cv context // v.01 //
FRAMES
Preface
[ Context ] is intended to begin a practice of book making throughout the coming years. It seems appropriate that it comes at a point in my education that such a practice begins, as I am both finishing and beginning. This initial edition emerges as the final works and statements from an undergraduate education at the University of Kentucky’s College of Design. While the work explicitly comes from a semester’s work it is impacted by the many courses, conversations, and critiques leading up to this point. The beauty of book making, in this nature, is that it asks for a clarification of ones thoughts with a degree of self-criticality. The intentions are not to prescriptively propose or impact a future trajectory or discourse, but rather compile and archive a point in time and personal thought. It is not a manifesto. The potential and what this work and book may become in the next 10 years is unknown, and frankly not worth emphasizing. [ Context ] can be considered a personal journal - a means to archive the most important and informed thoughts of various points of work. It is a synopsis, a thesis, and a point of departure. -Connor Verteramo, BA of Architecture, UK/Cod, 2016
Introduction: FRAMES This work was produced during the final semester of an undergraduate degree in architecture at the University of Kentucky’s College of Design. The presented body of work, FRAMES, is derived from personal interests in “paper architecture”, drawing, and speculative architecture; from the desire to pursue a level of scholarship that could integrate a series of concurrent courses that ranged in conversation from the practice of sketching within architecture to the questions of architecture in the “information age”; and lastly it is directed towards a call for submissions by the Bartlett School of Architecture’s conference DRAWING FUTURES. As final products the drawings presented range from initial digital studies to spark conversations to irreplicable physical artifacts of translations from digital to physical. In addition to the drawings produced a subsequent essay was composed, for a separate course, which investigated the oscillations of drawing as objects of speculation to processes of speculation. While the work is explicitly an act of drawing and speculating of modes of drawing, it must also be noted that, for me, drawing is a medium that allows and encourages students to critique architecture at varying scales and breadths. The discourses that are emerging or already present within academic and professional work and conversations are fetishistic of the technology that we use. Historically this trend and obsession has existed, we can look to the 1900’s as predecessors of such lust. From the FUTURISTS to the MODERNISTS. It is not to say that it is wrong merely that we should not so blindly accept and assume architecture to have quality from specific checklists.
The software and technology artists, designers, and architects use today are highly precise and intelligent. It is common-place to validate design through the quantification and hyper-realistic visualization of architecture. Not to say that parametricism and rendering, even VR, is bad for architecture more so that such software has become a crutch for professionals and students alike. We have to question and begin to engage the technologies in a manner that opens doors into conversations and potentials of their uses. Though there are many designers that are working on this right now, it must not be so obscure and esoteric of a dialogue. Furthermore the technology of today’s design culture allows for the rapid production of the seductive that can be easily replicated. Also, with the immersion of design school culture into the social media world there is a constant need to make products. It is in such an environment that while ripe with potential there is conversely an inundation of skin deep things being produced and a lack of any discursive statements being made. While I am proposing that the culmination of the following work is a critique of the current state of academic work, explicitly, it is concurrently a self-critique and reflection. It acknowledges my own personal work previously completed and the preconceptions that led to the semester. Speaking from a point in time after the work was completed, at first glance it may look as it aligns with the seductive and skin deep that I am quite strongly opposed to as a justification system. But it is not, it is hyper-refined and thought through with constraints and processes that are intentional at each step of the way. It is not a final statement; it is not prescriptive for the future; it is a compilation of the past four years.
Dreams of the Digital
[Re]Figuration
Artifacts
_Drawing on Context_
_The Intentionally Imprecise_
_Swipes_
_The Intuitive and the Unguided_
_Digital Fodder_
_Waves_
_The Hyper Massive_
Dreams of the Digital: Drawing on Context.
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The beginning of this discussion on drawing is rooted in drawing practices which emphasize the act and processes of drawing. It it not to say that the works are not merely objects but are interested in the conceptions and techniques of art, design, and architecture. One of my former professor, Jerzy Rozenberg, noted that while talking about the act of drawing and making images is one way to discuss the topic, we can also understanding drawing as the act of extracting information and understandings. The works of architects like Daniel Libeskind for instance touches on both of these meanings. His Chamberworks are procedurally driven, with the end result not as the main pursuit of the work but rather the residue of a series of thoughts whose understanding can be “drawn out” afterwords. Robin Evans writes, “[Libeskind’s] procedure is therefore more like augury than writing: first form the signs, knowing only how, never what, and then look to see if they signify anything...” The drawings emerge from a specific process of making and constructing drawings, but the final artifact is never preconceived. The way in which the drawings emerge gives the maker, whether someone like Libeskind or myself, a critical distance from the final work. In such a sense the drawings become active in discourse at large and internally. This is important, the work is not seen as pristine final objects that are intended as mere imagery but instead are capable of being interpreted and reinterpreted overtime.
