Thursday, May 30, 2013

Epiphenomenon


Ultimately architecture -aside from its many growing implications in the sciences- and as the practice, is responsible for the physical definition of space, a definition that has invoked the notion of ‘performance’ and the tired utilitarian debate on the correlation of form and function. To move this debate on entirely, we should possibly "redefine ‘form’ not as the shape of a material object alone, but as the multitude of effects, the milieu of conditions, modulations and microclimates that emanate from the exchange of an object with its specific environment - a dynamic relationship that is both perceived and interacted with by a subject. Performance evolves from the synthesis of this dynamic(Hensel and Achim 6-11), the same way it evolves from the dramatic definition of the word in its theatrical realm. Once the perspective is shifted form the 20th century world view of dissecting the physical world into individual atoms to an understanding of interrelations, connections and ultimately to the architectures of ‘interface’ we can deduce that in a network society the interfaces between things matter as much as things themselves. With this perspective, theatrical performance, and screen acting in particular pose an interesting commonality with the performance of architecture in the digital age not only through an understanding of matter and form, but rather the emergence of substance through the study of complex behavior and those boundaries between systems that govern the condition of exchange between them.



Hensel, Michael, and Mendez Achim. Versatility and Vicissitude: An Introduction to Performance in Morpho-Ecological Design. 78. London: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2008. 6-11. Print.   

Noumenon



 
 
A Noumenon (in Kantian philosophy) is a thing as it is in itself, as distinct from a thing as it is knowable by the senses through phenomenal attributes.
 
 
image: Hiroshima, photographer unknown

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Free Body Diagram


 

One can argue that the composition of forces that contribute to a climber’s ability to hang from four fingers or a karate master’s power to smash a brick wall, surpass conventional structural analytics (whether dynamic or static). This is an altogether different convergence of forces than a strongman competitor or a boxer where the forces are equal on both sides of the equation. This is quite possibly an example of a structural equation where the sum is greater than its parts, one aligned with "the principle of least effort" in evolutionary biology.  If one can truly map the forces that are accumulated through these intensities, new paradigms for structural stability can disentangle our built environment from buildings to cars and our relationships with them.

Photo: Mustang Wanted - Ukraine

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Plasma

“Stores have the product displayed to follow the logic of marketing,”  At a warehouse, on the other hand, “there’s no psychology involved. It’s pure efficiency.”1

1. Wired interview with John Bartholdi, professor of warehouse science at Georgia Tech.
Photo:  Mark Bramley

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Hæc


Hæcceity denotes the discrete qualities, properties or characteristics of a thing which make it a particular thing. It is a person or object's "thisness" or in other terms, a non-descriptive reference to an individual.

Source: Wikipedia
Image: Robert DeNiro, Raging Bull, 1980

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Existance





"The mortal player". In a recent genre of games, the prospect of permanent death alters the landscape and dynamics of games in a fundamental undertaking as every decision made in the game could lead to annihilation of the player. This change in strategy, shifts the alliance of video games and reality from superior graphics to the psychology of human existence.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Lenore Tawney 

Photo: Yousuf Karsh

Friday, April 1, 2011

"Why is there something, instead of nothing" [1]


1. Hawking, S., & Mlodinow, L. (September 7, 2010). The Grand Design. Oxford: Bantam.
Image: Allen Friedman  Telescopic photograph of the Sun with hydrogen filter 

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Immaterial Space

When the Schiphol International Airport in Amsterdam decided to expand from handling accurately and efficiently 70 million pieces of luggage per year—20 million more bags per year than they used to, they had a problem with space since the airport is confined within city and other territorial limits. An increase of 40 percent in the capacity of luggage meant an even larger spatial growth due to the number of employees and accessories that was required to perform this task. The solution came in a collaboration with IBM, where the airport's automated baggage system will allow Schiphol to increase their baggage handling capacity to the desired level.

“We could not make the airport bigger; the physical footprint is limited by highways, cities and villages. We must make more capacity available by making the system smarter…The system chooses the fastest way by which it can get the suitcase to its exit point… So you can imagine the intelligent software creates space where there was no space before. Schiphol is not really buying software, they are buying performance.”[1]

In this practical example, organization of matter has lent itself to the organization of bits, thus providing an immaterial substitution for the architecture of space.




