Abstract

Vibration is a phantasmal boundary object that coalesces concrete physical and abstract metaphysical characteristics. It directly affects the built environment, is a transmaterial imprint of said world, and mediates between various spheres and environmental scales, from the corporeal envelope of human bodies to that of the planet. This essay sketches the virtual world-making properties of vibration as a phenomenotechnique, an epistemology of process in which phenomena are always mediated, not pure, and constructed through differential processes of interiorization and exteriorization. Converting its boundary-permeating properties into a design technique, the essay is accompanied by five vibrascapes, imprints of vibrations registered by specialized technological sensors and produced by specific objects, physical entities, or natural phenomena that range from the infrasound of church bells to the seismic vibrations of an exhibition.

Worlds within Worlds

Imagine a world filled with a substance that, unlike light, you cannot see, and unlike air, you cannot breathe, but that permeates you, everyone, and everything around you, always. This substance is both material and immaterial, a transmaterial force that easily evades perception. Human sensoria are ill equipped to register the full bandwidth of this transcalar substance but all organisms e.g., fauna, flora, funga, bacteria, even acellular life such as viruses are affected by it, their biochemical systems often more finely attuned to it.¹ Inanimate matter too, whether buildings, machines, or the earthly ground gravity anchors you on, are fundamentally impacted by this substance. Sometimes you can hear it, can viscerally feel it move through you, can see its effects shaping the matter around you. You are nevertheless unable to hold onto it, incapable to seize this substance that structures the environment, built or un-built. Exceeding this thought experiment, your budding curiosity concerning this substance — vibration — was shared by researchers across disciplines since Antiquity and formally tied to the epistemological category of the “imponderable” (weightless matter) by natural philosophers in the seventeenth century.² Losing nothing in relevance or impact since, today vibration has recaptured the limelight of technoscientific progress, mobilizing its agency in the service of industry to mediate between material conditions at various scales. It has become a powerful tool capable of bridging real world-making and virtual world-making in the augmented or virtual reality technologies currently being developed. This ranges from doppler-laser vibrometry, computer-vision aided measurements aimed to reveal the vibratory emissions of the built and natural environments to assess functionality or health, to tech giant Meta’s embodied internet, the metaverse, whose engineers seek ways to trick the human brain and sensory system through bodily vibratory signals into truly experiencing the metaverse’s virtual architecture e.g., the texture or weight of objects simulated by vibratory feedback.³

Vibrascapes

Five vibrascapes, imprints of vibrations registered by specialized technological sensors and produced by specific objects, physical entities, or natural phenomena, accompany this text. A vertical axis seismograph and a seismo-acoustic sensor, the latter able to detect both vertical motion seismicity (geosphere) and infrasonic wave signals (atmosphere), served as technoscientific instruments in the creation of the vibration mappings. Each vibrascape is composed of two elements: the large-scale detail-plot and a smaller overview-plot, the latter of which serves as an appendix to the much larger and more prominent former. The dominant abstract colour field of the frequency detail draws the initial gaze and intentionally blurs the line between artistic and technical image.⁷ Its polychromous abstraction detaches the vibrational landscape from its technoscientific context and provides space for an initial encounter with the otherwise invisible environmental trace.⁸ The overview-plot firmly situates the isolated event within an extensive dual mapping that translates vibrations — seismic or infrasonic — into a spectrogram (in Hz) and an oscillogram of either air pressure (in Pa) or velocity (in m/s), neatly framed by numerical scales (y-axis) and a time scale (x-axis). Each two-component vibrascape elicits aesthetic experience and scientific comprehension.

