ADS4: Plants. Plants. Plants.

‘Ice cream so good. Gang gang. Ice cream so good. Gang gang. Ice cream so good.’—PinkyDoll

Again and again and again, these and other canned phrases are chanted by TikTok creator PinkyDoll during her livestreams as followers send digital gifts in the form of cartoon roses, dinosaurs, and ice cream cones. The gifts float onto screen and PinkyDoll responds – each item is cash payment – with the repeated incantation of stock phrases.

What is produced is a viewerly experience of utter monotony. Yet this form of content creation is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. This summer saw a surge in the number of creators live–streaming themselves as NPCs (non-player characters). The trend involves awkwardly performing a cycle of pre-programmed phrases and actions, emulating the robotic nature of video game ‘idle animations.’ [1]

What has engendered this obsession with repetition? What is this cult of herd–like conformism? Does iit acknowledge a deeper truth about where agency today might lie?

These videos throw a spotlight on what we might more broadly describe as background actors who populate the ‘looping edges’ – 2 bit–players, extras, and supernumeraries. [2] Their actions celebrate the long–overdue death of ‘main characters.’ Those heroes and lead actors who populate history books, yet are no more than ‘ordinary human beings who are ignorant and vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would rather take the blame for all the cruelties, injustices, and disasters justified in their name than recognise their own insignificance.’ [3] These videos ask why focus on the 0.001% of humanity who are main characters, when the world and human history is a carrier bag full of “side character” energy? [4]

Rhubarb, rhubarb, peas and carrots. This year, ADS4 will return to the background.

Last year, ADS4 'Green Room' explored the problematic understanding of land and landscape that has arisen from a history of misrepresentation. In 2023/24, we will build on this work by considering what lessons architecture could learn from different types of ‘plant’? Entities which, in their own way, tend to exist in the background.

Advocating for the background – or for a more peripheral existence – is often framed as a sort of retreat. Solutions to the challenges we face will never, it is assumed, be found away from the action. Yet it is exactly in these areas ADS4 believes we must look for more radical modes of existence. The background has always been a testbed for society. A place to explore the plausibility of our psychological and sociological intuitions, and to calibrate beliefs, desires, and intentions.

Although background characters, like extras, for example, are superficially insignificant, the spaces they occupy are sites of profound political struggle. The German word for extras, statisten, was introduced in the eighteenth century and is originally derived from the Latin status, meaning the rank, or position of a person within a community. Extras struggle for recognition within a frame of strict hierarchies, with struggles echoing the issues of society at large. We are seeing this struggle in real–time today with the coordinated industrial action of Hollywood writers and actors, many of whom are extras. These strikes come as the film and television industries grapple with how technology is changing the way content is made and consumed. Background characters are leading the debate.

ADS4 will explore the capacity of extras to organise, determine the rules of the game, and wrestle back control from an entrenched elite. ‘Main character energy’ has led us to the brink, with so-called ‘leaders’ proving useless in the face of the climate emergency. This summer saw the hottest June on record; the hottest July on record, which was the hottest month ever; hottest day on record globally (6 July, 2023); devastating wildfires; record ocean surface temperatures; and Antarctic sea ice at record lows. As UN secretary general António Guterres rightly observed, the era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived.

If we are to develop a just response to these threats, we must adopt a wilfully perverse gaze, ignore the foreground, and design only with and for ‘side characters.’ These designs will invariably be covert and invisible – we must plant or hide agents in the periphery.

The American philosopher Stanley Cavell once observed that ‘a painting is a world; a photograph is of the world.’ For Cavell, it makes sense when looking at a photograph to ask what lies beyond the frame, outside the area represented. Generally, this makes no sense when asked of a painting. You can ask these questions of objects in photographs because they have answers in reality. The world of a painting is not continuous with the world of its frame – at the edge of its frame, the world finds its limits.