[1] Hans Deijkers & Remco Sierat of IBM Global Services
Photo: Port Sudan Airport courtesy Science Photo Library
Source: IBM

Friday, February 18, 2011

Space and Time

Although fixed in space, Michel Foucault notes "Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up."

Michel Foucault. (1967) Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heteroptopias

Monday, January 24, 2011

Affect of Science

"What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia [you] must be silent?"

Richard P. Feynman

Friday, November 12, 2010

New Regime of Fineness

[In his Monadology 1] true substances were explained as metaphysical points which, Leibniz asserted, are both real and exact — mathematical points being exact but not real and physical ones being real but not exact 2.




Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadology

1.^ Leibniz G., The Monadology translated by George MacDonald Ross, 1999
2.^ Leibniz G., New System §11
Image: Controlled-NOT Molecular Gates of NMR-type Quantum Computer
http://www.carolla.com/quantum/QuantumComputers.htm

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Natural Engine

Five brand new close-ups of comet 103P/Hartley 2 arrived at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab...at 8:02 Pacific time this morning.


The Deep Impact probe (now on a mission called EPOXI) passed by comet Hartley 2 at 7:01 a.m. PDT... The probe flew through the comet’s diffuse corona at about 27,500 miles per hour and came within 435 miles of its icy, dirty core.

Source: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/11/epoxi-comet-flyby/

Monday, August 23, 2010

Design of Design

"Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it. I think that’s what Steve Jobs does. He starts with a vision rather than a list of features."

Fred Brooks

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Interstitial Mind

A revolution is only interesting in its becoming. The intermediary state of revolt, not the authority state nor the revolutionary government. An interstitial state between events. The negative space. The Void. The zone of not the city nor the suburb, but the street. That of wires that connect nodes, and that of mathematical equations that put two otherwise distinct variables in a relationship. Guerrilla artfare, with no plausible form or taste. The culinary art of preparing ‘water’. An entire movie on the flow of black oil.


That median space is where the DJ usually stands; in-between two decks, twisting reality on the turntable. A circlet or what Deleuze might call a “crystalline ” is formed, resonating the minute reactions of chemical influx onto amplifiers. Palpation of vibrations at a sub-atomic level. Once again it is the body that is the instrument of inscription. It is an infinite loop between an organic battery and the indomitable machine powered by electricity. Electricity that is traditionally produced by burning oil.



 
Image: Pixel3 Photography 2007

Ecosystem of Bodies

“My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (--its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on__”1

1- F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, s.636, Walter Kaufmann transl.
Image: Formation of intensity in Mamatus Clouds. Jorn C. Olsen 2004

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Hets

If the role of architecture is to create spaces of superior quality, that of motivation and refinement, then one is to ask why the most effectual conceptions in human culture were initiated in treacherous spaces.1 Many great thinkers flourished and died in deficient spaces. It is possible that uneasy conditions are essential to the path of human nobility. There is something about the 7½ floor and its improbable connection to the head of John Malkovich in the office building that extracted dramatic tension from its actors.2 Rem Koolhaas argues that human beings are species that easily form to their mold. “People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming.”3 My best work has been so often the result of tormented ulterior conditions. This conditioning might even be interior to the self. It is no secret that many great thinkers have died of terminal illnesses that followed them all along. Tormented conditions that were the result of their containing rather than their container. It was cancer that transfused Sohrab’s body –the late Iranian poet- onto paper in the form of poetry.4
Tormented spaces are often ambiguous. The magic of Koans and fortune cookies lie in their ambiguity. They are almost universal to any situation and everyone tailors them to their individual zeitgeist. Ambiguous spaces have the same effect, they are far from, yet optimally generic. They are specific by being vague and the feat lies in their complexity. You inhabit your ‘place’ not because of your situation (such as affordability and social status) but because you have ‘found’ them. “[Don Juan] pointed out that I was very tired sitting on the floor, and that the proper thing to do was to find a “spot” (sitto) on the floor where I could sit without fatigue…. [He] clearly emphasized that a spot meant a place where a man could feel naturally happy and strong. …[He] explained to me that not every place was good to sit or be on, and that within the confines of the porch there was one spot that was unique, a spot where I could be at my very best. 5

