汪一笛 eté
© 2024 eté. All rights reserved.
Abstract
Meandering among concepts and practices, this essay tries to reveal the entanglement between them instead of advocating for any single perspective. It is structured into three interrelated analyses. First from computation to global infrastructure, the analysis covers geopolitical meanings and regional development based on systematic planning. Then, their shared empirical abstractness and intrinsic composition lead to and echo with the discussion of the correlation between music and architecture, initially analysed by musician and architect Iannis Xenakis, according to whom a stochastic system accommodating order, and disorder emerges elevated into aesthetics. Third, I argue the stochastic system contains anxiety from disorder and noise, reassembling artificial aesthetics’ effect. This sense of anxiety attaches to redundant objects having a physical presence and actors’ roles proven by sonic-urban events and projects intervening in the existing infrastructure culturally, technologically, planetarily, and intellectually by examples. The planetary way differs from occurred globalism, as it allows for contextual adaptations allowing redundancy and noise desired as friction in music production.[1] Philosophical reflection and literature reviews are the main methodologies here. From a holistic perspective, threads of thinking across disciplines are recorded preparing for future research on nuanced systems and new philosophy or institution involved.
Keywords: Sonic Architecture, Artificial Aesthetics, Synaesthesia, Noise, Probability, Stochastic Composition, Object-Oriented Philosophy, Planetary Thinking, Global Infrastructure, Computation and Planning
Synaesthesia, 2020 to 2024. Painted by eté.
From Synthetic Computational Modelling to Global Infrastructure
The emergence of discussion towards infrastructure has made it a convenient tool to bridge abstract architectural theories and empirical, sometimes futuristic speculation based on condensed reality. In Sven Opitz’s and Ute Tellmann’s analysis appeared in Limn journal on European infrastructure, they mentioned that the process of defragmentation and intentional collectivity of energy infrastructural integration constitutes “a space with both topographical and topological feature” within which borders of nation states are moving.[2] More specifically, European energy system has claims to adopt an intelligent integrated grid system to accommodate renewable energy based on and gradually replacing nuclear and fossil fuel-based energy sources. The decentralized pattern of integrated grid systems enables more parties to come into play. Besides the virtual connecting role of the market between producers and consumers, this decentralized network echoes with Web 3 format and AI-aided industrial revolution ongoing. Artificial intelligence is embedding itself into such geopolitical gestures showing how technology and politics interplay in a constituted world that is becoming more and more tangible. How does such tangibility coexist with planetarity? How does technology reach both theory and empirical development? Andreas Folkers argued, that there is “a lack of ideas for smart and politically progressive uses of it”, and “they are full of gaps, unpredictable currents, and channels that allow for all kinds of electric and political forms of resistance”.[3] It also seems that the force to enable such gestures thanks to big political and tech bodies has been in charge of this industry.
Deleuze’s concept of rhizome[4] uses biological metaphoric form not just to describe bodies that could be political, economic, and societal and expand outwards into a system but as Foucault summarised,
“a phantasmaphysics…in the reversal that causes every interior to pass to the outside and every exterior to the inside, in the temporal oscillation that always makes it precede and follow itself.”[5]
Likewise, transportation infrastructure can also be read as such a rhizome enabling urban interconnectedness in Ole B. Jenson’s writing on urban mobility. He marked how culture and human everyday life flow inside of this giant urban infrastructure of transportation.[6] This vivid flow inside of an artificial world.
Sven Opitz’s work on pandemic also reveals that the world falls into a self-observed and self-simulating mode,[7] inspired by Richard Grussin’s concept of premediation[8] which reveals how plural futures are created by media. This article gives a spontaneous idea on the relation and transition between the pre-computational era that inspires a priori creational theory such as Xenakis’s music and architecture, and the current cultural urge to create a planetary reality though augmented and embodied with everything including politics, and the shared catastrophic integrated imagination based on events and scientific speculations. Such events have global impacts, and their activism on social media dominates a generation’s vision of how to access the world. The changing way of engaging with the system echoes with how the latter constantly adjusts itself to risks, and even failure of common imagination.
