Enlarging the Computational Spectrum

The Obsolescence of Mankind

The lecture deals with a crucial event of the 20th century – the discovery and subsequent use of atomic power for military and then civil use - and the spaces related to it. At the same time, it addresses two issues that are indeed timely: the first is the overwhelming role of technology in our lives and the fact that we are not able anymore to fully control it (the “promethean gap” philosopher Guenther Anders referred to); the second is the fact that the extreme nature of the Manhattan Project and its legacy introduced in scientific thought and practice a completely new paradigm, one of non-graduality.

We can recognize this non-graduality—this “unthinkability”, as intended by Herman Kahn in his book “Thinking about the Unthinkable”(1962) —also in many events that increasingly affected our lives since the beginning of this millennium: the epochal effects of climate change, the economic crisis of 2008, the combined effects of earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima in 2011, the Covid-19 pandemic that hit us globally, the overwhelming evolution of artificial intelligence. Events that exceed what we consider plausible, out of scale both in psychological and cultural terms.

The research presented in the frame of the lecture engages with spaces where the non-graduality paradigm took shape and first manifested. It does so through the exploration of memories and landscapes related to the atomic bomb and its legacy. Following the path opened by Simon Schama with his groundbreaking work “Landscape and Memory” (1995), individual and collective memories, tangible landscapes and landscapes of the mind are intertwined in a seamless narrative.

Ludovico Centis is an architect, founder of the office The Empire and co-founder and editor of San Rocco magazine. He has been a partner at the architectural office Salottobuono from 2007 to 2012. Centis holds a PhD in urbanism (Università Iuav di Venezia) and is currently assistant professor in urbanism at the University of Trieste. His research focuses on the ways in which individuals and institutions, as well as desires and power, shape cities and landscapes. Recent monographs and edited volumes include Reyner Banham: A set of actual tracks (2024), The Lake of Venice. A scenario for Venice and its lagoon (2022, with Lorenzo Fabian) and A parallel of ruins and landscapes (2019).

This lecture is available in person and online. 

In person: Room G.12, 22 Gordon Street – first come, first seated

Online: Register on attend online

Agential Computing

This lecture treats the shift from algorithmic composition to synthetic media as a watershed moment in computational aesthetics, transforming notions of generativity that computation puts forth. By ingesting a vast corpus of source material, generative deep learning models are capable of encoding multi-modal data into a shared embedding space, producing synthetic outputs which cannot be decomposed into their constituent parts. These models call into question the relation between conception and production in myriad creative practices spanning musical composition to visual art. Moreover, artificial intelligence as a research program poses deeper questions regarding the very nature of aesthetic categories and their constitution. 

These developments will be explored by analysing the notion of aesthesis in machine learning—a study of how computation constructs the worlds it navigates—seen through the lens of a family of models known as ‘latent diffusion’. The stakes for our account of computation and its epistemic limits will be discussed by elaborating a critique of AI, drawing on the work of Wilfrid Sellars. Throughout, AA Cavia will endorse a topological view of computation, which will inform the neural turn in computer science, characterised as a shift from the notion of a stored program to that of a cognitive model.

Lastly, AA Cavia will consider notions of autonomy and agency within the regime of computation, drawing a distinction between the axiomatic precepts of rule-following automata and situated learning agents. In this way, we can begin to move our focus from the nomos (laws) to the topos (sites) of computation, to consider what agential affordances are at play when designing with and for non-human actors.

AA Cavia is a computer scientist and researcher based in Berlin. His studio practice is centered on speculative software, engaging with machine learning, algorithms, protocols, encodings, and other software artefacts. He has lectured and exhibited internationally, at institutions such as Jan van Eyck Academie, ZKM, and The New Centre for Research. His writings have been published by HKW, Urbanomic, Routledge, and the Glass Bead Journal, amongst others. He is the author of one book, Logiciel: Six Seminars on Computational Reason (&&&, 2022). He has over a decade of experience building platforms for the arts and is currently lead machine learning engineer at Artsy.

This lecture is available in person and online.