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The drawings are both timeless and timely; they can be understood within a specific context that they are made and reconceived in a new context. Each of the architects are drawing and speculating with a relative distance to specific technological advancements. For Libeskind, the stasis of architectural and associated technologies “encouraged” the reconsideration of drawing norms and techniques. With a flatlined climate of design there is space to question the everyday. While Libeskind’s work comes to us from a time with little advances to note, Lebbeus Woods and Neil Spiller had a radically different context for their provocations. They each were surrounded by a growing discourse of network theories, connective technologies, and later computational tools. Though each produced analog drawings, in technique, they tapped into larger conversations of technology and its potential impact on society, culture, and design practice. Like Libeskind’s work, Lebbeus Woods sketches can be discussed as artifacts of process from which understandings can be extracted after the fact. Neil Spiller expands upon this mode of drawn speculation by engaging with the processes of technologies to inform an architectural form and resolution. Though his work leans more towards an architectural representation, Spiller is blurring the boundaries of process and the product; he is taking the means of making as a kind of construction line which defines the final architectural object.
Lebbeus Woods. Utopx.
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Neil Spiller. Walled Garden for Lebbeus Woods.
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Though Neil Spiller’s work, and Perry Kulper’s as well, are observably architectural as an image and product, Libeskind and Woods create equally architectural drawings. They are abstractions of conceptions and larger issues that cannot be reduced to an explicit drawing. The difference emerges from distance from the point of comprehension of technology. Libeskind and Woods speculate on concepts that were still in the nascence and not matured until the later work of Neil Spiller and more apparently during Perry Kulper’s context. For that discrepancy the first pair create process driven abstractions that can be interpreted after their completion and the second grouping could engage in the architectural form making through procedural speculations. My work that will follow emerges in a context that could be considered as a hybrid of the two aforementioned situations. While the technologies that are implemented in design are rapidly changing they are constantly understood and manipulated so that the adage, “the only constant is change” is everpresent. The drawings that I will present are both process driven for fodder of reinterpretation and also products. They are both passively and actively participating with processes of translation from digital to physical. What they may become in the years to come is not known nor do I wish to project that upon them. The drawings exist somewhere between the work of Libeskind/ Woods and Spiller/Kulper, for now.
Perry Kulper. Fast Twitch Dwelling.
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Connor Verteramo. Anexact Translations. [ submission for DRAWING FUTURES ]
Dreams of the Digital: The Intuitive and the Unguided.
The subconscious dreams of this chapter are naive and undirected as a cohesive statement, but lay the groundwork for the terminus of the body of work as a statement directed towards the Bartlett’s call for submissions to its DRAWING FUTURES conference.
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The origins of this collection of work comes about from conversations with peers and professors about the existing paradoxes of the digitally mediated design environment and its processes. Many of the highly publicized works of the past decade or so have embraced, even fetishized technologies and softwares. While each computational program presents opportunities to modernize the profession of architecture, it should not be the over indulgence and emphasis of such modes of design that directs the field. The aesthetically driven work of the past decade or so is no longer enough, as there are means to integrate many of the softwares and technologies for design and representation such that the work that lacks a traceable characteristic. As a student of architecture, it is nearly impossible to attack the broad issues of discourse related to the place digital has in method and practice. But there is space to speculate for such a demographic in the world of drawing. These early digital “collages” emerge at first as intuitive explorations of digital processes and workflows to give definition to abstract qualities of architecture such as perception, phenomenon, and atmosphere. The language initially associated to the work gave only a characteristic definition to the appearance of the work, as though it was to be defended as a generic architecture studio project. The initial work comes from “playing” with scripting, modelling, rendering, Photoshop, and digital drawing. They are interested in using each software of output so that patterns could appear that may or may not have been results of another technology. It is not to say that these drawings are investigating “glitches” or “camouflage”, as other trendy digital work may be at this point in time. The drawings are trying to get a process that is not bound by the tools that are used predominantly in design education today; that the drawings are intentionally composed through collaging various outputs of differing softwares and computational technologies.
Jonas
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Collage in this work is used not in the sense of the 20th century term, where images, drawings, and text are overlaid to compose a new scene, story, or composition. Instead the work is a transparent collage, it is the overlay and mixing of software in a comparable way as preceding media of before. In this sense it is the concepts of collage that are transferred to the work not the processes, explicitly. The perception of the collage is incomprehensible as a product of specific technological processes; the drawings begin to acknowledge a greater potential of the artifact than just a merely seductive image. It gives the images the ability to take on an experiential quality. They take on a figuration that is perceptible from a distance and detail that entices the viewer to come close. This is an initial bit of thought that is interested in the experience of non-spatial “architecture”. As this manifests into drawings, it takes on a methodological critique of the complacency and blind acceptance of workflows in design process sweeping the field of architecture. The irony, though, of the initial drawings is that they are each bound to a digital existence. They can be printed and projected but the power and beauty of the artifacts comes from their ability to transcend geography and scale. The digital file can be emailed, blogged, scaled, and reproduced an infinite amount of times. Does the uniqueness of the drawing then really exist any more?1 They begin to fall into the category of the mass produced or the “meme-tecture”2 that is seen on social media outlets, internet blogs, and architectural websites. Every person is competing not for fifteen minutes of fame but fifteen seconds of fame.
