The open seminar is co-curated by Vera Bühlmann (ETH Zurich) and Erin K Stapleton (Kingston University, London). It is a laboratory for applied virtuality event, organized by the Chair for Computer Aided Architectural Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, ETH. The event will take place at Wirtschaft Neumarkt and Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, on November 26th – 27th 2014. There will be papers delivered by invited speakers, and each will be 30 minutes long, with a 30 minutes discussion to follow.
Wednesday November 26th at Wirtschaft Neumarkt
Thursday November 27th at Cabaret Voltaire
The space for audience is limited, but the event is open for anyone who is interested. Please refer to the event’s website for registration.
Download the poster here: sunsinversePosterA2-2.
Abstract
In this seminar, we focus on the role of speculation in theory and philosophy in a historical manner, yet with clear inclinations to our contemporary present and the currently exploding interest in speculative methods in academic practice and research contexts. In order to expand our positions beyond strictly pragmatist considerations, we locate the role of speculation between two schematically accentuated poles: the first approaches the role of speculation in the (arguably inevitable) dogmatisms of anthropological cosmopolitics, operating within domains of sufficient reason; while the second approaches the role of speculation within a rational cosmology, where it (arguably inevitably) is prone to engender what Kant terms “the antinomies” of pure reason, and which he sees as inherent to all systematic approaches to the cosmos.
We will align these positions in a matrixical manner with vectors of (contemporary) characterizations of the sun written by such thinkers such as Henri Poincaré, Georges Bataille, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Serres. Based on these characterizations we will attempt to profile different understandings of economy. Two fields will serve as ‚case-situations‘ for thinking about the ‚energetic-material‘ role of the sun: (1) Artificial Photosynthesis and its consequences for how we can think about food and energy, and (2) ‚metabolizing‘ algorithms such as Google’s PageRank which introduce circuitous units for measuring the relevancy of data in a quasi-climatic sense, and the peculiar economy of data’s value the emergence of which we are presently witnessing – as an economy that is being addressed within the registers of ‚biopolitics‘ and/or ‚cognitive capitalism‘.
Speakers
Terence Blake (Agent Swarm blog)
From Inversion to Many Versions. Feyerabend’s Philosophy of Nature.
Paul Feyerabend is often associated with a destructive criticism leading to an anarchism that flouts every rule and a relativism that treats all opinions as equal. This negative stereotype is based on ignorance and rumour rather than on any real engagement with his texts. Feyerabend’s work from beginning to end turns around problems of ontology and realism, culminating in the outlines of a sophisticated form of pluralist realism. This largely unknown ontological turn taken by Feyerabend in the last decade of his life was based on four strands of argument: historical considerations, cosmological criticism, complementarity, and the primacy of democracy.
Vera Bühlmann (CAAD ETHZ)
The Creative Conservativeness of Computability
Felicity Colman (Manchester School of Art)
Transmission Materialist Informatics and Regimes of Entropy
For this seminar I explore some of the core elements for a practice of creative speculation: the concepts of energy, matter, transmission, and entropy. The practice model is that of the American artist Robert Smithson. In 1971 Smithson proposed that we should compile all the different entropies. This would provide a study of ‘entropology’ (after Claude Levi-Straus described of a post-anthropology). Smithson joked about how ‘wreckage’ is more interesting than ‘structure’ and he proposes the sun and its associated entropic regimes as a methodological process, one that is productive of material systems. As any system is itself subject to change through shifts in informational matter, any computation of a system must take into account the transmission factor, and is thus always subject to not only the entropy of its materiality but the entropic language of its sense as a description. Smithson proposes that between the absurdity of language structure and the virtuality of the 4th dimension ‘a device for unlimited speculation’ is located.
Ref: Felicity Colman. 2006. “Affective entropy.” Angelaki (11, 1) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09697250600798060#.VHSbPLywHhZ
Ludger Hovestadt (CAAD ETHZ)
Continuing the Modernist Legacy by Reverse Engineering
Jorge Orozco (CAAD ETHZ)
How the PageRank Algorithm Operates Technically
Matteo Pasquinelli (Philosopher, Berlin)
The Computation of Cognitive Capital
Since the times of Smith, Ricardo and Marx, capital is clearly a form of computation. The apparatuses of capital describe by themselves a complex mathematical system. After WWII the numeric dimension of capital has been coupled with the numeric dimension of cybernetics and computing machines, then gradually subsuming also upcoming forms of augmented intelligence. Capital, as a form of accounting, as a form of exterior mnemonic technique, is in itself a form of trans-human intelligence. Cognitive capitalism, specifically, on the basis of all its numeric procedures, from layman’s accounting to sophisticated algotrading, from immaterial labour to scientific research, is an institution of computation. (unfortunately, there is no video available for this lecture).
