Of pigeons, and mud, and streets, and clouds

Attending to nonhumans--the innumerable trees, rats, cows, copper, smog, clouds, bricks, oil, shade, doors, speed bumps, and others who must be omitted for the requisite brevity of an 'abstract'--orients the ecological problem per our everyday epistemology: how we relate with the world. In this domain, architecture, fundamentally an environmental medium, may operate as a fulcrum, shifting how we situate ourselves within the world.Yet, before we can design in such a way, we must first learn to witness the agency of nonhumans, a shift which demands expanded practices of attention and representation. This thesis focuses on a technique of mediated observation-simultaneously filmic, sonic, and textual-promoting an awareness of the multiple dimensions through which nonhumans constitute collectives. Playing upon the ubiquity of mobile devices, these techniques are brought together in the form of a smart phone application that prompts users to redirect their attention to the multitude of entities active around them. Participants' responses aggregate as a database of relational anecdotes, which is then choreographed into a series of episodic representations. Forgoing the human monopoly over the fabrication of worlds, these seek to foster an aesthetic "contact zone" whereby the agency of nonhumans is foregrounded. De-centering, yet not negating, the human.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Weaver, Christopher Allen.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mark Jarzombek.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123606

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/123606