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.

Source http://boiteaoutils.blogspot.com/

Video: 'Drowning' by Luke Brown

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

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

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

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.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

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

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.

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.

Cai Guo-Qiang at Guggenheim Bilbao

Watch Cai Guo-Qiang at Guggenheim Bilbao in Animation  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

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)

Beauty should be edible, or not at all*

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

Design Your Own Baby

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=7001778

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?

http://floppyfilms.pleintekst.nl/oscars_2009/slumdog/

http://floppyfilms.pleintekst.nl/oscars_2009/wrestler/

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]

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

This is Architecture

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

Geometry of the Brain

consciousness, intelligence and the role of neural networks in their formation.

Connectionism is an approach in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology/cognitive science, neuroscience and philosophy of mind, that models mental or behavioral phenomena as the emergent processes of interconnected networks of simple units. There are many forms of connectionism, but the most common forms use neural network models. The central connectionist principle is that mental phenomena can be described by interconnected networks of simple units. The form of the connections and the units can vary from model to model. For example, units in the network could represent neurons and the connections could represent synapses. Another model might make each unit in the network a word, and each connection an indication of semantic similarity.

source: wikipedia.com

Contemporary Relevance

"Jingoism"

Façades: expressive, responsive, interactive

An interesting study of buildings that assume controlled electronic skins can be found at this link. Above is the model image of the project at 8941 sunset blvd in west hollywood that me and reza designed in 2005 using central electronic control to apply pixelated imagery to the LED units that are mounted on the structure that itself is performatively dynamic. (project pending budget approval)

Quantum Dots

A novel QD-molecule system is realized using metal-organic vapor-phase epitaxy growth. The dots are tunnel coupled via connected quantum wires (QWRs). The stronger tunnel coupling in this integrated QD-QWR system allows the hybridization of both electron and hole states, yielding direct-real-space excitonic molecules (see image). The structure holds promise for nanophotonic devices for quantum-information-processing applications.

Qing Zhu, K. Fredrik Karlsson, Marcin Byszewski, Alok Rudra, Emanuele Pelucchi, Zhanbing He, Eli KaponPublished Online: Jan 20 2009
interscience.wiley.com

Deep Sea Architecture

Mexican walking fish (Axolotl salamander)









treehugger.com

Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not

Letters to a young poet #1

“Things aren't all so tangible and effable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are ineffable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more ineffable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.”

ParisFebruary 17, 1903
Rainer Maria Rilke

The Future of the Web: GGG (Giant Global Graph)

In a post on Nov. 22, 2007, Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989, prescribes the future of the web as another sieving of the granular elements of its network into a new level of fineness : "So the Net and the Web may both be shaped as something mathematicians call a Graph, but they are at different levels. The Net links computers, the Web links documents. Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, 'It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important'."

This calls for the restructuring the 'architecture of the web' as what Kevin Kelly calls the Semantic web. According to Kelly, the Internet moved from being ‘the net’ from connecting computers and sharing packets to linking ‘pages’ (the web) [a probe of smaller units, comparative to the investigation of particles that moved from molecules to the understanding of atoms and thereon to protons, gluons and the string theory in modern physics.] The third stage [Web 3.0] is linking ‘data’ rather than linking pages to pages. Every idea is linked to every idea and is supported by such at the scale of word, items and so on. A “Database of Things” that contain meaning for the parent web. In this respect physical space becomes engulfed by the 'One Machine'. A machine that links every object and place to the other with our gadgets a window into this machine.

Within this new paradigm, material loses its value to time.

"Attention is the new currency"
Kevin Kelly

American Idol

Power, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate. The burden of proof is on those in authority to demonstrate why their elevated position is justified. If this burden can't be met, the authority in question should be dismantled. Authority for its own sake is inherently unjustified. An example of a legitimate authority is that exerted by an adult to prevent a young child from wandering into traffic.

Noam Chomsky

Mad Particles

Deleuze and Guattari use the term BwO (Body Without Organs) in an extended sense, to refer to the virtual dimension of reality in general (which they more often call "plane of consistency" or "plane of immanence"). In this sense, they speak of a BwO of "the earth." "The Earth," they write, "is a body without organs. This body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles" (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 40). That is, we usually think of the world as composed of relatively stable entities ("bodies," beings). But these bodies are really composed of sets of flows moving at various speeds (rocks and mountains as very slow-moving flows; living things as flows of genetic material; language as flows of information, words, etc.). This fluid substratum is what Deleuze calls the BwO in a general sense.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari eventually differentiate between three kinds of BwO: cancerous, empty, and full. Roughly, the empty BwO is the BwO of Anti-Oedipus. This BwO is also described as "catatonic" because it is completely de-organ-ized; all flows pass through it freely, with no stopping, and no directing. Even though any form of desire can be produced on it, the empty BwO is non-productive. The full BwO is the healthy BwO; it is productive, but not petrified in its organ-ization. The cancerous BwO is caught in a pattern of endless reproduction of the self-same pattern.

Theatre of Cruelty

Antonin Artaud advocated what he called a "Theatre of Cruelty". At one point, he stated that by cruelty, he meant not exclusively sadism or causing pain, but just as often a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality.

The Theatre of Cruelty aimed to hurl the spectator into the centre of the action, forcing them to engage with the performance on an instinctive level. For Artaud, this was a cruel, yet necessary act upon the spectator designed to shock them out of their complacency:
Artaud wanted to (but never did) put the audience in the middle of the 'spectacle' (his term for the play), so they would be 'engulfed and physically affected by it'. He referred to this layout as like a 'vortex' - a constantly shifting shape - 'to be trapped and powerless'.

source: www.wikipedia.org

Superrationality

The idea behind superrationality is that two logical thinkers analyzing the same problem will come up with the same, correct, answer. For example, if two persons are both good at arithmetic, and both have been given the same complicated sum to do, it can be predicted that both will get the same answer before the sum is known. In arithmetic, knowing that the two answers are going to be the same doesn't change the value of the sum, but in game theory, knowing that the answer will be the same might change the answer itself.

source: www.wikipedia.org