Manuel Delanda, "Deleuze and the Use of the Genetic Algorithm in Architecture"

welcome to the Columbia art and Technology lectures uh my name is reinold Martin I don't teach in the School of the Arts i i in fact teach in the in the school of The Graduate School of Architecture um and uh but Mark Tribe wasn't able to be here tonight and he asked me to stand in for him in welcoming uh your fourth speaker in this series Manuel danda um my uh sort of opportunity to introduce Manuel is perhaps not entirely in congruous since he's been teaching with us on the other side of the campus um uh since 1995 um in uh filling the lecture Halls uh with uh radically philosophical uh courses on uh on such topics as materials and uh and and urbanism um so uh so it's great to sort of uh cross uh the way here and and have a chance to in a way continue the conversation on on the other side of the University um man delanda was born in 1952 in Mexico City and has lived in Manhattan this is the official part uh since 1975 he began his career in the mid-70s as an independent filmmaker uh showing his films in cine clubs and museums around the world in 1980 uh he he strategically acquired an industrial grade computer and became a programmer and computer artist we were just hearing about sigraph uh what 1982 8283 right um writing his own software for several years um uh he has also written uh he writes in in that sense at many levels uh many philosophical essays which have appeared in uh in numerous journals and he lectures extensively in the United States in and Europe on uh nonlinear Dynamics uh theories of self-organization artificial intelligence and artificial life among other subjects uh he is the author uh as you probably know of uh of the important book wor on in the age of intelligent machines uh a thousand years of nonlinear history with a great cover uh and intensive science and virtual philosophy in in 20201 Manuel was also a fellow at The Institute for advanced studies uh at Princeton another kind of interesting combination uh if you know that institution um uh and uh tonight's lecture will be uh delz uh and the use of the the genetic algorithm uh in art so uh and and Market also asked me to remind you that the art and Technology lectures will continue uh with Ricardo Dominguez uh on May 12th and indeed you'll find video streams uh of all the lectures in this series online uh at the website of the digital media center so please join me in welcoming Manuel danda hi everyone the point of this lecture this is the this is my first class of the second semester at Colombia I'm going to adapt it a little bit to to a new audience the main point of the lecture is to introduce the basic ideas of the Phil the French philosopher Jill galus which as you know comes from the same generation as many other postmodern philosophers in in in France but unlike those postmodern philosophers delus is a materialist philosopher to begin with is someone who believes the world exists independently of our minds which is more than I can say for most other postmodern philosophers you know in most other philosophies that come from the continent of Europe basically we create the World by cutting it out with language or with Concepts and and they concentrate mostly on phenomenology Theus doesn't write one word about phenomenology he wrote his very first book on Hume meaning he buys a completely different theory of experience and of sensation which of course ends up having repercussions in its ideas about art so I want his his materialism is very timely it's is very good that we finally had a new materialism to replace the old dialectical materialism based on Hegel since the left needs Rejuvenation needs needs some fresh new ideas uh and they have to be based on a materialist philosophy idealism doesn't matter what postmodern people say is an inherently inherently conservative ideology what materialism has demonstrated for many decades now to be a a progressive philosophy the problem is it needs to be based on science it needs to be based not on on critical acceptance of science science needs to be approached critically but of course we need to always go to the experts on matter the problem with the all materialism is that the only type of M material entity that it included was physical labor the physical labor of the working class where a true materialism needs to give matter its due uh on the other hand I want to also and this is just a way of kind of giving this ideas a slightly more relevant uh touch in a kind of uh computer art type of way I'm I'm going to be linking this with ideas about the genetic algorithm the genetic algorithm is basically a so piece of software that's relatively old now is born in the 1960s which mimics Evolution it's sort of like virtual evolutionary processes in the computer the even though it sounds relatively new it isn't some parts of Windows 95 which is already an old piece of software were actually breed you know breed like you breed dogs like way people breed race horses uh breed through successive Generations in which the the the program instead of writing code by hand was actually just steering the evolution the way in which a dog breeder does you know a dog breeder begins of course this is an ideal case you know with mongr dogs a bunch of mongr dogs let's assume of course that's not the way it actually works mongr dogs have all the genes for all the different dogs all the different dog Styles uh but combined and what and the task of the dog breeder is of course to extract designs from that mongr by picking in every generation for instance certain physical or uh behavioral traits you can be picking for smaller size smaller size smaller size and more and more and more obnoxious and you end up with a Chihuahua dog or you can be picking for larger and larger size and hairier and perhaps a kind of a uh an altruistic disposition you end up with a San Bernard and the idea is that all these designs are implicated or there in the mongr dog and so there is a certain way in a certain sense in which art can actually be done via or artist can utilize uh uh evolutionary processes as one more tool not to replace them but simply as one more tool one more visualization tool that they can bring to the task of creating computer art as I was saying Windows 95 which is already seven or almost 10 years old some of it very very small pieces the pieces that deal is called they are called drivers the ones that interface directly with a printer with a modem that need to be particularly efficient were bred this way they were not programmed by hand so the genetic algorithm is relatively old is already part of Industry so it's is there's nothing new about it what's new about it in in a sense is its utilization by artists and so I want to be talking about that too so let me first introduce a little bit a few ideas on on the loses materialism uh the a the one of the main reasons why most postmodern philosophers went idealist that is everything is done with language everything is a text everything is just a matter of interpretation in a semantic kind of way is because when you assert that the world exists in the pendently of our minds you end up being an essentialist in other words if you believe that hydrogen atoms exist in a peny of our minds that dogs exist in a pen of our minds That clouds and mountains exist of our minds what guarantees their identity what makes them maintain that mind independent identity well an Essence hydrogen atoms have an Essence which makes them what they are mountains have an Essence Mountain Hood which makes them what they are and so clearly that is unacceptable that is just to reintroduce a kind of a kind of idealism into into a fake materialism no wonder so many people so many philosophers in the 20th century went idealist they didn't want to have anything to do with Essences so the novelty of the is having created a new materialism which gets rid of Essences basically essentialism has many faces but one of them is a theory of the Genesis of form this is why it's very important to artists since artists are involved in the Genesis of form in the processes that that give birth to new forms uh essentialism basically says matter and energy are inert they do not have any morph genetic capabilities they cannot give rise to new forms on their own forms come from a world of Essences or from the mind of God creationism is another form of idealism another form of essentialism uh in and they are form begins as a concept in the mind of God and then is imposed on this inert matter who can do anything but just sit there as a command let there be light Let There Be animals and plants Let There Be form form cannot emerge from matter itself so the L turns this around and says what the last 30 years of Science in nonlinear Dynamics fractal Theory Chaos Theory theories of self-organization and complexity and so on have demonstrated Beyond any doubt is that matter is morphogenetically charged that it has powers of morphogenesis of their own and that this should somehow Al the position of the artist with respect to his or her materials the artist can play the role of God of course and have an image a cerebral project exclud that that this well this is the form I want to create then buy more or less domesticated materials like mild steel or other forms of Industrial Metals which have become almost inert and then impose that form on that particular say sculpture on that particular piece of metal or the artists