How Prometheus could cut Gods' Balls?

few thoughts on the riots that took place today in Greece... thoughts that could find relevance when we discuss critic, revolution and violence in the western world...

"αναίμακτα επανάσταση δε γίνεται ποτέ" ή μήπως γίνεται; γιατί θα συμφωνήσω οτι αναίμακτη επανάσταση δε γίνεται όταν αυτή η επανάσταση προσδιορίζεται με όρους ενός ουτοπικού ιδεολογήματος (καταστρέφω μια υπάρχουσα κατάσταση για να εγκαθιδρύσω μια νέα τάξη, να υπογράψω ένα νέο συμβόλαιο). Το πρόβλημα σαφώς εντοπίζεται στο τελευταίο, στο 'ουτοπικό ιδεολόγημα' γιατί αφενός μεν είναι 'γραπωμένο' σθεναρά απο ιδέες 'ουράνιες' και υπερβατικές απο την άλλη η ουτοπική του διάσταση το κάνει βαθιά ριζωμένο σ'ενα ακίνητο 'τώρα' και τραγικά αποκομμένο απο ένα γίγνεσθαι που εκ των πραγμάτων θα το φέρει μεταμορφωμένο, στρεβλό και άλλο στο μέλλον. Οταν λοιπόν η κριτική, που γεννά μια επανάσταση, βασίζεται σε μια προκαθορισμένη υποδεικτική εικόνα και δεν εχει άλλα μέσα παρά την βίαια αντίδραση προς όφελός της... τότε σαφώς η επανάσταση δεν μπορεί να είναι αναίμακτη...

Το ερώτημα λοιπόν είναι, θα μπορούσαμε να δούμε μια άλλου τύπου επανάσταση; ή καλλίτερα, μπορούμε να σκεφτούμε την επανάσταση με άλλους όρους; Θα πρότεινα να σκεφτούμε μια κριτική μια επανάσταση, μια δυναμική μεταμόρφωση, με δάνεια απο θεωρίες δυναμικών συστημάτων. Το ζήτημα σε τετοια συστήματα δεν είναι να τα αρνηθούμε, να τα καταστρέψουμε, αλλα να συνειδητοποιήσουμε οτι σε αυτα συνυπάρχουν εν δυνάμει καταστάσεις που μπορούν να προκαλέσουν την αλλαγή. Είναι ανάγκη να επικεντρωθούμε σε αναίμακτους πειραματισμούς, να δημιουργούμε μικρές ρήξεις αφήνοντας δημιουργικές ροές να εισέλθουν στο εσωτερικό. Μια μικρή αλλαγή σε τοπικό επίπεδο μπορεί να προκαλέσει τη διακλάδωση σε ένα τέτοιο σύστημα, που σημαίνει την αλλαγή της εξέλιξης του. Αν η σκέψη και η πράξη αντιληφθούν τη δυναμική, μη γραμμική πολυπλοκότητα της πολιτικής και όχι μόνο ζωής μας τότε το "cut the balls of the repressive power" του Zizek θα το κάνει o "Cautious Prometheus" του Latour.

συμπυκνωμένη σκέψη που σε σημεία γίνεται δύσκολα κατανοητή... ζητώ συγνώμη αλλα παίρνω το ρίσκο να το ρίξω στην αρένα... δεν είναι ούτε πέτρα ούτε μολότοφ...

automaton

"The automaton is free not because it is determined from within, but because every time it constitutes the motive of the event that it produces. the automaton is programmed, but the 'spiritual automaton' is programmed by motivation for voluntaary acts, just as the 'material automaton' is programmed by determination for mechanical actions..."

Deleuze, G(1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. The Athlone Press, London. p. 72

Phylo: harnessing the computing power of mankind

"We call this project Phylo - A Human Computing Framework for Comparative Genomics, but don't let the fancy name scare you; really, it's just an interactive game that lets you contribute to science.

