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Fluid Territories: Mississippi River and Mississippi Delta Landscape interventions
COOPER UNION -Organizational
Simulation of Fluid Territories Students groups:
Elan Fessler and Mack Cooper William Jeremie Waechter, Sylyng Yong and Katheleen Brumder
Introduction: "Progress and catastrophe are the opposite faces of the same coin" Hanna Arendt (1968) “The State subordinates the hydraulic force to canals, pipes, damns that do not allow turbulence, which obligates movement to go from one point to another, for the space to be striated and measured, for the fluid to depend on the solid, and the flux to proceed passing by parallel laminar series. Instead, the hydraulic model of the nomad science and the war machine consist of expanding by turbulence over a smooth space, in producing a movement that occupies the space and that affects simultaneously all the points, instead of being occupied by itself as a local movement that goes from one point to another. ” Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” ORGANIZATION AND STRUCTURE Space and Structure have always been related to architecture’s subject matter. In order for an idea to be of any relevance to deep structure, it has to be able to relate to the structure of that space. Public space and infrastructure play a similar role in that relationship. Architectural ideas concerning public space should relate to its structure. In this sense, infrastructure remains an area untouched by our profession, with few alternatives largely unexplored, where it is only developed by state driven organizations like the Army Corps of Engineers. Since a large amount of energy and economic resources are related to infrastructure renewal and enlargement, the architect, in a side role, should engage a more active participation in order to take these opportunities for large-scale interventions to transform so that they can achieve a more sensible role to the urban space. The problems of infrastructure excess and infrastructure redundancy are produced as everyday common interventions and present continuous opportunities for architecture interventions to affect the city at large. There is a known shift in worldwide port cities over the turn of the 20th century that involves the recycling of the port’s infrastructure in order to incorporate the ports into the fabric of the city. The shift produced by maritime global exchange, presents a background for a less developed problem. The shift in the incorporation of these structures, which were originally designed for different scales, purposes, and then domesticated by cities, mark a special social shift in the perception of urban space structures. On the other hand, those same cities are challenged by a parallel problem, in relation to the same areas of exchange between city and water. Today, water control systems are the focus of attention of many states, since not only the rising levels of underground water affect cities in floods with water coming from underneath, but also from borders facing open waters or rivers, with problems of containing the increasing pressure of water. As studied at Princeton University, the effects produced by global warming present the case that in 100 years, the tide will raise 2 feet globally, an equivalent of .60m (for instance, the shore of New Jersey and its beaches will be receding by 240 feet (80m). UNSTABLE ARCHITECTURE GROUND The seminar takes on some of these problems as an opportunity to experiment with urban scale architectural problems relating this time to water. Water presents a different type of problem to architecture ground. It presents a territory that has not been striated by the city, or by the state. Because it presents many scales of difference between solid and fluid ground, the seminar searches and experiments with ground stability. We are accustomed to conceive “ground” as a determinate and neutral parameter, which remains stable. These are more conventional than real qualities. For instance, if one refers to the example of Holland, where the level of the water is more stable than the progressive, continuous, varying, and sinking level of the ground, which generates dependency and psychological phobias related to the flat infrastructure-engineered landscape. Holland’s history is one of controlling water level, an inverted panoptical relationship with the continuous latent threat of the water tide. In the social psychology of control and protection, all have participated in this process, in instances such as the use of manual pumps at private houses, removing water surfacing from underneath its structures. The open territory of the water remains smooth because of the lack of tools to deal with its fluidity and turbulence. No single infrastructure dealing with water systems presents a new defiant problem for the states worldwide, or presents a different set of parameters, and thinking to understand different types of architecture interventions and grounds, which are necessary. Historically the state eliminates dynamism, but superimposes strict fixed rules. The State requires a hydraulic science as Wittfogel relates the importance of the great hydraulics works in relation to big empires. “We are tired of the tree-structure and the roots… Subterranean roots… Amsterdam is a rhizome city: roots –canals no rooted city….” Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” The apparent stability of the ground in Amsterdam is revealed within time and the continuous movement of the foundations of the buildings. This problem of stability, foundations and structure gives an interesting background at many levels in the relationship of city-port. Not only is Amsterdam’s structure of ring-canals and cross-streets an important structure precedent, but also Rotterdam’s successful growth of port-city. Rotterdam proposes a large urban strategy for controlling water levels and building an engineered, artificial, large, and domesticated landscape area producing a strange relationship between inland-protected series of cities and the open waters mediated by a series of ports or the world largest port. Infrastructure writes the territory while colonization takes place. Rotterdam has always been the host for the most advanced research on water systems. Its own state has been developed out of growing land and controlling water forces, developing a history of state related mechanisms to regulate and control the environment, and is always a resource and reference for many cities that deal with these problems. Because Holland has always dealt with striating the smooth by expanding towards the sea in hostile territories that were far from other state’s ambitions, this gave Holland the opportunity to invent itself by building a strategic territory that became relevant for overseas commerce and world exchange. This strategy boosted the economy and the potential for building up more control over this land. The series of Island systems that are cities-ports operate also as barriers that contain the force of the water. As a referential of a strategy for generating territory and landscape opportunities out of the mechanisms of flood control, Holland, and specifically Rotterdam, became referents for our site in New Orleans. New Orleans has the opportunity of its historical function as an entry-port to the Mississippi river and its series of port-industries that serve the entire United States Territory. The area and its linear port are capable of large operations and today is responsible for 20% or more of the commerce in the US. without considering that these levels have reduced consistently and offer a much larger potential. Additionally, the offshore oilrig facilities also produce 15%-20% of the oil in the US. Because of the scale of its port, Rotterdam was able to develop infrastructure not only to serve that scale of ships for commerce but also financed a parallel landscape and an important city with high-end infrastructure, which produces other goods due to the facilities that enabled a a large amount of operable land.
(INFRA)-STRUCTURE AND POLITICAL REPRESENTATION: The rising level of the water in most metropolises all over the world generates a new paradigm in the relationship between public democratic representation and state response and accountability. Because infrastructure problems of this kind are only visible when catastrophes occur and are not seen as everyday life problems, the state is unable to address those issues and invest resources. At the same time, it seems that in the US, the landscape of the city is unmediated and defined by redundant infrastructure interventions than by a more integrated and comprehensive idea of public space. Katrina left a 30 foot tall column of water in certain areas, and being the 2nd largest hurricane devastation in the US history, its cost reached 80 billion dollars. Since 500 oilrigs were out of service, 9 oil refineries: that is 12% of the US production of gasoline. The money lost and the money necessary for recovery together with the funds spent in infrastructure renewal during the last 80 years since the first levees were built, could be spent on a more sophisticated, comprehensive and studied analysis of the situation, on a more creative and collaborative basis. In this respect, infrastructure and landscape collaborate to generate spatial opportunities as well as protecting and restoring the environment, which is the safest and most efficient way to protect the area against storms. In this way, the infrastructure and landscape are recovering the latent lost memory of the site as an opportunity. The visible public works define the exchange of state power and private control on the modern American city, and what it is not visible, is often neglected or manipulated by or for private interests. Public tax money is usually spent arbitrarily on public infrastructure projects. A more involved and direct participation of the public would be necessary that concerns public space issues and its relationship to infrastructure. There could be more resistance to the ideology of the private regulating of the common wealth of the urban space. It seems that today a capital based system has problems to regulate itself towards the common social interest. The army corps of engineers, a military state organization regulates, designs, implements and develops the main state infrastructure interventions in the US without any more control than the apparent linear efficiency, which can never be comprehensive. Also socially, topography and infrastructure have been always used as an opportunity for segregation and an instrument of measurement of social meaning at the level of the state. Cities like New York, Atlanta, and even New Orleans have long history of the use of these modus operandi. In this respect, New Orleans’ levels and landownership, have always been in exact relation to flood control areas. INFRASTRUCTURE EXCESS AND ARCHITECTURE AS EXCESS Infrastructure today has no time, it is always new and replaced for the new, instead of growing and adapting organically with the city. A more open-ended comprehensive thinking of the public space in relation to infrastructure is necessary. A strategy with these bases could adapt to new uses proposing an alternative behavior. Public space and its structure must incorporate accumulation of time, effects, functions, and layering of problems, which continuously transform within time. Infrastructure interventions progressively have become simple engineering, linear solutions, while opportunities for integration in a more comprehensive urban design panorama are being simplified by shallow economic thinking. Its excess, its qualities, and side effects as well as its urban potential