WHAT? WHY? HOW?

M Arch Report Abstract: SPATIAL LETTERS TO A PRISONER

The project explores the dynamic transformation and translation of a very established architectural product, the office, into a new space that fluctuates between different realities, by means of a narrative. It is an attempt to collide the dynamic construction of an identity in a multicultural society against the rigidly institutionalised architectural typologies by means of cultural productions such as novels, paintings, photographs, architectures and films, that are interpreted through the narrative as an opportunity to develop a hybrid architectural response.

The narrative is the device which addresses the parameters of interpretation, transformation and generation of an standard office located in the Tower 42, in the City of London. This narrative is a non-lineal structure consisting of a set of letters that Nora, a 25 years old basque woman, sends anonymously to her imprisoned father while she is living in secret in an empty office that was occupied by an advertisement company that went bankrupt during the economic turn down. Based on the secrecy that involves the narration, the letters are encode drawings, collages and images, in which Nora describes her mood and activities through the space she occupies, transforms and recreates in each letter.

This project deals with the contradiction between the increasing empty office space in the city center and the consequences of the lack of dwellings, the spread of the city boundaries. The fixed and impersonal architecture of offices is a clear reflection of the market logic. In a multinational capitalist society the architectural institutions (typologies) not always correspond with the cultural paradigm shift, the multicultural and fragmented framework of the so-called postmodernist culture. Aware of the role of architecture as a follower of social demands, this project aspires to define an hybrid spatial configuration based on a disinstitutionalised and recycled architecture.

The personal interests are addressed toward new spatial possibilities based on the concept of Architectures, in plural. Architectures of personal conditions in a multicultural society. A collage made of cultural references, a personal assemblage of a space made of fragments that create a unity based on the difference.
The potential of the narrative as architectural device for addressing personal stories toward spatial configurations, a mixture of art and language, are implemented here to blur the universal unity of modern architectural production and to suggest a new myriad of architectures that escape from binary oppositions and dichotomies. In these terms,it is a critical analysis against the conventional method of modern architecture thinking, linear and time-based.

To achieve this goals the project is addressed by means of a narrative made of different writings and cultural references. The plot is weaved by means of others writings. The project is developed through two narrative processes: the interpretative, of the structure, plot, characters and voice of the space and, the generative, through the opportunities that offer the text to materialise the space. The structure is based on Perec's "Life: a user's manual", where the subject of the narrative is the space which articulates all the parts, and on John Berger "From A to X" ,a plot based on letters without beginning nor end.The project does not follow a linear development, its order is partially left on the particular understanding of the reader who, as the fictitious prisoner, has to decode the space through the letters. In this metaphor the reader is a prisoner of cultural conventions, who is challenged to free the chains of linear thinking and grasp the ambiguous whole. The letters are a text in images that corresponds to a text of words. It manifests a reaction against the dominance of visual image and written language in western architecture, questioning the neutrality of both as the proper correspondence of the act of see and speak. The letters are made of different fragments as an effect caused by the collision between the narration and the space .The assemblage of fragments forces an abandonment of the idea of the reader as a passive receptor.
The space, in its original configuration, is de-constructed, fragmented and violated, converted in shreds that form a pile of pieces, a row material that the structure of the narrative gathers by means of allegorical interpretation, transformation and translation. A space to be recreated with each new reading, with each new assemblage.
The secrecy of the letters, the essence of the narrative, entails the choice of a method that can encode the text into images allowing after a decode of the images into the text. The methodology focuses on such conductors that can express simultaneously these uncertainties from the text to the image and vice-versa. According to this condition the project looks for symbolic and allegoric conductors. The symbolism of drawings and images, the emblems that mix letters and images, the mnemonic of places, objects and lyrics, and the allegory.

The Dynamic Construction of Identity of the character, Nora, as a Reflection on the Spatial Transformation

Starting from the consideration of post-modern identities, as dynamic, non static with regard to a multi-layered, non-Unitarian, fragmented, plural post-modern subjectivity, Nora, the character of the narration is going to life a process of negation, frustration, opening, learning, adaptation, offer and exchange.
In the narrative, based on letters, the character is going to face the dilemma of explain her experience to her father through the space she is dwelling. The time of the narrative is not determined so the speed of her change is neither deductible. The narrative takes into account the influence of the space and its surroundings, the office and the view of London at night, over her dynamic construction of identity.
This different steps are related to specific spatial conditions. The particular spatial interpretation is made by using the estates she experiences in the dynamic construction of her identity.
From the Basque woman who feels nostalgia, and seeks refuge in the her culture, refusing to open her mind to the different (the other) toward a Basque woman who feels herself part of the multicultural society where she takes and she gives and all subcultures are recognized.

