Information Theory and Architectonics

Ghosts of Transparency (2019)

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Information and data are not synonyms: data (etymoogically, the ‘given’) has to be treated, articulated, read or deciphered in such a way as to contain information. The sheer amount of data today tends to obscure this important difference between data and information: data is entropic, while information is where this entropy is negated; information is negentropic. An emerging political imperative of ‘transparency’ conflates the abundance of data with an increase in information. Unfortunately, the reverse is often the case: The more ‘data’ is rendered available and passed off as ‘information’ or ‘knowledge’, the more opaque the dealings with ‘information’ become. This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges we face with regard to becoming literate in the algorithmic and symbolization processes that organize data in our world today—processes we refer to here as ‘ghosts of transparency’.

This book is above all about architectonics and com- munication. What, you may ask, does this have to do with architecture and urbanism? Data and software are thought to reshape the city, while the word ‘architecture’ refers equally often to buildings and to the organization of computer software and hardware components. With this book, we want to cast a projective space that accommodates various dispositions of quarrelous grounds with implicit and explicit mixtures of these two domains interpenetrating each other.