Evolving Synergy: OCEAN Currents, Current OCEANs and Why Networks Must Displace Themselves

Founded in the early 1990s, OCEAN was one of the first collaborative geographically distributed practices to realise the potential of telecommunication and digital design technologies. Here Michael Hensel recounts the various mutations and fluid transformations of the experimental groupings that came to form OCEAN net. Accordingly, Henselʹs account is more akin to a band biography than a staid sociology of a professional office. Moreover, he explores how the molecular model of distributed authorship presents difficulties, either by confounding external expectations of a singular identity or signature behind the various design processes, or internally as a stable whole of identities attempting to re-emerge and fix its collaborative mixings into a rigid hierarchy. As OCEANʹs biography attests, true collaboration is inherently flat, distributed and transformative, situating architecture as more than just a service profession and transforming it into an intensive practice of living. Collective intelligence in these terms is embedded in the distributed evolutionary processes of the practice as a design project in itself.