Diagrammatics of Virtual Connectome

Going Digital 2018
Keynote Speaker Dragana Ćirić*
“Diagrammatics of Virtual Connectome:
Architecture of Digital Memory Scaping”

 

diktyochóros/diktyotopia [1]
[the next imaginariumin cyberterritory: a digital archive and a digital diagram]

[1] diktyochóros [δίκτυοΧώρος] – network space, diktyotopia [δίκτυοτοπία] – network place

Diagrammatic tracings and inscriptions of data and their processes of temporary clustering, consolidation, dissolution, and restructuring within the virtual space, render an intricate documentary and creative complex data-dynamics while generating a distinctive cyber-connectome. Bearing properties of a spatial entity – a field, a territory, or a scape as the broadest term that may cover its particularities – and having some kind of spatial relational or formal regularity (a kind of order whether fixed or in constant transformation) it carries architectural logic and features by which we can describe its behaviour and current state. As a cognitive device and a thinking tool (the extension of our biological thinking mechanisms), or a thinking method and strategy (design intelligence strategy), it has been devised to facilitate – track and direct – research processes by interactively recording and networking information in an open-ended way. By visualizing and mapping thought processing (the black box), it gives a synthetic form to the emergent memory-scape (parallel, coupled, extended or augmented mind) – it creates a digital archive as a dynamic mnemonic information field/landscape/network which enables weaving of complex web-lines connecting singular entities in a dynamic setting – based on quantum processing, connectivity, and decidability.

Dynamic diagrammatic connectivity patterning, thus, has been proposed as a specific mode of architectural design research. Considering the opposition between propositional (linguistic) and diagrammatic logic, reasoning, and representation, ‘diagrammatic mode of inference’ has been claimed, developed and confirmed to be a relevant system of proof and thinking; ’research diagrammatology’, as a logic and an instrument, improves the status and scopes of ‘design intelligence research strategy’. It enables new knowledge to emerge out of the established concepts, referring to established historical data systems and categories (metahistorical archives/strata); it disturbs them, provides their critical reassessment and deconstruction creating an open metalevel data-field from where it becomes possible to determine hidden relational patterns (‘microhistorical connectivities’) or to anticipate new ones; it maintains the archive’s elastic state based on data-mobility even while creating stable inferences.

Being the most convenient means of transfer and conversion from one medium into another, from one disciplinary or a thinking system into another, as well as maintaining subjects of this translation in-between – in an abstract relational state of multiple potential, affiliation, and activity, and a state of specific notation and coding – diagrammatics are here particularly developed and explained as architectural strategies and instrumental frameworks of design investigation and invention. Pushing their boundaries within the virtual scapes, they evolve digitally as tools, mediums, and collaborators, creating their own and shared theoretical discourses, methods, and aesthetics.

*architect and researcher

Biography

Dragana Ciric, Ph.D, Architect and Researcher, Department member at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade; her work includes scientific and artistic research in/by/for theory and design, writing and publishing, architectural and urban design, experimental design, and teaching applying new cross-disciplinary methodologies (in relation to contemporary post-disciplinary critical theory) through teaching curricula and design studios programming.

She conducts continuous research in (architectural/design)diagrammatics, mappings, spatial scripts and codes in relation to architectural design process;design intelligence strategies and datascaping; architectural theory and history, arts, sciences and technology in relation to advanced studies and innovation in architecture within the interdisciplinary and postdisciplinary framework, aiming at methodological advancement in explanation and application of new architectural paradigms and lines of thought (comparative integral studies); architecture and border studies (exo-, extra-, and supra-territorial concepts).

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