can recognize that materials have powers creative powers of their own and enter into a partnership with the materials in the Genesis of form my my favorite example here is the architect fry Oto froto is a German architect who worked for a long time in Stuart's uh Institute for lightweight structures he was responsible for the T light roofs of the Munich Olympics in ' 68 uh and the way he designed because this is before computers or as computers were coming along he could have used computer Graphics you know 3D computer anim computer packages to create those beautiful uh uh shapes that make his tent like roofs but he didn't have access to that so what he did is he used soap film as a you know one of the most humble materials that you find in your kitchen and your bathroom you know to assist them in the calculation of the forms soap because it's Mor a genetic pregnant although does very very simple things has already Tendencies it's not inert so film all you had to do is blow a little bit on it and a sphere comes out all by itself you know how hard it is for artists to create real spheres you know how hard it was for buck Mr foer to come up with his jessics in spherical forms and soap does it all by itself all he had to do is blow of course he didn't want a sphere he wanted tent like roof so he needed to put something of himself so what he did is basically I you know I don't know the apparatus he used I imagine him in slippers and in his bathroom you know he took a piece of plywood put little uh of course was going to design this at scale smaller scale he put uh little uh wooden sticks where the columns that would eventually hold this tent-like roof would be Loosely hanging threads attached the tips of the of the columns to serve as constraints on the soap lower this this art this this this thing into the bathtub then pulled it out very carefully through the surface so as not to break the soap and the soap had magically computed uh the surfaces for him because soap tends by itself to minimize surface tension that is what film soap film does and when you don't constrain it that minimization that tendency results in a sphere but when you do constrain it it results in a iety of shapes which are also minimal shapes which are always beautiful now that's an example of an artist entering into a partnership with the materials he didn't try to come up with the forms in his head and then impose them on a bunch of workers and say well now I want this you have to come up with it it was a kind of interaction with the materials where he recognized in fact he uses the word form Finding for his little setups and his little assembl where he gets materials to do a little a little bit of the design for him and in a way this is what the L has all the time been talking about not only for art but in general for industry for economics for sociology the material aspect of our lives and material aspects of our cities are meshing with environment in a in a more irrational or at least less irrational way uh needs to take into account the flows of genes through generations the flows of flesh or biomass through food chains the flows of water the flows of air and until we begin to create a partnership with the material world instead of trying to impose our will preconceived will on this material world we are in trouble so that is basically his materialism I'm going to give you more details about this now the genetic algorithm the genetic algorithm is simply as I said a simulation of evolution in the computer it can only be applied for the same reason to Art done in the computer so for the T for the rest of this lecture I'm going to assume that some of you at least utilize the computer this doesn't mean that the final product needs to be computer Graphics or computer music or computer anything you can be using the computer as an intermediate step to something like if you're a choreographer and you are using the computer to you know with little stick figures to create some movements and so on and you're just using them as an intermediate step in the design process of your choreography that would still count or it can be the of computer artist whose final output is a computer output but the computer needs to be involved at some point or another obviously otherwise the genetic algorithm would not be appliable second it can only be applied to Art in which the artistic element the design elements with the brush strokes and a painting the notes and motifs and so on in a in a in a piece of music the the different bodily movements in a in a choreography the the different spatial components in sculpture uh are defining the computer not via clicking with a mouse which is the way most of us do it but procedurally you know most programs Photoshop Maya which is a 3D now come with little script writing capabilities of course most of us are you know not well I became a hacker very early on in my life as as I the introduction just said so I learned how to program in the early 880s but I was forced to do that because my computer that I had just spent my family fortune on uh didn't do anything back then you couldn't buy software so I was forced and I was kicking and screaming brought into the into the programming world but then I realized after a couple of years of pain that uh it was the best thing that could have happened to me because For the First Time I understood process I understood how the computer can be used to specify processes how algorithms which are simply mechanical recipes can be used to specify a process that in turn generates a particular formal element this process approach to computer art is now becoming more and more a a a welln in the sense that the software packages themselves come with this scripting capabilities before you either you had to click and you know Mouse and click your way through through through through the process now you can do it with a mouse or a tablet or whatever other input devices you have or you can begin to think in terms of process it involves not math but a little bit of formal thinking because you need to learn about loops and and how to represent processes within a computer language but it pays in the end because you can do many things that you could not do by clicking and mousing around specifically you can create works of art that then lend themselves to performance since every single element of the work of art is produced in the computer and you can interact and intervene in it uh changing parameters changing buttons and so on as it produces it it lends itself to a to a wider variety of applications than just clicking and mousing regardless of that I'm not going to go into that specifically it is absolutely necessary to apply the genetic algorithm that the elements of design are specified as a process as a little program because it is those programs that play the role of genes in the computer and that generate what what comes out on the other side examples of this include there's a British Artist who is a sculptor his name is William leam L A am I recommend that you read his book on genetic art he has very pretty pictures I've been doing computer modeling for a long time 3D modeling I did that for a living for a long time that's how I paid for my books my books cost me money they don't really make I don't really make any money out of those suckers uh and I remember when I opened William Leon's book for for the first time and I thought oh my God he did not even model he did not even touch with the mouse one of this little complex creatures uh he actually bred them he began because he gives you the genealogical trees with the grand grand grand grandparents and you know and so on and you see that he begins with a lar kind of looking things and then they begin sprouting you know arms and and and weird things you know uh and then at the end he picks one you know like a dog breeder he picks his little Chihuahua dog of a sculpture and this what is the final product uh interesting but I'm going to tell you some limitations precisely this is where the list comes in how remove the limitations of the software what kind of philosophical resources need to be brought in addition to the software to make this work another example his name is blinds John blinds it's a musician a jazz musician and as a jazz musician he was accustomed to interacting with humans as as everybody knows Jazz musicians play play on each other's music you know and as the clarinet is finishing a particular line it goes okay take it away sax and the sax needs to kind of have heard the last few notes or the last few bars of the and then exploited for melodic ideas and then you begin jamming with the other person doing that now blinds wanted to do the same thing with a computer he wanted to travel around Jazz H uh clubs playing with a computer but he knew that if the computer just played canned melodies the audience was going to get bored he was going to get bored he was don't have absolutely any any any any kind of rapport with the other participant because it was just playing canned music that he himself had put in so he took a genetic algorithm to breed melodic pieces melodic lines in real time the computer is constantly listen to the human performer his his uh piece of software by the way it's called gen Jam J as in genetic Jam as in a jam session Jen Jam Jen jam now plays in jazz clubs and it's accepted as a human because it's not bad it's not a bad player and the hope but what's interesting is that every single Melody