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WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

(Abstracts below)

10:00 – 10:15
WELCOME & INTRODUCTION

10:15 – 11:30
PANEL I PERSPECTIVES RULES? (Moderation: Gabriele Gramelsberger)

Nathalie Bredella: How, and why has linear perspective survived in architecture?
Mathias Fuchs: Ludic Perspectives

11:30 – 12:00
Coffee break

12:00 – 13:15
PANEL II BREAKING THE CODE (Moderation: Nathalie Bredella)

Gabriele Gramelsberger: Ruling out Perspective in Non-Euclidean Geometry
Nicole Stöcklmayr: Code and the Perspective Overlay in Parametric Design Environments

13:15 – 14:15
Lunch (served at MECS)

14:15 – 15:45
PANEL III RULING ALGORITHMS (Moderation: Nicole Stöcklmayr)

Frieder Nake: Some things I might want to address
Wolfgang Hagen: The Graphical User Interface – A perspective tool? Some remarks on its history.

15:45 – 16:00
Coffee break

16:00 – 17:00
ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION

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PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS

Nathalie Bredella: How, and why has linear perspective survived in architecture?

Despite attempts to outrule linear perspective by the rise of algorithmic variability, it is in the context of computer-based renderings that hyper-stylized perspectival visualizations have survived in architecture. What are the strategies embedded in those renderings, and how does the idea of a building as static object relate to its transformations in space and time?

Mathias Fuchs: Ludic Perspectives

Computer Games offer a variety of spatial representations. From 2D birds’ eye, 1st person and 3rd person view, to side-scrolling or isometric representations, perspective seems to have become a matter of choice for the game designer. Sometimes different forms of representation are superimposed or offered as alternatives to pick from. I will present a small number of examples from computer games that serve as a basis for discussion about perspective and games.

Gabriele Gramelsberger: Ruling out Perspective in non-Euclidean Geometry

19th century mathematics was obsessed to overcome the rules of non-Euclidian geometry. Getting rid of the ancient parallel axiom was not the only motivation, but rather to overcome the statics of Euclidian geometry by introducing transformation. This, finally, led to outrule linear and central perspective in geometry.

Nicole Stöcklmayr: Code and the Perspective Overlay in Parametric Design Environments

Modeling and visualization software in architecture is still determined by projective geometry even within parametric design environments. In this setting graphical algorithm editors (such as Grasshopper for Rhino3D)are two dimensional diagramatic arrangements of code generating three dimensional geometry with mathematical functions and parameters. Visual conventions are still operating on a representational level but they merge into a novel tableau of different viewports and interfaces, with linear perspective as an active layer.

Frieder Nake: Some things I might want to address

In recent years, starting in the mid-1960s, but gaining momentum in the 1980s, linear perspective experienced a great push in Computer Graphics. The method of projecting a three-dimensional (algorithmic) scene onto a two-dimensional “canvas” took on an algorithmic form in the ray-tracing algorithms. The sight-rays of the Renaissance were reversed and reborn as light-rays, but of a virtual (imaginary) kind only. Together with models of lighting at an individual spot in a (virtual) three-dimensional scene, this became discussed as realistic and photo-realistic rendering (before a backlash happened in so-called NPR = non-photorealistic rendering). As is often the case, the protagonists of computer graphics used the term, photorealistic rendering, without knowing (or, at least, by ignoring) that the term “photorealism” (Hyperrealism) had been used before in art as the name of an art movement (largely in the USA) that was reacting to Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism (since the early 1960s, into 1970s). Thus, the things I want to address are the Bresenham algorithm: drawing a straight line-segment on a raster screen and the simple ray-tracing algorithm, rendering a scene algorithmically by central perspective.

Wolfgang Hagen: The Graphical User Interface – A perspective tool? Some remarks on its history.

The Graphical Unit Interface as the operational basis of all today’s design visualisation computer aided design and “algotecture” software tools is just a few years older than three decades. The first commercial GUI computer – the “Xerox 8010 Information System” called “The Star” – was released in 1981, a year before the first Apple machine called “Lisa”. Neither “the Star” nor its prototypically developed precursor “Alto” (1972-77) were conceptually or visually (let alone culturally) based upon a perspective viewing. On the contrary, the graphical user interface enabled revolutionary new viewpoints represented by a totally abstract perimetrical tool called “mouse” adressing every pixel on a screen thus in principle offering simulations/computations of n-dimensional objects on a in principle two-dimensional surface.