We are in the business of producing knowledge.
David Ruy
DTP is interested in figuring out what the core curriculum is or should be.
David Ruy
It is very disheartening to come to work every day if you don't believe in the institution.
Education Machine
Michael Osman
Interest is creating a space for reflection and that is what we desire but, at the same time, criticism is hegemonic. So how do we create a space for reflection that is not hegemonic?
Education Machine
Michael Osman
Moving through a discursive landscape is like a process of remembering.
David Ruy
You think about something that influenced you in the past and when you think about it, that thing from the past influenced you in the present. Causality is non-local.
Dancing about Architecture
Tim Morton
The virtual is a space of potential ideas where thoughts form in the movement of memories.
Less and More: On the Political Potential of a Virtual Architecture
Adrian Blackwell
It is possible to reclaim a space of discourse in the glitch precisely because it is useless.
Richard Mapes
Does the character matter? Should it be human? Should it be first-person or third-person?
Unknown
Character in the Age of Liberal Uncertainty.
Education Machine
Michael Osman
The principle of scholarship shifted in 18th century Germany to a new mode of higher learning. “Nothing more is required than freedom… the freedom to make a public use of one’s reason in all matters.”
What is Enlightenment?
Immanuel Kant
Images are data that have been output by a process called signalization, the detection and subdivision of energy in an environment and its transmission into electrical charges called signals.
Signal. Image. Architecture: (Everything Is Already an Image).
John May
It would be interesting to reconceive BIM that is not handed out to engineers and consultants, but the stakeholders.
Jasmine Benyamin
Shade is often understood as a luxury amenity but as heatwaves become commonplace, we have to learn to see shade as a civic resource that is shared by all.
Shade
Sam Bloch
Non-binary really means non-categorized. Facebook’s 58 gender options did not resolve the issue of the binary body. Rather, it makes and requires a box to be ticked, a categorization to be determined.
Glitch Feminism
Legacy Russell
Dirt is matter out of place. Matter located where it is judged not to belong.
Dirty Theory
Hélène Frichot
Architectural culture found a dead end in Deleuzian, technological utopianism. The single surface problem was a last ditch effort to save Modernism.
David Ruy
Curatorial statements fall into one of two categories. The first is a didactic project on supporting the lesson of a “genius” so that the audience may experience a humbling while the second is a project on distributed agency in which the didactic role is shifted to the curator who will teach the audience their lesson.
Education Machine
Michael Osman
Genius, in an architect’s understanding of the term, was still subordinate to taste (the feel one had for one’s art). Whereas genius for an engineer came to reside in assemblages and relations, with the sciences and arts never representing anything other than a combination of ideas and signs.
French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment
Antoine Picon
Let’s get rid of form and culture, and leave it to just best-practices professionalism. What you would get is procedural repetitions which would be termed best-practices. Repetition without distinction, which is the literal definition of banality.
David Ruy
Socially good projects are one-off projects just as much as starchitect's, highly aestheticized projects are one-off projects.
James Piccone
What are the forms of public discourse that we need and that we can produce? What is left out of this seeming hegemony?
Education Machine
Michael Osman
How do you define atmosphere? What is an environment to you?
Masha Hupalo
A central characteristic of architecture as environmental design was its dual allegiance: to the political and public action, on the one hand, and to scientific inquiry and knowledge, on the other. These two ideas, and the contradictions between them, shaped both the term and its fate in architecture discourse.
Environmental Design
Avigail Sachs
Personal labor is what makes you believe the thing you made is “yours.”
David Ruy
What are the aesthetics of labor? Often, the works that make the biggest impressions are the ones where you can see the labor. There is a qualification to the work but it also offers a destabilized image back to the world.
James Piccone
The idea of the licensed professional is primarily a European invention with origins in medicine (doctors). Why do we accept that architecture must imitate the model of medicine?
David Ruy
We are so subjected to the medium of cybernetic message sending that the work only ever becomes about signal and noise. The desire is to not worry if you got it... So, who gets it?
Education Machine
Michael Osman
The coalitions of indifference form autonomous subgroups within the discipline that have celebrated expertise and calculated precision of authoring the authorless and the formally inert, which is no happy accident despite their branding of insincerity.
Book Review: Not Interesting: On the Limits of Criticism in Architecture
James Piccone
Why do we need images that destabilize in this particular time? We need those images because they produce heterogeneous experiences but are heterogenous experiences conducive to social good will?
Unknown
Imaging is the technical hegemony we have to negotiate.
James Piccone
Reality is not a human construct but it is a construct that comes together from the measurer and the measured thing coming together to make it real. Reality is an interpretation.
Dancing about Architecture
Tim Morton
Be authentic.
Unknown
Architecture is wedded in a sad but true way to the traumatic dislocation of work in the Enlightenment brought on by the splitting of being from non-being and opus from arbeit.
Education Machine
Michael Osman
There is something fantastic about writing the rules and playing the game yourself.
Michael Young
Today, the United States operates out of the protestant tradition, in that Beauty is deemed evil. Yet, Catholicism will deem beauty to be holy, spiritual, a connection with the other. These are different ways of looking at the world.
David Ruy
In the digital age, debris doesn’t just exist in the physical world, there is digital debris such as spam. Around 80% of all email messages are spam. It’s the essence of digital writing and has a firm grasp on reality.
David Ruy
The sofas are filthy, ugly, out of place. Discarded sidewalk furniture is a fixture in Los Angeles.
NY Times
The fact that only two responses to boredom exist: avoidance or endurance is what creates an audience. Criticism is built into the perceptual stamina of the audience. Boredom is intentionally constructing a marginal subculture. Boredom shifts authorship to the subjective audience.
Book Review: Not Interesting: On the Limits of Criticism in Architecture
James Piccone
Power wants to be represented in the world.
David Ruy
Trivial aesthetic categories grounded in ambivalence and the surprising power these weak effects can have are so paradoxically central to capitalism and consumerism.
Sianne Ngai
The problem of any discussion of conceptual architecture is that it is inevitably seen as a subcategory of architecture but the word conceptual is broader and allows for discussion regarding the conceptual beginning of architecture.
A Conceptual Introduction to Architecture
Mark Jarzombek
Bureaucracy matters because it scales.
Kiel Moe
Could Architects be better suited as consultants? Should we abolish the profession and move into a consulting practice that interacts with a variety of different players?
Unknown
There is exhaustion in limitation. It’s a way of coordinating your efforts so you’re not exhausting into infinity. You eventually reach a limit and those limits are entirely different things than what you started with.
Unknown
The American Dream is tied to an understanding of land as a thing to be colonized and appropriated, but also a broader idea of structuring society and the government towards a singular mode of being as an individual, a family, and community. For architecture, the American Dream was also ruinous in that it prioritized buildings as a commodity, capital growth, and efficient means of production over any concerns for cultural and diversification.
Suburban Tendencies
James Piccone
The corner problem: people in cars seeing people on the street as a problem.
Masha Hupalo
It is the modernist desire to endlessly produce and consume everything in the visual field, appropriating reality, but also constituting a new material reality in and of itself, ultimately forming a constellation of images that must be negotiated as an ecosystem of media.
On Photography
Susan Sontag
Character is ambiguous but it carries with it a tradition of anthropomorphism. It personifies buildings that represent the populations they served.
Unknown
Architecture makes culture visible. It’s different from art in a gallery or film in a theater. You can’t turn architecture off. But representations are not truth.
David Ruy
Durand was an architect at a polytechnic, he taught engineers architecture. He was challenged with maintaining architecture as an autonomous discipline. Boiled down the essence of architecture by producing a system of rationalization to make architecture available to the engineers. He had interest and support from Ecole des Beaux Arts, but he was looked at as a figure in the margins of the discipline.
From "Poetry of Art" to Method: The Theory of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand
Antoine Picon
Mindfulness: focus on the process and meaning of seeing and knowing through drawing, rather than on the end product, to sketch a pathway to personal awareness.
Halleh Honaryar
Our mission is to research, build, and advocate for architecture that promotes justice and human dignity.
MASS Design Group
Invest in economic and intellectual capital where it can use innovative design solutions to improve the built environment, creating value for both stakeholders and the community at large.
DDG
Our interdisciplinary staff is proving, at sites around the world, that intelligent, evocative design can be made with real-world constraints.
SHoP Architects
A place nobody is from but anyone can go to. A collaborative architectural and landscape workshop that has remained true to its trans-disciplinary way of thinking since its inception.
Snohetta
A multi-disciplinary collective working across architecture, design and art that retains a democratic and co-operative working method that enables built, social and research-based work at a variety of scales, both making things and making things happen.
Assemble
A social enterprise with a mission to build the public sector’s capacity to improve the quality, equality and sustainability of places.
Public Practice
Design and build initiatives that promote neighborhood resilience and elevate the agency of working class communities of color.
LA Más
Opportunity Type: Seek opportunities to advance a practice agenda often focused on design. Competitions, One-Off Projects, Unsolicited Proposals, Self-Initiated. Opportunistic, improvisational, experimental. Flexible organization with core group and visible leadership, robust talent resource network, engaged as needed.
Paul Nakazawa
Client Type: Seek opportunities to form enduring business relationships based on creation of value for the customer or client. On-going, relationship based engagement, focus on responsiveness and customization of services to anticipate and fulfill customer requirements.
Paul Nakazawa
Market Type: Seek opportunities to create customers for specific services by leading in ideas, innovation, expertise, and value. Market leadership based on perceived expertise, experience, service offer, resource and financial capacity, such as a local architect that designs local hospitals.
Paul Nakazawa
Issues/Propositional Focus: Not everyone wants to be in a “Market.” Offer based in propositions/hypotheses about value and meaning (e.g., environmental responsibility, human health, and happiness, etc.). Engage anyone or everything who can contribute. Shares characteristics with Opportunity-focus practice model.
Paul Nakazawa
Cities are now driven by algorithms, including architecture. But the cultural project doesn’t survive on algorithms. The cultural project is an overlay on the algorithmic substrate as an intersubjective agreement among people about what is valuable and significant.
