Giambattista Noli's 1748 map of Rome, rendered from a bird's eye view, has long been considered one of the greatest breakthroughs in city planning as well as architectural perspective. It depicts massive black clumps of buildings shattered by the splitting threads of streets and little pockets of open space, like the lattice of white deposits in snowflake obsidian. This common ground density of human culture was given the space to be acknowledged and reorganized throughout continuous interventions in the following centuries. Architectural movements attached themselves to artistic movements and vice versa and were then completely married through Rowe and Slutsky's Transparency, an essay that put painting theory into use in multi-level architectural drawings that were drafted and applied during the wave of Modernism. New York's championing of Minimalism in the 1960s furthered Modernism's opening up and simplification of space, creating a projection of an idealized social space of productivity and sociability - a mass-producible space of factory, office and domestic life that took the experiencing individual out of the picture.

Safety, comfort, ease of use, productivity/performance, and aesthetics.

The pillars of workplace ergonomics illustrate the neutered aspects of the alienated subject. While the first four components easily compute as built towards sustained physical ability among associates, the fifth brings into play a more mental string that could be seen as an interesting vector into the larger social and commercial world. This anonymous aesthetic built from anonymous composite materials commands the market of productivity and success and while it remains neutered, allows for the projection of the individual that must assimilate. Think of corporate marketing or first-day orientation PowerPoints depicting co-workers interacting and smiling in the office and during a coffee break. Then think of the all-too-projectable James Bond movies in which he and his villains share the same polyester sheens of material, but undeniable socio-economic success as essentially layering in which their key individualization lies tucked within. Because whether they're the good guys or the bad guys, they're successful. You don't need to know much more. Think of Berlin’s current monoculture: all-encompassing cultural assimilation of the sterility of the office, the ambiguity of sunglasses at night, the long coats of black leather and that material’s history (both punk and cinematic hero character). This algorithmic use of mass-producible productive success, reintroduced now with the more exaggerated use of mass-producible ornament, allows for the full main character feeling without having to say anything about yourself. Perfect for ketamine.

The heavy, compressed sedimentary layers of metropolitan population density in which rivulet streets still carve through blocks subject to centuries of renovation for reuse and redirection of subjecthood in space become the emergent plane of projection. It's no wonder that in every zombies-take-the-world-by-storm film, the first big scene takes place among skyscrapers and honking horns, irrelevant of where it may have started. The market drive of personal projection and its economic glove-like fit give perfect layering of ground upon ground in which emergence is evolutionary - the zombie subject only functioning as an easy biological example.

- Ben Sang