Digital Culture in Architecture

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THE SEDUCTION OF INNOVATIVE GEOMETRIES Ali Rahim and Hina Jamelle / Contemporary Architecture Practice, Residential Housing Tower, Dubai, UAE. Courtesy Ali Rahim and Hina Jamelle / Contemporary Architecture Practice, New York.

What is digital architecture? Is it legitimate to apply the term to any design made with the assistance of a computer, or should it be reserved to productions that put to real use the capacity of the machine to be more than a drawing tool? For the past ten to fifteen years, in order to distinguish the term from the rapidly increasing use of computer-aided design, digital architecture has been often characterized by an experimental dimension more pronounced than in mainstream production.

As a result, there has been a tendency to confuse digital and experimental. Because of this tendency, noticeable in exhibitions like ArchiLab or the Venice Biennale, many innovative practices that undoubtedly belonged to the latter category have been deemed digital.1 But if the term is certainly appropriate for the productions of designers like Ali Rahim, Benjamin Aranda and Christopher Lasch, who rely heavily on the computer, does it truly capture what is arresting with the projects of Preston Scott Cohen or Jesse Reiser? Is it appropriate to interpret recent features of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron’s architecture, like the accent put on surface and ornament, in relation to the rise of digital culture? The vagueness of the term has been further increased by the series of offices that have pioneered the use of computer-aided design, where the senior partners have little actual familiarity with the machine. In these offices, programs are usually run by younger designers who have benefited from an early exposure to computer culture. To what extent is their production, which closely follows the intuitions and ideas of their employers, really digital? The question has been raised by the architecture of Frank Gehry. In Gehry’s office, the use of Catia (ComputerAided Three-dimensional Interactive Application) CAD software remains external to the core of a highly personal design process that relies

1 See for instance Marie-Ange Brayer, Frédéric Migayrou (eds.), ArchiLab. Orléans 1999 (Orléans: Mairie d’Orléans, 1999), and more volumes of the yearly meeting in Orléans; Kurt Forster (ed.), Metamorph 9.

International Architecture Exhibition (Venice: Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, 2004).

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Frank Gehry, model for the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, 2008. Image provided by Gehry Partners LLP. An assembly representative of Gehry’s design process.

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on traditional means like sketches, cardboard and wood models.2 However, the ambiguity is not as problematic as it might appear at first glance. As we have stressed it, digital architecture, in the narrow sense of a production using the computer in an experimental perspective, is inseparable from broader trends at work in the contemporary architectural world. Because they express some of these trends with a special clarity, Cohen, Reiser, but also Herzog & de Meuron have their full place in the discussion of what digital architecture is about. As for the argument based on the generation gap between architects trained before and after the spread of digital tools, its relevance is undermined by the enduring character of the relation between architecture and computer culture. For almost half a century, this connection has influenced theorists and practitioners beyond the mere use of software.

Despite the diversity of research directions revealed by this halfa-century-long history, the architectural uses of the computer in an experimental perspective have generally privileged form: the investigation of shapes in complete contrast with the limited vocabulary of modern architecture. The result has been a proliferation of alternative geometries that are calling for new criteria of evaluation. However, this focus on form should not lead to the reduction of the quest to a mere stylistic obsession. As we will see throughout this chapter, digital architecture’s formalist orientation is inseparable from a series of broader concerns, like the ambition to be in tune with the general march of the world’s economy. Above all, formalism is to be understood here as syn-

2 Cf. Bruce Lindsey, Digital Gehry (Basel, Berlin, Boston: Birkhäuser, 2001).

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onymous with an inquiry regarding the mechanisms of formation, or to put it like Sanford Kwinter, “the processes by which discernible patterns come to dissociate themselves from a less finely-ordered field.”3 The desire to understand form in terms of formation is one of the reasons for the attention that digital architects pay to recent scientific developments, for instance in dynamic systems theory or genetics that put an emphasis on the property of emergence conceived as a capacity of auto-organization at work throughout nature.

In the long history of the connections between digital culture and architecture, the postmodern turning point with its formalist dimension stands clearly as a key to present developments. Taking up Robert Venturi’s appeal to complexity and contradiction exposed in his 1966 eponymous essay,4 postmodernism proper was followed by a deconstructionist phase in which architectural form was meant to express the conflicting logics of its surroundings by resorting to heterogeneity and fragmentation. Completed in 1989, Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, was in that respect one of the most paradigmatic projects of the time with its colliding grids. Although the smooth forms of contemporary digital architecture are in complete contrast with deconstructionist violence, they have inherited from them the project to address with lucidity heterogeneous and often conflicting conditions.