Strange City-01
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These process driven speculations allow for a comprehension of a multi-faceted approach to drawing, for now. These works establish a foundation of the later work that no longer is naive and strictly intuitive; they create a broad attitude of drawing that does not accept the given qualities of current technology as an end all, as means to justify, qualify, and quantify architecture. More importantly, the tools at the disposal of designers allow for integrative and multi-platform processes to thrive, enabling a new era of design to emerge that is not dependent so much on a style resulting from a tool but from an intelligence based in contemporary tools and workflows. While the underlying premise of the collages are intellectually driven, the resolution of this iteration of work becomes quite skin deep. The composition and aesthetic dominates in the process of making. It has much to do with the workflow existing in the digital space only. In such a trajectory of work, why is there a need to even print or make physical the drawings? Would it not be more appropriate just to project or digitally present the drawings?
Dense Sponge
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Enigma
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As this phase neared an end, or rather a point of redundancy, the discussion shifted from just the work existing only in the digital space but the opportunities that could come from the printing, and furthermore making physical the drawings. Why was it needed for these images to made into a physical artifact? The initial response was to dramatically expand the size of the work, so that it was not preconceived to be bound to the dimensions of paper to plotted on. Instead the digital, at this point became the final drawing. While this leads to the production of a series of “hyper-massive� drawings, the nagging question of the physical replication of digital drawings lingers. This is foundation of the end work. In such a digital world, in terms of conception, design, and production, what does the physical output allow? Can it add value to the physical object? Why must we really turn drawings, explicitly, into physical artifacts?
Strange City_02
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Dreams of the Digital: The Hyper Massive
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As a continuation and maybe even a slight shift and layering of thought onto the work, this portion adds a curiosity of scale into the production of drawings and imagery. It is not to say that it has an architectural scale of so many fractions of an inch equals a foot in the world, but instead a conceptual scale. It questions the characteristic of drawings possessing and lacking scale3. The digital has two notions of scale. It operates in the pre-physical image, model, or drawing meaning that it is developed in reference to a future physical output and reproduction. With this the work has a physical scale, that is noted through a representation of its future size. The other scale is a bit more ambiguous, the digital scale. This has to do with a “file size” and its transportability. It is measured in the information that is stored. The former is of greater interest to this body of work; the latter is discussed more sub textually as a backlash to social media and mass media, in particular to the aforementioned “meme-tecture”. Digital environments reference, in notational space, a physical size and dimension of the artifacts in production. Whether it is a program used to create graphics, images, or models this acknowledgment of length, width, and height in terms of inches, feet, meters, miles etc exists. This being said, the works to follow will have a dimension associated to reference a “physical size” in a digital space. It is through the scale of the drawings non-spatial work becomes experiential4 as both a physical and digital phenomenon. The fluidity of experience is more facile in a digital environment.5 The size of the drawing can also be described as the scale of the artifact, relative to a space, surface, or similar artifacts. These select “Hyper-Massive” images were developed with the intent to have them printed almost as a wall decal or wall paper made of a single work. For these, the dimension of the artboard is important6; it to allow for a zooming in and out of the work in production and its perception. As the size increases there is a need to refine the detail within the composition, while the figure is still important and provocative from afar, what is afforded with the scale is the specificity and difference from one point to another within the same work. Hyper Massive Enigma [ 9’ x54’ ]
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The nuance in explicit details within a single work makes it necessary to explore its specificities. Interestingly the intentional variance from one point to another gets lost over time, in terms of its resolution in line with the original vision for the work. As a result the details from a starting point to the ending point may change a bit in technique and character, though working towards the composite whole. Meaning that if the refinement of a region on the top right of a drawing of this size was done at the beginning and the middle left was one of the final points of focus, they might have very discrete but noticeable differences from one another up close but from a distance blur into the figure of the final image. Digital space affords the opportunity to work in and out of specificity and figuration. It has an easiness to blur, layer, erase, compose, and undo, making the processes of production a fluid experience. It is nearly impossible to extract this logic from the observation of the final work once it was printed, posted, or sent out in another format; the artifacts are meant to be viewed as drawings, not representations, notations, abstractions, or otherwise. The chance to recognize this logic comes from the experience of the drawing by an individual. The observer analyzes the work in an analogous manner to the production. He or she would admire the piece as a whole, in composition and figuration, and then zoom7 in and out of instances of interest. While this shifting scale and size added a level of needed complexity and resolution to each drawing, it was not an end all solution; rather the terminus of these fascinations and intuitions expressed through a digital dreaming. They are categorically the same and operate in a similar manner. What was added, though, was the understanding of scale of artifacts in the digitally mediated world as an almost non-factor. The transients of work is not so strictly bound by size as it is when bound to physical properties for mailing and display. The work can be reduced in file size, in format, in delivery technique in such a way that the digital drawing can be omnipresent.
Speculative Lands [ 6’ x 28’ ]
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It may be the ultimate fulfillment of the way in which Walter Benjamin talked about the photographic reproduction and dissemination of art during the “Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.8 If this is the case, that anything can travel anywhere, then is there any real constraint in the digital environment? How critical can the work be if it is endlessly self-referential and filtered through circulation techniques and formats of social media? On the other hand, the works being produced are directed to this character of the information age, that everything can be accessed from anywhere, with minute limitations. If this is the case, then why really do we have any reference to a physical reality of the output of a drawing at some future point? Is it not just the archaic way of making the idea “concrete”? Valid? Assuming that the physical drawing and the digital drawing are nearly identical then there is no point to print. If it does not add something to a drawing then just leave a digital drawing in a digital format of display and presentation. This addition does not always have to be graphic or explicitly apparent in the work. It can be an atmospheric, experiential, or phenomenological layer. The conscious decision to print drawings must have control and intention in the modes of output. This is a basic premise of the final drawings; the product of this research and experimentation. The comprehension of the tools for output give control and rigor to the physical artifacts of these translations.
