Dennis Dollens | Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (original) (raw)
Papers by Dennis Dollens
SITES, 2024
Mind regarded as an element of nature enables us to recalibrate life/cognition locating earth as ... more Mind regarded as an element of nature enables us to recalibrate life/cognition locating earth as a complex organism as well as a phenomenal force. In these pages, I look to Gary Snyder’s vision of nature, matter, and Zen through his concept terms: wild and wilderness. I apply his classifications to design and urban practices filtered through environmental sciences to approach climate change as an existential crash. Then, in response, I recategorize how buildings and cities can biologically act as working parts of nature’s nature. In that sense, Snyder’s thought, “wild nature is inextricably in the weave of self and culture” stays in mind and recalls Spinoza’s 1670 “Deus sive Natura” (God or Nature) as a strain of Western philosophy compatible with Southeast Asian Buddhism.
To that weave, Snyder’s Buddhism is responsive to design theory and worldly bioscience, ecology, autopoiesis, AI, and ELMs (engineered living materials). As Peter Matthiessen wrote: “In Zen, one seeks to empty out the mind, to return it to the clear, pure stillness of a seashell or flower petal.” For this paper seashells and flower petals (or myriad analogues) are data sources I study to fill/empty cognitive realms with knowledge/observations referencing earth’s unicellular and multicellular intelligences and bio-performance.
From within that framework, I project regenerative wild/wilderness actions positively impacting agriculture, wetland creation, urban forestry, and metabolic architectures. To those actions, let’s add metabolic performances found in wild systems connected with our own biochemical production of energy, cognition, and generative inventions. Those interbeing associations warrant investigation and prototyping for new strains re-rooting The Practice of the Wild as the order-of-our-times. Perhaps, more precisely, as the order-of-the-day. They urge us to assume responsibility for expanding and enforcing species’ safeguards while bioremediating damaged nature by revitalizing cities and enlisting cellular sentience to help us beat our addiction, abolish our dependence, and leave fossil-fuels in the ground.
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Biodigital Architecture and Genetics, 2023
Institute for BioDigital Architecture and Genetics ESARQ. Universitat Internacional De Catalunya ... more Institute for BioDigital Architecture and Genetics
ESARQ. Universitat Internacional De Catalunya (UIC)
Alberto T. Estévez, Editor
Aware that microbes and fungi are decision-making organisms thriving and navigating harsh environments, it makes sense for architects/designers speciali ing in bioremediation to in uire into cell level perception/response as assets for metabolic architectures. From that supposition, it follows that if imbued with biointelligent, responsive life indigenous to some microorganisms buildings could eat and metabolize pollution when "cellular systems. .. function as living materials." This text outlines ideas and sources conceptualizing living materials and performative buildings for studio development using theory, design, and generative AI. Functions include searching out biological skills for metabolic architectures tasked to reverse fossil-fuel use, production, and damage. Forwarding that prospect, design theory anchored by Ecological Rift stabilizes metabolic architectural dialectics and practice by constructing pathways to discuss and design physiological, performative buildings. My proposition is that architects experimentally investigate biosystems along with plant/microbe capabilities for achieving the integration of life systems with urban structures in order to leapfrog conventional construction and materiali ation. The intention is to design AI-assisted, living-materials then buildings that eliminate Co2 utilizing microbe-activated facades, structures, and panels. With expected design advancements, life-sustaining organisms will populate materials to fortify cellular intelligence and AI systems — their job, metabolize pollution by colonizing buildings with biological agents.
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Leonardo, Oct 1, 2020
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Communicative & Integrative Biology, Jul 4, 2015
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Leonardo, Oct 1, 2009
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Leonardo, Jun 1, 2014
Alan Turing decoded nature in drawings and algorithmic programming. His botanical decryptions hel... more Alan Turing decoded nature in drawings and algorithmic programming. His botanical decryptions helped situate synthetic AI/ALife processes in digital realms now encompassing algorithmic simulation. These little-known drawings prompted the author's analysis via Maturana and Varela's theory of autopoiesis because of its emphasis on self-organization and minimal requirements for life. Autopoiesis, if hybridized with Andy Clark's extended cognition, then supports an underpinning hypothesis for generative architecture. Together, the theory and drawings propel design research, leading to the question: Can buildings think?—reprocessing Turing's original question: “Can machines think?” This paper thus situates Turing's 1950s' nature-to-computation images as unacknowledged design patrimony appropriated for generative architecture derived from nature and implemented via autopoietic-extended design.
