PAUL J LORENZ

INFO*STATE INFRASTRUCTURE

YSoA Advanced Studio with Michael Young
Nominated for publication in Retrospecta 40

While the practice of architecture always speculated about the near future, the studio prompt accelerates that speculation to 2036. This project imagines an architectural situation that is designed by and explicitly for computer hardware, and not for the human body. Instead of providing physical comfort, this cluster of computer nodes mediates the environment in support of machines. Further, each surface’s ornamentation imagines a non-human-readable symbolic pattern that carries information to digital cameras, not to biological senses. The project’s representation takes the form of an investigation in which humans struggle to interact with and understand a set of symbols meant for non-human decoding.

Abstract for the 2056 Iceland Energy Summit:

The failure of the modern nation-state's internet policing power has had profound effects on both contemporary and historical patterns of state-to-state belligerence, and especially state-to-nonstate acts of violence. During last year’s conference, Dr. Deborah Wood outlined her historical framework for understanding the rise of the trans-national ‘Information State’, tracing its conceptual origin to the post-Anon splinter groups. In Wood’s framework, the 20th century obsession with class struggle is replaced by the 21st century’s violent oscillation between supposedly corporeal and non-corporeally acting entities.

The Information State was used by Dr. Wood as an umbrella term to describe those non-corporeal entities that operate in ways that negate aspects of reality that have served the physical body; conveniences such as geo-located borders, material supply chains, physical militaries, etc.

The non-corporeal entities that followed the 2017 fracturing of Anonymous maintained their dis-association with physical locality and retreated to virtual communities bound together by a shared small-group aesthetic.

The violent events of 2035 quickly crushed the illusion of a powerless and ignorable Information State. We now know that the Second Siege of Sankt-Peterburg was enacted by the aggregated efforts of three of these non-geo-located Information States. While no direct violence occurred during the siege, the effect of the digital encirclement was a simple re-enactment of 1941. The attack on the city’s digital infrastructure propagated a complete collapse of Sankt-Peterburg’s water, sanitation, electricity, transportation, and civil response infrastructure. The supposedly non-corporeal violence of 2035’s digital total war led to a catastrophic loss of life, and marked the beginning of the robust hegemony of the modern Information State.

By extending Dr. Wood’s framework, our team’s ongoing investigation seeks to understand the relationship between the non-corporeal Information State and the corporeal physicality of computation infrastructure it requires. In tracing the digital activity of NCE33 (Nevyy Oktyabr), we have followed the group’s obsession with the legendary ‘Beowulf Cluster’. Our research team, like the community as a whole, assumed that the Beowulf Cluster was simply a convenient name for any large, high throughput slaved botnet. Late in 2055, however, our network forensics collaborators in Charlottesville came to the shocking understanding that Nevyy Oktyabr’s concentrated decryption attacks seen in July 2049 through January 2050 originated from a single geo-located point.

At this year’s conference, we will describe our discoveries from the physical Beowulf Cluster site. While the hardware is six years into obsolescence, it may begin to explain the use of contemporary (possibly geo-located) computation clusters.