Paul Nakazawa
We are trapped by the problem of representation but we should engage in other things than just form and style. Money is a pure representation. We want to embrace the real but practice defaults to flatlining everything into wages and money. Are there better ways to pay people besides money?
David Ruy
There is no possibility of a final reconciliation. What you can do is subvert the dominant hegemony, by visualizing that which is repressed and destroyed by the consensus of post-political democracy.
Art and Democracy
Chantal Mouffe
We can automate the deconstruction of buildings, but we know that humans will still be picking the components apart. The contractor has no incentive to become a materials librarian, but architects, who care about material and its implementation just as librarians care about books and their content, are well suited for the job. A new job for architects could be a circular economy materials librarian.
James Piccone
Architecture is obligated to do things outside of its own system of thinking.
Unknown
The public sector architect’s role is to challenge ingrained assumptions in both their discipline and public space.
James Piccone
In gestalt psychology, vision is only ever partial. Perception takes place only at the level of the conscious brain, that is counter to sensation that is immediate. Phenomenology would fall under the category of bodily effects. Cognitiation isn’t direct or sensory.
Gary Fox
The history of retinal projection along with the development of linear perspective projection saw the eye as the center of the image, albeit inverted and transformed into chemical and electrical transmissions. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the concept of image was becoming similar to picture and both were seen as visual artifacts often labeled as the graphic revolution, flood of pictures, media explosion, or cult of images.
James Piccone
Students working on literal to abstract. The literal school, learning to see the building as an architect might see, identifying the construction artifacts as regulating lines in a diagrammatic sense. Take the model and learn how to cut it up to fit inside a bounding box. Developing the line into a figure.
James Piccone
Complication is the act or process of complicating: intricate or confused relation of parts. They are things that are very difficult to solve because we can’t understand them. So they lack an overall coherence. Complexity is the state of being complex; intricacy; entanglement. A relatively simple formula or generator can create a variety of similar but varied answers. From that point, you can begin to understand the differences between work.
James Piccone
Why are we making up words? It’s hard to believe that two descriptive words can be merely combined to make a new category. Like images, blending tools like AI have no ability to contextualize the images in history and semantics. Word blending also should not be assumed to create new meaning.
Devyn Weiser
There is a problem in binary, diagrammatic thinking. We are haunted by whether something is or isn’t architecture.
David Ruy
Often, surface-level is a pejorative. But the surface is all the way down. Surfaces are more like interfaces, the platform where interaction is happening.
Unknown
Site plans are like Disneyland kitsch. Everything is a separate exhibit, distinct zones. No continuity between scale, material, color, form, etc.
Unknown
You can never be completely right (neoplatonic) because the physical world doesn’t work like that.
Dancing about Architecture
Tim Morton
We are dirt collectors and we need a place to store all our dirt. This dirt storage container should be virtual and shareable.
James Piccone
Maybe architect isn't the word. Maybe it's not worth saving. This isn’t just about buildings.
Unknown
Truth is modal, which means that there are amounts of truth. You are not quite, perfectly right. There are amounts of right and wrong. Newton is still right, Einstein just made him less right. Newton works at local, small scales.
Dancing about Architecture
Tim Morton
The grid is anti-natural, anti real, it’s what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.
Suburban Tendencies
Mimi Zeiger
The original purpose of squared paper had nothing to do with the decimal system. Not related to a scaled measurement but a practiced measurement for silk weaving - as patterns and codes for their looms. The dimensions of grids varied considerably without much accuracy. Grid dimensions close to 5/12 of a French inch.
The Origins of Graph Paper as an Influence on Architectural Design
Peter Collins
Nature is something that is entirely arbitrary; reinstated after it has been destroyed. Anything pre-existing has been neutralized.
Suburban Tendencies
Mimi Zeiger
What is missed in a hegemony of correction is that we forget that humans are fundamentally failure-driven creatures. Expelling failure itself is to ignore the entanglements of the site, or where we are today, because it is unknown and must be adjudicated beyond an understanding of correcting failure in a system of performance.
James Piccone
The minor aesthetic term “dirty realism” is a form of fictional writing that emerged out of the late twentieth century characterized by surface descriptions, context, and unremarkable characters in ordinary places.
James Piccone
Out of the noise comes the formation of planets, worlds, and ideas. When these objects coalesce and collide, they form their own solar system and become spaces of pedagogical exploration. The didactic role is in flux between the receiver and transmitter and truth can be found somewhere jumping back and forth between the two. When you enter one of these worlds, you’re floating in an enlightened space that is frightening to the bone because we don’t know what it means yet.
James Piccone
Today, the photograph’s index to reality is inaccessible due to two reasons: (1) the photograph is an image, and (2) images are democratically forged and degraded representation of reality.
James Piccone
A diagram is an abstraction that explains things through their relations. This is a type of marxist materialism that undermines things down to their structural parts.
Unknown
Irony is a weird form of sincerity that is showing that sincerity itself is dancing, it’s playful. Irony is vibrating sincerity. Irony is the exploitation of a gap between levels of meaning, but how does that happen? It happens through movement. It’s how sincerity functions. Things are sincere, but they’re not too serious. When things get too serious, they stop being genuine and sincere. Serious tends towards fascism.
Dancing about Architecture
Tim Morton
In many cases it seems as if the agreeable and the good are one and the same. Thus people commonly say that all gratification is intrinsically good. However, the concepts in these terms are not interchangeable.
Dancing about Architecture
Tim Morton
A judgment of taste must involve a claim to subjective universality.
Immanuel Kant
Nothing can be communicated universally except cognition.
Immanuel Kant
Kant’s mission was to explain that you can still have accurate truth in the world. Because truth is based on intuitions that just happen, they are not manufactured by your ego. You can know that you’re right because actually there are things in your head that are synthetic judgments a priori. Something is structuring the way you judge. Can you explain the number one? That is exactly the introduction to pure reason. Show me the number nine. A finger or any representation of a number is not the number. The number is an abstract.
Dancing about Architecture
Tim Morton
The unconscious is created by the process of culturing people. How does a baby become an english baby, or a spartan baby, etc. How can you see the unconscious? For Kant, the unconscious is beauty but it is truth. You can know there is capital because corporations have to grow to exist, therefore they accumulate money. These are the chinks in the armor that allow you to see the “unconscious.”
Dancing about Architecture
Tim Morton
There is always a gap between a thing and the data.
Dancing about Architecture
Tim Morton
Being alive is like making a deal with death. If you try too hard to be different from your environment, you die. If you try too hard to be the same, you also die. Alive, doesn’t mean the opposite of dead, it means in between two different types of being dead.
Dancing about Architecture
Tim Morton
While the physical collage exposed fragments, precarity, and instability of an image, what digital image editing allows for is seamless collage and non-contextual relationships with a granular attention to detail. Contemporary digital art and design practice is entrenched in virtual realities originating from digital space, models, and simulations but an alternative may be to operate on fragments of reality in a post-production space.
James Piccone
The digital collage is not a reinstatement of realism but rather a dirty and critical intervention.
James Piccone
One topical observation is that every single model during Covid was wrong. Every poll in the last two elections were wrong. Models of data. Those people who believe in these models. I’m on the side that they are bad models. But the stance they all took was that we need better data or more precise data.
David Ruy
In many ways, the Dingbat apartment did what the Case Study House program could not: offer affordable and modern housing that could be easily and widely constructed while offering its own particular aesthetic.
The Embodiment of Speculation and Regulation: The Rise and Fall of the Dingbat Apartment
Steven Treffers
Suburbia is a type of planned land development based on sprawling growth of mostly single family residential homes connected to commercial and government areas with a series of road and freeway systems. The suburbs are usually difficult to delineate as their models of planning have been subject to sprawl into the countryside. Suburbia matters today because it is the primary type of planning used throughout the majority of the United States and must be contended with in order to make any progress beyond the embedded social and economic barriers inherent in that type of land use.
Suburban Tendencies
James Piccone
The American Dream, like any utopia, was an idealized vision of a “perfect” society that when put into practice became a disastrous ideal and model for development of mainstream culture and society. The American Dream, for me, is tied to an understanding of land as a thing to be colonized and appropriated, but also a broader idea of structuring society and the government towards a singular mode of being as an individual, a family, and community. For architecture, the American Dream was also ruinous in that it prioritized buildings as a commodity, capital growth, and efficient means of production over any concerns for cultural and diversification.
Suburban Tendencies
Mimi Zeiger
Insofar as its order is that of pure relationship, the grid is a way of abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order particular to themselves; the relationships in the aesthetic field are shown by the grid to be in a world apart and, with respect to natural objects, to be both prior and final.
Rosalind Krauss
What role does language, and really dishonest or misleading language, play in the hands of governments and public-private partnerships?
Unknown
While driving we noticed a variety of small businesses, family-owned restaurants, massage businesses, hair salons, liquor stores, endless strip malls with a mid-century modern aesthetic, and lots of health centers which appeared to be new. Religious structures stood out prominently with domes, primitive box forms, and ornamentation. Bungalows were vibrant, colorful, and the natural plant life was lush. When we crossed under the 10 from Monterey Park to Rosemead, things changed abruptly with the presence of big hotels, new construction, starbucks, and other typical franchise businesses. The highway acted as a literal divider between different social and economic classes.
Suburban Tendencies
James Piccone
Thinking about the spaces we inhabit between home and the workplace, what kinds of “third spaces” exist and are they successful? Do these privatized or pseudo-public typologies produce leisure spaces such as Starbucks define new social constructs of what public means, rather than some idealized version of open, free territory rooted in nature?.
Suburban Tendencies
James Piccone
The realm of architectural practice today can be likened to a battlefield in which both the developer, architect, and public stakeholders operate “tactically” to achieve their varied interests. Given that tactical urbanism has been apprehended for capitalist gain without deep cultural significance, does it make sense that we, as students, think about developing long-term strategies, rather than tactics, to combat the deteriorative effects of the corrupt institutions and loss of public trust in the land development sector?
