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.Through the (Digital) Looking Glass
Author: Tobias Klein

Tobias Klein explores the narrative relationship between technologies and the poetic in a digitally driven environment. His field of research includes: synthetic topographies, virtual tectonics and digital ornament.

There is a certain scale-less quality to the virtual world situated within the computer screen. As a consequence, perhaps there is a reversed logic to the digital environment, and how it affects our perception of the real world.

Gilles Deleuze defined the virtual world as an inherited property carried within every object. It is neither its reality, nor merely what it could have been, but rather what it is imagined to be¹. ‘Virtual’ is therefore taken to describe a potential state that could become ‘actual’. At the same ontological level as possible, real, and potential, virtual is that which is not real, but displays the full qualities of the real. The prototypical example is a reflection in a mirror: it is already there, whether or not I am present.

It follows that a virtual object may release a real effect; our perception of it is very real, even if the object is not. But in the computational environment, with its simulative forces - reactive and proactive, scripted or merely sculpted - objects consist of infinitive points within a virtual zone, like surfaces with a non-descriptive thickness of zero and an infinite number of Monad. They are like control points that in themselves are similar to Leibniz’s² ideal construction of the Monad. They are integral in the concept of their existence, yet when composed into an entire construct, they are able to unfold an entirely different world.

Within this world, Alice³ is my protagonist. It is she who defines possible ontological space with her body and her imagined physicality. Traditionally architecture would describe her body with fixed parameters, including triangulation and approximation, to define a series of closed static orders and rigid geometric constraints. This method generates a discreet, ideal, fixed geometry, outlining the contours of her physical existence. In Wonderland though, Alice is not a real person more of a fluctuating construct: the ‘possibility’ of her existence is enabled by the reader and the background narrative. Her geometrical being is more like a numeric model of parametric possibilities and instances that enable her to become flexible and mutable; she is a performance envelope defined more by blurred boundaries than by static dependencies.

Due to her constant state of flux, her dress has evolved into a virtual surface. This surface is more a field of convoluted intricacy, topological in its nature and created from splines that are the result of the array of Leibniz⁴ points. Splines can best be described with the words of Greg Lynn⁵ as “…vectors defined with direction, … suspended from lines with hanging weights … accommodating gravities in free space, also called control vertices.” As interring elements, they create the basis for the typological existence of Alice’s garment or the knots of her flexible topological fabric.

So Alice’s dress is made of guiding splines, which are territorially blurred and describe the contours of her body. Her co(a)t-de is defined by non-uniform rational Bezier-splines that inherit the notion of a knitted dress in Wonderland. Threads made of control vertices fall into place, creating nodal points that define any given real or unreal form. The knot vector is a sequence of parameter values that determine where and how the control points affect each NURBS curve, which is tweaked around the non-real existence of Alice’s body.

Zooming into her dress reveals that each knot can be endlessly redefined, and contains infinitive possibilities for subdivided knots, strains and patterns. Similar to a mandala, each thread defines a smaller pocket that, due to its described nature, contains a virtual doppelganger of its digital environment. As in a fractal cadence, the virtual fabric is not dependant on scale; pockets become 4-dimensional, and as we zoom deeper and deeper into the rabbit’s bow, contain each scale-less possibility simultaneously. The dress at this point is n-dimensional, and in its knotted constraints, assembles all the qualities of intricacy as described by Lynn⁶. “Intricacy occurs where macro and micro-scales of components are interwoven and intertwined.”

This loss of scale leads to an overlapping of the geometrical constraints provoking a certain blurred, undefined, digital ornament. Through the overlapping of virtual patterns, effects like moiré might occur, and the ornament exist at the same time in every scaled version. Her dress might consist of an endless sum of pocketed virtuality, reassembling scale-less digital architectures.

So the scheme of Alice’s dress is a virtual construct, which assembles a mathematically based space. This space can be seen on our screens, but it is filtered through the resolution of the ‘actual’. Each actual construct rendered, rapid prototyped, even only seen on the screen, is a triangulated approximation of a virtual topography.

In order to get a glimpse of the convoluted beauty of her virtual dress it is necessary to condense the virtual into the actual by the means of fixing points in space and in its essence, triangulate her garment; this is a process of abandoning possibilities in favour of defining production information. For Alice to emerge into the ‘real’, or ‘our’ world, her physical existence can only occur through a process of tessellation to achieve a resolved definition of virtual space.

Alice may pop out of the rabbit hole from time to time, and eventually condense the virtual into the actual. She is not parametrically designed and therefore does not follow algorithmic rules. She uses the instances of parametrics to determine her appearance. She remains a virtual construct, neither mathematically correct nor absorbed by scripted realities.

Endnotes:

¹ Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, University of Minnesota Press, 2000
² Fundamental discourse between Leibnitz and Descartes regarding two model of complexity, whereas Descartes explores complexity by the means of complexity build up by simple orders is Leibnitz view on complexity derived by individual and collective order exist ‘at the same time …’ Andrew Benjamin, The plural Event; Descartes, Hegel, Heidegger, Routledge, 1993
³ Lewis Carrol, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Bloomsbury, New York, 2001

⁴ ‘The existence of the monad as an already existent ensemble means that the monad is an original ensemble, i.e. an ensemble in which differential plurality is not a consequence of the event. On the contrary it is constitutive of the event - the relational ensemble - itself’ Andrew Benjamin, The plural Event; Descartes, Hegel, Heidegger, Routledge, 1993 p. 125
⁵ Greg Lynn, Animate Form, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1999, p.20
⁶ Greg Lynn, Intricacy, catalogue to the exhibition ‘Intricacy’, guest curated by G. Lynn at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Philadelphia