Towards A*cognitive Architecture: A Cybernetic Note Beyond – or the Self-informing Machinery

Preface

We are writing in the year 2014. Information increasingly becomes a desire, the necessity in the form of communication. Desire is an extension of the brain while communication seemingly combines heuristic operations in design development, and reaches beyond thermodynamics. More than 65 years ago, Norbert Wiener’s “Cybernetics – the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” (Wiener, 1948) is published, the Macy Conferences then titled Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems are in their 3rd year and following von Neumann’s findings on the Ergodic Theorem, the Cellular Automaton are on their way.¹ In the meantime Baby, the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine and the world’s first stored-program computer, tested for the so-called Williams Tube (a lightweight storage device) runs its first program. The Universal Turing Machine becomes the continuing driver for computation.² Within the context of The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part Two, the subject matter of this paper relates to accessing knowledge and tools for observing and designing an interconnected para-metric world; a cybernetic world characterized by multidimensional behavioral structures informed through using the digital as interface. It provides an extension to the existing emergent construct of The Psychopathology of Cognitive Capitalism in general and the interdisciplinary Cognitive Capitalism Project in particular. The insight given into cognitive capitalism and design strategies are foundations formed in the 20th century and aims at understanding and formulating of what the pathology of The Psychopathology of Cognitive Capitalism may possibly be when looking through the lens of cybernetics beyond. It offers an investigation to the understanding and the form of knowledge through communication, a recursive re-invention and re-understanding of how we think, how we decide and how we actually design and behave. Not just as architects in the design process of a building or a city, but as human beings in the design process of the everyday. A compilation, a collection of thoughts and findings, hovering in a paradigm between architecture, cybernetics, system theory, technology and the state of being; Through Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, and its subject matter language or syntax, the question of what is reality, may operate as a filtering veil through which this essay may emerge.

The paper discusses cultural architectural theory in conjunction with technical, political and economical possibilities in order to produce tangible manifestations in the context of interdisciplinary cognitive work and authorship. In particular, in the context of open source software, virtual and unknown design teams, whose common ground is based on common interests and knowledge, a spatial-temporal structural coupling, which, at times, can occur in parallel. The field of cybernetics and architecture within computational design, researches facts and theories developed in the last half of the 20th century, and their relevance to computational thinking and digital making, shaping the built and unbuilt networked environment in the near and distant future. In contrast to the digital, referring to a particular technology of executing calculations, the computational relates to a way of thinking and making reflecting complexity and non-linearity. It is about process, rather than simply input/output. It is informed by issues such as emergence, algorithms, structure, material behavior, data and society. In most cases using computers as interfaces with calculating machines and CNC (computer numerical control) for digital fabrication 3D-printing, laser-cutting and/or robotic fabrication. Underlying principles are not just reduced to architecture; instead they are methods with broad applications to a variety of disciplines; in this case relevant as an application and proof for cognitive capitalism. The model suggested here pushes the boundaries of the contemporary understanding of architecture and as a result reconstructs reality. through experimenting with the scale of buildings, cities and smaller prototypes, understanding the liminal space between the built environment, materials used, the perception of the user, the regulation through the designer, client, budget, and most importantly decision-making processes, the choice of software during the design process, data used and the cognitive capital to inform all of the above. So the questions are: ‘Who is the designer?’ and ‘Who owns the copyright, or rather the cognitive copyright?’ Architecture as building, as physical form is the proof of the concept of interplay, and most likely is a result of thinking and internalizing dwelling that has been outlived by the construct architecture as organism, evolving and informing itself through filtering, observation and self-observation: “I am the observed link between myself and observing myself” (von Foerster, 1981).³