Suburban Tendencies
James Piccone
Fictions can’t be so alienating that they divorce themselves from reality. As architects and designers, we are often confronted with sites and places that have certain facts about them, and in some way, we devise visual and linguistic fictions through design to propose either extensions or alternatives to those facts. The first problem inherent in this schema is who gets to create the fictions, or stories, that have deep ramifications on what the built environment ultimately ends up becoming. The second problem is that there are always facts that precede the construction of fictions and the extent to which the fictions become real is correlated to how much of the facts can be ignored or forgotten.
James Piccone
A house is a landscape of cultural production. It’s a place of preservation. Place is about relationships rather than transactions.
James Rojas
The prevailing opinion is that it would best resolve its ethics with its authorship through an abandonment of its authorial ambitions and a full embrace of professional obligations, which might be detrimental to society. There are people who think it should be more ethical, other sides think it should be aesthetically engaged. There has always been this odd contradiction.
David Ruy
2022
Technology is not anthropologically universal; it is enabled and constrained by particular cosmologies, which go beyond mere functionality or utility. Therefore, there is no one single technology, but rather multiple cosmotechnics.
Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics
Yuk Hui
2017
The Anthropocene is the planetarization of standing reserves, and Heidegger’s critique of technology is more significant today than ever before. The unilateral globalization that has come to an end is being succeeded by the competition of technological acceleration and the allures of war, technological singularity, and transhumanist (pipe) dreams. The Anthropocene is a global axis of time and synchronization that is sustained by this view of technological progress towards the singularity. To reopen the question of technology is to refuse this homogeneous technological future that is presented to us as the only option.
Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics
Yuk Hui
2017
Element 0 ( Zero ) describes a shift in one’s awareness when surfing the web, entering a Zoom call, or scrolling through social media platforms. These modes of engagement are underpinned with various levels of abstraction that connect our virtual interactions with the very real material switches that facilitate computing.
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Skeuomorphism describes the technique of instantiating real-world buttons with their virtual counterparts. That is, a button on a GUI must look and react like a real button with realistic haptic, visual, and auditorial sensations like the one it is representing. These techniques have been used since the onset of the GUI and have only grown in complexity to abide by the standards to “Make Frictionless Communication” – Zoom’s Mission Statement and userfriendly interfaces.
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Our intent with this collection is not to share a strict, concrete, and definite jargon. Instead, we will be challenging these conventions to see what they could mean in developing our phygital sensibilities and to isolate out words, phrases, and events that need to be updated based on the evidence of our collective models.
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Augmentation: the action or process of making or becoming greater in size or amount Overlay, instantiation, widget, UI, buttons, sticker
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Prosthetic: an artificial device that is built to replace a missing body part.
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Companion: a person or animal with whom one spends a lot of time or with whom one travels.
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Augment: make something greater by adding to it, increase clothing, cell phones, corrective wear (glasses), accessories, time pieces, iOTs, tools.
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Computer Vision: AI that enables computers and systems to derive meaningful information from digital images, videos, and other visual inputs.
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Sensor (visual input): a device which detects or measures a physical property and records, indicates, or otherwise responds to it.
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Line Trace: tracing of a ray, or pulse of rays, from the user’s device in the direction of the given location in the camera view.
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Image Tracking: a detectable two-dimensional planar image from a custom-defined target set that continuously tracks the images locations and orientations as you or they move in the setting
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Face Tracking: technology which detects and tracks the presence of a human face in a digital video frame.
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Biometrics: physical characteristics that can be used to identify individuals. Fingerprints, facial recognition, dental records, and retina scans for all forms of biometric identification.
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Colliders: static world, dynamic world, physics body, and vehicles
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Nostalgia: a sentimental longing or wishful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. Real life lived (Individual/personal or intimate sharing of past)
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Anemoia: nostalgia for a time you’ve never known . Virtual World (90s Screen Savers)
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Browsing (skimming): the act of looking through a set of information quickly without a definite sense of purpose
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Searching: a line of results often referred to as search engine results pages (SEROs)
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
AR Wandering: an urban experience amongst the unseen infrastructure of object’s data.
Hyper-Interstitial Cyberspace
Jon Penvose
2022
Back of theater room with a plastic church organ covered in vines, oil, holographic oil, and digitally enhanced curtains colorized detailed, 8k resolution. Hyperrealism stage set of vines, wood, holographic oil with hanging masks Rendered in Cinema shrouded in stage lights. Stage becomes form, becomes scene, becomes vine nature.
Midjourney Prompts
Jon Penvose
2022
Instrument drum, trumpet, car combination in the Flemish Baroque style rendered with vray tracking next to a graffiti wall covered in stickers. Rough concrete and loud noises with soft, fat, and smooth instruments.
Midjourney Prompts
Jon Penvose
2022
Unexpected software and the capacity to explore the expansion capabilities that compose the GUI (Graphic User Interface). These are the tools and neo-primitive packages that have defined our first mass societal encounter of cyberspace. Cyberspace for our generation were a series of telecommunication, video conference systems connected to webcams. These define a new toolset that is necessary to explore in building the next modes of engagement. Especially with the dwelling reallocation of territory to the Zoom Room.
Jon Penvose
2022
Much to our surprise, cyberspace did not arrive with a specific set of "cyber-clothing" as suggested by Jaren Lanier since we did not wear the gadgets, however, we did inhabit our first stint into cyberspace by revealing ourselves and our immediate surroundings to the web camera.
Kreuger
2022
A participant was paired with a facilitator at a control panel (man-inside the computer) model. To draw or type at a distance so that the facilitator could activate the commands based on their interpretation of the video feed.
Kreuger
2022
Lacan describes the exact moment of our ego’s birth as occurring when we understand the realization that we are separate from the things outside of ourselves. Our previous model of thinking, as an infant, suggests that we were once in a state of both unrealized and perfect union with our surroundings. At the moment of our departure from this union, we begin the perpetual act of constructing our identity. Lacan also states, “identity is born of an interaction between the self and others.”
The Feed: Visitors in the Mirror
Jon Penvose
2022
Before we begin any influenced form of self-creation, we must undergo this separation to enact this second phase of becoming more in tune with ourselves or to become other. Zizek explains this desire to become the other is to share in the enjoyments that the other offers. Enjoyments that form a union through community around things, events, and actions that contribute to the group fantasy. The conflict of the self is one of influences from the masses to become either indistinguishable or distinguished as an isolated self.
The Feed: Visitors in the Mirror
Jon Penvose
2022
If we are to assume that society is filled with actors who are clothed in a generalizing fashion abiding by social norms, we are able to surmise that the mass is a collective aesthetic act of camouflage. It becomes what we assume and assimilate to as we prepare to act out our role in and for society.
The Feed: Visitors in the Mirror
Jon Penvose
2022
To mimic is to act out something that becomes indistinguishable from another species or from the environment. In both cases, the idea of a surrounding environment or collective must be realized in relation based on our distinction from it.
The Feed: Visitors in the Mirror
Jon Penvose
2022
Webcams provide another alternative to the mirror stage as a nonimaginary real condition often considered to be pre-infused. As Timothy Morton would say, “magical or spooky action at a distance.” Live feeds provide us a view into alternative reals removed from their physical contexts.
The Feed: Visitors in the Mirror
Jon Penvose
2022
The option of viewing ourselves while talking to other people is an installment of the virtual room type and is facilitated by the interface. A disorienting view of ourselves as being amongst our visitors in cyberspace. Cyberspaces such as Zoom offer up a jarred reality as we behave through our act amongst everyone else’s mirror and mirrored self. Oddity only begins to touch on the conditions we are acting within. Meeting people in the mirror within our webcam-based interface, and also as collective visitors in the gallery setting, means that we constantly evaluating ourselves where mirroring, self-corrective behavior, and influences of corrective behavior that manifests in exaggerated ways.
The Feed: Visitors in the Mirror
Jon Penvose
2022
Thomas Moran’s “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,” provides an example of a type of work often deemed functionally ‘impractical’ (art) that nonetheless produced significant effects on the practical organization of the material world, namely the early formation of US National Parks.
[im]practical architecture[s]
Richard Mapes
2021
Today, increasingly decentralized systems of belief are producing unexpected ripples in the smooth flows of authority. With respect to architecture, this phenomenon is simultaneously shrinking the pools of consensus on what architecture ‘is,’ while producing divergent branches in existing descriptions.
[im]practical architecture[s]
Richard Mapes
2021
What we once understood as ‘Paper Architecture’ – whose status as architecture is also contested – has branched from drawings into virtual reality environments, animations, augmented reality applications, video game design, renderings on Instagram, and works of art as exemplified by napkin sketches of unbuilt projects by famous architects for sale on artsy.net.
[im]practical architecture[s]
Richard Mapes
2021
We will consider architectural history from the perspective of practicality. Building an understanding of the multivalent – or even multi-dimensional – nature of “Architecture” will position ‘practical’ investigations in architecture relative to changing areas of focus through time.
[im]practical architecture[s]
Richard Mapes
2021
Shifting notions of reality are inextricably linked with the means by which we come to know what is ‘real.’ Beginning with an investigation into Epistemological models will build a foundation on which we will discuss the linkages between reality and knowledge, and the different postures taken on this relationship through time (empirical, naturalist, pragmatist, relativist, and skeptical).
[im]practical architecture[s]
Richard Mapes
2021
Develop a theoretical stance. In this case students are asked to support a kind of practice. This support will be defended with research on precedents, and a deeper knowledge of the empirical models upon which different practices have been approached.
[im]practical architecture[s]
Richard Mapes
2021
This lecture is not intended to provide answers to the question, but rather to present a set of work composed of projects that challeng rigid definitions of architecture, and that have themselves been called ‘not architecture.’ Installations, curated shows, artworks by architects, will be explored. Work by David Eskenazi, Mitch McEwan, etc.
[im]practical architecture[s]
Richard Mapes
2021
Multi-vision space, filled with collectively sourced material. The virtual space, with intersecting sets of aggregate objects and environments, serves as a portrait generator that can simultaneously hold subjects steadily in view, and contest the authority of said subjects by placing them in dialog with other narratives.
Making Room
Richard Mapes
2021
Our investigations will question the complex entanglements between emptiness, fullness, and the act of making room. More specifically, students will be tasked with ‘making room’ for something through the counterintuitive act of filling something up.
