The Chip Replaces Palladio By John Lobell

The most pervasive principle in modern physics is described in the Second Law of Thermodynamics; the principle that all systems (including the universe as a whole) tend to run down. That is, they move towards disorder, randomness, uniformity, and a “loss” of energy which becomes trapped in useless low entropy forms. The principle of entropy will ultimately bring our universe to a condition of randomly dispersed gases in which no orderly or meaningful activity will be possible as all of its energy will be helplessly dispersed among the dancing particles.

The Second Law is unquestionably established (at least in a system where time reversal is not possible as seems to be the case in our expanding universe) yet we are living in the midst of a major contradiction to that law. Evolution on the earth in moving from the random molecules in the primordial “soup,” to organic compounds and particles, to single celled organisms, and finally to the complex plant and animal life we know today, is actually an expression of anti-entropic activity. From the random to the orderly. While this seeming violation of the Second Law could always be explained by realizing that a system as a whole must obey the law, while any part of it could be in violation, contemporary information theory gives a much more satisfactory explanation of this seeming contradiction.

It can now be shown that the energy reaching the Earth from the Sun is actually acting as information. Information and energy are interchangeable in much the same way that energy and matter are interchangeable, and formulas similar to those for matter and energy (E=mc2) can be used to express this interchangeability. Energy is expressing itself as information when it acts in an anti-entropic manner, thereby reducing the randomness in a system or increasing its information. This understanding of information as an anti-entropic activity makes it possible to objectively measure many qualities important to our lives which were formerly measurable only by the crude means of the dollar economy, sentimental attachment, or aesthetic tastes.

The unit of measure now being used by some sophisticated whole system thinkers is sometimes called the “eco-dollar.” The eco-dollar can be used to measure the true cost of electricity purchased from Con Ed by including the health and cleaning costs of pollution in the calculated sum. The eco-dollar can be used to measure the loss of a species of wild bird in terms of the resultant simplification of the overall system when we lose that bird’s concentration of information in its gene pool. And the eco-dollar can be used to measure the social worth of a novel in terms of the new information or new ordering of information it brings into the social system. Information theory used in this way gives us a more useful means of evaluating Con Ed, endangered wild life, and literature than the previous means (dollars, sentiment and aesthetics). It also makes it possible to compare the relative value of one to another, once they are all expressed in terms of the new units, “eco-dollars.”

It might at first seem absurd to claim that animal life, literature, and perhaps even human life can be measured in numerical terms. It is not actually as destructive of subjective values as it might seem, since the value expressed can only be for a given situation and will vary for different observers. Thus, the new ordering of information in a novel is new only for a reader who is not familiar with that ordering. For another reader it might all be “old hat.” The new information in a message (now expressed in bits) varies for different receivers. One reader of our novel may find it worth many eco-dollars; another, few.

What is the relevance to approaching a new energy economy in terms of information theory? The value comes in realizing that information is nothing more nor less than anti-entropic activity, and that so is everything else of use that we do. All useful transportation is the movement of people or goods from positions of less energy potential (home or warehouses, for example) to positions of more energy potential (office–where work can be done; store–where customers can effect purchases, for example). In realizing that all of our intentions are anti-entropic, it becomes apparent that these intentions can be fulfilled either by physical movement or by movement of information. Obviously the movement of information requires far less energy than the movement of people or physical goods. The telephone company uses far less electricity than the subway system, yet the anti-entropic value in “bits” or “eco-dollars” resulting from phone calls, telephone, xerox, and computer terminals is greater than the anti-entropic value of commuters moved by the subways.

Images by Andrey Kravtsov

In 1900, ninety percent of our GDP was manufactured goods and ninety percent of workers were blue collar. Ten percent of the GDP was services and information and ten percent of workers were white collar. Today it is fifty-fifty on both counts. In another hundred years, it will be ten-ninety the other way. Anti-entropic activity must be sustained, and must be increased if the population is to increase. However, this fight against entropy can be expressed in energy and material goods, or it can be expressed in information. Our culture is evolving towards the choice of information in its struggle against entropy, and thereby stands a strong chance of approaching (although not actually achieving) a zero energy situation. The amount of energy needed to process, encode, and move information is rapidly decreasing as we approach a state of one hundred percent efficiency.