are eliminated as non-critical interventions become aggressive, eliminating any possibility of those landscapes to acquire identity or quality by simple substitution. Homogenization, standardization, simplification and insensibility are the only means to measure itself with anything else other than its immediate simplified purpose of its construction. Many times we can notice that infrastructure is replaced by building parallel infrastructures, with increasing simplification. The excess and replacement become unproductive redundancy because of the new rigid design, which derives only by multiplication of the same problems it tries to solve. A demand for accumulation by time instead of replacement is necessary. Integration rather than elimination and a comprehensive inclusion can only use time as a tool to accumulate complexity rather than beginning new in each case. It might be a possibility to de-motivate infrastructure linear functions in order to develop simultaneous public urban landscapes. Infrastructure needs to become formally unstable to be able to relate to the complexity of the interventions at the scale it usually sustains. Proposing a more integrated, more sensible and more complex for the dual. De-motivating its function to becoming more open in its being. Infrastructure has been commonly centralized, but today infrastructure has been extending largely the city landscape. This expansion of the urban space that consumes any territory has not been able to accommodate to the new, but rather the opposite to homogenize the landscape. That is the extreme case once it encounters the fluid territory of the edges of the water, as we can analyze its indifferent behavior connecting the Keys around the Gulf and Florida Coast. Infrastructure excess is generally present in redundant interventions and already an open opportunity to develop architecture opportunities. Architecture could operate using these structures generating interesting public space. At the same time, if infrastructure excess usually disturbs environment by producing side effects that affect the dynamic stability of natural processes, then those anomalies and disturbances can be manipulated to generate landscape opportunities. Generating an artificial ecology, Infrastructure excess may produce Architecture as excess. By these means infrastructure excess could propagate architecture opportunities as residue. Since Hurricane Katrina, current solutions for controlling New Orleans’ possible future floods will include the building of extra large infrastructure interventions with a degree of structural excess. Architects in this context can use, boost, and redirect this excess towards developing landscape architecture operations out of infrastructure deviations, side effects or latent opportunities in resistance by using infrastructure together with the existing environmental forces. A more creative and dynamically efficient determination of the structure of public space will allow for these large infrastructure interventions to operate at a more adequate and sensible scale. In this way, allowing spatial architecture strategies and public space to be conceived, which otherwise, without compromising the structure (infrastructure) of that public space will tend to be restricted to work as urban decoration.
MEMORY OF THE SITE The Mississippi River, as well as the entire system of deltas and wetlands, is in a continuous state of shift and movement. This continuous shift of the territory has been altered by the aggressive and insensitive application of levees and other structures, which affect the natural evolution of this shift. The changing the curves of river, its movements, sedimentations, processes and the entire ecosystem produces negative visible effects over time, which contributed in part to the Katrina disaster. It seems that the effect of the environment was not considered once these structures were developed. Clearly these structures could be more open-ended in function so that a more comprehensive and sensible spectrum of possibilities can be integrated in this dynamic ecosystem. The ratio of change of the Delta system is about 7500 years each time a new delta is created because of sediments. The delta has diverted its primary channel already by six times. Concerning the sedimentation process, which has been largely affected by the levees, the Mississippi carries 500,000 yds /day of sedimentation which once deposited at the delta, increases consistently at the area of the wetlands. Another fact is that the infrastructure has not been used in relation to recovering the latent history of the area to use of the sedimentation process as a way to generate dry land. Generally this is a common practice that was developed with the crop fields in the area and in the opposite lowlands side of the Mississippi River, generally where the highlands area lies. Within the amount of water that the river carries, 70% is water and 50% is sediment. At the same time, the Atchafala River carries through 30% water and 50% sediment, collaborating to a rich and diverse ecology once it encounters the Mexico Gulf. The Mississippi River Delta includes a history of evolution in which movement and the continuous reinvention and appearance of deltas is a part of these rich systems of territories. Currently, there is a high ratio of vanishing wetlands, of about 1 acre per 35 minutes, and these wetlands have always served as barriers for storms. The infrastructure of the levees to contain the river made a shift from working as flood plain to be more like a river constructed as a conduit, or as an artificial canal. Professor Jurjen Battjes from Delft University explains how to close or to protect the territory against storms before they get inside the territory, much like the generation of barrier islands where wetland or levees would not be eroded. In areas