Producing place atmospheres digitally: Architecture, digital visualisations practices and the experience economy

Computer generated images have become the common means for architects and developers to visualise and market future urban developments. This article examines within the context of the experience economy how these digital images aim to evoke and manipulate specific place atmospheres to emphasize the experiential qualities of new buildings and urban environments. In particular, we argue that CGIs are far from ‘just’ glossy representations but are a new form of visualising the urban that captures and markets particular embodied sensations. Drawing on a two year qualitative study of architects’ practices that worked on the Msheireb project, a large scale redevelopment project in Doha (Qatar), we examine how digital visualisation technology enables the virtual engineering of sensory experiences using a wide range of graphic effects. We show how these CGIs are laboriously materialised in order to depict and present specific sensory, embodied regimes and affective experiences to appeal to clients and consumers. Such development has two key implications. Firstly, we demonstrate the importance of digital technologies in framing the ‘expressive infrastructure’ (Thrift 2012) of the experience economy. Secondly, we argue that although the Msheireb CGIs open up a field of negotiation between producers and the Qatari client, and work quite hard at being culturally specific, they ultimately draw “on a Westnocentric literary and sensory palette” (Tolia-Kelly 2006) that highlights the continuing influence of colonial sensibilities in supposedly postcolonial urban processes.This research was funded by the ESRC (RES-062-23-0223)

Non-Visual Elements of Perception in Bazars

Visual dominance has been recently propagated through a considerable number of technological innovations and development of a cornucopia of images. Although human experiences and world perception are regulated through a combination of the five senses, yet it seems that generation of contemporary architecture is solely affected by the visual sense, vision. Consequently, nowadays we encounter locations which do not leave any shared memories among people .It seems that the physique and structure of bazar can directly affect human’s non-visual perception and the bazar has been formed to affect non-visual perception of space. As the manifestation of the Iranian traditional architecture, the bazar has been designed to engage all the senses. The present study investigates the non-visual components such as the visible and non-visible space-constituent architectural elements in Iranian bazars. The study was conducted with regard to the ecological theory of perception and based on comparative studies of documents, field study and library investigations. According to the results obtained, architectural pattern of bazars in Tabriz, Isfahan and Arak not only emphasize auditory territory but also they call for the presence of physical and tactile senses. These constructions were not formed based on an abstract visual idea; rather, they reflect a pattern of implementing senses in architecture which leads to establishing non-visual connection to the architectural space, aesthetic comprehension, strengthening mental image of environment as well understanding the surrounding environment

‘What shall be our new ornaments?’ Description’s orientations

Description has made something of a comeback in recent years as part of a theorising of possibilities for a post-hermeneutical critical orientation. The present essay considers the descriptive turn, so-called, in relation to a range of writing that crosses the boundaries of the critical and the creative: in work by Claire-Louise Bennett, Lisa Robertson, Wayne Koestenbaum and R. F. Langley. The essay identifies in this writing an occupancy of description’s register as it has been articulated over the ages by a frequently sceptical regulatory discourse: description as understood to be variously gratuitous, ornamental or passively affirmative. Rather than suggest an expanded field of contemporary descriptive practice, the proposal here is for description conceived as a minor mode, a relatively rare happening, but all the more valuable for being so

Discredited Metaphors of Mind Limit Our Vision

Teachers will be intrigued by recent discoveries in the brain sciences and the new metaphors of consciousness they suggest