that comes out of gen J speakers is bred like a chihuahua dog now to me that signals that something new is in the offen here there's of course other other art artists that have utilized this they are in fact urban planners John Frasier a British urban planner has has utilized genetic algorithms to breed proposals for new developments of cities it can be used at different scales again the most important thing is the elements need to be specified as a process for sculptures this is rather simple because everything you create in a cad system in a 3D CAD system is simply a sequence of instructions so for instance you want to create a a a a column you're an architect and you want to begin creating a a fancy column well the first step is to draw the outline of the column the second step is to spin it to rotate to create a what is called a surface of Revolution which is now a kind of cylindrical type shape with the shape or the profile that you drew then uh you can make some carvings to give it some you know what is called Boolean functions to carve out some decorations in the column it's a process it's a sequence of instructions that generates a column the sequence of instructions can then be stored and become the DNA of the work of art of course there got to be one for each one of the elements in that particular architectural piece so software is is is software writers software creators the people who sell this stuff like Photoshop uh the parent company of Photoshop and so on Adobe I think it's called are beginning to realize that they need to give artists more power over their software otherwise the software imposes its look on the artist everybody has seen stuff that's photosho to death you know Wire magazine used to be be a little bit like that you know where you could say oh you I can't even see the filters that this guy apply here uh and need the sequence of the filters and everything and that is not good for artists because that constrains you so learning how to write even simple scripts is a good thing because that you begin to take over the software you begin to impose now a little bit of your own will on the software instead of some software designer in California or somewhere you know telling you what to do it's hard at at first because it's onf familiar territory but it pays in the end believe me you know I always tell my students this in the first day of class or maybe I'm getting a little too pedagogic here uh let's all be hackers people anyway how do we blend these two things how do these two things have to do with one another the neom materialism of Jill delus and the genetic algorithm well they have to do with one another because genes out there in nature or even inside our own sperm and eggs count on the fact that matter is active in order to generate all the variety of natural forms that we see around us plants animals insects uh uh microorganisms and so on genes do not specify the genes are not a representation of the final form as if it were a blueprint an iconic representation that was going to come out and therefore matter is not as if genes are now like God telling matter what to do commanding matter to do this or that genes tease out a form out of materials which have their own morphogenetic potential and evolution has been able to do what it has been able to do only and exclusively because of that morphogenetic potential if it was all up to genes we would still be all microbes complexity can only be teased out of matter in certain ways and so if that is necessary in nature it clearly is necessary in the computer we need to bring certain ideas from NE materialism delusion materialism to the computer for the genetic algorithm to actually perform its job deliv virus from science three forms of thinking three reasoning Styles which I I want to call population thinking intensive thinking and topological thinking each one comes from a different branch of science the first one comes from evolutionary biology was created basically population thinking in the 1930s uh when the ideas of Darwin and and Mendel were for the first time Blended together uh intensive thinking comes from thermodynamics 19th century thermodynamics as well as 20th century thermodynamics topological thinking comes from mathematics and mathematicians thermodynamic evolutionary biologist each one has that reasoning style which has served them well in their own disciplines but precisely because of the int disciplinary boundaries that Define this are over specialized Academy they do not communicate with one another there clearly are some ecologist who need a little bit of thermodynamics a little bit of evolutionary biology and Blended too but no one has really Blended this three radically different styles of thinking which emerged in the you know in the 20th century uh or that acquired their final shape in the 20th century and so we need a philosopher this is in a way what philosophers do they do synthesis they get the best out of one specialty they get the best out of another specialty they jump over a silly academic boundaries that Define fields that are maybe at war with one another because you know so the sociology department wants more money than the economics department now cannot get and and and then they now they back mouth each other you know Economist are all for rational chice oh yeah sociology are all for ritual and ceremonial we need both we both make choices and follow routines so we need sociology we need economics and so the same thing goes for the rest of science so philosophers can bring something new to science which is a synthesis revealing something that scientists themselves may not have seen in their own over specialized blindness so let me explain how this three forms of thinking work first population thinking population thinking basically says that in order for evolution to take place you always need a large reproductive commun Adam and Eve one work you cannot start with two entities of that particular kind there's just not enough space for the mutations to propagate there's not enough space for the variation that that that that uh that drives Evolution I remember that what evolution the way in which Evolution uh destroyed Essences at least in biology is that essentialists Aristotelian essentialists in particular used to think of you you know for instance you see a population of zebras there is somewhere an essence of zebra Hood zebra hood is a is a list of traits that make a zebra what it is that give a zebra its identity there's the perfect zebra the one that meets all the specifications and then there's all the imperfect imperfect zebras that we see with variations in camouflage in height and so on uh you have to get past the heterogeneity past the difference past the imperfections to reach the perfect zebra population thinking says it's exactly the other way around imperfections are crucial heterogeneity and variation is what drives Evolution you homogenize a population say through biotechnology or some capitalist Agriculture and you stop evolution in its tracks heterogenity difference is is crucial to the process and needs to be valued because because natural selection which is just a filter all it can is just a mechanical filter just let certain genes pass certain genes not pass the moment all the genes are the same he has nothing to filter nothing to sort out so for the first time evolutionary biologist brought us a positive idea of difference a positive idea of heterogeneity a valuable form of variation which is absolutely needed and so population thinking also allows us to go past the cliches of Darwinism in the 19th century which degenerated into really bad politics with social Darwinism such as survival of the fittest or struggle for survival or things like that that made it seem as if you know a winner takes all and evolution is all about you know shedding blood and nature red and Claw and and in tooth and Claw or something like that uh whereas in fact there are many many acade many ecological strategies there's symbiosis there's predatory prey relationships that have nothing to do with competition and clear and another point that is very important is there's no such thing as the fittest the fittest assumes that that there's only one best design is going back to essentialism the essence of the zebra and then natural selection just brings us to that perfect zebra today population thinkers realize that there's in fact multiple equilibria that most species are trapped in local Optima that there is no such thing as the best design so population thinking has has switched the slogan of Darwinism from survival of the fittest or one of those silly ones to evolution is an automatic search process it automatically searches a space of possibilities the genetic algorithm is classified in computer science as a search algorithm search algorithms search recipes are extremely important in computer science not only because every time a new one gets invented some Google guy gets becomes millionaire but because just about every operation that you have to do in your computer demand searching when you save a file the computer needs to search the hard disk for empty space you can be searching for word searching for files themselves searching for something in the internet searches are are ubiquitous in computer science so every time a new search algorithm comes along they just go crazy for it and the genetic algorithm is one such thing it automatically in parallel every member of the