Supplementary Notes for IN-BETWEEN
This document serves as a supplement to the video installation by Fujikura Asako + Ohmura Takahiro, outlining the critical concerns that motivated its creation. Fujikura and Ohmura have consistently explored pathways for achieving a paradisiacal harmony within the impoverished landscapes and experiences characteristic of modernity. The fictional renovation implemented through In-Between is likewise an experimental method for reimagining and reshaping a hardened reality. In the Construction Video, for example, they attempt to meticulously translate the words of a dialogue into audiovisual elements such as colors, compositions, forms and movements, one cut at a time. Here, translation does not describe a formulaic process of conversion; rather, it is applied as a creative process for leaping from the asemantic realm into the realm of images, guided by the artists' critical interests.
Takahiro Ohmura
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The Modern City
Pre-modern city-like environments secured the self-containedness of their domains of habitation by interiorizing particularities of the land (that is, enclosing land endowed with productive capacity). The modern city deliberately abandoned this approach, opting instead for a radical strategy of maintaining and operating a delimited domain almost entirely dependent on external supply. Its viability, however, was predicated on building out an extensive network of transportation and distribution infrastructure by urbanizing territories beyond the city’s borders and intensifying the processes of land grabbing and resource extraction facilitated by this network. Both these attributes – the extreme dependence on the city’s outsides and the extreme extent to which the inside and outsides of that city was transformed into a network – came to define the modern city. While fostering a center of unprecedented capital accumulation on one hand, they also catalyzed perennial intra-city overcrowding and congestion and the rampant spawning of extra-city spaces tailored for the needs and convenience of the modern city. Examples of the latter include bedroom towns (depoliticized residential environments deprived of sites for civic engagement and dialogue as well as the means for self-sufficient energy and food production), various supply sites (like food production sites, energy production sites, forestry sites, mining sites, transportation infrastructure sites, utility infrastructure sites and waste treatment sites) and roadside commercial establishments (spaces of self-perpetuating demand and consumption). Severe pollution, epidemics, slums and other such intra-city crises brought on by the growth of industrial capitalism were dealt with in an ad hoc fashion through the establishment of these exclusionary systems.
The Suburb
A suburb, as its name implies, is an incidental product of urbanization. It can be defined as a place transformed according to the logic of urbanization simultaneously with the formation of the modern city it fringes. Its origin can be traced to Britain, where the first modern cities germinated as local market spheres encompassing manual labor-based factories (manufactories). What crucially distinguished Britain’s emerging urban centers from their medieval predecessors was their proximity to rural villages and also ports (Manchester or Liverpool, and so on). They were places where temporary low-wage labor could be easily sourced from the villages and where peasants could visit to buy things they had formerly obtained only through self-sufficiency or gift exchange, such as textiles. As these local market spheres steadily developed largely autonomously, sustaining their reproduction cycles without becoming heavily dependent on external trade, they came to be troubled by the aforementioned spatial crises such as pollution and slums. The idea of establishing a delimited core domain that relies on its outsides not only to supply all its needs but also deal with its problems – the modern city – was invented as an expedient solution to these issues. When implemented, the logic of the cities’wage-based economies cut deeply into the surrounding countryside, transforming former rural villages into suburbs tethered to modern cities. In other words, the spatial system of the para-rural local market sphere simultaneously gave rise to the modern city and its suburbs, recasting their populations as hybrid wage-earning worker-consumers. The basic implication of this hybridity was that workers became consumers of the very goods they helped produce, marking a key moment after which enhancing labor productivity through technological innovation (thereby reducing the value of labor power) became essentially the only way capitalists could hope to extract significant surplus value (this was one of the structural driving forces behind the Industrial Revolution). Over time, the suburbs that arose as nearby attachments to modern cities shed their attribute of spatial proximity, aided by the expanded arterial road and highway systems that allowed them to grow farther outward as homogeneous meshed sprawls with seemingly no end.
The Roadside
The roadside landscape along arterial corridors represents an achievement of modernism and industrial capitalism. How so? Because all its hallmarks – supermarkets, convenience stores, dining chains, discount shoe and clothing retailers, consumer electronics stores, auto parts stores, pachinko parlors and so on – collectively give form to both the spatial ideals envisaged by modernism and the exorbitant cityward flows of energy, food, labor, information and technology that ensure the synchronicity of the modern city and its suburbs. The banal suburban landscape we have grown wearily familiar with is nothing less than the final fruition of the grand project of the modern city that humanity went all-out to realize in the nineteenth century through to the twentieth century. One just has to strip away the gaudy signage and decorative finishes to see it. What should remain are frameworks of steel and concrete, built cheaply and efficiently with uniformly repeating spans. What more perfectly embodies the quintessence of modern architecture than the sight of such buildings inhabiting the landscape linearly, endlessly, in a highly abstract manner?