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AutopoietiX, 2023
Abstract Violent, unpredictable weather is forcing us to excavate ideas from the past in order to... more Abstract
Violent, unpredictable weather is forcing us to excavate ideas from the past in order to strategize survival and evolve tolerances/abilities needed to stabilize and treat global warming. One underutilized pathway is design research charted through the biological lenses of soils/earth and their resident microorganisms, plants, and mycorrhizal intelligences.34.40. Logically, science, ecology, engineering, design, land use, and philosophy are among candidates to link with systems-thinking for design development and theoretical debate. Once aligned mind/body, bioremediation, and earthcare become organizational possibilities for resisting and repairing damage caused by fossil-fuel production and its horrific environmental disruptions.
In this text, consciousness and sentience look like genetic/epiphenomenal attributes supporting cognition and perception as differently allocated between cell typologies and neurological or non-neurological systems.23. My argument suggests how microbes should be considered perceptual — they display choice, move toward food, perceive heat/cold/light/dark, and maintain homeostasis — all in the absence of brains and/or neurological systems generally considered prerequisites for cognition.17.
The hard part of that observation is adjusting our attitudes and outlooks to it — recognizing that all life is by degrees intelligent. That proposition identifies single- as well as multicellular organisms as co-facilitators of our organic planet and metabolic selves. According to that premise, and jumping forward to imagery I come back to, we are coupled with rivers, mountains, minerals, soils, and trees via biochemistry and the lifeforms inhabiting them. Peter Matthiessen wrote:
I know this mountain because I am this mountain, I can feel it breathing at this
moment.26 p257.
With the convictions of Matthiessen and others, I trace precepts in classic and secular Buddhism for theoretical operations that factor in earth justice and climate-change bioremediation. Underwriting that thinking process our being/cognition builds theoretical lattices and associations humans are woven into as components of nature’s nature. Further, adopting the autopoietic credo — life = cognition27 — helps balance thought with an understanding of living cellular cognition situating earth as a composite biome. In such contexts, The Snow Leopard reveals Matthiessen’s inclusion of molecular existence in mind, body, and matter experiences stemming from biological/phenomenal systems open to meditative and scientific clarity:
When body and mind are one, then the whole being, scoured clean of intellect, emotions, and the senses, may be laid open to the experience that individual existence, ego, the “reality” of matter and phenomena are no more than fleeting and illusory arrangements of molecules.26 p91.
Matthiessen’s words prompted me to seek cellular strategies that document which “arrangements of molecules” include lifeforms capable of helping us mitigate greenhouse gases. This text lobbies for that search, responding by casting cellular theories27 of life/cognition with input from the East and West plotted to support specialized perspectives. Remix is thus influenced by voices of thinkers and activists brewing what is essentially cultivated rage from William deBuys, side-by-side with Gary Snyder’s Practice of the Wild,1a where:
The depths of mind, the unconscious . . . [are] our inner wilderness areas . . . the body is, so to speak in the mind. They are both wild.35loc199.
Expanding from Zen practice, Roshi Joan Halifax and Marty Peale join with:
‘Wilderness practice’ . . . is not about stewardship. Rather it’s about letting the natural world move through us, while we move through it . . . In this way, it differs from most other forms of environmental activism. . . . Wilderness practice includes reincorporation of beings of the wilderness into our communities and reincorporation of wild wisdom into our lives.18 Pp21-22.
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AutopoietiX, 2023
Abstract Aware that microbes and fungi are decision-making organisms thriving and navigating hars... more Abstract
Aware that microbes and fungi are decision-making organisms thriving and navigating harsh environments, it makes sense for architects/designers specializing in bioremediation to inquire into cell-level perception/response as assets for metabolic architectures. From that supposition, it follows that if imbued with biointelligent, responsive life — indigenous to some microorganisms — buildings could eat and metabolize pollution when “cellular systems . . . function as living materials.”
This text outlines ideas and sources conceptualizing living materials and performative buildings for studio development using theory, design, and generative AI. Functions include searching out biological skills for metabolic architectures tasked to reverse fossil-fuel use, production, and damage. Forwarding that prospect, design theory anchored by Ecological Rift stabilizes metabolic architectural dialectics and practice by constructing pathways to discuss and design biologically performativ buildings.
My proposition is that architects experimentally investigate biosystems along with plant/microbe capabilities for achieving the integration of life systems with urban structures in order to leapfrog conventional construction and materialization. The intention is to design AI-assisted, living-materials — then buildings — that eliminate CO2 utilizing microbe-activated facades and panels. With expected design advancements, life-sustaining organisms will populate structures to fortify cellular intelligence and AI systems — their job: metabolize pollution by colonizing buildings with biological agents. Specifically relevant is research dedicated to bacterial biofilms I return to, but preview below:
". . . natural systems grow, self-repair, and adapt to the environment, they have distinctive living attributes that are beyond the reach of the vast majority of existing synthetic materials. . . . This new tunable platform [engineered cells] offers previously unattainable properties for a variety of living functional materials having potential applications in biomaterials, biotechnology, [bioarchitectures], and biomedicine.”
