Parisi - Symbiotic Architecture (Theory Culture Society) (2009)

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 346 Symbiotic Architecture Prehending Digitality Luciana Parisi Abstract This article tackles an old, classical problem, which is acquiring a new epochal relevance with the techno-aesthetic processing of form and substance, expression and content. The field of digital architecture is embarked in the ancient controversy between the line and the curve, binary communication and fuzzy logic. Since the 1990s, the speculative qualities of digital architecture have exposed spatial design to the qualities of growing or breeding, rather than planning. However, such qualities still deploy the tension between discrete spaces and continual curving. In this context, the article suggests the computational coexistence of discrete coding with continual morphing, defying any easy resolution for an aesthetic of continuity or discontinuity, the superiority of the analog or the meta-logic of the digital. The metaphysical dimension of such coexistence needs to include the abstract capacities of experiencing the transition from one state to another as the registering of algorithmic processing. Computation is intrinsic to microperceptions, incomputable quantities deploying the infectious property of the digital code. The article draws on the digital architecture of Greg Lynn to explore whether the computational nature of the digital calculus has the potential to challenge the bifurcation between the biological and the mathematical, the physical and the mental. Key words computation ■ extensive continuum ■ interaction ■ prehension ■ spatial design Introduction INCE THE 1960s the use of computing in architectural design has led to new perspectives about the generation of space by means of interaction. Such perspectives also anticipated some of the most recent S ■ Theory, Culture & Society 2009 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), Vol. 26(2–3): 346–376 DOI: 10.1177/0263276409103121 Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 347 Parisi – Symbiotic Architecture 347 debates about the impact of responsive software within the context of ubiquitous digital media. In particular, some of the cybernetic experiments with architectural computation carried out by Gordon Pask’s electro-mechanical, chemical and biological computers (1958), self-organizing systems that grew their own sensors, primitive eyes and ears, have anticipated the design of responsive media environment, whereby space is computed in response to sensorimotor data.1 For instance, Stanza’s project Sensity collects sensorimotor data from the change in the weather, the traffic noise and vibrations of buildings and the movement of people. These become key components of an emergent architecture involving the interactions of sense data, controlled via visual interface, able to re-form the experiences of the city in real time.2 From this standpoint, the seamless model of ubiquitous interaction, governed by a universal machine processing data from distinct communication platforms through input-output interaction, is in contrast with the calculus of architectural variables defined by sense-data changes, including atmospheric fluctuations, shades of colors, speeds of movement, and so on. Hence, recent debates about the nature of software architecture3 are characterized by an emphasis on the architectural modeling of curvilinearity and variability as opposed to the ubiquitous framework of direct communication between computational objects, determined by a Euclidean geometry of fixed shapes executed by equations. This tendency towards an architecture of variation and movement of course is not new, and is not simply triggered by the use of digital software in design. Sanford Kwinter, for instance, highlights how movement was central to the Italian futurist aesthetic of architect Antonio Sant’ Elia4 and to the sculptural work of Umberto Boccioni (Kwinter, 2002: 54; 61–66; 70). Sant’ Elia’s La Città Nuova, a collection of drawings and urban concept studies, exposes, according to Kwinter, his futuristic sensibility towards the contingent and the new, dynamic movement and the plasticity of the body (pp. 73–4). An aesthetic of spatial continuity, deployed by the force of curvilinear motions, is here at play. Similarly, architect Greg Lynn pointed out that the current use of architectural software programming brings back the baroque concern for the curvature of the line of Leibnizian memory. Movement and curvature have become central to a software responsive architecture aiming to disentangle the spatial form from Negroponte’s conception of the ‘architecture machine’,5 involving a mechanical fusion between the machine and the user, and to diverge from Le Corbusier’s axiomatic design of finite lines, right angles, frozen surface and his disdain for the curve.6 One could add that concerns with movement and curvature were also at the core of the Archigram’s generation of urban space, suggesting an architectural organicism and, to some extent, a curvilinear experience of space that remains parallel to, albeit opposed to, the mechanic geometrics of extension.7 This article will not argue that software architecture and the increasingly responsive mediatic environments pose a new problem for the conception and Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 348 348 Theory, Culture & Society 26(2–3) perception of space. Rather, this article tackles an old, perhaps classical, problem which is acquiring a new epochal relevance through the technoscientific and aesthetic processing of form and substance, expression and content. Here novel computational qualities of abstract thought and feeling are triggered by the symbiosis, and not simply the fusion, of codes and objects. The field of digital architecture therefore is not immune from the ancient controversy between the line and the curve, between input-output communication and the fuzzy logic of asymmetric connection. In this article, such controversy will be discussed through the instance of the neoDarwinian model of the genetic algorithm, currently used in software architecture to implement the genealogical design of types (based on the exchange of genetic instructions), and of the symbiotic model of parallel algorithms, a software deployment of a parasiting architecture (based on the trading between genetic populations). The article considers the epochal qualities of the tension between lines and curves characterizing digital architecture, which is not exclusively expressed by the technical computation of the architectural form. Rather, such technical computation cannot remain isolated from the capacities of these epochal qualities to traverse distinct computational states as in software architecture, interactive art and media.8 Abstracted qualities instantiate the affective transformations of the spatio-temporal experience in the post-cybernetic climate of the biodigital age. Such abstractions are here conceived as speculations or veritable activators of the force of the future entering the architectural design of the spatio-temporal experience of the present. Speculation in architecture is not new and can also be found, for example, in the mechanonetwork aesthetic of the metabolist movement in the Japan of the late 1960s. Architect Kisho Kurokawa exposed the biomechanical speculations of metabolic cycles to the urban designing of each quarter in Tokyo according to a circular network (1977).9 His metabolic design of the heart of Tokyo included a central nucleus and seven tentacular axes leading to peripheral paths of energy-information exchange. A network of secondary paths led to huge helical or spiral towers, resembling gigantic mushroom with spores and moss. The spiral design of the towers was explicitly opposed to the Cartesian model of a priori master-mass plan which, for Kurokawa, could not account for the natural curvilinear evolution of environments. The structure of a city was then conceived as a multiplanar transport system centred on the activities of daily metabolic life. As the double helix transmitted information, so the spiral structure embraced the metabolism of urban space for data transmission. The unitary-space of the DNA helix was taken as a prototype of a city with three-dimensional cluster systems of growth (1977: 54). At the centre of metabolic urbanism was the capsule: a minimum dwelling unit in evolving mega-structures, a cell in a state of variation triggered by the breaking down of substances yielding energy for growth. Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 349 Parisi – Symbiotic Architecture 349 Not a container of the body, but an information milieu conforming to its inhabitants. Not a standardized prefabricate, but a modular system allowing for the inter-change and replacement of parts at any space-time. For Kurokawa, speculative architecture was already deploying the alliance between man, machine and space, resulting in an info-organic body ready to metabolize the new form of habitation and dwelling of the homo movens. Similarly, Kurokawa’s mechano-metabolism of the city envisioning the new quality of cybernetic feedback between media and architecture, with a minimal space of externalized tubes and wires, also anticipated the late 1980s biomechanical eroticism of cyberpunk urban Tetsuo, the iron man (1989). Kurokawa’s philosophy opposed the geometric line in architecture with metabolic dynamics of continual growth and renewal by mechanical processes, where a large infrastructural matrix connects reconfigurable mega-structures. However, it has been argued, his projects are limited by the mechanical views of first-wave cybernetics, conforming biophysical variations to homeostatic cycles of transmission. In the mid-1960s architect Arata Isozaki questioned the mechanical principles of the metabolist model by designing instead labyrinthine spatio-temporal complexities defining dynamically open architectures.10 The metabolic networks of the mechanoarchitecture then seem too indebted to the finitude of the line and do not fully follow the labyrinth of the curve. Kurokawa’s metabolic design did not move beyond the centralized arrangement of megastructural metalogics able to expose local degrees of variation in complexity. On the other hand, the curvilinear aesthetic of the ‘pod design’ by the futurist architect Jean Louis Chanéac11 deployed a more organic, adaptable and mobile architecture, where the free construction of individual cubicles entailed a conception of habitat for the greatest number (Allison et al., 2006: 279–80). His design-concept of ‘plastic polyvalent cells’, where each cell can be juxtaposed and superimposed to form a neighborhood or an entire city, reminds us of the symbiotic architecture of bacterial genomes adding layers upon layers, remaining nested in an associative parasitism that builds slimy networks for the circulation of goods. Similarly, the ‘Habitat Evolutif’ experimental design of the late 1960s,12 where dwellers’ movements and perceptions acted as modalities of extensions, also deploy the growing networked arrangements of physical relations. And yet, one may wonder: are these examples of evolutive architecture sufficient to explain the epochal qualities of digital coding in generative architecture? Whilst the concept of evolutive habitat in the 1960s and 1970s seems to include the activities of inhabitants – guaranteeing the variations – in the formation of a