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Extensive Continuum Towards A Rhythmic Anarchitecture by Luciana Parisi & Steve Goodman
Extensive Continuum Towards A Rhythmic Anarchitecture by Luciana Parisi & Steve Goodman
1. Introduction
The fluidification of the Euclidean spatial matrix has resulted in the implementation
of topological models of spatiality, the temporal continuity between shapes and
places. In particular, as recently argued, algorithmic architecture stops time from
being spatialized into successive segments, opening static forms to temporal
variations derived from open programming . [1] Here the geometrical point is no
longer a fixed position on a uni-directional line, but an algorithmic calculus
demarcating a curvature between points, a spatio-temporal deformation that cannot be
observed but only experienced. For instance, open programming explains how
computation needs to be completed by experience, adding unpredictable variations to
the algorithmic calculus. An open programming therefore here defines how the
calculation of possibilities is always already incomplete or to be completed by
biophysical experience, intended as sensorimotor perception or embodied perception.
This algorithmic point is, borrowing from Bernard Cache, an inflection of linear time
and geometric space. Generative architecture, despite being criticised for its exclusive
focus on unbuilt forms, has, it is argued, introduced real time into design. [2] In
particular, such time has been associated to an experience of duration resonating with
Henri Bergson’s critique of the scientific, geometric and the intellectual distortion of
time. Such temporality is not only deployed by the evolutionary character of
algorithmic patterns, composing new forms out of the interaction with pre-
programmed instructions, but is also complicated by audio-visual and sensori-motor
interactive feedbacks adding new, un-programmed temporalities to data-based
information.
We argue that the need for a user to actively intervene to synthesize continuity, is
predicated on a metaphysic of continuity over discontinuity whereby lived experience
is added via subjective temporalities to the digital pre-programmed space in order to
explain novelty. Instead, we sidestep the problem of ontologizing either the
continuous or the discontinuous, the analog or the digital, hinting at, via Alfred
N.Whitehead’s notion of the ‘extensive continuum’, a kind of rhythmic
anarchitecture of cyclic discontinuity, or as Leibniz might say, an ecology of
nonconscious counting, in which flow is continuously split, cut and broken, while
simultaneously the atomic virtually congeals. Such a conception allows room for
abstract potentialities, such as computational entities, to produce real affectivities in
the form of contagious algorithms perceived nonsensuously.
For us, it is not sufficient to say that novelty is added by either the user or the route
through the digital (which, it has been argued, reduces experience to probabilities). [6]
Instead, we wish to speculate about a rhythmic anarchitecture which would arise as a
nexus of incalculable computabilities, begging the question of how we can talk about
the fuzzy dimension immanent to the digital, such as in Chaitin’s sensual mathematics
of Omega, where Omega is a real number between 0 and 1, which he defines as the
engine of uncompressable randomness.
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Luciana Parisi and Steven Goodman “Extensive Continuum: Towards a
Rhythmic Anarchitecture”
Inflexions No.2 “Nexus” (December 2008) www.inflexions.org
In contrast to a continuity of becoming, the space of flow where the unity of events
lies in an underlying continual temporal invariant, a lived duration, Whitehead’s
notion of the extensive continuum undoes the split between space and time. It
expresses a general scheme of relatedness between actual entities in an actual world.
More than that, Whitehead insists that the extensive continuum is above all a
potential for actual relatedness. The continuum gives potential, while the actual is
atomic or quantic by nature. The continuum only exists in the spatio-temporal gaps
between actual occasions, but it is what unifies the occasions in one common world.
The actual entity breaks up the continuum realizing the eternal object, or particular
potential that it selects. This breaking up, atomization or quantization, forces the
eternal object into the space-time of the actual occasion – in this process, actuality
becomes what is merely potential.
3. Rhythmic Anarchitecture
This vibratory nexus of the extensive continuum exceeds and precedes the distinction
between subject and object and constitutes a virtual mesh of relations, which enables
the becoming of experience, the continuity of discontinuity. Such a rhythmic
anarchitecture can be clarified via an investigation of theories of rhythmanalysis and
their limits. [7]
For us, Whitehead’s extensive continuum moves beyond the Bergson and Bachelard
deadlock because it accounts for the continual potential relations between
discontinuous actual occasions. Rhythmic anarchitecture accounts for a vibratory
nexus of actual occasions and tentatively initiates an ethico-aesthetic field of
experimentation against the backdrop of a pre-emptive topology of control.
4. Topological control
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Luciana Parisi and Steven Goodman “Extensive Continuum: Towards a
Rhythmic Anarchitecture”
Inflexions No.2 “Nexus” (December 2008) www.inflexions.org
conceptual feelings, between what we call topological control and rhythmic
anarchitecture.
From the standpoint of the extensive continuum, digital modelling implies more than
the mere quantifications of the continual temporalities of experience, i.e. is more than
mere probabilities. We wish to suggest that digital modelling is implicated in an
ethico-aesthetic of anarchitecture, or architecture ex situ.
We would like to conclude by offering some paths for future research via some open
propositions:
Notes:
[4] Lefebvre’s idea of lived space in particular has been adopted by interactive media
artists to point at the irregularities of spatial relations through gaming and playing for
instance, as opposed to the programmed or mathematical spatial coordinates. See
Lefebvre.
[6] The critique against the algorithmic reduction of the variabilities of organic
movement to sets of probabilities – unable to express the veritability of change – can
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Luciana Parisi and Steven Goodman “Extensive Continuum: Towards a
Rhythmic Anarchitecture”
Inflexions No.2 “Nexus” (December 2008) www.inflexions.org
be found in many approaches to interactive digital media. See for instance Hansen,
42-50.
References
Bachelard, Gaston, The Dialectic of Duration, trans. Mary McAllester Jones
(Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000).
Bergson, Henri, Matter & Memory trans. N.M.Paul and W.S.Palmer (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1991; 1896).
Chaitin, Gregory. MetaMaths. The Quest for Omega (London: Atlantic Books, 2006).
Hansen, Mark. New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).
Whitehead, Alfred N., Process & Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1979).
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Luciana Parisi and Steven Goodman “Extensive Continuum: Towards a
Rhythmic Anarchitecture”
Inflexions No.2 “Nexus” (December 2008) www.inflexions.org