The discourses that May and Easterling are forwarding lie within a plethora of research work concerned with the mass production of images availed by digital equipment. They are part of a broader design discussion circulating among academic forums and private practices that define digital models as either final renditions or modifiable models. Complex bodies of data, such as digital models, are like sets of instructions calibrated precisely for computer to computer communication and dialogues between computers and printers or robotic processes. These models can also yield diverse outcomes due to their editable potential and numerical condition, enhancing their capacity to resize, adopt and adapt in response to commands. For this reason, digital models are never final; they are intellectual weapons with endless opportunities and consequences. As an example, consider The Slow House . In 1989 it was a design-built commission, and now it is part of MOMA’s architectural collection and Diller-Scofidio+Renfro’s unbuilt archives. Like other digital models, it is a spatial entity exposing the ability to exist in different locations at any given time. It can appear and reappear as an original piece in prominent exhibits across the globe. In its transformative state, it is more valuable and resourceful than any built rendition would be. 8 Rebuilt with different instruments, a digital home defies traditional expectations for curators, educators and researchers, who can record, assess, store and retrieve its content according to its immediate locality. Like all digitalised information, The Slow House is not fixed on-site and does not travel on a vessel; instead, it can travel as a packet from one machine to another. Models of this kind introduced novel modes to redefine the functions and performances of architecture as reproducible, active and evolving objects tailored by codes and transactional agreements.
Historians see this conditioning as a transfer outside the ‘posthuman animal that flies’ and closer to a ‘god-like animal that designs and engineers life’. 3 Oddly, in this superhuman state, data mining and processing through digits scapes the specificities of a site, creating a physical separation from reality rendered by ‘pseudorthography’: Pseudorthography is orthography after simulation: a mobile army of skeuomorphism in which the world appears just enough as it used to. Immediately beneath those appearances is another world, ‘produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks, and command models-and with these, it can be reproduced an infinite number of times’. 4 Based on architectural practices and John May’s writings for SIG-NAL. IMAGE. ARCHITECTURE , design is without choice ‘mummified in stunning resolutions’. 5 This idea stands within a 2D–3D tug of war based on a 2D–3D dilemma first spun by anime slang, where 2D is beautiful, and the physical tangibility of 3D is a condition now known as ‘three-dimensional pig disgusting [3DPD]’. 3DPD indicates that 2D experiences are superior to 3D experiences. 6 Keller Easterling, architect and theorist, expressed concerns for this spatial reconditioning, noting that in the absence of gravity, this dematerialization of physical information represents a shift in perception where ‘the light, the blizzard of photons coming from everywhere is blinding and ugly’. 7 3 Bratton, Benjamin H. The stack: On software and sovereignty. MIT press, 2016 4 Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow . New York: Random House, 2016 5 May, John. SIGNAL. IMAGE. ARCHITECTURE (Everything is already an image) .
Columbia books on architecture and the city, 2019 6 giantparakeet. ‘3DPD’. Know Your Meme . 2007. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/3dpd 7 Easterling, Keller. ‘IIRS’. e-flux Journal . April 2015. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/64/60837/iirs/
8 Latour, Bruno and Adam Lowe. 'The Migration of the Aura Exploring the Original Through Its Facsimiles' in T. Bartscherer and R. Coover (editors) Switching Codes. Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. pp 275-297.
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