networked environment, it also tout court reiterates an organic principle of variation according to a concept of nature as an integrated whole, an architectural vitalism or organicism. The Euclidean geometric order of the line involves a tendency towards a mechano-organization of spatiality according to a principle of discontinuity, whereby the system is divided into parts that are united by a cyborgnetwork. On the other hand, the non-Euclidean architecture of the curve involves an organicism of space Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 350 350 Theory, Culture & Society 26(2–3) determined by a principle of continuity according to which each and any part of the system is always already working for the whole. From this standpoint, the speculative qualities of a digital architecture of space-time as developed, for example, by Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984),13 deploy an entire data environment turning all physical objects into a series of numbers, which are operated by a mechanogeometric order of discrete codes, the binary calculator of all nature. On the contrary, the speculative architecture of spatio-temporal coding as exposed in Octavia Butler’s genetically engineered environment of the Oankali14 rather points at the ingression of the unforeseen curvature in the genetic line of inheritance. Such engineered environment allows for a symbiotic and not genetic architecture of nature by precluding all return to an organic principle of variation or holistic concept of nature. Since the 1990s, the speculative qualities of digital architecture have actualized a non-standard architecture15 which, on the one hand, conforms to the genetic codification of the geometric order and, on the other, explores the curvilinearity of data. As discussed in the next sections, genetic, evolutive and symbiotic algorithms (GA, EA, SA) have exposed architectural design to the qualities of growing or breeding, rather than planning, digital variations in extension. However, such qualities are still imbued with the tension between an architecture of genetic generation of discrete forms and an architecture of continual curving. In this context, this article suggests that the epochal qualities of such tension are deploying a more intricate coexistence of discrete coding with continual morphing, evinced by a fuzzy mathematical logic of computation which defies any easy resolution into either an aesthetic of continuity or discontinuity, either a superiority of the analog or the meta-logic of the digital. For example, architect Greg Lynn uses the software program by Wavefront Technologies Inc called Meta-Balls16 so as to model an architectural organization made of assemblages of interacting local forces, zones of inflection and fusion rather than totality and holism (Lynn, 2004b: 164–6). Through a notion of iterative differentiation, distinct temporal variations can be accounted in an evolutive architecture evincing the movement and fluctuation of all kinds of interacting components. Thus, the inhabitants – parts – do not add movement to a given space, as it were from the outside, but rather movement remains intrinsic to the software calculations of spatiality. Such architecture points at a new conception of coded spatiality. It can be argued that the infectious relationality of numbered numbers (i.e. determinate probabilities) marks the ontological condition of biological, technical and cultural networked spaces. Recently, it has been observed that codes – both digital and biological – have viral capacities of communication. Viruses no longer constitute an exception, an external contingency of the code, but have become rather the rule of a viral networked order.17 This is an asymmetric network implying that autonomous programs can coexist in single modes of operations and contribute to the evolutions of networks Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 351 Parisi – Symbiotic Architecture 351 themselves. The emphasis on information codes as composed of internal, external and associated milieus of interactions has led to a new conception of digital culture as itself composed of milieus of viral ecologies.18 This argument, however, can be pushed further to suggest that a symbiotic architecture may need to account for the experiential dimensions of abstract extensiveness without falling into the impasse between the digital and the analog, the technical and the natural, mathematical and biological nature of extension. In other words, it is possible to suggest, echoing William James, that for ‘a relation to be real it has to be an experienced relation’ (1901: 533–43, 561–70). The metaphysical dimension of relationality attributed to network and viral architectures needs to include the abstract capacities of experiencing change by capturing the transition from one state to another or registering the algorithmic passing between distinct blocs of space-time. In other words, such relationality needs to be implicated in the process of infection that makes networks more than a formal organization of parallel viral programs. Similarly, the articulation of an ontological relationality that may radically overcome the impasse between nature and culture, codes and experience, has been proposed by Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (2005). For Latour, the connection and the disconnection of partial objects define a network of interaction in which these objects remain separable despite participating in assemblies. In other words, actors remain atomic, indissoluble, and at once undergoing changes through multileveled interactions. A relational ontology of this kind admits the coexistence of continuity and discontinuity of all actors: chemicals are as much actors as are corporations and ideas. No materialist ontology is here invoked to idealize the difference between the actors-objects forming networks. For Latour, connections of ideas are neither more nor less powerful than physical connections to the extent that all relations require some type of effort at coming together. Thus, networks expose all levels of gaps, and not just breaks between mind and reality. Hiatuses exist everywhere and are bridged everywhere by the nexus of actual occasions, as Whitehead would put it. In this article, such network model of relationality will be discussed by drawing on Alfred N. Whitehead’s notion of extensive continuum (1978: 61–82) and on the algorithmic theories of continuous discontinuity (Chaitin, 2005). It will then be suggested that relationality is implicated in the activities of microperceptions, infinitesimal, incomputable quantities deploying an infectious property of the digital code resonating across the mental and physical prehensions of all kinds of entities-objects-actors building a symbiotic architecture. To this end, the article will draw on the digital architecture of Greg Lynn so as to explore whether the computational nature of the digital calculus has the potential to challenge the bifurcation between the biological and the mathematical, the physical and the mental. Brian Massumi has argued that the diagrammatic use of software architecture in the design of shapes and the qualification of forms can be placed in resonance with the proprioceptive and affective activities of Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 352 352 Theory, Culture & Society 26(2–3) orientation of a body in space (2005).19 Relationality is not determined by a direct line between two terms: computational and physical architecture. On the contrary, Massumi insists on an amodal relation, a non-relational relationality, where a topological curvature exposes the body’s capacities of variation and movement across distinct levels, shapes and forms. Such amodality acts as a virtual residue in the direct relations between terms, an interstice or gap, irreducible to the terms. Yet such residue works as a topological knot opening the terms of the relation to an outside of the physical and the mental zone of perception and cognition, tapping into affective rhythms of orientation, extending spatio-temporal experience beyond itself. Massumi suggests that such affective rhythms of movement and variation replace diagrammatic architecture with the topology of a biogram, where centres fold into peripheries and out again, where arcs wave into knots (2005: 191). He observes that generative architecture may need to integrate affective perception and experience, habit, memory and movement into modeling. To this end, a topological rather than simply generative or digital architecture holds the promise of extending the ‘diagrams’ into ‘biograms’, reconnecting space to the virtual body, enabling technologies to address not simply pre-existing forms but emerging experiences (pp. 201–5). To implicate the biogram into digital calculation will then entail the soft design of extensive experience. As Whitehead argues, ‘Extension is the most general scheme of real potentiality’ (1978: 67) – ‘All actual occasions are internally and externally extensive’ (p. 77). Information space therefore depends not on an embryonic relation with the human body as a centre of temporal perceptions able to frame spatialized data as to make data part of experience – as, for example, Hansen claims (2004: 1–10). On the contrary, it will here be argued, following Whitehead, that there is primarily neither time nor space to be experienced, but rather a relation of extension between events. There is potentiality in extensiveness insofar as the real world is composed of the tiniest objects of perceptions: a body and thumb, a drop of water and a swarm of flies, a molecule and an electric charge. What is an object for one percipient, however, is something else to another percipient. A drop of water to a human percipient is a swarm of flies to an electron (Whitehead, 2004: 167). The continuity of nature is here found in events that are extensively connected in their intrinsic and extrinsic physical and conceptual relations (Whitehead, 1978: 288). Extension, from the Latin extendo, defines the capacities of relations to stretch or spread out. Whitehead proposes an energetic conception of extension which implies tension and effort. Here space and time are a partial expression of one relation of extension between events, which in itself is neither spatial nor temporal (Whitehead, 2004: 185). This is not only because spatial relations extend through time but also because, he observes, since the discovery of electro-magnetic relativity we know that what is simultaneous in space for one percipient is successive in time for another, depending on their relative state of motion. In this sense, the extensive Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 353 Parisi – Symbiotic Architecture 353 propagation of energy is an activity of successive divisible events, whereby earlier events are part of wider events: a discontinuous continuity in the evolution of prehensive extensions. From this standpoint, the neo-Darwinian model of the genetic and evolutionary algorithm will be set in contrast with the endosymbiotic model of parallel evolutionary algorithms in generative design, to point at the central experience of discontinuous continuity in the differential calculus of soft architecture. This suggests that the fuzziness of information cannot but resonate throughout a body, however small its prehensive capacities of experience may be. A two-folded expression of symbiotic architecture will be