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Once, I had a dream where I was trapped with a group of strangers in an abandoned warehouse. Some kind of cataclysmic event had taken place, and pale yellow smoke drifted inside through cracks in the walls. It was clear that we were running out of time. Turning to the gathered strangers, I asked if I could tell a story about the history of art: if it didn’t matter now, then it had never mattered. You wake up repeatedly over the night; you keep trying to remember the same dream. As you relive the dream again and again, small details begin to shift until the experience becomes unrecognizable. You suspect that even the name you whisper to yourself as a reminder has begun to change. Parametricism is a movement in art, architecture and design which takes its name from parametric equations, multivariable mathematical expressions which have in recent decades become virtually inextricable from how our world is designed, built, and experienced. Far more data-driven than any previous aesthetic movements, it is characterized by a workflow in which all aspects of production are quantified and become capable of responding to and influencing each other, often through the use of neural networks or digital modeling software. Parametricism had always been latent within modernism, but once we started to understand how code can be used to represent emergent phenomena, we began to develop entirely new design methodologies. Parametricism is not just an expansion of our tools; it represents a new way for us to think and build. We can manipulate the materiality of our collective reality in the same way that nature manipulates material itself. Parametricism offers the vision of a future where we are able to reshape every aspect of our world. It is not simply an expansion of our tools but a way of thinking through and developing new strategies of existence. These formal procedures offer us a set of methods by which we can experiment with the development of all social structure, giving us the freedom to explore different utopian conditions which might enable us to tune every aspect of a built environment: its inhabitants, their neural connections, their social life and habits. At the point that we started to think of digital code as an expression of physics, we began to approach design in a fundamentally different way. We began to consider how nature uses code to build so efficiently; how trees are able to grow and adapt in the most complex conditions through mechanisms such as branching morphogenesis; how coral works its skeletal structure to create its reef-like shape. These naturally occurring phenomena express themselves through a mechanism analogous, and some might argue identical, to parametric code; the interaction of their genetic code with the physics and chemistry of their environment creates unanticipated forms through a process of iteration and transformation. All cultural forms and principles can be expressed in similar ways. Of course, there is another element to consider in the discourse around parametricism. We build to mark human existence, yet our creations are increasingly designed to include ever-greater degrees of autonomy. The machines that aid and advise us shape our lives: from the apps on our phones to the weather forecasting software that directs our purchasing habits. As far back as the 1960s, investigators have noticed that many pre industrial societies validated their existence almost exclusively through human interactions, unlike contemporary societies which rely much more heavily on technology. The current global obsession with turning over functions of living to computers should be viewed against this background. Our technologies no longer serve merely to make life easier; they are our present way of life, shaping us as much as we shape them: forming a sort of convergent dialectic of algorithmic nature and technician subject. With mechanical, digital, and biological technologies merging, there is a vast new landscape for design coming into view just beyond the horizon. Do you want to stay in control, or pass along the steering wheel? The horizon of possibility must expand radically if the human spirit is to survive. Our tools are only useful to the extent that we can express ourselves through them, or they through us. By that same token, a rule only has value so long as it produces interesting results. Today’s corporatized psyche is constipated with trivial, and transient, self-criticism. The ordinary person is a shriveled untalented husk of previous aspirations wasted on safe prescriptions for fear and security. This suppurating self-loathing is the result of living in a system where a majority of value is derived from devaluing your work to zero in order to raise profits for paymasters further up the food chain. You temporarily escape from mediocrity to focus on entertainment; but only for its momentary distraction, not for its skillful performance or any deeper meaning. But how are we to make liberation immersive, addictive? An undying web of love. I’ve come to realize that Nostalgia is poison, which rots away our perception of the latencies dancing in every moment. But its taste is so smooth, so warm, so sweet… Zombies are perfect because they never change: a platonic ideal emanating upwards like rotten flesh from beneath the floorboards of the contemporary world. What is it about this necrotic ideal that transfixes us? Perhaps the zombie is nostalgia pushed to its absurd limit. One is not to bestow undue virtue upon those who wander forth from Plato’s cave. As the old saying goes, there’s still a whole world beneath the sun. I wrote the following five axioms in 2016: Introduction: As we progress further into the 21st century, the line between artistic production and ‘content creation’ grows increasingly unclear. First Axiom: All content is designed to be shared; thus, all content is performative. Second Axiom: content is created for many reasons, and is not always guided by a profit motive. However, the commercial nature of web hosting guarantees that all content is bound to capital. Third Axiom: content is constantly reconfigured and appropriated. Appropriation does not deny or diminish content as such. Fourth Axiom: All content is bound to platforms. Platforms provide content both with an essential context and with the very ground for its existence. When the platform changes, content transforms accordingly. Fifth Axiom: information from the ‘actual world’ is seemingly endlessly capable of transcription as content; the speed and extent of this transcription progresses rapidly with technological advancement in the ‘actual world.’ I would like to contribute a brief addendum to the aforementioned axioms: art and life have indeed merged, but not in the direction that past avant gardes intended. Life, that is, metric life, has almost entirely assimilated that most insular backwater known as the art world. We are moving towards a unified framework capable of processing the entirety of cultural production as one dense, humid mesh, always one step ahead of the coming rain. Today’s youth dream of becoming influencers, not artists, and can you blame them? An undying web of love. I am standing idly in a chic modernist room, painted entirely red. The furniture and walls are all untouched, covered with thin sheets of plastic. A large, circular table sits in the room, with a white globe embedded in its center. I sit down on a soft couch. People around me are deep in what seems to be a lively conversation, but I can’t seem to distinguish any individual voices. My body feels heavy, my vision is growing blurry. As my eyes drift towards the globe, it slowly rotates, wet, glistening, to reveal a black pupil, staring back at me. It is at this point, as I look down, and feel the moisture on my back and legs, that I realize the room is breathing. Elea. The soft buzz of the archon's wings. The scent of crisp ink and papyrus. The taste of spiced wine on the lips of your one true love, as we lay beneath the rose arch, lost in a dream of geometry and indeterminate truth. Every time I am with you, I peel off another overlapping veil to reveal an even simpler truth beneath. Do some statements always remain true, no matter who or what says them? Or delivered from a specific point, can any truth become a lie? I’ve been thinking a lot about how time works. The ways it scrunches up, sometimes, and the ways it unwinds in these long lines of moments, stretched out like gossamer over bones and hillsides and bodies of quiet water. All the things that it feels like from within, while you're living it. I was watching a documentary yesterday, and the narrator was discussing another documentary series that followed the lives of a number of people through their daily activities. At one point, there was a scene that took place in a garden, and the narrator said something along the lines of: “Plato once imagined such an ideal realm…” If what you say is true: if real empathy is possible, and two truly can become one: doesn’t every union represent a new form of solitude, and demand yet another union?