Aberrant Patterns: Cataloguing the Visual Effects of Materialising the Hidden Patterns in Digital Imaging Systems
Gavin Perin, Linda M. Matthews · UTS ePRESS (University of Technology Sydney) · 2018
The commercial imperatives behind promoting the contemporary city through the broad dissemination of its image have resulted in an escalation in the use of digital visioning systems.Importantly, these systems calibrate hard and soft technologies that aim to mimic the Human Visual System (HVS).To achieve this mimicry, patterns secreted in the camera's mechanisms and processing algorithms work to erase the aberrant visual behaviours inherent to these artificial visioning systems.Ironically, these immaterial patterns establish processes and protocols that clean up the image to present a city image that cannot be 'experienced' with the naked eye.Past design-based research shows how embracing the aberrant behaviours native to the digital visioning system reveals the conceit behind attempting to construct the perfect city image.Specifically, this research indicates that it is possible to disrupt the clarity of such images by simply replicating these secreted patterns on a building facade.Significantly, the application of these patterns across a range of scales and in either two or three-dimensions, can be calibrated and then catalogued to link aberrant behaviours to various 'real-world' functions.However, the rejection of mimicry associated with the simple act of making the immaterial material does more than disturb the city image: the tectonic expression of the immaterial ruptures the political economy that currently governs the contemporary practices used to image the city.The capacity to disrupt the city image allows for a critical assessment of the political economy of such representations.It is also apparent that the ability to catalogue the aberrant visual effects of digital imaging systems according to 'real-world' uses also brings with it a capacity to unpack and curate a range of political functions that accompany the deployment of the disparate effects of these patterns.