project12:Journal

Mandy Haakmeester
Productieleidering Programmering, Stichting NDSM Werf

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On a weekday visit to the Kunststad at the NDSM Werf, you may find many designers and artists hard at work, or none at all. However, in a cosy studio within the Kunststad, you will find Many Haakmeester, the festival organiser of NDSM Werf.

In a brief exchange of words, she explains that the absence of artists in the Kunststad is that many of the designers may be out in the city organising their exhibitions, putting on plays or just working on their own projects elsewhere. Most designers work at the Kunststad during their free time, developing new ideas or completing existing projects.

The greatest benefit of having a studio space in the Kunststad, she added, is the cheap rent. In addition, the big open spaces allow many of the artists to work and display their sculptures outside their studio, proving a glimpse to other creative agents on their project. This tends to spark inspiration in others or potentially a collaboration with other designers. Furthermore, the variety of creative agents within the Kunststad allows the designers to discuss and tap on the expertise of other tenants.

As for Mandy, she is in charge of organising festivals in the NDSM Werf, such as the Picnic Festival in September 2011 and the IJ Hall in February 2012, the largest flea market in the Netherlands. These festivals bring all kinds of people to NDSM Werf, exploring the creativity of the kunststad and simply enjoying the gathering in the big open space.

The next event will be the Queen's Birthday Festival, on 30 April 2012. Be sure to turn up in orange! Click here for the official page of NDSM Werf or here for the Facebook fanpage. Remember to check their prototag to follow their story!

Rick
Bar Attendant at Noorderlicht Cafe

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One of the quaint buildings in the NDSM Werf is the Noorderlicht Cafe, a great place to grab a bite or just relax after a hard day at work. In here, the friendly staff attends to you with a smile that will brighten up your cold day.

Rick, a bar attendant who has been working in the Noorderlicht Cafe for a year, tells us about the delight in working at the NDSM Werf. Although it is taxing to work in the cafe, he gets to meet a lot of interesting artists and designers who regularly visits the Cafe during lunch time.

In addition, the Noorderlicht Cafe also organises small parties during certain nights, playing live music, screening films outside or having a camp fire to enjoy the outdoors. Not only does Noorderlicht Cafe prides itself on the food they serve, they also infuse a sense of creative and open culture to its customers, embracing the creativeness that is of the NDSM Werf.

Click here for the official page of Noorderlicht Cafe. Remember to check their prototag to follow their story!

Notes
Complex interaction only needs 1 simply rule
Spatial Computing = Interactive Environments + Collective Desire
Decentralized Systems: Simple rules leading to intricate emergent behavior

Rhino Commands
Surface Experiment: Array || FlowAlongSurface
Mobius Strip Experiment: Twist || Bend || ExtractSurface || CageEdit || BoundingBox
Folding Experiment: FoldFace || Smash
Surface Analysis: Divide || SurfacePoint || CurvatureAnalysis

Part One
Complexity is a word that has frequently appeared in critical accounts of metropolitan space, but there are really two kinds of complexity fundamental to the city, two experiences with very different implications for the individuals trying to make sense of them. There is, first, the more conventional sense of complexity as sensory overload, the city stretching the human nervous system to its very extremes, and in the process teaching it a new series of reflexes - and leading the way for a complementary series of aesthetic values, which develop out like a scab around the original wound. (page 38)

There is also the sense of complexity as a self-organising system - more Santa Fe Institute than Frankfurt School. This sort of complexity lives up one level: it describes the system of the city itself, and not its experiential reception by the city dweller. The city is complex because it overwhelms, yes, but also because it has a coherent personality, a personality that self-organises out of millions of individual decisions, a global order built out of local interactions. This is the ‘systematic’ complexity that Engels glimpsed on the boulevards of Manchester: not the overland and anarchy he documented elsewhere ,but instead a strange kind of order, a pattern in the streets that furthered the political values of Manchester’s elite without being deliberately planned by them. (page 39)

Understood in the most abstract sense, what Frederich Engels observed are patterns in the urban landscape, visible because they have a repeated structure that distinguishes them from the pure noise you might naturally associate with an unplanned city. They are patterns of human movement and decision-making that have been etched into the texture of city blocks, patterns that are then fed back to the Manchester residents themselves, altering their subsequent decisions. (page 40)

The history of urbanism is also the story of more muted signs, built by the collective behaviour of smaller groups and rarely detected by outsiders. (page 41)

Jane Jacob’s Death and Life: She conveyed a vision of the city as far more than the sum of its residents - closer to a living organism, capable of adaptive change. “Vital cities have marvellous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties,”. (page 51)

The software, Tracker, had evolved an entire population of expert trail-followers, despite the fact that David Jefferson and Chuck Taylor had endowed their first generation of ants with no skills whatsoever. Rather than engineer a solution to the trail-following problem, the two UCLA professors had evolved a solution; they had created a random pool of possible programs, then built a feedback mechanism that allowed more successful programs to emerge. In fact, the evolved programs were so successful that they’d developed solutions custom-tailored to their environments. (page 62)
 

