The Irresistible Animacy of Lively Artefacts

This thesis explores the perception of ‘liveliness’, or ‘animacy’, in robotically driven artefacts. This perception is irresistible, pervasive, aesthetically potent and poorly understood. I argue that the Cartesian rationalist tendencies of robotic and artificial intelligence research cultures, and associated cognitivist theories of mind, fail to acknowledge the perceptual and instinctual emotional affects that lively artefacts elicit. The thesis examines how we see artefacts with particular qualities of motion to be alive, and asks what notions of cognition can explain these perceptions. ‘Irresistible Animacy’ is our human tendency to be drawn to the primitive and strangely thrilling nature of experiencing lively artefacts. I have two research methodologies; one is interdisciplinary scholarship and the other is my artistic practice of building lively artefacts. I have developed an approach that draws on first-order cybernetics’ central animating principle of feedback-control, and second-order cybernetics’ concerns with cognition. The foundations of this approach are based upon practices of machine making to embody and perform animate behaviour, both as scientific and artistic pursuits. These have inspired embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended notions of cognition. I have developed an understanding using a theoretical framework, drawing upon literature on visual perception, behavioural and social psychology, puppetry, animation, cybernetics, robotics, interaction and aesthetics. I take as a starting point, the understanding that the visual cortex of the vertebrate eye includes active feature-detection for animate agents in our environment, and actively constructs the causal and social structure of this environment. I suggest perceptual ambiguity is at the centre of all animated art forms. Ambiguity encourages natural curiosity and interactive participation. It also elicits complex visceral qualities of presence and the uncanny. In the making of my own Lively Artefacts, I demonstrate a series of different approaches including the use of abstraction, artificial life algorithms, and reactive techniques

Autopoietic-extended architecture: can buildings think?

To incorporate bioremedial functions into the performance of buildings and to balance generative architecture's dominant focus on computational programming and digital fabrication, this thesis first hybridizes theories of autopoiesis into extended cognition in order to research biological domains that include synthetic biology and biocomputation. Under the rubric of living technology I survey multidisciplinary fields to gather perspective for student design of bioremedial and/or metabolic components in generative architecture where generative not only denotes the use of computation but also includes biochemical, biomechanical, and metabolic functions. I trace computation and digital simulations back to Alan Turing's early 1950s Morphogenetic drawings, reaction-diffusion algorithms, and pioneering artificial intelligence (AI) in order to establish generative architecture's point of origin. I ask provocatively: Can buildings think? as a question echoing Turing's own "Can machines think?" Thereafter, I anticipate not only future bioperformative materials but also theories capable of underpinning strains of metabolic intelligences made possible via AI, synthetic biology, and living technology. I do not imply that metabolic architectural intelligence will be like human cognition. I suggest, rather, that new research and pedagogies involving the intelligence of bacteria, plants, synthetic biology, and algorithms define approaches that generative architecture should take in order to source new forms of autonomous life that will be deployable as corrective environmental interfaces. I call the research protocol autopoietic-extended design, theorizing it as an operating system (OS), a research methodology, and an app schematic for design studios and distance learning that makes use of in-field, e-, and m-learning technologies. A quest of this complexity requires scaffolding for coordinating theory-driven teaching with practice-oriented learning. Accordingly, I fuse Maturana and Varela's biological autopoiesis and its definitions of minimal biological life with Andy Clark's hypothesis of extended cognition and its cognition-to-environment linkages. I articulate a generative design strategy and student research method explained via architectural history interpreted from Louis Sullivan's 1924 pedagogical drawing system, Le Corbusier's Modernist pronouncements, and Greg Lynn's Animate Form. Thus, autopoietic-extended design organizes thinking about the generation of ideas for design prior to computational production and fabrication, necessitating a fresh relationship between nature/science/technology and design cognition. To systematize such a program requires the avoidance of simple binaries (mind/body, mind/nature) as well as the stationing of tool making, technology, and architecture within the ream of nature. Hence, I argue, in relation to extended phenotypes, plant-neurobiology, and recent genetic research: Consequently, autopoietic-extended design advances design protocols grounded in morphology, anatomy, cognition, biology, and technology in order to appropriate metabolic and intelligent properties for sensory/response duty in buildings. At m-learning levels smartphones, social media, and design apps source data from nature for students to mediate on-site research by extending 3D pedagogical reach into new university design programs. I intend the creation of a dialectical investigation of animal/human architecture and computational history augmented by theory relevant to current algorithmic design and fablab production. The autopoietic-extended design dialectic sets out ways to articulate opposition/differences outside the Cartesian either/or philosophy in order to prototype metabolic architecture, while dialectically maintaining: Buildings can think

