Impossible and Hyper-Real Elements of Architecture: Exercises, Provocations, and Theories of Digital Representation

Impossible and Hyper-Real Elements of Architecture addresses how and why architects, artists, and designers manipulate reality. Front and centre in this discourse is the role of rendering. Most often, to render is to engage a thick software interface, to accept a photographic framework of variables and effects, and to assume an unquestioned posture of articulating material, mass, and colour. But like drawing, rendering is an interdisciplinary, algorithmic, historically rooted cultural practice as much as it is a digital vocation. The elements explored in this book are labelled “impossible” because they avoid a fixed relationship to a singular built reality. Digital bonsai trees, pixels, video game levels, grids, and dioramas extend like skewers through multiple media and formats. Through work that looks very real and can’t possibly exist, representation becomes the territory of speculation, ambiguity, and curiosity.

Table of Contents:
9 Acknowledgments 11 Introduction CHAPTER 1 19 Bits Mapped 21 The Pixel 23 Constructing Elements in Pursuit of Impossibility 25 1988, the Year of the Pixel 31 Pixel Creating Cultures 40 Preserving the Pixel, Releasing Style from Technology 45 The Contemporary Binary Bitmapped Surface 48 Draw by hand within the space of a digital image 78 Resolve to true or false with tons of information CHAPTER 2 83 Every Grid is Material BY JULIE KRESS 87 Every tool is Pre-Gridded 89 Every Grid is Aesthetic 94 Every Grid is Constructed 99 Every Grid is Imposed 102 Build and Break a Scaffold 105 Every grid wants to go on infinitely 107 Every grid has mass 112 Contain a Grid 115 Every grid does not need to be the same 118 Un-Standardized Fixtures CHAPTER 3 123 Using a Tree to Represent a Tree 127 Bonsai is an Action and an Element 128 Books About Bonsai are Like This Book 129 The Tree Behind the Tree 133 Designing Tools to Control or Release Natural Randomness 140 Random Salt Crystals 142 Who is the “User-Author”? 143 Using Software the Wrong Way 149 A Tree Yet Rendered is Three Hundred Text Files in a Folder 150 Sometimes a Tree Looks Nothing like a Tree 154 Everything is Bonsai when in Pursuit of Bonsai 156 Over Time, of Time 159 The Pot is a Diorama CHAPTER 4 165 A Room that Becomes a Diorama; A Diorama Afflicted with Room Envy 167 Almost but not Quite a Diorama: The Room, its Powers, and its Limits 172 Model your space with every regard for detail and no regard for accuracy 173 All Apertures Become Dioramas 184 The Room as a Diorama 188 Model from Memory 189 American Landscape as Diorama 196 Like (Performed) Magic 208 Can a Diorama be Separated from Its Content?