Prolegomena to an Art Theory of Event-scape Architecture

The theory of Meta-Morphology introduces the concept of process patterns. The present contribution seeks to establish (some preliminaries for) an art-theoretical foundation for the design of large edifices of process patterns, or in other words, an Art Theory of Event-Scape Architecture. With this term, we combine Virilio's description of the Event-Landscape in his book by the same title, and Christopher Alexander's "A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art", which analyses the pattern languages of ancient carpets. The purely metaphysical concept of Virilio's event-landscapes is transformed into practical graphical representations of process patterns that follow the style patterns of oriental carpets. This approach had earlier antecedents: deeper research into the culture-historical background of Alexander's work shows strong evidence that early Islamic art employed techniques to empathically evoke visions of exactly the (kind of) trans-temporal panorama of God's universe, which Virilio depicts, and this was part of the success story of early Islamic religion. In many respects, this visionary technique was quite alien to Christian occidental mentality which remained bound to visual pictorial representations. (With the possible exception of the spatio-iconography of gothic cathedrals). One could say that this was the most successfully hidden deep secret of Islam. During the decline of Islamic culture after about 1200, it seems to have become lost even to Islamic culture itself. Alexander's title: "Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art" implies that this secret of early Islamic Art is in the process of being rediscovered, as now the sciences and mathematics have advanced to a level where the outcome of the pioneering work of Al-Khwarizmi could be technologically spread to reach a large percentage of the population. The technics of programma (or algorismus) have now become common knowledge for a large percentage of the population. The, Art Theory of Event-Scape Architecture" is also expected to bring practical results, since computer software systems are large edifices of process patterns. Here, a more powerful practical graphic representation of process patterns would greatly enhance the control of the everincreasing complexity of software systems.