| id |
38e9 |
| authors |
Talbott K |
| year |
2006 |
| title |
The Constructed Image |
| source |
Cheng R and Tripeny PJ (eds) Getting Real: Design Ethos Now, Proceedings of the 94th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, Salt Lake City, March 2006, 529-536 |
| summary |
Rendering engines produce ever higher degrees of photorealism, and the process of image-making becomes increasingly automated. Architects benefit from this, but they also pay a price. They exchange local control at the tip of a pencil for global control through a list of variables. They exchange the incremental build-up of line and tone for the fast calculation of summative snapshots. This paper argues that the loss of local and incremental image control necessarily leads to an erosion of visual literacy. Lacking this control, students do not practice the close scrutiny needed to develop a critical eye. To combat this, students should be taught to combine the local and the global, the incremental and the summative. A series of teaching exercises are presented that seek a better balance between automation and human influence. Rather than resisting the digital medium, the exercises explore methods of teaching visual scrutiny within the digital medium. Students learn to see the flaws in computer-generated images, and they correct the flaws with local and incremental changes. Armed with the principle of the constructed image, students regain some control of the image-making process and use it to expressive ends, but an adjusted pedagogy is not sufficient. As long as software engineers prefer to make tools that automate human effort rather than augment it, architects will lack vital image control. The concept of the constructed image is needed not only to teach visual literacy in the digital age, but to focus the fight for more appropriate tools. |
| keywords |
computer rendering, hand drawing, hybrid media, human-computer interaction |
| series |
other |
| type |
normal paper |
| email |
|
| full text |
 file.pdf (766,497 bytes) |
| references |
Content-type: text/plain
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| last changed |
2006/08/13 06:39 |
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