another pamphlet #02 2011
repetition!
“Ceasing to repeat is to die: this is true for individual organisms, for genes and species, for cultures and languages. Yet repetition without renewal is also a kind of death…” – Richard Middleton
“Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it.” – David Hume
The second issue of another pamphlet will consider the possibilities of repetition – to order, to interrogate, to produce, to reveal, to obfuscate, and to change. As an underlying principal of the industrial age, repetition has informed and organized much of the modern world. The disciplines of music, literature, art, economics, manufacturing, trade, politics, and history (to name only the most obvious) have all been affected by the instrumental power of repetition. Repetition is concerned with the formal (serial, anti-compositional, emergent), the socio-political (productive, ordered, egalitarian, totalitarian), the temporal (cyclical, psychological, historical, evolutionary), and the semiotic (structural, indexical, coded). Repetition is fundamentally boring and profound, containing the paradoxical capacity to produce both “more of the same” and radical difference.
01 repetition’s other
02 truth and repetition
03 remembering repetition
04 the hard work of repetition
05 repetition’s sweet spot
06 deploying repetition
07 losing yourself in repetition
08 repetitive acts
09 repeating within the gaps
10 a repetition story
REPETITION! pamphlet contributors:
STAN ALLEN is an architect and dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University.
AARON FORREST is an architect living in New York City and founding partner of the cooperative Ultramoderne.net.
SARAH JAZMINE FUGATE is an architect living in New York City.
GABRIEL GLOEGE is a musician and composer living in New York City and founding member of The Dymaxion Quartet.
ISAIAH KING is an architect in New York City and co-conspirator of another pamphlet.
RYAN NEIHEISER is an architect in New York City and co-conspirator of another pamphlet.
TAL SCHORI is an architect in New York City and an editor of The Real: Perspecta 42.
PATRICK THRASHER is a technocrat working for the Port Authority of NY and NJ. He lives in New York City.
GIANCARLO VALLE is an architect in New York City and co-conspirator of another pamphlet.
KAREN YAMA is an artist living and working in Princeton, New Jersey.
another pamphlet is a document of loose exchange, an excuse to play, a frame through which to look, a shared excitement. It is an open dialogue with our friends, our histories, and our surroundings.
Meaning both “more of the same” and “something different”, “another” contains the seeds of both continuity and change. another pamphlet mines this contradiction – this tension between past and future – opportunistically interrogating, critiquing, and celebrating the discipline of architecture.
It is deliberately short. We’re all busy and we want to keep the conversation quick, easy, relevant, and fresh.
It is perversely anachronistic – it is printed on paper and distributed via, gasp, the post. Against the haze of digital distraction we crave an object to hold our attention – something to touch, to fold, to tuck in our back pocket, to discard.
And above all it is a group effort. Distinct voices are provisionally brought together into a contingent collective. But while the contributors and the ideas they offer are vital, particular authorship is obscured. The authors are given credit for participating, but the ideas stand on their own. The collective dialogue is given primacy over the individual position.
