Let's go directly to the second panel, from fascination to construction. After decades of fascination by technology, its ubiquity has become a global instrument of progress, but also a tool of oppression and segregation. Medellin practices try to develop certain sensitivities to expand the concept of technology beyond the airway construction system, exploring its cultural and social implications, to understand and to re-describe complex social and cultural contexts. We have again three practices invited to this panel. Amund will be first. From 2010, Sonia Neigel and Jan Ciesen have been working in Berlin under the name of Amund in cooperation with Björn Mantensen. Their material and architectural culture is intimately connected with the construction understood as an statement. In their work, small commissions are used as a laboratory of construction inventions, and because many of them are interventions in existing architectures, their engagement with reducing, reusing and recycling buildings is part of the ideology of the office. O plus H architects are Maki Onishi and Yuki Hyakuda, and they are established in Tokyo in 2008. Materiality and construction are in the base of their work. Simplicity and a kind of do-it-yourself and materialism builds a precise example of how to work with the immediate resources in a very inventive way. Palace, Benjamin Reynolds and Valle Medina established Palace in Basel in 2012. Their web page is organized in cycles, botanics, materials and displays as a collection of windows that shows how they speculate and react to different states of culture, space and economy. The moderator of this panel will be Lori Hockinson. Lori Hockinson is professor of architecture at Columbia G-Shap, and is also a partner of Smith Miller and Hockinson Architects, an office with a long trajectory as a laboratory of speculation and making, and an office also for investigation and practice, negotiating traditional craft with bandwidth construction techniques. So let me invite Amund, the stage. Hello, everybody. Thanks a lot for inviting us to Columbia. I'm very happy that we are around here in this conference. So... And I want to... Also, I'm Sonja. I also want to say hello. And it's really amazing to see how somehow it's perhaps a generation that forms a... They have some common ground. And I'm recognizing that the dealing with problems is perhaps something which everybody of us is dealing with a lot. And this is very interesting to me. So we are two-thirds of the office, Amund, Sonja, me and Björn. Amund is actually the acronym of our names. So it's Architects, Martensson and Nagel Tyson. And so we founded by kind of random... The office was founded almost randomly. And I will give you a short introduction about our history. So this is the Academy of Arts where we studied architecture. I studied industrial design before at the Design Academy and at the Academy in Brücken in Germany. And then at the Academy, Sonja and me, we met. And there it was also... Like Mareike did say, it was very... In the design studios, it was very focused on the conceptual way and of bold designs and how to focus on a very bold and architecture. And there, I did an internship at the office of B&K+, which is the first office of Arno Brandlhuber in Cologne. Björn Martensson was a partner there at that time. And that's where we met. And we both finished our studies with a diploma in 2002 and 2003. And at that time, it was already a little crisis in Germany. So many of our colleagues went to Spain and to countries where it went well at that time. So we stayed in Germany and we mainly did exhibition designs in the first years. So this was our first project. It's a very small exhibition. We did for an design competition where office products had to be presented. So we made an abstract office context with a vacuum-molded tabletop where we presented the new designs. So it looked like this. We had all these red tables with this vacuum-molded surface where we presented the new developed products for this design competition. Then we did an exhibition on some urban planning and some architecture in the city of Mannheim. They had this 400 years anniversary that they were celebrating and we were asked to do an exhibition in a museum there. And then we also did some fair stands. This is, for example, for a solar module producer. And we did this fair stand where we did hang the solar modules from the ceiling. And on the reflecting floor, you could see the mirrored image of this hanging city. And you could walk about these roofs of this solar module covered roof. So during these first years, we hardly could get any architectural permission. But we were still all the time very enthusiastic about architecture. And we're very interested. And so we are some small studies we could go on with architectural or dealing with architectural themes and topics, which we are kind of interested in. It was more like a hobby in these time days. And a few years ago, our passion for observation found for architecture without architects and also for anonymous architecture led us to a special phenomenon, which we have documented ever since. And this card shows a little bit the periphery of Stuttgart. It's very fragmented. A lot of settlements going on. It's very dense, the whole region. And the initial ignition was a bizarre building, which we found in this region. It was an elevated gas station and residential building, a mixed-use building. And it was planned like this. It was not rebuilt somehow. This was the original planning from our architect. And we discovered this building in the urban periphery around Stuttgart, which is characterized by many medium-sized companies. These buildings are special to us because they come to existence through a special law regulation. And these are kind of mixture buildings. And they are especially, you can especially find these buildings in industrial areas. And the possibility in these areas is that the rigid separation of function is softened up by the legislator. And the people who are living there, or the entrepreneurs, they are interpreting this situation in different, very kind of interesting and funny ways. So this was kind of the study we did by our own. And it's why are we interested in these buildings, in these mixed buildings? It's kind of a symbiosis. And on the one hand, they are kind of unconventional to us because there's some, very often there's no architect integrated in this design process. And so they have also a high degree of individual solutions. And on the other hand, these buildings also overcome the functional separation of modernity and creates a center of life that integrates work and home at the same place. And the inhabitants of these areas, they are a little bit unnoticed and they make kind of experiments with possible forms of buildings that, and also with life and also models of working somehow. And that's what we are interested in. And in this early study, there's also, you can see kind of an obsession or passion for kind of a field research for observations of the built environment. And also for the examination of the context, why can these forms or designs or buildings occur? Probably there are some role models for us, like Rudovsky's architecture without architects. And also the investigations of Alison and Peter Smith and Venturi Scott Brown and also the photographs of Bernd and Hillar Becher, which are encouraging us to encourage us to kind of follow our passion. And because at the beginning when we did that, a lot of other architects we asked, we showed them our photos and we were kind of proud and somehow fascinated about that and they could not really understand what we are doing. And so, but we keep on doing that. And a photograph of these things. And because they also find some, for us we can find some solution in these photographs and these strange, kind of strange buildings. So this is one of them. The fascination is, there's a really wide range of things that we are fascinated with. So it's like everyday buildings, but also like this, very traditional buildings that have a strange shape, which is a result of circumstances, streets, neighbors. So we collect this and the buildings of the in between cities, these half industrial, half living buildings, that's a bigger body of photographs, which we are, which we collected and we could form a group of. So in 2009, we did our first joint project, Björn, Sonja and me, which is the Just K house. It's a low energy or passive house for a family with four kids. And we had lots of constraints and requirements for this building. It was a very small site with 365 square meters and it was a house for a family of five and now six. So it had to be a more tower like building. And for there are all these constraints and requirements. There are some buildings like the Black Maria, which is quite important building for us. It's one of the first film studios for the Edison Film Company from 1890s. And it was a building to develop films. And at that time, the film material was not very light sensitive. So they had to invent this film studio where, which you could rotate and open the roof. So you could expose the film material to the maximum of light. And so this kind of buildings, we are, or this kind of ideas we try to incorporate in the design of the Just K house. Here you see the development in models. We work quite a lot with models, but also with Rhino and with 3D, which you never show because it's not sexy. Another requirement was the local building regulations. So we had to build a pitched roof in the area. Usually you don't build pitched roofs during architecture school or you are, it starts now, but in our studies, it was not that popular. And we got kind of fascinated by the diversity of pitched roofs there were. And so these are some targets and solutions we found for this house, the elevated ground floor, which is the main living space. And then the bedrooms and the individual rooms under this huge roof space. And the interior is all done in a prefabricated massive wood panels, which we investigated a lot at that time. How to work with this system. Another aspect was that we are very inspired by artists, which work with minimum spaces like Al Wexler from New York. And I happened to work with him in 99 when I was studying here in New York. And some of the ideas we incorporated in also the Just K house, how to build minimum space for five to six people and still generating a feeling of generosity in this building. Or then there are these salutes of the of epsilon. It's an artist he already died from Israel. And he created this very intimate salute just around the daily functions of the inhabitants that are imagined inhabitants. So I will focus a little bit more on technical aspect of this project of the Just K house. We had a very limited budget. So we decided to cover the roof in a very cheap roofing material is a roofing membrane, which is usually used for industrial or for warehouses. And it was a very technical and simple solution how to seal the horizontal seams. But there was no solution for the edges. And another inspiration is like the Belgium fashion designer Matam Agella. And in the 80s, he deconstructed