Thomas PearceORCHESTRATING THE EDGE.

TOWARDS A NOISY POINT CLOUD

ONTO-EPISTEMOLOGY

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MArch Thesis BENVGA05The Bartlett School of Architecture

Unit 23 2011-2012Supervisor: Peg Rawes

Thomas Pearce

ORCHESTRATING THE EDGE.

TOWARDS A NOISY POINT CLOUD

ONTO-EPISTEMOLOGY

MArch Thesis BENVGA05

The Bartlett School of Architecture

Unit 23 2011-2012

Supervisor: Peg Rawes

2 3

INTRODUCTION p7

Tracing shadows in an overexposed world

CHAPTER ONE p15

HIGH–TECH REALISM AND THE (IM)POSSIBILITY

OF AN OPEN-ENDED BECOMING

_A new unimpeachable witness

_The tragic faith of the ASDA triad

_The witnesses’ creative complicity

_Designing a “constructivist” scanner

CHAPTER TWO p31

BRINGING A GUN TO A GUNFIGHT: STRATEGIES

OF HIGH-RESOLUTION RESISTANCE

_The emancipated pixel turns nostalgic

_Modulating the schizophrenic point

_The irrelevant choice of the indecisive

photon

_The ubiquitous edge of the high-

resolution city

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CHAPTER THREE p69

ORCHESTRATING THE EDGE: TOWARDS A

PUNCTUALIST-MATERIALIST AESTHETIC

_The anxious mesh and the interstitial

shadow

_The silent doughnut and the becoming

point cloud

_Two punctualist-materialist projects

_Aspects of a punctualist-materialist

architecture

CONCLUSION p124

_Endnotes

_Bibliography

_Image Credits

_Acknowledgments

4 5

What would you see through the eyes of a 3D scanner?

7

INTRODUCTION

Tracing shadows in an overexposed world

8 9

“To manage at last to ‘bring to light’ an over-

exposed world, a world without dead angles,

without ‘areas of shadow’ … this is the objective

of technologies of synthetic vision.”

Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb1

“Such is our way of thinking - we find beauty not

in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows,

the light and the darkness, that one thing against

another creates.”

Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows2

If we are to believe Paul Virilio, the world is ap-

proaching state of “overexposure”. Like many

other contemporary futurists and science fiction

authors, he speculates on a future of ubiquitous

and all seeing vision technologies that leave noth-

ing unrecorded or unexposed. Bruce Sterling,

in maybe the most radical version of this futurist

topos, envisions a scenario in which every single

surface of every object becomes photographic,

absorbing and “remembering” each photon it en-

counters.

As scientist or historians we would no doubt wel-

come this new era of complete knowledge – an

era which science fiction author Charles Stross, dif-

ferentiating it from the patchwork knowledge of

the current era of “pre-history” appropriately calls

“history”.4 Being designers however, quite the

opposite is true: we are naturally inclined to seek

shelter in the shadows that are threatened to be

obliterated by this overexposure – as these shad-

ows are, by virtue of not being “known”, pregnant

with potentiality and ambivalence. They are plac-

es of openness and imagination – and hence of

design.

This thesis sets out to recuperate, inhabit and de-

sign within the shadows of one specific technology

of “overexposure”: 3D Lidar scanning. It is a tech-

nology rapidly expanding throughout a variety of

10 11

Fig. 01Top: Google’s project for a mobile 3D scanner that “shares

our sense of space and movement”; Bottom: wearable Lidar research at the MIT AI-Lab.

INTR

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different disciplines ranging from archaeology to

forensics, conservation to fabrication, and from

the film-industry to robotics. Within architectural

practice, it is finding an increasing use as a survey-

ing tool that allows previously unimaginable levels

of precision and customisation during both the

design and building phase. And its use is about to

spread dramatically: with Google having recently

launched a mobile phone prototype with a built-

in 3D scanner and MIT developing scanners that

need “one photon per pixel” (rather like in Ster-

ling’s scenario), the technology is soon to become

small, cheap and ubiquitous.5

The point cloud (the set of measurements/points

created by the 3D scanner) will thus become

part of our “visual literacy” and will undoubtedly

change our spatial perception – maybe by con-

tributing to a new spatialisation (as Google’s 3D

scanners promise to do6) or by merely reinforcing

the triumph of screen-oriented (commodified) vi-

sion that marks our present-day experience.7 For

us, as architects, the shifts caused by scanning in

both the construction and the experience of the

built environment mean that we will have to start

designing not only with but also around and for

this new mode of vision.

If we are to do this, however, a healthy scepticism

towards scanning technology should balance the

12 13

embracing of its obvious potential and merits.

This thesis will therefore concentrate on the tacit

assumptions about the nature of scanning tech-

nology that precede its experience and use. For

it seems that new technologies of vision like scan-

ning always come packaged in the positivist prom-

ise of their own realism. Precisely this supposed

transparency and veracity of the instrument of

knowing lies at the basis of the imagined transpar-

ency of an overexposed, entirely knowable world.

It is the immaculate aura of realism and veracity of

the scanner – and hence the possibility of a shad-

owless world – that this thesis wants to challenge.

The process of physical testing and prototyping,

the first method of deconstruction of the point

cloud’s “reality effect”, will be the “stuff” on which

the thesis builds. We will adopt the hacker’s spirit

of technical scepticism and creative appropriation

and disassemble the insides of the scanner to find

its inherent shadows and glitches, only to then

reappropriate and “misuse” them as inhabitable

design spaces.

This physical deconstruction will go hand in hand

with the deconstruction of the ontological and

epistemological concepts (representationalism,

atomism or essentialism among others) on which

the “realism” of the scanner is based. Referenc-

ing to post-structuralist theory, theoretical physics

and science studies (and to Karen Barad in par-

ticular) the thesis will then formulate an alterna-

tive onto-epistemological framework that instead

emphasizes the material nature of knowing and

notions of becoming and multiplicity. Equally,

while revolving around and always returning to 3D

scanning technology, the thesis will extrapolate its

findings towards a critical analysis of contempo-

rary modes of governance.

This deconstructive stance towards technology,

philosophy and politics, however always finds it

implied counterpart in the formulation of alterna-

tive aesthetic understandings and creative strate-

gies. This will mean that we are able to formulate

critically informed design strategies that propose

new forms of integration of the point cloud in the

built environment. The thesis will therefore also

discuss two architectural design projects, which

emerged from my design-research. These proj-

ects propose an approach towards the point cloud

that, rather than treating the scanner as an imma-

terial and realist conveyer of truth, involve it as the

designer’s and the observer’s creative complicit in

the very forging of phenomena.

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1

High–tech realism and the (im)possibility of an open-ended

becoming

16 17

“The past will at some time become too ‘small’ to

be inhabited and shared by those alive.”

Rem Koolhaas, The Generic City8

A NEW UNIMPEACHABLE WITNESS

Exactly 50 years after the facts, a new unimpeach-

able witness enters the court to once and forever

settle the murder case of the century. The origi-

nal “unimpeachable witness” of John F. Kenne-

dy’s 1963 assassination, the film shot by Abraham

Zapruder, was never able to resolve the case irre-

futably, as the essential moment, the fatal head-

shot had slipped through the net of its low resolu-

tion. Until now, this fraction of a second between

Zapruder frame 312 and 313 were to be inhabited

by speculations of officials and conspiracy theo-

rists alike. In the recent television documentary

“Cold Case: JFK”, researchers use state-of-the-art

forensic tools to collect evidence to finally fill in

this knowledge gap and resolve this mother of all

whodunits.9 One of these tools is a 3D Lidar scan-

ner. The viewer flies above Dealy Plaza through

a high density and scientifically colourful point-

cloud, voiced-over with superlatives of high-accu-

racy and low-tolerance, and approaches the scene

of the crime.

More interesting than what the viewer is about to

find out, is the aura of high-tech realism that sur-

rounds the point cloud. The 3D scanner, accurate-

ly and impartially registering the scene, is treated

as the ultimate facilitator of objective knowledge.

This imagination of the scanner as a new camera

–Impeached for missing the essential moment:

Zapruder film frame 312 & 313.

18 19

–Realist superlatives of high-accuracy and low-tolerance: a

point cloud model of Dealey Plaza.

obscura is, I would argue, characteristic of an un-

derstanding of knowledge rooted in the Enlight-

enment that takes “observation to be the benign

facilitator of discovery, a transparent lens passively

gazing at the world”.10 It is an understanding of

knowledge that places the active (human) observ-

er/designer at the centre of a passive reality, which

can be taxonomised, mastered and consequen-

tially acted upon by imposing form upon its ma-

teriality. Such epistemological assumptions (and

their obvious design implications) are what this

thesis, through the deconstruction of the “reality

effect” of 3D scanning, will ultimately try to chal-

lenge.

