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Ian Margo & Fakewhale Interview, d/wb project
Crisis Media: Sonic Architectural Synaesthesia, Stochastic Redundancy and Nuclear Post-Humanitarian Tactic Yidi Lola Wang
Chatbots as Psychoanalysts, or, ‘The Talking Cure Morgane Billuart
Creative Liberation or Digital Colonization?, David Lazăr
The Artificial Unconscious, Germán Sierra
Artificiality and Emotions: Beyond the FleshMorgane Billuart
Fango 1000 & Large Lore Models, dmstfctn, Alasdair Milne, Eva Jäger
Self Stalking Prey: A Study for a Portrait of Little Red Riding Hood, Carl Olsson
How Images Turned Invisible, Ivan Netkachev
What Is Artificial Experience (AX), William Morgan











Crisis Media: Sonic Architectural Synaesthesia, Stochastic Redundancy and Nuclear Post-Humanitarian Tactic

31.10.2025.BER.GER

publications Sonic Architecture
 Synaesthesia
 Noise
 Probability
 Stochastic Composition
 Object-Oriented Philosophy

Planetary Computational Infrastructure
 Post-Humanitarianism
 Nuclear Consciousness
 War Strategy
 National Developmentalism


Abstract
Meandering among concepts and grassroots practices, this essay points out the entanglement between them, rather than advocating for any single perspective as a solution. It is structured into three interrelated analyses. First, from computation to global infrastructure, the analysis covers geopolitical meanings and regional development based on systematic planning. Then, their shared empirical abstractness and intrinsic composition lead to and echo with the discussion of the correlation between music and architecture, initially analysed by musician and architect Iannis Xenakis, according to whom a stochastic system accommodating order and disorder emerges elevated into aesthetics. Third, I argue the stochastic system contains anxiety from disorder and noise, reassembling artificial aesthetics’ effect, which dominates the post-Cold War nuclear consciousness (deterrence). The planetary differs from the occurred globalism as neutrality; it is discovered through contextual adaptations, tipping redundancy, and computation in objects and strategic diplomacy in exploitative national developmentalism. Philosophical reflection and policy analysis are the main methodologies here. From a systemically entangled perspective, threads of thinking across disciplines are dared to emerge, preparing for an ongoing practice of post-humanitarian composition formalizing cultural production.
   
    


  From Synthetic Computational Modelling to Global Infrastructure


The emergence of discussion towards infrastructure has made it a convenient tool to bridge abstract architectural theories and empirical, sometimes futuristic speculation based on condensed reality. In Sven Opitz’s and Ute Tellmann’s analysis appeared in Limn journal on European infrastructure, they mentioned that the process of defragmentation and intentional collectivity of energy infrastructural integration constitutes “a space with both topographical and topological features” within which the borders of nation-states are moving.[2] More specifically, European energy system has claims to adopt an intelligent integrated grid system to accommodate renewable energy based on and gradually replace nuclear and fossil fuel-based energy sources. The decentralized pattern of integrated grid systems enables more parties to come into play. Besides the virtual connecting role of the market between producers and consumers, this decentralized network echoes with Web 3 format and AI-aided industrial revolution ongoing. Artificial intelligence is embedding itself into such geopolitical gestures, showing how technology and politics interplay in a constituted world that is becoming more and more tangible. How does such tangibility coexist with planetarity? How does technology reach both theory and empirical development? Andreas Folkers argued that there is “a lack of ideas for smart and politically progressive uses of it”, and “they are full of gaps, unpredictable currents, and channels that allow for all kinds of electric and political forms of resistance”.[3] It also seems that the force to enable such gestures, thanks to big political and tech bodies, has been in charge of this industry. Deleuze’s concept of rhizome[4] uses biological metaphoric form not just to describe bodies that could be political, economic, and societal, and expand outwards into a system, but as Foucault summarised, 

a phantasmaphysics…in the reversal that causes every interior to pass to the outside and every exterior to the inside, in the temporal oscillation that always makes it precede and follow itself.[5]
Likewise, transportation infrastructure can also be read as such a rhizome enabling urban interconnectedness in Ole B. Jenson’s writing on urban mobility. He marked how culture and human everyday life flow within this giant urban infrastructure of transportation.[6] This vivid flow inside an artificial world. 

