"We are writing the year 2014. Information increasingly becomes a desire, the necessity in the form of communication. Desire is an extension of the brain while communication seemingly combines heuristic operations in design development,...
more"We are writing the year 2014. Information increasingly becomes a desire, the necessity in the form of communication. Desire is an extension of the brain while communication seemingly combines heuristic operations in design development, and reaches beyond thermodynamics. More than 65 years ago, Norbert Wiener’s “Cybernetics - the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” (Wiener, 1948) is published, the Macy Conferences then titled Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems are in their 3rd year and following von Neumann’s findings on the Ergodic Theorem, the Cellular Automaton are on its way.(1) In the meantime Baby, the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine and the world’s first stored-program computer, tested for the so-called Williams Tube (a lightweight storage device) runs its first program. The Universal Turing Machine becomes the continuing driver for computation.(2)
Within the context of The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism - Volume II, the subject matter of this paper relates to accessing knowledge and tools for observing and designing an interconnected para-metric world; a cybernetic world characterized by multidimensional behavioural structures informed through using the digital as interface. It provides an extension to the existing emergent construct of The Psychopathology of Cognitive Capitalism in general and the interdisciplinary Cognitive Capitalism Project in particular. The insight given into cognitive capitalism and design strategies are foundations formed in the 20th century and aims at understanding and formulating of what the pathology of The Psychopathology of Cognitive Capitalism may possibly be when looking through the lens of cybernetics beyond. It offers an investigation to the understanding and the form of knowledge through communication, a recursive re-invention and re-understanding of how we think, how we decide and how we actually design and behave. Not just as architects in the design process of a building or a city, but as human beings in the design process of the everyday. It is a compilation, a collection of thoughts and findings, hovering in a paradigm between architecture, cybernetics, system theory, technology and the state of being. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, and the subject of language or syntax, the question of what is reality, may be kept as a filtering veil through which the forthcoming can be received.
This paper discusses cultural architectural theory in conjunction with technical, political and economical possibilities for tangible manifestations in the context of interdisciplinary cognitive work and authorship. In particular, in the context of open source software, virtual and unknown design teams, whose common ground is based on common interest and knowledge, a spatial-temporal structural coupling, which, at times, can be in a parallel fashion. The field of cybernetics and architecture within computational design, researches facts and theories developed in the last half of the 20th century, and their relevance to computational thinking and digital making, shaping the built and unbuilt networked environment in the near and distant future. In contrast to the digital, referring to a particular technology of executing calculations, the computational relates to a way of thinking and making reflecting complexity and non-linearity. It is about process rather than an input/output informed by issues such as emergence, algorithms, structure, material behaviour, data and society, in most cases using computers as interface and calculating machines and CNC (computer numerical control) for digital fabrication, such as 3D-printing, laser-cutting or robotic fabrication. Underlying principles are all but reduced to architecture; instead they are methods, possible to be applied to a variety of disciplines; and relevant as an application and proof for cognitive capitalism. The model suggested here pushes the boundaries of contemporary understanding of architecture and reconstructs reality; from the field of function in the scale of buildings, cities and smaller prototypes, towards understanding the liminal space between the built environment, materials used, the perception of the user, the regulation through the designer, client, budget, and most importantly decision-making processes, the choice of software during the design process, data used and the cognitive capital to inform all of the above. So the questions are: ‘Who is the designer?’ and ‘Who owns the copyright, or rather the cognitive copyright?’ Architecture as building, as physical form is the proof of concept of interplay, and most likely is a result of thinking and internalizing dwelling that has been outlived by the construct architecture as organism, evolving and informing itself through filtering, observation and self-observation: “I am the observed link between myself and observing myself” (von Foerster, 1981).(3)
This paper is structured in a series of parts, which at times overlap and merge. “Defining the Matter” aims to clarify key terms used, and to establish possible relationships between them. These terms–which derive from biology, computer sciences, architecture or mathematics–so far have neither been defined cross-disciplinarily, nor within architecture. They do however affect how the forthcoming text is understood. Since in an era of rapid technological and theoretical shifts terms and expressions are revisited constantly and receive numerous varying definitions there is a necessity to delineate their complex functions. This will provide a theoretical basis for the present text and sets the topic into the framework of the philosophy of computation simultaneously. The main inquiry focuses on the agenda “It’s not alone, it’s synthetic – the bits are calculating,” and provides the reader with a description of A*cognitivist Architecture in a cyber-biological framework and embeds its construct within the mind/body phenomenon immanent in social environments. The narrative Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles bridges computational thinking, the body, perception through our senses and the brain in a material world. This part introduces the concept of Wechselwirkung offered by biological cognition and the cognitive Internet, with its unknown amount of reflectors in an existing non-linear para-space.(4) Here the cybernetic note will be woven into a genealogical string of thoughts. The paper concludes with an exploration for and of an interconnected para-metric world by engaging largely with immaterial, neurotectural design strategies and the question of collective authorship, relating back to the synthetic that becomes natural, cognitive and bio-semiotic.
"
