Processual Consistency: a form of composition

In this paper I am interested in fleshing out an understanding of how entities can be coherent while offering no absolute boundaries or formal fixity. This elusive condition of being is situated as integral to the nature of our broad socio-economic atmosphere that I characterise through models of emergent behaviour. Emergence is usually defined as a ‘bottom-up’ phenomenon, wherein there is no master plan implemented from above. But the crux of this paper lies in the claim that ‘top-down’ action does not so much disappear as transform from master plans to processual consistencies. Discerning this particular kind of ‘holding together’ demands an implicitly aesthetic mode of attention, which I liken to the kind of relationality that defines emergent phenomena.

‘Holding together’ is an issue of composition, which I am claiming is a practice guided and defined by processual consistency. Rather than simply being a process of making something, composition becomes as issue of embedded refrains of behavioural tendency that define the always ‘in-process’ character of a thing.

These claims are diagrammed and detailed through an interactive installation project called ‘The Invisibles’, by the New York based research-design laboratory bio(t)hing (directed by Alisa Andrasek). Unlike most architectural design, this practice does not work primarily with visualisations of form, but with algorithmic scripting wherein behavioural relations provide the base material. This project offers a particularly crisp example of the relational configurations at work in the emergence and ontogenesis of processual consistencies.

Pia Ednie-Brown, Senior Lecturer SIAL / Architecture. School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University