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

Use of Flaneur, etc.

Search between 1980 and 2008 for flaneur, flanerie, cyborg, posthuman, manifesto, twitter, and tweet for books in French, English, British English, and American English.

I’ve been framing and reframing the evolutionary properties of ELDC, trying to come to grips with their impact for this sign-off. What I’m thinking is that the Lifestream became the central point of focus: a generative component for thinking these past months. I see the blog as a media feed reporting on the readings or presenting assignments, as well as a new form of production digital-journal, where impact and effect of theory are hybridized with eLearning delivery while interconnected with thoughts and works of classmates.

Focusing my extrapolations from the assigned texts on design and architectural issues aids the branching of the uncanny, cyborgian, and posthuman in articulating design procedures — to use class theory as a bridge to design and environmental theory and to reach out from the class reading for ways to connect and describe space and space formation in design. In most cases this is only just taking root. The application or hybridization of ideas from one field to another is not prescribed nor a smooth, one-to-one, translation. Various strangenesses exist as idiosyncratic behavior, discrete to each discipline. While the biological is clearly an integral part of say, Haraway’s cyborgian and Hayles’s posthuman theories, biology as they use it (invasive, implanted, prosthetic) is difficult to transfer to the inorganic world of architecture where my eL classes will live. New striations of theory must be explored to inject the biological to design; the issue of prosthetic device is not well established for architecture. And there is little theory stemming from, or developing the ideas of cyborgian and posthuman cities, infrastructure, and buildings.

eLearning is a necessary component for schools of architecture in the future, so is a new theoretical base of idea/product hybridization/extension, researching and teaching how ideas are embedded/retrieved in materials, and in the natural world. The methodological development of ELDC as a learning sequence, has for me, been of enormous generative inspiration — it has allowed the seepage of design ideas into the flow of established eLearning and by doing so is helping to set a digital laboratory for experimentation within my own courses and at the two universities I teach at.

I think the fusion/application of posthuman thought opens a trajectory where the strange and uncanny may be successfully employed to ease the shock of dealing with the emergence of biological cities and buildings. It facilitates the integration of traditional ideas of hand-eye making of things, with concepts of social media communications in the development of prosthetic constructions or new ontologies for understanding posthuman artifacts as well as ways of being and ways of knowing nature. From utopian/dystopian early discussions to ways of narration, the class has seeded and nurtured learning in digital space. The integration of our Lifestreams became central virtual places, place-presences; the experiments with media tech for our virtual artifacts and ethnographies opened potentials of hybridizing ideas and theories with net-native apps and digital tools, for ways of filtering learning contexts of cyborg politics and posthuman views of science, society, and nature.

SumUP #12 see 8 Dec

Grasshopper Webinar

Took a parametric software intro class this afternoon. 200 students watching live software demo and discussion for Grasshopper for Rhino. Text chat because of the number of students — client software was GoToWebinar; functioned beautifully.

Grasshopper (free) but needs Rhino (free demo)

Works on most platforms — impressive for eL

I wish, as a group, we were going to next semester’s classes together. Knowing the dauntingly good work and ideas from other students makes me want to know 2011s work/ideas/thinking and see the class in terms of an iterative community (besides the good music, apps, reading, and video suggestions I’ll miss the TweetDeck flow of presences) — and I would like to see and be a part of the consequences of ELDC evolution and emergence in new contexts. Can you believe a cyborg has warm and fuzzy feelings? ☺

Livestream has been an anchor, shelter, source. After the first couple of weeks getting it up and running, I gained momentum to keep it active and to try to relate all posts to an overall goal of fusing ideas from eLearning to design — and I have attempted to illustrate some processes of design that seem posthuman and/or cyborgian (for example machine fabrication) that might be interesting to some colleagues. A bit of an exception, but still design based, began with Wallwisher frustration. I tried to develop an alternative sequential story (CyborianNoir with 6, illustrated chapters) even while attempting to make Wallwisher work for a longer format.

Early on I was eager to make mobile posts to Livestream. But there were strange app apparitions — I loaded it into my iPhone wanting to try posts from Los Angeles looking for spaces of betweeness / urban strangeness; but most posts failed, the app registering unsent images. I reloaded and tried a second time but, ditto — now, as I review the blog I find some posts got through (but not all). I was also thinking of the posts/images as the dystopian links to sites of Blade Runner and SciFi visualization and wanted to contrast the city with its nature as a sort of cyborgian urbanism, useful for later citations of structure/place/nature/artifact/strangeness. Instead, I used some of those ideas in the virtual ethnography (FallenFruit) dealing with digital/virtual/physical community in states of urban and garden contexts. It seemed a good way to merge mobile phones into the class stream and it almost worked and will be something I keep working on.