The process of becoming an information based culture is not without its problems, which are threefold. First is the energy needed which remains substantial until more efficient techniques are developed, second is social adjustment to the massive amount of information floating around and third is the developing of channel capacity for th

e information to be moved. The cultural and psychic changes that will come about as these problems are rapidly solved over the next two decades will transform us into creatures we would hardly recognize.

Advances in communications and computers have already opened a lot of possibilities. At the same time we are being closed in on ourselves by the feedback potential of miniaturized hand held computers, the capacity for the electronic web encircling the globe to put us more and more directly in touch with each other and all sources of information is also rapidly expanding. A pair of telephone wires in 1930 could carry 60,000 bits of information. A co-axial cable introduced in the 1940s can carry 684,000 bits of information. Laser fiber optics are able to transmit 100,000,000,000 bits of information. The increases are no longer only quantitative.

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These recent additions to the electronic complex surrounding us will bring radical changes in the human form in just a few years, changes which will ultimately result in our leaving our bodies as excessive energy consuming relics and moving like hermit crabs onto magnetic tapes–biologic films–which can be stored in energy free states and which can run on a couple of AA batteries.

“I was traveling with The Intolerable Kid in The Nova Lark–We were on the nod after a rumble in The Crab Galaxy involving this two-way time shock; when you come to the end of a biologic film just run it back and start over–nobody knows the difference–Like nobody there before the film.” -William Burroughs, Nova Express

From Newton’s Space through Einstein’s Spacetime, we now live in a non-space, each point of which constitutes an entire four dimensional geometry. As more of our personalities can be stored and transmitted, and as technology makes time, distance and energy meaningless to human existence, we approach a cosmic nature in which all of reality is integrated into the personality.

The world becomes less matter and more information; translatable, storable, and transportable at the speed of light. The human personality as contained in its biological housing can be indefinitely preserved in liquid nitrogen. Translated into genetic code it can be stored and shipped on DNA. Translated into digital code it could be projected across the universe.

The new world created by a new perception becomes a timeless spaceless flux of simultaneity. Nations dissolve into projections of cosmic consciousness. Buildings and cities become the magnetic tapes and the fluidic valves that house and transmit projected consciousness. Photo-etched onto ceramic micro-circuits; structured on self-reproducing DNA, personality survives the ravages of entropy. Cities empty and circuits are occupied. The computer chip replaces Palladio.

top image credit: Argonne National Laboratory

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John Lobell received his architecture degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently a professor at Pratt Institute. His interests range widely, and include, besides architecture, cultural theory, consciousness, art, Buddhism, mythology, information theory, post-humanism, quantum reality and quantum architecture.

To find out more of what he is up to please visit:

http://johnlobell.com/

http://www.futurefeeder.com/category/jac/

http://www.cinemadiscourse.com/

In September 2009, Storefront for Art and Architecture will inaugurate an exhibition of the work of Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler, Architecture and Digital Fabrication, ETH Zurich and, in conjunction with NYC Department of Transportation’s Urban Art Program, Storefront will present the first architecture project to be digitally fabricated on site, at 1:1 scale, in the US.

Developed through their research at ETH Zürich Faculty of Architecture, Gramazio & Kohler’s work explores highly complex architectural artifacts, built by industrial robots typically used to assemble automobiles and perform other high-precision tasks. The accuracy, strength and speed of these robots allow them to fabricate architectural forms of unprecedented complexity and intricacy.

Gramazio & Kohler’s work represents the cutting edge of innovation in the field of digital fabrication in architecture. For many years architects have relied on digital manufacturing processes such as CNC milling or 3D printing as a tool for formal research at model-scale. For the first time, Gramazio & Kohler’s work explores the potential of mobile digital fabrication techniques that can fabricate at 1:1 scale on site.

A simple, featherweight headset, a 10′ x 10′ x 10′ white room, and $600,000 worth of projector and computer equipment, combined with the smarts of the folks at Eon Reality, results in one insanely real experience.

The cave (or iCube, as we’re told they would prefer we call it) is comprised of three white walls and a floor, all about 10′ x 10′ in size. Onto each surface is projected a high-resolution, stereoscopic image. A viewer stands in the room wearing polarized 3D glasses — like you might use in a 3D movie — with small markers that stick out a bit from the frames.