All you need is a keen eye and some spare time." Phylo

Phylo is "a framework for harnessing the computing power of mankind to solve a common problem"

more you can find here and here

Computer Games like Phylo are the Foldit and the Galaxy Zoo, both of them as well are based on a framework for harnessing humans' ability in pattern recognition.

Paris, Désordres Publics

A web doc by Raspouteam based on the QR codes technology

thinks is learning to resist

Where can we situate, in our present, a “cause” capable of resisting the accusation of compromise and able to teach us to resist, along with it; a cause that we can acknowledge to be free of complicity, having resisted not through some historical contingency predicated on “not yet”, but through its own resources, the dynamics of capitalist redefinition? If learning to think is learning to resist a future that presents itself as obvious, plausible, and normal, we cannot do so either by evoking an abstract future, from which everything subject to our disapproval has been swept aside, or by referring to a distant cause that we should inagine to be free of any compromise. To resist a likely future in the present is to gamble that the present still provides substance for resistance, that it is populated by practices that remain vital even if none of them has escaped the generalized parasitism that implicates then all.

Stengers, I(2010) Cosmopolitics I, University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis. p. 09-10

Connect, Conjugate, Continue

"You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying... If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata with out taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified - organized, signified, subjected - is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow of conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small pot of new land at all times. it is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole 'diagram', as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs"

Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1987) A thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Continuum, London p.160-161

Postscript on the Societies of Control

Gilles Deleuze died 15 years ago today

"The event is always that which has just happened and that which is about to happen, but never that which is happening."

"The event is a synthesis of past and future. In reality, the expression of the One in becomings is the eternal identity of the future as a dimension of the past. The ontology of time, for Deleuze as for Bergson, admits no figure of separation. Consequently, the event would not be what takes place 'between' a past and a future, between the end of a world and the beginning of another. It is rather encroachment and connection: it realises the indivisible continuity of Virtuality. It exposes the unity of passage which fuses the one-just-after and the one-just-before. It is not 'that which happens', but that which, in what happens, has become and will become. The event as event of time, or time as the continued and eternal procedure of being, introduces no division into time, no intervallic void between two times. 'Event' repudiates the present understood as either passage or separation; it is the operative paradox of becoming. This thesis can thus be expressed in two ways: there is no present (the event is re-represented, it is active immanence which co-presents the past and the future); or, everything is present (the event is living or chaotic eternity, as the essence of time)". Alain Badiou The Event in Deleuze

"He was too tough to experience disappointments and resentments — negative affections. In this nihilist fin de siècle, he was affirmation. Right through to illness and death. Why did I speak of him in the past? He laughed, he is laughing, he is here. It's your sadness, idiot, he'd say." J.-F. Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 2000), p. 194.

Additional Text:

Derrida on Deleuze's death

a Trojan horse without any Soldier

"I think the technology serves as a Trojan horse all right, but in the real story of the Trojan horse, it wasn't the horse that was effective, it was the soldiers inside the horse. And the technology is only going to be effective in changing education if you put an army inside it which is determined to make that change once it gets through the barrier.

Unfortunately, the easier way to get the technology to the school, if you're a vendor, for example, is to open it up and say, "Look, there's no army inside here. It's fine. It suits your purpose. It's not going to be subversive, and so it's a Trojan horse without any soldiers, and that's not a very effective way of doing it.""

Seymour Papert

lost-in-space workshop

A one and a half day interdisciplinary workshop, to be held on 2nd and 3rd December 2010,

in which participants will debate and cross-fertilise ideas and notions of space. The purpose is to provide a platform from which typically disparate disciplines considering spatial issues may ‘find’ one another in order to discuss, debate and develop ideas on space.

The event is aimed towards research and PhD students studying in the UK, focusing on how they think about space, how space influences their work and on what properties of space they draw to shape their work.

It is organised by a PhD student group spanning departments in UCL from the Bartlett School of Architecture, the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience and the University of East London.