absent of wetlands, the levees were eliminated easily. In fact the common use of drainage systems for canals with pumps is not a very eloquent solution to the problem. A larger understanding of these processes needs to take place by understanding the scale of the operations in relation to the environmental processes involved. In New Orleans, 148 pumps working at full capacity, the City’s pumps could drain an Olympic size swimming pool in 2 seconds. What seemed to work at the moment, was the drainage of 90.000 gallons per second (30 of 148 working full capacity). Even with the biggest pump, at 67.000 gallons per sec., these huge systems can only work in emergency situations, and they will never be enough, as the problem is already within the city instead of being dispersed and solved among the entire territory. Environmental restoration on vast scales to replenish buffering wetlands could help to protect the area, as well as an environmental restoration on vast scale to replenish buffering Barrier islands. Even local Native American groups who previously inhabited the area had intelligent responses to floods produced by storms: they developed groups of artificial rounded highlands or mounds to protect themselves during a flood. These are examples of architecture landscape opportunities that need development and that will withstand the environmental pressures to protect the area. Displacing toward a new territory, the territory of the fluid, will begin to define the historical memory of New Orleans’ wetland and the continuous struggle for controlling and drying land. Previously, the back crop fields have a history of domesticating the fluid territory by drying land. This latent memory is continuously forgotten and replaced by the new technological war machine that does not recognize any potential on this ecology. The territory offers rich relationships between areas of intense striation and areas of deferred striation, like the city of New Orleans and the scarce linear suburban development along the Mississippi Delta. In contrast, these rich systems offer in the opposite scale, a smooth open territory of the Gulf Waters that is partially occupied by oilrig stations and campuses. Geography already sets up a ground in which an intermediate state of fluidity of a continuously shifting territory presents special relationships between border and river, ground and water and intermediate states of fluidity of the ground as well as intermediate states of solidity of the water with high levels of transportation of sediments. The seminar proposes a different scale of architecture and urban related dynamic interventions by directly dealing with the softness, fluidity and dynamic instability of a territory that moves continuously, a hydraulic model expanding by turbulence and resistance over the smooth space of the water. These interventions are worked out by making progressive use of the dynamic conditions and existing environmental forces as they inform the projects. SEMINAR LAYOUT A specific response to the area affected by the Hurricane Katrina, starts to inform problems which may end up activating design strategies and specific speculations. Preliminary analog research of specific conditions of interest within the site and then specifically related to the events of Katrina are tested, resisted and recorded digitally to understand them by filtering pieces of collected information. Following those tests, classification in terms of qualification and quantification allows for that material to be more determinate in a certain artificial parameter, understood in terms of gradients of behavior and scales of modalities, by this operative means start thinking how one might be able to manipulate those analyzed problems. Creative observation determinates the scope of the analysis and the generation of material to study and apply. Experimentation and testing included parallel physical bodies’ problems of weight, density, fluidity, tectonics and resistances, against immaterial agents such as forces of gravity, inertia, vectors, directions and turbulences. These forces were tested and compared against real forces and then the computer worked as a tool to classify, catalog, and measure specifically those interactions. As an architect may take an architectural section to study a certain object, the model, in our case, was filtered digitally to understand parts as a layered condition in which visualizing and separating systems of information that then can be classified, ordered and studied separated. After those experimentations, the computer was accustomed to work in parallel to that real: reality displaced immaterial tools were used to operate within their logical realm and to experiment with their vectors, deformers, fragmentations, virtual solids, efforts, striations. But also, and specifically the generation of large striation strategies for repeated bodies that were hold together structurally by a surface to which one could apply and visualize smooth changes, such as the dynamic and linear, quadratic, cubic and logarithmic transformations that would inform that structure. Both analog and digital strategies were used strategically to test certain developed logics bringing both realms closer together. The first movements were related to work and research existing conditions, which then could enable a strategy of occupation. Developing an architecture idea that starts to inform actions in the site, and developing a strategy of location, scale, typology, direction and generic decisions that start activating a formal architecture problem related the studied problems. This organization would progressively become more complex incorporating studied problems and dealing with different demands, such as open program, response and activation with natural forces, active response, output and a time-based strategy. Time was understood