Marco Poletto

Marco Poletto, Polycephalum, 15 de septiembre de 2016. Fotografía: Pablo Gerson, Juan Ignacio Palma, Sebastián Izquierdo. Archivo EAEU.

Polycephalum Marco Poletto

En la era del Antropoceno, ningún territorio queda intacto respecto de la influencia humana. Las nociones de desierto y de conservación del medio ambiente deben ser evaluadas nuevamente en el contexto de la urbanización planetaria. La conferencia presenta el trabajo de ecoLogicStudio en diseño bio-digital, como una herramienta operativa para concebir y diseñar territorios aumentados y arquitecturas ecosistémicas para las cuales la habitación humana se entiende como una fuerza co-evolutiva de los ecosistemas naturales. ¿Es el antropocentrismo inmanente a los dibujos de arquitectura un factor que limita los modos operativos de la disciplina en un mundo en el que los problemas requieren una perspectiva amplia y distributiva del diseño? Se argumenta si el dibujo tiene algún futuro en la arquitectura y cuál es su rol, estatuto y sentido en un futuro poblado por protocolos de comunicación entre máquinas autónomas que hacen que cualquier sistema de notación solo legible por humanos resulte obsoleto. Se intenta transmitir las trazas de una visión inhumana capaz de informar, actualizar y reorientar nuestro intelecto.

Fonts of Intelligence

The Greek etymology of the word Polycephalum means literally many or multiple heads. A box of images of monsters, creatures, God-like beings, in contraposition to the typical definition of human rationality, incarnated by the brain, a single source of self-consciousness and intelligence. But, as we know, according to not only general science but also to other disciplines, there are other forms of intelligence in nature. Biological Computation

Despite exhibiting an articulated morphology, this creature is a single cell organism. It has a wall that contains protoplasmic fluid, the flow of which varies in pressure, stretching the wall and provoking changes on its morphology. It is a network or pipelines the shape and pressure of which is continuously changing and adapting. Even if this simple creature has no brain, or anything even remotely close to a nervous system, it possesses a form of intelligence. This happens through local interaction and the consecutive emerging biochemical gradients. Scientists and engineers alike have been interested in slime mold as a an entry to biological computation, and as a way of rethinking network infrastructures.

Manufactured Landscapes

In Arizona, there is an area called the Copper Corridor, a mining area where mines are superficial and very extensive. One of the recurring themes of our current work lies in an interest for these landscapes, which some call manufactured or driven landscapes. Essentially, they are territories that are shaped by the intense exploitation of resources. They are interesting for two reasons. On the one hand, they have been neglected in the discipline of urban design, although, today, they are a central node in the network of matter and energy that fuels the metabolism of the contemporary metropolis, and they have an essential role in how our urbanizing society is evolving. On the other, they are often described as scars, areas product of the destructive impact of human technology. There is a conceptual trap which is worth investigating in this, to understand the relationship between human technology

and the landscape, beyond the ideological idea that nature is a perfectly balanced equilibrium system that we are destroying with technology.

Slime Mold Simulation

One of the mechanisms to engage with this type of landscape is abstraction. It is by using technology and mathematical algorithms that this manufactured landscape can start existing again outside the dichotomy natural versus artificial. One of the techniques that we have been using is satellite monitoring. We have developed a partnership with ESA, the European Space Agency, and we are able to work with data sets to extrapolate the different elements that we want to observe. We can detect processes at a biochemical level on the ground, at a resolution that goes down to 10 meters. The idea of the research was to create numerical descriptions, including the morphology of these landscapes and its internal composition. Upon this field we fed the slime mold, exploring and understanding how its behavior would transform the landscape in the process of reaching out and exploiting resources. We used color, as the slime mold carries a pigment while exploiting the results, and we could thus see its traces. The idea was to retrieve this information back through a set of digital algorithms, revealing the territory as computed by this form of intelligence.

Bio Segmentation Simulation

We started to speculate how these logics could be implemented in the landscape not merely as an applied form, but rather as a device to induce processes. In one of the projects, it took the form of digital gardening. We did not deal directly with plants or trees. We were rather looking at stimulating bio segmentation. The idea was to implement a network of metal rocks connected to photovoltaic cells capturing the energy of the sun, giving a weak electricity sign back to the processor, attracting the minerals dissolved in the water onto the rocks. This generated a substratum to repopulate the landscape from the left overs of the construction happening on site.

A Foggy Kind of Terrain

It was not really an efficient machine, and this fact added a higher degree of fascination to it. It was creating its own landscape, its own atmosphere. The factory itself, after a few hours of operation, was a foggy kind of terrain. At the moment of digging out the dust, which is something that you normally do in your little 3D printer, it became a work of archaeology. These machines can inhabit the landscape and become its creatures.

Cyber gardening

There is a branch called precision agriculture, in which satellite and drones are deployed massively together with software interfaces to monitor crops in real time. This idea of cyber gardening, which, in fact, already belongs to the industry of agriculture, is typically deployed in very large monoculture crops. We tried to see if it could be deployed in a different way, to recuperate time as a variable, not only in the design phase, but in the process going from the design to its realization.

Wavelengths

The sensors in the satellite register different wavelengths, depending on the one you get, you know what the ground is made of. Then, you can algorithmically subtract one band from the other, and reveal patterns that are not visible to the naked eye.

Landscape Embedded with Mechanism

The idea was to activate this salina and, through a morphological articulation, create the condition for different biotopes to emerge. First, we did so by creating a substratum essential to the production of basic food, like insects. There was also an impact of the machines. They had been abandoned, but they were part of the process of collection and extraction of the salt, and so, to a certain

extent, the landscape was already embedded with the mechanisms. So, what we were proposing was a substitution of these machines, which still belonged to the logic of assembly line and maximum exploitation of the landscape. Through these devices, birds become data fields, but only with this kind of abstraction you begin to understand another level of operation embedded in what we call nature. The idea is that, through this level of understanding, we can connect to technology and speculate about the morphology of open areas.

Interactive Systems

We have done a few works that consist in building interactive pavilions, to create a material organization that reflects a behavioral quality. We worked on this piece that would not be interactive in the traditional sense of action-reaction, but instead have a complex nonlinear response. We started by setting simple parameters, in this case little speakers made of electric discs. They could have different frequencies, analogous to the sound of a cricket in a field. We played with simple acrylic tubes, cut at different lengths. The tubes channeled the noise, creating different tones. We had a few variations where the tonal difference was coming from the morphology. The sounds were not recorded, this is real material sound. There are six sensors at the foot of each of the six legs of the pavilion, and everything happens through signals.

Microscale

Can we imagine ways of planning regional areas all the way down to the micro scale of algae? In this process, we went through the different aquatic bodies of the area, and discovered, together with local scientists, the variety and diversity of the microalgae. In conversations with them, we discovered that there is basically nobody doing this kind of work. Microbiologist do not work in the landscape, and landscape architects do not go to such small scales. For us, it was just about finding a medium to engage the regional scale from a different perspective. First, we worked on the city, understanding it as a potential garden. But then, we went down in scale and started to develop prototypes. This generated completely new opportunities of work, not only in terms of exhibitions, but also of projects. The first prototypes we did consisted in embedding cultivation into the public space. It is a bacteria-based pavilion called Future Food District, which gave form to the infrastructure while creating shelter.

Extractos de la conferencia de Marco Poletto, con introducción de Manuel Mensa, organizada por el Centro de Estudios de Arquitectura Contemporánea, el 15 de septiembre de 2016.