untitled#1 UK

to Cecil Balmond, Untitled #1, Disaugmented Reality, by PETERS isfi (Delphine Costedoat & Pier Fossey), 2010.Overworld, 41 rue Borie 33 300 Bordeaux | France - www.overworld.eu - +33 (0) 952 834 872

to Cecil Balmond, Untitled #1, Disaugmented Reality by PETERS isfi (Delphine Costedoat & Pier Fossey).

Consider for example that the neuronal projections emitted by two more or less humanoid sensors, (PETERS isfi for example) on the quays in Bordeaux, a privileged main stream tool for experimentation and suitable for the propelling and accelerating of a full range of particles, inducing the direct introduction and quasi-inclusion (therefore virtual) of virtual items into the ‘real’ and that in real time: chiasmus is generated, a fictional sub-level layering itself over the ‘real’ which is already there.

Whence the equally systematic generation of two juxtaposed and intersecting universes, represented in 3D with software Processing, lending it material form. The capacity required of the software would no doubt require its applications to be further developed.

In the current state of impoverishment of meaning and applications on our deadly planet, deep and extensive development of this action, consisting in accelerating the juxtapositional and fusional stages, while intensifying this with the appropriate scissional and dissociative processes, designed ad hoc but necessary nonetheless, of this fictional sub-layer and already present ‘real,’ is one of the potential presuppositions from which we might establish the reversal of the rate of Disaugmented Reality in the world.


This reversal may be envisaged in terms of secret passage(s), some of which may or may not be progressive and whose rhythmic dynamics are yet to be determined.

In terms of sudden irruption(s), generated in real time, but from a chosen standpoint, chaos, whose meaning has over the last years grown increasingly weak and feeble, or has been lost, as the initial state, is actively but provisionally densified and is not the final culmination of the process.

In terms of global and massive upheaval, chaos itself therefore becomes the subject of experimentation, and also its emphatic basis: its reality, greatly augmented, makes way for the creation of an intermediary state or state in suspension. From the stasis of Disaugmented Reality, the initial ‘chaotic’ base becomes, once isolated and thus in suspension, the matter of predilection of the global process. When applied large-scale, the juxtaposition and fusion, combined with the scission and dissociation, the fictional sub-layer and the chaos no longer ‘already there’, but transformed and transposed, allow us to open the door to an alternative world which we may at last find the courage to envisage.

NDURL. Please note that the correct translation of the English term virtual in French is quasi. When Jaron Lanier launched his concept of ‘Virtual Reality’ in 1985 to describe a ‘realistic, three-dimensional representational space, calculated in real time, he is speaking of a ‘quasi-reality’. The antonym of the French term ‘virtual’ is not ‘real’ but ‘present.’ Similarly, the antonym of ‘real’ is ‘fictional’ and not ‘virtual’. The virtual is then a component of ‘reality.’ In the words of Maurice Benayoun, it is ‘the real before it acts-out’ in other words, before it becomes present, current. Hence the idea of a sub-layer of representation which would precede its presentification. The term ‘Virtual Reality’ may not therefore be considered an oxymoron.

The generic city is a harbinger of death for modern society and offers only dreary and depressing grey zones for our deadly and soon to be dead planet. This is the disaugmented reality we condemn in its most insufferable guise. A planet-city is already in the making, already almost upon us, with its sordid combination of ridiculously artificial town centres (with their ready-made life-style centres thrust upon us) and sprawling obscenities and shantytowns.

Is there still enough life left in us to condemn this, however disillusioned we may be about the fate reserved for our censure? A salutary return to structure, to the underlying structure of human identity – its DNA, its lifeblood – is a possible way out of this dead-end. The rich histories of cities forged through the centuries on strong identities, embracing difference, are there for our exploration on the internet today. Their varied and fertile past, the exchange, interaction and urban life they have fostered, are sources of inspiration for the ‘real’ world today, for the physical context of the 21st century.

Our guiding light and driving force come from the writings, philosophy and architectural production of Cecil Balmond, opening up new horizons for our modern world, in an age in which a clear sense of direction is so cruelly lacking.

Informal – the term with which Cecil Balmond defines his theory – explores a series of ideas in which surprise plays a key role, in which the unexpected is encouraged and provided for, in which traditional rhythms and conventional perspectives are broken down and pride of


place is given to ellipsis and velocity, to the mental reconstruction of spaces the conscious mind cannot immediately apprehend. This desire for fertile complexity is played out as part and parcel of the creative process itself, accompanying each stage, from inception to completion. Nothing is left to chance, nor forsaken to the sterile gratuitousness of an easy solution. Such ‘elusive bad behaviour’ is the reflection of how the informal theory is enacted, refusing structural, and therefore formal, solutions to the challenges of building design, rejecting conventional, comfortable answers which prevent speculations from being explored to their farthest limits. The different spaces housed between the walls of a single building, spaces born from this resourceful, meticulous design process, slip and slide over and above each other, tip over and overlap, interlock and interconnect, but never in a spirit of nonchalant permissiveness or futile expressivity.

For this reason Cecil Balmond also rebuffs what he refers to as the ‘desolate skeletons’ of ‘high-tech machines.’ The buildings he designs are in no way indomitable structural exacerbations. On the contrary, their conception is nourished with the history of the site on which they are to stand, the time-honoured culture and contemporary mores which pervade that sense of place. Each design makes ample room for poetry and beauty, for sensitive exploration of rough or silky smooth structures, born from the weft and weave of memory and promise.


The result is an architecture in which structure neither hides nor draws attention to itself, in which the work on structure, ‘deep structure’ is taken as the starting point for conceptual research, then to be fuelled and enriched by other elements of the project and engendering buildings which hop, skip and jump towards a new aesthetic.

Jump to Number 9. Such is the title of Balmond’s enchanting book, in which he investigates the legacy of Oriental cosmogony and the symbolism of numbers to which, as a mathematician, he is so deeply attached, harnessing their true potential significance as a driving force for his research and employing them as the fundamental pivot around which his philosophy and musings revolve. As a musician, his ear alerts him to the pregnant harmonious beyond into which he ventures when his little finger slips one note beyond the octave and dares play a ninth. 9, is the Jump which sends informal bursting into the world of machines and soulless buildings, it encapsulates the resonant, disturbing intrusions of the elements (on which he has composed such eloquent texts), of sounds and colours, of worlds past and future into the world of architecture yet to come in the twenty-first century.

Cecil Balmond’s prophecy of a structural and formal beyond is the inspiration for our vision of an alternative to the death-bringing, disaugmented reality of the modern world. In other


words, how, by rejecting easy solutions and enticing fashions, the wealth of knowledge stored in our civilisation’s universal memory bank may be harnessed to open up new aesthetic perspectives which live and breathe hope.

‘There was a depression over the Atlantic. It was travelling eastwards, towards an area of high pressure over Russia and still showed no tendency to move northward around it. The isotherms and isotheres were fulfilling their functions. The atmospheric temperature was in proper relation to the average annual temperature, the temperature of the coldest as well as of the hottest month, and the aperiodic monthly variation in temperature. The rising and setting of the sun and of the moon, the phases of the moon, Venus and Saturn’s rings, and many other important phenomena, were in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The vapor in the air was at its highest tension, and the moisture in the air was at its lowest. In short, to use an expression that describes the fact pretty satisfactorily, even though it is somewhat old-fashioned: it was a fine August day in the year 1913.’

Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Man without Qualities)




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