Week 5: The Mechanical Eye

The concept currently lies in the capturing of the memorable windows of a space as you discover and rediscover it while isolated in your own mind. These windows are a machine for viewing from within the protection of our objects of habitation. Before the window, we are aware of its scope, its boundaries, its terminus, but we are also only aware of a minute framed view as we move around it. As we approach, however, we lose track of the space in which we are readily present and become entrenched within a threshold condition, in which the distinction of space behind us is lost as we fully submerge within the scene before us. There are few exceptions to this rule, such as the boundary of the window becoming an absence of window or an augmented condition of window like that of the Willis Tower overhang. However, for most spaces and most windows the machine remains the default condition for awareness of the material world beyond our immediate surroundings and serves as our connection to that outside of world. The activation of this affect, much easier with novel and unfamiliar scenes and spaces, where that which lies within the view of window both beyond its pane and reflected from before it is still in a state of failing to be taking as a given. Ultimately, I argue that the assemblage of these views is as powerful of a signifier of a place as the space itself and, thus, belongs to an individualized repository of meaningful views. The concept, then, is the representation of a cognitive space, in which the viewer enters a subjective gallery of these curated windows that is incredibly specific to my journey of discovering New Haven as an M. Arch student under unique conditions of spatial access. This is, under current conditions, very much an exploration of interiorities and what lies beyond as an extension of the role of the gaze in world that is increasingly physically inaccessible and our desire to reengage those novel and memorable interiors and notable views that we otherwise cannot access at this point outside of this loose realm of memories within the cognitive known. In this way, it is both the machines of the gaze and our cognitive projective gaze that become the prosthetics by which we view our surroundings and understand the place we engage the world under these conditions, which ultimately serve to highlight the cognitive reality that until now we have taken for granted.

My current Technik has been simple photogrammetry techniques at night primarily to work with the conditions in which the machine works most easily as an individual projection beyond the frame to a viewed scene and as a reflection of the space itself, which would be largely inaccessible beyond the memory encapsulated in the window itself, which serves as both an aperture and mirror.

1: ReCap Pro File — Attempt One: Issues with Reflectivity and Rendering the Window

Fig. 2: Maya FBX Import — Positioning of Views Within the Approach to One Window

The most challenging this with this process has and likely will be the rendering of a window that is reflecting the space behind the viewer in multiples while also holding the image of what lies beyond the window. It seems to be that I will need to try out more descriptive scanning methods to attempt to capture the window itself or at least something on which the interplay of both readings can project onto.

I think that this interplay of reading by the digital tools provides an interesting extension of the interplay of the cognitive reality of the window as a constant oscillation between both states, but I’d be interested to see how other modes of capture way facilitate the reading of this interplay that seems to be a challenge for capturing our often taken for granted view of a duality simultaneously.

Fig. 3: Fish Eye and Rescaled — Dethroning the cognitive known as direct experience and relegating it more to assemblage of familiar objects at unfamiliar scales and focal lengths. Needs further capturing work and additional windows to build the experiential space.

Further Reading:

Colomina, B. (2019). X-Ray architecture. Zürich: Lars Müller.

Jacobs, Steven. (2011). Architecture of the gaze: Jeffries apartment & courtyard. In L. Weinthal (Ed.), Toward a new interior : an anthology of interior design theory (pp. 546–558). New York, NY, USA: Princeton Architectural Press, from https://lib.ugent.be/en/catalog/pug01:1947243?i=0&q=+%22Rear+Window%22&search_field=subject

Orell, J. (2003). Window [Scholarly project]. In Chicago School of Media Theory. Retrieved October 5, 2020, from https://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/window.html