in three different modalities which would relate to organization time, phasing and ultimate stability. Organizational time was worked so that the design and development of the project is understood on a dynamic basis of interaction between information that may change on a time basis, so then the project would have to assume that the organization might evolve responding to the shift of the different conditions. Phasing is understood in a conventional way with the exception that is taken as an opportunity for consistent change or adaptability: program may change, grow or transformed as well as the physical conditions of the project informed by their construction phases. Ultimate Stability refers to the progressive accumulative deceleration of instability or change in the project. In reaching the ultimate span of its active organizational life, it becomes more stable as things more fixed, and starting then a more productive phase in its development. MATERIAL EFFECTS Working with concepts of entropy, the course looked at environmental processes as material processes which the students could relate physically to understand and manipulate in scale. By developing a system of exchange of information, one may focus and study a particular effect to understand a larger process. Those material processes will then be dynamically studied and simulated again through interfaces between Photoshop, AutoCAD, Rhino and MAYA. The research on New Orleans’ Infrastructure and environmental processes, as well as latent infrastructure side effects, were used to study how to propagate, accelerate or decelerate certain selected processes to manipulate these anomalies to generate landscape opportunities as feedback, as it happened before with the crop fields. PROGRAM or PURPOSE The program remained open, but also abstract, in that the scale of operation of a program was not forced. Different possibilities included: to develop temporal or permanent infrastructure nodes of organization relating to an existing infrastructure propagating productive redundancy or in excess to it (such as connectors, walkways, bridges, coastal protection devices, levees systems, etc), remain a main strategy to start thinking of a surface occupation of the territory offering an architecture landscape intervention. Other alternatives included: developing a strategy to manipulate and activate environmental forces to propagate the generation of landscape opportunities in time. By this means, an architecture idea about a certain occupation of the territory would be informed back and forth between its site specificity in relationship to the organization of its structure, the infrastructure which would relate to the structure and the environmental processes which would become activated by the intervention. Programmatic change will be informed on a sequential growth basis out of an exchange of dynamic conditions. An understanding of time accumulation in relation to form construction would be determinate by the relationship between quantitative and qualitative change: a sequential accumulative gradation which looks forward for expanding up to that special moment in which a change of class would emerge, as a more relevant change or as a more relevant difference in a genealogy. Grade and class change are understood as a part of a same sequence. The same movement of the territory but within ranges of efficiency ANALOG AND DIGITAL STRATEGIES: “Any description, explanation or representation is, in a certain sense, the mapping over a surface, or a matrix, or a coordinate system, of conclusions from the phenomena that it tries to describe…Maybe Procusto, the malefic person from Greek Mythology has designed the Universe. He would adapt any guest to his bed, by stretching or trimming his legs.” Gregory Bateson, “Mind and Nature. A Necessary Unit” (1979)* Contemporary domination of the digital medium does not rely solely on the expertise of the latest program, but implies the development of personalized analogical strategies to cut through the homogenization and standardization of many programs. One of the aims of the course is to provide a spectrum of possibilities to produce, organize, and manipulate two and three-dimensional form. Many steps were studied. First, the digitalization and manipulation of analog material would help interactive use (analog to digital). Second, the digital manipulation achieved from the transmission of information from one program to the other (digital-digital). Third, the development of skills by the fluid manipulation of information would enable an analog strategy (digital as analog). Fourth, techniques will be studied for the output of digital information: the development of physical models, through preparation for the use of laser-cut and paper plots (digital to physical). Fifth, digital animations were implemented for the visualization and understanding of dynamic-based formal strategies, such as topology and genealogies which incorporate time. Sixth, the testing and feedback of dynamic information to design with based on digital simulation of material effects and processes. The intention of the course was to provide a learning uniform plateau with a critical understanding of three-dimensional software, and also certain understanding and practice of some key specific cutting-edge advanced techniques for drawing and modeling, importing and exporting in Photoshop, AutoCAD, Rhino and Maya, and then VRML extensions as well as MathCAD and Animation programs using RHINO as a platform for crossing digital and analog information. While Rhino served as a drafting engine and hard-based aggressive operations, Maya was used for dynamic and fluid purposes as well as for animation and simulation. It intended to explore the production and transmittal of digital information between each program and their analogical and digital inputs and outputs.