fashion or garments. And he took them apart and we stitched them again, putting the seam to the outside so that the production process of fashion and of of furniture and not of clothes became visible. So on the right side, you see the corner detail as it was proposed by the by the company. And on the left side, you see the detail how we finally did it and to accentuate the corners of this building and to give it also more distinct appearance. So as I mentioned, we dealt deal a lot with the found found crude architecture of everyday's life. And we like these unpretentious charm of these buildings. And also, it's not always about beauty beauty in these buildings, but they're rich in a kind of stimulating inspirations and unusual design tricks. And it testifies somehow a relaxed approach to handle materials or finding solutions. And through these daily observations, we we find interesting solutions and strategies of which we can learn. And we photograph these buildings and try to understand the circumstances and the strategies we found it could be the use of material or also detailed solutions. We want to kind of enlarge our repertoire to find solution to our design problems. For example, this illustrated by project we did some years ago. And and our client he bought a quite quite ordinary house and he wanted to we had to extend that. And we wanted to do it in a simple way. And there's some kind of our findings, how they build and how they extend and how they deal materials they already have like like this house in Bill Gottwiesen. And they there we are kind of somehow attracted by the this radical predict pragmatism. And also the kind of it also shows somehow a kind of how anonymous buildings are grown somehow. And and with these things, they are creating very often very own specific character, which we are interested in. And also, for example, these ruins in in we've we'd found in our holiday in Greece, which also remind a little bit on the work of the artist, so live it. And this also could be an inspiration for our design solutions. And actually, we are interested in quite a lot of wide range of building activities. And so the this is the existing building, which client bought it's quite a not really very, very simple structure. And nevertheless, we think that also these kind of very simple buildings are have the potential to to to develop a lot of qualities. And so in this much in this project, it was a lot about sustainability and resilience. And also, we wanted to, and we wanted to make a kind of a concept out of repairing things instead of building or rebuilding things. And so we wherever it was possible, we tried to apply this method of of repairing to our project. Also, we and we also wanted to overcome the separation of the old and the new. We just want to go on building as we as we saw it a lot in old medieval towns, for example. And so this was the extension for the family to extend the 70 square meters building to for a family and the use of the needs to a family of five now, and and also bring some very light and modern life or in this building. So for us, architecture has a lot to do with also interventions or and many of these interventions are somehow already done in the past 100 and maybe also thousands of years that architecture exists. And for us, it's very quite important to know these strategies and to and to how to deal with them. So I always saw that time is over. So I quickly flip through the final project, which is the Freed Pavilion. It's a cafe pavilion on a cemetery in the city of Durand. And they had the requirement was that it public summit. It's a public cemetery. The requirement was that there's a cafe pavilion for morning feasts, but as well as regular visitors. So we had the idea to combine this archaic shapes with with a kind of modern pavilion like ideal. And it's this square ground floor, 12 by 12 meter roughly roughly. And it's organized by four by three volumes and the bathrooms and the kitchen. And you have three guest rooms. So you could use these guest rooms individually for smaller groups or join two of the guest rooms for bigger groups. And in section, it shows the diversity of these three spaces. So you have a vaulted space, a tentroof spaces and a pitch roof space. And all these spaces open up to the surrounding cemetery and park and creating a distinct facade towards the surrounding cemetery. At daytime, it has this reflective glaze. And at nighttime, it changes and the pavilion becomes transparent. And so Amund is, as I said before, collaboration of Bjorn Martensson, Sonja Nagel and me, we are actually two independent offices working together for projects, but also with other offices. So this is part of Bjorn Martensson's office, a small working space for his models and the computer opening to the adjacent garden. That's an archive and archive space in our studio, which is also in a regular townhouse in the city of Stuttgart. Well, that's a friend of us visiting us, a friend from Paris visiting us in our office. So thank you. O plus H. My name is Makio Nishi. I'm Yuki Hyakuda. Thank you very much for inviting us to this symposium. We started our office in 2008 right after we finished master course. We're actually classmates in Kyoto University. And Yuki decided to go to Toyo Ito's office for five years. And I stayed in Tokyo University as a doctor course student. And also I was teaching in YGSA Yokohama National University where Kazuyo Sejima and Rie Nishizawa are also teaching. And we in 2011 in Japan, we had a big earthquake in Tohoku area earthquake and tsunami. And that was a big thing for us when we start started architecture. This is our office. Let us introduce our office. Our office is in Nihonbashi area, Tokyo. And our last office was actually in the on the fifth floor in a building. But we decided to move here after 2011 earthquake, because we found it is very interesting to talk local people and think architecture together. So we moved our office on the ground floor and totally open to the town like this. It's almost like a vegetable shop. We has actually it was a garage so we don't have any glass glasses. So totally open to to the town. So sometimes many children suddenly come to our office to see our models. And we use rows as a room to make big mock-ups like this. So in 20th century people tend to think that it is important to look for a common rule that can be shared by as many as people as possible. In our current time, small individualities like ripples enabling us to respect the things that one can one can and cannot do. While overlapping of diversity values, we can also cherish what we share. One of the beginnings that led us to respect individualities and diversity is a project called Good Job Center Kashiba. It is a place where people with disabilities create new jobs in society. It is the message from the client when we were asked to design Good Job Center Kashiba. Sorry my English is bad but I would like to read this concept. Acknowledge the differences, cherish the differences. To distinguish the differences between each person, cherish these differences and aim to create an environment where good distinction can grow. It is necessary to properly understand the characteristics of human in order to create a comfortable living environment based on such understanding. Art illustrates the differences between each person profoundly, allowing these differences to stand out and transform into visible materiality as individuality. People who gather here with or without disability can coexist with one another as their true self. To create an environment where everyone can be deep in their own potential and can make the most of their abilities. This was the message from the client but we found it is very important thing that we should think when we think architecture. Actually this is original atelier. Some members are working together at the big table and the other members have their own table to be alone like this. Actually he is staffs who support people with disabilities but he is also an artist and he is doing his own paintings here. Behind this wall there is a storage and a person who really don't want to talk anybody. There is a space for him to work alone. After seeing original atelier we make a first concept. We want to do something like a forest. There are some con closed space and bright open space. Each people can choose a comfortable space for themselves. This is a model. Wall is very unique. I think this wall system, the style wall pattern creates walls and gaps at the same time. In this system connection and separation is equal. Within one space people can choose to be alone or be with one another. This is main interior image. This is narrow and space and back is very bright and big spaces. This is big, bright spaces. We can see the very nice corner through the space. This is the completion photo. You can see many walls and stairs and windows and roofs are gathered together in one space and various activities are happening in one place at the same time. People feel that they have their own spaces and also they are together. You can see a big table for the meeting. On the second floor there is a place for parking. This is a craft space. This is office space. Many people are doing different things but they are together. This is a cafe. Under the table there is a small store. It is open to the town. It became a school route for elementary school students. This is a small shop. We like this photo a lot because this is an office space and this is resting space. A space where resting and working happen together. Gathering of activities gently. It is a place to work but sometimes some artists come here to do some installation like this. This was art and music installation by art university at Good Job Center. This is from outside at night time. Second project is a new cultural center in Taga town. We thought about landscape from landscape to architecture. This is a surrounding area. In this project we try to think about landscape and architecture, how to relate each other, create a new landscape in harmony with environment using wood that has been cut out from mountain behind. You can see beautiful mountain here and material comes from here to this building. This town is located near Kyoto. It takes two hours from Kyoto by train and bus. In this town, 8,000 people live here. Over 85% is a forest. Even though there is a lot of forest, trees are left unused because of limited demand. Wood industry is not popular in this town. Through this project, we have to encourage the lumber industry. This is how to deliver from the forest. It took more than two years to prepare all of the wood for project. We have constraints about timber production. We have to consider the construction method and there is a limit to the length of wood because of the transportation problem. We cannot use laminated timber because there is no plan in the neighborhood. Maximum size of timber is limited. Clam length is maximum 6 meters and beams maximum 4 meters. We propose a structure sign. This is typical order of the timber structure. This is a very simple idea. We create a long beam by connecting with steel plate. This span is maximum span 10.8 