college station TEXAS
Texas A&M
Critic: Joris PUTTENEERS and Gabriel ESQUIVEL
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Anna COOK, Luis RUBIO, Benjamin HERGERT, Courtney WARD, and Francisco ANAYA: This project speculates on a prison in the post-singularity era
- Anna COOK, Luis RUBIO, Benjamin HERGERT, Courtney WARD, and Francisco ANAYA, “Ornamental Crime.”, Plan
- Anna COOK, Luis RUBIO, Benjamin HERGERT, Courtney WARD, and Francisco ANAYA, “Ornamental Crime.”, Perspective
- Anna COOK, Luis RUBIO, Benjamin HERGERT, Courtney WARD, and Francisco ANAYA, “Ornamental Crime.”, Elevation Diagram
- Anna COOK, Luis RUBIO, Benjamin HERGERT, Courtney WARD, and Francisco ANAYA, “Ornamental Crime.”, Site Plan
The prison is occupied by both humans and AI who have committed cyber crimes who are exposed to a customized VR simulation as punishment to fit their crime. This process would simulate time and therefore expedite prison sentences while still carrying out the intended correction. In creating this new prison typology, we are reinterpreting Foucault’s anthropocentric basis to fit the conditions of a post-singularity and post-anthropocentric society where the effects reach both human and AI while redefining the rehabilitation process to achieve proper reintegration into society.
This model is based in cities and can be implemented in multiple locations throughout the world as needed. Each model will be tethered to the city and thus acts as both a panopticon and a reflection of crime rates within the city. The aesthetic agency operates as an interpretation of ornament through VR generation. In this manner, the influx of crime data gathered from the city generates further ornamentation. These concepts are represented through the form of a narrative collage in which the progression through the experience of the prison is displayed in a digital reinterpretation of the collage. The collaged images become something else—a new form that is neither representative of nor derivative of the original architecture that seeks to further dilute reality.
This produces a program that blurs the lines between reality and simulation through strategies of manipulation of time and space in an effort to change societal perceptions of the purpose of prisons. This progresses past Foucault’s analysis of prisoner treatment and separation from society by providing a solution in the form of a post-heterotopic existence: an in-between space that acts as a way to not to only alter an individual criminal, but as a way to repurpose the influence of the prison on society.
