thinking the impossible

Chrysanthi Nigianni from UEL poses a crucial question - on the premise that our society conceives actions like experimentation and risk as signs of stupidity, idiocy and irrationality and additionally it is built on the premises of "reality principle" that distinguishes, through rigid boundary articulations, the life and death, the real and the illusion, the organic and inorganic and that declares 'safety' and 'stability' as the highest social and moral ideals. - "Is our society willing to encourage the experimental, irrational, risky and dangerous thinking?"

Are we ready to abolish this pathogenic fear for the new and the unprecedented?

Are we ready to confront "a life" or a life that is not stable with the illusion of safety?

Are we ready to think the impossible and occupy the unforeseen?

Did we learn anything from the economic crisis from an economy that was built on such presuppositions?

These are the questions that architects have to answer.

These unexplored domains of the social organization of the post-Fordist society need to be rethought in order to renovate our understanding of heterogeneous spatial constructs.

And from my point of view stochastic computational models like swarms and neural nets can unleash this required creativity... are we prepared to risk?

the creation of alternative algorithms

I came across with this abstract from Alexander R. Galloway's paper entitled “Alternative Algorithms (On Method)”

"It happens from time to time that a certain amount of reflection becomes necessary, not simply concerning the objects of the mind, but as to the actual manner in which intellectual work is done. This typically comes under the heading of methodology, which today has a distinctly liberal profile. With method, it is often more a question of suitability than existential correctness, often more a question of personal style than universal context. Hence methodological discussions these days often devolve into a sort of popularity contest. Who advocates what method and for what purpose? Which general equivalent trumps all others—is it race, or is it class, or is it the logos, or the archive, or the gaze, or desire, play, excess, singularity, resistance, or perhaps life itself—elevating one methodological formation above all others in a triumphant critique (to end all future critique)? In this paper I examine what sorts of methodological approaches make sense today, making the case that the proper methodological position for those working critically within techno-culture is the creation of alternative algorithms."

looking forward for the full text.

innovation and creativity in Post-Fordist Capitalism

There is no point to expand on the whole critique that Shaviro develops for Boutang's latest book Le Capitalisme cognitif, But I would like to focus on a very crucial point that Shaviro makes clear in his text: "we shouldn't buy uncritically on the current capitalist mythology of "innovation" and "creativity"- without thinking through what it might mean to detach these notions from their association with start-ups and marketing plans and advertising campaigns (and how this might be done)". Shaviro will bring into the discourse the work by Whitehead and Deleuze which I also find very important in order to re-conceptualize innovation and creativity.

biopolitics in space

I have to agree more than anything else with Christopher Hight when he points out that:

"Architects have not worked through the implications of such Post-Frodist social organizations constructed through biopolitical operations rather than humanist representations. to so so engage such territories requires architects and urbanists to renovate their understanding of spatial complexity and heterogeneity."

Christopher Hight in Space Reader: Heterogeneous space in Architecture, 2009 p. 27

building as a thing

the dinstinction between "object and thing" was at the core of the lecture hosted at the Sociology deperatment of Goldsmith's college where a diverse audience of architects, designers and Social Scientists where gathered to follow an ANT methodological approach to Rem Koolhaas' design process. I didn't get exactly the arguments cause all of them where so obvious... I suppose for the social scientists and the ethnographers to understand the process of an architectural project was some kind of revealing... Yes, I will agree with the distinction between the object and the thing, between a symbolic understanding of a build project and its understanding as a multiplicity but however as an Architect I would expect to see such a distinction in the way occupants inhabit spaces. I had my conclusions and I have to admit this kind of "synergies" between different fileds could only be constructive.

oh! and it is something else... the really annoying fascination of Architects with the trendiness... they feel guilty if they use words that somehow have been used before and mark a theoretical exploration in architectural design... and this is happening due to the fact that architects approach theory in a fragmented fashion and not as a continuous transformation of concepts and ideas...

thirst for servitude!

"I hear myself experiencing what might have been, what could have happened, if it weren't for this bunch of alienate cretins that you!