Typical forms of digital architecture are, above all, indebted to the reaction against deconstruction that arose in

Eisenman Architects, entry stair detail, Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, 1989. Photo: ESTO. Courtesy Eisenman Architects.

The conflicting geometries are typical of the deconstructionist phase of postmodernism.

3 Sanford Kwinter, Far from Equilibrium. Essays on Technology and Design Culture (Barcelona, New York: Actar, 2008), p. 146.

4 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966).

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Cover of the French original edition of Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli – Leibniz et le Baroque, 1988, Collection «Critique». © Les Éditions de Minuit.

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the early 1990s. One of the most telling episodes of this reaction was the enthusiasm for folding – understood sometimes literally, most of the time as a metaphor – that characterized a whole range of architectural productions around that period, especially in the United States. The use of the term was triggered by the translation of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s essay, Le Pli (The fold), into English.5 A study of Leibniz’s metaphysics, The Fold insisted on one of its aspects: the possibility to envisage complexity in other terms than discontinuity and frontal collision. For architects like Peter Eisenman, the book opened new perspectives on the question of complexity. These perspectives were theorized in an influential collection of essays edited by Greg Lynn. Published in 1993 as a special issue of Architectural Design, “Folding in Architecture” suggested an alternative to deconstruction and its cult of fracture based, to use one of Lynn’s expressions, on “smooth transformation involving the intensive integration of differences within a continuous yet heterogeneous system.”6 Advocating curvilinearity, pliancy, gentle blending and of course folding, Lynn’s prose was evocative of the geometric developments that would soon follow using the computer. Interestingly, computers remained marginal among the sources of inspiration he evoked such as topological geometry, morphology and catastrophe theory. They were only mentioned en passant, dealing with the defense industry and Hollywood early morphing effects.

Thus, the folding trend was announcing the formal investigations of digital architecture while remaining extraneous to early computer-aided architectural experiments. There is perhaps no better illustration of the necessity to interpret digital design within the broader frame of contemporary architectural evolution than this convergence that technology cannot explain by itself. As historian Mario Carpo puts it in his retrospective assessment of the episode, “computers per se do not impose

5 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Paris: 1988, English translation Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

6 Greg Lynn, “Architectural Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant and the Supple”, in Greg Lynn (ed.), “Folding in Architecture”, Architectural Design (London: 1993, revised edition London: Wiley-Academy, 2004), pp. 24-31, p. 24 in particular.

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shapes, nor do they articulate aesthetic preferences. One can use computers to design boxes or folds, indifferently.”7 Although in his introduction to “Folding in Architecture”, he insisted on the potential of the new approach to deal more efficiently with increasingly conflicted urban and cultural contexts, Lynn mostly retained the possibility to chart a new formal territory marked by continuity and smooth transitions. From the mid-1990s on, the computer became an essential tool in this exploration. Lynn himself soon became an enthusiastic proponent of the machine and one of the most influential theorists of the new design principles it seemed conducive to.

Based on continuity, these principles were at odds with the common perception of the digital as fundamentally discontinuous. More generally, digital architecture is often based on an idiosyncratic interpretation of the scientific and technological principles it claims as a source of inspiration. Its use of topology represents another instance of this idiosyncratic interpretation. Whereas for mathematicians topology corresponds first and foremost to the study of invariants, architects tend to give precedence to the geometric discontinuities it reveals. In other words, for designers invariance does not matter so much as dramatic change.

There is perhaps no better illustration of the autonomy of digital design vis-à-vis the scientific and technological principles and tools it uses, beginning with the computer, than this type of divergence.

The machine has been nevertheless instrumental in the direction taken by digital architecture. Since the early developments of computeraided design, all sorts of new and spectacular forms have appeared on screens. Some of these forms have even begun to transform the built environment. Among them, a special mention must be made of the smooth volumes, strongly reminiscent of organic life, that have appeared in the wake of the orientations pointed out in “Folding in Architecture”.

