A4597 Protocols: Architecture of Active Organizations
History/Theory SeminarKeller Easterling
Architecture, unlike geology, biology, music, mathematics, etc., has very limited means to describe organizations with active parts, temporal components or differential change. But one could argue that the protocols expressing constraints over timing, organization and interactivity are the dominant architectures, in our culture of development. For instance, the process of assembling some kinds of residential fabric resembles that of agricultural production, where large numbers of houses are executed simultaneously in uniform fields. Though, immaterial, it is the architecture or format of that process which may be the chief determinant of spatial and material con sequences, not the appearance of the suburban house.
The fields of biology, geology, mathematics, or network electronics, develop precise terms to express process, difference, and exchange amongst multiple components over time. At the turn of the century while our own profession was, absurdly, stylizing activity as speed, geologists, for instance, were transferring their analytic efforts from the study of artifacts to the study of processes like fluvial activity, glaciation, erosion, etc. In communication and computational networks, timing and storage space are critical operations which are sometimes one and the same thing and so cannot be expressed in terms of absolute spaces or objects, but rather must be expressed in terms of process. When technologists use the word architecture they refer to the active organizations and relationships between circuitry behind the screen.
Architecture is typically fluent in descriptions of process which are determinate or which can be named by form or geometry. Activity is often turned to attract or expressed in forms representative of dynamism. With computer tools for instance, it is often the software environment and its representational virtuality rather than the organizations behind the screen which are most attractive. Or network fascinations seem scripted by the rather positivistic agendas of mid-century cybernetics and the more recursive organizations which they favored. Process operations are routine in architectural practice but are usually performed without identification or in support of what is regarded as the real artistic product, one which has some kind of representational currency.
The course is divided into four parts, considering, in parallel, ideas about mental/virtual process, network architecture, geological process, and mathematics. Each segment considers texts, organizational operatives, and sites of adjustment. Some of the terms for these organizational operatives remain durable throughout because, though they may be borrowed from biology or mathematics, etc., they describe a simple species of relationship between multiples. For instance, the discussions will consider how relationships like function, switch, derivative, summation, parallelism, etc. are transposed to the spatial environment.
Introduction
1 Slide talk: Adjustment and Differential versus Recursive Differentiation or Switches and Gadgets and Artistic Risk
Part I Mind/Virtuality
2 Site: Performance
Talk: Virtualities and Mental Craft
Part II Geology
3 Site: Terrestrial and Virtual Infrastructures
Slide talk: Technocracy and Environmentalism: AT, TVA, Levee, Watershed, Wayside
Part III Network
4 Site: Recursive networks in Cybernetics
5 Site: Transportation Infrastructures, differentials and switches
Slide talk: Differential Switching: The Interstate and Intermodality
Part IV Mathematics
6 Site/artifacts: Urban derivatives and functions
7 Site: repetitive/distributive residential formations and functions
Talk: Residential formations: Summation, Subtraction, Function, Gadget