Compared to the beginning of an interconnected computational world based on infinite simulation and fabrication, our global infrastructures in the present rooted in abstract theories tend to deal with more concrete geopolitical contexts and issues “consolidate and distribute power”,[9] counting itself has been viewed as a scientific methodological root of political surveillance of control and care. There is “a system of systems”[10] in contextualization to situate and the accelerated simulating plurality real-time in the fields of urban operating, and agricultural, forest, and ocean monitoring “from GPS to machine sensors, along with automation, robotization, augmented reality, remote operations…”.[11] Everything is “colliding, mingling or separating bodies” talking to us through quasi-physics.[12]Yet synaesthesia as the haunting voice between sound and 3D form is more than simulacrum or illusion besides metaphysics but illusion as metaphysics itself that carries innumerous redundancy, undefined as objects, and the contradicted relations caused by the undefined, the in-between.[13]
Sonic Architecture: Object-Oriented Musical and Architectural Synaesthesia
While “geometry is physical, topology sensual”,[14] following Foucault’s thought, “events then require a more complex logic”. In the linked sonic and architectural studies originated in the 20th century from Iannis Xenakis, computation as a method and revolutionary way of interacting with and building worlds impacted both the musical and architectural industries in the last century. In his book Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition, the concept of causality and mathematical logic was mentioned before discussing musical composition.
“It is therefore not surprising that the presence or absence of the principle of causality, first in philosophy and then in the sciences, might influence musical composition. It causes it to follow paths that appeared to be divergent, but in which, in fact, coalesced in probability theory and finally in polyvalent logic, which are kinds of generalization and enrichments of the principle of causality.”[15]
Though it is not merely a coherence that “situates accidents in the entangled nexus of causes and effects”, comparing Foucault’s linguistic organization composed for “events”,[16] the concept of stochasticity was directly introduced by Xenakis as the expansion of probability theory in the process of digital musical formation dealing with “conflicts and knots”.
“The composition was tailored to interact with the Pavilion’s distinctive acoustics and geometric structure, reflecting Xenakis’s interest in merging mathematical and physical models across different fields. The architecture’s unique shapes and surfaces influenced the diffusion of sound within the space, making Concrete PH an early example of spatialized sound design that integrates music with its physical environment.”[17] French Pavilion’s Elevation Designed by Xenakis.[18]
Instead of purely leaning towards a parametric computation, this marriage would rather be a balance between the stochastic and the systematic. The question is, how do we know our system thoroughly and how do we make sure our understanding of it is correct? If the system itself is always changing as it is now, as Grahan Harman suggested, our enclosed understanding of a simulated solidified system will blind us from knowing anything other than such a system, such as the remaining peculiar objects, but lead us to fall into the fatalism of catastrophe.[19]
Scoring: Xenakis’ design for laser configuration within the Diatope.[20]
Such mere emphasis on a solidified system, Graham criticized, has made architectural creation believe in measuring the environment based on algorithmic parameters.[21] In Christopher M. Kelly’s essay in Limn number 9 on the theme of little development devices, participatory entities as
“…an enormous, amorphous, yet nevertheless intimate collective that represents itself to itself constantly”, recalls the importance of “the reflexive practitioner whose ‘algorithm’ is human judgment, memory, and discernment” versus “an automatic, machine learning, artificial intelligence”.[22]
I argue that the analog and the algorithmic could combine, and spontaneous emotion and the evolving abstract system could merge into one situatedness of synaesthesia. The value of narrative formation does not merely lie in its theoretical relation to ANT, but in the liberating fictions that reevaluate the role of actors, objects, and environments. Each of these is an abstract entity that could be rearranged and function actively. Bodies, brains, and objects do not only interact with and become infrastructure by repetition.