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AutopoietiX, 2023
Generative image making transports predictive AI into a close relationship with a designer’s thin... more Generative image making transports predictive AI into a close relationship with a designer’s thinking by tying human cognition, expressed in natural language prompts, directly to neural-net bots as programming, code, input. With this linkage in mind, I have begun describing incarnations of metabolic architectures in descriptive, phenomenal, and structural terms (word streams) to cue AI production of morphological images manifested as bioremediating structures/components using DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion. (Figs. 1. 2. 3. 4) In this sense, I’m thinking that designer’s minds enter autopoietic2 unions/partnerships with AI to coextensively share in the design imaging of bioremedial architecture. Resulting images are understood as aesthetic partnerships related — theoretically by autopoietic structural coupling3.4 — and, interlinked through cognitive science’s hypothesis of human-to-nature cognitive extension.1.5
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AutopoietiX, 2022
During an October 1836 outing, Ralph Waldo Emerson jotted the Goose Pond Principles1a into his no... more During an October 1836 outing, Ralph Waldo Emerson jotted the Goose Pond Principles1a into his notebook.1—p254 That eight-point notation marked a stage in his thinking when observations and perceptions, prompted by wild nature, were comprehended as generating ideas illuminating life, intelligence, physical matter, and phenomenal mind. Circulating today, the Goose Pond Principles can be read as prefatory to Nature’s collection of essays arising out of what the sage of Transcendentalism had previously called the casting moment.
Emerson had cast his text in outline — a manifesto to himself — intended to guide the writing of his Philosophy of History lecture series. I look at two of those principles, registering their content as originating in cast moments that resulted in a précis of Nature as well as a preamble to the book’s most notable literary image, the “transparent eyeball.” The cognitive network of casting moments contributes to and unavoidably conveys biological data mingled with visual-aesthetics realized in Nature and Emerson’s later Transcendental ideals. In Bernhard Berenson’s art historical words, that network adds “tactile values to retinal impressions.2”
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
AutopoietiX
Abstract. Microbes and fungi are living organisms autonomously thriving and navigating diverse an... more Abstract. Microbes and fungi are living organisms autonomously thriving and navigating diverse and harsh environments, it makes sense for designers to consider primal levels of cellular perception/cognition as assets to deploy in next generation bioremediating buildings and city infrastructures. From that supposition, it follows, that if buildings could incorporate intelligent actions native to microbes and mycelial webs, they could sensory detect and biochemically eradicate (eat) pollution. Doing so, they would become be integral to future bioarchitectural systems. My proposition is to theoretically investigate realms of intelligences emerging from synthetic biology for experimental use in new materials and 3D fabrication envisioned for metabolic architectures. Self-maintaining microbes could facilitate the biochemical extraction of energy from airborne CO2 and thereby aid the continuous 24/7 eradication of fossil-fuel toxins. Ongoing research in synthetic biology and computation/simulation drive this design probe for Engineered Living Materials (ELM) to help eradicate atmospheric and urban pollution. They highlight biological methods for animating matter with microbial intelligences referencing bacteria, fungi, and forest mycorrhizal communities. Sourcing DARPA’s research objectives for ELMs further alerts architects, designers, and educators to the fact that the time has come for university and studio dialectics to factor in bioremediating living materials to ecologically pilot metabolic buildings, cities, manufacturing, landscape recovery, and reforestation infrastructures.
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ZQ Journal, 2022
Original at: https://zqjournal.org/editions/zq31.html Proposing that nature is pervasive and tha... more Original at: https://zqjournal.org/editions/zq31.html
Proposing that nature is pervasive and that metabolic architectures are embedded in nature, I situate texts and theory as responses to techniques/methods for operational and research procedures. This text is thus a companion to my ongoing Metabolic Architectures campaign for thinking about, theorizing, and designing digital-biomimetic structures dialectically related to biology, technology, intelligence, and environmental bioremediation. In that categorization, theory is integral to the tasks of defining and evolving generative metabolic architectures and urbanisms as equal to the projectʼs drawings and models.
I started by building analog branching systems with plant and tree limbs — sometimes skinning their sculptural forms with environmentally strong, handmade yucca paper (Fig 1).This was in the early 2000s. My intention was not to create structural efficiency, but to evolve expressive branching that fused, bonded, and distributed force to create tension/compression, treelike scaffoldings hosting performative surfaces. I drew those structures in Rhinoceros 3D (Rhino) thinking that once structural systems were rooted in digital space, plant algorithms, and living infrastructures, facade panels could be designed and prototyped as bioarchitectural case studies.
