GEORGE KATODRYTIS / STUDIONOVA ARCHITECTS :: article :: Texts on DIGITAL FORM :: PUBLISHED ARTICLES :: DIGITAL MEDIATION

If the 20th century had been characterized by the art of technology, the 21st century began with the technology of art. Technology is inextricably linked to the contemporary condition – that of media and mediation. This new state is shifting the formal attributes of architecture, even the nature of the discipline. The most dramatic changes have been taking place in the technology of simulation, visualization and perception of space.
We are now entering into a completely artificial space. However, this new terrain may prove, paradoxically, in the final analysis, to be the most internal and intrinsic to nature itself.
The traditional limit of architecture has not only been transgressed, but also “trans-placed”. Our understanding of space will be changed; a new matrix, a new formal syntax, will be adopted to describe it.
As an abstract machine, the new architecture points to “data-space” environments, rather than to “tectonic-space” compositions. In a fabricated landscape where form follows simulation, the modeling machine becomes an instrument of intro-jection and reflection, concurrently placing itself inside and outside in a world of speed and endless variations. This land(e)scape is at once neurotic and solitary, here and there, recto and verso.
In an image saturated environment which increasingly resembles the interior space of subjective fantasy turned inside out, the very subject-object distinction begins to break down. Such fragmentation, decentering and loss of subject-object boundaries, is characteristic of paranoia. Digital imaging technology however offers itself as therapy for the very anxieties it helps to produce.
“Space may be the projection or the extension of the physical apparatus”, Freud noted. Space is never universal, but subjective. Digital space is not mimetic or literal, but referential. What the new digital spatiality has re-discovered is the unconscious of urban space.
In a parallel universe, which is both algorithmic and metaphysical, the modeling machine creates a new abstraction, the morphogenesis of the “new hybrid condition”. The emphasis of the exploration is on morphological complexity. By engaging in the theoretical and technological debate, which has been traditionally perceived as being “outside” its domain, architecture may become – paradoxically – rigorous yet more uncanny, introverted and primitive.
Image produced by STUDIONOVA ARCHITECTS / GEORGE KATODRYTIS

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