- you! there in front of me, were so willing to identify with

if it weren't for that fear, that pathogenic fear of the unknown of anything really unprecedented and new, that you hide behind and use as an excuse for your own passivity- and thirst for servitude!"

as Deleuze would remarkably asked "Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?"

I've heard about! Francois Roche

His talk at the Tate on 26th of October will be postponed

complexity

"A theory of complexity that abandons either the single or the multiple in favor of a series of continuous multiplicities and singularities is one way of escaping the definition of identity through dialectic contradiction"

"Complexity is the provisional unification of disparate components without totality or wholeness"

"the most difficult task for the moment is the development of a discourse of complexity that avoids an appeal to conflict and contradiction without drifting into reactionary discourses of wholism and emergence"

Greg Lynn in Blobs. Folds, Bodies and Blobs

create a new domain

“The goal-orientated approach that the management books advocate is to find a need and fill it. We don’t get many new ideas out of that because if you ask most people what they want, they want just what they have now, 10 percent faster, 10 percent cheaper, with 10 percent more features. It’s kind of a boring way to predict the future. But if we look at the big hitters in the 20th century, like the Xerox machine, like the personal computer, like the pocket calculator, all of these things did something else. They weren’t contaminations of existing things. They weren’t finding a need and filling it. They created a need that only they could fill.”

Alan Kay in Predicting The Future, Stanford Engineering, Vol. 1, No. 1, Autumn 1989

Un jour, peut-être, le siècle sera deleuzien

machinic assemblage | creolization | the remix

we build an "experience economy". Reading lately a series of articles by Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky came across with this:

" Mono-reality... something like that. It's boring. Again, the D & G connection about multiple situations occurring simultaneously - reflects the "post post modern" scenario - it's not about "deconstruction," but reconstruction - of building a new vision of how we can live and think in the info ecology we've built for ourselves. And so on, and so on, and so on..."

found here

Dj Spooky + Sussan Deyhim: Azadi (The New Complexity) by Dj Spooky

thoughts on Constructivism

this is not an elaborated explanation of the terms constructivism but it is more a clarification of the term that nowadays bifurcates in two.

from one side we have

the Social Constructivists that support the view that reality is always social mediated and mind-dependent and

Radical contructivists that argue that mind-independent entities exist and they are knowable.

thus

[Social] Constructivism is concerned with the social construction of reality

[Radical] Constructivism is concerned with the construction of reality

however it will be really dangerous to support that view that the social reality is mind independent

Manuel Delanda will clarify this point: "in the case of social ontology though this definition (of mind independence) must be qualified because most of the social entities, would disappear althogether if human minds cease to exist. In this sense social entities are clearly not mind independent but [as he adds later] the reality is conception-independent" (Deland 2006, p1)

Crowd synchrony

in symb(i/o)tika's video collection you can find a short film about the unexpected sway from side to side that emerged under the synchronization of pedestrians step... it is a very clear example where local action produces and emergent behaviour that then feeds back and drives that local action.

more on Steven H. Strogatz et al. paper "Theoretical mechanics: Crowd synchrony on the Millennium Bridge". published in Nature 438, 43-44 (3 November 2005).

Beyond Autopoiesis II

"the key innovation effected by autopoiesis is to grant to living systems a dynamical capacity for change through self-maintenance, which means, at least in part, that such systems must function as open systems (only relatively). the functioning of the autopoietic organism or machine is not reducible to its particular genetic structure or composition. In other words, what are inportant are not the component of the system but the dynamic relations between them. Autopoietic entities engender and specify their own organization and limits/boundaries, functioning as unitary, individuated, and closed to relations input and out put. Such entities are understood as being 'organizationaly closed', which does not mean that they do not interact with an environment but rather that such interaction is always informed and determined by the organization of the particula autopoietic entity. An autopoietic organism evolves by engaging in an endless turnover of components under conditions of continuous petrubations and compesation of these petrubations. Any inference with their operation outside their domain of compensations will result in disintegration ( see Maturana and Varela in Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living, 1980).

