CHArt TWENTY-FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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Seeing…Vision and Perception in a Digital Culture

Linda Matthews and Gavin Perin, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Digital Sites and Performative Views


In the essay Unreal Estate, prominent Australian Architect, Carey Lyons, argues that the post-industrial economy, and specifically its reliance on the image, necessitates design methodologies outside those used traditionally to substantiate built form. However Lyons, being conceptually wedded to a postmodern interest in semiotics, doesn't extend this argument to consider how the technological means of production and modes of propagation influence those images released into the public sphere. This conceptual limiting of the image to that of signification not only denies the designer agency in its making but also discourages an exploration of the social and cultural impact of the performative capabilities of these technologies.

The permeation of digital systems throughout contemporary space is typified by the CCTV webcam system. Research recently conducted within an undergraduate context revealed the increasing use of these systems as a new privileged vantage point from which the ‘remote' tourist can view the city. The transformation of the role of CCTV from surveillance to the imagistic promotion of the city also provides an opportunity for the designer to work outside the traditional repertoire of formal strategies and tactics derived from the physical interaction with urban form. This paper, explicated through design-based practice, presents a methodology of generating public space whereby the raw data from this virtual space is processed through the strategic recruitment of a range of open-source digital software. The paper will discuss how this procedure paradoxically adapts the ‘flat' CCTV image as the primary site for form making and how its implied three-dimensional space subverts the disciplinary reliance on the two-dimensional orthographic plan. There will also be a discussion of how interaction between the co-existence of duplicate virtual and real-time sites both challenges and shifts the traditional temporal framework used to guide formal intervention.

The paper, therefore, will discuss how the virtual provokes a technical springboard from which to establish an intervention that departs significantly from traditional urban design methods. Following this, the discussion will examine the formal agency of the ‘scopic regime' of the CCTV webcam and will demonstrate how its logic can be co-opted to serve social and cultural demands beyond those for which it was originally intended. In doing so, the paper reveals how this approach to the making of urban form exceeds the symbolic expectation of post-modern processes and works to replace the idea of signification with that of affect.


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