1. A continuum of such spaces are well presented in the ghostly crust of post-manufacturing buildings in the movie 8 Mile (2002, Universal Studios and Dreamworks LLC)
3. Katrina Heron, From Bauhaus to Koolhaas WIRED Issue 4.07 - Jul 1996 [When humans bearing the same physical anatomy dwell in such diverse forms of habitat, it is easy to nullify Corbusier’s universal definition of ‘man’.]

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Atlantic Architecture








The images [are] captured by researchers from the University of Aberdeen during more than 300 hours of diving with a remotely operated vehicle between 2,300 feet and 12,000 feet deep along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the largest mountain range on Earth, which runs down the center of the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and Africa on the east and the Americas on the west.

“They have no eyes, no obvious sense organs or brain but there is a head end, tail end and the primitive body plan of backboned animals is established,” said Monty Priede, one of the lead researchers on the project, part of the Census of Marine Life.

Images: David Shale
Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/gallery_marine_species/#ixzz0t0qRNWa8


Friday, July 2, 2010

Speed Merchants


Emotion > Choreography > Motion > Illusion > Trace > Intent










Image: Satellite image of the Nurburgring race track, Google inc.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Mapping Free Will

The "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), [is] exploring the development of new technologies to rapidly create theoretically-informed, data-driven models of complex human, social, cultural, and behavioral dynamics that are instantiated in near-realtime simulations. These technologies would leverage the entire social science community and provide a rich test bed for establishing the empirical validity of alternative theories, and identifying gaps in knowledge that cannot be accounted for by the current body of social science theory. Other important technologies of interest include the formalization and semantic representation of social science theories, the semantic integration of disparate types of social science data, techniques for analyzing these data, and efficient computational techniques for rapid data processing. DARPA refers to this range of technologies as “Technologies for the Applications of Social Computing (TASC).” DARPA anticipates all these technologies would be integrated to develop a flexible, modular social simulation system that integrates sound social science theory with real world data, that facilitates a wide spectrum of military and intelligence applications, and that supports reliable, real-world decisions at multiple levels of analysis."

From: DARPA-SN-09-20 Request for Information (RFI): Technologies for the Applications of Social Computing (TASC)
Image: Apocalypse Now, © 1979 Omni Zoetrope

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Optimism

Still from Kárhozat (Damnation) by Béla Tarr


'Artistic creation is by definition a denial of death. Therefore it is optimistic, even if in an ultimate sense the artist is tragic.’

Andrei Tarkovsky, Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, London, 1994

The Screen


"Chaos does not exist; it is an abstraction because it is inseparable from a screen that makes something - something rather than nothing - emerge from it. Chaos would be a pure Many, a purely disjunctive diversity, while the something is a One, not a pregiven unity, but instead the indefinite article that designates a certain singularity. How can the Many become the One? A great screen has to be placed in between them. Like a formless elastic membrane, an electromagnetic field, or the receptacle of the Timaeus, the screen makes something issue from chaos, and even if this something differs only slightly. In this way Leibniz had long been able to ascribe several approximations to chaos. According to a cosmological approximation, chaos would be the sum of all possibles, that is, all individual essences insofar as each tends to existence on its own account; but the screen only allows compossibles -and only the best combination of compossibles -to be sifted through.

Following a physical approximation, chaos would amount to depthless shadows, but the screen disengages its dark backdrop, the "fuscum subnigrum" that, however little it differs from black, nonetheless contains all colors: the screen is like the infinitely refined machine that is the basis of Nature. From a psychic point of view, chaos would be a universal giddiness, the sum of all possible perceptions being infinitesimal or infinitely minute; but the screen would extract differentials that could be integrated in ordered perceptions. If chaos does not exist, it is because it is merely the bottom side of the great screen, and because the latter composes infinite series of wholes and parts, which appear chaotic to us (as aleatory developments) only because we are incapable of following them, or because of the insufficiency of our own screens.' Even the cavern is not a chaos, but a series whose elements remain caverns filled with an increasingly rarefied matter, each of which is extended over the following ones."