meters. By making primary and secondary beams the same size, we create a large and thin plate. Sorry. We can create space in which thin roof plates are floating like this. This is space. This span is over 10 meters. We have another problem about fire proofing and fire compartment. Sorry. A and B is a typical way of solving this problem. A is wrapping everything with fire proof materials but we cannot see the timber. So I had this option and B is installed fire compartment wall. We refer to traditional houses in nearby area and we choose option C. This is a drawing of traditional merchant house in nearby area. Colored part is warehouse, fire proofed by clay. This is outside and this is inside the house. Fire proofed warehouse surrounded around the main houses to protect them from external fire. They also divide the main houses into several parts to prevent the spread of fire. It is like photo of traditional merchant house. Actually, this is monkey's grand-grandfather's house. Inside this is a photo. This is a plan. Total floor is 2,600 square meters. Hole needs compartment by law. The other part, we installed fire proof portions like this and divided several parts. So the other parts can be in exposed timber frame. This is a concept to how to make the space. Let me shortcut. Okay. This is a compression photo. Right side is space for kids. This is a cultural center. If people use the rooms, people have to pay small money. But common area is free. We want to make many places in the common area, benches, in our like space and victim for kids. This is the main entrance hall. We can see the sky through the gap of roof. We can see the rice fields through the kids' area. This is a space for library corner. This table is very large and low for kids. Kids gather this space and study. They can study. I like this photo. Several roof plates overlap together. I think through this project, technology and wisdom can transform local constraint to attractive regional characteristics. Also, we made a lot of free papers and delivered them to all the houses in the town in order for people to know about the process of making architecture like this. We made 10 free papers during planning and construction period and delivered it all over the town. That's why we do that because when I was a child, we thought public buildings are not loved by people. We would like to change the situation. We would like to share the process of making architecture with local people and celebrate the architecture together. We are preparing opening ceremony with local people together. This is opening ceremony. We had a big party. She is a lady in local area. She researched local cooking and did a party. Many children helped us to help that party. This is a very small town. Many elderly people are living in this town. Many, many elderly people came to the ceremony. At last, we would like to show you some of our projects because this talk is about technology. We would like to use technology to make uniqueness of the architecture. This is our first project we designed. This is an animal-like roof in the forest. That is what we're talking about and technology is a still plate. One still plate cannot stand by itself but support each other. It will be the strong structure. Next is imagine the floating cave with clay technique. This is that is a folly in the park. Next is animal-like bell hut in temple. And technique is 3D carving wood. This is a one to five scale mockup. And this funny creature has two legs like this. So if hung the big bell, wait, heavy bell, he rotates. But this is still a lot, and this is carving a dream. Technique is still a lot and acrylic like this. Joint part is very interesting like this. And this is our latest project we have in Bangladesh. We are trying to make a factory for 600 people to work for making bags. And we are trying to talk with people in Bangladesh and we are trying to think technology and diversity and individuality through this project. Thank you very much. As Juan mentioned, my name is Ben Reynolds and... I'm Vaya Medina, thank you for the invitation. Yeah, it's clearly a pleasure, as many people have said already, to be here and to also listen to the way in which other offices are negotiating contemporary questions that we hope also in our kind of brief talk about what we do, we can let you know how we tackle them and how we, in fact, use the project as a means to comprehend this context. So we wanna talk about the way in which context shapes our practice and the role of the project as a strategy to comprehend. And here we're referring to the context in a broad sense, I should pick this up. One that we're all exposed to and one that is in fact hard to articulate for us. And more precisely, and perhaps this relates also to the panel that we've been assigned to, one that's becoming increasingly too complex even for human comprehension. So, okay. In our practice, the question of comprehension entails firstly acknowledging a kind of surrender to the context, the kind of laying down of the arms of knowledge. This begins somewhat of a chaotic act of shrugging off convention and our own pretense. So with every project, there's a kind of fatalistic act of the beginning moment of the project. So in the past, we've talked about this context as being somewhat of a, could be described as a noir context, something that we can sense dramatic things are happening, fed by massive shifts, I'm sure we are all aware of, but exactly what they are and how they shape the context, it's very difficult to claim. So in order to talk about our projects is to talk about long sequences of work and varying outputs and materials that are basically reasoning processes in order to comprehend. So in fact, we wrote a book not so long ago and we'll refer to it a little later, but it was inspired by this figure of Hugh St. Victor, the great mystical writer of the 12th century, you can see here on the left, a Parisian theologian who produced a document called the Mystic Arc, which is a non-existent document. It's only known by the whispers and the gossip of those who attended his lectures, but effectively it was a wall painting. So something at the architectural scale that contained at the time of the 12th century all the knowledge of the world.  For him, the arc, and I quote, was to rid himself of confusion, which is the mother of all ignorance. So again, this kind of brings us to the topic of technology in that every project begins as a kind of comprehension spurt, a jolt, which provides this initial vector of investigation. And we begin by looking at this multitude of ways in which a subject can be addressed. The key for us is this massive survey, much like the work of Hugh St. Victor. For example, we were commissioned by a private librarian in eastern Switzerland to work with a collection of 13,000 books. And obviously there's the physical side of a library and it's arrangement, which is something we took into account. But also we also had the kind of ability to see with new eyes this entire collection in a very detailed way. And from that, we actually decided to find what could be called the kind of center of information of this place if we were to pass the information through a software that could read locations of where the books were written and locations that were mentioned, effectively you could produce the center of the library, which we found to be approximately 480 kilometers off the coast of Greenland. The poem, a poem could then be written by the titles of the content of this library. And this poem, as you see sort of in this film that we made at the bottom of this image here, is essentially these places that the software thought were real, but in fact were not. So we passed this database through an information extraction pipeline, which actually has already built inside of it geography, names of places, names of rivers, names of mountains. And these were all places, in fact, that the algorithm thought were real, but it were indeed not. Yeah, so following from this large act that we call like a extraction act, we find that often the moment in which one can establish anything, within complexity, within multitude, reveals that actually nothing is established. So, but only a series of claims in motion could be considered as something that is always moving and that actually informs the present. In order to form a sense with the ideas that we often work with, we find simply clues that we unearth from motifs that often are contradicting, often come from very ancient times. For example, in ancient Egypt, the heart used to be, yeah, the belief was that was the originator of thought. We still say that we memorize something by heart. Not only did we discover that the mind is in fact the seat of intelligence, now the mind can fluidly print the images in association to what it has experienced in the past. For example, on the left-hand side, yeah, the brain can actually be exposed to footage and then on the right-hand side, we can see how, oops, our memory can be reconstructing such a sequence only from the images that has been storage, biologically. Or for instance, when in the past we tried to make sense of the sky, of course, the differentiations in different levels of the atmosphere were simply meant to be a perfect division between strata are almost like levels of powers. Nowadays we know and we can have a different understanding where we can perceive and we can compute at an atomized level, things like turbulence and laminar conditions and actually the differentiating planes between them are simply different pressures and different mathematical understandings of it. Indeed, the seas were thought to be made not simply of water of the river, but of the material found directly under the heaven. Crystalline, congealed, especially combined to resist the flame of the sun, moon and stars. It was an elusive kind of material.  