Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
computational strategies
"The network attack appears as something like a swarm of birds or
insects in a horror film, a multitude of mindless assailants, unknown,
uncertain, unseen, and unexpected. If one looks inside a network, however,
one can see that it is indeed organized. rational and creative. It has swarm
intelligence " 1
Swarm intelligence is primarily a term that describes events of
interaction between agents. The identity of these agents is fluid, not yet to
be defined; any population that expresses qualities of collective dynamics
has been used as a case study. What will be discussed here is how the
studies of humble organisms, such as ant colonies or bird flocks, can decode
and reshape the way that humans behave and form highly complex urban
structures. This hybrid field, where technological advances converge with
biological concepts, will be approached in two different levels: one that
focuses on computational tools and aspects, and one that draws conceptual
links between the city and the swarm system, attempting to influence the
way that we understand and analyze it as a superorganism.
The concept of swarm intelligence is based on the effectiveness of
multiple simultaneous interactions that
follow three simple rules:
2
avoidance, alignment and cohesion . "Look at your neighbors state, and
change your state accordingly", as Steven Johnson describes 3. In a
computational environment, these rules are transformed to vectorial
relationships that enable a dynamical simulation of the flows. The simplicity
of the behavioural rules and the absence of a centralized system of control
are key concepts in swarm intelligence: every action emerges from a local
level, but these local acts form a global behaviour 4. This logic shatters the
concept that a perceptual knowledge of the global, a sense of "seeing the
whole" is a necessity for intelligence to emerge.
Through the intrusion of such biological concepts in the realm of
architectural and urban design, the urban web can be viewed as an
aggregate of highly complex relationscapes, open to dynamic processes of
differentiation. As changes in global economy, climate and ecology are
reflected in technological advances, decoding and reshaping the urban
network, there is a necessity for the architect to acknowledge these
unforeseeable trajectories of forces and intensities, as well as the potential
of the synergetic properties that happen in low-level interactions. The
realization that the city cannot be viewed as a stable environment, as a
static array of buildings, can be seen as an echo of the poststructuralist
thought, and namely of the works of Deleuze and Guattari. This concept
attacks the tendency to favour stability over fluidity, a tendency which is so
strongly entwined in the Western thought that it is almost not realistic to
believe that it can be shifted. In this context, the superorganism of the city
1 Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and democracy in the age of Empire. New York: The
Penguin Press. 91
3 Johnson, S. (2001). Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software. New York:
Scribner. 88-89
4 ibid, 74
5 West, R. (2009). Space in theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze. Amsterdam [etc.: Rodopi. 177
6 Weinstock, M. (2011). The Architecture of Flows. Integrated infrastructures and the metasystem of
urban metabolism. In ACADIA 2011: Integration through computation : Proceedings of the 31st annual
conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA). United States:
Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture. 51
7 (Vehlken, p.43)
8 Biloria, Nimish. (2008) Morphogenomic Urban and Architectural Systems. In ACADIA 08: Silicon
Skin : Biological Processes and Computation : Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the
Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) .United States: Association for
Computer-Aided Design in Architecture. 154
9 Krugman, Paul R. (1996). The Self-organizing Economy. Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell Publishers
10 (Pavlov, p.180)
11 Herzogenrath, Bernd. (2010).An American Body-politic a Deleuzian Approach. Hanover, N.H.:
Dartmouth College Press. 48