Making Room
Richard Mapes
2021
‘Making room’ takes on new meaning as it takes for granted the ongoing shuffling of architecture’s meaning somewhere between its organizational and aesthetic rationales; its status as 'building,' and its appearance.1 In other words, making room is not always an act of clearing; using a variety of methods to redistribute extant objects in cartesian space such that the space between them becomes greater, more open, or emptier.
Making Room
Richard Mapes
2021
We will be filling-up something that is literally empty as an investigation of making room.
Making Room
Richard Mapes
2021
What are the means by which we can focus on clear ideas one-at-a-time in a world of competing narratives, priorities and readings? How can we ‘stage’ multiple futures (on this site, urban, etc.) that move away from keeping up appearances, and toward embracing – making room for – other appearances.
Making Room
Richard Mapes
2021
To synthesize a working environment (by inhabiting both the same virtual space, and material studio) in which individuality and collaboration are not situated in binary opposition, but rather in a way that can engage the complex interplays of finding both voice and solidarity simultaneously.
Making Room
Richard Mapes
2021
The project doesn’t have a finish line. The goals are not to produce a final product for a final review, but rather to continuously engage in experimentation, conversation, debate, refinement, and compromise; to put things in dialogue.
Making Room
Richard Mapes
2021
What should the student be able to do at the end of the semester is a more valuable question than ‘what will they have?’
Making Room
Richard Mapes
2021
Each week, the class will gather to see all levels ‘streamed’ into the same map (as we will do now), and discuss design as both a product of individual work, but also as a set of emergent qualities inadvertently produced by adjacencies, overlaps, resonances and conflicts.
Making Room
Richard Mapes
2021
Studying the appearance of architecture right now is of increasing importance concerning the decentralization of cultural givens or underpinnings by the emergence of digital 'spaces' in which self-construction, or identity construction is facilitated with virtually no constraints, but within 'filter bubbles' which obscure information that is incongruent with one's worldview. Architecture, on the contrary, does not require admin authorization to be seen. Architecture becomes an unignorable source of information, which arrives in our consciousness as if spontaneously.
Making Room Core Studio
Richard Mapes
2021
Aesthetics make realities accessible.
Making Room Core Studio
Richard Mapes
2021
In this studio, students will explore architecture in the realm of aesthetics before all else. We seek to challenge the hegemony of certain types of information. We will work with information under the scrutiny of quality, perception and description. In this territory students will test, challenge and explore architecture in aesthetic territories, which, by character, eschew the binary logics of the quantitative and the definitive, while being skeptical of traditional, disciplinary notions of 'organization.'
Making Room Core Studio
Richard Mapes
2021
In aesthetics, the idea of 'making room' is reframed. Rather than prioritizing the cartesian distribution for bodies, objects, and barriers with the various logics of governance (political, commercial, etc.), 'making room' turns its focus toward the "distribution of the sensible" through experience[s], perception[s] and appearance[s]. Here, our understanding of access becomes reoriented. In the tradition sense, access evokes the right to inhabit a space physically. But how can we begin to understand other means by which we extend ourselves into space?
Making Room Core Studio
Richard Mapes
2021
Urban, public sites in which hegemonic notions of 'organization' can be most clearly read will be the sites and visual landscapes of investigation for this studio. These sites provide the necessary services that facilitate daily urban life, but despite being invaluable, they are banal, overlooked, and often resolutely not-public.
Making Room Core Studio
Richard Mapes
2021
Urban, public sites in which hegemonic notions of 'organization' can be most clearly read will be the sites and visual landscapes of investigation for this studio. These sites provide the necessary services that facilitate daily urban life, but despite being invaluable, they are banal, overlooked, and often resolutely not-public.
Making Room Core Studio
Richard Mapes
2021
Conduct a survey of aesthetics online. Aesthetics can come from anywhere - aesthetics 'outside' architecture are encouraged.
Making Room Core Studio
Richard Mapes
2021
Search for an empty space. More specifically, search for a space that seems strange because it is missing something one would normally expect to see there: an empty fountain, a storage space, a retail storefront, a subway station, ballpark dugout, etc.
Making Room Core Studio
Richard Mapes
2021
Have fun with your debut! Enjoy the setting: being surrounded by your peers work, and having an informal setting to build connections. It is in this setting that we will - hopefully - frame the studio as a collaborative environment - a collective with dynamic and diverse voices that are all seeking points of contact with each other, and a new form of solidarity.
Making Room Core Studio
Richard Mapes
2021
Despite contemporary claims that the architect is a ‘master builder,’ expertise in building has long been redistributed to allied industries, which themselves do not require the participation of an architect in most cases. In this exclusivity – hemmed between marginal engagement and apparent apathy for that very condition – the profession of architecture has constricted itself, and the discipline has accepted that such constrictions to legitimate architectural work are unquestionable.
Practical Acts and Practice Design
Richard Mapes
2022
It may not be the case that the profession of architecture today can solve this problem, or that it is even the responsibility of ‘the profession’ as-it-is to do so. Rather, it is the responsibility of the discipline, which, in a perverse replacement of the pursuit of knowledge with skill refinement, has structured itself around ‘best practices.’ If such a conflation underpins our predicament, then therein lies our first steps toward disentangling the mess.
Practical Acts and Practice Design
Richard Mapes
2022
It is time to ban ‘the drawing.’
Practical Acts and Practice Design
Richard Mapes
2022
The drawing, pinned on the walls of a gallery during reviews, is not only an anachronistic relic. It is an inversion in which practice precedes knowledge, and where knowledge is subject to judgment by mere rules.
Practical Acts and Practice Design
Richard Mapes
2022
Discourse follows the path of least resistance. It’s easy. It strings a neat thread from point a to point b, no unexpected turns or deviations. But the teaching tool of simplistic categorization – the thing we are looking at either is, or is not architecture – itself is better suited under another classification. It’s not valid critique. Instead It reveals a pedagogue’s position on the kind of audience they perceive their students to be: either inherently computational ‘replicants’ or capable thinkers.
Computational Pedagogies
Richard Mapes
2022
The byproduct of ‘best practices’ reasoning produces ‘best practices’ architects. Architectural thought is replaced by computation, and so far, it’s winning. It’s stronger because it can do the same thing bigger, faster, stronger, cheaper, sexier, etc. through practice (double meaning intended) without having to ‘reinvent the wheel.’
Computational Pedagogies
Richard Mapes
2022
I make the stuff that I do – the projection mapping, real time ticking, immersion soaking, brain tickling environments – precisely because inviting audiences to participate in new worlds is a powerful form of teaching.
Computational Pedagogies
Richard Mapes
2022
Etymologically, the word ‘surround’ can be traced to the Latin super (over) undare (to flow), or later superundare. Immersion is embedded in the term, but rather than being positioned in the center of a space, still a distinct observer, the Latin might suggest that environments wash over us. They touch us, comingle with us, and – if effective enough – produce the experience of being ‘a part’ of something, rather than ‘apart.’
Show About
Richard Mapes
2022
Perhaps it’s too reductive to claim that all art is political, where art can only become political when it is spoken about, or when it is ‘substantiated.’ It requires language to even make such a claim.
Show About
Richard Mapes
2022
If I don’t know what pepe the frog is, it’s just a stupid cartoon frog, and an ugly one to boot.
Show About
Richard Mapes
2022
Per propaganda, it is not the reality of some nationalistic glory that draws populists to a fascist banner, but rather symbols substantiated by demagogues to appeal to audience members’ nationalistic imaginaries, not their actual, lived experience.
Show About
Richard Mapes
2022
Architecture is not beautiful. To clarify, one cannot assume architecture is beautiful by default. It is easier to claim (much easier) that architecture is gratifying. Indeed many beautiful things are gratifying. But Kant’s Critique of Judgement reminds us that this relationship is not reciprocal; not all gratifying things are beautiful.
Architecture is Not Beautiful
Richard Mapes
2022
With increasing frequency, abstraction in the design of our shared world has been conflated with the notion of access, the statement boiled down to something like “the greater the degree of abstraction, the greater degree of cultural access.” Embracing the fleeting nature of projected environments as a valid mode of architectural study and production show us that abstraction does not support access – it limits the possibility that style may ‘offend.’
Architecture is Not Beautiful
Richard Mapes
2022
To paraphrase Loos, it is in bad taste to adorn anything with ornament.4 Loos’ argument had little to do with aesthetics, and instead with the proletariat-oriented crusade to eliminate inequity through labor. Over one hundred years later, few of the same socioeconomic labor phenomena persist.5 The legacies established by Loos’ canonical work have become mere preference for, and privilege of an aging legacy.
Architecture is Not Beautiful
Richard Mapes
2022
When architects, historians or theoreticians state that a building is beautiful, they should immediately be struck with a nagging anxiety they such a statement may not be right, simply because architecture’s entanglements leave no room for priorities less than appealing.
Architecture is Not Beautiful
Richard Mapes
2022
The internet is now where we go to learn how to do everything else except the internet
How to Internetl
Jenny Odell
2016
I also won’t deny that my pre-teen correspondence with randomly encountered internet pen pals (complete strangers to this day), or the discovery of someone’s GIF-ridden GeoCities home page, felt very different from subscribing to a popular YouTube channel or even accepting friends recommended by algorithms.
How to Internetl
Jenny Odell
2016
I’m interested in misreading things outside of their context but AI is always trying to read things “correctly.”
James Piccone
2022
Barthes was not concerned with distinguishing the good from the bad in modern mass culture, but rather with showing how all the apparently spontaneous forms and rituals of contemporary bourgeois societies are subject to a systematic distortion, liable at any moment to be dehistoricized, ‘naturalized’, converted into myth.
Subculture, the meaning of style
Dick Hebdige
1979
Social relations and processes are then appropriated by individuals only through the forms in which they are represented to those individuals. These forms are, as we have seen, by no means transparent. They are shrouded in a ‘common sense’ which simultaneously validates and mystifies them. It is precisely these ‘perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects’ which semiotics sets out to ‘interrogate’ and decipher.