Logistics
The logistics revolution took off during the 1960s in the US. Before then, the primary focus of physical distribution was on minimizing the time goods spent in circulation. The strategic framework of logistics introduced a fundamental shift: value began to be managed during the circulation process through the systemic coordination of supply chains (the transnational networks of business transactions involved in fulfilling customer orders). It should go without saying that what spurred the rise of logistics was the globalization of distribution, as demand uncertainty naturally increases at the global scale. Longer lead times (the period from order placement to fulfillment) lead to greater uncertainty. Improving demand forecasting accuracy and reducing lead times allows for lower inventory carrying costs (storage and handling costs). This is why conventional physical distribution emphasized minimizing circulation times. Doing this alone, however, proved insufficient for dealing with the scale and complexity of global distribution networks. Logistics can execute intricate operations whereby, for instance, production volumes are dynamically controlled through constantly monitoring demand trends, fine-tuning production processes and blending make-to-stock (demand forecast-driven) production with make-to-order (actual demand-driven) production – all while the relay race of goods continues to unfold around the globe. Today, such operations that are core to logistics no longer simply permeate tangible distribution workflows; they are being applied to script object and event behaviors – that is, converting tangible and intangible phenomena into numbers and language – and to modulate and manipulate reality based on these scripts. Forecasting demand, placing production orders, optimizing delivery – these are exactly the kinds of processes through which decisions once dependent on the embodied acuity of humans are being replaced with operations informed by the disembodied sapience of artificial intelligence (AI).
Generative AI and Natural Language
The advent of generative AI technologies – particularly large language models (LLMs) – has opened a new path where natural language itself is the input modality for computational operations. But is natural language not a highly body-dependent dialogue and scripting medium, inherently adapted for culturally and historically nuanced exchanges between corporeal subjects? Take, for instance, the word heavy. The vague sensation of heaviness it evokes within us is grounded in our past physical interactions with countless objects, such as stones, dumbbells, tables, balloons, plates and so on. Or to put it differently, the sensation evoked by the phrase “this is quite heavy” is a virtual embodied simulation that is activated, or prompted, by the audio or visual expression of the word heavy. This is not mere metaphor. Thanks to breakthroughs in non-invasive neuroimaging technologies (like PET, fMRI and MEG) made back in the nineties, it has been empirically verified that when we create a mental image of – or imagine – performing an action and actually perform an action, the regions of our brain that exhibit activity are basically the same. Language, thus, is simultaneously an ultra-compressed information format and an information-prompting device capable of rendering an incomputable amount of perceptual imagery through a receiver’s body. In contrast, current LLMs merely perform probabilistic pattern prediction based on large amounts of historical language data, and their generative processes intrinsically have no sensory grounding in the real world. This fundamental disjunction between symbol and reality also underlies the spaces generated by the operations of logistics, which have come to permeate every nook of our everyday lives. It is hence imperative that we humans duly shepherd AI systems by carefully reviewing and supplementing the deviations in meaning and discrepancies with reality in their outputs through drawing on our corporeal finiteness and experiences.
Environmentally Embedded Intelligence
The evolution of generative AI technologies so far suggests that AI systems will acquire a physicality and situatedness different from that of humans. AI systems integrated with sensors, cameras, actuators and other cyber-physical system (CPS) devices could potentially become ambient presences that adaptively modulate the behavior of a swarm of environmentally responsive non-human entities. When environments themselves become capable of processing and responding to information, buildings and cities can become perceptually responsive actors as opposed to inert stage elements. Such a reality would certainly pose the dystopian risks of relying on technology that is difficult to control and obscuring the acting agents, but it also presents a fresh, intriguingly hopeful possibility: all things could become bodies. The key to environmentally embedded AI systems lies in the sense-symbol feedback mechanism that associates mental imagery (sense-derived internal representations) with symbolic expression (language and iconography). Consider an AI-enabled doorknob. The haptic data it gathers when gripped by a human hand (like grip pressure, body temperature and rotational movement) could function as sensory input for its AI, prompting it to generate an internal representation – a mental image – that informs its subsequent physical reaction or linguistic response. It is through this two-way circuit of sense and symbol that a dialogue emerges between AI entities and humans or between AI entities and physical environments. These unfold not as logical linguistic exchanges but as generative processes where the subjects mutually attempt interpretation by imagining the sensory mechanism of the other.
The In-Between and the Garden
Let us provisionally refer to a spatiotemporal domain conceived as a place for human and non-human subjects, or heterogeneous intelligences, to exist together, with the inherent incommensurability of communication left intact, as the in-between. The in-between is not a site for facilitating understanding and empathy. All it fosters are unstable relationships upheld only by the humans’ will to maintain them with resigned acceptance of the misconveyances, frictions and loneliness each must bear. There exists a familiar, timeworn spatial archetype that has instantiated countless in-betweens: the garden. The garden is a technology by which the incommensurability of heterogeneous subjects is formally juxtaposed within a single delimited domain (forget not that such enclosures are also acutely political constructs for establishing a boundary line that imposes value judgments on what is included or excluded). The various non-human subjects, plants and otherwise, operate proactively, growing and developing on their own. Rocks shift in the wind, engineered structures weather. Everything gradually transitions into a different state. The humans execute acts of maintenance to periodically rewind space and time to a certain reset point as though to resist the changing circumstances. This dynamic tension gives rise to neither quite artificial nor quite natural rhythms (dictated by things like growing seasons, germination periods, pruning cycles and decomposition speeds), which tend to demand of all humans involved a commitment to a kind of bond that transcends the logic of economic profit: communality.
Climate change, logistics, extractivism – all these realities are transformative processes unfolding as vast global-scale networks that cannot be grasped in full from any individual perspective. Yet this is precisely why it is crucial to establish points of engagement for apprehending and responding to local manifestations of these processes through our bodies and senses. This is not about “overcoming” or “designing”; it is about committing to much more immediate forms of engagement that can be effectuated only through the intentions and actions we direct toward our own small but persistent acts of intervention and inscription on the world within our reach. As a start, we must sustain dialogue. Even in a world where everything is increasingly decided on the basis of plausibility, the option remains for us to deliberately inhabit the gaps between the incommensurable voices.
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(English translation: Gen Machida／マチダゲン)
