ARCHITECTURE AND NEW MEDIA ART / MEDIA FAÇADES, VIDEO AND LIGHT-INSTALLATIONS

A media façade – here understood technologically, primarily as light or animated pictures generated by electronic devices (although there are examples of kinetic, that is, mechanical media façades) is not an ornament, that is, its function is not merely decorative, but, with its potential as metaphor and for interaction, it is a mode of communication between architecture and environment, that is, the observer/passer-by and the city. As new fundamental perspective paradigms (Damisch, 1987), and finally the concept of distance perspective collapse or “warped space” (Vidler, 2001) developed in architecture in the 20th century, the dominant view of the observer remains that achieved in moving vehicles, which necessarily has, as a consequence, minimalization or the disappearance of those decorative elements from architectural facades which can only be observed if the building is approached on foot (that is, the pedestrian view). Therefore, it could be said that the acceleration of the observer is causing the death of tectonics (according to W. Tegethof) in architecture of the 20th century (similarly, video is a media of flexible images, often the rapid exchange of images such as free associations – which Freud compared with the attempt to describe the landscape while in a moving train), and instead of intricate architectural and sculptural decorations as elements of the vertical view, appearing is a naked outer plane that, with its form and color, becomes the only decorative (and often the only deliberate aesthetic) element of architecture. On the façades of buildings, video projections (which, as opposed to film or TV, are not connected to a screen) can be shown on buildings or electronic media (video reproduction) planes, where video becomes involved in public space, assuming the role of contemporary substitute of architectural and public decorations. The hybridization of video and architecture points to the possibly increased potential of architecture in the sense of social interventions and channeling and modeling of social processes – a trigger of microchanges. According to Vito Acconci, the function of art in public art is to de-design (Vidler, 2001: 141). Deleuze’s formal topic of deconstructing (or Leibniz’s “great Baroque montage” of hybrid space) deals with the façade of a building as moving matter, as the inside of the outside. Instead of looking at a building as being closed into itself and, therefore, self-sufficient in the sense of its relation toward its own context, the building assumes upon itself the quality of the context, by which it is transformed. The building is, therefore, a significant part of the activities that define its urban environment (location). The media façade is the presence of incompleteness, within the meaning of the continuous opening of the intangible-future into the present: the form does not follow function, but defines the possibilities for a change of function. Video and architecture exist in new forms of public space, as the Internet and shopping center plazas (redefined public space which is also a private space of gradual limiting). A building with a media façade behaves like a video-sculpture in the public space, or like a “television of an urban measure”. The cubical skyscrapers of modernism can be re-designed as temporary screens, where every window in the homogenous façade network is animated, that is, lighted (often according to the principle of interactivity), and so in the night view of the city functions as a pixel in a color, monochromatic or achromatic picture – black is the light turned off. The metropolis lives and grows in a way that ignores and destroys the capacity of the environment to reproduce itself. Whilst analyzing folies, architecture without predeterminated function in the park La Vilette by Bernard Tschumi, Derrida suggests the possibility of "arhitecture of event", fr. "an ' architecture de l'evenement'", decontrusting thus the notion of architecture as monumental, fixed and esential, pointing to the fact that in the Franch language the word "event" has the same origin as the word "invention", fr. invention.