Robo{eco}logy
Project Details
Student/s: Danai Toursoglou
Date: August 22, 2016
The relationship between robotics and architecture is analyzed as an assemblage and the new qualities that emerge from it are explored, in the way that Manuel De Landa described: the analysis of the emergent consists of the analysis of the way it emerged.
What are the reflections of robotic technology on the architectural discipline? How could the term “architectural robotics” be defined and how could it transform and interact with the contemporary (technologically-driven) world? How could a technology that was once invented as aggressive, collaborate with the architectural discipline?
The Robotic systems are increasingly being integrated in the contemporary world. Not as an additive feature but through their symbiotic relationship with human nature. The strategy of our environmental adaptation is to build systems, we are technological beings by nature.
The idea that endues this kind of architecture today could be summarized as an interactive environment, “alive” through a procedure of interrelation with other means of technology and the environment. The idea of hybridization of the natural with the artificial, of the digital with the material and of the animate with the inanimate tends to proceed to the centre of contemporary architecture. A “symbiotic” architecture with the ecological whole which can be enhanced by the contemporary robotic systems.
The architectural project is understood as an emergent system throughout a procedure of constant feedback loops, and no limit point is encountered in its evolution. Feedback between the digital and the material, the perceivable and the tactile. With the addition of the robotic systems, the architectural discipline is transformed partially to an experimentation of topological geometries, partially to a robotic orchestration of matter production and partially to a kinematic sculpture of space through a seamless process. Architecture is understood as the mediator between matter and fact.
Due to the constant changes we perceive the architectural space as ”becomings” and not beings. The robotic systems are able to enhance this perspective and transform the spatial and time linearity and therefore to increase the degrees of freedom of the architectural project, inside a topological space. Through this logic seeks to conform to the human nature, characterized by hundreds of degrees of freedom and tends to increase them.
Robotic technology constitutes a field that evolves with immense speed towards multiple directions, and therefore tends to influence every aspect of contemporary reality.
The immense profits that this new technology is meant to produce, tends to underline the importance of an economic conversation on the robotic evolution. Not by following the path that science fiction leads, through the predictions of the complete replacement of the human labor, the changes that this new kind of globalization and way of labor are examined, in a way that cautions are formed and a new economic system is proposed.
Deleuze states in his work “Logic of Sense” that the technocrat is friend with the dictator by nature, but the revolution lives in the gap between the technological evolution and the society.
Through conceiving the robotic systems as general purpose machines, the limits between the reason of their development and the field of their application gradually blur. Deleuze and Guattari could distinguish an amount of possibilities that emerge from the computer aided ways of thinking and creating, possibilities that emerge from the general purpose machines, opening new worlds, creating imperceptible ways of existence and influence. The revolution that will lead to new realities is possible only through opening the gap between technology and social forces that has collapsed.
The computational systems are frequently presented as black boxes, as items whose use is known but we cannot perceive the reason and the way of their construction. Artificial life is capable of finding immediately a place in our world, since it is presented as something obvious, and therefore comparable with the already known reality. As a part of it, capable of being integrated and processing new assemblages. From this point arises the need to question this element that gradually infiltrates and transforms the world that we perceive as non-segmented.
The architectural field is capable of propounding the function and the importance of the produced elements. Evoking the new understanding of things, we could notice that it is spurred to exceed its limits, and explore and take place in the emergent result of the assemblages.
The transformations that are evoked in material and immaterial elements, as culture, consciousness, communities, are explained in terms of becoming. Subsequently, they become subject of external relations. In order to understand our era, it is essential to understand this complexity, and in order to understand the complexity it is essential to understand what renders this moment different from the others.
All this analysis made through every scientific field that these systems are embodied, and at the same time in a general frame. In the frame of the reality that they are part of. A reality in which every addition and transformation evokes an amount of reflections. An ecological reality that is characterized by associated systems of interaction.