Hadas discusses the importance of pneumatic architecture and elaborates on how she feels that they have been one of the more important discoveries in architecture / the use of structural pneumatics.

“…free the living environment from the constraints which have bound it since history began.”

Tension between form and formlessness as an unfinished architecture.

Antoine Stinkteo used as an example to begin conversation about nomadology, as the nomad is nowhere until the most valid non-locational system is designed.

Are these projects treated as a response to information exchanges?

“Yet this ‘progression’ from fat city to reality suggests that their ‘new vision’ or fantasy for a time yet to come remained indebted to the experience of altered states of consciousness…”

In response to Tattel’s article, the concept of interconnectivity as an outreach to the human identity is a not so far reaching phenomenon.  I see the implications of such manifestation in everyday activities.  We return to the concept of speed within architecture and activities of daily living [ADL’s]; these measures of outreach bring together a deeper connection to previous literature discussing details of globalization and the effect on humanity.

ManComputerSymbiosis

During this week, our group studied the theory and complexity of mobs and crowds. We were provided with five texts, Smart Mobs: The Power of the Mobile Many by Howard Rheingold, Entr’acte by Jordan Geiger, The Real Social Life of Wireless Public Places by Anthony Townsend, Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti, and Electronic Civil Disobedience by Critical Art Ensemble. Through these various texts, we discovered a new world of crowds. It has also helped us understand and question the characteristics of crowds and mobs. The texts we were provided with focused highly on how we as humans have advanced and began to form crowds other than in the physical world.

The bare privilege to have access to the internet and to utilize our smart devices have given us all the opportunity to utilize the internet to form our own type of crowds. These new types of crowds are forming over social media, and often times over common/opposing interest/opinions. It has also allowed us to organize ourselves to create a crowd in public spaces. Which brings us to how public spaces has long been a gathering place for crowds.

Congregation happens in places like these due to the ease of access and usually it’s vastness. A few good example of how our advancing technologies has allowed us to congregate together more often is the MP3 experiment (hosted by ImprovEverywhere), the Michael Jackson flash mob (or any flash mob for that matter), the Ice Bucket Challenge, and many more others. Although some of these are not our stereotypical crowds of physical congregation, our networks has allowed those who participate in similar “crowds” to be a part of a “network crowd”.

The beauty of many of these crowds is the idea of inclusiveness. For a few, like the planned crowds, one can not simply just join the crowd and know what to do. Taking the MP3 experiment and flash mobs for example, if you are not a genuine and active participant, you, an outsider, will not and can not join these crowds. All due to the fact that you do not know the dance routine, or you do not have the MP3 file to follow along. (Even if you did, most likely you won’t get to the right time). Although, for some flash mobs, (the ones that are just spontaneous dancing), those who have high spirits have the ability to join.

Most of the time, these events take place in public spaces. Without public spaces, these activities can not happen. (Well they could but they would be small groups rather than crowds.) In the film, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces  by William Whyte, it discusses how public spaces play a huge role in human interaction and crowd formation. Designers have also went to extents though to design accordingly to prevent from crowd formations. For example, many times they would implement spikes or rocks to make a seating area uncomfortable to deter away solicitors or homeless people seeking a place to post up. However, these public spaces have long been providing a meeting area for crowds of many kinds. They  have allowed crowds to congregate and to get across what ever message they wish to get across. (A good example could be Yoko Ono’s giant peace sign for John Lennon’s birthday held in Central Park)

Inhabiting the network. This week’s texts step up in scale to the conception of the role that the house occupies in a modern society. The (im)materiality of this conception is of particular interest, where Fuller saw the mass-produced unit, Antfarm saw the amorphous bubble, to Banham conceiving on the literal environment as a means of ordering the inhabitations of society. What I find fascinating of this proliferation of a house from a tied down (overly) materialized object is the possibility of an open source housing. One whose means of production and constraints allow not only for a person to decorate their living space, but to spatially define it. The possibilities of a similar process exponentially grows when these configural methods can become articulated quickly to instantaneously. Where a bubbles is dependent on its physical location on spaceship earth, I dream of an environment proliferated from time.

“At breakfast Sal reads the news. She still prefers the paper form, as do most people.”

This article is showing it’s age.

This video from The Media Lab highlights the contemporary issue of a one size fits all approach to personal computing. It’s connection is loose with the Weiser article, but I believe it brings up a very important issue, being that of identity. Weiser is seemingly theorizing to a future that has already solved the issue of raised by the video, a future where physical digital objects no longer define the human-computer interaction, instead this interaction is defined by the digital human-computer interaction. The digital-human is our identity (our actions, characteristics, location etc) as translated by the computer. Enabled by the popularity of a networked society, this identity is already beginning to take shape today, but with the profitability of large scale data collection as the driving factor. If we are to see a future where the computer fades into the background of life, or fully dematerializes, this digital identity must be reclaimed in full from those who currently control it.