06 VARIATIONS ON THE DISCO BALL OR, THE AMBIVALENT OBJECT
2011
House Party of the Future
Exhibition, Land Of Tomorrow Gallery, Louisville, Kentucky
Variations
on the Disco Ball or, The Ambivalent Object
There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of
fact it’s all dark.
-Pink Floyd 1973
There may be no other architectural object
simultaneously so powerful in effect yet so dismissed by our discourse than the
disco ball. In terms of effective “bang for the buck” - an increasingly vital
criterion by which to judge design value in these difficult economic times -
nothing else compares. Think about it: a sphere as small as a basketball
covered in cheap mirrored glass tiles hung from a ceiling can throw off an
amount of optical effects sufficient to drive a dance floor into a frenzy. Not
to mention its more diffusive power to turn the course of popular taste from
folksy trips through dropout hippy fantasy (or its darker flip-side, the heavy
slog through a metallic wasteland) toward something clearly brighter and more
productive. Whether you liked it or not, you have to admit that disco’s sweet
light eclipsed all else for a few short years and, more importantly, has helped
spawn a variety of new genres and sub-genres to this day. And at the center of
it all, the disco ball.
Objects and Their
Associations
Is it possible for an object with such distinct and
established identity to blur its own associations toward novel readings? That
is one question this project would ask. The problem of the floating signifier
refers to the capacity for certain objects to carry different significations
for various viewers. This is not a new problem for architecture or the arts, of
course, but it is one having renewed potential for a discourse increasingly
engaged in the pursuit of spectacle. What does it mean for a thing to be looked
at? Should it always produce the same effect, or might it be more interesting
(valuable, provocative, etc.) if a thing could produce a plurality of
interpretations? We think the latter but first things first. In order to create
a multivalent object one must first master the play of established associations
and objects and what better exercise than to dislodge associations so singular
and obstinate as those of the disco ball? Stated more simply, wouldn’t it be
interesting to create a disco ball that somehow did not convey the imagery,
ethics, and emotion of disco? And in their place...what?
The Ambivalence of Some
Objects
As we know, some objects are not as well-defined as
others in relation to established cultural perception. Mars and its moon
Phobos, for example, are two objects useful to compare relative to their
attendant associations. Each of the two heavenly bodies is morphologically as
exact as the other, and yet we “know” far more about Mars than we do Phobos. It
is true that we have looked at Mars more closely than we have Phobos, but this
increased attention is not all there is to it. If we are honest we will admit
that Mars has certain qualities we understand to be more certain, and more
univalent, than those of Phobos. Its color, red, for example, seems more
singular than the more ambiguous gray of Phobos. Its shape, too, the sphere, we
think we know as well, whereas the less-perfect quasi-sphere of Phobos seems
difficult, resistant.
It might be that the creation of an object that
floats across signification begins with the replacement of entrenched
signifiers (red, sphere) with more obscure qualities that lend themselves to
difficult, perhaps multiple readings. This project, then, aims to disrupt the
disco ball’s cultural familiarity without damaging its performative capacity to
push optical effects through space. In the same way we have just enough
information to know Phobos is a planetoid but not enough to know what kind it
is, our objects are just enough disco ball to be seen as such but not nearly
enough to conjure the expected soundtrack.
Planetesimal Principle 1:
Not a Sphere (Not a Planet)
Phobos is an example of a kind of celestial body
astrophysicists refer to as a planetesimal.
Generally speaking, these objects fail to rise to the definitional category of
“planet,” itself a contentious subject within planetary science. Without going
into esoterica and in avoidance of the above-mentioned controversy, planets
still correspond largely to the layperson’s understanding of their key
attributes: they are relatively large objects in space, are round, and exhibit
the more or less “regular” behaviors that large, round objects display in the
world of Newtonian physics (they have orbits tied to the gravitational pull of
even larger objects (usually) and rotate about their own axis in a singular
way. Planetesimals, on the other hand, are things like planets that lack at least one fundamental defining
characteristic. They may be quite small, for example, or have eccentric orbits
or rotations, or be irregular in shape. In a word, they are less than ideal in
some critical way and are thus relegated to the substratum of lesser objects in
the universe.
