The Negative River
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Knowledge Architecture

This project was part of DEAF98, The Art of The Accident festival. Beside the show, there has been a mind-mapping workshop at the zeroglab office in Rotterdam.

In 2000 T.N.R. was invited as a guest project for the F.I.L.E. festival (electronic language international festival), in M.I.S., São Paulo, Brasil.

The River has always had a great impact on emerging cultures. It has been a link, an element of coherence between different groups of people. Often, riverbanks were the birthplaces of the great classical civilisations.

Since ancient times, distinctive geographical elements like rivers have been determinating factors for the development of cultures. Today, another type of landmarks take that role: places along data-streams in a knowledge space, the so-called Internet.
During this century, the collective scientific knowledge has grown exponentially. According to forecasts of cognitive and system scientists, this quantity is going to reach, given the current curve of growth, the critical mass of '(near)endless' around the year 2030.

We are going to have a problem, Houston :)

This new situation is forcing us to think on a different scale from the one we are used to.

One reacts by falling back into old patterns of behaviour. One is thinking about new strategies. One is doing nothing.

The structure of our knowledge is dependent on the nature of knowledge itself. Its topology is not given geographically. It has an a-topological character. In a merely artificial environment we do not deal with the laws of Newtonian physics. Even simulating the forces of gravity, for example,takes a great effort.

The quantity of available knowledge for people from outside of the traditional strongholds and keepers of knowledge: academia, burocracy, intelligence agencies, corporate elite, has been increasing dramatically in the last decade.

T.N.R. is multidimensional interface design for an organic knowledge system about art, cities, habitats, put together by various artists, thinkers, with many different world views, backgrounds.

T.N.R. is going to have the ability to absorbe, process and interpret its knowledge pool autonomously, and create new habitats, cities from its artistic input in three dimension.

T.N.R. is a strategy.
T.N.R. is an art engine.
T.N.R. is an interface for a m.m. database.

1996 Pécs/Hu

Bibliography, suggested readings:

Turchin, Valentin: The Phenomenon of Science. A cybernetic approach to human evolution, Columbia University Press, New York 1977

Stonier, Tom: Információ és az Univerzum belsõ szerkezete. (Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe). Springer Hungarica Budapest, 1993

Aristotle: Categories Et Liber De Interpretatione, Oxford Classical Texts,1949