7.1.2 Panoptical Permutations: From Computing to Permuting

“Over centuries, a single fungus can cover many square miles and network an entire forest. The fungal connections transmit signals from one tree to the next, helping trees exchange news about insects, drought, and other dangers”. Wohllenben, 2015.

Whereas humans compute, plants permute. Put simply, as you read this text your sensory organs are sending a stream of electronic signals via your nervous system to the epicentre thereof, which then utilizes some of its processing power to analyse said data. Although endowed with traits that enable them to ‘see’, ‘smell’, ‘feel’, and ‘hear’ their environment (Chamovitz, 2012), absent of a brain, plants, and their offspring, seeds, process sensory information in decentralised fashion [Fig. 80] (Fry, 2016; Kesseler and Stuppy, 2006). Thus, theirs is a very different kind of ‘intelligence’.

While ‘smart’ has become a ubiquitous term in the future cities debate, definitions thereof are highly ambiguous. However, ambiguity doesn’t wash in the WUI, and more specifically, whereupon a wildfire of such intensity as could incinerate a building and its abiotic and biotic contents in a matter of minutes is fast approaching. The bandwidth for cognitive dissonance zero, all such data to be utilised in the development of a Panarchistic architectural and urban design paradigm need be as neutral in its interpretation as that of the sensory organs of fire-adapted plant species. Impossible? Not necessarily.

Evolution a process not an event, the migration from centralised information processing, and the inherent interpretive bias therein, will be not momentary. But, as wide-ranging developments both within, and beyond architecture and urban design evidence, that journey is already underway:

Environmental Sensing, Actuating, and Analysis

An idea inherent in several ancient belief systems, including Hinduism [137], and anticipated in science fiction works including James Cameron’s 2009 epic Avatar [138], the notion of flora as axis mundi is not new. However, fiction is turning to fact, as plants become utilised as environmental sensors by means of monitoring temperature, humidity, and more [Fig. 81]. Pivotal projects towards building a Living Internet of Things [LIOT] include PLants Employed As SEnsor Devices [PLEASED] (European Commission, 2015), which researched plant sensory response to stimuli, including the presence of flames (Manzella et al, 2013), with the aim of advancing understanding of the electronic signals emitted in response thereto. More recently, ‘wearables’ have migrated from humans to plants, as flexible graphene-oxide sensors that affix to Poaceae family members are used to monitor biomass state-changes, including water vapour release (Krapfl, 2018). While their findings are yet to be published, developers of the PlanIT Urban Operating SystemTM, it being the most technically-advanced IOT infrastructure developed to date, Living PlanIT (www.living-planit.com) have made significant advances in bio-sensing and analysis (Steve Lewis, Living PlanIT Founder, personal communication, 2018). Put succinctly, experimental research in plant sensing in combination with their pre-existing capabilities in data acquisition and processing at the city-to-regional-scale make the leap to a real-world biological axis mundi a short one. More rudimentary devices include commercially available sensors that monitor soil hydrology by means of indicating plant hydration (Gebhart, 2014), which in fire ecology translates to fuel-state. Thus, though presently the market for such goods is targeted to they so absent of understanding of biology as to require an app to tell them when to water their pot plants, whereupon use thereof was transferred to environmental monitoring, data extrapolated therefrom could contribute to saving more than Boston ferns and Aspidistras. Additionally, recent advances in satellite-enabled tracking of animal movements and migrations (Teare, 2018) present the potential to extend the LIOT’s remit from local to global. Common in indigenous cultures in fire-prone regions, integration of observation of faunal movements into natural hazard monitoring has heritage so ancient as to predate the written record.

Architecturally, up-to-the-minute data on wildfire spread rate, direction, level within the biomass-strata [i.e. ground, surface, or canopy], intensity, and behaviour more generally, could enable responses that help save lives and/or property. For example, whereupon structures within the WUI were networked in a fashion equivocal to a mycorrhizal network in a forest, thus gathered and exchanged environmental data in real time, insights garnered therefrom could help take the guesswork out planning escape routes, while also activating structural and other wildfire defences, such as automated closure of windows, vents, and other openings through which embers could enter, and thereon ignite a building.

