IdeaFestival

Worlds from algorithms

Characterizing it as the "science design movement," the current issue of SEED features a number of articles related to the convergence between disciplined observation - science - and design.

While fractal art has gained popularity, the use of the term "fractal architecture" in a Salon video featuring Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, and Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry, attracted me.

Paola Antonelli:

What is really amazing to me right now is how contemporary architects are using the idea that is behind fractals, the idea of a rule that lets them work at different scales indifferently, at least until the moment when the real design application, the reality of the client or manufacturer wanting a building or a toaster, sets in. I am thinking, for instance, of Ben Aranda and Chris Lasch, who you may remember spoke right after you when we had the salon at MoMA. They are two architects that have founded their practice on understanding algorithms and finding ways to take scientific concepts and translate them for architecture's benefit and evolution. So, it seems to me that it is not only and simply about the formal beauty of fractals, it is the idea of growth that your theory has really given to architects and designers. And now we're seeing the algorithm become the principle, and the subject of research, for so many architects today. They're hoping that they can ultimately input an algorithm, give it a push, and then all of a sudden an object, a building, a city, and a world will grow out of it.

I'll add a couple of thoughts:

Natural objects such as ferns and blood vessels can be described in the language of fractals, which means that their unfolding can be described as an algorithmic progression. Fractals, interestingly, can produce nearly limitless two-dimensional shapes, but a finite number of things in three dimensions.

Secondly, I really appreciate Mandelbrot's description of the movement of a cognitive discipline like math toward its biological and physical roots, a point recently driven home in Pulse, a book about the "coming age" of biologically inspired design, which makes just that point about economics. There is no denying the essential natural processes that can be found in presumptively cognitive pursuits.

A transcript of the Antonelli-Mandelbrot exchange is here.

Paola, by the way, also created the MOMA exhibit, "Design and the Elastic Mind," mentioned previously.

Wayne

Wikipedia: fractals

Pangea Day: image and story

Jehane Noujaim's TED Wish was to change the world through film. The result is Pangea Day, "a worldwide search to find films of unique power." 

Wayne

MacArthur fellows announced

The 2007 MacArthur Fellows have been announced. They include an education strategist, a "translator/poet/publisher," a molecular biologist, a spider silk biologist, a Medieval historian, a neuroroboticist specializing in prosthetics and a choreographer, among several others.

Each of these individuals will receive a no-strings-attached $500,000 stipend to pursue his or her creative vision.

Wayne

Cameron Sinclair confirmed for IF '07

Architect and author of "Design Like You Give a Damn," Cameron Sinclair, has been confirmed for the 2007 ideaFestival. He is the founder of the Architecture for Humanity & the Open Architecture Network.

As always, for a complete list of 2007 participants see this page.

Wayne

SciFi: "literature of change"

What is science fiction? From a "literature of change" to a device to explore "cognitive estrangement" or a "mythos of scientism," (or, conversely, to attack scientism), Machina Memorialis supplies several thoughtful definitions from prominent writers in the genre and links to many, many more.

My favorite quote in the larger list is attributed to Damon Knight:

What we get from science fiction---what keeps us reading it, in spite of our doubts and occasional disgust---is not different from the thing that makes mainstream stories rewarding, but only expressed differently. We live on a minute island of known things. Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but in bigger ones of space and time.

Wayne

An artist-scientist dream team

In the current issue of Seed, Chuck Hoberman - designer, architect, artist, and engineer best known for inventing the Hoberman Sphere, a geodesic globe that can expand up to five times its diameter, meets with Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, famous for her work on extra dimensionality, to discuss the idea of shape.

A brief video with highlights from the discussion may be found here, a transcript, here.

On the menu: what it means to see. I found it interesting near the end of the video that for Hoberman, shape should to be functional above all else, whereas Randall seems to indicate that aesthetic values also come into play when evaluating the fitness of scientific ideas. It thought it might have been the reverse.

But her hesitancy to endorse practicality above all else, if indeed it was that, brought to my mind cosmologist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne's suggestion that "if you've got some ugly equations, you almost certainly haven't got it right." Of course, any discussion of our mental models and what they can access (or not) touches on the much older ideas expressed in Plato's theory of forms. Whether real or not we cannot comprehend, at least not now, all of reality at one time. An even deeper and related question might be why is there something rather than nothing? Because oblivion is unstable?

