3. Locating the Parafactual in Reality TV

Douglas:

I was curious too, do you perhaps have some more examples of the parafactual? You wrote  about the "Big Brother House?" in your essay.

Zhiyi:

Yeah it’s one of the few reality TV shows that I've watched quite intensely and really got into, which was the Big Brother Netherlands. And the first two seasons were especially quite a cultural phenomenon. 

There was also a documentary series that studied what exactly it is about this space that triggers certain psychological emotions. Like if you're stuck in a space, where its ceiling is 20%, lower, it does something to you psychologically. That's the predictive design part of parafactual sites that I didn't really investigate too much since there is already so much literature on that. What I wanted to focus on instead was its character. Like Keller Easterling puts it, the disposition of the site, and how, whether it is, something that is predetermined and immutable, or it's something that can be hijacked, or moulded upon interaction with constituents like fans or the participants itself. Can they shape the disposition of a site like that, and what are other examples of the site? I used Terrace House, which is also another reality TV show but for that, it was more on ‘love/friendship labour’ or maybe emotional labour (what you need to maintain relationships of all sorts). The parafactual site in that case, as I go into details in the text, migrates to the psychological instead of remaining in the physical realm. And then I was also looking at Biosphere 2, which originally was an ambitious scientific experiment, but at some point, it mutated and turned into a media spectacle, also because it was during the early 90s, which was on the brink of the 24 hour news cycle, which is also why they received so much media attention.

4. Beyond Earth: Apollo Moon Missions as Parafactual Site

Douglas:

Okay, so something you won't have witnessed, but would you say that the Apollo moon missions by NASA are parafactual sites? I'll just explain a bit more. As a school child, and like school children all over the Western world, we were watching the moon, the launch of the spaceship, learning all about what it looked like, what the different stages of the rocket’s flight were, what the capsule was like. And you also saw these shots from inside the module. So you're watching a major world event, or it becomes a world event because everyone's watching and following these stories. It becomes especially interesting with Apollo 13 – there was a film made about it – where it goes wrong when they can't land on the moon, and then the drama that is created from that becomes “Will they get back? Or will they die?” And they get back eventually, but it becomes like a really good reality TV show.

Zhiyi:

Yeah, you know when people say something knowing well in their mind that it will go down in history? I'm thinking about the moon landing. Specifically, the quote that goes, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” I see that as an attempt to live those few moments of the landing as something fictional, to the point that it is almost mythological, to produce something hyper-quotable, as a narrative to be repeated over and over again. That's really interesting.

6. Synthesis of Nature and Capitalism in Vertical Building Design

Zhiyi:

You talk about the island and how its spatial-political aesthetics are those of immunisation and escape. When you use that to describe Oceanix and seasteading communities, I'm curious to know, what sort of aesthetic do you ascribe to those kinds of vertical buildings that are seemingly integrated with nature? 

Douglas: 

The aesthetics do a number of things. I think they are meant to stand for an idealised notion of the compatibility between capitalist development and nature. Through that, in a kind of crude way, they suggest that because their vegetation is so tightly integrated with the structure, that there is no anomaly, that there's no contradiction between them. So it's a kind of synthesis or metabolism between the built and the botanical.

But you could equally have a building that didn't have any greenery around it, that could be operating in a very kind of environmentally responsive way. But then in the greenery-dressed buildings you have to have lots of labour to constantly maintain them, maybe you're having to use chemicals to keep down the insects because in your expensive luxury hotel, you don't want mosquitoes everywhere. So the appearance of nature, or a sensitivity to nature is not everything that it seems to be. I think that they do have something in common with the kind of aesthetics that we see in the Oceanix project as well. It would be a bigger discussion, but it also has something to do with a certain kind of, originally colonial aesthetics of the tropics, that you can see in the botanical gardens in England and in Amsterdam. So two big colonial nations, the Dutch especially in Indonesia, and then the British in Singapore which are trying to produce those places as productive environments and also kind of bring them back as spectacles to Europe. So you create the environment and the greenhouse which you see in Gardens by the Bay, a greenhouse in a tropical environment. That is a strange thing. I don't know what they're protecting. Perhaps it's a different type of plant life. But in the UK or in Holland, when you go into a botanical garden, it is very humid and hot.

I definitely think that even the notion of the tropics was kind of a colonial construct. And when I say construct, I don't mean it's not real. It's not just an idea, it has a reality. But you know, there's a lot historically in terms of tropical architecture.. Through the 19th, and into the 20th century, there was architecture coming from the West that was trying to build for the tropics.

7. Climate, Identity and Colonial Intervention: A Complex Web of Land Remaking

Douglas:

There's something I want to interject here as well. And it's something I've been thinking about a lot, which is the way in which climate, the way a land is identified, especially from a colonial and the capitalist perspective, is often that the people are identified with the qualities of the often negative qualities of the land before it's intervened in, developed or remade, in some way. So as you say, it's like, the climate is said to make people lazy, or the people are lazy because of the climate. There are also racialising arguments about lazy people, or the character traits of people from different parts of the world, which seem to be really closely integrated with the land. And then colonial intervention is the project to come and remake the land or the environment in order to remake the people. 