Sven Opitz’s work on the pandemic also reveals that the world falls into a self-observed and self-simulating mode,[7] inspired by Richard Grussin’s concept of premediation[8], which reveals how plural futures are created by media. This article gives a spontaneous idea on the relation and transition between the pre-computational era that inspires a priori creational theory such as Xenakis’s music and architecture, and the current cultural urge to create a planetary reality though augmented and embodied with everything, including politics, and the shared catastrophic integrated imagination based on events and scientific speculations. Such events have global impacts, and their activism on social media dominates a generation’s vision of how to access the world. The changing way of engaging with the system echoes with how the latter constantly adjusts itself to risks, and even the failure of common imagination.

Compared to the beginning of an interconnected computational world based on infinite simulation and fabrication, our global infrastructures in the present, rooted in abstract theories, tend to deal with more concrete geopolitical contexts and issues, “consolidate and distribute power”,[9] counting itself has been viewed as a scientific methodological root of political surveillance of control and care. There is “a system of systems”[10] in contextualization to situate and the accelerated simulating plurality real-time in the fields of urban operating, and agricultural, forest, and ocean monitoring, from GPS to machine sensors, along with automation, robotization, augmented reality, remote operations…”.[11]

Everything is “colliding, mingling or separating bodies” talking to us through quasi-physics.[12]Yet synaesthesia as the haunting voice between sound and 3D form, is more than simulacrum or illusion besides metaphysics, but illusion as metaphysics itself that carries innumerable redundancy, undefined as objects, and the contradictory relations caused by the undefined, the in-between.[13]


    Sonic and Architectural Synaesthesia from Stochastic Objects in Redundancy


While “geometry is physical, topology sensual”,[14] following Foucault’s thought, “events then require a more complex logic”. In the linked sonic and architectural studies originated in the 20th century from Iannis Xenakis, computation as a method and revolutionary way of interacting with and building worlds impacted both the musical and architectural industries in the last century. In his book Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition, the concept of causality and mathematical logic was mentioned before discussing musical composition. 

It is therefore not surprising that the presence or absence of the principle of causality, first in philosophy and then in the sciences, might influence musical composition. It causes it to follow paths that appeared to be divergent, but in which, in fact, coalesced in probability theory and finally in polyvalent logic, which are kinds of generalization and enrichments of the principle of causality.[15] 
Though it is not merely a coherence that “situates accidents in the entangled nexus of causes and effects”, comparing Foucault’s linguistic organization composed for “events”,[16], the concept of stochasticity was directly introduced by Xenakis as the expansion of probability theory in the process of digital musical formation dealing with “conflicts and knots”. 



The composition was tailored to interact with the Pavilion’s distinctive acoustics and geometric structure, reflecting Xenakis’s interest in merging mathematical and physical models across different fields. The architecture’s unique shapes and surfaces influenced the diffusion of sound within the space, making Concrete PH an early example of spatialized sound design that integrates music with its physical environment.[17] French Pavilion’s Elevation Designed by Xenakis.[18]
Instead of purely leaning towards a parametric computation, this marriage would rather be a balance between the stochastic and the systematic. The question is, how do we know our system thoroughly, and how do we make sure our understanding of it is correct? If the system itself is always changing as it is now, as Graham Harman suggested, our enclosed understanding of a simulated solidified system will blind us from knowing anything other than such a system, such as the remaining peculiar objects, but lead us to fall into the fatalism of catastrophe.[19]



Scoring: Xenakis’ design for laser configuration within the Diatope.[20]


Such mere emphasis on a solidified system, Graham criticized, has made architectural creation believe in measuring the environment based on algorithmic parameters.[21] In Christopher M. Kelly’s essay in Limn number 9 on the theme of little development devices, participatory entities as “…an enormous, amorphous, yet nevertheless intimate collective that represents itself to itself constantly”, recalls the importance of “the reflexive practitioner whose ‘algorithm’ is human judgment, memory, and discernment” versus “an automatic, machine learning, artificial intelligence”.[22]

I argue that the analog and the algorithmic could combine, and spontaneous emotion and the evolving abstract system could merge into one situatedness of synaesthesia. The value of narrative formation does not merely lie in its theoretical relation to ANT, but in the liberating fictions that reevaluate the role of actors, objects, and environments. Each of these is an abstract entity that could be rearranged and function actively. Bodies, brains, and objects not only interact with and become infrastructure by repetition. 

