Marjan Colletti, 2006.
Published in:
Colletti, Marjan. 2&1/2D Twoandahalf Dimensionality / Zweieinhalbdimensionalität, Bucher Hohenems, Austria, 2006.
Bucher Hohenems, www.quintessence.at
6/2007 | 1. Aufl.
Mappenwerk im Schuber
33 x 33 cm | 24 prints
ISBN 978-3-902525-48-2
EUR 35,00 | CHF 56,00
With an intro ' Die Zeichnung ist tot – es lebe die Zeichnung!' (in German) by Hannes Stiefel.
Digital Seeds - Graphical Plantations
'That the world of digital procedure can breed something immense;y unpredictable was always known but too rarely experienced. Now Marjan is creating whole forests and plantations of swirling, knotting, budding, challenging lines that are hairy, flowery, mysterious and almost certainly consequential.'
Sir Peter Cook
At face value, CAAD (computer-aided architectural design) seems to perform within the parameters of a domain overpowered by what is best described by the German term Technik, for it conveys all three concepts of technology, technics, and techniques. Since CAAD techniques may be deemed as less technical and more abstract than computer-aided manufacture (CAD/CAM) technologies—because not fundamentally aimed at production, but rather at reproduction— and against the monopolistic emergence of pure parametric design processes, I have committed to the manifestation of poetic digital properties of CAAD.
Rooted in the Heideggerian unison of technē (craftsmanship) and poiēsis (art), CAAD reveals and brings forth forces of ‘metareproduction’: a second-order making that produces something that re-produces something. The first something fluctuates in a digital limbo (I have elsewhere described this limbo as ‘Intraface’—a homologous framework bounded inside a controlled feedback system) of constructs that exist somewhere between images and things. These intermediary constructs convey twoandahalf-dimensional (2&1/2D) qualitative properties (rather than quantitative parameters), and mediate authentic digitality with projective reproduction. The second something is itself exhibited, and effectively exercised by digital mimesis. On the opposite to simulation, mimesis is not aimed at deception and representation, but at expression and reproduction. In fact, aimed at production, digital mimesis involves the notion of Platonic mimesis as imitatio (imitation)—the construction of an action; aimed at metaproduction of digital things, it comprises the concept of Aristotelian mimesis as natura naturans (the generative nature of nature), plus Heideggerian mimesis as poiesis (the bringing forth) - the production of expression; targeted at reproduction, it considers Walter Benjamin’s mimesis with regards to nonsensuous similarity as displaced into language and writing (not a priori decoded and conforming).
In its un-decoded, anti-conformist 2&1/2D-ity, CAAD acts demiurgically—it invents and creates not things but worlds of images and phenomena. It is triggered towards what I call ‘digital meta-re-production’, for it assists the detachment from tradition as asserted by Benjamin, fully embracing, and incorporating the notion of detachment from the ritualistic notion of authenticity. The authenticity of these drawings lies therefore in their fiction (similarly as to a set—theatrical or cinematographical—where the actors feel like in a Pirandellian exile and discomfort, because what is projected is merely a shadow). All drawings are per se metareproductions—expressions and mediations of a non reproducible original, which dwells, in its digitality, beyond the realm of Technik.
These 24 prints depict the 2&1/2D properties of an interstitial, floating, digital world, which can only be described in an illustrative, poetic way. All drawings are accompanied by personal variations of the shortest form of poetry, the Japanese Haiku, which consists of a 5-7-5 syllables three-liner. They are also, for my part, departure point for marcosandmarjan projects, which attempt to extract some of these digital properties into programmatic architectural propositions. All 24 drawings:
- are purely vector based, rather than pixel based;
- are constructed in two-dimensional space and never underwent any three-dimensional manipulation;
- are completely flat and entail no z-axis value at all;
- are geometrically precise, yet entirely abstract;
- are infinite but not endless;
- are not rendered two-dimensional graphic projections of three-dimensional geometric entities, but are per se productions and reproductions of digital properties;
- focus on the reality of virtuality, rather than on the virtuality of reality;
- aim at the virtual and digital rather than the actual; at the poetic and intuitive rather than the technological; at the artistic and blissful rather than the mathematical; at the intermediary and mediated rather than the medium; at the gestural and cognitive rather than the figural;
- represent line and spline based blots, which, rather than NURBS and surface based blobs, convey reflexive, projective interpretations;
- result from intuitive and playful interaction with software packages, rather than from parametric or algorithmic design processes;
- illustrate neither structure, nor materiality; neither surface, nor volume, but mere digital matter;
- are intrinsically digital for they can be identically reproduced, but not produced;
- show the splinear structural fabric of intrafaces, rather then the pictorial graphic formation of interfaces;
- depict convoluted ornamented fields rather than geometric enclosed entities;
- are product of digital demiurgy that permits symbolic bliss, rather than metaphorical gloom;
- fuse the signifier (signal), the signified (signification), and the referent (object) together;
- advocate to a certain extent the possibility of architecture apart from the too common emergent neo-Sachlichkeit with its algorithmic, mathematical, design-procedural obsessions.
[Images: Marjan Colletti]
