data-types we are discarding? As these may involve hidden branchings that challenge our design and practice orthodoxies The fundamental question: What are we computing? — brings forth the lines of questioning, research, and the accelerated growth which have been enabled by our tools — the rapid customization, manufacturing, and analysis of complex building processes. However, should we ask: What isn’t computed? — we would open a wider range of questioning around topics of social relevance, such as: poverty, economic flows, and politics; topics, that due to their reliance on narrative (word based) data-types are perceived as uncomputable, and thus, too complex to understand. What is not computed incurs the risk of obsolescence due to the comparatively slow evolution of its study. The measure by which our collective explorations into material systems, form-finding, advanced structural design, manufacturing, spatial analysis and occupation patterns, far surpasses the rate of growth of our studies into poverty, gentrification, theory, social unrest, cultural impact, city growth, religion and spirituality, and the assimilation of economic flows throughout the urban fabric. These are topics that are often carried by the social sciences at a far slower pace due to an inexistent framework for comparative synthesis of these narrative data-types. The amount of data produced by the vast majority of the world’s population is by far narrative, in all its manifest forms: text, audio or video. It is the most direct form of expression, ranging from individuals to massive populations. Failure to engage with these primary forms of expression results in a lower resolution understanding of the cultural implications of building and the social/environmental repercussions in that given region. This research seeks to extended our set of available tools to enable an architecture that can engage with the massive amounts of public opinions, debates and ideological forces which compose our noetic landscapes. It is meant as a a higher resolution layer of analysis with the purpose of increasing our capacity to modulate struggles between environmental and human forces, in culturally sensitive ways. Synthesizing the Gaseous State is an ongoing research effort that uses neural networks to map word relations, hierarchies, gaps, and foci of terms within large data sets of architecture theory and public opinion, as they are graphed geographically and by epoch. The methodology employed by the software in order to achieve this relies on each term stored according to its contextual relations (words directly surrounding the term in a sentence) that are referenced according to their place in multiple texts and occurrences within the same text. While this context is dynamic, as dependent upon the weighted relations traced through texts loaded upon the data set, it is balanced against a static or fixed context - the definition of these words, their author, place, and date. Relying upon the information acquired, each term behaves as an active agent, seeking out relations based upon new contexts and visually graphing them according to place, author, and date, as opposed to abstract or empty space. This comes with the purpose of visually revealing the movement of architectural thought through the terrain, while describing how it converges and diverges from certain concerns locally, as compared to global currents across time, as a Computer Aided Epistemology of architecture theory.
53