The algorithmic approach to sound creation in the 20th century was not about programming computers to create variations of Bach or Debussy. Instead, it was about advancing sound composition by handling vast amounts of information on a microscopic level[23] 
More recently, the linkage between musical and architectural expression has been explored more through different tools shared by both, such as scoring and mapping. By comparison, besides the methodologies of analysing, signifying, and layering, which indicate spatial and objective features that are deeply connected to human living entangling with power, diverse ethnicities, and communities, the original scoring’s abstractness might just represent how human life is now inseparable from such thinking of notation, modelling, representation, and objectification. After all, transformed into an “intelligible” system itself, actively instead of passively, far beyond Lefebvre’s initial argument on spatial politics. Such a system and its agents are not linguistic-oriented systems either, but object-oriented, which redefines what is intelligence in infrastructural and industrial contexts, interacting with both humans and objects, stretching locally and planetarily. 

Different from the “most engineering application needs to be removed as a source of noise and instabilities, friction, the tangible force between objects in contact is a desirable component in musical applications.”[24]

The constant flux of natural processes is a fertile ground for developing sonic morphology and timbral movement as elements of a continuous composition. Aleatoric, or random processes in music, have long been a focus of avant-garde composers exploring the boundaries of unpredictability.
Mapping, scoring, and installing on different scales constitute an intelligence of redundancy, opening up practical possibilities for a shared future among humans, objects, human objects (non-binaries), and smart systems. Besides developing these systems, multiple artists and researchers in this conjunctive field have proven that complex contexts lead to the failure of the simplified systems, and redundant objects such as noise have always existed within them, waiting to become part of the ouroboros.





In Formalized Music, Xenakis soon depicted a scene that absorbs multiple states “in oscillation between symmetry, asymmetry, order, disorder, rationality” and transcends anxiety, which might emerge naturally with the creator’s presence. “Traditional behavioural framework” is inherited and negated when “rare random events” occur and “defining chance as an aesthetic law, as a normal philosophy.” In this sense, a stochastic composition contains as much fluid instability, noise, and dynamic as transformable “aesthetic stimuli”[25]; and inside the temporal scale, the act of organization and ordering exists rapidly, not necessarily consistently. We then therefore, could say a psychological anxiety emerges not due to the disorder itself, but out of a sense of unmeasurability of the temporal scale in the panoramic space.

Combining the architectural and musical notation systems, and their relatable compositional aesthetics, we find the unmeasurable redundant objects within a relatively large scale are the engine that keeps the system moving as the node to generate intuition. In spite of the entanglement between notable system and stochasticity, there is always room, or non-space, nothingness for redundancy “endangering being”, wherein grow scenarios and narratives, or vice versa.


   Synaesthetic Post-Humanitarianism and Nuclear Intelligence as Crisis Media


Crisis, war, extractive infrastructural development, and nuanced human rights violations displace people, fragmenting resources, spaces, and knowledge as object composition. Grassroots cultural ecology is taking more social responsibility, adopting populist views amplified by social media while remaining investigative towards regional struggles. Communities in the post-apartheid social system protest and constantly restructure, yet sharing simultaneously local and planetary dilemmas, grappling with spatial and financial oppression. Even popularized humanitarian aid infrastructure, based on laissez-faire neoliberalist economic policy and law-making, as Naomi Klein pointed out, advocates speculative moral condemnation more than systematic criticism and comprehension. [26] Their implementation, however, accidentally adopts surveillance methodology to better allocate aid and human as targets, attempting to tackle the object-human-system relationship. 

Existential crisis, creating a condition of blank page for reconstruction and speculation, has been nevertheless desired by Western developmentalism proved by the war economy of today in Gaza and Ukraine, entangled with European diplomacy. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, as a reformative power aiming at a new global order, however, brings its unsolved internal labor human rights issue to ‘glocal’ contexts embedded in the new urban complexity of more than mobility and narrow planning. (Shichor, 2018) Linear predictive economic development could not balance long-term infrastructural malfunction and hollowness, proven by Chinese housing development, and the rural patriarchal labour structure domestically. 

Nuclear knowledge is of infrastructural density and tactical interpretation. Its abductive logic cannot be exchanged with the inductive orientation of AI [27]. A protohistorical understanding of artificial intelligence can be traced back through warfare, state capitalism, and the pacified economic weapon of extractivist developmentalism. Developmental inference here operates as a bridge between deductive stochasticity and state-led infrastructural speculation, forming variations through automated command, simulation, and compositional intelligence. [28]



The diagram Crisis Ecology Map outlines this conceptual terrain. Deductive stochasticity and developmental inference entangle as the generative logic of planning. Narrow AI and nuclear capture compete with each other in their capture of intelligence and energy, chemical collision, and data laboring, both as modes of extraction.[29] Between them, simulation composes the middle layer, connecting seemingly intelligent tactic and strategy through dimensionality. Spatial intelligence hovers as an unbreakable media image, while the phrase “广度本身作为可靠性的平铺” (breadth itself as the plain of reliability) grounds conceptual diffusion through a sense of spatiality. 

