Cyborg situations: Media extensions for the architect's body

Banou, Sophia; Hynam, Matthew

Abstract

Architectural thinking and making have been historically attached to and conditioned by representational practices and their corresponding media, most notably of all, drawing. From the Salamis Stone (4th century BC) to medieval tracing floors and contemporary VR headsets, this paper proposes a critical review on architecture’s situations within the real through varying degrees of embodied mediation.

The representational dimension of architectural praxis has often been seen as a point of controversy and contestation for architecture’s situation within and ‘power’ upon the real. Mario Carpo’s (2011) positioning of architectural drawing as a distancing intermediary between the architect and their craft, offers one of the most direct of such critiques of architectures attachment to mediation. As the media landscape has been advancing more rapidly and drastically over the past thirty years, new grounds for architectural ideation through mediation have been uncovered. Architecture’s relationship to the media landscapes that have emerged over the last two centuries, have repeatedly offered fertile ground for architectural critique and the manipulation through the conquering of new modalities of spatial perception: from the cinematic vision (Tschum, Diller Scofidio) to the televisual aesthetics of the sixties and seventies (Archigram, Superstudio). However, more recent digitised media frontiers have raised both techno-fetishist and techno-phobic responses about the death of drawing and most recently the overtaking of architecture altogether by artificial intelligence. This presentation seems to define architecture’s attachment to representational mediation as an integral condition of the discipline and practice, which proceeds through the embodied appropriation of media as means to architectural situations.

These ‘cyborg situations’ will be framed through the establishment and identification of spatial conditions within the media landscapes that architecture has and can potentially occupy. Digital media, in particular, which by default mark a shift to a covert hyperreal condition of simulation,, will be examined in terms of their ability to provide new forms o f representational situations. The paper will thus define mediation as an embodied condition of architectural praxis, at the same time defining media as critical, creative, extensions to the architect’s body.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: AHRA 2024 International Conference: Body Matters
• Start Date: Nov 21, 2024
• End Date: Nov 23, 2024
• Acceptance Date: Jul 30, 2024
• Deposit Date: Nov 14, 2024
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/13426415