What Is an Event? by Gilles Deleuze from the Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque, translated by Tom Conley, the University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

image: Matthias Dittrich music visualization Java-Applet http://www.matthiasdittrich.com/projekte/narratives/applet/index.html

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Eventalization

The Utah State Prison firing squad execution chamber  Photo: Trent Nelson/Salt Lake Tribune


'[Eventalization] means making visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropological trait or an obviousness that imposes itself uniformly on all. To show that things weren’t ‘necessary as all that’; it wasn’t as a matter of course that mad people came to be regarded as mentally ill; it wasn’t self-evident that the only thing to be done with a criminal was to lock them up; it wasn’t self-evident that the causes of illness were to be sought through individual examination of bodies; and so on. A breach of self-evidence, of those self-evidences on which our knowledges, acquiescences and practices rest: this is the first theoretico-political function of eventalization.'

M. Foucault, ‘Impossible Prison’ [1980] in Foucault Live, 1996, p. 277

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Photon Farm

The power of crowd sourcing becomes obvious in its quantum application in a new experiment by the Japanese Space Agency. "A new space propulsion technology dubbed Solar Sail has been put to test in space ... When a photon strikes the surface of the sail, it bounces off, imparting its momentum to the sail. Each photon might not deliver much thrust, possibly a few millionths of a g, but due to its constant impact, it allows a build up of large velocity change over time which is ideal for long space travels."

A photon, frail by itself  as a source of thrust yet empowering and essential to the terrestrial ecosystem by its contribution to the photosynthetic process, makes its electromagnetic qualities visible through macroscopic effects. Scientists have demonstrated here that photons are capable of displaying particle qualities by harnessing its power in a swarm state.
Photo of solar sail deployment Courtesy JAXA/JSPEC

Mathematics of Hunting


When sharks and other ocean predators can’t find food, their movement patterns shift in surprising ways that are associated with particle physics rather than animal behavior. They abandon Brownian motion, the random motion seen in swirling gas molecules, for what’s known as Lévy flight — a mix of long trajectories and short, random movements found in turbulent fluids.

Computer models suggest Lévy flight is the optimal search pattern for predators in low-prey areas, and maximizes the chance of a random encounter. But real-world studies have been inconclusive, with reports of Lévy flight countered by doubts about data gathering and interpretation. As the animals went from areas of high ecological abundance to low, the equations describing their movement switched from Brownian motion to Lévy flight.

The findings raise the question of where Lévy flight comes from — whether it’s an instinctive or learned behavior, a property of individuals or a function of spatial distributions governed by as-yet-unknown laws — and how it first evolved. “Animals’ behavior is much more plastic than previously thought,” said Pade. “They have a huge repertoire of movement strategies and patterns.”

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/06/levy-flight-strategy/#ixzz0qhbSAQGy

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Jeff Koons BMW art-car

"I don't speed. But i like to get to my destination as soon as possible"
Jeff Koons


Read More http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/06/jeff-koons-art-car-doesnt-suck/#ixzz0plbu9GoM

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Affective Computing

While human emotions are often associated with surges in hormones and other neuropeptides, emotions in machines might be associated with abstract states associated with progress (or lack of progress) in autonomous learning systems. In this view, affective emotional states correspond to time-derivatives (perturbations) in the learning curve of an arbitrary learning system.


Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneering computer scientists in artificial intelligence, relates emotions to the broader issues of machine intelligence stating in The Emotion Machine that emotion is "not especially different from the processes that we call 'thinking.'"[8]


Minsky argues that emotions are different ways to think that our mind uses to increase our intelligence. He challenges the distinction between emotions and other kinds of thinking. His main argument is that emotions are "ways to think" for different "problem types" that exist in the world. The brain has rule-based mechanism (selectors) that turns on emotions to deal with various problems.