“The algorithmic approach to sound creation in the 20th century was not about programming computers to create variations of Bach or Debussy. Instead, it was about advancing sound composition by handling vast amounts of information on a microscopic level”[23]
More recently, the linkage between musical and architectural expression has been explored more through different tools shared by both, such as scoring and mapping. By comparison, besides the methodologies of analysing, signifying, and layering which indicates spatial and objective features that are deeply connected to human living entangling with power, diverse ethnicities, and communities, the original scoring’s abstractness might just represent how human life is now inseparable from such thinking of notation, modelling, representation, and objectification. After all, transformed into an “intelligible” system itself actively instead of passively, far beyond Lefebvre’s initial argument on spatial politics. Such a system and its agents are not linguistic-oriented systems either, but object-oriented, which redefines what is intelligence in infrastructural and industrial contexts interacting with both humans and objects stretching locally and planetarily.
Different from the “most engineering application needs to be removed as a source of noise and instabilities, friction, the tangible force between objects in contact is a desirable component in musical applications.”[24]
“The constant flux of natural processes is a fertile ground for developing sonic morphology and timbral movement as elements of a continuous composition. Aleatoric, or random processes in music have long been a focus of avant-garde composers exploring the boundaries of unpredictability.”
Mapping, scoring, and installing in different scales constitute an intelligence of redundancy, opening up practical possibilities for a shared future among humans, objects, human objects (non-binaries), and smart systems. Besides developing these systems, multiple artists and researchers in this conjunctive field have proven that complex contexts lead to the failure of the simplified systems, and redundant objects such as noise have always existed within them waiting to become part of the ouroboros.
Theoretical Diagrams on a fictional project linking on-site water bodies, noise, and architecture installation in urban space
Stochastic Composition: Redundant “Objects” Within Planetary Systems
In Formalized Music, Xenakis soon depicted a scene absorbs multiple states “in oscillation between symmetry, asymmetry, order, disorder, rationality” and transcends anxiety which might emerge naturally with the creator’s presence. “Traditional behavioural framework” is inherited and negated when “rare random events” occur and “defining chance as an aesthetic law, as a normal philosophy.” In this sense, a stochastic composition contains as much fluid instability, noise, and dynamic as transformable “aesthetic stimuli”[25]; and inside the temporal scale, the act of organization, and ordering exists rapidly, not necessarily consistently. We then therefore could say a psychological anxiety emerges not due to the disorder itself, but out of a sense of unmeasurablity of temporal scale in the panoramic space.
Combining the architectural and musical notation systems, and their relatable compositional aesthetics, we find the unmeasurable redundant objects within a relatively large scale are the engine that keeps the system moving as the node to generate intuition. In spite of the entanglement between notable system and stochasticity, there is always room, or non-space, nothingness for redundancy “endangering being”,[26] wherein grows scenarios and narratives, or vice versa. Stephanie Sherman’s historical critical piece on Fordism has talked about how ignorance of the jungle environment, and therefore concrete contexts, has made Fordist standardized models and platforms fail, proving “smart systems” are fragile when they are not adjusting and adapting into transformed scenarios.[27] Applied consciousness is also defined as the “transformative and adaptive” programmed materials and objects in Tomas Vivanco’s thesis[28] before he delves into Fab City Global Initiative which is trying to build a local-focused production process combined with a circular economy concept facilitating data-in data-out mode of smartness that promotes climate justice. AI as the entity embody-able into anything is seemingly the transformative substance that echoes our imagination of the a priori or understanding towards the smart system that’s unsurprisingly rooted in the capitalist corporation[29] and governmentality which also reveals the paradox of democracy.[30]
Rebellious effects of such a “smart system” happen too, and sensorial signals and entities can be used as weapons to intervene in the public space, and a tool to read the complex composition of an environment. Sonic Protest is not just the name of a music festival but occurred politically on-site during the 2023 French pension reform strike. Protestors use techno music to build solidarity and occupy streets with their bodies and extensions through sound. Gascia Ouzounian in her more-than-concept projects Sonicities, and Scoring the City explored how architectural installation, urban studies, and sonic presence as one gained EU Funds. Replacing the traditional top-down perspective of urban planning, this way of intervening in the city requires a less rigid view, but more cultural expression and flexible situatedness, expanding the recoding scale into a temporal capability and easy to understand while music is the carrier. Thanks to the heritage of understanding aesthetics through social critical perspectives by Adorno in the last century, it is rather not surprising when we find in similar initiatives like Theatrum Mundi sonic and theatrical immersive intervention as cultural infrastructure could be critical about issues such as racial barrier attached to territorial division in cities like London, and subcultural backyards in the unique street layout of Marseille intersecting with its abundant Mediterranean port history which has embraced multiple cultures. Improvisation and defiance have been a key part in interpreting street politics’ ignored wisdom in Suzanne Hall’s research involved with global migration.[31] It is more precious to find out a technological-philosophical potential in breaking norms of governing, though usually, art practice is the way to expect something in between and more than dependency and resistance along the path dependency of such concepts.