In return, early works started reconfiguring my thinking about triangulated (truss) systems as irregular, curving and branching units — what I called eTrees (Fig 2). This motivated the transformation of post-and-lintel, load-bearing construction into biomimetically inspired components, based on interwoven vines or intermingled tree branches. And, although far from living, the models took on properties of skeletal organisms with environmental resilience — modules intended to partner with and sequester intelligent organisms capable of autonomous, bioremedial functions. Those trusslike models can be seen as steps toward computational and STL-fabricated eTrees plotted as material and structural concepts.
Drawing, modeling, and scanning there after opened as pathways for generative architectures envisioned for machine fabrication and AI-regulated . . . (continued at https://zqjournal.org/editions/zq31.html)
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DeSForM19 Proceedings, Sep 16, 2019
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In this paper I track 3D printed bacterially-infused materials in which microbes live and reprodu... more In this paper I track 3D printed bacterially-infused materials in which microbes live and reproduce — selected and nurtured — to carryout biochemically-controlled tasks intended to mitigate the ravages of climate change. As architecture and urban designers we are existentially challenged to integrate nature, biology, and genetics with the built world we interpret through fablab/robotic production to tackle those ravages. That viewport reveals our need for multidisciplinary procedures arising in disciplines not usually associated with buildings or city design. Collaborating with science/technology we may take steps toward proof-of-concept materialization imbued with microbial life and intelligences that lend living environmental defenses to architecture and urban/environmental operations.
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Innestare prestazioni biologiche in architettura significa creare, crescere, sintetizzare attribu... more Innestare prestazioni biologiche in architettura significa creare, crescere, sintetizzare attributi biologici e pensare l’architettura come una natura/cultura metabolicamente evoluta. Questo processo richiede una strategia di integrazione fra design, biologia, arte, orticultura, simulazione mediante e-plant, vita sintetica, bio-mineralizzazione e metodi di fabbricazione avanzati. L’integrazione fra la ricerca in campo botanico e in quello industriale ha l’obiettivo di introdurre specifiche risposte di tipo ambientale in campo architettonico. Questo contributo illustra un approccio alla progettazione architettonica che utilizza la simulazione digitale derivata dalla biologia - in particolare gli algoritmi di generazione di planto-architetture, quali ad esempio quelli che si fondano sulla fillotassi e sull’allometria - in fase ideativa.
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SITES, 2024
Mind regarded as an element of nature enables us to recalibrate life/cognition locating earth as ... more Mind regarded as an element of nature enables us to recalibrate life/cognition locating earth as a complex organism as well as a phenomenal force. In these pages, I look to Gary Snyder’s vision of nature, matter, and Zen through his concept terms: wild and wilderness. I apply his classifications to design and urban practices filtered through environmental sciences to approach climate change as an existential crash. Then, in response, I recategorize how buildings and cities can biologically act as working parts of nature’s nature. In that sense, Snyder’s thought, “wild nature is inextricably in the weave of self and culture” stays in mind and recalls Spinoza’s 1670 “Deus sive Natura” (God or Nature) as a strain of Western philosophy compatible with Southeast Asian Buddhism.
To that weave, Snyder’s Buddhism is responsive to design theory and worldly bioscience, ecology, autopoiesis, AI, and ELMs (engineered living materials). As Peter Matthiessen wrote: “In Zen, one seeks to empty out the mind, to return it to the clear, pure stillness of a seashell or flower petal.” For this paper seashells and flower petals (or myriad analogues) are data sources I study to fill/empty cognitive realms with knowledge/observations referencing earth’s unicellular and multicellular intelligences and bio-performance.
From within that framework, I project regenerative wild/wilderness actions positively impacting agriculture, wetland creation, urban forestry, and metabolic architectures. To those actions, let’s add metabolic performances found in wild systems connected with our own biochemical production of energy, cognition, and generative inventions. Those interbeing associations warrant investigation and prototyping for new strains re-rooting The Practice of the Wild as the order-of-our-times. Perhaps, more precisely, as the order-of-the-day. They urge us to assume responsibility for expanding and enforcing species’ safeguards while bioremediating damaged nature by revitalizing cities and enlisting cellular sentience to help us beat our addiction, abolish our dependence, and leave fossil-fuels in the ground.
