Week 10 - Digital Fabrication and Robotics

In architecture today, the constantly evolving nature of digital fabrication and robotics is drastically changing the way in which we create the built environment around us, and Mark Wigley’s eulogy to the mouse explores the ‘power that such a discrete device can have on the human ecosystem, a seamless interface between body and brain that is still only to be dreamt of in architecture’ [1]. In order for the mouse to work it has to be ‘a part of my body and a part of the computer, binding two organisms into one’ [2]. It is a way of ‘linking organic and inorganic circuits’ [3] with simply a thin wire. The mouse as a ‘potent prosthetic’ [4], it ‘sustains a new body able to move in new ways, in new spaces, starting with the sense that one is moving through the seemingly virtual space of the computer’ [5]. This simple gesture of a mouse is changing the people using it and its surroundings. ‘You can be affected by a prosthetic before using it, after using it, or without ever using it’ [6]. There is this notion that ‘to reach out to the world is to simultaneously pull the world inside’ [7]. In the future of architecture and the ever changing role technology is playing, the mouse is playing a key role, ‘systematically reconfiguring our relationships to signals, to circuitry in general, irreversibly expanding the human ecosystem out into the digital environment simultaneously bringing the digital inside the house, the personal space and even the body itself’ [8]. ‘The human would become the prosthetic attachment to the machine organism before a final seamless blending of the two’ [9].

[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] Wigley, M. (2010). "The Architecture of the Mouse." Architectural Design: EcoRedux: Design Remedies for an Ailing Planet 80(6): 50-57