symb(i/o)tika

Dumitrescu the spectralist

2012-02-04T23:09:00.001Z

Watch "Iancu Dumitrescu - Cogito /Trompe l'Oeil (1/2)" on YouTube

make the accidental the essential

2012-02-04T20:27:00.002Z

stratagem five: make the accidental the essential
In Ancient Greece, the sophists were consummate exploiters of the faults, disturbances and idiosyncrasies of language, its non-sense. Installing themselves within the cracks of language, the fissures which open up where one word could mean many things, two different words could sound exactly alike, where sense and reference was confused, sophistry sometimes humourously and playfully, sometimes with apparently more sinister demagogical intent, exploited the ‘semiurgical’ quality of language and the seething cauldron of affective charge it contained to make and remake our relations to the world. For this, history shows, they were vilified, slandered and excluded from the community of normal human users of language. Philosophy and the right (thinking) use of reason was the prime agent in this historical expulsion. By the genial invention of principles such as that of non-contradiction and entities such as rhetoric to absorb the excesses of language, philosophy not only created strong normative principles for communication arguably operating on a transcendental basis (recently rehabilitated by Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel), it also created a perception of language and of logic in which faults, glitches and bugs started to be seen simply as accidents, trivial anomalies easily removed by means of the better internal policing of language. Short of being a two-headed monster or a plant of some sort, you could not possibly say one thing and mean two. The norms of reason precluded this: transparency should be the elimination of agonism, not its secret accumulation. But as the sophists knew and practised, double-speak was something which politicians did all the time, more or less knowingly, more or less well. Twenty-five centuries later, with the advent of deconstruction and other approaches, we discover that in fact double-speak is the ‘repressed’, disavowed norm of reasonx.

Towards an Evil Media Studies

the old, analytic way is replaced by new, synthetic one.

2012-02-04T20:25:00.004Z

the old, analytic way is replaced by new, synthetic one.

A : Let's take an ecosystem - like a jungle for example. When you try to approach it, when you study an ecosystem, using top-down approach, you start with an ecosystem as a whole and then you begin dissecting it until you get to the final units, which are the animals and the plants. That is the method that science has used for 400 years now and it's called analysis or top-down analysis. The problem is that many of the properties of an ecosystem rise from the interaction between the animals - for instance the interaction between the predators and the preys, the parasites and hosts or between simbiots. When you dissect things and take them apart, the first thing you lose is these interactions. You reach the final units by dissecting things, but then at the end you end up with units that are separated from each other. In an ecosystem, society or any other system, many of the properties are what is called synergetic or synergistic properties, that are more than the sum of the parts. But when you do analysis, you end up with a bunch of units and then you want to add them up - everything that was more than the sum gets lost - almost by definition.

So, to complement analysis, we need synthesis, and that's what artificial life does. In artificial life, you do not analyze an ecosystem, you synthesize it. I we begin with several populations of virtual animals inside a virtual environment and set them to interact with each other, the synergistic properties of an ecosystem emerge from those interactions. So instead of using top-down, starting at the top of the whole ecosystem and working your way down to the animals and the plants, you start with the animals and the plants - at the bottom - and work your way up. The advantage is that you do not lose the properties of interactions because you created these virtual animals and put them together to interact with each other. So, an ecosystem should emerge from those interactions.

Another example would be a flock of birds or an insect colony. In an insect colony, the whole colony has a kind of swarm intelligence. The colony as a whole is kind of like a computer. One little ant finds food and then the others follow him as if the whole colony was an intelligent being. Or if you have a flock of birds - there are a few rules when flying ; keep the same speed as the bird next to you, if you're too close get farther away and if you're too far away, get closer. With those few rules - as long as you put enough birds together - flock behavior emerges. And the whole flock has a kind of gracefulness of its own. That is more than the sum of its parts, it's more than the sum of the birds.

Manuel De Landa and Karlo Pirc (Interviewer)

"Deleuze and Computers" - Alexander R. Galloway - YouTube

2012-01-20T12:19:00.000Z

Can We Think Democratically? Laruelle and the ‘Arrogance’ of Non-Philosophy « London Graduate School

2012-01-12T00:12:00.000Z

Can We Think Democratically? Laruelle and the ‘Arrogance’ of Non-Philosophy « London Graduate School

the event that dramatizes

2011-12-08T21:17:00.001Z

"A lighting bolt flashes between different intensities, but it is preceded by an obscure precursor, invisible, imperceptible, which determines in advance the inverted path as in negative relief, because this path is first the agent of communication between series of differences. If it is true that every system is an intensive field of individuation constructed on a series of heterogeneous or disparate boundaries, then when the series come into communication thanks to the action of the obscure precursor, this communication induces certain phenomena: coupling between series, internal resonance within the system, and inevitable movement in the form of an amplitude that goes beyond the most basic series themselves. It is under these conditions that a system fills up with qualities and develops in extension. Because a quality is always a sign or an event that rises from the depths, that flashes between different intensities, and that lasts as long as it takes for its constitutive difference to be nullified. And most importantly, these conditions taken together determine spatio-temporal dynamism, which themselves are responsible for generating qualities and extensions."
Deleuze, Gilles. The method of Dramatization

