Diffusions in Architecture: Artificial Intelligence and Image Generators
by Matias del Campo, Lev Manovich
Computation Past Forward: The Endless Recurring of the New
Marco Vanucci
Tomorrow, may I have your yesterday?
(Benjamin Bratton)
It is a profoundly erroneous truism (…) that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
(Alfred North Whitehead)
The flow of real‐time data that feeds planetary‐scale computation provides the lifeblood of our increasingly digital way of life. From bank transactions to geolocation technologies, from scientific research to the consumer price index, there’s hardly an aspect of our life that is not regulated by data. Data also constitutes an original knowledge base for understanding the present and anticipating the future. Unlike any other period of civilization, where data was scarce, hard to manage, and expensive, today data is abundant, ubiquitous, and very cheap.53 The term Big Data refers to data sets that are too large or too complex to be dealt with by traditional data‐processing application software, let alone by humans. Big Data is used for predictive analytics and behavior analytics: to foresee, to predict, and to forecast. In the last years, however, Big Data has also entered the design field thanks to the increased computing processing power. In the information‐rich environment of the digital age, computational technologies operate under the remit of synthetic forms of ...