#longform ### **Software As A Project** ## 2018 [[Software]] has become the meta-medium of architectural design, a common cognitive and representational toolset with which designers see, engage and construct the [[World]]. At the same time, software is a cultural [[Apparatus]], a regime that shapes [[Authorship]], the 'abyss that stares back'. The invisible hand of the software [[Default]] has a central role in constructing our collective representations of [[Space]]. The text presents an idea of a critical software practice for architectural design and education, that explores alternative ways to engage with the software regime through strategies of disruption and [[Play]]. Eventually, the ethos of play might be our last resort in engaging with the coming regime of cognitive technologies that will emerge through machine learning and [[AI]]. What do we talk about when we talk about software? Our culture often falls back onto a position that states: “It doesn’t matter what you use, as long as it works”. We need to ask the obvious question: what is it that works, and is that the only thing that works? What is being produced through the modeling? What else is at work, unseen, unchecked but all-pervasive? First, I would like to do away with such a utilitarian, naive approach to software. Yes, it is a tool, but as we know, tools shape the way we think. It is one thing to talk about limitations/constraints and another to understand the cognitive modeling that software does, and to take that as a possibly productive problem. ~~More importantly , this particular tool is tied to a very special part of cognition, which is imagination. It sounds cheesy but I mean it literally: our tools produce the boundaries of our imagination.~~ For architectural design, software is not simply a passive medium, as it is not a hammer, or a pen, it is easily the most complex set of thinking tools humanity has ever invented. Similarly, software interfaces are arguably the most powerful images in history, due to their capacity to affect reality in real time. They are the at the same time the most technically evolved type of image and a realization of medieval dreams of magic and alchemy. Interfaces are the actually working diagrams and actually potent magical devices, all wrapped into one cultural form. Software does not simply speed up design procedures, it augments, frames and eventually changes them. Software is ideological, it has content as well as form. Software is a thinking tool, but it is also a tool that embeds a certain culture, aesthetic and politics in ways not easily graspable, with potentially lethal effects. Software has not only replaced traditional mediums for designing architecture, it has brought its own specificity and bias, and this is why its cultural production demands a serious examination. Software embeds it defaults into the creative act, and it has taken over the image space of architecture. Before there is a space within the design of a building, there is an implied space afforded by the software, the default space of software. In this way, software captures, frames and describes the space of the possible for architectural design. Can we imagine modes of resistance to the software regime? These ‘big picture’ conceptual questions are at the core of the educational work of Damjan Jovanovic, who makes experimental software in order to establish a technical platform, speculate on the cultural and aesthetic positions and propose a teaching syllabus. Software does not break, it is always already broken, unfinished and in the state of change. It always does more than called for. When thinking about software, we should avoid oversimplification and banal insisting on the so called binary nature of it etc. Yes, all computers at the moment run on discrete mathematics, and even continuous functions are internally represented as discrete mathematics. But, It is the same as with cinema - cinema uses discrete images to produce a continuous effect, and it is thus both discrete and continuous, depending on scale. Most importantly, how a mathematical model look like may have no relation whatsoever with the way it was conceived in code. There is always a gap between a model and its description, and its description and its interpretation. ~~the main one for architecture being default space. Software~~ First I should say that I am interested in architecture and design insofar it is a cultural practice, and especially a cognitive practice, a practice that employs a very special kind of modeling and produces a very specific new kind of real. Modeling and the default. Can we imagine modes of resistance to the software regime, modes of empowerment that operate through direct engagement with software and not refusal and false criticality? I think that a cognitive revolution is coming, and it is already happening. Design as we understand it and as we know it from our own history might be one of the only possible modes of engagement with it. In order to do this, we have to go through technology, partner up with technology, not naively pretend we can be outside of it, or even worse, assume that we can control it through an imposition of a cultural narrative.