E-FX

We are pleased to introduce Joshua Guiness as one of our guest lecturers. Joshua Guiness is an architect working at the intersection of speculative design and territorial transformation. His work applies spatial intelligence to processes of environmental, social, and institutional change. As co-lead of Architecture Land Initiative, his design projects develop trans-scalar approaches to architecture, landscape, and territory. He is a lecturer at VOLUPTAS, ETH Zurich, where his teaching explores experimental design and architectural worldbuilding. Shrinking Archipelago — apply now. 
 AA Visiting School
Berlin
5–14 August 2026 @aavisiting_school @aaschool @shrinking_archipelago @joshua__guiness @edge_effects #greenarchipelago ä#intelligentruin #oswaltmatthiasungers #remkoolhaas #genericcity #transformation

Long Landscapes — Half-Earth Chimeras –
Exhibited at Swissnex’s Planetary Embassy for COP30, Brazil. @swissnex_network – “Long Landscapes: Half Earth Chimeras” seeks to question the antagonistic relationship between the spheres of man and nature, envisioning how the two can coexist. This video work forms part of an ongoing inquiry into the spatial and territorial potentials of global wilderness networks. – In the intricate weaving and crossing of trans-continental corridors, Zones of Hybridity emerge: Areas in which the two spheres of the Earth collide, contain, and cross each other. Areas that remain off-limits to the human thrive and influence their surroundings, creating fertile zones of indistinction along their edges: Along the limits of the natural and the human-centered zones, linear membranes emerge, containing and mediating at once. Points of crossing result in vertical superposition: Complex nodes where two entirely separate spheres flow through each other, without interfering.

Long Landscapes — Half-Earth Chimeras –
 Exhibited at Swissnex’s Planetary Embassy for COP30, Brazil. @swissnex_network – “Long Landscapes: Half Earth Chimeras” seeks to question the antagonistic relationship between the spheres of man and nature, envisioning how the two can coexist. This video work forms part of an ongoing inquiry into the spatial and territorial potentials of global wilderness networks. – The realm of nature, granted full rights, would manifest as a sovereign planetary entity: A network that follows its own logic, cutting through and across existing man-made demarcations, legal zones, and nation-states. O.E. Wilson, inventor of the Half-Earth project, calls these interconnected spaces 'Long Landscapes'. These Long Landscapes stretch across continents, connecting disparate points of the planet within a single, continuous network of diverse spaces of wilderness, where plants and animals can roam free of human interference.

Long Landscapes — Half-Earth Chimeras –
 Exhibited at Swissnex’s Planetary Embassy for COP30, Brazil. – “Long Landscapes: Half Earth Chimeras” seeks to question the antagonistic relationship between the spheres of man and nature, envisioning how the two can coexist. This video work forms part of an ongoing inquiry into the spatial and territorial potentials of global wilderness networks. – What would the Half-Earth look like? One side is the world as we know it, ruled by the systems we’ve created. The other, a world devoid of human influence, dominated by the hidden order of nature. Plant and animal intelligence manifests through movement in space. If migratory pathways and territorial zones are expressions of the right of nature. Our goal must be establishing our own diplomatic relationship to it.

E-FX/05 — On Scenarios (and Transformation) II – If listening is an opening towards the existing, the scenario is an opening towards the possible. Based on observations of the real, its possible transformations are imagined. To write a scenario is to plot a jailbreak — to test the ways a system might escape itself. Its intelligence lies not in prediction but in cunning: turning constraints into paths of divergence. Scenario-thinking appears as an evolutionary intelligence: the capacity to sense metastable conditions, to model their possible trajectories, and to act within them. Design, here, becomes the world’s own way of diagramming its next move. – Full dispatch ↗︎ edgeeffects.substack.com – Lecture delivered at VOLUPTAS, ETH Zurich, as part of the seminar ‘Territories of Sound’ that explores sound as a means of figuring space. The seminar is part of an ongoing investigation into planetary spatiality through methodological innovations in pedagogy, strategy, and design.

E-FX/05 — On Scenarios (and Transformation) II – The dream-image re-makes reality: montages allow us to connect things that don’t actually belong together. While the scenario acts on tendencies, the montage renders its effects. Through montage, the dream-image emerges as an alien prehension of the possible, a vehicle to transcend convention. – Image Credits: 1 – Chris Marker, La Jetée (1962) 2 – Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho (1960) 3 – Andreas Gursky, Tote Hosen (2000) 4 – Philip-Lorca diCorcia, New York City (Fred) (1984) 5 – Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains (2002) 6 – Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, from Hover series (1996) 8 – Filip Dujardin, Fictions (2009) – Full dispatch ↗︎ edgeeffects.substack.com – Lecture delivered at VOLUPTAS, ETH Zurich

E-FX/05 — On Scenarios (and Transformation) I – Space is a medium of change. Sound reveals this active nature—revealing dispositions, affordances, and tendencies through the way vibrations move, interfere, and change. We can think of our entire world as a collection of overlapping and interdependent tendencies. So, how may we act within a space that is already full of change? The task of design is to construct problematiques from the existing mutations and tendencies of the environment. – Full dispatch ↗︎ edgeeffects.substack.com – Lecture delivered at VOLUPTAS, ETH Zurich, as part of the seminar ‘Territories of Sound’ that explores sound as a means of figuring space. The seminar is part of an ongoing investigation into planetary spatiality through methodological innovations in pedagogy, strategy, and design.

