Jingqi Kay Liu

Translated/transcribed from “Vita, Educazione, Cerimonia, Amore, Morte: cinque storie del Superstudio, 2 [Educazione]” by Superstudio; Originally published in “Casabella”, N.368-369, 1972

Education, Or the Public Image of Science and Liberty

A project for a universal system of information exchange. Imagine five continental complexes, each composed of a central computer, a feedback computer, relative auxiliary memory-banks and a concentrator. These complexes collect all possible information. They are connected together by a sixth complex, situated on the Moon, equipped with receiving and transmitting apparatus. Four orbiting relay stations cover the whole planet with their areas of transmission.

In this way, every point on the earth’s surface is connected up to the network of computers.

By means of a miniaturized terminal, each single individual can connect up to the network described above, and thus obtains access to all the world’s information.

The hypothesized “machine” receives all enquiries and sends answers. If the answer does not satisfy the enquirer, he can refuse it: the machine from thenceforth will bear his refusal (and the proposed alternative) in mind, and will transmit it together with the information supplied by others. In this way, the machine supplies data for decision-making without influencing the decisions themselves: everyone is connected to everyone else in a form of expanded democracy in which education as a continuous process is consistent with life itself.

EDUCATION: a didactic example. International Competition for the Reorganization of Florence University.
Motto: The Invention of Printing Has Rendered the University Useless.

This quotation (from memory) from Bertrand Russell synthesizes one of the basic precepts of our work. The others can be synthesized as follows:
a) The impossibility of an “overall re-organization” of the university of Florence, to be considered within the integrational relationship to the city and the territory and within its internal organization and in particular the impossibility of any overall re-organization without a previous re-consideration of the relationships governing the life of man, with his intellectual capacities, of the relationships governing man’s life in society and those governing man’s life on the planet.
b) The uselessness of the competition as an institution, as a pseudo-confrontation between different cultural positions, which is really the verification of the connections between those in power and their fields of influence.
c) The ever more obvious uselessness (see the student movement, fires at the universities of Yale and Florence), of the University as a closed place for the transmission of the formal structures of society through “knowledge”.
d) The necessity for the formation of an alternative model for life on the planet through the analysis of all components.

In this perspective, the university is transformed into a transmission process for universal ideas, learning becomes a continuous process and is, declaredly, identified with life.

As we are perfectly aware that the rigid alchemies of power governing this competition have already designated the winner of the first, sec-and and third prizes, and aware of the fact that the minor prizes and the expense refunds will also go as rewards to “constituted values” with their agreed alliances, it seems useless to us to spend time and money on presenting our work in “good shape”.

Those few drawings we have presented* simply constitute some example of a text entitled “Education, or science and liberty”, at the disposal of all those interested at our office.

Florence,
6.15.1971

*Drawings presented:
4 small sheets (10 x 10′) of silk-screened plastic laminate, with a small photo; a fifth sheet had a printed circuit on it; all the sheets carried the inscription “Superstudio” in obvious contrast with the rules of anonymity governing the competition.

Education, Or the Transmissibility of Experience

A whole life (project for a film).
A whole life spent filming a whole life.
A whole life spent in front of the camera.
A whole life spent watching a whole life on a screen.
A human being is the subject of the film, from the moment of his birth to the moment of his death.

The film shows a human being in every moment of his life.
The time in the film is real natural time.

The experiences recorded in the film happen in their own real time: the representation has the same time as the action, but naturally the action, being subject to representation, is not entirely real.
(Somewhat similar to the principle of indeterminacy in science).

The project of the film is composed not only of the project for the film itself, but all its economic, legal, moral, technical, scientific aspects, as well as all the projects for the use of the material elaborated for the film.

For example,
a) All the material goes into one single film.
The same procedures which went into choosing the “actor” are used for choosing the “spectator”: a human being destined to spend his life in front of the representation of the life of the “actor”. (Design of the screens and portable, miniaturized, semi-invisible projector complex, helmets for simultaneous synchronic experiencing of the film and another – perhaps impossible – reality…).
b) All the material goes into one single film.
A group of spectators, selected so as to form a study-team, watches the film with the same methods one would use in watching a scientific experiment.
(Design for the theater-laboratory, the graphics of the innumerable reports, the congresses, conferences, intrigues, journeys, prize-givings…).
c) All the material is divided to make several films.
For example: Birth, Education, Love, Ceremony, Death… Time is no longer natural time. Experiences are grouped together to form homogeneous groups. The dissection and recomposition of the material into various forms can also give birth to films with adventurous comic, documentary, pathetic, heroic, political subjects…
(Design for a cinematographic industry to handle this material).
d) Several films can be made according to chronology.
For example: the first minute of every year, the first day of every spring, the monthly cycle (if the actor-subject is a woman), the 15th of April of every even year…