Participants will be PhD candidates from across the UK and a panel of invited guests.

for more details please visit:

http://www.lostinspaceworkshop.co.uk/

Politics

"whereby politics does not mean life in some local party headquarters, but the generically human experience of beginning something again, an intimate relationship with contingency and the unforeseen, being in the presence of others."

Paulo Virno: The Grammar of Multitude

Cyb-org-s

"...you need a cybernetic feedback system to maintain homeostasis unconsciously. These systems need to become a part of the organism. A cybernetic organism. A Cyborg.

The key notion here is non-hereditary adaptation. Technological interventions that change the course of biological existence."

extract:: What's a Cyborg | Quiet Babylon

"For the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously, we propose the term “cyborg”".

This is where it starts "Cyborg and Space"

CODE

"Perhaps to ask code and coders to think again about the way in which they see the world, to move from objects to things, and practice code as poetry (poiesis). Rather than code as ordering the world, fixing and overcoding. Code as a craft, 'bringing-forth' through a showing or revealing that is not about turning the world into resources to be assembled and reassembled forever"

Jo Pawlik

symb(i/o)sis

In 1980, at their symbiotic volume called A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia Deleuze and Guattari argued that "transversal communications between different lines scramble the genealogical trees. Always look for the molecular, or even sub-molecular , particle with which we are allied. We evolve and die more from our polymorphous and rhizomatic flus than from hereditary diseases, or diseases that have their own line of descent. The rhizome is an anti-genealogy". An argument based on the science by a minor - minor as opposed to Royal in a Deleuzoguattarian sense- scientist called Lynn Marguilis. It is in 2010 that this polyphonic, melodic and democratic approach to evolution attempts to re-emerge by avoiding the reductionism of Gene Centric approaches like Evo-Devo. Seedmagazine has an excellent article on the latest scientific developments on the science of meta-genomics, that places the notion of symbiosis, not at the center, but on a flat plane to able express, still partially though, the complexity of life.

"Symbiosis goes a step further by showing us how species are linked by more than history; they are living together in a continuous. interconnected now."

David Relman says "we put a lot of weight on a life form's ability to think independently" but microbes have achieved fantastic evolutionary success by operating on a very different principle. Microbial communities are filled with examples of self-sacrifice for the benefit of the larger colony. They form physically close communities in which some cells exist solely to provide structural support or protection for others. "This Intertwining of fate" is maybe a lesson of how human could potentially start to think and work with the dynamics of their own societies. The century of the self might be coming to a critical point of transformation where a new century might arise. The century of the assemblages, the multitudes the collectives. It is about time to focus on cooperative and collaborative practices, practices of the common. It is about time to abolish the identity thinking of success and wealth.

poetry code

a very interesting article regarding trends and future developments on programming languages http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/08/towards-an-expressiveness-of-c.html

Published with Blogger-droid v1.4.9

teaser

The exact meaning of life made possible by life
The exact meaning of standardization made possible by standardization
The exact meaning of protocol made possible by protocols.

a life as resistance to life
a standardization as resistance to standardization
a protocol as resistance to protocol

the desire for the subject to transcendent the given while still be constituted in the given

DNA visualization of Wrapping and Replicate

Being-in-the-world never saw the world before*

Being-in-the-world never saw the world before*. For being-in-the-world, world was an unseen background that was resolved through mental activities. It was only through photographs from astronauts, the decoding of DNA and the expansion of informatics networks that we start to understand what Serres calls world-objects. It is through them that we realized the power to move uninterrupted from the local to global and back again.

Being-in-the-world never heard the world before*

Being-in-the-world never acted on the world before*

*Micael Serres in the Natural Contract

the ineffable

"Loss is inevitable in the story of each person. Losing your wallet, losing your job, losing your home, your family, your city—the degree of loss escalates from the inconvenient to the inconceivable, and with it the experience of the ineffable. Loss, however, is necessary in order for us to change, not only in our habits, but also in our understandings and beliefs. As long as we cling comfortably to what we are and know, we cannot learn, or create. If design is to be a creative act, it must take on the most difficult situations in our lives. It must offer more than comfort and reassurance. It must confront the unspeakable—the ineffable—and become a means by which we can transcend it. This means that we—as individuals and as architects—must, as the Existentialist poet Nikos Kazantzakis once put it, “build the affirmative structure of our lives over an abyss of nothingness.” A heroic—probably too heroic—task, it is true. Except for those who have no choice."

