Vera Bühlmann – författare

Symbolizing Existence deals with the current rapidly happening “deterritorialization” of everything which was once regarded stable and binding. What we today regard as statistically encoded information is capable to explicate and index the entire realm of what can be expressed and represented through a cascade of geometrical, functional, or finally logified schemes. We are currently experiencing a rapid loss of “grounding” of that which we once considered binding in our cultural and intellectual history. How can we obtain an articulate, cultivate way of thinking about “instances” that does not fall back into a schematic model Platonism (thereby falling behind Plato), and that does not remain enmeshed in an Aristotelian realization dynamics with a naturalism organized by original genus, kinds, and specific marks of distinction?The central phenomenon considered was the technological process of doping material: At the quantum level, a particle or its representation, the point, is no longer “that which has no parts” (Euclid).

The Atlas of Fantastic infrastructures deals with the characterization of architecture, media and digital infrastructure. In concrete terms, it deals with the materiality of buildings and the intangibility of data. While technical or functional studies often tend to "flatten" the multiplex phenomena, the author speculatively propose four abstract prisms: 1) AFFAIR WITH PHANTOMS – who do we want to meet in a digitally mediated space, and what kind of conversation/activity will we have?; 2) PARA-DESIRE – where do our surreal desires live, and what are their strategies?; 3) MEDIATED SPACE CATALOGUE – what kinds of data, information, things, spaces and places are available in the world, and how our activities blend them?; 4) GIFTS OF THE GARDENS – how can an idea enter physical reality, and what are the pathways of such becomings?

The author examines buildings and projects by Toyo Ito, Philippe Rahm, Olafur Eliasson, Greg Lynn, MVRDV, Electroland, Troika, NOX, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and others.

Recent developments in computer science, particularly ”data-driven procedures“ have opened a new level of design and engineering. This has also affected architecture. The publication collects contributions on Coding as Literacy by computer scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, cultural theorists, and architects.

The main focus in the book is the observation of computer-based methods that go beyond strictly case-based or problem-solution-oriented paradigms. This invites readers to understand Computational Procedures as being embedded in an overarching ”media literacy“ that can be revealed through, and acquired by, ”computational literacy“, and to consider the data processed in the above-mentioned methods as being beneficial in terms of quantum physics. ”Self-Organizing Maps“ (SOM), which were first introduced over 30 years ago, will serve as the concrete reference point for all further discussions.

We know the specific strengths of various cities, are aware of their ranking, are able to discuss their density and growth. But what do all cities have in common, what do we know about the “lowest common denominator”?

The “city as a species”, the “primal genetic material of the city”: this is the subject of A Quantum City. This colossal work is a love letter to the city and intellectual culture.

We follow the fictional narrative figure, Orlando, beginning in 320 BC, on his odyssey through the Western world up to the present time. The book is divided into four interrelated chapters and can be read page by page in a discursive manner, however randomly browsing through the book also offers new and multi-faceted interpretations. Great intellectual achievements are compared with obscure and mundane events. A Quantum City offers an inspiring view of the city that is in us and around us.

Imagine a world where the power is always on, where there is not just enough energy, but an abundance of it. Such a world is no Utopia, it is a possible reality. Using indefinitely available sources of energy – especially photovoltaic solar, in combination with others – and networking this energy, much in the way that we have networked information, we can get beyond our current energy ‘crisis’ and resolve it. The world we then find ourselves in is not a world without problems – we will face new challenges on the way – but in terms of energy it is a world of plenty. Rooted in sound theory and based on technology that is available now, A Genius Planet offers an accessible but detailed and insightful perspective on how we can free ourselves from our dependency on natural resources and generate, trade, and use energy in ways that open up the genuine potential that we have at our disposal today.

Edited by Ludger Hovestadt and Vera Bühlmann

Applied Virtuality is a book series which is edited by Ludger Hovestadt, ITA Institute of Technology in Architecture, ETH Zürich, Switzerland and Vera Bühlmann, Technical University Vienna, Institute for Architectural Theory.

Based on the thesis that technology changes character over time, the series aims and scopes are to reflect that change by describing and analyzing the most recent explorations and innovations in technology, as well as their implications for a more philosophically comprehensive understanding of technics in our contemporary symbolical, information saturated, climatic environments. The overall interest thereby is to (1) affirm the mightiness of the generic without embracing homogeneity as a necessary consequence, (2) to affirm calculation, computation and automatization without embracing the reduction of human intellect to mechanisation without arcane ésprit, and (3) to oppose in principle the contemporary attitude that tends towards a certain “intellectual chicness” that seems to rather narcissistically celebrate itself in a strangely detached competition for “critical divination” of soon-to-be-expected cultural doom and decay.

