digital, drifting and the end of history

sci_arc hosted a provoking lecture from the italian theorist mario carpo wednesday night, titled above.

among the subjects he touched on was the notion of drift in creative production. mr. carpo discussed the nature of writing before and after the advent of the printing press. before, content was subject to progressive change - drift - through intended (editorial) and unintended (mistaken) revisions during the copying process, placing authorship in a constant state of flux. the printing press radically transformed the situation, de-coupling the creative act of writing from the mechanical act of reproduction. as a result, authorship became fixed.

mr. carpo traced a similar transformation in architecture through a treatise written by alberti at the outset of the renaissance. alberti sought to detach the architect from the guild-system and the tradition of the architect as master-builder (exemplified, for example, by the project of Brunelleschi's dome). rather than a collaborative, evolving process of design-build, the architect would take sole authorship of the design. the product, and the final form of the architecture, was a fully realized representation of the building. the builder then would implement (copy into physical form) the construction from these documents. this conception is very much familiar today, institutionalized in the record drawing set / bid contract structure of most projects.

the emergence of the networked society has called into question alberti's model of cultural production. in this environment, drift becomes possible, and is in fact (like the manuscript) unavoidable. open-source software development and the changing landscape of the music industry are prime examples of this emerging condition. for mr. carpo, the techno-centric cult of the individual, a defining characteristic of contemporary practice and discourse, is in its last throws -- glorious as they may be. a new paradigm is emerging: in exchange for giving up absolute authorship, the architect gains access to a far richer cultural vein, a vast network of real-time data, feedback and cultural flux.