Zhiyi:

And also this neo-colonial export of technology is still very contemporary. I recently found out that the Dutch invest in a lot of sand and drainage related research, such as land reclamation and marsh-levelling, not to improve the standard of living of the Dutch, but to export the techniques to places like Indonesia and Singapore, even though the technology method may not even work perfectly for these tropical environments. But somehow, Indonesia and Singapore still have this notion that the Dutch are the best at these terraforming processes, and that allows this industry to continue to be a huge part of the Dutch economy. There’s the Great Garuda seawall in Jakarta. Now we know that since Jakarta is sinking, they are relocating the Indonesian capital inland. But for a long time, the plan to save Jakarta from flooding was to build a 40 kilometre seawall that has the shape of the Garuda which is a mythic eagle.

They constructed maybe just two kilometres. And then within a year, it collapsed. Because the Dutch technology just did not account for the strength of the coastal waters in Indonesia. So there's this cycle of failure and reinvestment. And it's obviously capital accumulation for the Dutch and maybe the Indonesian political elite via forms of corruption and money laundering. But for the people living in Jakarta, it’s such a “what the fuck” moment. If you know it doesn't work, then you should just stop and try something else. But there are people at the top who still want to make this vision happen for financial reasons.

8. Marshland terraforming

Douglas:

In the 16th century, in England, there was a major project initiated by Queen Elizabeth the first. It was to drain the marshy areas of England, so that they could be used for production. And they were needed for production because of colonialism. Britain was trying to expand and compete with Holland, but also with Spain, and Portugal to be the major colonising nation, and they eventually succeeded. And in some ways, that's the birthplace of capitalism. So they have all these marshes and there were major infrastructure projects to drain them. The people who lived there were called subhuman. Because they live in these boggy, marshy areas and they merely subsist there. They don't produce a surplus, and surplus has got to be produced from this land. So the land is represented as diseased, pathological. Meanwhile, the people are represented as kind of pathological and problematic. So land reform goes hand in hand with human reform. 

So there's a book that I've read by James C. Scott called, “Against the Grain.” It talks about how land use and development is tied with grain production. And how grain is an effective use of land if you want to accumulate a surplus, but it has all these political consequences attached, around the formation of the state.. He also makes the point that the state cannot abide marshy land. Things have to be the sea or the land. So it's really interesting how these things are still with us. 

This desire to get rid of the marshes is a form of internal colonisation. They try to get rid of the people or displace the people and eliminate the lifestyles and the cultures of people who merely subsist on the land. Because capitalism is all about making a surplus, you can't accumulate if there's a metabolic closed loop where people are going, “Well, there's a bird. I'll catch it, and that will do for my dinner.”

Zhiyi:

Research has now shown that this sort of marsh lands are the best way to protect land from flooding, which is a fact that the Dutch did not take into consideration when draining a lot of that. Many parts of the Netherlands are at constant risk of flooding. And so the consequence is like a form of slow violence. There are consequences to terraforming like that.

9. Islandification: Autonomy and Compartmentalisation within Urban Spaces

Zhiyi:

One significant part of the text was about islandification, And how that is a form of limiting unpredictability, compartmentalization, dislocation and fundamentally, incarceration.

Douglas:

Yeah, I think it's a double-edged thing in that the island can be seen as a kind of space of autonomy. So the piece I wrote about islands, although it's explicitly about the oceanics project, and the involvement of the Bjarke Ingels Group, amongst others, is implicitly about and against the idea of establishing spaces of autonomy within the city, which is the political project of Pier Vittorio Aureli. So his project draws on the fact that urbanism is like a sea, that everything flows. All the finances flow, everything flows through all the infrastructures, everything is about flow. But ultimately, it's about the flows of finance or flows that lead to accumulation. Whereas in a limited part of the city, you can kind of hold that sea off and make a small part of the city operate something like a monastic commune, which keeps the urban sea at bay. So he thinks about the city as a kind of island within the larger urban system. You could do that with the courtyard, for example.There were projects of his students that are often based on that idea, of creating a courtyard of some sort that is like an internal space where people can play out a different lifestyle compared to the capitalist driven one outside. And the reason I'm critical of that is because that can be an equally exclusionary space or a space of privilege as well. For example, gated communities are a kind of island in the city that protects from crime, other classes, and sometimes from other races and ethnicities as well. The island is a double-edged sword. You could think of it as a kind of space for autonomy or escape. Classically, the island is space of escape, but you can also think about it, as as you say, a carceral space or to tie it back in with the notion of a parafactual site, a space where some kind of experiment or narrative is staged within a limited environment, to see how it plays out. Perhaps you could say something about how you see reality shows based around islands because I haven't really watched any of those, like Love Island.