These steps that are developed through the plot have not a defined order:

-alienation, strangeness, melancholy of the gone, her culture place and people.
-refuse, shutting herself in her background, living from the past, avoiding her new environment.
-frustration, and rage, impossibility of live from the past and avoiding “the other”.
-opening, start learning the “other”, facing the present.
-assimilation, of the “other” into “ours”.
-contribution, personal investment
-exchanging, giving and taking from the “ours”, multiculturalism

About Post-modern Identities with reflections on the Implications of a Multicultural World

The essay “Structuring of Modern an Post-modern Identities with reflections on the Pedagogical Implications Multicultural World” by Mariam John Meynert, University of Lund, is a starting point to assess the theories of the construction of the identity, that is going to be used to address the personal development of the character of the narrative.

The essay is “a theoretical attempt to de-constructt the notion of essentialized, stable, static and coherent modernist subjectivity/identity and tries to explore the construction of amulti-layeredd, nonUnitariann, fragmented, pluralpost-modernn subjectivity/identity...It tries to construct the representation of identities within a world-system paradigm..Post-modernity is seen as a condition of fragmentation due to capital flight, resulting in discontinuities between different forms of collective and individual life."

This deconstruction of modernist identity does not write of “the other”. "Writing the "other" is seen as violence, as it silence and disallow the other from representing themselves...This has resulted in a focus on research on self-definition, self-identification, autobiographical and local narratives and a replacements of flawed grand narratives". It involves the notion of “difference” as ideal.

"Post-modernism discourses challenge the fiction of the self-determining subject of modern discourses and the inflated conception of human reason and will. The notion of subjectivity is de-constructed and is considered non-Unitarian and multi-layered."

"The identity of a person is produced simultaneously in many different locales of activities by different agents for many different purposes. Identities are continually displaced and replaced. The subject is neither unified nor fixed."

Identity is also constructed through narratives – stories, sagas, histories and world views internalised into cognitive make-up of identity of a person. Narratives are crucial (Said, 1993), because they are the method through which people assert their own identity and an existence of their own history.

Eriksen (1993) describes three main strategies used by nation-states in dealing with minorities:
- The first one is Assimilation, a modernist strategy, where minorities loose their language and market and gradually come to identify themselves as the dominant people. - The second strategy is the domination, where segregation on ethic ground is implied, the creating of ghettos and slung.
- The third strategy is multiculturalism, a strategy close to post-modern perspective. “Here the members of all cultures and ethnicity enjoy full rights as citizens, without implying high degree of local autonomy. Multiculturalism may take two forms: that of melting strategy, where instead of the traditions of the immigrants being dissolved in favour of those dominant among the pre-existing population, traditions of all cultural groups blend to form a new, evolving cultural pattern. And cultural pluralism where it is foster the development of a genuinely plural society, in which the equal validity of numerous different subcultures are recognized.

About the Structure - About the letters

Before starting to develop the first letter (what just means the first letter that is going to be produced not having in any case the role of a beginning), it is necessary to explain what are these letters to the project, why they are what they are and how they are going to be made and how they can be read. This is one thing and the same than to explain the structure of the project.

- The letters draw the project. The subject of the encoded narration is the space. The descriptions, details and cluster of references that accompany the plot are related to the space

- The letters do not follow a linear development, its order is partially left on the particular understanding of the reader of the project. The reader, as the fictitious prisoner, has to decode the space through the letters. In this metaphor the reader is a prisoner of cultural conventions, who is challenged to free the chains of linear thinking to grasp the ambiguous whole.

- The letters are a text in images that corresponds to a text of words. It manifests a reaction against the dominance of visual image and written language in western architecture, questioning the neutrality of both, image and text as a proper correspondence of the act of see and the act of speak.

- The letters, are like “ruins”, in terms of Jennifer Bloomer for whom ruin “represents a construction in which temporality is a sluggish or slothful (lazy) operator, becoming, anachronized, petrified, and thereby legible as spatiality”

- The letters question the conventional method of architecture thinking and the project is presented as a critical analysis that is made of questions rather than hypothesis. This abandon of time to present a project as spatial is a response against the blind faith in the scientific-method,the proof versus the hypothesis, the linear thinking.

-The letters are made of different fragments. This fragments are an effect caused by the collision between the narration and the space .The assemblage of fragments forces an abandonment of the idea of the reader as a passive receptor.

- As a collage, the heterogeneous fragments of the collage occupy two different positions. One is the position that the fragment occupies in connection with its original context and the other is the position related to its role as a part of a new whole. This way the collage, the fragmented whole, oscillates between presence and absence and therefore it does not allow a linear and unique reading of the whole.

- As a puzzle, the logic of assembly of the reader recreates the space. A new reading supposes a new logic of assembly and therefore a different spatial construction. As Perec shows in “Life: a user's manual” the process that a puzzle-maker starts never comes to an end. The logic of the puzzle-maker is confronted in a different way for each new assemblage of the pieces.