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Biodigital Architecture and Genetics, 2023
Institute for BioDigital Architecture and Genetics ESARQ. Universitat Internacional De Catalunya ... more Institute for BioDigital Architecture and Genetics
ESARQ. Universitat Internacional De Catalunya (UIC)
Alberto T. Estévez, Editor
Aware that microbes and fungi are decision-making organisms thriving and navigating harsh environments, it makes sense for architects/designers speciali ing in bioremediation to in uire into cell level perception/response as assets for metabolic architectures. From that supposition, it follows that if imbued with biointelligent, responsive life indigenous to some microorganisms buildings could eat and metabolize pollution when "cellular systems. .. function as living materials." This text outlines ideas and sources conceptualizing living materials and performative buildings for studio development using theory, design, and generative AI. Functions include searching out biological skills for metabolic architectures tasked to reverse fossil-fuel use, production, and damage. Forwarding that prospect, design theory anchored by Ecological Rift stabilizes metabolic architectural dialectics and practice by constructing pathways to discuss and design physiological, performative buildings. My proposition is that architects experimentally investigate biosystems along with plant/microbe capabilities for achieving the integration of life systems with urban structures in order to leapfrog conventional construction and materiali ation. The intention is to design AI-assisted, living-materials then buildings that eliminate Co2 utilizing microbe-activated facades, structures, and panels. With expected design advancements, life-sustaining organisms will populate materials to fortify cellular intelligence and AI systems — their job, metabolize pollution by colonizing buildings with biological agents.
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Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Leonardo, Oct 1, 2020
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Communicative & Integrative Biology, Jul 4, 2015
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Leonardo, Oct 1, 2009
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Leonardo, Jun 1, 2014
Alan Turing decoded nature in drawings and algorithmic programming. His botanical decryptions hel... more Alan Turing decoded nature in drawings and algorithmic programming. His botanical decryptions helped situate synthetic AI/ALife processes in digital realms now encompassing algorithmic simulation. These little-known drawings prompted the author's analysis via Maturana and Varela's theory of autopoiesis because of its emphasis on self-organization and minimal requirements for life. Autopoiesis, if hybridized with Andy Clark's extended cognition, then supports an underpinning hypothesis for generative architecture. Together, the theory and drawings propel design research, leading to the question: Can buildings think?—reprocessing Turing's original question: “Can machines think?” This paper thus situates Turing's 1950s' nature-to-computation images as unacknowledged design patrimony appropriated for generative architecture derived from nature and implemented via autopoietic-extended design.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
AutopoietiX, 2023
Abstract Violent, unpredictable weather is forcing us to excavate ideas from the past in order to... more Abstract
Violent, unpredictable weather is forcing us to excavate ideas from the past in order to strategize survival and evolve tolerances/abilities needed to stabilize and treat global warming. One underutilized pathway is design research charted through the biological lenses of soils/earth and their resident microorganisms, plants, and mycorrhizal intelligences.34.40. Logically, science, ecology, engineering, design, land use, and philosophy are among candidates to link with systems-thinking for design development and theoretical debate. Once aligned mind/body, bioremediation, and earthcare become organizational possibilities for resisting and repairing damage caused by fossil-fuel production and its horrific environmental disruptions.
In this text, consciousness and sentience look like genetic/epiphenomenal attributes supporting cognition and perception as differently allocated between cell typologies and neurological or non-neurological systems.23. My argument suggests how microbes should be considered perceptual — they display choice, move toward food, perceive heat/cold/light/dark, and maintain homeostasis — all in the absence of brains and/or neurological systems generally considered prerequisites for cognition.17.
The hard part of that observation is adjusting our attitudes and outlooks to it — recognizing that all life is by degrees intelligent. That proposition identifies single- as well as multicellular organisms as co-facilitators of our organic planet and metabolic selves. According to that premise, and jumping forward to imagery I come back to, we are coupled with rivers, mountains, minerals, soils, and trees via biochemistry and the lifeforms inhabiting them. Peter Matthiessen wrote:
I know this mountain because I am this mountain, I can feel it breathing at this
moment.26 p257.
With the convictions of Matthiessen and others, I trace precepts in classic and secular Buddhism for theoretical operations that factor in earth justice and climate-change bioremediation. Underwriting that thinking process our being/cognition builds theoretical lattices and associations humans are woven into as components of nature’s nature. Further, adopting the autopoietic credo — life = cognition27 — helps balance thought with an understanding of living cellular cognition situating earth as a composite biome. In such contexts, The Snow Leopard reveals Matthiessen’s inclusion of molecular existence in mind, body, and matter experiences stemming from biological/phenomenal systems open to meditative and scientific clarity:
When body and mind are one, then the whole being, scoured clean of intellect, emotions, and the senses, may be laid open to the experience that individual existence, ego, the “reality” of matter and phenomena are no more than fleeting and illusory arrangements of molecules.26 p91.
