Technoetic Arts - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2009

The journal welcomes theorists and practitioners, working at the leading edge of their field, to guest-edit issues of the journal. In this present case, we are delighted to have secured the collaboration of Professor Neil Spiller and Doctor Rachel Armstrong of the Bartlett. I wish to thank them both, and their selected authors, for the originality and scope of the articles here assembled.

Systems architecture and its associated parallel biology generate architectural forms that are both green and surreal by nature. The connection between systems architecture and Leo Lionni's fantastic book Parallel Botany are considered as architects are now starting to have the ability to create great works of biological parallelism using technologies that are highly sur real, they are on top of the real.

Modern building practices rely on Victorian construction methods founded on industrial technologies. This article asks how it may be possible to develop an alternative approach to the construction of our homes and cities that is more environmentally responsive, works with the natural energy flows within matter and which is connected to natural systems, not insulated from them. The approach of plectic systems architecture suggests that it is possible to create living buildings by re-examining the dynamics of terrestrial matter through a new approach to materials science and computation to engage in a fundamental re-visioning of what constitutes an architectural practice for the twenty-first century.

My research is centred upon how architecture is invigorated by cyberspace, the blurred boundary between the virtual and the actual, and how the different parameters of these spaces can be used to inform one another. My early experience in practice was that buildings are limited by the inert materials used to construct them and by the unimaginative ideas of what a building should look like and be. My research draws upon a variety of different disciplines to inform one architecture. The areas of research are multidisciplinary and include the changing status of the architectural drawing, smart materials, computer-aided architectural drawing, computer-aided manufacture, emergent systems, responsive environments, the architectural design of cyberspace, interactivity, cybernetics and evolving systems and algorithmic design.

To create responsive, non-prescriptive designs for architectural intervention was the starting point that led to an interest in the logic of algorithms and open-ended systems. These problem-solving diagrams used by computer programmers are very useful as a way of describing fluctuating conditions in responsive environments. This led to an interest in other computing paradigms such as cellular automata, complexity and emergence. These and other ideas I attempted to bring into the arena of architectural design to help architects cope with the rapid growth of computational technology, which is starting to revolutionize the way buildings are designed, drawn and built.

We are at another of the important perturbations in technology and epistemology that seems to affect us so often these days. Cell biology is the new cyber-space and nanotechnology. Once we fully understand the exact nature of how our world makes us and, indeed how it sometimes kills us, we will be able to make true architectures of ecological connectability.

This is our profession's future. Small steps have been made, but much more remains to be done.

A new model for environmental and urban sustainability living architecture that connects artifice with the natural world through the use of materials that possess some of the properties of living systems, and can therefore actively exchange energy with the ecosphere, is proposed.

Simple chemical agents with lifelike properties can be termed a protocell, meaning the earliest form of a natural living cell. These agents are not necessarily alive but are examples of living technology, namely technology that possesses lifelike qualities. Given that the protocell can respond to environmental cues with directional and controlled movement it can be thought of as being able to make decisions whilst navigating through a complex environment. In this way a mobile protocell agent can be considered to exhibit a form of computation. The development of smart protocell agents can be used as experimental model systems for the investigation of abstracted living processes that can subsequently be physically and chemically manipulated to produce architectural design outcomes.

The 200-Year Continuum is the producer, recorder and exhibitor in Christian Kerrigan's advancing anthology of narratives. Central to Kerrigan's practice is storytelling and myth-making as a means of engaging his audience. Kerrigan uses drawing as his primary mode of research into these narratives which are consequently offered in the form of live Internet feed installations acting as ecological sites, collaborative scientific experiments introducing new organic technologies and digital images of worlds unseen. Each addition acts as a middle story within The 200-Year Continuum. In his narrative, The Amber Clock, a ship is grown in the yew forest, Kingley Vale, over 200 years. As such, he explores the possibilities of time in relationship to technology and the natural world. In his narrative, artificial and wild systems are choreographed, and the natural production of resin is harvested from the yew trees as a way of measuring time. Biological imperatives are harnessed in a second collaborative architectural project entitled Living Architecture: The Protocell. This project seeks to investigate the design potential of using the drivers of biology, the technological issues and the implications of intervention.