Education, Or the Equivalent Information

Lecture: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

I have been invited here to speak on the theoretical work and professional experiences of Superstudio, the group of architects in which I am a partner, and first I would like to thank the organizers of this series of lectures for their invitation. I have always thought of a public lecture as a marvelous opportunity for putting order into my ideas on our work, to render it transmittable as information. I have already tried this same operation on other occasions (lectures, anthological or complete publications), and lately it has taken on a recurrent rhythm, that is, once every six months, we try to take an inventory of our ideas, just as big companies take inventories of their stock. These inventories are a strong springboard for future work, and from the structure of preceding ideas (together with present stimuli) ideas generating new work are born.

During the past year, however, despite a complete absence of any finance for this kind of research, I have been spending my time studying the architectural works and the personality of an architect that, although not well-known, I consider essential to the understanding of our ideas and generally to the understanding of the history of ideas in architecture during the past fifty years, that is, from 1920 until today. I would therefore like to dedicate this lecture to the works of Amerigo Baccheschi (whom I will call AB), architect and theoretician. (Murmur of surprise). I would ask you therefore to consider all that I say and the illustrations that you will see in the slides as an explanation of our ideas and of our work in the so-called field of the avant-garde…”

(From the notes for the lecture):
AB was born in a bourgeois Middle-European (Milanese) family eighty years ago… A late vocation for architecture.. due to the desire to show off and conquer the love of a young school fellow (high school) by going to paint landscapes under her windows…
His architectural education was at various schools…
Endeavored to enter the Bauhaus in…, but his admission was rejected by Gropius himself, offended by some of his appraisals on the architecture of the Bauhaus buildings (he had said: “In thirty years, all this will be indigestible” or – sources disagree – “In thirty years, all the plasterwork will be a sickening crust”).
An unfortunate homosexual love for a painter…
Experiences in professional studios (Milan, Vienna, Paris…).
A meeting with Le Corbusier who copies one of the designs of his youth…
Participation in international competitions… He wins one through a case of mistaken identity (he had called his entry “Ars Gratia Artis” as also had the winner)…
Publication of historical-theoretical articles…
He marries the daughter of a famous engineer…
He goes to war and produces a sketchbook of drawings of extraordinary beauty, then completely destroyed by the damp trenches…
The post-war works…
He enters the University of Rome through family connections…
He leaves (unofficially) to work on the restructuring of the university…
His greatest works… 1949-62 in Africa…
The fundamental essay by AB, never published through lack of faith on the part of various editors (it had been proposed to Editions d’Architecture, Phaidon, Centro Di, Studio Vista – 1968)… remains in the form of a Xerox copy… I would like to quote a few pages… (12-48-187… 305?).
The great work… (sketches – first model – re-elaboration – working drawings – photos on the site – the completely new technical procedures – photo of the finished work)…
Quote from a letter:
“This work is my self-portrait” or “My self-portrait is this work” (or perhaps the cyclic form?)…
AB dies in 1966 (June 27) falling (suicide? Do not mention) off a scaffolding just before the official opening of the great work… (he had climbed up in order to erase the following spray-painted slogan: “Architecture is for the bosses”…).
List of slides (45 minutes altogether)
“The prime reason for this dissertation is the intimate conviction of the substantial equivalence of various experiences within a homogeneous culture such as the one in which we find ourselves. In this sense, AB’s work constitutes a scientific testimonial to our cultural bases, constitutes our background and the direct generatrix (cause-effect or action-reaction) of our experiences.
Architecture fascinates and attracts us like Family, Church, History. A kind of morbid attraction which can only be destroyed through an asystematic (but not a-logical) action.
Our action on architecture, the respectful “taking to pieces” which we have been able to effect and the loving reconstruction of the same which we attempt through morphoses, are part of this therapy for new equilibrium… AB has already dreamed all our dreams. Our “heavy” architecture is only the daytime re-creation of these ghosts.
Our actions are logical efforts at substituting the dream with total reality.
Sentimental education, continuous education, sexual education, political education… and also the atrocities of education, and the well-educated child and “it’s time to forget all this stuff about good education” are all equivalent parts of this architectural education which is facing us today, dissected by delicate or rudimentary instruments.
AB’s work, with all its contemporary derivations, the political tensions and existing contradictions, form a homogeneous body to be operated on. It is from this recognition of the equivalence of information (and of their irrelevance while they are still contained within disciplines) that a new action arises – technical perhaps, but certainly not more usable. Our present architecture is only the search for a different state which might finally do without architecture.
That’s all. Thank you”