The viability of creating a hybridized human and biological IOT system is growing, literally, by the day. Conveyed conceptually in Diana Scherer’s Rootkit (Manaugh, 2016) experimentally, the computational potentialities of non-human intelligence have so far extended to organisms including bacterium, mycorrhizal fungi, slime moulds, bioluminescent phytoplankton, algae, ants, silk moths, and arachnids, amongst others (Park, 2018; Armstrong and Ferracina, 2013; Poletto and Pasquero, 2012). Structurally, projects indicative of the capacity of buildings and their component parts to respond to environmental cues include RVTR’s Straus Project, which an interior envelope system reconfigures its form in response to atmospheric change including variations in heat, carbon dioxide, and pollutants; Future Cities Lab’s Hydramax, which utilises shape-memory alloys and building-scale robotics to react to “daily changes in weather and occupation” (Brownell and Swackhamer, 2015, p.80); DOSU Studio’s Bloom, which harnesses the “contrasting coefficients of thermal expansion” (Ibid, p. 116) within its bimetallic materiality to shape-shift in response to changing temperature gradients; Lidia Badarnah Kadri’s explorations in environmentally-responsive biomimetic building envelopes (2012); and Menges, Krieg, and Reichert’s HygroSkin, which a timber pavilion inspired by the cones of a member of the Pinus family, features apertures that open and close as humidity levels rise and fall. Their environmental-responses triggered by material state-changes, Bloom and HygroSkin embody the essence of architectural permuting not computing, in that their intelligence is structurally distributed not centralised.

Data Storage

Descartes Labs’ 5m gigabytes of satellite imagery is but a drop in the global digital data storage ocean. Estimated to reach 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020 (Extance, 2016), should the present growth rate sustain, by 2040 demand could exceed supply of microchip-grade silicon 10-100 times over (Ibid). But, even whereupon supply met demand, the limited life-span of hard disks, and no less than in the event of fires, floods, and other natural hazards, has led leaders within the data storage community to conclude, in words of Microsoft Research, “now is the time for computer architects to consider incorporating biomolecules as an integral part of computer design” (2015, online).

DNA data storage so compact that the entire human genome fits into a cell “invisible to the naked eye” (Extance, 2016), theoretically, 1 billion gigabytes of data could be stored in 1mm3 (Microsoft Research, 2015). Bringing a sense of scale thereto, computational neuroscientist David Markowitz estimates that “the world’s storage needs could be met by about a kilogram of DNA” whereupon data was stored as compactly as in the genes of Escherichia coli bacterium [E.coli] (Extance, 2016). Digital data was first encoded in DNA in 1988, when bioart pioneer Joe Davis, in collaboration with molecular biologist Dana Boyd created an 18-base pair message titled Microvenus, which ‘scripted’ in E.coli, contained a 35 bits image of a Germanic rune representative of life and “the female earth” (Agapakis, 2012). Since then, Microsoft Research have successfully stored items including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [and in over 100 languages], over 100 Project Guttenberg books, including some of those that are referenced in this thesis, and a seed databank in DNA, while also demonstrating that file recovery can be achieved with “no errors, using a random access approach” (Organick et al, 2018, p.242).

In addition to space-saving, DNA data storage is orders of magnitude more energy- efficient than that of current generation data centres, and considerably more durable: currently, Microsoft Research estimate DNA data storage half-life of over 500 years (2015). However, in theory, the duration thereof could extend to howsoever long DNA remains intact, which if frozen could extend to hundreds of thousands of years, or, if living tissue could extend indefinitely, as evidenced by the genome of Ginkgo biloba, of which the overall morphology and wider functional traits has remained stable for over 200 million years. Might the storage device of [human] choice of the future be not a microchip, but a seed?

DNA data storage in its authentic not synthetic form fundamental to fire-adapted species’ modes of enduring, evading, and resisting persistence, the transition from ‘tech’ to ‘biotech’ sensors, actuators, computing, storage, and networks [Fig. 82] will be central to the development of Panarchistic architecture and urban design. As evidenced by the examples above, such is the speed of advancement in biocomputing as to warrant the speculations and fictions that follow nesting their narratives therein.

>Continue to Chapter 7.1.3 here.

Footnotes

[137] In reference to the Tree of Life.

[138] In reference to the Tree of Souls.

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.