On Internet Magic and Architecture of Uncertainty
Somewhere between the hum of a 3D printer and the flicker of another TikTok astrology forecast, a door creaks open. Not a door door—as in hinges and oiled brass, open-or-closed—but a kind of portal, a threshold. You’re sitting at your desk, where tabs multiply like mushrooms across two screens. The good teapot steams beside a cracked mug; crop circles in the tabletop from last summer’s sanding project. The murmur of a tarot livestream in your headphones mixes with the vibration of the washing machine two rooms down the hall. A furry in full costume walks past the front hedge. Your inbox pings. A package arrives. You scroll past a war, a meal, a dance, a landslide. The kitchen light flickers, syncing for a moment with the algorithm. You wonder—not for the first time today—what is real? And is the distinction even useful anymore?
This is the kind of threshold that New Immaterialism inhabits. A mood more than a movement, a proposition more than a polemic. It doesn’t oppose new materialism – on the contrary, it grows from its soil. We hold dear the rhizomatic vision of Donna Haraway, the diffraction patterns of Karen Barad, the careful entanglements of Rosi Braidotti, the actor-networks of Bruno Latour. But these thinkers did not grow up with the Internet. Not in the way that the internet grows inside us.
What, then, does New Immaterialism add? In two words: Internet Magic. Not magic as escapism or pseudoscience, but as a mode of understanding lost in the flattening force of historical linearity. Before the book, before the archive, before the disciplinary diagram – there was the spell, the ritual, the scene. And now, in a world where more cameras than human eyes are observing everything into brittle states of hyper-visibility, we are slowly rediscovering it.
The late Vilém Flusser anticipated this shift in his Communicology. In the book he described a coming crisis of consciousness. He suggested that beyond historical existence (rooted in progressive time and irrevocable events), and magical existence (defined by circular time and mythic scenes), a third mode was beginning to emerge – one structured by technical imagination. This nascent form of life, he warned, would remain unreadable unless we learn to decipher the programs encoded in the technical images that now mediate our perception:
“Unless we attain the level of consciousness corresponding to technical images, we shall not decipher the programs of which we are the receivers.”
– Flusser, Vilém and Rodrigo Maltez Novaes. Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2022 (originally published 1998).
It is no coincidence, then, that contemporary life feels so paradoxical, so unstable, so… quantum.
In quantum mechanics, the act of observation collapses uncertainty into state. But what happens when everything is always already observed? What happens when we are the observed, the observers, and the algorithms in between? Flusser’s prophetic warning has become everyday experience: we live in a perpetual scroll of technical images – interfaces more real than the streets we walk down, more formative than the concrete of our buildings.
This is where architecture comes back into view – not as a metaphor, but as a medium.
The past decades have seen a welcome resurgence of the material in architectural theory. New materialism has offered a framework that places the built environment within intricate ecological, political, and affective assemblages. Buildings are no longer mute containers; they are porous participants. Concrete, desire, policy, and rain – each a node in a network of becoming. And rightly so. In the face of planetary breakdown, it matters what matters.
But something else is happening, too. While the academy bathes in mud and ecological realism, the collective psyche drifts further into code, image, and ambient unreality. Architecture – so concerned with tectonics – risks losing grip on the surreal tectonics of digital presence. What does it mean to build in a world where “home” is increasingly an algorithmic feed? Where “place” may be more emotionally attached to Grove Street than your actual postcode? Where digital rituals – YouTube tarot, gamified politics, aesthetic-coded activism – shape the experience of dwelling as much as windows and walls?
New Immaterialism does not deny the urgency of the material. It insists, instead, that the immaterial must be taken seriously – and materially. It is not a return to Berkeleyan idealism. It is the inverse: a claim that immaterial things do, in fact, exist and matter.
That is: affective infrastructures, ambient interfaces, the dream logic of UX design, the slow epistemology of memes, the architectural unconscious embedded in gamescapes. These are not distractions from reality. They are its recursive extensions.And yet, architectural discourse often treats the virtual as an aberration – an unreal space, a simulacrum to be resisted. But what happens when simulation becomes the dominant condition? What if the real is no longer what it used to be—not lost, but multiplied beyond retrieval?Here, too, we take distance from Silicon Valley’s adolescent metaphysics. We do not support the fabulations of the richest gamer alive, with his simulation theory apologetics and libertarian glee. We borrow the term “base reality” not to surrender to it, but to question its coordinates.
What is base reality, after all, when half our memories are shaped by images we’ve never touched, and half our actions are guided by prompts not quite written by anyone?
In this light, New Immaterialism becomes not a break but a recursion. It loops the insights of new materialism through the warped mirror of the technical image. It asks: what if the assemblage includes not only bodies and buildings but also bots, vibes, and collective hallucinations? In this sense, we might consider the architectural site to have shifted. Not replaced, but expanded. From plot to platform. From corner lot to interface. From blueprint to bluescreen – the kind of design logic that draws from code, myth, and attention economies in equal measure.
The point is not to abandon the material. It is to avoid reenacting the very hierarchy that new materialism sought to undo – only now with digital infrastructures relegated to the unreal. Instead, we must navigate a world in which the material and immaterial no longer oppose each other, nor exist in a stable binary. They interfere, resonate, superimpose.
To engage the present, we must learn to speak this unstable tongue. To practice magic – not as fantasy, but as the rigorous deciphering of new-world logics. To become sensitive not only to bricks and carbon but to the ghosts in the machine, the feelings in the feedback loop, the architectures of attention.
New Immaterialism, then, is an invitation. A call to architects, thinkers, designers, programmers, artists – to embrace the uncertainty of our moment not as a failure of knowledge, but as a condition of it. Not to fix the real, but to play with its programs. Not to dismiss the vibe, but to architect it.