Troiage aesthetics
pp. 199-218
in: Shlomo Argamon, Kevin Burns, Shlomo Dubnov (eds), The structure of style, Berlin, Springer, 2010Abstract
As the world around us is transformed into digitally enabled forms and processes, aesthetic strategies are required that articulate this underlying condition. A method for doing so involves a formal and conceptual strategy that is derived from collage, montage and assemblage. This triple "age" is termed "troiage", and it uses a style of computational apparency which articulates the edges of our current representational forms and processes as the semantic elements of culture. Each of these component aesthetics has previously had an important effect upon different areas of contemporary art and culture. Collage in painting, montage in film, assemblage in sculpture and architecture, are recombined via algorithmic methods, forefronting the structure of the algorithmic itself. The dynamic of the aesthetic is put into play by examining binary relationships such as: nature/culture, personal/public, U.S/Mexico, freedom/coercion, mediation/experience, etc. Through this process, the pervasiveness of common algorithmic approaches across cultural and social operations is revealed. This aesthetic is used in the project "The Scalable City" in which a virtual urban landscape is created by users interacting with data taken from the physical world in the form of different photographic techniques. This data is transformed by algorithmic methods which have previously been unfamiliar to the types of data that they are utilizing. The Scalable City project creates works across many media; such as prints, procedural animations, digital cinema and interactive 3D computer graphic installations.