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After the lecture being relocated to another auditorium because of a broken water pipe it took half an hour to get Marcos Novaks Apple laptop connected to one of the beamers of the Technical University of Vienna. Such the future was able to meet the present, though. ;-)

In the lecture, that was structured in ‘game’, ‘set’ and ‘match’, Novak presented the ‘alloBio’ stuff from the Biennale di Venezia 2004 and some new themes like ‘alloAtomic’, dealing with fluid dynamics simulation.
A funny part of the presentation was a 3-D sculptural interaction with fMRI-data of Marcos Novaks brain (linked to a project that aims to find where the impression of ‘beauty’ is located in the brain).

A great deal of the lecture emphasized the theoretical motivation, explanation and justification of ‘transvergence’ as an attitude for architects. Transvergence in Novaks words means the projection of an interdisciplinary research vector into the ‘unknown’ and ‘unreachable’ and to use the outcome of such efforts for building the world in a new way.

Of course this is an old story. But architecture, particularly in Europe, is one of the slowest disciplines you can imagine. This is why I don’t want to stick to that kind of criticism. Novak is right, every idea developed in science and philosophy in the last 40 years really is new and exciting for architects. This may be the combined effect of gravity, laws, money – in short: reality – on the minds of people, who are occupied by hard and long work designing houses ;-)

In this spirit I want to recommend some further reading (optimistic literature from the USA), namely Steven Johnson, who writes in a modern, first-person style about recent scientific topics.

Interface Culture (1997), Emergence (2001), Mind Wide Open (with a vivid description of a fMRI-session) (2004), Everything Bad Is Good For You (2005).

Some people might be interested in software. 2005 I made the above image with QuaSZ, a Windows program by Terry W. Gintz. Price 30 $. Marcos Novak used Gaston, by Leo Fink, a freeware Mac application, for the alloBio stuff. Both programs are based on Quaternion Math to transform 4-dimensional graphs into neat little 3-D objects. For nice renderings you have to export them to modelling applications like 3dSMax or Maya etc.

Robert Pfaller: Die Illusionen der anderen: Über das Lustprinzip in der Kultur
Frankfurt am Main, 2002
edition suhrkamp 2279

Lese gerade dieses geniale Buch von Robert Pfaller, einem Linzer Philosophen. Es hebt sich von der Literatur der Game Studies und ihres üblicherweise oberflächlichen Namedroppings in Bezug auf Huizinga und Caillois wohltuend ab. Eingebettet in die fundierte Entwicklung einer Theorie der Einbildungen ohne Subjekt, liefert der Autor brilliante Analysen der Thesen Huizingas und der Caillois’schen Kritik daran. Empfehlenswert!

For all who can read German and who are interested in a unique view on Huizinga and Caillois: A must!
Whenever I’ll have the time, I will try to write an english summary. A pity, that there is no translation, yet.