population of course moving one tick at a time every time they pass their genes is a very very slow process remember Evolution doesn't see organisms Evolution sees species so it doesn't see us it only sees us the moment we pass our genes to our babies it is only at that point that we enter into the picture and every time one of these virtual creatures passes its genes the the C population moves a little bit in this space a little bit in this space a little bit at blindly grow because Evolution doesn't have foresight it cannot Evolution cannot favor today a wing a Proto wi because it's going to be useful 200 years down the road evolution is opportunistic it only it only catches what's Now new now but in its blindness in his blind groping in this is space of possibility let's call it a search space in the blind groping of search space is very effective by finding new things and so it's being used in industry as a Searcher but artists can of course use it as a visualization tool artists many times do searches themselves they put they they draw five variations of a facade for instance then they step back pick the best one and they five variations on that one and then they step back and then they maybe pick another one and they do five variations on that one and that's basically what evolution does except that it does it with hundreds of drawings at a time so the genetic algorithm is not going to replace the artist clearly it's simply one visualization I tool one more visualization to add it to the increasingly complex kit of tools that artists can bring now to the job of creating new forms but let's just stop at that population thinking tells us evolution is a search process and a very effective search process I'll come back to more details in a second the second form of thinking I remember this is a reasoning style it's a reasoning style in which variation now has become crucial in which multiplicities or collectivities have become crucial because Evolution does not happen with Adam and Eve and that collectivity searches blindly a space of possibilities the second form of thinking that the L latches on or barrows from science but then makes it work for for for philosophy it's called intensive thinking let me introduce the word itself intensive in a thermodynamics textbook when you open it up and read for the in go for the definition you find that they defi they different they distinguish extensive properties from intensive properties extensive properties are properties like length volume area intensive properties are properties like pressure speed uh density temperature and the difference is that at least in the textbook difference is that while extensive properties can be divided in space one can take a one meter a one met long ruling ruler break it in two parts and one end up with two one ends up with two half meter rulers in other words where areas can be divided volumes can be divided temperature pressure and so on cannot be divided if one takes one gallon of water at 90° temperature and divides it into two one has two half gallons but they are not two half gallons at 45 degrees of temperature they're two half gallons at 90 degrees of temperature now that doesn't sound very exciting does it but the L sees more in this that is the textbook definition the L is more in this and he says forget about the textbook definition it's good but needs to be extended philosophically first of all let's reintroduce the word difference that's the key word in the lusian philosophy his main book is called difference and repetition and the differences are intensive difference he says intensive differences Drive processes they are active they are productive the for instance if you take but let's go back again to our you know a a box of air divided into two parts then we one heats up air on one side and we have hot air and cold air separated by a barrier it one opens a tiny little opening in the barrier the cold air the hot air is going to has the tendency just like the so bubble has the tendency to minimize surface tension here the the Intensive differences tend to be minimized there's a spontaneous flow from one side to another a the perhaps the best example to have in your mind as to what intensive what an intensive map would be imagine a map a map of Earth which shows the continents with their coastlines and so on that would be an extensive map most maps are extensive they are based on lengths the lengths of the coastlines the areas covered by continents and so on an intensive map is the map you see every night in your meterological report you know when you're checking out the weather it's a map that is it has a zone of high pressure and a Zone of low pressure so differences differences in pressure a cold front a warm front a mass of air moving at this speed another mass of air moving at another speed those intensive Maps shows you the the couple system atmosphere hydrosphere for what it is a a a a place where process is constantly occurring where intensive differences move because you need to see this Maps animated the zones of high pressure moving One Direction the lows moving in another and the differen is in intensity as long as they don't cancel themselves out in our case they don't cancel themselves out because we have sun shining on one side of the Earth at any one time keeping those differences alive will drive processes and will get will give a a a a birth to form this those intensive differences give birth to hurricanes and tornadoes give birth to to good weather and bad weather give give birth to different air currents like the jet stream that have their own form and their own Dynamics whereas extensive properties Define final products they find that which is already kind of done and finished of course even the most done and finished thing like like our continents are in constant process because underneath us all their gigantic self-organized lava conveyor belts moving the plates of plate tectonics against one another and making the Himalayas go 1 mm a year and having produce the Rockies you know all all the dramatic Landscapes that we see in our when our travels are actually produced by those gigantic conveyor belts as they move this rock on top of them but those gigantic conveyor belts are also fueled by differences in intensity by intensive differences so this is the second time the word difference appears here notice that it's crucial that intensive differences are there notice that an intensive difference is is the word difference is being used in a different way than uh say when I say uh this hand is different than this watch because that is different but that is only is a negative use of difference all I'm saying is that they lack resemblance to one another that they have no similari so it's a negative use of difference the L ones a positive use of of difference and intensive differences give them the clue now in biology intensive differences manifest themselves in the process of embryogenesis as genes at the moment you have a fertilized egg that's beginning to develop into an embryo and as the different organs begin to form of course the genes play a very important role there directing uh uh the the the um the process but most of the process is driven by intensive differences in these particular cases differences in concentration or differences in density in the concentration of certain morphogens certain chemicals the chemical would concentrate a certain part of the embryo and at that point you know a limb would emerge and then that limb would grow and another concentrations of of intensive concentrations of that chemical the the fingers will spread out and so on for every organ and so and and and and and and uh and part of the body so genetic information with its differences with its variation depends on the existence of intensive differences in order to keep the process going now another characteristic of intensive properties and intensive thinking that the L mentions a lot is the fact that intensive different intensive properties are always characterized by critical points at which matter spontaneously changes architecture or form the perfect example here is if you take water as an example and then think of it water as ice as liquid water and as vapor at very specific points of intensity 0° Centigrade 100° Centigrade water changes spontaneously from one architecture from one form from one structure to another it crystallizes at 0 degrees Centigrades or liquefies it vaporizes and becomes steam or remains liquid with all this different possibilities then the liquid form has its own line of intensity defining different regimes of flow at very slow speeds liquid water flows in a uniform way at a critical point of speed it begins flowing in a wavy or periodic kind of way called convection at another critical point it becomes turbulent and it's it is within it is within it is is another spontaneous architecture that emerges and those critical points of intensity called phase transitions are also crucial because they Define a lot of things in biology animals for instance have different Gates a horse you can put it in a threadmill and and and and uh it Mo it change the speed of the threadmill at very slow speeds a horse would uh walk then you start you know uh increasing the speed you know if you think of the horse as Mr Ed it's like oh freaked that like Wilbur what's Happ here at a critical point of speed the force has to jump has to switch to truing and then at another critical point