technologies of thought

It seems obvious that our environment shapes our behavior and thinking. What isn’t clear is how these relationships are established and changed, especially now by interactivity and virtuality—whether these are new relationships or more of the same. Is our fascination with reactive environments constitutively different from nineteenth-century obsessions with camera obscura, panorama, or the immersive illusions provided by ornate and gilded halls of mirrors? Still awesome, these last somehow seem so simple now.

In Architecture of Thought University of Minnesota Professor of Architecture Andrzej Piotrowski provides a broad outline of material significance in human life. An exciting illustration of our shifting modes of cognitive framing–from Middle Byzantine formation of Christian experience through the syncretic and hybrid religiosity given by Mesoamerican architecture–the book culminates with the high Modern efforts of Le Corbusier.

Most interesting are the paradoxical relationships between meaning and surrounding found in late Victorian England (and beyond), which are blatantly dependent on images. The promulgation of devices was crowned, Piotrowski notes, by the stereoscope, which, despite its failure to achieve serious longevity through the twentieth century, by chance would define the turn of the last, through 3D illusion.

The result is related to a philosophical upheaval that would eventually undermine positivist, objectivist science. Rather than a reality based on the senses, what we perceive and recognize is intimately connected to what we know. Attention thus is a “constitutive (and destabilizing) component of perception.”[i] Piotrowski continues: “The most fundamental changes and shifts in the modality of thought characterizing Victorian England emerged like design ideas—they produced perceivable and material outcomes before anybody could theorize or even describe the mechanisms generating them.”[ii]

What we attend to seems likewise to grow. Of course it is also good to remember that relationships between object and symbol have never been direct.[iii] As Marshall Berman notes of the nineteenth century, ours is a culture that shares more with its history than its future.[iv] In other words, our everyday life shares more with the realities of the twentieth century than it will with the twenty-first.

With our new devices for mediating life we might expect to experience revivals in public action. However this risks comparison with failed hopes of the Arts and Crafts Movement, against which critiques of flighty idealism are well known. It would be difficult to suggest now that industrial production should enable craft engagement on a mass scale, more common knowledge is that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. With basic needs satisfied by mechanized agriculture and machine made goods, we do not, unfortunately, all spend more time experimenting with weaving, carving, and blowing glass.  Too bad.

Likewise in non-sited milieu of instant visual communication we might anticipate a growing interest in the full sensorium: scented spaces, tactile means, and perhaps person to person interfacing. Of course we might also be only further sequestered. The truth is likely somewhere in between–time will tell. At any rate we’re now (and always) at a particularly significant moment for determining which way. And, in light of global health crises of national, global, and universal proportion, our concerted efforts might best go to noticing and exploring the very fundamental effects of the changes.

sb 02 2012

Andrzej Piotrowski, Architecture of Thought (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).