pragmatic/machinic

2011-11-29T14:12:00.001Z

"The same semiotic material can befunctioning in different registers. A material can both becaught in paradigmatic chains of production, chains ofsignification (under the cardologic), but at the same time canfunction in an a-signifying register (the ordologic). So whatdetermines the difference? In one case, a signifier functions inwhat one might call a logic of discursive aggregates, i.e. alogic of representation. In the other case, it functions insomething that isn't entirely a logic, what I've called anexistential machinic, a logic of bodies without organs, amachinic of bodies without organs. In that case, what are wetalking about? We're no longer talking about representing, butof enunciating, of creating what one might call an existentialenunciation (_e'nonciation existentielle_), a production ofsubjectivity, a production of new coordinates, anauto-coordination, an auto-referentiation. In the domain of thelogic of discursive aggregates (the cardologic), there's anexo-referentiation; there's a referent, like in Peirciansemiotics, where there is always a third term, a ternary naturewhich refers at one remove to the semiotic reference, whereasthere (under the ordologic), it's the same mechanism, insidethis ternary nature, it's the auto-positionality of subjectivitythat asserts itself there, that asserts itself on all sorts oflevels, on a modular level or on an incomplete level. It's avery complex level of collective assemblage."

extracted from here

Guattari on Semiotics and his term of a-signifying semiotics.

Expression

2011-11-20T13:43:00.001Z

"This is what we are told by the forces of the outside: the transformation occurs not to the historical, stratified and archaeological composition but to the composing forces, when the latter eneter into a relation with other forces which can have come from outside (strategies). Emergence, change and mutation affect composing forces, not composed forms."

Deleuze, G. (1988) Foucault. The Athlone Press. London. p.87

Co-evolve

2011-10-24T22:12:00.000+01:00

"I believe we are entering a time when our diverse civilizations can, more than ever, coevolve together in a generative way, inventing novel cultural forms at the interfaces among us, diversifying our ways to be human."

"My most recent book, Reinventing the Sacred, struggles to show that science is powerful but that the evolutionary becoming of the biosphere, human economy, and culture is partially beyond the "Galilean Spell", the belief that all that unfolds in the universe is describable by natural law. This almost 400 year old belief is, I am quite sure, false. We live in a partially un-prestatable, evolving, creative universe where not only do we not know what WILL happen, we often do not know what CAN happen. Then reason, the highest human virtue of our beloved Enlightenment, is an inadequate guide to living our lives forward into mystery. We need reason, emotion, intuition, imagination, all we have evolved to be. We need to rethink profoundly our entire humanity. We need a new enlightenment. But if this is true, then the barriers between science, the arts, and our historicity, start to crumble. If we live in a creative universe, we can try to reinvent a sharable sense of the sacred based on that very creativity to span the globe, find an ethic to undergird a coevolving ecology of our civilizations, find our way to a sustainable planet. My hope is that WE can jointly participate in an emerging conversation that will be generative, confused, creative, unprestatable, and help shape how the hinge swings."
Stuart Kauffman

Entering A New Time For Our Co-Evolving Civilizations

Delanda's Ontology

2011-10-24T08:29:00.001+01:00

"Manuel De Landa. Metaphysics As Ontology: Aristotle and Deleuze's Realism. 2011"

What is Real?

2011-10-23T23:51:00.001+01:00

"So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new."

Philip K. Dick (1978) How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later

The Politics of Affect

2011-10-15T21:44:00.001+01:00

Recent events both in Greece and all over the world signal the need to rethink politics. Solidarity, resistance, change notions and concepts heavily chraged from another era, from a completely different world, seem inadequate to provide a way to open up new domains of political intervention and collective action. The immence interest on the work of Deleuze and to certain extend of Spinoza brings me to think affect and radical empiriscism as practices that could frame a new productive model of politcs capable of opening up new possibilities. The following extracts are from Susan Ruddick's paper "The Politics of Affect: Spinoza in the work of Negri and Deleuze" that best describe and frame my thinking on politics

Ruddick poses a very interesting and up to date question: "How do we fashion a new political imaginary from fragmentary, diffuse and often antagonistic subjects who may be united in principle against the exigencies of capitalism but diverge in practice, in terms of the sites, strategies and specific natures of their own opression?"

"How we might engage difference and alterity wihtin our own political projects, our collective creations[?]"

Her work focuses on how Spinoza and his 'affect and be affected' approach to Nature has been assimilated by thinkers like Negri and Deleuze.

"The coherent sense of self is literally ungrounded in the first encounter with the wave, but later replaced by a new social body: swimmer/surfer/wave, the combination and enhancement of active powers." and as Ruddick will point out further at her notes "the simplicity of this example also allows us to think about a potentially limitless array in combinatorials in a social body of both human and non-human dimension."

Deleuze and Guattari would ask: Why the masses "chose to fight for their servitude as if it was their freedom"? They give a possible answer in Anti-Oedipus: "No, the masses were no innocent dupes; at a certain point, under certain circumstances, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of desire for the masses that needs to be accounted for."... "the social field is immediately invested with desire"

Deleuze vs Hegel

2011-10-06T11:09:00.005+01:00

"This is where Deleuze does break decisively with an 'Hegelian'
mindset. It is not the dialectic of confronting the other that
determines my boundaries and brings me (us) into being. There is
something prior to that operation, which for Deleuze is secondary.
It is not the opposition of the other that marks my difference.
Difference is primary, originary, self-differentiating. Or to
translate this back into mass movement politics -- it is not the
large-scale formation of political majorities that determines
the small-scale adherence of particular constituences to those
majorities. It is the other way around. It is out of the self-
organising activities of the molecular politics of difference that
the possibilities of majoritarian politics for a mass movement
arises in the first place."

