Digital Doubles: The Major Agency of Minor Bits

Lucía Jalón Oyarzun, A paradoxically accurate 43% of blurred uncertainty, 2022. Google’s Cloud Vision API applied to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The tower of Babel (c. 1563) confirms that there is a building in the image with a 57% certainty.

In a world that seeks to describe, codify and quantify everything, and particularly our viscerality and its interactions with our actual and digital environments, can we find interstitial spaces, currently unseen, unobserved and unlegislated, where we might be able to create minor architectures capable of blooming?

Published in Architectural Design’s Special Issue: Architectures of Refusal.
Edited by Jill Stoner and Ozayr Saloojee.
Volume 92, Issue 6, November/December 2022

03.11.2021 [Talks]

Invisible Maps: Minor Architectures as Ecologies of Signs

Study for 'Blind Man's Buff' (1811), by Sir David Wilkie (1785-1841)

We cannot avoid the touch of the world. Presence emerges out of an ecology of signs; traces with different textures and surfaces that index any given encounter. That’s why we can think of embodied or invisible maps which are not drawn (inscribed) on paper, but on our bodies. They are affective images as Spinoza defined… View Article

10.09.2017 [Research] [Writings]

Exception and the Rebel Body: the Political as Generator of a Minor Architecture

Bus seating chart for Rosa Parks 04767_2000_001

Following the Iranian elections in 2009, the city of Tehran experienced a wave of protests to denounce alleged irregularities in the electoral process. As the streets were lined with police chasing protesters, they climbed to the city’s rooftops to express their disagreement. Thus, every night a chorus of voices intoned the same chants their parents’… View Article

12.09.2022 [Writings]

Windowish Practices, Unreadable Backgrounds and Raw Semiotics. Tracing Minor Architectures and Ecologies of Signs in Women’s Writing

Minor architectures can be defined as an open set of spatial practices and know-hows based on the agency of bodies. While these practices escape representation, codification or measurement, they have a fertile relation with literature. After framing this relationship, we analyze the work of three women writers (Carmen Martín Gaite, Ali Smith and Toni Morrison)… View Article