Their fascinating work, theories and practices will undoubtedly inform the architecture of the next generation. Potentially, it will also alter our understanding of the optical experience of space. Indeed, it may well inform our spatial interactions and architectural practices in direct and clear ways. However, as we continue taking our initial steps in the emerging territory they describe, it is worth remembering that the history of the phenomena they deal with is deep rooted. As Paul Virilio, in particular, has pointed out, the history of “visioning technologies” reaches back centuries, through film, photography and the mathematical and optical experimentations of Renaissance perspective, to magnifying glasses, telescopes and eye lenses.
Film is nothing more than the most recent stepping stone in the long evolutionary line of “technological sight”. Today, we contemplate the completely digitised visual world appearing on the horizon from the vantage point it offers. In its privileged position of near distance, film is perhaps the most important precedent we have today for what this fully digital world will bring. Completely understanding this precedent and its influence on architecture, and on society at large, may never be possible particularly, when considered as a cross-disciplinary phenomenon, as it has been here. Nevertheless, it is still worth reminding ourselves of the radical potential it was once seen to have.
Key to its early radicalism was its new visual language and its mechanical capacity for “realistic representation”. As we have seen in this work however, it was also a medium with its own optical and cinematic vocabulary and a unique ability to represent the world in motion. It would be these characteristics that would allow it to reconfigure what it captured in its lens. It was this that made it able to present the world in totally new on-screen compositions. Central to film’s impact on architecture was its optical syntax. This, we suggest, may be much more significant than anything it actually represented on screen; a room, a building, a city, and it is this that we emphasised throughout these pages.
This dualistic ability to “recreate reality” on the one hand and “create the incredible and the impossible” on the other also characterised photography and perspective drawing before it. It most certainly characterises the visioning technologies developed in recent years. As with film, both perspective and photography moved beyond their mere technical ability to “reproduce reality” very quickly. Both mastered perceptual representation and immediately entered the realm of “perceptual creation”. In the case of perspective drawing, it would manifest itself in the illusionism of the Baroque, whilst in photography it would be seen in the fragmentary and dynamic spatial compositions of the 1920s New Objectivity.
This is perhaps key to understanding the path current developing technologies will follow. Just as painting moved beyond its literal representation of the optical world, when an improved reproductive technology emerged, so too in turn, did photography. At this instance, it was film that played the role of usurper. In each case, the fascination with realism was mastered, absorbed and eventually morphed. It emerged as an interest in the use of visual technologies to “create”, and to fabricate what could not be seen or experienced by the naked eye. In this regard, the history of art gives us a clear example of a Hegelian evolutionary process. Reproduction is followed by deliberate distortion.
It may not be a phenomenon restricted to the arts, however. If we consider the realm of robotics, the initial goal set by science is the reproduction of the human form and the capacities of the human body. Similarly, artificial intelligence represents a scientific endeavour based, in the first instance, on the mimicry of the human mind and its processing functions. Virtual reality is another example. Here, the “reproductive” aims of the technology in question are directly referenced in its terminology. Reality is to be recreated, only not quite. Taking the metaphor to its extreme, we find in these realistic reproductions the human tendency to play God; for “man” to reproduce “man” in his own image. Where such things will lead to, once genetics achieves its own particular “reproductive” ends, remains to be seen. Here too, however, some see the same characteristics in play.
As the more mundane history of perspective painting, photography and film all indicate however, in the context of visioning technologies, the virtual realism of the image is only a first step. The path trodden by any reproductive technology is long and unpredictable. Just as with these old media digital imaging, simulation machines and virtual realities will inevitably move beyond what we see today. The mimicry of “Second Life” environments or the digital visions conceived in films like The Matrix and Inception are only the most obvious of futures. Today’s technologies will find new will find new tools and their own new visual vocabulary. They will find their own ways to move beyond the mere reproduction and representation of “real” environments, and their architecture. As with film, they will find their own voice, their own language and, in a Gestaltian effort of rupture and creative fragmentation, will reform the spaces we perceive and inhabit.