Matthiessen’s words prompted me to seek cellular strategies that document which “arrangements of molecules” include lifeforms capable of helping us mitigate greenhouse gases. This text lobbies for that search, responding by casting cellular theories27 of life/cognition with input from the East and West plotted to support specialized perspectives. Remix is thus influenced by voices of thinkers and activists brewing what is essentially cultivated rage from William deBuys, side-by-side with Gary Snyder’s Practice of the Wild,1a where:
The depths of mind, the unconscious . . . [are] our inner wilderness areas . . . the body is, so to speak in the mind. They are both wild.35loc199.
Expanding from Zen practice, Roshi Joan Halifax and Marty Peale join with:
‘Wilderness practice’ . . . is not about stewardship. Rather it’s about letting the natural world move through us, while we move through it . . . In this way, it differs from most other forms of environmental activism. . . . Wilderness practice includes reincorporation of beings of the wilderness into our communities and reincorporation of wild wisdom into our lives.18 Pp21-22.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
AutopoietiX, 2023
Abstract Aware that microbes and fungi are decision-making organisms thriving and navigating hars... more Abstract
Aware that microbes and fungi are decision-making organisms thriving and navigating harsh environments, it makes sense for architects/designers specializing in bioremediation to inquire into cell-level perception/response as assets for metabolic architectures. From that supposition, it follows that if imbued with biointelligent, responsive life — indigenous to some microorganisms — buildings could eat and metabolize pollution when “cellular systems . . . function as living materials.”
This text outlines ideas and sources conceptualizing living materials and performative buildings for studio development using theory, design, and generative AI. Functions include searching out biological skills for metabolic architectures tasked to reverse fossil-fuel use, production, and damage. Forwarding that prospect, design theory anchored by Ecological Rift stabilizes metabolic architectural dialectics and practice by constructing pathways to discuss and design biologically performativ buildings.
My proposition is that architects experimentally investigate biosystems along with plant/microbe capabilities for achieving the integration of life systems with urban structures in order to leapfrog conventional construction and materialization. The intention is to design AI-assisted, living-materials — then buildings — that eliminate CO2 utilizing microbe-activated facades and panels. With expected design advancements, life-sustaining organisms will populate structures to fortify cellular intelligence and AI systems — their job: metabolize pollution by colonizing buildings with biological agents. Specifically relevant is research dedicated to bacterial biofilms I return to, but preview below:
". . . natural systems grow, self-repair, and adapt to the environment, they have distinctive living attributes that are beyond the reach of the vast majority of existing synthetic materials. . . . This new tunable platform [engineered cells] offers previously unattainable properties for a variety of living functional materials having potential applications in biomaterials, biotechnology, [bioarchitectures], and biomedicine.”
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
AutopoietiX, 2023
Generative image making transports predictive AI into a close relationship with a designer’s thin... more Generative image making transports predictive AI into a close relationship with a designer’s thinking by tying human cognition, expressed in natural language prompts, directly to neural-net bots as programming, code, input. With this linkage in mind, I have begun describing incarnations of metabolic architectures in descriptive, phenomenal, and structural terms (word streams) to cue AI production of morphological images manifested as bioremediating structures/components using DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion. (Figs. 1. 2. 3. 4) In this sense, I’m thinking that designer’s minds enter autopoietic2 unions/partnerships with AI to coextensively share in the design imaging of bioremedial architecture. Resulting images are understood as aesthetic partnerships related — theoretically by autopoietic structural coupling3.4 — and, interlinked through cognitive science’s hypothesis of human-to-nature cognitive extension.1.5
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AutopoietiX, 2022
During an October 1836 outing, Ralph Waldo Emerson jotted the Goose Pond Principles1a into his no... more During an October 1836 outing, Ralph Waldo Emerson jotted the Goose Pond Principles1a into his notebook.1—p254 That eight-point notation marked a stage in his thinking when observations and perceptions, prompted by wild nature, were comprehended as generating ideas illuminating life, intelligence, physical matter, and phenomenal mind. Circulating today, the Goose Pond Principles can be read as prefatory to Nature’s collection of essays arising out of what the sage of Transcendentalism had previously called the casting moment.
