| Title | COMPLICIT IMAGES |
| Tutor(s) | Michiel Helbig, Corneel Cannaerts |
| Campus | Ghent |
| Language | EN |
| Engagement | Mediating Tactics |
| Semester | 1 |
Description of the studio:
Fieldstation Studio (https://fieldstationstudio.org/) explores how architecture and urban design might respond to the proliferation of networked digital technologies and media in our environments. In this expanded notion of media ecologies, we are particularly interested in the changing role of the images and image making, and their implications for architectural practice and culture.
In an ongoing series of master studios on the post-digital condition, we explored the meaning of digital technologies for image making and the resulting visual regime for architecture. Under the title Artificial Images, we critically investigated the status of synthetic image production using AI in architectural design. Framed within the larger cultural shift from representation to simulation, we investigated the impact of this shift on how architecture is represented, conceived and understood. The master studio Building Images (Post Digital Constructs), focused on how digital images mediate processes of construction and fabrication, and increasingly manifest themselves in the built environment and contribute to new forms of materiality. For this Mediating Tactics studio, we will explore the notion of Complicit Images, focusing on how images operate in addition to what they depict. We are interested in how images are complicit in technological, political, societal systems, in shaping contemporary post-digital media ecologies.
Expanding the work on the synthetic and material nature of images, in this studio we will expand our disciplinary practices and tools with computational and time-based media to map, trace, navigate and narrate the role of images in our technologically saturated environments and pro-actively design speculative architectural reflections or propositions in response. The studio combines collective research, hands-on experimentation and speculative architectural projects. We are interested in extending architectural practice through artistic and interdisciplinary approaches.
OPERATIONAL IMAGES
The term ‘operational images’ was coined by filmmaker Harun Farocki in 2001, describing technical images that mainly function as part of machinic operations rather than representing or depicting something for human understanding. These processes range from scanning, tracking, navigating, controlling, identifying, detecting, visualizing, and involve images resulting from various cameras and instruments such as satellites, drones, autonomous vehicles, sensor arrays, scanners of all kinds, security cameras, industrial imaging systems… In his films and installations Farocki focuses on politics of images resulting from military and industrial operations that are generally hidden from the public at large or even invisible images not meant for human eyes but used in machine-to-machine communication, as described by Trevor Paglen.
Since Farocki coined the term 20 years ago, our environments are becoming more and more saturated with networked digital technologies: internet-of-things, global communication and transportation technologies, mobile devices, increased satellite coverage, location-based services, ubiquitous computing… Camera’s, tracking devices, sensors and scanners are constantly mapping our environments, activities and behaviors. People are increasingly sharing all aspects of their lives through blogging, social media, image and video sharing platforms. The vast amount of information gathered by these technologies and platforms is not limited to the media artefacts themselves, it is tagged with metadata, processed and filtered through algorithms, forming a hyperlinked graph, an ecology of interconnected media. This increasing amount of data is no longer a passive representation of our environment but is actively informing and steering how we design, inhabit and maintain urban environments. In that sense all images, even those aimed for human consumption have become operational to some extent, they are complicit in the systems that are shaping our environments.
ENTANGLEMENTS OF CODE, CONTENT & HARDWARE
Digital technologies have been deeply affecting architectural practice and culture, as architecture is increasingly designed, constructed and experienced through digital media, which are technically speaking images. We can trace the interests of architects in the digital from formal exploration with digital modeling software, over prototypical experimentation with digital fabrication and material articulation to the recent ventures into data driven design. However, the predominately instrumental approach of digital technologies left architecture largely blind to the deep societal, environmental and cultural impact of digital technologies. Our houses, cities and environments have become saturated with digital technologies, to such a degree that they impact all aspects of our lives and are more noted by their absence then their presence. Through social media, image and video sharing platforms, digital technologies are deeply impacting cultural production and consumption. While emerging technologies have become inextricably interwoven in the very fabric of our environments and permeate our visual cultures, architects seem to lack the capacities and tools, or even willingness, to engage this ubiquitous technological layer, this post-digital condition.
