Surfaces

The computer allows us to mobilize images in new ways, to produce new forms of knowledge through the aggregation of images as data, and to make legible information that might otherwise remain obscure and untethered were it not for its visualization. This is to say that computer graphics can produce new forms of knowledge, but this formation is predicated on a much more prevalent logic of erasure and absence. The computer artist Frieder Nake has famously described this as a relationship between the computer’s surface (Oberfläche) and “subface” (Unterfläche), where “the surface is there for us, for the human. The subface is there for them, for the computers.” This talk examines Nake’s distinction, asking how we might reconcile critical methods for historical analysis that hold both surface and subface together.

This talk interrogates the representational stakes of shiny surfaces in the designed world. I work through two surfacing processes, which although analogous in visual effect are worlds apart in process and material effect— rendering of chrome graphical objects and decorative chrome plating of physical objects. I demonstrate how a situated and embodied approach to the process of surfacing casts it as not only a technical accomplishment, but also a social one. By expanding the site of this sociotechnical accomplishment, I present a taxonomy of the work involved in producing shiny surfaces, and the visual, cultural, and political representations that encode them.

Historically, automation has carried with it a complementary politics of labor, which, when undertaken, invents concepts capable of addressing life’s newly automated realities. During the highest phases of mechanical indus­trialism, the concept of deskilling was invented to define conditions in which the skills of preindustrial handicraft had been supplanted by the logic of divided labor. Deeply layered, computational automnemonics are dissolving once and for all any imagined division between the mental and the material. If the technical dimension of life is coextensive with memory itself, we might contemplate today the meaning of mental deskilling, both for its potential to stimulate new experiences and for its uncertain politi­cal consequences.

One hundred years ago Le Corbusier thought that building sites should become industrial factories; by a curious reversal of roles, today’s robotic revolution promises to turn the post-industrial factory into something very similar to a pre-industrial building site. The intelligent, adaptive, “agile” robots that are being developed by the design community are likely the future of manufacturing, but the social and economic import of this technical revolution – unleashed, almost accidentally, by research in computational design and building automation – far transcends the ambit of the architectural discipline, and raises questions of greater consequence, and of a more general nature.

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