of SP well it has to has to break into Galloping now walking trotting Galloping are three modes three gates invol different muscles uh and emerge spontaneously after a critical point of intensity now those critical points of intensity are crucial too in the formation of of the embryo and and its development just about every organ is born at a concentration of intensity and branches out or throws up uh you know uh uh veins and and nerve connections and so on following face transitions so DNA depends crucially on the existence of an intensive world of a world charged with differences which is active and morphogenetically pregnant so to speak finally there's topological thinking here I need to get a little you know more because it's mathematics I don't want to start you know boring anybody here but top topology unlike ukian geometry involves a completely different conception of space uh the simplest way of exploring this is is historically by telling you how uh non-metric or non- ukian geometrist were born when gaus and reman the 19th century uh uh Pioneers who created uh the differential geometry which is the geometry of soap bubbles uh they began with a question of well if we have a a two-dimensional piece of paper that's bent say that's bent following a curve like this the way the cartisan way of thinking about it was well you take the two-dimensional surface you put it in a three-dimensional shoe box so to speak with this coordinates and then you measure the orig lengths or distances that each point in the surface have from the coordinate system and for every point in the surface you gave it an x y and z address that is the distances from the x- axis the y axis the z- axis you always need a transcendental space a space that's one dimension larger than whatever you're studying in the case of two Dimensions is a three-dimensional space in order to metrize it in order to to to divide it to make it in a way extend I and G thought do we really need this I mean is is there any other way of thinking about space without rigid lengths and and definite coordinate systems and and and grids isn't there a better way of thinking about this and he thought well we already have the differential calculus this is the third appearance of the word difference differential calculus of course differential calculus triggers panic sweat and everybody uh after having gone to horrific math classes in high school I remember I did you know I didn't understand what the hell was that supposed to be how how was that relevant to me I was good at math I got a but I hated my teacher he was boring and I'm sure most of you did too but the differential calcul actually quite special because it is a very it's the most powerful modeling tool in physics is used particularly prior to quantum physics and so on it was the most important way of trying to capture the Dynamics of of processes material processes in the world you not to get into a into a whole thing about the calculus you know a hacker is used to blackboxing whatever you don't want to talk about you just just hide it and think about what goes as an input what comes as an output forget about how it works so let's do that let's blackbox it and the only the only operator we need is a differentiation operator it takes us an input a rate of change the the the velocity or a speed with which something is changing which with which something is becoming different this is the third sense of difference which is which matters here for instance the rate of change of position relative to time that's speed that's velocity but it can also be you can be an engineer that's trying to calculate you're trying to build a dam in a river you're trying to calculate how much pressure that water is putting on the dam and so you want to see calculate the rate of change of pressure relative to depth because it will be more the the deeper you get the more water on top of you have the more pressure there is or it can be any other rate of change and the Black Box the differentiation operator spits out an instantaneous value for that so for instance maybe you're a ballistics expert who's analyzing a murder and you want to know at what speed was the bullet going right before it hit the victim you know you don't want to know the average speed of the Bullet From the Moment he left the gun to the moment it hit you want to know the instantaneous value the the bullet had right before it hit the victim right and so you use the differential calculus you put in the the rate of change of of of position with respect to time of the bullet out it comes the specific moment at which the bullet hit hit the victim so gals thought can we use this to get rid of all those coordinates and all those metric cartisan kind of jail cells that the confiner are thinking about space and and he and he the answer that he came up with was yes we can take our surface and at every Point calculate the instantaneous rate of change of curvature and that will now give us strictly with local information without going into the shoe box and and and metrized and coordinating this this surface it gives us strictly with local information how fast that surface is changing in its curvature at every single point what that means is that the surface first of all you can kick out the threedimensional space you don't need it anymore you can do everything with local information and the surface becomes a field of rapidities and slownesses the rapidity or slowness with which curvature is changing so for instance if in a cross-section our surface looks something like this over here is not changing curvature at all so the speed is very slow or not or not at all then it begins picking up speed it accelerates decelerates and goes to nothing again uh completely different idea of what space is 70 then the G solved the problem for two-dimensional manifolds as this bent surfaces are now called his disciple rean was supposed to be you know humble and nice and just go for the threedimensional case but he not he went for the whole chilada he solved the N dimensional case he solved the case for all kinds of dimensions and so he in he began at that moment a completely new differential view of space so we now have three forms of difference Einstein of course became famous when he thought hey no one has used this it's been 70 years since reman wrote this no one has used it and Newton assumed that the entire Universe was inside some big shoe box called absolute space which of course doesn't exist there shoes there are not shoes that are that large and uh Einstein thought he maybe we can get rid of the shoe box and instead calculate the shape of space strictly with local information using this new ideas that's how he managed to think about the fact that the sun has so much gravitational energy that in fact it curves space around it he came up with that idea in the early 20th century no one really believed it except that the math was perfectly clear but we needed experimental evidence the only way of of really proving this was well there are certain stars that during the day appear are right behind the Sun but at night they are now in a different position you we can measure the distance between the stars at night but during the day the Rays of light that come out of the stars and reach our eyes have to pass through the gravitational field of the sun because the sun is in front of them and so the sun should curve those light rays and the the two stars should appear farther apart than they in fact are because there should be a kind of optical illusion due to this Distortion of space but of course you cannot measure that distance because the sun is in front of it making you know ruining the thing so in 1919 there was a big Eclipse a total eclipse the Royal Society of of London sent observers the the Royal Academy of Paris sent observers and all of them went there to measure the distance between the Stars to see if Einstein was right and Einstein was right to the last millimeter he became a superstar so and change the way we think about space all all of a sudden space became differential difference once more made its entrance into the into the into our ways of thinking and created a new way of thinking about space just like intensive thinking had created a new way of thinking about process and just like population thinking had created a new way you're thinking about Evolution three forms of difference three new ways reasoning Styles which are absolutely necessary to run the genetic algorithm I already said that somehow this is where I tell my students you have to become hackers because someone is going to have to put this into code someone needs to repr produce within the computer this intensive this this intensive differences every branch of art has different intensities deals with different intensities those need to be represented somehow in the computer otherwise it's not going to fly how is topological thinking going to affect this well topological spaces which are similar to differential spaces slight except slightly slightly more abstract but basically in the same direction away from metric coordinates and that kind of stuff have all also been used throughout the 20th century to uh uh as representations for spaces of possibilities you simply assign an intensive quantity to each one of the dimensions of the space and now the space each point in the space becomes a space of POS it becomes a possible state for a given the system that you're modeling the system that