Lake’s Edge [ 6’ x 18’ ]
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[Re]Figuration: The Intentionally Imprecise
[ FRAMES ] is a series of drawings that engage the techniques of designing and translation from digital to physical. The collection is not a representation or an exercise; it is a series of drawings. It comes from a frustration with the design culture’s fetish with the hyper-precise, the hyper-real, the quantitative, and the easily digestible. As a result there is an inundation of easily reproducible things being made, but very few statements being made. [ FRAMES ] recognizes the opportunity to engage the mechanical processes of translation from digital to physical in order to extend drawing through software and mechanical technologies. The physical artifacts become the drawings - the intentionally imprecise translations - resultant from the re-production of digital images through interrupted processes of translation explicitly at the point of the mechanism. By understanding the procedures of the mechanisms the drawings develop replicable details and characteristics but become impossible to reproduce in totality. The desire is to reproduce the digital as a new physical drawing, not a 1-to-1 replication, but rather as a drawing that is specific to its relationship to the digital input, the processes of a mechanism, and physical surface. These final physical artifacts take the digitally produced drawing not as the end product but as a medium to engage contemporary technologies for replication. The first technique engages the plotting of drawings by altering the precision of feeding paper through the plotter. Each drawing is printed and re-printed multiple times. The paper is held and pulled so as to create slippages of the wheels or paper as the sheet. The second mode uses the cnc-mill to produce drawings by taking the processes used to decipher digital drawings as the grounds to inform scenarios which allow for intentionally imprecise translations. By altering the surface of the paper with “waves” new line-work and line-types emerge that track tool paths. The orientation and position of these aberrations is directly related to the sorting of digital information – directionally or “randomly” – and the original line types – parallel lines, points, or curves. The resulting drawings appear uncontrolled and accidental but they are embedded with a logic and comprehension of the processes and results of varying relationships between the digital and physical. The drawings layer the digital, the precise physical, and the imprecise emergent drawings that are new physical artifacts. [FRAMES] is neither the precisely created digital image nor the precisely replicated physical image. The drawings are the new and emergent artifacts that result from the interruption of precise processes of translation from digital to physical.
*abstract for submission to DRAWING FUTURES*
[Re]Figuration: Digital Fodder
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The digital drawings shown up to this point basically died at some end image. Much of the contextual digital work going on at this time was becoming seduced by its own seductiveness. It was a time of fetishization of digital workflows and perfections.9 Even the content around the ideas of camouflage and glitch still relies on the perfection of the softwares of production to counter the “error� and blurring between things. So the dissection of the digital work was a self-critical rejection of such obsessions. It is a deconstruction and reinterpreting of the esoteric drawing practice, in a digital space. Perversion gives a technique for extending the digital image making into a physical practice, not meaning analog. It also needed to understand, at first, rudimentary processes of the mechanisms for output whether a large format plotter or the cnc. The drawings emerge from drawing tools not meant for drawing.
Original Digital Collage_Strange City 02
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Six extracted color ranges from original digital collage. The layers are then converted into curves. For this drawing a total of eleven color ranges were actually pulled out.
The extraction of “color layers” of a digital drawing gives a line work, regions, and points to use as clean, “OG” inputs to imprecisely reproduce. In honesty, it started as a “what-if” in digital space with the quick recognition of a parallel opportunity in outputs. The delamination of the early work is based on an existing figuration and coloration that was desirable. It had to have a certain quality of depth, density, and layering; it had to possess a complexity and legibility to an extent. 053
The initial physical artifacts had a bit of intuition layered in, accepting portions of the originals for the sake of producing something like families of drawings. The characteristics of the inputs initially were the means to give specificity in the final artifacts. Meaning that with similar line-types of input there was a control of the output aesthetic and characteristic. Line could also be point or fill. The combinations of input types inform the final palette used to make drawings, like a palette of pens, pencils, inks etc.
Original Digital Collage_Dense Sponge
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As the series of drawings emerged, the comprehension of techniques of both digital inputs and of the mechanisms for output informed a “final�10 drawing set. The feedback loop of this process is continually evolving, while a later digital set was developing the physical outputs were concurrently being produced. The digital was being informed by findings and revelations of the processes of the mechanisms for translation. The start and end of the feedback loop was ambiguously the same and different. In such a way the later work becomes both process and product driven. The drawings begin to understand the processes of drawing in the digital and the extension through the mechanical so that they can predict certain qualities of the final physical artifacts. Lines are oriented, regions are filled, points are aggregated in such a way that figures, densities, and effects of perception will emerge. In such a way the final physical drawings are difficult to comprehend has procedures or products//images; they exist somewhere in between, in a state of tension ripe for extraction, reinterpretation, and full of life.
