies (real or virtual) to seek their own disappearance. The viral contamination of forms by images destabilize all spatial referents. Negation, as a process of erasure, attempts to eliminate the pre-modern l andscape's impact (writing) of modern space. The space of landscape itself suffers a negation, in that the static/bounded/atmospheric space is erased in favor of a voided landscape Classical ordering principles, derived loosely from the landscape, are t hemselves negated by the inevitable consequences of technology, though it is the stealth landscape that endures.
Cyber-City Tokyo: immersion in THE city that fears the daylight causes one to investigate the possibility of the smallest inhabitable space. The endless stealth landscape is no different than the these minuscule spaces. Every act of disappearance point s towards the possibility of a metropolis that has left behind its need for stone and shadow, of body and space. Hence the need for commodification of EVERY object of desire encourages the surgical revision of bodies, of architectures, of ideas - the pos sibility of the stealth landscape is merely one amongst others (commercial, sexual, political, tectonic, aesthetics). It is in the dual processes of erasure and (false) projection, of calligraphic reduction and surgical revision, that the re/presentation of the contemporary metropolis is being supplanted by its electronic "other". Tokyo is the intersection of feigned space and overlapping plates, a prevalent stealth landscape driven by unseen machines.
As the possibility of re/constructing a cyberspace asks us to revise our theories of knowledge and the production of artifacts, so to our assumptions relating to the translation of the body from flesh into trajectory across the cold surfaces of the steal th landscape demands reconsideration. Feigned bodies in feigned spaces lead us to a suspension of disbelief of the cyber-city, such that this immense realm of immersion and potential always abandons us into the vacant parking-lot of midday (identical wit h a matinee film-goer's disappointment upon exiting to the "real" world). It is this disappointment, this fatigue, that characterizes the most significant contribution to our readings of the metropolis, those repeatedly generated by the (unfulfilled) po tential of cyberspace.
If we can expand the construct of the stealth landscape, as the unfolding of skin from a body, there exists the possibility of the interjection of cyberspace (feigned AI-generated or computer-generated simulation space) into the arena of pre-modern space (the city) amplifies the possibility of a stealth landscape and its virtual bodies. Here the crucial distinction between immersion and representation can be raised - as the stealth landscape is driven by technology, immersion/dispersion cannot escape t he limits of representation. Or should it?
It is interesting that the spaces of modernity negate the landscape, a reversal of the pre-modern relation. The absent landscape signifies this process of (partial) erasure, as a site of inscription for new components of modernity. Each potential subst itute further erases the pre-modern condition of an integrated landscape in a bounded space. The landscape, once the ultimate integrated referent and locus of meaning, no longer maintains its unity, but becomes another site of intervention for virtual st rategies of desire. The landscape's fall invites countless speculative revisions of the landscape in favor of the hegemony of the machine. The machine in the landscape subsumes, obscures, and overrides all. Now the machine IS the landscape.
The radical transformation of post-machinic spaces places the post-machinic body in a marginal but dependent relation to those spaces; therefore the body is not only a site of superimposed inscriptions for modern disintegrated strategies of abstraction, it is a shift in the body-space relation into a (para)sitical relations to the negational landscape.
Implicit in the apparatus and the medium of the emerging (recombinant) code of (stealth) technology, a formal methodology arises solely from the apparatus. It is a question of an aesthetic theory of concealment engendered within a machinic assemblage, n ot exterior but folded into itself, into its shadow. The stealth landscape obscures its own origins and boundaries. In each case, the relation between artifact, gesture, and space will implicate (suppressed) architectural strategies of urban in(ter)vent ion. Hence disappearance is a composite action.