In 2022, the introduction of DALL.E’s ‘outpainting’ feature rendered these kinds of ontological distinctions meaningless. Whether extrapolated from a photograph or a painting, it became possible to continue any image beyond its original borders by ‘adding visual elements in the same style, or taking a story in new directions.’ With such functions as outpainting and actions like Pinkydoll, the space beyond the frame – the space where extras reside – has been made manifest in radically new ways.

ADS4 will look to inhabit and design in this space. In Antkind (2020), Charlie Kaufman described the diegetic/social/political significance of everything which lies beyond the edges of the frame, ‘I have struggled with this issue, and my solution is to build and animate the world outside the view of my camera. These characters exist and are as carefully animated as those seen in the film. They are just forever out of view.’ [5] The film, photograph, or project becomes a vehicle to change things elsewhere. This shift in focus complicates what architecture is about and who it addresses. A building should, we might say, never simply be about the people who occupy it, but rather it should address those peripheral actants who engage with it just out of view.

ADS4 will explore this peripheral, unseen space to create an offscreen architecture.

Technologies, such as film and video games, have always possessed the ability to enhance our perceptual possibilities and suggest other, alternative counter–hegemonic ways of thinking about the world. Such technologies have dramatically reshaped our understanding of plant life.

Mediated plants – like those in plant–based horror films, such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978) and Day of the Triffids (1963 and 1981), or the art–works of Harun Farocki and Pierre Huyghe – invite us to develop more attentive and complex attitudes toward the vegetal. Attitudes which make us sensitive to other–than–human subjectivities at a time of profound ecological breakdown.

Despite their essentiality, plants, like extras, have always tended to form part of the background, or scenery. This year we will seek to overturn this plant blindness. Our sensitivity toward offscreen space and backgrounds will not just uncover novel attitudes towards humans, but also to other–than–human life. When understood as extras or NPCs, plants can be designed for as powerful characters in their own right. As peripheral agents, they can covertly determine what is happening in the foreground.

In early–September 2023, Shell followed other large companies, including Gucci, Leon and Nestlé, in abandoning their commitments to carbon offsets, arguing that these offsets have no real environmental benefit. Despite this, the unregulated voluntary carbon market is forecast to grow from $500m this year to tens of billions of dollars in the years to come.

Irrespective of the validity of different offset programmes, it is obvious that the financial quantification of plant life – a dominant theory and practice in conservation, which calculates the carbon value of every natural asset – enables and exonerates environmental violence. Such interpretations legitimate the destruction, displacement, and replication of natural landscapes over entire territories and regions.

If a tree falls over in the woods, its financial value is well understood. But what if a tree falls over in offscreen space? Does it make a sound?

By framing plants as offscreen extras, ADS4 will make their value more difficult to ascertain, undermining the quantification of nature and its problematic relationship with power dynamics. This year, we will develop alternative strategies of conservation that are based on hiding and covertness. By considering plants in the three ways above – plant as hidden agent, plant as living thing, and plant as mechanical equipment – ADS4 will occupy the background, imagining new and disruptive forms of architecture and environmental care within more–than–human worlds.

Notes:

[1] See https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/style/pinkydoll-social-media-livestream.html

[2] See https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/16/arts/television/hollywood-strike-background-actors.html

The figure of the 'NPC' has been used in other meme formats for more nefarious ends. In 2018 the term had gained traction within right-wing subcultural spaces as shorthand for individuals apparently incapable of thinking for themselves, and was used to accuse liberals and leftists of uncritically accepting progressive doxa and parroting left-wing catchphrases. While the NPC meme has served as a vehicle for antidemocratic bigotry, it may yet harbour critical potential, providing a vocabulary for theorising the cultural and political impacts of late capitalism.

[3] Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog And The Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011), 30.

[4] Tolstoy quoted in I. Berlin (2011), 15; see also Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Terra Ignota, 2019).

[5] Charlie Kaufman, Antkind (Fourth Estate, 2020), 285.