THEORY QUOTES + NOTES
The Visible and the Invisible – Marice Merleau-Ponty
- Claudel has a phrase saying that a certain blue of the seas is so blue that only blood would be more red.
Art + Space – Heidegger
- The forming [of space]? of it happened by demarcation as setting up an inclosing and excluding border. Herewith, aspace comes into play. Becoming occupied by the sculptured structure, space receives its special character as closed, breached and empty volume - The sculptured body embodies something. Does it embody space? Is sculpture an occupying of space, a domination of space, Does sculpture match therewith the technical scientific conquest of space? - The question, what space as space would be, is thereby not even asked, much less answered. In what manner space is, and whether Being in general can be attributed to it, remains undecided. - ….to clear ou (roden), to free from wilderness. Clearing-away brings forth the free, the openness for man’s settling and dwelling - clearing-away is release of places - how does clearing-away happen? Is it not makin-room (Einraumen), and this again in a twofold manner as granting and arranging? - Place always opens a region in which it gathers the things in their belonging together - Preserving, ie the gathering of things in their belonging together - Are places first and only the resultant issue of making room? Or does making-room take its special character from the reign of gathering places? - We would have to learn to recognize that things themselves are place and do not merely belong to a place - The interplay of art + space would have to be thought from out of the experience of place + region. Art as sculpture: no occupying of space. - Sculpture would not deal with space. Sculpture would be the embodiment of places. - Emptiness is not nothing. It is also no deficiency. In sculptural embodiment, emptiness plays in the manner of a seeking-projecting instituting of places. - Sculpture: the embodiment of the truth of Being in its work of instituting place - Goethe said:It is not always necessary for the true to be embodied; it is enough if it flutters nearaby as spirit and generates a sort of concord, like when the sound of bells floats as a friend in the air and as a bearer of peace
Emergence – Steven Johnson
- For scientists trying to understand systems that use relatively simple componests to build higher-level intelligence - Maths had played such a tremendous role in expanding out understanding of physics, Keller thought – so perhaps it might also be useful for understanding living systems. - Brain science, software design, urban studies - Slime mold spends much of its life as thousands of distince single celled units, each moving separately from its other comrades. Under the right conditions. Those myriad cells will coalesce again into a single, larger organism, which then begins its leisurely crawl across the garden floor, consuming rotting leaves and wood as it moves about. When the environment is less hospitable, the slime acts as a single organism; when the weather turns cooler and the mold enjoys a large food supply, “it” becomes a “they”. The slime mold oscillates between being a single creature and a swarm. - How do all my cells manage to work so well together? - “morphogeneseis” – the capacity of all life-forms to develop ever more baroque bodies out of impossibly simple beginnings. - For millennia we’ve built elaborate pacemaker cells into our social organization, whether they come in the form of kings, dictators, or city councilmen. Much of the world around us can be explained in terms of systems and hierarchies – why should it be any different from the slime molds? - Simple agents following simple rules could generate amazingly complex structures - If each solo cell was simply releasing cyclic amp based on its own local assessment of the general condition, Keller and Segel argued in a paper published in 1969, then the larger slime mold community might wellb able to aggregate based on global changes in the environment – all without a pace maker cell calling the shots. - How difficult it is for people to think in terms of collective phenomenon - Self organization studies and bottom up software helps organize the web’s most lively virtual communities - …….unearthed a secret history of decentralized thinking, a history that had been submerged for many years beneath the weight of the pacemaker hypothesis and the traditional boundaries of scientific research - there were isolated cells pursuing the mysteries of emergence, but no aggregation - solve problems by drawing on relatively stupid elements, rather than a single, intelligent “executive” branch. They are bottom-up systems, not top-down……they are complex adaptive systems that display emergent behavior. In these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them: ants create colonies, urbanites create neighbourhoods, simple pattern-recognition software learns how to recommend new books. The movement from low-level rules to higher level sophistication is what we call emergence. - In the first phase, inquiring minds struggled to understand the forces of self-organization without realizing what they were up against. In the second, certain sectors of the scientific community began to see self organization as a problem that transcended local disciplines and set out to solve that problem, partially by comparing behaviour in one area to behavior in another. - ……we stopped analyzing emergence and started creating it. We began building self organizing systems into our software applications, our video games, our art, our music. - Up to now, the philosophers of emergence hace struggle to interpret the world. But now they are starting to change it. - The field’s core principles: neighbour interaction, pattern recognitions, feedback, indirect control. - [looking at an ant farm]? ……in fact, thousands of harvester ants, crammed so tightly into their quarters that I had originally mistaken them for an undifferentiated mass. - [look at]? micro behaviour of individual ants and the overall behaviour of of the colonies themselves. - The matriarch doesn’t train her servants to protect her, evolution does. - [on ant colony layout planning]? ……they’ve built the cemetery at exactly the point that’s furthest from the colony. And the midden is even more interesting: they’ve put it at precisely the pont that maximizes its sistance ceom both the colony and the cemetery. It’s like there’s a rule they’re following: put the dead ants as far away as possible, and put the midden as far aways as possible without putting it near the dead ants.
