confectious

Session I: network

Marcos Novak, Peter Bentley, Peter Testa

Marcos Novak

wants to use simulations to “generate and discover systems of buildings that flow, like liquids.”

mentions Scott Draves’ work as an example of a distributed network creating complicated forms

[borrowing metaphors from Darwin again]: media follow paths of hybridization, sterility, extinction, speciation, and diversity.

describes airports as “alien body with a giant stride” and “a city on a grid for a giant — a corporation — who can walk around the world”

[I of course disagree — airports are in no way homogenous. Similar in structure, yes — but always composed of differing (though transient) populations. It would be difficult to mistake the Munich airport for Chicago-O’Hare, and extremely difficult to mistake it for the Lagos airport. Yes, there’s a global monoculture of architectural design that tends to homogenize international airports, but this feels like the stereotypical Le Corbusier-ish blindness to the presence and difference of people. Onwards.]

allogenesis: transvolution of the alien
transvolution: technology is evolution by other means

transvergent space: (?)

[Nothing would make me happier than to see the prefix “trans-” eradicated temporarily from Novak’s vocabulary. Just imagine the grand strides in listening comprehension.]

new work: making sculptures out of RNA

“allobiology of evolution” - learning from the past to produce, with formal mechanisms, the alien — the proliferation of new species

[Then he talks for a while about how architecture is the best possible discipline and how all other disciplines just fail in the face of all...this...alienness. ]

Peter Bentley: “Climbing Through Complexity Ceilings”

life is the best designers — it creates, adapts, and repairs itself — we can’t do that; we can’t even understand our brains

and we cannot evolve anything complicated enough to that, either

question: how does nature do it and how can we control the process [such a scientist]

the problem of increasingly complex computers: at the nanoscale, we cannot even design our own processors

solution: use biology (the ultimate nanotech)

ie, in a way, the IBM Autonomic Computing Initiative

there are lots of other complex problems: determining friend vs foe in war, building space satellites, power grids and cascade failures, economy and housing management — its lots of small components interacting with each other to form a larger system

Susan Stepney: systems that depend on “correct” assumptions about the environment are inherently fragile

systems vs networks: a network is a mathematical notion we impose on a complex system — networks and nodes don’t really exist in nature, as biological “networks” are more dynamic:

his definition of a system: “A bunch of stuff that interacts with others stuff, and the interactions are dynamic and the stuff is variable” [so right on, and so lost on a lot of this crowd]

maybe nature works because it doesn’t have designers, just processes?

ex: evolving a sports car, snake robot, hospital plan

complexity does not mean optimizing a bunch of predetermined parameters

”it’s just a structure. We can call it a network if we want, but it just works.”

it’s easier to evolve instructions than complete objects — no division between information and function, btw code and environment

genes can contain only a little information because the rest of the information is out there — in the world [this is of course kind of the recipe for social software, and why I sometimes get confused about “content”]

because complexity is embodied -- evolution exploits physics and changes in response to the environment, trying out genetic variation

ex: swarm intelligence systems for theoretical nanotech [more engineering utopianism]

ex: algorithmic simulation of red blood cells — no “network,” just a system that works

tech is going great, but design is more difficult — we want complexity, but we’re not good at seeing the big picture

[this is the architecture-should-be-useful vs the architecture-is-an-art-project again. bentley’s being a little contradictory about whether aesthetics is an acceptable criterion for evolutionary soundness in social contexts like architecture — he wants buildings where “people feel terrible” -- but how do we get there? if you make human opinion one of the forcing factors in his systems, then aren’t we doing more design, which for bentley seems to be sort of a dirty word? it’s the same goddamn pleasure vs. practicality rhetoric we always hear. his avoidance of the idea of imposing his own ideas is just another version of the myth of scientific objectivity: “we don’t talk about metaphysics; we talk about knowledge.” I wonder what happened to his hospital project, the only time he tried to use evolutionary systems to design human-used spaces?]

