343 / Kyle Troyer: Postdigital Mishaps
Kyle Troyer from Kent, United States; “Kyle Troyer is a current senior in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Kent State University pursuing his Bachelor of Science in Architecture. Kyle has worked in DS Architecture's Kent and Cleveland office before accepting two Research Assistant positions for faculty in the college. He is interested in theory-based work that fosters a dialogue alongside contemporary architects and artists. His work reflects on the possibilities, challenges, and limitations of contemporary design in the realm of academia.”
University: Kent State University
Professor(s): Jean Jaminet
Instagram Username: @kyle.archi
Name of Project: Postdigital Mishaps
Project Description: We live in the time of the postdigital where we are being overwhelmed by algorithms and the distinction between the digital and physical is blurred. Instead of technology being extraordinary and limited, it is now much more pervasive and altogether too familiar to our everyday lives. The abundant mass of online resources and models we have accumulated over time have not disappeared; rather we bury them with more of our stuff. When breaking ground for this new campus building, archaeologists discovered a ground overcrowded with objects. The archaeologists soon abandoned the cause once realizing the mundane and unwanted nature of the accumulation.
The result is a project that remains sensible to computation as an inescapable part of our reality. It explores the irresponsibilities of photogrammetry, texture mapping, and insertion of materiality in today's postdigital world. It plays with the current recognition of our true state of the digital, and exaggerates it similar to how the Baroque interpreted the Renaissance. Images of Borromini's San Carlo Quattro Fontane are photo-mapped in incorrect ways and given physical artifact to trace the consequences of the image's presence throughout the design. The image is then removed to provoke a ruin of irresponsibilities. The image of the entrance to the church has been applied to the corner of the building, due to the frontal perception the corner holds within the urban ensemble. Therefore, the image is stripped from its previous identity of entrance, forcing it to become a new thing in and of itself.
The plan of the church is correctly applied to correspond with the physical artifacts of the image of the facade. The consequences are poche disengaged from the wall, existing as its own autonomous object externally, while remaining contingent to the image as a whole. The section of San Carlo is applied in a location of perceivable depths. The poche of the section itself becomes mishaps found in the material of which it is projected on to, tracing the consequences of the image through the body of the architecture to behave similar to the functionality of the section.
In some locations, brick as a texture is misapplied. While its out-of-scale joints begin to create seams that connect back to the original design, its pixelation at first glance can also be mistaken for correctly applied brick. Materiality is irresponsibly applied in multiple ways. Brick becomes an answer to cladding instead of structure, interior cladding is applied externally, travertine marble (a novel material) is used in abundance, and a curtain gets draped onto rear elements to exaggerate the importance of the building's frontal considerations as well as the unwanted quality of having a library to house our digital accumulation we no longer want.