The infrasonic vibrations produced at noon by the bells of the St. Bonifatius church in Giessen, Germany, are imprinted in vibrascape CBIVGG20220512 [Fig.1-2]. Bright yellow zones cluster cloudlike on the lower part of the flattened pictorial ground, raised amid the swaths of dark and lighter hues of violet and orange tones that fuzzily blend into each other [Fig. 1]. These luminous hazes signal the recorded intensity peaks of the church bells’ infrasonic vibrations as they emanate from a seventy-meter-high bell tower of the three-aisled neogothic basilica (1902-1905), spreading throughout the exterior and interior spaces of the surrounding residential district whose buildings resonate sympathetically in kind. The oscillogram recorded on the vibrascape’s plot overview [Fig. 2] reiterates this phenomenal event in the intensity of air pressure recorded. The somewhat muted orange-yellow cloud on the upper right of the frequency detail shows the echoing trace of a smaller church bell stimulated into resonance by the exuding vibrations of the larger bells. Less ritualistic if nevertheless rhythmic, vibrascape ANSVGG20220513 [Fig.3-4] shows the traces of anthropogenic noise, more concretely the seismic vibrations sensed on a vertical geophone channel during building construction work on a nineteenth-century villa. The repetitive pattern of a hammer imprinted as yellow columns with intermittent red lines [Fig.3] can be better discerned in the plot overview and the oscillogram depicting the velocity with which the vibrations travelled through the brick-and-mortar skeleton of the architecture. Vibrascape ANSVBB20220505 [Fig.5-6] collects the traces of another anthropogenic noise event, the vernissage for the exhibition Sick Architecture at CIVA in Brussels, Belgium, on May 5, 2022.⁹ The vibrascape opens a 10-minute-window into the visitors’ active or passive engagement with the interactive artwork sick world building syndrome [phonon v.1], which traces the architectural experience, that is the intensity experienced by the former electrical factory (built 1895-1901) at the Rue de l’Ermitage, positioned at the rear of one of Brussel’s oldest water reservoirs (built 1855), while it hosts the exhibition and visitors for a four-month duration. Another type of solitary visitor, a bee, is responsible for the infrasonic vibrations recorded invibrascape ABIVGG20220512 [Fig.7-8] while vibrascape NTIVGG20220516 [Fig.9-10] traces a natural phenomenon as infrasonic imprint of a thunder that accompanied a rainy summer storm.

Vibrascapes render vibration’s transmaterial and transcalar contact zones tangible. By converting its boundary-permeating properties into a design technique, these vibrational landscapes entangle artistic and technoscientific exploration as mappings of the built environment’s vibratory resonance with the un-built worlds. The transdisciplinary project emerged as an applied dimension of research undertaken in 2022 as Planetary Scholar at the Panel on Planetary Thinking of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany. It examines vibration as transmaterial Ur-element, a primordial force that shaped the Earth since before the emergence of biological life and to a degree significantly beyond the capabilities of the self-proclaimed agent of the Anthropocene. Precarious entanglements play a crucial role in discerning the universalizing agency of vibration as a planetary media that transcends epochal designations, physical boundaries, and scales. Its conceptualization thus expands on what human geography scholar Stephanie Wakefield terms the “precarity-entanglement thinking” of the Anthropocene’s “back loop,” the empowering processes that seek to equalize human agency across sociocultural or racial rifts to engender the “end of the ‘one-world world’” and reasons moreover for a radical embrace of more-than-human worlds, built or un-built.¹⁰

Operationalized within this transdisciplinary matrix, the vibrascapes project is firmly embedded in contemporary discourses that advocate for a recalibrated planetary thinking.¹¹ The “planetary,” as environmental media theorist Jennifer Gabrys stresses, crucially exceeds its definition as a figure of totalizing scale toward “being planetary as a praxis” — processes that seek to destabilize the injustices of the “human” as a mode of being that sustains exclusionary practices within its familial faction and concerning more-than-human entities.¹² Expanding the contact zone even further, inhuman geography scholar Kathryn Yusoff aptly describes this planetary thought as a “new sensibility” to geologic life.¹³