So what we're effectively doing here is kind of comparing a knowledge at a particular moment in time that has been undermined and somehow critiqued by what we could call the contemporary condition. And it's also true with nature. You know, nature, as told by the Hudson River School, not so far from here about 200 years ago, was considered immense, untamed and something to be settled. Now our salads are actually, I guess, nascent beasts in the way that here cardiac tissue has been injected into a spinach leaf and is pulsating like a heart could. Obviously in language, in a primitive sense, can be traced to an understanding of how nature signals itself. We always thought those signals, to be honest, on the right, you see very clearly, a yellow band for all clearly identifies its toxicity by its color. But those signs also can be dishonest. On the left, this fiddler crab possesses a weak claw, despite its size, that still intimidates smaller species. Now, what is the future of language if words can be assigned, quote unquote, a poeticness? This is a project by Kyoto University wherein a machine can read an image and assign, in its library, words which it thinks it's kind of poetic. Things like singing free heaven and so on and create poems out of just looking at something. What does that actually mean for language? And, you know, surely the poem of the future tries to avoid poeticness in general. And again, if we keep comparing, in deciphering the body, East Asians understood it as a series of meridians. The body was not considered as something biological but made of pathways along which energy flows. Now, among other things, the body is a space that can be read at a cellular level, whereby abnormalities are recognized after matching samples against massive amounts of collected patterns. The line actually between a fake smile and a real smile has been for a long time, excuse me, a subject of study. In some cases, we simply were like a fear green, to tell our predators that we are harmless, that we are one of them. But now my smile is like my wallet, actually. And even the tall and dark amalgam that we call the city was for the ancient Chinese, a cosmic diagram, an image that actually meant to balance man, state, nature, heaven. It was designed to distribute she, the divine breath. Now there's a reality of the city, as we know, is that of certain harboring of the known, the threat and the potentials. So in all of these previous examples, it seems that the perception of reality changes always over time. What is considered a truth is made way for a heresy, which becomes truth and so it continues. The idea that there is nothing established, but only claims, emotion, means that there is an eternal crisis of definition. Already in the mid-60s, back minister Fula produces this document. It says knowledge had doubled every century up until the 18th century. By the end of the World War II, information was doubling every 25 years. Now, information is doubling every 30 months. The moment when every project becomes a sensor, we can say, and also it's also sending information out, we will lead to the doubling of information every 12 hours. So our practice has been for a while operating under this quest of amassing information to create this sense and this intelligible ideas. Projects respond to a context that is becoming increasingly beyond the reach of our human comprehension, where information is at the vignettes of information itself. So what we do is very much architectural in nature, but this process often leads to exploration in different mediums and working with unique and independent collaborators. And our practice goes through, of course, an endless consolidation process since we produce buildings, but we teach and we produce books. For example, in the context of this particular project, yeah, the idea of an intense reconfiguration of what it meant to build in a context foreign as China, it is a project in itself. So out of this complexity that we tried to cater through this presentation, we discover that there are two archetypes within our practice that are key to understand the way we articulate thinking. The two figures are the fear of the conjurer and the fear of the seer. So on the wall of our studio in Basel is a gift given by a friend of ours, which is a reproduction of the painting, card shops by Caravaggio from 1594. And this friend cut out two details and framed them. They're two faces, one of an unworldly boy and the other is the card shop himself. He said, or this friend of ours said that it was a reminder of that we forever slip between a state of unknowing and being able to author a manipulation over reality. Incidentally, this friend of ours is a marathon runner and he said it's running for him is the only moment where he can become kind of characterless. So this became quite important in the beginning of our office to understand the problem of dealing with information, that it could be possible to be both someone in awe of complexity, i.e. the state of unknowing and someone that could manipulate it, i.e. the conjurer as Bay mentioned, which kind of reminds us of this also particular interesting, I would almost call it kind of performance that Frank Lloyd Wright did during the construction of the Johnson Wax building where he was ordered by the Wisconsin Industrial Commission to prove whether his slender columns could withstand 12 tons. So what Wright did was he said, okay, I will take up your challenge, but also I will invite the press. And so one afternoon in 1946, he invited Mr. Johnson and the press and after piling the column with sand for hours, it fell at 60 tons, which was five times the expectation. So here, somehow Frank Lloyd Wright as the conjurer where technical prowess meets the manipulator of truth. The second archetype, which is quite relevant for the studio, is the seer. The figure of the seer can really be traced back to Greek mythology, and it was known for being able to see things that are hidden from others. The seer doesn't operate by foreseeing the future, but instead operates by divination, out of being able to comprehend reality. It makes something appear out of nowhere and operated by sacrificing information. Seeking knowledge of the future, we signed a pact very early on as could be considered like a funding document for the studio that it reads, I climb high mountains to prepare my writing, which means in a way that is a reminiscence for us of maintaining a certain sense of euphoria in able to enable a constant evolvement. Under constant recording as well, we constitute each of our individual annotations sheets or diaries. This large tabulae of horizontal partitions is in principle algorithmic because of the vast information that and variables that it can contain, but also of the type of operation that can perform. You could, for example, quickly construct an intersection between a thought annotated at 6 a.m. in a solitary room in New York City with a joke from 2005 annotated at 3 p.m. This is part of the method to organize what appears to be disjointed, random facets of existence. So this figure of the conjurer and the seer pays a role in our projects, but as well in our teaching. We're currently leading two pedagogical experiments. One is taking place in Vienna, which where we direct a design studio for his third department. It's quite special about it, is that it runs with a philosopher Vera Wielmann and a visionary and entrepreneur operating under the pseudonym, like a fake name, Don Gross. In parallel in London, we run a studio at the Royal College of Arts, currently entitled Chronocopia. The studio runs as a pseudo-corporation and is entitled High Holdings, where we encourage each of the individual participants to respond and be responsible for a certain domain of knowledge for them to evolve thinking. In both contexts, actually, we operate under certain freedoms and also certain contractual operations, for example, what we call the free sheets, which entitles each one of the students to actually produce thinking under restrictions. So the free sheet is actually a contractual limitation. Same with our own project, these two figures come together. For example, in the making of the monograph Paris Hermitage, the building came about or originated from a performance and here the architect can be seen carving a space and stepping away from the computer to engage with a sense of materiality. It documents the building Paris Hermitage, which is constituted by quartz articulations and where citizens go there to restore their sense of work or rest, wakefulness from what we claim to be a current contemporary condition of pulverisation. It was published in late 2017 and was co-edited by New York publisher, Nicholas Weltyke. Yeah, and as a sum up, also the architectural response and the building was formed from masking 100 plants of educational spaces across history. Maybe just to finish, a second example of how a project for us is really a strategy of comprehension was an exhibition we produced for a gallery in Vienna in the form of sculptures and video works that became the seeds of a larger publication currently in the making. The first move was to create a site-specific work, which is this fragment of a ceiling of a building called the Melgrube, which is a building that used to store on one of the main plasters in Vienna the flower from all over Europe. It was a public building. The work is made of 300 kilograms of flower and composed from just reading a text about the building since no images or drawings of it exist. In the same exhibition, we explored the possibility of how to contain an atmosphere in an image. This idea comes from the notion that everything between us and an object is mediated by a thick layer of air which distorts an image, i.e. that everything is mediated by a state of turbulence. And this became the beginning of a project that puts the ideal geometry of an architectural rendering in question. And in doing so, can you measure this turbulence? This is a capture of the movement of pixels across many frames looking at the previous video. And so in order to inject an image, sorry, an atmosphere inside of an image which we're currently working on, we build a device in the gallery, which is called a scintillator, which is a handmade telescope and a source of heat, which is the candle you see on the left, which needs a precise alignment according to the focal length of the mirror. And in between that setup, we are placing 35-millimeter slides of some renderings of forthcoming projects. And out of this setup, which is, I guess, hot off the press we're currently working on, is a way in which you can document the recording of atmosphere or, let's say, a kind of layer of reality on top of something as precise as an architectural image. And so to close, the project has become an excuse to comprehend context of increasingly massive amounts of information. And the role of this conjurer, or these two characters, the conjurer and the seer, is to adopt not just a method, but a character that produces a range of outputs. Typically, this only creates more questions, but above all, it produces a sense. And the origin of the word sense is direction. So thank you very much for your time. It's such a pleasure to see the work of you all and this kind of wild grouping of technology. But also that it's fantastic to have a window into the way that you think about your work and the way you produce your work, right? So this is opportunity. And when we have this kind of grouping together, you start to think about the relationships. So your practices are so thoughtful. And I also enjoy, which I think others do too, seeing studios in which you're working. So you kind of help us understand the context, like kind of the local context and also the context of your thinking. So I just wanted to say a couple things before we open it up to questions to the audience. One was that given this topic of technology, which is of course, you know, and the ubiquity of it and the context is that we could maybe all agree or not, I would say we might all agree that technology is not neutral, that it's not a neutral thing. And that was a question I wanted to ask you about, but maybe we'll open it up here too. And that material, because you all are working with this, also I would say material, materiality, whether it's the material, information material, whether it's a particular material, or whether it's this kind of context of materiality in a given place, like, so if we could also agree