In Contagious Architecture, Luciana Parisi develops a radical reconceptualisation of computation by arguing that algorithms are no longer reducible to finite instructions executed within deterministic systems, but instead function as autonomous entities capable of generating new spatiotemporal actualities. Against the cybernetic assumption that computation merely processes information according to fixed logical procedures, Parisi demonstrates that contemporary algorithmic culture is increasingly defined by the irruption of randomness, incomputable data, and contingent probabilities within formal systems themselves. Computation therefore ceases to operate as a stable mechanism of prediction and instead becomes a speculative mode of aesthetic production. Central to this argument is the notion of “contagion”, through which algorithms prehend, absorb, and transform data in ways that irreversibly alter the operational logic of digital systems. Drawing extensively on Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, Parisi contends that algorithmic procedures possess a quasi-ontological status: they are not representations of reality, but actual occasions of experience that actively construct new architectures of space, temporality, and thought. A paradigmatic example appears in her analysis of parametric and topological digital architecture, where computational design no longer reproduces fixed geometric forms but generates mutable environments driven by probabilistic relations and incompressible quantities of information. Consequently, architecture becomes an anticipatory infrastructure of computational culture itself, revealing how algorithmic aesthetics reorganise perception, embodiment, and urban existence. The enduring significance of Parisi’s intervention resides in her insistence that contemporary computation should not be understood as a closed rational system, but as a speculative ecology of indeterminate forces through which culture, matter, and abstraction continuously contaminate one another.
URBANISM MEETS ART