Introduction:
This paper is a transformative guide to becoming a posthuman as you journey through the Peninsula Fun Palace. It considers both a physiological and psychological factors towards the amalgamation of your anatomy and cognition into the future city. With the goal of posthumanism to become an entirely unique experience based around our individual needs and desires, this paper will be a unique perspective of my own method and progression through the process.
Through the histories, theories, technologies, technicalities, social and political concerns of becoming posthuman along with the rich involvement of science fiction, we can develop a detailed brief on the need of a methodology towards developing ourselves into a posthuman. The need for this guide now is of vital importance, given the rapid adoption of media coverage on the topic through both science fiction (Westworld:2016, Humans:2015 and Ghost in the shell:2017) and actual scientific achievements like the neural lace, synthetic limb replacement and mixed reality architectures.

 

Structure:

  • Introduction
    • Introduction
    • Glossary
      • Stella Duffy – Fun palaces campaign
  • Considerations
    • Case studies
      • Human:
        • CYSP-1 – robot dancer – 1956
        • Hyung koo lowe
      • Nature:
      • Architecture:
        • Le Corbusier House – Machine for the living
        • Spatiodynamic tower – 1954 (vibrating cantilevered bars, mechanized soundscape)
        • Schoffers House with invisible walls – 1957 (replace architecture with technology enclosures)
        • Cybernetic City – 1969 – generating programmed climates from scientific research to sexual recreation centre.
        • Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood – cybernetics within the Fun Palace – 1964
        • Cloud-like blur building – 2002 – Diller + Scofidio
        • Golf stream projects – 2008 – Philippe Rahm

 

  • Technicalities
    • Defining the posthuman subject
      • The Evolution of human form based on the Vitruvian man, Le Corbusier’s Modulor Man into La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine (Posthuman Territories Pg 4)
      • 1948 – The idea of the networked Man by Norbert Wiener (
      • 1985 – Donna Haraway : Cyborg Manifesto
      • 1990 – Donna Haraway : Developed theory from
      • 1999 – Katherine Hayles – How we bacame post Human
      • Synthetic Posthuman form
    • Type of environment and constraints
      • Nanotechnology formed adaptive environment connected to each user
      • Cybernetic architecture
      • Theories of the environment (9)
        • 1920 – Ludwick Hilberseimer – Post-idividualist framework
        • 1970’s STS (Science and Technology Studies) – Latour and Hayles – Situates scientific study activity in a social and cultural context and grants agency to nonhumans; formerly “netural” environment becomes a space crowded by human and non-human actors.
        • 2003 – Reinhold Martin – The endgame of postwar corporate modernism is a post-industrial or posthuman subject, immersed and constructed in data flows and patterns. Information and architecture become one element in a feedback system. Linking the first wave of cybernetics to a posthuman.
        • 2004 – Latour – differentiates the posthumanist politics of collectives from the humanist politics of nature which enforce a staticconception of nature versus man. Latour doesn’t break entities down to single objects, politics, objects or discorse are composities, quasi-objects/quasi-subjects
        • 2006 – Verb Natures – Organic materials and assembly
        • 2008 – Christopher Hight – Architectural Principals in the age of cybernetics
        • 2009 – Subnatures – David Gissen – theorectical underpinnings of what he simlary identifies as an organic material-aesthetic in contemporary architectural practices. The subnatural becomes manifest in overlooked materialities-smoke, dust, pigeons, weeds.
        • 2009 – Technonatures: Anthropocene – D. White and C. Wilbert. Translates the anthropocene concept from the geological and evolutionary to the ethnocultural level (9)
        • 2010 – Digital culture in architecture – Antoine Picon – cyborg networks, computational aestheics, diagrams of complexity. Explores the dialogue betweenarchitectural, scientific, and social doscourses
        • Posthuman bodies and their networked subjectivities nevertheless do emerge in postwar architectural precedents – Dada Link???
    • Environment interfaces in science fiction
  • Cognitive Thought
    • Post-New-Dadaist studio
    • Cultural hub on the peninsula
    • Existing theories on cognition as humans
    • Thinking as a posthuman
      • First Wave of cybernetic Theory:
        • Creation by Norber Weiner “the theorist who first explored the concepts of environmental feedback” (Hales, 1999)
        • The Binary Concept of cybernetics (Signal/Reciever) (Claude Shannon). Cognition is a pattern independent of the material world.
      • Second Wave of Cybernetic theory:
        • Autopoesis – F. Varlea, H. Maturana and G. Bateson
        • The cybernetic system includes the observer and his/hers effects on the system in question. An organism that simultaneously maintains an openness to energetic and environmental stimuli and a formal closure within its environment.
        • Fukuyama – “biotechnological transformation of the human body will eradicate human values”
      • Third Wave of Cybernetic Theory:
        • Developed by R. Brooks, E. Thacker, K. N. Hales – physical nature of networks.
        • The material substrate for data is integral to its informational structure, apparent in new methods for processing data through machinic and organic matrixes in the fields of AI, Bio Tech and Nano Tech.
        • The human body in its current form is not a sacrosanct vessel for human consciousness, a perspective that envisions humans and machine intelligences co-developing in various degrees of interdependency.
        • This is Posthuman
        • K Hales “In the Posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanisms and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals”.
        • Hales – What it means to be human is not about intelligence but  creating just societies in a transnational global world
    • Environmental integration
  • Conclusion
    • The postwar era produced a rich chronology of architecture’s deplyment of netowrk models. Efforts as precedents for contemporary formulations of a networked, responsive – or posthuman architecture.