Source: en.wikipedia.org


Image: Fearful face recognition after placebo infusion versus neutral face recognition after placebo infusion. WOEXP: 475. http://neuro.imm.dtu.dk/services/jerne/brede/WOEXP_475.html

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Linux vs. Genome


A comparison of the networks formed by genetic code and the Linux operating system has given insight into the fundamental differences between biological and computational programming.

The shapes are very dissimilar, reflecting the evolutionary parameters of each process. Biology is driven by random mutations and natural selection. Software is an act of intelligent design.

“One of the biggest problems of biological data is that you have no intuitions about it. It’s just a bunch of gobbledygook symbols. One way to get intuition is to map its structure onto something we know about,” said study co-author and Yale University informaticist Marc Gerstein. “Linux is evolving and changing. But unlike evolution in biology, we know exactly what’s going on.”

Several years ago, he refined a technique for turning gene-network “hairballs” — densely tangled depictions of gene interaction — into hierarchical maps. At the top of each map are what Gerstein calls master regulators, which steer the activity of many other genes. At the bottom are workhorses, which pump out protein code. In between are the middle managers, which do a bit of both.

Since then, Gerstein has compared the structure of gene networks between species, and contrasted biological networks with corporate and governmental structures. He hopes the contrasts will illuminate how network structure shapes genomic function.


In the latest study, published April 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he compared the genome of E. coli, a widely studied microbe, to Linux, the popular open source operating system. Though Gerstein hoped for insight into biological networks, the study also suggests strategies for social and technological engineers.

“If we don’t have designers fine-tuning things, and we have to deal with random changes, then what do we need to do in the control structure to make it robust?” said Gerstein.

E. coli’s network proved to have a pyramid-like shape, with a few master regulators, more middle managers, and many workhorses. In stark contrast, the Linux kernel call graph — the network of interactions between different pieces of program code — looks almost like an inverted pyramid. A great many top-level programs call on a few common subroutines.

Gene network structures start to resemble the Linux call graph as species become more complex, according to Sergei Maslov, a Brookhaven National Laboratory systems biologist not involved in the study. However, their pyramids never become as top-heavy as Linux. There seems to be a natural limit to this progression. The new study suggests why.

“If you update a low-level function, then you need to update all the functions that use it. That’s doable if you’re an engineer. You just go through all the code. But it’s impossible in biology,” Maslov said.

Indeed, when Gerstein’s team tracked the evolution of Linux kernel code since its original 1991 version, they found that its basic components had undergone extensive alteration. Biologically analagous are so-called evolutionarily conserved genes, which are used in a great many functions, but these have hardly changed at all. When a mutation is added, evolution can’t quickly update the rest of the genetic code.

Asked if human software engineers have outpaced natural evolution, Gerstein said the opposite was true. The computer model may be so extreme that it can’t be scaled to biological levels of complexity. “You can easily see why software systems might be fragile, and biological systems robust. Biological networks are built to adapt to random changes. They’re lessons on how to construct something that can change and evolve,” said Gerstein.

For now, the researchers have no plans to compare genomes to the most widely-used operating system of all, Windows.

“That’s forbidden,” said study co-author and Stony Brook University biophysicist Koon-Kiu Yan. “Windows is not open source.”

Image: Network structures of E. coli genome and Linux./PNAS.


Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/05/linux-vs-life/#ixzz0n7JJmx81

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

clocks



Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.

Wired Contributing editor Jonah Lehrer

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Continental Bodies



"Nobody can deny that to be able to swim is a conquest of existence, it is fundamental that you understand: I conquer an element; it is not so obvious to conquer an element. I can swim, I can fly; wonderful. [But] what does it mean? It is very simple: not being able to swim consists of being vulnerable to the confrontation of the wave. Then, you have the infinite ensemble of water molecules that compose the wave; it composes a wave, and I say it's a wave because it is composed of elementary bodies called “molecules”. Actually they are not the most elementary; one should go even further than water molecules. Water molecules already belong to a body, the aquatic body, the ocean body, etc…