Lebbeus Woods

S.p.a.c.e.

"this is because the logic of space would be that of the multiplicity itself"

Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert in Deleuze and Space

politics of identity

"There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore a book also has no object. As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge." (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 4)

symb(i/o)tika reader

txt01

Dream Logic The Internet and Artificial Thought by David Greener

txt02

Rethinking Social Democracy by Mckenzie Wark

txt03

Economies of affectivity by

Juan Martín Prada

network ethics

“its impossible to justify epistemological or ontological claims without invoking value statements, and hence, ethical and political concerns. Philosophy today that doesn’t talk about oppressions like racism and global capital is radically incomplete, and even if its implied ethics is anti-oppressive.”

in another point he adds

" I think that the only reason for having a flat ontology over any other is ethical. And I don’t think you can separate ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics – yes, for practical purposes they may be distinct, but each implies the other when it comes down to it."

Christopher Vitale

I think this is something that I have tried to argue for so long. If we as architects are about to be engaged in a deep and profound way with the machine (computer) and to ride the wave of emergence that would mean a new ontological and epistemological framework through which we express and practice architectural design. if this is the case then nothing remains intact in terms of ethics and aesthetics. if ontology and epistemology change then we need to reinterpret and think afresh both ethics and aesthetics. It seems appropriate to think in terms of ethics of immanence and aesthetics of pragmatics.

Emergent behavior / Symb(i/o)tika / CECA

MSc Computing and Design in Architecture | UEL | Show 0910

[CECA] Center for Evolutionary Computing in Architecture

color tracking and emergent patterns.

a voronoi formation emerges and is transformed in cellular morphing and emergent tessellations through simple behavioral rules without the use of any geometrical description. The decision to work with the Popular (the last 5 years among the architectural cirlce) Voronoi diagram was to demonstrate that in the MSc Computing and Design the main focus is to 'deep dive' (at the level of local rules) in any system and observe (and many times be surprised by) its behavior. Algorithmic thinking exploits the potentials for a different methodology in architectural design. Our profound engagement with the machine (computer) allows us to code design in order to recode architecture, in a constant haunt of the epistemic autonomy of the model for a truly emergent behavior.

The algorithm is based on Paul Coates' original code developed in NetLogo and uses simple rules in a field of interrelated elements. Visitors of the show are mapped in an abstract domain where their potentials amplified in a novel way and the experimentation or if you like the game starts in a form of a constructive and positive feedback loop... users can alter at the course of their exploration the rules through a simple interface. Creativity is maximized as the emergence of new patterns reveals affordances for novel behaviors.

developed in processing.

libraries used : JMyron (camera tracking), ControlP5 (GUI)

code will be posted soon

violence

notes and thoughts on Zizek

# the ideology of competitive individualism

# liberal conception of violence is limited to subjective forms of violence

# there are forms of objective or systemic violence

# Objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to the ‘normal’ state of things

# Sometimes, doing nothing is the most violent thing to do

# love is an essential component of revolutionary thought and action, as out of love for others alongside solidarity, the desire for the overthrow of repressive socio-economic systemic machinery is born

# the information revolution is in the process of creating radical social formations capable of challenging the system of global capitalism (not Zizekian but Negri's and Hardt postion that Zizek critiques unfairly)

# ‘Leftist political movements are like banks of rage. They collect rage investments from people and and promise them large-scale revenge, the re-establishment of global justice,’

# ‘There is no longer a global rage potential.’

how does one go about effecting large scale changes to the systems which inflict violence on so many peoples and their environments?