Planetary Sensorship

“Form is only a snapshot view of a transition,” the French philosopher of time Henri Bergson once considered in Creative Evolution (1907).¹⁴ His avowal fittingly frames the vibrascapes, which isolate but a few vibrating or vibration-inducing environmental sources and their observable traces amidst an ever-changing vibrational landscape. Advanced sensors for analysing the planetary environment coupled with increasing public accessibility have in recent years spawned a multitude of citizen science projects that empower communities around the globe to enact conscious sociocultural change. These range from Raspberry Shake’s planetary earthquake observation network, localized air pollution monitoring initiatives such as Citizen Sense that enable communities to detect toxic particles or novel viruses, to Planetary Praxis, a research group at the University of Cambridge, led by Gabrys, whose practice-based research approach entwines social life, technology, and the planetary as potent revolutionary catalyst.¹⁵ This shift in perspective from anthropogenic to planetary agency echoes what the American architect and system builder R. Buckminster Fuller advocated for in the 1960s as revolutionary move from the egosocial to the geosocial.¹⁶ Initiating applied change where the hollow rhetoric of politicians readily collapsed, the “[d]esign science’s geosocial revolution,” Fuller envisaged, “is indeed capable of supplanting the political initiative and may indeed eliminate the seemingly irremediable world impasses.”¹⁷ It may not come as a surprise to learn that Fuller entertained the conceptual breakdown of the human into frequencies that “could be scanningly unravelled and transmitted” to link physical entities beyond their apparent ability to communicate, an emancipatory form of geosocial sensorics.¹⁸

Vibration’s boundary permeating properties are just one way in which the contact zones between the built and un-built worlds may be traced, understood, and utilized to kickstart the design sciences’ geosocial revolution. Cultural theorist Mary Louise Pratt coined the concept of the “contact zone” in the 1990s as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.”¹⁹ Revisiting her classic “Arts of the Contact Zone” (1991) in the recently published “Mutations of the Contact Zone” (2022), her expanded planetary thinking signals a crucial move towards the geosocial, transitioning attention from a human to more-than-human worlds.²⁰ That the design sciences were early on interested in providing contact zones between the human and more-than-human worlds, considering especially the transmaterial agency of the planetary media vibration, is illustrated by the prominent German art and architectural theorist Adolf Behne, who advocated for an all-encompassing “worldview of tremendous mobility and agility, a cosmos that is glorious in its abundance, an infinite, in its numerous functions vibrating world.”²¹ Writing around 1914, Behne sublimated the transgressive atrocities of modern warfare to take recourse with the inhumanity of humanity by tracing the uncanny thresholds between the human and non-human. Yusoff fittingly notes that performativity is crucially embedded in the contact zone, which critically juxtaposes subjectivity and material relation as asymmetries of inhuman nature, ideally coalescing into a recalibrated geologic realism.²²

The recent planetary turn in thinking (and acting) sustains hope that faced with increasingly noticeable consequences of environmental entropy, coupled with the onset of disillusion about the limitations of virtual reality, the design sciences will unswervingly adjust the meaning of virtual world-making to strike a forgotten symbiosis between the built and un-built worlds. As Gabrys fittingly notes: “[t]he world of sensors is one of amplified connections.”²³ Instead of virtual world-making ventures such as the metaverse, which are riddled with sentimental escapism and resource-guzzling ingenuousness, it will be paramount to focus on the un-built worlds already contiguous with ours. Captured by advanced technical sensors and amplifiable e.g., by abstract imprints of our resonance with these worlds, the tardy geosocial revolution fosters a planetary consciousness operated by actionable confidence, not anaesthetic doom.

Bio

Clemens Finkelstein is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University, where his dissertation “Architectures of Vibration: Environmental Control, Seismic Technology, and the Frequency of Life” renders modern architecture’s complex relationship with the phenomenotechnique of vibration. His work engages the built environment at the junction of art and architectural history with the history of science and technology and is supported by the History of Science Society and the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities, among others. He is a Fulbright Scholar (Harvard University, 2015-2017) and Planetary Scholar at the Panel on Planetary Thinking of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen.

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