The assumption of “forensic accuracy” surround-

ing 3D scanning lies tacit even within critical artis-

tic and political discourses that have recently em-

braced the technology. Eyal Weizman’s research

project “Forensic Architecture” for example uses

the technology to document sites of violence

and address them as novel types of evidence in

the framework of international humanitarian law.

He describes the 3D printed versions of scanned

scenes produced in this context as “a previous-

ly unknown form of object-making that could be

called – for lack of a better word – ‘documenta-

ry sculpture’”. These 3D prints, he continues, are

“not a representation but a documentation”.11

Although Weizman thus challenges the realities

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documented by the scanner, the realism of the

medium as such remains unchallenged.

THE TRAGIC FAITH OF THE ASDA TRIAD

However, the notion of “documentary sculpture”,

in its close alliance between 3D scanning and 3D

printing (an alliance also unquestioned within ar-

chitectural practice), might provide some clues as

how to start redefining scanning as a constructive

process rather than taking for granted its represen-

tational integrity. For rather than re-presenting or

re-constructing a pre-existing scene, the process

of meshing (the technical term for transforming

scanned points into a printable surface) performs

a very specific – and very partial – construction of

the scene based on the extrinsic coordinates of

the scanned scene. In its “superficial” fixation on

the extrinsic skin, the process, by constructing a

mesh, also constructs the boundaries between a

set of discrete objects and identities.

This construction of discrete identities is perhaps

nowhere as blatant as in the example of the “Mini-

Me”: 3D scanned/printed personal replica pup-

pets that are becoming incredibly mediatised and

popular, being now even provided by the super-

market ASDA as a while-you-shop service. ASDA

–3D scanning, 3D printing, 3D You: the Mini-Me creating the

discrete, docile identity of the Maxi-Me.

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advertises this service with the slogan “3D scan-

ning, 3D printing, 3D You”.12 This brings to mind

the notion that - without taking it all out on ASDA

- corporations create the discrete identity of the

customer they subsequently come to serve – just

like Foucault’s description of how “juridical sys-

tems of power produce the subjects they subse-

quently come to represent”.13 In other words, the

Mini-Me does not re-present but creates the dis-

crete biometric subject of the “Maxi-Me”, a sub-

ject that hence is observable and controllable, or

as Foucault, would put it, “docile”.

We will return to the implications of this control lat-

er, but let us now concentrate on the notion of cre-

ation that starts to unfold in the description of the

ASDA triad as a constructive sequence (scan-print-

you), not an equation (scan=print=you). This cre-

ation however is masked by representationalism

as a mere re-creation. Such representationalism

bases on the assumption that there are “ontolog-

ically separate entities awaiting representation”.14

It posits an essentialist ontology on the one hand,

in which these entities and their inherent attributes

(identities) thus exist prior to their representation

and a realist epistemology on the other hand, in

which they are represented through the static de-

scription of their extrinsic form.

The issue with this essentialism-realism is quite

simply that it puts at risk the very possibility of

change. For as Manuel De Landa, referring to

Deleuze, puts it: “if the idea of material objects

independent of human experience is based on a

conception of their genesis in terms of preexist-

ing essences, then we are back in a closed world

where all possibilities have been defined in ad-

vance by those essences”.15 In other words, it im-

plies the inability of the world and the subject to

“become” or to produce anything novel.

For us as designers, such a vision of a closing

world is problematic to say the least. It means that

our conversation with the material world, prede-

termined and transparent as it is, will hold little

surprise and in fact turns into a master monologue

of naming and imposing pre-existing categories.

In this scenario, the scanner, an instrument of our

taxonomy that only sees what it is programmed to

see, turns into a rather tragic apparatus, casting its

medusan laser rays onto a forever passed scene,

petrifying everything on its way, be it a building, a

person or an entire city, into something of a pom-

pei-esque mesh.

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–“Not a representation but a documentation”, Top:

Forensic Architecture’s 3D scanned/printed “documentary sculptures”, Bottom: plaster cast of a Pompeii victim

THE WITNESSES’ CREATIVE COMPLICITY

How do we then lead the scanner and ourselves

as designers out of the philosophical impasse of

a closing world, wholly anchored in the passed?

How can we start to engage in what Guattari as

an alternative calls a “‘futurist’ or ‘constructivist’

opening-up of fields of possibility”?16 Guattari

and Deleuze propose an ontology of constant

becoming, which bases on the difference-driven

process of the genesis of form rather than the

resulting static form of matter itself. This mor-

phogenetic approach, which they contrast with a

“hylomorphic” one, concentrates on the constant

flow of “spatio-temporal dynamisms” underlying

the extrinsic form. Such dynamisms are caused by

ever shifting intensity differences – rather like in

thermodynamics or the spontaneous creation of a

soap bubble. Morphogenesis thus has the poten-

tial to “generate new structures without homog-

enizing the components and without submitting

them to hierarchical control”.17 The attraction of

this model makes it unsurprising that architectur-

al theory and practice (among many other disci-

plines) of the last two decades have been deeply

saturated with Deleuzian ontology.18

What is distinctive about our enquiry, however, is

that it is inherently epistemological. So if we de-

fine the scanner as an epistemological apparatus

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that grants us access to this Deleuzian morpho-

genetic ontology of becoming, it is clear that we

also need an alternative epistemology that is able

to account for and incorporate this sense of be-

coming: “It follows that truth cannot be a corre-

spondence relation between representations and

a static, fixed set of beings, but an open-ended re-

lation of isomorphism between problems as actu-

alized in reality and problems as actualized in our

bodies and minds”.19 However, this description of

an “open-ended relation of isomorphism” is not

unproblematic either, as it is in fact still haunted

by the representationalist assumption that there

is a pre-existing (albeit becoming) world awaiting

representation by a (becoming) language or im-

age. This might explain why so many Deleuzian in-

spired architectural projects literally represent on-

tological concepts of morphogenesis, translating

a “folded” and “smooth” space into folded and

smooth architecture, mimicking forms, systems

and “codes” found in “nature”.

The reason for this, it seems, lies in the very par-

tition between ontology and epistemology. As I

will illustrate in the second chapter with regards to

our epistemological apparatus, the scanner, such

a separation of the known from the act of know-

ing, the act of measurement from a supposed

measurement-independent measured state is

untenable. For now, it is enough to state that the

entanglement of measurement and measured lies

within the material nature of the scanning process

and the physicality of the laser beam. As Karen

Barad states: “Practices of knowing and being are

not isolatable, but rather they are mutually impli-

cated. We do not obtain knowledge by standing

outside of the world; we know because “we” are

of the world. We are part of the world in its dif-

ferential becoming”. She therefore abandons the

binary model of ontology vs. epistemology and in-

stead speaks of onto-epistemology as “the study

of practices of knowing in being”.20

Firmly materially embedded within this onto-epis-

temology, the scanner now, instead of the design-

er’s passive epistemological tool, a “transparent

lens passively gazing at the world”, is endowed

with its own creative agency, performing and cre-

ating rather than merely representing phenome-

na. In Barad’s model of “agential realism” (not to

be confused with the representationalist realism

described above), “apparatuses play a crucial, in-

deed constitutive, role in the production of phe-

nomena”.21 The scanner is thus turned into a pro-

ductive agent, a creative complicit, that instead of

a conveying sameness and passedness becomes a

catalyst of difference actively creating multiplicity.

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DESIGNING A “CONSTRUCTIVIST” SCANNER

To arrive at this re-definition of the scanner as the

designer’s creative complicit and contribute to

Guattari’s “‘constructivist’ opening-up of fields

of possibility”, the following two chapters deploy

two different strategies: while the second one an-

alytically deconstructs the scanner, the third one

aesthetically reconstructs it. In the second chapter,

we will perform a dismantlement of the black box

of the scanner and scrutinise its different compo-

nents and constitutive algorithms. By “corpore-

alizing” the scanner – by forwarding a materialist

understanding of the scanner and its processes _

we will simultaneously dismantle its conception as

an objective “camera obscura”. The process of

“materialising” the digital point cloud will, rather

than make the point cloud physical (i.e. fabricat-

ing or “reifing” it, which would mean the above

described processes of meshing and printing), un-

cover the inherent physicality of the process of the

point cloud’s generation. Firstly, this physicality

entangles the scanner and the scene in a material

continuum of entangled knowing and becoming.

Secondly, within the physicality of the scanning ap-

paratus and within the diameter of its laser beam,

this chapter will recuperate notions of multiplici-

ty and uncertainty and challenge the reductionist

data manipulations that mask this multiplicity.

The third chapter will then draw the consequences

of this analysis towards the definition of affirmative

design strategies driven by and revolving around

this new materialist definition of the scanner. It

will therefore shift the focus from the multiplicity

within the point, towards a redefinition of relations

between the points and redefine the point cloud

through a relationality of open-ended becoming.

While these two strategies of decomposition and

re-composition can be differentiated and allocat-

ed in two different chapters, it will become clear

that they are in fact mutually implicated and that

the disassembly of the scanner will simultaneously

start unfolding its creative multiplicity.