Subculture, the meaning of style
Dick Hebdige
1979
All aspects of culture possess a semiotic value, and the most taken-for-granted phenomena can function as signs: as elements in communication systems governed by semantic rules and codes which are not themselves directly apprehended in experience. These signs are, then, as opaque as the social relations which produce them and which they re-present. In other words, there is an ideological dimension to every signification.
Subculture, the meaning of style
Dick Hebdige
1979
Youth subcultures challenge hegemonies through style… “The objections are lodged, the contradictions displayed at the profoundly superficial level of appearances: that is, at the level of signs
Subculture, the meaning of style
Dick Hebdige
1979
Style in subculture is, then, pregnant with significance. Its transformations go ‘against nature,’ interrupting the process of ‘normalization.’ As such, they are gestures, movements towards a speech which offends the ‘silent majority’, which challenges the principle of unity and cohesion, which contradicts the myth of consensus. Our task becomes, like Barthes’, to discern the hidden messages inscribed in code on the glossy surfaces of style, to trace them out as ‘maps of meaning’ which obscurely represent the very contradictions they are designed to resolve or conceal
Subculture, the meaning of style
Dick Hebdige
1979
Tease out some of the tendencies and then construct fictions.
David Ruy
2022
Goth fashion was about the adolescent fear of death but today it’s about how you dress because you already feel dead.
David Ruy
2022
The remarkable thing, in my opinion, was the connection of the components to each other. They startd small and large, from the beginning, and were examined in each connection, both in class and on the site. All components were seen as a whole and were proportional to their whole.
2GAX Observation
Halleh Honaryar
2021
What suprised me was that the instructor accepted all of the projects and, as far as I was aware, no projects were rejected. Any theory can be true from another point of view.
2GAX Observation
Halleh Honaryar
2021
In this studio, the main purpose is to emphsize the fundamental and undeniable role of the hand in the design process.
Core Studio Syllabus
Halleh Honaryar
2021
Students learn to express their inner thoughts through art. It's an exercise in interpretation that must use different elements to express an idea of movement.
Core Studio Syllabus
Halleh Honaryar
2021
The dichotomy is nothing new. On one hand, the professional architect is a figure in society with responsibilities to protect and serve people, not unlike a doctor or lawyer, rather than engage in frivolous play or experimentation associated with art. On the other hand, the academic architect is a figure in architecture culture with the responsibility to educate students, often through play and experimentation, rather than engage in the duties of professional service. Too often, architects with one foot in practice and the other in academia try to devise ways of bridging the practical concerns of the mechanistic world with the aesthetic experience of art, or vice versa, which almost always ends in complications.
Architecture, Martian Rocks, and Beauty
James Piccone
2022
The idea of completion is actually damaging to the profession because it supports architecture as an inert object while construction and control systems technologies reinforce a mechanistic view of buildings as machines for human life and safety, which is the teleology of practice.
Architecture, Martian Rocks, and Beauty
James Piccone
2022
The geology of Mars is ambiguous, unexplainably beautiful and utterly banal in terms of its similarity to Earth as it becomes backgrounded in our search for carbon. Though I am provoked by the images with a strong desire to reproduce the appearances of the various rock fragments, boulders, and stratified cliffsides, as they are uncanny but familiar to me at the same time, I fully recognize that paint on a canvas, pixels on a screen, or any of the working methods that include points, lines, planes, and volumes will produce a representation that is always inadequate to the Martian rocks.
Architecture, Martian Rocks, and Beauty
James Piccone
2022
It is not obvious to recognize that Martian rocks are constantly changing, albeit extremely slowly in comparison to our human time scales; but they are dynamic objects in an open system. Their appearances are linked to asteroid bombardments, volcanic eruptions, and flash flooding that occurred over billions of years of terrestrial formation. Even human’s brief technological presence on the planet is changing them as the Curiosity Rover’s wheels disturb their orientations, sometimes fracturing them, and redirecting flows of the sands around their footings. Paradoxically, all of these incidents and none of them are directly responsible for the beauty of the rocks because we cannot point to the specific qualities that would define a rule or logic that explains why they are beautiful. They just are.
Architecture, Martian Rocks, and Beauty
James Piccone
2022
Freud explains that “the pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts… it is on guard against increases of stimulation from within, which would make the task of living more difficult.” Life is inevitably a state of tension that we are cultured into from birth but I continue to date because of a perceptual unpleasure; an unsatisfied instinct that I am not whole.
Death Drive in Dating, Work, and School
James Piccone
2022
Architecture students almost certainly have death drive or, at least, an unconscious fear of being anonymous. Even if awards are given out for notable thesis projects, the anxiety produced by the fear of anonymity is never truly eliminated. After graduation, students find themselves as employees laboring for a boss who also has death drive.
Death Drive in Dating, Work, and School
James Piccone
2022
Death drive is so prevalent in the industry because efficiency is its primary ethical ideal. How this gets accomplished can be either subversive or direct.
Death Drive in Dating, Work, and School
James Piccone
2022
The anxiety to achieve prestige was compulsory. It was not enjoyable or fun. It was a survival tactic in the paranoid mind of the architecture student; their ego’s instinct of self-preservation. Losing the competition was deeply unpleasurable because it absorbed the students and spit them out.
Death Drive in Dating, Work, and School
James Piccone
2022
In the context of Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” the question I should be asking is what happens when a human becomes a machine or, more specifically, a hot dog eating machine?
Hot Dog America
James Piccone
2022
Turing describes the main problems for computers as being adequate storage, speed, and programming to satisfactorily imitate a human but these also seem to be the same set of requirements that competitive hot dog eaters take towards satisfactorily imitating a machine. For example, the “instruction table” for the hot dog eating machine (Joey Chestnut) would read something like: enhance jaw power by 250 percent, accelerate ingestion by 300 percent, and stretch stomach by 350 percent.
Hot Dog America
James Piccone
2022
The chess playing machine is not the same as the machine with vision and speech, or the machine that eats hot dogs really fast. But humans are not flawless robots that don’t have to feel anything from the inside. We aren’t zombies and we have a conscious self. We also know that animals feel from the inside too and that knowledge is what leaves a deep-seated fear in our hearts that we are no different than them.
Hot Dog America
James Piccone
2022
Maybe artificial intelligence is scary when it means that machines would compete in human eating competitions with all the vigor and spectacle displayed at Nathan’s. Humans fear the “singularity” because it would reduce them to the status we assign to animals now and while neurological research and technological development in artificial intelligence has replicated the abilities of the human brain in machines, it still has not tapped into the emotional well of what it feels like to be one.
Hot Dog America
James Piccone
2022
Typically speaking, diagrams are static representations. They don’t dance. These static representations are evidently subjective constructions and yet, pedagogy continues to legitimate them as objective, disciplinary tools.
Can a Diagram Dance?
James Piccone
2022
While it’s true that diagrams must work both within their formal and subject-matter’s rules, architectural diagrams have always wanted to do the impossible; to be both an object of beauty and a communicator of meaningful information.
Can a Diagram Dance?
James Piccone
2022
In a more traditional sense, the architect’s classic “napkin sketch” is a first attempt at representing a formal solution but it is also a diagram containing some additional information that its author intends to communicate. It can be read as a set of instructions, similar to a script, with the architect as the dramatist and the laborers as the actors who mechanically execute the diagram-script according to the architect-dramatist’s rules. This acting out of the diagram is a specific kind of ritual that might be called “practice” today.
Can a Diagram Dance?
James Piccone
2022
The attempt to make life better through dramatic architecture almost always leads to some form of tragedy.
Can a Diagram Dance?
James Piccone
2022
Conceptual argumentation in architectural projects forces students to have “legitimate” reasons why they decide a building should represent some kind of metaphor, usually related to culture, or perform some kind of action, usually related to efficiency.
Can a Diagram Dance?
James Piccone
2022
In spite of their expressive linework, gestural forms, and comical onomatopoeia, diagrams are still static objects that attempt to crystalize a metaphor about a single aspect of a building. This is problematic because it marginalizes the student and architect as peripheral stakeholders in a project, not invested in the dance of architecture as a participant in the ecology of planet Earth, but as a top-down world-maker that, in a best case scenario, fools their investors into believing that their metaphorical or performative diagram is somehow true.
Can a Diagram Dance?
James Piccone
2022
If “Dancing about Architecture” means not being too dramatic, there really should be no good or bad architecture and, it should follow, that there are no good or bad diagrams.
Can a Diagram Dance?
James Piccone
2022
While God is the timeless alter ego for our ideological sense of ourselves, Mother Nature is the timeless alter ego for our ideological sense of nature. It is ideological because it is the fiction that is symbolic and specific to ourselves that we believe is necessary in order to survive with nature. It remains as an unquestioned ethical truth and yet, what results is not coexistence but a keeping up of appearances that re-represent nature as a preservable image.
AI Images are Ideological
James Piccone
2022
In the context of artistic production, keeping up appearances has meant continually chasing the creation of new, denatured objects with their own autonomy and rules. Just as the environmental conservationists want to escape death by telling themselves a fiction about nature, art culture wants to escape time into a higher state of consciousness by preserving novel art objects in museums and the institutions of taste. Like the big Other, Mother Nature, that does not really exist, the version of nature that artists want to produce is virtual. They want to create the virtual, the big Other, because that is what watches over and influences them.
AI Images are Ideological
James Piccone
2022
The advent of artificially intelligent methods of producing art have obviously reduced the labor pains of producing art objects but it is questionable to me whether they have produced novelty yet. After making that kind of statement, many of my contemporaries would probably shame people like me as luddites, unwilling to accept new technology but that shallow political critique misses the mark entirely. It is not the technology that I fear, it is the ideology of AI images.
AI Images are Ideological
James Piccone
2022
Computing and ideology work well together because they are complementary. Artificial intelligence basically optimizes a fitness landscape of recorded data that measures difference and similarity between outputs of an ideological function.
AI Images are Ideological
James Piccone
2022
Although, when the logic of AI optimization is applied to finding the fitness landscape of aesthetic novelty, we suddenly encounter a problem. To be human is to be flawed and to be flawed is to exist but it is unclear what a flaw means to artificial intelligence.
