Ambiguous Assemblage: Sublime Architectural Narratives, Urban Assemblage: The City as Architecture, Media, AI and Big Data

Abstract

Hyperreal architectural assemblages are pervading our daily experience and progressively disrupting our spatial practices. Thought-provoking paradigms using VAM (virtual, augmented and mixed) realities profoundly transform our perception of space, ascribing new spatial qualities to architecture. Instantly activated digital spatial transductions juxtapose, superimpose, permutate and blur the elements of incompatible systems producing spatial assemblages with powerful emergent properties. Long before digital augmentations, creative practices widely experimented with transductive techniques. Numerous architects, artists, and photographers, such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi, László Moholy-Nagy and Aldo Rossi, and visual arts movements and styles, such as dadaism, surrealism and cinematographic montage, have used representational means to produce speculations in the form of hyperspatial assemblages. Recently though, assemblage research by artists such as Laurent Chéhère, Dionisio González and Noémie Goudal has deployed digital technologies to challenge “reality” by recreating, manipulating and “agencing” spatial qualities that redefine the way we sense, conceive, and perceive space. These artists have in common the prolific production of distinctive works that we propose to call hyperreal follies: instances of imaginable futures that offer recombinant, translocalised and deterritorialised visions. This paper discusses hyperreal follies as artworks that explore the creative power of hyperreality through the most accurate technique of visual reproduction, photography. It aims to shed light on the fundamental connections between analogue and digital creative practices, and to describe what enables photographers to produce assemblages of particular relevance for architecture: the sublime. The sublime, though, is not intended as the superlative or the lofty, but rather as the embodiment of both the fabulous speculative and the awful reinterpretive. Such sublime, in the reading of the follies, is the engagement with the real through the production of fictitious spatial qualities that decode and deterritorialise buildings and environments to constitute assemblages differentially emplaced, synchronised and considerately set within othered mundane landscapes. Sublime hyperreal follies are made of components manifestly disembodied from their original contexts to annihilate their beauty, as ascribed by Edmund Burke, and provoke astonishment and mystery, albeit, as Kant3 observed, appealing to the realm of the “idea” of the sublime rather than the “object” representing beauty. The approach by which these assemblages are interpreted is dialogic, manifold and heterologous. It firstly addresses the terminology and meaning within the field of art theory that ambiguously distinguishes, as near-synonymous, pastiche, montage and collage, and assemblage. 4 Insights and readings of their multiple components, sets of relations and narratives will depend on the specific intent and the designated output of each representation. Case studies and analytical methods vary to cope with plural and unstable sources, techniques and meanings that often belong to the evertransforming electronic space where spatial properties are in continuous becoming. Comparative analysis is used to detect differences and repetitions among key actants (people and objects), relations and themes of the assemblages. It is anticipated that there will be commonalities across the case studies as well as a new narrative with which to investigate the significance of these works. The Deleuzian concept of “assemblage” (agencement), is used to disentangle the representations of hyperreal follies and expand the understanding of their spatial qualities. This enables a focus on the emergent properties of concatenating heterogeneous elements of the hyperreal follies, which belong to systems liberated from rigid and unproductive relations, by foregrounding the effects of their deterritorialised associations.