CAROLIN WIEDEMANN & SOENKE ZEHLE DEPLETION DESIGN: A GLOSSARY OF NETWORK ECOLOGIES A SERIES OF READERS PUBLISHED BY THE INSTITUTE OF NETWORK CULTURES ISSUE NO.: 8 CAROLIN WIEDEMANN & SOENKE ZEHLE DEPLETION DESIGN: A GLOSSARY OF NETWORK ECOLOGIES Theory on Demand #8 Depletion Design: A Glossary of Network Ecologies Editorial support: Carolin Wiedemann, Ned Rossiter, Soenke Zehle. Published in cooperation with xm:lab. Additional support by the Saarland Ministry of Education and Culture. Acknowledgments: Editing is a way of engaging, reading, relating. We thank all contributors for their generosity as well as Guillaume le Denmat (translation) and Julian Kuecklich (inspiration). http://depletiondesign.xmlab.org Design: Katja van Stiphout DTP: Margreet Riphagen Printer: ‘Print on Demand’ Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2012 ISBN: 978-90-818575-1-2 Contact Institute of Network Cultures http://www.networkcultures.org This publication is available through various print on demand services. For more information, and a freely downloadable pdf: http://networkcultures.org/theoryondemand. This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Netherlands License. INC Publications web: http://www.networkcultures.org /publications DEPLETION DESIGN 3 CONTENTS Depletion Design - Carolin Wiedemann & Soenke Zehle 5 Algorithmic Architecture - Luciana Parisi 7 Anonymous - Gabrielle Coleman 11 Biopolitics - Sebastian Olma 17 The Common - Judith Revel 23 Creative Industries - Sebastian Olma 27 The Cyborg & Her Siblings - Marie-Luise Angerer 31 Digital Embodiment / Digital Materiality - Anna Munster 35 Dirt Research - Ned Rossiter 41 Disorganization - Boyan Manchev 47 Dust Matter - Jussi Parikka 53 Ecologies of Practice - Heidi Rae Cooley 59 Ecology Without Nature - Timothy Morton 65 Crisis - Jason W. Moore 73 Exhaustion / Depression - Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi 79 Fracking - Brett Neilson 85 Grey Ecology - Drew S. Burk 89 Hackerspace - Johannes Grenzfurthner, Frank A. Schneider 93 Information Bomb - Sean Smith 99 4 THEORY ON DEMAND Natural History - Jennifer Gabrys 105 Persistence - Boyan Manchev 111 Persuasive Design - Sebastian Deterding 115 Playful Technologies - Sebastian Deterding 121 Queer Darkness - Zach Blas 127 Remix[ing] Re/Appropriations - Eduardo Navas 133 Salvage - Jennifer Gabrys 137 Software - Lev Manovich 141 Soul Work - Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi 14 5 The Spam of the Earth - Hito Steyerl 151 Sustainable Immobility - Eric Kluitenberg 159 Terminality - David M. Berry 16 5 Vitalism - Sebastian Olma 16 9 Wicked Problems - Sonia Matos 177 Contributors 185 DEPLETION DESIGN 5 DEPLETION DESIGN We, or so we are told, are running out of time, of time to develop alternatives to a new politics of emergency, as constant crisis has exhausted the means of a politics of representation too slow for the state of exception, too ignorant of the distribution of political agency, too focused on the governability of financial architectures. But new forms of individual and collective agency already emerge, as we learn to live, love, work within the horizon of depletion, to ask what it means to sustain ourselves, each other, again. “We need”, Felix Guattari suggested a long time ago, “new social and aesthetic practices, new practices of the self in relation to the other, to the foreign, the strange”. To relate is to create, design, maintain new modes of relation, inventing the spaces from within which to do so in the process. Above and beyond well-meaning injunctions to conduct ourselves more artistically, more playfully, more openly, a wave of socio-technological decentralization reminds us of our individual and collective capacity to create. Eager to assist, organize, and structure our lifestream logistics, new corporate actors offer com- municative freedoms based on commercial user-as-product philosophies of expression. But we now design our own interfaces to face our others, our algorithmic others. Our collective reflection on nature as machinic assemblage has yielded functional foods and the financialization of agriculture. But networked selves already develop other ecologies, reclaiming social machines as technologies of the common, unearthing the conflicts covered in disaster- driven environmentalities whose horizon is delimited by energy security and resource efficiency. Both helped and hindered by the ontological resonances of the common, these ecologies remain fragile, not yet structured by a politics of rights, animated by an interest in the autonomy of things. As nature continues to seep across the curriculum, research and education struggle to keep track of the corrosion of their institutional frameworks. Powered by a cartographic vision unconstrained by the statist