Heck if I know.

Elsewhere in Seed - it's a terrific issue - editor Jonah Lehrer fantasizes about other artist-scientist dream teams:

What are my dream art-science pairings? I'd put Richard Serra in a room with Edward Witten, and have them discuss the possibilities of 10 dimensions and curved space. Richard Powers would talk with Gerald Edelman about the strange nature of the self. Ian McEwan and Richard Axel would discuss scientific descriptions of consciousness. John Updike could talk with Steven Pinker about the uses of language. My list goes on and on. What artists and scientists would you pair together, and what problem would they work on?

Wayne

Virtual philanthropy

In addition to its focus on digital learning, MacArthur is also looking at what philanthropy means in virtual worlds, granting $550,000 to University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication to explore the issue.

MacArthur also links to a New York Times article (free registration required) on same.

Hat tip: Ethan Zuckerman

Wayne

John Gaeta interview posted

Photo: Geoff Oliver Bugbee, www.geoffbugbee.com

Chaz Rough at PodFactory has posted the latest IF podcast.

Fresh from a sit down interview as part of the 2006 ideaFestival formal agenda, pictured above, Oscar winner John Gaeta follows up with a few quick remarks on the future of screens.

Some quick hits from the ten minute audio:

• He's pleasantly surprised by the quality and production value he sees in some YouTube content.
• Film marketing could be turned on its head. The step by step product roll out of products based on feature films could be reversed. Who knows what other media, like World of Warcraft, might spawn films?
• The gaming industry wants to open up the medium to the casual gamer. The Wii paddle helps move that along.
  
• Television will find levels of engagement to keep its audience.
• Asked about his current (October, 2006) projects, he says he has recently directed two short films. In one, some gaming platforms were used to generate visual effects. Another short took its inspiration from Japanese cinema.

Have a listen. IF podcasts may also be found to the upper left of IFblog.

Wayne

Richard Rorty: it's a Big World

Famous - or infamous, depending on your view - thinker Richard Rorty died earlier this week. You can find a number of obits at Google News. While not necessarily enamored of his politics, and by no means an expert on his thinking, I do appreciate the criticisms that he leveled against analytic philosophy.

Rorty's just-updated entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy emphasizes his attempt to "target... the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty... sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism."

He believed that language shapes what we come to believe is real, both creating meaning and obscuring fact. Despite the sound of it, the position is rather in the middle range of possibility. One could, if not careful, take that thought and move quickly to the idea that we just make up reality, a position ridiculed by another well known thinker, Jerry Fodor, in a book review of his that I blogged here, "Bossie the Cow" is Story-Independent.

Despite the criticism from many that Rorty didn't believe a thing - read, he was a relativist - I'm broadly sympathetic to the idea that language does not live in a one to one correspondence with fact and that our mental models limit access to a single unchanging truth, not because I think what's real is unknowable, but because I think what's real is pretty friggin' big. Totalizing philosophies, those suggestions that economics is "nothing but" the material dialectic, or our psychological lives are "nothing but" the acting out of repressed fantasies, or - steady now - the world is "nothing but" the collision of matter, left - a leave - a lot to be desired. Any single way of seeing things is by definition limiting.

Rorty died as a professor of comparative literature at Stanford.

You might enjoy this Believer article. If not, Google the obits. They're everywhere.

Wayne

Wikipedia: linguistic turn, pragmatism, postmodernism

Update on "One Laptop" and TEDGlobal2007

Ethan Zuckerman offers an update on the One Laptop Per Child project direct from Nicholas Negroponte, who makes clear that it isn't a computing project, but an educational project. If you haven't seen video about the little machine, OLPC.tv features just that. Here is one from May 22:

Ethan is also currently blogging - I mean, seriously blogging - TEDGlobal, which is underway in Arusha, Tanzania as I write this. There are many, many posts, but I'd have to hand in my geek credentials if I didn't at least point out the entry on "ethnomathematician," Ron Eglash, titled African Fractals. As represented in African and Islamic architecture, fractals have some pretty interesting properties, the study of which I've elsewhere called Zenography.

See Ethan's TEDGlobal2007 category for a complete list of posts from Arusha. [Update] And don't forget to make the trip to TEDblog for a "best-of" round up of posts and quotes.

Wayne