addressed here: the differential calculus, the surplus of digital code, points at mental and physical anomalies of imperceptible connectedness between microbodies and macrobodies and, at the same time, at the production of new prehensive capacities of extension. These prehensive experiences of the extended relations amongst all kinds of actual occasions add to the concrescent nature of atomic objects, growing asymmetrically out of singular events. Symbiotic architecture introduces stealthy occurrences in the seamless Figure 1 ‘Becoming Animal’ is an interactive performance piece developed by Minimaforms. The project explores the story of the mythical three-headed beast Kerberos, guardian of the underworld. The objective of the piece is to create an environment of performance through collective participation and conversation. Each participant’s presence stimulates the three heads of the Kerberos, triggering behavior-based interactions and exchanges. Interactions are expressed through sounds, facial expressions and general activity of the Kerberos. With special thanks to Theodore Spyropoulos, minimaform.com Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 354 354 Theory, Culture & Society 26(2–3) calculation of digitality. These have a direct impact on thought to be felt in its invisible variations entangled to a multiplicity of inorganic bodies. Symbiotic architecture is the sticky residue implicated in the smallest and the shortest of encounters, a sort of biofilmic slime20 that gels without fusing things together in the unnatural dens of an anomalous nature. Symbiotic architecture turns space into blobs, a wet or aqueous extension: ‘[a] near solid, to borrow Luce Irigaray’s term, [that] has no ideal static form outside of the particular conditions in which it is situated including its position and speed. Gel solids are defined not as static but as trajectories’ (Lynn, 2004b: 171). Examples of symbiotic or blob architectures are, like the genetically engineered environments of the Oankali, populations of large numbers parasiting upon each other, stretching trajectories into curving labyrinth, building a wet supersurface in the multiplexing experience of an extended continuum. Digital Generation The epochal tension between the geometric order of the line and the curving curve of spatiotemporality will be discussed specifically in the context of software design. This is a window into the new conjectures of the architectural experience, not simply concerning the technical qualities of spatiality but also how these are directly implicated in aesthetic and cultural qualities of the digital ambience. The centrality of the genetic algorithm in the design of network architecture derives from a mathematization of biological organization, intended to forecast the evolutive behaviour of extension. Since the early 1990s, genetic and evolutive algorithms (GA, EA) have been used to explore design variations that can be bred via software simulations. At the core of digital architecture is a design technique based on neo-Darwinian models of evolution. In particular, Dawkins’s conceptual device of the ‘blind watchmaker’ algorithm suggests that the evolution of forms is not simply derivable from the random mutation of simple genetic instructions but, more importantly, on non-random cumulative selection leading to the development of complex shapes called biomorphs – a complex set of genes (Dawkins, 1986). Dawkins’s genocentric view of evolution argues that the emergence of complex form cannot be explained by random genetic mutation. Instead, only the workings of a blind nature that intervenes to combine accumulated variations in the most complex of ways can account for evolutionary complexity. In the Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins refines his previous genetic theories21 by emphasizing the role of natural selection. He argues that the emergence of complexity cannot be explained by single step selection, according to which the entities selected are sorted once and for all. For example, clouds through the random kneading and carving of the winds come to look like familiar objects – a sea horse, a group of sheep, a face with a nose and so on. For Dawkins, the production of these shapes is based on a single-step concept of selection, derived by one type of combination without evolution. Accumulative selection, on the contrary, points out that Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 355 Parisi – Symbiotic Architecture 355 each selected entity – or at least the result of sorting entities – reproduces in time. The results of one sieving process are fed into a subsequent sieving, which is fed onto the next one and so on (Dawkins, 1986: 45). Selection therefore implies the sieving of entities over many generations in sequential succession. The end product of one step is only the starting point for the next generation of selection. Cumulative selection indeed points at a blind watchmaker that selects at each step the best adapted generations of genes to favour their survival into the next. To demonstrate his point, Dawkins devises a computer simulation of such process through a recursive programming of a simple tree-growing procedure.22 The result is a complex shape emerged out of simple rules of replication – recursive programming – applied locally all over the branching tree. The biomorph – a set of recursive genes – develops and (a-sexually) reproduces. In every generation, the genes supplied by the previous generation are passed to the next generation with minor random errors or mutations. This means that – as generations go by – the total amount of genetic difference from the original ancestor can become very large. Although the mutations are random, the cumulative change over the generations is not random. Whilst progeny in any one generation are different from their parents, each progeny is non-randomly selected to advance into the next generation. Since Dawkins’s ‘Biomorph Land’ is very large – thus implying that there are a very large number of genetic populations – it is as if the evolutive development of the best-adapted shape-creature is already mathematically contained in the areas of the genotype. The ‘Biomorph Land’, like Conway’s ‘Game of Life’,23 is a practical example of the use of evolutionary computation for the generation of form. While its original purpose was only to illustrate the theoretical principles in progressive-cumulative selection, it was soon adopted by a generation of artists and scientists.24 In digital architecture, Dawkins’s notion of cumulative selection has been used to search for the genetic space of shapes that generatively reproduce and develop through random mutations. Delanda (1998), for example, explains that generative models of simulation are searching devices exploring a space of possibilities through the combinations of traits so as to find, over many generations, more or less stable solutions to problems posed by the environment. The searching device in the field of computer simulations is called a ‘genetic algorithm’ in which a population of computer programs is allowed to replicate in a variable form. The use of genetic algorithms has then enabled architects using CAD to breed new solutions to spatial design instead of directly programming those solutions. Take, for example, the generative solutions of a chair designed by architect Celestino Soddu25 as a way to evolve a modular type according to parameters of random mutation and cumulative selection at each chair generation. Evolutionary design, according to Soddu, enables a fast design for industrial production, a sort of prototype of a uniquely evolved form. To evolve the modular prototype of a chair a basic algorithm Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 356 356 Theory, Culture & Society 26(2–3) undergoes repeated cycles of evaluation, selection and reproduction leading to variations in the composition of the algorithmic population and exploring the space of possible solutions in the vicinity of the best adapted generation of chairs. In the computer model of the ‘Blind Watchmaker’, genetic configurations of variables are arranged into a matrix where each combination of variations occupies a different place defined by the distance between parents and offspring. More specifically, for each set of possible offspring that may be generated, a given distance from the parent to the offspring occurs with equal and uniformly distributed probability. This modular evolution of prototypes involves the adaptation of a single population in a fixed niche. For example, all individual chairs are assessed according to the same criteria and the same fitness function, which distributes equally to specifically located genes. Every individual gene has an identifiable fitness, and all individuals in the same space are ranked in the same way. The only type of variable dynamics between individual genes and amongst generations of genes is competitive exclusion, i.e. the algorithms of the same niche compete to become members of the next generation. There is no concept of change in the mechanisms of selection, variation, reproduction of genetic algorithms over evolutionary time. The basic intuition of genetic and evolutionary algorithms follows the dominant intuition of natural evolution: by accumulating small random variations that incrementally improve fitness, best-adapted solutions progressively grow in the design of spatiality. Here the axiomatic order of the line establishes a set of simple rules out of which all complexity can reproduce. Is there any tortuous path, any anomaly, in such generative design of space? Since mutations are already contained in the genetic space of possibilities and within the phases of cumulative selection, changes in shape are here calculated possibilities. The mutations of the genetic algorithm are here mainly conceived as a sort of combinatorics of 0s and 1s positions. What such digital binary logic assumes is that nature like culture – natural environments as those constructed artificially with CAD – operates through a genetic-digital programming that contains in itself all possible solutions for the design of a new shape of chair. What if indeed genetic space did not coincide with the calculable positions of 0s and 1s? Algorithmic Symbiosis Dawkins’s model of the biomorph proposes a serial genetic algorithm – a set of finite instructions that can be executed a piece at a time on many different processing devices, and then put back together again at the end to get the correct result. Other models of evolution instead have focused on the activities of parallel algorithms entering a symbiotic alliance triggered by environmental variations. Serial algorithms are hierarchically arranged into a genetically related lineage through the gradual accumulation of random variations.26 On the contrary, parallel algorithms are nested into each other activities, trading Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 357 Parisi – Symbiotic Architecture 357 and distributing variations across milieus of interaction. Serial algorithms have a saturation point and a problem of memory space, whereas parallel algorithms allow simultaneous communication between different processors and the sharing of memory and message transmission. Parallel algorithms are distributing algorithms designed to work in cluster-arranged computing environments. Such algorithms are governed by a multiple agent system (MAS), which is a