political imagination, the study of supply chains has already become a paradigmatic form of transdisciplinarity, moving across the boundaries of life and labor, tracking every speck of dust on the scratch-free screens of our mobile economies as a reminder of the complexities of mutual constitution. The question of depletion is the question of the institution, of what it means when subjects and objects join in a refusal of roles in the great games of reification. No accident, perhaps, that phi- losophies of play are back, not quite a renaissance of aesthetic experience, but an affirmation of the openness of objective and subjective constitution. Of these and other knowledges so created, there can no longer be an encyclopedia; a glossary, perhaps. This is its initial iteration, its entries conjoined by a logic of connotation and constellation. Carolin Wiedemann & Soenke Zehle 6 THEORY ON DEMAND DEPLETION DESIGN 7 ALGORITHMIC ARCHITECTURE LUCIANA PARISI In the field of algorithmic architecture and in the works of, amongst many, digital architect Greg Lynn, computational design takes inspiration from vector fields, used to model, for example, the speed and direction of a moving fluid throughout space, or the strength and direction of some force, such as the magnetic or gravitational force, as it changes from point to point. Here the architectural form is the result of the computational processing of biophysical variables (e.g., the distribution of weight, gravitational pressures, the circulation of air, the intensity of traffic, the frequency of movement). Influenced by the second-order cybernetics of evolving feedbacks, dur- ing the 90s algorithmic architecture started to adopt biophysical dynamics to input change in the software program, for instance by retrieving biophysical data as a new parameter to be added to the sequence of algorithms. By closing the gap between mathematical models and bio-physical contingencies, algorithmic architecture entered the topological field of spatio-temporal connectedness, involving a continual transformation of form without cutting or tearing. From this standpoint, biophysical unpredict- ability became superior to mathematical axioms and the reality of abstraction slipped behind the concreteness of matter. Similarly, the digital design of space has now left behind the Euclidean matrix of extension, and has added temporal evolution to fixed points developing a topological surface of continual variation enveloping all points. The figure of the blob or topological surfaces of continuity now dominates digital architecture. In particular, parametricism, according to Patrick Schumacher, now represents the new global style for architecture and design. When applied to large-scale urbanism, for instance, parametricism is said to transform the differential distance between points into an integral surface of continual variations. From this standpoint, parametricism implies the inclusion of contingent objects (e.g., atmospheric, geological, biological, physical elements), which become variable parameters whose temporal evolution contributes to the overall transformation of the architectural whole. This means that variables, for instance, are not only added to the program (as if from the ‘outside’), but rather partake of the software environment of parametric relations. Parametric programming, therefore, is not just concerned with the computation of existing elements, but also, and significantly, with how feedback relations between finite parameters can engender the infinite variations of the architectural form. From this standpoint, parametricism is, as Hatherley calls it, a manifestation of the “cultural logic of late neoliberalism”, whose topological operations of continual transformation, structural coupling and mutual correspondence between the inside and the outside are now defining the choreographic arrangement of data. This is not a new argument, and it is also one that is, to a degree, separate from the issues that I aim to pursue here. I am not specifically concerned with criticizing parametricism or its excessive formalism for its inability to address infrastruc- tural issues and the political implications of lived space. Instead of arguing that parametricism promises a formally open-ended and flexible space that does not physically match realized ar- 8 THEORY ON DEMAND chitectures (as in the case of the Evelyn Grace Academy Zaha Hadid Architects) and instead of contending that parametricism is the direct incarnation of the spirit of the neoliberal mar- ket, I would suggest instead that parametricism is not abstract enough to meet the possibili- ties offered by a radical algorithmic formalism that exposes the algorithmic governance to its internal inconsistencies, which, I argue, imply