What is the fundamental mode of acquiring knowledge? It is ... the experiential acquisition of knowledge: I dare, I wade, like one says. What does it mean to wade? … the word indicates pretty well, one clearly sees that it is an extrinsic relationship: sometimes the wave cuffs me and sometimes it takes me away; they are shock effects… meaning, I don’t know anything of the relationships that compose themselves or decompose themselves, I receive the extrinsic effects. The parts that belong to me are being shuddered; they receive a shock effect coming from parts that belong to the wave. Therefore sometimes I laugh, sometimes I weep, depending if the wave makes me laugh or knock me out, I am within the passion affects…

On the contrary, ‘I can swim’ does not necessarily mean that I have a mathematical, physical, or scientific knowledge of the wave’s movement; it means that I have a skill, a surprising skill; I have a sense of rhythm. What does ‘the rhythm’ mean? It means that I know how to compose my characteristic relationship directly with the wave’s relationship. It does not happen anymore between the wave and me, meaning it does not happen anymore between the extensive parts, the wave’s wet parts and my body’s parts; it happens between the relationships. Relationships that compose the wave, relationships that compose my body and my skills when I can swim, presenting my body under some relationships that compose themselves directly with the wave’s relationships. I dive with synchronicity; I come out from under the water with synchronicity. I avoid the coming wave, or on the contrary I use it, etc… All this is the art of the composition of relationships.”


Translation of short excerpt extracted from a class by Gilles Deleuze's on Spinoza in Cours Vincennes University in Paris during the 70's.

Video: 'Drowning' by Luke Brown

Monday, January 25, 2010

Self-Optimization

In [an] experiment, researchers led by Toshiyuki Nakagaki, of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, placed oat flakes (a slime mold delicacy) in a pattern that mimicked the way cities are scattered around Tokyo, then set the slime mold loose.After about a day, the slime mold had constructed a network of interconnected nutrient-ferrying tubes. Its design looked almost identical to that of the rail system surrounding Tokyo, with a larger number of strong, resilient tunnels connecting centrally located oats. “There is a remarkable degree of overlap between the two systems,” Fricker says.
The researchers then borrowed simple properties from the slime mold’s behavior to create a biology-inspired mathematical description of the network formation. Like the slime mold, the model first creates a fine mesh network that goes everywhere, and then continuously refines the network so that the tubes carrying the most cargo grow more robust and redundant tubes are pruned.

The behavior of the plasmodium “is really difficult to capture by words,” comments biochemist Wolfgang Marwan of Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany. “You see they optimize themselves somehow, but how do you describe that?” The new research “provides a simple mathematical model for a complex biological phenomenon,” Marwan wrote in an article in the same issue of Science.

source: wired.com

Architecture is


As our capabilities for understanding phenomena becomes more granular and fine and processing power enables us to accurately map them, we can quantitatively calculate and thus materialize an interface that mediates between these domains, one that responds not only to material systems, but to flows of asomatous phenomena (climate, Hertzian Space, economics, sound, affect and so on). Almost all trends in contemporary technology and science point to the development of ubiquitous and ambient models based on fine granulation. Examples are parallel in almost every field from the development of the genetic computation and fitness function, the Semantic Web (GGG) as a single global machine that is materializing from all the computing bits and tagged objects in the world, the design of implicit interactions and distributed agents[1] to finally the understanding that the universe is made of bits and it is storing and processing information in the quantum realm [2]


A physical structure -being the medium of architecture- forms spontaneously as these fine components try to meet energetic requirements and seek a point of minimal free energy.

In this respect the architectural form, moving rapidly from the tradition of being the node itself, operates in an in-between fuzzy mode, an interface that exists only by means of connecting the nodes in the global network of said phenomena.



[1] "The most profound technologies are those that disappear” “[they] weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” The Computer for the 21st Century by Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC, 1991. He also coined the term Ubiquitous Computing.


