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Praveen Paranagamage
Praveen Paranagamage
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The Sky in 1697, Praveen Paranagamage
Digital
Major project:
Laplace's Demon
The sky has always represented a territory of uncertainty, a
zone of limited human influence. Once, we rationalised this uncertainty through mythic thinking. Early
cosmological diagrams and post-Enlightenment meteorological instruments were an
attempt to measure and order the uncertain. In 1946, the ENIAC computer ran the
first ever single day’s weather forecast. ENIAC ‘proved’ that it was not merely
possible to predict the weather, but also to rationalise uncertainty through
computation. At each layer of the sky, computation
has attempted to eradicate uncertainty, replacing mythic with technical
thinking: a new form of deriving meaning.
In information theory, ‘noise’ is an index of unpredictability, the term given to the
difference between a predicted and observed outcome. The project takes the form
of a quasi-scientific
‘investigation’ which attempts to measure this innate unmeasurable aspect of
the world: ‘noise’.
Rather
than measuring the sky, the investigation attempts to generate meaning from a
series of randomly generated computational ‘noise’ maps, employing a process of
apophenia: the human tendency to mistakenly perceive meaning between unrelated
things. The investigation is described through a series of instruments which
calibrate one another, a cyclical loop that at each stage tries to eliminate
uncertainty error but ultimately generates distorted ‘views’ of the world that lie
between ‘reality’ and myth.
Info
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School
School of Architecture
Programme
MA Architecture
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Contact
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Previous degrees
- MA Architecture, University of Cambridge, 2012
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Collaborators
- Limal Harris, Victoria Craven