Enactive individuation: technics, temporality and affect in digital design and fabrication

The nature of creative engagement with computers and software presents a number of challenges to 4E cognition and requires the development of analytical frameworks that can encompass cognitive processes as they extend across material and informational realms. Here I argue that an enactive view of mind allows for better understanding of digital practice by advancing a dynamic, transactional, and affective framework for the analysis of computational design. This enactive framework is in part developed through the Material Engagement Theory (MET) put forward by Lambros Malafouris, in part from the phenomenologically inspired philosophy of Bernard Stiegler. Both advance temporality, technics and technique as key to understanding human creative imagination and their work can support each other in different ways; Stiegler allows for a theorisation of digital tools largely missing from the cognitive archaeology of Malafouris, whilst Malafouris provides a cognitive theory to further develop key ideas in Stiegler’s philosophy. Bringing their work together through Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation, I develop the concept of enactive individuation and apply this to the analysis of a case of robotic design and fabrication from my fieldwork with digital architects and engineers. This case allows for further exploration of how enactivism might productively be extended into the digital realm by underscoring the explorative engagement at heart of even highly systematic work with computers and software

A two-step algorithm of smooth spline generation on Riemannian manifolds

This paper presents a simple geometric algorithm to generate splines of arbitrary degree of smoothness in Euclidean spaces. Unlike other existing methods, this simple geometric algorithm does not require a recursive procedure and, consequently, introduces a significant reduction in calculation time. The algorithm is then extended to other complete Riemannian manifolds, namely to matrix Lie groups and spheres.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6TYH-4GY8919-1/1/9cd210c7d197d60af876560487e2110

Reconstructing Low Degree Triangular Parametric Surfaces Based on Inverse Loop Subdivision

Abstract. In this paper, we present an efficient local geometric approximate method for reconstruction of a low degree triangular parametric surface using inverse Loop subdivision scheme. Our proposed technique consists of two major steps. First, using the inverse Loop subdivision scheme to simplify a given dense triangular mesh and employing the result coarse mesh as a control mesh of the tri-angular Bézier surface. Second, fitting this surface locally to the data points of the initial triangular mesh. The obtained parametric surface is approximate to all data points of the given triangular mesh after some steps of local surface fitting without solving a linear system. The reconstructed surface has the degree reduced to at least of a half and the size of control mesh is only equal to a quarter of the given mesh. The accuracy of the reconstructed surface depends on the number of fitting steps k, the number of reversing subdivision times i at each step of surface fitting and the given distance tolerance ε. Through some experimental examples, we also demonstrate the efficiency of our method. Results show that this approach is sim-ple, fast, precise and highly flexible