Parables for the Virtual – Brian Massumi
- against that possibility, the everday was the place where nothing ever happens. Culture occupied the gap between matter and systemic change, in the operation of mechanisms of “mediation” - we determine/judge colour by its context, relations - realistically we never see colout in its singular state/ element state - once material things are produced, they createframework/fertilizer/cultivate environments for new relations + therefore new ideas and realities - the anomalies of vision can’t be brushed aside for the simple reasin that they are what is actually being seen - what is actually seen is “absolute” - only comparable to itself - the reality of the yellow peril was cerated through relationships. Reality actually is intangible, material products are a result of reality. Reality exists whether humans do or don’t but what is it worth if it has no one to perceive it. Humans are selfish in that the only judgement of reality is through their own perception – but of course this is the case – how can you fully understand something through means of which you are not? - Colours are convivial by nature. Deprive them of company and they blank out. A colour is an alteration of a complete spectrum. - Except, as absolute, they are not “elements”. They are parts or elements before they fuse into the relational whole by entering indissociably into eachothers company, and they are parts or elements afterward if they are dissociated or extracted from their congregation by a follow up operation dedicated to that purpose. - Context and objectivity are operations of desituation - A variable, as just described, is an operation uon a relation: an extraction and making ready for recombination. In oather words, a variable is a transformative process - Standard “red, “blue” or “white”, separate form vagaries of illumination, are seen anytime in principle, but no where in particular. anytime and nowhere: the elements of the empirical are timeless and spaceless
The Autonomy of Affect? - ??
- “the Body” what is it to The Subject? Not the qualities of its moving experience.. But rather, in keeping with the extrinsic approach, its positioning. Ideological accounts of subject formation emphasize systemic structurings. - How does a body perform its way out of a definitional framework that is not only responsible for its very “construction,” but seems to prescriptevery possible signifying and counter signifying move as a selection from a repertoire of possible permutations on a limited set of predetermined terms? How can the grid itself change? - The space of the crossing, the gaps between positions on the grid, falls into a theoretical no-body’s land. - If at any point I thought of this refreshing in terms of regaining a “concreteness” of experience, I was quickly disabused of the notion. Take movement. When a body is in motion, it does not coincide with itself. It coincides with its own transition: its own variation. The range of variations it can be implicationin is not present in any given movement, much less in any position it passes through. In motion, a body is in an immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary…….real but abstract. - exemplary examples to do with affect: yellow peril, billboards, dirt eg ants nest/beach sand + waves, whirlwind, trees, scaffolding, igloo, icepalace - here, abstract means: never present in position, only ever in passing. This is an abstractness pertaining to the transitional immediacy of a real relation – that of a body to its own indeterminacy (its openness to an elsewhere and otherwise that it is, in any here and now). - An incorporeal dimension of the body. Of it, but not it. Real, material, but incorporeal - One way of starting to get a grasp on the real-material-but-incorporeal is to say it is to the body, as a positioned thing, as energy is to matter. Energy and matter are mutually convertible modes of the same reality. - ….incorporeal materialism. This movement-slip gives new urgency to questions of ontology, of ontological different, inextricably linked to concepts of potential and process and, by extension, event – in a way that bumps “being” straight into becoming. - Movement, in process, cannot be determinately indexed to anything outside of itself. It has withdrawn into an all-encompassing relation with what it will be. It is in becoming, absorbed in occupying its field of potential. For when it comes to a stop in the target, it will have undergone a qualitative change. It will not just be an arrow. It will have been a successfully shot arrow. It is still the same thing by definition, but in a different way, qualitatively changed by the passing event.
Diagramming – Larsspuybroek interviewed by Choimsik
- …a network of relations that make the thing the thing without actually designing it. It is an informational system. It is a networked system of decisions. - ‘flexible’ because they are not rigid, they don’t know just one solution, ‘interactive’ because all are connected into one system: one perameter changes everything. I’m trying to move architecture in the direction of systems theory.
StephanieText : i've just listed some points which i think are interesting and worth looking into below :
taught to, etc. So if, like colours, remove any one of these from the equation, will our perception and understanding change? So archticturally, if an alteration occurs ( in the traditional sense of architecture) i woudl argue that our perception of space would change.
affective..?
hope it's not going off the wrong track here..