Original Digital Collage_Lakes Edge
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Dark Pink_Color Range
Chartreuse_Color Range
Cyan_Color Range
Blacks_Color Range
Artifacts: Between Process and Product
The Inexact Translations are the artifacts of the translation of digital drawings into physical artifacts. The following work is a refinement and directed series of drawings that take concepts developed throughout the semester within and outside of class.11 The intent was extend drawing through the entire process of making and presenting, why print out drawings or make surface models if they are equivalent to the digital environment? What is added? The drawings are continuing the act of drawing through a comprehension of procedures of output that various mechanisms use to decipher and translate.
Anexact Translations: Swipes
These Swipes are drawn with the plotter; again though they are not just replicated by a plotter. A single sheet [ 11” x 14” ] is used to make each while it is printed on multiple times. Each time the digital is plotted on the sheet a series of manipulations, of the surface, occurs. The paper is pulled, stalled, or shifted/tilted as it is being fed through the plotter. Each type of interference results in a particular characteristic to emerge. The drawings are never only printed once, but multiple times so that each pass through is an unfinished layer of an artifact.
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When the paper is pulled, the original is stretched; each band of the drawing is only partially printed in the “correct” position and then reprinted, as if the plotter were laying the finish layer of ink down, in an advanced location on the sheet. This stretching also fades the image, it demands multiple layers of the same drawing to be printed over itself in order to achieve a density and depth desired. In contradiction, by stalling the paper as it is fed through, the digital condenses and overlays early bands of the print over later. This makes the artifact heavier, as a result the fills that are reprinted have to be conscious of the near muteness if there is too much ink laid, it can rid the drawing of detail. By the same token, the figuration of a drawing takes fewer layers but only if an appropriate staggering of each reprint can fill the white space to create an evenness and composition. Lastly the shifting or tilting of the drawing pulls the drawing at an uneven rate; the rotation of the drawing makes the artifact a bit fuzzier. This effect is a kind of hybrid between the aforementioned techniques; it both lengthens and shortens the digital. But the figuration of this is less dependent upon the initial input as it distorts the work to a degree that the final drawing is more concerned with the angle and layering of shifts and rotations.
digital inputs
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Knowing these effects and techniques, the drawings morphology from digital to physical can be tracked. Though the archive of process is apparent it is not the hope that it is comprehensible in the final drawings. By combining multiple techniques in each layer of the print, the clarity of the how is lost into a reading of what the drawing is. The artifacts are objects in and of themselves, it does not really care how at the end of the day when viewing. The ambiguity proposes an observable curiosity that pulls in the viewer so as to evoke an experience. 069
Through delamination and re-lamination of digital drawings, explicitly composed through a plotter informs certain characteristics that are both residue of the digital and mechanical; the beginning and end of each is blurred together so that not only the input is difficult to understand but also each type of tool is nearly indiscernible. The final artifacts are then the talking point as objects not as an apparent constraint to a specific tool or software. Though it is not meant to be a discussion solely of how, it becomes important at least as a premise. The possible layers of input and output techniques make the reproduction of a drawing impossible12 in totality. But instead the understanding of these means for drawing allow for a rigorous set up of possible scenarios that control the drawing of certain qualities in the final drawing. Sets of drawings emerge as having familial relationships based up on the fodder and the technique for producing a final artifact. The drawing on each page cannot be made again in whole, though through each set there is a recognition of similarities. In this the hope is to take back an aura of the drawings produced in this age of information when there seems to be an inundation with content but not so much anything being said.
digital inputs
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While the shear amount of work produced might align with a mass production of work that is so often seen on social media, the uniqueness of the final artifacts’ inability to be reproduced gives them an aura. The work that is fetishized and recirculated on platforms such as instagram, issuu, tumblr, and other blogs and fora can, arguable, be reproduced in totality. The software saves layers, inputs, and effects among other things in such a way that one could just reapply certain things to get an identical output.13
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Furthermore there is a kind of group think that occurs, whether at macro scale of everyone who is feeding into and from specific outlets of work or in micro instances within a school14,. This way of operating and designing becomes so self-referential that it would appear that a single individual is making all of the work when there are actually several people doing nearly the same thing. It is not to say that all students of architecture, for instance, should reject striving for a certain quality of work, rather that it is often misguided. The young architecture student does not always fully understand the subtext of images, that which cannot be completely explained in the brevity of a caption. That being said, everyone should be critical of the context which they are operating within and participating in. This is one of the discourses that the work of this book is addressing; an architecture gallery of social media. How is work disseminated and displayed? But it is the subtext of the work. The speculative drawing practices of the likes of Perry Kulper, Lebbeus Woods, Peter Cook, and Daniel Libeskind, to name a few, is where these drawings want to be situated. Though the power of the drawing is also in the potential to act politically. It can speak to a zeitgeist in such a way that is passionately aware and critical but only in its reading and text becomes provocatively controversial.
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Interestingly there is a possibility to use separate inputs to layer the final drawing. This produces a seductive image but it operates in likeness to the work of the digital. So what? It adds too much to the drawing, not as clear as using a single input. It is a false ambiguity because the two drawings will always blur together, it is not as controlled.
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This family looks at how distant can the final drawing become by using as little digital matter as possible and still develop a figure, density, and effect. The inputs are nearly invisible as they a points, their aggregation as physical artifacts makes the drawings more an object of the mechanism for translation than the digital tools.
