A Proper How-To: Another Digital
Computers bewilder me—I have no clue what goes on behind the screen I am staring at—but I think this is part of their magic, part of why our society is so obsessed with them in this Age of Technology. Erik Herrmann’s lecture taught me about current computers, and their past predecessors. His infusion of old with new (and new with old) in this lecture “Another Digital” have helped me grow in appreciation for how far technology has come and how user-friendly it has become (it’s only taken me months, weeks to learn new programs, versus years). And his research on pre-interface era computers was fascinating in that even without screens (interfaces) people were beginning to experiment with infusing art into computing.
His explanation of computation versus computerization struck me as reminiscent of what Mark Stanley has reiterated all year long in our Drawing and Representation classes: we’re not trying to make an exact copy of real life in our models, we’re trying to re-imagine them in the software provided (typically Rhino). We should embrace and celebrate their differences because through these we see new and often unexpected things in our real-life model. This is what Erik defined as “computation” and this is what he promotes and what the pre-interface era computer-artists seeked. By distinguishing the difference between this and “computerization” (which is computer-aided design, meant to speed up and correct hand representational techniques), Erik has given me further insight into what a successful architect should seek to achieve while being educated in one of the many (but by far the best) Brutalist-building architecture schools in the US.
(image source: http://www.erikwherrmann.com/architecture/Eroded-Urbanism/)