The markers are illuminated by IR LED floodlights located on the perimeter of the room, and IR-sensitive cameras use those positions to determine the precise location of each eye within the room. From those positions, stereo images for each projector are calculated and rendered on the fly, and the result is absolutely amazing.

Text description from ideo labs + for more info visit labs.ideo.com

originally posted on core.form-ula

This is an image of a formative technology coming out of RoboFold. It is a new formative computer aided manufacturing technology currently under development and could be promising considering that when a human hand enters into the production process it = $$$$$.

RoboFold is currently developing manufacturing processes utilizing industrial robots to directly create sheet metal forms. The system requires no tooling thus enabling the creation of new forms unavailable with current methods.

Please follow below for more info and videos–>>

The patent pending technology utilizes standard industrial robots to directly manipulate sheet material into complex surfaces by folding along curved lines. The RoboFold system will be controlled by a simple software plug-in to enable design, engineering and production planning in a familiar CAD environment.

text and images via RoboFold

Epithelium image courtesy of photographer Mark Mahaney

Polemics of a Cybernetic Future by Joseph Clarke

Never before has the hand of technology applied itself with such assiduity to the vital fabric of organic life. The mapping of the human genome, life-support machines that extend metabolic processes beyond brain death, industrial agriculture’s use of hormones and crop modification, humanity’s realization of our capacity to influence the planet’s climate, and countless other recent scientific developments have challenged our conceptions of nature and of ourselves in relation to it. Accompanying these advances has been a corresponding burgeoning of cultural artifacts exploring the technologization of organic life, from late-twentieth century pop phenomena like virtual reality, cyborgs, and vocoder-enhanced music to work by Roy Ascott, Tim Hawkinson, and other artists.

The robotic installations of Philip Beesley are an architectural investigation of the same themes. Beesley is an architect and co-director of the University of Waterloo’s Integrated Centre for Visualization, Design, and Manufacturing. His Orgone Reef (2003), Hylozoic Soil (2007), and Epithelium (2008) consist of numerous small mechanical components assembled into amorphous masses with emergent responsive properties. While his early installations were static textiles made of inert components, these more recent projects have incorporated sensors, microprocessors, motors, and shape-memory metal capable of generating movement in response to the presence and actions of spectators. Epithelium, whose name refers to an organic boundary tissue made of cells connected to form surfaces, was built by nine fourth- and fifth-year Pratt architecture students in a studio co-taught by Beesley and Richard Sarrach in Fall 2008. It was a lattice of tongues, whiskers, and tendons made of wire, acrylic, vinyl, and mylar – over 50,000 components in all – suspended from a cable structure. As visitors moved around and through the installation, tiny motors meant for cell phone vibrators brought it to “life” with an animal-like awareness.

Epithelium image courtesy of photographer Mark Mahaney

Attempts to give architecture the qualities of organic life are by no means new. Animals have been adopted as metaphors for architectural form since at least the Renaissance, when Leon Battista Alberti compared part-to-whole relationships in buildings with the proportions of living creatures. Countless 20th century architects were influenced by D’arcy Thomson’s On Growth and Form and its conception of morphogenesis through mathematically describable transformations. In the late 90s, Greg Lynn’s call for “animate form” proposed new digital methods by which architecture could use the metaphor of the animal to configure the built environment, structuring the relationship between human subject and inorganic milieu.

Instead of mimicking the formal structures of living things through the mediation of visual representation, however, Beesley is more concerned with modeling organic systems of behavior—processes of “communication and control,” to borrow a phrase from the cyberneticists of the 1940s and 50s. This approach is indebted to designers like R. Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes, Dymaxion prototypes, and other inventions were conceived not as self-contained formal compositions but as components integrated organically in a broader “ecosystem” of technology. One consequence of this approach is the relative unimportance of graphic images in Beesley’s design process. While architects have long tested ideas through visionary renderings and drawings, his experimentation is carried out through the production of actual fabricated prototypes; indeed, when I visited the studio at Pratt on a typical work day, the walls were comparatively bare of architectural representations, and the students were busy designing through physical construction. This work is not meant merely to be looked at, but rather to act directly on the human occupant, evoking instinctive emotional responses.

