Neil Leach

Neil Leach, Swarm Intelligence, 25 de abril de 2017. Fotografía: Juan Ignacio Palma. Archivo EAEU.

Swarm Intelligence Neil Leach

Los sistemas de múltiples agentes han alcanzado un papel cada vez más importante en la interacción de una diversa gama de disciplinas, incluida la arquitectura, con los fenómenos complejos. Pero mientras muchas de ellas operan principalmente como un modo de simulación, en la arquitectura estos sistemas constituyen un sustrato virtual y un medio operative para el desarrollo de nuevas estrategias generativas en el diseño computacional. La lógica inteligente de los enjambres surge, en este contexto, como el catalizador en un desarrollo metodológico radical que, inspirado en el comportamiento biológico, opera en el interior del diseño arquitectónico. La conferencia explora dicho desarrollo dentro de un contexto social e histórico amplio, ilustrándolo con ejemplos del diseño computacional progresivo de la actualidad.

Revision and Style

My first publication was a translation from Latin into English of Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise on architecture, De re aedificatoria. That translation was the first thing I ever did in a computer, and I realized the advantage of computation, as I was able to iteratively revise the text in a very particular way. I remember having a conversation with Joseph Rykwert, with whom I worked in the translation, and he said: what kind of style are we going to use? Those were the days of post modernism. What became clear to me was that, out of the process of continually being able to revise the text, something completely new was beginning to appear, a very precise style of language.

Computation

I am trying to theorize the digital, which is extremely difficult. I want to pick back on one aspect, the most recent one in terms of publications, but also what I believe to be the most long-standing: the question of swarm intelligence, and how that kind of behavioural simulation can be seen as a manifestation of the theoretical approach to digital computation. In the background, I have to declare that I see this world through a certain lens: what we call critical theory in England, Americans call it comparative literature.

Ways of Thinking

Gilles Deleuze has been a real influence on my thinking. In part because, when teaching at Columbia, I came across the work of Manuel de Landa. He was constantly following, developing, and to a large extent promoting the reading of Deleuze, particularly of one of his most important books, his collaboration with Felix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus. But, through time, I discovered that Deleuze was being in various ways misunderstood by many architects. It often sounds like he is talking about architecture when he talks about folds and diagrams, but he is rather talking about ways of thinking.

Process

If you see the world in terms of processes, you can see it in terms of morphogenesis, in terms of form finding. Imposing things on the world is different when you look at it in terms of form and in terms of formation. Formation is a bottom-up process, while form making is a top-down approach. The bubble is an example of the first, and in that context, if how material computation works in nature. A bubble finds its form because of the computation between internal and external pressure, surface tension, and other physical factors. Its form is thus both unstable and consistent.

This way of thinking has influenced architects that I consider important, like Antoni Gaudí and Frei Otto.

Natural Systems

The shift towards a biological way of thinking is not about copying the forms of nature, but rather about trying to understand how things happen in nature and about redeploying those processes creatively within an architectural arena. This involves a shift away from a static world towards a world of dynamic systems. Throughout a wide spectrum of sciences and arts, you see this shift taking place: from technology to biotechnology, from chemistry to biochemistry, from philosophy to biophilosophy. Bioarchitecture, in this context, is not about copying the forms of nature, but about learning, through the behaviour of natural systems, how form works and emerges.

Swarm Lineage

The term swarm intelligence appears for the first time in a book written by three European scientists: Eric Bonabeau, Marco Dorigo, and Guy Theraulaz, who were working at the Santa Fe Institute in 1999. It is intelligently written, but difficult to digest. In 2001, Steven Johnson published Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, which is a repackaging of this discourse. He managed to massage the topic into a very accessible bestselling book. Along these lines we have published Swarm Intelligence: Architecture of Multi-Agent Systems.

Flocks

The logic of swarm intelligence is that it is not a single bird leading a flock. Instead, each individual agent, each individual bird, is following very simple, basic rules. Complexity emerges out of simple rules. This is the case of automata. The whole becomes bigger than the sum of the parts. It takes a life of its own. The birds themselves are not individually aware of the formation they are making. In one formation there is a bottomup collective process, where the collective of birds produces an astonishing display. What is interesting about this phenomenon is that the same behaviour is manifested in whatever the agents are, a swarm of fish, a swarm of bees, or indeed of human beings, taking in each case a different modality out of analogue but subtly different rule systems. There is a bottom-up process at work, whereby these formations enter in operation. What is the relevance of this for architecture and how can we make connections?

Feedback

When we talk about neural networks, we immediately make connections between computation and cities. Craig Reynolds, who produced these things called boids, tried to map and understand the behaviour of flocking birds. In order to do so, he had to understand the rules. He was able to go back with new findings to the biologists. This becomes a metaphor for what I hope the digital will do for us, in other words, we will be able to understand things and processes about the analogue world coming out of the digital domain.

Trails

Another aspect of emergence is how an ant will lay a trail and other ants will follow it. A typical example of that logic is the slime mould. Scientists understood that a slime mould is a host of tiny little agents that come together and start foraging for food. They operate collectively as a single entity. In architecture, it is more interesting when we do not translate this literally into the contours of a landscape, but nonetheless it is a procedure to experiment with how natural systems operate.

Algorithmic versus Parametric

There is a link between ants, brains, cities, software, and how to lock into the logic of swarm intelligence to generate urban formations. Roland Snooks is pushing the realm of processing to generate form. It looks incredibly like the synapsis of the brain. And it is no coincidence because they follow the same logic. He works algorithmically, not

parametrically. I am nervous about Patrik Schumacher’s discourse about Parametricism, because he launches it as if it is part of the same principle, but it is not. One is agentbased and the other is parametric, which is a very different operation. Software

What is interesting about the way open-source systems are operating is that, compared to a corporate mentality like Autodesk, you engage directly to the person who wrote the script, and you get an immediate answer back. Things are shifting in terms of developing software.

Intelligence

Marco Dorigo was one of the authors of the book Swarm Intelligence, but he does not use the word intelligence. Swarm intelligence is very low-level intelligence. The question is to what extent does it need to be programmed? It is open to debate to what extent we consider it as a form of intelligence.

Tools

One of the real problems about Processing is the feedback loop, because it is not performative. It might look like it has a structural logic. The fibres and membranes are held together, but they are not structural. It is essentially a visual language. We must approach it in a critical way: to what extent do new tools afford new opportunities? The word affordance and the whole logic that comes out of J.J.Gibson is important here. They have no agency, and at the same time they open up possibilities.

Criticality

As educators, we have a responsibility to explore these ideas in a critical fashion. As a theorist, I have found that computation is often disregarded as superficial, apolitical, asocial. And yet, in the United States, the world of the computers is the most political you can possibly imagine, not in terms of the tweet you are reading, but of the cyber warfare that is going on. Post Humanism

The superficiality we have had since Learning from Las Vegas cannot be a reason to blame the computer for. The computer is a tool that can be programmed to do whatever one is doing. As somebody that is often criticized as having worked on Alberti and then abandoning humanism to enter the world of posthumanism, to my mind Alberti or Brunelleschi would have been absolutely fascinated with these technologies, especially Brunelleschi. Could you image Brunelleschi with a 3d printing robot for the Florence Cathedral?

Extractos de la conferencia de Neil Leach, con introducción de Julián Varas, organizada por el Centro de Estudios de Arquitectura Contemporánea, el 25 de abril de 2017.