Rethinking Social Democracy by McKenzie Wark

Post-Social-Democracy

2011-09-15T21:50:00.000+01:00

It is after the WWII that the Idea of Social-Democracy becomes so apparent. It will be an ideological pursuit for the years to come until 1960's where the Welfare State will face its first Crisis. Charlie Chaplin's speech from his movie "The Great Dictator" will inaugurate the desire of social democracy which became a successful program of a period that followed. The rise and popularity of Social-Democracy will be enhanced by two factors that consequently will play a crucial role in its decline. Social-Democracy "was sustained by two realities of the times: the incredible expansion of the world-economy, which created the resources that made the redistribution possible; and United States hegemony in the world-system, which ensured the relative stability of the world-system, and especially the absence of serious violence within this wealthy zone." (Wallerstein, 2011)

The period of forever progression didn't last and right after 60's the world economy falls into a stagnation the late phase of which we live today. Additional to that America's hegemonic role will start, slowly, to decline. The 70's will mark the new era according to Immanuel Wallerstein. "The new era beginning in the 1970s saw the end of the world centrist consensus on the virtues of the welfare state and state-managed “development.” It was replaced by a new, more rightwing ideology, called variously neo-liberalism or the Washington Consensus, which preached the merits of reliance on markets rather than on governments. This program was said to be based on a supposedly new reality of “globalization” to which “there was no alternative.” " (Wallerstein, 2011) It seems therefore that the pressing question of our time is if there is an alternative. If Social-Democracy is an illusion in 2011 then where the world system is moving towards?

Source: Immanuel Wallerstein: The Social-Democratic Illusion

On Think Tanks

2011-09-14T09:21:00.001+01:00

"Think Tanks, whether on the left or right are peddling Hayek's ideology in some form another - a managed and technocratic version of the free market as the central dynamic of society."
Adam Curtis

Suely Rolnik, Avoiding False Problems: Politics of the Fluid, Hybrid, and Flexible / Journal / e-flux

2011-09-13T23:17:00.000+01:00

"... it was clear by then that, in order to respond to industrial capitalism (with its disciplinary society and its identitarian logic), it was necessary to oppose a fluid, flexible, and hybrid logic that had been appropriated from the 1960s and 70s. It has now become a mistake to take the latter as a value in itself—since it came to constitute the dominant logic of neoliberalism and its society of control. It is, therefore, within this logic—between different politics of flexibility, fluidity, and hybridization—that the struggles take place around tracing the cartographies of our globalized contemporaneity....

asking the question of whether to refuse or celebrate the cartographies marked by cultural hybridization, flexibility, and fluidity would result in putting forward a false problem. It is just as false to pose the question of the pertinence of art’s role in the invention of such cartographies. The forces at work in each artistic proposal are what matter. What matters are the ways in which creation starts from the turbulences of contemporary sensible experience and the extent to which artistic practice is the consequence of frictions, tensions, and impossibilities that are implicated by the complex and singular construction of a globalized society at each moment and in each context. In the field of visual arts, those forces are embodied not only in the works themselves, but in their exhibitions and the curatorial concepts they articulate, in the critical texts that accompany them, and the directives of the museums that host them—and also, of course, in all of the artistic practices that take place in a drift beyond the institutional territory of art."

Suely Rolnik, Avoiding False Problems: Politics of the Fluid, Hybrid, and Flexible / Journal / e-flux

Panic in the streets of London

2011-08-10T11:36:00.000+01:00

"The prime minister's tax returns, real estate deals, pressure groups, and more generally the economical and financial mechanisms of capital -- in sum, everything is legal, except for little blunders, what is more, everything is public, yet nothing is admissible. If the left was "reasonable," it would content itself with vulgarizing economic and financial mechanisms. There's no need to publicize what is private, just make sure that what is already public is being admitted publicly. One would find oneself in a state of dementia without equivalent in the hospitals.
Instead, one talks of "ideology". But ideology has no importance whatsoever: what matters is not ideology, not even the "economic-ideological" distinction or opposition, but the *organisation of power*. Because organization of power-- that is, the manner in which desire is already in the economic, in which libido invests the economic -- haunts the economic and nourishes political forms of repression." G&D

People tend to underestimate London riots due to lack of any ideological support. But is this what is really lacking? On the contrary someone could argue that the lack of any ideological preoccupation reveals the pure desire machines of the public that are so trapped in the capitalist realm. Ideology tends to mask, hide or repress desires which while expressed freely reveal the magnitude of functioning of those machines.

Introduce a bit of anarchy, become an agent of chaos

2011-07-16T12:29:00.004+01:00

I've watched the other day again Christopher Nolan's Batman "The Dark Knight". An impressive work by Christopher, no doubt, but it was another Nolan that emerges as the genius of the film. Jonathan is Christopher's young brother and he is an author and screenwriter. You find him writing Memento back in 2000 and Prestige six years later before he launches the absolute anarchy encapsulated in Joker's persona.

Jonathan seems familiar with chaos theory, complexity science and the idea of emergence. He goes that far by replicating the well known Prisoner's dilema when the boats' fates, resting in a fragile equilibrium that could be destabilised any moment, have been left to a single human decision (the well known Cold war technique that pushed finally human out of the loop). Mostly though, Jonathan is aware of accidents and non-linearities, the dynamic aspect of the world and as a consequence the unpredictability immanent in every aspect of life.