Von Foerster’s paper is structured in a series of parts, which at times overlap and merge. “Defining the Matter” aims to clarify key terms used, and to establish possible relationships between them. These terms—which derive from biology, computer sciences, architecture or mathematics–so far have neither been defined cross-disciplinarily, nor within architecture. Since, however, they do affect how the forthcoming text is understood, and since in an era of rapid technological and theoretical shifts terms and expressions are revisited constantly to receive numerous varying definitions, there is a necessity to delineate their function. This will provide a theoretical basis for the present text and sets the topic into the framework of philosophy of computation at the same time. The main inquiry focuses on the agenda “It’s not alone, it’s synthetic—the bits are calculating,” and provides the reader with a description of A*cognitivist Architecture in a cyber-biological framework embedding its construct within the mind/body phenomenon immanent in social environments. The narrative Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles bridges computational thinking, the body, perception through our senses and the brain in a material world. This part introduces the concept of Wechselwirkung offered by biological cognition and the cognitive Internet, with its unknown amount of reflectors in an existing non-linear para-space.⁴ Here the cybernetic note will be woven into a genealogical string of thoughts. The paper concludes with an exploration for and of an interconnected para-metric world by engaging largely with immaterial, neurotectural design strategies and the question of collective authorship, relating back to the synthetic that becomes natural, cognitive and bio-semiotic.

Defining the Matter

Decision-making processes in the human brain are predominantly governed and influenced by heuristics (Gigerenzer and Brighton 2009) individually generated through experience, learning and conversations with the living and non-living environment. Heuristics is a relatively fast method of problem solving employing existing knowledge and wisdom to arrive at acceptable but not perfect solutions. Classical methods in computer sciences have focused on optimal problem solving, employing accurate and precise algorithms with little tolerance for perfect outcomes (in many cases with hardly inacceptable time frames due to complexity). The application of incremental search algorithms was first developed in the early 1950s and approached even economic, logistical and infrastructural issues. Search algorithms are programmed as functions to find the shortest path between two or more locations in a field, graph or cell matrix. Certainly restrictive parameters, obstacles and behavioural rules may influence which form the path may finally take and be part of the way-finding strategy. Today search algorithms are used in almost all fields and to a large extent in search engines. A*, a more flexible search algorithm designed in 1968 at the Stanford Research Institute can be combined with heuristic methods and herewith serves as concept for the notion of A*Cognitivist Architecture. It advocates behavior within architecture—a term to be redefined—that equals an organism, a living system, functioning according to a complex set of rules and dynamics, which are alien to linearity or reliance only. Architecture as social agency, understood in that way adapts and decides in accordance with its environment and the knowledge available as nodal points or locations in a dynamic, constantly reconfiguring network, virtually accessible as space and physically existent in form of servers and motherboards. Pathfinding for A*Cognitivist Architecture tracks down the elements of data and information required for successful problem solving and finds the best possible solution for survival, or the shortest path to success, without the dependency to arrive at a desired form or shape. It is a third order cybernetic system describing communication between itself and its observer in a dynamic multi-layered environment. Due to interaction and communication between the actors (relationship as in the functions between entities are also considered actors) in different velocities, the observer and the observed are interchangeable and regulate each other (Reichenbach 2003). The phenomenon parallels a self-replicating analogue and digital machinery, with a variety of intersections and communication abilities. Hence all operations take place in a ‘Self-Informing’system, which refers to Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s concept of ‘autopoiesis,’ established in 1972 (Maturana 1980). The term autopoiesis as coined by Maturana and Varela originally meant self-creation of an autonomous (entropic) organisation out of itself. The fractal nature of this machinery’s behaviour projects a slight and constant breeze of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1968) and The Fold (Deleuze 1992) and refers to both a process of topological and structural morphosis in a Deleuzian sense of desire, but also to the process of a series of parts working together in one system. The difference to the known mechanical machine is that the parts of the machine that change their function and form are soft, malleable and almost liquid, and therefore process, product and goal reform accordingly. “A cybernetic Note beyond – or the self-informing Machinery”. occupies stages in interfering interfaces, between coding designers and hackers, the Internet, software, external and internal hardware, and cognitive capital as collective design intelligence nurturing and breeding information. It is an ‘Architecture Machine’(Negroponte 1973), where the power of emergence and ability of data storage is congruent with the agents inhabiting it in constant data exchange through communication. Decoding and applying exchanged data, as function, is as relevant as the data itself. The form of communication becomes its own communication.