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2

Bringing a gun to a gunfight:strategies of high-resolution

resistance

32 33

“Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a

Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-di-

mensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his

own Universe; of any other than himself he can

form no conception; he knows not Length, nor

Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experi-

ence of them; he has no cognizance even of the

number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality,

for he is himself his One and All, being really

Nothing.”

- Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many

Dimensions22

“The danger is in the neatness of identifications”

- Samuel Beckett23

THE EMANCIPATED PIXEL

TURNS NOSTALGIC

Blackboxing is where Unboxing usually ends. The

neologism “Unboxing” describes one of the more

bizarre phenomena of present day consumerism:

the unpacking of new consumer electronics, re-

corded and published on Youtube and elevated

into a quasi-creative act of public appropriation.

“Blackboxing”, in turn, describes the paradoxical

tendency of the efficient machine to obscure its in-

ner complexity – allowing the user to concentrate

on the mere inputs and outputs.24 The two terms,

delineated by the outer shell of the electronic de-

vice, are mutually supportive.

As Karen Barad states however, “apparatuses have

no inherent ‘outside’ boundary. This indetermina-

cy of the ‘outside’ boundary represents the impos-

sibility of closure—the ongoing intra-activity in the

iterative reconfiguring of the apparatus of bodily

production”.25 To start deconstructing the “reality

effect” of the scanner, the high-tech realism of our

new camera obscura, we will have to embark on a

sort of “augmented unboxing” that does not stop

at the boundary of the device but disassembles

the obscure insides of the scanner and unpicks its

anatomy, zooming down to the level of the single

point – and even photon.

34 35

Such a zoom-in on constituent technological com-

ponents, as an act of critical magnification, finds its

parallel in a contemporary practice of digital artist,

designers and hackers for whom the pixel has be-

come a preferred mode of artistic expression. The

pixel, for them, is the “grain of seeing/computa-

tion. Of computer vision… the viewpoint of that

other next nature, the robot-readable world”.26

The critical potential of this magnification lies in its

effort to recuperate the pixel, whose size is dwin-

dling into hopeless irretrievability in times of ex-

ponentially increasing resolution.

By recuperating the pixel, they demystify the re-

ality effect of high-resolution “phantasmagoric”

mass media – and ultimately also of techniques of

late capitalist governance that build upon them.

This “Noo-political” governance constructs the

aforementioned “docile” bodies not as much

through disciplining the body directly but by,

through embedded and omnipresent media, di-

rectly addressing the constructed subject’s mind

(or Noos in Greek).27 Adopting a “pixelated” point

of view and thus seeing “through the eyes of the

device”, is therefore a step towards the develop-

ment of techniques of resistance. In an overex-

posed world, “to become invisible is to become

smaller than or equal to one pixel”.28 –The emancipated pixel: becoming invisible by becoming a pixel. Screenshot from Hito Steyerl’s video installation How

Not to be Seen.

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–The aesthetic pixel and its comforting legibility. Top:

The Cloud by MVRDV; Bottom: Megabytes of Spring by Reed+Rader

All too often, however, this initially critical magni-

fication fizzles out into making its point (or pixel)

through a mere aesthetic of low-resolution. Such

retro aesthetic (think the 8-Bit pixels of early ar-

cade games) finds a sense of nostalgic comfort in

the recuperated legibility of the discrete pixel. As

a strategy of resistance, such pixel fetishism loos-

es its force as it fails to construct an answer that

measures up to the regime of high-resolution. By

designing a pixel on a retina display, this aesthetic

is bringing a knife to a gunfight.

If we then return our attention from the pixel to

our point and buckle up to perform a similar crit-

ical zoom-in, we will have to learn from this and

resist the comfort of low resolution by eventually

zooming out again and proposing strategies of

high-resolution resistance. Also, while doing this,

we will have to avoid lapsing into an aesthetic style

of the point cloud fetishism that is currently en-

gulfing academia and artistic practice alike – and

which without doubt will soon spill over into popu-

lar and consumerist culture.29 Looking at the world

from the point of view of the point will have to pro-

duce a rethinking rather than an image.

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MODULATING

THE SCHIZOPHRENIC POINT

It is hard not to pity the faith of the “miserable”

point evoked by the quote opening this chapter.

In Abbott’s novel Flatland, the protagonist vainly

tries to convince the stubborn point of the exis-

tence of dimensions, inspiring a “though of Plu-

rality” in its solipsistic mind. Our point – one of

many in the point cloud – is in a similar situation,

reduced to the weightlessness of its Cartesian

coordinates and hence “really Nothing”. But

does it really “know no Length, nor Breadth, nor

Height”? The answer is, quite simply, that is does:

the non-dimensional point in the point cloud is

but the abstracted outcome of a complex mea-

surement process involving many dimensions and

multiplicities.

The fact that the scanner’s laser beam has a

“Breadth” – a diameter of a couple of millimetres30

– has rather far reaching implications for the na-

ture of the resulting point. I want to illustrate this

describing a phenomenon called “edge noise”.

Edge noise occurs when a beam hits the edge of

an object and the other part of the beam travels

on to meet an object behind it.

The range sensor, determining the distance by

measuring the “time-of-flight” (the time it takes

for the beam to reflect off an object and return

to the scanner) receives a “mixed return” of two

time-of-flight values.31

The scanner deals with this by means of interpola-

tion: it creates an average of these two measure-

ment values, thus outputting a “fictional” point

between the first object’s edge and the second

object behind it.

It goes without saying that the scientific papers

discussing these “mixed pixels” are mainly con-

cerned with the development of strategies for the

identification and removal of these abnormal ar-

Time-of-flight measurement: distance (d) between scanner (S) and Target (T) = laser return time/2 x speed of light

T

Sd

BF

g

Mixed pixel/edge noise: an interpolated “ghost” measure-ment (g) between foreground (F) and background (B)

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–Mixed measurements points (marked in red) spreading

backwards from the edge of the foreground object

GRAZING SHOT - ONE SHOT, TWO HITS:EDGE NOISE LOGICS SCALE 2:1

LASER RAY DIAMETER: 3MM

hit 1: d (in meters)= tof A (return time of �light in sec)/2 x 1.334 x 109 sec / m (speed of light)

�ictional point (edge noise)d (in meters)= (d hit 1 + d hit 2) /2

hit 2: d (in meters)= tof B (return time of �light in sec)/2 x 1.334 x 109 sec / m (speed of light)

50

60

70

80

90

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0246

X

Points

Z

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tefacts – say the noise of dense vegetation (twigs,

leafs) for unmanned military vehicles.32 For us how-

ever, these “ghost points” are fascinating as they

start contesting the realism of the scanner and

reveal that underneath the reductionist represen-

tation of the non-dimensional point, there is a plu-

rality to be discovered – that the solipsistic point is

actually a schizophrenic point.

In fact – though this is an extrapolation that bears

more epistemological than practical relevance

– this schizophrenia is lingering in every point of

the point cloud: every measurement can be de-

fined as a “noisy” mixed measurement for even

when the beam isn’t split by hitting the edge of

a discrete object, it will always hit a surface in an

“abnormal” (meaning not perfectly geometrically

normal or orthogonal) way. What starts to crumble

here is the notion of atomism, the assumption of

an “uncuttable” smallest unit, that as “the pos-

tulation of individually determinate entities with

inherent properties”33, not only functions as the

basis of a realist understanding of the point cloud

but also as the basis for the very notion of the in-

dividual (similarly meaning “indivisible”), which we

have started critiquing in the first chapter.

How then do we start defining a positive notion

of this inherent mixed state – an understanding

that neither eliminates these “abnormalities” by

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filtering them out, nor “resolves” plurality in a di-

alectical synthesis of interpolation? Can we think

of these mixed pixels in a non-reductionist and

non-dialectical way, seeing them as fleeting inten-

sities that are neither foreground nor background,

but “included middles”34? Can we, and if yes, how

do we design these included middles?

The schizophrenic point is not only a powerful

metaphor for multiplicity but can also become

an instrument or a catalyst for multiplicity. This is

because understanding the nature of edge noise

also has a practical implication: it allows us to re-

arrange the equation describing ghost measure-

ments (g) as resulting from the interpolation be-

tween foreground (F) and background (B):

g=(F+B)/2

into:

F=2g-B

Translated, this reversal of the edge noise equa-

tion means that we are now able to actively create

and control a ghost measurement, deducting the

position of the foreground edge needed to create

it. The ability to thus consciously instrumentalise

and design the resulting edge noise provoked a

series of physical tests, which involved the scan-

ning of finely perforated screens.

Since the diameter and spacing of the perforation

of these screens is always smaller than the diame-

ter of the scanner beam, these screens effectively

are “all edge”. This way, every single measure-

ment going through the screen will produce a

“ghost point”, as every beam without exception

will partially hit the screen and partially hit the

background.