We see here that the theory of autopoiesis equates change that does not conform to the internal and self-directed organization of the entity in question with destruction, dissolution, and abolition.

For a machinic thinking autopoiesis fails to appreciate the extent to which all living systems and their boundaries are caught up in machinic assemblages that involve modes of transversal becoming."

Germinal life: the difference and repetition of Deleuze

By Keith Ansell-Pearson

Henry Markram: Designing the Human Mind

Adaptiveness

the last two days I am working on a great text callled "From Robots to Rothko" by cognitive scientist Michael Wheeler and I found a very nice (dual) definition of adaptation

in page 211 he writes: "Naturally occuring adpative behavior is the result of evolutionary determined pressures on the survival and reproduction prospects of embodied systems. However he will continue that in the animat domain Adaptiveness is a matter of surviving long enough in an environment to achieve certain goals. These goals may not necessarily include reproduction."

2 notes

01/. by animats Wheeler implies artificial animals or alternatively artificial autonomous agents. The class of such systems involves

-robots with actual sensory-motor mechanisms, and

-simulated autonomous agents embedded in simulated environments.

02/. Kampis will clarify the pressures of natural selection in evolution by saying evolution can only act on the phenotype but the real subject of evolution is the genotype.

a life | the self

John Rajchman will write, in his introduction to Deleuze's book Pure immanence: essays on A life,

"we may think of a life as an empiricist concept in contrast to what John Locke called "the self". A life has quite different features thatn those Locke associated with the self - conciousness, memory and personal identiy. it unfolds according to another logic: a logic

of impersonal individuation rather than personal individualization,

of singularities rather than particularities.

it can never be completely specified. it is always indefinite - a life.

In short, in contrast to the self, a life is impersonal and yet singular, and so requires a "wilder"sort of empiricism - a transcendental empiricism.

A conception of empirisism that departs from the classical definition that says that all our ideas can be derived from atomistic sensations through logic of abstraction and generalization. the real problem of empiricism is rather to be found in a new conception of subjectivity."

David Hume: "thinking with AND instead of thinking IS, instead of thinking for IS: empiricism has never had another secret."

Deleuze, G.(2001)Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. Zone Books, New York

the constitution of organism

Living systems communicate not only through filiative relationships but also through transversal modes that lead to heterogeneous populations and assemblages. This is the point Richard Dawkins, the writer and advocate of the theory of the "selfish gene", made in his book. However an important aspect that Dawkins is missing or under-theorizes is the insight that organisms need to be treated as complex assemblages.

territory and deterritorialization

we shouldn't think in an abstract and strong opposition between the 'territiory' and deterritorialization'. It is clear that for Deleuze and Guattari any given territory, enclosure of things or closed systems enjoy vectors of deterritorialization which in fact they constitute a territory.

so inhabitants are protectors of the territory and vectors of deterritorialization of the system in-formation.

>/."in ATP detteritorialization is said to become 'absolute' when it enhances 'lines of flights' to the power of germinal or vital line of life and draws a plane of consistency (the non dialectical synthesis of heterogeneous and disparate elements)."

>/."it is a world of intensities where 'all forms come undone' "

>/."the absolute doesn't denote a quantity but a certain mode of movement that is held to be neither transcendent nor undifferentiated."

in Germinal Life by Keith Ansell Pearson

"it was too grand for you!"

intellectual speculative urbanism. “I have heard about” is an urban project developed by François Roche… In 2050, the architect returns with his bitterness for our pathogenic passivity and thirst for servitude. Self-organization, adaptation, ethics of immanence and aesthetics of pragmatics form a novel urban scenario. An architecture of real time, implements open algorithms and in an open source fashion triggers the creative indivitualism to form a machinic assemblage with its environment. but all that “It was too big for us”!
we couldn’t embrace the liberating forces, we couldn’t take the risk to live!

tres grandes pour nous!!!

