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17/1/2008

Situation Room

LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre, Gijon

Curated and coordinated by: Pablo de Soto
Concept: hackitectura.net

Concept

Situation Room is a term normally used to designate the place used in times of crisis to assess and monitor data for decision taking. Its origin can be traced back to World War II with the invention of computers, digitalization and the collaboration of architects and the military. These rooms are equipped with monitors and data boards used to control everything from the Strait of Gibraltar to the nuclear fission processes in a Nuclear Power Station or the life sustaining mechanisms on board the International Space Station.

Thanks to the invention of Internet at the beginning of the 90s and the computer boom, access to data collection and display technologies experimented a kind of democratization. This has enabled several experiences of Situation Rooms in civil society, with temporary media-labs mainly influenced by cybernetic ideas and free software.

Situation Room proposes an installation and processes which, taking Asturias as a case study, can offer to the public these reflections, invite them to participate in this open experiment–simulation of a Situation Room and ultimately facilitate the production of common knowledge among artists, geographers, architects, biologists, economists, computer specialists, critics and the public, about the issues put forward.

What to monitor? Which data to quantify? How to display it? Which database to access? What is the purpose of such a device in an Art and Industrial Creation Centre? How might this device act on a long-term basis? Which access protocols are required? How can this device help in certain decision-taking processes? And which of them?
CONTEXT

From Control Rooms to Situation Rooms
José Pérez de Lama y Halcón

Maps and Control Rooms

In a recent lecture, when endeavouring to explain the origin of the world of images we are currently immersed in, Beatriz Colomina focused on the works of Charles and Ray Eames and their relationship with what she called “situation rooms”.

Colomina described the involvement of architects and designers such as Buckminster Fuller and Eero Saarinen in the concept and development of the early situation rooms during World War II: rooms equipped with maps and projections in which the military and political general staff would monitor and supervise the progress of the war.

Those rooms are directly related to the control rooms managing—commanding and controlling—the large industries or power stations of Fordism, but also to the cartographies on which military strategies and tactics had been historically planned and also to the urban planning maps used for the planning and control of land transformations.

In 1959, Charles and Ray Eames, together with other collaborators, installed a media device in Moscow that, according to Colomina, was directly inspired by Fuller’s war experiences. It was a huge geodesic dome with seven screens attached to it, on which the Eames projected what at the time were extremely fast series of slides or slideshows to present the latest US technological advances to the people of Moscow. Given the advantage enjoyed by the USSR—which had recently launched the Sputnik into space—in the great military and industrial race, the Eames’ slideshow focused on an image operation in which technology was shown at the service of the everyday, the American dream—electrical appliances and automobiles standing out above everything else—incorporating the world of the struggle-production of subjectivity and the media as we understand it today, into the context of the situation room. In a clear anticipation of the texture of our present day, speed and the impossibility for “proper” concentration comprised a crucial element in the Eames’ communication-knowledge proposal.

As is clear nowadays, space, hardware, software and images were the elements of Eames and Fuller’s architecture in Moscow.

From Control Rooms to Situation Rooms

Since then, situation rooms have mushroomed and diversified and increased their power. Continuing with the classic model (Dr. Strangelove’s red telephone), we find control rooms in nuclear plants, television studios or in the management of the ISS (International Space Station). However, more and more, the project of centralising command and control is offset by processes whose deployment increasingly eludes the linear outlines characteristic of the sphere of Fordist industrial production, becoming grid-like, with continuously variable, viral, proliferating and catastrophic geometries. Now, we find the new situation rooms in the traffic control centres of big cities, in the rooms centralising border control (in the Strait of Gibraltar or on the US-Mexico border), at police stations in cities like Los Angeles, and we also imagine in those rooms endeavouring to manage communication networks, large multinational corporations, stock exchanges or military conflicts like Iraq.

Another significant new feature is the exponential growth of the power to gather data and to act remotely from a distance and in real time, using a combination of data digitalisation, a proliferation of communication networks, electronic (sensors and actuators) miniaturisation, and wireless communication (satellites, telephony, etc).

The forms of intervention in this new grid-like, global and complex scenario are also new, and in lieu of direct cause-effect relationships, new concepts and tools are making an appearance, such as strategic planning, opportunities and threats, asymmetries, externalities, competitive advantages, attractors, catalysts, enzymatic action, self-organised processes, communication, P2P, social netwars, subjectivity production...
William Mitchell, a former director of the MIT Media Lab, has underscored the paradox of the fact that in the net city, control is not centralised, rather it is increasingly disperse. Just like the WWW, of which its main inventor and promoter, Tim Berners-Lee, claimed that his main efforts were aimed at keeping it ‘out of control’—out of any centralised control so that it could proliferate and become more and more rich in complexity and diversity.

Global Laboratories

It is also worthwhile bearing in mind Bruno Latour’s reflections on the laboratories of the present. For the French thinker, while in the era of modernism experiments were carried out in well-demarcated spaces and at a small scale, the complexity and speed of the present day have demanded that those experiments which are actually relevant for the transformation of contemporary world to be carried out at a one-to-one scale, on a global scale, and with all of us inevitably involved in them; these would be questions including climate change, capitalist globalisation, democracy… Latour’s answer to that situation is to demand a control-monitoring system of those processes that could contribute to their visualisation as experiments affecting all of us, and to aspire to the decisions governing them to be globally and democratically taken. Latour sometimes defined his proposal as “a parliament” involving the participation of social organisations, technical experts, directly affected individuals, etc.

Final Comment

In point of truth, nowadays everybody has his/her own situation room at home, comprising Internet, the TV set and the rest of our cyborg extensions to the mediasphere. But we could probably also consider new types of scattered and connected situation rooms, granting greater transparency and agency to the processes, as well as a research-action capacity to the fragmented crowd comprising the inhabitants of the world laboratory.

CONFERENCES:

18th January

From Control Rooms to Situation Rooms.
José Pérez de Lama a.k.a. Osfa (School of Architecture of Seville)

The Laboratory Planet
Bureau d'Etudes/Université Tangente (Paris)

25th January

Designing freedom and ruling a nation: Socialist cybernetics in Allende’s Chile
Eden Medina (Indiana University-USA)

WORKSHOPS
*Recognised by the University of Ovideo as free-elective courses

19th-20th January

What to map? On Methodologies and Participative Construction of Tactical Cartographies
Léonore Bonaccini and Xavier Fourt (Bureau d'Etudes), hackitectura.net and Ulus Atayurt (Istanbul)

26th-27th January

Programming the Situation Room: Architecture, Hardware and Software; Centralised Control vs Distributed Control
Enrique Rivera and Catalina Ossa (Cybersyn.cl), Eden Medina and hackitectura.net

LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre
Los Prados, 121 - 33394 Gijón [Asturias] - Spain

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