Digital Decoys: An Architectural Index of Deceptions

(Paperback)

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Digital Decoys examines the social and political implications of the decoys that have emerged in the age of imaging and the new opportunities they create for architects to challenge existing hierarchies and systems of power through agency, expressions of identity, and collaborative resistance within digital platforms.

Contemporary representations are the products of a wide range of tools and techniques, engaged in ever more complex mediational exchanges, and have markedly different qualities than their antecedents. That is, architectures mediations today are decoys of past modes of representation.

Digital decoys exist as dualities of data and picture, image and object, architects working space and immersive worlds. These composites of image and object are not neutral vehicles and understanding and controlling their forces is a crucial task for architects today. Decoys are inherently political enterprises that can mask and carry into built form ecological, economic, social, and political violence embedded in digital media and culture.

Author Bio

Constance Vale is a registered architect and educator. Her research office, The Factory of Smoke & Mirrors, engages interdisciplinary intersections between architecture, art, theater, urban design, and emerging technology. In her writing and design work, she interrogates how computational images and artificial intelligence are effectively changing architecture theory, design methods, construction, and modes of sociopolitical action. Vale is chair of undergraduate architecture and assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis and has previously taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the editor and a co-author with Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich of Mute Icons--and Other Dichotomies of the Real in Architecture (Actar, 2021). She is also the winner of the On Olive Local Emerging Architect Competition, for which she is building a residence in Estudio Tatiana Bilbao's St. Louis Masterplan. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, and her work has been exhibited at the A+D Museum and published in the Los Angeles Times, Archinect, and CLOG. Vale earned a BFA from Parsons School of Design and an MArch from Yale School of Architecture, where she received the Moulton Andrus Award for Excellence in Art and Architecture.