CAAD Theory: Epic Encounters - Telling Stories from the Vectorial World

Abstract

The ubiquity of neural nets calls on architects to explore the vectorial world they index. After introducing participants to basic concepts of coding and machine learning, this course invites them to inventively explore hidden connections among vectorized digital objects.

Objective

- Familiarizing participants with Wolfram Mathematica as an agile coding laboratory and theoretical ideas related to the digital/vectorial world. - Inviting participants to work with pre-and self-trained machine learning models to play among millions of digital objects. - Supporting participants in strengthening their storytelling and presentation skills across different media. You will form your own voices, forms and styles. We will start with the initial theme of SATURATION. The digital cosmos is saturated. Saturation is extreme. Saturation is overwhelming. Saturation is beyond what is required. The task of the architect-writer here is to inhabit and write with this saturation; to find voices to properly articulate the saturated world. This requires skill and balance; gravity and agility; humour and lightness. During the course you will be guided through the process of writing texts which playfully inhabit the styles of the following: fragments of ancient epic poetry, Renaissance sonnets, modernist avant-garde poems and contemporary voices.

Content

The first phase of the course, CODING, offers entry points to coding literacy as well as related theoretical literature without attempting exhaustive coverage: using Wolfram Mathematica, participants will get familiar with functional programming, including importing and exporting data, organizing it into data structures, writing simple functions and encoding and decoding digital objects into and from vectors. In the second phase, INVENTING, participants are given access to a multi-modal corpus, an inventory containing millions of digital objects pertaining to different media – scans, sounds, samples and sentences – and a series of bespoke functions in Wolfram Mathematica. Aided by machine-learning algorithms, participants will join characteristic collections of digital objects into a story a character might tell. These collections can be based on authors, inviting participants to further engage with theoretical ideas. In the third phase, STAGING, participants will focus on bringing these stories to life through a deliverable in their chosen format, accompanied by weekly tutorials.

Resources