Bumpy point. I specifically remember the day Lifestream ate my Sum UP #2 — I wrote a long post directly online and clicked out to check a link address returning to find my text and ideas “melted into air,” paraphrasing Marx. I learned my lesson (never work in Lifestream) and now write the posts in Word and paste them in — not very modern. Trouble is, I was not able to reconstruct that sumUP. I also find I do not have sumUP #4 and I don’t know why — I find attempting to recover lost time something difficult to fake — other posts for those weeks exist, I had blogged the ongoing work; but the two SumUPs are missing. Lifestream has become a home base and evolutionary site for my work and thinking. I don’t think now, in December, like I thought in October, some of the class ideas have taken deep root — scrambled old notions and built new ones — they have become sources of literary research and text production — uncanny — and they have also become part of a way of being / way of seeing and I’m offering this last post, not as excuse but as acknowledgement and admission that even a cyborg can’t rewrite the past. ☺ I hope it partially stands in for #2 and #4. Consequence? The consequences of this class are unambiguously excellent. Thanks everyone.

Dennis Dollens. Generated Tree where branches loop and fuse into each other

First I digitally simulated a generic tree with a trunk and outstretched branches. Then I programmed the software to digitally “grow” (simulate) a curving tree branch and applied it to all elements causing recursive generations to create looping, interlocking forms that fuse (a biological truss). Then, structurally not needing a central trunk I had the program evolve it out, leaving interlinked tree branches on their way to a new type of flexing column or beam — meaning a building could take great seismic stress and movement before failing or, more interestingly, the entire building could shape-shift to increase or decrease heat/light orientation or to become aerodynamic with wind changes and passively help ventilate the structure. This is an ongoing project where various types of branching forms and clusters are tested and now where I’m applying MScEL theory to articulate the liminal spaces between biological nature and cyborg/posthuman thought. In the next semester I intend to generate a completely new project as part of the program and try to apply posthuman thinking to each of the generative steps. I’m wondering if this is clearly within the realms of posthuman or is this postNature? With a theory of postNature do we make openings of new approaches to ecology and environmental remediation?

sumUP #11

I’ve been trying to apply aspects of cyborg and posthuman theory to generative sequences of design. I’ve been using a software program to design, hybridized branches that loops and links with one another creating an interlinking structural element for part of a beam or column. The link functions in tension and compression with forces coming from almost 360 degrees; since it is based in plant geometries, proportions, and growth-principles used mostly in biology and environmental simulations, it is not difficult to consider it (as a physical unit), situated in the uncanny world of freakish, unsettling products. But that’s applying categories of thought to describe a digitally born product — what I want to do is consider how to incorporate the digitally-born aspects as natural attributes (branching, stemming, budding, flowering, seeding, poding etc.) as not only nature inspired and simulated, but as an extension of my thinking (genetic process), a posthuman collaboration resulting in a morphological form with relationships to bio-robotics; to consider a new architecture as a plant-hybrid robot genetically related to humans (eventually it could even have properties of living plants or bacteria).

Ultimately placing architecture and design within a generative framework of cyborg and posthuman theory must connect with nature, with the biological, in order to move from the metaphorical to the scientific empirical. I find deep resonance in the past weeks of discussing media, technology, and literary and educational theory framing discussion of ontological issues, and I see pathway, even if through borderlands of seemingly unrelated topics, to positioning design-architecture-urbanisms in a new theoretical context.

The week also found me hard at the keyboard drafting the 500 word, final sumUP for the class — and that will be completed and posted later this week.

Reading about Sugata Mitra’s efforts to group school children around one net-connected computer (not one computer for each child) and leaving them to teach each other made me think this method was posthuman. Guiding students with questions such as, “How do you stop something moving?” followed days later with “Who was Isaac Newton?” followed with “What’s the connection between Newton and stopping things moving?” seemed a complex use of technology that, from the beginning, suggests data bases could teach and guide learning along with providing facts. Even today, searching information in a group context opens new educational experiences by supplementing teachers, facilitating group debate, and illuminating routes to autodidactic methodology. I think Mitra’s methods fuse learning digital equipment/systems with cognitive information reward. It seems fundamentally different to learn computers in discrete computer classes opposed to hybridizing them with the information they link. The students’ abilities to use equipment in a process of sourcing and employing information are learned as seamless, not bordered categories where information is one thing and hardware is another — the posthuman aspect highlighted in the stabilization of equipment/information as unified.

The news article “Turning Kids From India’s Slums Into Autodidacts” by Mat Ridley. The Wall Street Journal. Saturday/Sunday 4-5 December 2010.