inFORM — To illustrate the point of the ‘self-informing Machinery’ with its data exchange and complex communication methods I would like to sketch out two architectural strategies of inFORMation and data transfer, namely geometrical ones that are distinctly different to cognitive once, but play a role when explored topologically:
a) Algorithmic – means to apply one or more concrete rules or functions, such as the Golden Mean or Brownian Motion.
b) Parametric – means to apply one or more parameters on top of an algorithm.

Algorithmic design therefore can be regarded as genotypic and isolated, parametric design as phenotypic, objected to an environment. Either is linear and reduced in their cognitive and biological abilities. Both borrow from nature, such as the geometrical Voronoi pattern on a giraffe skin or the Fibonacci series apparent in sunflowers, waves or hurricanes.⁵ An example for parametric behavior in nature could be the choreography of a flock of starlings, moving according to certain internal rules, forming beautiful shapes of clustering and aggregating, according to and affected by external environmental parameters, such as wind, circulation of air and temperature. Algorithms acting as a regulating system in this fashion are genetic algorithms, combining biology and geometry. Both the algorithmic and parametric approaches refer to a technique for form finding through computational means and apply one or more algorithms or a combination including behavioural rules to agents in a system, which have the ability to generate a multi-dimensional network of varying forms. Working parametrically is extremely useful in order to investigate and analyse iterations or forms according to fitness values (aesthetics, structural behaviour, material usage, etc.). The famous analogue computational string model by Frei Otto, the father of structural form finding is exemplary for finding a minimal path network through self-organization of natural material and environmental behaviour. It is a set up with dry woollen threads stretching across a circular frame in a regular fashion. Once water is added material behaviour is elicited and the threads start to cling together. They create a Voronoi-like pattern. A natural example for minimal-path finding is the behaviour of slime mold, an organism, which naturally finds the shortest path between all points in a network. Ant colonies are also behave along the lines of minimal path networks, except that their behavior responds to pheromone spurs. Structural, minimal surface (not path) form finding can be seen in the 1972 Munich Olympic Stadium, also designed by Frei Otto. It is designed according to the natural behavior of soap film. Probably the first building designed through form-finding is the Sagrada Familia, conceived by Antonio Gaudi in 1882 using a physical chain model (algorithm) and gravity (parameter), and recently completed by Mark Burry (RMIT), who used digital algorithmic computation and fabrication for models and prototypes by the means of computers. That is to say that there is a similar decision-making process at play in the choice of algorithm via a specific design model resulting in a finished materialized product owning topography, surface topology and tactility. Using parameters is a technique, an instrument. Notwithstanding, parametric architecture has been used to describe a new style [parametricism] of architecture, which reflects ornament, geometry and the static of the 20th century, and steers away from a context-based, open-system, cognitive architecture of the 21st century. The crux of A*cognitivist Architecture, a product of digitilisation and the Internet, lies in the intensity and amount of cognitive capital necessary for producing collective brainpower that is all but reduced to aesthetics only. It is about understanding the logic of becoming form, breeding forms, and understanding form as a result of communication processes and the ability to decode it within a system, rather than form for forms sake. A*cognitive Architecture is primarily concerned with extended parametric strategies focusing on paths between nodes of knowledge, cognitive capital, all accessed through digital means. A pool of minds is replacing material capitalism. Therefore the model A*cognitivist Architecture suggests is determining for all disciplines. It is a survival strategy, obeying and extending to what Nicholas Negroponte described, as “The Change from Atoms to Bits is irrevocable and unstoppable” when observing the increasing “instantaneous and inexpensive transfer of electronic data that moves at the speed of light…” (Negroponte 1995, 4).