To designate them, Greg Lynn coined the term “blob”, the acronym for Binary Large Object.8 If the name was supposed to be merely technical, a direct reference to Blob modeling, a module in the Wavefront software used by the architect, it was subsequently often interpreted in

7 Mario Carpo, “Ten Years of Folding”, in “Folding in Architecture”, pp. 14-19, p. 16 in particular.

8 See for instance Greg Lynn, Folds, Bodies & Blobs: Collected Essays (Brussels: La Lettre Volée, 1998).

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relation to the 1958 eponymous film in which an amoeba-like alien made of a gelatinous substance terrorizes a small American town.9 Between technicality and monstrosity, the term reflected the ambivalent reception that computer-produced forms encountered among architects, beyond the small numbers involved in their early exploration.

Visually unsettling for eyes trained in the appreciation of modern architectural vocabulary, they could indeed appear as the result of an outrĂŠ

9 Irvin Yeaworth (director), The Blob, 1958. On the connection with early digital architecture, see John K. Waters, Blobitecture: Waveform Architecture and Digital Design (Gloucester, Massachusetts: Rockport Publishers, 2003), pp. 8-11 in particular.

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NOX/Lars Spuybroek, HtwoOexpo, also known as Water Pavilion, Neeltje Jans, The Netherlands, 1993-1997, exterior and interior views.

Courtesy NOX/Lars Spuybroek. Critic Charles Jencks considered the building paradigmatic of a new architectural era.

cult for the new and trendy. Despite this mixed reception, blobs rapidly became a built reality. Revealingly, blob architecture associated young Turks of digital design like Lars Spuybroek with historical figures of the 1960s and 1970s experimental architecture such as Peter Cook, a former Archigram member, or Jan Kaplicky´ of Future Systems.10 Spuybroek’s studio, Nox, opened the way with its 1993-1997 Water Pavilion. A few years later, Cook and Kaplicky´ gave prototypical examples of blob architecture

10 The notion of experimental architecture was formalized by Peter Cook in his book Experimental Architecture (New York: Universe Books, 1970).

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Peter Cook, Colin Fournier, Kunsthaus, Graz, Austria, 2003. © paul ott photografiert.

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with the Kunsthaus of Graz and the Selfridges Department Store in Birmingham. That the blob trend was so easily adopted by Cook or Kaplicky´ is telling of how, beyond the postmodern and folding episodes, digital architecture inherited from the researches of former experimental architecture, beginning with Archigram’s various pods and bubbles.

Blobs were not the only direction taken by digital architecture, far from it. For a start, they were part of a broader inquiry regarding the topological properties of surfaces and volumes and their link to geometric operations that could be modeled on the computer. Of special appeal were in that respect those topological singularities which René Thom had called catastrophes.11 As geometric analogues to events, they seemed to translate time into space while challenging some fundamental assumptions regarding the latter. The Moebius strip and the Klein bottle questioned for instance the boundary between exterior and interior and more generally the notion of clear-cut thresholds between spatial and functional sequences. Whereas blob architecture has stalled in recent years for reasons we will evoke later in this chapter, these singularities have retained their appeal. Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos’ 1998 Moebius House is echoed by the recently completed Klein Bottle House of the Australian practice McBride Charles Ryan.

Moreover, just like folding, the smoothness that digital designers were looking for could be understood either literally or metaphorically.

Taking it metaphorically allowed for a broader range of shapes than the amoeba-like blobs. Hence the presence of projects that did not look smooth at all with their angular, almost deconstructionist features, like Michele Saee’s early production. However, alike blobs, they contrasted

11 René Thom, Mathematical Models of Morphogenesis (Paris: 1974, English translation New York: Halsted Press, 1983).

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Future Systems (Jan Kaplicky´ + Amanda Levete), Selfridges, Birmingham, 2003. Courtesy Jake Davies. As with the Graz Kunsthaus, the smooth curves of the project are typical of what has been sometimes dubbed as "blobitecture".

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UNStudio, Klein Bottle, mathematical design model.

Courtesy UNStudio.

An intriguing topological singularity.

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with mainstream geometry, thus reinforcing the tendency to confuse digital and experimental.

The development of digital architecture has undoubtedly benefited from the seduction exerted by forms that were impossible to obtain using prior design tools. Until the early 1990s, sophisticated geometric researches were generally synonymous with the presence of paraboloids or hyperboloids, like those used for concrete shells or tensile structures, or with the smooth but loosely defined forms of plastic casts and pneumatic structures.12 The spread of the computer has changed that, allowing digital architects to expand dramatically the range of their formal vocabulary. What is new is not only the variety of the shapes themselves, but also the possibility to define them rigorously using computer modeling.