All measurements through the screen (E) create ghost measurements, the screen is “all edge”.

g

BE

g1

g2

g3

The differentiated aperture ratio defines precisely where be-tween fore- and background ghost measurements are created.

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Though initially producing rather scattered results,

the experiments became increasingly successful

by, among others, refining the perforation grid’s

resolution and by differentiating the aperture ra-

tio.

As the resolution of the screens and hence the

level of control over the resulting edge noise in-

creased, these initially open-ended analytical

“scanner eye test” evolved into something much

more powerful. Now able to design and build,

through the scanner, any fictional point cloud out-

come of choice, the screens, as deceivers of the

eye of the scanner, open up an entirely new realm

of illusion and phantasm. In this sense, they are

similar to the early nineteenth century phenakisti-

scopes (from the Greek phenakizein, “to deceive,

to cheat”), which instrumentalised the newly dis-

covered fallacy of the eye called the “afterimage”

to blend between two given images and create

the illusion of movement.35 The screens, as scan-

ner phenakistiscopes, employ a parallel method

of instrumentalising the fallacy of edge noise to

create illusory points that blend between two giv-

en measurements.

–The Edge Finder: a mask allowing one to see “through the

eye of the scanner”, the brass tube having a 3mm inner diameter, identical to that of the laser beam.

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–Resulting scan: the edge noise measurements

are marked in blue.–

Scanner, edge screen and background.

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–Resulting scan.

–Scanner and edge screen prototype C3.

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–Scattered result due to low edge resolution.

–Edge screen prototype B4, scale 1:4 (apertures ca. 1.4 mm).

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–Increased resolution and control over

the resulting edge cloud (blue).–

Edge screen prototype B7, scale 1:2 (apertures 0.1 - 0.8mm).

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–Controlled resulting edge cloud (blue).

–Reverse engineering the edge: counter-algorithm

calculating the perforation of foreground screen needed to create an given shape.

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–Nylon printed edge screen (see opposite)

–Counter-algorithm calculating the (evenly perforated) fore-ground geometry needed to create an ovoid shape in front

of a known (pre-scanned) geometry

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THE IRRELEVANT CHOICE OF

THE INDECISIVE PHOTON

There is a certain modernist-positivist naivety,

however, about the clear equations of this reverse

engineered edge and its suggestion of measur-

ability and control (even if over fictions) – so that

we might be at risk of developing a “realism of the

phantasm”. The reason is that, even if we have as-

signed “Length, Breadth and Height” to the mea-

suring process, we are still operating within these

purely geometrical definitions. Light has been

treated as an abstract geometric entity, the beam

as a homogenous cylinder performing calculable

interactions with other geometrical abstractions.

We have fallen, as Karen Barad would put it, into

the “representationalist trap of geometrical op-

tics”.36 To escape from this trap, we will now have

to shift our focus to physical optics and look at

what this cylinder of laser light is actually “made

of”.

Strikingly, in physics the experiment that has been

key for the demonstration of the nature of light,

bears a strong similarity to our own experimental

setup. In the famous double-slit experiment, a

plate pierced by two parallel slits is illuminated by

a coherent source of light (often a laser beam) while

the light passing through the slits is observed on

a screen behind the plate. While the experiment,

conceived around 1800, initially served to proof

the wave theory of light by demonstrating optical

interference in the projected light patterns, it later

came to illustrate what is called the wave-particle

duality. Light, according to this principle of duality,

exhibits properties of both matter (particles) and

energy (waves). These properties however, are not

simultaneously observable or measurable, as they

require a “particular choice of apparatus, provid-

ing the conditions necessary to give meaning to a

particular set of variables, at the exclusion of other

variables”.37

Moreover, apart from excluding the possibility of

other types of observation, every apparatus of

measurement unavoidably influences the nature

of the object observed. Again, it is precisely time-

of-flight range finders that are often used to illus-

trate this idea. By shooting light (as both matter

and energy) on the measured object, they essen-

tially “push” this object away and change the very

distance they are measuring. Similarly, by merely

turning on the light in a room, one minutely alters

the arrangement of the furniture within it. As prac-

tically irrelevant such descriptions may seem, they

do start to dismantle the “seperability of knower

and known” assumed by Newtonian (geometrical)

physics – and by our earlier naïve equations.38 En-

lightenment physics, by assigning physically and

conceptually separable positions to objects and

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–Niels Bohr’s drawings of the double-slit experiment (bot-tom) and his various (theoretical) apparatuses to measure

the behaviour of the diffracting light’s particles/waves.

observers, understood “observation to be the

benign facilitator of discovery, a transparent lens

passively gazing at the world“.39

By recorporealizing light – having given the medi-

um a body – the body of the observer (the scan-

ner) and the observed become inextricably entan-

gled. The term “remote sensing”, actually used

to describe scanning’s lack of physical contact40,

now receives an opposite, and rather literal, valid-

ity. The belief in the realist veracity of the scanner

starts to crumble while the “metaphysics of indi-

vidualism and the belief in representationalism”

are discarded in favour of the alternative material-

ist-realist onto-epistemology described in the first

chapter.41 The scanner cannot longer be seen as

the designer’s passive and immaterial camera ob-

scura but instead receives a certain creative com-

plicity. As such it plays a more active role as a pro-

ductive agent of measurement, not just indexing,

but actively creating the phenomena observed by

physically assaulting reality with its laser beams.

So let us now throw a new (physical) light on our

attempt to control and design these “ghost mea-

surements”. Zooming in further onto the laser

beam – and continuing our augmented unboxing

– we now encounter a new challenge: the beam is

not homogenous as the particles within the beam

are unevenly distributed (note that we decide for a

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mutually exclusive description of the beam as par-

ticles). In fact, there are different zones of density

and intensity within the laser beam.42 This again

has both philosophical and practical implications.

The former is that the beam is inherently differen-

tiated and exhibits multiplicity even before meet-

ing the multiplicity of its targets.

The practical implication of this heterogeneous

beam is that, even if we, with the perforated

screens, manage to create an experimental setup

in which the ratio of the beam diameter hitting the

screen to that passing through is perfectly known,

we are still unsure about (and not in control of) the

measurement the setup will produce. This is be-

cause the particles may be distributed throughout

the beam in a way that either more or less of them

than planned will either pass through or reflect off

the screen.

The obvious way to regain control and diminish

this uncertainty is by increasing the resolution of

An uneven particle distribution within the beam diameter makes the result, even with a known aperture ratio, uncertain.

g?

Increasing the perforation resolution reestablishes control over the resulting ghost measurement.

g

the perforation even further – to the point that ev-

ery single particle in the beam is confronted with

the same aperture ratio of the screen.

It is fair to say that, now that we have arrived at

the order of magnitude of a single photon (light

particle), we have in fact left the realm of practi-

cability and are starting to describe the problem

as a Gedankenexperiment (thought experiment)

rather than intending to actually solve it. The issue

now becomes not that a physical experiment at

such a scale is impossible, but rather that its out-

come is inherently uncertain. Niels Bohr, returning

to the double-slit experiment, described the pos-

sibility of shooting a single particle onto the slitted

plate and measuring through which slit it will trav-

el. The problem however, Bohr continues, is that

this measuring apparatus will unavoidably disturb

the very behaviour of the particle it is measuring as

the act of measuring will destroy the interference

pattern.43 Having zoomed in this far, we are now

confronted with the limits of control, as the uncer-

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tain behaviour of the single photon performing

our act of measurement implies the impossibility

of a total knowing.

In the meantime, the result of our high-resolution

screens has nevertheless become rather convinc-

ing. So although the “choice” of the “indecisive”

photon may be uncertain this choice has also be-

come, in the face of our techniques of high-reso-

lution design modulation, irrelevant.

THE UBIQUITOUS EDGE OF THE

HIGH-RESOLUTION CITY

The reason to dwell upon this “irrelevant” notion

of the photon’s choice goes beyond the success of

our phantasmogoric screens. For, as Karen Barad

argues, the “seismic shift in epistemology” which

followed the development of quantum physics

pervades all orders of magnitude, “from the small-

est particles of matter to large-scale objects”. The

fact that this “essential discontinuity is examined

on a micro-level does not mean it doesn’t influ-

ence every scale of reality”.44 Following Barad’s

impetus but going one step further than the or-

der of physical magnitude, I would argue that this

“quantum shift” can also become a useful meta-

phor to critically describe (and counteract) con-

temporary modes of governance.