- In the project both, the different assemblages of pieces of each letter, as well as, the different assemblage between letters, bring about different narratives that again can suggest new interpretation of the parts and the whole, enclosing a cycle.

-The space, in its original configuration, is de-constructed, fragmented and violated, converted in shreds that form a pile of pieces, a row material that the structure of the narrative gathers by means of allegorical interpretation, transformation and translation. A space to be recreated dynamically with each new reading, with each new assemblage.

- The letters have different writers, painters, film makers, architects, musicians and photographers. They all departure from the text and are interpreted by means of the idiosyncrasy and technique of their work.

- The secrecy of the letters, the essence of the narrative, entails the choice of a method that can encode the text into images allowing after a decode of the images into the text. For, in this process of creating text in images that corresponds to a text of words, the methodology cannot be based on a relationship between signifier and signified, it is not a translation that can be achieved directly because the dynamic shift of sensations, feeling, aspirations and fears that are reflected into the space are ambiguous and the correspondence has to be mediated.

- The methodology focuses on such conductors that can express simultaneously these uncertainties from the text to the image and vice-versa, a hermaphrodite condition that merges text and space. According to this condition the project looks for symbolic and allegoric conductors. The symbolism of drawings and images, the emblems that mix letters and images, the mnemonic of places, objects and lyrics, and the allegory (which complexity and importance in this project will be expose in another post).

Tracing the main plot - 01

The structure of the narrative that is going to address the project is based on the letters a prisoner is receiving. But behind these letter is hidden a narrative, which is going to be responsible for the spatial transformations. This plot has the role of "Bartlebooth's plan" plot in Perec's novel. So it is a plot which is related to the space, the proper subject of the letters.

The plot tries to gather three main features, that in the end, explain the inner logic of the project:

- Deal with an current and established architectural issue: empty offices and lack of dwellings
- Define the feeling of the characters related to their places: To be living illegally and in secret in an office as it would be a dwelling while sending letter to her imprisoned father
- Explain the symbolic and allegoric secret language: that a daughter can use to encode the the drawn letters, by using cultural productions, how she is doing through how is her place.


Here is the Summary of the Plot:

After her father arrest, Nora, a 24 years old Basque girl who has just finished her degree in Art and Literature in Bilbao, escapes to London. Her father, a 58 years old editor of a Basque magazine of Arts and Politics, is under protective custody in Nanclares Prison, because the magazine he works for has been accused of illegal activities. All the staff and writers are suspicious until the trial, and Nora wrote some articles the last year so she is going to be asked to testify.
She flies to London and the first day she finds a job cleaning an office in the Tower 42 of the City of London. Among the 1 million sq m of empty office space of the City of London, this empty office was occupied by an advertisement company which went bankrupt during the economic turn-down. She has to throw the remained stuff away, clean and tidy the office to be rented again. She has very few money and she does not know anybody so she decided to life in secret in the office for a while. She eats from vending machines, use the toilet and sleep in a reception sofa. She decided to sent some letter to her father to tell him how she is doing. She cannot put her name in them, so due to his father relation to artists, she decides to draw the letters and tell about her life reflecting her place and activities encoded through them. At the same time, she reflects in this letters her mood, uncertainties and aspirations in a dynamic construction of her identity. The office is used as a dwelling but as well as his father she cannot leave the place. All her contact with the exterior world is the view of London at night, from 5 pm to 8 am.

Expression for Spatial Narrative_2

Following with this search of art production that can suggest me a possible expressions for spatial narrative, I put as another example the work of the American artist Robert Rauschenberg.

His paintings are more abstract that those of Salle, being a funny depiction of abstract expressionist that take into account mass culture. Before the boom of the Pop Art in the 60´s his three dimensional painting are very innovative of how space and painting can be related. After the 60's his works started to be bi dimensional and the use of collage, images and abstract background suggest me a way of depicting space, with the abstraction of half light to express deepness and the figuration of object that are shown in the foreground.

"He found his signature mode by embracing materials traditionally outside of the artist’s reach. He would cover a canvas with house paint, or ink the wheel of a car and run it over paper to create a drawing, while demonstrating rigor and concern for formal painting... The idea of combining and of noticing combinations of objects and images has remained at the core of Rauschenberg’s work. As Pop Art emerged in the ’60s, Rauschenberg turned away from three-dimensional combines and began to work in two dimensions, using magazine photographs of current events to create silk-screen prints" From http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters

Expression for Spatial Narrative_1

In these set of post that I begin with this first example, I am going to gather some artistic productions that I consider very suggestive of how the space can be expressed through narrative.

I start with the work of the neo figurative painter David Salle. His paintings gather images and icons of the culture, where mass culture and elite cultural product share the same space of the canvas. The figurative is mixed with the abstraction of the backgrounds. They also mix tradition with current topics. These paintings are a interference of a myriad of expressions that I find very interesting as a way to express the space through a narrative based on space and not on time. I consider or interpret his paintings as unfinished tales that allow you to fill the gaps with your imagination.

