Re: architecture in cyberspace?

The makings of electromagnetic architecture as humans,
humans as e-arch, androids, are available and in use, to
recall Brian's earlier musings.

Some of the simplist are those like the venerable iron lung, the
dialysis machine, the pacemaker. A step up in complexity are
space modules, deep sea divers (saw a Japanese beauty today
at the American Museum of Natural History), offshore drilling
platforms (maybe the most creative -- and expensive --
architecture in the world today, truly, literally, world-class), and
forest canopy-supported web-encampments (air-lifted into place
and accessible and supplied only by helicopter), around the
world balloons, nuclear submarines.

Higher still in the complexity-android chain are the underground
bunkers for military, government and secret research laboratories
which have all-year environments, totally sensored internally
and maximally watchful of the threatening universe, from the earth's
core to distant space, from psychological profiles of world leaders
to counterintelligence tracking of every person seen as enemy.

Perhaps the highest step, as far as the public knows, are the terawatt
smashers being built in Switzerland and elsewhere, the most expensive
gadgets ever built, and their architecture of electromagnetism is unearthly,
a devil's brew of experimental physics, big science, subterranean
engineering, intricate multi-national funding and treaty-making, public
relations and wooly education, state vanity, and other grand expenditures
once invested in funerary pyramids, temples, palaces, cathedrals,
and, lately, mansions galore of pointless grandiosity -- all the latter

of which now are not much more than costly imitations of mobile
homes. The mobile home, itself, is an android for the masses,
not quite as comfy as the snub apartments behind the cab of an
18-wheeler android, the $500,000 Bluebird road bus of a hot
rock band.

Simulated nuclear explosions appear to be the most advanced use
of computers though we don't know if they are also modelling the
destruction of Earth -- as viewed from a timeless, offshore cyberspatial
sanctuary.

We know that architecture appears and disappears at the speed
of light by way of the wall switch, bulb pop, or substation black out.
And vaporizes at nearly light speed via the Hiroshima demonstration.
Some physicists claim that matter can be created at virtually light
speed, or more accurately, rearranged from one state to another.
Schroeder's Cat posits architecture in two places at once. IBM
claims to have succeeded at teletransportation. Near instantaneous
hemispheric effects are alleged for the HAARP atmospheric
electromagnetic program: in a specific part of the spectrum the
lights are turned on and off for half the planet.

Immensively variable electronic signage is avant garding facade and
interior design, well ahead of the Gates' mansion which employs,
according to electronic engineers, technology that is at least three
generations out of date -- about par for conventional architecture,
as about par for the computers and technology in general architects
are comfortable abiding (so said Mumford and Banham and Fitch,
and lately, here, Hypersurfsive Perella).

The speed of the fastest activities within the human body far exceed

the mechanical and biological measurements we best know. The speed
of thought, say, requires rapid distributed transmissions of signals that
cannot be measured by known instruments but only approximated by
mathematical algorithms developed for subatomic understanding.
This is beyond electricity of the earthly kind, which I believe Tesla
claimed was beyond human understanding still locked in 19th Century
physico-mechanical-biological (and corollary philosophico-religious)
paradigms.

Which is why some argue that reason is too slow to be useful any more.
Intuition and insight are speedier, but not as fast as illogic and madness.

Humor tops them all in that it discards crippling coherency altogether.
It is its electrifying effect that shocks us out of complacency, lifts us
out of safe and sane sanctuary, puts us into giddy flight, helps us
shed dead skin, dead mind architecture. Could be that silly tonic works
faster than the all too reasonable speed of light. And why an
architecture generated by humor (the totally unexpected pleasure)
is what's just beyond the electromagnetic mirror. Is that not what
the quantum jokesters are promising?

Quandom = quantum-dom?