- And before this, the network city was already well understood. The Romans, and the informational city by French pneumatic tube engineers who largely perfected the point-to-point packet, switched distribution analog information units. By the 1960s, continental-scale computational network systems, such as the SAGE early warning system, suggested more comprehensive transformations of urban pathways and partitions according to information processing perspectives, especially in cinema and architecture. A short and scattered list might include Jean-Luc Godard ’ s Alpha 60 (1965), overseeing a future Paris in Alphaville; Dennis Crompton ’ s Computer City (1964); and John McHale ’ s 2000+ (1967). All are part of a milieu popularized by Marshall McLuhan ’ s publication of Understanding Media in 1964, which made the redefinition of the city into a landscape of smart networks, informational prosthesis, a cocktail party commonplace. That figure of the city, less a vast industrial machine than an unfolding collective sensory apparatus, couched many of the important cinematic projects of the time, from Stan Van Der Beek intermedia experiments to Gene Youngblood ’ s expanded cinema; they explored the architectural potential of cinema as an architectural material and the urban environment as a cinematic surface. See also the early music video for Pierre Henry, “ Psyche Rock, ” 1967, http:// www.dailymotion.com/video/xcjrav\_pierre-henry-psyche-rock\_music.
- The ambition of the BioBricks Foundation is to introduce general-purpose modular blocks of DNA for do-it-yourself biotechnologists. See “ About BioBricks Foundation, ” http://biobricks.org/ about-foundation/.
- The resolution of real events in the physical world will be determined as much by operations made through software as not, and from within the substance of that real world, perhaps processed by nanometric smart motes and their yet-to-be-invented atom-scale effectors, to remote sensing and management through various sensors and interfaces. If so, then the implicit or explicit association of the digital with the virtual and the virtual with the immaterial or unphysical (and, conversely, the analog with the actual, material, and physical) is well beyond the point of impasse. More pressing is the physicality of computing and the materiality of the virtual and the actuality of digital/analog as state conditions of the same matter. This holds for architectural and urban-scale matter as much as any other, and so the question of architecture at the edge of physicality is less interesting if it underwrites interest and evaporation of interest in physical systems through a relentless investment in computation as a numinous and gnostic portal to pure algorithmic autonomy, or some opposite thereof. Better to serve the physicalization of urban material as the computational figuration of what we used to call virtual toward the physical, toward data in-the-wild and as-the-wild.
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