IaaC bits 2.5.1

Implementing Advanced Knowledge

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2 .5.1

IaaC Lecture Series: Form and Meaning Julius Popp

Form and Signifiance

(IaaC Lecture Series 11 december 2012; synopsis by Jordi Vivaldi)

If there is any element that in the last years has become indispensable in order to explain our contemporaneity, it is the concept of information.

Instant, interactive and heterogeneous, it no longer stops at the borders of our city or neighbourhood, as was happening just over one century ago.

Nowadays, information doesn’t recognize any other limit than the one of our desire: any time and from any point of the globe we can interchange information with any other of it. Far from being something merely anecdotic, the important role that information has acquired in our society is a decisive and determinant fact: We are referring to our society as the Informational Society for quite some time now. A transcendental shift that operates as if it were a positioning movement in the Earth: instead of being the individual placed on the surface of the planet and visually limited by the horizon, now he is placed in the interior of the sphere, being in this way able to access, as is currently happening, any point of the globe in an immediate manner and without geographical borders.

Cover - Bit.Fall, Julius Popp Figure 1 - Earth, Julius Popp Figure 2 - Reflection, Julius Popp 2

However, and beyond entertaining geometrical metaphors, some of the aspects that orbit around the concept of “information� suffer from too many chiaroscuros to be ignored: Which is the origin of information? When does a simple datum make sense and become information? To what extent can an informational unit be considered as a valid one? How does information create culture?

Precisely these questions are the elements that vertebrate all the work produced through a series of concepts: Form, sense, perception, technology, data‌ These are only some of the tools used for reflecting about the universe of information. Questions of great complexity that start to be understood when examined in the light of extremely simple mechanisms: Basic elements, made from one dimension/perception/action and articulated through several mechanic artefacts that in an easy but precise manner shed light on this matter. In this respect, the case of the artefact elaborated through several fixed tubes that contain two types of liquid, opaque and transparent respectively, stands out. They correlatively displace through a labyrinth itinerary, determined by the position of the tubes. According to the perspective from which the ensemble is observed, this allows to detect this very peculiar moment in which the opaque patches are no longer noninformative data, becoming suddenly significant forms such as letters or other symbols, hence becoming information.

Several experiments developed with this example or with diverse machinery of the same synthetic and precise gender, allow to elaborate discourses that highlight to what extent the human perception, in relation to the surrounding world, is narrow, contingent and relative. And even when that perception is formally manifested to our sense, it still cannot be understood as information because it a priori lacks significance. And this is precisely one of the epistemological points that result both more interesting and mysterious, the instant in which a simple group of perceived data begins makes sense in our intellect and becomes information; a moment in which there is no new data contribution, but it is just about a mere formal change in the distributive pattern that organizes it. Still, various questions remain unresolved: In which precise moment does this transformation occur? Which mechanisms participate in this process? Which is the relation between form and significance?

However, even when the information is already present in our intellect, the quantity of time in which it will remain is variable, and hardly constant, pure and immutable. In this regard, experiments like the bit.course are greatly suggestive in order to describe the ephemeral essence of information, through the experiment of dragging a trailer along a road that spreads drops on the pavement. Once they settle on the surface of the road, they become signs and recognizable words. However, in a speed determined 4

mainly by environmental factors, this information will dissolve, evaporated by the sun, distorted by other elements, or will simply never be printed if for example the ground surface is already wet.

Moreover, the presence of information in our intellect has an extremely contingent value if it is kept isolated. As a consequence of the communication, or even better, the interaction of this information with other subjects of knowledge, a complex relational system will be sewed, giving birth to what distinguishes the human being: culture. An element that is characterized by being, paradoxically, a possibility of condition and limit contemporarily: on the one side we use its mechanisms in order to decode data, and on the other side precisely these mechanisms are what confines and reduces the potential understanding of those groups of data that could be converted into information.

Figure 3 - From data to information, Julius Popp

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Therefore, cultural tools will basically determine this transformation from data to information. These will differentiate sense from non-sense in the elements that we observe, converting a process that is apparently objective, univocal and evident, into something extremely contingent. The moment in which we distinguish a flash of information through liquids that circulate in the framework of tubes - previous example – this alludes to a series of conventions that are completely fortuitous and relative, and that occasionally, in the context of other cultural frameworks, would appear in different moments or just wouldn’t appear at all.

There is, nevertheless, a last aspect that is to be underlined: most of these works add another layer of complexity to the work that in this case, and despite often being implemented in an artistic context, is not desired: aesthetics. These mechanisms and mechanical experiments produce extremely attractive results, peculiarity that obviously facilitates its diffusion. However, it is inevitable that precisely because of the same reason the quality and efficiency of its diffusion is mitigated, due to the important temptation to remain trapped in the aesthetic phenomena itself, in its shape, in its seduction, without going deeper into its semantics, that is to say, into its significance. Because, without any doubt, it would be a grave mistake to forget that the engine that propels all this mechanical production is not nourished by any aesthetical desire, but based on its desire to reflect a range of questions that hold an inherent philosophical character. And, if finally, we are not able to obtain a reflection related to this, beyond an occasional aesthetical pleasure, we should ask to ourselves: has all this effort been worth it?

Figure 4 - Machines, Julius Popp Figure 5 - Reflection works, Julius Popp Note - The pictures here presented are a selection done by the editorial team.

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IAAC BIT FIELDS: 1. Theory for Advanced Knowledge 2. Advanced Cities and Territories 3. Advanced Architecture 4. Digital Design and Fabrication 5. Interactive Societies and Technologies 6. Self-Sufficient Lands

Nader Tehrani, Architect, Director MIT School Architecture, Boston Juan Herreros, Architect, Professor ETSAM, Madrid Neil Gershenfeld, Physic, Director CBA MIT, Boston Hanif Kara, Engineer, Director AKT, London Vicente Guallart, Architect, Chief City Arquitect of Barcelona Willy Muller, Director of Barcelona Regional Aaron Betsky, Architect & Art Critic, Director Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati Hugh Whitehead, Engineer, Director Foster+ Partners technology, London Nikos A. Salingaros, Professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio Salvador Rueda, Ecologist, Director Agencia Ecologia Urbana, Barcelona Artur Serra, Anthropologist, Director I2CAT, Barcelona

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