E-FX/05 — On Scenarios (and Transformation) I – Sound shows us: Transformation in space is ubiquitous. Everything is always already in the process of changing. But what is change, in a deep, not just superficial sense? It is a shift in what appeared constant, an alteration of norm: a switch in habit, stability, or convention. We can say that a norm is transformed when a reliable recurrence is re-wired — when a novel connection between instances occurs, and this new linkage of instances attains consistency. Real transformation is the emergence of regular connections (in space and in time) that previously escaped prediction, that seemed unlikely. – Image Credits: 1 – Pierre Huyghe, Untilled (2012) 2 – Catherine Opie, 105 Freeway (1994) 3 – Unknown, Ball on Inclined Plane (unknown) 4 – Archizoom Associati, No-Stop-City (1968) 5 – Archizoom Associati, No-Stop-City (1968) 6 – O.M. Ungers and Rem Koolhaas, Berlin: A Green Archipelago (1977) 7 – Joshua Guiness, The Existing and the Possible (2025) 8 – Richard Long, Walking a Line in Peru (1972) 9 – Pierre Huyghe, After ALife Ahead (2017) – Full dispatch ↗︎ edgeeffects.substack.com – Lecture delivered at VOLUPTAS, ETH Zurich, as part of the seminar ‘Territories of Sound’ that explores sound as a means of figuring space. The seminar is part of an ongoing investigation into planetary spatiality through methodological innovations in pedagogy, strategy, and design.

E-FX/04 — On Mapping (and Diagrammatics) II – Stillness, or stability, is nothing but an effect of scale – an illusory phenomenon. By listening closer to sound, honing in on vibratory oscillations, rhythmic patterns, and dynamic fluxes in our environment, we gain a more precise impression of the temporal processes that surround us. Sound disrupts the fixity of states. It is in essence temporal. As a form of Rhythmanalysis, any Sonic Cartography requires some act of decomposition. The question is how — How to decompose time? What frame of reference to employ? — Full dispatch ↗︎ edgeeffects.substack.com – Lecture delivered at VOLUPTAS, ETH Zurich

E-FX/04 — On Mapping (and Diagrammatics) II – “Reality is mobile. There do not exist things made, but only things in the making, not states that remain fixed, but only states in process of change. Rest is never anything but apparent, or rather, relative. . . . All reality is, therefore, tendency, if we agree to call tendency a nascent change of direction.” – Full dispatch ↗︎ edgeeffects.substack.com – Lecture delivered at VOLUPTAS, ETH Zurich – Image Credits: 1 – Harold Fisk, Mississippi River Meander Belt (1948) 2 – Wassily Kandinsky, Dance Curves (1926) 3 – Claude-Marc Magny, Sarabande pour un Homme (1710) 4 – Bernard Tschumi, Parc de la Villette Fireworks (1991) 5 – Emma Willard, A Glimpse of Universal History in Perspective, from the Creation of the Napoleonic Empire (1836) 6 – Brian Eno, Music for Airports (1978) 7 – Carsten Nicolai, Time..Dot (2000) – Quote: Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics

E-FX/03 — On Mapping (and Diagrammatics) I – In the case of the tick, three perception marks — and three only — lead to the execution of its bodily actions, “and then only in a certain sequence. From the enormous world surrounding the tick, three stimuli glow like signal lights in the darkness and serve as directional signs that lead the tick surely to its target.”
As a result, the complexity of the animal corresponds “perfectly” to the complexity of its umwelt, which surrounds the animal like a “soap bubble,” conditioning how it extends itself dynamically. This is the classical example cited by Jacob von Uexküll in his description of the concept of “Umwelt”. The tick’s life world can be represented diagrammatically — its reality is an extraction from the vast complexity of the natural world. Every cell and every living being, according to Ueküll, is an agent, creating its individual environment. Which signals and effects are you on the lookout for? What enters the world of your map, and what does not? – Full dispatch ↗︎ edgeeffects.substack.com – Lecture delivered at VOLUPTAS, ETH Zurich – Part of the seminar ‘Territories of Sound’ that explores sound as a means of figuring space. The seminar is part of an ongoing investigation into planetary spatiality through methodological innovations in pedagogy, strategy, and design.

E-FX/03 — On Mapping (and Diagrammatics) I – When we begin to figure space through sound — capturing and mapping our ever-changing, vibrant surroundings — we are already immersed in the process of creation. The map generates a projective view on what is given in space, inviting us to speculate on its possible mutations and transformations. Creation can then be re-defined as the speculative act of modulation — bending the existing into something new. Mapping is already part of design. We move, continuously, from sensing, to mapping, to speculation. The map reflects a problem back to us: It is an abductive device, it captures a tendency, a state, an affordance, a shred of the future. A relational map remains open to change. It is not a finished product, but a beginning of something new, something previously hidden, unclear, unspoken. — Full dispatch ↗︎ edgeeffects.substack.com – Lecture delivered at VOLUPTAS, ETH Zurich – Image Credits: 1 – Jakob von Uexküll, Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen (1934) 2 – Athanasius Kircher, The Sun, the Earth and the Movements of the Moon (1664) 3 – European Space Agency, Gaia Satellite’s First Sky Map (2016) 4 – Al-Sharif Al-Idrisi, World Map (1154) 5 – Fernand Deligny, Maps and Wander Lines (1969-1979) 6 – flowingdata.com, Where People Run: Chicago (2013) 7 – Francesco Jodice, Sao Paolo Helicopter Routes (2006)