"Do you know that thing about chaos" asks Joker to "the two faced" Dent. "It's there." Something that Nolan tries to make apparent through out the film. Chaos is an implicit aspect of order.

Taking plans as our ultimate reality turns out to be a 'bad' Joke. The obsession with order is a petty as petty is the obsession with chaos. But now and then, we can turn ourselves into dogs chasing cars. Introducing a bit of anarchy, upsetting the established order we drive the course of the system in a new direction. Not necessarily good or bad but new.

"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 DO things. 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 little worlds. I’m not a schemer; I show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are." Zizek's take on Batman here

biopoliticis and noopolitics

2011-06-27T09:32:00.001+01:00

While Foucault was suggesting through his biopolitics the process of extracting information form the human body, of understanding and exploiting its mechanisms, the idea of noopolitics suggests the process of extracting information from the human brain, of understanding and exploiting its own mechanisms. Twenty years of constant networking and protocol control transformed a mass of skilled human brains into a network-like entities that melded together into armies of data consumption/production. Noopolitics

Ray Brassier: Noise and Capitalism

2011-05-02T01:09:00.001+01:00

Four parts of Ray Brassier's interview to Braham Leven.

1/ "we can attain an objective perspective on our own subjectivity"

2/ "Integrated global capitalism is constitutively dysfunctional: it works by breaking down. It is fueled by random undecidabilities, excessive inconsistencies, aleatory interruptions, which it continuously reappropriates, axiomatizing empirical contingency. It turns catastrophe into a resource, ruin into an opportunity, harnessing the uncomputible."

3/ "The interesting [part] about noise is its dis-organizing potency: the incompressibility of a signal interfering with the redundancy in the structure of the receiver. Not transduction but schizduction: noise scrambles the capacity for self-organization."

4/ "there can be no ‘aesthetics of noise’, because noise as I understand it would be the destitution of the aesthetic, specifically in its post-Kantian, transcendental register. Noise exacerbates the rift between knowing and feeling by splitting experience, forcing conception against sensation."

Edge: WHEN WE CANNOT PREDICT - An EDGE Special Event

2011-03-30T19:35:00.003+01:00

Edge: WHEN WE CANNOT PREDICT - An EDGE Special Event

Bruce Parker, Kevin Kelly, Mary Catherine Bateson, Douglas Kenrick,Douglas Rushkoff, Roger Schank, Ed Regis, Gregory Paul, Eiko Ikegami,Rodney Brooks, J. Doyne Farmer, James J. O'Donnell

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF
Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Program or be Programmed

It's too easy to discount intuition. Pattern recognition. The almost literary sensibility through which we make sense of our world.

The narrative implicit in the nuclear plant disaster in Japan is just too striking for most humans to ignore: the nation that suffered an atomic bombing is now enduring a nuclear crisis. A particular kind of scientific orthodoxy refuses to even entertain such parallels except as evidence of psychological or cultural biases clouding what should be our reliance on the data.

But, as black swan events like this prove, our reliance on the data continually fails us. We just can't get enough data about our decidedly non-linear world to make accurate predictions. There are just too many remote high leverage points in the chaotic systems constructing our reality for us to take all of them into account. Things that seemed not to matter — or that we didn't even notice — iterate enough until they end up mattering a lot. We're better off looking at a fractal and intuiting its relevant patterns than relying on its various pieces to tell us its unfolding story. Science too often divides to understand, incapable of even acknowledging there might be a science in divining to the same ends.

The coincidence of nuclear crises in Japan, combined with our inability to predict the events that precipitated it, forces another kind of predictive apparatus into play. No, it's not one we like to engage — particularly in rational circles — but one we repress at our own peril. Science is free to promote humanity's liberation from superstition or even God, but not from humanity itself. We still have something in common with all those animals who somehow, seemingly magically, know when an earthquake or tsunami is coming and to move to higher ground.

And our access to that long lost sense lies in something closer to story than metrics. A winter bookended by BP's underwater gusher and Japan's radioactive groundwater may be trying to speak to us in ways we are still human enough to hear.

RODNEY BROOKS
Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) AT MIT, and Director, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab; Founder, iRobot; Author, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us

The avian flu outbreaks in 2007, the spike in oil prices in the summer of 2008, the financial system meltdown later that year, the volcanic eruptions of 2009, the oil spill in 2010, and now the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear emergency of 2011, let alone the political upheavals in the middle east, all serve to remind us that we are very poor at making predictions. And we are apparently very poor at assessing risks. But perhaps we can make some observations.

All of these events, one way or another, have shown us how fragile our global supply chain and transportation network really is. There are already reports of how the recent earthquake, never mind the nuclear issues, have slowed down repairs to New York City subway stations, halted production of some GM automobiles in the US (an industry still recovering from the financial meltdown), and even rippled into my own hobby project of building a credible 19th century digital computer.

Our quest for squeezing every efficiency out of our systems of production and supply have lead us to fragility rather than robustness. We have gotten short term margins at the cost of long term stability. Our quest for every last basis point in our financial results have lead us to build a system with countless single points of failure. We are vulnerable to natural disasters, unforeseen economic disasters, or clever exploiters of our systems [such as governments cornering rare earth metals supply chains, or just plain opportunistic hedge traders on rather conventional metals (which is why all nickel based batteries rocketed in price three years ago).