Would it be audacious to describe what Gilles

Deleuze has called the “society of control” – in

analogy to our screens – in terms of resolution

and as a coping strategy with uncertainty? Before,

Foucault’s disciplinary societies operated by dis-

ciplining the abnormal through the apparatus of

physical boundaries and institutions – a physicality

that has given his theories an overwhelming reso-

nance in architectural discourse. Control societies

however operate on a much less graspable level:

having incorporated uncertainty, control ramifies

and mobilizes the abnormal through strategies

of modulation.45. As mentioned earlier, modula-

tion, instead of disciplining the body, addresses

the brain (Noos) directly through high-resolution

media, which, embedded and ubiquitous, come

to define a high-resolution urbanism. Rather than

imposing a certain conduit (“I am being watch and

hence should act correctly”), these modulations

induce the decision made by the “autonomous

subject” (“I want to act like this”) – replacing the

logic of coercion by the far more subtle logic of

persuasion.

The subtle smoothness of the society of control

is complete when the hard edge of the coercive

device (the building) disappears, not by becoming

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–The dissolving edge: The Go-Between Screens in

Broadgate, London, are noo-political apparatuses that, as Iain Borden points out, rather than physically prevent

passage, architecturally modulate the visitor’s self-regulatory judgment.46

immaterial but rather by increasing the resolution

of modulation to such an extent that it becomes

barely visible – but at the same time pervasive.

“The city of control”47 thus becomes – like our

screens – “all edge”. Its modulated citizens/con-

sumers are constantly moving and crossing this

ubiquitous and controlled edge. Inundated by a

(consumerist) sense of continuous and pervasive

choice, each singular choice of the citizen/con-

sumer becomes – like the choice of our photon

– irrelevant.

Should it then discomfort us that the “modulatory

interventions” of our screens emulate the logic of

a governmentality of control? I would argue quite

the opposite: the critical dismantlement of the

measuring apparatus – like that of the apparatus

of governance – is just the first step towards the

formulation of critical and aesthetic design strate-

gies that are able to perform a meaningful count-

er-agency against these very apparatuses. Such

aesthetic strategies should re-use, dis-use and in-

vert the mechanisms critically analysed and thus

– contrary to the defeatism of the critical magnifi-

cation’s nostalgic turn – extract positive and affir-

mative notions of both biopolitics, high-resolution

technology and the high-resolution city.48 Defining

these affirmative, aesthetic design strategies will

be the purpose of the next chapter.

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3

Orchestrating the edge: towards a punctualist-materialist

aesthetic

70 71

“When information supplants the old form,

story-telling, and when it itself gives way to sensa-

tion, this double process reflects an imaginary

degradation of experience.”

Walter Benjamin49

“All that is not information, not redundancy, not

form and not restraints—is noise, the only possi-

ble source of new patterns.“

Gregory Bateson50

THE ANXIOUS MESH

AND THE INTERSTITIAL SHADOW

Now that we have mastered the techniques to

instrumentalise the point’s noisy edge, the next

question is how we want to orchestrate it. This

last chapter shifts the attention from the decon-

structed point back towards the design of the

point cloud. First, we will attempt to transfer the

complex relationalities found hidden beneath

the point’s weightless Cartesian coordinates to

an equally rich and open-ended understanding

of the relations between the points. Then we will

extend these relations towards broader, non geo-

metric, issues of observation and design, both of

which are understood within the context of the

point cloud’s material embeddedness, which we

established in the previous chapter.

Our starting point again lies in the laser beam’s

stroke weight: not only is it, as we have analyzed,

accountable for the point’s divisibility, it also di-

vides the entire point cloud. Within the radial ar-

ray of measurements, it defines a succession of

concentric zones, describing different ranges of

exposure. Within a first “overexposed” zone, ev-

ery scanned object is sampled by multiple over-

lapping neighbouring beams. Within a second,

“underexposed” zone, an increasing amount of

geometry isn’t sampled at all. We will call the un-

72 73

–Tracing the interstitial shadows appearing between the laser beams. The circumference of the underexposure boundary

depends on the device’s resolution and beam diameter.

74 75

surveyed wedges that thus appear between the

beams “interstitial shadows”.

This notion of the interstitial shadow, as a shadow

integral to the very functioning of a device, could

in fact, similar to Virilio’s concept of technology’s

“integral accident”51, be applied to every form

of optical technology – say the time between the

frames of a video. Ironically then, the impossibility

of Virilio’s own prophecy of a “world without shad-

ows” is inherent to technology’s integral shadow -

as even the highest resolution will move but never

remove the contour of the integral shadow.52

More importantly however, these interstitial shad-

ows also cause an “integral anxiety”, a fear for the

unchartered territory between the samplings or

the frames. The interpolation that fills these shad-

ows – the libraries written to bridge the gap be-

tween frame 312 and 313 of the Zapruder tapes,

the meshing of the point cloud – are therefore

coping strategies that deal with the horror vacui

caused by the interstitial shadow’s knowledge

gap.

However, as the term interpolation suggests, these

anxious mechanisms are unable to add data that is

not already present within the samplings – so that

the “magic bullet” for example, neither visible in

Zapruder frame 312 nor 313, can never magically

appear in the interpolated frame. In fact, quite the

opposite is true: interpolation and meshing could

be described as reductionist operations as their

collateral damage is the removal of shadows as

places pregnant with potentiality for a multiplicity

of interpretations and imaginations.

Meshing, in fact, is just one in a whole array of

reductionist “manipulations” that are applied

during the processing of the scanner’s measure-

ments. Following Bruno Latour’s maxim “the more

manipulations, the better”53, these algorithms,

while abstracting the data further from the initial

values, make it more usable, eventually transform-

ing data into noiseless information. These manip-

ulations are the underlying reductionist machinery

sustaining the supposed transparency, realism

and control of the scanner described in the first

chapter. One of them has already been treated at

length: the translation of mixed time-of-flight data

into single weightless points. Other reductionist

manipulations are the various filters applied to the

point cloud as a whole. The filters, for example,

that identify and remove “edge noise”, are pro-

grammed to look for “stray points”: points that

exceed a certain distance threshold in relation

to neighbouring points.54 The evaluation of the

point’s (ab)normality is thus always defined as a

relation to other points.

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–Reverse forensics of anxiety: Zapruder frame 161 as seen

through the eye of the scanner. The sampled points, as op-posed to pixels, decrease in size with increasing distance,

leading to growing interstitial shadows.

78 79

5 m

(3.

335

. 108

sec)

10 m

(6.

671

. 108

sec)

15 m

(1.

001

. 107

sec)

20 m

(1.

334

. 107

sec)

25 m

(1.

668

. 107

sec)

30 m

(2.

001

. 107

sec)

35 m

(2.

335

. 107

sec)

40 m

(2.

669

. 107

sec)

full exposure

2x exposure3x....

1/2 exposure

1/4 exposure

INTERSTITIALSHADOW

ZONE

OVEREXPOSED ZONE

1/8 exposure

–Reverse forensics of anxiety: Tracing zones of under- and

overexposure in Zapruder Scan 161.

It is clear however, that as long as these relations

are defined as a function of distance, only certain

types of relationalities can be accounted for. If we

for example imagine scanning a lattice (say a piece

of fabric) and subsequently mesh it, the mesh will

connect neighbouring points, instead of points

belonging to the same strip, and thus become a

smooth and sealed surface. This process (appro-

priately called “shrink-wrapping” or “draping” in

3d modelling) cannot account for the interwoven

complexity and rich multiplicity of leaky relations -

let alone relations that are in constant flux.

THE SILENT DOUGHNUT

AND THE BECOMING POINT CLOUD

Looking for a descriptive tool that avoids

shrink-wrapping the point cloud through the re-

ductionism of purely Cartesian (metric) relations,

topology may seem to be an appropriate alterna-

tive. Topology is a branch of mathematics that de-

scribes geometries in terms of their relationships

rather than referring to their co-ordinates. As Man-

uel De Landa – elaborating Deleuze’s use of topol-

ogy as an alternative to the hylomorphic approach

described in the first chapter – explains, in topolo-

gy time thus gets assigned a “creative role”.55

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The creative role of time in a relational approach

to geometry lies in the fact that it can account for

processes of becoming or morphogenesis. To

quote the most classic example, a coffee mug and

a doughnut are, topologically speaking, the same

as the relationships within their geometry (for

example the amount of holes) are identical and

their shapes can be transformed into each other

in one continuous movement. Quite contrary to

many contemporary architectural appropriations

of topology – which use its notion of morphogen-

esis to legitimate (pseudo)evolutionary processes

that eventually crystallize geometry into an “opti-

mized” discrete form – topology describes “a flow

which does not allow the intensive process to be-

come hidden underneath the extensive results”.56

The reason however that topology might eventu-

ally seem inadequate for our purposes, lies less in

the awkward side-taste of its formalist misuse than

in its inherent limitation as an abstract description

of form – even when concentrating mainly on de-

form-ation and the properties preserved within a

constantly fluctuating form. To return to the classic

example: in topological space, a doughnut can be

become a cup and vice versa, but it won’t stand up

and start playing the piano. In other words, while

topology accounts for becoming, this becoming

is not truly open-ended. While surely these de-

scriptions don’t do justice to Deleuze’s intentions

for reappropriating topology57, eventually it is its

descriptive (as opposed to creative) nature that

seems unsatisfying for us.