Emerson had cast his text in outline — a manifesto to himself — intended to guide the writing of his Philosophy of History lecture series. I look at two of those principles, registering their content as originating in cast moments that resulted in a précis of Nature as well as a preamble to the book’s most notable literary image, the “transparent eyeball.” The cognitive network of casting moments contributes to and unavoidably conveys biological data mingled with visual-aesthetics realized in Nature and Emerson’s later Transcendental ideals. In Bernhard Berenson’s art historical words, that network adds “tactile values to retinal impressions.2”
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
AutopoietiX
Abstract. Microbes and fungi are living organisms autonomously thriving and navigating diverse an... more Abstract. Microbes and fungi are living organisms autonomously thriving and navigating diverse and harsh environments, it makes sense for designers to consider primal levels of cellular perception/cognition as assets to deploy in next generation bioremediating buildings and city infrastructures. From that supposition, it follows, that if buildings could incorporate intelligent actions native to microbes and mycelial webs, they could sensory detect and biochemically eradicate (eat) pollution. Doing so, they would become be integral to future bioarchitectural systems. My proposition is to theoretically investigate realms of intelligences emerging from synthetic biology for experimental use in new materials and 3D fabrication envisioned for metabolic architectures. Self-maintaining microbes could facilitate the biochemical extraction of energy from airborne CO2 and thereby aid the continuous 24/7 eradication of fossil-fuel toxins. Ongoing research in synthetic biology and computation/simulation drive this design probe for Engineered Living Materials (ELM) to help eradicate atmospheric and urban pollution. They highlight biological methods for animating matter with microbial intelligences referencing bacteria, fungi, and forest mycorrhizal communities. Sourcing DARPA’s research objectives for ELMs further alerts architects, designers, and educators to the fact that the time has come for university and studio dialectics to factor in bioremediating living materials to ecologically pilot metabolic buildings, cities, manufacturing, landscape recovery, and reforestation infrastructures.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
ZQ Journal, 2022
Original at: https://zqjournal.org/editions/zq31.html Proposing that nature is pervasive and tha... more Original at: https://zqjournal.org/editions/zq31.html
Proposing that nature is pervasive and that metabolic architectures are embedded in nature, I situate texts and theory as responses to techniques/methods for operational and research procedures. This text is thus a companion to my ongoing Metabolic Architectures campaign for thinking about, theorizing, and designing digital-biomimetic structures dialectically related to biology, technology, intelligence, and environmental bioremediation. In that categorization, theory is integral to the tasks of defining and evolving generative metabolic architectures and urbanisms as equal to the projectʼs drawings and models.
I started by building analog branching systems with plant and tree limbs — sometimes skinning their sculptural forms with environmentally strong, handmade yucca paper (Fig 1).This was in the early 2000s. My intention was not to create structural efficiency, but to evolve expressive branching that fused, bonded, and distributed force to create tension/compression, treelike scaffoldings hosting performative surfaces. I drew those structures in Rhinoceros 3D (Rhino) thinking that once structural systems were rooted in digital space, plant algorithms, and living infrastructures, facade panels could be designed and prototyped as bioarchitectural case studies.
In return, early works started reconfiguring my thinking about triangulated (truss) systems as irregular, curving and branching units — what I called eTrees (Fig 2). This motivated the transformation of post-and-lintel, load-bearing construction into biomimetically inspired components, based on interwoven vines or intermingled tree branches. And, although far from living, the models took on properties of skeletal organisms with environmental resilience — modules intended to partner with and sequester intelligent organisms capable of autonomous, bioremedial functions. Those trusslike models can be seen as steps toward computational and STL-fabricated eTrees plotted as material and structural concepts.
Drawing, modeling, and scanning there after opened as pathways for generative architectures envisioned for machine fabrication and AI-regulated . . . (continued at https://zqjournal.org/editions/zq31.html)
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DeSForM19 Proceedings, Sep 16, 2019
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In this paper I track 3D printed bacterially-infused materials in which microbes live and reprodu... more In this paper I track 3D printed bacterially-infused materials in which microbes live and reproduce — selected and nurtured — to carryout biochemically-controlled tasks intended to mitigate the ravages of climate change. As architecture and urban designers we are existentially challenged to integrate nature, biology, and genetics with the built world we interpret through fablab/robotic production to tackle those ravages. That viewport reveals our need for multidisciplinary procedures arising in disciplines not usually associated with buildings or city design. Collaborating with science/technology we may take steps toward proof-of-concept materialization imbued with microbial life and intelligences that lend living environmental defenses to architecture and urban/environmental operations.