London / Tate Modern / Starr Auditorium / 26 October 2009

Cognition

"Cognition: as immanent to extended /distributed / differential bio-environmental systems in which “real experience” is the non representational direction of action via the integration / resolution of differential fields."

"They thus are naturalists in fighting the myths of the subject"

John Portevi

This creature Life (Differently - original title)

extracted from Fractal Ontology more here

"This creature Life, beyond all evaluations, remains an uninterpretable difference — a kind of difference which is primary with respect to a differential identity, a difference which directly induces individuation, and thereby also seduces us to imitation, to the law of identity, and the shackles of representation.

forcibly undermines the notion that all descends from pure forms

(existence from Idea; God as pure and liberating Force of truth)

rather than through the violent admixture and interpenetration of wildly heterogeneous forces and bodies

(existence from cruelty; God as the tortuously circular Process of differentiation.)

from the absolute will to tragedy is an anti-moral, materialist, atheist metaphysic

Thinking is precisely this adventure which connects its desires not to an identical reality or a primary nullity, but precisely to the an-identical, the differentiality of existence. Not a kind of compromise between two poles of the idea but a war with the arbitrary division of the idea into isolated components, the body of Life into organs without bodies. “We have to learn to think differently — in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.” Nietzsche (Daybreak, II.103) "

extracted from Fractal Ontology more here

object oriented P

By the time I have immersed my self into object oriented programming I always try to draw transverse connections with an object oriented approach to ontology and general to philosophy. The object oriented philosophy is the intellectual child of Graham Harman. I have to deal with his concept in greater detail and depth but for the moment my personal understanding about this object oriented approach is more inclined to DeLanda’s assemblage theory where an object is a dynamically constructed assemblage.

experimentalism... to inhabit forbidden spaces

"De Landa: The call to be "more experimental" stems not from a utopian desire, and it certainly has absolutely nothing to do with "changing language in the hopes of changing perception". This type of talk belongs to the linguistic relativism that I attack above and which I think is a major block to any progress in this regard. Rather, the "call to action" stems from the realization that we never understood the world properly. We have extremely naive views about the economy, for example. We feel happy to simply speak about the "capitalist system" or "commodification", when the reality of economic history (as uncovered by Fernand Braudel, for example) is much more complex and full of opportunities. There are alternatives to the corporate model, such as a region of contemporary Italy called Emilia-Romagna, dominated by small businesses competing against each other not in terms of costs and reaping economies of scale, but in terms of product design and a concentration of creative people in a region (a model known as "economies of agglomeration"). Now, this region of Italy was put together over the last thirty or so years on the basis of experimentation: it was not planned from above (though local governments did play catalytic roles) and it was not guided by theory. Yet, our obsolete economic ideas prevent us from seeing how innovative this region is, and bias us to see in Emilia-Romagna just another form of "capitalism", or to dismiss it as a short-lived utopia. But a deeper understanding of economics has the opposite effect: it shows that past history is full of "Emilia-Romagnas", that our economic choices were never between "capitalism" and "socialism", but were more open than that.

A similar change has ocurred in our conception of matter, which is now viewed as capable of much richer behavior than before, and this needs to change the very form that a materialist philosophy takes. And being more experimental here is simply a way of responding to the extra capabilities we have discovered in matter itself. How this may impinge on the practice of art is related to what I said above in relation to theories of the genesis of form. To develop a new, non-essentialist, relation to materials (including linguistic materials) seems to me more important today than challenging social assumptions about what art is or how it should be displayed. (We have been "challenging conventions", or "deconstructing them" for over thirty years now, it's time to move on.)"

extract from an Interview by Art210

symb(i/o)tika's new logo

I had 2 hours break today and I decided to spend my time to create this short video/animation with the brand new logo/id of symb(i/o)tika research project. hope you like it.

update: the same logo emerges through diffusion rules

using wiring parameters in 3dsmax

acting pragmatically

"As an intelligent species we spent millennia successfully coping with the environmental changes using accumulated knowledge about cause and effects relations. Hume himself argues that the ability to match means to ends (i.e. the capacity for causal reasoning), is not an exclusively human ability but may be observed in other animals which use it 'for their own preservation and the propagation of species'... The subject or person emerging from the assembly of sub-personal components (impressions, ideas, propositional attitudes, habits, skills) has the right capacities to act pragmatically (i.e. it match means and ends) as well socially, to select ends for a variety of habitual or customary reasons that need not involve any conscious decision."

