Architectures of Vibration

Architectures of Vibration is an extended research project — in three parts — that investigates the evolutionary epistemic shift and materialized cosmologies co-constitutive of the phenomenotechnique of vibration from the nineteenth century to the contemporary.

updated November 24, 2022

AoV I

Architectures of Vibration: Environmental Control, Seismic Technology, and the Frequency of Life, 188x-194x

—in progress—

Throughout global history, human engagement with the physical phenomenon of vibration has oscillated between intellectual attraction and existential precariousness. As a force of nature, vibration may induce seismic destruction on a planetary scale or regulate the life-sustaining pulsations of animate organisms on a cellular level. These formative capacities significantly developed at the dawn of the twentieth century as scientists and engineers progressively operationalized vibration as a force of industry and design practice. Increasing volumes of vibration within the spaces of urban life, produced by new building types (skyscrapers, powerhouses, industrial plants), motorized vehicles, or electromechanical machinery, affected the efficacy of infrastructure and impaired the health of human dwellers.

AoV I retraces this epistemic shift in the impact of vibration on the built environment. Modern architecture served as media for capturing and analyzing natural vibratory phenomena or reproduced them artificially to obtain knowledge about materials, spatial objects, and tectonic structures, including vibrational technologies applied in architectural construction or geological prospecting. The project maps dynamic exchanges between the disciplines of architecture and geophysics via the transimperial entanglements of early-twentieth-century Germany and the United States. From the architectural systems of Prussian geophysicist Emil Wiechert, who deduced the interior structure of the Earth through seismic vibrations and furthered imperial Germany’s geopolitical aspirations via a novel form of “seismic colonialism” in Africa, East-Asia, and Oceania, to the near destruction of Nikola Tesla’s New York City laboratory, in which the engineer unleashed his “earthquake machine” to transform the Earth into a mechanical power transmission system, I trace the transformation of vibration into a territorial design technique that fundamentally reshaped conceptions of global space.

Whereas previous historical scholarship focuses on its acoustic properties or intangible esoteric qualities, AoV I offers a different assessment of vibration as a modern medium defining colonial and environmental contamination, cultural imperialism, and the technoscientific coupling of human and planetary bodies that waver at the edge of global war and ecological catastrophe.

  • [Vibration as Phenomenotechnique in the Environmental Conceptions of Modernism] in: Wahrnehmungskräfte - Kräfte wahrnehmen: Dynamiken der Sinne in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur, edited by Frank Fehrenbach, Laura Isengard, Gerd Micheluzzi, Cornelia Zumbusch [forthcoming ].

  • [Seismic Colonialism, Architecture, and the Triangulation of the World: The Geophysical Samoa-Observatory in Apia (1902-1914)] in: Deutsch-koloniale Baukulturen. Eine globale Architekturgeschichte in 100 visuellen Primärquellen, edited/curated by Michael Falser [TU München Architekturgeschichte, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, Germany 2023]

  • e-flux Architecture, Sick Architecture series edited by Beatriz Colomina with Nikolaus Hirsch and Nick Axel (May 2022).

  • trans 40: Phantasma (2022): 43-48.

  • react/review, vol. 2, The Sprit in the Shadow (March 2022): 26-41, 42-56.

  • PNYX 65, AA Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, 2019.

Publications

  • “Architecture and sickness are tightly intertwined. Architectural discourse always weaves itself through theories of body and brain, constructing the architect as a kind of doctor and the client as patient. Architecture has been portrayed as both a form of prevention and cure for thousands of years. With Sick Architecture, CIVA and guest curator Beatriz Colomina (Princeton University) highlight a topic that has shaped our lives since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

    curated by Beatriz Colomina, Nikolaus Hirsch, Silvia Franceschini

    exhibition design by OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen

    artist: Clemens Finkelstein

    work: sick world.building syndrome [phonon v.1] (seismic vibrations sensor, installation)

Exhibitions

AoV II

The Total Environment of Vibe: Sensory-Substitution Design, Technologies of the Self, and the Technics of the Other, 195x-197x

—in progress—

This project extends the investigation of the drastic epistemic shifts of vibration around 1900 (AoV I) towards a moment at mid-century when novel media-technologies and scientific advances triggered the imagination of transdisciplinary agents that swiftly transposed the modernist dictum of a romanticized aesthetic of technology to an amorous entanglement with the aesthetics of technicity. Shifting their focus from formal analysis to anthropological synthesis, artists/ architects/ designers were captivated by the possibility of a systemic alliance between design and media technologies that built on the Modernist ideal of the machines-for-living-in and extended their desired efficacy to encompass an infinitely modifiable operative ambience. This project prods technoscientific examinations that concretized the abstract pulsations through modern design or architectural technologies, entangled the reverberations of architectures, environments, and humans into reflexive machines, or fused resonances of psychophysical excitation through cybernetic media and design technics in a total environment of vibe.

  • in: The Routledge History of the Senses, edited by Andrew Kettler and William Tullett [forthcoming]

  • [Vibration as Phenomenotechnique in the Environmental Conceptions of Modernism] in: Wahrnehmungskräfte - Kräfte wahrnehmen: Dynamiken der Sinne in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur, edited by Frank Fehrenbach, Laura Isengard, Gerd Micheluzzi, Cornelia Zumbusch [forthcoming ].

