Sensorial Instruments and Architectonic Objects: A cryptographic approach to spatial experience

This communication will reflect on how architecture articulates a world that is both energetic and informational. To use the senses as an analytical tool is to consider the sensorium as a reliable intermediary for sorting the noisiness of embodied experience. That something in this noise merits mention can be understood as a foundational point for information to become knowledge, to be immortalized and passed on. The intentionality with which one looks at the world is, of course, personal, but its emission into the world first as shared forms of symbolization (language or mathematics), then inscription and even as building renders it partially objective. The role of the object is important, because a building, a tree or even another body are material and coded, both hard (dur) and soft (doux). This cryptographic understanding challenges a Romanticist reading of the doux and the dur, which places the former on the side of language and contingency and the latter on the side of mathematical abstraction and necessity. The information-theoretic approach I propose to adopt in thinking about sense experience will address it less as a tool for analysis than as a sensorial instrument that combines naturally intelligent humans and artificially intelligent objects. Such an instrument would allow architectonic articulation to gain a literacy with regard to the ways one can experience a world when trying to reason and encode those experiences into existing or future artefacts.