Image as a virtual construction

Abstract

The shift in visual technologies from the early twentieth century understandings of interior vs. exterior and subject vs. object are radically different when compared to contemporary architectural media and the immersive environments that they suggest. The rethinking of the photographic medium as a digital construct can reveal its virtual potentials as an ‘architecture’ in and of itself. The digital technologies used in the custom-made optical device, the diplorasis, allow for a re-thinking of both architectural and photographic discourses, as they reveal their tendencies to converge with one another. This is important today because vision, and hence the body, is increasingly embedded within media environments. The self is multiplied within virtual domains that in turn affect the actual space of the corporeal body. In this respect, it is crucial to think how time-based media re-present our spatial environments and how this virtuality shifts the locus of the body and its limits to produce new understandings of interior/exterior, subject/object.