Oskar Maly
Always/Drift
"All that was once directly lived has become mere representation." Guy Debord and the Situationists wandered 1960s Paris, getting drunk, declaring modern life a shadow. They spray-painted "Never Work" on walls, practiced derive - purposeful purposelessness, walking to disrupt the city's capitalist programming. They're still right, half a century later.
Los Angeles killed its flâneurs. No walking, no wandering, no discovery. The city faces a choice: surrender to digital isolation or reinvent public space for the algorithm age.
We scroll instead of stroll. Infinite scroll is colonialism perfected, behavioral cocaine, no violence needed when everyone's too high to resist. The restaurant exists more in Instagram tags than its address. The party happened most intensely in stories. Capital became image; image became the only capital that matters.
Always/Drift transforms The Bloc from dying mall into living algorithm. Architecture must become the dealer of better drugs, hyperinteractive, entertaining. Enter the building to find what you seek but stumble upon others' thoughts. Fulfillment theatre makes commerce visible, while architecture above becomes pure drift. Individual feeds merge into collective experience. Walls pixelate into shared algorithms, paths become feeds, shopping becomes performance.
This is détournement made architecture - turning capitalism's infrastructure against itself. The Situationists mismatched maps to unlock urban drift; we mismatch algorithms to reclaim digital wandering. The building learns from use, reshaping like landscape eroded by weather.
Architecture is dead. The algorithm lives. Architecture must learn to drift.