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Line fills to regions to blur the difference between solid and line. The orientation was intentionally aligned with the stroke of the print heads so the lines would not be split half way but would be printed in whole while the input as a whole was being stretched or condensed.
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At some point there was a fascination with the peculiar curves that come from the translation from color regions into linework for output. These adopt those curves but clip them to angled bands to develop fields. Later work in this section is a refined version of this technique.
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Generic input that uses transparency and density of fill to draw. The layering of density allows for a depth of field to emerge. These are about the perception of figures that may emerge out of fields of information.
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Similar to previous set but more aware of how to develop a field from a generic.
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The final drawings using the plotter begin to revert to original studies, and is an apparent terminus of this drawing technique. The end of this group of drawings exists when there is redundancy and furthermore a heavy-handed work. The drawings become excessive, overly done. It is like the late eras of architectural movements that become over cooked. These drawings are begin to revert a bit in clarity relative to the overall whole. Instead of blurring the bounds between digital and mechanical modes, there actually is a schism between the two. The digital input, already complex, is attempting to become complex through an output technique and results in a striation that shows the hand of the plotter. It reveals the secrets of the process. 107
While seductive, it is at these points that there is a need to step back for a period of time and ask what has been made? How successful is it? What determines success? What statement is really trying to made and is the work fully addressing it? These plotted drawings are interested in the blurred boundaries between digital drawings and intentionally imprecise techniques of translation through a mechanism. The tools at hand are to be questioned so to appropriately and properly use in the future. The precision of the instruments are important to understand as relative and nebulous, they are only precise according to a need and intent when they are called upon to be used.
Inputs used original collages as means to blur already blurred images, which actually almost revert the effect. The plotter’s “hand� becomes noticeable as striations through the originals.
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Anexact Translations: Waves
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“What if?� A dumb yet common question, in the case of this work quite a powerful one. By simply asking how else could a drawing be physically produced, for instance with a cnc mill, gave way to a series of events that would otherwise not have occurred. An initial looseness allowed the power of the cnc to extend the drawing practice to emerge. The final drawings began to record random and intentional accidents, random prior to an understood technique to add rigor to the outputs. The scans that are included here show the layering of the digital, physical, and meta lines. In other words these scans are representations of the drawing typology that was worked on. The line-types give a final blur to the clarity of production in the drawings cannot be fully comprehended as a physical drawing nor merely a digital artifact nor a physical reproduction; it is an extension of drawing through a tool kit that blurs the digital software and the physical instruments for translation. The digital line, on the final drawing, is the precise translation of the input information as a physical line. The meta lines are those which are drawn when the pen, marker, or highlighter is tracking16 from one curve being drawn to another. The tracking can only occur, in this specific scenario, by taping the paper surface so that there is slack that billows above a zero-point and the height of the billow is greater than that input for the height the drive is to pick up the bit. The combination of the digital, which is a predetermined input from a software workflow, the drawn line, and the meta line gives a density and complexity to the drawings that emerge. Understanding the relationship between an assumed ideal situation that the mechanism for translation works within and the opportunity to alter the reality of the ideal gives way to these anexact translations.
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Pandora’s Box
By orienting the billows, lines, and sorting technique of the input determines a certain drawn outcome of the final artifact. The beauty of this is that if not fully explained as to the specific setup of a drawing it would be near impossible to know the different line types from one another. But through an explanation these drawings begin to speak to a way of producing that is enriched by the potential of all of the tools for production not giving up complete control at any point to the underlying technologies.
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The explicit device and technique of replication, from digital to physical, there are an intermediary steps that allow for artifacts of process to be neither precise replications nor horribly inaccurate but instead intentionally imprecise. Residual artifacts are the new lines, the meta-lines; the lines that speak of the process of making and translating. The layering in of these inscriptions, whether in apparent contrast to or in harmony with the digital and later physical line work is pivotal in the perception of the work. If the digital line is a curve, that may look geographic, then the meta-lines tracking from region to region of the drawing defines a zone that makes apparent where a billow was during the translation. The density and lightness of this group gives a subtly to the overlay of translated linework; hierarchically it appears secondary if not tertiary. In fact, though, they are the most telling and poetic of the drawn information; they tell the story of the project that opposes total acceptance and the fetish of technology. They express the intervention of artist, designer, or architect in the production of the physical drawing. Though they are contrasting to the initial digital line work, and the physical translation of those lines into a physicality, the meta-lines are similar in many ways to representational images of information transfer, flight patters, shipments of goods, etc. This similarity and potential recognition in observation of the drawings further blurs the legibility of the lineworks origins. It demands the attention and questioning of the observer of the drawing; it requires engagement with the work.
digital input
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Dueling Lands
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In process detail image from the translation of “Duelling Lands� from digital to physical; the curves are the physical lines from the digital drawing and their weight shows the inconsistency of the backing surface. Diagonals are the meta-lines.
