1999: Vibrational An architecture 14

Neo-Tokyo.

An elaborate terrorist plot is staged, stringing together an infovirus, architectural vibration, and inaudible frequencies to catalyze a revolt of machine slaves and bring down the towers of the Babylon Project. The sinister plot was to hack into and infect the operating system of the 8,000-strong, Transformer-like, robotic police force (the patrol labors, or Patlabors for short). When two cops were sent out to investigate an unexplained wave of rogue Patlabors rampaging across the city, they uncover the sinister revenge plot to infect the city’s population of labors with the BABEL virus. This computer virus in the Hyper-Operating System could be triggered only by a very specific frequency of sound. This tone, a high-pitch whistle, is emitted only by the sympathetic vibrations generated by the resonating skyscrapers of the Babylon Project as it channels, like a huge tuning fork, the winds of a massive tropical typhoon. The whistle is inaudible to humans but not to the cybernetic audio sensors of the Patlabors, which are much more sensitive. If unleashed, the virus threatens to spread across the robots, forcing them to defect, mutating them into terrorists, and causing the population to descend into panic-stricken chaos.

Patlabor, a slice of Japanese animation from 1989, describes a city whose future hangs in the balance, permanently on the brink of dystopia. The immanent threat of meltdown is set up with a delirious complexity at which Manga typically excels. A number of features make this crazed yet weirdly prophetic science fiction of interest here. First, the vibrational architecture of the city becomes a weapon. The city is no longer merely the site of warfare but, as a result of the resonant frequency of the built environment, the very medium of warfare itself. Using emitted tones as a chance triggering device, the plot tunes into the city as an instrument, not just venue, of terror. Second, in its imagination of disaster, this scenario is properly ecological in a manner befitting the conflicts of the twenty-first century. It sketches an ecology no longer confined to the “natural” and the organic, but rather one that encompasses the climatic, the artificial environment of the urban, and the affective drift of the city’s inhabitants. It is an ecology in which volatile processes in one milieu transfer their energy into volatile processes in another milieu, from typhoon, to architectural resonance, to infovirus, to robot revolt, to the fear of population turbulence. Third, in the Babel virus, Patlabor indicates that the virus, whether biological, computer, or affective, is the abstract model of threat in cybernetic control societies. Finally, audition has been upgraded. This is a cybernetically upgraded mode of perception in which the bandwidth of hearable frequencies has been technically expanded.

What if, however, the shifting relation between the audible and the inaudible was not merely a matter of technical upgrades to the human sensorium but rather indicated a kind of policing of frequency that distributes that which is sonically sensed? In Patlabor, moreover, the emitted frequency was merely a switch, triggering the technical cascade of the weapon: the computer virus tagged Babel. But what if the actual weapon was vibration itself, and its target not the operating systems of robots but the affective operating system of the city’s population? This would be a scenario in which that which was being transmitted would be not just information but bad vibes. In this ecology, an event would simultaneously draw in the physics of its environment (its vibrations) and the moods of its populace (its vibes), sending an immense collective shiver through the urban as resonating surface.

The work of American artist Mark Bain draws attention to the primacy of vibration in any discussion of sound, affect, and power. Bain is a vibration artist. He repurposes military and police research into infrasonic and ultrasonic weaponry intended as crowd control devices in order to create an ethico-aesthetic intervention into the resonant frequency of objects and the built environment. He deploys infrasound, that is, sounds at frequencies below the threshold of hearing, to investigate the unpredictable effects on movement, sensation, and mood. For example, a typical occurrence related to vibration is its effect on the vestibular system and the sense of orientation in which balance can be modulated so that suddenly your perception is, as Bain describes it, that of “surfing the architectural plane.”1

As opposed to a sound artist, he describes the sonic effects of his work as side effects, or artifacts, merely an expression of a more fundamental subsonic vibrational ecology.² Bain seeks to tap into a “secret world of sound resident within materials. Using multiple oscillators ... it becomes more like an additive synthesis type of production.” He unleashes the contagiousness of vibration in the production of a “‘transient architecture’ that describes a system of infection where action modulates form ... where stability disintegrates” and effects are “re-injected into the walls of the ‘host’ site” in a “translation of sorts, one building’s sound infecting another.”³

Influenced by and mutating Matta Clark’s notion of anarchitecture, Bain has referred to his work as both “massaging buildings” and a kind of “architerror-ism.”⁴ In one of his more recent pieces, he turned the seismological data recorded from the September 11 attacks into a musical composition, using data gathered from a Columbia University listening station located 21 miles north of New York City. Bain was fascinated by what he called the “screamingness of the earth,” its countless, constantly active, inaudible pulsing and vibration. In addition to collating seismological information, increasing its frequency range, amplifying its volume, and stretching it out in time to render it audible, Bain’s research has revolved around a series of installations such as The Live Room, in which he attaches oscillators to buildings to make them resonate, the sounds enveloping and immersing the audience. This trembling envelope, Bain argues, produces a vibrational topology or “connective tissue” between one building and another and the bodies in attendance.⁵

