2.9 Walk like an Egyptian. Think Like a Mesopotamian: Coding and Cities at the Dawn of Civilisation

“Mesopotamian civilisation behaved both like a living organism and as if it were governed by natural laws.” Kriwaczek, 2010.

Pictograms, including proto-cuneiform, were the preeminent visual mode of communication used in ancient Mesopotamia and in the wider Indo-European region during the Chalcolithic period [Late Neolithic, known as the Copper Age in the three-age system]. Whereas today, and senso lato for the sum of the post-pictogram period [i.e. the advent of the Phoenician alphabet], information is largely communicated as a unidirectional stream of individuated data units, which be they comprised letters or bits, words or bytes, are arranged, if not technically, then conceptually, in two dimensional space, the meaning thereof explicit with respect to the content’s spatiotemporal context, the peoples of the Chalcolithic conveyed information in a form of coding of which the nature was, in essence, four dimensional and bi- directional in construct. Whereas the script within this thesis, and indeed in all Western literary works since the arrival of syllabic writing systems, including their antecedent logosyllabic forms, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, necessitate the aforementioned structure, pictograms, including proto and early cuneiform did not. In the words of anthropologist Gwendolyn Leick, “Generally, the information could be distributed in random fashion on the tablet surface. There was no general direction in which to decode the signs” (Leick, 2002, p.42). Therein, unlike the contemporary written word, cuneiform may have been “encoded in a linguistically non-specific form”, thus sufficiently flexible as to be read by “ethnically and linguistically diverse” communities (Ibidem, p.43), thus a universal language millennia before the advent of computing codes, such as Hypertext Markup Language [HTML]. Bringing context thereto, we need consider how, more broadly, Indo-European peoples of the period communicated.

Long before the evolution of the written word, be they Homo sapiens, or other members of the genus Homo, early humans exchanged information through a rich assemblage of audio and visual mediums, of which some are hypothesised to have worked in unison. So ancient are some of these mediums as to pre-date the arrival of our species, for example while we know not the date of origin of spoken language, given that the anatomy of H.heidelbergensis evidences the species had capacity to hear human-like auditory patterns some several hundred thousand years ago, and the scientific consensus is that by <100 tya spoken language was “completely formed” (von Petzinger, 2016, p.4), one can state with reasonable assurance that by the Chalcolithic period, the spoken word, and derivatives thereof, including poetry and song, were the pre-eminent means of information exchange. The latter statement is supported by the fact that the earliest known literary works were written in poetry, hymn and verse, i.e. modes that lend themselves to auditory communication, examples thereof including all the above referenced Vedic, Greek, and Native Americans’ texts. Visual communications are similarly ancient in origin. For example, engraving emerged between 540 – 430 tya (Ibidem), and while we know not if the intention of the original act was to store or communicate information [i.e. notations], analysis of a compelling collection of archaeological artefacts suggests that the development thereof was, if not universally, at least in part established by the Upper Palaeolithic (Ibidem; Rappenglück, 2014; Bradshaw Foundation, 2015). Further communications mediums that were firmly established by 3 tya include colour symbolism, of which the date of origin is unknown, but potentially as early as 300 - 230 tya, painted image, currently dated to circa. 41 tya, and figurative art, dated to 40 tya (von Petzinger, 2016). In the words of paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger, symbolic art was born not in a vacuum, nor overnight, but of “fully modern people living in a cultural world overlying the natural one” (Ibidem, p. 115), the use of the term fully modern pertinent, for neurologically Upper Palaeolithic peoples were little different to contemporary humans, thus their use of symbols, and of communication in general is illustrative of how both the use and the context thereof is, like our species, evolving, as are our thought processes, thus thinking.

