Networks, Interfaces, and Computer-Generated Images: Learning from Digital Visualisations of Urban Redevelopment Projects

Abstract

1 networks, interfaces and computer-generated images: learning from digital visualisations of urban redevelopment projects abstract Over the past five years, computer-generated images (CGIs) have become commonplace as a means to market urban redevelopments. To date, however, they have been given relatively little attention as a new form of visualising the urban. This paper argues that these CGIs deserve more attention, and attention of a particular kind. It argues that, instead of approaching them as images situated in urban space, their digitality invites us to understand them as interfaces circulating through a software-supported network space. The paper uses an Actor-NetworkTheory understanding of 'network' and argues that the action done on and with CGIs as they are created takes place at a series of interfaces. These interfacesbetween and among humans, software and hardware -are where work is done both to create the CGI and to create the conditions for their circulation. These claims are explored in relation to the CGIs made for a large urban redevelopment project in Doha, Qatar. The paper concludes by suggesting that geographers need to reconsider their understanding of digital images and be as attentive to the interfaces embedded in the image as to the CGI's visual content.

Rethinking the geographies of cultural ‘objects’ through digital technologies

“…The conceptualisation of network that can address the three-fold agency of interfaceshardware, software and humans -is that developed by Law (2002). He argues that a network is articulated in both physical space and also through the work that is 14 done by various actors to make things move or pause (for a fuller discussion, see Rose et al, 2014;and see Jazeel, 2010). In describing the networks that digital interfaces open onto, there is clearly an extensive and complex material infrastructure that stretches and locates digital cultural activity in physical space: cables, servers, drives, processors, exchanges, screen, keyboards and so on.…”

“…This is an important critical point, when digital interfaces are so pervasive and so many are complicit with the smooth and glossy 'aesthetic economy' of late capitalism (Böhme, 1993). The Msheireb Downtown images, for example, encountered many hitches in their circulation and a lot of work was required to resolve the various difficulties (Rose et al, 2014): office computers that couldn't open the huge image files of complex digital renders; confusion over what version of a visualisation was to be worked on; instructions on how a visualisation had to be altered not being understood when received. Different kinds of friction affect the different components of the interface and network.…”

“…This section will therefore focus on a case study of a particular type of digital image, in order to specify empirically the challenges that this new form of cultural 'object' poses to toolkit offered by the new cultural geography: digital visualisations of new urban developments, which are intended to show developers, architects, planners and the inhabitants of urban public spaces what a new development will look -and feel -like when they are complete (see Figure 1). The digital visualisations to be discussed were made as part of the design and marketing of a large-scale redevelopment project in Doha, Qatar and they might thus be seen as 'representations' of a place (Degen, Melhuish, and Rose, n.d.;Rose, Degen, and Melhuish 2014). The thousands of visualisations made as part of this development include forty-two created to persuade the developer to invest in the project, and if those forty-two are studied, it is obvious that they represent the new development in very particular ways.…”

Digital interface design and power: Friction, threshold, transition

“…Whilst this work has done much to understand how power operates in the background of digital systems, through algorithms and search engines (Amoore and Piotukh, 2016;Cheney-Lippold, 2011;Deville and Velden, 2016;Mackenzie and Vurdubakis, 2011;Pasquinelli, 2009;Striphas, 2015) and interfaces (Ash, 2015;Degen et al, 2015;Rose et al, 2014;Seigworth, 2016;Wilson, 2014), little work to date has focused on how power operates, and is enabled, through actual practices of interface design. As work on the sociology of design (Broth, 2008;Farías and Wilkie, 2016;Mackenzie, 2006;Marenko, 2015) suggests, the risk is that, in ignoring practices of design, assumptions about the smooth manipulation of user action and experience creep back into analysis, reproducing conventional stories about the location and form of power in a digitalising world.…”

Performing the sharing economy

“…Thus the seemingly paradoxical nature of the sharing economy indicates the necessity to examine 'the continual emergence of new capitalist niches, cultures and forms of agency' rather than any 'capitalist monolith' (Tsing, 2000: 143-44). This dynamic between monism and pluralism in framings of the (capitalist) economy is given an additional orientation through the 'digital' (Dalton, 2013;Rose et al, 2014). The digital dimension of the sharing economy opens up the possibility of new appearances and practices of economy.…”