[2] Seth Loyd interview with WIRED magazine Issue 14.03 - March 2006

[3] Image:Vincent Fournier/The Space Project/Courtesy of The Steps Gallery, London, UK

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Formation of Intensity


Moldavite glass was formed 15 million years ago during the impact of a giant meteorite in present-day Nördlinger Ries. Splatters of rocks that were melted by the impact cooled while they were actually airborne and most fell in central Bohemia - traversed by Vltava river (German: Moldau). As such the glass can be found in the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany.






Source: www.wikipedia.org

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Univocity


Deleuze claims that being is univocal, i.e., that all of its senses are affirmed in one voice. Deleuze borrows the doctrine of ontological univocity from the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus. Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that being is, univocally, difference. "With univocity, however, it is not the differences which are and must be: it is being which is Difference, in the sense that it is said of difference. Moreover, it is not we who are univocal in a Being which is not; it is we and our individuality which remains equivocal in and for a univocal Being."[1]
Here Deleuze at once echoes and inverts Spinoza, who maintained that everything that exists is a modification of the one substance, God or Nature. He claims that it is the organizing principle of the Dutchman's philosophy, despite the absence of the term from any of Spinoza's works. For Deleuze, there is no one substance, only an always-differentiating process, an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding. Deleuze summarizes this ontology in the paradoxical formula "pluralism = monism".[2]


Source: Wikipedia

Image: Andy Fischer, Chicken Retina,Technique: Epi-fluorescence Widefield

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Making knowledge computable

WorlframAlpha's computing engine has come alive today. According to the website its goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. With an aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. The goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Affordance


Affordance is the perceivable possibilities for action seen in objects. Perception theorist J. J. Gibson claims that we perceive possibilities for action. i.e. surfaces for walking, handles for pulling, space for navigation, tools for manipulating, etc. In general, our whole evolution has been geared toward perceiving useful possibilities for action.

Diagnosing the ramification of this theory in the functionality of objects and furthermore spaces, provides us with the understanding that human requirements for inhabiting spaces are beyond the systematic means of Corbusiean measurement, which in essence has provided the base for accepted building code standards around the world.
This theory also illuminates the field of human-space interaction and the interpretation of architecture as interface, which will be discussed in another post.

image: www.nmda-inc.com


Sunday, May 3, 2009

Quantum Biology

A sea slug neuron may tap quantum forces to process information. In humans quantum physics may be integral to thought.
Dylan Burnette/Olympus Bioscapes Imaging Competition

"Quantum physics may explain the mysterious biological process of smell, too, says biophysicist Luca Turin, who first published his controversial hypothesis in 1996 while teaching at University College London. Then, as now, the prevailing notion was that the sensation of different smells is triggered when molecules called odorants fit into receptors in our nostrils like three-dimensional puzzle pieces snapping into place. The glitch here, for Turin, was that molecules with similar shapes do not necessarily smell anything like one another. Pinanethiol [C10H18S] has a strong grapefruit odor, for instance, while its near-twin pinanol [C10H18O] smells of pine needles. Smell must be triggered, he concluded, by some criteria other than an odorant’s shape alone.
What is really happening, Turin posited, is that the approximately 350 types of human smell receptors perform an act of quantum tunneling when a new odorant enters the nostril and reaches the olfactory nerve. After the odorant attaches to one of the nerve’s receptors, electrons from that receptor tunnel through the odorant, jiggling it back and forth. In this view, the odorant’s unique pattern of vibration is what makes a rose smell rosy and a wet dog smell wet-doggy."


by Mark Anderson from the journal Discover - January 13, 2009

As einstein concluded his general relativity based on the hypothesis that the geometry of space explains further dimensions and oddities in the laws of classical physics, yet he was unable (and unwilling) to match his theory with the, then young, quantum mechanics theory. The M-theorists furthermore have tried to provide a link between the two theories by explaining phenomena in light of vibrations rather than matter. All this concludes the interesting relationship of geometry to spatial phenomena as non-static and quatumly viable.

Friday, April 17, 2009

On the Complex vs.the Complicated


Above: 100 stocks in the USA equity markets: M. Tumminello, T. Aste, T. Di Matteo and R. N. Mantegna, A tool for filtering information in complex systems, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Vol. 102, Num. 30 (2005) 10421-10426.

