Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space

by Luciana Parisi

Overview

A proposal that algorithms are not simply instructions to be performed but thinking entities that construct digital spatio-temporalities.

In Contagious Architecture, Luciana Parisi offers a philosophical inquiry into the status of the algorithm in architectural and interaction design. Her thesis is that algorithmic computation is not simply an abstract mathematical tool but constitutes a mode of thought in its own right, in that its operation extends into forms of abstraction that lie beyond direct human cognition and control. These include modes of infinity, contingency, and indeterminacy, as well as incomputable quantities underlying the iterative process of algorithmic processing.

The main philosophical source for the project is Alfred North Whitehead, whose process philosophy is specifically designed to provide a vocabulary for “modes of thought” exhibiting various degrees of autonomy from human agency even as they are mobilized by it. Because algorithmic processing lies at the heart of the design practices now reshaping our world—from the physical spaces of our built environment to the networked spaces of digital culture—the nature of algorithmic thought is a topic of pressing importance that reraises questions of control and, ultimately, power. Contagious Architecture revisits cybernetic theories of control and information theory's notion of the incomputable in light of this rethinking of the role of algorithmic thought. Informed by recent debates in political and cultural theory around the changing landscape of power, it links the nature of abstraction to a new theory of power adequate to the complexities of the digital world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262312622
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	03/08/2013
Series:	Technologies of Lived Abstraction
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	392
File size:	5 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Luciana Parisi is a Senior Lecturer and runs the MA program in Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths University of London.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword vii

Preface: Weird Formalism ix

Acknowledgments xix

1 Incomputable Objects in the Age of the Algorithm 1

1.0 Metamodeling 1

1.0.1 Programming the living 10

1.0.2 Random probabilities 14

1.0.3 Anticipatory architecture 19

1.1 Background media 26

1.2 Metadigital fallacy 36

1.3 Discrete objects 43

1.3.1 Unity and relation 47

1.3.2 Qualities and quantities 50

1.3.3 Form and process 55

1.4 Algorithmic aesthetics 66

1.5 Speculative reason 71

2 Soft Extension: Topological Control and Mereotopological Space Events 83

2.0 The invariant function 83

2.1 Folds or differential relations 96

2.2 Parametricism or deep relationality 102

2.3 Soft temporalities 107

2.4 Extension is what extension doesn't 110

2.5 Blind spots: space events 117

2.6 Mereotopology of extension 123

2.7 Mereotopology of abstraction 128

2.8 Parametric prehensions 135

2.8.1 Scripting uncertainties 140

2.8.2 Une architecture des humeurs 144

2.9 Extensive novelties 158

3 Architectures of Thought 169

3.0 Soft thought 169

3.0.1 Neuroarchitecture 177

3.0.2 Enactive architecture 180

3.0.3 Negative prehension 185

3.1 Cybernetic thought 193

3.2 Ecological thought 200

3.3 Interactive thought 204

3.4 Technoembodied mind 211

3.5 Mindware and wetware 219

3.6 Synaptic space 224

3.7 Transitive computation 234

3.8 Thought event 242

3.9 Soft thought II 249

Glossary 259

Notes 269

References 339

Index 353

What People are Saying About This

Adrian Mackenzie

The thrill of this volume lies in its sustained pursuit of the problem of chance, randomness, and noncomputability as core dynamics in digital media. Its brilliantly heterodox take on computation allows Contagious Architecture to develop a groundbreaking account of algorithms and software, an account that puts debates about prediction and control in computational cultures on a much more exciting footing.

Eugene Thacker

In Contagious Architecture, Luciana Parisi gives us a sense of space beyond spatiality, showing us an architecture in which the fixed is fluid—an evocative and rigorous study whose scope exceeds traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Endorsement

Contagious Architecture is the antidote to the cyclical trend of Auguste Comte's neopositivistic 'order of discourse.' By restoring the whole spectrum of languages, the multiple whispering in computation's Tower of Babel, Luciana Parisi introduces contingencies, the 'one thousand plateaus,' as a factor of knowledge—rid of its deterministic and intrinsic nature of control—to release its consequences as well as its presuppositions.

—François Roche, architect

From the Publisher

The thrill of this volume lies in its sustained pursuit of the problem of chance, randomness, and noncomputability as core dynamics in digital media. Its brilliantly heterodox take on computation allows Contagious Architecture to develop a groundbreaking account of algorithms and software, an account that puts debates about prediction and control in computational cultures on a much more exciting footing.

—Adrian Mackenzie, Lancaster University; author of Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures

In Contagious Architecture, Luciana Parisi gives us a sense of space beyond spatiality, showing us an architecture in which the fixed is fluid—an evocative and rigorous study whose scope exceeds traditional disciplinary boundaries.

—Eugene Thacker, School of Media Studies, The New School; author of The Global Genome

Contagious Architecture is the antidote to the cyclical trend of Auguste Comte's neopositivistic 'order of discourse.' By restoring the whole spectrum of languages, the multiple whispering in computation's Tower of Babel, Luciana Parisi introduces contingencies, the 'one thousand plateaus,' as a factor of knowledge—rid of its deterministic and intrinsic nature of control—to release its consequences as well as its presuppositions.

—François Roche, architect