PR How can hybrids of architecture, painting and digital fabrication create spatial imaging experiences? Our Predator II project is inspired by Greg Lynn and Fabian Marcaccio’s Predator (2001) which was inspired by the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies (1987, 1990) with the same name. Lynn and Marcaccio’s collaboration fused the digitally printed image of Marcaccio’s abstract painting on a CNC-formed clear plastic sheets designed by Lynn. Thus a 2D image was transformed into a 2.5D relief and a 3D space. Predator II explores today’s possible hybridization of digital imaging and building technology by generating patterns and graphics from the original digital imaging in the movies. The result is a real condition of architectural and emotional experience. Predator II relies on imaging that never existed in the physical world to investigate the connection between architecture and popular digital media. Our technoimaging is not tech-obsessed: it produces a vivid architectural surface of new formal, aesthetical, and material qualities that is at once strange and familiar. Predator II offers new possibilities for future architectural imaging practices.
AA As Stafford has written, art is no longer a physical layer of work in a medium. Instead, the hybridizing of art and technology provides “a more expansive boundary-crossing vocabulary” and working field.[1] Predator II investigates how digital imaging and technology can work together to reproduce visual effects as “a new sensual-surround experience” in a physical and material dimension as architecture.[2] Predator II also pursues Bernard Cache’s plea for an articulated and ornamented surface, as opposed to a smooth and seamlessly rendered one.[3] The constructed surface in Predator II is not only a partition that insulates the interior, but also a speculative interweaving of structure and imaging.
Predator II explores imaging theory and architectural practice through the manipulation of architectural skin and form to create a new spatial and emotional sense. It adapts digital imaging from cinema to articulate a new space and speculate on a future practice for architecture between dream and reality, strangeness and familiarity, practicality and radicality. Alex Potts’s “pop” theory of replicating art through material transformation is pursued through the generation of image and its conversion into relief pattern. In Predator II digital imaging from the film, Predator (1987) is manipulated “not deliberately to depict anything.”[4] Instead, as described by Potts, the “image quality is rendered in degraded form” to distance itself from the original.[5] As the information from the original imaging can be manipulated to enhance different qualities, there are many ways a specific image can be manipulated to offer abundant effects for architectural practices.
[1] Alex Potts, “The Image Valued ‘As Found’ and the Reconfiguring of Mimesis in Post-War Art,” Art History 37:4 (September 2014): 788. [2] Potts, 798. [3] Barbara Maria Stafford, “Seizing Attention: Devices and Desires,” Art History 39:2 (April 2016): 426. [4] Stafford, 427. [5] See Bernard Cache, Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories, ed., M. Speaks, tr. A. Boyman, MIT Press, 1995.