In Person: Room 505, 25 Gordon Street – first come, first seated

Online: Register to attend online

Cybernetics, Computing and Creative Collaboration in 1970

This lecture is an exploration of cybernetics, interactivity and computational art in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The use of a computer to create art was a radical concept at this time, raising questions about creative behaviour and process, and challenging the notion of what art was or could be. Based on Catherine's latest book Creative Simulations: George Mallen and the Early Computer Arts Society (Springer: 2024), learn about George Mallen, a pioneer of creative computing systems since 1962 and his early work with cybernetician Gordon Pask, the ground-breaking exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity, the founding of the Computer Arts Society and Ecogame, the Society’s collaborative project of 1970. 

Able to modify its reactions according to the behaviour of the participants, Ecogame was a simulation model of an economic system, dealt with opportune issues of ecology and environment, and was the first multi-player, digitally driven, interactive gaming system in the UK. It exemplified the Society’s belief in a positive ‘human machine interrelationship’ made visible through art. Ecogame was part of that community’s conversation around early machine learning in art and the challenges that a highly computerised society could face in the future. 

The creators of Ecogame, by embracing computing, discovered that art could have a greatly amplified role, one that was integrated with societal concerns. Ecogame was focused on a positive vision of the future, an understanding, posited on cybernetics, of a future that could be participatory via digital means, and therefore more democratised. This use of early interactive systems foreshadowed the AI digital art revolution we see today.

Catherine Mason is a researcher and writer who has been focused on recovering the lost history of computer and digital art since 2002. Her book A Computer in the Art Room: The Origins of British Computer Arts 1950-1980 (2008, ebook 2021) was the first published comprehensive account of the history of computer art in Britain. It records 60 British pioneers of this genre, many of whom had never had their story in print before. This was followed by the co-edited White Heat Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960-1980 (MIT Press: 2009). She is on the board of the Computer Arts Society.

This lecture is available in person and online 11:00 – 13:00 BST. 

In Person: Room 107, 25 Gordon Square – first come, first seated

Online: Register to attend online 

Shape Computation Fifty Years, 1972-2022

Sotirios Kotsopoulos

In Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics 1937–1944, Ludwig Wittgenstein touched on shape computation. His lectures at Cambridge in 1939, which Alan Turing attended, challenged traditional notions of arithmetic. Turing's 1936 essay on computable numbers established the Turing machine as a standard for symbolic computation. During the 1940s, mathematician John von Neumann, a pioneer in computer science, expressed concern that symbolic descriptions could not fully capture visual experience, arguing that visual interpretation is often idiosyncratic and beyond logical or symbolic representation. Von Neuman's argument raised the issue of shape computation in art and design, where the whole can exceed the sum of its parts. What might happen if Wittgenstein, Turing, and von Neumann seriously considered the full implications of shape computation?

In 1972, George Stiny and James Gips made a case for shape computation in their seminal essay, "Shape Grammars and the Generative Specification of Painting and Sculpture" (1972). Their essay showcased the feasibility and utility of calculating with shapes in art and design, pointing to a new frontier that was soon valued as a discovery, especially for designers. Shape grammars emerged as a robust theory of design that is formal and visual rather than speculative or merely instrumental and ad hoc. The theory accounts for how the mind processes knowledge, descriptions, and representations, as well as what the eye perceives—often encompassing elements that may be overlooked or contradict existing representations. Shape computation gained traction at leading academic institutions globally, providing a new paradigm for design computing.

In conjunction with the publication of my book Shape Computation: Fifty Years, 1972–2022, this presentation will examine the past, present, and future of shape computation and shape grammars. It will highlight the contributions of key figures in the field, discuss various research practices, and provide illustrative examples of interdisciplinary investigations in art, architecture, design theory, computer implementation, and design education. The presentation will include theoretical reflections, retrospective assessments, practical applications, and speculations on developments in shape computation over the past 50 years.

