*I'm trying to imagine myself old, and feeble, and weak, and sick, and white-haired, and totally surrounded by mid-21C
"Plectic Architecture."
Obviously I've got it coming, I deserve that fate, but...
maybe I'd be really *pleased and serene*. "Yes, this part is nanotechnological... and this is an old-skool
Janine Benyus biomimicry riff here... and this useless Koolhaas junkspace where I keep my dialysis unit, that's where they goofed off doing Rhinoscript 'taffypulling.'"
And then I take visitors over to the BDLGBLOG
room where I've got a crumbling archive of the only stuff every *physically printed out* from BLDGBLOG.
It's like Tut's tomb in there. It's like Otzi's autopsy table, and a cloud of plectic dry-ice pours out whenever I open it.
http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/otherhostedsites/avatar/intro.html
PLECTIC ARCHITECTURE -TOWARDS A THEORY OF THE POST-DIGITAL IN ARCHITECTURE (((no no, don't run away yet – it's pretty good stuff, and I put some paragraphs in it so it's almost parseable)))
Definitions:
Firstly it is important to stress that "Post-Digital Architecture" is not an architecture without any digital component. Indeed it an architecture that very much is a synthesis between the virtual, the actual, the biological, the cyborgian, the augmented and the mixed.
It is impossible, anymore, to talk of Digital Architecture as a binary opposition to normal real world architecture. Cyberspace has insidiously insinuated itself into our existence, at every scale and at every turn. (((Yep.)))
Murray Gell-Mann defines "Plectics" as the "...the study of simplicity and complexity. It includes the various attempts to define complexity; the study of roles of simplicity and complexity and of classical and quantum information in the history of the universe, the physics of information; the study of non-linear dynamics, including chaos theory, strange attractors, and self-similarity in complex non-adaptive systems in physical science; and the study of complex adaptive systems, including prebiotic chemical evolution, biological evolution, the behaviour of individual organisms, the functioning of ecosystems, the operation of mammalian immune systems, learning and thinking, the evolution of human languages, the rise and fall of human cultures, the behaviour of markets, and the operation of computers that are designed or programmed to evolve strategies - say, for playing chess, or solving problems." (1)
If we start to think of the architecture in this book (((there's a book? Hey wait, wow, I need that book))) as the first stirrings of a Plectic post-digital Architecture, then Murray Gell-Mann's, mid nineteen eighties definition, of "Plectics" seems a suitably broad umbrella within which to situate it.
Such terrain can include a variety of complex sub cultures of architecture that are all composed of differing degrees of the digital, the virtual, the biological and the nanotechnological, interaction and reflexivity without banishing the more off piste and often less fashionable investigations, propositions and researches.
Above all these architectures seek to simplify, amplify or facilitate and make visible the complex entanglement of contemporary space. (((And that's a full day's work right there, folks.)))
