A contemporary view of human condition challenges its confinement in the boundaries of a body and a mind as entities, which have reciprocal connections but are considered separated from their milieu (the set of environmental, cultural and edaphic conditions). First of all it questions their purity and integrity: our own body is itself an environment that hosts several lifeforms (populations of virus and bacteria, which have their own ways to communicate and organize themselves); it’s being perpetually changed as its constituent cells are replaced periodically; moreover it also exchanges continuously energy, matter and information through its outmost frontier. We are inextricably connected with our environment on all levels of complexity; in each of these, information exchange is continuous (from the horizontal – specie to specie - exchange of genetic material up to sophisticated transmission of values). Ever since our ancestors, we used technology (which pre-dates our humanness) as a mean of environmental interaction, we took advantage of it to engineer nature in order to enlarge our ecological niche; this implies also improving our capacity to manage a higher level of complexity and sophistication in the architecture of information, which changed our physical body (see for example how the development of cooking food triggered the development of a bigger brain) and influenced mutually the way we inform our architectures, both in the morphological and spatial organization and in their use as a medium and storage for our cultural products (including social organization). Technology then isn’t an added feature that implicitly subjugates or undermines human condition, rather a symbiotic dimension that is inextricable from it: our environmental adaptation strategy is to build systems, but when one becomes the use of a system, it becomes part of the system. Technology is co-evolving with humanity, blurring the boundary that an outdated yet popular idea (still linked to the image of industrial prosthetic additions deforming an originally pure body) set between the biological world and technology itself: the same idea of “artificial” is disrupting as the notion of “growing” and “breeding” new products are gradually substituting the one of “making”, the typical mark of man up to the industrial age. The notion of machine in its philosophical meaning of an assemblage able of self-organization and self-reproduction processes provides a better description of the upcoming generation of systems we will interact with. The continuous and mutual interaction between technology and our metabolic functions resulted in their outsourcing: part of our body thermal regulation is delegated to our artifacts (clothes, architecture) and part of our mnemonic functions are delegated to storage systems (books, paintings, computers, the city itself). It is precisely this ability to build symbiotic systems to enhance our ability to manage complexity that becomes an essential quality of human condition. Contemporary technology is establishing a pervasive and ubiquitous connection between an active space of information (whether physically embedded or coded) and our metabolic functions, moving from an idea of human as a body+mind whole to that of a system of relations: it is the set of relations between these systems that engenders an ontology of human condition as a dynamically interconnected system with its environment at large, an interdependent part of it. Humanity and technology are catalysts of their own co-evolution. Architecture is partaking in the orchestration of those systems of connections; steering away from the mere concept of a rigid protection and mitigation it should become a more sensible mediator for interconnected relationships in a complex field of environmental and cultural pressures, as well as a new dynamic subject itself, using form as agency for environmental adaptation and construction of meaning. Its potential to promote the engendering of diversity and novelty can be exploited in its full potential only through computation (information processing), more precisely computing systems (organic-inorganic) endowed with autonomous agency, which are able to tease out emergent properties by building hierarchies of relations at several levels of complexity. Humanities are as well partaking, as all disciplines share network of connections and soft spots where they merge with others, they too are affecting technology and being affected at the same time. To recognize this symbiotic condition and exploit its potential is what could generate open landscapes of desires for the human condition to explore.

The Fashion Robot

ERIOLI, ALESSIO
2014

Abstract

A contemporary view of human condition challenges its confinement in the boundaries of a body and a mind as entities, which have reciprocal connections but are considered separated from their milieu (the set of environmental, cultural and edaphic conditions). First of all it questions their purity and integrity: our own body is itself an environment that hosts several lifeforms (populations of virus and bacteria, which have their own ways to communicate and organize themselves); it’s being perpetually changed as its constituent cells are replaced periodically; moreover it also exchanges continuously energy, matter and information through its outmost frontier. We are inextricably connected with our environment on all levels of complexity; in each of these, information exchange is continuous (from the horizontal – specie to specie - exchange of genetic material up to sophisticated transmission of values). Ever since our ancestors, we used technology (which pre-dates our humanness) as a mean of environmental interaction, we took advantage of it to engineer nature in order to enlarge our ecological niche; this implies also improving our capacity to manage a higher level of complexity and sophistication in the architecture of information, which changed our physical body (see for example how the development of cooking food triggered the development of a bigger brain) and influenced mutually the way we inform our architectures, both in the morphological and spatial organization and in their use as a medium and storage for our cultural products (including social organization). Technology then isn’t an added feature that implicitly subjugates or undermines human condition, rather a symbiotic dimension that is inextricable from it: our environmental adaptation strategy is to build systems, but when one becomes the use of a system, it becomes part of the system. Technology is co-evolving with humanity, blurring the boundary that an outdated yet popular idea (still linked to the image of industrial prosthetic additions deforming an originally pure body) set between the biological world and technology itself: the same idea of “artificial” is disrupting as the notion of “growing” and “breeding” new products are gradually substituting the one of “making”, the typical mark of man up to the industrial age. The notion of machine in its philosophical meaning of an assemblage able of self-organization and self-reproduction processes provides a better description of the upcoming generation of systems we will interact with. The continuous and mutual interaction between technology and our metabolic functions resulted in their outsourcing: part of our body thermal regulation is delegated to our artifacts (clothes, architecture) and part of our mnemonic functions are delegated to storage systems (books, paintings, computers, the city itself). It is precisely this ability to build symbiotic systems to enhance our ability to manage complexity that becomes an essential quality of human condition. Contemporary technology is establishing a pervasive and ubiquitous connection between an active space of information (whether physically embedded or coded) and our metabolic functions, moving from an idea of human as a body+mind whole to that of a system of relations: it is the set of relations between these systems that engenders an ontology of human condition as a dynamically interconnected system with its environment at large, an interdependent part of it. Humanity and technology are catalysts of their own co-evolution. Architecture is partaking in the orchestration of those systems of connections; steering away from the mere concept of a rigid protection and mitigation it should become a more sensible mediator for interconnected relationships in a complex field of environmental and cultural pressures, as well as a new dynamic subject itself, using form as agency for environmental adaptation and construction of meaning. Its potential to promote the engendering of diversity and novelty can be exploited in its full potential only through computation (information processing), more precisely computing systems (organic-inorganic) endowed with autonomous agency, which are able to tease out emergent properties by building hierarchies of relations at several levels of complexity. Humanities are as well partaking, as all disciplines share network of connections and soft spots where they merge with others, they too are affecting technology and being affected at the same time. To recognize this symbiotic condition and exploit its potential is what could generate open landscapes of desires for the human condition to explore.
2014
Agile Design - Advanced Architectural Cultures
69
78
Erioli, A.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11585/560977
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