Cat's Paws & Catapults - Steven Vogel

"The biologist studies something that exists: nature, in all its splendor. The engineer, by contrast, creates. Further, the engineers success has more immediate impact than those of the biologist, and failure exacts penalties far beyond the approbation of a few peers."

Biomechanics: views biology through a mechanical lens, the mechanical metaphor, mechanized nature : horror! View constraints upon living systems as mechanical, informational, functional: towards progress.

Nature must make a motorcycle into a automobile while staying in motion.

DNA as bits of information: a 2D graphic worth a thousand words while taking up just as much disk space: organisms are 3D requiring a vast store of info.

Becomes a question of data & fidelity, "informational economies," evolution as a process of continuous innovation - organisms as products of a particular evolutionary history.

Are we humans emulating nature or integrating with it? Appropriating & bastardizing its elegant forms, merely paying homage, or striving to become more natural ourselves?

"Nature must follow an inherited plan. The human designer on the other hand can borrow devices from other designers.... Nature has trouble doing anything analogous (to open source/public domain)."

Mixotrichs in termites: for digesting cellulose fibers:

"The Protozoa have adopted bacteria as engines the way a human might use a team of horses."

Nematocysts:

"Appropriating jellyfish technology: they steal loaded guns from the army."

"As a designer, nature is not only glacial in speed but lacking in versatility & erratic in performance." ...."design in human technology is far less constrained."

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Drawing from Plato to Aristotle (as method): disegno (from which design evolved) - Ancient Greek concept that origins sprout from drawing, inspiration, before becoming rational forms. Plato: thesis>antithesis>synthesis vs. syllogistic construction of Aristotle building a generalized conception out of general observations = an emergent process, based in observation & discovery. Plato: to clarify simplify & distill as a good thing is a cultural habit - PB is against reductionism = to start with points of tension as a form language (flood wall) accumulates tension in the system rather than letting it pass through.

The locus of focus: the creation of the humanitarian plane, the tenuousness of the trembling trauma with the imperative to take care & to heal. The kinds of interrelationships, intersubjextivities, towards constructing resonance, beyond the linear social experiences of convention to extend relation to animal/vegetal/mineral towards a speculative social lattice.

Surface quasi-geostrophic substrates. Standing resonance, absolutely coherent while constantly shifting. Renews a term like 'chaos' to create a world & not dismiss it through tired terms, requires a deep nuanced language of participation.

To get away from arborescense & move towards efflorescence.

Hegel's hierarchy of the arts = Wagner's gesamntkunstverk : the trap is controlling or ordaining the activities/expressions vs. producing scenarios of freedom, trust, mutual care in self-crafting our shared experiences.

Placement

Resonance

Cosmology

Physics as the physical enactment

Stereotomy: cutting out of solid forms the intricacies of the inner resonance. The difference is transcendental strategies: the importance of the inner core vs. just the superficial/ornamental structure being important .

Frank Lloyd Wrights spiritualist background: indebted to Gurdjieff: composite auratic selves, defining architectural spaces of potential resonance, "seeded" building akin to crystalline growth through the replication of forms, halo-like expansions.

Van Eyck: Dutch structuralist architect. No backs, no non-conceptual spaces in favor of being radiantly present celebrating the upwelling/swelling of negative spaces. The meniscus between amphibian states is where his conversation is located. Structuralist architecture is highly contested. - student of Herman Hertzberger

Amphibian liquid wet mind vs. the straw horse of the dry brittle Platonism.

Lawrence & Anna Halprin: fountains serving as stage & audience chamber= "the love joy fountain" in Portland, OR , landworks engendering response from the spectators.

Architectures that survive through time are those built upon the activities of people, what they do, as opposed to an ideal determining a box/frame of the universe.

Mies van der Rohe: a profoundly democratic space of the wide open floor & floating ceiling, the opposite (in aspiration) from the facism of control. But! The withering gaze of the panopticon diminishing the individual/autonomy of subjects. THE GRID: as the compartments which contain us or the armature upon which freedom may play out.

Darkness = space where the subconscious can be present. Modulating the light in space is a matter of tuning.

Consciousness engendering machine for thinking about the whole. A responsive lighting instrument which can envision the flows of the world, enacted on the basis of tectonics, a solar responsive envelope, of cellular solutions opposed to one large vellum: operating like the iris of the eye.

Pavilion environments are built quickly, not meant to last but to radiate lasting influences into future milieus.

The institute of lightweight structures!!

Frei Otto: research to observe natural structures to derive details. Soap film studies seeking the most minimal form - finding, the structure emerging the solution, it gives it like a gift, like magic, a process of searching rooted in the experience of surprise. Research begins in intuition, proven through material experiment: soap film provides tension/contraction revealing most minimal form, like gothic - doesn't hide anything. A spiritual ideal to use as little material as possible to do something - ecological framework. *These structures always defuse force rather than concentrating it, to increase its resilience, learning from how nature diffuses its materials. Must always create a double curvature: every point has the same tension, nowhere is there a gathering of tension, if there is it is revealed by the wrinkles in the fabric. Projects in Saudi Arabia: shading clusters for midday functionality in the desert. To make the scrim material pattern - utilizes the same logic of the striations of the earth: back to the prima materia.

Reading requirement: acting as medium for active reflection: something of precision & something of depth

Performative reading

Context

Reflection/response - poetic/analytical

Gordon Pask's drawings: theories of everything: "conversation theory"

Actor-network theory of Latour

Fascia as the connective gradient substrate that connects & correlates our language of materiality with the body.

Erosion/shedding as a way of describing the wear and tear of the work being installed and deinstalled.

Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - 1990's eight stage model

Transitional objects: expanded psychology: Winnicot= not knowing one is an autonomous being, an extension of the mother through psycho-affective attachment to objects representative of the affective gradient, transposed upon "blankie" or "lovey" objects which inhabit & extend the transitional states of identity. Offers the proposition of the composite identity as a different model of consciousness rather than one of concrete autonomous identity.

PB: these objects/forms are offered as transitional objects fostering/cultivating the amphibian state in the subject/spectator/viewer.