Design

Note: following the exhibition Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989 until last April at MOMA, images of the show appeared on the museum's website, with many references to projects. After Archeology of the Digital at CCA in Montreal between 2013-17, this is another good contribution to the history of the field and to the intricate relations between art, design, architecture and computing.

How cultural fields contributed to the shaping of this "mass stacked media" that is now built upon the combinations of computing machines, networks, interfaces, services, data, data centers, people, crowds, etc. is certainly largely underestimated.

Literature start to emerge, but it will take time to uncover what remained "out of the radars" for a very long period. They acted in fact as some sort of "avant-garde", not well estimated or identified enough, even by specialized institutions and at a time when the name "avant-garde" almost became a "s-word"... or was considered "dead".

Unfortunately, no publication seems to have been published in relation to the exhibition, on the contrary to the one at CCA, which is accompanied by two well documented books.

Via MOMA

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Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989

November 13, 2017–April 8, 2018 | The Museum of Modern Art 

Note: with a bit of delay (delay can be an interesting attitude nowadays), but the show is still open... and the content still very interesting!

Via Archpaper

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New MoMA show plots the impact of computers on architecture and design. Pictured here: “Menu 23" layout of Cedric Price's Generator Project. (Courtesy California College of the Arts archive)

The beginnings of digital drafting and computational design will be on display at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) starting November 13^th, as the museum presents Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989. Spanning 30 years of works by artists, photographers, and architects, Thinking Machines captures the postwar period of reconciliation between traditional techniques and the advent of the computer age.

Organized by Sean Anderson, associate curator in the museum’s Department of Architecture and Design, and Giampaolo Bianconi, a curatorial assistant in the Department of Media and Performance Art, the exhibition examines how computer-aided design became permanently entangled with art, industrial design, and space planning.

Drawings, sketches, and models from Cedric Price’s 1978-80 Generator Project, the never-built “first intelligent building project” will also be shown. The response to a prompt put out by the Gilman Paper Corporation for its White Oak, Florida, site to house theater and dance performances alongside travelling artists, Price’s Generator proposal sought to stimulate innovation by constantly shifting arrangements.

Ceding control of the floor plan to a master computer program and crane system, a series of 13-by-13-foot rooms would have been continuously rearranged according to the users’ needs. Only constrained by a general set of Price’s design guidelines, Generator’s program would even have been capable of rearranging rooms on its own if it felt the layout hadn’t been changed frequently enough. Raising important questions about the interaction between a space and its occupants, Generator House laid the groundwork for computational architecture and smart building systems.

R. Buckminster Fuller’s 1970 work for Radical Hardware magazine will also appear. (Courtesy PBS)

Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989 will be running from November 13^th to April 8^th, 2018. MoMA members can preview the show from November 10^th through the 12^th.

Note: I'll have the great pleasure to be in discussion tomorrow with Fabio Gramazio, Prof. & Head for Digital fabrication at ETHZ and partner at Gramazio Kohler, during the much-awaited symposium "Research in Art and Design", at ECAL.

If you can attend, please do so! As we're expecting great presentations from the likes of Xavier Veilhan, Roel Wouters, Skylar Tibbits, Catherine Ince and several others... including Fabio Gramazio of course, who will speak about their rescent researches at the Swiss Institute of Technology / Department of Architecture in Zürich.

Via ECAL

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10+10 Research in Art & Design at ECAL
A symposium celebrating 10 years of Research in Art and Design

Tuesday 10 October 2017, 8.00–18.30
IKEA Auditorium, ECAL, Renens
www.researchday.ch

On the occasion of the 10 years since the moving of ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne to its current premises in Renens and marking the 10th anniversary of the foundation of EPFL+ECAL Lab, ECAL is hosting a symposium on Research in Art and Design, featuring artists, designers and scholars in these fields from all over the world, in conversation with ECAL faculty members.

Admission is free upon registration through the online RSVP form at www.researchday.ch
Due to the limited number of seats in the auditorium, the maximum number of participants is 350.

