INDUSTRUCTO journal

a mmesic survey of the in between
pursuing a method to transcribe the immaterial into a physical chart
that could be a matrix for its own virtualization.



puncture: information in two potential states. either by absence or location of the holes.

DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLE OF MUTILATE
damage to punched cards may make them unreadable. in the 1950s, when they became widespread, manufacturers printed a warning on cards to prevent office workers from stapling, folding…

(also the title of a 1970s movie in which four middle-class ladies create a fictitious woman and submit her profile to a computer dating service to amuse themselves with the potential suitors’ letters)

a motto for the Free Speech Movement, which upon recognising the United States had become an organisational society,
used punch cards as a metaphor to its commoditization, a symbol of the "system" and alienation.

in striving for efficiency, timekeeping also got standardised.
whereas before time was local, and its perception dictated by shadows, burning candles, or the bells of a church.
natural rhythms and seasons sufficed.
with the railway weaving cities and countries
synchronized and standard time was essential.

from places of (re)production to spaces turned into an unreproducible
and speculative commodity themselves, in which the remnants are of a semiotic nature.

is it through symbols that we must not mutilate whilst freely operating on the remaining surface? symbols have a dual existence: part reality and part mental image.
these voids are like the holes on the punch card that weaves the city around relatable signs.
the tabulated information of the masterplans, is a schematic vocabulary of urbanisation.

   

in a similar way, we have created a common diagramatic language with machines, to perform actions and create patterns.
in the textile industry, we rely on a punch card to mediate that transcription and produce facts.

if manipulated, the punch cards can render a faulty depiction

— of a society that has seen the punch card as the intermediary to the corporate system, hence a symbol of oversimplification, dehumanization and depersonalization. the individual is a number, encoded in a binary set —

< 1968, MTI-FOTO-856411 / 1963,MTI-FOTO-844827

now that the information is indeed ellusive,
what do the physical vestiges
still tell us of the workers
whose hands operated progress?

as much as ancient ruins, industrial sites are milestones in the history of humanity, marking our dual capability of destruction and creation that engenders both nuisances and progress. our power over matter allows us to extract, transform, erect and exhaust.
because such structures belong to a recent past, only pioneer species have come to inhabit these sites.
time hasn’t still: when it sediments, it will l be over uncharacterized traces that our actions of pillage and neglect leave. we are being agents in this exploitation, under an act of voluntary anthropic ruination.

through historical documents such as cartography, illustration and photography, former industrial sites were identified in the district III and a flexible route outlined to allow the dérive. the photographic records were then developed, processed, cropped, photocopied and it’s fragments manipulated and assembled in a widespread sheet. whilst the pattern chart is an allusion to the weaving drafts, and so to a systematised preceding planning, it also resembles the method of archaeological surveys that record what is found. if exploring the mutilated, obsolete, derelict, demolished factories, and calling to action how it endures (in the memory, records, archives or ruins) this duality of possible readings is fundamental.

totems in a contextual

vacuum.