I enclose the examples of David Salle painting (above), with some descriptions of Fredic Jameson in "Postmodernism- or the cultural logic of the late capitalism" related to this kind of painting and the work of Salle particularly.

"(his description of this kind of painting)Surrealism without the Unconscious...in which the most uncontrolled kinds of figuration emerge with the depthlessness that is not even hallucinatory, like the free associations of an impersonal collective subject, without the personal unconscious neither of a group one"

"(David Salle) His archetypal category (for it is not a form, exactly) seems to be the empty organization of the dyptich or double panel, where, however, the content that traditionally accompanied such gesture - authentification and de authentification, unmasking, the puncturing of one sign system in the name of another, or of reality itself - remain absent"

Letters to a Prisioner - Goikoetxea and Berger

Looking for materials to conceive a narrative structure I found very interesting the letters that prisoners receive. I took this real anecdote related to this activity:

A friend of mine, a 60 years old writer of the Basque Country called T.Goikoetxea, told me that he was sending some letter to a prisoner. He really knew the prisoner because they both have a lot of friends in common but they did not meet for several years.
Goikoetxea was sending letters with a pseudonym. He send the prisoner 51 letters. The writings were based on fictitious characters that belong to some of Goikoetxea's novels. These characters preferences, places, political activities, aesthetics and kind of language are very very familiar to the prisoner social environment but no one of the names are known for him. Each letter has a different content but some of the characters appear and disappear and it is possible to relate some plots between the letters.
According to some information that Goikoetxea knew from the prisoner lawyer, at the beginning, the prisoner thought that the letters were not for him. Letter after letter he started to identify in his imagination some of the characters with some of his friends, acquaintances and public persons, and he even made the genealogical tree of the characters, recreating the stories and filling the gaps with his imagination. After more than twenty letter he started to guess who could be the writer and finally he discovered him.
After receiving the 51 letter the prisoner was released. He knew that the jailers read the letter before delivering them so when he was leaving the jail, the prisoner told the jailers ironically: Oh, what a shame, you get rid of narratives!!! The novel has finished.

Using this anecdote I find very interesting the structure of a narrative in which a prisoner is receiving letter but never answer them, all what you know about the writer and the prisoner is from the letter. Just the way in which the prisoner imaging what is described is suggestive but if what is describe is space? How can be space interpreted through a narrative when you are locked in a claustrophobic minimal room and deprive of free space?

After this first discovery, I was looking for more material related to this kind of narratives. I fortunately found a novel of the British art crit, novelist and painter John Berger. Berger in his novel "From A to X" recreate a story in which I am interested. His novel is based on the letters a prisoner is receiving from his lover, a woman that send him letter about their love, his captivity, freedom... One of the most interesting part are the description of her everyday life in detail that allows the prisoner to go out of the cell and get in her bedroom with each letter. The letters have not date so the order is not established and this way, as in Perec's Life: a user's manual, the time is not responsible for telling the story.

Perec's "Life: a user's manual"

If some of the considerations of narrative as a vehicle to interpret and generate space that have been presented in the post entitled " Architecture through narration", this novel "Life: a user's manual" of Georges Perec, goes much further. It is an evocative, suggestive and even practical example of how a narrative can be architecture and how space can be an assemblage of tales, stories and plots.

The structure:
The novel structure is based on a fictitious building as if it would be seen in cross-section and without facade. It created a grid of 10x10 that Perec uses to establish a very strict conditions. The novel follow the order of the knight's tour on this grid. It starts each chapter (99) in one of the rooms that form the block. The time varies between chapters so the time is not the conductor of the events which is actually the space. By laborious and high detailed descriptions from the space to furniture and miscellaneous, then characters cloths and finally a tale, story or part of any of the different plots.
The movement of the knight is completed by the graeco-latin square as a way to add a list of different references that Perec established at the beginning.


the subject:
In this novel, or novels, in plural, even if there is a plot which is more developed and more important, that of Bartlebooth's plan, the real subject is the building. It is space and not time nor Bartlebooth's plot which establish a relation between all the fragments that form this work.

the plot and plots:
The plot in itself is the British multimillionaire Bartlebooth's plan for his whole life to spent 10 years learning to paint watercolours to go through the world during 20 years and paint one watercolour in a different seaport each fortnight until reach a number of 500. At the same time, once the watercolour is painted this is send back to Paris where a craft man converts it into a puzzle. When the 500 puzzles are ready he should spend 20 years reassemblaging each and sending them to the original port in order to dissolve them into the sea and recover the original blank paper.
He did not finish his plan, as the main characters of the stories that are told in the novel, neither. But as well as Bartlebooth's plot all of the stories are very singular and complicate, personal challenges that if not useful in all the cases, fulfill the lives of the characters.