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Programme

8.00–8.30 Registration
8.30–9.00 Welcome
Alexis Georgacopoulos director, ECAL

Introductory notes on Research in Art and Design in Switzerland
Davide Fornari professor, ECAL

Moderation
Vera Sacchetti design critic, Basel

Design Research: from Academia to the Real World

9.00–9.45 Alba Cappellieri professor, Politecnico di Milano, Milan
in conversation with Nicolas Henchoz director, EPFL+ECAL Lab

9.45–10.30 Sophie Pène vice president, Conseil National du Numérique, Paris
in conversation with Davide Fornari professor, ECAL

10.30–11.00 Coffee break

Research Through Art and Design: Materials and Forms
11.00–11.45 Xavier Veilhan artist, Paris
in conversation with Stéphanie Moisdon professor, ECAL

11.45–12.30 Fabio Gramazio co-founder, Gramazio + Kohler Architects, Zurich
in conversation with Patrick Keller professor, ECAL

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12.30–13.30 Lunch

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Research Practices in Curating Art and Design
13.30–14.15 Catherine Ince senior curator, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
in conversation with Anniina Koivu professor, ECAL

14.15–15.00 Astrid Welter head of programs, Fondazione Prada, Milan/Venice
in conversation with Federico Nicolao professor, ECAL

15.00–15.15 Coffee break

The Future of Art and Design Research
15.15–16.00 Roel Wouters co-founder, Moniker, Amsterdam
in conversation with Vincent Jacquier professor, ECAL

16.00–16.45 Skylar Tibbits co-founder, MIT Self-Assembly Lab, Cambridge (MA)
in conversation with Christophe Guberan professor, ECAL

16.45 Closing remarks, panel discussion
Alexis Georgacopoulos
Vera Sacchetti
Davide Fornari

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17.30 Exhibition openings at Cinema Studio, Gallery l’elac and EPFL+ECAL Lab

• Caustics, curated by Mark Pauly, EPFL RAYFORM
• Projects for Victorinox, curated by Thilo Alex Brunner
• The Sausage of the Future, curated by Carolien Niebling (preview)
• Augmented Photography, curated by Milo Keller (preview)
• EPFL+ECAL Lab Research Land, curated by Nicolas Henchoz
• Rapid Liquid Printing, curated by Christophe Guberan, MIT Self-Assembly Lab, Steelcase

ECAL will launch the book Making Sense: 10 Years of Research in Art and Design at ECAL on the occasion of the symposium.

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18.30   Cocktail

10+10 Research in Art and Design at ECAL
In collaboration with EPFL+ECAL Lab
With the support of HES-SO
Media partner Disegno

Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne
5, Avenue du Temple, Renens  

Related Links:

Note: Summer is coming again, and like each year now, it's time to digg into unread books or articles! "Luckily" and due to other activities, we didn't publish much since last Summer. So it won't be too much of a hassle to catch back. Nonetheless, there are almost 2000 entries now on | rblg...

So, I hope you'll enjoy your Summer readings (on the beach... or on the rocks)! On my side, I'll certainly try to do the same and will be back posting in September.

By fabric | ch

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As we lack a decent search engine on this blog and as we don't use a "tag cloud" either... but because Summer is certainly one of the best period of the year to spend time reading and digging into past content and topics:

HERE ARE ALL THE CURRENT UPDATED CATEGORIES TO NAVIGATE ON | RBLG BLOG:

(to be seen below if you're navigating on the blog's html pages or here for rss readers)

Note: the following happened to be a quite fascinating and "spontaneous" collaborative experience recently held in 2d, pixel by pixel as the main expression tool, on Reddit.

It has certrainly the formal flavour of the online community (-ies) the project was first dedicated to ("dick" stuff, fantaisy or game characters, ...). But nonetheless, how much (almost spatial/ "places") "stories" can happen inside a blank online shared 2d space, with 16 colors and pixels, during 72 hours, is quite astonishing.

The project was called Place.

Terminologies used in the post below could certainly be refined and we could also wonder why (kind of sad) the process ends up into so many national flags (when it comes to collaborative design, a flag is certainly something so simple to communicate to many and co-create, due to its basic shapes and identifiable design rules, that it might be a reason - if not the reason - for the large amount of them that are present at the end of the experience (beside the copycat effect) - or why are these what we see at first glance? But that's not the main point about the whole experience.

As a matter of fact, it is undoubtedly a reminiscence and a much more interesting version of this "Million Dollar Homepage"  by Alex Tew, on a 1000 x 1000 pixel grid, dating back 2005.

