Regulatory Nonsense

2019 – Current

The specific things governing authorities choose to regulate and the methods they choose to evaluate compliance tell a (partial, but authorised) story about what we, as a society, collectively value. In architecture, regulatory compliance hurdles inscribe bare-minimum standards of good-enoughness, beyond which spatial practitioners are free to exercise design intent. But as the space between bare-minimum compliance and design intent collapses under the weight of increasing design automation and aggressive cost management, the regulation becomes an urgent site of creative provocation.

So, what might the world be like if regulations were co-written by (a glitchy AI-amalgamation of) poets, storytellers, artists, and philosophers?

In Regulatory Nonsense, I iteratively rewrite building and planning codes, standards, statutes, policies, guidelines, legislation, and regulations using glitchy natural language processing (NLP) artificial intelligence (AI) bots that have been trained with bespoke datasets of poetry, fiction, and descriptive prose. By blurring thresholds of bare-minimum compliance with ambiguous, poetic, and nonsensical language, these regulations force us into messy – but urgent – negotiations about whether our architecture is good enough, and how we know.

Video artworks of Regulatory Nonsense have been featured in A New Normal for Melbourne Design Week in 2021 (WasteNotWantBot) and the Every. Thing. Changes. 2020 Summer Exhibition for the L.A. Forum for Architecture & Urban Design (LaLaBot). You can read an interview about the project, here. LaLaBot and WasteNotWantBot videos are available to watch on Vimeo.

I gave a public lecture about Regulatory Nonsense at MPavilion for the Writing & Concepts series in 2022. A short essay about the project was also included in my guest edited issue of Architect Victoria.

I run a Regulatory Nonsense design studio in the Masters of Architecture course at RMIT University, Melbourne, which is now in its seventh iteration. An online exhibition of past student work can be found via @regnonbot on Instagram and linktr.ee.

A book chapter is forthcoming.

Socio-Spatial Exploits: A Critical Anthology of Heists, Hacks, Hijacks, and Copycats

Ongoing Research

The cross-planetary connections and flows that link cities worldwide also offer us opportunities for infiltration, resistance, and subterfuge. A heist, for example, is an attempt to instrumentalise the coordinated movement of objects, property, value, and power from one space to another. In a heist, possessions and spatial understandings are radically reconfigured, walls cease to be barriers, and topography becomes a tool.

In my research with the Melbourne Centre for Cities, I explore the ways that ‘socio-spatial exploits’ - not only heists, but also hacks, hijackings, hoaxes piracies, forgeries, and getaways - are able to make visible the invisible power relations that commodify and control our shared planet.

Think: Bernard Tschumi meets Heat, Die Hard with a formal agenda, The Thomas Crown Affair in the town square, or even Architecture Grand Tour meets Grand Theft Auto.

I also ran an intensive heist-themed travelling studio to Los Angeles with the Melbourne School of Design during the summer of 2018-19. Work from this studio was presented at the 2019 Interstices Under Construction Symposium in Auckland, titled Political Matters: Spatial Thinking of the Alternative.