Emerging think tanks like Antikythera led by philosopher Benjamin Bratton and multidisciplinary researchers brings a planetary vision into the space between the ground and the air, physical and the virtual through technological debates, and simulative speculations based on historical references. Such initiatives and projects are established corresponding to a more epistemological shift and hetero-purpose from the production-based situatedness of fab labs to an ontological ambition to engage with the computational system for the globe. Based on Bratton’s theory, Antikythera’s project Planetary Computation[32], different yet inspired by what Sun Ra described “planetary sound of guns, anger, frustration” in Space Is The Place[33], inherited the positivism of globalism but culturally and technologically critical. In Terraforming, Bratton analysed how nature and the artificial aren’t as opposite.[34]Biological inventions are also referred to. However, in one of the projects, Infinity Mirrors, the holistic approach ignored the meaning of stochastic composition in the substrate as a potential engine to generate newness as explosion in physics form energy and new forms of synthetics.
Their activism undoubtedly melts the barrier between academic and public culture, like AI could do to citizen science with proper regulations. A future of multiple actors’ participation could visualize itself as a stochastic composition when actors and objects are able to adjust to and transform the sense of anxiety into nodes of synaesthesia where multiple disciplinary theories coexist in one composition.
Conclusion
Fab City Global affiliated and scholar-led initiative Interspecies Network emphasized the awareness of understanding another language when exposed to the anthropocentric world while expanding the scope of intelligence.[35] Computational language was firstly a computer science then used in specific areas of certain fields. Musical and architectural creation both rely on software to articulate their composition either sonic or geometric. Artificial intelligence or smart intelligence has entered the tangible world already in infrastructure with a global fluid layout based on political pursuits. Such a smart system could mobilize and empower citizen participation and become citizen science considered by grassroots democratic initiatives. Since there is an early tradition between computation and artistic creation, in the current transformation of enlarging AI’s implementation, will the definition of aesthetics be remodified along with its intelligent alliance?
Beyond obscurity,[36] architectural practice mirrors the world’s changing and situates itself in a core (or physical) part of the yet-to-be phantasm world. Sonic architecture invented and theorized by Iannis Xenakis illuminates the nuanced entanglement. This article unveiled the entanglement between separate fields of studies highlighting the potential to reanalyse aesthetics while mirroring us to artificial intelligence as either a mirroring system or a redundant object that reassembles us the most in the completing and existing planetary infrastructure or human colonization of the mother earth alongside territorial violence towards each other based on unwitting simplicity. As Francis J. Gavin described, we are facing more of a problem with plenty instead of scarcity.[37]
Process of weaving physical stochasticity in a social lab
[1] Serafin, S. (2004) The Sound Of Friction: Real-Time Models, Playability And Musical Application. Ph. D. Thesis. Standford University.
[2] Opitz, S, Tellmann, U. (2016) ‘Europe’s Materialism: Infrastructures and Political Space’, Limn 7: Public Infrastructures/Infrastructural Publics, pp.89–93.
