Call for Papers: Post-Parametric Environments

Call for Papers
Post-Parametric Environments
ACSA 100th Annual Meeting: Digital Aptitudes

Topic chair: Jennifer W. Leung, Yale
Annual Meeting Co-chairs: Mark Goulthorpe, MIT; Amy Murphy, USC
Deadline for Submission: 9/14/2011

One of Marshall McLuhan’s central arguments, identified in “The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion” as “counter-environment” (Perspecta, 1967), is that transformative new technologies eventually bring the social and sensory consequences of superseded technologies into relief “through the rear-view mirror.” For McLuhan, the Greek oral tradition is the counter-environment of written language; Romantic landscape, the counter-environment of the railroad and factory; technologies of classification, the counter-environment of cybernetic pattern recognition. Counter-environments change the very nature of perception, and by extension the opportunities for intervention. McLuhan’s dialectic is neither oppositional, nor mutually exclusive, but involves positioning. His counter-environment does not destroy the environment, it frames and creates awareness, suggesting new models of engagement with present, past, and future conditions.

This session will posit that the parametric is already a historical periodization and, as McLuhan might argue, is the counter-environment to the current state of pedagogy and practice. Thus, the post-parametric is not the intensification of the same or similar codes and processes, as in the rationalization of curvature, optimization of form, or even the potential democratization of compute power afforded by cloud computing, self-modeling buildings, or personal super-computing. Instead, fundamental assumptions about parametric thinking, design, and computation need to be re-assessed according to the physical realities of our actual environments and sensory thresholds. Questions of perception, scalability, technology transfer, translation (not from drawings to building, but from models to models), and the construction of evaluative criteria for iterative design are critical to this re-alignment.

For example, supplementing the familiar celebration (or castigation) of geometries freed from industrial production or of capital freed from the rules of arithmetic, recent conversations have begun to take up the digital division of labor and the management of economic and ecological risk, furthering the disciplinary understanding of socio-economic relationships of distribution, communication, and production. On the other hand, the ubiquity of data processing and the binary code has homogenized, rather than adjudicated, post-war technological debates about the status of matter, energy, biological life, time and subjectivity. In other words, the naturalization of the parametric environment has surpassed the thermodynamic, molecular, relativist, and psychodynamic points of view which historically have shifted cultural notions of space and time. However, research in these areas, now on the other side of a disciplinary divide, has not ceased.

This session seeks to bring together various positions on the post-parametric environment, which will allow us to reflect generally on obsolescence, or which via reconsideration of obsolete diagnostic protocols, sensory thresholds, or representational schema in practice or allied fields clarifies the near and distant future.

• What forms of technology will bring parametric thinking and computing into relief?

• How have perceptual and representational regimes kept pace, or not, with computing and fabrication?

• What is the status of “environment” after the parametric?

Further guidelines will be updated periodically, including instructions for formatting and submitting papers for blind peer review. Please visit: https://www.acsa-arch.org/conferences/100.aspx . Acceptance or rejection of submissions is at the discretion of the topic chair and peer reviewers. Questions about the topic or about submissions may be emailed to: [email protected]