Despite the exponential progress in computing power of digital computers, the development of lifelike cognitive systems appears has not yet reached the complexity of the simplest kinds of organisms. This may be explained by the lack of robustness of digital computers due to the requirements of structural programmability in the conventional computing architectures. In contrast, biological systems appear to operate in a different mode of information processing. In order to approach more lifelike artificial cognitive systems, the integration of natural and unnatural systems may open a path to investigate the possibilities of the desired biological functions such as through the creation of hybrid architectures that interface nature's computing brains with artificial devices such as using the behaviour of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum to influence the behaviour of a mechanical robot.

Architectural design is typically limited by the constraints imposed by physical space. If and when opportunities to attenuate or extinguish these limits arise, should they be seized? Here it is argued that the limiting influence of spatial embedding should not be regarded as a frustrating tyranny to be escaped wherever possible, but as a welcome enabling constraint to be leveraged. Examples from the natural world are presented, and an appeal is made to some recent results on complex systems and measures of interaction complexity.

A new design principle is discussed for making a sufficiently complex cell for the creation of the first wet artificial life in the laboratory. The current approach is to attempt a minimal cell, which consists of a liposome that contains a minimal metabolic cycle for self-maintenance and self-replication. Given the lack of success with the minimal cell to date, the authors suggest it is possible to take an alternative approach to building the first wet artificial life form that they have called the first cell. In this article, the concept of the first cell versus the minimal cell is discussed. The new design principle is supported by the following observations that are examined and developed from an Origins of Life perspective:

That human development shows a U-shaped curve where the skills and developmental patterns of human infants are proficient at the first phase then decline and subsequently recover to a qualitatively better level.

A review of spatial temporal dynamics using cellular automata studies shows that complexity generated at both the initial states and the time evolution dynamics can synthesize rich evolutionary processes.

A chemical experiment exhibiting self-organizing dynamics results in the emergence of a self-propelling oil droplet that demonstrates the self-sustaining properties of a non-equilibrium state.

Finally, the important design question Is life a contingent or deterministic phenomenon? is examined which asks whether a life form is a dynamic product of its surroundings or whether it is the inevitable outcome of prior events, and is discussed making reference to the characteristics of an art installation The Way Things Go. This contemporary masterpiece, which exhibits a long-lasting chain of unrelated causal events, serves as a theoretical model for discussion of evolutionary processes, suggesting that when it comes to designing wet artificial life forms in the laboratory, both contingent and deterministic processes should be taken into account.

Nature and the world can be viewed as complex volumetric computation. Historically, humans have interacted with nature in a reductive and homogeneous manner. However, inexpensive digital computation is now extending our capabilities allowing us to understand the complexity of nature and operate in and modify it as such. It is now possible to use computation to control matter, to design and fabricate natural solutions and objects creating a new class of human-made objects that allow more localized, dynamic, sustainable and natural interactions with the world. Unfortunately, current digital design and fabrication systems have failed to fully capitalize on available computation. These systems are non-exact and fundamentally incapable of accurately representing real objects. Digital materialization proposes an approach, system and symbolic basis for two-way conversion between reality and information, where reality is represented as information in a dimensionally correct and exact manner and is accessible to human understanding, modification and design.

In the early 1950s at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the canonical digital computer was created by John von Neumann. One of the first scientific applications written for this machine was a simulation of numerical symbioorganisms, a prototypical artificial life environment authored by researcher Nils Barricelli. In the decades since, computers have increasingly been used as tools to tackle major questions in biology, including the process of evolution and, more recently, the origins of life itself. Richard Gordon, co-editor of the 2008 volume Divine Intervention and Natural Action posed a challenge to a new generation of artificial life programmers to cast off the temptation to intelligently design simple virtual organisms and go to the root of the matter by creating an origin of (artificial) life. Bruce Damer is answering this challenge with his proposed Evolution Grid (or EvoGrid) project which would assemble the elements of a primordial digital soup within which self-organization, replication and, eventually, an origin of virtual life might be observed.

Systems architecture is seeking to cooperate with the creative processes characteristic of life on earth for novel and sustainable design outcomes. To achieve this, new design methodologies are needed to create structures and processes that are composed of the inanimate and the living the physical, the biological and the artificial to differing degrees. The principle of symbiosis is presented as a biologically inspired model for some of the design challenges, and design ethics, in systems architecture.

The concept of living technology can be applied to any technology that is powerful and useful specifically because it has some of the fundamental features of living systems. This article is a brief general overview of living technology's current state and projected future. After illustrating living technology and discussing why it is complicated to define, I explain how it is related to so-called NBIC convergence (see below) and discuss some of the larger social, ethical and aesthetic issues that it raises.