parallel computer system built from many very simple algorithms whose parallel communication leads not to the evolution of one algorithm or the other but to a new algorithmic behaviour. Ant colonies and bee swarms are examples of multiple agent systems working in parallel towards a shared goal. These are self-organizing systems that are not centrally guided by one set of instructions but grow out of parallel algorithmic processes. A parallel algorithm has also been defined as a symbiotic algorithm or cluster algorithms, working in parallel yet independently of any other clusters running in the system, building multiple and composite solutions to the same problem. The evolution of genetic algorithms is based on their local interactions with the environment. A symbiotic algorithm involves the joining together – the parasitism – of previously free-living entities into a new composite under certain conditions. Such a conception of symbiotic parasitism has been derived, amongst others, from Margulis’s (1992) serial endosymbiotic theory stating that the origin of multicellular organisms or eukaryotes is not explained by the cumulative selection of random mutations but by a symbiotic alliance between distinct colonies of bacteria engendering a novel cellular composite. For endosymbiosis, variations are the results of distinct yet parallel entities, each containing relatively large amounts of genetic material whose independent symbiotic roles remain active in the new composite. Whereas genetic – or serial – algorithms use a finite set of binary features or genes to track their evolution in a single lineage, where every individual gene has the same features which only change in value, the symbiotic algorithm entails the parallel processing of binary features which are neither contained in a single lineage nor inheritable in a filiative fashion. Rather the interdependence of the symbiotic algorithms points at a labyrinth in evolution. In evolutionary computation, the compositional – symbiotic – algorithm has many resonances with the ‘Building Block Hypothesis’ theorized by Holland (1975). However, symbiotic interdependency, as Watson and Pollack (2003) have recently argued, distinguishes compositional symbiosis from the ‘bottom up’ hypothesis. In particular, Watson and Pollack suggest that symbiotic interdependency accounts for a number of modules where the number of possibly maximal configurations for each module is low, and yet greater than one. Thus, the dimensionality of the system is reduced not to simple elements but to self-contained parts that can function on their own yet remain interdependent. Interdependent modular structures are hierarchically organized in clusters and subclusters. Far from being random, such modular dependencies Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 358 358 Theory, Culture & Society 26(2–3) show that the complex is not dependent on the simple. Rather, the configuration of a module is dependent on the configuration of other modules. This reduces the dimensionality of the search space for an algorithm entering in evolution with other entities regardless of their distance. As Barabási (2003) would say, the world indeed can be scale-free. Arguing against the fact that most quantities in nature follow a Bell Curve, a peaked distribution characterizing random networks around a homogeneous average, Barabási insists that network architectures follow the mathematical expression called ‘power law’, which is characterized by the absence of a peak (p. 67). In particular, he argues against random graph theory, which has dominated network theories by equating complexity with randomness. According to this theory, the formation of networks stems from a number of isolated nodes connected through randomly added links, through which a gigantic cluster of several nodes emerges. This conception of networks is based on an egalitarian model, according to which all nodes have approximately the same number of links. However, Barabási explains that his research on the distance between nodes has revealed that despite the millions of nodes, the web can be scale-free. Indeed, he argues that network architecture does not coincide with the geometries of Euclidean space (where each node occupies an individual place). Network phenomena such as clustering, he suggests, cannot be measured according to randomness. Clustering is a ubiquitous phenomenon cutting across levels of order – biological, social, economic – following the mathematical expression called ‘power law’, a continuously decreasing curve where many small events coexist with a few large events (Barabási, 2003: 70); the network entails not equal distribution of links but unevenness, where few clusters have many links. Barabási suggests that such power-law distributions characterize what he calls scale-free networks, non-centred modular organization accounting for independent but interlinked sub-networks that can coexist and cooperate. Similarly, the parallel or symbiotic algorithm suggests that modular interdependency is defined by the uneven symbiotic encapsulations of distinct entities – a symbiotic sex rather than the linearity of sexual or asexual reproduction. Whereas the genetic serial algorithm relies on the accumulation of hereditary material from parents to offspring, determined by half the genetic material from one parent and half the genetic material from a second parent, symbiotic encapsulation may simply take the sum of genetic material from both parents, a sum that is more than two, more than 0 and 1. Thus, symbiotic sex – or the infectious activities between parallel algorithms – points at the acquisition of genetic material without direct genetic transfer or filiation. According to Watson and Pollack (2003: 189–200), Symbiogenetic Evolutionary Adaptation Model algorithms (SEAM) show clearly that the concept of a module is not dependent on gene ordering in specific niches but on epistatic dependencies (i.e. the relationship among genes). This also implies a rethinking of the activity of Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 359 Parisi – Symbiotic Architecture 359 a natural selection which is directly influenced by the milieu-sensitivity of an entity and, thus, by its contingent capacity to enter an ecology of genetic relation. Endosymbiosis, however, is not concerned with the extension of simple genes towards the evolution of a complex form but with the parallel bacterial genomes forming clusters or information ecologies: architectures of infection. Rather than generating variation through the cumulative model of selection, symbiotic algorithms expose the primacy of multiple genomes entering in uneven, curving composition. The parallelism of symbiotic algorithms points at a relational dynamics in evolution where genetic populations are large numbers that occupy no fixed discrete locations. The parallel algorithm, therefore, may need to be rethought not simply in terms of modular organization. The conception of symbiogenetic modularity proposes the standardization of building material that allows fast assembling and disassembly of the autonomous parts that compose a modular home, for example.27 On the contrary, endosymbiotic parallelism may more importantly point to the mutational nature of the assemblage, an extended matrix of continual variation: the genetic deformation of the grid, the anomalous connection between unreachable milieus, the viral coactivities of differentiation, the topological continuities of discrete genomes. Whilst modularity more directly defines the retrospective link between pre-ordained parts that can be broken apart and brought back together in the same order, a symbiotic algorithm may instead be pushed to expose the mathematics of curves, the topological continuum between discrete clusters of numbers. In short, the primacy of relational movement or anomalous connection in extension. Dawkins’s model of the genetic algorithm functions according to the binary logic of digital communication – a cognitive model of computation – based on the probability function of a set of possibilities. On the contrary, the symbiogenetic algorithm exposes such digital logic of combinatorics to the vagueness of information milieus, a cloud of fuzzy numbers that cannot but be prehended. A symbiotic algorithm thus accounts for the curving of a spatio-temporal experience not simply as a result of the responsive interaction of the user with the software. Rather, the intrinsic implication of the symbiotic algorithm in computational design points at the fuzzy, tortuous qualities of the software population itself. In the next section, the symbiogenetic algorithm will be contextualized in the software design of blob and folding architecture, to argue that digital software expresses biomathematical features of extension defined by an experiential field of numerical continuities in discrete coding. Incomputable Architecture Since the early 1990s, the combination of mathematics, genetics and information technology has become central to architectural design. In particular, software has become a tool for the design of a responsive and evolutive environment bringing back movement in extension.28 Experiments in Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 360 360 Theory, Culture & Society 26(2–3) Figure 2 ‘Brunel Gateway’. Minimaforms, through an invitation from world renowned performance artist Stelarc, conceives of a threshold space suspended above an existing reflection pool as an exterior room and sanctuary. The structure is an open cell structure that operates as a perceptual framing device. Deployed in the open cell network are series of operable lenses that amplify and collapse the experiential relationships between the users and the context. With special thanks to Theodore Spyropoulos, minimaform.com parametric design have developed according to distinct tendencies. On the one hand, the geometric order of the line dominates designs of digital space by implementing a super-Euclidean modeling of spatio-temporal experience commanding a responsive behaviour implemented by the software architecture of ubiquitous media.29 On the other, such experiments have turned away from the Euclidean order towards the possibility of including environmental variations in the system now open to the anomalies of a fuzzy logic.30 As opposed to the focus on the evolution of complex form from simple genetic instructions within a digitally rendered Euclidean space, a new conception of extension based on the centrality of variability has entered software architecture: ‘no geometry of complexity and morphology resulting from an epigenetic process can be fully Euclidean or elementary’. It is up to relations to produce the elements, not the other way around. ‘Variability comes before elementarity’ (Spuybroek, 2004: 11). Variability in extension challenges the Cartesian ideal geometry of exact coordinates. Amongst many experimental designers aiming at including variations and parallel algorithmic calculations in software, architect Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 361 Parisi – Symbiotic Architecture 361 Greg Lynn (1999) has pioneered modes of articulating movement and force in the software design of space. Lynn does not use software for rendering and visualizing data, but according to its material capacities to design flexible, mutable, differential spatiality. Unlike the use of software to implement a generation of prototypes that randomly vary up