Images and Other Stuff

incessant, conspicuous and peculiarly influential aspect of contemporary life. Today, the status of images is greater, and different, than ever before. If ever there was a subject in need of theorization and application, images are it. Now is the time for images. In both the distant and recent past, images were considered primarily an aspect of, or means toward, architecture as a material or intellectual practice. Images were operative or projective representations that used conventional languages or encoded information to convey ideas or legible meanings. But today, images have a new status as actuality. They are neither medianor mediumspecific and operate through association, affect, and processing, not through reading and interpretation. At the very least, images are now a special case of the regular stuff that constitutes our worlds. As a result, fundamental disciplinary assumptions about how architecture makes its appearance face radical challenges. For over 500 years, orthographic projections, perspectives, and other delineations have been understood as architectural images par excellence. But since the advent of photography, mass media, and computing, this is no longer the case. This evolution of the architectural image is not the result of disciplinary shifts as much as a necessary response to the effects and potential of technology and media. This new status of images is fundamentally different from the many innovations in the history of architectural representation, from the spectral projections of the camera obscura and the visual pleasures of other optical devices, to Serlio’s iconic woodcut of the five orders, to Piranesi’s puzzling etchings, to the legible forms of architecture parlante, to Ruskin’s theory of resemblance, to Mies’s uncanny photomontages and Le Corbusier’s canny use of commercial photographs, to Kiesler’s fantastic plans for a vision machine, to the Smithsons’ populist claims in “But Today We Collect Ads,” to Rossi’s oneiric sketchbooks, to Venturi and Scott Brown’s billdingboard, to the diagrams and the digital renderings, animations, and models that are now the most pervasive design modes. None of these instances in the history of the architectural image fully anticipates or engages the realization that architecture has become a matter of image, as has virtually every aspect of contemporary life. Serious and sophisticated speculation on architectural images provokes a string of difficult and consequential questions. What are these ubiquitous entities and enigmatic things we call images? How are they related to, but not simply aligned with, photography, representation, visuality, pictures, icons, screening, mimesis, concepts, figures, cartoons, or shapes? How do they work in architecture? How are architectural images produced? When you think of architecture, what do you see? What is image-thinking? How have computing and networked media altered our answers to these questions? What is needed to deal productively with images today? How might image-thinking change the discipline and practice of architecture? How might it alter its relations with other disciplines? What would architecture become if images were its means and end? Fully embracing the potential of images would require architects to suspend the operative logic of imitation or reference in a visual or linguistic sense, and, in turn, to suspend disabling and now intellectually unsustainable dichotomies: real and virtual, form and concept, medium and material, presence and absence, or, most radically, architecture and other stuff. We need not assume that the proliferation and ubiquity of images in today’s culture effaces and denigrates rational discourse or architecture’s basic value. As contemporary artists, neuroscientists, and theorists suggest, we have many compelling ways to focus and clarify our understanding of the contemporary status of images. Images are a complex subject of inquiry and a quickly evolving mode of cultural currency that is historically deep, technically challenging, and discursively sophisticated, and that taps evolved human cognitive capacity. In an effort to understand the operation, potential, and manipulation of media, numerous artists and theorists today are turning to the matter of images and proposing ways of thinking and acting that can be sustained technically and conceptually by images. Architects should aggressively exploit any of those approaches that seems advantageous for and affiliated with the discipline, especially in areas where architecture engages digital media for its production and dissemination. Despite the diversity of their projects, most theorists are looking back to just a few key figures in a first generation of image theorists, such as Henri Bergson and Walter Benjamin, who began to embrace image-thinking as a peculiarly modern alteration of cognition, communication, and speculation. In very different ways, Bergson and Benjamin each attempted to explain modernity in terms of a new potential to engage and manipulate the reality of images. Benjamin’s famous concept of the dialectical image proposes that historical understanding is achieved through fabricated images that collapse anticipation and recollection. Much like photography but based in language, these images offer a flash of recognition of the present as it was prefigured in the past. Benjamin identified the most intense and complex example of these technically specific instances of “dialectics at a standstill” in the urban architecture of the Parisian arcades. Benjamin’s insistence on the dialectical and technically determined basis of these images, as exemplified in both glass and iron construction and photography, is countered by the immaterial and durational images vividly theorized by Bergson, whose 1896 book Matter and Memory offers an evasion of thinking based in language, representation, and logic. For Bergson, thinking is first and foremost the mental processing of perceived and recollected images as a means toward action. Bergson’s images condense stuff and mind into a single entity (of which the body is a unique instance) that is neither a representation of reality nor a projected mental Images and other stuff MARK LINDER Syracuse University