Expanded Environments and the Objects Between Them
The work of the Expanded Environment has tended to focus on the domestic relationships between human and non-human animals — the worlds they make and inhabit and the implication of such on our worlds. And somewhat tangentially on the objects that mediate those relationships. But, in nearly every respect the subjects and their relationships have been the primary focus. But what of the objects themselves? How do objects mediate human/animal interactions? What is their role in creating and defining our worlds? How do they trace the bounds of subjective experience? And then by extension, can they reach into and across subjective experience to create interworlding interfaces – bridges – between human and non-human subjectivities?
However, this topic is not entirely new to The Expanded Environment. In 2015 the Expanded Environment published a short series on object oriented ontology, and implications to architectural theory and the built environment. And, with the passage of time, thoughts have progressed. Some of which will be revisited, and some of which will be new material. But, like many discursive exercises on the Expanded Environment, we begin with Jacob Von Uexkull (J.V.U.).
Writing almost a century ago JVU theorized that organisms experience life through species-specific and spatio-temporal, highly subjective terms. In the introduction to “A Foray in the worlds of Animals and Humans” he describes the percepto-environment (a very Uexkulian phrase) of a simple woodland Tick. The word for these many discrete worlds is umwelten.
Each umwelt is created by an individual organism and each exists within its own life-world. JVU describes it as if there is a metaphysical soap bubble drawn around each organism. Within each soap bubble are all of the things, objects, sensations and other organisms that are present to the specific being of that umwelt, nothing more, nothing less. Your umwelt is different from mine and very different from that of another species.
“We begin our stroll on a sunny day before a flowering meadow in which insects buzz and butterflies flutter, and we make a bubble around each of the animals living in the meadow. The bubble represents each animal’s environment and contains all the features accessible to the subject. As soon as we enter into one bubble, the previous surroundings of the subject are completely configured. Many qualities of the colorful meadow vanish completely, others lose their coherence with one another and new connections are created. A new world arises in each bubble.”
The tick, by example, hanging upside down on a long blade of blowing grass – waiting for its next meal, does not have sense organs to perceive many of the diverse and rich qualities of the woodland meadow.
“…the whole rich world surrounding the tick is constricted and transformed into an impoverished structure that, most importantly of all, consists of only three features…the detection of butyric acid from a mammal’s skin, the contact with hair from the animals hide, and the warmth from the first bare patch of skin to initiate its bite.”
But if we leave the umwelt of the tick and enter the umwelt of another animal, a deer for example, the senses objects within that world would reconfigure. Now we can feel the warmth of the sun, the sounds of the birds, the smell of the grass, the feel of the grass on our fur. Andy perhaps most importantly for our analogy, we don’t feel the bite of the tick.
Generally speaking the umwelten of the tick and deer are vastly different but some elements are common and present to both. The grass for example. The long blade of grass for the tick is a ledge from which it will drop onto our skin, but to the deer (or a human), it may be a soothing physical sensation, a passing irritation, or food. To a silk-worm the same blade of grass might be food, shelter or a structure. One might say that the grass, is present to the tick, deer, and silkworm, albeit in different measures and to different ends. It transcends the boundary of the soap-bubbles of subjectivity.
“Figuratively speaking, every animal subject attacks its objects in a pincer movement – with one perceptive and one effective arm. With the first, it imparts each object a perception mark, and with the second an effect mark… All animal subjects, from the simplest to the most complex, are inserted into their environments to the same degree of perfection. The simple animal has a simple environment; the multiform animals has an environment just as richly articulated as it is.[3]”
Martin Heidegger, a contemporary of Uexkull’s, theorized similar ideas about objects and how they are perceived. To use a Heideggerian term, objects within umwelt are only “at hand” through subjective perceptions. And like Uexkull, objects present themselves to the Heideggerian DaSein within a world and through relationships:
“Things at hand are encountered within the world. The being of these beings, handiness, is thus ontologically related to the world and to worldliness. World is always already “there” in all things at hand….world is that in terms of which things at hand are at hand for us.”
Might we interchange Uexkull’s “pincer” with Heideggar’s “hand?”
But, Heidegger continues that their qualities, i.e the “hammering of the hammer” are not specific to the object itself. They have meaning only when they are “relevant to something else.” For example a termite might use a hammer as a house, something to burrow in, or a child as a door-stop – something heavy to arrest other motion. Back to Uexkull, the grass to the tick is structure, to the deer is food.