Self-reference:
The novel is based on multiple fragments that the building relates where Bartlebooth's plot specially is a self-reference of the processes that Perec is using to write his novel. The processes of creating puzzles and resolve them, comparable with the writer and the reader or the architect and the user.
The logic of assemblage is shown as particular and the book is written taking into account and facilitating personal different perspectives.

the example of Virtually Venice

"British Council UK commissioned this project for the Venice Architectural Biennale 04 and FRAC 07 - it celebrates the legendary story of Marco Polo’s meeting Kublai Khan. In these portrayals of how Khan might have imagined Venice, the city takes on aspects of the East and reconfigures itself in new architectural forms. This lagoon city of one hundred and eight majestic water harvesters (Fontuna Pozzo-Pozza) cooling its inhabitants by spraying water. Elsewhere lies an information lemon park where choreographed foreign languages textured the landscape (Giardini), a place of rest for the tired feet (San Michele), the cathedralesque Tower of Death with chandeliers of cage pigeon ready for the slaughter (San Marco) and a woven beach (Lido). An alien vessel (Par Xien Gou Hai) glides through the waters while conjuring a succession of animated windows, doors and balconies, as it extends its antennae to bridge one space to another" Studio 8 Architects . CJ Lim Professor of Architecture and Cultural Design, UCL Pro-Provost for North America,Director of Bartlett International Development, Design Tutor Unit 10

The power of narrative, The travels of Marco Polo, and the sole suggestion of Khan imagining the city with the eyes of someone who never has been in the East, what at the same time is made by an architect that is originally from the East, allowing him to use a epistemology of that culture to recreate a iconic city like Venice, show the potentialities of this project. But the development through so incredible drawings makes it one of the most innovative, interesting and well-developed project of Architecture through Narrative.

Architecture through narration

The use of text to inspire architecture and spatial configurations is the first step or the obvious possibility if we face the statement "architecture through narration".
At the first glance, narrative description of space can be a vehicle to generate another space. The language of words can stimulate the language of space.

But the power of narrative is much more suggestive, evocative and multipurpose. During the last 10 years in the Bartlett have appeared some projects that in one sense of another uses narrative as a device to generate architecture.

As Jonathan Hill and Jane Rendell explain in the publication "Bartlett Design: Speculating with Architecture", narrative has two sides that conduct architecture, two processes " that are both interpretative, that allows us to consider the plot, character, voice and tone of the building, and generative, that propose the device of story-telling as a way of suggesting the design of the programme, content and materialisation in architecture"

Among the different projects which deal with narrative in architecture combining drawing and writings, Hill and Rendell summarise various "interconected themes:

- An articulation of interactive relationship between writing and design
- An exploration of the materiality of visio-spatial processes which combine written and drawn text.
- A development of the particular spatial and architectural qualities of story-telling
- A blending of personal and academic writing styles to develop multiple voices and different subject positions
- An investigation of how physical journeys through architectural spaces work in dialogue with changes in phychis and emotional states.
- An examination of how responses to specific sites can pattern the form as well as the content of text generating new genres for architectural writing based on letters, diaries, guidebooks, (auto)biographies and travelogues"

From Ways of Simulations to Hybrid Narrative Architectures

After having analyse the "Ways of Simulation" as the title of this blog until now, the interest of the project shifts to the Narrative as a vehicle to interpret and generate space. Related to simulation here are some of conclusions:

- The simulation allows to create a model of a constricted system, determined by some parameters that after can be manipulated.
- These systems can be directly taken from physical world but also from the virtual one, and all the spaces that oscillated in between.
- Simulation could be interpreted as a kind of substitution, as Paul Virilio calls it
- The invisible can be materialise and shown as a hyper real presence.
- It substitutes nature while mimesis aspire to imitate it where nature also encloses the cultural production blurring the dualism that opposes it to artificial.
- The computer generated simulation offers depictions of high detailed, hyper realistic and defined systems, being a powerful tool to analyse, process and express spatial generation and transformations.
- Simulation, in the speculative process of architectural proposition, can deal with and facilitates the coexistence of different layers of realities, substitute them, as well as combine them, but it is mainly a mediator, not a vehicle.
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Gabriele Gramelsberger THE EPISTEMIC TEXTURE OF SIMULATED WORLDS

From this essay that appears in SIMULATION – PRESENTATION TECHNIQUE AND COGNITIVE METHOD by Andre Gleiniger and Georg Vrachliotis, I have taken this last part:TOWARDS A NARRATOLOGY OF SCIENTIFIC SIMULATIONS.

