(Image Source : http://www.informatblog.com/partnership-google-apple-nel-futuro)

“it’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want” is a well-known phrase spoken by the deceased CEO of Apple. Apple users know best why they purchase apple products. It’s so easy that it blends into your hand. It’s so easy that you don’t know why it is so easy.  that’s the result of a top-down design. You are pretty much disoriented but you still don’t feel it, you just feel good and in control. While Google relies on experiments and data from the users out there. The company used the data offered by customers as input. By googling, you are giving your data. And google is smart enough to bring you in as a design partners. The result is that you know where you started, where you are going and where is your destination.

The design approach of these two giant companies are far opposite. It is undeniably interesting when you put something so intelligent into a kid’s hand and he know exactly how to use it. In the other hand, you put something not so intelligent with a manual to a 15 years old, what’s going to happen? He is likely going to start learning about it. I have heard so many arguments on the topic Apple vs. Google and I am not here to judge which one is better. I am going to compare one small tangible design to another massive-atmospheric urban scale design. And we can see how these two universes are close to each other.

Digital Cities talks mostly about urban design works produced by help of computational methods. Parametricism, Swarm Intelligence, Breeder, Urban Experiments, Morphogenetic Urbanism, or even smaller scale like Hyperhabitat etc. I’ll start with the bright sides. I have been astonished by the intelligence of these tools and aware how they are going, rapidly, to change the face of the planet. From the human scale – Chlorofilia, we can’t deny that that is not going to happen. The birth of it is on the timeline already. If it is something that humanities need then it is going to happen and expand eventually. The documentary was a hugh provocation. Manuel DeLanda’s Urban Simulation is a great example of how to extract the best interest out of the people the design was for. The continuous and discrete theory seems to be a perfect interweaving of the city and it’s population. When he talked about the discrete models of urban simulation where he introduced “multi-agent” system, an agent whose decision is specified by rules. The agent follows the rules but also produces an emergence. Is the agent an individual? or a community? And this push the boundaries of agent and the city far closer. Either way, there are good and explainable connection between these two.

The connection and relation is, of course, a total different thing. Emergence doesn’t know the whole. It is a part of the whole, however. So we might say that the only relation of the two is that the emergence build the whole without knowing so. What is the use of it the

n? Would it be ok if we put an entire of ant colony into an abandon colony? Will the ants still work as they do in their old colony? My guess would be yes. They would probably know exactly what to do. They still have their basic instinct that we know for sure. They still have their neighbors and they still get their work done by the end of the day. My thinking is that they won’t feel very happy for some reason and will start reforming their home. It is a thin layer between the agent and the surrounding, either in bigger scale or smaller, it’s in the cloud area of 5 senses. We can ignore the fact that these ants will never learn anyways so why bother teaching them how to grow but we can’t do that to human. We learn through 5 senses. Putting human into a new earth, we just going to find out how we got there. So if the relation is in the senses, does the digital intelligence have enough soul to fill that gap? The feeling of touching the wood, the smell of dirt, the humidity of the rain forrest, the force effect of a new landmark in town, the festival lights? These are inputs that only the population a.k.a. customers can give. Any scale of agent, these are the most truthful and determining factors. The type that Google wouldn’t hesitate to grasp. The real source for bottom-up approach. It is a surprise how we are so familiar of technologies today without questioning them so much. I guess we can make that clear by pairing product design with urban fabric, and by pairing user’s interface with community behavior. So until the computers are able to detect the senses as good as we can. It will still be top-down.

DELEUZE & GUATTARI’S A THOUSAND PLATEAUS (1980-1987)

“RHIZOME”

Where there is an end, there is a beginning. This phrase was flashing in my mind the whole time I was reading the writing.

What is achieved is nothing rather that the understanding of how things are. The way the writers wrote it has never been clearer.

The idea of not concluding anything, never define things, never systematize any seem-to-be-related things might not make sense in the Western.

But in the other hand, from the eye of the Western, it all make sense in the Eastern. (or at least Asia)

Rhizome is everywhere where I am from. Cuisine, Infrastructure, Religion etc.

Is it better? I think it’s purer.

Also more constructive if you know how to extract the essence.

Rhizome is a type of root that grows under the soil in a lateral direction.

It has no center-point, to beginning or end, no middle point, no heir achy involved.

It is just an assemblage of heterogeneities.

This is to explain the multiplicity and to oppose this concept

to the arborescent model of the “Tree Structure” (for example : Chomsky’s Tree Structure)

Always comparatively,

A rhizome works with planar and trans-species connections, while an arborescent model works with vertical and linear connections.

The authors also introduced the 6 Principles of Rhizome …

1+2 Connection of rhizome : Rhizome, at any point, can connect with any heterogeneity. It develops by connecting multiple points and as they connect, they increase their dimension and later become an assemblage.

“A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic  chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic gestural, and cognitive : there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages.” (pp7)

3 Multiplicity : There is no unity in Rhizome to serve as a pivot point in the object, or to divide in the subject.

“A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature” (pp8)

4 Asignifying Rupture : If you break a Rhizome at any point, it can start growing again on it’s old line or on a new line and reform itself elsewhere.

