#contrasting closedness and openness

[zhoudadudugongjin]

Nirvana in Fire (2015) -Episode 06/54

[samael-n]

It’s interesting how we’re now seeing some perspective on Askr and Embla’s respective cultures of openness and closedness and how they’re derived from the powers granted to their royalty and respective gods.

Askr’s designs are very open and outdoorsy with few actual doors, while Embla is more indoors and closed off, as seen by the new castle design.

Askr’s retainer Ash speaks in a roundabout way to invite openness to both opinion and change, and even admits when she may be wrong. Embla’s retainer Elm, by contrast, is blunt and curt with no room for change in duty or opinion.

Askr’s contracts with their heroes are rather open-ended, with no real expiration or restrictions to them other than “don’t kill allies or innocents.” Meanwhile Embla (namely Veronica) was contracting heroes under strict contracts, but always with specified terms and expiration times.

Askr as a country is very accepting of different lifestyles, going as far as to accept famous villains under the moniker of “hero.” Embla, however, is implied to be more xenophobic and closeminded (I mostly derive this from the peoples’ support of imperialism through Veronica’s attempted conquest of Askr and other realms).

Finally, we have Askr’s Order of Heroes which are effectively peace-keepers with a lot of freetime on their hands. Compared to Embla’s Curse Directive, which specializes in assassinations and misinformation among other things- in other words, maintaining control.

Seeing the cultural impact of divine power in FEH has definitely been interesting so far, but particularly for the main countries so far.

[infinitesofnought]

"Neither the separated being nor the infinite being is produced as an antithetical term. The interiority that ensures separation (but not as an abstract rejoinder to the notion of relation) must produce a being absolutely closed over upon itself, not deriving its isolation dialectically from its opposition to the Other. And this closedness must not prevent egress from interiority, so that exteriority could speak to it, reveal itself to it, in an unforseeable movement which the isolation of the separated being could not provoke by simple contrast. In the separated being the door to the outside must hence be at the same time open and closed."

– Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority

[allael]

Disciplinary society (Foucault: A disciplinary society is a society where one becomes a docile body due to the presence, or threat of, constant surveillance.) consists of settings and institutions of confinement. The family, schools, prisons, barracks, hospitals and factories all represent disciplinary spaces that confine . The disciplinary subject changes from one milieu of confinement to the next. In so doing, it moves within a closed system . The inhabitants of milieus of confinement can be ordered in space and time. The animal of disciplinary society is the mole .

In his ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, Deleuze diagnoses a general crisis affecting all milieus of confinement. 1 Their closedness and rigidity pose a problem: they are no longer suited to post-industrial, immaterial and networked forms of production . The latter push for more openness by breaking borders down. But the mole cannot bear such openness. Accordingly, the snake takes the mole’s place. The snake is the animal of neoliberal control society, to which disciplinary society has yielded . In contrast to the mole, the snake does not move in closed spaces. Rather, it makes space by means of its own movement . The mole is a labourer . In contrast, the snake is an entrepreneur . The snake is the animal of the neoliberal regime.

📚 Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Byung-Chul Han (2017).

[paegger-christgantenbein]

Entrance Transition

whatever kind of building or building complex you are making, you have a rough position for its major entrances—the gateways to the site from main gateways (53) ; the entrances to individual buildings from family of entrances (102), main entrance (lio). In every case, the entrances create a transition between the "outside"—the public world—and some less public inner world. If you have half-hidden gardens (ill) the gardens help to intensify the beauty of the transition. This pattern now elaborates and reinforces the transition which entrances and gardens generate.Buildings, and especially houses, with a graceful transition between the street and the inside, are more tranquil than those which open directly off the street.The experience of entering a building influences the way you feci inside the building. If the transition is too abrupt there is no feeling of arrival, and the inside of the building fails to be an inner sanctum.

The following argument may help to explain it. While people are on the street, they adopt a style of "street behavior." When they come into a house they naturally want to get rid of this street behavior and settle down completely into the more intimate spirit appropriate to a house. But it seems likely that they cannot do this unless there is a transition from one to the other which helps them to lose the street behavior. The transition must, in effect, destroy the momentum of the closedness, tension and "distance" which are appropriate to street behavior, before people can relax completely.

