Information Theory and Architectonics
2016 - Current
ATTP (TU Wien) / U Laval
Discussion with Selena Savić on Ghosts of Transparency and its influence on our current work.
(part of the ATTP Lustrum 5-year celebration in 2021)
Ghosts of Transparency (2019)
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.
Related Publications:
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Doyle, Michael. 2015. “What Do We Touch When We Visualize Data?” Contour Visual(izing) Data: Online.
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Doyle, Michael R. 2016. “Potentialities of the Urban Volume: Mapping Underground Resource Potential and Deciphering Spatial Economies and Configurations of Multi-Level Urban Spaces.” PhD in Architecture and the Sciences of the City, Lausanne, Switzerland: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL).
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———. 2018. “The Informational Motor of Michel Serres: An Architectonics of Algorithmic Reasoning and Abstraction.” Azimuth X: 137–51.
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———. 2019. “Softness, Hardness: Contemplating Architectonic Circuits of Mediacy and Immediacy.” In Ghosts of Transparency: Shadows Cast and Shadows Cast Out, edited by Michael R. Doyle, Selena Savić, and Vera Bühlmann, 233–42. Applied Virtuality Book Series. Basel: Birkhäuser / de Gruyter.
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Doyle, Michael R., Selena Savić, and Vera Bühlmann, eds. 2019. “Introduction.” In Ghosts of Transparency: Shadows Cast and Shadows Cast Out, edited by Michael R. Doyle, Selena Savić, and Vera Bühlmann, 8–19. Applied Virtuality Book Series. Basel: Birkhäuser / de Gruyter.