Building an Post-Perspectival Imaging Paradigm from Virtual Worlds
Self-Led research project, SOURCE Fellowship Grant Award
This project will develop post-perspectival imaging strategies that confront the inadequacies of perspectival systems of projection utilized by the West for the past 500 years. Emerging environments of virtual complexity present a new paradigm in information and space, replacing static images with the swarming miasma of constant change and feedback. These contingencies exist as layered realities projected upon experience, prompting the use of digital “projection” as a technique of understanding these environments. This project will produce an array of small projectors which each represent a user/facet of the swarming whole, layering their projections to form a collective image of the swarm.
Online games (r/place, 2b2t, and Fortnite) provide case studies through which swarming environments can be studied. Utilizing the diagrams of Jacques Lacan, these environments can be understood as sequences of projection, reflection, and translation. Moving to the digital projector, these diagrams will serve as design guidelines, governing the use of mirrors, transparency, translucency, and opacity to modulate digital projections.
The discipline of architecture relies heavily on perspectival and orthographic representation. These practices are increasingly inadequate in understanding and designing within emerging virtual worlds. This project, through its proposed post-perspectival imaging, is an attempt to visualize and understand the swarming environments that present representation systems fail to grasp.