[3] Folkers, A. (2016) ‘Nuclear States, Renewable Democracies?’, Limn 7: Public Infrastructures/Infrastructural Publics, pp.81–92.
[4] Deleuze, G, Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
[5] Foucault, M. (1970) ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, Critique 282, pp.885–908.
[6] Jensen, B.O. (2009) ‘Flows of Meaning, Cultures of Movements – Urban Mobility as Meaningful Everyday Life Practice’, Mobilities, 4(1), pp.139–158. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17450100802658002.
[7] Opitz, S, Tellmann, U. (2017/8) ‘Simulating The World: The Digital Enactment Of Pandemics As A Mode Of Global Self-Observation’, European Journal Of Social Theory 20:3, pp.392–416.
[8] Grusin, R. (2010) Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11. Palgrave Macmillan UK.
[9] Sherman, S. (2024) The Fordian Slip. e-flux: Architecture.
[10] Gabrys, J. (2016) Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1b7x5gq.
[11] Gabrys, J, Michelle W, and Yuti A. F. (2024) “Actually Existing Smart Forests: A Proposal for Pluralizing Eco-technical Worlds.” Environment and Planning F. https://doi.org/10.1177/26349825241264393.
[12] Foucault, M. (1970) ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, Critique 282, pp.885–908.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Eshun, K. (1998) More Brilliant Than The Sun. Quartet Books.
[15] Xenakis, I. (1963) Formalized Music. Pendragon Press.
[16] Foucault, M. (1970) ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, Critique 282, pp.885–908.
[17] Bökesoy, S. (2024) Introduction to generative audio synthesis: Part 1. Sounding Future.
[18] Xenakis, I. (2008) Music and Architecture: Architecture Projects, Texts, and Realizations. Pendragon Press.
[19] Harman, G. (2018) ‘Non-Relationality for Philosophers and Architects’, Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism. Southwest University Press.
[20] Xenakis, I. (2008) Music and Architecture: Architecture Projects, Texts, and Realizations. Pendragon Press.
[21] Harman, G. (2018) ‘Non-Relationality for Philosophers and Architects’, Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism. Southwest University Press.
[22] Kelly, M. C. (2018) ‘The Participatory Development Toolkit’, Limn 9: Little Development Devices/Humanitarian Goods, pp.110–118.
[23] Bökesoy, S. (2024) Introduction to generative audio synthesis: Part 1. Sounding Future.
[24] Serafin, S. (2004) The Sound Of Friction: Real-Time Models, Playability And Musical Application. Ph. D. Thesis. Standford University.
[25] Xenakis, I. (1963) Formalized Music. Pendragon Press.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Sherman, S. (2024) The Fordian Slip. e-flux: Architecture.
[28] Vivanco, T. (2019) Programming Intelligence: Consciousness of Material Algorithms. Ph. D. Thesis. Tongji University.
[29] Bridle, J. (2023) Ways Of Being Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search For A Planetary Intelligence. Penguin Books.
[30] Rouvroy, A. (2024) 'Algorithmic Realism: Anarchic or Utopia’[Lecture], Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference, Architecture Philosophy and Theory academic group, Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft.
[31] Hall, S. (2021) The Migrant’s Paradox: Street Livelihoods and Marginal Citizenship in Britain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
[32] Antikythera.org (n.d.) The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project. Available at: http://www.antikythera.org
[33] Ra, S. (1974) Space Is The Place. USA: Persistence of Vision Films.
[34] Bratton, H. B. (2019) The Terraforming. Strelka Press.
[35] Interspecies.io (n.d.) Interspecies I/O: Exploring Human-Animal Communication. Available at: https://www.interspecies.io/
[36] Merve Bedir et al., eds. (2023) Automated Landscapes, Rotterdam: Nieuwe Instituut.
[37] Gavin, J. F. (2024) The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era, Routledge.