IKA Lecture: Out of the Eye

Lecture Philippe Pareno
IKA Lecture Series 2020|2021

Out of the Eye

All lectures start at 7pm and will be held via ZOOM
To receive the Zoom-link, please send a registration mail to arch(at)akbild.ac.at
The lecture series winter 2020/summer 2021, a collaboration between IKA and IKW, is organized and curated by Christina Jauernik, Andreas Spiegl and Wolfgang Tschapeller.

Out of the Eye
Drawing Perspectives and Profiling Figures in Architecture
What if seeing with the eyes is accomplished or substituted by cameras that provide data for algorithms to profile patterns and figures? What if the visualization of these figures and patterns is no longer related to the realms of visibility and perception? What if the production of data-based images masks the very disappearance of visual qualities?
Architecture structures space and its perception, not least on the basis of the points of view and perspectives that it offers. Architecture is and always has been a viewing machine that wants to be looked at as well. Yet the issue of seeing and the capacity of the (human) eye is challenged by processes of digitalisation and artificial intelligence that offer new perspectives – or, to put it in more radical terms: a mode of perception that is related less to seeing than it is based on the recognition of patterns and quantifications. The (visual) perspective is substituted by an algorithmic process of reading data. The results are perceived as (visual) images to a lesser extent, even if that is what they look like, because the identification of objects or situations is based on (ir-)regularities of and in patterns. The (earlier) notions of view and perspective thus appear redundant. What is left of perspective is the point of view that reality and presence appear as a thread. The question of forecasting and planning is not so much a political issue as a task of programming and tinkering with data. Out of the Eye looks at politics out of the political.
The lecture series wants to reflect on the concept of perspective in the context of media technologies that substitute the actual performance of seeing and looking with the recognition of patterns that only algorithms can “see”, which they do by “profiling (e-merging) figures”.