Co-existence

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

The installation rediscovers the boundarys of the human body.

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

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

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

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

since then, few things on the installation here

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

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

here is another article from wired

the Programming of Architecture

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

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

You can pre order the book here

kriegspiel

the kriegspiel or the Game of War

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

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

more on Kriegspiel

and trace its philosophical roots in Alexander's Galloway essay

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

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

read the full article here

Aesthetics

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

Barnett Newman

few ideas about Aesthetics

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

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

Aesthetics of pragmatics

Semantic Web

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

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

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