Perceptual Automaton

Perceptual Automaton (PA) challenges and disturbs human subjectivity. It attempts to reform architecture that has been for millennia centered on the authority of human subjectivity driven by the whims of architect personalities. It more crucially interrogates the role of architecture as the material manifestation of human-specific dispositif and provides a glimpse of posthuman ecology where architecture may transcend the vagaries of human body.

PA consists of two primary modalities: the operative-autonomic and the expressive-rational. The operative-autonomic modality employs standardized and mass-produced parts that are cheap, fast and out of control. It presents technologized body comprising disparate organs in the age of flexible accumulation and cognitive capitalism. It defines the mechanization of aesthetic experience, of which sole purpose is to pick up and register environmental signals (i.e. sound, light intensity, color, objects in space, etc.).

The expressive-rational modality consists of algorithms that transcribe and formalize the environmental signals. It gives shape to the environmental information in geometrical configurations that express a new form of rationalities afforded by the apparatus-dispositif, which does not address any particular needs (especially the teleological ones). The algorithmic transcription of environmental signals indicates a new form of semiotic space that is devoid of human subjectivity as we know it.

Ongoing research project; Berlin, Germany; 2015