that material is not neutral, and that I was thinking that one of the things, or some of the things that your all work is dealing with also is context, whether it's the context of thinking of knowledge or information in this very broad context, or the context of the forest and the wood in which you're working in a very precise way with that material only, or the context with which you guys are working where you began to assemble those photographs and thinking about how this kind of local architecture and how you're putting those two things together and exposing a kind of seam often, the seam, it's this materiality of the seam, and maybe the seam is also something that you're all working with. So I just wanted to say those few things, but I also, to think about a context for speaking about the work here, and I wanna open it up because I know we're seriously over a schedule, and you guys have all been sitting for a long time before eating, so if there are questions. You're all positioned as representatives of technology as architects, and how you respond to the capacity of, I guess, technology and knowledge to both clarify thought and clarify intent, and also obfuscate that and confuse that by the burden and kind of overwhelming nature of data and knowledge at the moment. How does your practices operate between that spectrum of overabundance of knowledge and technology and data, and clarification of it? Give a quite short thought to that. Well, at least I could say that for us, the technology is not an end on itself, so we really like to work with these tools in order to be able to articulate rather complicated scenarios. And I would say it's also like a gate to see more things rather than the opposite. I would maybe answer it. Yeah, thank you. In our case, technology is always quite hands-on, used in a very direct relation to the project, so if we have, you always, for us, it's a challenge to also challenge the technology in a certain way to go beyond the standard. Usually, there's always a standard which is applied in building construction, and how do you challenge this the way technology is used, and you can see this in all the three projects in sometimes details like the coroner details, but also in the use of material, and also the misuse of material sometimes. Please, please, please, please. And I think there are obviously several aspects of technology. The one is that you can use it for, perhaps, have more possibilities in the building process, which is quite interesting. For example, the prefabricated wooden constructions, you have also kind of more freedom than in other systems, perhaps, and this is also not easy to handle that because then you have to find other reasons why you're doing something in a certain way, and the other thing is that for the sustainable buildings, in Germany, at least, we have a lot of technology to build in the buildings, and we are now trying to reduce all these technology. It's not really important to the building as in design aspects, because you mostly don't see these things, but you have to handle it, and it rises up the costs enormously, which is really kind of bad, and you always have to kind of repair these things, and after a few years, you are recognizing that doesn't really work properly, and things like that, and so now we try to make some building, for example, where we kind of handle it in a completely different way, and try to really reduce it and make low technology buildings, so. Like no ventilation, no heating system, or just a very simple heating system with... Things like that. So there's no hydraulic system anymore, so just how basic can you go using as least as much technology as possible? Because after 10 years or 15 years of monitoring all these systems, it became a little bit obvious that it doesn't work like the kind of numbers are, it's just a kind of a calculation, but it doesn't match with the reality. Andreas, did you? Yeah, well, thank you that the talks were really amazing, and they open many questions. One of them, and I'd like to ask specifically to Amon, because you had this reference to a number of books that have been very important. Rudovsky, of course, Architecture Without Architects, or the Beher's work at large, or Made in Tokyo, in which basically the relationship of practices with technology was very different in the way it was perceived through those studies. The first, also, Beher was very much about the technology in which designers, engineers, or developers were very much hands-on in the development of components, systems, whereas, for instance, Made in Tokyo is much more opportunistic, it's technology that was developed by others and was mobilized through a series of, from a position in which basically designers were not that much developing those components, and Rudovsky was talking of something different, like, my question is basically, what is the way you think, as practitioners, you have the possibility of relate to industry, or to the processes by which components, systems, are developed, not only, let's say, applied? Well, these references, or these books are, maybe they were also a little bit misleading because they are more references or models for our aim of observation. So, I can understand that, technology-wise, it's a totally different path, so. But, we still, like, Rudovsky, he's focusing on this simple construction, like the, let's call it more, authorless architecture, not architecture, without architect, but it's, in Germany, we are really, it's a very advanced building market, so technology is something which is massively sold, and so, we try to reduce it more, it's our aim and our project is to reduce this enormous technology amount, so, because the experience is that you don't build you don't make better architecture by incorporating more and more technology, so, it's just in some very specific corners and construction elements we use advanced technology, like the prefabrication or the misuse of material, but, like, all these heating systems and all this technology is not something that we are very interested in. It's interesting as well, following from this notion of the building systems, the idea that technology is there, we can use it, we can apply it, but for us, at least, as a thought, the idea of almost challenging, the idea of this comfortability, as you were mentioning before, that maybe you're thinking nowadays of consuming a space that has no heating, maybe, or no ventilation system, that for me is very interesting to see, yeah, to somehow find these sort of seams where the idea of comfortability or the idea of the convention can be, maybe, challenged or reconfigured. I might also just add, if I can. Sure, please. Yeah, I think it's interesting also teaching, which, I guess, by teaching, you kind of come into contact with a kind of emerging generation who have no pretense about what the point of using technology is. It's not really even a question. It's somehow something natural. And it's interesting also to look at the way in which architecture's relationship to technology, not just in how a building comes about, but also the forms which have kind of generated with respect to, say, certain kinds of software. And I guess for us this, what we kind of term a sort of naturalizing process with respect to technology, obviously these things are somehow polar opposites, nature and technology, but nevertheless, deciding when and how to use something and almost respective of understanding what architecture does with technology, that if we could make decisions based on what is the most effective way we can use technology at one point, or how can a certain output using technology be relevant for the certain thing that you need to achieve? I guess it sounds kind of abstract, but somehow, given the fact that technology is such a given, then I think everything's in question as well. I was thinking that also, I mean, in all of your work, so the question of the dialectic or this kind of opposition all comes up in your work, but also constraints in which, whether it's this, you said a comprehension spur where you're kind of trying to gather all this information as a way to spur ideas, but the free sheets that you used in the studio or the constraint of just using the one material or just this question of how do I resolve a connection? And not even talking about the rules, all these rules that came up last with David's discussion about sustainability or the kind of constraints, the governmental constraints that you're referring to in sustainability. So, I mean, so this topic here of technology, which seems, we kind of think we know it, but actually I think what you guys are exposing, I think to me or to us is this other side of it that when you say it's more natural or not the ubiquity of it, but a kind of given that you're undermining in another way. So anyway, thank you and thank you guys.


Before we begin, this video is sponsored by Candle House Collective. We at Site 42 are excited to team up with CHC again to introduce you to another one of their unique theater experiences. On with the video. Hey there, Site 42 fam. Sherm here and I've got something special for you guys this week. Ugh, ignore my voice. There's an anomalous rhino virus league going around the lab.  Maybe we have some anomalous poacher virus that will get rid of them. Anyways, in case you couldn't tell by looking at the all of me, I'm a theater guy and not just sit back in the theater watching Shakespeare. Although I did just perform Shakespeare in San Francisco last month. That was pretty dope. VOD is coming. But no, not just that. I was brought up in the range of interactive theater, immersive theater, where you go in and you interact with the actors and they improv back with you and they stay in character and it's all choose your own adventure stuff.  