With the kind permission of Strelka Press, we publish an excerpt from the book "Garage" by American authors - artist Olivia Erlanger and architect Luis Ortega Govely. The chapter "The Garage Plot" is the final, summarizing part of this book.
Once in the garage, we are immersed in the suburban context of ownership and the accompanying cult of power. In this book, Frank Lloyd Wright is portrayed as the owner of the garage, but how much is this true, and at what point does this fact become a fiction that the architect wanted to instill in us? As soon as something becomes in someone's property, it seems that only the owner can talk about it, control it, build a narrative and at the same time belong to what he owns. The scene gives you the opportunity to construct a story, but it also involves the recognition that all property is theft. Prairie style was a project of rejection and reinvention. By reinventing the house, Wright reinvented himself, abandoned his past. The quickest way to reinvent is rejection: rejection of history and tradition that fetters us. He wanted to throw off the fetters of nostalgia, to rethink the desires and habits of the previous generation. It was a parting with a previous life due to his personal history. Something like trying to collect all the blocks of Froebel's constructor that formed his trauma of fatherlessness, and then lay a new foundation - for a new beginning. Frank's approach was clearly antagonistic: he opposed the norm, seeking to test and create a new normality. This outdated, but tenacious myth of the lonely male genius is gradually crumbling, and with this myth the garage itself will collapse.
Today, the global system of immaterial labor is being built over the physical world, absorbing a significant part of the city and destroying spaces where there is a potential for protest, since the very concept of the “individual” has undergone commodification. This process reached a symbolic climax in 2007 when the release of the first iPhone coincided with a giant high-risk subprime bubble. We can link the emergence of smart devices to the real estate market crisis and assess how important the Internet has become in the living infrastructure. The mortgage crisis of 2008 and the subsequent collapse of the market showed that the house was abstracted long ago, became the subject of financial speculation, and this only increased its value as an image. It has become a status sign reflecting the architecture of our personal finances. With four-door garages and endless kitchen remodeling, the suburban home has become a conspicuous place of consumption. The suburban middle class that emerged from this suburban home was supported by developers as a source of income to reduce the uncertainty generated by the instability of American capitalism.
Today, the house goes online, is virtually consumed on screens, but at the same time continues to serve as a reference to physical space. The platforms built around the house have created a new brand for it, presenting it in the form of something smart, global and collective - a product that can be broken into pieces and put into circulation. They represent individual relationships and social interactions as spatial components. If the suburban model, coupled with its architectural techniques, produced a subject to be sheltered (a non-working mother, an office-worker father, a defenseless child, a smart entrepreneur), then what kind of subject is being shaped by this new image of the home?
The garage was supposed to be a space in which the subject was supposedly able to regain control over the direction of his own movement, abandoning the collectivity of the family. Steve Jobs didn’t recognize his daughter, and he didn’t do justice to Steve Wozniak either. Gwen Stefani broke up with Tony Canal for a solo career. Cobain committed suicide over his garage a few years after his marriage to Courtney Love, when they already had a daughter, Frances Bean. Frank Lloyd Wright was a systematic deceiver and traitor who also abandoned his fatherly role. All of these cases appear to be symptoms of a more general political disorder, an egoistic realm in which we are all forced to struggle alone to survive.
The garage was the technology that changed the home and its subjects. He gave a space in which one could be out of place, question the future, reveal the contradictions between reality and the picture. Today, home life is being reformatted again by technologies that separate life from home. Facetime, Airbnb, WhatsApp, Uber, Amazon and so on are programs that reproduce some of the qualities of a house, but ultimately transform the house into an entity independent of its architectural reality. Thanks to these networks, we are provided with the virtual and physical ability to live in the space of another. Here is the seemingly unmediated access to space. But in the end we choose the familiar, the well-known, and stay inside our own virtual bubbles. These platforms work by bringing the intimate space of the home to the public. Digital capitalism and free market conditions make home available anywhere. Platforms governed by the rules of use monitor how we behave, what we access and how we navigate in space, creating a new architecture of divisions, restrictions and prohibitions.
In 1967, the first steps towards what we today call the Internet were described by Joseph "Lick" Licklider, who proposed a two-way network of communication and knowledge. He called it the "Galactic Network." Initially, the Internet was presented as a space without gravity, space, a nebula of science fiction, but today our common reality in an invisible network is most often described by metaphors rooted in the physical world: an organism, an open architecture, a highway, a set of bubbles. The advent of the Internet ushered in a new ecosystem, and the term gradually absorbed a complex set of virtual environments. We now exist as digital agents in the virtual world of clouds, bubbles, mountains of information, content streams, grids and networks. This communication matrix functions in networks of different media, which in one way or another transmit information. When we compose a request, we rely on the power of the network to transmit our data - be it simple keystrokes or complex questions that hold us in its wilderness. Intangible knowledge and communications transmitted over the Internet take on physical embodiment in a hidden network of cables and wires that entwine the globe and connect together a dematerialized network, integrating it into both productive work and home life.