such a question then cannot be answered if there is no understanding of the behavior of complex and dynamic systems... old leftish always supporting the idea that through rage and massive social mobility the system could collapse... Deleuze offers a meaningful reading on complex dynamic phenomena and he points out that any small change in a dynamic system could disturb the whole system and bifurcate it to another attractor. Therefore he moves ontologically to the level of the virtual where the actual emerges. At the same time he proposes that a rhizomatic engineering and a machinic opening of this level could cause major differences in the production of the singular. Deleuze though warns us.... that the smooth space is not suffice to liberate us. We need to embrace the risk and the responsibility of our experimentation to cautiously deterritorialize the system in order to be able to ride its creative force. Thus, we could say that Deleuze proposes an activism that is about to experimental exploitation in order to reveal the afordances of any system, to hack its rules and to drive it away from its habitual patterns. The recursive and relational nature of those models could amplify the differenciation to differentiation. from molar to molecular.

to be continued, elaborated, reworked and transformed...

Dangerous Knowledge

Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, a thin thread of thinking that gradually reveals the power of uncertainty. Four mathematicians that profoundly changed the course of the history by laboriously working on the paths of the uncertain.

So Gödel after Turing's death set the profound question "how the mind could reach truth outside logic and what it could mean if it couldn't?"

Greg Chaitin adds in his concluding touch to this brilliant documentary:"You do not want to solve the problem, it is more fun to live with the problem and create... it is much more creative".

It is not therefore about solving the problem, it is about living and creating within the problem.

So indeed, "logic has revealed the limitations of logic and the search for certainty revealed uncertainty"

It is about time though to question, as the documentary invite us to do, how different is our world from Cantor's. Why we haven't learned to live with uncertainty, and to transport our thinking to social science, political theory and economics, it is time to question how all these established realities have affect the way we understand and reject uncertainty. Why have we stopped being creative?

Creativity and Schizophrenia

the only reason to write this post is to clarify, and consequently to diminish a misconception, on the title of BBC's article on Creative minds and schizophrenia. The article authored by BBC's health reoprter Michelle Roberts is entitled Creative minds 'mimic schizophrenia'. It is a well written piece of journalism based on current findings on neuroscience and brain scans "that reveal striking similarities in the thought pathways of highly creative people and those with schizophrenia". The author anticipates though the mimicism that the title implies by stating: "Rather than a clear division, experts suspect a continuum". It is exactly at this point that a conception of difference based on degrees and not in kind is in operation. Someone could argue that this is a minor detail but in an ontological level makes a huge difference. Deleuze associates schizophrenia with capitalism in the two volumes co-authored with psychologist Felix Guattari and through this new formulation of difference (difference in degrees) they create a whole new ontological framework that questions boundaries and identities.

picture of Virginia Wolf source www.thefamouspeople.com

empathic civilization

Bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society.

Examined Life

Examined Life is a 2008 documentary film directed by Astra Taylor. The film features eight influential contemporary philosophers walking around New York and other metropolises and discussing the practical application of their ideas in modern culture.

The philosophers featured are Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Žižek, and Judith Butler, who is accompanied by Taylor's sister Sunny, a disability activist.

source: Wikipedia

"Nature is not a balanced totality that humans disturb. Nature is a big series of unimaginable catastrophes where we profit from"

If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans*

*Woody Allen

"AT A DECISIVE MOMENT in the film The Dark Knight, when Harvey Dent transforms into chance-obsessed Two Face, the Joker, clad in a nurse’s uniform, looms above the maimed politician’s hospital bed. “Do I really look like a guy with a plan, Harvey?” he asks. “I don’t have a plan. The Mob has plans, the cops have plans.” He continues, reflecting on the plans at work all around them: You know what I am, Harvey? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. I just dothings. I’m just the wrench in the gears. I hate plans. Yours, theirs, everyone’s. Maroni has plans. Gordon has plans: schemers trying to control their worlds. I’m not a schemer; I show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are."

