Exhibition at Des Lee Gallery
Curation Project
https://decoysanddepictions.net/
In the contemporary world, nothing we produce as architects is what it seems at face value. Familiar outputs in the form of drawings, models, and photographs — now produced through a spectrum of digital tools and techniques — masquerade as replicas of their predecessors when, in fact, they are entirely other. These products of electronic imaging have expanded the discourse concerning images and operate in the world as decoys and depictions. Decoys & Depictions: Images of the Digital examines the role of digital images as grounds for theoretical development, vehicles for the production of form, physical components of buildings, and mechanisms through which architects and artists can form new audiences for our disciplines and contribute to social and political change.
Decoys are objects that share characteristics with images, and depictions are images that have the qualities of objects. They are not oppositions but bookend the working space in which those architects and artists that are invested in constructing images operate. Generally thought of as representations, doubles, or fakes, they operate like staged scenes or props inserted into the existing surrounds. However, while the parameters of vision drive decoys and depictions, they are attuned to the visual world for a fraction of their existence. Beneath the surface, they respond to a complicated matrix of applied pressures. Their special visibility is only rendered when we see the invisible effects of the informational formats, material frames, fictional objectivity, and accumulations of data that underlie them. To see the images of the digital we cannot simply look at digital images, we must look through them to the logic of their construction.
Digital images are inherently multiple artifacts that are in perpetual translation, forming composites of ever compounding information that distorts as it is shared, accumulated, stored, uploaded, downloaded, edited, and reformatted. Like theater, there is an inherent collectivity to these images; multiple actors interface across collaborative platforms, and captured images anticipate constant possible audiences. These visually comprehensible piles of information speak to the complicated web of materials that they chart, geopolitical boundaries they cross, and energy they consume. Images are inherently political enterprises that can rewrite material, informational, and spatial boundaries.
Architects have long had to contend with translating layers of information between image and object. Translations that are specific to the discipline of architecture require cyclical flattening and inflating, unfolding and reassembling, causing image and object to impinge on one another. Contemporary architectural problems concerning images are revealed in work that deals with this exchange in new ways, recasting images as objects and examining the imageable characteristics of objects.
This collaborative discussion between architects and artists raises questions about our operations concerning contemporary images: How can a deeper understanding of electronic imaging and the ongoing technological developments therein reshape how we design and build? How might we reconsider conventional methods of display in relation to the circulation of images through social networking and web-based media? How can interfacing with images directly change how we structure design pedagogy? Decoys & Depictions: Images of the Digital aims to address critical questions about the capacity of images to transform architecture through a dualistic analysis of data and picture.