Messy Lines of Pure Structures

“What kind of histories should one write, and how do these suggest different futures?” “Do our histories reproduce dominant narratives?” “How can our histories account for different futures?” asked, with an evident sense of urgency, the panellists and participants during the second day of the Digital.Visual.Material symposium dedicated to the theme Structures. Despite the open-endedness of such questions, the presentations and panel conversations that day of the symposium, taken together, already hint at some possible responses. On the one hand, the morning presenters, Alma Steingart, Anna-Maria Meister and Moa Carlsson, interrogated abstractions, from mathematical theories to models and databases, and complicated their histories. On the other hand, the evening conversations with some of the protagonists and active participants in the development of early computer applications for art and architecture, such as Frieder Nake, Leslie Mezei, Rachel Strickland and Paul Pangaro, revealed multifaceted and often ignored aspects of technology work, hidden behind carefully curated and polished pictures of historical research labs.

Together, histories of abstractions and first-hand accounts of embodied experiences challenged the dominant, squarely-fitted, and universal narratives of design computing projects. In so doing, they revealed a much messier reality, hidden behind computational structures.

Communities of scientists and designers have historically crafted abstractions in the form of mathematical axioms, pedagogical models, and data infrastructures deliberately, to purify discourses, rehabilitate subjects, and optimize practices, highlighted the morning panel moderated by Alessandra Ponte. In the talk titled “On Mathematical Aesthetics,” Alma Steingart looked at the changing and often contradictory meanings ascribed to the notion of structure by artists and mathematicians from the mid-century to the 1980s. While for artists such as Gyorgy Kepes and Buckminster Fuller, the visual perception of nature’s various structures could unite arts and sciences, for their contemporary American mathematicians of that period, structures—abstract relationships between entities—could help evade the subjectivity of perception. The subsequent appearance of computer graphics that combined underlying mathematical structures with visual appearances, Steingart detailed, alleviated this discrepancy between the two communities’ esteem of visual perception, drawing them together into mutual collaborations.

Central in Steingart’s presentation was the question: what can we learn by thinking about mathematicians’ and artists’ conceptions of structure in conversation with one another? In my view, such a question and approach problematize and expands existing narratives on the intersections of art and science that have mostly focused on uni-directional translations of scientific theories into design tools. By relating different meanings, Steingart illuminated how each community projected their values onto “structural vision,” “seeing,” and “perception.” These values were shaped by both their mutual interactions and their distinct intellectual traditions in the postwar context.

Through a close reading of a diagram of the ideal product design process produced in the early years of the renowned Hochschule fur Gestaltung Ulm, Anna-Maria Meister argued that it was not simply a protocol for object design but a model. For Meister, models are formulations of design choices and operations rather than merely representational media for design. In the presentation titled “Processing Models, Modelling Processes for the HfG Ulm ca. 1952,” Meister drew together designed objects, methods, and curriculum schemas to show that Ulm models attempted to promote a rational universality through the erasure of scale (for example, objects were depicted scaleless in school’s publications) and of subjectivity (students were trained in a monastic lifestyle disconnected from the city of Ulm). Her approach challenged how existing scholarship has understood the school’s history as divided between form-making and process-designing. For Meister, the notion of the model can illuminate continuities between those traditions. This presentation illustrated that the abstract process presented in the Ulm diagram was, after all, “a truly material sequence” that involved teachers and students. Ulm’s models structured particular material relations between subjects and objects of design, following the visions of its founders to reeducate the german subject through “good” design in the context of post-war Germany.

Moa Carlsson‘s presentation “From Paper to Code” reminded the audience that the emergence and dissemination of new technologies, such as the geo-spatial database, is not merely a story of technical innovation but of profound negotiations. Carlsson highlighted the changing debates during the transition from hand-drawn to computer-generated maps, from questions of visual appeal to questions of financial efficiency. While, initially, computer-generated maps could not achieve the visual graphic quality of hand-drawn ones, as Carlsson discussed, when a map produced by the Experimental Cartography Unit at the Royal College of Arts was finally visually comparable to traditional maps, the focus of debates changed to questions of financial value. The database —an underlying data structure stored in magnetic tapes— had more potential than a computer-drawn graphic image as it could store, reproduce, and update information multiple times. Carlsson’s talk compellingly showed how the adoption of computational techniques in place of traditional practices is not an immediate and straightforward advancement, but a political project.

If the morning talks were archivally-based historical analyses, the evening panel included reports directly from the source. People who participated in early computer experiments shared their first-hand experiences. Computer art pioneers Leslie Mezei and Frieder Nake (in conversation with Theodora Vardouli) conveyed the atmosphere, common incentives, and personal motivations that drove their active involvement in the early experiments and interactions between art and computers. Subsequently, Rachel Strickland and Paul Pangaro (in conversation with Daniel Cardoso Llach) contributed another perspective. Back then, Strickland and Pangaro were both at the beginning of their careers, working as students or young professionals in the eminent Architecture Machine Group at MIT directed by Nicholas Negroponte. Their stories illuminated aspects of early work with computers that were omitted from the dominant narratives publicized by the lab. For example, a video filmed by Strickland back in the day zooms in on the glitchy tactile interactions with computer-aided design programs through the cathode-ray-tube display. As the film illustrates in a strikingly poetic way, manipulating these trembling lines and shapes on the computer display was no more precise or less embodied than other everyday tactile gestures. The trembling lines on the screen suggest that their underlying computing structures were messier than their orderly narratives.