I wasn’t too sure what I was getting into when I approached this building.
Well it is called the “Brooklyn Navy Yard“, by the water, just opposite of Manhattan. My friend Architect Mitchell Joachim told me there would be a ton of good people there…
Yeah, I know, we are moving to Hong Kong, but I am super excited knowing that a home for Protei might be under construction in New York ;) Gabriella is from here and we dream of being allowed using a table there for now :)
The New Lab has this huge terrace…
And just by the future building there is this large dry dock.
I cannot help but dreaming how we could build very large “Ocean Zeppelin” in there ! Above Protei_003 I built in New Orleans in 2010, model is Hunter Daniels.
This is a view of the future NewLab from the current NewLab. Manhattan is just there.
I was daydreaming the other day and I was fascinated how we, as human, try to make sense of it all.
Over time we’ve constantly attempted to understand the underlying mechanisms of the universe, trying to decipher what is true at every scale, from gravity to relativity, quantic, experimental physics… I had this short sentence flying around in my mind, and I could not find it anywhere on the internet. So it would be a big surprise, but I might have come up with this simple axiom a while ago (2008 is the first time I posted this on facebook as my favorite quote) :
What I love about this axiom, is that it temporarily brings peace between science and faith. Because nature can neither be god nor be explained by science. It fundamentally denies science or philosophy the capacity to comprehend nature even through it’s most elaborate chaos theory, versions of the infinite, leaves skepticism nothing to grip. It talks about something that is beyond understanding, that is not sacred nor knowable. It is the infuriating declaration of peace, the eternal victory of nature on humans. We are not the system, there was no system before us and won’t be any system after us. This may contribute to a more complete definition of what nature is, that is neither a finite object nor describable context. We’ll never fully understand “it”.
It is 4:07AM, I’m in the middle of the Indian Ocean sleeping on the aft of the MV Explorer en route for Kochi, India. Maybe I spent too much time on this ship and I am loosing my mind a little, ha. I would love to write more about this, so I need you to prove me wrong. Seriously. Do it. :)
And the word that came to my mind was “urban vascularisation” or how the city is a living organism that conduct flows, evolves and can be modified.
At this stage it would be hard to avoid mentioning Luigi Colani “Biocity”, a city that is supposed to be built and function like a human body (thanks to Matthew Plummer-Fernandez for the ref).
I connect this to a current research I am excited to see develop : a robotic traffic light system for Nairobi Kenya, spear-headed by the *IHub_ and Jessica Colaco. it is really interesting to see how the radical modification of a “simple” traffic controller could re-orient “life” within the city “vessels”. This interest came from research notes of “network growth” I have been making recently.
A traffic jam in Nairobi. iHUb is developing a system that will use lights to control traffic flow. Photo/File
“A team of Japanese and British researchers observed that the slime mold connected itself to scattered food sources in a design that was nearly identical to Tokyo’s rail system. Atsushi Tero from Hokkaido University in Japan, along with colleagues elsewhere in Japan and the United Kingdom, placed oat flakes on a wet surface in locations that corresponded to the cities surrounding Tokyo, and allowed the Physarum polycephalum mold to grow outwards from the center. They watched the slime mold self-organize, spread out, and form a network that was comparable in efficiency, reliability, and cost to the real-world infrastructure of Tokyo’s train network.”
In the comment of this article ”JMillsPaysBills” suggests this article loosed in relevancy because the actual rail system and the slime mold are not placed side by side to be compared. So I made this graphic underneath. On the left it is the experiment with slime mold, on the right it is my maps overlays.
“Charley” also commented : “This article’s assumption is that that city populations are static and oat flakes can be a standing for those static cities in this model. Then slime mold can be used to predict mass transportation links between these cities.
In practice, the situation often is reversed. Mass transportation is built, and then cities expand at the nodes of that transportation system.”
I think it works both ways : cities expand from transportation AND train stations are decided upon the location of existing settlements.
My friend Nick Kaufmann, recommended me this interesting reading “Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization” by Richard Sennett. http://books.google.com/books/about/Flesh_and_Stone.html?id=W9sXRG3z-lgC
“Flesh and Stone is a new history of the city in Western civilization, one that tells the story of urban life through bodily experience. It is a story of the deepest parts of life – how women and men moved in public and private spaces, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed their noses, where they are, how they dressed, the mores of bathing and of making love – all in the spaces of the city from ancient Athens to modern New York.
Behavioural Programming: Guiding people to form 1) Line, 2) Mesh, 3) Fully connected, 4) form groups.
Visual Programming: Asking a group of connected individuals to conform to prescribed geometrical figures.
Numerical Programming: Giving each single individual a set of simple instructions to apply regardless of other dynamics, and let these “naturally” interact.
Entropy: After having conducted these previous experiments, giving participants the instruction to do whatever they want with the string.
I have also updated the instruction set of instructions for the “Behavioural programming” here :
Warm up
Walk random patterns eyes open
Run random patterns with eyes open
Walk random patterns eyes closed
Run random patterns with eyes closed
Stand up still eyes open, look at others
Stand up still eyes closed, feel others
Stand up still eyes open, stand up on one leg
Stand up on one leg, close one eye. Close the second eye.
Spin in one direction until you get dizzy.
Spin the other direction until you cancel the dizziness.
Stand up still eyes open, look at others
Stand up still eyes closed, feel others
Linear Network (Line)
_ I pull one line and connect everybody.
Walk random patterns eyes closed
Run random patterns with eyes closed
Stand up still eyes closed, feel others
Stand up still eyes open, look at others
Mesh Network (Mesh)
_ I cut the line, disconnecting some, reconnecting others in a mesh.