Lattices as an image and as a physical system were investigated by the Italian teams of architects and designers Superstudio and Archizoom. Superstudio used a grid to conceptualize scattering objects and diffusing space. In Continuous Monument (1969) they proposed "an earthly parallel and a crystal lattice that encloses the globe." The premiere of this utopian system, generalizing space and objects, coincided in time with the first public discussions about the Internet. Almost ten years later, Rem Koolhaas returned to the same theme in Delirious New York (1978): “The Manhattan grid of streets is primarily a conceptual guess … exists, it proclaims the superiority of the mental construct over reality …”The grid has not been replaced; it has remained a powerful conceptual tool for comprehending the Internet of Things. The technical world, in its eternal search for innovation, is busy with the continuous rebranding of products, and therefore they are called "smart". And these goods - from toasters to personal assistants with artificial intelligence - constitute a total system of control and supervision.
The car gave us mobility and the ability to explore space, but also led to exploitation and destruction of the environment. The new frontier is a vehicle with smart technology that supports automation. Thanks to the programming, the car has become smarter and cleaner, but it must integrate the tracking systems necessary for "safety". He becomes a mobile node of state control, an overseer in the panopticon of an ideal prison. In the future proposed to us, which comes with the creation of the grid, the driver switches to the user position, so that the passenger is even more locked in a position of blissful inaction, constantly monitored and documented. The blue dot marking our location on the map becomes the disembodied beacon. What is this - complete lack of rights or, on the contrary, acquired freedom? Since we no longer need to know where we are going, we remove our ability to act, and an algorithm personalized for us smooths out the fact that there is no conscious destination. Massively stamped and directed nowhere, we fly forward.
The garage has already become a relic, a ruin, an extension to a different era. People's homes were tied to one place, and in the same way a family car, like a pet, deserved its own home. But with new subscription options, cars don't have to be in the garage today. Uber, Lyft, and a myriad of other car services have made it possible for a car to pull up to wherever you specify and drive away when it arrives. Does anyone want to pay for additional space? The car was removed from the stall, but not sent to graze in the pasture, now it is aimed at its familyless paddock like a rocket.
The grill promises safety. Self-driving cars will need all-round cameras that can be used to create a holistic tracking system, every street and every alleyway will transmit not only user data, but also images to the government. This kind of automation awakens optimism and paranoia alike. Since the physical act of driving a car is eliminated, terrorists will be able to use the car as a weapon, hitting as many people as they can in public places. The pessimist will recall Stanley Kubrick's film A Space Odyssey, in which the insidious computer program HAL 9000 deceives and kills the crew members. An optimist would argue that automation and systems like the integrated grid could save the average person from terrorist attacks, improve comfort, and make life easier.
The Lattice and utopian Nonstop City, dreamed up by architects at Archizoom, began with deceptive promises of freedom and lightness. Likewise, the idea of the Internet as an ocean of accessible information, in the waves of which you can float freely, can be misleading. The grids are neutral, but the Internet is not: it is a strictly ordered spiral, fragmented into separate branches. Various systems limit our ability to move through it, filtering content, composing frameworks, drawing boundaries around each person and their IP address. As the Internet grew, with billions of sites with tens of millions of daily searches, automated algorithms began to organize this data, combining similar elements into clusters and bubbles.
This has not always been the case. The revival of cybertopism coincided with the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, during which the hacker movements Anonymous, Wikileaks and the like became politicized and became mainstream. It was a digitally driven revolution on social media; they saw in it a breakthrough of the boundaries of social classes, the erasure of geographical differences and the collapse of power itself; it was to be the beginning of an era of transparency and collaboration. However, along with the Twitter revolution came an increase in control over the Internet. Participants of the Occupy movements were forced to learn to hide their negotiations from the state. Edward Snowden called journalist Laura Poitras and confirmed that the state was systematically breaking the law by intercepting messages. Hope faded under tough sanctions. Instead, unions of people with a similar way of thinking appeared. The suburbs promised a utopia based on free choice of lifestyles, as the workforce could say goodbye to the constraints of urban life and create new spaces for families and communities. We saw the same thing on the internet.