Via & by Sudoscript

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Last weekend, a fascinating act in the history of humanity played out on Reddit.

For April Fool's Day, Reddit launched a little experiment. It gave its users, who are all anonymous, a blank canvas called Place. The rules were simple. Each user could choose one pixel from 16 colors to place anywhere on the canvas. They could place as many pixels of as many colors as they wanted, but they had to wait a few minutes between placing each one. Over the following 72 hours, what emerged was nothing short of miraculous. A collaborative artwork that shocked even its inventors.

From a single blank canvas, a couple simple rules and no plan, came this:

Each pixel you see was placed by hand. Each icon, each flag, each meme created painstakingly by millions of people who had nothing in common except an Internet connection. Somehow, someway, what happened in Reddit over those 72 hours was the birth of Art.

How did this happen?

While I followed Place closely, I cannot do justice to the story behind it in the few words here. There were countless dramas -- countless ideas, and fights, and battles, and wars -- that I don't even know about. They happened in small forums and private Discord chats, with too much happening at once, all the time, to keep track of everything. And, of course, I had to sleep.

But at its core, the story of Place is an eternal story, about the three forces that humanity needs to make art, creation, and technology possible.

The Creators

First came "the Creators". They were the artists to whom the blank canvas was an irresistible opportunity.

When Place was launched, with no warning, the first users started placing pixels willy-nilly, just to see what they could do. Within minutes, the first sketches appeared on Place. Crude and immature, they resembled cavemen paintings, the work of artists just stretching their wings.

Even from that humble beginning, the Creators quickly saw that the pixels held power, and lots of potential. But working alone, they could only place one pixel every 5 or 10 minutes. Making anything more meaningful would take forever -- if someone didn't mess up their work as they were doing it. To make something bigger, they would have to work together.

That's when someone hit on the brilliant notion of a gridmap. They took a simple idea -- a drawing overlaid on a grid, that showed where each of the pixels should go -- and combined it with an image that resonated with the adolescent humor of Redditors. They proposed drawing Dickbutt.

The Placetions (denizens of r/place) quickly got to work. It didn't take long -- Dickbutt materialized within minutes in the lower left part of the canvas. The Place had its first collaborative Art.

But Creators didn't stop there. They added more appendages to the creature, they added colors, and then they attempted to metamorphize their creation into Dickbutterfly. Behind its silliness was the hint of a creative tsunami about to come.

But it didn't happen all at once. Creators started to get a little drunk on their power. Across the canvas from Dickbutt, a small Charmander came to life. But once the Pokemon character was brought to life, it started growing a large male member where once had been a leg. Then came two more.

This was not by design. Some Creators frantically tried to remove the offending additions, putting out calls to "purify" the art, but others kept the additions going.

Suddenly, it looked like Place would be a short-lived experiment that took the path of least surprise. Left to their own devices, Creators threatened to turn the Place into a phallic fantasy. Of course.

The problem was less one of immaturity, and more of the fundamental complexity of the creative process. What the Creators were starting to face was something that would become the defining theme of Place: too much freedom leads to chaos. Creativity needs constraint as much as it needs freedom.

When anyone could put any pixel anywhere, how does it not lead immediately to mayhem?

The Protectors

Another set of users emerged, who would soon address this very problem.

But like the primitive Creators, they weren't yet self-aware of their purpose on the great white canvas. Instead, they began by simplifying the experiment into a single goal: world conquest.

They formed Factions around colors, that they used to take over the Place with. The Blue Corner was among the first, and by far the largest. It began in the bottom right corner and spread like a plague. Its followers self-identified with the color, claiming that its manifest destiny was to take over Place. Pixel by pixel, they started turning it into reality, in a mad land grab over the wide open space.

The Blue Corner wasn't alone. Another group started a Red Corner on the other side of the canvas. Their users claimed a leftist political leaning. Yet another started the Green Lattice, which went for a polka-dot design with interspersing green pixels and white. They championed their superior efficiency, since they only had to color half as many pixels as the other Factions.

It wasn't long before the Factions ran head-on into the Creators. Charmander was among the first battle sites. As the Blue Corner began to overwrite the Pokemon with blue pixels, the Creators turned from their internecine phallic wars to the bigger threat now on their doorstep.

