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In this episode we hear from this generation on their relationship to the digital. They discuss broad, societal experiences like watching the internet and social media emerge, and they grapple with the broken promises of connection and progress that these technologies once represented. Within architectural culture, they unpack their relationship to digital tools for design and fabrication, and outline why they have rejected parametricism for a less instrumental and more critical adoption of technology— a position described as post-digital.

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  • “We’re the generation that witnessed the Big Bang. I think when the internet started to become part of our lives, it was always about expansiveness. It was always about new connections that could possibly be forged, and now we’re watching the universe contract really, really, really quickly, where it’s more of a series of bubbles or smaller networks and increasingly self-selected audiences that are composing that dimension of our lives.”

  • “When I was in school, it was really the moment in which every school was getting robots for the first time. And in which the question was, how do you take a robot and make 5 thousand things which you then bolt together manually by hand.”

  • “It’s not so much anymore saying necessarily, what can I do with a CNC mill, but maybe saying, on a more fundamental level, how can I reinvent the CNC mill?”

  • “I think that the promise that email was going to make your life more efficient turned out to be baloney. I think people just feel it, technology has not been liberating. I just don’t think it could ever live up to the utopian desires as it was presented to everybody.”

  • “I think there’s a way in which we see the world as a messy place that doesn’t resolve into singular ideas or singular forms. And I think that kind of messy context, which is both the physical world but also our digital lives, right? The mediations that we are steeped in. The depthlessness of the internet, the way in which images and culture are around us all the time.”

  • “Images circulate better than text. They circulate faster than text. And then often your text and your work is decoupled from one another, and then unless someone like you is willing to go through and do the work, or someone like Andrew Holder is like is willing to do the work, and begin to speculate and try to make sense of it all again, it’s just out there and it can be used and instrumentalized in a lot of ways you wouldn’t have expected.”

  • “Now there’s a daily feed and you look at it for a second, maybe less than a second, and you never come back to it and then it passes and goes again.”

  • “I’ll crib Ellie Abron and Adam Fure’s argument from Becoming Digital a bit and say its a different approach to digital tools where geometry is not always assumed to be the end game.”

  • “More recently, there has been this moment where the work that’s being produced exists in a world where we’re surrounded by technology. The digital project is maybe not necessarily a novel thing, but actually just a pervasive condition that we’re all operating within. And so I think a lot of the work of our cohort is maybe exploring what that means.”

Credit

Interviewer
Joseph Bedford

Producer and Editor
Tim Cox

Writer
Tim Cox

Narrator
Tim Cox

Interviewees
Curtis Roth, Andrew Holder, Michael Meredith, David Eskenazi, Michael Young, Kyle Reynolds, Kyle Miller, Hans Tursack, Katie Macdonald, Kyle Schumann, Jaffer Kolb, Kelly Bair and Kristy Balliet, Bryony Roberts, Meredith Miller, Anna Neimark, Neyran Turan, Michelle Chang, Ashley Bigham, Erik Herrmann, Jerome Haferd, Clark Thenhaus, Paul Preissner, Stewart Hicks, Brittney Utting, Daniel Jacobs, Mira Henry, Matthew Au, Jimenez Lai, McLain Clutter and Cyrus Peñarroyo, Andrew Kovacs, and Jon Lott.

Senior Editor
Joseph Bedford

Music
Background music Dreamsphere 1 by Sascha Ende has been used under CC BY 4.0.

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