7.1.1 "Life," materialised as information and signified by the gene, displaces "Nature," preeminently embodied and signified by the old-fashioned organisms. From the point of view of the Gene, a self-replicating auto-generator, "the whole is not the sum of its parts, [but] the parts summarise the whole." (Haraway, 1998, pg. 183)

7.1.2 In 1944, Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961), an Austrian physicist who developed wave mechanics [1] and received a Nobel prize as a result, wrote a short book entitled What is Life? in which he advanced a hypothesis about the molecular structure of genes. This book stimulated biologists to think about genetics in novel ways and opened a new frontier of science-molecular biology. This new field unravelled the genetic code and ushered us into an age when we began perceiving our own physical architecture as 'information.' That same year, George R. Stibitz of the Bell Telephone laboratories produced the very first general-purpose, relay operated, digital computer. (Goldstein, 1993, pg. 115-116). We are now at the threshold of entering an age of biologically driven computers and can only anticipate that this will entail an enormous paradigm shift from industrial-based digital mechanics to ubiquitous computing that could become true extensions of our bodies. Perhaps when the most compelling question that has puzzled philosophers and scientists alike is answered-how complex structures evolve out of random collections of molecules-we will have no choice but to move to the next evolutionary stage.

7.1.3 Biologists such as Francesco Varela and Lynn Margulis are questioning what relationships our own bodily architecture and our societal organisations have to these underlying biological principles. An entire field of consciousness studies is questioning what we know now about neurones in our brain and their relationship to consciousness. The consideration of silicon chips linked into high-bandwidth channels as the neurones of our culture, looking to how networks have naturally evolved and comparing this to biological systems, is, at minimum, a fascinating mental exercise. Any network has two ingredients: nodes and connections. How these are designed and what the implications are is a very important question for information architects to ask themselves. Understanding some basic principals of nature and the various systems humans have devised to function in and control the natural world is essential.

7.1.4 As we have seen in chapter 5, great efforts are at work to map the human genome, to digitise the entire human body, as well as to digitise entire print libraries and other cultural artefacts. Donna Haraway, a cultural critic who frequently focuses on the implications of scientific practice, speaks about the new fetishism of mapping: "Map making itself, and the maps themselves, would inhabit a semiotic domain like the high-energy physicists' "culture of no culture," the world of non-tropic, the space of clarity and uncontaminated referentiality, the kingdom of rationality." (Haraway, 1998, pg. 185) Gene mapping, according to Haraway, is a particular kind of spatialisation, she calls 'corporealisation,' which she defines as "the interactions of humans and non-humans in the distributed, heterogeneous work processes of technoscience. . . . The work processes result in specific material-semiotic bodies-or natural-technical objects of knowledge and practice-such as cells, genes, organisms, viruses and ecosystems." (Haraway, 1998, pg. 186) Haraway, with a background in the sciences, has the unique ability to translate to the interested lay audiences current scientific concepts, developments, and innovations with a unique critical viewpoint.

7.1.5 But, as pointed out in chapter 2 when discussing the tenuous relationship of humanists and scientists, critical theorists largely speak a different language from the scientific community, and room for misunderstanding and indeed alienation is ample. Practising artists who use digital technologies as tools informed both by critical theory and the scientific community are in a unique position to offer suggestions, create prototypes, and enter into a discussion of possibilities. When moving into the realm of becoming an information architect, it is important to have a broad view of what exactly that means. This chapter examines the information architectures of nature that Haraway refers to and looks at the various informational topographies that are emerging in the biological sciences mapping the human body or the genome and the computer sciences mapping the information activities on the networks. Once again, I will turn to Buckminster Fuller to begin my exploration of information architecture. Two critical pieces of the puzzle for this thesis, Tensegrity and the Buckminsterfullerene, are not only important as principles to be considered when designing information architectures but offer a fascinating story that brings us back to the discussion of the Two Cultures. [top]