Maybe a non-geometric (non-scientific) termi-

nology will serve better to define an affirmative

and open-ended aesthetic approach to the point

cloud. Therefore, I propose to use the term Punc-

tualism. Punctualism – not to be confused with

Pointillism58 – was a compositional technique,

closely related to serial music and used by com-

posers like Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez

in a series of post-war pieces. In a radical rejec-

tion of compositional thematicism and harmony,

Punctualism treated individual notes as “points of

intersections of parameters” that could engage

in more open and complex relations with other

notes/points than merely vertical (harmonic) or

horizontal (melodic) ones.59

If this rejection echoes our dismissal of discrete

identities and hylomorphism in favour of more

complex relationalities, our discovery of the mul-

tiplicity within the point finds it counterpart in

Punctualism’s description of the note/point as an

n-dimensional intensity at the intersection of pa-

rameters like pitch, duration, dynamics and attack

characteristics. A punctualists musical piece hence

was understood not as a “mass” or a “body”, but

rather as a “space” or a “gas”, “taking place” be-

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tween these points, the points merely “marking

the space in between”.60 What we here see open-

ing up again, is the indeterminate space between

the points/frames/notes/samplings, the “inter-

stitial shadow” as an unfinished and becoming

space of imagination and potentiality.

To return to our notion of orchestration/design,

this “punctualist” approach thus refrains from im-

posing a definitive “form” onto its design object.

Instead, it looseness the straps of the composer/

architect’s authorship towards an understanding of

morphogenesis that does not end in the design’s

“implementation” but forever continues within

the indeterminate space of the interstitial shadow

between its points – a space where the observer,

the contingent event and other agencies share au-

thorship by supplementing (but never completing)

the creation of emerging phenomena. It thereby

avoids the covert hylomorphism of many appro-

priations of topology (specifically parametricism),

which, though claiming to give up authorship

towards a “becoming” world, instead define an

even more heroic sense of authorship and mastery

over the emergent processes of morphogenesis

– an authorship dramatically culminating in the

“stoppage” of these high-resolution processes at

the single “resolution” of an “optimal” form.

Vital to this post-topological extended sense of

morphogenesis is the previously established ma-

terial onto-epistemological embeddedness of

both the designer and the observer. Firstly, this

means that the designer cannot longer stand out-

side or above material reality, as a subject acting

upon objects, but rather is merely one (construct-

ed) agential subject among countless other ma-

terial agents. This post-anthropocentric, or even

post-human, stance is one we share with “new

materialism”, an umbrella term designating a

range of philosophical, feminist and architectural

currents (among others) that align in their concern

to define and act within a non-hierarchic material

ontology.61 Within architectural theory and prac-

tice, this new materialism not only engenders an

alternative understanding of authorship and a re-

turn to hands-on materiality, but also a heightened

sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of the hu-

man and non-human “other”.62

The nuance and contribution of our approach

then, lies in the extension of this (primarily ontol-

ogy based) new materialism into the epistemo-

logical realm of the observer. Positing a materi-

ally entangled epistemology – Barad’s notion of

“knowing in being” –, we can extend the process

of morphogenesis beyond the reach of the de-

signer into an extended authorship of the (scan-

ner’s) material practice of knowing. 63

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However, in danger of lapsing into endless and

abstract formulations of intentions, we will now

attempt to make this argument more tangible by

jumping straight into the description of two de-

sign projects that try to define a “punctualist-ma-

terialist” architecture. Subsequently, we will draw

further conclusions on how a punctualist-material-

ist architecture could operate.

TWO PUNCTUALIST-MATERIALIST PROJECTS

“The Fountain Man at Buttes Chaumont”, the first

project that I will discuss only briefly, is a choreo-

graphic piece, performed at the Vesta Temple of

the Buttes Chaumont Park in Paris and solely legi-

ble by the eye of the scanner. A lantern, a concen-

tric array of mirrors enclosing the scanner forms

the centre of a series of carefully timed move-

ments, coordinated with the rotation of the scan-

ner and executed by six performers. The mirrors

reflect the laser rays and create fictional geome-

tries within the resulting point cloud. The result-

ing scan, an uncanny scene of fictional columns

and fictional bodies, dis- and reassembled by the

mirrors and floating suspended in mid-air, evokes

the final apocalyptic scene of surrealist poet Louis

Aragon’s “A feeling for nature at the Buttes Chau-

mont”.64

Defying the realism of the scanner without decon-

structing it, this 3-dimensional exquisite corpse,

by sampling, copying and pasting fractions of

scanned scenes, still builds upon the tacit assump-

tion of the initial realism of these very scanned

fractions. Predating my development of the edge

noise manipulation, the project is still stuck in the

“representationalist trap” of geometric optics (re-

flection) rather than operating within the realm

of physical optics (diffraction).65 Also, although

setting in motion the performers, which circulate

around the scanner, the project finally freezes their

becoming movements into the extrinsic coordi-

nates of the resulting static point cloud.

“The Masks of Fleet Street” is a second piece that,

while continuing the idea of a point cloud perfor-

mance, casts off some of the realist and hylomor-

phic naiveties of the early stage. It inserts a series

of “counterfactual scanning Masks“ along the ex-

tent of Fleet Street in the City of London. Fleet

Street, long-time home of (and still synonym for)

the British national newspapers is chosen as a site

where the sharp edge between the factual and

fictional has been historically blurred, the media

fabulating and sensationalising stories to feed the

public’s insatiable demand for spectacle. Architec-

turally, it provides a dense visual field of architec-

tural styles, urban typologies, building scales and

materials – a complexity which the realist scanner,

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as the tragic apparatus we have described in the

first chapter, would have homogenized and frozen

under a think coat of Townscape nostalgia.66

The function of the Masks then, is to propose a

non-normative reading of the city by inserting

fractures of the imaginary into the supposed ve-

racity of the point cloud. The Masks are finely

perforated screens (the perforation basing on the

inverted edge noise algorithms described in chap-

ter two), creating clouds of edge noise between

themselves and Fleet Street’s facades, recesses

and side alleys. These illusionary apparitions in

the point cloud re-enact scenes of the fabulated

stories of Fleet Street’s media. Staged in a near

future scenario of ubiquitous and wearable scan-

ning, the anamorphic apparitions appear only for

a fraction of second in the communal real-time

point cloud, constantly fed by moving scanning

agents. Together, these agents and the Masks

transform the street into an imaginary procession,

a high-tech surrealist performance only decodable

by the scanner.

TWO PUNCTUALIST-MATERIALIST PROJECTS:

IMAGES

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92 93

94 95

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98 99

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108 109

110 111

112 113

114 115

116 117

118 119

–Previous pages:

The Fountain Man at the Buttes Chaumont: scanner lantern (88-89); choreographic annotations (90-91); resulting scan

(92-93);Shadow tracings, the animation as a digital-material assem-

blage (94-97); The Mask of Fleet Street: fleeting urban agents (98-99); the street as procession (100-101); masks and apparitions (102-109); collective anamorphosis in the communal point cloud (110-113); scanning agents, ubiquitous scanning (114-15); scaling, fabricating and editing Fleet Street’s point cloud

(116-117).

ASPECTS OF A PUNCTUALIST-MATERIALIST

ARCHITECTURE

The Masks of Fleet Street deconstruct the high-

tech realism of the scanner in several respects.

First of all, there is the rather literal notion of count-

er-factual content, smuggled into the supposedly

realist set of data (literally “given”) constituting

the point cloud archive. Also, the Masks challenge

assumptions of the atomism of the discrete iden-

tity by introducing notions of multiplicity both on

the level of the point and of the cloud. Each sin-

gle point, created by, or rather through the masks,

is in itself a mixed measurement, a sum of back-

, middle- and foreground of which the equation

is uncertain and noisy. Furthermore, the Masks

have the potential to destabilize and subvert the

Cartesian space in which the scanner’s realism

is anchored – enabling for example for multiple

overlapping geometries to simultaneously occupy

one single section of the point cloud’s xyz-space.

They thus force us to reconceptualise this space as

n-dimensional – n being the amount of possible

relations between its singularities.

The resulting orchestrated “edge clouds” are, like

the points themselves, what Deleuze and Guattari

call “assemblages”: compositions of heteroge-

neous objects and elements that enter in fleeting

and non-hierarchical relations with each other.67

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The heterogeneous elements that make up these

assemblages – the scanner itself, the background

of the city, the inserted screens, the passerby walk-

ing in between both, the (human or non-human)

scanning agent, the constantly fleeting air particles

caught in the beam’s diameter, the changing tem-

perature expanding and contracting the screen’s

apertures – become indistinguishably blended

into one material continuum of shared authorship

over the resulting phenomena. To speak in Barad’s

terms, these elements “intra-act” - a notion that,

as opposed to “inter-action”, deconstructs the

idea of the “prior existence of independent en-

tities”.68

With Barad and through our material understand-

ing of the scanners’ knowing agency, we can then

extend the Deleuzian assemblage from the realm

of ontology into that of epistemology. As the

Masks have shown, this entails an important shift

regarding the status of the digital. For even if the

materiality of the digital is logically implied within

the above-discussed “new materialist” approach,

it is still mostly regarded as subordinated to its

“real” “materialisation”. In such a design process,

the digital is regarded as the virtual that isn’t yet

or is no longer actual (the model, the visualisation,

the photo), therefore always marking the absence

of the actual. In other words, the point cloud is

no longer (“reality) and not yet (mesh) “material”.

