Reflecting Architecture
What Pictures Know that Online Reality Does Not
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andreas Schelske
Societies construct explicit forms of knowledge through images and through online realities (VR) in head mounted displays (HMD). Both forms of knowledge must be recognized and stabilized in societies within communication as being “true.” The lecture shows how the knowledge of images differs from the knowledge of online reality. A significant difference is that images show their knowledge as a medium of communication, whereas online realities communicate their knowledge multi-modally as a medium of interaction. The VR in the HMD explicates knowledge of how to deal with something - for example, how to control a helicopter in the online helicopter simulator. As in architecture, the story telling of the VR consists of staging a dramaturgy of the path. In a movie, viewers see the pictures approaching. In online "architecture," the observer moves towards the "spaces." In interaction media, the dramaturgy therefore develops through the online "resistance" of the signs, which provide a path through online "spaces". Because of this dramaturgy of the path, the VR produces a surplus of possible views, whose information should occupy a recipient. The information of an image exists in the surplus of possible interpretations. This informational content distinguishes the knowledge of the VR as an interaction medium from the knowledge of images as a communication medium. Neither the image nor online reality have grammar. Consequently, images and online realities present a knowledge without logic and without negation in positive presence.
The Modern Ruin as Icon: A Phenomenological and Aesthetic Approach to the Peripheries
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rafela Nicolau
This study aims to be an aesthetic reflection around a category of ruin it will be presented by the name of "residue." We will approach the epistemological and ontological conditions that construct these kinds of objects belonging to modernity geographies. The investigation will focus on the defensive ruins from aesthetic experience along the European military landscapes of the 20th Century. By the tools of the phenomenology (M. Heidegger), this contribution will try to help to develop a theoretical framework around a type of architectonic ruins that generates an alteration on its condition of image, as well as an alteration on the landscape that derives. For these reasons, we will try to unfold the aesthetic result of the broken relation between the entity and its surroundings, between the noumena and phenomena, understood as objects without world.
A Fallen Line of Marble Drums: Photographic Re-imaginings of an Historical Moment
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Penny
The site of the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens is dominated by the remaining sixteen monumental marble columns of the original temple. One of these lies on the ground with its drums stacked upon one another like a line of dominoes. They appear as though they have been gathered and neatly re-organised, too ordered to have fallen in such a way, as though the aesthetic of ruin is constructed as spectacle. I have become fascinated with this column and the fragmented history of the site. The column was damaged in a storm on the 26th October 1852. I try to imagine the event of the storm and witnessing this ancient structure fall. I think of the strength of the wind and the sound as each 2-metre block of carved stone crashed to the ground. The impossibility of documenting the event of column’s falling is at the origin of this project. Working with 3D modeling software photogrammetry, Victorian architectural drawings and a creative interpretation of the site itself, the column is being rebuilt as a method to re-imagine the night of its destruction.