Nathan Schneider, Divine Wilderness. In triplecanopy

[Image: From The Dark Knight by Christopher Nolan, courtesy of Warner Brothers].

unknown unknowns

>after this the unknown unknown has been forever aligned with the inability of one to imagine utopia but only dystopia. The image of the future becomes the image of death, fear and terrorism. This whole idea of this double negation can also be explored through the banned "kinder chocolate eggs" in 1960's. It was from the unknown unknowns that the youth should be protected... A whole society wasn't able to confront surprise... and unfortunately this surprise in the contemporary world has been aligned with FEAR!

OOO // Object Oriented Ontology II

"The issue I have is not with either Levi's onticology or Graham's OOO as it is with the general perception (a perception I don't think I've gotten from either of them, but from others) that "object-oriented" philosophy, as a kind of generic term, is a new and important development within Continental philosophy. Used in this broader sense, especially with the "-oriented" attached to the "object," one can't help but to think this means "object" in the everyday English sense of the word. And when I get asked (as I have been) why I'm interested in this trend, it's difficult for me to answer that, because the term sounds too much like "objectivity," "objectivism," and all the other things the word "object" has been philosophically associated with.

The general answer others might give, I imagine, goes something like this: it's a move away from X (subjectivity, perception, phenomenology, correlationism, Kantianism, relationism, or whatever else) and back to the actual real THINGS that make up the world. (That of course sounds, unintentionally I'm sure, a lot like Husserl's "Back to the things themselves!" The difference is that here it's the actual things, not our perceptions of those things. But I'm not willing to concede that we can purify the world of our perceptions.) While I can't pinpoint where I've heard this, it's still made to sound too much like a swing of the pendulum from one side (subjectivity, relationality) to the other (objects). And I dislike that both because I'm tired of swings of the pendulum, when what we need is more integrated accounts of how all these things (objectivity and subjectivity, etc.) work together, and because I think it will have a hard time doing much work outside the limited circles of (mostly) young Continental philosophers who use the term now. So my issue is really a strategic one."

extracted from a blog-post let a thousand objects bloom

State of emergency

"Just as the school, in Foucault, was merely preschool for the learned behaviour necessary for a laboring life on the factory floor, so games like State of Emergency are training tools for life inside the protocological network, where flexibility, systemic problem solving, quick reflexes, and indeed play itself are as highly valued and commodified as sitting still and hushing up were for the disciplinary societies of modernity. "

Galloway, A., Thacker, E.(2007) The Exploit. University of Minnesota Press, London

OOO // Object Oriented Ontology

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology ("OOO" for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.

Bringing some of its foundational figures together for the first time, this inaugural Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium marks an effort to brew a new flavor of post-continental philosophy for the twenty-first century.

The one-day event is free and open to the public.

rap off!

"I like DeLanda’s basic argument: which is to insist on the exteriority of relations. Traditionally, positivist, atomistic thought has pretty much denied the importance of relations between entities: the entities themselves are the absolutes, and all relations between them are merely accidental. Thus neoclassical economics adopts a “methodological individualism” according to which “all that matters are rational decisions made by individual persons in isolation from one another” . On the other hand, what DeLanda calls the “organismic metaphor” asserts that entities are entirely defined by the totality to which they belong, entirely constituted by their relations: “the basic concept in this theory is what we may call relations of interiority: the component parts are constituted by the very relations they have to other parts in the whole”. Hegelian thought is the most powerful example of this tendency, thought Saussurean linguistics and the “structuralism” influenced by it could also be mentioned."

extracted from Shaviro's Post on: DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society

I would like to focus on two rather interesting points of this short quote:

the relations of exteriority and methodological individualism

The concept of relations of exteriority is what gives to an assemblage its machinic character. Those relations are coming to repose Autopoiesis as a machinic autopoiesis that is open both organizational and informational.