"If we regard scientific simulations as narrative textual structures, however singular, then a narratology of scientific simulation should be possible. We have learned from the narratology of literary text that narrative events possess a certain duration, even if these are not always ordered in a strict sequence, and that narratives are conditioned by certain omissions, reminiscences, and anticipations, as well as by a specific narrative schema. Analogously to literary genres ( detective fiction, novel, short story), the various types of simulations articulate diverse narrative schemata. The climate situation under description (how the climate is simulated) is based on the classical narrative schema of deterministic simulations of partial differential equations, while for example the monte carlo (mathematical formulae) simulations resort to a stochastic narrative schema that follows the law of large numbers." Gabriele Gramelsberge

Jens Trimpin's Wandloser Raum

In the exhibition Kunst-Licht 2004 the sculptor Jens Trimpin presented the sculpture called Wandloser Raum based on a poem written by Ernst Meister in 1979. The author said "the relationship between emptiness and fullness was apparently reversed." although it is a sculpture it has the effect of an architectural representation."the appearance of an architectural actuality". In terms of expanded mimesis concept, it is a matter of a sensual, in this case, artistic visualization of architecture. Here, as a final consequence, the visual simulation of architecture achieves its own status as art object.

From: SIMULATION–PRESENTATION TECHNIQUE AND COGNITIVE METHOD by Andre Gleiniger and Georg Vrachliotis

Thomas Ruff "Interierus" 1979-1983

It is of special interest the architectural interior portraits of Thomas Ruff. In these photographs there is a clear interest of revealing the essence of one specific period of time by means of different parts of different domestic interiors, using space to symbolise time. What follows is a description of this set of images analysed by http://www.union-gallery.com.

"While these subjects may appear to be distinct from one another they are linked by Ruff’s conceptual approach to image-making and a fascination with the processes of photography and image manipulation, as well as the viewers’ perception. In each instance he examines how the subject has been approached by other photographers. He also looks at different techniques in order to exploit what they can offer. These processes inform his decisions on production and how the final image will look.His first series Interieurs (1979-83) comprised views of domestic settings. Ruff was concerned with capturing an ‘essence’ of these spaces so that those who encountered the photographs would then identify with homes of a certain era –their furnishings acting as signifiers. So, while each space was denoted as individual -a result of the home-making of the inhabitants- the series could also be read as a collective image of a particular period "

Thomas Hänsli essay: PARRHASIUS'S CURTAIN:VISUAL SIMULATION'S MIMESIS AND MEDIALITY

This essay deals with the concept of mimesis from its origins to explain its end or what Hänsli calls the autonomy of visual representation.

Mimesis, the fundamental relationship between art and reality, according to Aristotle, imitating of nature as the main goal of art which is clearly expressed by Pliny the Elder tale about Zeuxis of Heracle and Parrhasius of Ephesus (the grapes that birds deceive with reality and the curtain that Zeuxis deceive with reality)

Imitatio Naturae as a category in the modern understanding of art – the art of the Renaissance devoted itself to depicting reality as faithful as possible, the transformation of Italian painting from meddle age to Modern era.The rationalization of mimesis; Alberti's Finestra aperta, a window open in the space, as Alberti descrives perspective effect.

Baroque art, which made use of painting's illusionist potential and effects of deceptive illusioriness on the beholder, would also ground it theoretically teaching perspective and geometry as a way of deceiving the beholder. As the main example Andrea Pozzo's Apotheosis of Saint Ignatius(1688-94)

In recent years, philological research has assigned a further semantic field to the original concept of mimesis that goes far beyond the understanding of mimesis as pure imitation in the sense of a copy that doubles reality(Thomas Metscher Mimesis Enciclopedia of Philosophy Hamburg 1999).

"This render the concept operable once again within today's aesthetic art-theoretical discurses. It proves productive – largely against the backdrop of an increasing mediatization of architecture and image of architecture – as the conceptual definition of architecture's visual simulation.

The goal of visual simulation, from an artistic perspective, is no longer simply the imitative reproduction of architecture in the sense of a faithful copy of reality. Instead, the artist faced with a flood of medial representations of architecture in film, photography and television, is forced to create a picture of a picture of reality, as it is depicted by the media.

This transformation can be recognized in the example of contemporary architectural photography, as artist Thomas Struth states, contemporary architectural photography has meanwhile "... established itself more between art and other realities that classical disciplines a picture of a picture of reality"(Ludger Derenthal "Skeptische Architekturphotographie" in: Ansicht, einsicht, aussicht 2000 Düsseldolf).

Photography as a representational medium has attained an autonomy distinct from the depicted reality of the represented architecture. AS photographer Thomas Ruff has so aptly surmised, the artist no longer creates pictures of reality, but now only "a picture of a picture of reality" Thomas Hänsli, SIMULATION – PRESENTATION TECHNIQUE AND COGNITIVE METHOD by Andre Gleiniger and Georg Vrachliotis

the invisible

The realm of the visible and invisible are constant preoccupations in architecture, both worlds are present in the process of spatial transformation and a new way of achieve them could be extracted by means of the simulation based computer imagery.

