• Urban Drift • m-Learning with apps • Dennis Dollens

Biomimetic tower comic page & tower as 3D app

The screen shot is from the 3rd comic book I made in a series for master students in my bioDigital Architecture classes — the comics are intended as introductory texts for digital design, generative architecture, eSpace, and biomimetics and have a close relationship with IDEL and ELDC readings focused on cyborgian organisms and posthuman theory. Further, I’m trying, through MScEL program, to begin articulating an eLearning strategy for the development of metabolizing structures and urban infrastructures that contribute to environmental problems instead of being one of the major causes of them. The comic book format has been a way for presenting complex work in easy (well, moderately easy) chunks and while the comics are distributed though Amazon.com I felt an iPhone app might reach farther faster and released the comic in a very simple linear format — (I now want to join Marvel Comics and use their mobile phone delivery system for formatting and screen movements (and beauty) — but they seem to have other ideas ☺ ). The above image is a next step for moving toward design eLearning using 3D files — the image on the iPhone screen is a fully movable (360o rotation) of the building shown on the comic book page. It is stripped of textures and colors for sending and testing 3D architectural files on mobile phones. This building file begins to address two problems in design eLearning — that files are enormously big and require powerful computers to open. Here the file is small and is opening on Rhino’s app called iRhino 3D ($3.99 Apple’s AppStore).

I’m thinking this is a related response to Bayne’s “Academetron” where “Uncanny pedagogies are seen as a generative way of working with the new ontologies of the digital.” With the position of new architectural organisms situated between living cellular (plant cells), synthetic life, and robotic creatures, they embed the uncanny while the relationship that would have to evolve between humans and hybridized living, breathing (oxygen producing) structures seems a challenge posthuman theory could help by easing the strange, otherness, of humans reintroducing “living” environments and structures— its been a long time since we lived in trees and caves; still there are potentials for reconceptualizing our former homes with our current unhomely places.

http://blog.rhino3d.com/2010/03/iphone-app-about-biomimetic.html

http://www.irhino3d.com/en/

For the Rhino app: search iRhino 3D at the AppStore (if you download it fell free to let me know and I’ll send you the file seen here).

This week I found much in Edwards to admire (the idea that experimentation is method for learning) but also much to question. Edward’s injects Biesta’s “transcendental violence” in his own positive search for experimentation and responsibility. (13) Transcendental violence “involves challenging and confronting students with otherness and difference.” But he goes beyond otherness and difference citing “emancipatory ignorance” with Biesta’s:

“It just is an ignorance [intelligence] that does not claim to know how the future will be or will have to be. It is an ignorance [intelligence] that does not show the way, but only issues an invitation to set out on the journey. It is an ignorance [intelligence] that does not say what to think of it, but only asks, `what do you think about it?’ In short it is an ignorance [intelligence] that makes room for the possibility of disclosure.”

In the above I find the use of “ignorance” arbitrary except for a will-to-performance (but not necessarily without semantic logic). Therefore, following hypertext work and discussion in IDEL, and because the above quotation seems fluid without conviction, a manifesto, I overwrote it inserting “intelligence” for ignorance — since ignorance is a station within intelligence (both are ways of knowing), it is for Edwards a positional geography for a nomadics of experimentation. But ignorance is uncivil, ruthless — hard to reconcile with either “transcendental” or “emancipatory.” In my view, Biesta’s quotes are ugly posturing and, if possible, not to be used lightly for pedagogical strolls. I think they miscalculate bordering on violence; after all, ignorance is reserved for the position of the other, the native, the lesser (perhaps miscalculate is a position with uncanny).

In many ways I found reading Bayne’s Academentron, Automation, Phantom: Uncanny Digital Pedagogies as a finer resolution for resolving home, place, presence, and digital bearing in experimentation. Filtering through the strange, haunted, miscalculated, (perhaps even through a positive transcendental unhomely) Bayne places the experimental, the responsible, in the uncanny: “how we might, in practice, go about forging generative digital pedagogies . . .” Searching generative pedagogies marks a position (a presence) within a field, a striation of nature. Finding non-violence in Kristeva, Bayne quotes, “. . . the sign is not experienced as arbitrary but assumes a real importance. As a consequence, the material reality that the sign was commonly supposed to point to crumbles away to the benefit of the imagination . . .” Benefit of the imagination is pure generosity, deep responsibility — they are generative and nomadic and on an experimental, educational pathway that could be mapped in Deleuze and Guattari. The sign becomes emancipatory, not in a state of ignorance, but a state of experimental resolve, informational flow, hybridized discovery.

Experimental does not mean unguided pathways of ignorance even though it may include and employ otherness, difference, and uncanny as code, marker, and navigation device. We could, partially, define the experimental as embracing uncanny insights, premonitions, and Freud’s 1919 unheimliche (i.e. the learning mind mutating through cyborg to posthuman).

Edwards uses entanglement (9) but neglects to explain its scientific relevance to hypertext or posthumanism. Entanglement is part of quantum physics. Here I’m pulling a sentence from Wikipedia that registers my understanding of it: “information describing the objects is inextricably linked such that performing a measurement on one immediately alters properties of the other, even when separated at arbitrary distances.” In a sense all forces are contributing to evolving of all systems, and that limited, discrete change is not possible. Edwards states: “entanglement is materially and practically fundamental to a hybridized post-human condition.” But in the next sentence leading to Latour’s “quasi-objects” he hints that experimental “things” are evolving by saying “objects are not entirely separate entities, but are mixings, gatherings, things. . . ” (9) This statement readies us for an insert quote from Latour emphasizing the production of “objects and subjects and matter and meaning” (10) — does this, filtered through “objects are not entirely separate entities,” effectually say: constructs made (at this point in history) by evolved humans define a posthuman pedagogy? I think it comes close.

