excerpt

[...] Our discipline is as defensive a system as it is possible to imagine. Yet this defensiveness is anything but a problem for the Informated Space—quite the contrary, such rigidity ensures that the architectural product is as predictable and immaterial as the Informated Space needs it to be in order to successfully include it in its own pervasive geographein. In our universal design processes and through the contractors’ standardization, the innovators’ newest sensor or even the avant-gard’s latest speculative project, lies the factor of predictibility—so well embedded in the practice, disguised as flow diagrams, data visualizations or meaningless charts, that they have ceased to be noticeable. 

Transparent to the Informated Space, yet totally invisible to the now mathematized subject, the architectural product exists, but in a constant state of disappearance. When Paul Virilio was asked by Andreas Ruby in 1993 about architecture’s future in the age of information, he noted that any kind of matter is about to vanish in favor of information. For Virilio, disappearance was not synonymous with elimination. Much like the Atlantic continues to exist although imperceptible to the aeroplane passenger, architecture, too, was to become anesthetized. 

As Anthony Burke brilliantly put it, architecture has always worked with representations of abstractions. The development of architecture depends on its ability to address concerns for the intention of new visual vocabularies capable of dealing with real complexities.If the Informated Space leaves us with an architecture that is imperceptible, constructed of systems of knowledge forever in growth, how does one design “for [the] newly regulated human that exists in an osmotic balance between what the system sees and what the human produces?” 

Learning how to operate in this frictional gap between location and dislocation requires a meticulous deconstruction of the vast algorithmic heuristic of the Informated Space through inventive new media and language. A protocol for modeling uncertainty, the embracement of paralogy or even the replacement of Python with the Pythonesque could be a good trailhead to the road of comprehending, manipulating and even obstructing this omniscient certainty. After all, the chances of Lara coming back to the store are still only seventy-four percent. 

‍