For purposes of this project comprised of deformed
and disaffected disco balls, as well as its more general inquiry into the
contemporary status of the object in architecture the planetesimal is taken as
both conceptual starting point as well as literal primitive. In the same way
that planetesimals refuse to straighten up and fly right, so too does the
malformed disco ball. We begin by mining the internet for digital models of
these objects, most of which are asteroids, many of them constructed to remarkable
degrees of accuracy given the dearth of information gathered on them. This
astonishing discovery itself - the apparent disproportionality between
quantitative data measured (low) versus degree of geometrical description of
the digital models (high) - became one of the working principles for the
project. For it surely must be the case that these anexact yet rigorous models
created by doctoral students of astrophysics cannot really be entirely true,
and must instead be riddled with fictions. Our goal involves taking these
models back around full circle by creating objects of exacting quantitative
definition that carry vicarious, even ambivalent readings...like planetesimals
themselves.
The initial models of asteroids we select are
geometrically ambivalent, which is to say they are neither spherical nor are
they not spherical. They are nearly spherical, and in so being may
appear to be one or the other - round or irregular - depending on viewing
distance and/or rotational speed. In this way we begin with a stacked deck,
with primitives that already appear to hover between Platonic ideal and more
prosaic organizations of real matter, something nearly spherical but not
really. This is, after all, the essence of ambivalence - the desire to have it
both ways at once.
Planetesimal Principle 2:
Concavity’s Awkward Influence
As a general attribute ascribed to the category of
form, concavity would seem to be
nothing more or less than objective feature, the result of a surface inflected
inward. Strangely this is often not the case. Instead, concavities in bodies
frequently engender more focused, poignant reception than the indifference of
geometry would suggest. Holes, folds, cleavages, dimples,
craters...indentations of all sorts draw attention somehow different from that
to be had from the fullness of convexity. However observational this claim may
sound relative to any general theory of form, it certainly is true of
planetesimal form. The unnerving presence of concavity is, in fact, among the
primary morphological conditions responsible for so many astronomical bodies to
be categorized as planetesimal. More specifically, it is a significant,
measurable proportion of concavity to convexity across the mass of an object
that is at stake. The greater the degree of indenture the more awkward and
unseemly the object becomes...revealing an apparent revulsion on the part of
the taxonomists of such bodies toward anything less than uniformly full.
Disco balls display this same vulnerability to the
weirdness of indentation, an observation so intuitively obvious as to require
no further argument. Suffice it to say that some of the strangest moments found
in our disco balls are those places where the centrifugal impulse so dominant
in the surfaces of spherical bodies is subverted by inflection.
Planetesimal Principle 3:
Irregular Albedo
Albedo refers to the reflection coefficient, or
brightness, of a surface. Relative to most other celestial bodies planetesimals
have comparatively low albedo due to material composition, lack of atmosphere,
and shadows induced by cratering. For example, asteroid 253 Mathilde is very
nearly black. Specifically, its
albedo measures as low as virtually any known object or material, reflecting
only three percent of the Sun’s light. Twice as dark as charcoal, Mathilde’s
elevational aspect is nearly that of space itself, making it extraordinarily
difficult to see and photograph. Ambivalent, it would seem, to the traditional
and dichotomous relationships of object to field, mass to volume, body to
context. As it slowly rotates it presents a continually changing figure as its
outer profile appears to slip away into the dark of space, making edges
difficult to discern. A study in black, Mathilde presents real problems of
representation for astrophysicists and architects alike since each is more
accustomed to objects with more pronounced optics. The definition of an object
indifferent to legibility suggests that standard, disciplinary means of
representation be questioned and may very well require the development of new
methods of visualization. Indeed, renderings for Planetesimal Series I often relied on the full range of seven
different blacks available in the Pantone palette.
Despite this tendency toward darkness, however, the
protoplanets as a group exhibit a broad range of albedo, occasionally as high
as Eris’ 0.96. Moreover, as might be imagined the irregular surfaces of such
objects often create an irregular albedo, sometimes moving from very bright
highlights to the darkest blacks. In the disco balls this pronounced variation
in reflectivity plays out in dramatic fashion too, as each face competes with
the next for attention. Some surfaces occlude neighboring faces while others
combine effects in the manner of amplification. Surprising as it may sound
given the irregularity of these objects, ensuing reflection patterns on
surrounding surfaces is not incoherent. A striking level of rigor and
compositional tightness results that moves away from the painterly wash of
discrete points of light evenly spaced that comes of a standard disco ball
toward decidedly more draughterly effects. Were Libeskind’s Chamberworks imagined as a planetarium
laser show this might be the result. To be clear, these objects are not meant
to function in a disco nor are optical effects the primary aim - they are very
secondary to questions concerning the legibility of the form itself. Nevertheless,
given the surprising (and delightful!) shift from such effects enhancing the
background of a distracted audience to their more forceful projection onto the
foreground of a concentrating subject, this subordinate line of enquiry seems
worth exploring.
