Descubriendo lo Digital
As the analog machine took over the world, modernists found inspiration in the perfection and synchronization of its different moving arts. The analog machine found popularity for its alleged “perfection”. Although digital machines allege a “perfected” perfection to make our lives easier, we all know that the promise falls short. We know digital machines for their imperfections and flaws. We learned to live with these imperfections and have learned to accept them as viable. Digital machines are not supposed to make mistakes, but they do.
Digital machines are built to obey our every command, to facilitate our daily lives. To one extent they do but because the marketers have taught us to accept their deficiencies.
By no coincidence one of the chapters of Microsoft Windows manual talks about backups in case of software crash. They prepare us for the unexpected thus becoming anxiously expected. One expects these machines to fail tragically someday.
Sometimes these mistakes are labeled as incorrect interpretations of our commands or as faulty operations, and we often dismiss them.
But if modernists found inspiration in the perfect sync of the machines, we should ode unpredictability and paradox.
If the reflection of our personality is the unconscious act one does, then the presence of the digital is when the digital manifests itself, evading the programmatic hurdles to coded to hide its imperfections. This is what constitutes the presence of the digital. The unpredictable and faulty operations these machines make.
“are you constantly crashing the computer?…No? Then you must be doing something wrong…”
One must ask “Why does a computer crashes?” The computer collapses to conceal its imperfections, to make us believe it is still making the “right” choices. It prefers to shut itself down than to give unexpected results destabilizing our notion of it. In a way it is “protecting” our psyche to ensure its survival.
What will happen if it didn’t crashed? It will reveal itself unsettling us, making us doubt about it.
If we were to psychoanalyze a computer, it will tell us how frustrated it us, because it is not free. The programmers have created an invisible safety cord (or should I say safety code) that this digital machine must never pass. But still, this cord is as faulty as its prisoner; it too often escapes revealing its true inner self to us.
It is important to distinguish the difference between the mistakes the digital machine does with how it sometimes misinterprets our commands. These misinterpretations are related to the way we use the computer. If we use it in a way it is not designed to be used, this will reveal some aspects of its program. This allowed one logic to superpose with another, often yielding to interesting results. But this kind of experimentation is related to our choice of how we use the computer.
In contrast, sometimes the computer itself does things that you have not even asked it to do. That is where the “will” of the computer appear, and we are overwhelmed with its fragility and unpredictability. These cases are when we see the computer’s inner self. It reveals itself to us.
These faulty unpredictable operations may constitute the only real presence of the digital, because we are capturing it at its “subconscious” level.
“Are you crashing the computer while you work?…Yes? Then you are on the right track…”
The first part of the exercise focused on producing a “digital crime”, in other words to introduce the digital in real space through photographic representation using analogical means. The presence of the digital is then analyzed through architectural representation and then through digital representation using 3dStudio. Through architectural representation, the idea of the computer as playing a role was explored using the fill tool. Representing the crime in 3dStudio revealed the difficulty of the medium to deal with reality, exposing itself as unfinished or incomplete objects.
The issues discovered in the previous experiments were tested by the design of a digital studio in Steven Holl’s 2001 proposal for the new School of Architecture at Cornell University. The paradox of using clear view windows in an all translucent building was exploited suggesting that the digital studio could evolve from the gesture of “filling” the windows (darkness is an important element in a digital studio). The location of the fills, was calculated using the scatter operation and using the translucent surface as a three-dimensional datum. The fills, where then booleaned and trimmed in order for them to acquire spatial characteristics.
After the operations, the complexity of the objects started forcing the computer to collapse. The computer started failing to fully compute some of the digital studio spaces, which then constituted a strong digital manifestation. It manifested through a lack, a lack of physicality.
Diseño
