Unconventional Accuracy; Objectivity in the Digital Turn

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The first digital turn in architecture allowed practitioners to transition everyday analogue design processes, such as drawing and modelling, to highly specific digital technologies through computer aided design and simulation. The second digital turn then asked us to question the role of these technologies conceptually and as Mario Capro highlights, new cognitive technologies are emerging into the architectural discipline that are also 'training us to think in a different way, ... [but] unless we learn to cope with this new science, we are likely to make a terrible mess of it.'[1] And even though digital technologies are now commonplace, within both architectural practice and academia, as designers we still rarely choose to question the fundamental underpinnings of these highly technical processes. Our digital architectural tools, which are mostly appropriated from scientific and computational backgrounds, still struggle to find unique terminologies by which to be discussed spatially. In even the most common transferable architectural terms, such as 'render', architects unconsciously simplify the potential of these digital softwares, which have the ability to accurately simulate vast arrays of light particles crashing against complex cartesian geometry. This simplification results in conflated aesthetic ideals that register with analogue hand drawn 'rendered' terminologies and are then biased by a conventional expectation of the designer. As Simon Penny highlights on the same appropriation of anthropomorphic definitions in computing, 'When any such assertion is no longer explicitly understood as metaphor, we are already deep in an ontological mire.'[2] As a result of this lack of truly applicable terminology, between our longstanding analogue and relatively new digital languages, we exacerbate the problematic rift that exists between representational ideas and their physically constructed reality in the built environment. This problem has led to the prioritisation and fabrication of aesthetic imagery over constructed architecture and leaves us at a critical point in our discourse; where we must define the terms of engagement with these tools to avoid descending deeper into the digital mire. This research draws parallels to our current problematic digital rift with the late 19th and early 20th century objective turn in scientific image making. Led by Arthur Worthington, alongside fellow scientific practitioners, this conceptual turn began to question aesthetically biased practices in the production of factual science, and as Peter Galison & Lorraine Dalston note with regards to Worthington's experiments, 'What had been a high-order scientific virtue - tracking and documenting the essential, ideal "auto-splash" - became a psychological fault, a defect in perception.'[3] This understanding of the underlying fault in their methodology resulted in a conceptual shift away from bias representation of an expected reality of the author, to one of truthfully constructed, simulated and documented reality that was observable through a non-biased lense. This approach, which at the time was considered unconventional, stripped away the admirable, but virtues, pursuit of the idealised perfect image. This design-led research sets out to develop experimental and unconventional forms of practice, alongside self determining measures of accuracy, in relation to digital tools that are under-defined within our architectural dialogue. Predominantly looking towards aforementioned new forms of cognitive machine learning, which are unparalleled in our architectural lexicon, the research will engage with tools and systems that have an ability to define their own unique self taught understandings of spatial conditions. [1] Carpo, M., 2017. The Second Digital Turn. Cambridge: MIT. p162.[2] Penny, S., 2019. Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment. MIT Press. p4.[3] Daston, L. and Galison, P., 2010. Objectivity. Zone Books. p16.