Peter Testa: emergent design group

goal : develop software tools for generative architecture

proposes new control modes: genetic, nonlinear, stochastic

using open and ad hoc methods for distributed design

projects: Agency (building systems — in Maya — fitness from POV of constructed agents who live in the space, which can be groups, people, institutional parameters, etc [very Actor-Network-Theory]), MoSS (morphogenetic surface structures — plugin to Alias — grows surfaces in 3D env), weaver (inspired by computer-controlled weaving/braiding; instead of surfaces there are threads and tangles that use fiber science and materials)

[what’s nice here is the explicit participation of the designer, addressing the function/aesthetics issue glossed over by Bentley]

PANEL
(moderator, Richard Rheinhardt)

Q: difference between art and architecture?
A: obscurity and populism

[That is, of course, because none of the people here make anything nearly as fun as GTA]

Then Novak and Bentley started to bicker and didn’t stop until the panel was over.

Yehuda Kalay made a nice point about culture as function — then mentioned the 1965 book “Science of the Artificier,” by Herbert Simon (science: what IS; art: what ought to be)

Testa: we are defined by what we make, not what we say we make

Session II: Technology

Mark Goulthorpe

[where was the “distributed form” all morning? all anyone talked about was unitary constructions]

“paramorphs vs. saltation monsters”
paramorph: changing the form without changing the attributes [?]
saltation: the art of the accident; massive swift mutation

desire drives development, so form follows need

networked praxis is hard work

ex of Pallas House, Kuala Lumpur

ex: Southwark Gate (“mining the tendencies of a site” to get new forms)

alloplastic (malleable and reciprocal) vs autoplastic (“static”)

ex: Bill Forsyth and the Frankfurt Ballet

evolution does not actually work through saltation, but architecture CAN

ex: Paul Steenhuisen, the musician

“in fact the digital is dirty, delinquent, transformative”

his process: “fishing for spatial material potential, then figuring out how to deploy it” “condensing a spectacle to produce something unassimilatable”

George Legrady

pockets full of memories: classification, organization, visualization

“their actions are information”

Dagmar Richter

three phases of design/architecture:
topological: computer-driven process, research
topographical: geometric definitions and positions
territorial: politically defined and constructed

discussed her 1980s work in collaging maps and systems

working on the “practiced space of everyday life”
plan of house as city map: breakfast room is Starbucks, lunch is at McDonald’s, shower at the sports club, nights in a motel
the only thing left was the backyard as a space for the pet (a symbol of home) and personal authorship (grilling and gardening)
the front of the home is a vitrine for display, owning, consumption (see below)

survival defined by access to media/presence in media

“performative surface creates the architectural space”
creating a grammar of surface to help her escape animation

maison dom-in(f)o
reworking modernism to eliminate inside/outside dichotomy
[why? it seems like a perfectly useful one in the practice of MY everyday life, though theoretically very pernicious, I suppose]

looking at opening up living systems with mass production in mind — now looking at alpine (and/or) timeshare cultures

looking at space as a performance problem: what does it need to do in social and environmental terms?

an aside: thinks current CNC (?) is odd and 19th century, even though it seems high tech, because it’s wasteful and one-off

she wants to “come back to earth”: what do we need spaces to do? how can we open up space?

PANEL
Richter: bringing out cultural politics and bringing people “past the formal sublime” -- what should the per-form do?

Yamamoto: trauma and the idea of the origin and referent?

Goulthorpe: we began by interrogating precedent, but now we’re more generative from the constraints of a given situation

Richter: well, the historical referent provides the possibility of criticism [this reflects back on Novak’s obsession with “transvergence” and the totally new — it’s kind of millenial, isn’t it?]

[I note the total lack of networked or mediated spaces in these buildings, which are all imagined as singular structures with no digital adjacencies]

Anthony Burke: efficiency, form as matter and measure?