AI Images are Ideological
James Piccone
2022
Maintaining appearances in religion and society requires that people “forgive and forget” in order to keep on living but why do we forgive and forget the mistakes of fellow humans while not doing the same for AI? Perhaps it is because AI doesn’t feel guilt.
AI Images are Ideological
James Piccone
2022
SCI-Arc initially approached AI images with the hope that there was some entropic element in the medium that could be revealed by disciplining the machine into producing productive failures. Could artificial intelligence generate an accident or is everything that artificial intelligence generates already an accident?
AI Images are Ideological
James Piccone
2022
As AI’s accuracy and resolution got better, it became easier to judge whether a style transfer was good if it accurately depicted a subject with the style of another in high resolution. Within the formatting of images as data, sufficiently robust AI could reduce style to patterns, making it accessible to a wider audience, democratizing method while simultaneously devaluing its meaning.
AI Images are Ideological
James Piccone
2022
The pedagogical ramification of embracing style transfer as a labor to be automated signified a disinterest in the human construction of meaning through thinking and a preference for an accelerationist stance on rapidly producing combinations of style through codified language. Mesmerized by computational intricacy, we were like drug addicts trying to get a bigger, better high; one after another. Novelty was the drug of choice, injected through style transfer onto any cybernetic substrate we could get our hands on.
AI Images are Ideological
James Piccone
2022
AI images are ideological because we are unaware that they are ideological. They are slowly redefining everything we once knew about art but like democracy, AI images have to be easy in order for them to be an effective ideology. What makes democracy ineffective is friction, tension, and difficulty which is never evident in the product but only in the process or method of creating art.
AI Images are Ideological
James Piccone
2022
When we displace the artist’s method onto automated machines, what is really left to work on? Perhaps, human agency is not what makes an artist creative and decision-making between predefined options is not agency, it’s labor. What or who made the rules in the first place? What or who made the style?
AI Images are Ideological
James Piccone
2022
Agency is constructing a new, unnatural object that disrupts the decision-making abilities of machines. Covid-19 had agency. The AI models trained on “normal” human shopping behavior simply broke when they encountered the sudden and extreme shift towards purchases of toilet paper, face masks, and hand sanitizer in 2020. The important difference, to me, is that the human artist intends to disrupt the flow of time by imprinting it with a moment when we had to pause and question if we were living in an ideology.
AI Images are Ideological
James Piccone
2022
I was always left pondering exactly what that was but I think the feelings of fear, distrust, and shame were very real and possibly there all along, even before Crewdson arrived with his film crew and set. He just showed us how to see them.
How to See Earth
James Piccone
2022
Disciplining the lawn is really a way to represent white suburban enclaves while masquerading as responsibility towards communitarianism. You are not really punished for the wildflowers themselves but for not being one of us.
How to See Earth
James Piccone
2022
Like an artist who tried to expose opportunities in their medium, I would look for interstices where disciplining nature had failed; where the literal gaps, cracks, buckling sidewalk plates, and dilapidated pavement surfaces revealed a crumbly, organic matter considered unfit to tread on by any member of the community. Like standing off-center to view the distorted skull in Hans Holbein’s painting, “The Ambassadors,” skate-spotting required an anamorphic approach that could not be achieved by looking directly at the world.
How to See Earth
James Piccone
2022
We found the existing precedents for rammed earth construction, which generally fell into the category of cheap construction for impoverished societies or the category of luxury residences that romanticize geological strata as a mute image, to be disturbing and useless to us.
How to See Earth
James Piccone
2022
By reorienting the position of our totem molds, we pre-cast earth into layers of deep color that evoked atmospheres of a multidimensional place. The textures were rough, sometimes chipped and broken, but that was just fine. We had no desire to cover up the earth because it was no longer just a mutable dirt, or matter out of place, but the entropic medium that all life on earth shares and cannot escape.
How to See Earth
James Piccone
2022
In Building Character, Davis seeks to trigger in his reader, particularly his white reader, precisely the kind of reflection it did in me. The critical history told in his collection of essays is a provocative and expertly crafted argumentation of the whiteness of modern architecture, particularly in the United States, as well as an argument for the construction of western architectural history as a parallel to the aesthetically motivated racial categorization in western scientific development in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. As such, Building Character stands as a call to architects and designers to rethink our relationship to what is often considered the architectural canon.
A Review of Building Character by Charles L. Davis II
Justin Doro
2022
One potential problem for readers of all types—historians and designers—is that Davis’ historical rhetoric often makes seemingly interchangeable “style” and “character.”
A Review of Building Character by Charles L. Davis II
Justin Doro
2022
One must keep one’s character. Earn a character first if you can, and if you can’t, then assume one. Mark Twain
A Review of Building Character by Charles L. Davis II
Justin Doro
2022
Despite the many voices in my head that all begin to sound like my mother telling me that, “there is no bigger waste of time than video games,” I will dare to utter that I feel the greatest architecture experiences I have had in the last decade have occurred within the work of the video game studio, FromSoftware.
Virtually Sublime: The Work of FromSoftware
Justin Doro
2022
A video game, like board and field games, are very much set up as abstractions that begin with a bounded space and a set of rules, it’s just that often in a video game, the rules and limits are not as clearly marked.
Virtually Sublime: The Work of FromSoftware
Justin Doro
2022
The virtual world you inhabit as a player approximates that more indifferent and estranging experience of the natural environment, wherein one gets the sense that the characters and creatures would continue with or without you there
Virtually Sublime: The Work of FromSoftware
Justin Doro
2022
The game becomes a manifest dream space, a dream you are aware you are in and often can work through in your pursuit of achievement and glory. Conceptually the character of this vantage owes much to Robert Vischer’s use of the term Einfühlung, often translated to English as empathy, referring to the manner in which beholders comprehend an artwork by feeling into it or projecting themselves into its forms.
Virtually Sublime: The Work of FromSoftware
Justin Doro
2022
Has technology not advanced to a point where games can now be a playable, experienceable virtual world and if, as Kant argues, that representation of these fantastic worlds are “a beautiful presentation of,” I think in this case, human struggle, should we not call these games fine art?
Virtually Sublime: The Work of FromSoftware
Justin Doro
2022
After World War II, the suburb became the primary form of urban development of America. Reinforced by multiple federal policies, more and more Americans were encouraged to move to the suburbs to enjoy a "happier and more convenient life." American cities were reimagined through the lens of suburban development.
Reston Realized
Justin Doro and Angel Ho
2022
Levittown is the embodiment of the American Suburb that's dominated by the culture of the automobile. The idea of suburb and sprawl become almost inseparable in many American's perception.
Reston Realized
Justin Doro and Angel Ho
2022
There is much current pressure to transition the golf courses to more traditional parkland and public space more welcoming to the non-golfing crowd, and to allow for new housing development on the site of the existing courses. Over these spaces, there is a battle being waged for Reston’s future by three resident groups: the older white residents who do not want to see more development, the older non-white residents that cannot continue to afford to live in Reston without the development of lower-cost housing and the younger multi-racial residents that can afford to rent in Reston, but not buy.
Reston Realized
Justin Doro and Angel Ho
2022
Pittsburgh is a city of contradictions. One minute you are walking through the recently renovated Union Standard Building, and the next you stroll a block over to stand in front of the hauntingly empty shell of the former central Kaufman’s Department Store. One stands as memento of a time lost when a half a block stacked nine stories high housed the best in worldwide luxury, now appears as a slowly eroding stone and concrete façade with blurrily coated windows hiding stacks of storage and unsold goods of the bygone era.
On the issue of Acting and Appreciating
Justin Doro
2022
The experience of this beauty is almost demonic as it cannot be controlled, framed or manifested.
On the issue of Acting and Appreciating
Justin Doro
2022
Going forward, there is a real question I wish to answer through design work of a subscendent architecture: an architecture of homes rather than of houses.
On the issue of Surviving and Living
Justin Doro
2022
Drama generally is the self-reflective monologue that we share with the audience and with it comes this cathartic rapturous expression of self. When we dance, when live life, when we enjoy and enter the space of comedy rather than drama alone, we free ourselves from the terror of facing the audience and sharing our inner stuff.
On the issue of Drama and Dance
Justin Doro
2022
Mau’s work is dangerously filled with ideological phrases. The whole book is filled with ten word answers. The ideas feel good and sound good, and are sure to sell some beautifully designed books and tee shirts, but are never capable of creating real change. Ideology is sure to move people and sure to garner followers, but without substance it only ever exists as a tool for control, fame, or popularity.
On the issue of Ideology and Structures of Feeling
Justin Doro
2022
Ecological preservation requires us to measure all technological potential by considering equally productive specificity, distinctiveness and environmental impact to our contemporary focus on universality, simplicity and industrial efficiency.
Craft, Character and Composition
Justin Doro
2022
Lounging upon a pile of ruined fragments of classical buildings, the allegorical figure of architecture is the embodiment of architectural history educating the eager, youthful and aspiring architect represented by a plump juvenile with tiny undeveloped wings, through discussion of the prehistoric wooden structure as paradigm.
The Primitive Hut
Justin Doro
2022
The ecology of this region reflects not the woodland flora of most temperate mountain ranges, but instead is an inhospitable, dismal and rotting bogland made more treacherous via ruptures of earth and bubbling sinkholes of black mud.
The Adirondacks
Justin Doro
2022
Given recent discourse on identity, there is new interest in this article. Underlying Rowe’s intended message is a contradictory air of appreciation for the potential of character and composition. If stripped of its politics, Rowe appears to unintentionally suggest a framework for a theory of pluralist aesthetics sited in the qualitative and expressive distinctions of architectural objects.
Character and Composition; or Some Vicissitudes of Architectural Vocabulary in the Nineteenth Century
Justin Doro
2022
Mau and McPhee are channeling a deep nostalgia for a handcraft of the past, or as David Ruy warns against, both are making “a call to rewind the tape of history.” 3 These sentiments smack of the moral conscience of many conservative ethics that rely on history as justification for the articulation of the way things ought to be made.
