politics of identity

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

symb(i/o)tika reader

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Dream Logic The Internet and Artificial Thought by David Greener

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Rethinking Social Democracy by Mckenzie Wark

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Economies of affectivity by

Juan Martín Prada

network ethics

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

in another point he adds

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

Christopher Vitale

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

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

MSc Computing and Design in Architecture | UEL | Show 0910

[CECA] Center for Evolutionary Computing in Architecture

color tracking and emergent patterns.

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

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

developed in processing.

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

code will be posted soon

violence

notes and thoughts on Zizek

# the ideology of competitive individualism

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

# there are forms of objective or systemic violence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dangerous Knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creativity and Schizophrenia

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

picture of Virginia Wolf source www.thefamouspeople.com