Thank you very much for your lectures. We have around 10 minutes for questions. Oh, oh, oh. Finn, you were first. Thank you both for a fascinating set of talks. These were really brilliant. I just wanted to start with something that builds off the exact last line of your talk, talk which was so going I was delighted to see parts of the history that you brought forward and and going back through Riddle and the work with Christopher Alexander so these were this was a moment in not just design in general but in architecture in particular where Chris Alexander is
proposing the idea of the structure of patterns the pattern language system which was this sort of model for changing how architecture is done it It will be done by all, and it will be done in accordance with systems of patterns that work well for people in certain situations. And this actually changes how software is developed. It actually gets adopted much more in the world of developing software than in architecture. And in the process of that, though, the original political content of the patterns disappears. And instead, it just becomes good ways of doing things. And what I wonder is, given what you've argued here, are there better ways for us to continue to include the political content in design, rather than see it sort of washed away, which seems to me to be part of the story that you're telling here. Are there ways to force the political process that's worked on through design to be sustained? Just a short answer.
I'm not a design theoretician. I'm a media historian. So my approach to the design is just strictly historic. And I agree. Christopher Alexander was a non-political part of the movement, and Rittel was a political side of it. So he was forgotten, in a way, in the decades after. And I don't know why. We had two questions here in the back. First Nishant, and then Andrew, I think. Thank you. I thought this was such a great panel, also, because design and abstraction seem to be such uncomfortable bedfellows, moving in very, very different directions. But it's a question which kind of draws from Wolfgang,
and then hopefully, Luciana, you will jump into it as well. But I was just doing a perverse reading of design because so much of design is about designating value, but it's also maybe about designification as opposed to just designation, right? Designing. That the process of design often, the real political axis of designification, for example, is that which needs to be thrown away out of that machine as residue so that it can be designated a new kind of a value, which might be very close to the ways in which mystification of computing works in contemporary times. So I was wondering if both of you would want to address the idea of design and its political power not as that which is obvious, not design as that which brings politics into the reified object, but design
as that which actually leads to a recolonization of symbols, values, and meanings, so that it actually programs the political agenda, as opposed to merely mimicking it or bringing it into the fore. And I thought it would deal well with abstraction and design if we could just hear some more about it from you. Thank you. Jhiana? Yeah, I think what you said about the programming of political behavior is absolutely right. That's the interesting thing with the idea of media as information systems that, as Wendy knows very well, is exactly the process of programming programs. And so we know that there's been many attempts deprogramming design, deprogramming media, all sorts of media activism, and especially
the one that has used the idea of tactical means whereby you debug the system, reprogram it, but you use the function. But for me, I know this was very important, still important, the history of course, this kind of reverse engineering of the system, as it were. But the problem of tactics is that for me, leaves me always with the conception of media as instrumental and descriptive, as operating in some kind of temporality that doesn't allow for generality or abstraction, which is something that we have abandoned because we have inherited the post-structuralist hate and post-modernist hate for that.
And it's obviously a moment in time we need to rethink that. It's not about becoming Kantian again, or dialectical, but rethinking those kind of ontologies. That's pretty clear, because otherwise we just relativize engineering through this kind of reverse engineer. It just becomes relative to the temporary activity that we can do with every media. but creating some kind of general, by which I mean rethinking universalism and multiscolar levels, but without renouncing generality because of the kind of specificity of political actions. And computing allows that, hopefully.
Thanks. Andrew? Yeah, thank you so much, both of you, for your talks. I have questions actually for each of you, and I'm hoping I can kind of connect them together. Wolfgang, I was kind of wondering about the question you left us with of acting, right, and specifically the relationship between action and the iPhone. Because it seems to me one of the problems of contemporary digital culture, basically, is that the iPhone instrumentalizes a certain kind of action. So now, once we have these phones, we can just press a button and have a car arrive for us, right? or we can just press a button and have food arrive for us. All these kind of things that normally required a sort of sense of being in the world
are now replaced with a sense of an application economy. So I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about politics, action, and specifically maybe mobile or locative media in that regard. And I think that one of the reasons I'm kind of interested in that is because of what Luciano was talking about, which has really resonated with some things that I've been thinking lately, which is that as digital media comes to absorb more and more things, I mean, first other media, let's say, but now actions, it really seems crucial to me to think about the limits of computation and the relationship between what computers can do and what they can't do at a very, very sort of formal level. And so I was really struck by the way you used randomness in this regard. And one of the things, I mean, it's kind of a cliche, right?
computers can't do real randomness. But one of the really interesting things is there's a way in which computers can actually incorporate randomness quite well, as long as you can get it from the outside. So if you look at people, we've talked a lot about Claude Shannon this afternoon and generally throughout the thing, but mostly in terms of information theory. If you look at his papers on encryption, there's a sort of gold standard of encryption that everybody we've known about since the Cold War, thanks to Shannon really, that says that if you have a truly entropic stream with which to modulate information, you will never be able to decrypt that stream. Right? And so it's in the very first kind of digital encryption was actually done this way.
