Digital Pulse in Architecture

November, 2008

This symposium is a unique opportunity to formalize an ongoing discussion that is dramatically changing the nature of architecture and architectural education. We have with us eight designers and thinkers who are part of what our conference organizer –Assistant Professor Eric Goldemberg- describes as the ‘digital avant-garde’. They have been invited to discuss their work and to situate that work in a broader discourse focusing on the evolving nature of digital technology, digital representation and architecture. This symposium is an occasion to explore some of the extraordinary concepts and techniques connected with the production of contemporary architecture and design, a revelation of cutting-edge technologies that are changing the ways in which contemporary architecture is theorized and conceived, as well as the ways we receive and perceive it.  

 In order to enframe what I know will be a lively and insightful series of presentations and discussions over the next few days, Id like to share a few ruminations.  My goal is to situate tonight’s discussions on the digital in architecture and the transformative nature of the virtual and its associated technologies in a broader cultural discourse. I will attempt to provoke just a little in the hopes of ensuring a good debate over the coming days.

 Today digital technology forms the core of the transformations that are generating startling changes in virtually every design, cultural and political activity; for almost half a century digital technologies have ushered in radically reconfigured forms of representational systems, a re-functioned industrial base, a re-invented communication system, and a medical system that now treats disease as a form of defective genetic code instead of as a manifestation of complex physiological and corporeal conditions. Codes and strings of information have replaced flesh and blood as the locus of the medical discipline and that change is not unlike what we have experienced in the discipline of architecture in which data sets, scripts and codes have fundamentally changed our understanding of both the object and the subject of architecture. Just as lines of code have replaced the body as the primary site of medical practices, so too have they altered our disciplinary sense of where and upon what we act.

 If the shift from Modernism and an industrial base to Postmodernism and information-based economy was to some degree precipitated by the triumph of technology over speculative science, then the primacy of technology within postmodernist culture is premised on the triumph of technology over experience. At this moment, technologies (digital and others) are being encouraged that alter the terms of our relationship with the far more subtle effects of our inherited genetic history, our psychological history and our epistemic notions of what and how we construct and how we construct. And I mean this both in terms of constructing things and constructing ideas.

Technology and the digital –obviously over the course of the next few days we will be referring principally to digital technology, digital fabrication and digital representation - mediates and increasingly simulates the experiential in ways that complicate and confound many of our previously held notions of the real and the actual. In the introduction to his novel Crash, J.G.Ballard wrote “We live already in a world ruled by fictions of every kind. The fiction is already here and the role of the writer is to invent the reality.” I would strongly suggest that one could exchange the word architect for the word writer and the point is extremely relevant to our topic tonight.  The mere promise of dizzying access to digital technology, information systems, communication systems and electronic communities have engendered fictions that actively alter reality. In so doing they in turn create dramatic leaps in technologies. What emerges is an endless spiral of means and ends, fictions and technologies.    The boundaries that for so long have characterized the distinctions between the speculative and the instrumental have been almost fully eroded by the merging of technological research with marketing; a trend characterized by the commodification of digital technology in ways absent of reflection and devoid of critical examination.  Enveloped in the demands of production and immediate consumption, technologies (digital and others) become convincing in part because they appear to function invisibly and effortlessly; perception, memory, history, politics, identity and experience become totally mediated through technology in ways that make simple economic or contextual historic analysis unfeasible. Indeed, technology and digital fictions pervade the present not simply as a mode of production or representation but as an operative principle.

Digital technology has been empowered to subsume experience across every aspect of our lives and within our contemporary culture. In forms that assail the boundaries between understanding and certainty, it has become operational not merely in the formation of ideologies but also in the practices of everyday life. Donna Haraway - who as an author, zoologist, primatologist, and professor of gender studies, transcends boundaries -notes that ‘late 20th Century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between the natural and the artificial, the mind and the body, as well as the difference between self-developing and externally designed’.  Extending Haraway’s critique, one cant help but marvel at how our machines and the fictions they create have become disturbingly lively while we ourselves have become frighteningly inert.  As the pervasiveness of technology and digital simulacra increase in ways that are both revealing and intricate, we are often lured into hazardous complacency; Haraway reminds us that the issue of electronic and digital technology stands as the most demanding denominator of the current cultural condition.

 As a fundamental element in the construction and representation of experience, technology and the digital serve in several forms: as entertainment, as communication and as work.  I presume others might emerge over the next few days as well.  The web of technologized experience –using Heidegger’s terminology enframes the ways things are done; technology and the digital are assimilated into pop culture in ways that reinforce their authority but also mask their domination. Games, news, film, music, the design disciplines, etc. often serve as the testing ground -whether we know it or not- with research and development merged with and masked by marketing strategies; advanced digital technologies – have been integrated into every sphere, nook and cranny of our contemporary culture as both novelty and as necessity. In less than a decade we have witnessed a fundamental shift as the computer embraces an increasing range of tasks. Yet the administrative efficacy of the machine is eclipsed as it begins to assimilate representation of itself. Imaging systems have come to echo the forms of representation that so dominate our culture and digital imaging technologies routinely use computational simulacra sequences to dramatize content; virtual commercials, animations and morphing have become indispensable components and strategies in making images relevant to a generation of users who are comfortable with and expect electronic illusion.

 At the same time video, film and photography are being challenged to hold their authority against the simulacral systems and digital fictions. While, these new imaging paradigms may have their practical roots in the photographic/technologic traditions, their conceptual inheritance is firmly in the sphere of simulation. Like the union of opportunity and predicament that emerged with the advent of mechanical reproduction at the beginning of the 20th Century –and I hope that the ghost of Walter Benjamin will float through the discussions this evening – a similar union of opportunity and predicament might be hoped for in the emerging discourse on digital representation and technology in the 21st Century. To channel Benjamin’s ghost into this symposium would likely result in the assertion that the reconfiguration of data employed to construct an electronic image based in part on the knowledge of how the structure of perception can be rendered is essentially epistemological in nature and is thus very different from a photograph, a film or a visual recording which are all phenomenological in nature.

 The shift from phenomena to episteme is a significant reconfiguration of the model of what constitutes an image and it raises the question of how images, representation, simulacra and animation serve as objective and or fictive information; as such, the link that photographic and filmic representation presumed for so long is severed and reconstructed. While this severing may be perceived as both constructive and liberating - and I presume that all of our guest speakers believe it to be so - it also suggests a form of detachment that fragments experience more deeply than the media environments that preceded it. There are those who follow Baudrillard and tell us that the screen has now eclipsed reality and that to live now is to exist in a world of image, simulation and spectacle disconnected from this here and this now. 

The remarkable design work and writing of our guest speakers suggest that the blurred territory between simulacra and the physical actuality is a contested terrain worthy of exploration. The fertile gap between Baudrillard’s and J.G.Ballard’s fictions, illusions and spectacles on the one hand, and the genuine and real actualities in which actors act, things happen, buildings get built, and political and social consequences unfold will no doubt be the complex topographic map upon which and within which this symposium’s debate will be situated. I very much look forward to that unfolding debate.