architect 3.0

citizen architect or if you prefer architect 3.0

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

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

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

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

Spatial Thinking

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

Olafur Eliasson: Space is Process

Space

[leave a space]

do we mean the same thing...?

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

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

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

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

confront the unexpected

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

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

CECA | phase one jury

MSc Computing and Design v.0910

CECA [Centre for Evolutionary Computing in Architecture]

University of East London

Unsupervised

"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

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

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

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

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

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

These are the questions that architects have to answer.

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

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

the creation of alternative algorithms

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

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

looking forward for the full text.