They took entropy from decaying thermal atoms, basically, like thermal energy, and transposed it, like made it into a kind of a digital system. And so there's a way in which randomness actually becomes incorporated by digital media as well. So I'm wondering if you could kind of think about the relationship between randomness and non-randomness, or the relationship between randomness and computation, let's say, in light of that fact, and in light of the fact that computation and digital media seem to be kind of taking or have the capacity to take almost anything over. Yeah. Did you want to answer for me? Yes, OK, two things. There has been an argument about the randomness using within computation is it cannot be defined as randomness,
but pseudo-randomness. One, then there's another argument that says that actually instead of entropy, one can think of anti-entropy. Because entropy, as we know from Wiener, so we have two different models, Shannon and Wiener. They are not the same model of entropy yesterday. Rain was referring to Wiener understanding of entropy, which is really a measure of chaos. And what we are concerned with is information that is structure. Whereas channel and entropy, a noise or randomness, is completely constitutive to communication. It's not something that is needed within the channel in order to have all this level of compression
You need that kind of. OK. Whereas anti-entropy, so this conception of entropy are, so obviously we have nega-entropy as well. That is the adaptation of entropy from biological system. Organism by living, they create structure, the world of entropy or kind of out of order tendencies. But interestingly, I found very useful Giuseppe Longo understanding of anti-entropy. Because what he says is that both biological and physical system do not expel entropy, but have many levels of entropy. And actually entropy, randomness,
or uncompressibility, or contingency, or as you want to call it, is absolutely necessary to the order of the organism. That's very important. So that for me was an interesting provocation to try and map that within computation system. And the reason why I say we need to address randomness within computation is because I do not want to relativize and have this kind of external reference. Because within the level of complexity that we have today within computations are pointing to a randomness of information within the computational system, not extended. The system is not just collecting data from the outside.
It's collecting data from the inside. We also are in the inside, by the way. So I don't know what really counts for biological system anymore. One last quick question from Ronald. I wanted to also ask Luciana further about Michel Serre and the parasite, which were very important for those. Maybe we could talk about that after, because I must intervene in this Christopher Alexander discussion. I cannot allow Christopher Alexander to stand for progressive politics. And it is an opportunity, very, very interesting one, to intersect design history or architectural history with media history. Because Alexander, exactly what he basically reformulated
was the Bauhaus tradition, the first book, notes on the synthesis of form from the 60s, that led to the pattern language. The critique was of the socialist dimension of the Bauhaus, basically. I mean, it's a long story, and we'll have to break it down. And he had a huge influence in urbanism that wound up, actually, being written as another kind of code. Because the basic idea is that he wrote code, right? So code, code. But it was a different kind of code. It was like planning code, building codes, and so on. And so he wrote these biblical books that were really about changing the code, the law, literally the law. And then in the mid-'90s, the law was changed. The social housing across the United States was demolished, and patterns were built. And the people who wrote that code
were apostles of Christopher Alexander and Prince Charles. So just to, you know, it's a complicated story that I'm obviously reducing. But I think it's extremely interesting and important. And it explains a little bit, I think, how Alexander could have become a corporate architect, in a sense. Like, could have become the hero of Sun Microsystems and object-oriented programming and all of that. And I don't know. I'd love to hear more details from the media side. With Engelbart, yes. Yeah, Engelbart and so on and so forth. It's very interesting. But it seems there are many more connections, I think, than we've yet fully excavated. And just one more little footnote about the iMac. I'm thinking, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong,
but it was always my assumption that that was the moment when computers were really designed on a computer. And the design history, so it's the return of that sterilized kind of formalist approach. But through another dimension of the critique of the Bauhaus, which is the critique of the mechanistic productivist Bauhaus, which is the leftist Bauhaus, that in the name of seamlessness, a thing that in architecture they started calling them blobs. And these became figures to reject modernism, basically to reject the idea that you can see inside the machine and like a good constructivist, re-engineer it and make the revolution. It's a kind of black boxing, but through an aesthetic
of seamlessness that was very, very deliberate and very strategic designed on computers. So maybe just an open-ended. Because you could see something, you see nothing. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. I think on that note, we should end. Please join me in thanking our speakers.