"Regulation should not prevent innovation, rather it should ensure that innovations are sufficiently transparent and understandable to allow consumer choice to drive good market outcomes, [...]When complexity reaches the point of reducing transparency, it impedes competition and leads consumers to make poor choices. And, in some cases, complexity simply serves to disguise practices that are unfair and deceptive."

Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke 4.17.09


Once deconstructivism appeared as the antagonistic tour de-force sequel to post-modernism's 'Complexity and Contradiction', it became clear that with any unstructured complexity, we are exposing the systems architecture to infection, where integrated diversity is shadowed by an external force that is able to modulate and hijack the system entirely as it was witnessed in the economic crash of 2008. The same can be true with the formulation of geometrical systems, where lack of processed organization can lead to the disintegration of social assemblage.

Monday, March 23, 2009

if

"If architecture is an act of organization, the building is an organism: the incorporation of a spirit, and the inspiration of a body. The organism is the optima forma of a certain vital function, it has organized all differences in a heterogeneous and sovereign Whole that finds it's legitimization only in itself, as an internally coherent efficiency without a goal."
(Kant)

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Beauty should be edible, or not at all*

* Salvador Dali Los Angeles-based artist Carolyn Mason uses frosting as material to make edible rooms.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Is Pixelation Stereotyping?




"A stereotype is a preconceived idea that attributes certain characteristics (in general) to all the members of class or set. The term is often used with a negative connotation when referring to an oversimplified, exaggerated, or demeaning assumption that a particular individual possesses the characteristics associated with the class due to his or her membership in it. Stereotypes can be used to deny individuals respect or legitimacy based on their membership in that group." 1


In this case pixelation (generally caused by compression)is created by averaging the color information attributed to a digital picture. As HD programming becomes more relevant in the film industry, the question arises as to whether we can extract information, previously hidden from the process of pixelation and generalizing data.This is similar to the process of data sampling in statistics and how conclusions are derived about a population of concern.




Both pixelation and stereotyping assume negative connotations specially in the digital age where collecting and refining the size of the sample rate and analyzing massive amounts of data is increasingly achievable. (see DNA sequencing). However the question still remains whether generalized information can extrapolate hidden information about a process, previously unknown?




Artist Florian Cramer puts this to challenge with some interesting outcome in his project "Floppy Films", where he has compressed all the 2009 Oscar nominated movies into floppy size gif animations (at full length). Can we quantify all the qualitative data of a feature film by studying its pixels?


Sunday, February 22, 2009

Symbiogenesis

The biologist Lynn Margulis, famous for the work on endosymbiosis, contends that symbiosis is a major driving force behind evolution. She considers Darwin's notion of evolution, driven by competition, as incomplete, and claims evolution is strongly based on co-operation, interaction, and mutual dependence among organisms. According to Margulis and Dorion Sagan, "Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking."[31]

[source: wikipedia]

Proton Collision


A computer representation of particles produced by protons smashing into collimators* at the Large Hadron Collider of CERN.

[image courtesy CERN via New Scientist article]

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Monday, February 16, 2009

Production Design

The subtle yet important difference between architecture and production design is that one is about making spaces and one is about discovering them.

Pattern Mining


"Pattern mining" is a data mining technique that involves finding existing patterns in data. In this context patterns often means association rules. The original motivation for searching association rules came from the desire to analyze supermarket transaction data, that is, to examine customer behaviour in terms of the purchased products. For example, an association rule "beer => chips (80%)" states that four out of five customers that bought beer also bought chips.
In the context of pattern mining as a tool to identify terrorist activity, the
National Research Council provides the following definition: "Pattern-based data mining looks for patterns (including anomalous data patterns) that might be associated with terrorist activity — these patterns might be regarded as small signals in a large ocean of noise."[9][10][6] Pattern Mining includes new areas such a Music Information Retrieval (MIR) where patterns seen both in the temporal and non temporal domains are imported to classical knowledge discovery search techniques.
Source: Wikipedia.org

Saturday, February 14, 2009

This is Architecture

Theories after theories and scholars and history. What is Architecture?
Here is a brief answer: