In the history of technologies and materials the transfer from soft to hard plays a central role. From a dialectic point of view it seems to be a clear-cut matter of one overpowering the other, yet conceptually things are more convoluted. What we call the chiastic model of history is driven by the exchange of empowerings where the one inhabits the other. By taking the most antithetical examples of materiality from architectural history, the plastic and the lithic, we begin to (...) understand the psychological aspects of this exchange: a history of dreams, imagination and even hallucination. The technologies involving the plastic offer an enormous array of such imagery, which we start to analyze as part of a fundamental aspect of technology itself. Using the notion of the pharmakon, as developed by Derrida and Stiegler, we study its ambiguities: technology by its nature is both remedy and poison, cure and addiction. Accepting this ambivalence is the explicit goal of pharmacology, which makes the history of soft and hard one of prosthetic extension as much as of mimetic absorption. We will be guided by two architectural fantasists to investigate the what we call the pharmacology of architecture, J. G. Ballard’s fantasy of a house automaton in the case of the plastic, and G. B. Piranesi’s hallucinations of a reversed archeology in that of the lithic. (shrink)

This essay follows the fascinating mythology of grace and gift exchange to construct an argument about appearances as transcending the boundaries of things through a form of radiance or shining. The latter is based on the primary figure of the Graces, Aglaea, whose name literally signifies shining. The question arises how the obligatory rules of gift exchange—giving, receiving, and returning—apply to appearances, which leads to a cyclical “alternating current” of shining and working. It now becomes clear why the ancient Greeks (...) married the ethereal figure of Aglaea to the sweaty, clubfooted smithgod Hephaestus: shining things are necessarily linked to the making of shining things. In the magic realm of Hephaestus shining and automation are fully merged: automata are without exception made of gold or silver, while the abundantly embellished objects he creates always evoke movement. At this point in the essay the term “phenotechnology” is coined: the work of making things lies in their overworking (hypergon) which is sharply contrasted to the classic notion of ornament as parergon, as by-work, or in the words of Aby Warburg, as bewegtes Beiwerk. Instead of viewing movement as added-on (Alberti) to structure we find that the figural movement of pliant motifs in fact creates structure, a structure that according to Gottfried Semper undergoes “the mystery of transfiguration,” which reverses the relationship between surface and space: space is the very depth of radiating surfaces. (shrink)

By slowly dissolving the contrast between necessity and chance we arrive at Leibniz’ Principle of Sufficient Reason, which we trace back to his ideas on sufficient grace. Doing so, the world of things falling and befalling starts to become the engine of appearances and images, something we initially find in Lucretius, then in Virilio and Baudrillard. Why is it that the media crave accident? Because in phenotechnology only the transfer to images counts, not the breaking with the final cause of (...) technical objects. From the perspective of media, nothing goes wrong. The media constitute a realm of technical grace, the gentle force that makes brutal events happen. (shrink)

A number of essays and interviews published between 1997 and 2008, revised for this publication with V2_.

The revised and expanded edition of The Sympathy of Things with Bloomsbury Academic, which appeared in 2016. The pdf sample contains the new preface to the second edition and the foreword by Brian Massumi.

This essay developed out of the final chapter of The Sympathy of Things where I related beauty to a notion of radical generosity. Tracing generosity back to the ancient Greeks brought me to a whole new world of grace and “charis”, the etymological root of words like charisma and charity. The essay establishes a fundamental connection between grace and beauty, deeply interrelating movement and object. In the second part the argument develops into an ontology based on the concept of radiance, (...) which we encounter in Aglaia, the first of the Three Graces, in fireworks, jewelry, makeup and in fashion, but also in acts of bravery, kindness and friendship. Radiance is subsequently defined as “thickened appearance”, where phenomenology and ontology become continuous in a “presence beyond the present”. (shrink)

The first chapter of The Sympathy of Things published in Research & Design: Textile Tectonics (2011). It develops the notion of a “gothic ontology” which inverts Deleuze’s baroque ontology of the fold. Where in the universe of the fold continuity precedes singularity, in the gothic singularity precedes continuity. The reversal is based on the Ruskinian notion of the rib, which is the source of “changefulness”, expressed through “millions of variations” of figures. Figures move and change only to interact with or (...) connect to other figures, i.e. to build configurations. Ruskin’s notion of savageness, which is always categorized as an ethics-over-aesthetics, now becomes a notion of craft that is inherent to matter, not to humans. (shrink)

