I'll be speaking at the Agent Code Symposium on Wednesday, April 11th, 12:30-6:00 at Columbia University's Avery Hall. Description by Ed Keller below:
“… each portion of matter is not only infinitely divisible, as the ancients observed, but is also actually subdivided without end, each part into further parts, of which each has some motion of its own; otherwise it would be impossible for each portion of matter to express the whole universe. Whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls. Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquid parts is also some such garden or pond.”
Leibniz, Monadology
Cutting edge architectural work increasingly uses scripting and models of emergent and embedded behavior to explain systems and to generate morphology. The patterns we discover in architecture, social structures, political bodies, and in the formal operations of the city, function as a spatio-temporal index of life and the substrates of reality itself.
Drawing on the idea of an ‘agent intellect’ stemming from alchemical and philosophical thinking some 2000 years old, the term agent_code is used as a provocation for the symposium, critically problematizing the relation between agent-like behavior, the function of low level code and scripting as a way of producing and controlling that behavior, and the morphological consequences of this. Additionally, information flow, models of entropy, and systems design play a key role in this discussion.
These concepts of code, material intelligence, scripting, diagramming, etc, have gained a strong position in the past decade in avant garde design culture. Of late, the code/scripting aspect has moved to the forefront, claiming a territory vacated by the apparently obsoleted concept of the diagram. This symposium, presenting academic, professional, and research work in progress, is the third in a series of events acting as a forum for debate on the themes of code, script, diagramming, emergent and generative systems.