Page 8 - META

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of the new paradigm, they are neither the origin nor the product. Therefore, the author’s concept of “meta-” constitutes a hybrid condition that implies an appreciation of the “pri- or” and the “subsequent”, not only in the sense of “post”, but also in the sense of “with” and “alongside”, based on the intermediate contemporary perspective. Finally the essay suggest that in order not to conflate meta-progress with just digital advance, we ought to look into the future of comprehensive research based on the origins of parametricism in architecture, based on the hypothetical existence of an equally rich parametric pre-digital theory and history that has been barely explored.
The essay entitled “Architecture in a Petri dish: co-programming Meta-Life in design through biointegration and synthetic biology” by Selenia Marinelli, doctoral student at DiAP (Dipartimento di Architettura e Progetto), Faculty of Architecture “Sapienza”, Uni- versity of Rome, Italy, touches upon ‘meta’ through the investigation of the concept of meta-life as a grey area between the animate and the inanimate, the natural and the en- gineered, the born and the built, in order to demonstrate how these entangled notions could be applied also as new design strategies. The essay suggests that the advent of syn- bio and bio-information as tools for architecture could in fact drastically change the way we conceive buildings as meta-living beings in ontological continuity with the biosphere. Fine illustrations of how biotechnology and synthetic biology are offered, and suggest the entanglement of contemporary architectural contemplation and practice to climate change and environmental decay.
Meta(re)presentations essay authored by Antonis Moras, PhD candidate at Aristotle Uni- versity of Thessaloniki, reviews the key literature on the notion of metarepresentations in fields beyond architecture. The essay is an attempt of rereading the conception of repre- sentations in the architectural domain. Two main categories of metarepresentations in ar- chitecture are proposed and depend on their effect on thinking representations; Content and context aware metarepresentations
Content aware metarepresentations are based on a value system and can be divided in two categories. The first one is characterized by standardization and selfreferentiality while the other one is structured as criticism by enabling referencing and quoting within content. Characteristic examples are modern and postmodern architecture. As the author argues “Context aware metarepresentations resemble the condition of monitoring a sys- tem by focusing on the relations between the different parts that temporarily constitute it as such. Characteristic examples are post-cybernetic and post-digital architectures”.
Verena Ziegler, doctoral student at Linz University of Arts and Design in Austria, in her es- say “InBetween – a post-digital turn – Crafting 4.0” discusses the “continuous beta” version of becoming as a way to describe the between space for the merging and coexistence of what used to be the ends of polarities and the dialectics of anthropocentrism. As Ziegler explains, post-digitality involves the physical dimensions of spatio-temporal engage- ments. This new ontological paradigm reconceptualizes digital technology through the experience of the human body and its senses, thus emphasizing form-taking, situational engagement and practice rather than symbolic, disembodied rationality. The emerging questions focus on ways in curiosity, playfulness, serendipity, emergence, discourse and collectivity, are encouraged. Furthermore, ways in constructing working methods without foregrounding and dividing the subject into an individual that already takes position are
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Maria Vogiatzaki
Meta