It’s not Alone, it’s Synthetic – the Bits are Calculating

A CYBER-BIOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK — Changes in socio-economic formations and the rise and availability of “sophisticated communications equipment (cyberdecks or matrix simulators), […] privileged or differential institutional access and specialized hardware and software expertise,” (Tomas 1991, 43) elicited a novel cyber-biological framework for a large number of players. The pitch can be regarded as the non-space of a collective, in constant morphis; it also exists as liminal space, consisting of thresholds between individuals. In both cases it is a non-linear paraspace derived through genealogical cultural evolution, a cyber-space beyond the unambiguousness between inside and outside, action and reaction, digital and computational and last but not least cognitive and economic. “Cognition is a biological phenomenon and can only be understood as such; any epistemological insight into the domain of knowledge requires this understanding.” (Maturana 1980, 7). The English psychiatrist and cybernetician Ross Ashby summarized the ubiquitous subject matter and the problem discussed herewith and today in his book Design for a Brain, chapter The Animal as Machine when he wrote,

“As the organism and its environment are to be treated as a single system, the dividing line between ‘organism’ and ‘environment’ becomes partly conceptual and to that extend arbitrary. Anatomically and physically, of course, there is a unique and obvious distinction between the two parts of the system; but if we view the system functionally, ignoring purely anatomical facts as irrelevant, the division of the system, into ‘organism’ and ‘environment’ becomes vague.” (Ashby 1954, 39).

Ashby’s treatise is an early investigation into the behavior of an animal in relation to stimuli from the immediate environment and neural action. More precisely the interaction between an animals’ observation of an irritation, followed by information flow to its nervous system and subsequently physical reaction by the animals’ receptors affecting relevant muscles and also cognitive responses. To illustrate the apparent complex biophysical mechanism Ashby presents the example of a sculptor’s hand holding a chisel, and he goes even further in explaining that the chisel is “a part of the material which the nervous system is attempting to control.” (Ibid., 39). The example describes three aspects: an internal infrastructure for data transfer (between the internal human and the external object), an extension of the body through its brain (chisel and sculptor become one, the marble to be sculpted may be included) and an action specific configuration of bodies in time and space (space, time and bodies become one field of relationships and mathematical functions). In science fiction the scene can be described as one re-formation of the ‘homos formatos’ (maker) and can easily be visualised as a temporal topographical merging of objects and skins made of different materials in order to fulfil particular operations. The organism and its environment as one functional system are structurally coupled within one and the same paradigm.

BANHAM — Leaving the discipline of biology and cognition and diving into the same topic through culture, the very phenomenon of merging becomes a tangible one. “There is no such feeling in the world that compares with taking off on a clean seven foot wave crunching down, feeling the forces of the waves […] It’s just the greatest thing in the world, I don’t wanna trade it for anything.” (Banham 1972). This scene from the 1972 BBC documentary Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles shows a surfer being at one with his board, his body moving according to the rolling waves and his physic, balancing in this changing space of the Los Angeles ocean spirit. The deeply embedded identification with the sea, surf culture as well as the location LA add to the physical and cognitive reactions of the surfer’s body affected by the immediate environmental forces. Reyner Banham underpins the notion of organism established by Ashby through observing culture. The movie celebrates driving through Los Angeles, the only way to travel the city, moderated by the latest technology of a Baedeker tape, hence replacing a physical guide. Banham conveys the idea that Los Angeles’ architecture is more than an aggregation of buildings, but a hub of interactions happening in parallel changing the city constantly, one city, one homogeneous organism incarnated through the car. “So something like a million Angelinos could say that you would never expect to hear them say: I live within walking distance of my work.” (Banham 1972). Los Angeles was, and remains to be, a city in which freedom is the driving force for material and cognitive operations. Freedom describes the culture and cultural cognitive capital of Los Angeles that also melts into the export of “Matt Mason space toys, hot wheels and Barbie dolls to all parts of the free world” (ibid. 1972). Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles portrays the convergence of feeling as knowledge (and its export), the success of freedom and waves and an increasing and reflecting globalisation that triggers the breaking down of cultural and communicative differences.