In his seminal essay Everything is Already an Image, John May argues that the terms drawing, image and photograph are often interchangeable in architecture. While digital design media mimic drawings and photographs they have effectively become images. The computational nature of images allows them to be processed, calculated, filtered, tagged and manipulated, they can be endlessly duplicated and transmitted and are inherently dynamic and transformable. This shift in architecture from drawing to image, does not just affect the speed and reversibility of design processes, but fundamentally impacts how architecture is represented, conceived and understood. May argues that we are going from orthographic drawings to post-orthographic simulations. A similar argument is made by David Ross Scheer in his book The Death of Drawing: Architecture in the Age of Simulation. Sheer describes this shift as being part of a deeper cultural shift from representation to simulation.
Architects are still coming to terms with the shift from drawing to image resulting from the digitalization of all aspects of architectural practice. In meantime the development of the software that is driving this change is complicit in the system of venture capital investment and resource extraction. The map History of BIM shows the role of investment firms like Blackrock, Vanguard and Capital Group in development of architectural software. These groups also have major interests in military industries, extraction of fossil fuels and have been accused of supporting human rights violations. Autodesk, the leading company in the architectural software industry, is directly involved in extraction of coal, deforestation and other industries that are massively contributing to climate change, as is revealed by Joanie Lemercier on the website autodesk.earth. While we think of design software as harmless, neutral, virtual environments, they are not just ideological and monetary, but quite directly complicit in the messiness of the late-capitalist world.
COMPUTATIONAL CINEMA
Computational cinema allows us to actively engage with the visual regime resulting from the proliferation of digital technologies and operationalization of images and enables us to see our world and ourselves differently. When rendering the data resulting from the machinic operations visually again, through computational techniques we can extend our understanding of the complexities and entanglement shaping our environments. As Benjamin Bratton argues, our understanding of climate change results from new sensory apparatus such as satellite imagery and earth observation technologies and the climate models enabled through planetary computation. He calls for a new cinematography that uses this geo cinematic apparatus, not to produce a singular master image, but a multitude of possible compositions, each of which overflows frames of perception.
The impact of computation is not just affecting the sensorial apparatus, the proliferation of cameras, scanners and other sensory devices that capture our world as data, but the whole process of cinematography, from production, editing to displaying and consumption of visual media. Through software like game engines or postproduction, Cinema has become volumetric. The linear sequence of two-dimensional images is just one way in which spatial data contained in video can be rendered visual. David Rudnick argues that this extended understanding of cinema is more than other artistic media capable of depicting our contemporary condition, which he calls ultra reality. In addition to going beyond linear time he identifies the tendency to the endless scroll, the perfect loop, the 360° freedom of movement enabled by the virtual cameras, replacing the horizon as the main organizational plane on which we construct the world. Lastly, he identifies what he calls ‘camera intifada’, a world constructed from fragments, shards of debris rendering the audience from an observer to an active protagonist.
As spatial designers engaged in conceiving of our environment as inherently dynamic and changing, architects are well positioned to take on the spatiotemporal potential offered by volumetric cinema. Within Fieldstation Studio we work extensively with computational, time based and narrative media, to extend the architectural toolbox and to directly engage the new visual regime of post-digital media ecologies. We use techniques like data scraping, working with found footage, integrating video or images from social media into four dimensional models, processing various data types and metadata, rendering, data visualization, animation and post-production. We will introduce students to these techniques to develop a critical position towards the role of images in our environment, architectural practice and culture.
Expected output:
The Complicit Images studio will explore how architectural images and image making are complicit in contemporary technologically saturated environments, in post-digital media ecologies. We will do this in three parallel threads each with their own output, building up to a layered reflection and faceted project. We will mainly work in teams of 2 students, but also as a collective with explicit individual contributions.
(1) Theoretical reflection building a collective body of references through carefully analyzing and mapping references and reading key texts and establishing a lexicon. We will organize a curated screening of short movies and cinematic architectures and explore state of the art examples, manifestations and sites of complicit images.
>> Groups of 2 students develop a Field Guide starting each from one key image we have selected as a starting point for developing a project. These images will be contextualized through research, reading texts, finding related works, in addition to their content we will look at how these images operate, in what context they are produced, through which means they are consumed, extracting strategies and tactics. The resulting research will be compiled in a series of Field Guides that constitute a collective frame of reference.
(2) In a series of skill shops, we will be interfacing with media ecologies through hands-on experimentation with computational techniques such as web scraping, image processing and computer vision and data visualization, and narrative media such as animation and video.