Evidence comes from the report by Robert Weiss and Serge Boutcrline, Fairs, Exhibits, Pavilions, and their Audiences, Cambridge, Mass., 1962. The authors noticed that many exhibits failed to "hold" people; people drifted in and then drifted out again within a very short time. However, in one exhibit people had to cross a huge, deep-pile, bright orange carpet on the way in. In this case, though the exhibit was no better than other exhibits, people stayed. The authors concluded that people were, in general, under the influence of their own "street and crowd behavior, 3 ' and that while under this influence could not relax enough to make contact with the exhibits. But the bright carpet presented them with such a strong contrast as they walked in, that it broke the effect of their outside behavior, in effect "wiped them clean," with the result that they could then get absorbed in the exhibit.

Michael Christiano, while a student at the University of California, made the following experiment. He showed people photographs and drawings of house entrances with varying degrees of transition and then asked them which of these had the most "houseness." He found that the more changes and transitions a house entrance has, the more it seems to be ' 'houselike." And the entrance which was judged most houselike of all is one which is approached by a long open sheltered gallery from which there is a view into the distance.

There is another argument which helps to explain the importance of the transition: people want their house, and especially the entrance, to be a private domain. If the front door is set back, and there is a transition space between it and the street, this domain is well established. This would explain why people are often unwilling to go without a front lawn, even though they do not "use it." Cyril Bird found that 90 per cent of the inhabitants of a housing project said their front gardens, which were some 20 feet deep, were just right or even too small—yet only 15 per cent of them ever used the gardens as a place to sit. ("Reactions to Radburn: A Study of Radburn Type Housing, in Heme! Hempstead," RIBA Anal thesis, i960.)

So far we have spoken mainly about houses. But we believe this pattern applies to a wide variety of entrances. It certainly applies to all dwellings including apartments—even though it is usually missing from apartments today. It also applies to those public buildings which thrive on a sense of seclusion from the world: a clinic, a jewelry store, a church, a public library. It does not app]y to public buildings or any buildings which thrive on the fact of being continuous with the public world.

As you see from these examples, it is possible to make the transition itself in many different physical ways. In some cases, for example, it may be just inside the front door—a kind of entry court, leading to another door or opening that is more definitely inside. In another case, the transition may be formed by a bend in the path that takes you through a gate and brushes past the fuchsia on the way to the door. Or again, you'might create a transition by changing the texture of the path, so that you step oft the sidewalk onto a gravel path and then up a step or two and under a trellis.

In all these cases, what matters most is that the transition exists, as an actual physical place, between the outside and the inside, and that the view, and sounds, and light, and surface which you walk on change as you pass through this place. It is the physical changes—and above all the change of view— which creates the psychological transition in your mind.

Therefore:

Make a transition space between the street and the front door. Bring the path which connects street and entrance through this transition space, and mark it with a change of light, a change of sound, a change of direction, a change of surface, a change of level, perhaps by gateways which make a change of enclosure, and above all with a change of view.

A Pattern Language

[shibbylax]

Week 10 - Intimacy

In Lambert’s article ‘Intimacy, Cosmopolitansm and Digital Media’ he argues that there is a formal dialectic between intimacy and cosmopolitanism. These opposing forces are grounded in the theory that they can be thought of as being inside and outside of a sphere respectively. In the article, Lambert goes on to further propose how intimacy is an ever-changing concept and is always influenced by the context and times that we are in. In this case, intimacy is a superfluous and ambiguous concept and does not necessarily hold any formal examples that stand the test of time.

