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Technology is the application of scientific principles to the problems of everyday living. It is an ability of no other species but humans; a weaver-bird's nest or a honeycomb, for example, are constructed but not planned, and there is a perceptible difference in nature between a finch using a twig to gouge insects out of a tree and a human being devising a tool for the same purpose. Technology has always been considered a measure of the process of civilisation but is not distracted by the novelty of this process.I believe it is important to apply the use of digital tools to further evolve spatial parameters and restrictions in order to investigate the possibilities of form and response and to determine whether the digital formations are informed by the structure of code. Computation¹ takes place in time. As a set of instructions, programming is fundamentally procedural, and its complex structures still return us to an underlying sense of linearity. With generative algorithms² and the breeding of agent-based systems, we come to think of the digital as being sited within timeframes more similar to a biological time. This computational complexity is more bound to the time of nature, the restless ticking of cell division or the flickering of heart-rate variability. These models grow rather than move their programmed script. Acting as an artificial DNA, the genetic algorithms can simulate thousands of years of evolution in a few moments. The difference, as with any type of mimicry from natural to computational, is in the inconsistencies of nature, the imperfections and interruptions, the little deaths that occur in natural conditions, which need to be remembered and not simply choreographed into code. Computers are more than a tool but still need to be stripped of their mythological veneer in order to further indicate the extensive possibilities they offer. As necessary as these exercises are, it is easy to lose track of how they in turn can evolve, be inhabited or respond to scale, orientation and human appropriation. My fear with this comparison between the computational and the biological is that the identity of such research may become larger than the intention. In order for strategies for self-organisation and intelligence to be successful as intelligent tools for developing urban strategies, we must not isolate these approaches, but rather allow for a dialogue between digital and social narratives.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-7091-0816-1_10

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