Aligning the analog, digital and hyperreal: Software errors as design exploration drivers

Paper i proceeding, 2021

This work explores the relevance of photogrammetry-generated errors for contemporary architectural design. Unlike approaches featuring correction or elimination of such errors, this study demonstrates how they can be accommodated in the design process to expand its exploratory boundaries and emancipate the designer from the need of ultimate control. The work also highlights the relevance of software error explorations in the context of modern media culture theory and critical discourses on computer-generated imagery. By exploring the errors of photogrammetry, the study sought to highlight its potential as a creative exploration medium instead of a mere representation tool, using new interventions to an existing building as an experimental brief. Conducting the explorations within the phil-osophical framework of Jean Baudrillard's four orders of the image, and relating them to contrasting discourses, allowed to coin their most important creative and esthetic values. It revealed how surplus, leftover and undesirable data can be harnessed to provide a crit-ical trajectory, through computation, to fields like historic preservation and adaptive reuse. The study concludes by proposing that photogrammetry errors, although distancing the digital representation from an accurate depiction of analog reality, do not deprive it of new meaning. Conversely, they generate new esthetic, spatial and functional qualities that uncover alternative, critical ways of architectural creation. Conducting error explorations in the context of philosophies debating the value of the real and hyperreal increases their discursive potential, legitimizing the agency of software errors in architectural computing.