[A 35mm film, in color, with sound, 12 minutes; designed and directed by Superstudio]

Story of the School and the Tree

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The history of schools perhaps began with a man starting to teach others in the shade of a tree. And certainly a woman sheltering her child started teaching him the names of things. Thus the story of the pedagogy is more a story of love than a story of didactic material.
Then the tree grew and grew, or perhaps its shadow grew ever larger as it grew nearer and nearer to the sky until it became such a faraway tree with an

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enormous shadow… until it became an electronic tree capable of covering ever larger areas of the planet under its cone of shadow…
Then becoming a series of electronic trees (the vertices of a tetrahedron) which completely covered the earth with their cones… (see Education.1)
The repressive structures of their vehicles of instruction (family, school, work, army, church, state) have until now characterized our society, perpetuating

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the models of the repressive society under a series of rhetorical figures and superstructures.
The widening of the field of scientific research into human behavior, in both a biological and psychological sense, has brought about the creation of sciences such as anthropology and sociology for the study of the models of cultural aggregation and social behavior.
On the other hand, the study of the

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mechanisms regulating cerebral function have brought as a consequence of creation of cross-disciplines such as bionics for the creation of servomechanisms for intellective activities. Any work on education must thus:
1) stimulate awareness of the structure of society and the educational system that perpetuates its repressive behavioral model.

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2) increase the possibilities of reception, exchange and choice of information through electronic servomechanisms (and perhaps even telepathic mechanisms in the future).
3) educate the human organism to a free expression of its vital possibilities.
In our society, there are two principal types of education: one for individuals intended for working activities, and one for individuals intended for

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intellectual activities. Each type produced alienation and division. The Communist Revolution should have brought a fusion of the two types of activity, thereby giving birth to a new type of integrated existence. The machine, finally, should have aided this process by replacing man in the mechanical activities of the conveyor belt. The Communist Revolution has failed at least in this part of its programme precisely because while it is a political revolution

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born out of dialectic antagonism towards the capitalist society, it has found itself on the opposite side of the same river.
Research to be carried out is on parallel lines:
A: new techniques for control of mind and body;
B: Potentiation of memorization capacity of the machine;
C: Techniques for the integral use of cerebral potential;

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D: Interplanetary information network;
E: Life as a permanent global form of education.
The 19th century saw the machine as an extension of the limbs. The 20th century has seen the computer as an extension of the brain. On the one hand we have seen a process of rationalization and on the other a de-conditioning in favor of new syntheses.
Hardware is now sufficient and available while software is insufficient

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and limited. We need to plan many futures.
A series of images for a film on education:
the repressive school (rites, ceremonies and techniques)
different learning methods, learning mechanisms, thinking machines (perceptron)
planetary information network, the earth as brain cortex.

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The good savage walking around with his transistor radio.
The good savage walking around with his portable TV.
David Greene finding a working refrigerator in the desert.
Cedric Price and his Pottery Thinkbelt.
Bucky Fuller and his Geoscope and Education Automation.
Illic and his Deschooling Society.

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Good – very good, but what can one say about the quality of teaching/learning? And what’s going on in all these multimedia info centers?
Teach what? Learn what?

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–

Machines and Education

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“The Story of Cybernetics” by M. Trask
The three activities of counting, measuring and reasoning are the means we examine, evaluate, understand and control the world we live in. From olden times man has collected information out the bewildering variety of phenomena around him, drawn connections about their relationships and constructed ‘ideas’ to explain them.

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The Stepped Drum Principle invented by Leibniz
Leibniz saw that the mechanical processes of calculation could be paralleled by a mechanization of thought, the reasoning machine. It was around these two concepts that he attempted to build his logical calculus.

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Truth tables for a two-valued Boolean algebra: By applying ordinary algebra to sets of classes, George Boole showed that they could be handled in the same way as algebraic symbols or numerical quantities. His Boolean algebra deals with connecting words like ‘not’, ‘and’ ‘or’, as symbols, so it can be used to analyze many forms of argument, making it a powerful tool in science and engineering.

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The binary code for numbers 1 to 9
A pulse language for the computer can be represented by two digits: one and zero. The zero means no pulse, and so no bit, the one means a pulse and so one bit. This number system gets its name from binary (Latin binarius, from bini, two together) having or consisting of two, giving a numerical system with two as base instead of ten.