you're representing uh then then you can then you can explore whether that space is structure or not whether every possibility has the same probability of occurring or whether there certain states that are the most probable of them all for instance the case of a so bubble unconstrained the most probable state is the sphere and that will appear in that space of possibilities as a point which attracts all the different processes and this is why soap film is attracted in a way to a sphere that's how a sphere comes out of soap film by being a the attractor of the process attractors and and you know remember the word chaos as in Chaos Theory it always refers to chaotic attractors the important word is attractors not chaos because attractors are are features of topological spaces which represent tendencies in material systems and so 20th century physics particularly self-organizing complexity Theory all that kind of stuff of the last 30 years depends crucially on using this spaces hello I'm sorry I thought you talk thought you were talking to me um so uh just a second let me just get my train of thought back here so why is this important because the genetic algorithm is a search algorithm it's a search algorithm which explores a space of possibilities so we the the the putting together a population of variable replicators with any kind of filtering or sorting device to play a role of selection pressure creates a search process but what is that process searching well searching a space of possibilities but how can we represent to ourselves that space of possibilities well we with topological spaces let me give you an example biologists speak they use the word philm philm is basically one more division in the tree of life the Tree of Life Begins by dividing into animals and plants then animal and then that's the first Kingdom that's the first Division and the next division down is called a phym we as vertebrates belong to the phym core data but besides that phym tends to refer to an abstract body map a body map that can be stretched and bent and fold during embryological processes to yield a giraffe or it can bent and fold and stretch to your arroceros it can be bent and fold and pocketed and to get a kangaro and so on for every single vertebrate all kinds of designs come out of that space so the space is Rich with possibilities and of course the abstract vertebrate cannot be defined metrically because if you define in terms of lengths the neck for instance would have to be Define as a l rigid length and then you would not be able to get to stretch it to get the giraffe or Shrink it to get the roseros uh the the the limb of the philm of our this topological vertebrate let's column the limb cannot have any definition of lengths or anything it's just the connectivity how the bones are connected to one another but that limb that abstract limb or topological limb needs to be such that the genes can the moment they get to the fingers they can repress this finger from coming out leave this one hanging and end up with a hoof as in a horse or they can prolong the the lengthening of the finger process and end up with something that cannot grasp things anymore but that can serve as a wing or it can short you know stop the growth at a certain at a certain length and end up with a hand and a supposable thumb a vertebrae limb has to have all those possibilities at least in the body map of the phylm so the idea would be to be to use topological spaces as a spaces of possibilities to represent a phm and that would explain why the first artists that began using the genetic algorithm such as William leam seem to run out of shapes right away you know you open the book of William Leon it's very impressive you see the generations you see the genealogical Tre showing you how the thing evolved but then you begin to get the feeling that he's running out of shapes that he's not finding new shapes that the search space is too small and of course the search space of the vertebrae philm of the phm Cordata is gigantic and it it can leave entire areas unexplored during you know in the Triassic and Jurassic periods and so on the D when reptiles dominated they had all this incredible variety of the signs Velociraptors and T-Rex and so on and mammals we a bunch of rat-like hairy rat-like creatures that you know if a martian would have come to where would say well I don't give him any future reptiles are the ones who R here look at those ugly rats then all of a sudden a Mite comes in wipes all those ugly reptiles opens up all these niches in in in e in in ecosystems for mammals to begin differentiating and begin to become you know everything from uh whales and dolphins to uh bats and and rats and dogs and chihuahua and so on uh an incredible explosion of the signs once the space is open so space in in fact we have not exhausted it we don't even know how many other designs are in that space of possibilities so an artist using the generic algorithm needs to bring topological thinking in order to design search spaces part of what he or she loses in terms of Designing the final product because now that is done evolutionarily it gets recovered back in the process of Designing the very spaces of possibilities that Evolution searches of course we have not yet have textbooks on principles of topological design but someone should write the book because that is one of the one of the futures of of of software uh is to begin training us to begin thinking non metrically to begin thinking in these different forms in order to invent this spaces of possibilities and then yeah unleash the genetic algorithm to search it for us while we are asleep maybe so that if you know when we wake up in the morning we can oh my god did I do that I'm good I'm good at any rate it's time for me to conclude and so what I want to say in you know a a in conclusion is the neom materialism that the leis has proposed based on these three modes of thinking is is drastically different from the one that we need to leave behind the one that informs Marxism and that it has inform the Thinking by the left the last 150 years I cannot give you all the economic and sociological and and historical consequences of this you can read that in my book A Thousand Years of nonlinear history 1698 that a Bookstar near you but there are many consequences political consequences of thinking like that uh because you need to start bringing the environment you need to start bringing the Intensive processes that occur with or without us but that we need to watch out because changing the temperature of the planet for inance is the way we're think we are right now warming the Earth increasing an intensive property Without Really caring what all kinds of phase transitions that can happen how our epidemics are going to begin stretching their you know certain malaria which right now sticks around only in tropical areas as things get hotter well malaria is also going to expand there's going to be all kinds of phase transitions that we don't know because we don't care or apparently at least our governments don't care uh precisely because we think think in extensive terms we don't think in terms of critical points that can be reached and then they are irreversible unless we begin to to change our way of thinking in intensive ways we're not going to be able to to do that but also topological thinking and population thinking are very important in ways that I cannot go into detail here so what the L has done is liberated materialism from what was basically an a priori process dialectics invented by Hegel I admire Hegel because he was gods you know you had to give it to him when you read the books you know someone who believed in his own idea so much as to dialectically generate all the concepts in a book in a way that almost reminds you of morphogenesis is it's admirable unfortunately it's not true and so you can respect it as a piece of philosophical architecture that happened that happens to have a beautiful Monumental shape and at the same time just well it's history we need something new something that that connects with something science but at the same time that does not make slaves to science that allows to take scientific Concepts just like I just did Go pass the textbook definitions which is all the scientists need derive all the real consequences of this reasoning Styles and then apply them in our own philosophical thinking I believe that it's only with the injection of this new materialism that LE will be rejuvenated I I have great hopes for it once we of course read J the L of his crazy terminology because one of the obstacles of reading the L is that he think he doesn't think that everything I just said is complex enough he has to add different terms for every chapter you know just to confuse the hell out of us he probably thought well you know I'm reading Spinosa which is a 400y year philosopher I'm reading lives which is a 300E philosopher they can wait for me to I don't have 200 years I want my deliv now and I want to clean and de poost modernized and so if we can manage to do that and this is something that is very experimental and where artists as a collective need to also be part of the process we might be able to create a new materialism that would inject new youth into the old left thank you very much we can take some questions Comm on okay you ATS form it's not use brush and and I how do you address that well I mean I I understand totally what you're saying you're right now