From “Into a Forest of Script,” my article on computational design in Log 12:
What could be more rational than a computer program? It is tempting to view software as a methodical means of accomplishing complex but still clearly definable tasks. Being digital and therefore ultimately translatable into unambiguous electronic signals, computer programs appear to be instruments of control, themselves controllable and their effects fully describable. Yet the cultural apparitions of computer code have often shown a more shadowy side. The showering green glyphs in The Matrix movies were the medium of a vast communal hallucination force-fed to humans in lieu of conscious thought. In William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition, characters who had lost loved ones used the mediation of software to work out the pain and repressions of their grief. And in the real-life hysteria of Y2K, the specter of code run amok, possessed by unseen bugs, was expected to induce a digital apocalypse. In each of these instances, computer code frustrated its creators’ intentions and interfered, for good or ill, with human thought and feeling.
Today, as the direct manipulation of computer programming languages becomes a reality for experimental architects, giving rise to numerous visionary projects (and a handful of actual buildings), we might expect to find the “rational” behavior of software haunted by a similar capacity to overflow its context and give rise to the unanticipated. Sure enough, the undulating forms of many script-generated projects could plausibly be read as expressing anxieties and fantasies associated with the computerization of the contemporary environment: Dizzying cybernetic landscapes may reflect unease about the proliferation of code-based machines; or perhaps they indicate a god fantasy, evoking a digital garden generated by the fiat of an architectural demiurge that initiates self-perpetuating processes of growth and evolution. But the essential question is how the software functions in these projects. After all, this new form of notation is not simply a transparent means of access to architectural form, but inevitably establishes its own conceptual framework and methodological constraints like any other medium.