Sotirios Kotsopoulos is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), an Adjunct Professor at the School of Science and Technology at the Open University of Greece, and a Research Affiliate at the School of Architecture of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sotirios examines the impact of computation on how we practice and explain design. His research contributions are in shape grammars, geometrical/topological aspects of form, and environmental design. His teaching covers topics in the theory of computation, the role of artificial intelligence in design education, and the history & logic of generative systems in design. He has taught numerous courses, cross-disciplinary workshops, studios, and seminars at NTUA, the MIT Media Lab, the MIT Department of Architecture, and the MIT School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (SHASS). Additionally, he has published over forty academic papers and presented at prestigious conferences and symposia worldwide.

Learning from China, Qatar and Thailand

Kas Oosterhuis 

The world is changing. So is architecture, the art of building, primarily due to evolving communication and manufacturing methods that have changed drastically and with increasing speed.” Drafting this new book during the COVID-19 pandemic, during the continuing denial of the ever-increasing climate crisis, during continuing blatant racism, during an ever-increasing schism between the poor and the super-rich, during the war that Russia has imposed on Ukraine, I need to add “and due to evolving social dynamics”. 

In response to the pandemic, the climate crisis, blazing war rhetoric, the alternative truths of fake news spreaders, in response to poverty and injustice, and an increasing number of warmongers, scientists, artists, and architects are imagining new rules for the new economy, eventually crystallizing into new tangible projects. New cultural rules based on new forms of social distancing, climate justice, and warmongering are likely to become more permanent in the years to come. People will change their spatial behavior, how and where they meet, how and where they communicate, how they move from one place to another, how they shop, relax, and work, and, as a direct result of their adjusted social behavior, we rebound to see substantial changes in the way materials are mined, how products are designed and fabricated, how urban environments are reimagined and built.

Kas Oosterhuis is an innovator, a writer, an educator, and a practicing designer, leading the innovation studio ONL [Oosterhuis_Lénárd], together with visual artist Ilona Lénárd. Oosterhuis has been a professor of Digital Architecture [Hyperbody] at the TU Delft from 2000 to 2016, a professor at Qatar University from 2017 to 2019, and a visiting professor at INDA Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok from 2023 to 2024.

In his book “Towards a New Kind of Building, a Designer’s Guide to Nonstandard Architecture” [2011] Oosterhuis reveals the fundamentals of the paradigm shift from standard mass-produced to nonstandard mass-customized architecture and from static to dynamic environments. Kas Oosterhuis's latest book is titled “The Component, A Personal Odyssey Towards Another Normal”.

This lecture is available in person and online 10:00 – 13:00 BST. 

In Person: Bentham House LG26 – first come, first seated

Online: Register to attend online 

Machine Learning and Human Creative Practices

Rebecca Fiebrink

When technical researchers, creators, and the general public discuss the future of AI in music and art, the focus is often on a few types of questions, including: How can we make content generation and processing algorithms better and faster? Will contemporary AI systems put human creators out of a job? Are algorithms really capable of being "creative"?

In this talk, Rebecca Fiebrink proposes that we should be asking a different set of questions, beginning with the question of how we can use machine learning to better support fundamentally human creative activities in music and art. She will present examples from her research to show how prioritising human creators—professionals, amateurs, and students—can lead to a new understanding of what machine learning is good for, and who can benefit from it. For instance, machine learning can aid human creators engaged in rapid prototyping of new interactions with sound and media. Machine learning can support greater embodied engagement in design, and it can enable more people to participate in the creation and customisation of new technologies. Furthermore, machine learning is leading to new types of human creative practices with computationally-infused mediums, in which a broad range of people can act not only as designers and implementors, but also as explorers, curators, and co-creators.

Rebecca Fiebrink is a Professor of Creative Computing at the UAL Creative Computing Institute. Together with her students and research assistants, she works on a variety of projects developing new technologies to enable new forms of human expression, creativity, and embodied interaction. Much of her current research combines techniques from human-computer interaction, machine learning, and signal processing to allow people to apply machine learning more effectively to new problems, such as the design of new digital musical instruments and gestural interfaces for gaming and accessibility. She is also involved in projects developing rich interactive technologies for digital humanities scholarship, exploring ways that machine learning can be used and appropriated to reveal and challenge patterns of bias and inequality, and advancing machine learning education.