referring to questions of style of course which is goes beyond form because now it's a it's a system of forms in a way the the example of the brush stroke is not so good because then form remember that form can be the form of the overall painting the composition but it can also be the form of The Strokes themselves form has to be seen at all these different levels of scale in music from from a you know three or four notes to to entire Symphonies they will be form you know scaling up but you're right style is one thing I left out but on the other hand when we talk about the philm cord data we're talking about style isn't it isn't aren't vertebraes a kind of style you can tell them apart immediately from the philm arthropoda which is insects and insects in all their incredible variety of forms form a style and so what the list would say is Styles didn't need us to come into being is the other way around Nature has Styles and it is we humans that need to learn from that because we are part of it we are made out of Flesh and Blood we are one of those Styles and and in order to assert our Singularity our uniqueness our difference it is important of course that we need to to start considering all the different forms of difference difference in variation difference in intensity difference in in in the kind of differential calculus that I just said that exist in nature that power nature and try to use it a lot of times we use those things unconscious ly we are simply good artists that don't know how to explain what we do but we can we can tell about intensities we can tell whether a painting strikes us or it's powerful or on the other hand is subdued because subdued on purpose and you're playing with intensi not necessarily using D vocabulary now the last thing that the L would want to do is impose a particular ideology on artist because artists are the search process are you know they are the kind of probe head at at the tip of the search search process and so the always kind of let them pass PR and Kafka as literary creators he followed them rather than say oh well I'm better than CF I'm better than PR he quotes them as as people who saw who who drove Humanity in a particular intense Direction same thing he wrote a couple of books on Cinema he wrote about Francis Bacon and painting uh he writes quite a bit of about music in a thousand plateaus with Felix gatari so for him artists are the kind of cutting edge of this Pro what he would want is that when artists begin to talk about their art that they would have a better vocabulary instead of deconstructing things when many things the word deconstruction they they don't even know what it means you know I asked the question what the construction means to every person that uses the word the construction in front of me no one has been able to Define it what does that tell you and of course I was at the dentist the other day opening a cosmo magazine I don't normally read that but I thought I may answer the questionnaire I was at the dentist for God's sakes and there was there it was the constructing lipstick great so what the L would want us to do is yes do art but the moment you start talking about your art don't go hide behind those funky words use words that mean something because the last thing we want artists to be doing is giving us this pseudo explanations of their art cast it in the latest terminology I saw a hand somewhere yeah um it seems that we as a species are in a place in history to be able to to some degree to a large degree edit and control what genetic mutations we willing to accept or in most most cases and not deny I would say such as uh Simon's Twins or any other number of uh diseases and so on and so forth and how I'm interested in what your thoughts are on that and how that well I mean we are you're absolutely right we are right now at a point in history where we can have we have access to secrets we don't know or are responsible to handle let me just give it to you put it this way what makes a species besides natural selection is what is called reproductive isolation the moment two reproductive communities that used to be one Community get separated for whatever reason a river change course and now passes in between them and they eventually begin to diverge and they don't cannot mate with one another imagine here perfect example is horses and donkeys horses and donkeys can mate mechanically they can you know hump they can actually the eggs and the sperms are compatible but the result is a mule which is sterile and therefore the genes won't go through there they are reproductively isolated we are reproductively isolated from chimpanzees in a much harsher way the sper won't even fertilize the egg and where reply isolated from whales in an even greater sense make mechanically won't even work uh so reproductive isolation is what gives a species is enduring historical identity but it is precisely because it's not an Essence it's a contingent barrier it's something that is there and it can be very harsh but it is breach because it's a historically contingent thing all species are individuals in the same way in which we are individuals once we kill zebras when we drive them to Extinction there won't be any more zebras which has an ethical connotation much greater than if there was a zebra Hood out there because then we can kill all the zebras but then zebra Hood will come back because there's no zebra Hood they won't come back now the fact that the barrier is historical means that we with biotechnology can breach it as we speak there is a factory in Upstate New York which is trying to manufacture uh spider silk spider silk spiders make nine different types of silk depending on the the whether some part for the AR structural aspects of the the spider web others to capture insects the one particular type of silk is is so strong that it's stronger than Kevlar Kevlar is the material they use to make bulletproof vests and so the scientists are trying to produce spider silk right but spiders because they're Predators unlike silk worms don't allow themselves to to be domesticated you know put 200 spiders come on produce some silk and they won't do it so what did they do well they figure out the protein that makes this chains that we call spider silk then they figure out the genetic code of it they found the gene in the spider they took that Gene and implanted into a goat right now when I first heard about this I thought that the result was going to be spider goat you know a goat dressed in blue and red going [Applause] B but no nothing nothing as exciting is that on the other hand What's Happening Here is that the goats this genetically engineered goats Express that protein but of course they don't have any use for for spider silk so they just they kind of excrete it in their milk and then what what it is a factory that actually exists right now as we speak right they take the milk they separate the Milky part from the other stuff and then they extrude it through through tiny little pores to create spider silk now it all seems like wow another Triumph for Humanity well let's wait and see we don't know what happens when you begin breaching this historically contingent barriers but that are there not for a purpose but in a complex arrangement of things you begin fooling around with this you know and of course it's just a matter of time before genetic engineering begins appear you know being applied to humans it's going to be illegal for a long time but then tattoos are illegal you know and all kinds of cosmetic changes that you can make to your body are illegal and yet that doesn't stop people from doing it right today we have people who go to St Star Trek conventions you know and then they learn how to speak speak Klingon and they teach their kids how to speak [Music] kingon and one day those guys may want Rhino jeans in their forehead because they think you know cling on Rhino kind of foreheads are very cool and I'll bet you they're going to find someone who's going to do it illegally so our own barriers are not safe and what was what's going to happen once we start fooling around with those things we don't know this is probably one another reason why genetic algorithms could be useful because they could allow us to begin visualizing prior to that cling on future uh what would happen once we begin transplanting rhinos rhinoceros genes into our foreheads another question yes I would like to know if you see any similarity between Del philosophy and Buddhism because in bu there's a nity it goes beyond El absolutely and in fact the L mentions Zen Buddhism as one particular Branch several times in his writings as the one religion that would be the most compatible with what he's talking about and not only Theus there is a a a person his name is Francisco Varela who began as a neuro as a cognitive scientist neuroscientist and began to apply this ideas about self organization to the tribes of neurons to the insect colonies so to speak that inhabit our brain uh and and self organized into thoughts and images and and and and feelings and he was a Buddhist he he died recently but he obviously found that there was a very direct connection between certain meditation techniques and certain attit certain certain uses of your body in which you use your your breathing rhythms to pulse certain other rhythms and then Focus the mind in certain ways to experience precisely the topological that which is non-metric you know with the the patterns in nature