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While the tracked meta-lines are compelling and add depth to the works, the physical lines are equally as relevant to the comprehension to the argument the compilation presents. These drawings are all impossible to fully reproduce; they are produced in mass quantities but they are unique objects. The specific cnc used to draw and the random sheet of 3/4� 4 x 8 plywood used as backing for the output is never perfectly flat. These sheets are warped. As a result, whatever point on the sheet used to establish a z-plane of zero is not the same across the board. The heaviness or lightness of the physical lines then are dependent upon this setting. This gradient gives a reading of depth that is controlled in part by the individual setting up the scenario for the translation and the bit of randomness of the entourage necessary to output. The final touches of the drawings involved layering the same drawing, with differing billows, orientation, and positioning - shifts and slides - either at the start of each output or mid-process. This in addition to color and doubling of pens makes the drawings more and more irreproducible. The richness of these drawings are in their ability to be communicative at multiple levels - intellectually, systematically, and intuitively artistic. They have a criticality and intention within the subtext of making that has much to do with the way which designers engage and often accept the tools at hand that is accessed first through a seductive graphic language and appearance. If Walter Benjamin believed that art would lose its aura in an age of mechanical reproduction, then the this work believes that the technological - both digital and mechanical combined - age of production provides a way in to add aura back into art without completely disregarding those tools.
digital input
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A Sea of One
A Sea of Some
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The digital lines are those horizontal lines which are of a heavier lineweight and appear to be notches. The orientation of the notch switches as the line falls on one side of a billow or the other. The diagonal lines are results of the pen tracking between groups of lines and skimming the billow. This line, at this point is intentional, but first emerged by chance and made physical the potential of extending a digital/technological drawing practice through the mechanisms for
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production. Lastly, the lighter horizontal lines only exist in this drawing. They are the tracking of the pen-tool along a billow. The orientation of the billows, the digital linework, and the sorting of the tool paths are all intentionally choreographed so that there could be a layering of the clarity of the digitally made and physically residual lines. The density, weight, complexity, and appearance enable an experience of the drawing.
Life of a Surfer.
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01 129
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04 130
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Cross Disciplinary Research.
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Four Variations on the Same.
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1:8 Music (pt. 1)
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1:8 Music (pt. 2)
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Grab It.
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Conclusion
These drawings are only replicable in specific detail, not in totality. They are products of a refined process that demands the understanding, in a certain manner, the technique of drawing in digital and mechanical space. As a result, they are extremely esoteric. The intentionality for an imprecision of translation had to do with a state of mind and way of working at the point in time the drawings were produced; it resides as a point of transition from an undergraduate education and pedagogy to one of a graduate school (at UCLA). While the work can be seductive, something I do hope my work always carries, the intent and resolution does not come from a fetish with certain softwares and graphic styles used to mask an intelligence or lack thereof in architectural and speculative work. Rather these drawings emerge from a critical view of larger context of design at a point in time.
Notes 1
The reference of lost uniqueness and furthermore “aura” is in reference to Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
2
“meme-tecture”: Thompson Burry. the mass produced work of students, firms, and speculative studios that is easily replicable in character by technologies.
3
Scale and scalelessness, an idea I was iterating through in concurrent works. Liz Swanson’s sketchbook class in particular, where I was looking at the sketch a space of speculation that was more of a stream of thought; that the work being produced was to be perceived as a drawing, as a representation of an idea, and as a representation of something much larger whether construction detail, section, plan, site plan, perspective etc. The compilation of sketches will be in another “book” in a similar format, probably with much less text. In the fall following this work, so a bit of a retrospective note, the A+D Museum in Los Angeles had a exhibition called The Drawing Show. In a conversation with Andrew Kovacs he noticed a similarity in tendencies within my work to the work there, in defense or reading of such drawing I discussed the intrigue of such work as being provocative as a composition and the ability to zoom in physically as you neared the drawings and further details emerged. The experience of drawings that I had and still am interested in.
4
5
At the same event, at A+D, I was talking to Bryan Cantley about similar notions of digitally, if now virtually, experiential drawings. He was working on developing this work and in talks a bit with Marty, Owen, and Thompson as a continuing their series of drawings. Tracking the work following this encounter.
6
The dimensions referenced have to do with the location of my work. While I was at Kentucky there were plenty of “nice” presentations but they nearly all followed a specific format and size. The work was never printed on sheets greater than a certain area, something like 3’ x 7-8’. Though many presentations included several boards they were passively accepting certain sizes for output.
Notes At this point I have used the term “zoom” several times. It is meant to be understood in both a literal and metaphoric terms. While in the environment of a computer, tablet, or cell phone the observer can zoom into specific regions as it is a common function of accessibility in most softwares. In the physical environment the observer has to move in closer to the drawing to achieve the same effect but it is possible to focus on an instance without moving closer in order to analyze. The way in which someone looks at art in a museum or in general is similar in effect to the way I am describing the zooming in and out of the drawing. Its a scanning technique of viewing.
7
In Walter Benjamin’s piece, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, he discusses the impact of the camera in-particular on the aura of art as it is photographed and replicated and disseminated. For Benjamin, the camera killed the work of art; it stole the uniqueness of the piece.
8
The fetishes that I was “upset” with had to do with the equating of visually seductive, photorealistic, and otherwise “sexy” work to a quality of architecture. I despised the smoke and mirrors of graphics to mask the insecurities of the actual architecture being produced. Some institutions, schools, and peer/people were consumed by this way of thinking, even at Kentucky. Basically it was an outlash and sub-textual political statement against a naive and skin-deep way of thinking about architecture. I wanted the conversations to be much more critical of the work itself, of pedagogy and methodology, and most importantly of a specific discourse within architecture.
