Form-Making in SIFT Imaged Environments (2016)
article⁄Form-Making in SIFT Imaged Environments (2016)
abstract⁄Within the contemporary condition, turbulence that confronts architecture is no longer unpredictable weather patterns or wild beasts, but the unintended forces of a constantly connected digital infrastructure that demands constant attention. If, as Mark Wigley puts it, ‘architecture is always constructed in and against a storm’ it is time for architecture to reevaluate its ability to separate us from a new stormone that situates technology, global connectivity, human, nonhuman and composite users, and algorithmic architecture itself as new weather systems. Toward this end, this paper explores architecture’s ability to mediate and produce algorithmic turbulence generated through imagebased sensing of the built environment. Through a close reading of Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme, we argue that for much of the 20th and the early part of the 21st century, cities have been designed to produce diagrams of smooth and homogenous flows. However, distributed personal technologies produce virtual layers that unevenly map onto the city, resulting in turbulent forces that computational platforms aim to conceal behind a visual narrative of accuracy, cohesion, anticipation, and order. By focusing on SIFT algorithms and their ability to extract ndimensional vectors from twodimensional images, this research explores computational workflows that mobilize turbulence towards the production of indeterminate form. These forms demarcate a new kind of challenge for both architecture and the city, whereby a cultural appetite to deploy algorithms that produce a smooth and seamless image of the world comes hand in hand with the turbulent and disruptive autonomy of those very same algorithms. By revisiting Urbanisme, a new set of architectural objectives are established that contextualize SIFTS within an urban agenda.
|
|
| Year |
2016 |
| Authors |
Parker, Matthew; Taron, Joshua. |
| Issue |
ACADIA 2016: POSTHUMAN FRONTIERS: Data, Designers, and Cognitive Machines |
| Pages |
78-87 |
| Library link |
N/A |
| Entry filename |
form-making-sift-imaged-environments |
