In Fighting fire with fire, Dk reflects on 8 years of activism at Harvard where he…
…meant to balance starchitecture, techno-formalism and what I like to call ‘fancy-pants design’ (hyper-expensive art museums and grossly unrealistic ‘visionary’ urban design proposals) with a commitment to community design, diversity and the social dimensions of design.
In his analysis he writes that:
Universities have a (near-)infinite time horizon, whereas students are only students for ~4 years. [...]
[...] the institution-apparatus knows — even if only unconsciously — that in a few short years, those students will graduate (or leave) and so will the objections. [...]
The longer the counter-institution is likely to last, the more the institution will pay attention.[...]
Write memos — [...]
The post prompted me to think about many things, three of them relate to my favorite topic:
(1) Sampling: One of the strategies of neo-nomads to formulate home is sampling. In (electronic) musical terms, sampling is the appropriation — selection and recording — of sound and music bits (often part of a precedent creation by another artist) for reuse in a new musical piece. The musical analogy holds true for neo-nomads as they sample cultures and the urban environments they roam in to reuse in the creation of a comfortable, personal and movable space. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have amplified the phenomenon. To relate it to Dk’s post… what made me think of sampling is the word STARCHitecture. I have been using this word quite a lot — I think STARCHitecture is STIFF! I like using words, hybrids of various words… such as archtivism (this latest one was inspired by the blog post mentioned above). As a hybrid, born French who has been speaking or writing in English everyday, I have been fascinated by (and practicing) the morphing morphology of words and the creation of a third language — Franglish for example or Arabofranglish, now that I am located in the UAE. Neo-nomads are also sampling words. They use language as a way to anchor to places and create a personal space. Similarly to electronic conversations, their language also wants to be intuitive, clever and, at times, funny.
New language gets created everyday, sometimes by accident. A dear English friend of mine was trying to remember the French word for pastry = pâtisserie but pronounced it “pétasserie”, which made me laugh so hard (a “pétasse” — pardon my French — is a “slut” in French) that I now have included it in my personal neo-nomad dictionary (I’ll always remember that moment; Telling the story to other French speakers always provokes a good laugh).
(2) Adherence: More closely related to the topic Dk raised is the difficulty to adhere or stick to places. Nomads move through places, hence they do not have time to dwell and change things on a permanent basis (I am still debating whereas this holds true in all instances). The pace of nomads is quite faster than that of the dweller. Deleuze and Guattari were mentioning the “war machine” and the “State apparatus” where nomads are raiders (which is true for traditional nomads of the Empty Quarter — read Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands (London, Penguin Classics: 1959 - reprinted 2007)). How can nomads feel at home everywhere if they do not have the time to dwell to places because the pace of life is slow and practices in the cultures they move through are thick? In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, assembling (to me it means dwelling momentarily) is violent. For neo-nomads, assembling is also mentally draining as one needs to rapidly understand the culture in which one lands, translate it in one’s own words/world, navigate through it, appropriate some of the practices and incorporate them. (incorporate… mobility is a fleshy matter).
(3) Tools/Protocols: Creating peaceful tools/protocols of interaction is compelling. Protocols of interactions establish the identity of the persons, places and objects interacting. Neo-nomads create tools and protocols of interaction to understand the culture in which they land, to swiftly adapt to spaces… Reminds me of Latour and Woolgar’s seminal book: Laboratory Life: the construction of scientific facts, 1979.
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