DeLanda, M. (2006) A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. Continuum, London p.51-52

* "thought and physicality are not antithetical"

To understand Hume means to accept that thought and physicality are not antithetical, this very much resonates with the 4EA (embodied ,embedded, enactive, extended and affective) cognition extensively described by John Protevi. Thus once this confusion has been resolved then someone can sense that the subject emerges from a field of physical sensations and other physical intensities.

Delanda nicely makes the analogy between software (thought) and hardware ( neurons) there is no way something significant to emerge when someone tries to map the word processed text that you are reading at this moment with the firing of and-gates or–gates deep within the transistors in the hardware. There are only different layers or better several softwares that bring the transistors and text into communication. The problem with the human mind is that no one has ever identified any of those layers that happened to be between neurons and thoughts.

The only thing neuroscience is capable of saying is not how we think but only “what our brain must be for it to be possible to think and feel in other ways” (Rajchman, p137). Delanda then provides through Deleuze an approach to the issue, “this problem should be approached evolutionary” to start from the simplest organism with simple sensations and minimum consciousness and then to add layers of complexity. for this argument Deleuze in different context brings forth Uexkull’s Umwelt to describe Tick’s cognitive process through three affects.

This kind of understanding concludes to the non antithetical nature of thought and physicality.

The above text is in form of scattered notes from the following sources

* Manuel DeLanda in

DeLanda, M., Ellingsen, E.(2007) Possibility of Spaces. In Models-306090, eds (Abruzzo et all), 306090 Inc. New York.

Rajchman, J.(2001) Deleuze Connections. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, London

the history of hacking documentary

it is that moment that Nietsche's "gay science" produces innovation and redefines the ethical aspect...

steve wozniak

co-founder of apple computer

hacking is about invention

john draper

a.k.a Captain Crunch

hacking is about experimentation

kevin mitnick

wanted by FBI 1992-95

hacking is about subversion

Co-existence

it's been couple of days now that I wanted to write few things about the installation at the Welcome Trust here in london entitled "CO-EXISTENCE" which has been designed by Julia Lohman.

The installation rediscovers the boundarys of the human body.

"Only one in ten of our cells is human - the rest are microbes. The human body can therefore be considered as an ecosystem that supports and is supported by millions of 'other' living things" .

that brings again into the forefront that whole discussion about the constituion of the organism, the subject, the self. it reveals a rhizomatic understanding that moves the autopoietic theory towards machinic heterogenesis and the theory of assemblage.

anyway it is worth passing by the Wellcome Trust center at Euston road to see the installation and to realise that you are everywhere not only informationaly but also structuraly... you form a rhizome within a braoder ecosystem.

this whole discussion resonates with my research about the symbiosis of a meshwork of systems in the build environment... you will argue that this is not so novel however I will state the opposite... more soon hopefully!

since then, few things on the installation here

"the important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between different velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles"

Deleuze, G.(1988) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. City lights Books, San Francisco, p.123

here is another article from wired

the Programming of Architecture

Paul Coates' new book is finally scheduled to be published at the very early of 2010... you will be suprised that Paul strugles to make programming a method or/and property of architecture almost the last 30 years. The title of the book has been translated to the mainstream title "the Programming of Architecture" which direclty implies to the more computational one which was programming.architecture/architecture.programming... the book covers a history of experimentations from turing machines to alpha syntax and the most contemporary research on Neural Networks.

Before you dive into scripting and code hard geometric functions to produce the popular now voronoi diagram read how you can program simple rules and wait for the complex pattern/behaviour to emerge.