Richter: efficiency — capitalism

Session III: Operation

David Crawford, Casey Reas,

Introduction
Rosalind Krauss: axiomatic structures
Allan (?) field conditions: formal or spatial matrices — loosely bound aggregates, highly fluid, bottom up (defined by intricate local connections)

Derrida: forms BETWEEN things are what matters
Quinter: demise of absolute time/space as cultural mode led to approximate, active, qualitative models of biology

matter as active, space as active

David Crawford
Stop Motion Studies: international stop motion studies of
“transient spaces” as places for
social exchange
ethical inquiry
aesthetic reflection

celebrate subways and draw parallel to Internet as inclusive technologies (vs television and cars)

analyze events that are often only experience subliminally

visualize not just relationships between people but relationships with photographer as part of script

roger schenker (yale): “scripts is a set of expectations about what will happen next in a well-understood situation”

cellphones reveal lack of script for this technology

sms – algorithmic montage
time does not flow forward or backward but stutters, mediated by technology and interruption — the technology of the internet

debord: images are cultural objects
“the spectacle is not a collecition of images but a social relation bbetween people mediated by images”

not fiction vs nonfiction, but a question of form: the montage

montage of interruptions in sms leads to situationist refusal to be implicated — a montage of forgetting

Gottfried Reggio 1983 — Koyaanisquaatsi — earth as protagonist in relation to build environment and pollution — time as special role
and relation to Philip Glass
criticism of Glass: not hypnotic but (Foreman) non-mimetic relation with time keeps us from settling down

compel viewers to accept process as a mode for perception and composition since compositions develop not linearly but semantically
dialogue between being present and being in transit — being in flux
reflection on human body in networks, growing out of similarity between two networks
precursors: Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman etc,
video: Martin Arnold, Paul Pfeiffer

blog post: “doing to pictures what Philip Glass does to sound”

look at subleties only available to long-dormant instincts

people in photos become “familiar acquaintances” over time and through the intensity of observation.

remind us of the nuances of communication that we’ve “optimized away”

laptops and cellphones giveth and taketh away

Photography and Performance: Cindy Sherman is btw (big paraphrase) artistic appropriation of working photograph and photograph as document of performance, as a record of the Other — worth in being both photographs AND performances

Sherman’s work as detournement

DC: deconstruct scopophilia and surveillance state

methodology
stop motion recorded in one camera
images distilled down to handful of frames
frames are stochastically reanimated via code
-->minimize file size, maximize aesthetic power

Lev Manovich: “games are powerful because players seek to discover underlying algorithm” — any player who becomes proficient has invested considerable effort in becoming an expert in the rules of the world

pleasure in problem solving — how children come to understand the world

code alters cyclical motion into something more complex and more captivating — mimics complexity of life — realist but also mechanical

Foreman again: art makes the process, rather than the object, part of being in the present

algorithmic montage mediates experience of being in the moment — on the subway, between presence and telepresence: puts constraints on reflexivity

Q: Leger, moving bodies in time

Q: being rescrambled dynamically
A: algorithm for texture

Q: sudden motion of eyes flickering playing off of human instincts
A: feeling of consequence: when you make eye contact, it’s an authentic human exchange — algorithmic texture punctuates those moments

Casey Reas (processing.org, groupc.net)

{Software} Structures
open:
open to interpretation
(Eco) the work is a system rather than an object
easy to understand, accessible

process:
process of building
reading

interpretation
many different ways

literacy
reading and writing software

animation, installation, prints, performance, software

what he does:
create systems that execute processes that instantiate themselves in software

abstracted systems:
sensors and motors and relationship between them (negative or positive)

using software to go from studies of line and movement to texture and mass

representation
using only lines b/c it most clearly represents process
but also represented in code
different parameters: accumulate rather than refresh
data generated by it
so which is the most valid form of representation?

process:
the way he writes software
describes moving from sketches in processing to final articulations in c++

openness and accessibility
Larry Cuba: programming languages: power and limitations
so recently, he’s chosen English (as with Sol DeWitt’s work)

literacy
Alan Kay: you must be able to both read and write to be literate. in software, the tools you write are processes.
software is a unique medium, requiring its own terminology and discourse
each language is its own media and enables its own way of thinking
important to be able to sketch
should be general
artist-written programming languages will be more appropriate to artists, unlike engineering-written programs

Kris Pister

smart dust

rooster as “wireless dawn sensor”

thinking about multi-hop message passing: [best geek metaphor EVR]: like passing messages from Rohan to Gondor across mountain tops by lighting signal fires

as speed and memory of digital circuits increase, and the range and data rate of communications circuits increase, and the measurands and sensitivity of MEMS sensors increases — and the size, power, cost of all decrease... you get wireless sensors