Análisis descriptivo

CONFERENCE: Digital-Cultural Ecology and the Medium-Sized City

AMPS; Architecture_MPS journal; UWE: CMIR. 01-03 April, 2016

As with other ‘borrowed’ concepts in architectural discourse, topology risks either being so general that it refers to every curvilinear form, or so precise that it is conceptually limited. Certainly, the unique disciplinary contribution of digital design practice is that it replaces Euclidian spatial geometry with topology. This change in geometry, making form relational rather than metric, allows objects to physically express an interplay between material and context. Topology solicits objects that are now indexical responses to contextual ‘affects’ rather than geometrically descriptive forms with a specific shape and size. By extension, topology understands form through processes of deformation. Topological form is not radical simply because form is literally, rather than figuratively, malleable and plastic. As Greg Lynn’s use of Gilles Deleuze’s ‘asignifying concept’ demonstrates, any form ‘in the drawing’ is not immediately referential; making form instrumental before it is iconic or emblematic.iv

It is radical also because theoretically, objects can never be prefigured. The form ‘in the drawing’ is not idealised because the process of making never forecloses the form of the architectural object. For this reason, digital practice has used typology to promote the drawing as the site of formal production. The radical embrace of the drawing as a space of formal production echoes Robin Evans’s call for a “history… [of] the gap between drawing and building” resists the tendency of the illustrative drawing to formally prefigure architectural objects.v _{The conversion of the drawing to a site of formal}

generation also overcomes the formal prefiguring found when the drawing simply illustrates what the architect is thinking. For Andrew Benjamin, this illustrative role is problematic because it reduces the drawing to a melancholic site of absence. Benjamin circumvents this problem by framing the digital drawing as a site of procedural plasticity and formal generation.vi _{The digital drawing becomes the}

perfect medium for acts of repetition and difference, or ‘alterity’ because the toolset allows for “the complex interplay of production and disruption.” vii

This optimistic view of the digital toolset is offset by how the spectacular formal consequences of topological geometry. Aided by digital image production and dissemination, topology helps commodify the objects captured in the camera's frame. The adaptation of Closed Circuit TeleVision (CCTV) technology to promote idealised city views over the Internet is simply an extra role added to its original use to police urban space. Clearly, both the promotional and surveillant use CCTV networks alter our understanding of the urban fabric by providing images that flatten formally discontinuous urban fabric into a continuous urban surface. The promotional image and surveillant view differ in that the former promotes qualitative, expressive objects. The flattening of space in the surveillant view demands that the viewer 'carves out’ space and see behind the surface. In contrast, the promotional view flattens and re-orientates form towards the camera lens.

Civic authorities use the promotional city image to furnish indexical re-presentations of the built fabric. The viewer is expected to interpret the view as a spatial condition. Like the surveillant view, the promotional webcam wants the viewer to see three-dimensionality in the 'virtual'. However, it is also true that the promotional webcam produces images and presents two viewpoints situated in ‘real’ and virtual space.

The unique aspect of digital image production is that, unlike emulsion photography, the real is indexed into discrete, three-dimensional packages of visual data. Unconstrained by what the negative captures, real objects are flattened into a grid of pixels that are distinguished through a numerical conversion of form. The beauty of the image is that it indexes materiality, and thus program, into quantifiable packages of colour and luminosity. The digital transformation of the real is unique because of the ease by which one can reconfigure both the number of pixels in the image and the values assigned to each pixel. In this sense the digital image makes the re-presentation of real objects inherently adjustable and relational, rather than absolute. Thus the numerical conversion of the real ensures that the digital image is a predictable, relational and multi-scalar site of topological variation.

The conventions of digital discourse suggest that the diagram is the best drawing to represent and formalise the variable relations found within a context. Thus Lynn’s animated diagram requires an idiosyncratic naming process where the diagrammatic deformation of geometric elements are fabricated and not mapped from the world. This type of digital diagram relies on the selection and

CONFERENCE: Digital-Cultural Ecology and the Medium-Sized City

AMPS; Architecture_MPS journal; UWE: CMIR. 01-03 April, 2016

naming of geometric topological entities. In contrast, the topology of the digital image achieves its relational translation of the ‘real’ without recourse to geometric form. The quantified mediation of materiality and program through colour and luminosity functions, instead, through an interdependent relationship between the technology and real objects. The numerical basis of this relationship presents diagrams that are in the strictest sense abstract, mathematical constructs. The digital camera technologies offer more information than contained in Lynn’s purely formal topological forms. The relationality found in the digital image presents material and tectonic within defined parameters that frames both the reception of existing, as well as the projection of new, urban surfaces. The surface of the digital image is far closer to the non-formal logics of ‘topology’.

THE CONSTRUCTIONAL LOGICS OF THE DIGITAL IMAGE: SCALING, SCANNING AND