the below manifesto was developed as the project's goals began to materialize:

1. "THE GAP". We know how we started and where we are now, but thousands of years of advanced, valuable iteration is neglected by the way we learn. By not knowing how we got here, we lose valuable truths, and are doomed to repeat avoidable mistakes.

2. ENVIRONMENTAL LOGIC IS INTUITIVE: A child could do it, and children did do it. We’ve just unlearned it. All you need is your body.

3. WE HAVE NO SENSE OF SCALE. Or time, or duration, or distance. We imagine and feel these things through tools and screens, forgetting their context.

4. ORIENTATION IS EVERYTHING: All that you learn and will produce in your life relies on how you know what time it is, and where you are in the world. Everything.

5. KNOWLEDGE IS DISAPPEARING: More knowledge is completely lost than we could ever fathom. It is being rewritten and skewed at a terrifying, accelerating rate.

6. IF IT IS NOT MADE COMPUTATIONALLY LEGIBLE, IT WILL DISAPPEAR.

7. WE DESIGN TOOLS THAT FLATTEN AND ERASE: There is a way to be efficient, and advanced, without historical amnesia. We can cultivate the field without clearing it.

8. WE SET OUR OWN TRAPS: The tools we design have invisible constraints which we mistake for reality, and the phenomena that inspired their framework are forced into an artificial symmetry. That artificial symmetry becomes our reality that we continue to build on.

To uncover lost temporal realities, spatial frameworks, and environmental logics, it would be counterintuitive to rely solely on the tools and lenses of the present day. I would only fall into the same traps.

I need to look at the world through the eyes of those who lived in it, who interpreted it, and who laid the frameworks for what we know now, to know how to understand the world today.

These frameworks are often illuminated by the sideways gleam of cultural production. Their traces, often subtle, often scattered, are found in language, poetry, art, tools, materials, and other artifacts of lived experience.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - Linguistic Relativism - is the theory that language determines the way people think, and suggests that the language spoken will shape the way one sees the world. When language is perpetuated and built upon, so is that worldview the language operates within. In other words, the language you speak expands, limits, and generally orchestrates your thoughts and worldview.

Therefore, to understand how people in the past viewed the world, it would be useful to dive into rich, deep-rooted languages, to possibly reveal long-lost environmental logics that would explain the framework on which we built everything we know today. Or at least serve as a foil to expose the assumptions we have about how time and space are understood today.

Arabic is a valuable starting point here, because I speak Arabic, and classical Arabic poetry is how I learned and interpreted some of the sky. However, this project will soon encompass other languages and the forensic piecing these dispersed logics together.

For Names of the Sun, Houses of the Moon, Cloudspotter and other Resistant Atlas projects, the main resource is Ibn Qutaybah al-Dinawari’s Kitab al-Anwaa (written in 880 CE), a dictionary of meteorological terms, including dozens of words for the sun, the moon, the stars, the wind, the rain, the clouds, and other environmental phenomena. These terms are listed alphabetically, and defined on an aesthetic/poetic basis. No real quantifiable or empirical, a.k.a. 'scientific' data regarding use, the time, the area, etc, is listed. No timestamps, heights, coordinates, orbit paths, or meteorology data are listed.

But assuming Sapir-Whorf's hypothesis, the language itself is the data. The Western divide between poetry and science is just that. Western. By operating as if the two are not separate, but two sides of the same coin, there is much to be uncovered.

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understanding the sun through a computational lens

The sun, a celestial body that has guided human perception of time, holds countless meanings across temporal, spiritual, and cultural contexts. In English, the sun is that ball of fire that gives us light, warmth, and life. It gives us time, governs space, keeps the Earth tethered to its orbit, and is the central point that holds everything in place (and in time). However, no matter what, whether it is in the East, the West, high overhead, or underneath the horizon, it is called "the sun". Whether it is in the East, the West, high overhead, underneath the horizon, it holds the same _name_. This is how Western language works. In Arabic, it is a different story. The sun has different names based on where it is in the sky, which season, what time of day, its angle, intensity, behavior, how it is perceived, whether a friend, or an enemy. So, just from the name, you can infer crucial spatial, temporal, and meteorological information. From the Ibn Qutaybah al-Dinawari’s Kitāb al-Anwāʾ (كتاب الأنواء) (The Meteoreological Dictionary mentioned previously) I found 42 words for the sun I could use in my research. Then I conducted the below process to make these words computationally legible to lay the groundwork for future digital tools;

A snippet of the research process.

1. Read the word in its original context: Examine the word in meteorological, poetic, observational, or even religious sources.

2. Extract environmental logic: Identify patterns in how it is used contextually, or etymology that may reveal embedded temporal or spatial meaning.

3. Place within environmental phenomena: Place the word within seasonal cycles, celestial movement, agricultural schedules, atmospheric conditions, etc.

4. Assign computational parameters: Temporal marker, altitude and azimuth, intensity, spatial connotations.

5. Reparametrize for x, y, z, symbol, size: Encode those values into the tags outlined in the parametric process which include x y z coordinates, a symbol id, and a size id.


Parametric Process:

1. Define primary environmental variables: Map out: - X (solar altitude) - Y (solar azimuth) - Z (temporal-spatial weight) Then also an index for size & symbol.