Though perhaps difficult to draw an exact line (though we know that Heidegger, knew of and was influenced by Uexkull’s work) we can certainly sense some of the same ideas at work in Uexkull’s umwelt. The grass is not a thing-at-hand to the tick as it is to the silk-worm. The rock is perhaps not handy to the tree at all, but it is perhaps very present to the ant. Additionally, both Heidegger and Uexkull start to suggest that objects may be present to two or more actors simultaneously and thereby “handy” in multiple worlds. This would be a different kind of interworlding of objects.
SPIDER WEB
The most clear example of this interworld-object bridge is a spider web. Having left the grassy field, Uexkull spends a few pages later in the book ruminating on the trans-worlding qualities of the spider web. The spider web, as we will all likely agree, is a near-perfectly engineered device for capturing flies. The spider, in order to capture its meal, creates an object that is so perfectly tailored to its prey, that it – in form and structure – manifests externally the inner-world of the fly. The threads are invisible to the fly’s vision, the elasticity of some strands ensure the easy ensnarement of the prey and its construction in key locations increases the odds of collision. All of these elements combine to form an object that is simultaneously spider-like and fly-like. A trans-umwelt-ing object. One single object that is simultaneously present in two umwelt that unites these two actors together in, not just a semiotic and dance, but also in space and time.
For Heidegger and Uexkull it is an object’s total subjectivity, its semiotic opaqueness – its refusal to be overly determined – that allows it to a bridge-between umwelts. It is precisely because, as Heidegger, and then later Harman, Morton and others claim, that objects recede from reality that they can exist – i.e. are present between inner-worlds. Objects, existing betwixt umwelts, have a unique status as worlding-vagabonds. Pulled in and out of various realities they are only sometimes perceived but always relational.
And so, by extension, what would be the implication for architecture? Literally built structures, things that have a physical presence? Could we reconsider our built objects as inter-worlding objects? And if so, what would that look like?
The Character of Interworlding Objects
If one were to resurvey the projects on the Expanded Environment with a lens towards interworlding projects one might come to a new taxonomy. Rather than Synathropic Habitats, Soft Structures and Post-Animal Projects, we might see a series of characteristics that reframe our built environment.
We might see an openness of use and lack of over-prescriptive qualities in the projects, where space is left for the unexpected or the unplanned. Such as in Daniel Metcalf’s Hannafore Tidal pool, where a concrete structure with pockets for receding pools of water becomes a walkway at low tide and a supportive habitat for creates at low tide. Or the Garden building for Humans and Butterflies, that is both a work space for seamstresses as well as home to local flora and migratory butterflies.
Maybe most intimately, we might just find ourselves transported via art or technology into another umwelt to experience for ourselves other subjective worlds.
We might also see a sense of “compromise” to use a term from Amy Haig. Where, it can cut both ways: as a sharing, between bird and human, or racoon and human, or as an undermining of the object as in:
The compromised spoon and urban appendages, create an opportunity for other life to find utility in otherwise human objects. Each are compromises and thus are re-openings of a potential for cross-species Use.
Intermediate Artefact 02 shows an artful un-spooning of the spoon. The object is no longer, classically a spoon. It’s somewhat deformed, or maybe unformed to allow for other potential users and in this case, a bird. And similarly Sarah Gunawan’s appendages reflect an “un-forming” or compromising of the Traditional home. Here’s a situation where we’re actually proposing to live with “pests” better known as synanthropes. And this unwinding, or opening of the literal architectural envelope forces, in my opinion, an opening into the practice and theory of Architecture more broadly.
Perhaps, in a world of simultaneously overlapping umwelts, it may be more accurate to view that all or most things, beings, spaces, are present in more than one umwelt and that thereby, semiotically, functionally, ontologically multiples. They reside in a place of collage, or hybridity. A human space is present in non-human worlds, just as to lean on Donna Harraway’s work, non-humans compose and collaborate in the bodies and lives of humans. We are already multiple
And in the context of the rise architecture’s complicit role in a pervasive kind of speciesism this “opening up” of the built environment, this revealing of the paucity if anthropocentrism should enable architecture to move beyond merely creating structures for the animals that pay for them and to give itself to others who may have another sense of worldliness.
That to see the world through the lens of the interworlding object is to recognize and appreciate that each object is already a hybrid. There are indeed no singularities and hopefully that provides a sense of wonder and excitement, and call for further exploration in our built environment.
A version of this post was delivered as a lecture at Rochester University, 5/10/2024.