to reaching a threshold of cumulative selection, Lynn (1999: 18) suggests that the veritable challenge of software design can only result from the assemblage of independent interactive variables, parallel algorithms able to influence one another through their potential activities. Here the Euclidean grid of isolated positions summed up to one another according to the logic of the line deprived of any force and time, represented by steady-state equations, is contrasted with the Leibnizian geometric curving of the world instantiated by the conception of the monad, infinitesimal habitats converging and diverging in a point of view, which resembles less an exact mathematical point and more a vectorial flow, the continuation or diffusion of the point (Deleuze, 1993: 23). Lynn (1999: 15) takes the monad to be an integral calculus of variables, at once a mathematical singularity and an infinitesimal, incalculable, differential multiplicity.31 Contrary to Descartes, Lynn highlights, Leibniz’s integral calculus – the calculus of coexistent variables – defines the monadic conception of objects in space, based not on the bifurcation of force from matter but on the dynamics of a gravitational field defined by the movement of masses in space, or vectors entering in a mobile balance with one another. Digital animation, according to Lynn, needs to be rethought in the context of a Leibnizian mathematics of differential forces and motion that accounts for variability in spatial design (1999: 16). Lynn draws on Leibniz’s study of differential calculus32 to express the centrality of time, motion and force in architecture, the point at which the tangent crosses the curve. A point-fold, as Deleuze calls it (1993: 14), or enveloped time, where the straight line is always a curve, a nondimensional point of conjunction of vectors, a real yet inexact quantity, an intensive degree of differentiation. Only random, irregular, complex equation can calculate the irrational numbers of the curve, the limit of the relation between two quantities – exact points – that vanish into the curve. The irrational number implies the descent of a circular arc on the straight line of rational points, and exposes the latter as a false infinity, a simple undefinite that includes an infinite of lacunae. . . . The straight line always has to be intermingled with curved lines. (Deleuze 1993: 17) The calculation of infinitesimals (infinitely small numbers) defines continuous relationality between the smallest quantities, a continuity to be found in the evanescent quantity, which retains the character of what is disappearing – a virtual residue. Recently, mathematician Gregory Chaitin has re-addressed the question of the differential calculus in his algorithmic information theory, suggesting that the string of bits running between 0 and 1 corresponds not to a calculable number but to a random, irreducible, structureless Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 362 362 Theory, Culture & Society 26(2–3) quantity.33 Randomness is here understood as maximum entropy, something that cannot be compressed. Since randomness has no pattern or structure, Chaitin argues, it has to be understood as ‘a thing in itself”, an irreducible quantity. Chaitin defines such an incompressible quantity as the number: an infinitely long and utterly incalculable number made of gaping holes, a number maximally unknowable (2005: 129; 143). It is impossible to calculate the value of digit-by-digit, or bit-by-bit, in binary codes. Chaitin affirms that these digits, written in decimal, coincide with a number between zero and one: a decimal point followed by a lot of digits going on forever. Whilst the number is perfectly well defined mathematically, the digits in the decimal expansion of this real number (i.e. a number like 3.1415926 . . .) cannot be determined. Every one of these digits spans between 0 and 9, but it is impossible to know what it is, since the digits are accidental, random (2005: 105–6). The incomputable cipher defined by Chaitin re-introduces a sort of randomness into the scene of evolutive mathematics. However, Chaitin (1979) defines randomness not in terms of an empty space between nodes – a space of equally distributed information – but rather as a full, densely packed zone of information. In short, this mathematical interval between zero and one is neither a discrete number nor a void, but is an intensive quantity defined by an intrinsic numerical variability, which remains computationally open in relation to the configuring constrains of an inexact cipher. Similarly, Lynn (1999: 25) explains that the mathematics of animation software is based on the un-compressibility of the infinitely small interval, a dynamic space full of information defining a differential equation with more than two interacting components, such as velocity, direction, and temporality of each vector. The interval defines a relational space pregnant with information populated by infinitesimal variations, qualitative transformations of the form-matter relation. According to Cache, each singular and distinctive point is a geometric point of inflection, an infinite curvature of digits where numbers move in opposite directions. Inflection is ‘the true atom of form, the true object of geography’ (Lynn, 1999: 40), the slopes and the oblique gradients of hills and valleys rather than the ground of basins. This conception of continual variations in extension has been central to the study of the flexible grid or ‘rubber math’ described by the biomathematician D’Arcy Thompson (1961; Lynn, 2004b: 38–41). In his writings, he analyses variations in the morphology of animals using deformable grids, which yield curvilinear lines due to changes in form.34 He compares the curvature of deformations in formal configurations to the curvature of statistical data, such as speed, and weight and gradient forces, such as temperature. He then concludes that these variable deformations are instances of discontinuous morphological development. Through a concept of variable grid, D’Arcy Thompson develops a mathematic of species rooted in dynamical sets of geometric relations. Indeed, deformations are not simply derived from a given form but from a continuous relationality between internal and external forces. Here the accident is understood as the continual deformation or destratification of the species, Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 363 Parisi – Symbiotic Architecture 363 directly constrained by the un-computable relationality: a point of inflection, the curling of the line between the inside and the outside; an accident constrained by inflection. Contrary to neo-Darwinian genecentrism, Thompson believes that genetic information is unable to fully specify the generation of form. Rather, form can only result from the microactivities of the environment (natural forces), which can be described with the mathematical laws of differential calculus. Thompson finds such laws in the geometric shapes of shells and sponges, which cannot be explained by genetics, i.e. genetic inheritance and random mutations. He affirms that evolution is not governed by natural selection but, more importantly, by the variable constrains and parameters within which organisms develop certain limits that channel animal forms into particular patterns which are constantly repeated across the phyla. For example, he argues that the shape that droplets of viscous liquid take when dropped into water is virtually the same as the medusa forms of jellyfish. And yet such a convergence of form is not accidental. Indeed, this accident is fundamentally constrained by the physics of moving fluids described in the equations of fluid mechanics. Thompson points at a concept of mobile stability between divergent series of internal and external forces. Lynn draws on Thompson to address the nature of geometrical folds, a supple geometry that enables the object to bend under external forces whilst folding those forces within (Lynn, 2004a: 28). This is the topology of curving and not segmenting line, expressing the movement of folding and unfolding between distinct levels of interiority and exteriority. D’Arcy Thompson’s speculations on the deformation of types suggest a topological rather than a modular evolution of shapes: a bending architecture evincing the capacities of algorithms to infinitely curve in symbiotic accord with the gradient variations of the environment. Singular intricate knots are not simply reproducible in the fashion of modular typologies – the complexification of types – insofar as the ecological conditions of reproduction are constrained by the infinitesimal accidents of inflection. In digital architecture, such topo-ecology is described with a notion of developmental landscape, defining the space within which organisms evolve and replacing the notion of fixed types organized in phylogenetic trees. This model of developmental landscape has also been discussed in terms of a fitness landscape: a surface that represents an external environment across which a facetted sphere rolls (Lynn, 1999: 28–32). The facetted sphere expresses the organism with its own internal constraints, whilst the landscape stands for its potential pathways of development. A landscape becomes a field where a small vectorial change is distributed smoothly across a surface so that its influence cannot be localized at any discrete point. Slow and fast movement is built into the landscape surface through hills and valleys. Yet the mobilization of space is not derived from a direct action of objects but is imbued in the environment itself; the potential for movement is enveloped in extension. The movement of an object across a landscape then entails the intersection of its initial direction, speed, elasticity, density and friction doubled with the inflections of the landscape Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 364 364 Theory, Culture & Society 26(2–3) across which it is traveling. It is not that the object performs movement. Rather, the landscape can initiate movement across itself without literally requiring any motion on behalf of the object. The inflections of an environment are then gradient slopes enfolded into its own geological stratification. Surfaces are not simply horizontal, not merely composed of pieces stitched together alongside a trajectory tending at infinitum. Surfaces then do not constitute a ground. On the contrary, surfaces are themselves points of inflections, folds that are of an oblique nature, already imbued with motion through an intrinsic propensity of space to movement. These surfaces are not an empty space but microbodies full of dens where virtual force and motion are stored. From this standpoint, the notion of fitness landscape defines not an environment for the selection of best-adapted organisms but a field of residual potentials housed by the slopes of inflecting surfaces-bodies ready to propel movement again. In digital-generative design, the breeding of topo-ecological surfaces corresponds not exclusively to a combinatorics of codes – discrete quantities. Rather, it exposes the realities of the curvature in fuzzy numbers, the incompressible qualities of gradients where extension becomes inflection or infection: active and passive parasitic forces mark the obliqueness of the environment, never reaching a point of equilibrium insofar as these are governed by a mobile stability, directed by vectors of attraction and repulsion. Such