 Further explaining the dialectic nature, Lambert draws upon some of Sloterdijk’s arguments. In defining the sphere, Sloterdijk suggests that cosmopolitanism is a threat from the outside to the inner bubble of the sphere. Cosmopolitanism represents the global forces that threaten the homogeneity and sameness that makes up our ideas of intimacy. In this definition, intimacy becomes an idea of closedness and similarities while cosmopolitanism is the openness and the different. The argument is inconclusive as they posit that cosmopolitanism could be detrimental to the idea and notion of intimacy in terms of its contrasting values, however, at the same time, it is also deemed that the lack of cosmopolitanism would lead to the dark side of intimacy. The dark side being how since its so insular there is a sense of exclusion that may lead to violence (social or physical) as well as hinder multicultural relations and understanding.

 To contextualize the arguments, Lambert also brings up digital media technology and how it encodes and manifests this whole idea of intimacy and cosmopolitanism. He brings up examples of how digital media helps to introduce cosmopolitanism into intimacy, as well as how digital media causes the notion of intimacy to be superfluous and ambiguous. He also explains that traditional notions of intimacy have been radically changed due to digital media especially the idea of touch and presence.

 After explaining all the concepts, Lambert argues that digital media is tending towards an immunization of the sphere. The evolution of digital media is pointing at the direction of us rejecting open spheres and preferring the closed spheres of intimacy. At first glance, this may seem like an ironic outcome. Why would technologies that seem to be opening the world actually make our spheres even more closed and intimate. I feel that this is a reflexive process that is determined by both the systems and the human psyche. For example, in filter bubbles and echo chambers, this notion of closed chambers is something that could be deemed an outcome of the system and platform. Social Media platforms have long used algorithms to curate our news feeds and in turn limit the cosmopolitan influence into our spheres as they tend to only display the people close to us and the things we like. However, while that may seem to indicate that the platform is the issue, the platforms are designed that way to cater to our own human preference of wanting familiarity and in turn intimacy in a sense. This is why the process is reflexive and is always influenced by each other. In fact, what I truly believe is happening with digital media, intimacy and cosmopolitanism is that we are going to enter an age of curated cosmopolitanism. We will welcome cosmopolitan influences in our spheres, but only if it doesn’t jar our own intimacies. With this, I will like to conclude with a question, is this idea of curated cosmopolitanism even cosmopolitan anymore, or is this just a slightly tweaked sphere of intimacy.

[ollieburchell]

Government architecture in the Bonn Republic such as Schwippert’s Bundeshaus (1949) had been designed in direct opposition to that of the Third Reich, with relatively modest, glass structures considered not only to symbolise democratic values such as self-effacement and transparency but, through functioning as ‘reverse panopticons’, to inculcate them. Even in the GDR, where the policies of the sed government and the brutal suppression of expressions of dissent undermined any claims to political openness, the visual transparency of the parliament building, the Palast der Republik (1976), was designed to function as a metaphor for ‘openness and contact among people’. 

In stark contrast to this, the Aviation Ministry building had effectively been ‘hermetically sealed to the public’ while functioning as Göring’s Aviation Ministry. The deliberate exclusion of the citizen is strongly conveyed through the building itself; from the wrought iron fence and the stone cladding that completely ‘encases’ the exterior walls, seen as emphasising the ‘closedness’ (Geschlossenheit) of the building, to the disorientating sequence of rooms, considered a manifestation of ‘the principle of architectural uncertainty’, designed to disorient and thus intimidate any visitor who was granted access. For Building Minister Irmgard Schwaetzer (fdp), a building so tainted by its previous occupants and by its aesthetics had no place in a democratic Germany. 

Keen to emphasise Germany’s break with the past, Schwaetzer and other Bonn politicians called for the demolition of buildings ‘contaminated’ by National Socialism or the gdr and their replacement with new constructions on the same sites. The Berlin State government strongly opposed this with Berlin Building Senator Nagel condemning what he referred to as a policy of ‘coming to terms with the past with a wrecking ball’, while Thierse, deputy leader of the spd, scoffed that, following such logic, ‘we might as well bomb Unter den Linden’.

‘Stones do not Speak for Themselves’: Disentangling Berlin’s Palimpsest |  Clare Copley

https://brill.com/view/journals/fasc/8/2/article-p219_219.xml?language=en