This document discusses Dr. Martyn Dade-Robertson's introductory lecture titled "Loosing the Ballast of Materiality". The lecture is part of a series on architecture in the information age. It focuses on how architecture is losing its ties to the physical or material world as the digital world grows in influence. The lecture series explores topics like cyberspace, augmented space, and sentient space to understand how information technologies are impacting architecture.
26. …World One, he (Popper) identified with the
objective world of material, natural things
and their physical properties-with their
energy, and weight and motion and rest;
Benedikt, M.
Cyberspace First
Steps (MIT 1992)
27. World Two he identified with the
subjective world of consciousness – with
intentions, calculations, feelings, thoughts,
dreams, memories, and so on, in
individual minds.
Benedikt, M.
Cyberspace First
Steps (MIT 1992)
28. World Three, he said, is the world of
objects, real public structures which are
not-necessarily-intentional products of the
minds of living creatures interacting with
each other and with World 1.[Benedikt
1991: 4]
Benedikt, M.
Cyberspace First
Steps (MIT 1992)
29. …temples, cathedrals, marketplaces, courts, li
braries, theatres or
amphitheatres, letters, book pages, movie
reels, video tapes, CDs, newspapers, hard Benedikt, M.
Cyberspace First
disks, performance, art shows…are all Steps (MIT 1992)
physical manifestations-or should one say, the
physical components of objects which exist
more wholly in World Three…patterns of
information. [Benedikt 1991: 4]
45. 500 BC
Yates, F. A., The Art
of Memory (London:
Pimlico, 2001)
Simonides
46. 80 BC
Cicero M. T., Cicero
on the Orator
(London:
LOEB, 1948)
47. Sorabji, J., Aristotle
Aristotle's application of the word 'topos' to on Memory (London:
Gerald Duckworth &
general patterns of argument is the source of Company, 1972)
the name of this treatise, 'The Topics'. And this
use of the word, along with the related use in
rhetoric, is the source of the English
expression 'topic' and 'commonplace'. If the
above suggestions are correct, these words
will have come via Aristotle ultimately from the
system of place memory.
Aristotle, Topics
[Sorabji 1972: 32] (NuVision, 2005)
52. He pretends that all things that the human
Yates, F. A., The Art
mind can conceive and which we cannot see of Memory (London:
Pimlico, 2001)
with the corporeal eye, after being collected
together by diligent meditation, may be
expressed by certain corporeal signs in such a
way that the beholder may at once perceive
with his eyes everything which is otherwise
hidden in the depths of the human mind.
[Yates quoting Salvarolo 2001: 137]
53. The art of memory was, through the
development of the 16th century Lullist
Rossi, P., Logic and
tradition, also a „memorative logic‟, based on the Art of Memory
(London:
the belief that the placing of things had an Athlone, 2000)
inexorable association to the logical ordering
of knowledge, „in the perfect
correspondence between words …. and
things…, between logic and ontology’
[Rossi 2000: 61]. Though the art of memory
has been lost, relegated to the status of „an
intellectual fossil‟ [Rossi 2000: xxi], the
drive towards a universal language with which
to represent knowledge has persisted, first
through Aristotle and later through Leibniz.
58. 1800s
It is usually found that one and the same truth
may be put in different places according to the
terms it contains, and also according to the
mediate terms or causes upon which it Leibniz, G. W. New
Essays Concerning
depends and according to the inferences and Human
Understanding (New
results it may have. A simple categoric York:
proposition has only two terms; but a Macmillan, 1896)
hypothetic proposition may have four, not to
speak of complex statements.
[Leibniz 1896: 623]
62. When data of any sort are placed in
storage, they are filed alphabetically or Wardrip-Fruin, N. and
N. Montfort (eds), The
numerically and information is found (when it New Media Reader
(Cambridge Mass:
is) by tracing it down from subclass to MIT Press, 2003)
subclass, it can only appear in one
place…The human mind does not work in that
way. It operates by association. With one item
in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that
is suggested by the association of thoughts, in
accordance with some intricate web of trails
carried by the cells of the brain.
[Bush 1945: 105]
65. 1990s
[Information organised] as a network in which
nodes are text chunks (e.g. lists of
items, paragraphs, pages) and links are
relationships between nodes (e.g semantic Berners- Lee, T., Weaving
associations, expansions, definitions, example the Web: The Past, Present
and Future of the World
s…).
Wide Web by its Inventor
(New York: Texere, 2000)
[Rouet et al 1996: 3]
66. The Web‟s type of “chunk style” hypertext –
static links that allow the user to jump from
page to page-has been around for decades
and has been criticised for just as long. For
Nelson, chunk style hypertext is just one
subtype of hypertext, a term he introduced to
mean “a body of written or pictorial material
interconnected in such a complex way that it
could not conveniently be presented or
represented on paper.” The “hyper” in
Nelson‟s neologism does not mean “link” but
rather connotes extension and generality: cf.
“hyperspace”.
[Wardrip-Fruin and Monfort. 2003: 301]