From this observation emerge 3 questions.
  1. If narrow AI is incompatible with the strategic level that warfare needs yet instrumentalized by states and capital as an intelligent tool, where does this frame mislead us to through policy rhetoric and institutional advocacy?
  2. What would it mean to read nuclear policy not through national power but as planetary infrastructural composition of redundancy and activist disarmament as part of the media landscape?
  3. And if moral dialectics fail in practicing responsibility that it claimed, how might artistic social engagement, through post-Gaza media streaming or citizen science, act as a medium of humanitarian abductive action beyond media as spectacle? 

Within the mesocosmic level of bioregion, for example, sensors act as philosophical agents: biointelligence crystallizes within the artificial, producing immanent redundancies across external ecologies and semi-artificial labor landscapes largely sustained by women in rural systems in China. [30] Architectural and musical composition become both conceptual and methodological tools for investigating simulation as spatial intelligence. Composition is treated as stochastic object formation, capturing narrow AI’s induction and socio-political systemic roots, as in OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) in military automation, delayed than commercialization, command cannot be objectively defined, only simulated.[31] The kitsch optimism of military AI cannot reconstruct the full strategic complexity of war.[32]

Taskification and data laboring reduce architectural scales into devaluing repetition, feeding an aesthetics of intelligence and status quo of hierarchy and systemic extraction in a loop of its own automation. China’s infrastructural expansion as synaesthetic redundancy in conjunction with European post-colonial policy frameworks in the truth-making era, experimental cooperative metrics of thinking and composing for post-extractivist governance, becomes the duty of cultural agents, easily mapped by sonic architecture.[33]


   Conclusion


While expanding the scope of intelligence, understanding another language is pivotal when exposed to the anthropocentric world.[34][35] Computational language was first computer science then applied in specific areas of certain fields. Musical and architectural creation both rely on software to articulate their composition, either sonic or geometric. Artificial intelligence or smart intelligence has entered the tangible world already in infrastructure with a global fluid layout based on political pursuits. Such a smart system could mobilize and empower citizen participation and become citizen science, considered by grassroots democratic initiatives. Since there is an early tradition between computation and artistic creation, in the current transformation of enlarging AI’s implementation formulates an artistic protohistory of infrastructure.

Beyond obscurity,[36] architectural practice mirrors the world’s changing and situates itself in a core (or physical) part of the yet-to-be phantasm world. Sonic architecture, invented and theorized by Iannis Xenakis, illuminates the nuanced entanglement. 

This research as media studies recognizes that cultural agents corresponding to urgent humanitarian narratives become pivotal in designing plural infrastructures. 

Reframing cultural institutions as intelligent infrastructures of crisis ecology, this work constructs a situated conceptual model where artistic practice and planetary governance intersect, toward a more practical infrastructural intelligence that reaches systemic breadth while viewing developmental infrastructure as media. This article reanalyzes aesthetics while mirroring us to artificial intelligence as either a mirroring system or a redundant object that reassembles us the most in the completing and existing planetary infrastructure or human colonization alongside territorial violence towards each other based on unwitting simplistic logic in redundancy. As Francis J. Gavin described, we are facing more of a problem with plenty instead of scarcity.[37]


