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- Volume 3, Issue 2, 2013
Design Ecologies - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2013
Volume 3, Issue 2, 2013
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Abducing chances: Evolution, cognitive niches and hybrid humans as chance discoverers
More LessAbstractHumans continuously delegate and distribute cognitive functions to the environment to lessen their limits. They build models, representations and other various mediating structures that are considered to aid thought. In doing these, humans are engaged in a process of cognitive niche construction. In this sense, I argue that a cognitive niche emerges from a network of continuous interplays between individuals and the environment, in which people alter and modify the environment by mimetically externalizing eeting thoughts, private ideas, etc., into external supports. Through mimetic activities humans create external semiotic anchors that are the result of a process in which concepts, ideas and thoughts are projected onto external structures. Once concepts and thoughts are externalized and projected, new chances and ways of inferring come up from the blend. For cognitive niche construction may also contribute to making available a great portion of chances – in terms of information and knowledge – that otherwise would remain simply unexpressed or unreachable. The central part of this article will illustrate that abduction – or reasoning to explanatory hypotheses – is also central to understanding some features of the problem of action and decision-making. Abduction prompts new affordances and subsequent possible actions and plays a key role in decision-making, as C. S. Peirce teaches: the eco-neurological perspective depicted in this article also increases knowledge about the distinction between thought and motor action, seeing both aspects as fruit of brain activity. We can say that thought possesses an essential ‘motor’ component reflected in brain action but not in actual movement. On the basis of this analysis I can further illustrate some problems related to the role of abducting chances in decision-making, both in deliberate and unconscious cases.
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Chemical darkrooms: Three architectural design experiments for surreal metamorphoses of body and photography
More LessAbstractCentral to my research is the collapse of nature, technology and the human body as a both creative and critical way for speculating architectures of constant change. Photography and film have been essential for recording these changes, and in many cases these arts have even allowed to register a world beyond our perception. The article focuses on Surrealist artist Man Ray and his contemporary artists, photographers and film-makers who saw the chemical photography’s potential through the alchemic transformation of light and dark throughout their devices, films and darkroom methods. In parallel the article links with architectural design and theory, with a series of design experiments through chemical photographic and analogue processes, to challenge and re-inspire a more contemporary digital architecture. This article will investigate chemical photography of its variable density and indices as a new form of constructing architectures. How the wet process of chemical photography could advance in such a way that could become architectural, and by exploring the light and temperature sensitive aspect of space, will evoke its constant transmutation and openness to chance.
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Rationality and rupture
More LessAbstractAny thought which is true to the contemporary must, seemingly, recognize the complex ecologies of human and non-human assemblages, algorithms, data structures, planetary climate change and so on. In this setting, it is unsurprising that there has been a recent shift towards consideration of basic questions of ontology and epistemology in order to attempt some traction on this terrain. In much of this, however, we find a constructed caricature of both reason and intuition, in which reason is reduced to the algorithmic by means of a recursively axiomatized formal system for the enumeration of all truths in a structure. Here, I suggest that this is a poor shadow of rationality that is rooted in a static, classical ‘image of thought’, and that many attempts to construct a category in excess of reason end up with an ossification and metastatization of intuition at the loss of any criticality and epistemic mediation. This article provides an attempt to undermine these views from within the caricature itself. In so doing, we consider a form of rationality capable of gaining traction on the shifting sands of the quasi-transcendental structure of experience, through the rehabilitation of abstraction as a process of navigational dialogue and transformation.
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The shape of the void
More LessAbstractGeographies and the territories that opportunistically spring up to inhabit them, populate their landscapes and exploit their riches are merely superficial manifestations of more substratal tendencies of movement. What appears stable and static is, in fact, volatile, mutable, unstable. Coastal erosion, whether attributed to climate change or less anthropocene causes, can be read as a hyper-accelerated manifestation of geological time on a human scale. The processes of geological change, measured out in millennia and thus ordinarily imperceptible to the evanescent oscillations of human mortality, and the imaginations seated therein are dromologically condensed to a scale measurable in months or years. This sudden access or awareness, or maybe confluence between human and geological time, gives us a glimpse into the scales of the universe normally incomprehensible, and in doing so a glimpse too of our fragility and ephemerality. This article in itself ‘a quantity of faded images accompanied by only partial notations’ explores the way in which the tools and apparatuses we use to interrogate the detritus of both past and the present are unstable, mutable and often inadequate.
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