The drumbeat of continued unexpected failures of nature, technology, or economics, will not go away. Perhaps, however, we can take lessons from the disruptions they cause, and find a way to monetize stability over maximum possible short term efficiencies, so that our constructed civilization will be more resilient to these events.

J. DOYNE FARMER
Chaos Theory Pioneer; McKinsey Professor, Sante Fe, Institute; Co-Founder, former Co-President of The Prediction Company

Viewing the Nuclear Accident in Japan Through the Lens of Systemic Risk

Predicting risk might sound like an oxymoron, but it isn't: We do it everyday. Everyone knows, for example, that the risk of a dangerous fall on a steep mountain trail is higher than it is on level ground. Prediction of risks is more difficult, however, when they are systemic. Systemic risks occur when individual components of a system interact and collectively generate new modes of behavior that would never occur for a single component in isolation, amplifying or generating new risks.

The recent financial crisis provides a good example. Banks normally manage risk under the assumption that the financial system will behave in the future more or less as it has in the past. Such estimates are based on historical losses. This is fine under normal circumstances. But in the recent financial crisis a small drop in housing prices triggered a chain reaction that suddenly made the financial system behave completely differently, and extrapolations of risk based on historical losses became irrelevant.

Systemic risks are hard to predict. They are inherently complex phenomena, typically involving nonlinear feedback that couples together the behavior of many individual components. Systemic risks frequently occur in systems where there are neither good models nor good measurements, where theory or simulation is impossible. They often involve modes of interaction that have not been seen before, making past experience of little value. The amplitude of the resulting problem is often far larger than previously imagined possible.

How can we anticipate and minimize systemic risk? The key general principle is stability. Systemic risks occur when bad behaviors feedback on one another, so that small problems are amplified into big problems. When things go topsy-turvy, do the problem behaviors damp out, or are they amplified? In the recent financial crisis, for example, the key problem was leverage, which amplifies both gains and losses. Leverage is good during good times, but during bad times it makes the financial system unstable.

The recent Japanese earthquake/tsunami provides another example of how a normal risk can turn into a systemic risk. For Japan, given the history of the region, an earthquake in tandem with a Tsunami might be called a normal risk. But no one realized in advance that a Tsunami could destroy both the main power and the backup power of a nuclear power plant, while an earthquake could also create cracks causing a loss of coolant. The resulting nuclear catastrophe came on top of all the other damage to the infrastructure, making the nuclear crisis even harder to solve than it would have been otherwise, and the radiation leakage has made it even harder to get the infrastructure functioning again. The risks of both have been amplified.

With hindsight the consequences of a large earthquake and tsunami seem obvious, so why didn't the engineers plan for them properly? This is the usual story with systemic risk: In hindsight the problems are obvious, but somehow no one thinks them through beforehand.

As already explained, from a complex systems engineering perspective, the key principle is stability. Nuclear power generation is intrinsically unstable. If you walk away from a wind generator or a solar cell when a crisis occurs, not much happens. If you walk away from a nuclear reactor under the wrong circumstances, it can melt down. To cope with the systemic risk one needs to think through all possible scenarios. The experts might be able to plan for all the known failure modes, but it is much harder to anticipate the unknown ones.

The prognosis for nuclear accidents based on simple historical extrapolation is disturbing. After roughly 14,000 cumulative years of nuclear plant operation, we have now had three major accidents. If we ramp up nuclear power by a factor of ten, which is necessary to make a significant contribution to mitigate global warming, we will increase from the 442 reactors that we currently have to about 5000. Historical extrapolation predicts that we should then expect an accident of the magnitude of the current Japan disaster about once a year.

But I don't trust the historical method of estimating. Three events are unlikely to properly characterize the tails of the distribution. My personal choice for a really nasty nuclear scenario goes as follows: Assume the developed world decides to ramp up nuclear power. The developing world will then demand energy independence and follow suit. For independence you need both reactors and fuel concentrators. There will be a lot of debate, but in the end the countries with stable governments will get them. With a fuel concentrator the waste products of the reactor can be used to make weapons grade fuel, and from there making a bomb is fairly easy. Thus, if we go down the path of nuclear expansion, we should probably assume that every country in the world will eventually have the bomb. The Chernobyl disaster killed the order of ten thousand people: A nuclear explosion could easily kill a million. So all it will take is for a "stable government" to be taken over by the wrong dictator, and we could have a nuclear disaster.

I'm not an actuary, so you shouldn't trust my estimates. To bring the actuaries into the picture, anyone who seriously advocates nuclear power should lobby to repeal the Price-Anderson Act, which requires U.S. taxpayers to shoulder the costs of a really serious accident. The fact that the industry demanded such an act suggests that they do not have confidence in their own product. If the act were repealed, we would have an idea what nuclear power really costs. As it stands, all we know is that the quoted costs are much too low.

Danger is not the only property that makes nuclear power exceptional. Even neglecting the boost in cost that would be caused by repeal of the Price-Anderson Act, the cost curve for nuclear power is remarkable. My group at the Santa Fe Institute has collected data on the cost and production of more than 100 technologies as a function of time. In contrast to all other technologies, the cost of nuclear power has roughly remained constant for 50 years, despite heavy subsidies. This cannot be blamed entirely on the cost of safety and regulation, and after Japan, is anyone really willing to say we shouldn't pay for safety? In contrast, during the same period solar power has dropped by a factor of roughly a hundred, making its current cost roughly equal to nuclear. Wind power is now significantly cheaper than nuclear. Solar will almost certainly be significantly cheaper than nuclear within a decade, roughly the time it takes to build a nuclear plant.