2. Assign sun height (X) based on seasons: - X = 0 is maximum altitude at summer solstice - X = 9 is minimum altitude at winter solstice - X = -9 to -18 solar depression angles (civil, nautical, astronomical twilight)

3. Assign east-west (Y) based on diurnal arc: - Y = 0 is sunrise (maximum east) - Y = 20 is noon (midpoint) - Y = 40 is sunset (maximum west)

4. Assign temporal-spatial index: The Z-axis scale at 30 indicates a temporal concept (e.g., noon, dusk), and 0 indicates a spatial or navigational concept (e.g., position in relation to land or structures).

5. Reparametrize for x, y, z, symbol, size: The symbology is highlighted in the next pages, and the size (from 0 to 1) indicates intensity / seeming closeness to the sun.

6. Input into a parametric system: Using Grasshopper, the parameters are embedded into a dynamic system, which can result in a visualization of the sun’s names as a zone, arc, or duration on the map. the same was repeated for the houses of the moon, which are the lunar stations in which the moon travels through the sky. the moon has 28 houses, and each house has a different name based on its position, and the time of year. the same process was repeated for the clouds, and the stars.

class: methods as practice, practice as methods colloquium.
instructors: violet whitney and william martin

this project explores the relationship between time and space through architecture. it began with data collection and continues with a historical dive into the development of timekeeping devices, and how, with each era, our temporal imagination followed the affordances of the tools.

1. studio temporal awareness study – analyzing the intuitive unit (60 seconds) that my classmates could figure out. a study of their studio space showed insight on what was affecting their awareness.
2. historical timekeeping devices – a study of each era of timekeeping devices, and how they reflect the temporal imagination of the time.
   
   
   
   

browse the website, created with html, css, and javascript.

class: methods as practice, practice as methods colloquium.
instructors: violet whitney and william martin

"the sun not working with your schedule? want to take back control of time? try KADA, the revolutionary new helmet that will change your life! those pesky earth cycles will bother you no more!"

a satirical ad campaign for a helmet that controls your circadian rhythm through light and sound, as well as using AR to filter the world you interact with. this project reflects the politics embedded in temporal perception, and how that reflects through design.

the project continues to become a website and booklet with simulations of the product.

class: computational modelling
instructors: luc wilson and meli harvey

How do we correlate the movement of time and your movement in space?
Time-geography is a conceptual geographic framework initially developed in the late 1960s and the early 1970s by the Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand (1916–2004).

structure of basic hagerstread time geography graph

"on the left a household as a bundle, on the right a school." - after carlstein

so i should probably analyze the typical time-space data of a typical student. i will start with myself. a typical day looks like this:

the geographical locations are modelled and input into grasshopper.

the following graphs show my typical daily path based on class schedules and shortest geographical path. The XY space is space, and the Z is how I move in that space through time. There is a threshold of change in my daily routine, and that is showed by the curved paths.

the hagerstrand graph, showing the time-space path of my typical day.

DAYLIGHT ANALYSIS

The paths within the campus, especially around the buildings shown in the image, will receive vaarying amounts of daylight based on the time of day and year. The percentages of in sun vs. in shade are compared, and based on that, the new timings are decided on by the algorithm. Ideally this would also include new locations based on where is more comfortable to walk, and new paths leading up to those locations.

grasshopper's analysis on the usual paths i take through campus, mapped based on the previous hagerstrand graphs.

Revised SCHEDULE

These graphs are the temporal aspect of the revised schedule. Usually, the class schedule cycle is what is rigid, while environmental cycles change. In this project, those are flipped, meaning the class schedule is remapped everyday based on the more structed solar cycle. This tool changes which cycle is dependent on the other.

class: seeing with algorithms.
instructor: catherine griffiths

goal: to establish a conscious weather forecasting model that respects the nuances of the environment beyond sunny/rainy/windy/etc, inspire a deeper understanding of the environment, and create a new forecasting model based on sensory and cognitive aspects.

and to critique the weather algorithm:

class: metatool: attentional mediums.
instructor: dan taeyoung

this project was an experiment on passive attention. how aware are you of the sun, at any given moment? how can i gather that data? through writing? through diagramming hourly? through diagramming whenever i remember? here are some trials:

attempting to translate the manual data into a generative model, or a digital tool:

to capture passive attention, there is a difference between a scheduled log, and a spontaneous question. this IFTTT triggers as a phone notification at random times of the day, which, when clicked, will turn on your laptop camera, and as you point to the sky, the p5.js software captures the tip of your fingers, giving you a definition for the sun that corresponds to your guess. it doesn't tell you if you were accurate or not.

the visual developed from static, to animated, to static again.

as you move your finger, the description of the sun changes. this is the tool projected onto a wall.

class: data visualization for architects.
instructor: jia zhang

this project is a digital sundial, but instead of telling you the time from the sun, it will detect your time, and offer you the description of the sun overhead, according to the previous temporal framework research...

try it here.

advisor: professor laura kurgan
class: explore, explain, propose (colloquium ii)
class: design in action (colloquium iii)
instructors: seth thompson and catherine griffiths and snoweria zhang

advisor: professor laura kurgan
class: explore, explain, propose (colloquium ii)
class: design in action (colloquium iii)
instructors: seth thompson and catherine griffiths and snoweria zhang

advisor: professor laura kurgan
class: explore, explain, propose (colloquium ii)
class: design in action (colloquium iii)
instructors: seth thompson and catherine griffiths and snoweria zhang

flip through the book here: