"Rappers" on the roof of the electrostatic precipitator knock the accumulated dust free, letting it fall into the storage hopper. Each rapper is the size and shape of a baseball bat. Inside is an electromagnet that pulls a steel plunger upward, then allows it to fall again, producing a sharp knock. The rappers are energized at seemingly random intervals, producing a haunting, syncopated music. (The rhythm seemed more modern jazz than rap.)
Today population forecasts are based on extensive and reliable data. However, no such demographic base exists for the world's growing population of machines and devices. Now may be the time to take machine demography seriously and enter into real discussions about machine population control.
The couple of years in question here saw one of the largest bureaucracies anywhere undergo a convulsion in which it tried to reconceive itself as a non- or even anti-bureaucracy, which at first might sound like nothing more than an amusing bit of bureaucratic folly. In fact, it was frightening; it was a little like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human.
In 1964, the historian Bernard Rudofsky curated a show at MoMA called Architecture Without Architects, celebrating the formal qualities of a range of traditional building practices drawn from around the world.
Setting aside the endlessly troubled implications of the Western gaze on “primitive” cultures, the show had the very constructive impacts of encouraging formal diversity at a time when mainstream architecture had grown desperately, myopically monochromatic and of suggesting that “non-architects” were capable not only of making good judgments about their environments but of actually taking the lead in creating them.