Sometimes like a cabaret and the waiters or actors and stuff like that. Or like we did with last call theater in Los Angeles. The scp theater shows the Ikea one and signals. So that's the kind of stuff that I'm really into. It's the kind of stuff I want to bring more to the scp community. But this is not an scp event tonight. It's something different last year. We worked with a group called candle house collective. They were doing a horror themed phone immersive event. So you buy your ticket and then they called you and you and the actor go through the theater experience over the course of an hour that one. We only get to preview that one for 20 minutes, although it was a pretty good video. If you haven't seen that, go back and check it out. But we preview the beginning of that and then it was up to you if you want to buy a ticket to see it. Well, this time things are different. They've got a new show called Lenox Mutual. And the deal with this is it takes place over multiple calls. And so I hear through the grapevine that some people have been calling this tens of times and they're trying to solve the mysteries of the branching paths and the different endings in the choose your own adventure aspects. And so what we're going to do here is we have permission from candle house collective to record all of our session one and I can show that to you. And then for session two and three with some minor redactions, we can also show you that. But depending on how you guys like it, depending on how we're enjoying doing it as a series, we might get a little mat pad up in here, a little theorizing and we might get to start to try to figure out the ARG aspects of this. Because from what I hear, it's going to get weird. And you know the scp in the site 42 FIM, we love it when it gets weird. We do the weird stuff. So they should be calling me pretty soon. A quick disclaimer. Last year when we did this with claws, I played it as Dr. Sherman, partially because it was a horror experience in SCP. It was a good gimmick. And also because we were just doing a preview. We weren't doing the whole show. And if you called it to do the show for yourself, candle house collective strongly suggested that you don't play a character that you call in as you and it would make the experience more immersive. Now tonight for Lennox Mutual, it's a different structure. We are filming the whole first session and then we're going to do a couple extra videos and then see where we go from there. But they told me because of the structure of this particular show, I should drop kayfabe. So I will not be Dr. Sherman tonight. I will be Sherman Christensen, actor, dance instructor, YouTuber. And so just so you know, that's how it's going down. So let's get to the call. Here are friends now. Dr. Kam of the one day I will have a box for the ahoy ahoy Sherman. We can go with I'd like to redact that information if that's fine with you. I was informed that you were a life insurance company. I am sitting. Yes, I would say so. I am indoors. My phone. Yes. Yes. Take your best shot. Did that feel okay? I must admit I'm a bit stuffed up today, but overall fine. Affirmative. Yes. What can I see with the torchlight? Multiple lights and a computer and a microphone. They are in fact a studio. There's air conditioning and a green screen and a voice booth. The door is not locked. Unfortunately, yes. Quite familiar. I It's very crowded. So there's a possibility I couldn't just without bumping into things. Confused as I'm currently awake. From inside through diamond wood or gold. I'm a music man. I head for the gold door in that scenario. What menu option you want, you can choose either at any time. Let me know if you'd like to hear an example of an extension or documentation or learn more about Lennox Mutual. Let's learn more about Lennox Mutual. Thank you. If you know your party's extension or if you already know what menu option you want, you can choose either at any time. Let me know if you'd like to hear an example of an extension. Our current options follow. Would you like to hear our hours of operation, make an appointment, review our documentation, or learn more about Lennox Mutual? What are the hours of operation? Pacific time. Having time? Yes. Yes. 23. 5783. 1444. 4.543 billion or something else. Could you repeat those options for me? 4.543 billion or something else. The current year in my area is 2023. In the West. Oh, I'm a typical time person, same as everyone else in that state. I'm going to go with, on a hunch, the future. Depending on the day, it could go either way, but right now the future is more perilous. I have not. Kaleigh to our main menu. If you know your party's extension, or if you already know what menu option you want, you can choose either at any time. Let me know if you'd like to hear an example of an extension. Before we hear our menu options once more, I'd like to congratulate you on behalf of Lennox Mutual on a successful run of Much Ado About Nothing. As the character Don Pedro says in Act 1, you are come to meet your trouble. The fashion of the world is to avoid cost, and you encounter it. Lennox Mutual extends its heartfelt congratulations. Our current options follow. Would you like to hear our hours of operation? Make an appointment, review our documentation, or learn more about Lennox Mutual. I feel the need to review your documentation. Hmm, I thought I was reviewing your documentation. I do not yet have documentation. I should go back to the menu and make an appointment then. I cannot. My windows are all covered for studio recording purposes. Yes. I will be on time. I will lock my door. Your appointment. Say I will turn off the lights. I will turn off the lights. I do not know your list of prohibited substances. I will keep track of things. I will speak with care. Will teach any concepts or non-corporeal entities unless with authorized exception from Lennox Mutual. Uh, no, it is not in my business to declare fealty to otherworldly deities or concepts in general. Have I reconsidered what? Yes. Clarification. Are you asking if I have previously declared fealties to things or if I'm willing to right now declare fealty to something? Clarification accepted. My answer is no. Positive. I do. Four. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. I do. I like sunlight. I am a Leo and therefore the sun is my horoscopical sign. The sun is the planet of the Leo, but the lion is the animal of the Leo. It's multiple meanings. No. I have to say to the- Please. Were that to be the case, I would say that I am sorry for your situation. Yes. Not eligible to schedule an appointment with us at this time. You were just one question away. Let's go back to the main menu. Now, please listen carefully to our main menu options. They have changed, though not in the way you might think. If you know your party's extension, or if you already know what menu option you want, you can choose either at any time. Let me know if you'd like to hear an example of an extension. Options follow. Would you like to hear our hours of operation? Receive a promotional offer. Review our documentation or learn more about Lennox Mutual. Let's receive a promotional offer. Lennox Mutual, we work one-on-one with people like you to make the most of the time you have. Our work is personal, so we aim to connect personally with every single customer, including prospective customers like you. To foster this connection, Sherman, I'd like to extend a selection of special promotional offer challenges.  You may attempt each challenge once, but only one challenge may be completed successfully per call. To access your offers, say, I will play by the rules. I will play by the rules. Let's go with Hangman. Correct. I believe Trivia was a secondary option. That's correct. Form name. Open mic. It contains a recording of Thomas Lennox playing Jim Crow choose time in a bottle at night located. Your 10 seconds begins now. Unfortunately, I do not. Do you know what menu option you want? You can choose either at any time. Let me know if you'd like to hear an example of an extension. I would like to hear an example of an extension. Let's hear the menu options. I believe so? Yes. I'm wisely. Yes. I typically believe if I've done something, I was wise in the means of doing it.  Okay, so first of all, they stalked me. They stalked my social media. I told y'all about the play on social media. They stalked my social media. I don't know if they're going to do that to you. Will they do that to you? I do not know what information they're going to give you or you're going to give them. Okay, that was interesting. That was a little brain melty, actually. I do not know what to make of that right now, but I'm very interested. Now, while I'm marinating on that and reacting to it, think about this. There is a subreddit for Linux Mutual. Now, again, spoilers are a thing that if you don't like them, then you don't get them. Don't go to the subreddit. But the people who are doing this thing and they're continuing to do it, they are sharing their experiences. They are apparently pretty good at spoiler tagging, but they are going through some of the stuff and answering some stuff. And so I'm not looking at them yet because I want to go through my calls and see what the Site 42 canon of Linux Mutual is going to be. But if you want to go into this on your own, apparently whatever choices you make make for a radically different story. And so what you guys do will be completely different from what mine is and stuff like that. So you can look at the subreddit or you cannot. You can do your own calls or you could not. But if you do want to do your own calls, go to the link in the description because we do have a discount code for Site 42. And when you use the Site 42 promo code, then you get 10% off any individual call that you purchase. Now, if you're going to start doing what some of these people do and do like multiple, multiple, multiple calls, then they do like a three pack with a discount and that discounts better than 10% off. But if you're going to do one or two calls just to test the waters, Site 42 is a good promo code to start with. So yeah, I'm gonna ruminate and marinate on that and I hope you enjoyed session one of Site 42's Lennox Mutual Run. If you do your own, I hope you have a good adventure and stay tuned for sessions two and three coming in the coming weeks. And other than that, I'll see you guys in the next video. Thank you for listening.  Please become a patron or visit our merch store at the link in our bio to support our work. Secure, contain, protect.


Artists can make thousands of dollars selling their art to just one person, but to do that you have to understand that you don't just have to settle for pittings at a time, you don't have to be afraid to ask somebody to buy from you and all in all it requires a big perspective shift. Now what do I mean by that? We get so this idea all the time of if I just had a thousand true fans and they spend a hundred dollars with me every single year, then I'd have a hundred thousand dollars from the year, but what if you only had 100 fans, but those 100 fans spend a thousand dollars with you every year? It's less people, but they're spending more money and you still have a hundred thousand dollars in that year. The numbers are actually arbitrary. What's important is understanding the depth of a relationship and how do you create that depth? And we're going to go over the four elements in this video. Actually, we're going to go really, really, really deep into one of them, the most important and you'll start to see something that personally I don't see out there enough. I have multiple clients, friends, artists that you've seen us with actually on the channel or talk about and they've sold multiple pieces of art, their music or a single show and did thousands of dollars, one thousand dollars and they've done it multiple times, but it's all from understanding this and I want to be clear, the multiple time part, it's the important part because anybody can pull something off one time, I think personally. So in this video, I'm going to break that down and really get into the details, but before I do that, there's two things I really want to speak on just really quickly. First, I want to let y'all know that this video is actually inspired from my video last Saturday. I got some feedback where one of the things I mentioned, people were asking me questions about, some people hit me up about it and it made me realize, oh, I should go deeper on this. So I appreciate that and I pay attention. And the second thing is at the end of this video, I'm going to make a free offer and I mean truly free, you're not going to have to send me any links, you're not going to have to give me your email, none of that go anywhere, none of that just trust me. If I steal you wrong, if I steal you wrong, then blast me in the comments and all that good stuff. But I mean like a truly free offer, but you got to just wait to see what I, when I'm saying you could fast forward, but it's too much value to skip in between. There's four levers of value that you can pull to increase and decrease value.  