Divine Name Verification | Noah Horwitz || Punctum Books, 2003 |
First, Divine Name Verification is not an essay on either architecture or art but an essay on philosophy. An essay that can be classified as or related to speculative realism and related movements such as Object-Oriented Ontology, a movement defended by French Quentin Meillassoux and Scottish Ray Brassier. However, the theme the books addresses is threefold: (1) Divine Name Verification is an essay on Anti-Darwinism — speculating that we should turn our back from Darwinism; it also addresses two important issues related to our matter of concern: architecture: (2) intelligent Design; and (3) the computational nature of reality.
I confess not to be familiar with Noah Horwitz's research. This will be an enjoyable occasion to read him. As indicated in Punctum Books' website, the essay defends intelligent design "by attempting to demonstrate the essentially computational nature of reality." The readers of computational theorists such as Wolfram, Chaitin, Friedkin, Lloyd, Schmidhuber, etc. will appreciate this book. Not only, those familiar with designers such as Neri Oxman, Biothing, R&Sie(n)/New Territories, to limit to these examples, will also be concerned.
Other topics discussed in the book are chaos theory (e.g., Brian Goodwin), contingency (I am looking forward to reading his Darwinism's Apotheosis: Quentin Meillassoux's Atheism of Radical Contingency), etc. It will be a good opportunity to read or re-read design theorists, let me cite only one William Dembski. It is not Punctum Books's first time to published books that concern the discipline of architecture as the publisher has published books related to architecture such as Making the Geologic Now (edited by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse of Smudge Studio) and New-York-based French architect Léopold Lambert's The Funambulist Pamphlets: Volume 01_Spinoza and volume 02_Foucault. Or this must-read, at least for those interested in topics such as landscape futures, decay, etc., Ben Woodard's On A Ungrounded Earth.
This summer is announced to be rich in books…
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