Facing Mud On Matter-Informational Building and Writing

This text postulates mud as a host and a source of three architectonic thoughts. Suspending immediate judgment about the value and potentiality of muddy matter, these architectonic thoughts offer figurations of mud that slip between inappropriate and necessary, between generosity and exploitation. The three aspects of mud depicted in the figurations characterize different informational processes: standardization, communication, and augmenting. Informational processes encoded in mud traverse dichotomies such as discreet-continuous,
soft-hard but also dirty-clean. In terms of the communication theory of the French philosopher Michel Serres, this text offers an account of mud as a noisy matter, at once the channel and a part of the message, host and parasite, a capacious potentiality that circulates through and even determines urban infrastructures and architecture. The treatment of mud, therefore, aspires to be
inventive of images and techniques to work with its noisy composition.