>> The technologies and methodologies taught in these skill shops will consist of small exercises resulting in individual contributions to an artificial collective landscape of sites, references and media.
(3) Starting from the collective research and the Field Guides, the groups of 2 students will develop a speculative project that translates their reflections on and position towards the topic of complicit images into cinematic and architectural constructs and design propositions. The (non)site, scale, nature and scope of these projects will result from the research and design process.
>> The final project will take the form of a video essay, a travelogue exploring a speculative cinematic architecture. The medium of cinema will be investigated and used as an extension of traditional architectural media, allowing to think and design in different time frames, perspectives and spatial dimensions. The cinematic architecture designed for and explored in the video will ultimately be translated again to a drawing, a render or a collage, trying to compress the entanglements and complexities into one complicit image.
Excursion/study trip/…
Workshop and/or Fieldtrip in W7, To Be Confirmed…
Video Trailer:
References/Further reading:
TEXTS
Flusser, V. (2011). Into the universe of technical images. University of Minnesota Press.
Kurgan, L. (2013). Close up at a distance: Mapping, technology, and politics. Zone Books. https://www.zonebooks.org/books/28-close-up-at-a-distance-mapping-technology-and-politics
McKim, J. (2019) Into the Universe of Rendered Architectural Images, Unthinking Photography. https://unthinking.photography/articles/into-the-universe-of-rendered-architectural-images
Menkman, R. (2021), Impossible Images, Beyond Resolution https://beyondresolution.info/Impossible_Images
Mitchell, W. J. (1994). The reconfigured eye: Visual truth in the post-photographic era. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262631600/the-reconfigured-eye/
Paglen, T. (2014), Operational Images. E-flux, Issue #59, November 2014 https://www.e-flux.com/journal/59/61130/operational-images/
Parikka, J. (2023). Operational images: From the visual to the invisual. University of Minnesota Press. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/operational-images
Rettberg, J. W. (2023). Machine vision: How algorithms are changing the way we see the world. Polity Press.
Schuppli, S. (2020) Material Witness, Media, Forensics, Evidence, MIT Press. https://susanschuppli.com/DISASTER-FILM
Steyerl, H. (2009), In Defense of the Poor Image. e-flux, Issue #10, November 2009 https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/
Weizman, E. (2017). Forensic architecture: Violence at the threshold of detectability. Zone Books.https://www.zonebooks.org/books/50-forensic-architecture-violence-at-the-threshold-of-detectability
Zylinska, J. (2017) Nonhuman Photography, MIT Press. https://www.nonhuman.photography/book
STUDENT WORKS
FEED by David Van Oostende & Enrico Pavone https://vimeo.com/531351596
School of Aesthetosphere by Nicolas Claessens, Ines Somviele, Luka Heymans & Celine de Fauconval https://vimeo.com/874391395
Hyper-Learning and Unlearning by Yue Hua, Anqi Wang, Jindi Jia & Xinyue Zhang https://vimeo.com/629913140
Metaphysical Greenhouse by Michiel Swerts https://vimeo.com/531380704
Beyond the Grid: Territories of Resolution by Carolina Safieddine, Jiahua Dong, Kun Luo & Yandong Liu https://vimeo.com/629924776
… (LESS)(NESS) by Mattias Bruyneel https://vimeo.com/586701782
COMES WITH BEING A VOYEUR by Emma Vanneste Kelsey Van Oost Stien Vanderstede Veerle Haems https://vimeo.com/629990161
Dis Integrated Sceneries by Tim Kuijlen, Balder Fabre, Lana Keppens & Caro Cools https://vimeo.com/755590066
Ghosts of Nakagin Tower, Lost and Found in Translation by Sitan Zhu & Hsi Ping Hung https://vimeo.com/995570572
Expanded Vision & (In)Visible Images by Jieyu Yang, Yuewen Jing & Ziqian Xu https://vimeo.com/995575349
Dopamine City (Clout Images) by Youngshin Jeon & Weiye Zhang https://vimeo.com/996387408
Immersive Landscapes (Artifical Images) by Yuxin Hong, Qian Chen & Yinhui Dong https://vimeo.com/996407843
Reference for the image: