ADS4: Plots, Props & Paranoia – How Architecture Stages Conspiracy
Grace Schofield
Grace Schofield is a designer from London whose interests lie at the intersection of art and design, digital technology and economics. She has used her two years at the RCA to make work that responds to these themes, with a particular focus on the social and spatial significance of data, and the notion of information as an asset. Her projects have explored these ideas through infrastructural and material investigations, as well as more speculative, theoretical enquiries that seek to expand her own definitions of architectural practice.
Prior to her time at the RCA, Grace worked in architectural practice in London. She studied architecture at the Glasgow School of Art (2014-2017), where she was nominated for the RIBA Bronze Medal, as well being the recipient of the Glasgow Institute of Architects Student Award and the Holmes Miller Award for her final year project. Her first year work at the RCA won a RIBA West London Student Award.
Degree Details
School of Architecture
ADS4: Plots, Props & Paranoia – How Architecture Stages Conspiracy
Machines of Loving Grace seeks to examine the ethical implications of ownership by exploring the paradoxes and complexities of the intellectual property system. It questions the role of emergent technologies and language in the production of new ideas, and the consequences of creative collaboration between humans and machines.
Ownership of intangible property, such as intellectual property, is an increasingly dominant form of value creation. This is significant because it behaves in a different way to its tangible predecessors of land, natural resources, or machinery: it is more abstract and not bound by scarcity, yet still capable of generating inequalities. The project uses the example of intellectual property to explore the subjective and shifting boundaries of both what may be legally owned, and who (or what) may own it.
Through developing speculative methodologies of human and machine collaboration, the project seeks to understand the consequences of considering human and machine imagination as not necessarily distinct from each other. Using machine learning text and image generation tools, alongside human interpretation, a catalogue of texts, images and props is established. The props are intended to both embrace and reveal the tension between human and machine in the design process, as well as the agency of text and the consequences of translation.
The project imagines that the products of this speculative design methodology may be cared for by the Intellectual Property Trust - a new organisation that acts as a steward for future objects, such as non-existent inventions, non-existent artistic works, and non-existent designs.
Bodies of knowledge or systems of abstract legislation are often understood as landscapes; rather than physical places, they are landscapes of information. The project explores how the fantastical landscape can act as a repository, as well as a symbolic representation of the Trust. It takes ekphrastic texts as a starting point from which to materialise props and landscapes. In this way, the project is able to use architectural criticism as a legitimate precedent, alongside the usual visual and material sources.
The use of animation, filmic tropes and theatrical techniques is intended to reference the project’s premise of ‘the properties and props of property’, whilst exploring the idea of stagings, plots or scenarios as fundamentally spatial constructions. It alludes to the notion of world building through prototypes and surrealist representation, as well as the idea of vistas, fakery and perspective tricks in landscape architecture as emblematic of cultures of claiming and ownership. Its aesthetic language is intended to evoke a sense of endless unknowns, or a spatial quality that is imbued with potential. The project exists and is realised through its representation, which is fundamentally subjective, and indicative of just one version of an intellectual property landscape.
The Properties and Props of Property
The Boundaries of Legality
A Patent Illustration for a Non-Existent Invention
A Patent Illustration for a Non-Existent Invention
Patent Models of Non-Existent Inventions
Patent Model of Non-Existent Inventions
Text-to-Image Generation
Text-to-Image-to-Object Generation
This scenario prompts us to ask: what are the ethical implications of ownership; how does human and machine imagination inform the production of new ideas; and, just as dominant forms of property rights have shaped our physical world throughout history, what are the spatial manifestations of intellectual property?
Ultimately, the project can be understood through the multiple meanings of the term property; its motivation lies in the notion of property as something that can be owned; its methodology is rooted in the idea of properties as attributes that can be communicated and interpreted; and its medium is props, which can be composed to create fantastical and allegorical stagings or landscapes.
Intellectual Property Trust Organogram
Asset Identification Strategy
Asset Classification Strategy
Asset Classification Strategy
"The Intellectual Property Trust is a charitable organisation that acts as a steward for future creations, such as non-existent inventions, non-existent literary and artistic works, and non-existent designs. As both Settlors and Trustees, we produce and care for potential ideas so research, imagination and creative content can thrive for generations to come. Through generating, collecting and collating these items, the Intellectual Property Trust aims to mitigate the impact of corporate ideas hoarding, crises of imagination, and the blurring of the public domain, for the benefit of everyone and everything.”
The work of the Intellectual Property Trust may be categorised or understood using tools like the Johari Window. The Johari window is typically used to compare self knowledge and collective knowledge, in order to identify unknowns, blind spots, or things `that may be hidden. As well as this, the Trust might use tools such as Bruce Sterling’s diagram of conventional and anti conventional objects - which categorises objects as buildable, desirable, profitable, or some combination of the three - in order to categorise and ultimately distribute its assets to beneficiaries.
Volume One - Seed Texts
Volume Two - Bot Texts
Volume Three - Images
Volume Four - Props
A Sample of Props
The assets of the Intellectual Property Trust are collated in a catalogue. The catalogue currently has a total of four volumes: the first is the seed texts, chosen from existing literature; the second is the bot texts, which are AI generated from the seed texts; the third is the AI generated images that correspond to each text; And the fourth is the props, or the objects that are designed from the images and texts. Each of the four volumes of the catalogue is arguably a design for the intellectual property trust landscape in its own right.
The props perhaps represent best the human-machine collaborative ideas generation process. They embody the notion of translation from language to design, and the understanding of properties and attributes from textual or visual sources.
Plan Diagram of Prop Stagings
Plan Diagram of Prop Stagings - Garden of Perspective
Plan Diagram of Prop Stagings - Buildings Within Buildings
Plan Diagram of Prop Stagings - Superstudio & Junkspace
Specific methods of staging can be derived through a reading and understanding of the text sources of the landscape. For instance, text referring to ‘anamorphosis’, ‘forced perspective’ and ‘morphing’, results in specific objects, which are staged and animated in such a way as to refer directly to these themes.
Closeup - Buildings Within Buildings
Closeup - Buildings Within Buildings
Closeup - The Imagery of the Interior
Establishing Shot
Its aesthetic language is intended to evoke a sense of endless unknowns, or a spatial quality that is imbued with potential - whilst also referencing theatrical imagery, and reminding us of the role of the prop in this project.
The work is intended to speak about a broad range of issues that have a significant impact on contemporary cultures and societies, from economics and property rights, to technology and the virtual, to language and imagination. The project exists and is realised through its representation, which is fundamentally subjective, and indicative of just one version of an intellectual property landscape.