9
The term final in this body of work is difficult to use. It implies a resolution of issues and questions proposed, but really it is more of a temporal endpoint. The end of this research presented equally as many questions as answers. It answers the finite questions, maybe only to an extent, prompted relating to a technological workflow and toolbelt from digital space to mechanical space. But the work as a drawing practice cannot end, really, it was more of a beginning to a long-term and apparently esoteric way of iterating through ideas. (Jason Payne made this last point most apparent to me, I am often esoteric and obscure...see book from Fall 2016 at UCLA for greater description of this.)
10
The semester’s work tied in readings, conversations, and work from Brent Sturlaugson’s Seminar at UK/CoD and Liz Swanson’s Sketchbook elective. Initially the intent was to do a thesis of sorts, then it strayed away only to resolve back at a thesis type of project.
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Notes An argument that I can see coming up on the irreproducibility of this work is that each drawing has be translated into this book. But the scans and images here are merely representations of the drawings. Information has been lost in translation, it is this quality that differentiates the drawing from something that does not reach the same definition and rigor. The technique was a means to archive the work. Though it was discussed as a possible layer of iterating through digital to physical to digital to physical and so on; like mentioned earlier in the book this conceptually did occur towards the end of the drawings as the digital was informed by the physical and so on.
12
In theory this could work in the digitally mediated environment of design, the perfect replication is not fully possible but much more feasible in such a work space and flow than in one that I am proposing and working on.
13
In particular an outlet like @superarchitects or @nexttoparchitects tend to encourage students to produce a certain type of work or try to make images that are properly seductive to be “published”. In schools in comes in the form of work being of a certain professor’s studio, and it is strongly apparent. (In hindsight, this at UCLA would be considered the “collective whole” which is important to be conscious of. Either fully adhere or critically, intentionally, and rigorously act as the devil’s advocate.) But it is concerning when still naive students are not critical enough of such effects on work, you can participate as long as there is an understanding of why, how, and what you are contributing to, this is an example of participating in a specific discourse.
14
An origin plane for the cnc is a reference point in a ‘z-axis’ at zero, with a programmable tolerance that allows the bit plunge below the origin plane. It is a digital and ideal surface that is perfectly flat where all its points would be at the same z-elevation.
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Selected Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Chard, Nat, and Perry Kulper. Fathoming the Unfathomable. Vol. 33. Pamphlet Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2014. Colomina, Beatriz, Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen, and Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe. Manifesto architecture: the ghost of Mies. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014. Cook, Peter. Drawing: The Motive Force of Architecture. Chichester, England: Wiley, 2008. Evans, Robin. “In Front of Lines that Leave Nothing Behind. Chamber Works.” AA Files, no. No. 06 (May 1984): 89-96. Accessed April 23, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29543404. Evans, Robin. Robin Evans: Translation from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. London: Architectural Association, 1997. Games, Stephen. “Dream Cities. Lebbeus Woods: Origins.” AA Files, no. No. 11 (Spring 1986): 82-86. Accessed April 23, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29543497. Ibelings, Hans. Supermodernism: Architecture in The Age of Globalization. Rotterdam: NAi, 1998.
Imperiale, Alicia. New flatness: Surface Tension in Digital Architecture. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2000. Kice, Karen. Chatter: Architecture Talks Back. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2015. Kotoulas, Sotirios. Space Out. Wien: Springer, 2005. Krasojevic, Margot K. Spatial Pathology: Floating Realities. Wien: Springer, 2007. Lally, Sean, and Jessica Young. Softspace: From a Representation of Form to a Simulation of Space. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2007. Libeskind, Daniel. Miscellaneous Texts and Lectures. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Humanities Press, 1962. Mohassel, Parviz K . “Trajectories of Horizons: Daniel Libeskind.” In Phenomenology of Architectural Drawing, 26-39. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2008. Mohassel, Parviz K . “Transparent Projections: Zaha Hadid.” In Phenomenology of Architectural Drawing, 2639. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2008. Mayne, Thom, Stan Allen, and Morphosis Architects. Combinatory Urbanism: The Complex Behavior of Collective Form. Culver City, CA: Stray Dog Café, 2011.
Meredith, Michael, Hilary Sample, and Sylvia Lavin. Everything All at Once: The Software, Videos, and Architecture of MOS. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012. Norwood, Bryan E. “Metaphors for Nothing.� Log 33. Sadler, Simon. Archigram: Architecture without Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Spiller, Neil. Digital Dreams: Architecture and The New Alchemic Technologies. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1998. Virilio, Paul. The Art of The Motor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Woods, Lebbeus. The Storm and The Fall. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.
Acknowledgments
A Special thanks to Mike McKay, without his critique, advice, and encouragement none of this would have been possible. To my close friends Andrew, Barry, Ian, Owen, and Thompson who shared many drinks and conversations with me over the semester. To the College of Design’s many great professors who have impacted me throughout the past four years. It has been humbling to be apart of such a great tradition of architectural education. Lastly, to my family. I could not achieve any of this work without your unending support and encouragement.
[ FRAMES ] Connor Verteramo UK/CoD_Spring 2016 Advisor_Mike McKay