Feed Feeds Feed

Kostas Terzidis
Professor, College of Design and Innovation
Tongji University

The definition of a cybernetic feedback may involve a degree of randomness which could make its behavior unpredictable. Then, the balance between randomness and order gives rise to entelechy, creativity, and imagination. Feedback systems occasionally exhibit a degree of autonomy that could be interpreted as self-reflection. Do systems have a mind of their own? Does the emergence of self-regulating feedback systems possess intentionality? This lecture will present a series of studies, experiments, and findings that lead towards a novel theory of diapathy: the use of something to become. It heralds a paradigm shift from the anthropocentric to the animistic.

Kostas Terzidis is a professor at the College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University and the founder of the 尚想实验室. Previously, he was an associate professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Design (2003-2011) and assistant professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (1995-2003). He holds a PhD from the University of Michigan, a Master's from Ohio State University, and a polytechnic diploma from Aristotle University. His areas of concentration are AI Art, algorithmic design, and Kids AID. He is author of numerous academic papers and the sole author of four books: Permutation Design (Routledge: 2014), Algorithms for Visual Design (Wiley: 2009), Algorithmic Architecture (Architectural Press: 2006), and Expressive Form (Spon:2003). Between 2011-2017 he launched and ran a startup company called Organic Parking, Inc. that dealt with parking optimization using smart phones. In 2019 he was selected as High-End Foreign Expert by State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs. In 2023 he received the Magnolia 白玉兰 Baiyulan award.