They fought back, replacing each blue pixel with their own. But the numbers were against them. With its single-minded focus on expansion, the Blue Corner commanded a much larger army than the Creators could muster. So they did the only thing they could do. They pled for their lives.

Somehow, it struck a chord. It ignited a debate within the Blue Corner. What was their role in relation to Art? A member asked: "As our tide inevitably covers the world from edge to edge, should we show mercy to other art we come across?"

This was a question each Faction faced in turn. With all the power given to them by their expansionary zeal, what were they to do about the art that stood in their path?

They all decided to save it. One by one, each of the Factions began flowing around the artwork, rather than through them.

Rebel against Bluegoisie all you want, but let's make one thing clear: THESE THREE ARE OFF ABSOLUTELY OFF LIMITS. THEY ARE NOT TO BE HARMED. from place

This was a turning point. The mindless Factions had turned into beneficent Protectors

Still No Happy Ending

Finally at peace with the ravenous color horde, the Creators turned back to their creations. They started making them more complex, adding one element after another.

They started using 3-pixel fonts to write text. A Star Wars prequel meme that had been sputtering along took a more defined shape, becoming one of the most prominent pieces of art in Place.

Others formed Creator collectives around common projects. Organizing in smaller subreddits that they created just for this purpose, they planned strategies and shared templates.

One of the most successful was a group that added a Windows 95-esque taskbar along the bottom, replete with Start button in the corner.

Another were a block of hearts. They started with only a few, mimicking hearts of life in old bitmap video games, like Zelda, before their collective took off with the idea. By the end they stretched across half the canvas, in a dazzling array of flags and designs.

And of course, there was Van Gogh.

But not all was well. The Protectors who they had once welcomed with relief had become tyrants dictating fashion. They decided what could and couldn't be made. It wasn't long before Creators started chafing under their rule.

Meanwhile, with the issue of artwork resolved, the Factions had turned their sights on each other, forcing followers to choose sides in epic battles. They had little time to pay attention to the pathetic pleas of Creators who wanted approval for ideas of new art.

The fights between the Protectors got nasty. A Twitch live-streamer exhorted his followers to attack the Blue Corner with Purple. There were battle plans. There were appeals to emotion. There were even false-flag attacks, where the followers of one color placed pixels of the opposing side inside their own, just so they could cry foul and attack in return.

But the biggest problem of all was one of the only hard rules of Place -- it couldn't grow. With the Factions engaged in a massive battle among themselves, the Creators started realizing there wasn't space to make new Art.

Country flags had started emerging pretty much from the beginning. But as they grew and grew, they started bumping into each other.

Out in the unclaimed territory of the middle of the canvas, with no Protector to mediate between them, Germany and France engaged in an epic battle that sent shockwaves through Place.

Suddenly, a world that had been saved from its primitive beginnings looked like it would succumb to war. There were frantic attempts at diplomacy between all sides. Leaders form the Protectors and the Creators and met each other in chat rooms, but mostly they just pointed fingers at each other.

What Place needed was a villain that everyone could agree upon.

The Destroyers

Enter the Void.

They started on 4chan, Reddit's mangled, red-headed step-brother. It wasn't long before the pranksters on the Internet's most notorious imageboard took notice of what was happening on Reddit. It was too good an opportunity for them to pass up. And so they turned to the color closest to their heart -- black. They became the Void.

Like a tear spreading slowly across the canvas, black pixels started emerging near the center of Place.

At first, other Factions tried to form an alliance with them, foolishly assuming that diplomacy would work. But they failed, because the Void was different.

The Void was no Protector. Unlike the Factions, it professed no loyalty to Art. Followers of the Void championed its destructive egalitarianism, chanting only that "the Void will consume." They took no sides. They only wanted to paint the world black.

This was exactly the kick in the ass that Place needed. While Creators had been busy fighting each other, and Protectors still measured themselves by the extent of canvas they controlled, a new threat -- a real threat -- had emerged under their nose.

Against the face of extinction, they banded together to fight the Void and save their Art.

But the Void was not easy to vanquish, because the Place needed it. It needed destruction so that new Art, better Art, would emerge from the ashes. Without the Void, there was no force to clean up the old Art.