From the invisible architecture of Koolhaas very first project, whose insight of "Berlin Wall as architecture, 1970" was presented as the " revelation in architecture of how absence can be stronger than presence", to his invisible cities in "Mutations" until the strange invisibility of the old continent that is reflected in the project "the image of Europe, 2000". The insistence of Rem Koolhaas to reveal or emphasise the invisible has been present throughout his carrier. From Hans Ulrich Obrist conversation with Rem Koolhaas, Bonn 2006


"our interest in the invisible world stems from a desire to find a form for it in the visible one, which means to prise open, to decompose, to atomize the deceptively familiar, the visible exterior appearance, before we can deal with it again...we are interested in hidden geometry of nature, in an intellectual principle, and not primarily in the external appearance of nature" Jacques Herzog and Pierre DeMeuron description of their architectural enterprise in the Pritzker price speech 2001.

"Could there be anything more natural than to start with the visible form and then gradually to penetrate into the realm of the invisible? The architect must be able to manipulate the invisible so as to render reality visible, but also capable of seeing reality in order to change it" – Franz Oswald,Foreword to Pierre von Meiss in "Elements of Architecture:From form to place Lausanne" 1991

"One of the possibilities of the computer simulation: is this not precisely the inverted path toward knowledge harbored by computer simulation? To begin in the realm of the non-visible, advancing painstakingly towards the structure of the visible?" Andre Gleiniger and Georg Vrachliotis

From SIMULATION – PRESENTATION TECHNIQUE AND COGNITIVE METHOD
Andre Gleiniger and Georg Vrachliotis

surrealistic still-life

If the former exercise focuses on a combination of two kind of realities, to contrast that I have tried, on the one hand to avoid using anything directly taken from the physical world, instead I have simulated all the object but changing the laws or better said creating new laws to this micro universe. This way it is possible to create an alternative reality by altering the form of objects to the extend of removing their functionality. This way I wonder if in this universe a glass can go on being a glass even if it is no more possible to drink from it. This way it is possible to demonstrate that the reality is constructed by meaning because even this deformed objects which can't be used are identifiable according to their former use,no matter if they are absolutely distort because they keep their names.
On the other hand, this image try also to face the possibility of creating my own laws to a possible world where I am the ruler, in this term the work of surrealists such as Dali it is fully suggestive. So I have used the object of the still-life and I have transformed them establishing unexpected juxtapositions, depicting the expression of neglected associations, a context of imaginary dreamscape where the still-life object transgress the boundaries of the so-called physical-reality, where it is not determined if the scene is reflected or if it is actually the reflection of a scene, to close this relationship around an infinite cycle where both reflection and reflective are the same thing forever...

video-micronarrative

To understand the process of the video its is necessary to read the former post. The video shows different moments of the activity of the people surrounding the table, and the precise moment in which our gaze catches the activity shown through reflections.
This moment gives order to the whole composition, one based on two overlaid realities, one digitally simulated and other directly taken form the physical world. That is the order that as Foucault argues "has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language".

still-life based narrative construction of a simulated reality

In this exercise I have tried to express my first conclusions.
I have created a micro narrative where each event of the story is reduced to a set of objects on a piece of a side table, treating this set as a still-life. These account of events have a particular location. The events are going to be repeated through out the week, months and years therefore they are shown in a diachronic order.
The objects are the main characters of the scene while reflections on them are the vehicle that relate them to the activity of people around.
The objects are the protagonist, they are the strongest presence of the scene but they have been digitally created. They aspire to look like real, hyper realistic depiction that simulate the physical reality.
The reflection are the weakest presence of the scene but the unique reference directly taken from the physical world.
By taking the simulated objects as the main character and the reflections as the vehicles of the plot directly taken from physical world, I change their usual roles to mix both reality in an hybrid one that tell an everyday life. This hybridization is an attempt to approach the mixed physical and virtual reality we experience everyday in our computer based society.

conclusions on reflections

I have tried to understand what we read as real and why and to achieve it I have focused on reflections. Reflections and the objects that are reflected create a system that is easily noticeable in the city where this system is formed by many different reflective surfaces that are fully spread out.
This system is a network made of deliberate and accidental causes, such as staged reflections on bodies of water and buildings and spontaneous reflections on puddles and vehicles. The combination of predictable and unpredictable features shows the complexity of this system and it is by means of it that I have extracted some features that help me to explain what we read as real and why.