At the same time this short quote raises another issue that has to do with "methodological individualism" and Hayek's opposition on collectivism. Delanda's attempt to move obliquely from Hayek's individualism and Keynes' collectivism with a very insightful way will be extended to a project that he will call A New Philosophy of Society. it is not annoying for my understanding the use of the world new, since the last 50 years we tend to believe that nothing new and novel can be produced.

hypertrophic state

why those two approaches are so politically different?

creativity and experimentation are to be discussed...

but what does it mean to overlay one system on top of another without any intrinsic communication between the two and what does it mean to exploit a system? The failure of the system is its success. They did manage to push the system in a hypertrophic state... to maximize its virtual states, to push it beyond of what is meant to be. It is this possibility to think the impossible that marks the second example as political resistive.

I would like to close this post with what E. Dijkstra said in 1972:

“I have the feeling that one of the most important aspects of any computing tool is its influence on the thinking habits of those that try to use it.”

now replace computing tools with any technological machine and you would have them opened into a machinic field. Experimentation becomes the mode to generate and acquire knowledge.

algorithmic text as beyond text

"today to write theory means to write code"

Galloway & Thacker, The Exploit

theorization and its mode of experimentation. I will come back on this shortly, it is a field that we would like to exploit by putting forward an interdisciplinary web platform. The goal is not to destroy IT but to push IT into a hypertrophic state, further than IT is meant to go... this is resistance through an active experimentation

Architecture of Consequence

"Architecture of Consequence proves that any notion that architecture should be an "expression of its time," or should do no more than express the vanity of its commissioners, pales into insignificance when compared to its tremendous potential for resolving urgent societal problems".

architect 3.0

citizen architect or if you prefer architect 3.0

I will have to stick with my old man... at some point Peter says... "I do not believe that architecture is about makin' a better world! architecture is about challenges, changes is about suggesting a truly open future"

cause if we believe that is about making a better world then we have to define what is "better", to reveal our moralistic principles but at the same time we need to avoid not to be trapped in an anthropocentric approach... a "better" world maybe is not exactly what this trailer would like to promote... this is a homeostatic view of world that through entropy will die soon or latter...

thus we need to free our ethics from moralistic principles and to embrace the ethics of emergence... to be able to mutate and change by dynamically forming networks or better heterogeneous assemblages that would proliferate world in a truly open and unpredictable future where afresh will be ready to affect and be affected, to challenge and be challenged... this is what architect 3.0 needs to take under consideration. he or she needs to become an ant not a God, a system designer and not a MegaEgo, an architect that constructs distributed, ill defined, open, participatory systems.

from the other hand, I might be completely wrong... well, that is part of the risk I have decided to take...

Spatial Thinking

Spatial Thinking:: Architecture and Neuroscience [do not] communicate

Olafur Eliasson: Space is Process

Space

[leave a space]

do we mean the same thing...?

Space is one of these notions that you can find in thousand different contexts.

space alone, space as opposed to time or space in spatiotemporal continuum...?

there is no clear definitions of space... everytime that someone tries to articulate one it slips, moves, mutates. It doesn't stay still, it is in a continuous construction, it is always in becoming.

So, I will turn back to an artist and not an architect to help me formulate an understanding of space. Olafur Eliasson(2008) will agree that “it is crucial to recognize [space's] temporal aspect. Space does not simply exist in time; it is of time.” It is this continuous becoming of the space that affects and is been affected by users' actions that architects were trying to express in today's twofold workshop in Bartlett at UCL.

confront the unexpected

"Many people refuse to be absorbed by something they don’t know. Žižek talks about Kinder eggs. Kinder eggs were forbidden in California in the mid-1960s because it was a total disruption of American life where everything needed to be predictable, and here you didn’t know what was inside. You could buy cocaine but not Kinder eggs because they thought it could corrupt the young. Kinder eggs were made by the Germans after the war to reconnect to the unknown and to force the kids away from the lazy period where everything was free. It’s a beautiful articulation of knowledge."

Francois Roche in a conversation with graphic novelist Warren Ellis, moderated by blogger Geoff Manaugh, at the Architectural Association, London, 29 May 2009.

CECA | phase one jury

MSc Computing and Design v.0910

CECA [Centre for Evolutionary Computing in Architecture]

University of East London