And how do they understand that? You have to communicate that. Make sense? Right. Now what are those four levers? The primary four levers, I want to make sure I say I'm right, is economic value, social value, emotional value and functionality. I'm not going to go super deep into every single detail on each one, but I want you to hear these for one more time, economic value, social value, emotional value and functionality. There's one of these that artists focus on more than others. Take a second and guess the answer is economic value. And this is why that's a problem. Most people who don't understand value, what that looks like and how you truly create it, they think about money first. If I only understand economic value and I don't understand the other forms of value in terms of communication, you know what I'm going to do if I want you to buy something? I'm going to start to say, man, if I want these people to come to my show, I don't want them to feel like they aren't getting enough value. So what am I going to do? It's only $5 to come to my show or it's free to come to my show or I made this visual art piece or vinyl to go along with my project. I'm going to charge only like $10. It forces you to lower the price to increase perception of value. And that's all artists do over and over again. Most of the artists that I work with, right? And this is what we're usually like coaching them through is like, no, if you want people to buy from you, your art does have value, but you have to understand how you extract and communicate that value to people otherwise. The only thing you're going to be left to do is use the economic lever, which forces you to just drop the price. And nobody wants to drop their price and get closer and closer in this race to zero. Do you? The worst part about that for an artist is you're building something that comes from you, right? This is your mind and their end result is basically an expression of you. It's one thing to take something from your mind and then I build, I don't know, a software or something like that. It doesn't feel as direct as a part of you. But as an artist, you're basically building out, right? An end result of yourself or a capturing of yourself in a moment. So when you devalue that and you only see a way to cheapen that as a way to get other people to see value in that, you have this internal impact of cheapening yourself. You feel devalued. And even when you make the sale, it doesn't feel good, right? You would think anytime an artist wants to make a sale, it feels great, right? It doesn't feel that way if you made the sale for way less than what you feel like you're worth, right? Now I'm not talking about the delusional. Oh, I think I'm a billion dollar fella and, and you know, no, you give them some like not the delusional stuff. I'm talking about straightforward, like, all right, what's a fair, fair price? What did you put in it? Where are you in the spectrum of your career? Okay. So because this cheapening of yourself can be so detrimental to not only your finances and ability to support yourself from a career standpoint, but to your internal confidence, right? Emotional state of being. It's important to understand that every artist should become a luxury brand. And I truly believe that. And if you have any artists and manage your friends, share this with them over and over again. Every artist should be a luxury brand, all right? If you are not one, become one. And if you think they'll think you sound crazy, send them this video. And before I go further, by the way, I appreciate those of y'all who have said, yo, Sean, keep doing this Saturday series. I really do. And again, I only ask that you subscribe to this series, just subscribe to the channel, because it just lets me know, we can see the steps, right? That it's worth doing, right? We can see that people are subscribing to these videos. And as I said, even the commentary on my last video is actually what inspired me to go deeper on this topic today. And for those of y'all who don't know this Saturday series is really much more of an open, real insight style of video that we know is only going to reach the people who are already subscribed or watching this channel for the most part. It's not necessarily formatted to go viral, where it's going to touch people who don't care as much about the deeper topics, because most people just don't. You might be surprised. But back to the concept that every artist should become a luxury brand. What do I mean by that exactly? Well, luxury brands cost how much? A lot of money. Don't have to insert exact price, but we know the idea of luxury means it's going to cost more, ultimately, because people perceive it as a luxury, right? Where really, if you think about it functionally in life, a luxury means something that you do not need. It is a luxury. However, we get people to pay more for things that are luxuries. How is that? Why is that? Because we're not focused on the economic value when I'm selling Gucci, when I'm selling Louis, when I'm selling whatever the most expensive car you can think of is. You know what I'm selling? I'm selling something deeper than that. I'm selling an idea. I'm selling a feeling. I might even be feeling a void in ways. So I'm not focused on the price in order to communicate value.  They communicate value and then they give you the price of that value they just communicated. It's the difference, right? Most people say, this is the price. And now how can I make you feel like it's worth that price? I promise you this project is worth $50. I'm telling you, it's so good. I've done all this and this is the real art, but that's what the people do versus saying, like a luxury brand, I show you the imagery of being on an island. I show you the beautiful women that come around you and the successful men that come around you and do big deals, talk big business, and this great life that you have all because you have this cologne on. What? Smelling good changes your life to that level, to that extent?  Smelling good does impact your life positively, but to that extent, not necessarily. But what's happening there, I want to make sure I don't leave anything out. What's happening is they're focused on how they make you feel, right? How they make you feel. And then they focus on the function that that feeling feels in your life. For example, if you're an artist, what are you feeling for somebody? I've said that you're the hero for somebody, right? You are somebody's hero. They're looking up to you. They admire your traits, your personality, the type of music, right? The feeling that you give, you make them feel pumped up. So they appreciate you as an artist because of that, you might give them courage or you might give them the ability to have a conversation that they need to have with somebody else in real life because you said something. You might also give them confidence in something that they just personally feel inside. A lot of that falls into the hero world, but then some of it just falls into the friend role. You might have music that's like depressing or something like that. And there's the rah rah. You can be better. You can get over it. There's versions of that. Some people go to that for artists, but some people just want to sit in it, right? And they hear your depression and you talk about your experience or some of those feelings and them hearing that helps them to relate to you and it's more so relating to a friend. You hear what I'm saying? And then we just summarize it all because there's multiple ways I can talk about those two roles and there's other roles that people play, but it's really, you are feeling some type of void and the void doesn't have to be super deep. It doesn't have to be depression, right? It doesn't have to be confidence or insecurity. It might just be, I need this party to get lit. How can I get this party lit? Here's my artist that I go to for that. All right? I want to chill vibe. Here's the artist I go to this. Oh, I need the vibe. I got this void where I need to feel romantic. You know what I mean? I need to create the energy in the room. Oh, here's my playlist for that. But a big thing, the deeper thing when we get into brand identity is validation. Validation. And this is when we get back to the luxury brands. Validation. What does this mean? If I have a certain belief system and I hear you communicate that belief system, you're validating how I feel, how I think. But sometimes you might not actually truly communicate something directly. You might just represent something. Tupac is really good at this to this day, right? He still represents something. J. Cole. I think the Russell is doing this in a lot of ways. If I think about like younger artists, there's a lot of artists in the rock space that do this well, the ones that have made it to a certain degree, where me just wearing your shirt, your merch validates a certain belief system about my identity. It validates who I am. People are looking for that sometimes. That's when you think about the functionality of value. It's not just does it work and how well something works. That's the quality side when we get on that part of functionality and value. But even if we're not talking about building hard products, there's a functionality in saying me listening to this artist says something about who I am to the rest of the world. That's what artists do more than anything for people. When you go that deep. So now I'm willing to support certain things about you. I'm willing to buy certain things from you because it's deeper than buying a varsity jacket because you did some capsule or merch release or just buying a project or a vinyl. There's a representation of myself in you. When you understand that, then you start thinking, well, what do I represent or what can I represent? How do I communicate my value and point of view so clearly and deeply that people see that in me and now they're connected with me beyond that because my function in their life goes beyond just hearing the music directly. And it doesn't mean you have to do all this silly stuff, give speeches or anything like that. Nothing wrong with giving speeches. You can actually do it purely through your music based on what you're saying. But everybody's music is in all like straight message. You can represent this in so many different ways. So with that being said, luxury brand. Let's rethink this concept a little bit. When most people miss, and I hope I kind of painted a picture for you where this is going to drive home correctly. But what most people miss is luxury is relative. What is one of the elements that I spoke on in