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Innestare prestazioni biologiche in architettura significa creare, crescere, sintetizzare attribu... more Innestare prestazioni biologiche in architettura significa creare, crescere, sintetizzare attributi biologici e pensare l’architettura come una natura/cultura metabolicamente evoluta. Questo processo richiede una strategia di integrazione fra design, biologia, arte, orticultura, simulazione mediante e-plant, vita sintetica, bio-mineralizzazione e metodi di fabbricazione avanzati. L’integrazione fra la ricerca in campo botanico e in quello industriale ha l’obiettivo di introdurre specifiche risposte di tipo ambientale in campo architettonico. Questo contributo illustra un approccio alla progettazione architettonica che utilizza la simulazione digitale derivata dalla biologia - in particolare gli algoritmi di generazione di planto-architetture, quali ad esempio quelli che si fondano sulla fillotassi e sull’allometria - in fase ideativa.
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The sum of Andy Clark's theory of extended cognition — argued in research papers and books such a... more The sum of Andy Clark's theory of extended cognition — argued in research papers and books such as Natural-Born Cyborgs, Supersizing the Mind, and Surfing Uncertainty — now impacts the theory and practice of advanced generative design in emergent realms of biointelligent, bioremedial architectures. This is especially true for biodigital and genetic-architectures where design-by-research sources technology and biology for computational simulations and AI. For my own writing, designing (Fig. 1), and teaching Clark has provided a philosophical and theoretical logic I redeploy to connect cross-specie biointelligence, bioAI, and synthetic biology for justifying metabolically autonomous buildings. Consequently, Clark's philosophy underpins the theoretical integration of metabolic architectures designed to biologically remove carbon from the atmosphere. Biointelligent structures and biochemical materials thus theoretically testify to Clark's vision that nature/environment/cognition are inseparable from the designer's processing of data from urban and wild organisms and phenomenal matter for ecological performative architectural duties. Figure 1. Metabolic Tower. Barcelona. Algorithmic plant-grown structure, microbe panels. Dennis Dollens As I explain in the last chapter of Metabolic Architectures (devoted to Clark's extended cognition), architects can derive analogies appropriate to the interchange of design/nature/technology — pathways for understanding and integrating a designer's visualization-inaction with theories of how environments (including cities, objects, infrastructures) hold, exchange, and generate data/information. This is literally a
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Digital-Botanic Architecture 3, 2015
Looking through a filter of autopoietic theory as it defines living intelligent systems, DBA3 Aut... more Looking through a filter of autopoietic theory as it defines living intelligent systems, DBA3 Autopoietic Architecture: Can Building Think? asks questions of how AI, synthetic biology, and living tech- nology can merge with aesthetics, geometry, and plant research in order to visually and systemically aid extrapolation of generative procedural rules, geometries, and genetic forms to theoretically consider intelligent architectures. D•BA3 proposes architecture hy- bridized through algorithmic plant simulation, living bacteria, plant metabolism, computational simulation, and living technology. The text discusses and illustrates an induced evolution in one emerging method — autopoietic-extended design — for metablic architecture realized through software-simulated, plant-to-architecture morphol- ogy and biological intelligence. The resulting autopoietic generative architecture is manifested in prototype ideas, theory, structures, surfaces, materials, and systems documented with drawings, ren- derings, and STL models.
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SITES Books, 2005
Like an organism sitting and breathing on its site in the Chihuahuan desert, the Swan House is a ... more Like an organism sitting and breathing on its site in the Chihuahuan desert, the Swan House is a building of organic beauty and hybrid cultural intelligence. Simone Swan has created an architectural and environmental project that re-examines and promotes traditional adobe building while introducing compatible forms, such as the Nubian vault and dome. Swan studied with the great Egyptian architect, Hassan Fathy, in his Cairo studio and after his death in 1989 adopted his mission of helping house the world’s poor. Simone Swan: Adobe Building is the first book to discuss and illustrate Swan’s architecture while also chronicling one of her annual workshops in Dollens’s first-hand account. Dollens suggests that by biologically analyzing historic adobe we may be able to hybridize its constituents as replacements for current toxic materials, creating new biomimetic, adobe-related building materials suitable for green architecture.
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AutopoietiX, 2022
This speculative 3D seedpod is stacked as a module then intersected with a glass and metal tube t... more This speculative 3D seedpod is stacked as a module then intersected with a glass and metal tube that creates a hollowed-out cylinder for a tower's vertical space. Sections of the biotower's exterior, as well as its branching datura spikes, are modeled to be reseeded with microbially-inhabited, 3D-printable, bioremediating, intelligent microbial life. In this way the studio project addresses ways to integrate synthetic biology into 3D visualization, drawings, and project materialization involving Engineered Living Materials (ELMs). The project and studio are envisioned as hypothetical tests for living, performative, generative technologies such as those discussed in the text: "3D-Printable Life for Bioremedial, Metabolic Architectures" (download below). They are intended to prompt student discussions around issues of climate change and bioperformative cities and buildings to subsequently guide and evolve student's individual studio projects.
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