One example Deleuze and Guattari used to explain movements of deterritorialization (break) and processes of reterritorialization (reform). These two stages are related,  connected, caught up in one another?

The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image.

The wasp is not only deterritorialized, by being a part in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. But also it reterritorializes the orchid by delivering the pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome.

5+6 Cartography / Decalcomania : Comparatively, Rhizome is like a map and not a tracing. You can enter Rhizome at any point. It’s never finished.

The rhizome as more like a map then a tracing. They compare them by describing the map as a performance where as a tracing “always involves an alleged ‘competence’. For me, the map is more open then the tracing. The tracing is much more about trying to capture exactly what something is and being able to recreate it. At the same time, it is hard because the map and the tracing are not meant to be two spectrums with the map being good and the tracing being bad. They even point out that part of the map is it can be traced and that the rhizome many times contains redundancy.

It’s not the case that rhizomes are good and arborescent growths are bad at all, at all, at all. When Deleuze and Guattari speak of how to prudently construct a Body without Organs they circumspectly advise of always having spare land to reterritorialize, always be able to regroup, set roots, however temporary, observe opportunities rather than be carried away in pure turbulence.

The concept of rhizome is a rejection of traditional genealogy. It is the path through something new; variations, conquests, expansions. The rhizome is a rejection of the assumptions and history of the dominant class. However, the rhizome is not an anthropological study of culture, but rather a living organic continuous effort of free the forces that have been constrained.

The Principle of rhizome can and should be used as a tool to explain various of things. The social interaction, Facebook, or the habit of people on a particular incidence. Conversely, you can use them to question the existing tree structure of conventional system.

Where it is an end, there is a beginning.

Picture Credit : ” Neuron-network1″,extracted from MCRUSELLS (2013) on http://theonescience.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/neuron-network1.jpg

The architecture of the atmosphere

What is the atmosphere? Is it gas that surround the earth? Is it the climate? Is it the sound and smell of living creatures that fill in a certain space? The text written by Mark Wigley raises a discourse about ‘atmosphere’ in relevance to architecture. He believes that “to construct a building is to construct such an atmosphere” so what you feel when you enter  a building is the atmosphere. To enter a building is to walk from one atmosphere to another. As if the walk is infinite, no inside, no outside.

Wigley points out the concept of atmosphere associated with architects that it either chases those who try to run from it or run away from those who try to chase it. How is that?

In this text, there are examples of both case. Such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s drawing, the architect insisted that powerful architecture can not be directly perceived, it’s not in the walls, the floors or the decoration, it surrounds people who root in it. Created by integrating every single detail and by thinking as a whole, the intangible ambience automatically wraps around, in between the buildings or fill up the living space. Unlike the later generation of architects, he trusted in this power of architecture, rather than making a powerful drawing and hoping to convince the audience that their designs will deliver some kind of special feeling when entering to each part of the project.

Another example was described by the attempt of a situationist from Guy Debord’s “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography of 1955″, to redefine architecture as pure atmospherics. The situationists proposed the removal of any indistinct border zones between intense ambiences in order to redesign the architecture by exploiting the radical potential of atmosphere.

There were also other situationists that had been working on different approaches on experience of atmosphere in architecture.

In 1958, Debord and Constrant Nieuwenhuys’ “Amsterdam Declaration” claimed that to redesign a city, situationist architects had to start with the development of complete decors.

In 1953, Ivan Chtcheglov’s “Formularly for a New Urbanism  had introduced the idea of “constructing situations by playing with changeable decoration.

1956 Constant Nieuwenhuys proposed “New Babylon”, the project is this massive machine that produces changing atmosphere, to prove that atmosphere can be made with precise calculation. Debord later rejected this project he called “ambience-city” along with other situationist architect who started to argue that  the atmosphere can no be planed that way. It is rather defined by the users. This denotes that the architects are no longer in control of atmosphere in architecture.

Wigley seemed to agree on this situation, from the text, he believes that there was no way to learn how to create atmosphere. This intangible ambience can not be designed or predicted. Architects as special effect producers had to learn that the drawing they produced with fancy lines that create powerful effect to the audience and the atmosphere in architecture are distinct. The point where the construction stopped is where the atmosphere begin to grow and to define the architecture itself.

// Totally agree on that but humbly, I would like to see the power of technology and advanced science to step into this controversial. Half a century is more than enough to drift the direction of architecture wave. Increasing in modern technology in life has been the most significant part in the last leap of mankind. May be there is a way to argue to Wright and that last part of Wigley’s text by using advanced architecture as a weapon. Is it time for a new era of simulated theatrical atmosphere in architecture? Imagine today is a nice day, sunny outside, with light breeze, we are working in front of a computer, in an enclosed space, there is noises outside, cars on the street, I asked, Can you turn on some beach music? I want to go to the beach. And there it is, the ambience of the whole living space drifted. So what happened? We, the user of the space not an architect, just designed our own atmosphere? from a list of music? composed by musician? The same thing might apply here. Architects are the musicians. How do we sell our music to the user?