multiplex assemblages of potential residue have been incorporated in Lynn’s experimental designs of blobs: warped kinematic spaces (2004b: 157–67).35 Blob surfaces are held together by their mutual capacity to infect one another and compose symbiotic assemblages. The blob is not topographically specific but is specific to its topological evolutive environment, which remains irreducible to one form or another. Lynn understands blobs as monads equipped with internal forces of attraction and mass. ‘A blob has a centre, a surface area, a mass relative to other objects, and a field of influence: i.e., the relational zone within which the blob will fuse with or will be inflected by another blob’ (1999: 30). Blobs are objectiles defined by relations of proximities that enable them to redefine their respective surfaces based on particular gravitational properties or fuse into one contiguous surface defined by the interactions of their respective zones of inflection. The blob is not an entity shaped by its internal genetics but remains open to the gradients of the relational field that compose its different configurations. It is not the variation of the same genetic instructions to generate new spatial configurations of an object. The potential to acquire different configurations is embedded in miniscule gradients – infinitesimal variations, or intensive quantities, of speed, temperature, and pressure of a symbiotic environment, mapping an entire ecology of coexistent milieus of information. A blob architecture, in other words, has more in common with an endosymbiotic conception of evolution than a generative model of evolutionary types. In particular, it is possible to suggest that the parallel algorithms at work in the design of a blob architecture coincide with Lynn Margulis’s Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 365 Parisi – Symbiotic Architecture 365 evolutionary process of assemblages, where no single body can remain in royal isolation from the parasitic architectures of bacteria. A bacterial metametazoic environment, according to Sagan, characterizes evolution as a series of intricate eco-systems replacing the gradual evolution from simple to complex form with symbiotic parasitism, where the host and the guest become accomplices in the production of intricate ecologies (Sagan, 1992: 378–9). Here the environment is not a typographic ground occupied by an organism that gradually evolves through random mutation and cumulative selection. The environment is not a static ground, but a veritable mobile house. Like the snail carrying the house on its back, the environment is continuously being moved by a series of epigenetic relationships where the outside is enfolded within the movement of an extended continuum. Similarly, blob architecture proposes a non-modular concept of extension, an incomputable pack of numbers: open-endedness in digital calculations, turning limit points into a continuum of complex numbers. This is a continuum of slimy residue that connects things together: an infectious extension in the infinitesimal populations of numbers glued to each other, a stealthy building of anomalous socialities. Here the status of the object and the subject is rethought in terms of vectors of a curve. From a series of inflections a line is distinguished as a place, a site, a point of view. Far from the ocularcentric tradition that equates the point of view with a pregiven subject or that assigns to an object a fixed position, the subject here is defined by ‘what remains in the point of view’, the virtual residue of inflection. Similarly, the object is an objectile virtually coexisting with an infinitesimal numbers of objects, which transform in relation to the variable positions of the subject. The latter, as Deleuze drawing on Whitehead affirms, is less a sub-ject than a super-ject: ‘a point of view on variation’ marking the conditions in which ‘the subject apprehends a variation’ (Deleuze, 1993: 19–23). From the continuity of infinitesimal variations – incompressible into a discrete set – to the discontinuity of the viewpoint, a new conception of extension as ‘continuous repetition’ of the point of view is made possible by a multiplicity of enveloped inflections. An extensive continuum remains uninterrupted by the disjunctions and conjunctions of the lines: a mathematical, topo-ecological continuum in the minute perception of microbodies. Leibniz’s differential calculus cannot be disentangled from the activities and passivities of microperceptions housed by an entity-thing-actor, no matter how small, how inorganic, it is: tiny folds probing in every direction, vibrations under the skin, passages through states resonating across all layers of perception (Deleuze, 1993: 86–90). Digital/generative architecture is not exclusively concerned with the modular evolution of forms, determined by the Euclidean spatio-temporal parameters, but also with incomputable chance – the unstructured cipher – in the digital calculation of parallel forces, gradients, motions, temporalities. However, such irreducible complexity entails the primacy of an infectious relation of the tiniest bodies. In short, as argued in the next section, Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 366 366 Theory, Culture & Society 26(2–3) the symbiotic nature of space, the flexibility, elasticity, malleability of geometrical forms instantiated by a mathematic of discontinuous continuity, needs to account for the experience of relations. If architectural form has to move beyond the sterile evolution of algorithms in Newtonian space, the experience of the distinct levels of the abstract and the concrete has to be explained. Felt Spatium Blob architectures borrow from the digital calculations of spatial evolution not simply the combinatorics of 0s and 1s but, more importantly for us, the infinitesimal variations of curving lines linking 0 and 1, where a multisymbiotic enmeshing of surfaces engenders the grid. Like the quantum bit36 – or qubit – the symbiotic algorithm defines not one state or another (0 or 1) but encompasses at once 0 and 1: a quantum entanglement. The digital animation of such parallel surfaces works not to imitate the spatio-temporal growth of form, a sort of digitalization of natural evolution. Such animation indeed probes into the relational capacities of minimal units of information, not ultimate atoms ‘but miniscule folds that are endlessly unfurling and bending on the edges of juxtaposed areas, like a mist of fold that makes their surface sparkle, at speeds that no one of our thresholds of consciousness could sustain in a normal state’ (Deleuze, 1993: 93). Here software is not a mere tool for design, since as a tool it implies an experiential zone for the quasi-imperceptible activities of minute percepts, the obscure dust of the world, drawn into clarity by their variable relations. An entire process of continual relation between micropercepts and perceptions – nonsensuous and sensuous prehensions – draws the curvature of felt thought, a thought that is felt. Arguing against the primary function of sensory perception as defined by Hume, whereby the world is perceived in distinct objects, here and now, Whitehead points out that perception cannot be ‘divested of its affective tone’, ‘its character of a concern’. In other words, sense-perception is entangled to non-sensuous or conceptual prehension: the continuum of the immediacy of the past in the immediacy of the present. Non-sensuous prehensions define the activity of feeling continuity in discontinuity (Whitehead, 1933: 180–1). Non-sensuous or conceptual prehensions are neither sensory responses nor cognitive reflections, but expose the activities of thought at all levels of nature. Greg Lynn points out that the differential calculus remains central to the software activity of designing spatio-temporal variations as embedded in an environment of algorithmic computations open to the fuzzy logic of incomputable qualities. Yet one could push this argument further and suggest that the qualities of the differential calculus in software define not solely the centrality of fuzzy numbers – incomputable quantities – in the symbiogenetic evolution of the architectural form but, more importantly, expose the ‘psychic mechanism of perception, the automatism that at once and inseparably plunges into obscurity and determines clarity’ (Deleuze, 1993: 90). In other words, symbiogenetic algorithms in software Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 367 Parisi – Symbiotic Architecture 367 architecture are not definable in royal isolation from the dark activities of matter, the dusty percepts, and the incomputable thoughts adding new curves in the continual extension of spatio-temporal experiences. We have seen that the digital metaphysics of a discrete mathematical universe able to explain all complexity out of simple, elegant axiomatic rules, as those implemented in architectural design with the genetic algorithm, is never simply – or exclusively – an ultimate matter of combining binary probabilities resulting in a computable-cognitive equation. Chaitin’s incomputable algorithm suggests that there is mathematical extensiveness between actual codes containing too much information – a chaotic fuzziness – indivisible in an exact set of equations. Such extension is not determined by the void, since emptiness is only perceived as such from the point of view of clarity, of remarkable and distinguished perceptions, while remaining populated by fuzzy obscurities, the infinitesimal chaos of minute percepts. This leads us to define not a digital architecture of form, the clear genetics of form – an axiomatic digitality in perception, as the ultimate transparency of mathematical formulations devoid of incomputable darkness. Digital architecture, and its extension in the design of contemporary media culture, may need to include the perceptual experience of extensive continuity, the vagueness of minute percepts. This is an hallucinatory perception ready to grasp ‘the haze of dust without object’ out of which form emerges and soon falls back into it, in a flick of a second, which is long enough for an abstract incomputable extension to be minutely prehended (Deleuze, 1993: 94). But what exactly are these minute perceptions, which do not cease to expose each perception to hallucination? As Whitehead would suggest, hallucinations derive from the vibrations of matter contracted by all sorts of organs of perceptions, enveloping incalculable dust into distinct clear form. In other words, the calculus is split into two causalities corresponding to two parallel symbiotically nested computations. These correspond to two inseparable yet distinguished faces of the calculus: ‘one relates to the psycho-metaphysical mechanism of perception, and the other to the psycho-organic mechanism of excitation or impulsion’ (Deleuze, 1993: 97). The differential calculus therefore entails the infective relation between mental and physical realities: minute perceptions are minute entitiesthings-actors defined by the communication of movement through receptive organs distributed everywhere in nature. Thus, what is perceived is not disentangled from what happens to a body, and the latter exists in no royal isolation from what happens to abstract extension. If the modification of objects in digital architecture has so far utilized the differential calculus to expose the infinitesimal variations of an environment of dens and slopes (storing virtualities, force and motion), then it may be useful to ask a few questions: which clear perceptions does the differential calculus select from minute obscure percepts? Which states of hallucination does digital design entail? Which kinds of communication and propagation of physical movement does it imply? In short, what are the Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 368 368 Theory, Culture & Society 26(2–3) physical and mental affective states enveloped in an architecture of symbiotic extension that does not depend on a subject (prehending) or an object (prehended)? What is the surplus value of code in digital architecture? What does digital extension add to the abstract concreteness of an extensive continuum? What kinds of prehensive events does it deploy? Whitehead’s concern with the relation between extension and prehensive extension points out that extension is required by process (1978: 67–8). In other words, extension is implicated into an intensive spatium of virtual spatio-temporal coordinates directly experienced as prehended in the immediacy of the past in the present. Yet while process is not in the digital processing, the infinitesimal divisions of such processing are indeed involved in a relationship of extensiveness, which necessarily entails activities of microperceptions, at once sensuous and nonsensuous, physical and mental. Lynn’s design of Port Authority Gateway, for example, has modeled the site as a gradient field of forces simulating the movement of pedestrians, cars, and buses at varying speeds (1999: 103–19). The final design of the Gateway has been derived from a software field of forces that already includes the interactivities of distinct components of movement. The breakdown of these components into geometrical particles that would change shapes and positions has enabled the study of singular cycles of movement over a period of time. The generative capacities of extension are here imbued in the design process itself deducted from a relational field of micropercepts. Here the speed and slowness of variable interactions construct an architecture of infection: an experiential mutation of levels of relations between the abstract and the concrete. The qualitative nature of the epochal tensions between the line and the curve in the ambience of digital culture is thus evinced by the surplus value of the code. The surplus is defined by its relational capacities in the field of influence of all kinds of micropercepts, defying privileged points of orientation and exposing the propensity of movement in the software itself as an associative milieu of calculations, the numbering numbers of differential relations. It could be argued that this kind of digital architecture is mainly concerned with the software rendering of form and not with experiential relationality, and with sensory-motor interactivity where touching a wall coincides with the sensory reception and not with the inventive process of prehensions, for example. Yet it would be misleading to overlook the subtle persistence of prehensive events (mental and physical) caught up in the darkness of minute activities exceeding both sensory-motor responses and mental recognition. Such events operate in the overload zones of too much information: the incomputable extension of Omega, the supple spatio-temporal curvatures pressing against the cortex of cognition, suspending all channels of sensory perception, melting the body into throbbing microbodies of an extensive continuum. Here the locality of relations is each time engendered by the speeds and slowness of past vectors and Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 369 Parisi – Symbiotic Architecture 369 vectors to come. To overlook these zones of tiny inflection-infection is to deny that experience occurs in the interstices of macroperception, that socialities are built in the intramaterialities of an entity-thing-actor no matter how small, how inorganic. Digital architecture does not simply reduce the relational event to binary processing. On the contrary, it has been argued here that coded spatiality is infected with incomputable quantities, spatio-temporal anomalies in experiential thought entering the everyday through the symbiotic dependencies with nonsensuous worlds. Notes 1. Pask also designed an early system, ‘Musicolour’ (1953), which drove an array of lights that adapted to a musician’s performance. Later, in 1956, he devised the SAKI, a ‘self-adaptive keyboard instructor’ which remains the world’s first adaptive teaching system to go into commercial production (Frazer, 2001). Images of the musicolour can be found at http://www.interactivearchitecture.org/2008/03 (accessed 20 March 2008). 2. Sensity artworks entail a collection of data across the urban environment. Through the installation of a network of sensors, some fixed and some embedded, sense data is gathered and then published online. The sensors then interpret the micro-data of the interactive city. The output from the sensors displays the emotional state of the city online and the information will be used to create installations and sculptural artifacts. All the documentation for the Sensity project, 2004–7, can be found at http://www.stanza.co.uk/sensity/index.html#Sensity (accessed 20 March 2008). 3. This debate can be traced back to the Architectural Design issue edited by Greg Lynn, ‘Folding in Architecture’ (1993), when questions about Euclidean and nonEuclidean architectures allowed by computer-based design started to most explicitly characterize the transformations in conceptions of geometric space. 4. See Antonio Sant’ Elia, ‘Manifesto for Futurist Architecture’, at http://www. unknown.nu/futurism/architecture.html (accessed 30 August 2008). 5. This concept was first introduced by Negroponte and his MIT group at the MIT Media Lab, which was followed by the publication of Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment (1970). 6. In ‘The City of Tomorrow’ (1998 [1924]), Le Corbusier argues that a modern city must live by the straight line, eliminating the chaos of the streets, the conglomerate of different architectural styles. He maintains that ‘[t]he curve is ruinous, difficult and dangerous; it is a paralysing thing. The straight line enters into all human history, into all human aim’ (1998: 45). And furthermore: ‘[m]an walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going’. The straight road is ‘sane and noble’. The winding road, on the other hand, is the result of a ‘happygo-lucky heedlessness’ and ‘animality’ (p. 47). 7. Archigram’s ‘Instant City’ (1968–70) is a floating web of balloons that could be grafted onto existing structures to make a new portable city. 8. Amongst many examples of interactive media architecture, minimaforms’ project ‘Becoming Animal’ points at the centrality of movement, participation and conversation for the production of an interactive environment. The project explores the Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 370 370 Theory, Culture & Society 26(2–3) story of the mythical three-headed beast Kerberos, guardian of the underworld. Each participant’s presence stimulates the three heads of Kerberos by triggering behaviour-based interactions and exchanges. Interactions are expressed through sounds, facial expressions and general activity of Kerberos. The images used in this article are courtesy of Theodore Spyropoulos, director of minimaforms (www.minimaforms.com). 9. On metabolist projects, including Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, see http://www.kisho.co.jp/page.php/209 and archrecord.construction.com (accessed 30 August 2008). 10. Moving beyond the biomorphic model toward a more organic model of spacetime, architect Isozaki emphasized the need to consider diverse forces in order to foster true complexity. Isozaki’s architecture wanted to move beyond the linear and teleological view of growth at the core of the metabolist model of the city towards a vitalist organicism of dynamic complexity (see Asada, 1998). 11. Chanéac’s ‘Prototype de Cellule Polyvalente’ and other examples can be found at http://www.frac-entre.fr/public/actioncl/pdf/dossier_mobilite.pdf (accessed 30 August 2008). 12. Pascal Hausermann, Jean-Louis Chanéac and Antti Lovag were part of this movement promoting the concept of the ‘egg house’, enabling the dwelling to adapt to its inhabitants, who will direct the extension or combinations of cells – an architecture that evolves through free aggregation, interconnection and juxtaposition of elements that fit together to form an inhabitable whole (Allison et al., 2006: 296). 13. It is important to remark that Gibson’s concept of cyberspace was famously adapted by the architectural vision of the early 1990s cybernetic culture (Benedikt, 1991). 14. In Dawns, the first book of the trilogy Xenogenesis, Octavia Butler describes the Oankali’s genetic engineering techniques of evolution, exploiting the extremely infectious nature of genetic codes. The entire architecture of such engineered nature is a lab of genetic experimentation ruled by the promiscuity of codes exceeding the program of numbered probabilities via their residual potential to be combined anew. The engineered environments of the Oankali are governed not by new stochastic calculations of a binary code – in other words, a set of delimited probabilities, but by the milieus of connectedness of the code – its approximate proximities, the associative numbering zone of all numbered codes (Butler, 1987). 15. For the historical formation of the concept of non-standard architecture see Allison et al. (2006: 17–20). 16. Examples of Greg Lynn’s blob design can be found at http://www.glform.com/ and at http://www.glform.com/blobwall.html (accessed 30 August 2008). 17. Tony Sampson and Jussi Parikka have both in different ways argued that the Universal Turing Machine can be rethought as a Universal Viral Machine. Drawing on the research on computer viruses carried out by Cohen, they argue for viral evolution as a means of computation (Parikka, 2005; Sampson, 2004). 18. For further insights into this argument see Parikka (2005) and Fuller (2005). 19. As Massumi states, ‘Doesn’t topological design method digitally repeat what our bodies do non-computationally as we make way to and from our workstation? Then when we watch the program run, aren’t we doing it again, slumped before the Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 371 Parisi – Symbiotic Architecture 371 screen? Are we not immobily repeating our body’s ability to extract form from movement?’ (2005: 183). 20. A biofilm is a complex aggregation of microorganisms marked by the excretion of a protective and adhesive matrix. Biofilms are also characterized by surface attachment, structural heterogeneity, genetic diversity, complex community interactions or an extracellular matrix of polymeric substances (see Bassler, 1999; Greenberg, 2003). For the architectural shapes of biofilms, see http://www.ebiophysics.com/ biological_tissue/Biofilm.gif and bacteria-world.com (accessed 30 August 2008). 21. Dawkins’s genecentric view of evolution is extensively discussed through the concepts of the ‘selfish gene’ and the ‘extended phenotype’, proposing that the organism and the environment act as the hosts – or vehicles – of a microlevel of evolution driven by genetic replication (Dawkins, 1976). 