  • in: The Sound of Architecture: Acoustic Atmospheres in Place, edited by Angeliki Sioli and Elisavet Kiourtsoglou, 71-86. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022.

Publications

  • “Architecture and sickness are tightly intertwined. Architectural discourse always weaves itself through theories of body and brain, constructing the architect as a kind of doctor and the client as patient. Architecture has been portrayed as both a form of prevention and cure for thousands of years. With Sick Architecture, CIVA and guest curator Beatriz Colomina (Princeton University) highlight a topic that has shaped our lives since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

    curated by Beatriz Colomina, Nikolaus Hirsch, Silvia Franceschini

    exhibition design by OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen

    artist: Clemens Finkelstein

    work: sick world.building syndrome [phonon v.1] (seismic vibrations sensor, installation)

Exhibitions

AoV III

—in progress—

This project examines the contemporary application of vibration at the intersection of architecture-engineering and science-technology. Channeling attention to its previous iterations, the historical inquiries of AoV I and AoV II provide an evolving foundation — a prehistory — that informs current tendencies and futuristic developments of vibration technologies, which consistently revise the affective and effective spectrum of this powerful phenomenotechnique. Whether it is the passive utilization of vibration in rendering “real” space (i.e. vibrometry, environmental modeling, datafication) or its active application in simulating “virtual” space, transgressive vibrations are increasingly entangled and consumerized by tech giants like Apple or Meta that call on the immaterial/material superposition of vibration to integrate the physical world and human bodies into the virtual metaverse seamlessly.

Sensory Fields: Vibrometry, Planetary AI, and Anthropogenic Noise

  • koozArch (June 2022)

  • e-flux Architecture, Sick Architecture series edited by Beatriz Colomina with Nikolaus Hirsch and Nick Axel (May 2022).

  • trans 40: Phantasma (2022): 43-48.

Publications

  • “Architecture and sickness are tightly intertwined. Architectural discourse always weaves itself through theories of body and brain, constructing the architect as a kind of doctor and the client as patient. Architecture has been portrayed as both a form of prevention and cure for thousands of years. With Sick Architecture, CIVA and guest curator Beatriz Colomina (Princeton University) highlight a topic that has shaped our lives since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

    curated by Beatriz Colomina, Nikolaus Hirsch, Silvia Franceschini

    exhibition design by OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen

    artist: Clemens Finkelstein

    work: sick world.building syndrome [phonon v.1] (seismic vibrations sensor, installation)

  • “The participatory artwork Planetary Forest: Bring the Forest into the Garden refers to the scientific and cultural construction of worlds. Placed on a free-standing green area next to the newly built greenhouses of the Botanical Garden Giessen, the regional forest soil is relocated and recreated as a living sculpture. The planetary material originates from an ecological disturbance area in the city forest of Rosbach vor der Höhe, Hesse, which was severely affected by forest dieback. The supposedly natural forest is carried into the human made world of the botanical garden. There, it serves as an element of ethical, aesthetic, ecological, and political disruption that raises awareness for forest dieback and showcases the artificiality of our conception of nature. Like a crack in the perfectly constructed reality, the artwork sparks discussions on the harmful impacts of climate change and human societies on local forests, reflected on in a planetary context.”

    curated by Clemens Finkelstein and Mathias Kessler

    artist: Clemens Finkelstein, Mathias Kessler, Claudia Hartl

    work: Planetary Forest: Bring the Forest into the Garden

  • curated by Clemens Finkelstein and Mathias Kessler

    works by Clemens Finkelstein, Mathias Kessler, Claudia Hartl

    artist: Clemens Finkelstein

    work: vibrascapes

  • “The Future of _Space // Reflections is an exhibition aims at opening a dialogue about the shifting relationships to space we have all experienced through a year that has brought critical issues to the fore and insisted on necessary change. Our conceptions of space have all been forever changed by the social and medical events of the year. On the anniversary of the stay-at-home order in Los Angeles, the A+D Museum asked artists who participated in the first exhibition to come back to their work and create a reflection.”

    artist: Â (Clemens Finkelstein and Parsa Khalili)

    work: Â Space 2.0 [extended stasis]

  • “As we Zoom into this new normal, a83 hits pause (||) to consider what it means to work remotely. Whether locked out of schools or workplaces, the coronavirus pandemic has produced all manner of dislocations. The home has become a workplace, school, studio, gym, bar, … all taking place within the four corners of your computer screen. “Working Remotely” is an opportunity for artists and designers to share their work off-screen. a83 presses print (Ctrl+P / ⌘P) to materially document this moment and reflect on its effects in the areas of architecture and design through the production of a living archive.“

    artist: Â (Clemens Finkelstein and Parsa Khalili)

    work: Â (risograph print)

  • “The Future of _Space comes as a response to the current global situation. As physical space becomes a fractured concept and experience, permeated by concern and hesitation, new means of engaging are arising. Out of this heightened awareness, we have the opportunity to pause and consider what normal means when it comes to space, and if after this rupture, we will have to or should discover a new normal. Our social norms dictated by the spatial cues we have relied on are changing. When 6 feet of space is the closest to physical propinquity we’re allowed to feel, how then do we depend on digital frameworks and mental space to cut down the space between?”

    artist: Â (Clemens Finkelstein and Parsa Khalili)

    work: Â Space

Exhibitions