1. Reciprocity
At the first glance we can interpret reflection system as a means to represent objects. But the objects that is reflecting other is at the same time reflected in other part within the system, therefore we obtain an self-representation system. An autonomous system that does not need anybody to go on working, that is, representing.
To go deeply in this argument I have made an analogy with Las Meninas, where the objects are to the painting as the reflections are to the invisible canvas inside the painting. We don't know what Velazquez is painting so the relationship between the model and the spectator, the object and the subject's role is never determined, this way, as Foucault points out, it can be a pure representation. But at the same time as the mirror inside the painting which give order to the whole composition, is our gaze which recover and establish a relationship between what is reflected and what is not, and this way we give an order, a meaning, composition to that we consider real.
On the contrary, reflection system is not a pure representation since the equivalence between the object's meaning as a value as its reflections a sign does not exist, both are the same, there is not a hidden meaning nor value to discover, what we see and recognise in both cases is real, or, as Baudrillard says, hyperreal, so it is not a representation but a simulation of reality what we face.

2. Dislocation
In the reflection system the dislocation of objects is obvious, but what is really relevant in this search is the dislocation of the subject, or better said, the decentralisation of the subject. It is no longer the role of the subject as a fully intentional and cognoscente individual who read just what is in front because the thinks in the world have been given, but the role of the subject as an individual who read what is real according to a myriad of meanings and discuses that precede him/herself, in this approach the reality is a social construction where the subject has been also socially constructed within reality. But to put all this meaning in a relationship that can create or construct such a complex reality we face it is necessary to put all this fragment in common or in a sort of order.

3. Fragmentation
The reflection system is fragmented as well as the different meanings and discuses we assign to each object and subject in the world to construct reality, this means that reality appears fragmented and the way to tell and elaborate all these fragments is the narrative. But nowadays our way to create the narrative construction of reality differs from the history, as a way to create the reality that we drag from the enlightenment project. As Lyotard states our time is characterised no longer of meta narrative but is made of an abundance of micro or little narratives.

Therefore, the search goes to an end anb it shows that there is no a unique reality but different kind of reality. All the object we see, touch, heard, taste and smell exist but the meaning we give us it has been created by our self over time assigning to them meanings and discourses that are at the same time articulated through narrative, and all of them have been filtered by the subject. In this continuos creation and destruction of what we read as real, the postmodernism is a period in which the role of the subject has been dislocate, it is no longer the centre of the understanding, what we read as real is not given is created and is neither articulate through a unique approach, but all of us have its particular subjective approach to reality. The history of art is full of different possible world and particular realities, paintings, literature, visionary architectures and sculpture for example show us some realities that were constructed by the particular rules of their author. According to this state, the architecture itself, by means of the virtuality can also propose some new way of understanding the world, creating new juxtapositions and spatial relationships. In this term, the cyberspace is a new field to develop this new open and rich individual way of proposing spatian world and realities for the XXI century society.

city reflections by simulated pictures 3

The fourth and last picture is an attempt to depict time instead of space. So the place is reflected over time where time is represented by Queen Victoria portrait that has been transformed in a reflective chromium-plated statue and the place is Tottenham Hale.

With this set of images I leave this place and I am going to start to theorise what I have discovered through simulation of real using reflections as a system.

city reflections by simulated pictures 3

The third picture is a simulated scenario of an old and important industry that was located in this place. In this case is not only what is reflected but also the space and the objects that are created what is talking about the real place without using directly any of its images, some are taken from the history, anothers are invented using a picture and the rest are reflected on some surfaces. The industry that is used as reference is Gestetner factory of multy copy machines and the picture to create the composition is a decay romantic depiction of Louvre museum painted by Hubert Robert

city reflections by simulated pictures 2

The second picture is based on the painting of Van Gogh, the room. I use this painting to create a current student room in a place that is only insinuated by the reflections we can distinguise on the reflective surfaces of the room. In this case not only reflections but also some posters are telling about the place while the room has been invented but inspired in the so-known painting. It is a way to reflect the place through a domestic scene.

city reflections by simulated pictures 1

This set of pictures are following the former attempt of using an not existing scene to reflect a place that already exists. The set is increasing in scale, from an still-live of everyday habits to a depiction of time using the queen Victoria to simulate not space but time.
The first picture is a still-live that is based on Diego Rivera's bodegón in its composition and colours. It does not exist but it is very familiar to us because it is made of item and popular food all we know and use. It does not exist but it is representing an existing picture of the mexican painter. On the other hand this picture shows a place, Tottenham Hale, through reflections, where no one of them can be possible but they are showing the most significant parts of this place.

Natural and staged

To analyse that we read as natural or staged and why I have used the way in which the canadian photographer Jeff Wall makes us to wonder what we are looking at, may be staged or may be natural. He creates an absolutelly controlled stage to take a picture in which all is precisely manipulated to render a spontaneous and accidental piece of reality.

My exercise consists of simulating a piece of a street that does not exist and cast some reflections on some surfaces. The reflections are taken from a real place, so they are the unique real thing of the picture while the objects that reflect them are not. This way I try to make you wonder what is natural or staged and at the same time I use the reflection system to represent or better said simulate a piece of an hybrid reality, one in which one not existing but familiar place is reflecting another not familiar but real one.