Environmental dynamic systems are fluid in form; therefore they need to incorporate the problems of change and time. Since no kind of production will ever be critical, but rather automatic response to a process, each instance should provide output that redefines, reads and conceptualizes to contextually apply solutions in relation to the means of production. REPRESENTATION vs SIMULATION: “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory, … It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself”.Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. By applying certain digital frames to animated sequences of the analog research, a new digital material becomes visible and operative. Framing, layering and filtering with digital tools becomes a mode to select information. Forced distortion and manipulation should be discerned between excessive information. A creative vision of “what to look for,” and “how to look,” became two faces of the same problem related to interpretation and reading. In this sense, a more active and important role to representation started activating the problem of presentation as opposed to representation. One of the ideas worked through this specific medium was to present rather than represent actions, problems, solutions and speculations. Animation was then understood not only as a representation in time, but as a way to think and understand the constitution and construction of form within time. A strategy, which uses time to build up form, would be able to include more evidence or data as well as dynamic input that would progressively become incorporated as new problems and shifts to solve. GEOMETRY, CURVATURE AND ALGORITHMS: Curvature is a geometric problem that has become more motivated lately by contemporary design, as a way to deconstruct structure. Curvature is understood more as a conceptual problem than as pure visual one, and will enable the projects to assert progressive change over a path of continuity, rather than expressing that willing for continuity in a direct static and determinate way. Fragmentation may be underwritten by continuity as algorithms are run over these fragments to allow an overall strategy and an idea of structure in affecting a territory. At this precise moment, the projects start facing a different relationship between parts and the whole. It is not the difference of the figurative change of parts that react differently to a new local demand, or the one of a differentiated figure that articulates by its fragmentation a new response. On the contrary, difference or progressive change is incorporated as a problem of writing, running along the structure of the project. Different algorithms are layered transformations over a structure that holds everything together, affecting the overall organization at all times, and by a layered operation. This is to say, that each formal response to a specific problem intends to affect the entire structure in differentiated scales, accumulating change and producing synthesis at each new over layered operation. Parts are no longer those differentiated moments in the project, but parts or geometric deformations in the form of algorithms over write the project in its totality by inscribing progressive geometric differentiation. But, in order to suspend the continuity of these surface continuous strategies, another relation of part to whole over runs the projects. Other fragmented operations affect and produce figures locally, but each time extending its effect to the entire project which produces distinctive moments of rupture in the diagram, working out certain minor invisible acting forces. SURFACE AS STRUCTURE AND ACCUMULATION AS DIFFERENCE “The increment in our knowledge comes from the combination of information from two or more resources. There is the problem of the crossing of information, the tool to produce the mapping and the representation. In order to produce information, that is to say news about a difference; there should be two given entities, whose difference could be related to their intrinsic relationship. The news about their difference could be represented as a difference that is inherent to a determinate process-information entity.” Gregory Bateson, “Mind and Nature. A Necessary Unit” (1979)* Surface writing, that is to index operations and progressive incorporation of difference by accumulating geometric transformations over a determinate typological structure, became an instrument to program an algorithm which affects the entire organization of the project once its structure is set up. Therefore, the relationship between parts and wholes is no longer distinguished in this case by fragments, but by the layering of operations that are related to specific responses. These differences are sequentially and progressively imprinted in the surface writing which serves as a receptive matrix each time mathematical formulas related to a specific formal relationship and manipulated analogically with digital tools is loaded and accumulated along the entire structure. These formulas are accumulated transformations that are regulated and edited analogically with the digital parametric constrains of the used tools. The algorithm then, in this case is not a scripted formula, but a visual form, which has physical and vectorial properties that can be edited in order to achieve control and therefore resist automatization. This surface then became an interface between analog design and parametric form to generate an output that is underwritten by these processes. The structure of many computer algorithms, if…then…run loop or the indeterminate series of sequential transformations or iterations over the same parameter set up by the algorithm has been tested widely. Consequentially, uncritical, non-stop, indeterminate and senseless transformational progressive infinite series do not eliminate the problem of critical selection or determination. On the opposite oppresses the rational against the automata. In ideological terms of productivity mechanistic approach alienates the possibility of expression or critical thinking towards standardization. If anything, an algorithm should resolve a problem, but mathematically that problem is not a number, architecturally is tension, space and ultimately form which makes sense, a kind of sensibility and intelligence which can never be achieved by a tool or a means of production, which the computer is. Any variable has been already set up by the constrain of the algorithm, that is to say that any possibility has been already selected as a response, and therefore difference is up to