Carpo - The Alphabet and the Algorithm

Aus Leowiki

Interessante Überlegungen:

• die verlustfreie Digitalkopie ist die Basis für ubiquitäre Variation in From der kreativen Kopie
• digitale Revolution in mancher Hinsicht ein zurück zu Logiken vor dem "mechanischen" Zeitalter

Exzerpt

• "one key practice of modernity: the making of identical copies" (p. ix)
• "The modern power of the identical came to an end with the rise of digital technologies. All that is digital is variable, and digital variablity goes counter to all the postulates of identicality that have informed the history of Western cultural technologies for the last five centuries." (p. x; Anm: Paradox: erst die Ubiquität der verlustfreien Kopie erlaubt die Ubiquität der variierten, kreativen Kopie)
• "the author of the original script may not be the only author of the end product, and may not determine all the final features of it." (p. 5)
• "digital differentiality" (a term introduced by Greg Lynn to describe the new forms of serial variations in the digital age" (p. 8)
• "Alberti famously advised architects against directing the actual construction" (p. 21)
• "a building and its design can only be notationally identical" (p. 23)
• "If all that is built is built from notations, and if the drawings (or models) must contain all of the necessary data for an object to be built identically to its design, it follows that in most cases what can be built is determined by what can be drawn and measured in drawings. (...) This notational bottleneck was the inevitable companion of all allographic architecture from its very start." (p. 31)
• "The idea of nonstandard seriality, as this mode of production is often called, was already inherent in the original definitionsof the objectile, but its economic implications were not. (...) digital fabrication tools can produce variations at no extra cost." (p. 41)
• "But if Alberti's allographic model is phased out, the traditional control of the designer over the object of design (as well as the author's intellectual ownership of the end product) may be on the line, too. If variations may occur at any time in the design and production process, and if parts of the process are allowed to drift open-endedly, interactively, and collaboratively, who will "authorize" what in the end?" (p. 43)
• "digital architects today are increasingly designing and making at the same time"
• "In ages of variable copies, the meaning of visual signs does not depend on sameness, but on similarity. This was the case in the West before the rise of print, and this is again the case now, in the vast and growing domain of variable digital media." (p. 46)
• "the death of the author affects today but one, particular, time-specific category of authors: the author of identical, mechanical copies - the modern, Albertian author." (p. 47)
• "Alberti knew all too well that the manuscript transmission of texts and images was a risky operation. Copyists make mistakes, sometimes they interpret, sometimes they interpolate, sometimes they invent." (p. 53)
• "Alberti's tools and processes were intended to curtail, and ideally to eliminate, the variablity of hand-making from the process of making copies." (p. 61)
• "evidently, the pursuit of identicality between a copy and an invisible original is per se a paradox: no wonder the original and the copy do not resemble each other. How could they? But also: Why should they? Who would have noticed? Who could have told the difference, and who would have cared at the time?" (p. 63)
• "The constraints that Albertian notationality imposed upon architectural design were a determining factor throughout the history of modern architecture" (p. 71)
• "The legend of the models that Brunelleschi would have left deliberately incomplete thus makes perfect sense." (p. 75)
• "Wölfflin never used the pendulum metaphor - although he did use the image of the spiral: the history of art never goes back to square one, but often revisits the same location from a loftier position." (p. 83; Anm.: History matters!)
• "built on a truism but generalized into a fallacy. True, without computers some of those complex forms - most of them round - could not have been designed, measured, and built. Yet digital tools per se do not necessarily impose malumian shapes." (p. 85)
• "As Deleuze had remarked, Leibniz's mathematics of continuity introduced and expressed a new idea of the object: differential calculus does not describe objects, but their variations (and variations of variations). Deleuze even introduced a new term to characterize this two-tiered definition of the object - the "objectile," a function that contains an infinite number of objects." (p. 91)
• "A nonstandard series is a set in which each item has something in common with all others. In techical terms, all objects in a nonstandard series share some algorithms, as well as the machines that were used to process those algorithms and to produce the objects themselves. In visual terms, a nonstandard series comprises a theoretically unlimited umber of objects that can all be different but must also all be similar, as the digital tools that were used to make them leave a detectable trace in all end products." (p. 99)
• "In the new world of algorithmic, or differential, re-producability, visual sameness is replaced by similarity." (p. 101)
• "When one size must fit all, those users or customers that don't fit - physically or ideologically, by choice or by necessity - must pay more to have what they need made to measure. Nonstandard technologies promise to alleviate this tac on diversity." (p. 102)
• "But a revolution is a modern ideological construct. If you try to make one in a postmodern environment, odd things may happen - as they did in this case." (p. 107)
• "A revolution without an enemy is a solution without a problem, and even in a postmodern environment, a revolution without a vision for the future is an anomaly." (p. 111)
• "Digitally enhanced or not, architectural design has always been a delicate act of negotiation and balance between many participants, personalities, and committees; between the individual and the collective. The pendulum may swing both ways: in the not so distant past, public participation in design was actively pursued by many socialist architects in Europe, and in America by community activists and advocacy planners. But the new forms of digitally supported social participation in decision-making are significantly different in spirit from traditional, consensus-seeking modes of "design by committee." Interactive digital versioning (as supported by wiki technologies, for example) posits a never-ending accrual of independent, diverse, and individual edits and changes, where consensus is neither sought after nor ever achievable." (p. 114)
• "Mozart and Beethoven, however (or even Arnold Schoenbeg or Luciano Berio, for the matter), never published sounds: they wrote notations, which were recorded and transmitted in writing, and became music only when performed." (p. 116)
• "Digitally supported texts, music, and pictures can now start to drift again, as they did before the brief interlude of the mechanical age. In architecture, the vertical integration of computer-based design and manufacturing is giving rise to new forms of digital artisanship, narrowing the Albertian divide between conceivers and makers." (p. 117)
• "Indeed, Wikipedia would be a fascinating field of enquiry for medievalists. Both a medieval manuscript and a blog, or a wiki, are bidirectional, interactive, read-and-write information technologies: if you can read from them, you can write on them. Wikipedia pages can morph and change more or less in the same ways as philologists claim vernacular literature did at the end of the Middle Ages. And the participatory nature of the design process that digital integration may now support and promote is equally evocative of the collective and often anonymous way of building that was common on medieval building sites before the humanists' revolution." (p. 118)
• Re-narrating the metaphor of the cathedral and the bazaar (p. 119, FN 79)
• "To embrace digital authorship in full, however, designers will need to rise to the challenge of a new digitally negotiated, partial indeterminacy in the process of making form. (...) But a new algorithmically driven, interactively generated visual environment need not be a gaudy dump of cyberpunkish, unreadable formlessness (as science fiction writers often imagine), nor a bland, design-by-committee, regression-to-the-mean, technocratic landscape of benign formal negligence. As in all tradeoffs, some things will be lost and some gained. Architects may have to relinquish some control on specific end products, but they will acquire full control of generic objects. (...) A generic environment is not uncontrollable. Quite to the contrary, every open-ended, generic environment is strictly controlled by the very same generative rules that make it possible." (p. 127)

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