The Cedar-Strip Canvas Canoe
Justin Doro
2022
Canoe craft is thought to have begun with the dugout, a boat built from the carving out and shaping of the trunk of a large tree. In North America this practice evolved over a thousand years ago, with the introduction of more precise woodworking tools, into wooden-framed crafts, clad over with thin wood planks and then sealed with bark and pitch.
The Cedar-Strip Canvas Canoe
Justin Doro
2022
If we are going to turn back and use canoe craft as a pedagogical tool, maybe we should consider more the cedar-strip canvas canoe’s introduction of mass produced natural products for efficiency and convenience as a way “to carefully avoid what might be unproductive dead ends in current directions, due to an ill-conceived ontological foundation.”
The Cedar-Strip Canvas Canoe
Justin Doro
2022
At its core, the operative and iterative design methodology and formal continuation of the autonomous architectural project as started by the Texas rangers still seems to pervade the discourse and evaluations of the work.
1GA Observation
Justin Doro
2021
I would argue that character is more than duplicitous, it is in fact ambiguous as much of architectural theory on the topic reflects. Similarly rustic and wood are ambiguous terms in relation to architecture and each other, and it is this assemblage of ambiguities that will serve as the field of study for my proposed vertical studio.
Core Studio Syllabus
Justin Doro
2021
The public sphere is that space wherein the desires for public good are given voice, are presented to others, and resisted, in the form of critique and counterargument.
Occasioning Social Practices: The Search for New Public Spheres
Justin Doro
2021
We will actively seek out architecture that appears more a type of infrastructure that suggests a use or creates an "air," but respects its user as free to use as desired.
Occasioning Social Practices: The Search for New Public Spheres
Justin Doro
2021
Given the slow decline of the family unit in American culture as well as the growing inadequacy of the public education system to support the healthy development of our youth, alternative educational spaces, particularly those occupying sites outside the direct purview of the state, present increasingly charged sites for the productive development of our youth into future active and participatory citizens.
Core Studio Syllabus
Justin Doro
2021
The variety of regional politics, localized social conditions, environmentally specific infrastructural tactics, and plurality of identities present an opportunity to conduct this study throughout the United States, while manifesting different results in different contexts. Each region of the United States has its own manifestations of place, whether they take the guise of neighborhood, geography, topography, religion, wealth, race, and many other social structures of inclusion/exclusion, rendering this project different by setting.
Core Studio Syllabus
Justin Doro
2021
This course is founded on a desire to fuse the artistic and scientific aspects of architecture and planning to not lose track of the potentials of both artistic exploration and scientific study.
Core Studio Syllabus
Justin Doro
2021
Your hometown is a personal place and somewhere familiar. This familiarity blurs the outside realities of a space that continues, even now, without you there with the subjective manifestation of the memory of this place in your mind. It is your experience we are interested in.
Core Studio Syllabus
Justin Doro
2021
Rather than simply representing the current sustainable strategies of bounding and securing new environments, this studio will look at the rustic structures raised from the land in rural settings and rethinking these strategies through contemporary technologies and techniques
The Craft, Character and Composition of Rural Manners
Justin Doro
2021
What qualifies a material as natural is in part its resistance to purely rational and regular manipulation, use and appearance. The first exercise will focus on the way in which these irregularities manifest visually. Students will seek out characteristic depth and diversity in wood at multiple scales via visual texture.
The Craft, Character and Composition of Rural Manners
Justin Doro
2021
Bruno Latour, one of today’s most influential philosophers, argues that there is “no wilderness” left in the world and that man’s reach has fundamentally changed every environment on earth.
The Craft, Character and Composition of Rural Manners
Justin Doro
2021
Replicating traditional rites of passages, social media platforms and online games, develop their own language to recognize goals and achievements. Public posts about individual are a way to recognize achievements in a social context. While at the same time highlighting how structured and established online communities are.
Place in Placelessness
Santiago Ceballos, Carolina Garcia, Justin Doro, Dana Shaviv
2022
Shifting form “place-based” social communities MMORPGSs, allow player the experience of placeless connections, but the idea of a game-space, in which players are playing through a virtual but specific place transcends the notion of being isolated in a placeless network. The place determines the rituals played in MMORPGS.
Place in Placelessness
Santiago Ceballos, Carolina Garcia, Justin Doro, Dana Shaviv
2022
The creation of elements and spaces have become a way to exchange ideas between players, since the game has no actual quests or goals. The players own everything they make and retain all legal rights on their in world creations. Even though the creations in the virtual space are user owned, the place to build them in has to be bought through the developers website. Placing it in between the physical and the digital.
Place in Placelessness
Santiago Ceballos, Carolina Garcia, Justin Doro, Dana Shaviv
2022
Ritual is the shape of how we create relations with the other and thus with our existence. Mediating between the sacred and the mundane, rituals were enactments of the circularity of time and life that allowed for a community-based reinvention of the self. They were a protective layer in the process of catharsis that tied the community together in shared practices and provided comfort in the face of despair.
Place in Placelessness
Santiago Ceballos, Carolina Garcia, Justin Doro, Dana Shaviv
2022
Covid made us pause and realize that we are at a crossroads in how we engage with the world so why not seize the moment and re-shape rituals so that they can better serve us. How would rituals be mediated by technology to aid the fortification of communities?
Place in Placelessness
Santiago Ceballos, Carolina Garcia, Justin Doro, Dana Shaviv
2022
Because education is related to knowledge and knowledge is related to truth, there is no legitimization. It is a vicious cycle.
Unknown
Packaging can make the difference. In a crash, the driver was often impaled on the steering wheel. The passenger collided with the dash, instrument panels. Seatbelts and padding were added to cars. You couldn’t get people to use seatbelts.
Unknown
When you search for criticism online we look for things that reinforce our existing beliefs, which is the opposite of the function of criticism. It may be tempting to conceptualize a post-criticism society, such a society may be ungovernable.
David Ruy
2021
Strangely, every constituency thinks they are underrepresented. This is true, that no matter how marginal, any opinion and orientation to society and criticism can be found in support of it online.
David Ruy
2021
Images are understood through scanning - optically wandering over the surface of the image. Images are not ‘denotative’ (unambiguous) complexes of symbols (like numbers, for example) but ‘connotative’ (ambiguous) complexes of symbols: They provide space for interpretation.
Toward a Philosophy of Photography
Vilem Flusser
1984
We reach through the electronic field of each that cushions us, like amniotic fluid, through the field that allows us to order, reform, and transmit almost any sound, idea, or word, toward what lies beyond, toward the transient and ineffable - a breath, for example, a pause in a conversation, even the twisted grain of a xeroxed photograph or videotape. Here is where the aura resides - not in the thing itself but in the originality of the moment when we see, hear, read, repeat, revise.
The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Douglas Davis
1995
That which withers in that age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin
1935
Both options suck - politicizing art and aestheticizing politics. This third option must have something to do with contemplation of what is not human.
Unknown
Ultimately what is disturbing is that there is something behind our consciousness, despite there being little scientific evidence to back it up.
David Ruy
2021
It’s not smart to engage into overt combat - If you want to be direct, you can go work at the UN. Direct and overt activism doesn't work in architecture because it produces a weird subculture of talking to only people who already agree with you.
David Ruy
2021
Architects with one foot in practice and the other in academia try to devise ways of bridging the practical concerns of the mechanistic world with the aesthetic experience of art, or vice versa, which almost always ends in complications.
Architecture, Martian Rocks, and Beauty
James Piccone
2022
Architects are responsible for balancing the dynamic forces acting on buildings in practice, but while in design studios, they are cultured to ignore those same forces in order to experiment on form. Thus, architecture students find themselves on an endless quest to discover new forms of beauty without consequence since digital models provide an empty space with infinite resources.
Architecture, Martian Rocks, and Beauty
James Piccone
2022
The physics simulations of “soft bodies” and the “open world” environments of game engines do not recreate reality but represent it through structural mechanics, a set of finite elements that have physical properties, or game mechanics, the rules that govern a player’s limits of interaction in a simulated universe.
Architecture, Martian Rocks, and Beauty
James Piccone
2022
I tolerate unpleasure because, in the back of my mind, there is an inkling that pleasure will eventually happen.
Unknown
The best forms of parenting and education are the transfer of responsibilities.
Education Machine
Michael Osman
2022
CityLAB is a public company that was founded in 2006 by Dr. Dana Cuff as a “think tank” within the University of California, Los Angeles Department of Architecture and Urban Design. Led by Dr. Cuff, the team is composed of graduate and PhD students from UCLA, outside researchers, planner, architects, and design professionals with financial support from philanthropic donors, Sarah Jane Lind and Cindy Miscikowski. The mission of the company is to research and propose design solutions to urban issues based on four core initiatives, including spatial justice, the postsuburban metropolis, rethinking green, and new infrastructure.
Five Objects
James Piccone
2022
The Circular Construction Lab is a design research program within the Department of Architecture at Cornell University that hosts a variety of studio and seminar courses around the topic of a circular economy in the architecture, engineering, and construction industries. The main goal of the lab is twofold: to plan for the material reuse of future buildings through their careful material selection, design, construction, and deconstruction, as well as to extract useful materials from the currently available built environment for their design potential.
Five Objects
James Piccone
2022
The USC A-Lab was founded in 2021 with support from industry partners and the USC Good Neighbors Grant Program as a semester-long, pre-college architectural education laboratory for Los Angeles Unified high school junior students. A-Lab’s mission is to provide students from all backgrounds and identities with the skills, technology, and professional support to build a portfolio of work and successfully apply to college in architecture or other design-related degrees.
Five Objects
James Piccone
2022
MetaLAB was founded within Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 2011 as a laboratory for research, experimentation, and transdisciplinary knowledge production in the arts and humanities. In early 2022, the lab expanded to the Freie Universität Berlin with the mission of forming international partnerships while retaining its autonomy to initiate projects at an institutional level.