the beginning? I said there's economic value, all right? There's functional value, emotional value, and then there's social value. A lot of the emotional value, I think, has become pretty clear based on a lot of things I said. But if you think about social value, another lever that luxury brands pull is if you have this watch, or you have a Lambo, or you have whatever type of luxury brand you're representing a certain level of status, which is relative to other people, right? To have status, there have to be other people that do and do not have status. There has to be this spectrum that exists, right? So why is luxury relative? Because status goes into more than money. People just think about it that way because that's what we think about when we hear luxury brands. But you've probably been in environments, let's say when you're in high school and money might not have been a thing. Some people might not even have money, but somehow there was some level of status that existed based on what? If you're a gamer, you're not worried about how much money somebody has for their status. If you're in sports, what is your status, right? It comes from winning. There's different forms of status in different environments, and one can be completely counter for one audience than another. So what are the things that people view in your category as status? How do you increase and decrease? And ultimately, how do you make your brand become a status symbol? Not to the point of elitism or anything like that. But what luxury brands focus on heavily is what do I mean socially, right? How do I connect with people? And simply focusing heavily on the emotional side of it and that identity, right?  So that's the luxury brand aspect of this. Now if you want to see me go way deeper in this, I actually have a four hour workshop that I did last year and it was completely free. I did it with a partnership and that's actually something you can see when you join our 30 day challenge. That's only $1. You've probably heard me speak of this if you've seen multiple of my videos, but I just don't touch on that part. There's a bunch of free stuff that comes with that. And people who ask, well, why don't I just throw it on YouTube? It was done as a part of a partnership, right? So I don't have all, I don't have all say in that. So you can check that out at www.knowlabelsnecessary.com slash 30 days, link in the bio description wherever you're watching this. And even with that, I actually want to say something because a lot of artists are afraid to do something like what I just did, right? I just spoke about something that I do have to offer people. And by the way, this is not the free offer, like completely free offer that I was talking about when I said that $1, knowlabelsnecessary.com slash 30 days, you do have to do the www. But I do want to use this for the last point, right? A lot of artists are afraid to mention their value. They're afraid to ask people who are in their audience for something. But the way I think about it is differently. And this is something that we coach artists through again and again. It's, look, do you have something to offer? Do you want to fund your career? Do you want to be able to continue to do what you're doing? At some point, right? If you're actually trying to do it right, right? Build infrastructure around it and do it at a high level, at high quality, and give of yourself, of your art, right? No difference than a huge part of what we do is give of information.  But how do you decrease anxiety around that? You have to believe in what you're doing. Right? You have to believe that I'm not offering a trash show. I'm not offering a trash project. I think everybody should hear this. That's what a lot of people like about Kanye. Kanye believes he's so dope. He doesn't mind talking about how great he believes he is. He doesn't mind to talk about why everybody should get his product and his product is better than everybody's product because he has that level of confidence in it.  I want you to buy. I'm greedy, right? There are some people who are like that, but there's also just, look, well, what am I here for? One of my mission, right? And if I know on the other side of that rainbow, after they interact with me, after they engage with me at my show, my concert, they'll be happy, right? It only feels bad if you feel like they're going to come to your show and they're going to buy your project and then they're going to be disappointed, right? But if you know that, yo, everybody's like, yo, this is life changing. I love this. Do it. Do it again. If that's the experience you start to see, you get these testimonials, you become more and more confident. And all in all, I say that it just comes down to being a professional or not. If you are a professional at some point, it means that there's going to be some level of transaction.  You can make music all the time in the studio for free, right?  Never has to be for sale and deal with any of this pain of offering value. But if you want to support yourself, if you want to try to reach more and more people, inevitably, there's going to become a point where you have to determine to pursue it professionally, which goes beyond just the actual skill set, no different than being a professional athlete has to do with way more than just being an athlete, but somebody who can schedule themselves, eat correctly, become a team player. All right? There's all these elements that come into play. So all the time I tell my homies, look, I have to do it too. All right? So I can back it up and tell you how to walk through that and how to think through that and look at all these other artists I helped do the same. But it starts with understanding the things in this video. So before I go too far, and I just don't want to spend too long on this video, because like I said, I did an entire four-hour workshop that was done in four separate parts, so I could talk on this for a very, very long time. And I don't want to be too much on a tangent. I want you to just be able to go through the specific parts. I want to make this free offer before I forget. I was speaking with an artist earlier this week, and it got put on my heart. So what is the offer? If you have a contract deal that you're working through, feel free to reach out to me for my thoughts on it. That's it. All right? That is the offer. All right? I don't make money from deals. That's not my expertise. I'm not a lawyer. And this is not legal advice that I would be giving you. And I want to make some boundaries around this. I do mean a real deal. I don't mean for any reason at all like, hey, Sean, what are you thinking? It's like the smallest thing in every decision you're making. But throughout my career, I've definitely got a lot of understanding from the business, right? And I've helped artists negotiate some pretty big deals, right? Some pretty big deals. At this point, can accumulate over a million dollars, many hundreds of thousands of dollars in single deals alone. And that's looked like management situations. That's looked like negotiating for booking situations, individual venue situations, signing deals for record label contracts and distribution contracts, or not signing in a why they don't make sense, right? So that is my offer. Again, but it has to be serious, please not for anything. And the artist I spoke to earlier this week, she was meeting with the label and she asked my feedback. And it just reminded me that we've come so far, but there's still a lot of nuances to this business and artists still could use help, people could use help, right? When it comes to not making bad decisions that can impact their life to dire extremes. Because boy was the offer that she had on the table that she was seriously thinking about a bad deal. And all of them weren't bad situations. But again, it did remind me that I do want to make that offer to people. Let y'all know that I am somebody that you come to in those situations, not for the legal aspects of every single point on the actual contract, but for the general pieces, the core pieces of the contract that are being exchanged. And I have to speak generally in this video because I don't know exactly the type of contract. And I will tell you also, Hey, this isn't my thing, but there have been very, very, very many of these situations that I've helped with. And I never have or will take a dime as far as I can personally foresee. And I want to make create a super never because maybe years from now I decide to take on a role like that in the business. But again, I do ask if you want me to look at this, make sure it's something serious. And I also do not promise that just because you reach out to me about something like this, that I will be able to respond because I do still have my life responsibilities. I think that part is only fair. Don't feel bad or like I'm sonning you or something like that just because I didn't respond. And I guess with that being said, how do you reach out to me? Just do it on like social or however you know how to reach out to me. And I'm not going to create like a form or something like that. But just know if two years from now you have a situation, you know, you could feel free reaching out. And I will be honest about the fact that most of the situations that I have helped out with these have been people that have been like clients of the agency and we built a relationship over the years or many of them, like the young woman I helped earlier this week, she's in that 30 day challenge that I referenced earlier. So we have opportunities to like build a relationship. All right, we're talking, we're having conversations and I'm already prioritizing you to some extent in my life if you are a client or in like one of our programs or something like that. However, there have also been people who have just deemed me on Instagram. It's just that I don't have as high of a prioritization to answer random DMs. So this video is already going long enough. Again, that is the free offer. I truly do mean that and I do ask still one, please be serious when you, if you ever reach out on something like that to don't use it to try to like finesse into another situation and get a free marketing plan and all this other stuff, please don't do that because I will sniff that out. And three, know that I do have a life and when I say this, this is something that's truly free, but that also comes with the fact that I might not get to you or get to you fast enough. Like, oh girl, she got lucky. She was like, yo, I got this situation I'm about to have tomorrow and with this meeting with these executives. Can I get some feedback? And I actually happened to catch it and be able to respond within a pretty decent amount of time just because where I was in life for that weekend. So that's it for this video. And again, any of y'all who really want to go deep into brand identity, understanding yourself and how to sell for yourself and also how to use that as leverage to prepare to build 1000 fans in a 30 day span. You can get all that for only one dollar, see other artists that we're working with that are doing it and get real feedback from me at www.nolabelsnecessary.com slash 30 days.