Johannes Paul Raether (artist, Berlin)
Augmented Embodiments and Identitecture in Capitalist Society
Through the filter of his multiple Potential Identities, the Identitect Johannes Paul Raether will give an introduction to his shizzo-realist avatars and psycho-active institutions that have been crystalizing in evolving experimental framework they call Identitecture. Appearances of figures such as Protektorama, the SmartphoneSangoma and WorldWideWitch as well as Transformella, ReproRevolutionary of the Ovulo-factories, will be presented and reflected, while instances, sites and practices within these Appearances will be discussed for their respective terms and methods. The aim of self-made conceptualisations of proto-academic terms such as ‘Beautified Intervention’, ‘Immersive socio-real Environment’ and ‘Augmented Embodiments’ will be to continuously construct a partial and situated, yet evolving planetary model of identity production. The lecture aims to show vectors of how to dissect from the genre of political art and attempt to travel towards a potential framing of what psycho-realist artistic practice in a capitalist society could entail.
David Schildberger (CAAD ETHZ / ZHAW Wädenswil (Beverage Design))
The Principle of Artificial Photosynthesis Generalized
For most of us it seems to be clear – as we missed the tempting opportunity to live in a lap of luxury, a paradisiacal state, we agrounded and assented to have only one nature to live in, therefore we necessarily should take care of it as its resources are finite and an escape seemed not to be worth considering yet. In General Photosynthesis supplies all of the organic compounds and most of the energy necessary for life within nature. This is a fact. A function. One dimension. But new pathways might offer opportunities for further speculations. As a chemical process photosynthesis is in principal electrical – flows of energy – affections of photons and electrons. Semiconductors offer the possibility to act as catalysts and allow to hack and dope existing systems – working on all kind of atomic substrates hence forming molecular compounds (e.g. carbohydrates). Intellectual ability as its fundamental source – opening up new worlds of food and energy flows – starters which make us eager to do more with it – from necessity to luxury. Play around. Imagine. Taste. Affections for our senses – accompanied by evoked shifts of how food is administered and its impacts on the current cosmopolitical civil engineering.
Erin K Stapleton (Kingston University London)
Digital Images, Heterogeneity, Expenditure, Destruction
Elias Zafiris (University Athens and University Budapest)
Natural Computation as Cryptography: A Spectrum View on Number Theory
Natural computation is based on the simulation of natural processes making use of natural materials, for example the use of synthesized macromolecules as computational units in DNA nanotechnology. I will explore the idea that the formation of these computational units requires an encoding-decoding procedure, which can be described in general as a two-way mapping from the molecular scale to the macroscopic scale. Considering these computational units as codes we need algorithms to operate with them. In turn, this can be described as an enciphering-deciphering procedure operating by means of a key. This brings us to the domain of natural cryptogrpahy. In this context, I will discuss the role of number theory in unraveling natural keys for computation”. (unfortunately, there is no video available of this lecture).
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Précis
The decades of our immediate past throughout the 20th century are characterized by the perhaps unprecedented air of an apparently post-cosmological era, where secular politics builds on scientific knowledge rather than on theological authority, and where questions of moral value are framed ‘critically’ within the various cosmopolitical (rather than cosmological) orders (humanist, neo-humanist as well as post-humanist) that seek to render the very touchstone of enlightenment philosophy fit for our contemporary time: namely to find an alternative to cosmology as the domain from which the nature of thought might be deduced. Because, as Kant realized, cosmology – if pursued undogmatically, and that meant for him purely rationally – is prone to produce paralogisms, and hence poses irresolvable antinomies for a modern, secular and non-tradition-based philosophy at large. Like this, enlightenment philosophy distances itself from theological narratives of time, involving ideas of apocalypse, the fall, and accounts of salvation.
But critical distance doesn’t mean having done with. The questions of justice, decision and judgment, in short the problem of good and evil have not, of course, disappeared. They remain entangled with the relation between the concrete power of cognition and thought’s abstract character.
Despite the general appreciation of Kant’s insight and his call for moderateness and critical distance vis-à-vis a cosmic ‚truth,’ scientists from the mid-19th century on were bound once again by the idea of an apocalypse purported by insights into the cosmos itself, now arising from within the Laws of Thermodynamics. Considered as a scientific Universal Law (not cosmological in the pre-critical sense!), the second law seemed to inevitably announce a „heat death“ of the universe (Helmholz), which would be the „end of all physical phenomena“ (Rankine). Thus, once again, there was a big interest in waving Kant’s cautions against a scientific cosmology from the table, and in setting out instead to formulate one – in a sense that could now claim to be based on an approximative, empirical and experimental basis, rather than on abstract rationalist speculation alone. Henri Poincaré’s „Leçons sur les Hypothèse Cosmogonique“ cover, and put into a more Kantian-like, moderately-minded perspective, many of the then prevalent ideas about ‘entropic creation’ and ‘cosmic evolution’ that began to rise with the development of thermodynamics. Helge S Kragh’s book Entropic Creation. Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology (Ashgate 2008) gives an informative overview.
