Impossible and Hyper-Real Elements of Architecture : Exercises, Provocations, and Theories of Digital Representation

Impossible and Hyper-Real Elements of Architecture addresses how and why architects, artists, and designers manipulate reality. Front and centre in this discourse is the role of rendering. Most often, to render is to engage a thick software interface, to accept a photographic framework of variables and effects, and to assume an unquestioned posture of articulating material, mass, and colour. But like drawing, rendering is an interdisciplinary, algorithmic, historically rooted cultural practice as much as it is a digital vocation. The elements explored in this book are labelled “impossible” because they avoid a fixed relationship to a singular built reality. Digital bonsai trees, pixels, video game levels, grids, and dioramas extend like skewers through multiple media and formats. Through work that looks very real and can’t possibly exist, representation becomes the territory of speculation, ambiguity, and curiosity.