This change is inseparable from the development of a wide array of geometric modeling techniques. Beside wire frame and solid modeling, a special mention must be made of NURBS – the acronym for NonUniform Rational B-Splines – that are available in software like Maya or Rhino. More than other techniques, they allow designers to interact with curves, surfaces and volumes in a highly intuitive way, to produce and visualize complex deformations as easily as if they were compressing, elongating, twisting or pinching real objects in space. In this regard, despite their limitations, NURBS are emblematic of the creative space opened up by modeling.

Even more emblematic is the recent development of parametric design that coordinates the different aspects of a project so that all sorts of modifications become easy, even with an extremely intricate geometry. In a presentation given for the 2008 Venice Biennale, Patrik Schumacher, partner at Zaha Hadid Architects, hailed what he called “para-

12 Cf. Antoine Picon (ed.), L’Art de l’Ingénieur: Entrepreneur, Constructeur, Inventeur (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, Le Moniteur, 1997).

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metricism” as the new defining moment for architecture enabling designers to reach a complete fluidity at all stages and all scales, from initial sketches to construction, from single building to major urban compositions.13 If such a vision is certainly simplistic insofar that it minimizes the various technological and economic obstacles that designers have still to address in their everyday practice, parametric design makes nevertheless geometric complexity manageable.

If “computers per se do not impose shapes”, they have certainly contributed to broaden the range of possibilities offered to designers.

On a stylistic standpoint, the consequence of this freedom has been often assimilated to a new baroque condition because of the dynamic appearance of projects and the importance taken by deformations. Indeed, many projects suggest the idea of a frozen flow or wave somewhat reminiscent of the undulations of Bernini’s or Borromini’s walls. At different scales, from the modesty of the Water Garden for Jeffrey Kipnis’s house in Columbus to the gigantic West Side competition entry for New York, the architecture of Jesse Reiser and Nakano Umemoto provides various examples of the frozen flow concept. Other digital productions

13 Patrik Schumacher, “Parametricism as Style – Parametricist Manifesto”, 2008, http://www.patrikschumacher.com/Texts/Parametricism%20as%20Style.htm (visited on 20 January 2009).

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Jesse Reiser + Nakano Umemoto, West Side Convergence competition entry, New York, 1999.

RUR.

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Studio Daniel Libeskind, Victoria and Albert Museum extension proposal, 1996. Image © Miller Hare. The project combines a deconstructionist agenda with a baroque-like inclination for geometric intricacy.

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are more reminiscent of the complex, almost fractal play of volumes and light in Guarini’s cupolas. Daniel Libeskind’s extension to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London suggests a similar play. Presented by its author as an investigation using Leibniz as a key to gain access to some fundamental structures of baroque metaphysics and culture, Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of the fold has added another layer to the analogy. Claiming inspiration from the philosopher, folded and fractal surfaces have been interpreted not only as distant cousins of baroque undulations but as expressions of an intellectual kinship based on notions such as complexity, multiplicity and movement.

For a designer like Preston Scott Cohen, the relation to the spirit of mannerism and baroque follows, however, a totally different path based on the use of sophisticated projective geometry and on the interest taken in optical constructions like anamorphoses.14 Despite the prevalence of Deleuze-based readings, there are various ways to relate digital architecture to baroque today. But the parallel, as we will see in a moment, must not be taken too far, for significant differences remain between the baroque approach to form-finding and the morphological explorations that are currently going on.

14 Preston Scott Cohen, Contested Symmetries and Other Predicaments in Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001).

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DIAGRAMMING COMPLEXITY Although their outcome may be compared to a geometric zoo because of its diversity, allied with the uncanny aspect of some of its forms, contemporary morphological explorations follow certain key directions; hence the impression of déjà-vu that one experiences at times when one skims through series of contemporary digital architecture projects. Just like Beaux-Arts or modern architects addressed again and again the same fundamental issues, designers of the computer age tend to concentrate on recurring problems like the smooth transition between heterogeneous subparts that was at the core of the folding program exposed by Lynn. This accounts for the repetitive character of some of digital architecture’s most striking features, like frozen flows or single folded surfaces.

Such an agenda is linked to the project to anchor architectural form into something that goes beyond the pure seduction of innovative geometry. Contrary to other arts, architecture is rarely at ease with plastic gratuity.