The fourth of eight chapters from my recently published book "Grace and Gravity: Architectures of the Figure." The argumentation builds on terminology introduced in the first three chapters, the most important being the phased structure of the figure: prefiguration, figuration, and transfiguration. Also, the earlier developed interdependence of movement and standstill, which we find both in beauty and in grace, is here expanded in the relationship between the mineral, animal, and vegetable.

This chapter is a rethinking of my earlier “The Ages of Beauty” which investigated Charles Hartshorne’s Diagram of Aesthetic Values. The argument is placed in a long history of beauty being considered as the middle between extremes. It slowly develops into a structure not merely of aesthetic experience but of existence itself, making it a competitor of Heidegger’s fourfold.

This transcription of a keynote for the Speculative Art Histories conference in May 2013 is a mixture of the main argument of The Sympathy of Things and some new insights. The text might be helpful for those who have not read the Sympathy book, which has been sold out for a number of years. This essay will appear as a chapter in Sjoerd van Tuinen's Speculative Art Histories, to be published with Edinburgh University Press in 2017.

A long chapter for The War of Appearances: Transparency, Opacity, Radiance (V2_Publishing, 2016) building on the findings of “Charis and Radiance,” an essay published two years earlier. It discusses the inherent connection between visibility and radiance within the framework of Plato’s sun model as the source of reality.

This chapter is a rethinking of my earlier “The Ages of Beauty” which investigated Charles Hartshorne’s Diagram of Aesthetic Values. The argument is placed in a long history of beauty being considered as the middle between extremes. It slowly develops into a structure not merely of aesthetic experience but of existence itself, making it an alternative to Heidegger’s fourfold.

An essay, which I wrote for the catalog to the exhibition “ARCHESCAPE: the Piranesi Flights,” organized by the Dutch Piranesi scholar Gijs Wallis de Vries. The text, which is necessarily kept short, uses notions of the magnificent and the tragic that I discovered in Hartshorne’s Aesthetic Diagram as discussed in “The Ages of Beauty.”.

Starting with a few simple questions about living well and where movement originates from this essay turns into a vast map of intricate relations revolving around the notion of grace. By developing the argument from a historical perspective it quickly becomes clear that grace relies on the specific qualities of figuration and how the figure appears in what is termed “the gap between habit and inhabitation.” This article is a shorter version of the introductory chapter to my “Grace and Gravity: (...) Architectures of the Figure” (Bloomsbury, 2020). (shrink)

This long essay was published in Vital Beauty, a collection including Wendy Steiner and Tim Ingold, which investigates the possibility of new ways toward beauty. This is my first encounter with Hartshorne’s Diagram of Aesthetic Values, a mandala-like structure explaining the relations between aesthetic experiences. The essay looks into the awkward history of the diagram in Hartshorne’s philosophy, its connection to Max Dessoir’s work, to Whitehead’s chapter on beauty in Adventures of Ideas and the notion of creativity in Schelling.

A shortened version of the second chapter of The Sympathy of Things as it was published in The Politics of the Impure (V2_NAI Publishers, 2010). It relates John Ruskin’s “Wall-Veil” to the better-known “Wall-Dress” (Gewand) of Gottfried Semper by understanding both as occurring at the intersection of matter and force. Matter tends to generate patterns in two ways, either downward or upward in dimensions. The first relates to tessellated ornament (cf. Owen Jones); the second to the ribboned ornamentation as we (...) find it in Morris’s work. (shrink)

This transcription of a keynote for the Speculative Art Histories conference in May 2013 is a mixture of the main argument of The Sympathy of Things and some new insights. The text might be helpful for those who have not read the Sympathy book, which has been sold out for a number of years. This essay will appear as a chapter in Sjoerd van Tuinen's Speculative Art Histories, to be published with Edinburgh University Press in 2017.

A pdf sample that contains the cover, contents page, preface and the back cover with endorsements and blurb.