22. As Dawkins specifies: ‘the computer starts by drawing a single vertical line. Then the line branches into two. Then each of the branches splits into two subbranches and so on. It is recursive because the same model is applied locally all over the growing tree’ (1986: 51). 23. Conway’s ‘Game of Life’ works according to a similar principle of evolutionary computation. See the online example at http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/ (accessed 20 December 2006). 24. One of the best known artists in this field is William Latham who, together with Stephen Todd and the IBM research team, generated very complex and organic looking 3D images and animations. 25. On the use of the biomorph model in architectural design, see Celestino Sodou’s rapid prototyping realization: http://www.celestinosoddu.com/rp/RP_ arch.htm; http://www.celestinosoddu.com/rp/RP_chairs.htm http://www.celestinos oddu.com/design/soddurings1.htm (accessed 20 November 2006). 26. On the use of generative algorithms in architecture see John Frazer’s online book and animations, An Evolutionary Architecture, at: http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/ publications/ea/exhibition.html (accessed 30 August 2008). 27. A modular home is simply a home built to local building codes in a controlled, environmentally protected building centre using precise and efficient construction technology. For examples of modular homes see www.modular-homes.us 28. Auto CAD, 3D Max, Maya, Rhino and Adobe Photoshop are the most common software now used as architectural tools to perform procedures such as streaming, scripting, automation and interaction. 29. Such software implementation can be found in the digitalization of media across distinct platforms, from mobile phones to online TV. The ubiquitous conception of media as anticipated in the 1960s by Mark Weiser’s view of ubiquitous computing, also defined as the coming age of calm technology, leads to an architectural design of direct stimulus, whereby the user is predisposed to respond to computational instructions. 30. Most recent examples of parametric design including the continual variability of local settings in urban modelling have been central to the projects-experiments carried out by the group Minimaforms at http://www.minimaforms.com and by the AA DRL Design Research LAB www.aadrl.net. In particular, Minimaforms’ project ‘Brunel Gateway’ explains how the algorithmic architecture of a threshold space becomes an open cell structure that operates as a perceptual framing device. Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 372 372 Theory, Culture & Society 26(2–3) Minimaforms here conceives of space as an open cell network, where series of operable lenses amplify and collapse the experiential relationships between the users and the context. 31. Bernard Cache explains the notion of singularity: ‘In mathematics, what is said to be singular is not a given point, but rather a set of points on a given curve. A point is not singular; it becomes singularised on a continuum. . . . We will retain two types of singularity. On the one hand, there are the extrema, the maximum and the minimum on a given curve. And on the other there are those singular points that, in relation to the extrema, figure as in-betweens. These are points of inflection . . . defined only by themselves’ (Cache, 1995: 16). 32. Calculus is built on two major complementary ideas, both of which rely critically on the concept of limits. Differential calculus analyses the instantaneous rate of change of quantities, and the local behaviour of functions, a slope, for example, of a function’s graph. Integral calculus looks at the accumulation of quantities, such as areas under a curve, linear distance traveled or volume displaced. These two processes are said to act inversely to each other by the fundamental theorem of calculus. 33. Chaitin’s notion of algorithmic randomness aims to re-address Turing’s concept that a computer is a mathematical concept that never makes mistakes. Whilst being always finite, its calculations can go on as long as it has to. After Turing stipulated this idea, von Neumann added that time needed to carry out the calculation – the complexity of computation – had to become central to the study of information. However, Chaitin suggests that rather than time, the question to be addressed for complex computation is the size of computer programs. He directly derives the importance of size from 19th-century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who coined the notion of entropy, which is the measure of randomness (how disordered or chaotic a physical system is). In Boltzmann statistical mechanics, contrary to classical physics, there is a difference between going backward and forward, the arrow of time of the past and the future. For Boltzmann’s theory, there is a tendency of entropy to increase: systems increasingly get disordered. Chaitin draws on Boltzmann’s problem of increasing entropy to argue that the size of computer programs is very similar to this notion of the degree of disorder of a physical system. Entropy and program-size complexity are closely related (Chaitin, 2005: 56–85). 34. Thompson’s shape variations defined by a grid in movement can be found at http://www-groups.dcs.st-nd.ac.uk/~history/Miscellaneous/darcy.html (accessed 30 August 2008). 35. For more information on Lynn’s blob architecture see http://www.glform.com. 36. The comparison between a symbiotic and a quantum algorithm is of crucial relevance here. This point, however, cannot be adequately discussed in this article and will be the object of further research. On recent discussions on the quantum bit see Collins (2005). References Allison, J., M.J. Brayer, F. Migayrou and N. Spiller (2006) Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson. Asada, A. (1998) ‘Beyond the Biomorphic’, Emerging Complexities Symposium, Columbia University (USA). http://www.geocities.com/medit1976b2/isozaki2.htm (accessed 19 March 2008). Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 373 Parisi – Symbiotic Architecture 373 Barabási, Albert-Laszlo (2003) Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means. New York: Plume. Bassler, B.L. (1999) ‘How Bacteria Talk to Each Other: Regulation of Gene Expression by Quorum Sensing’, Current Opinion in Microbiology 2(6): 582–7. Benedikt, M. (ed.) (1991) Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Butler, O. (1987) Dawns, Xenogenesis. New York: Popular Library Cache, B. (1995) Earth Moves. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chaitin, G. (1979) ‘Toward a Mathematical Definition of Life’, pp. 477–98 in R.D. Levine and M. Tribus (eds) The Maximum Entropy Formalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chaitin, G. (2005) MetaMaths: The Quest for Omega. London: Atlantic Books. Collins, G. P. (2005) ‘Quantum Bug’, Scientific American (17 October), available at http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&collD=000D4372 (accessed 20 December 2007). Conway, J.H. (1970) ‘Game of Life’, URL (accessed 20 December 2007): http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/ Cook, P. (1999) Archigram. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press. Dawkins, R. (1976) The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dawkins, R. (1986) The Blind Watchmaker. New York: W.W. Norton. Delanda, M. (1998) ‘Virtual Environment and the Emergence of Synthetic Reason’, URL (accessed 30 March 2008): http://www.t0.or.at/delanda.htm Deleuze, G. (1993) The Fold. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Frazer, J.H. (2001) ‘The Cybernetics of Architecture: A Tribute to the Contribution of Gordon’, Kybernetes: The International Journal of Systems & Cybernetics 30(5/6): 641–51. Fuller, M. (2005) Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gibson, W. (1984) Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books. Greenberg, E.P. (2003) ‘Tiny Teamwork’, Nature 424(10 July): 134–40. Hansen, M. (2004) New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Holland, J. (1975) Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. James, W. (1901) ‘A World of Pure Experience’, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 1: 533–43, 561–70. Kurokawa, K. (1977) Metabolism in Architecture. London: Studio Vista. Kwinter, S. (2002) Architectures of Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Clarendon. Latham, W. (1993) ‘Biogenesis: Artificial Life in Computer Space’, Computer Art Film, Arts Council/Channel 4. Le Corbusier (1998 [1924]) ‘The City of To-morrow’, Essential Le Corbusier: L’Esprit Nouveau Articles. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lynn, G. (1999) Animate Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press. Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016

346-374 103121 Parisi (D):156x234mm 29/04/2009 15:52 Page 374 374 Theory, Culture & Society 26(2–3) Lynn, G. (2004a) Folding in Architecture. New York: Wiley and Sons. Lynn, G. (2004b) Folds, Bodies, and Blobs. Brussels: Books-By-Architects. Margulis, L. (1992) Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Microbial Communities in the Archean and Proterozoic Eons. New York: W.H. Freeman. Massumi, B. (2005) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Negroponte, N. (1970) Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Parikka, J. (2005) ‘The Universal Viral Machine: Bits, Parasite and the Media Ecology of Network Culture’, CTheory, 1000 Days of Theory: td029 (December), URL (accessed 16 March 2008): http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=500 Sampson, T. (2004) ‘A Virus in Info-Space’ M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7 July, URL http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/07 Sampson.php (accessed 20 January 2007). Sagan, D. (1992) ‘Metametazoa: Biology and Multiplicity’, pp. 378–9 in J. Crary and S. Kwinter (eds) Incorporation. New York: Urzone. Sensity Project (2004–7) URL (accessed 20 March 2008): http://www.stanza.co.uk/ sensity/index.html#Sensity Sodou, C. (n.d.) ‘Generative Architecture’, URLs (accessed 20 March 2008): http://www.celestinosoddu.com/rp/RP_arch.htm; http://www.celestinosoddu.com/rp/RP_ chairs.htm http://www.celestinosoddu.com/design/soddurings1.htm Spuybroek, L. (2004) Nox. Machinic Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson. Thompson, D. (1961) On Growth and Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watson, R.A. and J.B. Pollack (2003) ‘A Computational Model of Symbiotic Composition in Evolutionary Transitions’, Biosystems 69(2–3): 187–209, URL (accessed 28 February 2008): http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/papers/biosystems_scet.pdf Whitehead, A.N. (1933) Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press. Whitehead, A.N. (1978) Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press. Whitehead, A.N. (2004) Concept of Nature. New York: Prometheus Books. Luciana Parisi is the convenor of MA Interactive Media at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has published various articles on the relation between science, technology and the ontogenetic dimensions of evolution in nature, culture and capitalism. Her research has also focused on the impact of biotechnologies on the concepts of the body, sex, femininity and desire. In 2004 she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum Press). She is currently working on generative or soft architecture in relation to perceptive and affective space. [email: l.parisi@gold. ac.uk] Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on September 28, 2016