Data and Senses; architecture, neuroscience and the digital worlds

Prof Deborah Hauptmann Deborah Hauptmann is Professor and Chair of the Department of Architecture at Iowa State University, USA. Previous to this she was the Director of the Delft School of Design, an internationally recognized platform for research and advanced education.

Hauptmann’s research draws on a trans-disciplinary approach to architecture, which includes disciplines such as philosophy, cultural & media studies, the social sciences and the neurosciences. Her co-edited volume, Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics: Architecture and Mind in the Age of Information and Communication (010 Publishers: Rotterdam, 2010), is an example of this approach. Other publications include: - ‘Northern Line’, co-authored with A. Radman, in Deleuze and Architecture, 2013; Forward to Writing and Seeing Architecture: Christian de Portzamparc and Philippe Sollers, 2008; The Body in Architecture (ed.) 2006. Hauptmann is a Bergson scholar, she is the English cotranslator of his 1889 Latin thesis Quid Aristoteles de Loco Senserit / On Aristotle’s Conception of Place.

Abstract: Noo-Architecture: between culture and brain The philosopher Henri Bergson, in Matter and Memory (1896) notes that philosophy traditionally works through dualist accounts: idealism-realism, internalism-externalism, etecetera; which inevitably equate to the classical mind-body problem. Bergson argues that the intersection of mind and matter is to be found in memory. Through his notion of durée he constructs a double movement between representation and experience. Deleuze refers to this as a ‘double progression’ in which duration, when applied to things, or rather ‘duration in things’ forces the question of space to be fundamentally reassessed: ‘space itself will need to be based in things, in relations between things and between durations.’

When thinking between data and the senses it is important to resist the tendency to imagine the digital as immaterial and the physical as material and that the cross-over between the two situates us in a dance, a pas de deux between body-sense and imagedata; or, perhaps more logically, between body-image and sense-data. Translations created to break down the dichotomies between the two in order to either thicken our experience or expand our knowledge. In addressing transdisciplinary thinking this I will offer a brief account of another double movement in Bergson, that is between translation and rotation. The underpinnings of this account will be located in 19th century empirical psychology.

In Cognitive Architecture, we argued that if we are to intellectually and fully engage in matters of our contemporary world - populated as it is by technologies of information and communication, as well as the internet techno-bred minds of this generation – fields located in the so called soft sciences: whether cognitive or aesthetic philosophy, cultural, spatial, social or political theory, would need to expand their traditional reliance on thinking environment, ethos, politics & relations of power in terms of biological models (bios) to neurological models or system (nous). This developed from the belief that that the world of culture and cultural artifacts, whether material or immaterial, reconfigures brain. Culture being the matter that makes up the human sociocultural environment – music, architecture, art, design, media, and language, as well as political, social, and cultural institutions. Within a neuroscience perspective it is can be seen much more straightforwardly: environment-induced neural activation contours brain development in a manner that is essentially consistent with human-made environment. In this account, 11