Architecture is a collective technological human practice to control local environments in order to protect the human body. Depending on the worldview and cosmology of the society which produces the architecture – increasingly the global worldview is rational, mono-technological and Western – this practice gives more or less space for nonhuman agency. This paper looks at ways to loosen the contemporary Western obsession with controlling the environment architecturally by exploring different forms of architectural memento mori (remember you must die). The act of willing (poiesis) protective-controlling architecture (technology) into the world, inside a certain worldview (cosmology), is explored through the conceptual entanglement of those three notions: cosmo-techno-poiesis. The paper concludes with an architectural example and a short summary.

What is an architectural object, taken from one place to another for the purpose of reuse, from a point of memory? Can it be seen as an object which connects humans through nonhuman memory, ‘sympathetic magic’ or matter’s own agency? This text explores some fragments of ideas, follows intuitive hunches and illustrates the concept of ‘architectural organs’ by using the architectural typology/archetype of the window— here specifically from a church — and its human use for contemplation.

When is a building finished? Is a building ever finished or is it just a product of constant transformation? Transformed by its users, by time, by society and nature? When is a building a building? The moment the foundation is created? The moment the first wall is created? When it is airtight? When the workers leave the construction site? Currently I am constructing a building which functions as an artist studio, a greenhouse, an energy accumulator and an architectural test site. The building is part of my PhD in artistic research at Konstfack University in Stockholm. My PhD and the building’s current state is “half finished”. What does that mean? Is there something to be learned from Romanticism and its obsession with ruins? Is there such a thing as an “active ruin” – a planned ruin? A ruin exposed to the weathering agents of nature but also not forgotten and still in the control grip of its creator. Can a half-finished building feedback and inform theory, which feeds back and informs the rest of a building? Architectural production is different from working with clay on a sculpture.

The “xeno” – “the other” – is a prefix found in such hyphenated bridge words such as xeno-poetics, xeno-politics, xeno-feminism, or xeno-architecture. Xeno is the other, the not-self. But who or wha tis this not-self and where is it? In contemporary architectural discourse we find an increasing interest in more-than-human justice, speculation, or realization: ontological or critical posthumanisms and new materialisms explore nonhuman agency and transhumanist or cybernetic posthumanists celebrate the (always coming) fusion of the technological other with the self in order to overcome nature’s imposed (mortal) limits. There seems to be two types of nonhumans, related to the different – and often opposing – understandings of posthumanism: the man-made nonhuman and the non-man-made nonhuman. The xeno seems to mingle with ideologies of the former. A monad – as found in different monadologies, such as Leibnitz’s or the theosophical – is the smallest part of a metaphysical entity. It is the invisible sibling of the, almost outdated and refuted, physical atom. The monad seems to be exclusively found in life, in the non-man-made. In my presentation I would like to speculate on the xeno_monad, a conceptual overlap of the man-made and non-man-made entity and where it is physically and metaphysically situated in architecture. Physically, we might find such speculative entity in either the weathering processes of ruination and decay (non-man-made) or in the digital infrastructures which make up an increasing part of our architectural matters (man-made). Metaphysically, we find it in human perception (does the nonhuman even exist without human perception?): it is found in the fear of losing control over(architectural) matters and (information) flows; it is found in the desire to project human shortcomings onto the other, the outside rather than the inside; and it is found in the spiritual, sometimes perversely mixed with the transhuman, desire to overcome human limitations.

This paper describes architecture as a form of cosmotechnics (Hui) which currently manifests a Western-Christian worldview globally. This worldview is entangled with the assumption of a God-given right to control and subordinate nonhuman nature (anthropocentrism). The text looks at the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi - which itself is a cosmotechnical architectural-aesthetic concept embedded in a Zen Buddhist cosmology - and elaborates on its understanding of human-nonhuman control as an alternative example. Afterwards it zooms in on the notion of control and speculates where it is located on the spectrum between microcosm and macrocosm and to what degree it can be active or passive. The conceptual spectrumof microcosm-macrocosm is used to locate control. The qualitative spectrum of chaos-cosmos is used to define its magnitude and directionality. The paper argues for an architectural cosmotechnological understanding of control which is located partially in the physical and partially in the metaphysical world and which is partially active and partially passive - between chaos and cosmos. This conceptual intersection of both spectrums is defined as a point of continuous active negotiation between the human and the nonhuman world. Awareness of this intersectional control point affords a thinking of post-Christian, postcolonial and posthuman architectural cosmotechnics.

All the works in the exhibition thematizes, in one way or another, spiritual confusion. The West – hungry for spiritual growth / tired of an over-rational scientism which borders on the irrational itself – looks to the East and to its own pre-Christian past in order to find new modes of being.

Somehow trapped in between new (old) ontologies and its current own capitalist-centric mind frame, the spiritual path of the contemporary truth seeker is filled with almost comical tripping stones.

One good example of this is Christmas: part Christian, part pagan, part Coca Cola, part spiritual, part commercial. The here proposed works are tongue-in-cheek references to a multifaceted spiritual memory, which is part ours and part someone else’s. They engage the architectural, the ready-made and found, the commercial and the technological in order to emphasize our entangled and complex status quo.