To properly assess systemic risks, the devil is in the details. We can't debate the risks of a technology without wading through them. But from a complex systems engineering point of view, one should beware of anything that amplifies risk. Systemic risks are difficult to predict, and precautionary principle dictates that one should take care when faced with uncertainty.

source Edge.org

Symbiosis

2011-03-19T22:40:00.001Z

"Thus former parasites have to become symbionts; the excesses they committed against their hosts put the parasites in mortal danger, for dead host can no longer feed or house them"

"This is history's bifurcation: either death or symbiosis." Michel Serres

nature

2011-03-18T13:22:00.002Z

"Our Culture abhors the world.
Yet quicksand is swallowing the duelists; the river is threatening the fighter: earth, waters, and climate, the mute world, the voiceless things once placed as a decor surrounding the usual spectacles, all those things that never interested anyone, from now own thrust themselves brutally and without warning into our schemes and maneuvers. They burst in our culture, which had never formed anything but a local, vagues, and cosmetic idea of them: nature.
what was once local -- this river, that swamp -- is now global: Planet Earth."
Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, p.3

The Evolution of Economic Wealth and Innovation

2011-03-14T21:51:00.000Z

Stuart Kauffman

Τί είναι η Φιλοσοφία; | Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?

2011-03-10T20:47:00.005Z

Entretien avec Félix Guattari 1 by DocMango

George Veltsos interviews Felix Guattari on Greek Television in 1991.
Videos

"Υπάρχει πάντα ένα μικρό περιθώριο(margin), μια δυνατότητα (possibility). Μέσα στον Πανεπιστημιακό χώρο έχετε μερικούς φίλους, έχετε τη δυνατότητα να δημιουργήσετε έναν πυρήνα που πιθανόν να βρει απήχηση και ανταπόκριση. Αυτές οι τοπικές, μικροπολιτικές διαστάσεις ίσως να επηρεάσουν μεγάλα φαινόμενα μοριακής (molecular) μετάλλαξης αφού τελικά το τοπικό επικοινωνεί τώρα με το πλανητικό."

"Σήμερα ποιος είναι ο δημιουργός ιδεών; Δεν είναι οι διανοούμενοι αρχηγοί μ' ένα μεγάλο 'Α'. Είναι μη-διανοητικές κατατάξεις, είναι γεωπολιτικές ευαισθησιακές (sensibility) μεταλλάξεις. Είναι οι ικανότητα να δεις τον κόσμο όπως εξελίσσεται... Αυτό σημαίνει σήμερα να είσαι δημιουργός ιδεών (concept)."

The Iokasti hypothesis

2011-03-07T17:32:00.001Z

"life processes have destabilizing effects, rather than homeostatic ones, upon the environment that they rely upon for survival" Shaviro. Symbiosis leads not to homeostasic whole...

Iokasti sits nicely as mother model between Gaia and Medea to express the contingent and unexpected affects of symbiotic relations. By avoiding the extremity of the nice and caring Lovelock's hypothesis (Gaia) as well as Ward's (Medea) evil and destructive, Iokasti hypothesis focuses on relations of exteriority with no a priori positive or negative overtone.

Common Sense and the orthodox image of thought

2011-03-04T22:59:00.003Z

"Many people have an interest in saying that everybody know "this", that everybody recognises this , or that nobody can deny it. ( They triumph easily so long as no surly interlocutor appears to reply that he does not wish to be represented, and that he denies or does not recognize those who speak in his name.)" DR p.166

the most general form of representation is thus found in the element of common sense understood as an upright nature and a good will. (Εύδοξος και ορθόδοξος). p.166

In this sense, conceptual philosophical thought has as its implicit presupposition a pre-philosophical and natural image of thought, borrowed from the pure element of common sense. According to this image, thought has an affinity with the true; it formally possesses the true and materially wants the true. p.167

Theory vs Practice

2011-02-26T11:11:00.000Z

Do we still hold on this argument? Are we still divided between a mental and physical world? Hume dismisses Descartes' 'cogito' by arguing that 'theory becomes an inquiry'. "Theory is an inquiry, which is to say, a practice: a practice of the seemingly fictive world that empiricism describes: a study of the conditions of legitimacy of practices in this empirical world that is in fact our own. The result is the great conversion of theory to practice" Deleuze Hume p.36 Deleuze adds in the same text that the origin of this conception can be found in Francis Bacon with his famous 'ipsa scientia potestas est' ("knowledge itself is power"). However it was after Hume that William James will popularize Pierce's conception of pragmatism where knowledge is produced in a pragmatic way where "the relation between knower and known 'works' in the world."