Planetesimal Principle 4:
Elevational Ambivalence
Vaguely round objects present a fourth problem of
disciplinary importance, that of elevational
ambivalence. Seen through the lens of the conceptual and analytical tool
known as the “developed surface” the issue becomes clear. Famously described by
Robin Evans in his text “The Developed Surface: An enquiry into the brief life
of an eighteenth century drawing technique” this underlying diagram is used
often to compose, in its most typical form, interior elevations around a
central plan. By extension this technique may be applied to exterior
elevations, and in either case the resultant projection to two dimensional
representation resembles something like an unfolded box. To work properly this
method assumes two things: fundamental rectilinearity of geometrical rationale
of the object, and unambiguous edges, or divisions between plan and elevation
as well as between elevations themselves. Our objects break both of these
rules. They are spheroidal, not cuboid, with regulating lines running
latitudinally and longitudinally, one set of which converges at poles.
Unfolding such objects is never the same as it is with boxlike forms, resulting
instead in flayed patterns that distort each flattened surface such that they
are no longer dimensionally equivalent to their original, unprojected state. If
an architectural elevation is defined in part as a thing in which measure
remains constant across projection from three to two dimensions then the
patches of surface created by developing a spheroid are not really elevations
at all. Moreover, these objects rarely have clear edges that indicate
definitive difference between one area and the next. While they do have “edges”
in the strict, technical sense of the term (such as those found in polygonal
modeling) these are not the same as the corners found in rectilinear forms
because they usually do not define the hard boundaries common to architectural
elevations.
This lack of correspondence to our standard model
for visualizing and defining the architectural elevation leads to uncertainty
in the worst case but ambivalence in the best, the latter being a conscientious
decision to identify transitions by other means. In tenebrism, for example, the
outermost edges of objects are obscured by light and dark such that
illumination itself becomes figural. Photographs of planetesimals have this
quality as well, as do our disco balls. In this way, elevations are
choreographed across objects in the round, sometimes adhering to geometrical
cues such as cusps, bumps, and ridges but sometimes not. In any case the
definition of an elevation is never automatic and instead involves a willful
effort to wrestle a certain degree of clarity from ambiguity.
Planetesimal Principle 5:
Contextual Indifference
Asteroids and their kin are famously indifferent to
context, at least locally. Popular depictions of asteroid fields such as that
of the chase scene between the Millenium Falcon and hostile TIE Fighters in The Empire Strikes Back illustrate well
the deep disinterest objects like these have toward whatever might be around
them. A lack of concern borne of introversion rather than antagonism, the
planetesimal’s sufficiency unto itself - its uniqueness - leaves little room for more extroverted contextual
impulses. While some are held captive by larger, global influences exerted by
massive celestial bodies they all still, at the local scales more relevant to
architectural objects, move in their own individual ways. Were they sentient we
would understand them to be shy to the point of autism. The cause of this
withdrawn affect goes deeper than behavior, though, to the core of the object
itself: its form. Roundish forms are inherently solitary due to the nature of
centripetal geometry where forces pull inward rather than push outward. Quite
naturally, then, outside observers read such forms as things unto themselves,
detached from the stuff of the world around them.
Architecture’s reflexive insistence on reference to
context has had altogether too long a run. What is the point, anyway?
Efficiency of use by way of smooth connections between things? Collage practice
alone should be enough to convince us how unnecessary are literal continuities
between forms for their rationalization by an external viewer and besides,
arguments for utility always privilege subject over object. This aside, even
more disciplinary cases made for contextual affiliation’s influence on the shaping
of form itself tends to distract our energies to the peripheries of things.
David Ruy warns of these preoccupations with everything but the architectural object itself as leading to the sad endgame
of architecture as “consequence.” A reference to the much larger and more
pervasive consequentiality that develops from Kant’s “Copernican turn” in which
all things are defined by their relationships to other things, Ruy argues that
architecture’s habitual return to all manners of contextual reference undermines
disciplinary integrity.