Walk random patterns eyes closed
Run random patterns with eyes closed
Stand up still eyes closed, feel others
Stand up still eyes open, look at others
Fully Connected Network (Fully Connected)
_ I each and everyone.
Walk random patterns eyes closed
Run random patterns with eyes closed
Stand up still eyes closed, feel others
Stand up still eyes open, look at others
Community building (Segregation)
How do you feel?
We went through 3 different types of network topologies :
1) a line network
2) a mesh network
3) a fully connected network
Which one did you prefer / dislike? Why?
What defines a community? Why?
Now I will get back to giving a few more instructions.
_ Pause.
Stand up still eyes closed, feel others
Feel others with the strings.
Which strings do you like most? Which string would you rather drop.
Keep the strings you like, drop the strings you don’t feel comfortable holding.
Eyes closed, keep holding the strings, but now move freely, wherever you want to go.
When you feel you are in the right place, stop. Take your time.
When I will see more than half of you standing still, this will be the end of this part of the experiment.
_ Pause.
How do you feel?
What did you learn?
What did we learn as a group?
How could push this experiment further?
I will continue this research further later – that was just a research note – and a cool poster coming out of it :) Original files here (.ai.pdf.jpg). Do you know of any interesting references / books / pdfs about network growth / evolution / topologies? Thanks!
World Environment Action (WEA)
The world leaders cannot agree, we need to take actions. We do 3 things :
1 – a global map conecting environmental reports to people taking action.
2 – a project managment interface
3 – a visual forum to imagine what the World Environment Organization (WEO) could be. Solving one problem at the time together. Take action!
Gabriella Levine and Cesar Harada have been selected to participate to the Unreasonable at sea for the Protei project.
Please watch the video above and you will understand why we are excited to be part of this great adventure. For several months on the sea, we will be in the company of some of the world most forward thinking entrepreneurs that will be our mentors. This is an immense honor for me and for the Protei Project and we will document this journey as well as possible to share this incredible privilege with the greatest number. You can see our dates of the travels and where we will stop on my time line.
An internet owned and moderated by people. Not belonging to companies, nor militaries, nor states. The world needs openet for freedom and security. Many similar projects exist, Openet tries to put them together, elaborate a standard. Collaborate.
https://vimeo.com/3997279#at=0
We are a group of passionate inventors and scientists trying to put together the International_Ocean_Station as an open-source hardware and software mobile laboratory. May it be ocean exploration, pollution and climate study, sustainable aquaculture, life-saving architecture, communication infrastructure etc. We are inventing an entire novel architecture family, with a hands-on approach.
Royal College of Arts, London, UK. About 7 people.
Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. About 10 people.
CCCB, Barcelona, Spain. About 35 people.
In the last years I have been exploring the relation between social networks and architecture. Or how we can embody social networks to understand them better, and why not generate a new type of architecture that would live through these changes and improve human interactions. I conducted these groups experiments
Workshop on “Environmental Governance,” Design & Environment, Goldsmiths University, London UK.
And I am looking for new groups of people interested in exploring this in different cultural contexts.
History
The fact is that the therm social Geometry has been in used since 1976 by the American Prof. of Social Science Donald Black in the book “The Behavior of Law”. A well written and concise wikipedia article presents the matter. Some attribute the origins of Social Geometry to the works of Georg Simmel , Emile Durkheim or Pierre Bourdieu. However D. Black approach seems to take into account clear variables that are “usable” more directly in the generation of physical social networks :
horizontal/morphological (the extent and frequency of interaction among participants)
vertical (the unequal distribution of resources)
corporate (the degree of organization, or of integration of individuals into organizations)
cultural (the amount and frequency of symbolic expressions)
Black refers to this multi-dimensional amalgam as “social space“. My personal interest is to temporarily dissolve these “social controllers” and let them re-emerge and reconfigure in large-scale choreographic experiments, in the form of ephemeral architecture, that I call “Architecture of Play.
In the illustration above, you can see different stages to the generation of a social network :
randomly moving disconnected individuals
Linear network : one line connecting all actors.
Branched Network
Complex Network
Voronoi Cells
Arches
Membranes
And as constructed model :
Essentially we’re doing the same thing as the video above, Delauney triangulation : http://youtu.be/GUnuSYUXpwo
A simple set of instruction to generate complex behaviors and networks
These were the simple choreographic instructions I would give to the group. Updated instructions here.
The study of network topology recognises eight basic topologies:[5]
Point-to-point
Bus
Star
Ring or circular
Mesh
Tree
Hybrid
Daisy chain
But every single topology can be arranged in a way that tells a totally different story in the context of human architecture.
Complexity, Function & Play
Needless is to say that networks are not formed arbitrarily.
The exemple below is a neural network. On the left : INPUTS, on the right : a single OUTPUT.
Where more complex networks might provide multiple answers simultaneously :
And this is an network of human contributors to a wikipedia article : many to one.
This is the physical reality of our information network, the internet:
And this how the internet sees itself, as data nodes:
In fact the best resource I found to be up to date about visualisation of complex network is visualcomplexity.com
Formation, growth, Reconfiguration, Resilience and Decay
Based on the 7 basic network topologies, I made some sketches of network growth. Really rough at this stage :
Collaborative academic research exploring what “Open Architecture” means in urbanism, computer software, biology, space engineering, philosophy, linguisitcs, social sciences etc. Epistemology of a eternally renewed term that keeps expanding knowledge domain. Contribute.
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