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How a computer is organized. Data follows the outer path from input to output, while instructions follow the inner path. “Peripheral units” are those used for input, output and additional memory. Input and output can be at a distance from the main computer and are known as remote terminals.
Through the terminals many people can get answers to different problems from the same computer, methods known as time-sharing/multiprogramming.

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Elements of a communications system
Many human senses can be imitated by man-mande sensors, called transducers – thermostat, strain gauge, photoelectric cell, microphone – to provide feedback for automatic systems. All sensors and transducers send coded messages or signals. These coded signals take many forms such as electrical pulses, sound waves, chemical changes, light flashes, indeed any change of state which can be transmitted in some way is a signal.

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The Turing Machine
In 1936 an Englishman, A.M. Turing, devised the Turing machine – an abstract general model of all logic machines – using ideas that define the general structure, feasibility and limitations of digital computers. A Turing machine is an imaginary model, a simple machine to do complex calculations step by step. It comprises an infinitely long tape, divided into squares, a box to expose only one square at a time, and a set of

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instructions or program. Only four steps are possible, to move the tape one square to the left or right, alter the symbol in the exposed square, or stop. Any square may be blank or contain a symbol. Although not practical calculators, these devices give a theoretical measure of optimum performance, against which the performance of actual machines can be assessed.

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From “Bionics” by L. Gérardin
Diagram of a system capable of learning
1. Bodies of entrance; 2. Educable body; 3. Body of evaluation; 4. Evaluation criteria; 5. Bodies of output: A. entrance situation; B. reward; C. punishment; D.decision

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Diagram of a perceptron
S1-S16: input sensory cells;
A1-An: association cells;
D: decision-making body;
E: evaluation network;
C: transport law correction calculator;
W1-Wn: modifiable coefficients for education;
S: input stimulus.

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–

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Decision Process
1: information selection;
2: configuration recognition;
3: evaluation of possible choices;
A: external environment;
B: purpose;
C: configuration memory;
D: memory of previous results;
E: selection criteria;
F: decision.

A Ceremonial Example. A Lecture

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LECTURE: EXAMPLE OF A CEREMONY
“Dear Colleagues, good morning. I have been wondering for a long time whether to present these notes before the masters of ethnographic inquiry present at this Congress on Initiatory Rites. This is because the studies I am about to speak of are far from complete, and are therefore not as circumstantiated as I could wish. On the other hand, I believe it was my duty to contribute

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To the work of this Congress by drawing your attention to this particular Initiation Rite, which is as interesting as it is little known. The object of my studies has been the initiation rites still practiced today by the natives of Italy. As you all know, Italian Culture is of the Patrilinear type in the phase of evolution from the Upper Agricultural stage; social organization is sharply divided into “classes” which in some cases take on

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the aspect of closed castes.
As also happens in the more rigidly patrilinear type of society, the children are entrusted to the women during the first few years of life; around the fifth year, generally, begins a preparation for entrance of the child into the Initiatory Society which he will form within the succeeding year with his age-group, and in which he will remain for 15 or 20 years, unless his own ineptitude causes his expulsion

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or withdrawal from the group.
This would severely compromise his chances of reaching the highest levels of the social hierarchy. The initiatory societies (called “classes” in clear reference to the “social classes”) are entrusted to “Elders” (called “masters’ or “professors”) and meet in buildings set at a good distance from the homes of the people, probably to better stress the extremely strict taboo which forbids anyone to spend

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the night there. The enforcement of this taboo, whose significance (evidently derived from ancient and now forgotten rites) I am now studying, is delegated by the Council of Elders to the Corporation of Warriors, who intervene with much energy at each infraction.

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As in any initiatory ceremony, from the Rites of Circumcision to the investiture Rites of Secret societies, these are also divided into a preparatory phase and the final test itself, according to a precise seasonal cycle coherent with the agricultural type of this society. These annual phases are further grouped into pluriennial series, with a more important initiatory test at their termination.

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It is success in these pluriennial phases which determines the passage of the initiate from one social level to the next. ‘There are, basically, five of these levels (from that reserved from the “pariahs” [call “illiterates”] who, not having succeeded in passing any of the initiation phases are banished to the margins of the social context and in practice subjected to the exploitation of the higher “classes”).

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Not only, but the complex mechanisms of the pluriennial phase also determine the vertical division of the ethnic group assigning individuals to the various Corporations (warriors, craftsmen, musicians, etc…). I would like to specify that success in the initiation tests is but one of the elements that determine the individual’s belonging to any social class, but an inquiry in this direction would take us too far from the subject.