Five Objects
James Piccone
2022
This exhibition investigates two platforms for the production of architectural knowledge outside of the hegemonies of educational institutions. The first is the laboratory attached to a school that provides research knowledge in exchange for academic resources while the second is the establishment of a new school that redefines the structure and product of education. Topics include urban policy, material upcycling, youth outreach, technology in the humanities, and the dialectic between different pedagogical models but, the real question is not what they are trying to create but how they are doing it. How is value created to justify their existence?
Five Objects
James Piccone
2022
The FSA can basically be discussed in one of two phases. The first phase, now referred to as FSA 1.0, started in planning toward the end of 2016 and commenced its first six week program in Los Angeles during the summer of 2017. It was founded by Peter Zellner, a then recently banished SCI-Arc faculty member who had decided to start his own school as an act of intransigence to invert pedagogical norms he saw as institutional impediments while charging no tuition.
Five Objects
James Piccone
2022
The principles of FSA 1.0 were determined by the ethos of post-studio and post-digital architecture, inspired by John Baldessari’s post-studio art class at CalArts in the 70s, and became the testing ground to overturn the long standing relationship between master and apprentice. But underlying the theme of post-studio and post-genius pedagogy was a remystification of design method that emptied out the workshop and filled it with a space for reflection that demanded no products and enforced no labor upon the students.
Five Objects
James Piccone
2022
The theories of architectural pedagogy can be simplified into two divergent paths. The first says that architecture can be taught. This opinion is often aligned with the architectural profession and the building sciences which have an epistemological basis rooted in measurable compliance and quantifiable performance data. The second position, which is what founded the FSA, is that architecture happens under the right circumstances. The ambiguity inherent in this pedagogical position is the logical inversion of the professional and scientific practice of architecture that cordones off of the discipline to the fine arts or social equity.
Five Objects
James Piccone
2022
Crumpled receipt you find in your pocket
Paper towel coffee filter
Microwaving bacon in paper towel
Spray painting mat
Kindling for a fire
House training dog with newspaper
Spilled coffee on notes/sketch pad
Crushed paper with heavy book
Ripped up gift wrapping after Christmas morning
Finger Puppets
Shelf Lining
Crumpled Shoe Shape Keeper
Wrap tomatoes in paper and store in a box to ripen
Dampen base of newspaper ball and blot on floor to pick up tiny shards of broken glass
Shred paper into thin strips and place in compost bin
Make a stop motion animation sketch book
Clean mirrors and windows with newspaper crumple
Activities of Exhaustion
James Piccone
2021
Recognizing that both your senses and your technology are limited, the spectrum of light we can see is limited, you can’t print lightness or white ink, unless you have a special white toner and printer, so you’re relying on the luminance of the medium to create brightness, especially if it’s an inkjet.
Activities of Exhaustion
James Piccone
2021
Limitations are actually useful because you can’t exhaust something until you set up or encounter a limit, or create a system that works with a constant and a few variables. So it is basically a scientific process, and we are both the instruments and scientists.
Activities of Exhaustion
James Piccone
2021
You are creating a new authenticity or multiple authenticities across the seriality of the images. They only make sense when they are together. When they’re ostracized from their family they’re like a blurry memory.
Activities of Exhaustion
James Piccone
2021
The darkness is intentional and requires close reading, developing closer attention. The subjects and their backgrounds are intentionally similar and there is a progression in the arrangement. That they should be read linearly, one after another.
Activities of Exhaustion
James Piccone
2021
The death of paper.
Activities of Exhaustion
James Piccone
2021
Producing redundancy, we start to get sick of it ourselves, from an aesthetic point of view.
Activities of Exhaustion
James Piccone
2021
The point of departure for this class will be to nonlinearly construct awareness of historical discourse while engaging the rise of different modes of understanding visuality through paradigm shifts that reformulated visual perception, from the construction of renaissance perspective into scientific models of optics and physics, and the alignment of sensory perception with the arts.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
We will investigate latent forms of thinking about perception that have undergird much of architectural theory for the last sixty years and ask which approaches could be abandoned or expanded on further. We will build up a resource of knowledge from the readings that fuels the intellectual growth of the class while helping to strategically challenge long held beliefs ranging from representational conventions, photographic objectivity, subjective appearances, and algorithms.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
We will also ask how visual practices contended with photographs as existing in the present while being a representation of the past. How much control do we have over our perceptual faculties and is there such a thing as an innocent eye?
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
How much do artists learn from their predecessors and do their methods become the conventions by which images are valued? Did modernism systematize vision through descriptive geometry and the construction of uniform perspectival space and how has photography and image making in the past and today been constrained or manipulated by this visual system?
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
Can we explain why representational truth has been converted into a false objective reality by technopolitics, and to what extent does visual culture support disciplinary autonomy?
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
As students of architecture and culture in the midst of an unprecedented proliferation of digital images, we will consider the networks of information, technology, and media involved in the processes of production, exchange, and consumption while being careful to not devalue the ubiquity of images but theorize on its cultural meanings.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
Aristotle proposed that thinking is like seeing as we construct thought-images generated by both subjective perception and memory.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
Through religious representations, the idea of false images are posited to come from outside and inside the mind while images of various Saint’s temptations became a model for resisting sinful thoughts. The image could also be considered to be a holy vision in that god could change the appearance of things or change the perception of the individual.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the concept of image was becoming similar to picture and both were seen as visual artifacts often labeled as the graphic revolution, flood of pictures, media explosion, or cult of images. Images of deception became instrumentalized by capital which Guy Debord would term the “society of the spectacle.”
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
Though Mitchell doesn’t go as far to claim that knowledge is ultimately in the form of an unmediated image, he takes a relativist approach that considers knowledge as an outcome of social interactions, including the necessary dialogue we must establish between images and words.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
When critiquing images, we may find that they are much weaker than we had thought them to be because, despite being a “popular political antagonist,” their effect is actually minimal in the visual and political world.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
The artist, observer, and picture must engage in dialogue because, while pictures construct desire, they are still low status mediums that don’t actually know what they want, except to be equal with language while not being language, or not without ontology and multiplicity.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
The medium, or how an image is transmitted is inescapable. Rather than being pure material, the medium of an image is the form that transmits images into pictures for collective memory.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
Social media today is able to record user experience without interrupting it while feeding an unlimited supply of images that demand attention and distraction in the flow of daily life.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
Contemporary visual culture does not support close reading because images today are less sophisticated and more surface-level.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
Benjamin argues that the original conditions of an art work, in space and time, are necessary for its authenticity or essence, extending from its beginning, to exist. The “presence in time and space” is a “unique existence” that includes its physical material degradation and its procurement and exchange by different hands of ownership. He is very direct in saying that originality is equivalent to authenticity and authenticity is based on the rituals of how the artwork was originally used, in its specific time and place.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
Krauss points out that André Malraux’s “Musée Imaginaire,” or conceptual museum of imagination, when translated into English became a concrete, physical space called the “museum without walls.” Malraux noted that artworks in the twentieth century museum began to take on a coherence of multiple foci which could be linguistically categorized into what became styles. No longer did the display of works have to be limited to the enfilade organizational scheme of past museum’s but could take on new models of “universal space” by Mies van der Rohe, or the spiral ramps of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
Krauss points out that André Malraux’s “Musée Imaginaire,” or conceptual museum of imagination, when translated into English became a concrete, physical space called the “museum without walls.” Malraux noted that artworks in the twentieth century museum began to take on a coherence of multiple foci which could be linguistically categorized into what became styles. No longer did the display of works have to be limited to the enfilade organizational scheme of past museum’s but could take on new models of “universal space” by Mies van der Rohe, or the spiral ramps of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
Flusser proposed a theory on the division of culture into three branches; the first being the culture of traditional fine art images, the second as the culture of science and technology text, and the third being the culture of “cheap texts.” The role of photographs was then to technically and conceptually connect all three branches together but what it actually did to culture was “grind it up into an amorphous mass” or create a mass culture
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
The history of photography struggles with being positioned between representing its subject as real and abstracting what is represented and the representation itself. Similar to a preserved building, the conflict in photography is that it is both existing in the present and a representation of the past.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
Starting with Goethe’s work on physiological colors, the retinal afterimage, or a spectrum of color generated internal to the human from the camera obscura, indicated a subjectivity to visual perception independent from the optical world. In the early nineteenth century, the reformulation of light as a wave delegitimized renaissance models of perspective projection as scientific models of understanding perception.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
Based on the point of view of Gestalt psychology, Arnheim establishes visual judgment as a total compositional field of tensions and vectors; a perceptual field of forces that stabilize or destabilize an arrangement. Vectors of movement and weight create potential for instability and are, according to Arnheim, to be stabilized in order to make an artist’s statement unambiguous.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
Although perspective was considered an abstraction that transformed space into mathematics, it did not acknowledge that humans see with moving eyes or the convexity of how a lens or retina receives a projected image. Further, the problem of unrolling a projected image from the spherical surface of the inner eye onto a flat picture plane was not addressed until modern times by physicists who observed the curvature of perceived images.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
Gombrich’s view was that conceptual thinking, beliefs, and expectations predetermine the totality of human perceptual experience (there is no innocent eye) and perceived reality is the result of one’s membership in a specific culture.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
Operating between two cultures, the artist-scientist both challenges the primacy of science and expands on the interpretation of art which she defines as “multistable perception.” This means that in order for an image to be understood in both scientific and artistic terms, it must be studied with both neural constructs.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
With reference to Kant, Marx, and Freud, there was a belief that fetishism was an infantile, commodifiable, and sexualized trap from which only the Enlightenment could provide escape, while aesthetic autonomy, in a similar way, also opposed the subjectivity of fetishism, which Foster claims is a contemporary state of Surrealism. Rather than default to a strict autonomy, though, he suggests that a “strategic autonomy” may be a possible way forward.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
In order for design culture to become an academic discipline, designers and thinkers must stop being overwhelmed by the sheer number of images in proliferation, they must study the artifacts and relationships between design and space, and finally, utilize this thinking to produce new approaches to design practice.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021
With the addition of visual culture into the studies of media and communications, it is also possible that journalism can be extended beyond the complementary use of images that just support text, but rather into a complex field of history, politics, and technology of visuality.
Visual Worlds: Seeing and Thinking, HT Syllabus
James Piccone
2021