The problem of immanence in Kant and Deleuze

In The Problem of Immanence in Kant and Deleuze, I reassess Kant's project in the light of its origins in Leibnizian rationalism. In his early works Kant seeks to ground the principle of sufficient reason as a 'real' rather than a 'logical' principle; it is this project that shapes his 'critical' formulation of the problem of the 'synthetic apriori'. I claim that Kant's project of 'immanent critique' never quite escapes the continuing requirement for metaphysical and teleological grounds, and that in the Opus Posthumum we find Kant returning to his rationalist roots in order to find a new relation between self, world and God, the three Ideas of reason. In parallel to this story, I argue that in his major work Difference and Repetition, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze effects a return to Leibnizian philosophy (in pursuit of a new account of sufficient reason) which allows him to resolve in retrospect certain problems that arose in the unfolding of Kant's philosophy. My account is conducted on both historical and philosophical levels. From the historical point of view, I suggest firstly that Deleuze's return to the problematic of 'immanence' should be seen as providing an alternative transformation of Kantianism to the better known trajectory of German idealism, one that is more faithful to Kant's project in its historical totality. Secondly, I demonstrate how Deleuze's interpretation is facilitated by insightful readings of more neglected thinkers of the post-Kantian period such as Maimon, Novalis and Holderlin. Philosophically, the weight of the thesis lies with the extensive development of two themes. Firstly Kant's theories of ideas and intuition are interpreted from a Deleuzian standpoint, in order to provide materials for a theory of nonconceptual difference. Secondly, a new perspective is taken on the question of the primacy of self-consciousness in Kantian philosophy

Using MapReduce Streaming for Distributed Life Simulation on the Cloud

Distributed software simulations are indispensable in the study of large-scale life models but often require the use of technically complex lower-level distributed computing frameworks, such as MPI. We propose to overcome the complexity challenge by applying the emerging MapReduce (MR) model to distributed life simulations and by running such simulations on the cloud. Technically, we design optimized MR streaming algorithms for discrete and continuous versions of Conway’s life according to a general MR streaming pattern. We chose life because it is simple enough as a testbed for MR’s applicability to a-life simulations and general enough to make our results applicable to various lattice-based a-life models. We implement and empirically evaluate our algorithms’ performance on Amazon’s Elastic MR cloud. Our experiments demonstrate that a single MR optimization technique called strip partitioning can reduce the execution time of continuous life simulations by 64%. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose and evaluate MR streaming algorithms for lattice-based simulations. Our algorithms can serve as prototypes in the development of novel MR simulation algorithms for large-scale lattice-based a-life models.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/scs_books/1014/thumbnail.jp

Loading World: (re)Creating Life, Nature and Cosmos in Evolutionary Computer Games

As a generalised field of study, artificial life has produced specific meanings and narratives about what it means to be alive: structured around the concepts of code, information, evolution, connectionism, emergence and cybernetics that connect silicon and carbon life together. Evolutionary computer games and popular programs have introduced the general player and user to advanced artificial life creations, with games based on the nurturing and breeding of silicon creatures placed within new digital natures conceived as computational regimes. Considered is the question of how it has become possible to talk of silicon entities as being alive, and to explore their relationship with carbon life as presented within evolutionary computer games. Similarities between digital and material proposed within computational regimes are also investigated. Playing computer games is developed as a productive practice that constructs meanings, stories and narratives within play. Tracing spiritual and scientific myths and narratives of construction, creation and change, reveals how common stories about life, nature and cosmos are employed in the building of bonds between silicon and carbon. Evolutionary computer games are presented as actively promoting themselves as artificial life products creating links with the life and biological sciences. Meaning produced within play is shown to naturalise and normalise specific definitions of life steeped in neo·Darwinian evolutionism and cybernetics, and how our digital creations have become perfected examples of the essence of this life. Whether this conceptualisation of life, nature and cosmos works within computational regimes is questioned and discussed. Reflecting similar arguments contesting the neo·Darwinian evolutionary perspective within biology, the assumptions employed within this framework are investigated and challenged. Utilising Bruno Latour's program of political ecology and his concepts of proposition and habit. An alternative framework is suggested to examine artificial life, utilising Bruno Latour's program of political ecology, his concepts of proposition and habit, and our relation with these entities

Visionary didacticism in Julian of Norwich's Showings

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