11. Navigating the blurred line between Reality and Fiction

Douglas:

I wanted to ask a bit more about this confusion between reality and fiction that you seem to be aiming to talk about or to capture with this term parafactual. I sent you this quote from Baudrillard about Disneyland. I don't know if you've come across that before. I don't agree with his ultimate conclusion that everything is just simulation, but I am halfway there into it and thinking, “If everything's a simulation, then that is the reality.” So we might as well just talk about reality, but while recognizing that it's always produced as a reality. I've always found this quotation, where he says that Disneyland is basically there to disguise the fact that all of the US is Disneyland, quite fascinating. Because then you could sort of say that the prison, or the carceral space, exists to disguise the fact that the whole nation is a prison, or on a spectrum of the carceral in the sense that your behaviour is governed, or rather, that you're governing your behaviour. This comes from your awareness of the laws, because of the fact that you're being surveyed. Like the panopticon, you know you're being surveyed all the time. For example, in the case of Singapore and its laws, why is it that I don't eat a bar of chocolate when I'm on the underground, on the MRT? Even though there's no one around? Because the cameras are there. I’m modulating my behaviour as people would do in prison. This is not to equate it to actually being imprisoned but to say, perhaps there's a spectrum rather than absolute difference between inside and outside.

Zhiyi:

Yeah, I guess that's also what a function that island fulfils is to create this segregation such that it seems like beyond the confines of the island itself, there is no performativity. That performativity only exists within that enclosed space. 

12. On Performativity

Douglas:

I think the idea of performativity is a really rich one to take. Take the idea of space, design space, as something that somehow implicitly or atmospherically generates a certain way of behaving. It's really interesting. I've thought a lot about how architecture works and how it governs behaviour. Like how in museums and galleries, people tend to be pretty quiet, you know, when there's no signs up to say, “keep your voice down”. But it's an idea that there's a reverence for culture.

Another one of the historical examples I like to think of is to go back to English royalty in the aristocracy, the development of the hallway, or the gallery. So the original idea of galleries being spaces where paintings are not for the general public to see, but for the rich and the powerful who collect paintings, and put them in galleries, which are generally elongated spaces. And in those spaces the powerful, the rulers would walk alongside one another. This could be someone who they want counsel from, the ambassador of another country, or someone else from the court. So you're not just sitting there, but you're having this conversation where formality is eased by the fact that you're looking at paintings. It becomes an interesting way of creating a space that you can kind of look at while you're walking, but it's also used to generate conversation.

14. Media Environments and Feedback Loops

Zhiyi:

I thought about how Biosphere 2 basically inspired the producers of Big Brother. That's a strange historical lineage that I didn't expect.

So, the way I framed it was that the producers of Big Brother realised that the dome of Biosphere 2 was not an infrastructure miracle, but a plot device. That's when this whole idea of encapsulating in terms of the “island” and “dome” context became such a big part of reality TV production.

I've also been thinking about media as environment and environments as media. Just like the scene of someone sitting on an urban beach, looking at a massive screen, which is a traditional form of media. The screen at Pompidou didn't come into fruition in our reality but the person sitting there is still engaging with some sort of media through the architecture itself.

Douglas: 

That's a really interesting way to think about it. And it's a way that steps outside of how architecture theory would conventionally think about what architecture is. So if you start to use that as a device to think about architecture, then it tells you something about The Pompidou Center, it's like the escalators on the outside of buildings are a plot device.

It's almost like a feedback loop where you're sitting on an urban beach, which is tilted so that you'd be sitting on it and looking at the building. So it is still a kind of screen, but it's made of the activities that are going on in there. And because they're transparent, you can see them, then when you look out, you can see the urban beach. Whatever way you look, it’ll look like you're in this feedback loop of civic cultural celebration.

15. Greenery in Luxury Architecture: Ecological Responsibility or Set Dressing?

Douglas:

So, as a provocation, you could ask whether all the greenery in those luxury hotels and projects are actually ecological and environmentally responsive, or is it just a set dressing? Because this is what we're thinking about, because I've been into those hotels and gone up to the levels where they've got the infinity pools and these inner green spaces. What you see is presumably wealthy people. They’re using the infinity pool, laying on the sun lounger, but also taking photos of themselves on the lounger so that they can post photos on Instagram to say, “Here I am.” I don't want to be cynical or look down on people doing that, but that really highlights the fact that there are stages for certain types of performance. Who would not, if you were staying in one of those hotels, go and use the infinity pool? Because otherwise, why would you stay there? 

I think opening up those things, how they really operate is a way to kill their prestige. In a way, it's all about “I have this and you don’t.” and “I can afford this and most other people can’t.” Also, “I can afford to inhabit what seems to be a space that manifests environmental consciousness.” Whereas, if you're a construction worker, you could never.

Zhiyi:

I almost wanted to study landscape architecture. That's something I was quite intrigued by, what WOHA was doing. I watched a lecture by them on how to cool buildings in the tropics, and instead of having all this air conditioning on and similar methods, they were looking more into structuring the buildings such that the wind is able to flow through unobstructed, and hence cooling the building naturally. Instead of trying to solve problems by adding structures/devices/technology, working with the environmental characteristics they exist in.