Play Among Books: A Symposium on Architecture and Information Spelled in Atom Letters

Abstract

Architecture and Information, abundance and connectivity, unsettling hierarchies. Clouds, streams, lists, indexes, pixels. What are they about and how do they shape the way we think about the world? How is coding changing the way in which we think about architecture? One way to approach this vast cloud is by thinking of coding as a literacy. Play Among Books wants to offer one fantastic scenario of what such a literacy might be about. Not by explaining or defining what it is, but by performing a Play Among Books. This play is an attempt to talk about architecture and information on the level adequate to abstractness, speed and breadth of today’s information technologies. It approaches architecture and information from an infinite flow of books. It strives to show a mode of handling objects as ambiguous and lively propositions, rather than finding their definitions. Play Among Books keeps concepts and books alive, open and implicit by placing them in the plenty, exposing them to different contexts, and taking into account their richness and beauty. In Play among Books, books start to open up to the world and grow. They become more, as one learns how they behave in different and new atmospheres. In this sense, coding as literacy becomes a way of approaching concepts and objects beyond specialised and disciplined perspectives, not by explaining and analysing them, but by indexing them in many manners, by taking snapshots of their informational faces, and by granting them intelligence. Play among Books consists out of two main parts. One part is the articulation of the Informational Instrument, and the other part is a performance with it. The performance, in itself, consists out of two plays, played in inverted manners. The first play talks about information in an intimate way, by going from the spectrality of concepts towards their articulations in books. The second play seeks for architecture in the infinite flow of books by approaching it in atom-letters. It goes from the flow towards a subtle articulation of characters and concepts. Together, both plays form an infinite spiral where one talks to books and learns with concepts. Books start to express their many faces. They can become a letter and a mood, encode the subjective and the objective, symbolise its quantities and qualities, change masks and dresses, produce paradoxes, and stay unsettled. Play Among Books is a symposium on architecture and information spelt in Atom-Letters.