Communicative differences do not relate to rhetorical linguistic or issues of foreign languages, but semiotics, psychology and values (such as, getting each other to know, beginning to understand each other). Reticulating the cyber-biological framework and the above cultural observations within the architecture of Los Angeles one can claim that neither architecture, nor cognitive capitalism is alone. Instead they synthesize as intertwined entities, as a living thing.

WECHSELWIRKUNG — There is another notable aspect extending Ashby’s organism/environment notion and the above epitomised narrative, namely the one of Wechselwirkung as discovered by the biologist and cognitive scientist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944). It describes the so-called Funktionskreis, where an organism’s ability consists of firstly perceiving (memory-net) and secondly acting (work-net). The direct relationship between those two operations (cognitive and physical) is shown in the Funktionskreis. Essentially it is an abstracted concept of experience and learning. Linking two or more memory-nets results in inter-net computational operations extending already existing experience and amplifies learning. Humberto Maturana describes breaking down differences
and learning–a result of communication–as understanding the code. “Organisms are adapted to their environments, and it has appeared adequate to say of them that their organisation ‘represents the ‘environment’ in which they live in, and that through evolution they have accumulated information about it, coded in their nervous system.” (Maturana 1970).

THE BITS ARE CALCULATING — As this paper introduces steps towards a cultural theory that discusses common ground between agent-based behaviour through mechanisms of programming and coding cultures, it strongly relates to a multi-ordered cybernetic model drawing from Gregory Bateson’s thoughts on Difference and George Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form, 1969. The following part of the paper aims at A*cognitivist Architecture to act as epigenetic extension of Humberto Maturana’s Autopoiesis towards a living organism and open organization of architecture as a construct of information and material alike, acting through and upon a dynamic, complex system, and therefore also operating as the system that allows for creating and transferring information in form of knowledge or, cognitive capital, if you wish. The system to be depicted owns a fractal characteristic akin to what Gilles Deleuze describes in the Fold (Deleuze 1991) on one hand, and in the age of immaterial material, cognitivist capital, and computational means of information [ex]change, an exaggeration of our perception through Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, on the other.

As seen in the excursion into algorithmic and parametric architecture in the previous part, a field can be a system, dealing with structural behaviour, where human occupancy is not the driving force for finding a form, but physical forces and behavior acting upon one larger entity or specific algorithms choreographing a crowd of agents of the same class. The application of geometric branching algorithm such as L-system or a search algorithm as in an ant-colony may serve to breed forms, structures and spaces, formerly alien to the discipline of architecture. Algorithms may trigger solutions and generate problems alike. Architecture as a cultural critical discipline and model drives itself into a state that increasingly departs from the traditional static understanding and material practice of architecture with all its constraints. Fields allowing human interaction as part of the structuring strategy are breeding grounds for knowledge that changes the surrounding to environment. Parc de la Vilette in Paris designed by Bernard Tschumi and the Fun Palace designed by Gordon Pask and Cedric Prize for London (unbuilt) are just two examples. The ellipsoid IBM Pavilion designed by Charles and Ray Eames with Studio Saarinen for the Expo 1964/65 in New York takes a slightly different approach and extends the strategy of breeding knowledge through introducing computer technology and the modern communication systems that tie as well as glimpse into the future for a audience of 500. A combination of computer controlled multiple, simultaneous screen projections and the appearance of actors in-between was presented to the crowd that beforehand was physically and collectively lifted into the space of a 90-foot high theatre. All visitors were part of one of the first and largest to date public human/computer encounters. The IBM pavilion housed a physical commonality, which cannot be regarded as an interacting swarm of agents, but a performance generating a novel kind of communication between computer technology and the visitor. The existence of simultaneously running sources of visual information to be transported to the human brain reminds us of a modus operandus when using the Internet, except, that the latter is a field that is not the result of a design strategy anymore but an integral part of the design process itself. In contrast to the Internet where individual users create a virtual commonality with interacting agents, collective intelligence, sharing cognitive capital, the Eames’theatre was physical in all dimensions. The flesh of architecture in the 21st century is driven by a desire towards the optimal and grotesque, the ultimate beautification and performative, the unforeseen and magical, finding its foundations in the mathematical forms and abstractions manifested by Wiener or Ashby. The desire leaves the three-dimensional Cartesian grid behind, and indulges in the incorporation of biological and cognitive behaviour; the bones and veins are encoded between the surreal and physical in a virtual asymmetry of statistical mechanics as operation to foster radical constructivism and Eigenform within a field that we ones called Cyberspace.