The suburbs are the most appropriate counterpart to the suburbanization of the mind that we are experiencing today in connection with the Internet. We live in our digital districts, which function as symmetrical halls of the same type of content reflecting our user preferences and viewing histories - hence the virtual communities of ideologically close people with similar works in similar socio-economic strata. Similar landscapes that exist in this biome have been described as soft bubbles. In fact, there are a lot of contradictions and friction, collisions and ruptures in them, which lead to the creation of thorny nests of protection. Spiked containers, like sea urchins, keep people in closed forms of consciousness. The internet today is in the suburbs of whites exodus, homogenizing itself for the user experience. Instead of fighting the other side, we use the virtual suburb to stay safe - in what we know well and what feels familiar. We see search results and targeted ads - and so what is exactly like "us" is returned to us. From the black mirror of empty screens, our own self looks at us.
The walls of the digital extension crush the existing architecture of the city; technologies developed in it reproduce its structure. The garage lived as a space for destroying reality, going beyond the immediate context, challenging normativity and habit. Since it was appropriated by the market and startup culture, the garage, the meeting place of man and machine, has become the ideology that has transformed the city into a chain of garages. Their physical nature has reincarnated as an image that still works as an empty promise of struggle, as an archetypal form for extremely neoliberal life forms.
The cluster and the cul-de-sac of the Internet have created neighborhood surveillance and redline practices in virtual reality. The Internet gives us carte blanche for perversely annoying attention to the lives of other users. This platform allows us to play social demo in our feeds and acts as a social drug that allows us to be more proactive than ever before in front of an audience that watches over us. In this suburban-style existence, empathy and generosity are reserved for members of individual communities in the digital space.
The team assembled in the network is constantly expanding, gaining an inner variety. The deprogrammed garage acts as a safety valve that relieves pressure that builds up in this core; it becomes the space to hack into and out of the suburban grid system. The garage had the ability to undermine the rules and regulations of the suburbs, albeit for a short time; the actions of the garage transformed the living area, shaping it for new practices and new identities. He shifted the restrictions placed on whoever held him.
The algorithmic closure of the digital suburb blocks the possibility of breaking the deadlock. Using the experience of the garage, a network resident can apply the strategies involved within him - to distort reality and repurpose network platforms for other purposes. And this, in turn, can allow one to go beyond the prescribed forms of behavior. The identity of the other has already been built and is available for hacking - for misuse, for demolition, for rebuilding. It functions as a vehicle for new thinking, new subjectivities and actions. In these suburbs, unexpected encounters are minimized, but there are still accidents, collisions, overlaps found in search engines and their pre-scheduled algorithms. The most powerful thing the Internet is still capable of is, in fact, that it can create new audiences, alliances or conflicts across borders, inflating bubbles that others burst by refusing to reach out to any particular group or cohort.
The garage tells a compelling story of subjectivity and technology that translates over and over again into the different functions that it served and housed in it. The primal shriek from the garage is drowned out by media, figures and stories, appropriating this space as they please. The garage acts as the starting point for identities that previously existed outside the marketplace, whose purpose must be constantly questioned. Is it not about simple self-aggrandizement, narcissistic appropriation? Or are we talking about a tool for emancipation and the creation of something new? In the garage, not only objects are stored and acquire new goals, but also narratives that are born and die within these walls, allowing people to connect with the attitudes built by this space and its adaptation to similar end results. Garage mythology is the mythology of endless recombination of images. It acts like a continuously expanding hard drive; our databases grow endlessly, and here the question is no longer in the uniqueness or originality of the material, but in the imposition of some images on others. The garage has amassed a sizable collection of images and stories that begin to exist as collages and references. It's not appropriation, plagiarism, or copyright infringement - it's all about reusing identity to replace history.
The garage genealogy presented in this book describes, in a sense, a professional dichotomy. A garage is a space where you can retire, and at the same time a space for self-expression, a place where true character is regained or made public. It is the emblem of the postmodern state, which presupposes action within and at the same time against the neoliberal system. Inside the garage, political positions are reduced to the platitudes of everyday life. On the one hand, self-elimination provokes confrontation, constant war with the surrounding context, antagonism aimed at the sphere of the public and at handy reality; it provides a loophole for relentless pursuit of otherness and subversion. The better option - to disappear, to hide in a reality that is ready to swallow anyone who gets into it - turns to the search for mass recognition. The image of restless youths, free minds, living dangerous lives implies the ability to challenge. The achievement in this case is that heroes like Frank Lloyd Wright, Steve Jobs, and Gwen Stefani figured out how to turn themselves into events by surrounding themselves with media and means of detente that they were able to individualize to counteract their social conditions. The antagonism inherent in the process of creating their self has become considered inappropriate, but we see in this approach the most real, hardcore realism. Such episodes represent an attempt to deprive the white middle class and its suburbia of dominance, but ultimately they seem to only reinforce it - glorifying the hero, forgetting about the collective.
