Luis Fernando Odiaga [IaaC]

The mistakes morié

The inclusion, development, propagation, existence, replication, acknowledgement, rights, patterns and beauty of what are commonly known as accidents, is encouraged. Furthermore, they have equal rights within the composition as deliberate, conscious, or premeditated compositional actions or decisions. —took from Matthew Herbert’s P.C.C.O.M. Numeral 5—

The reflection… The SIMULACRA… The PRIDE.

Trying to understand and be able to explain the most common phenomena needs a hard mind-work. In order to do so, De Landa appeal to the term Machinic-phylum. Coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, a hybrid-term that describes something between a machine and living being.

For the last decades, an extreme confidence in the “purity” of things has been the vector for design. The belief in a kind of moral integrity inside the object of design, and of course in the understanding of the whole reality, has been the path for many interventions and essays about the reality, translated in Urban proposals, Manifestos, Political plans, etc. This kind of approach forgets —in a way— the wrapped condition of contradiction that reality is. Is well known for the metal artisans, that the alloy is the best way to make a soft metal stronger and at the same time give flexibility to a non-flexible metal. These two properties breed a new metal. A metal with an improvement in the properties of the raw metals is more valuable in terms of its machinery for the manufacture of tools and weapons. It’s more about a state of “a-kind-of-impurity” in the alloy which gives in back a more reach-metal than the predecessors. “The point here is that a key ingredient for combinatorial richness, and hence, for an essentially open future, is heterogeneity of components.”—machinic phylum on the Web by De Landa—

Bringing up this machinery-system, embedded inside many natural behaviors, clear in
That is not an organic behavior, is a very healthy-approach to decode the apparent chaotic systems, which in fact are no more than a combinatorial-richness. Sometimes the effect of this combinatory may be a very destructive phenomenon like the storms or the tsunamis.

“The world hurricane is the name given to natures strongest storm.
A hurricane occurs when high pressure and low pressure masses of air come in contact with one another.
There is often a significant difference in temperature between the two masses.
One mass is warm, while the other is cold.
The warmer air rises, and the cooler air falls.
Likewise, the low pressure area slides down the sides of the high pressure area.
They swirl in and around one another, creating the beginnings of the storm.”— AIR, “The virgin suicides ”, track 06 : The World hurricane,  Astralwerks,  29 Feb 2000—

The “Machinic” part of the term reveals existing kind-of gears or machinery [a process in any case] that works inside many natural systems on a synergy. Is a kind of articulation that works and develops a novel state which is also expected to bring newer one if the present conditions are modified.

By the other hand the “Phylum” Calls the attention in the biological approach to life, this is the different lineages, families, or phylogenies in which the diverse living-beings evolved.

“The idea of a machinic phylum would then be that, beyond biological lineages, we are also related to non-living creatures (winds and flames, lava and rocks) through common “body-plans” involving similar self-organizing and combinatorial processes. As if one and the same material “phylum” could be “folded and stretched” to yield all the different structures that inhabit our universe.”— machinic phylum on the Web by De Landa—

…the journal Scientific American recently reported that a mathematical model, developed by Alvin Saperstein and later refined by Gottfried mayer-kress, “suggested that the same mathematics that described the transition of a jet of water from laminar to turbulent might be employed to describe the outbreak of war between nations…—De Landa M., “War in the Age of Intelligent Machines”.1999—

Nevertheless, the approach to the Machinic phylum of war systems, meaning: Weapons, Tactics, Strategy and logistics is the main subject of the book, hits was more used as pretext to explain with a very close example the way this combinatorial-richness of self-organization works in nature, going further biological explanations. The Machinic phylum which in fact is  an emerge of order within the chaos, is also used to explain the way the computers from their very first beginning were a new “phylum” with their own evolving systems and how this technology at one point cross with the human-machinic-phylum in the form of interactivity. This is: …from the moment that the “mouse” appeared as an interface between the user and the computer, it may be said that the “machinic phylum” cross between humans and computers for the very first time. This cross is: interactivity, transforming the screen in the “information space” where humans can see correspondence between the movements of the “mouse” and the pointer displayed on the screen.

From this point onwards the novel man-machine-system has been developing different social-products in a shift towards a heterogeneous-union of this two “phylum”. The cell-phones are becoming little and with lots of functions that allow humans to communicate in different ways, also becoming a kind of ear-eye-speak-prosthesis. Is an everyday matter that most of the day-work is done by “remote-control”. By the other hand, the computer-processors are becoming smaller and powerful in order to let users deal with wider amount of information. The wireless connections are letting the transference of information without physical limits. And of course, the Internet, in its phase 2.0 permits the share and develops of knowledge in a self-organization system.

