social recombination pt 1

From “The Architecture of Cyberception”:

Similarly the paradigms and discoveries of Artificial Life science must be brought into play. The architect’s new task is to fuse together material structures and cyberspace organisms into a new continuum. Architecture is the true test of our capacity to integrate into humanly enriching zones and structures, the potentials of the material world, the new consciousness, and virtual realities (Ascott).

If there is a corporeal counterpart to socially interactive Internet environments (as the primary loci of social reformation), that counterpart might be a precipitate of modern architecture. Meaning, individuals interface with the virtual in the aforementioned environments (MUDs, MOOs). An individual meets others, converses, travels, develops a personality, and makes memories in these environments; the individual is an active participant, inhabiting the environments and directly influencing every outcome within those environments.

This “new continuum” in which material structures and cyberspace organisms are “fused together” can be thought of as the corporeal counterpart to these Internet environments. Just as individuals inhabit these virtual spaces, virtual entities inhabit the material world at particular loci. Intelligent Cities, for example, “are defined as intelligent environments with embedded information and communication technologies creating interactive spaces that bring computation into the physical world… [they] refer to the physical environments in which information and communication technologies and sensor systems disappear as they become embedded into physical objects…” It should be noted that “city” in this instance, is interchangeable with “space.”

Taking all of this into account, we can then think of the virtual loci at which social reformation occurs as incubators for invention, having stripped away prejudice and bias that might otherwise constrict creativity and open-mindedness in the material world. This can be viewed as a type of social recombination. Just as communications technologies are forced to adapt to environments in order to accommodate a myriad of possible scenarios or to maximize a desired outcome, collaborating at times to the point of interdependency, human social interaction in incubation may serve a similar purpose.

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