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Part Two
Call it swarm logic: ten thousand ants - each limited to a meagre vocabulary of pheromones and minimal cognitive skills - collectively engage in nuanced and improvisational problem-solving. (page 74)

Local turns out to be the key term in understanding the power of swarm logic. We see emergent behaviour in systems like ant colonies when the individual agents in the system pay attention to their immediate neighbours rather than wait for orders from above. They think locally and act locally, but their collective action produces global behaviour (page 74)

If you’re building a system designed to learn from the ground level, a system where macro-intelligence and adaptability derive from local knowledge, there are five fundamental principles you need to follow. Gordon’s harvester ants showcase all of them at work: (page 77 - 79)

More is different - This old slogan of complexity theory actually has two meanings that are relevant to our ant colonies. First the statistical nature of ant interaction demands that there be a critical mass of ants for the colony to make intelligent assessments of its global state. Ten ants roaming across the desert floor will not be able to accurately judge the overall need for foragers or nest-builders, but two thousand will do the job admirably. “More is different” also applies to the distinction between micro-motives and macro-behaviour: individual ants don’t “know” that they’re prioritising pathways between different food sources when they lay down a pheromone gradient near a pile of nutritious seeds. In fact, if we only studied individual ants in isolation, we’d have no way of knowing that those chemical secretions were part of an overall effort to create a mass distribution line, carrying comparatively huge quantities of food back to the nest. It’s only by observing the entire system at work that the global behaviour becomes apparent.

Ignorance is useful - The simplicity of the ant language - and the relative stupidity of the individual ants - is, as the computer programmers say, a feature not a bug. Emergent systems can grow unwieldy when their component parts become excessively complicated. Better to build a densely interconnected system with simple elements, and let more sophisticated behaviour trickle up. (That’s one reason why computer chips traffic in the streamlined language of zeros and ones.) Having individual agents capable of directly assessing the overall state of the system can be a real liability in swarm logic, for the same reason that you don’t want one of the neurones in your brain to suddenly become sentient.

Encourage random encounters - Decentralised systems such as ant colonies rely heavily on the random interactions of ants exploring a given space without any predefined orders. Their encounters with other ants are individually arbitrary, but because there are so many individuals in the system, those encounters eventually allow the individuals to gauge and alter the macro-state of the system itself. Without those haphazard encounters, the colony wouldn’t be capable of stumbling across new food sources or of adapting to new environmental conditions.

Look for patterns in the signs - While the ants don’t need an extensive vocabulary and are incapable of syntactical formulations, they do rely heavily on patterns in the semiochemicals they detect. A gradient in a pheromone trail leads them toward a food source, while encountering a high ratio of nest-builders to foragers encourages them to switch tasks. This knack for pattern detection allows meta-information to circulate through the colony mind: signs about signs. Smelling the pheromones of a single forager ant means little, but smelling the pheromones of fifty foragers in the space of an hour imparts information about the global state of the colony.

Pay attention to your neighbours - This may well be the most important lessons that the ants have to give us, and the one with the most far-reaching consequences. You can restate it as “Local information can lead to global wisdom.” The primary mechanism of swarm logic is the interaction between neighbouring ants in the field: ants stumbling across each other, or each other’s pheromone trails, while patrolling the area around the nest. Adding ants to the overall system will generate more interactions between neighbours and will consequently enable the colony itself to solve problems and regulate itself more effectively. Without neighbouring ants stumbling across one another, colonies would be just a senseless assemblage of individual organisms - a swarm without logic.

This is the secret of self-assembly: cell collectives emerge because each cell looks to its neighbours for cues about how to behave. Those cues directly control what biologists call “gene expression”; they’re the cheat sheet that enables each cell to figure out which segment of DNA to consult for its instructions. It’s a kind of microscopic herd mentality: a cell looks around to its neighbours and finds that they’re all working away steadily at creating an eardrum or a heart valve, which in turn causes the cell to start labouring away at the same task. (page 86)

Paul Krugman’s 1995 lectures, “The Self-Organising Economy”, include a remarkably simple mathematical model that can account for the “polycentric, plum-pudding pattern of the modern metropolis”. Krugman’s system assumes a simplified city made up only of businesses, each of which makes a decision about where to locate itself based on the location of other businesses. Some centripetal forces draw businesses closer to one another (because firms may want to share a customer base or other local services), and some centrifugal forces drive businesses farther apart (because firms compete for labor, land, and in some cases customers). Within that environment, Krugman’s model relies on 2 primary axioms: (page 89 - 90)

1. There must be a tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces, with neither too strong
2. The range of the centripetal forces must be shorter than that of the centrifugal forces: business must like to have other businesses nearby, but dislike having them a little way away

There are manifest purposes to a city - reasons for being that its citizens are usually aware of: they come for the protection of the walled city, or the open trade of the marketplace. But cities have a latent purpose as well: to function as information storage and retrieval devices. Cities bring minds together and put them into coherent slots. Ideas and goods flow readily within clusters, leading to productive cross-pollination, ensuring that good ideas don’t die out in rural isolation. (page 108)