Since time immemorial, natural phenomenon have been utilised in codification and communication. For example, for millennia, forms of floriography have conveyed messages through the attribution of meaning to the type and arrangement of flowers. As relates to fire, smoke signalling is indigenous to numerous extant and extinct ancient cultures, including they of Aboriginal Australians, Native Americans, Classical Greece, and China’s Zhou Dynasty. However, humans aren’t the only species that can ‘decrypt’ smoke, and other signals that embed data on changes within their environment. Indeed, plants “are intimately connected” to their surroundings (Chamovitz, 2012, p.5), and both sense and process biochemical, thermodynamical, hydrological, and physical data around the circadian clock. Subsequent to Darwin’s early interrogations of the sensing and actuating processes of plants (1880), the field has evolved and expanded to influence innumerable domains, including computer science, engineering, robotics, and, central to this thesis, complexity theory, as expressed in several seminal works (Holland, 2014, 2002, 1994, 1992; Bentley and Corne, 2002; Mitchell, 1998, Mitchell et al, 1993; von Bertalanffy, 1969; von Neumann and Burks, 1967; Turing, 1952; Whitehead, 2015). “An ongoing revolution” (Mitchell, 1998, p.1), of which outputs are intertwined with the broader spectrum of transdisciplinary systems research, including evolutionary computation, as exemplified in Richard Dawkins’ Biomorph Land, which, a virtual territory within a software programme, simulated the processes of cumulative selection (2006), the potentialities for biologically informed, inspired, and/or integrative computing systems are akin to they of writing upon the advent of the Phonetic alphabet. Relatively embryonic biocomputing may be, but the legacy of several decades of development is an over-arching systems architecture and language sufficiently developed to support wide-ranging applications within the built environment.

Within architecture and urban design, both in analogue and digital, and organic and inorganic form, biocomputing has been extensively applied to form finding at the level of materials (Oxman, 2012, 2010; Iwamoto, 2009), structures (Brownell and Swackhamer, 2015; Dunn, 2012; Spiller and Armstrong, 2011; Menges and Ahlquist, 2011; Hensel et al, 2010, 2004; Reas and McWilliams, 2010; Hasdell, 2010; Garcia, 2009; Spiller, 2006; Hight and Perry, 2006; Frazer, 1995), cities (Verbes, 2014; Poletto and Pasquero, 2012; Gissen, 2010; Batty, 2007), and transport networks (Sharp and Graham, 2015; Armstrong and Adamatzky, 2013; Otto, 2011; Tero et al, 2010). However, the codification of building codes remains relatively unchartered terrain, with two of the foremost conceptually compelling essays to date they of Karl Chu (2004) and Edward Eigen (2004), who, in the words of the former, explored the “monadology of genetic architecture on the Turing Dimension” (Ibid, p. 96). But, Chu and Eigen interrogated not site-specific potentialities for biocomputing, instead considering generic genetic applications.

A study of which the foci is not a virtual biomorphic land, but real-world ‘pyromorphic’ wild-urban interface lands, which, as I type, are engulfed in fire- complexes so fierce as to be breaking records (Park, 2018; Sanders, 2017), the above cited works, together with the extensive body of literature referenced throughout this thesis, constitute conceptual building blocks as will be applied to what, in effect, is a hybrid of parameterization and simulation, in the sense that the paradigm in development is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but a fusion of both.

As scenes that have been likened to ‘hell’ unfold both within and beyond the case study regions (IBT, 2017), all the while, persons of wide-ranging professions, from politicians and policymakers more generally, to fire chiefs and foresters, architects and planners, journalists and media commentators, and more, heatedly dispute the causations and solutions to what has been coined ‘the wildfire problem’ (Gill et al, 2013) not, perhaps, since the outset of the inaugural Urban Revolution has it been so pertinent to reconsider the codification of building codes. Technically, as discussed later, biocomputing presents manifold means of monitoring the environment in real- time, thus empowering decision making, and at speeds as were unthinkable in times past. However, as has become abundantly clear in the past 24 months [19], information can be used for intentions both good and bad. Thus, today, as in UruKAgina’s age, data encryption, and not least as relates to codes and coding, and in all their many forms, remains not merely a useful, but in some regards, imperative tool.

Footnotes

[19] In reference to user-privacy breeches on the part of social media companies, such as Facebook, and the implications to western democracy.

Read the Literature Review in full here.

The thesis is also available in PDF format, downloadable in several parts on Academia and Researchgate.

Note that figures have been removed from the digital version hosted on this site, but are included in the PDFs available at the links above.

Citation: Sterry, M. L., (2018) Panarchistic Architecture: Building Wildland-Urban Interface Resilience to Wildfire through Design Thinking, Practice and Building Codes Modelled on Ecological Systems Theory. PhD Thesis, Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research [AVATAR] group, University of Greenwich, London.