Bücher der Reihe Applied Virtuality Book Series

Deals with the rapidly happening "deterritorialization" of everything which was once regarded stable and binding.

Deals with media architecture and digital infrastructure. The author examines buildings and projects by Toyo Ito, Werner Sobek, Philippe Rahm, Usman Haque, Electroland, Troika, NOX and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Ben Rubin, and Olafur Eliasson.

In times where the very concept of `nature' is questioned not only in its philosophical dimension, but in the core of its biological materiality, we need to reconsider the interrelations between architecture and nature.

¿SHEAVES¿ will not describe anything. It will not judge. It will inspire. There are no continuous texts, but a wide range of topics. How to read this book? Take the notions seriously. Search the Internet and they will lose their generalness. They will begin to speak to you vividly. Bundle these riches with the riches of other notions and they will activate each other. Also take the pictures seriously. Photograph or scan them. Use them as an index, while searching the Internet. Again, you will find rich stories. Bundle those riches, concentrate them into new identities that are interesting to you. Let yourself be inspired by the intellectual wealth of our world. You can expand it. It is an exciting adventure, demanding and optimistic.

This book shifts the frame of reference for today's network- and structure oriented discussions from the applied computational tools of the 20th century back to the abstractness of 19th century mathematics. It re-reads George Boole, Richard Dedekind, Hermann Grassmann and Bernhard Riemann in a surprising manner. EigenArchitecture argues for a literacy of the digital, displacing the role of geometrical craftsmanship. Thus, architecture can be liberated from today's economical, technocratic and bureaucratic straight jackets: from physicalistic optimization, sociological balancing, and ideological naturalizations. The book comprises a programmatic text on the role of technology in architecture, a philosophical text on the generic and on algebraic articulation, and six exemplary projects by postgraduate students in 2012 at the Chair for Computer Aided Architectural Design at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

Recent developments in computer science, particularly ”data-driven procedures" have opened a new level of design and engineering. This has also affected architecture. The publication collects contributions on Coding as Literacy by computer scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, cultural theorists, and architects. The main focus in the book is the observation of computer-based methods that go beyond strictly case-based or problem-solution-oriented paradigms. This invites readers to understand Computational Procedures as being embedded in an overarching ”media literacy" that can be revealed through, and acquired by, ”computational literacy", and to consider the data processed in the above-mentioned methods as being beneficial in terms of quantum physics. ”Self-Organizing Maps" (SOM), which were first introduced over 30 years ago, will serve as the concrete reference point for all further discussions.

In The Digital, a Continent?, the author argues in favor of a way of thinking about digital technology that draws on the new materialism. She uses photosynthesis and nuclear fission as examples of processes that are as artificial as they are natural to explain how digital technology can be viewed within the paradigm of a "communicative physics" in which poetics interacts with mathematical thinking. The author concludes that we can better understand ourselves and digital technology by developing notions of the multifaceted ways energy, form, and intellect interact in global architectonics. Theoretical consideration of digital technology Visual language and science New volume in the Applied Virtuality Book Series

In his 1979 essay The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge philosopher Jean-François Lyotard noted that the advent of the computer opened up a stage of progress in which knowledge has become a commodity. Modernity and postmodernity appear as two stages of a process resulting from the conflict of science and narrative. As science attempts to distance itself from narrative, it must create its own legitimacy. This paper takes up this challenge with a focus on the question of imagery. The image is precisely what modern science seeks to free itself from in its quest for absolute transparency. This transparency is examined from the perspective of architecture, drawing on arguments from philosophy, quantum mechanics, theology and information theory. Natural science in the context of postmodernism Quantum mechanics and information theory New volume in the Applied Virtuality Book Series