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The studio will look at current and future digital
technologies / softwares, which are applied in the study for global simulations
and control of weather systems. The students will design a monitoring
station and residence for a 24 hour 'scientist in residence'.
The station will be located either in Alaska or Iceland, only vast ice caps and/or
deserts have high enough atmospheric clarity to allow for uninterrupted
satellite connections. Real-time
information The
melting of the ice-cap, the hole in the ozone layer, larger and larger wildfires;
all mentioned in a recent issues of major newspapers, show the urgency of
the monitoring and studying emerging weather patterns on a global scale.
Institutions like TAO (the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean network monitoring El Nina
and La Nina), NCAR (The National Center for Atmospheric Research), NASA and the
International Tsunami Center (monitoring monstrous waves caused by undersea earthquakes),
are modeling the changes in climate, and consequences for habitats. They are currently
all interconnected and directly connected to GPS and satellite networks.
These large scale global networks consist of numerous small monitoring nodes,
constantly updating and emitting real-time information to the stations.
They thus predict, and hopefully prevent, large scale disasters from natural phenomena.
Interesting to note: any natural occurrence evolves in three stages; generation,
propagation and inundation. One needs to take measure
in the generation stage (Tsunamis have a reach of 100 km and longer) in order
to have a chance to take measure. Weather
modelling In
science, one of the subcultures is the meteorology branch of mathematics, where
weather simulation is modelled and represented in data scapes. Originally
chosen as an 'ideal computer modeling project' by John von Neumann in the
Princeton Institute for advanced studies (1950), the study of weather patterns
lead to being one of the first mapped out computer-generated weather data. The
computation time for a 24 hour forecast was 24 hours........something which is
now updated every hour. The main problem they encountered was; how to represent
3- or 4- dimensional information on a 2 dimensional plane? Corporation The
studio will take on the challenge to investigate/analyze these
complex behaviors of the systems represented in animated datascapes. This can
directly inform the behaviour and growth pattern of the station as a corporation;
as Kevin Kelly notes; more recently started companies
are not unlike organisms evolving in an ecosystem. He
calls these - biomes - rich,
interactive and highly flexible shapes. So here the weather monitoring station
no longer functions as a government-funded institution, but instead as a dynamically
developing entity, self- sufficient and independent. An indication of- and
an investigation in the space-time relationship. The students will develop this
into a concept on how to analyze, orient and organize the weather monitoring station
and its other; the residence for the scientist. This complex will form one
of the interactive nodes, or 'biomes' in the global network of monitoring stations.
This tendency;
the breaking up from large scale operations into a swarm of smaller individual
units, was discussed by futurist Allen Toffler : 'the era of mass society is over'.
No more mass production, mass consumption, mass entertainment - But a world
of demassified niches, niche production, niche world. A society of subcultures,
with net-centric alternatives. The culture of the middle, which fulfills the
need of commerce - connected through electronic communication space
- opens a new market approach. Simulated
Weather Systems Edward
Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist at MIT, already in the 1960-ies built
a primitive computer simulation system to model weather behavior; which he called
'an orderly disorder'. Here the minutest disruption would result in large scale
distortions. Lorenz found that weather behaves, as a system, in an aperiodic and
sensitive dependent way. He also called this the 'butterfly
effect' a technical name for a form of chaos, which requires
a sensitive dependence on the initial conditions. He found that because of the
large distortions only short term weather predictions were accurate, long
term predictions turned into the 'probability' that it may happen. Any chain
of events can have a point of crisis that will magnify small changes - in chaos
such points are everywhere. By looking for the simplest way to study complex behaviors;
he introduced 3 non-linear equations, played over and over again, series which
started to reveal unexpected patterns, a new kind of order within an unpredictable
pattern....... The Lorenz attractor became the start of Chaos theory, then
not understood, but developed and simulated decades later. Method The
studio will start with an analytical research on the internet in emerging technologies,
simulation methods and mappings of dynamic weather patterns. This will create
a digital library of background information, which will start to discuss the behavior
of dynamic, organic systems. A parallel will then be pulled to the newly discussed
organic behaviours of the modern corporations. The Weather Monitoring Station. Winka
Dubbeldam Reading
List 1.
Mapping the New Millennium Stephen
Hall
Chapter 5: "Plausible Fortunes" 2.
Chaos Gleieck
chapter 1: "Making a new science" 3.
New Rules for a new Economy Kevin
Kelly 4.
Scientific American issue May 1999 Frank
Gonzalez "Tsunami" 5.
Thousand Plateaus Deleuze
and Guattari "Rhizome" 6.
Late Modern Capitalism Frederic
Jameson "The Cognitive Map" 7.
The rise of a Network Society Manuel
Castells 8.
Bionomics, Economy as Ecosystem Michael
Rothschild 9.
The third Wave Alvin
Toffler
LINKS: Gipsy
Trial Residence
Is
architecture dynamic.... or not? Winka
Dubbledam Archi-Tectonics
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[05-2003] |