There must be reasons, even rules guiding the form-finding process. The tepid reception that designers often reserve to Frank Gehry’s spectacular buildings like the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao or the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles is a consequence of this demand. Indeed, their warped forms seem to follow no other

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Jakob + MacFarlane, Docks de Paris exterior view, 2007. Courtesy Jakob + MacFarlane.

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Etienne-Jules Marey, Man walking, clothed in black and white stripes, circa 1885. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library. In Marey's studies of motion, the animal or human form is already "animated".

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lead than the quest for immediate visual gratification. The same kind of critique can be probably addressed to Jakob + MacFarlane’s recent production, like their French Fashion Institute on the river Seine in Paris, the geometry of which does not seem to follow rigorous principles.

The longing for reasons or rules is reinforced by the fact that architectural form appears less and less as an isolated and static entity. Modeling software and its underlying calculus-based frame produces usually a continuous series of forms, something more akin to a geometric flow or film obtained from direct deformation or parametric variation than to a fixed configuration. In The Fold, Gilles Deleuze had introduced the term “objectile” to designate the capacity of calculus to generate an infinite number of objects as elements of a continuous series. The term has been employed subsequently by French designer Bernard Cache to name his practice that puts to use this potential for variation in order to produce “non-standard” furniture and buildings.15 As an element or a moment in a flow, form can be considered as a still frame produced by freezing the moving geometry. Form is also, as we will see, commensurable to something that happens, an occurrence or an event. It is here that we find the root of today’s tendency to interpret architecture as a performative art. Another way to envisage the

15 Bernard Cache, Objectile (Orléans: Editions Hyx, 1998).

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new status of form – the status that arises from its production through calculus serving as a kind of mathematical engine allowing for direct deformation or parametric variation – is to consider with Greg Lynn that form is “animated”, inseparable from fields of forces that generate geometric motion. Besides the pervasive analogy with baroque and the morphing techniques used by cinema, scientist Étienne-Jules Marey’s studies of motion represent another important source of inspiration for Lynn’s argument. In some of Marey’s studies, the shapes of moving animals or humans are no longer discernible as such. With the use of sensors, the positions of which are captured by photography throughout the motion, they generate almost continuous streams of dots, thus making explicit, in an almost cinematographic way, the intimate connection between form and flow.16 In this perspective, two set of questions immediately arise. The first regards the proper way to mobilize resources, forces or gradients – to use a scientific vocabulary – that transcend the designer’s free will and inspiration. Since architectural form should not result from the mere quest for the new and pleasurable – even

Greg Lynn, House Prototype, 1994.

Courtesy of Greg Lynn Form. A series of images showing how the project evolves according to a "gradient field of attraction and repulsion." Form becomes analogous to a still frame in a theoretically endless process of deformation.

16 Greg Lynn, Animate Form, pp. 26-28 in particular. On Marey see for instance François Dagognet, Étienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace (Paris: 1987, English translation New York: Zone Books, 1992).

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if these qualities are not to be discarded – the problem is how to plug it into an external reality that spans from local conditions to broader economic trends, while relating to more general architectural concerns. If form is a frozen moment or a still in a continuous flow, what equivalent to the laws of hydraulics can be proposed in order to allow designers to orient geometric flows in the most efficient way? In other words, what kind of principles may be invoked to describe a process of formation that should not rely on the arbitrariness of isolated artistic creation?

A second set of questions has to do with the definition and choice of particular moments within these geometric flows. Confronted with architectural forms to which traditional functional and aesthetic criteria do not apply easily because of their novelty, forms above all inseparable from a continuum of alternatives obtained from direct deformation or parametric variation, how is the architect to determine the most appropriate solution – like Faust asking time to stop in a moment of perfect happiness? Is the notion of a most appropriate, not to say perfect, solution even valid? The traditional architectural form-finding process was inseparable from the implicit belief in an optimum reached gradually through a complex design process. The computer has jeopardized this belief by confronting architects to a much more fluid world of dynamic entities, the evolution of which could very well never stop.

