The Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles - a postmodern architectural monument to disorientation.
1. Well, so here I am, in the Bonaventure Hotel downtown Los Angeles.
2. Driven by it a zillion times. A particularly kinetic and chaotic stretch of the 10 freeway (we just say numbers here, forget the "I") wraps around the north-ish side of DTLA, and the Bonaventure is this curvilinear structure that you can't help but wonder about amonst the stalks of tall boxes adjacent to it.
3. (Why am I here staying in a hotel 12 miles from my house? The annual AIGA conference is hosted here in LA this year, and I'm running a workshop on imagining possible futures of creative practice. It's going to be a big room 200+ people — and I'm not sure how to run a workshop with that many people. So I thought I'd try and run a workshop with that many people.)
4. The other reason I'm here is that my friend Rick Giffith has his pop-up book shop Shop at Matter here as part of the conference. And I'll be doing a book signing Saturday morning. And Rick's here. So...that's fun. Plus we'll both be joining Office Hours sitting in the same room on Friday! (More on that below.)
5. Anyway..
6. I read about it — the Bonaventure — before I had ever seen it in Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism back at UCSC in some graduate seminar while I was, you know — in grad school.
7. I think it would've been 'Approaches to History of Consciousness' when you might find yourself reading Jameson, Foucault, pretending you comprehended the WTF of Deleuze & Guattari, and likely the iconic works of our esteemed (truly, not being snarky) professors like Hayden White, Donna Harawa, Angela Y. Davis, James Clifford, Teresa de Lauretis.
8. (Anna Tsing was in residence at the time, too. Bonus points there, for sure.)
9. Coming from engineering, I had never really heard of Fredric Jameson and certainly never thought of a building as a metaphor for much of anything.
10. (Well, maybe the Statue of Liberty, I suppose.)
11. Flipping through a PDF of the Jameson, some of his highlights on the Bonaventure certainly feel poignant in their distance from now to then, in 1989 or so.
12. 36 years later, the Bonaventure is distinct in its retro sensibilities. Feels like an indoor mall, and not necessarily in a bad way. By that I mean that I found myself laughing out loud with the building. It's charming, because it's so of its time.
13. I got lost trying to find the elevator to my floor, which is designated by the color red. So you have to circulate around the lobby looking for the elevators of the correct color.
14. And then I recalled that Jameson saw the building as a space where individuals lose their bearings — spatially, psychologically, even existentially.
15. He alluded to the building's lack of a center for the subject. It instead produces a kind of “systemic subjectlessness.”
16. He described the Bonaventure as a ‘labyrinthine structure’ (I couldn't find the exact quote) that disorients visitors. It has this somewhat complex layout, puzzle-like, with lots of curves and concrete spiral loops and mirrored surfaces. One will inevitably lose one's way in a fashion. What side of the circle am I on?
17. But, I have to say — I find some kind of comfort in the disorientation, so maybe I'm not actually disoriented, but enjoying the moment of feeling like I'm wandering without a map.
18. It made me wonder: what are the Bonaventures of today? What buildings, spaces, or technologies evoke similar feelings of disorientation, loss of self, or systemic subjectlessness in our contemporary world?
19. Are our Bonaventures now the intangible architectures of data and algorithms that shape our perceptions and experiences? AI? Wearable "Friends"?
20. As AI architects the interactions and experiences we have (whether we know it or not), is our subjectivity going through another kind of ontological and existential transformation?
21. Anyway. I told you that to remind you that tomorrow at 0900 PST (UTC-7) is my weekly Office Hours The Side Projects Edition.
22. We have two side project shares lined up: I'll quote:
23. SLOT 1: ➱ Practical Futures: Strategic Imagination with Business Sci-Fi with Pawel Halicki
24. SLOT 2: ➱ Meshtastic Collab Project with Dre Labre”
25. RSVP To Attend: https://luma.com/lj34du1x