TWO INFINITE SCALES

MetaSpaces

“Today we live in a reality marked by digital information phenomena and, more recently, by the bio-technological […] imagination. If the first has already been evidenced, the second leads us to speculate, within the interface, upon the merging of body, technology, space, and infor-mation. In parallel, it inspires the idea of generative and mutant spaces and architectures – a future environment which, beyond a mere mechanistic responsiveness or VR imagery, is endowed with the capacity to engage crea-tively with the inhabitant and to evolve dynamically. […] The present reality, carries influences […] to the concep-tualization of the meta-territory [ie physical + digital space] itself. There are few discourses regarding the space-reality in which we are progressively living. […] In my understanding, imagining the performance of [… the] new contemporary meta-territory, inhabited by hu-mans at the convergence of the spatial and temporal, the physical and the digital, requires, in fact, some new foci. Productive hypotheses may arise from a systemic and quasi-philosophical focus, which understands the com-plexities and non-linear dynamics and the emergence that can be present in its performance (one recalls, for exam-ple, the productiveness of systems theories - beyond the equilibrium; chaotic, fractalized, and catastrophic). It seems plausible to put into perspective the Meta-territory, over all as a complex entity of interconnected components, marked by interactions and feedback in an oscillating hybrid reality between the real and the virtual. This is a system which acts beyond equilibrium, where semi-stable material and visual forms continually emerge from the dynamics of its components, interactions, fluc-tuations, and inputs. Its performance will be marked by feed-back and bio-feedback, emanating from various components, including, for instance, architecture, visual representations, the body-user, etc., and through the dy-namics of real-virtual self-organization This systemic performance, seen as an evolutionary dimensional con-tinuum, would involve innovative interfaces constituted by technologies of diverse natures, which would ensure a permanent connectivity and circularity. We perceive the possibility of an interface centered on a minute-infinitesimal scale between biotechnology and nanotech-nology and, which eventually (in limit situations) ap-proach a post-biological hybridization But, in our view, a vision that permits, and indeed requires the debate of various technologies – from nano to genetics; should safeguard our condition as human beings, instead of understanding ourselves as a mere processes of informa-tion as occurred in the past decades with some computa-tionalist perspectives in artificial intelligence. We will proceed by confronting the limit of the known with a Godelian consciousness of the incompleteness of our knowledge about our present future.”

IN:
Gonçalo Furtado, “Brief Notes on Two Infinite Scales”, in: Technoetic Arts, V.5, N.2, 2007, pp.87-96.