Our punctualist-materialist approach instead op-

erates not only through the digital towards the ac-

tual, but also through the actual towards the dig-

ital – short-circuiting a linear design process and

eventually melting the digital and the actual, now

both thoroughfares, into one inseparable material

continuum.

Every point or pixel within the material continuum

of the onto-epistemological assemblage is inextri-

cably actual and digital, a non-dialectical relation-

ship which cannot be “resolved” even through the

highest resolution. In this sense, we cannot longer

speak about a (point) cloud of digital information

“descending” on our cities as an “augmented”

reality, a digital layer draped in front of the intact

background of the “real” city.69 Rather, the digital

is enmeshed within the city’s very materiality and

becomes an embedded part of both the design

and experience of an “unresolved high-resolution

city”.

Like this city, the assemblages of points and point

clouds are in a constant state of becoming that

resists the crystallization into a definitive form,

as their nomadic elements constantly shift to en-

gage in new productive relations (in the case of

our screens: interpolations) with other elements. It

will have become clear that the constant becom-

ing of the Fleet Street Masks and the nomadic

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point cloud they generate are difficult to convey

in still images – which is how they are presented

in this document. The design project therefore,

rather than through still images, is represented

through animated films.70 These have the advan-

tage of both being time-based and allowing to

blend between the original point cloud, the en-

riched “edge cloud”, historical and self-made

footage and animated drawings that explain the

cloud’s morphogenesis. The medium revealing

the Masks’ assemblages thus becomes digital-ma-

terial assemblage itself.71

Finally – to return to our concern with governance

–, this onto-epistemologically understanding of an

embedded material digitality allows us to enact,

through design, more effective forms of resistance

towards a high-resolution governance that op-

erates exactly through this enmeshed reality. By

shifting our attention from the ontological material

“thingness” as the motor of design towards a un-

derstanding of epistemological processes as ma-

terially embedded within our own design practice

and experience, we have gained “access” to the

modulatory processes monopolised by this gover-

nance. The Masks have then become Noo-political

instruments of high-resolution resistance. They do

not block the scanner’s rays like shields – discrete

boundaries that allow inhabiting a classical notion

of shadows, hiding identities/bodies from the line

of sight of Foucauldian surveillance. Instead they

inhabit the integral interstitial shadow, emulating

and modulating the pervasive edge of Deleuzian

control society.

Masks, rather than hiding identities, create alter-

native identities. Going further than “becoming

invisible by becoming a pixel”, they don’t just

match up to the resolution of the confronted tech-

nologies but outperform it, breaking open the

atomic pixel like a nutcracker and reassembling

it fragments into high-resolution assemblages.

These assemblages thus not only define a new

and affirmative aesthetic of the point cloud, but

have the potential to open up broader questions

that allow for alternative and novel definitions of

subjectivities of multiplicity and becoming.CH

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CONCLUSION

Our “miserable point” has come a long way in-

deed. In the last three chapters we have led it

through a whole series of conditions, from its

initial miserable solipsism over tragic nostalgia,

schizophrenia and indecisiveness towards a state

of open-ended becoming. As was the case for Ab-

bott’s point however – the “romance” of Flatland

being a soundboard for his critique of Victorian

society – the “point” of our point by far exceeds

its initial geometrical habitat. The essential dis-

continuity within the scanner’s point thus stretches

out far from its own non-dimensional realm and

enables us to draw conclusion for many orders of

magnitude, be they physical, technological, philo-

sophical, political or design-related.

First of all, regarding a broader understanding of

(emerging) technologies, our critical magnifica-

tion, deconstruction and creative appropriation

of 3D scanning has made clear that such a treat-

ment of a technology cannot leave intact its ini-

tial immaculate state of realism. Our study of the

scanner’s “edge noise” did not only mean that we

could revert its mechanisms and manipulate its

outcome, it also lead to the conclusion that the

scanner’s every measurement (also without our in-

tervention) is inherently mixed and manipulated.

Such a critical and creative reappropriation thus

induces a sustained change in our ways of seeing

and (similar to how the proliferation of Photoshop

has made us assume that every published image

might well be edited) thus produces a new and in-

herently more critical visual literacy.

Philosophically, the point’s multiplicity has enabled

us to challenge notions of atomism and essential-

ism that are responsible for reductionist defini-

tions of discrete identities and static subjectivities.

Also, our excursions into theoretical physics and

physical optics through testing and theorizing the

physicality of the laser beam have allowed us to

draw conclusions regarding the material embed-

dedness of processes of measurement – and more

generally processes of knowing. This, in turn, has

urged us to challenge the binary trap of represen-

tationalism and introduce the notion of onto-epis-

temology, in which knowledge and the known are

inextricably and materially entangled. Within this

material continuum, novel and becoming relation-

alities emerged that eventually allowed us to cast

of a predetermined, realist future and imagine

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“constructivist” alternatives for an open-ended

future.

Furthermore, we have repeatedly indicated the

political implications of our technological critique.

The dismantlement of technologies like 3D scan-

ning, while leading to a better understanding of

the high-resolution techniques and media used

by a contemporary governance of control, at the

same time serves as a powerful metaphor for a

critical analysis of governance itself – this is what

we have called “high-resolution governance”.

This high-resolution governance functions on two

levels. On an underlying level, its actual opera-

tion bases on the acceptance of uncertainty, dis-

continuity and multiplicity, managing rather than

excluding them – and thus operating very much

like our perforated screens that modulate the par-

ticles in the laser beam. On a more visible level,

high-resolution governance sustains the illusion of

subjectivity, identity and the discrete body (as our

analysis of the biometrics of meshing and noise

filtering have shown), its high resolution masking

the grain (point/pixel) of its underlying operation.

The critical role of our design-research lies not just

in the exposure of these subjectivities as prod-

ucts of certain technologies and modes of gover-

nance but also in its implication that every process

of subjectification is inherently creative. This, in

turn, invites us to actively participate in alternative

processes of subjectification. Design in this sense,

becomes instrumental towards the enactment of

these alternative subjectivities. In the case of the

scanner, exposing the multiplicity of its material

processes, hidden underneath the realist illusion

of an immaterial and objective lens, unleashes

an onto-epistemological multiplicity that trans-

forms the point cloud – and the design proposal

tailored for it – into active agents and engines of

multiplicity. Enmeshed within the digital-mate-

rial assemblage of the high-resolution city, this

allows for design interventions that catalyse new

aesthetic and creative, rather than conventional

and normative, readings of the city. The bound-

ary between the analytical act of exposure and the

creative act of participation thus dissolves – and

with it the boundary between research and de-

sign. Research, in this sense, cannot be defined as

merely “underpinning” design and neither can we

describe design as an outcome or illustration of

our research. Rather they are aesthetic and agen-

tial practices that are mutually implicated and ma-

terially entangled.

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ENDNOTES

1 VIRILIO, P. (2000) The information bomb. London: Verso: 15-6.

2 TANIZAKI, J. (1977) In praise of shadows. New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books: 30.

3 STERLING, B. (2010) Vernacular Video [Lecture at the Vimeo Awards Festival], New York, 9 October.

4 Quoted by DOCTOROW, C. (2008) ‘Leaving Behind More Than a Knucklebone’, Journal of Evolution and Tech-nology, v.19, no.1: 1.

5 Hardesty, L. (2013), ‘3-D images, with only one photon per pixel`, MIT News, November 28, http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2013/3-d-images-with-one-photon-per-pixel-1128 (accessed 23 April 2014). Google’s 3D scanning phone in fact doesn’t use Lidar but a 3D infrared camera similar to the Microsoft’s Kinect scanner.

6 The project aims to create “mobile devices that share our sense of space and movement, that understand and perceive the world the same way we do”, Google Project Tango, www.google.com/atap/projecttango (accessed 23 April 2014).

7 Cf. Braodotti’s notion of scopophilia, BRAIDOTTI, R. (2006) ‘Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology’, Theory, Culture & Society, no.23: 204.

8 KOOLHAAS, R. (1998) S,M,L,XL. New-York: Sigler: 1248.

9 Cold Case JFK (2013) “Nova”, PBS, 13 November.

10 BARAD, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quan-tum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press: 97.