This lecture is available in person and online 13:00 – 15:00 BST.

In Person: Room 6.04, 22 Gordon Street – first come, first seated

Online: Register to attend online

Everybody Talks About Chance

Maya Christodoulaki

Had architecture engaged with probability during the Renaissance—as if anticipating the advent of machine learning—it would have likely been relegated to the realm of the "low sciences." While open to the untypical case, the potentiality of architecture as shaped by canonical treatises, left little room for speculation on uncertainty as such. In earlier conceptions of randomness, the randomiser appears either as a cryptic object regulating fortune —like a knucklebone— or through a device that facilitates both a condition of verticality and the ability to decide, like the gnomon. The concept of chance only begins to surface with works like Cardano’s Book on Games of Chance in the 16th century, while 18th century frequency-based theories were often treated as aberrations.

Such counterexamples of science are unwelcome reminders of the indeterminacy that mechanistic models sought to mediate with causal and empirical expressions. The drive to approximate certainty is a difficult one; Feyerabend points out an inconsistency between theory and facts. He argues that a discourse that defies contradictions brings about precise, yet graceless conclusions.

Through the prism of chance, the lecture unfolds the conceptual terrain between the technological narratives of our intelligence and the medieval intelletto. How does the technically-literate architect relate to theoretical debates on disegno interno and esterno, testimony and evidence, similitude and antagonism? How does the fine-tuning of neural models relate to the centuries-old struggle to grasp chance?

Retracing select historical and theoretical attempts to reconcile randomness with causality, the lecture considers the Architect as an approving figure negotiating uncertainty. Seeking an ‘acceptable level of probability’ creates room for an architecture which is not casuistic, photographic or imitative, but one which tends to the how to ‘make probable’.

Maya Christodoulaki is an architect, researcher and doctoral candidate at the Research Unit of Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics (ATTP) at TU Vienna. She teaches at TU Vienna and the University of Innsbruck, has co-curated the exhibition Radical Austria: Everything is Architecture for the Design Museum Den Bosch, and worked for architecture offices in Austria and the Netherlands. She holds degrees in Architecture and Computer Science and explores transversal expressions of stochastic thinking.

This lecture is available in person and online 11:00 – 13:00 BST.

In Person: Room 107, 25 Gordon Square – first come, first seated

Online: Register to attend online

Global Positioning Systems: Geoscopic Drives from Vermeer to Spacewar

Bernard Geoghegan

How did it come about that at any given moment we can reach into our pockets and render our precise location in precise and addressable planetary terms? “Global Positioning Systems: Geoscopic Drives from Vermeer to Spacewar” explores the rise of contemporary global positioning sensibilities in the rise of a geoscopic drive, with roots in early modern European navigation. With examples drawn from Johannes Vermeer, computer gaming, and generative AI, I show how the geoscopic drive is less a narrow “computational” or “technological” invention than a decisive feature of modern sensibilities, crafted for centuries in arts and entertainment, before it found its way into satellites and smartphones. Through examining how computational addressability found its way into diverse interfaces and visual media, this talk offers a “cultural-technical” history of spatial cognition and the role of media in lending global positioning to everyday experience. This analysis concludes with speculations on how mapping practices in neural networks may extend and transform the geoscopic drive today.

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a media theorist and historian of technology based in Gothenburg and London. Dr Geoghegan has written extensively on global conflict and cultural difference in the development of AI, cybernetics, information theory, HCI, and multimedia design. Related to these themes, he has also written in depth on the medial and technological history of twentieth-century philosophy, with a particular emphasis on projects, platforms, and programs that bound together French theorists and computer scientists in common epistemic cause from around 1945 to 1975. His book Code: From Information Theory to French Theory appeared from Duke University Press in 2022. Other essays and texts appear in journals including Critical Inquiry, Representations, and Grey Room. These research interests also shape his work as a curator and media practitioner, for example, in projects on the Anthropocene as planetary infrastructures for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

This lecture is online only 11:00 – 13:00 BST.

Register to attend online