gHOSTS OF TRANSPARENCY
- SHADOWS CAST AND SHADOWS CAST OUT
MICHAEL R. DOYLE
SELENA SAVIĆ
vera bühlmann
Birkhäuser, Basel 2019
Information and data are not synonyms: data (etymo- logically, the ‘given’) has to be treated, articulated, read or deciphered in such a way as to contain information. The sheer amount of data today tends to obscure this important difference between data and information: data is entropic, while information is where this entropy is negated; infor- mation is negentropic. An emerging political imperative of ‘transparency’ conflates the abundance of data with an increase in information. Unfortunately, the reverse is often the case: The more ‘data’ is rendered available and passed off as ‘information’ or ‘knowledge’, the more opaque the dealings with ‘information’ become. This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges we face with regard to becoming lit- erate in the algorithmic and symbolization processes that organize data in our world today—processes we refer to here as ‘ghosts of transparency’.
This book is above all about architectonics and com- munication. What, you may ask, does this have to do with architecture and urbanism? Data and software are thought to reshape the city, while the word ‘architecture’ refers equally often to buildings and to the organization of com- puter software and hardware components. With this book, we want to cast a projective space that accommodates vari- ous Auseinandersetzungen (settings, or setting ups, artic- ulated dispositions of grounds that are quarrelsome) with implicit and explicit mixtures of these two domains inter- penetrating each other. Contributions are short enough to make a point, yet long enough to glimpse the great variety of ‘scales’ of abstractive contemplation that these points index.
Contents of the Book:
Introduction
Michael R. Doyle, Selena Savić, Vera Bühlmann
I Crypto architecture: notes on machine learning and design
Roberto Bottazzi
II An instrument for communication: the self-organizing model
Nikola Marinčić
III Formal creatures: gilles châtelet’s metaphors
Ben Woodard
IV Voids, brands, characters, and how to deal with lots
Miro Roman
V Ambiguity and information in the context of ‘natural communication’: an obstacle-oriented galoisian standpoint
Elias Zafiris
VI From the bit to the pit: poetics of the financial market
Elie Ayache
VII The art of exaggeration
Alexi Kukuljevic
VIII Architecture, an artificial intelligence
Kristian Faschingeder
IX The aural: heidegger and fundamental oto-cheiro-logy II
Georgios Tsagdis
X Reflections of an imaginary object on a silurian lake
Gregg Lambert
XI pentecost – a model of communication for 21st century architecture
Jorge Orozco
XII between disegno & design thinking
Jonathan Powers
XIII crystal of things
Poltak Pandjaitan
XIV architecture of the diaphanous
Riccardo M. Villa
XV the designs of the natural
Martyn Dade-Robertson
XVI mythic noise: architectures of geological communication
Adam Nocek
XVII Photonic communications
Philippe Morel
XVIII Softness, hardness: contemplating architectonic circuits of mediacy and immediacy
Michael R. Doyle
XIX Excerpts from chronicles of the digital
Gilles Dowek
XX travelling on planets of resonating concepts. identification and directionality between computational and architectonic
Selena Savić
XXI an essay on the glossomatic process of communicating communications and other words
Jessica Foley
XXII when others passing by behold: media studies and archives across cultures
Matt Cohen
XXIII fluid spaces, enchanted forests
Yasmine Abbas
XXIC space as affective sense-making capacity
Daríone Gueruela Del Castillo
XXV a few protocol sentences on: non-synthesis, the voluminous form of ideas, temporalities of creation, hypercompatibility
Anne-Françoise Schmid
XXVI the digital, a continent? anarchic citizenship within the object-space
of cunning reason
Vera Bühlmann