With the birth of abstract/symbolic/universal algebra in the late 19th century, many scholars associate a fundamental crisis that affects human culture at large. We owe all of our contemporary electric and information-based infrastructures for living to these developments in mathematics, and it is no coincidence that we tend to find the symptoms that point to the manifestation of this crisis in the changes this new form of technics imposes on the people who begin to rely on it. This crisis is classically conceived as a crisis of intuition (Hans Hahn, Edmund Husserl et cetera). But from a more appreciative stance towards the sheer unlikeliness and fantastic power of intellection which is at work everywhere in the reality of such media-ized living environments, we might just as well see in this characterization an anxious (even if all-too understandable) misconception of the critical developments we are experiencing. From this stance, the sheer prominence of this misconception today indicates what appears like a certain fatigue of thinking, perhaps an exhaustion-through-overwhelming of our collective power to imagine.

We mean no offence by saying this. Let us illustrate more concretely: John Orton maintains in his book Semiconductors and the Information Revolution: Magic Crystals That Made IT Happen, that “as a human achievement,” semiconductors ought to “rank alongside the Beethoven Symphonies, Concord, Impressionism, medieval cathedrals and Burgundy wines and we should be equally proud of it” (2009, p. 2). Why is it, indeed, that this demand feels odd? Of course this lack of appreciating our current form of technics is owed partially to its abstractness and the degree of expertise it seems to demand from us. But has this not been the case for any of the abovementioned artifacts we all meanwhile hold as precious and dear?

We hope to find the right dosage of irony and humor that seems so necessary for theorizing technics, arts, intellection in a manner that seeks to escape (1) the servile irresponsibility that attaches to programs of mechanization, as well as (2) the narrow-mindedness and missionary commitment that attaches to ideological doctrine and programmatic. By celebrating moments of intellectual quickness, with our interest in theory and abstraction, we pursue a genuinely comparatistic approach. We regard artifacts as theoretical objects, constituted by the intelligible codes and symbolic grammaticality that give them consistency. But we don’t see the reality of artifacts in the white spectrum of these codes and symbols; rather, we see their reality in that which is enciphered thereby. The ambitions of a comparatistic approach to theory strive towards an alphabetization and literacy of these codes.

Dieses Buch beschreibt nichts, es beurteilt nicht. Es inspiriert. Es enthält keinen kontinuierlichen Text, sondern eine große Themenvielfalt. Wie soll dieses Buch also gelesen werden? Nehmen Sie die Texthinweise ernst! Suchen Sie im Internet und die Texte werden ihre Beliebigkeit verlieren. Sie werden beginnen, zu Ihnen zu sprechen. Bündeln Sie diese mit der Vielfalt anderer Ideen und sie werden etwas Neues formen. Nehmen Sie auch die Bilder ernst! Fotografieren oder scannen Sie sie! Verwenden Sie sie als Hinweis, während Sie im Internet suchen. Auch hier werden Sie wieder viele Geschichten finden. Bündeln Sie diesen Reichtum, fokussieren Sie ihn auf neue Identitäten, die Sie interessieren. Lassen Sie sich inspirieren vom intellektuellen Reichtum unserer Welt.

This book shifts the frame of reference for today’s network- and structure oriented discussions from the applied computational tools of the 20th century back to the abstractness of 19th century mathematics. It re-reads George Boole, Richard Dedekind, Hermann Grassmann and Bernhard Riemann in a surprising manner. EigenArchitecture argues for a literacy of the digital, displacing the role of geometrical craftsmanship. Thus, architecture can be liberated from today’s economical, technocratic and bureaucratic straight jackets: from physicalistic optimization, sociological balancing, and ideological naturalizations. The book comprises a programmatic text on the role of technology in architecture, a philosophical text on the generic and on algebraic articulation, and six exemplary projects by postgraduate students in 2012 at the Chair for Computer Aided Architectural Design at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

Mit der Inversion von McLuhan’s berühmten Dictum das Medium sei die Nachricht geht es der Autorin darum, einen Begriff von Medialität zu konturieren, welcher die selbstbezügliche – und damit dem Stattfinden nach unbegrenzte, weil rein operative – Wendigkeit medialer Instrumentalität beherbergen und in einem Element des Mitteilbaren einquartieren kann. Medialität wird hier seinem Sinngehalt nach als abstrakt-symbolische und virtuelle Verteiltheit konzipiert, die alles denkbar Mögliche aufnehmen und indexieren kann, unter einer Bedingung: dass dieses sich formal-operativ symbolisieren, adressieren und kategorisieren lässt. So begriffen durchkreuzt Medialität rein logische wie auch rein fiktive Ordnungsvorstellungen und eröffnet genau damit die Möglichkeit einer Architektonik ziviler, im Sinne von mehrwertigen und unstetig wandelbaren Gliederungsgefügen. Dieser Möglichkeit spürt die Autorin hier gegenwartsdiagnostisch und kulturgeschichtlich nach.