All this developments are the result of friction inside the man-machine-system, understanding friction as any condition where two or more, known or unknown components of a system converges in a state-of-flow, therefore is not an impact, neither a single approach. The reaction on each one of the components of this system is a loose and a gain on the same time —Nevertheless the friction can trigger a stop on the trajectory of components, this stop condition depends more on the previous behavior of the components than the friction per se.—

Nevertheless this two “phylum” are by now working on a novel system, it cannot be said that technology is going to give solutions to human problems. Because of the friction, there are many points in which the human side is going to loose some things. Paraphrasing De Landa… “Computer screens can become narcotic mirrors, trapping users by feeding them amplified images of their narcissistic selves. The same interface that can allow users to control the machine, can also give them a false and intoxicating sense of their own power… At every step we will find a similar mixture of new roads to explore and new dangers to avoid. And at all times we will have to play it by ear, since there is no way to predict in advance where those roads will lead, or what kinds of dangers they will present us with”

Friction

Numeric Control [NC]

Machinic Phylum

Simulacra

Self-organization

Singularities

Turbulence

Work It Harder Make It Better
Do It Faster, Makes Us stronger

More Than Ever Hour After
Our Work Is Never Over

[sheet #4 intellectual property of Daniel Castro-Cordano] 

GORDUGA, f (zool): Entiendase, una Oruga que ha comido, al punto de engordar tando que no puede moverse para volver a casa, menos aun continuar comiendo pues sus extremidades ya no tienen contacto con el suelo. En consecuencia, no es más una simple Oruga pues su volumen ha modificado su escencia y su funcion, es en cambio y por consecuencia una GORDUGA.

Male Voice1—Why, to measure something?
Male Voice2—forget measuring, to measure is just a step in the way of understanding something new… use the measurments.
MV1—Why to try to understand something that you can not handle?
MV2—In order to learn from it, the “repellors” and the “attractors” that describes its behavior.
MV1—Why to learn from the behavior of something?
Female voice—To reproduce that.
MV1—Why?
FV—To make a leap on the machinic phylum.
MV1—Is that possible?
FV—Not in fact.
MV1—Then, why to try to do something that is not possible?
FV—To bring flux into the process of forgetting, in order to re-learn with a balanced clear mind.
MV1—Why?
FV—To make a leap on the machinic phylum.
MV1 [whispering in a disappointed mood]— this is a non sense loop, this is not logic.
FV—exactly, take a look on this:

“the turbulent behavior of liquids, for example, with its exquisite structure of nested vortices and eddies, each contained in or containing the next, has come to be seen as a wonderfully ordered process. But as the previous quote indicates, more important than turbulent behavior itself is that special, singular moment at the onset of turbulence. A liquid sitting still or moving at a slow speed is in a relatively disordered state: its component molecules move aimlessly, bumping into each other at random. But when a certain threshold of speed is reached, a flowing liquid undergoes a process of self-organization: its component molecules begin to move in concert to produce highly intricate patterns. Transition points like these, called “singularities,” where order spontaneously emerges out of chaos, have been the subject of intense scientific analysis over the last three decades. These points or thresholds in the rate of flow of matter and energy are referred to as “singular” because they are rare and special.” (De Landa M., “War in the Age of Intelligent Machines”, p. 15., 1991)

FV—Now you can see…

The reacTable —developed within the Music Technology Group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain by Sergi Jordà, Martin Kaltenbrunner, Günter Geiger and Marcos Alonso, 2006— can be understood as the easiest way of making electronic music, also as the DIGITAL Instrument par excellence, left behind are the turn-tables and the synthesizers because this instrument is in fact a mix of its predecessors that goes forward-beyond them. Using only the hearing-sense is possible to make wonderful things but to involve the other senses in the actual performance of music with the freedom of the digital copy/paste faculty develops an age-coherent way of playing music. From now on, playing music will not only be about the dexterity on playing the instrument, neither the knowledge about musical composition-matters, with the reacTable the doors to a new way of sound-experience are open, furthermore the relation with the instrument is not only on how it sounds, but how this sounds look like while being produced; interchanging built-up music-pieces with the use of the tangibles —little boxes, freely placed over the reacTable, which let the user work with sequences, modulate Audio frequency VCOs, LFOs, VCFs.— Music can be played as always, but with the appropriate aid that technology can bring this days.

The design of the instrument is so open that is possible to ad-new tangibles on need. Björk is using the reacTable on her world tour VOLTA, and for sure there are some tangibles added. The richness of the work of such an oudio-designer brings-up wide lights of the limitless possibilities of this digital-instrument.

Björk´s “declare independence” on Jools Holland´s Later

[…] 

Imagine that when the user goes into the building—which can no longer be called building, let’s call it the Virtual-Artificial-Computer Hybrid. VACH from now on— The user gets a pair of glasses and a patch connected to the VACH,—the immaterial building project only proposes the patch connection— so the VACH and the user are connected interchanging information of location, temperature, heartbeats, what is the user watching, the height of the user, who is near the user, mini-GPS, etc. ,—much more further will be the implant of a micro-chip directly to the brain and connect this brain with the city not just with a single VACH—

Now, coordinated by the VACH the user receives on one eye the actual artificial environment while the other eye receives the virtual reality; this will become in a compound image of a real-virtual, artificial-hypernatural, reality. So the VACH will be allowed to give extra information of the reality, and also the artificial environment will be allowed to be incomplete—in a way— because the VACH will found the way to complete the reality-perception of the user using a combination of the real and the un-real. The boundaries between the real and the virtual will be so blured that the (re)materializacion of the architecture will be a reject of the materialization to acomplish a compound between the Virtuality with the Reality… finally the VACH will ask the user…(to)”let me show you the world in my eyes”…

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