Cinematic Arts Personal Statement
The artists may experiment with systematicity of functionalism… but always ultimately to revert such machinic realities to the staid structure of fine art. They turn the machine into art, but never art into machine
– Alexander Galloway (2012) The Interface Effect
Turning art into machine, through which things that cannot be paraphrased by words will be explicated, is the goal of my academic research during the iMAP PhD program at USC School of Cinematic Arts. My primary interests are in designing video games and theorizing their application to physical world building (i.e. architecture). The iMAP program, situated in an prominent research university, and within a school of cinema, whose media design and gaming expertise is one of the best in the world, means that I will be able to seize the opportunity to develop an interdisciplinary and scholarly practice that is crucial for such an ambitious academic goal.
Upon receiving an undergraduate degree in Architecture, I chose a career in advertising through which I have produced various experiential marketing campaigns rooted in digital media. During this time, I learned to incorporate inputs from users (targeted audiences) to successfully deliver messages in ways that are engaging and encouraging. Above all, my academic and professional work, including my current research for my master’s degree in Architecture, is deeply grounded in the praxis of image creation. My work theorizes the influences of visually oriented materials and places them into the world; it is a classical approach to design.
However, I have become increasingly aware of an issue in contemporary media art practice, that Alexander Galloway eloquently, although elusively, articulates in the above quote. I agree with Galloway that we tend to appropriate new technologies to fit our aesthetic preferences, but we rarely do the opposite, and exploit the capabilities of technology for its own right. Aesthetics are always beholden to cultural, political, and even economic subjectivity rather than being forthright for itself. Perhaps this is why we distinguish the image and the sound as “the exclusive province of the expressive and the creative, while words are viewed as the optimum vehicle for critical engagement," as argued by Virginia Kuhn, PhD (2012) in The Rhetoric of Remix.
In any case, the stakes are high for the design fields. As computational operations and their applications become more sophisticated in accomplishing economic “scalability,” the more trifling the obliged aesthetics will become. For the moment, the profession of Architecture is on the losing ground. We are losing the battles against management consultants, who “dislodged architecture… from the prime seat of authorship over urban form, as new built space becomes a form-finding by-product of speculative space-use and site-cost simulations,” as observed by Benjamin H. Bratton (2016) in his forthcoming book The Stack (P. 144 - excerpt published in: Log #35. New York, NY; Anyone). Algorithmic or parametric design methodologies are at the forefront of Architecture’s desperate responses to the losing battle, claiming that what drives these designs are not designers’ arbitrary aesthetic preferences, but seemingly more “neutral” data. Ironically, architectural projects made in this spirit, are being judged by their appearance. Usually, these projects encapsulate specificities of software capabilities that, when tweaked right, produce startling forms, creating progressive or futuristic “images”, as if to suggest that their intrinsic formal qualities are somehow superior. With this attitude, what is still prevailing in the practice is the faith in “grand design solution,” where the planning and the implementation are conducted in a coherent manner. However, this is not particularly the strength of computational technology. As Ian Bogost (2006) writes in Unit Operation, what distinguishes this new machine is in its ability to embed data structures and rules in modular units such that outcomes are compilations of decisions made discretely. Whereas coherency is culturally, politically, and economically appraised, “unit operations privilege function over context, instances over longevity” (Bogost, p.4), thus liberating designs from the rigidity of coherent system operations.
This is exactly what I intend to accomplish through the experimental application of video games in architecture. Rather than revamping them for “coherent” form-finding, I will use the new media platform and its computational capabilities to celebrate and incorporate discrete decision-making, and introduce an alternative design methodology that is flexible, open-ended, and contingent. This method will also create opportunities for non-designers to participate in the design process without discerning a formal education in design, which can be profoundly elusive. I believe that inviting users (audiences) into the design process is crucial to tackle the multiplicity of objectives in contemporary design problems.
Two of my recent research projects, “Block’hood” and “Trello-Ponic” (included in the Media Portfolio), that I am in the process of submitting as theoretical papers to academic conferences, have demonstrated the potentialities of such design methods in creating sophisticated building forms. I intend to develop the methodology further in the context of academia and professional practice within the iMAP program, to contribute to the advancement of interdisciplinary applications of physical world building and gaming.
References:
Bogost, I. (2008). Unit operations: An approach to videogame criticism. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
Bratton, B. H. (2015). The stack. Log, 35(Fall), 129--160.
Galloway, A. R. (2012). The interface effect. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Kuhn, V. (2012). The rhetoric of remix. Transformative Works and Cultures, 9, Sep. 30, 2015.
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