11 WEIZMAN, E. and DI CARLO, T. (2012) ‘Dying to Speak: Forensic Spatiality’, Log, no.20: 33.

12 http://your.asda.com/news-and-blogs/create-detailed-miniature-versions-of-you-and-your-family-with-3d-printing-at-asda (accessed 23 April 2014).

13 Judith Butler quoted by Barad (2007) 47.

14 BARAD, K. (2003) ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs, no. 28: 807.

15 DELANDA, M. (1999) ‘Deleuze and the Open-Ended Becoming of the World’, Manuel De Landa Annotated Bibliography, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/delanda/pages/becoming.htm (accessed 23 April 2014).

16 GUATTARI, F. (1989) ‘The Three Ecologies’. Tranlated by C.Turner, New Formations, no.8: 132.

17 De Landa (1999).

18 Cf. FRICHOT, H. (ed.) (2013) Deleuze and architecture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

19 De Landa (1999).

20 Barad (2003) 829.

21 Barad (2007) 207.

22 ABBOTT, E. A. (1885) Flatland: a romance of many dimensions. Boston: Roberts Brothers: 141-2.

23 BECKETT, S. (1929) ‘Dante, Bruno, Vico, Joyce’, in S. BECKETT (ed.) Our exagmination round his factification for incamination of work in progress, Paris : Shakespeare and Co: 6.

24 LATOUR, B. (1999) Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press: 134.

25 Barad (2003) 816.

26 JONES, M. (2011) ‘Sensor-Vernacular’, Berg Blog, 13 May, http://berglondon.com/blog/2011/05/13/sensor-ver-nacular/ (accessed 23 April 2014). James Bridle coined the term ‘New Aesthetic’ to designate this movement.

27 HAUPTMANN, D. (2010) ‘Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information: Introduction’, in D. HAUPTMANN, W. NEIDICH & A. ANGELIDAKIS (eds) Cog-nitive architecture: from bio-politics to noo-politics, Rotter-dam: 010 Publishers: 10-11.

28 STEYERL, H. (2013) How Not To Be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational .Mov File. Video Installation. Venice Art Biennale 2013.

29 E.g. some rock bands (Radiohead, Linkin Park, Broken Social Scene) have started using point cloud graphics for their music videos.

30 The Lidar scanner used for my research is the FARO Focus3D and has a beam diameter specification of 3mm.

130 131

31 To be precise, the Focus 3D’S measurement is in fact phase-shift based, a process similar to time-of-flight and which also creates “edge noise”.

32 E.g. TULEY, J. et al. (2005) ‘Analysis and Removal of Artifacts in 3-D LADAR Data’, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Car-negie Melon University, Pittsburgh, April 2005, 2203-10.

33 Barad (2007) 137.

34 Cf. Guattari (1989) 141.

35 The focus of Jonathan Crary’s brilliant analysis of such eye-deceiving devices focuses on the “recorporealisation” of the observer’s eye and was of great inspiration for my up-coming attempt to materialize the “scanner eye”. CRARY, J. (1990) Techniques of the observer: on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

36 BARAD (2007) 78.

37 Ibid. 115.

38 Ibid. 107.

39 Ibid. 97.

40 MANOVICH, L. (1993) The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Computer. Ph.D thesis, University of Rochester, 124.

41 BARAD (2007) 107.

42 TULEY (2005) Fig. 1.

43 And due its indeterminacy this observation-disturbed behavior cannot, as opposed what Newton assumed, be compensated by the measurement, BARAD (2007) 119.

44 Ibid. 252.

45 My description of Deleuze’s notion of control societies will build freely on MOORE, N. (2013) ‘Diagramming Con-trol’, in P. RAWES (ed.) Relational architectural ecologies: architecture, nature and subjectivity. Abingdon and New York: Routledge: 56-70.

46 BORDEN, I. (2000) ‘Iain Borden Thick Edge: Archi-tectural Boundaries in the Postmodern Metropolis’, I. BORDEN, J. RENDELL (eds) Intersections: architectural histories and critical theories. London: Routledge: 232-5. Cf. Moore (2013) 66.

47 HAUPTMANN, D. (2011) ‘Noo-Architecture and the Internet-Of-Things’, Volume Magazine: The Internet of Things, no.28: 18.

48 This stance builds on examples like Donna Harraway and her notion of “stepping out of the negativity circuit” of criticism and instead extracting affirmative positions towards technology/governmentality, cf. BRAIDOTTI (2006) 206.

49 Quoted by GUATTARI (1989) 147.

50 BATESON, G. (1987) Steps to an ecology of mind. Northvale, NJ: Aronson: 294.

51 VIRILIO, P (2001) ‘From Modernism to Hypermod-ernism and Beyond. Interview with John Armitage’, in J. ARMITAGE (ed.) Virilio Live. Selected Interviews. London: Sage: 16.

52 It should however be noted that the question of reso-lution becomes irrelevant at the moment when beam and point are rendered weightless and the shadow effectively becomes pervasive.

53 LATOUR, B. (2014) ‘The More Manipulations, the Better’ in: C. COOPMANS (ed.) Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 347-50.

54 e.g. TULEY (2005).

55 DELANDA (1999).

56 DELANDA (1999).

57 Nor does it to others, like Henri Bergson, who have applied topology outside of its original mathematical context, cf. RAWES, P. (2008) Space, geometry and aesthet-ics: through Kant and towards Deleuze. Basingstoke, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 121-153.

58 Pointillism – and even more its technical variant Divi-sionism – were, as opposed to Punctualism, both inherently atomist (the unblended individual colour dot) and themati-cist/figurative.

59 EGGEBRECHT, H.H. (1974) ‘Punktuelle Musik’, in: H.H. EGGEBRECHT (ed.) Zur Terminologie der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart: Musikwissenschaftliche Ver-lags-Gesellschaft: 163.

60 Ibid. 167.

132 133

61 Cf. McKIM, J. (2014) ‘Radical Infrastructure? A New Realism and Materialism in Philosophy and Architecture’, in N. LAHIJI (ed.) The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture, London: Bloomsbury Publishing: 133-50.

62 Cf. GOODBUN, J. and JASCHKE, K. (2012) ‘Architec-ture and relational resources: Towards a new materialist practice’, AD_Scarcity: architecture in an age of depleting resources), no.82: 28-33.

63 Maybe more ontology-based versions of New Materialism, like Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter”, have found more resonance in architectural theory because their emphasis on a shared “thingness” is more directly translat-able to familiar architectural terms than Barad’s attention towards practices of knowing.

64 Caption quotes are taken from ARAGON, L. (1971). ARAGON, L. (1971) Paris peasant. London: Cape: 143-158.

65 BARAD (2003) 803.

66 I am hereby referring to the preservationist discourse in the official Fleet Street planning policy, DEPARTMENT OF PLANNING, CORPORATION OF LONDON (1996) Fleet Street Conservation Area Character Summary, https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/services/environment-and-plan-ning/planning/heritage-and-design/conservation-areas/Documents/Fleet%20Street%20Character%20Summary (accessed 23 April 2014).

67 DELEUZE, G., and GUATTARI, F. (1987) A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, passim.

68 BARAD (2003) 815.

69 ‘…how we might address the atmospherics not of rain clouds but those of the data clouds currently descending over our city streets’, SHEPARD, M. (2011) ‘The Common Sense. Interview with Vincent Schipper’, Volume Magazine: Internet of Things, no.28: 5.

70 These can be watched on my Vimeo website: https://vimeo.com/user14707079

71 Cf. Deleuze and Guattari’s description of their own book as an “assemblage” with the outside, against the book as image of the world”, DELEUZE (1987) 23.

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136

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the following people for their generous support, advice and inspiration:

Peg Rawes

Bob Sheil, Emmanuel Vercruysse, Kate Davies

Matt Shaw, Will Trossell and the Toms (ScanLAB)

Jon Goodbun

My family and Mara

Chris Burm, for her continuing and unconditional support.

IMAGE CREDITS

www.google.com/atap/projecttango/(p10)____http://new-soffice.mit.edu/2013/3-d-images-with-one-photon-per-pix-el-1128(p10)____http://www.jfk-info.com/(p16)____http://

www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/cold-case-jfk.html(p18)____ http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/3D-printer-gives-Der-by-shoppers-chance-make-mini/story-20312880-detail/

story.html(p20)____http://www.forensic-architecture.org/explorations/documentary-sculpture/(p24)____http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/How-Vesuvius-Bur-

ied-A-Pompeian-Family-2.jpg/(p24)____ http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/may/31/hito-steyerl-how-not-to-be-seen/

(p35)____ http://www.dezeen.com/2011/12/08/the-cloud-by-mvrdv/(p36)____http://bingbangpouf.com/2011/01/09/

megabytes-of-spring-by-reedrader/(p36)____TU-LEY(2005)2206(p40)____BARAD(2007)79,182(p60)____BOR-DEN(2000)232(p66)____If not otherwise indicated: images

by author.`