INTERNET — NON-LINEAR PARA-SPACE — GENEALOGICAL STRING OF THOUGHTS — Since the late 1980s we have grown extensions of our minds beyond the individual body and brain into a physical environment; transformed into binary language, in overlapping simultaneous worlds, providing input from remote locations and IP addresses, output generated by accumulating information originally produced by grey matter around the globe. For approximately the past 15 years architects have officially started incorporating system thinking into their work and admitting that we are designers of systems and fields rather then sculptors of discrete objects or fields only. Since the advent of fast data highways, open source software and a culture that happily shares knowledge in specialized forums the options to design have increased by a large extent. Uploading and sharing code and scripts is extending our individual possibilities to design into the world, the Internet, an unimaginable space inhabited by collective design intelligence. Upon the code’s return, it may have not merely adjusted its phenotypic character, but possibly even changed into a different creature with new characteristics, mutated through the filter of “Electronics virtual communities [that] represent flexible, lively and practical adaptations to the real circumstances” (Stone 1991, 111). Especially in the field of architects and designers who develop and use tools based on code, the early 21st century offers a quantum leap in the evolution of the virtual excelling traditional methods of design. Drawing boards have been replaced with light programs using slender code rather than heavy three-dimensional ‘fancier’ models; office, brain and design abilities are extended to forums for multi peer reviews, design changes and advice. This process eliminated economically compensation, local independency, and software packages that in very many cases are free to run on machines that are generally affordable and increased the amount of cognitive capital. The question and the theory for architecture is if the architect is becoming a mutator, or the inventor of something that can be called ‘Neurotecture?’ (Werner 2011)⁶. When using code the process to arrive at a final product is closer to neural activities than mastering ones. “Making the link with Deleuze, we can see the embodied and embedded nervous system as a pre-individual virtual field: […] a set of differential elements—reciprocally determined functions—in other words, neural function is networked: there is no such thing as the function of ‘a’ neuron;” (Protevi 2010, 171). Bits are the form of operations happening offshore through collective design intelligence that must not be understood as phenomenon, but as an activity, as a process to FORM, at the same time as a form of communication that crates its own syntax and physiology through an active network of computational work, born within human nodes in human brains transported, translated and directed via real-time Autobahns through immaterial real-estate, the internet. A distinction between Form as a verb and Form as a noun vanishes and becomes obsolete.

SYNTHETICAL IS NATURAL — Advanced architecture using the instruments generously offered in the toolbox of Neurotecture is an architecture that embraces multiple authors and multiple hackers at risk of abusing the very same cognitive capital that they produced. Dissipative dynamic virtual space was almost unthinkable only twenty years ago. Benedikt writes,

“The principle of Commonality in cyberspace recommends that virtual places be “objective” in a circumscribed way for a defined community of users. More specifically, the Principle of Commonality requires that all comers to a given domain at a given time in cyberspace are to see/hear largely the same thing-the same place, the same objects, the same people-or at least some subsets of one “thing,” and that the same direction considered as up.” (Benedikt 1991, 180).