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The fact which radically differentiates the initiatory rites of the Cultural Cycle ( which the Italian ethnic group is a part of) from those of all other cultures, is the fact that they are not based on physical trials and pain, but on mental ability and suffering.

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We have thus explained the general characteristics of the rite. For an analysis, I will follow the lines masterfully traced by Theodor Reik in his essay on the Puberty Rite published in Imago Vol LV in 1916. Reik writes: “If we interrogate the Australians, who hold puberty rites, on their meaning, we receive the surprising answer that was once given by a native: ‘We are the ones who eat the pigs and we tell lies to our women’.

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We must not be discouraged by such a superficial answer; it is clear that this great ambition could be satisfied by a quicker and less tortuous method…” Analogously, the Italian natives justify their ceremonies as necessary for the education and preparation of the young for life in society, which is really laughable if we consider that their complex and extremely ritualized pedagogic system is based on notions which either

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have nothing to do with existential necessities (a typical example is the teaching of a couple of the tribe’s archaic dialects, now fallen into complete disuse, which however constitute the hub around which the ceremony revolves for a period varying between 3 and 13 years), or are expounded in such a ritualized fashion as to require a profound reinterpretation by the initiate before becoming usable.

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(The usage of transmitting knowledge in the form of mysteries is common also to the most primitive initiation ceremonies).
This apparently absurd ritual essentially has the purpose of creating in the candidates for initiation a constant state of awe with regard to the Elders, of fear of the danger of not succeeding in the initiation tests;

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the Elders promote and increase this state of mind with a subtle and continuous psychological pressure, consisting of veiled or explicit threats, and with a massive enunciation of ethic regulations which the young people continually see contradicted in everyday life, therefore creating in them a state of confusion, unease and profound instability.

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This atmosphere of strong emotional distortion, with its undercurrents of stress and fear, is accentuated by the passing of the years and the increasing difficulty of the tests, until it finally determines permanent changes in the psyche of the individual, changes which I believe to be the original and principal cause of the state of accentuated collective psychopathy which characterizes the cultures of this cycle and which has only rare counterparts

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outside the cycle (for example, the Culture of the Dobu in New Guinea described by Ruth Benedict in Pattern of Culture).
Thus, this long and complex ceremonial has a purpose which is essentially one of vexation of the young by their elders; once again Reik gives us the key to the interpretation of this attitude:

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“the presence of unconscious hostile impulses in the mental life of adults is well demonstrated by the refined tortues they inflict on the young. For example, among the Kani, after the circumcision rite, the men stand in two long lines and the youths must pass between them while the men strike them violently…”

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The explanation offered by comparative ethnology that these are tests of courage and endurance does not satisfy us. This may certainly be a secondary motive (like that of instruction in our case), but we prefer to take these refined acts of cruelty at their face value, that is, as cruel and hostile acts of adults towards the young…

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The adults among the Australian natives take the young ones to the monster, circumcise them, torture them and in the meantime hypocritically protect the novices in the fight against the monster”. This ambivalent attitude is also present among the Italians, where the majority of the adult members of the tribe object to the harshness of the tests and pity the young for their suffering”.

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(The fathers)… thus clarify the fact that an essential part of these feelings (hostile) derives from an unconscious fear of reprisals… which dominates the paternal generation in its relations with its young offspring.”
But, apart from the deep motivations of the unconscious, this is a precise protective mechanism which saves the holders of privilege in a particular social class from the attacks of the

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lower classes. In this, once again, the customs of the Italian natives are very close to those of the Australian aborigines described by Reik:
“The men who have for such a long time protected themselves against their sons through intimidation, now, (once initiation is over) have no objection to their glancing behind the scenes, since they now welcome them into their society… Keep our secrets to yourself: as we lied, so must

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you henceforth… In other words, if these protective measures were omitted, the young would let themselves go and abandon themselves to their feelings, in rebellion murdering their fathers; the tribe would in fact perish in the struggle between the two generations”.

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Nothing can serve as well as these words of Reik’s to end my brief excursus, a further proof, if there was any need for further proof, that ceremonies, as absurd as it may seem, constitute an irreplaceable stability factor in Cultures and therefore a factor contributing to peace and social order.
I hope I have been clear. Thank you for your attention.”

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This storyboard has been re-edited for publication.

Publication Scans

REFERENCES

Superstudio. Superstudio Opere : 1966-1978. Edited by Gabriele Mastrigli, 2016.

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