I used to hate the Void but watching the time-lapses I see they're a vital part of the r/place ecosystem. Like a forest fire making way for new life. from place

And yet, this was exactly what Place needed. By destroying art, the Void forced Placetions to come up with something better. They knew they could overcome the sourge. They just needed an idea good enough, with enough momentum and enough followers, to beat the black monster.

That idea was the American flag.

In the last day of Place, a most unlikely coalition came together to beat back the Void, once and for all.

They were people who otherwise tear each other apart every day -- Trump supporters and Trump resisters, Democrats and Republicans, Americans and Europeans. And here they were coming together to build something together, on a little corner of the Internet, proving in an age when such cooperation seems impossible, that they still can.

The Ancients Were Right

Reddit's experiment ended soon after. There are so many more stories hidden deep in the dozens of subreddits and chat rooms that cropped up around Place. For every piece of artwork I mentioned, there are hundreds more on the final canvas. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that on an anonymous, no-holds-barred space on the Internet, there were no hate or racist symbols at all on the final canvas.

It is a beautiful circle of art, life and death. And it isn't the first time in our history that we've seen it.

Many millenia before Place, when humanity itself was still in its infancy (the real one, not the one on Reddit), Hindu philosophers theorized that the Heavens were made of three competing, but necessary, deities that they called the Trimurti. They were Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Protector, and Shiva the Destroyer.

Without any single one of them, the Universe would not work. For there to be light, there needed to be dark. For there to be life, there needed to be death. For there to be creation and art, there needed to be destruction.

Over the last few days, their vision proved prescient. In the most uncanny way, Reddit proved that human creation requires all three.

The Final Canvas

Related Links:

Note: following the post about the conference at Bartlett about game design and architecture, I also post this link (show reel) regarding the recent set & prop design for the movie Ghost in the Shell.

We can certainly discuss the quality of the movie indeed, or rather its necessity compared to the original japan anime (a funny remark about it though: if you have the questionable chance to be "reborned" or "ghosted" like the major in the remade movie, you'll transform from asian to caucasian white ... Which is the same fate as the movie in fact, if you have the chance to be "redone", you'll go from japan anime to Hollywood pimped movie...), but we can all agree about the quality of the environment and character design nonetheless. Even if conceptually, this future looks a lot like an "hyper-present"  (more networks, more media, more digital, more robots, cyborgs and viruses, more hackers, etc. - that will not happen therefore).

In particular for architects, the urban design of the "Hong Kong++"  (or "Blade Runner++" ) style city, full of skyscrapers sized holograms, mostly publicities. A design in a kind of strange and brutal mish-mash with more regular yet buildings. This is the quite 3d graphical work ofAsh Thorp that i link below.

Considering these different exemples, we could wonder why architectural schools don't take more into consideration these kind of works? So as the ones present in literature. Couldn't we start thinking that architecture is a field that indeed and of course, build physical spaces and cities, but not only.

So, it should also take its part in the conceptualization and design of "networked", "virtual" or rather "mixed realities" (whatever further necessary debates we could have about the understanding of those words), environments for games and movies? Possibly also by extension non material spaces in general? And of course, all the probably more interesting "in betweens"? I truly believe architectural discourse could easily consider all these aspects of architecture and widen a bit its educational scope.

But I don't see this coming so much. Do you? (there are some discussion forums on Archinect for example)

Via Kotaku

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Some additionnal information about the conceptual work on the movie.

Another interesting and quite "space-graphical" short anime by Ash Thorp, "Epoch" - in a slightly "2001" style-, can be accessed on his site as well. And interestingly for 3d designers, he has created with fellow industry-artists a teaching platform led by professionals: Learn Squared (they are hosting a talk about the set design on Twitch next Wednesday btw). There can you learn "UI and Data Design for Film",  "3D Concept Design", "Motion Design", etc. 

More works about the movie HERE (in a post by Luke Plunkett).

Related Links:

Via It's Nice That

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Words by Billie Muraben, photography by Connor Campbell

Related Links:

Note: posted a few weeks ago on It's Nice That, those pictures by photographer Philippe Jarrigeon about mazes.

Where this out of date esthetic seems nowadays quite odd, with some "Marienbad" flavour in them, with colour and combined ... of ... course ... with some "Shining"!

Via It's Nice That

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More about it HERE.