Empiricism | Humean inversion

2011-02-26T00:42:00.008Z

Arguing against Empiricism's main epistemological claim that "everything finds its origin in the sensible and in the operations of the mind upon the sensible" Deleuze finds in Hume "a model of the genesis of subjectivity" (Delanda, 2006). Deleuze in his text on Hume (1972) writes about Hume's great inversion that places empiricism in a higher power: "if ideas contain nothing other and nothing more than what is contained in the sensory impressions, it is precisely because relations are external and heterogeneous to their terms. ...The real empiricist world is thereby laid out for the first time to the fullest: it is a world of exteriority, a world in which thought itself exists in a fundamental relationship with the Outside, a world in which terms are veritable atoms and relations veritable external passages; a world in which the conjunction 'and' dethrones the interiority of the verb 'is'" (Deleuze, Hume p.38)

Transversal thinking

2011-02-23T09:59:00.001Z

Alain Bombard's experiment. "The experiment involved two glass bowls, one filled with polluted water from the port of Marseilles or somewhere similar, in which a clearly very healthy octopus was swimming around –virtually dancing –and the other filled with pure, unpolluted water. Bombard caught the octopus and transferred it to the ‘normal’ water; within a few seconds, it curled up, sank to the bottom, and died. More than ever today, nature has become inseparable from culture; and if we are to understand the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere, and the social and individual universes of reference, we to learn to think transversaly."
Felix Guattari "Three Ecologies"

The world has lost its pivot

2011-02-17T21:19:00.000Z

"The world has lost its pivot: the subject can no longer dichotomize, but acceds to a higher unity, of ambivalence or overdetermination, in an always supplementary dimension to that of its object. The world has become chaos, but the book remains the image of the world : radicle-chaosmos rather than root-cosmos." Deleuze and Guattari ATP p.6

Affectio and Affectus

2011-02-08T01:18:00.001Z

"By affect I understand the affections of the body, by which the power of acting of the body itself is increased, diminished, helped, or hindered, together with the ideas of these affections." B. Spinoza, Ethics p.98

"In Networks, Affect is not emotion... Affect is networked, becomes distributed, and is detached from its anthropomorphic locus in the individual. In a dynamic network the individual is constituted through the circulation of the affects" E. Thacker, Networks, Swarms, Multitudes

from symbiosis towards symb(i/o)sis

2011-02-06T02:19:00.002Z

from symbiosis towards symb(i/o)sis... a need to become machinic in order to re-engineer the systemic regime of world's metabolic processes.

Technology is therefore social before it is technical (or I am a programmer!)

2011-02-02T13:03:00.001Z

“What is it that Foucault call a machine, be it abstract or concrete (he speaks of the machine-prison, but equally of the machine-school, the machine-hospital, and so on)? The concrete machines are the two-form assemblages or mechanism, whereas the abstract machine is the informal diagram. In other words, the machines are social before being technical. Or, rather, there a human technology which exists before a material technology. No doubt the latter develops its effects within the whole social field; but in order for it to be even possible, the tools or material machines have to be chosen first of all by a diagram and taken up by assemblages. Historian have often been confronted by this requirement: the so-called hoptile armies are part of the phalanx assemblage; the stirrup is selected by the diagram of feudalism; the burrowing stick, the hoe and the plough do not form a linear progression but refer respectively to collective machines which vary with the density of the population and the time of the fallow. In this respect, Foucault shows how the rifle exists as a tool only in the sense that is 'a machinery whose principle would no longer be the mobile or the immobile mass, but a geometry of divisible (and composable] segments.

Technology is therefore social before it is technical" Deleuze Foucault p.34

...

“The history of forms, the archive, is doubled by an evolution of forces, the diagram. The forces appear in 'every relation from one point to another': a diagram is a map, or rather several imposed maps. And from one diagram to the next, new maps are drawn. Thus there is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points which it connects up, certain relatively free or unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture. It is on the basis of the 'struggles' of each age, and the style of these struggles, that we can understand the succession of diagrams or the way in which they become linked up again above and beyond the discontinuities. For each diagram testifies to the twisting line of the outside spoken of by Melville, without beginning or end, an oceanic line of passes through all points of resistance, pitches diagrams against one another, and operates always as the most recent. And what a strange twist of the line was 1968, the line with a thousand aberrations! From this we can get the triple definition of writing: to write is to struggle and resist; to write is to become; to write is to draw a map: 'I am a cartographer'.” Deleuze Foucault p.37-38

From this we can get the triple definition of programming: to program is to struggle and resist; to program is to become; to program is to draw a map: 'I am a programmer!'.

"Long Live the Multiple!"

2011-01-30T23:31:00.000Z

"In truth, it is not enough to say, "Long live the multiple", difficult as it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it heard. The multiple must be made, nit by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest if ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available - always n-1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted: write at n-1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes." Deleuze and Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus p.6

the voracious appetite of Kronos

2011-01-24T17:30:00.006Z

"Kronos was eating away all that was archaic and irrational in his own progeny, sparing only those predestined for a radiant future. Suddenly, he lost his voracious appetite. Now he needs to ask himself if he is able to cohabit with his own sons who unlike their father they need to learn to live with him. They can get rid of nothing and of no one."

Rephrasing, paraphrasing, metaphrasing Latour, following his Greek Mythological adventure.

Painting by Peter Paul Rubens of Kronos devouring one of his children, Poseidon
image source: wikipedia

who knows these things better than architects?

2011-01-23T13:37:00.002Z

"This does not mean that there is no progress in the end, or that no arrow of time can be thrust forward. It means that we slowly progress from a very simple minded form of cohabitation — such as the revolutionary one— to a much fuller one, where more and more elements are taken into account. There is progress but it goes from a mere juxtaposition to an intertwined form of cohabitation: How many contemporary elements can you build side by side, generating the series of simultaneity?
By the way, who knows these things better than architects? Maybe once they have freed themselves from their intoxication with modernism —and with the bitter aftertaste of postmodernism— they will realise that the time of Time has passed as has fast as the time of myth and of epic poetry. They might just discover one day that they have written large chunks of the alternative operating system. After all, aren’t inhabiting and cohabiting part of what architects do? Are they not, by definition, the artisans of space?
When will the horsemen of Apocalypse stop meddling in politics?"