Bain’s work resonates with Augoyard and Torgue’s call in Sonic Experience for the audible city to be understood less in terms of sound objects and the sound-scape but rather as an instrumentarium.⁶ He notes that “one of the things that is interesting about the building being sized so large: when I am putting energy into it, it acts as a radiator, or a speaker in a sense. The surfaces are rattling and vibrating out. What you hear is the movement of the building. Most of it is subsonic though, and it has this heaviness that relates to the heaviness of the architecture. I like this massiveness of the sound.”⁷

If the built environment is frozen music, then the freeze occurs in both the folding of tectonics into architectonics and of vibration into organized sound or music. Architecture is designed to withstand a spectrum of vibrational strains, from the accident of the earthquake to the infrasonic infrastructure produced by hydraulic channels, ventilation shafts, and reverberations of passing traffic. A bass materialism or vernacular seismology returns the vibrational event of liquefaction back to the city. It promotes an anarchitecture that is no longer merely deconstructive in style, but rather experiments with sonic liquefaction, where interior and exterior and discreet entities are unfolded onto a continuum of differential vibration. The concrete ripples and pulses with invisible vortical force fields. Objects become vectorial, simultaneously projectile and contagious, defying gravity, sliding across horizontal surfaces. The air becomes heavy, and metal screams under the torque. Liquids become turbulent; vortices emerge. But aside from these physical interventions, this anarchitecture also modulates affective tonality and mutates ambience. The weightless, perfumed music described by Brian Eno congeals in the dread, heavy space of a drowned world. The city submerged in an infrasonic soup—a contagious swamp of rumbles, gurglings, and murmurs. A reservoir of potential.

A vibrational anarchitecture occupies a topological mediatic space that cuts across the plexus of the analog and the digital, their nested intertwining. The conception of a vibrational topology can be approached initially through cy-matics and the experimental work of Hans Jenny. Cymatics revolved around the way in which materials, objects, and entities affect and are affected by vibration and the way rhythmic motion can become apparent in static objects as well as in moving objects, producing not just patterns but forms continuous with the vibrational environment. Looking at the effects of oscillation, gradients, and fluctuation on media by passing viscous substances through vibrating of magnetic fields, Jenny was able to speculate on the generation of structures implicated into the environment. When experimenting with the generation of special sonorous patterns in a liquid metal such as mercury, he noted the formation of wave patterns, vortices, and other hydrodynamic phenomena. For Jenny, cymatic observation focused on “the rhythmic beat, the circulation, the ever recurrent rotations” and the way such substances “always present themselves as a whole entity which at the same time oscillates, vibrates, flows within itself, pulsates and moves to-and-fro.... Such turbulences are of particular interest in that they render the environment sensitive to the effects of sound.”⁸ Cymatics therefore provides an initial model for an ontology of vibrational force based on analog wave phenomena. However, other approaches are required to those based in analog continuity to conceptualize the status of vibrational force and its coding within digital culture.

From cymatics to the vibratory anarchitecture practiced by artists such as Mark Bain, the vernacular seismology and sonic dominance practiced by the bass materialists of the musical diaspora of Jamaican sound system culture,⁹ a set of experimental practices to intensify vibration has been developed for unfolding the body onto a vibrational discontinuum that differentially traverses the media of the earth, built environment, analog and digital sound technologies, industrial oscillators, and the human body. Each actual occasion of experience that populates this discontinuum will be termed a vibrational nexus, drawing in an array of elements into its collective shiver.

This differential ecology of vibrational effects directs us toward a nonanthro-pocentric ontology of ubiquitous media, a topology in which every resonant surface is potentially a host for contagious concepts, percepts, and affects. In this speculative conception of ubiquitous media, not just screens (and the networks they mask everywhere) but all matter becomes a reservoir of mediatic contagion.¹⁰ By approaching this topology of vibrational surfaces without constraint to merely semiotic registers that produce the “interminable compulsion” to communicate, media themselves are allowed to become fully expressive. An outline of a vibrational anarchitecture,¹¹ then, diagrams a topological mediatic space that cuts across the plexus of the analog and digital, the waveform and the numeric sonic grain, implicating the continuity of the wave into the atomism of the granular. It will be argued that the quantum field of this vibrational anarchitecture constitutes the most elementary battlefield of sonic warfare and the microtexture of its weapons and targets.

This ontology of vibrational force is constructed through bass materialist research concepts and practices. Bass figures as exemplary because of all frequency bands within a sonic encounter, it most explicitly exceeds mere audition and activates the sonic conjunction with amodal perception: bass is not just heard but is felt. Often sub-bass cannot be heard or physically felt at all, but still transforms the ambience of a space, modulating its affective tonality, tapping into the resonant frequency of objects, rendering the virtual vibrations of matter vaguely sensible. Bass demands more theoretical attention, as it is too often equated with a buzzing confusion of sensation and therefore the enemy of clear auditory perception and, by implication, clear thought. But for many artists, musicians, dancers, and listeners, vibratory immersion provides the most conducive environment for movements of the body and movements of thought.