The Second Digital Turn by Carpo Mario;

Author:Carpo, Mario;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: modern architecture; computation; computers; computer science; avant-garde; technology; post-human; The Alphabet and the Algorithm; architectural history; theory
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2017-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

3

The End of the Projected Image

From futurism and cubism to expressionism and architectural deconstructivism, perspectival images were proclaimed dead many times over in the course of the twentieth century. Modernist avant-gardes may have had few things in common, but they were united in their aversion to Renaissance perspective and to the perspectival view of the world. Yet, due to the domination of optical, mechanical, and then digital technologies for the creation of perspectival images, still or moving, perspective remained the dominant paradigm of our visual culture, and a staple of our culture at large, until very recently. Today, at long last, the demise of projected images may be happening for good—this time around, however, not by proclamation, but by sheer technological obsolescence. A major upheaval of our visual, cultural, and technical environment is taking shape, comparable to that which was brought about by the invention of perspectival and then photographic images. Indeed, these are the primary, albeit not the only, kinds of projected images that are being phased out by the rise of digital technologies for 3-D scanning and 3-D printing; parallel projections, long favored by the technical and design professions, have already been mostly replaced by computer-based 3-D modeling.

In the brief span of less than one generation, digital technologies have moved from word processing to image processing to 3-D processing—from verbal to visual to spatial operations. This is due in the first place to steady technical advancement: words use less data than pictures and pictures use less data than three-dimensional models; as computers have grown ever more powerful and cheaper, they have been able to take on bigger and bigger data. Today, for most practical applications, the marginal cost of advanced computation is close to zero. As discussed at length in the preceding chapter, one of the consequences of the ubiquity and affordability of processing power is that there is now less urgency to laboriously cull, select, and compress data to make information leaner and easier to deal with. As a result, many technologies for data compression that were developed during the early days of computing, and more generally throughout the history of cultural technologies, are being dropped or shelved. Projected images are a case in point.

Alphabetical writing records the infinite modulations of the human voice using a very limited number of standard graphic signs. Alphabetical files are data-light: a typed page contains approximately two kilobytes of data, which is more or less the amount of data that Cicero could have inscribed on a wax tablet when taking notes in the Roman senate. The same page, if recorded as a photographic picture in coarse black or white (binary) pixels, would weigh approximately 1,000 kilobytes, or five hundred times its alphabetic equivalent. This incidentally disproves the old (but in fact very modern) saying that a picture is worth a thousand words: in purely quantitative terms the opposite is true, and in the example I gave, each word is worth approximately 3,000 binary digits (bits) of images. This is one reason

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