Bruno Latour in Politics of Time, Politics of Space

the power of fear

2011-01-22T23:00:00.003Z

part 2

Isomorphism

2011-01-20T23:08:00.002Z

"There is, however, no analytic resemblance, correspondence or conformity between the two planes. But their independence does not preclude isomorphism..." (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.108) We need however to be rather careful at this point cause the use of isomorphism in the Deleuzoguattarian sense is referred to the two planes of content and expression in a direct reference to Hjelmslev's linguistic model. It is the decontextualization of the isomorphism that Delanda sets off to contextualise later at the field of theoretical and experimental physics. He will argue "In this old and tired view (realist), the relation between the plane of reality and that of physics would be one of similarity." (Delanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, p.170-171) Therefore, he recalls Deleuze in order to break the resemblance without denying the isomorphism and he adds "...the physics laboratory [or the computer simulation as he is arguing to his latest book] may be viewed as a site where heterogeneous assemblages form, assemblages which are isomorphic with real intensive individuation processes" (Delanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, p.170-171)

GoL Turing Machine

2011-01-19T22:39:00.003Z

Paul Rendell 2000
engineered patterns of John Conway's Game of Life assembled to operate as a Turing Machine able to carry out computations. More on the Machine can be found here

the internet of things

2011-01-15T00:24:00.002Z

The IBM Baby, or When Data Rules the world

The internet of things

How Prometheus could cut Gods' Balls?

2010-12-16T01:03:00.004Z

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

2010-12-15T23:23:00.004Z

"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

2010-12-11T23:31:00.004Z

"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

2010-12-04T23:24:00.004Z

A web doc by Raspouteam based on the QR codes technology

thinks is learning to resist

2010-11-28T12:07:00.001Z

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

2010-11-24T19:17:00.006Z

"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

2010-11-06T09:51:00.001Z

Gilles Deleuze died 15 years ago today

2010-11-04T11:44:00.004Z

"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

2010-11-02T22:48:00.003Z

"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

2010-10-21T20:58:00.003+01:00

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

2010-09-23T11:56:00.003+01:00

"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

2010-09-21T23:49:00.003+01:00

"...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

2010-09-11T00:13:00.004+01:00

"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

2010-08-07T16:36:00.005+01:00

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

2010-08-06T21:14:00.001+01:00

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

2010-08-03T19:10:00.002+01:00

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

2010-08-03T00:00:00.001+01:00

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

2010-08-01T14:48:00.004+01:00

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

2010-07-25T22:57:00.001+01:00

"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.

2010-07-23T16:21:00.001+01:00

"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

2010-07-18T18:45:00.005+01:00

"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

2010-07-10T14:09:00.004+01:00

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

2010-07-01T23:08:00.004+01:00

“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

2010-06-25T00:38:00.006+01:00

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

2010-06-25T00:09:00.005+01:00

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

2010-06-02T19:04:00.005+01:00

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

2010-05-31T19:10:00.003+01:00

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

2010-05-17T17:23:00.002+01:00

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

2010-04-23T01:03:00.003+01:00

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*

2010-04-17T23:43:00.009+01:00

*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

2010-04-10T12:48:00.006+01:00

>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

2010-04-10T10:21:00.004+01:00

"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

2010-04-09T12:30:00.004+01:00

"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

2010-03-31T23:41:00.001+01:00

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!

2010-03-29T11:33:00.004+01:00

"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

2010-03-29T00:46:00.008+01:00

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

2010-03-28T23:50:00.006+01:00

"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

2010-03-16T20:49:00.001Z

"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

2010-02-13T22:48:00.003Z

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

2010-02-12T23:30:00.004Z

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

2010-02-03T11:29:00.002Z

"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

2010-01-21T23:57:00.003Z

MSc Computing and Design v.0910

CECA [Centre for Evolutionary Computing in Architecture]

University of East London

Unsupervised

2010-01-20T12:11:00.008Z

"Being able to train an artificial neural network to recognize patterns or features in data sets using supervised learning algorithms is impressive. Creating networks which find patterns in data sets without supervision is amazing."

David Grimshaw here

picture: Dissociated culture of rat hippocampal neurons via /www.greenspine.ca

thinking the impossible

2009-12-16T12:38:00.006Z

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

2009-12-01T23:48:00.008Z

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

2009-11-16T13:47:00.005Z

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

2009-11-14T10:24:00.004Z

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

2009-11-05T11:17:00.004Z

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!

2009-10-18T21:49:00.010+01:00

"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

2009-10-17T12:54:00.007+01:00

"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

2009-10-16T20:00:00.002+01:00

“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

2009-10-12T22:06:00.003+01:00

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

2009-09-22T13:13:00.002+01:00

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

2009-09-13T22:19:00.002+01:00

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

2009-09-03T23:38:00.008+01:00

"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

2009-08-31T22:42:00.000+01:00

Adaptiveness

2009-08-30T12:03:00.005+01:00

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

2009-08-29T23:22:00.007+01:00

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

2009-08-29T14:30:00.004+01:00

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.