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Drawing and Reality: Photogrammetry, Data Shadows and the Zone Beyond the Scan


Joe Graham, American University of Sharjah
Sevcan Ercan, Istanbul Medeniyet University

 

 

A joint paper, our proposal offers up a piece of ongoing, speculative research for consideration, one that combines art, architecture, object-oriented philosophy, archaeology and drawing. In deploying drawing as a means to connect and work across the institutional boundaries traditionally associated with these disciplines, we treat image-based 3D models as drawing. Specifically, we treat them as a continuation and development of the poché (Young, 2022), that venerable architectural drawing convention for visualising the mass of buildings seen in plan view: a section-cut which cannot directly be accessed, but which remains vital in supporting those areas that can. Like the poché, image-based 3D models engage the tension between inside and outside: they raise the question of what lies in the background, beyond the surface scanned.

 

Our research employs this understanding of drawing to mediate our engagement with a particular type of abandoned building found scattered across the UAE: homes begun some time ago on the order of ‘locals’ but which now stand half-complete, for a variety of reasons. Constructed on land given to Emirati families solely for the purpose of being built upon, these sites stand as ruins of the recent and contemporary past (Petursdottir, 2014): monuments to rapid expansion, societal frameworks and speculative enterprise. Yet they are also treatable as things fully engaged in executing their own reality despite their ongoing neglect, and despite the fact they give little away. In short, these buildings seem to withdraw from direct access (Harman 2022), appearing alluring and inaccessible in equal measure. Our paper will discuss one such example from the emirate of Sharjah, with images and/or video accompanying the text.

 

The contribution and methodology are as follows. By drawing attention to these mysterious, modern ruins we capture them in a non-invasive manner, constructing digital point-cloud models that are capable of preserving them as cultural heritage, itself a growing area of concern within the region. But from a critical perspective, we use this same process to inquire further: into a reality that withdraws, using the 3D models we build as our guide. According to Young (2022), the contemporary poché has taken on new meanings in light of the data loss inherent to both photogrammetry and lidar. Not unlike the poché observed in plan-view, the zone beyond the scan hides the labour associated with the construction of such sites, along with a wealth of other information: who built them, who owns them, and who or what will come to claim them when the time is right. Like the speculative fabulations that Haraway (2016) offers to keep us rooted in the thickness of our shared and dangerous present, contemplating the zone beyond the scan permits narratives to arise concerning what may remain when the surfaces and structures of our rapidly evolving epoch have passed away.

 

References:
Harman, G., 2022. Architecture and Objects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Pétursdóttir, P., 2014. Things Out-of-Hand: The Aesthetics of Abandonment. In: P. Pétursdóttir & B. Olsen, eds. Ruin Memories: Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past. Abingdon: Routledge.
Young, M., 2022. Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image. New York and London: Routledge.

 

Keywords: Drawing, Reality, Photogrammetry, Poché, Object-Oriented Ontology



Biography
Dr Joe Graham is an artist, writer and educator with a research focus on drawing and its relationship to philosophy, understood in practical and theoretical terms. Currently Assistant Professor of Art & Design at the American University of Sharjah, UAE, he has taught interdisciplinary art & design programs in both the UK and abroad. A fine art graduate of Chelsea College of Art & Design and the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, he completed his practice-based PhD at Loughborough University with a phenomenological study of serially developed drawing. His research has been published as articles in peer-reviewed journals, and as chapters in edited volumes. His latest monographs include Serial Drawing: Space, Time and the Art Object is published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts (2021) and The Being of Drawing, published by Marmalade Publishers of Visual Theory, London (2020).


Dr Sevcan Ercan is an architect and architectural historian. Since 2020, Dr Ercan has been working as a tenured Lecturer at Istanbul Medeniyet University, where she teaches history and theory of architecture. Prior to this, she completed her PhD in Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where she also taught for the MA Architecture and Historic Urban Environments program. Her areas of expertise are island settlements, architectures of borders and spatial histories of displacement in the Aegean region. Her research has been published in academic journals such as Space and Culture, Architecture and Culture and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Her co-edited volume Architectures of Emergency in Turkey: Heritage, Displacement and Catastrophe was published by I.B. Tauris in 2021.