[courses]

(Some) Matter Calculates (Other) Matter: Seminar on the Philsophy of Pervasive Computing, SCI_Arc

[05.2008]

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FK: Silicon is nature! Silicon is nature calculating itself. If you leave out
the part of engineers who write little structures on silicon you see one part
of matter calculating the rest of matter.

“(Some) Matter Calculates (Other) Matter”:
Seminar on the Philsophical Foundations of Pervasive Computation, Ecological Modeling ?and the Revised Scale of the Architectural Assignment.

Benjamin H. Bratton, benjaminbratton@gmail.com
SCI_Arc, Southern California Institute of Architecture
Summer 2008, HUM3

Scenario: At some point in the near future, due to advances in the scale and cost-of-production of intensively intelligent computational sensors, we will be able to monitor, calculate and visualize the physical and chemical events of the entire surface of the planet. If flowers are dying within a given square meter of land, this event will be captured, transmitted and visualzed, if ambient silver changes density within a field of fishing waters near a Japanese island, this event will be known and measures taken to corrent  it, or avoid the territory.

From the Pervasive Persuasive working group page (not mine): Our goal is to “providing people with environmental data and educational information – via mass communications such as film, TV and print and new media, ­or micro communications such as pervasive sensor networks (cf. Participatory Urbanism and Ergo at urban-atmospheres.net; real-time Rome at senseable.mit.edu; biomapping.net; placeengine.com) – may not trigger sufficient motivation to get people to change their habits towards a more environmentally sustainable lifestyle. This workshop seeks to develop a better understanding how to go beyond just informing and into motivating and encouraging action and change.”

Or, put differently, when the world itself beomes, quite entirely, the image of the world itself. what is the space of political force of action? What is assembled by such a network of monitoring apparatuses if not finallly a new version of the ecology, now a captured striated landscape to be collectively regulated as a computational resource?
What is this as architecture? As political science?

Assignments: One term paper (3000 words) on the history, scale and significance of a single environmental information monitoring project. You will be able to choose from several I present for you. Due end of class last day. You will be asked to write every week and either bring written briefs to class for discussion and to post to the class blog.


1. Computational Primordia: Media, Networks, Operators (Two Weeks per Section)

-Michael R. Williams, “Beginning: Numeration” (handout)
-Martin Davis, “Liebniz’s Dream” (handout)
-Friedrich Kittler, “A History of Communications Media”
http://www.hydra.umn.edu/kittler/comms.html
-Paul Ceruzzi, “The Early History of Software, 1952-1968” (handout)
-Mark Wigley, “Network Fever”
http://www.hydra.umn.edu/kittler/comms.html
-Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (handout)
-Mark Richards and John Alderman, Core Memory  (purchase or view on reserve)


2. Geophilosophy and Computational Ontologies, Ecologies

-Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Geophilosophy”, “Of the Refrain” and “The Smooth and The Striated” (handouts)
-John Protevi, “The Geophilosphies of Deleuze and Guattari”
http://www.protevi.com/john/SEDAAG.pdf.
-Mark Bonta and John Protevi, excerpts from Deleuze and Geophilosophy (handouts)
-Alain Badiou, excerpt from Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (handout)
-Karl Chu, “Metaphysics of Genetic Architecture and Computation” (handout)
-Manuel De Landa, “Assemblages Against Totalities”


3. Ding, Ding, Ding

-Martin Heidegger, “The Thing” (handout)
-Elizabeth Grosz, “The Thing” (handout)
-Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik -- Or, How to Make Things Public”
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/96-DINGPOLITIK2.html
-Graham Harman, “On Actors, Networks, and Plasma: Heidegger vs. Latour vs. Heidegger”
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/informationSystems/newsAndEvents/2007events/harman.htm


4. Spimes, Networked Objects, and IPv6 Space

-Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things (purchase)
-Julian Bleeker, “Manifesto for Networked Objects”
http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/files/WhyThingsMatter.pdf.
-Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard, Urban Computation and its Discontents
http://www.lulu.com/content/1554599
-Benjamin Bratton, “Logistics of Habitable Circulation”
-John Batelle, excerpt from The Search (handout)
-Headmap Manifesto
www.technoccult.com/library/headmap.pdf
-Richard A.L. Jones, “Making Soft Machines” (handout)
-Friedrich Kittler, “There is No Software”
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=74


5. Machines, Assemblage, Expression

-Lewis Mumford, “Technical Syncretism and Organic Ideology” (handout)
-Norbert Weiner, “Men, Machines and the World About” (handout)
-Felix Guattari, “Machinic Heterogenesis” (handout)
-Sanford Kwinter, “Architectures and the Technologies of Life”
-Louis Armand, “Language and the Cybernetic Mind” (handout)
-Paul Edwards, “Meteorology as Infrastructural Globalism”
http://www.si.umich.edu/~pne/PDF/Osiris22-Edwards.pdf


6. Computational Polis

-Nicholas Rose interview with Bruno Latour, “The Social as Association” (handout)
-Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (excerpt) (handout)
-Benjamin H. Bratton and Natalie Jeremijenko “Modeling Assemblage” (handout)
-Eden Medina, “Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile” (http://informatics.indiana.edu/edenm/EdenMedinaJLASAugust2006.pdf)
-Cornelia Vismann and Markus Krajewski, “Computer Juridisms”(handout)
-Alex Galloway, “Protocol vs. Institutionalization”(handout)
-Paul Edwards, excerpt from Closed World
-Richard Stallman, “The GNU Manifesto”
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
-Vannevar Bush, “Memex Revisited” (handout)
-Duncan Watts, Six Degrees, excerpt (handout)

Tags: branding

Published: 05.24.2008

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