In the post Second World War era, there is another line of intellectuals who, in apparently untimely manner, stick to cosmical categories in one way or another: (1) Among the most prominent of these is Georges Bataille, who, writing directly before, during and after the war used political, anthropological and religious examples to illustrate how the operations of what he understood as the equilibrium of a „general economy of energy“ is destabilized by capitalist focus on accumulation, and what he designated as a dangerous deferral of the expenditure of excess energy. Bataille draws attention to solar abundance as a systemic model that focuses on the expenditure of the excess energy beyond utilitarian need and survival. (2) Then we have Jean-François Lyotard, for whom the question of the condition of postmodern knowledge is tied up with the foreseeable cosmic extinction of all embodied forms of life – “the sole serious question to face humanity today“ (Lyotard, The Inhuman, 9). By asking „Can Thought Go On Without A Body“, he relates the interest in liberating thought, through its aspired mechanization, from actual embodied life forms and their diversities (as it motivates, at least as a not-so-insignificant factor, programs of Artificial Intelligence) to the apocalyptic future as foreseen by the astroscientific theories that confront humanity with the finitude of the solar ‘reservoir’. For him, the sun’s approximating death is the sole important question because he sees it as organizing the vectors that are followed by capitalist techno-science, and that revolve around the question: how can science defy the upcoming cosmic catastrophe? Lyotard sees as the apparent goal of cosmopolitical capitalism the emancipation of intelligence from life. Today, as Lockheed announces their break-through in controlling processes of nuclear fusion (which would factually bring the production of an artificial sun on earth into proximate reach), and apparently plan to build fusion reactors (www.spiegel.de, October 17th 2014), Lyotard’s perceptive observation can be extended from Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Life and Robotic Forms of Embodiment. (3) Michel Serres is a third contemporary intellectual for whom a characterization of the sun is central to philosophy. The sun, for him, is “the real, ultimate capital” (Serres, The Parasite, 173). And it is as capital, he dares to think, that the sun can count as the origin of all things insofar as they can be reasoned in the terms of a systematical account. The sun is the realm of general equivalence, and as such it is outside the true and outside the false, “it indicates contents that are jokers” (The Parasite, 163). This introduces a turn in how to think about rationality and the nature of thought. Our challenge today is not to think the Universe’s dynamics as revolving around an axis of cosmic time, he maintains. Rather, it is to reason about a universe that expands. The nuclear particle perspective is only one aspect of the universe’s physics. Of equal importance is the wave dimension of the photons radiated from the fusion of nuclei. Photons are parceled quanta of light – light characterized by different frequencies – from which electrons can bind with atomic nuclei and accrete into the chemical elements that make up, materially, all the bodies in a solar system. If a cosmic order, rather than an anthropological one, is to inform philosophy, it must take both aspects into account. In consequence, where philosophy has hitherto been thinking in descriptive terms of relations of equivalence, we ought to think in contractual terms of relations of equipollence – being same in the mediate aspects of force, power or validity (the symbolic character of Being), rather than immediately in form or essence (Being). This relation of equipollence, he maintains, is different from the relation of equivalence in that it cannot, by principle, be stated in any firm and foundational manner – it needs to be articulated contractually, symbolically, in discrete terms that formalize the reciprocal bonds of all that factors in the relations that can be reasoned philosophically, and investigated scientifically, between the real (world) and the rational (cosmos). We can think about relations of equipollence, he suggests, as a contract with nature (The Natural Contract, 1980).
With Serres’ position, the vector of computability’s inevitable alliance with the fulfillment of cosmopolitical capitalism, as exposed by Lyotard, can be seen, to a certain extent, as disempowered – simply because the notion of ‚signature‘ interrupts the continuous transformability of functional conclusiveness. The notion of ‚signature‘ appears in Serres book rather abruptly, and given that Serres introduces the idea of a Natural Contract as an answer to the concerns of the planet’s climate and its health, speaking of ‚signatures‘ is likely to raise associations to Paracelsus’s 16th century pharmaceutics, developed out of his doctrine of a ‚harmony between the macro- and the microcosmos‘. But more urgently, perhaps, we can relate it to the technologies of communication and information that constitute science today as techno-science. Here, ‚signatures‘ occupy a central role in where and how we compute: the transmission of messages is organized by protocols, on the level of hardware as well as on that of software. Protocols establish encrypted keys that work with so-called ‚signatures‘ used to specify abstract data types algebraically. In communications technology, the notion of ‘signature’ exposes that all inferences of a computation-based logics are actually based on symbolical contracts.
In the seminar we want to discuss the problems that are implicated within the question ‘Where are we when we think computationally?’. We would like to invite you to speculate with us: what would it mean to ask about the Inverse of the Sun?*
* In mathematics, an inverse problem is a problem considered as indetermined. Or, pertaining to the language of logics, with inverse problems it is the domain of an argument (its established reason or firm ground, as we might say metaphorically) that is treated as unsettled, while the range of an argument (its manifestation in cases, like the symptoms of an illness) can be registered, labeled and documented.
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