P001 → Holoway House
Course: UG4, Wallenberg Studio, "・:*☆𝓲n OᵗǶƐr w❀ℝl𝓓s☆*:・ﾟ," Winter 2023
Instructor: Alina Nazmeeva
Created in collaboration with Mags Hawley
Wallenberg Award finalist and honorable mention recipient
Holoway House is published in Dimensions Volume 37. The journal can be purchased here: https://dimensionsjournal.us/Dimensions-37
The journal can be viewed digitally here:
https://issuu.com/taubmancollege/docs/dimensions_37
In a world recovering from environmental collapse, humans no longer exist at the expense of the nonhuman.
We enter a post-human world - one full of both interspecies conflict and cooperation.
Alliances are formed, and symbiosis evolves between unlikely allies.
This time is cyborg - this time is feral.
Through greater connections between human and non–human, either animal, vegetable, or mineral, an earth forms that is neither domesticated, nor wild.
Donna Haraway argues that we as humans are not discrete individuals, but instead cyborgs - monstrous hybrids made out of the many biological, mechanical, and social systems around us.
She proposes this cyborg philosophy in response to the practices of capitalism, which are based on the denial of sentience, objectification. and dehumanization of non-human or in-human others.
This creates complex systems of oppression and extraction, which Haraway’s manifesto challenges. Instead of domination, she proposes cyborg identities that embrace the connection between all beings.
These connections begin to blur many of the false dichotomies western capitalism relies on - strict divisions between the self/other, animate/inanimate, natural/ artificial, collapse when examined closely.
Evolved vs Designed
Wild vs Civilized
Physical vs Virtual
Human vs Nonhuman
Natural vs Artificial
The radical connectedness of the cyborg is not entirely speculative. A human cannot distinguish themselves form the bacteria in their gut- a cyborg cannot distinguish themselves from the greater systems around them.
Themes of ferality, entanglement, and the cyborg identity begin to coalesce. For the final imagining of this reality, the focus lays in conflict rather than cooperation, because it is through the conflict that alliances are formed and strengthened.
It became clear that traditional understandings of architecture could not accommodate this world. We searched for a kind of post-human permaculture, where the diverse needs and potential abilities of our world's inhabitants would be reflected in the environment.
Holoway House is a multi-species housing cooperative, existing in an alternate present.
The home and the habitat, both spaces of domesticity, go feral when released from expectations of human domination.
The original tour of Holoway House was presented through two mediums-- an interactive game that acts as an encylopedia of the house's inhabitants, and an immersive VR experience.
The design began with a modernist tower, originally designed as a bank/office building, a typology of no more use in this reality, as a precedent. We reclaim the domestic office space to create a feral architecture for a feral reality.
Within Holoway House, there exist spaces for every species as well as mixed-use collaborative nodes. Walls become burrows, pipes and sewers are overrun with rats, and composting facilities house dense mycelial and tree connections. Within and between these spaces, relationships form between the tower's diverse inhabitants. The home and the habitat, both spaces of domesticity, go feral when released from expectations of human domination.
Interspecies Alliances:
1. Scoby: Scoby is the top layer that forms from kombucha, and when perceived behaves similarly to leather. In this reality, scoby is a commonly used material, and kombucha is brewed within Holoway House.
2. Bark Beetle/Pine Tree: Bark Beetles and Pine trees are natural opposites, each with their own fungal symbiotic relationship. Pine Forests today are being decimated by a new kind of feral beetle that has migrated across the ocean and merged with new, highly destructive fungi. To combat this conflict, we propose microbe bots and PETRA, mechanical holobionts who manage the micro and macro ecological health of the cooperative.
3. PETRA: PETRA is a sentient AI who exists in every facet of this reality: regulating public infrastructure and ecological systems-- often interacting directly with the mycological cultures of the city.
The radical connectedness of the cyborg is not speculative, as seen in the holobiont. The holobiont refers to a symbiotic relationship so strong that the lines between two species are nearly indistinguishable. Often used to refer to microbial life and its host biome, the holobiont is the whole made up of many parts.
The urban environment is the ultimate site of cooperation, the ultimate human-mineral hybrid system. At its core, a city embraces connectedness and alliance. It already approaches
holobiosis.
We enter this world through The Mask. This mask enhances the senses, opens new worlds for exploration, and allows the user to experience the hybridic world around them. As a headset, the mask acts as a portal for us to experience VR simulations of Holoway House. Furthermore, the mask does not conceal identity, but reveals it. In the world of Holoway House, it augments speech, smell, and hearing, as interspecies cooperation depends on human adaptation to non-human modes of speaking.
These masks are created from in-world materials such as scoby, mycelium, and various mechanical and organic components.
Development of this project still continuous through the partnership of Leah Altman and Mags Hawley, separate site with interactive Holoway House game is currently in the works.