  1. Serafin, S. (2004) The Sound Of Friction: Real-Time Models, Playability And Musical Application. Ph. D. Thesis. Standford University.
  2. Opitz, S, Tellmann, U. (2016) ‘Europe’s Materialism: Infrastructures and Political Space’, Limn 7: Public Infrastructures/Infrastructural Publics, pp.89–93.
  3. Folkers, A. (2016) ‘Nuclear States, Renewable Democracies?’, Limn 7: Public Infrastructures/Infrastructural Publics, pp.81–92.
  4. Deleuze, G, Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  5. Foucault, M. (1970) ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, Critique 282, pp.885–908.
  6. Jensen, B.O. (2009) ‘Flows of Meaning, Cultures of Movements – Urban Mobility as Meaningful Everyday Life Practice’, Mobilities, 4(1), pp.139–158. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17450100802658002.
  7. Opitz, S, Tellmann, U. (2017/8) ‘Simulating The World: The Digital Enactment Of Pandemics As A Mode Of Global Self-Observation’, European Journal Of Social Theory 20:3, pp.392–416.
  8. Grusin, R. (2010) Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11. Palgrave Macmillan UK.
  9. Sherman, S. (2024) The Fordian Slip. e-flux: Architecture.
  10. Gabrys, J. (2016) Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1b7x5gq.
  11. Gabrys, J, Michelle W, and Yuti A. F. (2024) “Actually Existing Smart Forests: A Proposal for Pluralizing Eco-technical Worlds.” Environment and Planning F. https://doi.org/10.1177/26349825241264393.
  12. Foucault, M. (1970) ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, Critique 282, pp.885–908.
  13. Ibid.
  14. Eshun, K. (1998) More Brilliant Than The Sun. Quartet Books.
  15. Xenakis, I. (1963) Formalized Music. Pendragon Press.
  16. Foucault, M. (1970) ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, Critique 282, pp.885–908.
  17. Bökesoy, S. (2024) Introduction to generative audio synthesis: Part 1. Sounding Future.
  18. Xenakis, I. (2008) Music and Architecture: Architecture Projects, Texts, and Realizations. Pendragon Press.
  19. Harman, G. (2018) ‘Non-Relationality for Philosophers and Architects’, Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism. Southwest University Press.
  20. Xenakis, I. (2008) Music and Architecture: Architecture Projects, Texts, and Realizations. Pendragon Press.
  21. Harman, G. (2018) ‘Non-Relationality for Philosophers and Architects’, Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism. Southwest University Press.
  22. Kelly, M. C. (2018) ‘The Participatory Development Toolkit’, Limn 9: Little Development Devices/Humanitarian Goods, pp.110–118.
  23. Bökesoy, S. (2024) Introduction to generative audio synthesis: Part 1. Sounding Future.
  24. Serafin, S. (2004) The Sound Of Friction: Real-Time Models, Playability And Musical Application. Ph. D. Thesis. Standford University.
  25. Xenakis, I. (1963) Formalized Music. Pendragon Press.
  26. Klein, N. (2007). The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company.
  27. Hunter, C., & Bowen, B. E. (2023). We’ll never have a model of an AI major-general: Artificial intelligence, command decisions, and kitsch visions of war. Journal of Strategic Studies, 47(1), 116–146. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2023.2241648
  28. Symank, R. (2025). Durkheim’s empire: The concept of solidarity and its colonial dimension. American Political Science Review, 119(3), 1361–1374. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424001023
  29. Pong, B. (2025). V olumetric mediations: Atmospheres of crisis and unbelonging in humanitarian drone documentaries. Area. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.70020
  30. Ritchie, N., & Kupriyanov, M. (2023). Understanding the humanitarian consequences and risks of nuclear weapons. BMEIA. https://www.bmeia.gv.at/fileadmin/user_upload/Zentrale/Aussenpolitik/Abruestung/Understanding_the_Humanitarian_Consequences_and_Risks_of_Nuclear_Weapons.pdf
  31. Pasquinelli, M., & Joler, V . (2021). The Nooscope manifested: Artificial intelligence as instrument of knowledge extractivism. AI & Society, 36(4), 1263–1280. https://nooscope.ai
  32. Giovannini, F., Elbahtimy, H., Saradzhyan, S., & Flood, A. (2022). The role of nuclear weapons in the 21st century. Belfer Center. https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/role-nuclear-weapons-21st-century
  33. Dixon, J. (1982). The community-based rural welfare system in the People’s Republic of China: 1949–1979. Community Development Journal. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44258446
  34. Egeland, K. (2024). The struggle for abolition: Power and legitimacy in multilateral nuclear disarmament diplomacy. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003456841
  35. Arboleda, M. (n.d.). Technology, resource extraction, and the complete urbanisation of nature. Urban Studies Foundation. https://www.urbanstudiesfoundation.org/funding/grantees/dr-martin-arboleda/
  36. Merve Bedir et al., eds. (2023) Automated Landscapes, Rotterdam: Nieuwe Instituut.
  37. Gavin, J. F. (2024) The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era, Routledge.


































S02 Format Statement & Technical Logic For A Body That Remembers
Format s02 emerges centered on these practices, seeking to reconceptualize and reconcile the operative possibilities—both aesthetic and theoretical—within the conditions of digital culture, situating its inquiry at the limit, the edge, the frame, the frontier