which go beyond the actual products and inform the process I create products So I myself am a little bit more because you know I come from Mexico very Catholic kind of country you know with very bloody Jesus Christ and so on and somehow you know religion has always been one of those things I want to get away with from but if there was one religion that I would respect or that I would be find compatible with this materialism would be would be Buddhism certainly yes I'm sorry I'll get back to you um yes this another noticing quite different and it's also from the ha's criticism of yeah you know the worst thing that could have happened to Hayek was when Reagan adopted him I'll bet you that Hayek was turning turning in his grave going oh my God that bad actor and now he's president I'll tell you how that connects with that I believe that Hayek is right in talking about markets and self organizing things what he was wrong about is to think that corporations belong to the market I've written plenty about this I have many essays that you can get from the net just type the Landa and economics and there's at least 20 I call them anti- markets precisely because they are more like bureaucracies than they are like markets any any product that you find in your house that's not produced by a small producer in a in a real competitive situation with hundreds and hundreds of people competing is producing a corporation which is close closer to the central planning of a socialist State than it is to anything that Hayek ever talked about there are very few areas of the world today that actually display economic self organization I can name him with my one hand uh even with a horse's hand uh there's the third Italy that region in Italy between Milan and and Venice uh called Emilia Romana you know cities are Mona bologa uh is about 30,000 small businesses competing against each other is capitalist you make no mistake about that but small because they are driven by designers and they know that the moment you bring managers and accountants and a hierarchy and you become a joint stock company and so on the designers are the last ones to have a say in how the companies run so here we have 20,000 this is a figure that I got from you know it might might have changed but several thousand small businesses that do design you know the Italians how good they design they in this particular region they do textile design Ceramics but also industrial design the design machines and it has a completely different Dynamics you know you still have bosses and workers but because the typical size of a factory is 100 people I mean of a of a of a firm is 100 people a motivated worker who is also a designer can become his or her own boss the moment this firm grows too large it splits into to two and there's much less barriers to entry for workers to becoming bosses so there's a lot more social Mobility they have not eliminated is not a perfectly equal Society but then again perfect equality needs to be enforced by a super powerful State and all you're really doing is creating a class of enforcers which is what went wrong with Marxism there are certain parts of Silicon Valley that I like that particularly those that grew around Apple computer when Apple computer was started by two hippies and $1,300 in a garage they they created the Apple 2 with an open architecture which meant that people could design boards to plug in the bus and they did not try to to corner all the profits they realized that if they opened it a kach industry of Hardware designers software designers and so on was going to merem merge around it and they seated Silicon Valley that way of course Apple eventually grew too large there's a phase transition there a phase transition is when you cannot find Finance yourself from bank credit and you need to sell stock options you need to go public the IPO the famous IPO that everybody went crazy doing the bubble and the internet at that point 1984 they kicked jobs out Steve Jobs they brought in a manager from pepsicola as if selling computers was the same thing as selling sodas only less fizzy you know I don't I I don't even know what kind of mentality does that of course Apple went down the tubes steadily ever since they had to bring jobs back at the end of the '90s to kind of Infuse a little bit of life into it you can find those places but if one if one uses the word capitalism as a blanket War for everything where money is used and there's and there's division of labor and so on you will never see them or you begin coming up with silly labels like post fordism to to to to refer to them uh instead of making an inventory of all the e economic experiments are going on in the world which ones viable which ones are exploitative you know and and getting more serious about this I believe that the loses materialism can help us a lot in that one Chris you have your hand yeah yeah I found there's a potential contradiction for the form Finding Pro there's potential contradiction between the spontaneity and the internal determinance for example your fry model the so bubble model he actually is not the tri the diversity because he's looking for the minimum surface which is the structur the only uh the most efficient one possible surface so in that sense is not for diversity it's for the optimization absolutely yeah I but I'll tell you how you can okay but let me just answer that first part and I'll go back to the yes but that means only the only that means is that there spaces of possibilities or what they call Face spaces come in different forms and shapes the simplest ones have a single Optimum those were the ones that survival of the fittest evolutionary theorists assume they assume that everything was like a soap bubble uh fry uto began with those because those are the simplest ones to handle and you're right there's something about the optimizer engineer you know in Fry Auto that kind of limits him but we don't have to be limited like that we can we can study topological thinking the way it is and to show that the simpl possible space is only the extreme case we have all kinds of other sorry all kinds of other spaces much more complex with much more possibilities like the film for the vertebrates and therefore we don't have to fall for optimizing rationality we can we can in fact make it into a special case and then say yes you guys are right but that's not the way reality works for instance Hayek that he just mentioned as a conservative thing Hayek used to believe that the market has only one Point that's Optimum the point at which demand and Supply cancel each other out exactly therefore there is no wasteful excesses or wasteful deficits but of course markets are not like that markets have at least periodic equilibria ups and downs up swings and down swings and that yet another type of equilibrium another type of attractor today we know that there are chaotic attractors which actually have internal Divergence in them so they are exactly the opposite of steady state and we know that all of this come in bunches this is what topological thinking has does in this Century to show us the the the great diversity of spaces that we can have so even though I agree with you that FR uto fell for that and GA too remember GA how he calculated the the facade for the sagr Familia he took a little pieces of cord of of of of threads and hung little uh little bags with sand or something in them you know I saw it at the Museum and of course it's upside down you need to see a right side up but he was using morphogenesis to design and he does a lot that in all of his buildings in fact when you see his his style is almost topological there's something even though he didn't know any math and he do everything in a much more kind of naive kind of way intuitively he he inted this spaces and so the idea here is not to condemn something because a few artists went for the simplest type of spaces you know froto needs to be considered the starting point rather than the end of the line you had a second question has something to do with delivery quite here you set up for the machine to generate so there's no like ideal condition that's right but you know again we are in a much better position right now with extremely powerful computers you know with memory becoming cheaper and cheaper you know I just bought a new Mac with Maya for $2,000 when it used to be at $40,000 a piece of software things are going cheaper you know you used to need to go into debt and get a bank loan if you wanted that tool or use it at school today you can buy it and have it uh and the sellers of software are listening to artists because they are beginning to realize that the last thing they want to do is give you a tool that imposes its own style on you they want them the tools to be flexible they're hiring artists as consultants not because they want to do any favors but because they want to sell more software but that is they're moving moving in the right direction in the direction of complexity did I see a hand over there okay do you see excuse me no but no no no but what question is what is your point of view about the use of the space in this movie uh but unfortunately I haven't seen it so I I have to see it though okay that's all thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Columbia University

Views: 74,111

Keywords: manuel, delanda040904, YouTube, Prep, 640x480

Id: 50-d_J0hKz0

Length: 84min 36sec (5076 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2009