Our initial run of five misshapen disco balls did
not, unfortunately, anticipate the tendency for context to steal the show.
Despite all of our design energy being focused on the objects themselves
according to the principles outlined here, their exhibition in an expected
format - inside a room, hung from the ceiling, slowly rotating, lit for maximum
reflectivity onto surrounding walls, accompanied by rock music - reminded
viewers of the very thing these objects were meant to challenge: the “disco
ball” in all of its standard associations. As decorative devices used to
enhance the atmosphere and subliminally help fuel parties it was near
impossible for the more introspective work on form contained in each object to
be seen. If the original intent was to combine select aspects of both disco
balls and planetesimals to construct a new, third thing that was neither but
still resonated in strange ways with both, the first showing of Planetesimal Series I leaned too hard
toward disco.
This proved to be a learning experience. The purest
expression of our indifference to context are the renderings themselves of the
disco balls/planetesimals against a stark black background, or photographs of
them against blank white walls that challenge expectations to do with optical
effects. Thinking this was perhaps too easy, we also experimented with more
complicated contexts and placement. First we created a series of renderings
locating the objects on the Moon. Scale and situation were manipulated toward
estranging the original objects from common associations. They are much larger
here than disco balls - the size of supermassive buildings or even greater -
but still far smaller than the Moon itself, ultimately frustrating the effort
to know them according to size. Grounded rather than floating, they no longer
bear any association with common contextual associations. This simple act of
grounding an object with no inherent ground datum went far toward decontextualization,
so our next effort locates this line more precisely. Mathilde: Low Albedo finds one of our objects once again in a
gallery setting, this time placed on the floor and scaled to the size of a
pavilion. Like a black igloo, the dark and irregular monolith sits mutely in an
exhibition space and even has an opening something like a door. But why, the
viewer must wonder, would one approach this mass in the first place? If this is
the reaction then we have succeeded in freeing Mathilde from contextual responsibility, at least in any functional
sense. After this came Ida, similar
to Mathilde in its groundedness but
required to “speak” to passersby of information to do with bus arrival times.
It does as asked via subtly changing light effects linked to local transit
monitoring systems but the form itself has nothing to do with any of this,
detached as it is from such trivialities. And so it goes, each iteration in the
series disengaging from contextual relations in its own way.
Toward Architectural
Ambivalence
Ambivalence, in the original sense of this state of being, is a
powerful posture for a thing to assume and is nothing to do with uncertainty or
lack of commitment. The ambivalent object projects autonomy, though not
necessarily along the tortured pathways of earlier efforts toward autonomous
form seen in our discipline. Designers of such things, trained as we are to
make form both accessible and meaningful, find ourselves in a curious position
vis a vis these objects that are inevitably of our own imagination. After all,
it is one thing to ponder the nature of existing objects, including
architectural ones, according to a cosmology of estrangement suggested in the
points above; quite another, however, to create an object that might somehow
reflect the ambiguity contained therein. Whatever is entailed would likely
start with a circumspect thought exercise that wonders about the kind of forms
that might be borne through the acknowledgement of their refusal to be fully
known. Problematizing the object in this way poses special difficulties for the
architect whose discipline, at least in terms of methodology, assumes certainty
of measure and completion of form. Our drawings and models attest to this and
given their central role in our disciplinary life will not likely disappear,
nor is that the suggestion here. Instead, it would seem to be a matter of the designer’s embrace of the mysterious
autism of things. To be clear, the base condition of uncertainty is one thing,
but the conscious awareness of this
state of being is something more: ambivalence. To be ambivalent is to choose to be unclear, undecided,
equivocal. It is the inscrutability that comes from withholding all that might
otherwise be seen. The ambivalent object, then, must surely require much effort
to create and maintain. Like a poker face, such impenetrability does not occur
naturally and is instead the blankness of cunning artifice and cold
calculation. On some level the ambivalent object is not an uncertainty at all,
however opaque it may seem.
Credits
Design: Hirsuta LLC, Los Angeles,
California
Jason Payne,
Principal
Molly Munson, Project
Designer
Timothy Callan,
Project Designer
Lauren Rath, Project
Designer
Fabrication: Parrish Rash & van Dissel
(PR&vD), Lexington, Kentucky
Drura Parrish,
Principal
Timothy Rives Rash
II, Principal
Bart van Dissel,
Principal
Special
Thanks: Pluto (never forget!), all
things glam, and Sylvia Lavin