#controlled area

Paradisiacal enclosure | Atanasius Kircher, Topographia Paradisi Terrestris | via http://thecityasaproject.org/

The human component integrated into the man-machine system as the model for the fundamental operation of control rooms. (From Franklin V. Taylor Psychology and the Design of Machines, in 1957.)

A particular “inhabitation of becomingness” together with an immediate symbolic power detected in an action, could describe the definitive force of an event. I believe that through this concept we move again into the idealization of a living structure compared to a demonized lifeless one. The trace in a condition of passive reading crystallizes the dead and the disappointing. A long story connects the roots of philosophy to Heidegger’s Dasein and to Deleuze’s readings of Bergson. We could underline the necessary coexistence of these constructed opposite poles: we could argue that Badiou’s “fact and event” are defined only when the one refers to another, in a circular way. They are related in a complex manner. We could argue that thinking is necessarily a potential reactivation of “facts”; we will thus keep the distinction between fact and event in effect, in order to think again about this dichotomy and revisit, in the same time, a city and a video game structure. The game itself can be the place where an event in the Badiou's sense can never happen. But what would be the consequences of such an remark? [Aristide Antonas, in: the empyre_soft_skinned_space list]

Prison Architect

Πλάτων, Πολιτεία, 515c, Benjamin Jowett translated the fragment in English, Ν. Μ. Σκουτερόπουλος translated it in Modern Greek.

Observation in the dark

The Control Room serves as an important architectural precedent for the structure of surveillance. Based on the foucaultian concept of Panopticon, it also represents a growing stable cockpit, where from a handler can organize remote sovereignty over an observed field. The more a Control Room gets big and sophisticated, the more sovereignty over the watched field becomes complex and unpersonalized. Automatic control protocols substitute "immediate" observation. The ideal Control Room is an emptied space where the only human presence needed concerns technical reparations or treatment of malfunctions. A.A. [photo via amazing future]