documenta 12 magazines, 4 August, 1 pm, documenta 12 Halle

The psychedelic experience of a spatial expansion of “consciousness” and sense of an interconnected “planetary culture” was widespread among the late-sixties counterculture. This identification with a global community and its concern for the entire Earth’s ecosphere was largely a postindustrial phenomenon, a reflection upon new technological potentials that, while apparently euphoric, were haunted by a politics of survival. In addition to this spatial sensation was an equally symptomatic sense of temporal transformation. The psychedelic experience of the “trip” involved an “expanded time phenomenon”, a sense of one’s ability to “dwell exponentially” in time, or to experience not the sequential passing of time but accelerating rates of change.

It was within this historical condition that Ant Farm was founded in 1968 on a platform of educational reform, one intending to bring architectural pedagogy into alignment with these radically transformed space-time relations and in so doing to offer a “turned-on” counterpart to normative models of pedagogy.

The presentation will focus on Ant Farm’s early work, particularly the Truckstop Network project that sought to articulate an educational framework dedicated to radical environmental alternatives and within which architecture became closed life-support modules interfacing with open-ended media systems. If Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes had operated at the helm of a transforming modernity, Ant Farm’s work would be cast, rather, as fully inscribed within the postindustrial milieux.

With Felicity D. Scott (Grey Room, New York)

Location: documenta 12 Halle

Language: English

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