Since then a defined group of users, the Commonality, has become its own commodity. The Psychopathology of Cognitive Capitalism in this context has been breeding an offshore collective of design intelligence, a direct descendant of “electronic virtual communities,” the former Internet in the 1980s, which has already been described as “complex and ingenious strategies for survival” (Stone 1991, 111). The modus operandus collective design intelligence sprawls throughout all disciplines, faculties and individuals in ‘hard’ sciences such as mathematics or bioengineering and ‘soft’ sciences, cultural sciences or comparative literature alike, operating in a structurally coupled manner, and using the information exchange through bits and bytes, in an immaterial world, that we once called Cyberspace. Growing collective design intelligence and user intelligence replace designing fields such as Parc de la Villette. Collective design intelligence must not be understood as phenomenon or operator, but as an activity, as a process to FORM. The new cyberspace, the para-space, is very close to “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable Complexity. Lines of light in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…” (Gibson 1984, 51).

This present cybernetic note beyond certainly does not claim that computer programs or the Internet have achieved the ability of acting as devices owning artificial intelligence, as envisaged by Marvin Minsky and his peers half a century ago, in fact artificial intelligence still seems to be far off from being implemented in the research laboratories of Computer Sciences of Robotics institutes. Nevertheless, computer programs and their environments such as the Internet seem to start learning and responding as a result of feeding them with a set of algorithms, complex or simple, arriving at an unforeseen behavior as a form of communication. The cognitive, cerebral, data and bits become code and the isolated structure of a genotype subjected to the environment transforms into a phenotype. The architectural result is one of lushness and deep tissue, following periods of abstinence: abstinence of mathematic, abstinence of clarity, abstinence of pattern, abstinence of heterogeneity and abstinence of passion and indulgence. Architecture as Neurotecture in the cyber-biological framework of an interconnected parametric field is a production-system, the product of itself and an evolution of iterations through constant recursive observation and reinvention. It describes alchemy between real and virtual, not withholding the scientific, but re-entering it like a differentiator. A*cognitivist architecture transforms the concept of configuring space, of forming space to a new materialism, a structure considering context, environment, time, behaviour of and relationships between all agents involved; mutating, genetically engineering and processing data within an Architectural Computer Laboratory. We do witness an almost self-organising interconnected para-metric world on many levels owning a variety of intersections and matrixes. Novel immaterial and known material strategies together with new data born every split second synthesize in the self-informing machinery to become the new natural.

Bibliography

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1. The Macy Conferences (1946-1953). Core group members included Bateson, Hutchinson, McColloch, Mead, v. Foerster, von Neumann, Rosenbluth and Wiener amongst others. The terms cybernetics or second order cybernetics is not applied yet, however the theories are. First proposals are made that feedback mechanism are also valid for economic and social systems. A general system theory is being developed interdisciplinary.
2. The Universal Turing Machine, UTM (1936-37, Allan Turing). A UTM has the ability to read any Turing Machine and input for simulation. In this present philosophy of computation al architecture, Turing’s UTM is applicable and can be transferred from virtual to tangible.
3. In his essay “Building, Dwelling Thinking” (in “Poetry, Language, Thought,” 1951) Martin Heidegger discusses the notion that building is only possible if we are know what dwelling means and relates to the relationship of man, space. It is notable that the essay was written in post-war Germany suffering from a shortage of housing.
4. Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944), biologist and philosopher coined the term ‘Umwelt.’‘Umwelt’is the environment shaped by animal or human due to Wechselwirkung. The difference to ‘Umgebung’[surrounding] is, that the surrounding accepts its inhabitants and is not shaped by them. A relation to architecture exists within the notion of place as being a shaped space.
5. The Voronoi pattern is a mathematically based diagram describing a way to divide two-dimensional areas or three-dimensional space. The tessellation is a result of an algorithm employed on previously established points.
6. Neurotecture may not to be misunderstood as neuro-architecture, which is a specific interdisciplinary field between neuro-sciences and architecture, examining how architecture or any other man-made structure affects a human. Instead it describes an evolutionary strand of advanced architectural strategies and methods combining ubiquitous artificial computing and human computing.