Epithelium image courtesy of photographer Mark Mahaney

But an emotional stimulus is itself a kind of representation, and, like any representation, can be shown to express a particular ideological orientation. Beesley says that his work is motivated by a desire “to find strategies for thriving in complex interconnected ecosystems,” and speaks of a post-Enlightenment attitude of the human being in relation to the environment. His installations aim to shed light on the mingling of nature and technology by modeling new forms of subjectivity associated with it. The realization that an organism’s life is bound up with its milieu is a product of late 18th century zoology and the nascent science of biology; well into the 20th century, however, architecture continued to accord the human organism the privileged stance of the Cartesian subject, a rational occupant of a submissive exterior world. The Bauhaus radicalized the human subject’s isolation from the environment by reducing objects to technical elements of a potentially infinite, analytic system.

Beesley’s work, by contrast, attempts to challenge the occupant’s sense of self-possession by evoking the uncanny. His earlier installation Hylozoic Soil—named for hylozoism, the belief that matter is alive—inspired a sense of uneasiness as its pores breathed and rippled in response to motion. Epithelium was similarly unnerving: as the spectator walked between skeletal columns and vaults, tiny whiskers began to wave and the whole installation started to rustle and hiss. The computer that controlled the installation was distributed, simultaneously processing the input of many sensors in multiple locations (the system is called Arduino, and was implemented with the help of the MIT Media Lab). The result was a biomimetic environment whose lifelike behaviors implicitly threatened to “depersonalize” the occupant by blurring the lines between human life, animal life, technology, and environment.

Epithelium image courtesy of photographer Mark Mahaney

The paradox is that an actual splicing of biological and technological life would change the conceptual structure of the image to such an extent that all our impressions of cybernetic existence—Beesley’s robotic fantasia included—would be completely invalidated. As the philospher Elizabeth Grosz writes in her essay “Future, Cities, Architecture,” the predominant effect of recent technological advances has not been “to transform bodies in any significant way—at least not yet—but to fundamentally transform the way that bodies are conceived, their sphere of imaginary and lived representation.” This observation undoubtedly holds true for organicist architecture. Even Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, though ostensibly motivated by structural and ecological concerns, is remembered because of its symbolic potency, its polemical insistence on the altruistic potential of science in a postatomic world embroiled in social struggles. It was no less a representation than the sci-fi environments inhabited by robotic denizens like Blade Runner’s replicants and Star Trek’s Borg, which presented dystopian pictures of the intersection of architecture and life.

Epithelium image courtesy of photographer Mark Mahaney

Epithelium poses a more nuanced challenge to architecture’s traditional conception of the human subject than either of these examples. Here, technology’s infiltration of the organic—so familiar today in the form of genetic research, biotechnology, and climate science—is presented neither as a transcendent savior nor as a maker of monsters. Anti-humanist overtones are combined with an essentially affirmative (even romanticized) view of scientific development, and biological functions are characterized in cybernetic terms. At times, the installation’s robotic limbs seem strangely anthropomorphic, as though the technologized environment were reaching out to join hands with its human occupant and welcome an oncoming future of prosthetic interdependence. Not everyone will agree with this outlook, but perhaps that’s the point: If Beesley’s work is able to help us “find strategies for thriving in complex interconnected ecosystems,” it is by confronting us with the tangled web of representations that is the contemporary discourse about nature, science, and design. By questioning the occupant’s sense of self-possession, it underscores the limits of the human body in a world where technology threatens it with obsolescence; by defamiliarizing the built environment, it reminds us that all architecture has a life of its own.

Epithelium image courtesy of photographer Mark Mahaney

References

Beesley, Philip, Sachiko Hirosue, and Jim Ruxton. “Toward Responsive Architectures” in Responsive Architecture: Subtle Technologies 06 (Toronto: Riverside Architectural Press, 2006)

Caillois, Roger. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” Minotaure 7 (1935)

Dery, Mark. “The Persistence of Industrial Memory” in ed. Amerigo Marras, Eco-Tec: Architecture of the In-Between. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999)

Grosz, Elizabeth. “Futures, Cities, Architecture” in Architecture from the Outside (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001)

Ingraham, Catherine. Architecture, Animal, Human: The Asymmetrical Condition (New York: Routledge, 2006)

Mertins, Detlef. “Bioconstructivisms” in ed. Lars Spuybroek, NOX: Machining Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004)

Scott, Felicity. Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics After Modernism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007)