the first series of alternative that the algorithm can set up. Difference can be then flatten-out by this mechanization. A strategy of resistance is necessary to produce any critical attempt to resist standardization by computer algorithms. The course intends to construct a way out of this paradigm in which a hybrid and opportunistic approach might be good to consider. RESISTANCE TO THE DIGITAL 147 “The time of production, time-as-commodity, is an infinite accumulation of infinite intervals. It is irreversible time made abstract: each segment must demonstrate by the clock its purely quantitative equality with the others segments. This time manifests nothing in its effective reality aside from its exchangeability”.... Guy Debord, “The Society of the Spectacle”, Algorithm- A rule or procedure for solving a mathematical problem that frequently involves the repetition of an operation Algorithmic and the automata should be always resisted. Procedures that could run forever without stopping, arguing that some entity may be required to carry out such permanent tasks. Within the realm of the digital algorithm, success can no longer be defined in terms of halting with a meaningful output. Digital Algorithms may produce automatic responses, which could then be difficult to criticize. Analogically one can enter and establish a response to some alternatives. Deformations manually controlled and mathematically striated in order to have an indirect output once the problem is focused. Because an algorithm is a precise list of precise steps, the order of computation will almost always be critical to the functioning of the algorithm. Instructions are usually assumed to be listed explicitly, and are described as starting 'from the top' and going 'down to the bottom', an idea that is described more formally by flow of control.Neither image, nor digital renderings are used in the seminar, but an insistence in the construction and deployment of form, together with the simulation of forces and vectors as formal input in time and space. The seminar resists representation but intends to define the reality of the possibility of the process of construction and constitution of form. To work on the development of possible actions and formal processes that open up problems rather than representing fixed images of what those produced objects might be. Scenarios work more like construction of actions and forces that will then define an-exact, precise but yet open ended, not random approach, based on possibility of those facts. While using digital software to instruct a set of orders we cannot afford to let binary (digital 0-1) pre-established, programmed and charged algorithms to loop indefinitely without any relationship with the output, neither any possible critical divergent moment. Nothing is transformed or created automatically with the use of software computer, and everything that we enter has somehow been already pre-figured in the definition of the algorithms in the program. This means the computer system and the program have already languages that have a form and therefore make their construction ideology visible mediating to execute our problems. A problem is our goal, and the computer one of the instruments of production we use. Technology changes continuously together with evolving languages as well as machines do, which makes define these subjects in a shorter temporal basis. Where anything seems to be possible in the digital realm, nowadays, the outcome of some work is completely striated and homogenized by computer programs. In the transition of the analog to the digital, the form the mediation of this actualization is essential. There is an opportunity to dominate a medium and overcome the machinery of contemporary capitalist production. A possibility might be to stand over it’s systematic and resist it from within, develop tactics against its deterministic system, cutting through languages without being captured by computer’s subject matter. Distinguish this experimentation from the current positivistic and loose use of the computer, and therefore have more control over the outcome and tension between the mediation of representation. Certain criticism to the systematized output, criticized in the form of production. It is not surprising that, within the computer paradigm, Cooper Union has a difficult responsibility for the integration of the digital assisted technology to the production of architecture work, a tool of production of a very different realm. Digital design produces many changes of the parameters in the production of architecture; among others: dissociates, detaches, displaces and even disintegrates the established relationships between form and its production, design and authorship, object and materiality, gravity and structure, environment and ecology, context and specificity; or even economy and the available mediums. Architecture representation currently has another possibility for its bifurcation. On the one hand it homogenizes, looses character, and becomes equal by anything that is inserted into these languages. On the other hand, the detachment from any materiality may be an opportunity for the exchange of vectors and digital information and think its form in a different way of actualization But, instead of the computer becoming a myth, a kind of monster to fight against like Quixote, we may as well know more about it, may be we could even think on dominate, manipulate and eventually transform its language. So one can stand over it’s systematic and resist it from within, develop tactics against its deterministic system, even overwrite a personal virus that could work within its system cutting through languages without being captured by computer software’s subject matter. If this is not possible, one should be able at least to resist its repetitive means of production by presenting the problem within the parameters of the developed work.
STRUCTURE OF THE SEMINAR: DYNAMIC STABILITY Environment processes dynamics STATIC STRUCTURE: EXCESS Mapping of infrastructure effects against environmental forces and processes. DYNAMIC INSTABILITY: EXCHANGE OF INFORMATION Mapping environment linear and non-linear processes: unstable latent forces. Mapping of infrastructure side effects against main objectives. Dynamic organization makes profit of side effects to inform space PROGRESSIVE ULTIMATE STABILITY Infrastructure nodes, which work progressively their excess and redundancy to produce environmental side effects that can propagate architecture landscapes. Dynamic organization finds balance in an artificial ecology. |