Coral Cultures in the Anthropocene

This essay discusses how coral is becoming a kind of charismatic megafauna and a cultural icon for extinction in the Anthropocene. Until recently, most of the cultural associations around coral emphasized the strangeness and exotic qualities of coral that combines animal, mineral, and vegetable bodies. Darwin studied coral as a robust maker of atolls, while Melville wrote about coral stringing the Pacific Islands as ‘marine gardens.’ More recent theorizing on coral from Eva Hayward and Stefan Helmreich has been keen to emphasize how coral is transbiological and queer in the multi-species kinships it enables. However, in recent decades, as evidence of bleaching and mass coral die-offs have been registered by marine scientists, coral is also fast becoming a barometer for the sixth mass extinction. I look at how contemporary cultural representations of coral are straining to reconfigure the life of coral as caught between associations of fragility and resilience, seeing coral as capable of supporting indigenous island civilizations while not being able to survive ocean warming of less than one degree Celsius. I examine the work of recent artists (Courtney Mattison and Alison McDonald) whose coral-themed work combines science and spectacle. These artists return to older visions of coral figured fantastically as both living and dead, yet updating this view for today, as we find coral to be a primary figure for life and death in the Anthropocene. I finish with a discussion of the recent documentary film Chasing Coral (2017) as negotiating multiple simultaneous visual tropes and coral conditions. This film aims to provide viewers with a sense of time constraints for scientists, filmmakers, and for coral reef colonies under extreme stress in areas including the Great Barrier Reef. The film tries to articulate a pathway between scientific documentation, environmental activism, and visual drama, ultimately composing these perspectives into a work that suggests that the imbalance and overlap of these ways of engaging with coral will provide a model for how to form a global coral culture movement

Non-Visual Elements of Perception in Bazars

Visual dominance has been recently propagated through a considerable number of technological innovations and development of a cornucopia of images. Although human experiences and world perception are regulated through a combination of the five senses, yet it seems that generation of contemporary architecture is solely affected by the visual sense, vision. Consequently, nowadays we encounter locations which do not leave any shared memories among people .It seems that the physique and structure of bazar can directly affect human’s non-visual perception and the bazar has been formed to affect non-visual perception of space. As the manifestation of the Iranian traditional architecture, the bazar has been designed to engage all the senses. The present study investigates the non-visual components such as the visible and non-visible space-constituent architectural elements in Iranian bazars. The study was conducted with regard to the ecological theory of perception and based on comparative studies of documents, field study and library investigations. According to the results obtained, architectural pattern of bazars in Tabriz, Isfahan and Arak not only emphasize auditory territory but also they call for the presence of physical and tactile senses. These constructions were not formed based on an abstract visual idea; rather, they reflect a pattern of implementing senses in architecture which leads to establishing non-visual connection to the architectural space, aesthetic comprehension, strengthening mental image of environment as well understanding the surrounding environment

Non-Visual Elements of Perception in Bazars

Visual dominance has been recently propagated through a considerable number of technological innovations and development of a cornucopia of images. Although human experiences and world perception are regulated through a combination of the five senses, yet it seems that generation of contemporary architecture is solely affected by the visual sense, vision. Consequently, nowadays we encounter locations which do not leave any shared memories among people .It seems that the physique and structure of bazar can directly affect human’s non-visual perception and the bazar has been formed to affect non-visual perception of space. As the manifestation of the Iranian traditional architecture, the bazar has been designed to engage all the senses. The present study investigates the non-visual components such as the visible and non-visible space-constituent architectural elements in Iranian bazars. The study was conducted with regard to the ecological theory of perception and based on comparative studies of documents, field study and library investigations. According to the results obtained, architectural pattern of bazars in Tabriz, Isfahan and Arak not only emphasize auditory territory but also they call for the presence of physical and tactile senses. These constructions were not formed based on an abstract visual idea; rather, they reflect a pattern of implementing senses in architecture which leads to establishing non-visual connection to the architectural space, aesthetic comprehension, strengthening mental image of environment as well understanding the surrounding environment

The Stein, 03/13/1970

Senate Spruces Up: Session Sparkles With Efficiency -- Astor Muckraked -- Senate Bans Cops With Guns -- Faculty Meeting Farce At First: Flys Right At Finish: Reps. Chosen -- Sweigart Resigns -- Dissell Resigns -- Unequal Representation; So Say Candidates -- Ecologist To Speak! -- Chancellor\u27s Adv. Committee Meets -- People And Books In The Dipsey-Dumpster -- The Pied Pier Project; An In-Reach Model Cities Cultural Project For Peoplehttps://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/stein/1039/thumbnail.jp