Related Links:

Note: what about starting again after the Summer #farniente with some "illusions and science"? "Amazing" that's for sure.

Would have certainly been a useful resource for the research workshop we led around "the cloud" with Random International, about ghost data presence (and to develop Ghost Data Interfaces). Especially as I pointed out the "sublime" dimension of technology in a related post.

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Via brusspup (channel on Youtube)

...

with some gyroscopes:

(remember that btw?)

...

or with some magnets:

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or even with some hammer!

...

and many more tricks on Brussup channel, mainly in its "Cool science Tricks" playlist.

Note: published a little while ago, this article from Time magazine ("The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming") makes a fascinating point about the changing nature of photography. Even so the article mostly talks about journalism photography. 

An interesting analysis by Stephen Mayes that shows how far photography is becoming data capture (sensing)... as much --or even more-- as it is visual capture. We should certainly discuss further around this question with the scientists that are writing the algorithms of photography. Yet as stated in the paper, a camera is slowly becoming primarily a "data-collecting device" and the image reconstructed from these data (by algorithms then) a last "grip on the belief in the image as an objective record".

This comes in resonance with our scholar understanding of photography as the media that was once believed or phantasized of being able to "capture reality",  as it is. The early cinema carried later the same kind of beliefs. And we could then think again about this fantastic novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares (The Invention of Morel, 1940) that was extrapolating around these myths (of being able to fully record and register the "present", then replay it, entirely).

Today, this belief in our ability to "fully record the real" or digg into its recorded past (some big data projects) has a tendency to be transferred into data capture (and I obviously publish this post on purpose just after the presentation of an architecture project by fabric | ch that largely used and played around this idea of recording the present and that followed an installation around the same idea, through data).

So the connection that is made in this paper between photography and data capture is full of epistemological interests!

Via Time

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By Stephen Mayes

In the future, there will be no such thing as a "straight photograph"

It’s time to stop talking about photography. It’s not that photography is dead as many have claimed, but it’s gone.

Just as there’s a time to stop talking about girls and boys and to talk instead about women and men so it is with photography; something has changed so radically that we need to talk about it differently, think of it differently and use it differently. Failure to recognize the huge changes underway is to risk isolating ourselves in an historical backwater of communication, using an interesting but quaint visual language removed from the cultural mainstream.

The moment of photography’s “puberty” was around the time when the technology moved from analog to digital although it wasn’t until the arrival of the Internet-enabled smartphone that we really noticed a different behavior. That’s when adolescence truly set in. It was surprising but it all seemed somewhat natural and although we experienced a few tantrums along the way with arguments about promiscuity, manipulation and some inexplicable new behaviors, the photographic community largely accommodated the changes with some adjustments in workflow.

But these visible changes were merely the advance indicators of deeper transformations and it was only a matter of time before people’s imagination reached beyond the constraints of two dimensions to explore previously unimagined possibilities. And so it is that we find ourselves in a world where the digital image is almost infinitely flexible, a vessel for immeasurable volumes of information, operating in multiple dimensions and integrated into apps and technologies with purposes yet to be imagined.

Digital capture quietly but definitively severed the optical connection with reality, that physical relationship between the object photographed and the image that differentiated lens-made imagery and defined our understanding of photography for 160 years. The digital sensor replaced to optical record of light with a computational process that substitutes a calculated reconstruction using only one third of the available photons. That’s right, two thirds of the digital image is interpolated by the processor in the conversion from RAW to JPG or TIF. It’s reality but not as we know it.

For obvious commercial reasons camera manufacturers are careful to reconstruct the digital image in a form that mimics the familiar old photograph and consumers barely noticed a difference in the resulting image, but there are very few limitations on how the RAW data could be handled and reality could be reconstructed in any number of ways. For as long as there’s an approximate consensus on what reality should look like we retain a fingernail grip on the belief in the image as an objective record. But forces beyond photography and traditional publishing are already onto this new data resource, and culture will move with it whether photographers choose to follow or not.

As David Campbell has pointed out in his report on image integrity for the World Press Photo, this requires a profound reassessment of words like “manipulation” that assume the existence of a virginal image file that hasn’t already been touched by computational process. Veteran digital commentator Kevin Connor says, “The definition of computational photography is still evolving, but I like to think of it as a shift from using a camera as a picture-making device to using it as a data-collecting device.”