Whatever the answers brought to these two questions, it is striking to observe how the concern with form that characterizes digital architecture is accompanied by the simultaneous abandon of any kind of belief in its potential perfection. Nothing is more opposed to computerinduced formalism than Platonic idealism. There lies probably one of the major differences between baroque and digital attitudes towards form. Whereas baroque remained, despite its transgressions, the inheritor of High Renaissance Platonic beliefs in the principles and rules of order and proportion, the observation of which was supposed to give architecture a perfection imbued with metaphysical resonances,17 digital architecture distances itself from the quest for plenitude or perfection. The baroque metaphysical dimension also contrasts with the strong material-

17 On the enduring role played by order and proportion during the baroque period, see for instance Hanno Walter Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory (Munich: 1985, English translation New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), Georg Germann, Vitruve et le Vitruvianisme: Introduction à l’Histoire de la Théorie Architecturale (Darmstadt: 1987, French translation Lausanne: Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes, 1991).

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ist stance adopted by many digital designers. In reaction to the postmodernist taste for recognizable symbols, from classical elements to those popular culture icons that inspired Robert Venturi’s theory of the “duck”, some of them go as far as to refuse any kind of “meaning” exterior to architecture.18 On that ground, one cannot but be struck by the convergence between key orientations of digital architecture and the general direction followed by Peter Eisenman. In the latter’s itinerary, what has been at stake almost from the start is a radical critique of architecture as pure presence, of architectural form as plenitude or perfection. In that respect, one of the most telling moments – beside his “folding” phase that followed his discovery of Deleuze’s book – corresponds to the so-called “archeological projects”, like the Romeo and Juliet scheme developed for the 1986 Venice Biennale, in which form becomes a palimpsest bearing a series of traces, some of them real, others imaginary. The architect was inspired at the time by Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist philosophy, by his theory of difference as it was exposed in books like Writing and Difference or Of Grammatology, in particular.19 For Derrida, text was always porous to the subterranean working of a differentiation process devoid of any preconceived meaning, a process transforming writing into the trace of something beyond any metaphysical notion of presence. With his archeological projects, Eisenman tried to reveal the existence of a

Eisenman Architects, one plate from “Moving Arrows, Eros, and Other Errors: An Architecture of Absence“ (Romeo + Juliet Castles), Third International Architectural Biennale, Venice, Italy, 1985. Courtesy Eisenman Architects.

The project as palimpsest.

18 The theory of the “duck”, or the building whose form borrows from popular culture icons, is stated in Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1972). The rejection of meaning is for instance explicit in Jesse Reiser and Nakano Umemoto’s Atlas of Novel Tectonics (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006).

19 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Paris: 1967, English translation Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), Of Grammatology (Paris: 1967, English translation Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976).

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Example of Brownian movement of a microscopic particle.

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similar process in architecture, in order to undermine the discipline’s claim to unmitigated presence and plenitude.

Envisaged as frozen moment of a flow, digitally-produced architectural form can be also considered as a trace. Indeed, those who have not followed its elaboration on a computer screen are generally unaware of the large range of possibilities that have been left aside to allow it to appear as final. But the question remains of what lies beyond the fluid geometry and its parameters. Digital formalism is inseparable from the ambition to address broader issues, to express among other things the complex mix of stability and instability that characterizes contemporary reality. To put it in another way, form is conceived as a projection in ordinary space of phenomena that involve a superior number of dimensions. After all, a projection is nothing else than a trace.

The approach of digital formalism to this multidimensional reality is close to the philosophy of continuity, multiplicity and complexity developed by Gilles Deleuze. Indeed, the latter’s thought has served as landmark for many digital designers in order to place their intuitions within a broader frame. In addition to its intrinsic seduction, Deleuze’s fluid universe is also in profound accordance with recent scientific and technological developments such as dynamic systems, biotechnologies and nanotechnologies. In this universe described in books like the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia cosigned with Félix Guattari,20 order arises constantly from disorder; equilibrium is relative, dynamic and provisory. Matter is not passive as in Descartes’ physics; it appears rather as a matrix of becomings that blurs traditional boundaries such as the separation between the inorganic and the organic. Deleuze’s world

20 Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Paris: 1973, English translation Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Paris: 1980, English translation Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987).

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Probability of presence of the electron. Superimposition of quantum states of the hydrogen atom. Š CNRS Photothèque/CNET/Lactamme/Jean-François Colonna.

is constantly in motion. Contrary there again to its Cartesian definition, motion is to be understood in a different sense than mere spatial displacement. Even more than quantitative, it is qualitative. Biology and phenomena like differentiation, gradual organization and growth provide better guidelines to understand its nature than mechanical images.

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