We are moving closer to embodiment (entanglement) in nature. Listen: “Theorizing, like experimenting, is a material practice.” (Already we know, Edwards, in his Prelude says: “this article is a thing.”) Could we then read the above as: theorizing is making “things” in a state of nature? If so I think Edwards is taking us deep into a posthuman condition where “we move beyond the concept of learning as a purpose of education more toward a purpose of responsible experimenting.” (11) Here, experimenting is a living property, an evolutionary search, a part of posthuman “thing” production. As method, Edwards suggests “confronting students with otherness and difference.” And quoting Osberg and Biesta, “teachers are responsible both for the emergence of the world (the future) [the thing] and for the emergence of human subjectivity.” (13)

Watch to the end for the machines and consider the design can be very very complex with high resolution detail and can be in various materials including finished industrial products — posthuman industry from your laptop

“. . . crucial here have been the theories of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and more generally of deconstructionists and postmodernists at large. Barthes for his part promoted the notion of the “death of the author”; in a series of books published over the course of twenty-five years, Foucault challenged liberal belief in the individual intention and agency. The conventional humanistic understanding of subjectivity—the individual agent, writer or reader possessing a mind of his or her own and exercising free will through thought and action — was superficial and self-serving. Rather, such anti-humanist iconoclasts argued for the primacy of semantic sign systems, cognitive structures and texts. We don’t think our thoughts, they think us; we are but the bearers of discourses, our selves are discursive constructs. Within such frames of analysis, any notion of the ascent of selfhood is but idle teleological myth, a humanist hagiography.”

Roy Porter, “Flesh in the Age of Reason”

Digital Nature. Seeds generated in software and CAD

The images are not renderings of seeds they are new generations of seeds that don’t exist in nature. Simulations. Since early in the class I have not liked the avatars in SL. I’ve wanted to be represented as a mineral or molecule. In 2005 I used software to generate a series of Digital Botanic Prints based on pollen seen in microscopes or seeds observed in the wild — these are digital nature not nature’s nature, posthuman. Since I don’t have time to generate new simulations of minerals and molecules, I’m posting the seeds one way I would like to change my ontological being, presence in SL.

eL Tower. 1st Render

Posthuman pedagogy here lies in the idea of generating digitally, within nature, as natural. These images are attempts to use natural attributes from trees, simulated through digital algorithms, and generated in software, leading to a bio-digital and eventually to a living or semi-living architecture, as a means to discuss prostheses in nature analogous to those in cyborgian theory, as well as transliteracy involving line, form, and space as partners with text in eLearing.

See generative sequence in the post for 21 November.

This sequence begins to illustrate a process of algorithmic generation and digital hybridization of growth attributes from a generic tree as it is digitally grafted (think e-bonsai) for development of bio-intelligent building structure, filtration, power, and recycling . . . I’m attempting to fuse theory from IDEL and ELDC into the process and theory of bioDigital design. (Click on images for larger views).

Digitally generated tree being transformed into a structural truss

Detail of tree branches intersecting to create stable, interlocking structure

Trees grouped in a circle to interlock and create the tower

Trees and branches fuesing as tower body

Trees and branches hidden for generation of leaves (bioRobotic panels, filtration)

Tower schematic: trees, branches, leaves

The amorality of technology implicates eLearnig as a contaminated para/site for the not-for-profit, committed, teaching goals of universities by capitalistic cycles of products and innovation (eL life-support depends on military technologies such as satellites, surveillance, and massive data processing). Seen in this light, eL becomes an ecotone, a borderlands of conflicting goals and crony masters (government funders), whose determinations endanger teacher and learner ontologies (and physical environments). I’m thinking the sites of eL are lands of contention, of a new revolution, and that protecting them as open sites through teaching innovation and by originating platforms, pedagogies, and methods for soft occupation is critical for keeping eL from morphing into technologies of mere information processing and servitude. Maybe, the posthuman challenge includes not only presence and screen occupancy, but also occupancy of/on devices and infrastructures, as public collaboratives, public utilities, coming to terms with mobile technologies as environmental resources — redefining the cyborg as teacher not liberator. We become Flâneurs of the mobile not the spectacle, and comprehend Marx through Benjamin not Stalin.

TweetDeck as mobile classroom; PC, iOS, & Android, iPhone

manifestTWEETS is past the halfway point — they are a long-running (30 days) part of my final project intended as a test for sequential class texts coordinated with animations, discussions, and further assignments. TweetDeck is proving to be a good mobile site — a virtual classroom — with abilities to link other systems, media (especially YouTube for mobile class videos), and Tweet discussion. I have tested with TweetDeck on laptops, iPad, iPhone, and Android (Nexus). If anyone is running other Twitter catchers and/or other mobile systems Symbian, Windows, etc. and can check by following Twitter: manifestweets — information would be greatly appreciated. Ideas/opinions too!

I’m also thinking TweetDeck in terms of flanerie — a smooth surface (unlike Benjamin’s city) for a cyborgian stroll . . .