Whether the visual language of film offers something more specific than a precedent or an analogy in this regard is not clear. It would, however, seem premature to discount the lessons, effects, perceptions and creative distortions it offers, particularly as it morphs with these emerging technologies. Indeed, history again teaches us that the evolutionary morphing of technologies, their languages and their visual vocabularies very rarely involves a total rejection of the immediate past.
The language we use in our daily engagement with computer technology tells us much in this regard, and in very literal ways. The “desktop” has “files” and “folders”, the Internet is navigated through “pages”, and users of Facebook write on “walls”, a metaphor just one step away from writing on the blackboard or a stone tablet. The very language we use as one technology replaces another is inevitably based on the terminology and mindsets of an existing set of schema. The computer revolution, the Internet paradigm shift and the social media explosion are, of course, radical departures from the past. However, they use the “comprehensible” language of the present. The reasons are various: psychological, cultural, social, material and economic.
Thus, when we consider the “language” of film, we may have a vocabulary that will directly inform the visual constructs of the coming years. The fade, the cut, the dissolve, the pan, the zoom, the close-up and the long shot, may yet prove to be important concepts. Deep space compositions, eye line matches, spatial rules of continuity, lines of action, 180-degree space and 360-degree movement, may inform the digital physicality yet to come. This myriad of visual tropes and spatial concepts will, in all likelihood, be a short-term necessity. The communicative effectiveness of any emerging visual language may dictate it. For the next reality to be virtual, it must, almost by definition, be partially based on the visual language of the present, on the existing reality.
Considered in this light, it may still be worth dwelling a few more times on the groundbreaking phenomenon represented by the work of late nineteenth-century pioneers of film, such as Auguste and Loius Lumière, Georges Méliès, Brit Acres, R.W. Paul and many more. Similarly, the century-old work of the early-twentieth-century experimenters in filmic space, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Vesvolod Pudovkin and Lev Kuleschov, can still remind us of the radical potential of our now standard filmic language. If nothing else, this momentary dwelling on the past can remind us of how technology challenges the conventions of vision, and how to move them forward. Furthermore, the formalist approach found in the work of pioneering film theorists may also offer important insights. The writings of Rudolph Arnheim, Hugo Munsterberg and Béla Balázs reveal just what makes a new visual language potentially powerful; a force that distorts and replaces what came before.
More recent figures from the world of film tell related stories. Michelangelo Antonioni, Peter Greenaway, Tom Twyker, Alexander Sokurov and Mike Figgis have all engaged in formal experimentations with film’s established visual vocabulary. Each of these directors has, in dif
ferent ways, indicated that the visual language of film is full of precedents for newer technological experimentations in vision. They have also indicated that, as a medium, film is still capable of interesting experimentation and insights of its own. All this of course leaves aside those artists working in the context of video art and installation. As we discussed, in Part 2, artists such as Bruce Nauman and Jane and Louise Wilson persist in pushing the boundaries of the medium itself. These people continue to find new ways of exploring the lines of creative fracture that can exist between sight and space, film and architecture. They do so in the most naturally hybrid domain that exists between the two.
It also forgets both the architects and architectural theorists that remain active in the field. Here too, we have people with a trail of precedents behind them that goes back to the earliest days of film and beyond, whether it be Diller and Scofidio transgressing the border of the two disciplines, or Jean Nouvel looking at cinema from deep within the architectural camp. It may also be theorists and teachers such as Pascal Schöning; a scholar operating in a sort of no man’s land between physical space and filmic representation. These, and numerous other artists, directors, architects and theorists, all remain essential points of reference. They remain active participants in the creative hybridisation of the moving image and architecture. They signpost a future in which both disciplines evolve along diverging and parallel courses; a future of new and unpredictable cinematographic spaces.
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