Crossing Disciplines : Drawing

Jason Vigneri-Beane <jcvb@splitstudio.com>

Catalog Statement

The introduction of computing into architecture has complicated the problem of drawing in fundamental ways. What interests me most among these complications is the migration of drawing from a mode of representation to one of generation. This migration is further intensified by the replacement of the act of drawing with the act of modeling in such a way that organizational logics of systems become more important than the routine construction and visualization of objects. For me, an interest in the logic of systems introduces the necessity of various kinds of agency that will enact strategies of organization. Therefore, in addition to replacing drawing with modeling, drawing becomes a strand of research into agent-based modeling and its architectural potential. Drawing here is first and foremost the construction of rules that will govern the behavior of agents that will, in turn, execute those rules in a model over time. Over the process of rule-execution, graphic notations of the behavior and generative organization of various systems emerge.

These graphic notations are, in a sense, mere pools of information that do not necessarily carry with them any inherent material language or contract with an object to which they may lead. As organizational skeletons they are, in fact, relations that are independent of language. For example, systems of cellular growth here yield the rule-based deployment of cells but not the material of the cells themselves. Distributed behavior models yield the spatial relationships among components in a swarm but not the components themselves. Mathematically governed turtle graphics trace the differential position of a point in space over time but hold no cultural position on what that point will deliver with regard to the history of architectural categories. But architectural categories can be mined from the notational differences that constitute organizational diagrams and these categories can be actualized into architectural material though a subsequent set of techniques such as surfacing, meshing, instancing, mapping, and so on. These techniques begin to yield architectural complexes of category and material that, while strange, carry with them the emergent principles, conventional or otherwise, of the agents that organized them.