Beyond Digital by Mario Carpo

Author:Mario Carpo [Carpo, Mario]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press

3.3.4 The Emergence of Emergence in the Early 2000s

By the end of the 1990s the postmodern science of complexity was ready for prime time, and complexism soon pervaded popular science, as well as popular culture: Steven Johnson’s best-selling Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (2001) firmly established the legitimacy of an ideology that claimed to hold a key to our understanding of natural phenomena, social phenomena, and technical networks alike; and which furthermore saw the concomitant rise of the new digital technologies and of the so-called digital economy as the fulfilment and vindication of a law of nature predicated on the innate capacity of all complex systems to self-organize by dint of cycles of growing unbalances and catastrophic disruptions. By that time, the financial markets and economics in general were commonly seen as a primary field of application of complexity theory: Paul Krugman’s first best-selling book, The Self-Organizing Economy, which also included a primer to complexity theory in general, was published in 1996. Even if that was likely not Paul Krugman’s intention, many arguments from his book were quickly embraced by neo-liberal and libertarian economists. Artists and designers around the turn of the millennium were also familiar with a more esoteric version of complexism infused in the work of theoretician and filmmaker Manuel DeLanda, whose influential A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History had been published by Zone Books in 1997.

Christina Cogdell has convincingly argued that the Emergent Technologies and Design (EmTech) master’s program at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London was the crucible where, in the first decade of the new century, a creative conflation of complexism, computationalism, and architectural theory was successfully transmuted into a conceptual framework that was both relevant and hugely appealing to cutting-edge computational design research; and indeed the idea of emergence that was forged at the AA during those years soon spread to the computational design community around the world, and it remains to this day (2021) one of the most pervasive and influential design theories of our time—one that has already left an indelible trace on design history and on the history of architectural education around the world.50 The Emergence and Design Group was founded in 2001 by Michael Weinstock, Michael Hensel, and Achim Menges, and the group authored several issues of AD, of which the first, “Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies,” published in 2004, is reportedly the best-selling issue in AD history.51 Important books were published by the trio, and by Weinstock alone, in 2010;52 Hensel and Menges left the AA around that time and the program, which still runs, was until recently led by Weinstock. Christina Cogdell, who was a student in the EmTech program in 2011, has devoted pages of scholarly analysis to the ideas of Weinstock in particular. In her view, Weinstock’s teleological view of complexity theory leads to an almost irrational belief in the palingenetic power of emergence: if complexity is the most general, universal law of nature, and the laws of complexity mean

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.