The differences contained in the structure and processing of a digital file are not the end of the story of photography’s transition from innocent childhood to knowing adulthood. There is so much more to grasp that very few people have yet grappled with the inevitable but as yet unimaginable impact on the photographic image. Taylor Davidson has described the camera of the future as an app, a software rather than a device that compiles data from multiple sensors. The smartphone’s microphone, gyroscope, accelerometer, thermometer and other sensors all contribute data as needed by whatever app calls on it and combines it with the visual data. And still that’s not the limit on what is already bundled with our digital imagery.

Our instruments are connected to satellites that contribute GPS data while connecting us to the Internet that links our data to all the publicly available information of Wikipedia, Google and countless other resources that know where we are, who was there before us and the associated economic, social and political activity. Layer on top of that the integration of LIDAR data (currently only in some specialist apps) then apply facial and object recognition software and consider the implication of emerging technologies such as virtual reality, semantic reality and artificial intelligence and one begins to realize the mind-boggling potential of computational imagery.

Things will go even further with the development of curved sensors that will allow completely different ways to interpret light, but that for the moment remains an idea rather than a reality. Everything else is already happening and will become increasingly evident as new technologies roll out, ushering us into a very different visual culture with expectations far beyond simple documentation.

Computational photography draws on all these resources and allows the visual image to create a picture of reality that is infinitely richer than a simple visual record, and with this comes the opportunity to incorporate deeper levels of knowledge. It won’t be long before photographers are making images of what they know, rather than only what they see. Mark Levoy, formerly of Stanford and now of Google puts it this way, “Except in photojournalism, there will be no such thing as a ‘straight photograph’; everything will be an amalgam, an interpretation, an enhancement or a variation – either by the photographer as auteur or by the camera itself.”

As we tumble forwards into these unknown territories there’s a curious throwback to a moment in art history when 100 years ago the Cubists revolutionized ways of seeing using a very similar (albeit analog) approach to what they saw. Picasso, Braque and others deconstructed the world and reassembled it not in terms of what they saw, but rather in terms of what they knew using multiple perspectives to depict a deeper understanding.

While the photographic world wrestles with even such basic tools as Photoshop there is no doubt that we’re moving into a space more aligned with Cubism than Modernism. It will not be long before our audiences demand more sophisticated imagery that is dynamic and responsive to change, connected to reality by more than a static two-dimensional rectangle of crude visual data isolated in space and time. We’ll look back at the black-and-white photograph that was the voice of truth for nearly a century, as a simplistic and incomplete source of information about what was happening in the world.

Some will consider this a threat, seeing only the danger of distortion and undetectable fakery and it’s certainly true that we’ll need to develop new measures by which to read imagery. We’re already highly skilled in distinguishing probable and improbable information and we know how to read written journalism (which is driven entirely by the writer’s imaginative ability to interpret reality in symbolic form) and we don’t confuse advertising imagery with documentary, nor the photo illustration on a magazine’s cover with the reportage inside. Fraud will always be a risk but with over a century of experience we’ve learned that we can’t rely on the mechanical process to protect us. New conventions will emerge and all the artistry that’s been developed since the invention of photography will find richer and deeper opportunities to express information, ideas and emotions with no greater risk to truth than we currently experience. The enriched opportunities for storytelling will allow greater complexity that’s closer to reality than the thinned-down simplification of 20th Century journalism and will open unprecedented connection between the subject and the viewer.

The twist is that new forces will be driving the process. The clue is in what already occurred with the smartphone. The revolutionary change in photography’s cultural presence wasn’t led by photographers, nor publishers or camera manufacturers but by telephone engineers, and this process will repeat as business grasps the opportunities offered by new technology to use visual imagery in extraordinary new ways, throwing us into new and wild territory. It’s happening already and we’ll see the impact again and again as new apps, products and services hit the market.

We owe it to the medium that we’ve nurtured into adolescence to stand by it and support it in adulthood even though it might seem unrecognizable in its new form. We know the alternative: it will be out the door and hanging with the wrong crowd while we sit forlornly in the empty nest wondering what we did wrong. The first step is to stop talking about the child it once was and to put away the sentimental memories of photography as we knew it for all these years.

It’s very far from dead but it’s definitely left the building.