You can pre order the book here

kriegspiel

the kriegspiel or the Game of War

Guy Debord believed that the board game that he designed in 1977, after years having the idea in his mind, would be his legacy.

“I succeeded, a long time ago, in presenting the basics of [war] on a rather simple board game,” he wrote in 1989. “The surprises of this kriegspiel seem inexhaustible; and I fear that this may well be the only one of my works that anyone will dare acknowledge as having some value.” Guy Debord 1989

more on Kriegspiel

and trace its philosophical roots in Alexander's Galloway essay

your brain is like a pile of s***!

your brain is like a pile of sand! our brain is posed at the edge of chaos and for that reason it has all this creative power! A great article at the last issue of New Scientist brings our brain through a systematic view at a state of self-organizing criticality "these systems are right on the boundary between stable orderly behaviour and the unpredictable world of chaos." “The quintessential example of self-organised criticality is a growing sand pile. As grains build up the pile grows in a predictable way until, suddenly and without warning, it hits a critical point and collapses. These “sand avalanches” occur spontaneously and are almost impossible to predict, so the system is said to be both critical and self-organising”.

read the full article here

Aesthetics

"esthetics is for me as ornithology must be for the birds"

Barnett Newman

few ideas about Aesthetics

"Deleuze's Aesthetic takes the form not of a judgment, but rather of an experimentation and creation that defies judgment"

Rachjman, J. (2001) The Deleuze Connections. MAssachusetts Institute of Technology, p. 114

Aesthetics of pragmatics

Semantic Web

It has been quite a lot of time since my last post... but I am back again to share some thoughts about Semantic web. In few hours Wolfram|Alpha will be launched and with this event parallel project from other groups will surface the news. Scloud and the developments in Google with RDF and microformats are moving to the same direction. The web and the way we search online information is entering a new phase, where we will witness a truly symbiotic relationship between human and computers, with semantic web we will give the chance to computers to understand their own language and search through it.

If we are about to make a risky jump in our thoughts, we will face again the same persisting question of the construction of subjectivity. However semantic web will expose the subject distributed in the organic and inorganic world.

this is just a warm welcome for Lan's new Blog where you can follow their workshops globally

ubuntu / linux

the contemporary world is formatted under Windows, unable to access the programming source codes (Linux)... forced to cancel the estbishment of local protocols...

Francois Roche states in his (n)certainty...

have you ever thought the risks you take for being in this world?

I like the idea of an open (OS) operating system where you are involved in its developement.

weekly projekt

a new project coming soon...the intention is to spend one day per week devoted to a parallel in my research project. details will be posted soon. (soon?)

Web 2.0 _ relations of power

Following the logic of the previous post... here Juan Martin Prada exemplifies the role o WEB 2.0 in the understanding of power... the notion of relationality is coming to to forefront.

"in this second stage of the Web, we should speak not of power but of the relations of power, given that dominion is not a unilateral relation here, but rather it operates through power plays that are mobile, unstable, based on diffuse circulation strategies and the transmission of individual initiatives and freedom.

We could even say that in the context of the new culture of digital participation, politics can only be conceived properly as the organization of social interactions. Ideally, the most appropriate political model would be that inherent to the connected multitude itself, self-organizing its interactions in the full exercise of its decision and participation possibilities. The autonomy of politics, as a notion that implies separation or representativity, would thus no longer have any meaning. This political and social model would begin to take form today in those forms of organization distributed in networks, in the multiplicity of all the connected singularities, characterized by that Spinozan thought, where beings are constituted through desire, through the pleasure of being alive."

Juan Martin Prada - “Web 2.0″ as a new context for artistic practices

http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=307

Sn / Ns

social networking / network society
first was "I am who I am because of everyone"
then "Life's for sharing" 
society is an autopoietic system...
but how can we overcome this often too conservative circularity that boosts capitalism?
'assemblage theory' and 'machinic heterogenesis' provide few useful insights.
the French guys are out of fashion but that is what they were looking for...
thinking as experimenting promotes ethics of emergence and aesthetics of pragmatics.