Technology is everywhere in use and is inconsequential of you adapting it or not, as the matter of fact, it is a part of the civilization in so many ways that its effect is seen in a every household computer today that is faster than the one that took Neil Armstrong to the moon.
From music , art and architecture, there have been drastic steps of reformation in the global saga of understanding and appreciation of these art forms. The differences are stunning. The music industry went through interesting steps reforming the commercial zone by introducing electronic media which produced tracks much faster and used various experimental sounds. It revealed a new world of progressive house and others that have taken over the commercial industry of music completely (almost).
But lately it is observed that due to the increase in network and piracy, the commercial structure has taken steps to introduce live performances of a few tracks in public after the launch of the albums to regain profit. One might argue here that the necessity of such a step and in a direction back to the live performances, maybe not so much like the rock era of the 80’s, but to a certain extent gives a touch of humaneness back to the field of music. Hence the band picks a few tracks....practises it for a live show(with real instruments) and performs it in public which somehow is different from the original but keeps the people interested to look upon them and produce something for the promoter. From the music of the traditional bands with musical objects we now have a parallel line of electronic ones producing tracks at a much faster and effective rate. The participation of people in concert or the idea of seeing a live performance cannot be ruled out. The use of real instruments thus is inevitable, however could have been actually done with if seen theoretically.
In contrast to music, architecture has a problem. Where music can deal with in in-between condition where it holds both the live stage performances with real instruments as well as electrical objects, architecture always needs to produce in reality, outside the box of the computer- for a constant scale – the human. This new method in architecture has the capacity to produce forms that are unimaginable to the human creativity as the brain can only calculate or imagine certain number of dimensions at a time. The computer methods show results of forms and possibilities within a range which are incapable of the human understandings (like the large digit multiplication done by a calculator).
Now, when we look at designs that have such bottom up approaches which allows us to use control and produce the final product as per the changes and drifts introduced, the act of live performance in scale is still relevant in architecture just like the music shows that need to be made with real instruments for a complete electronic album. The architecture hence has or needs to look at two constantly new scales with probability of using the human vision in the larger picture scale, maybe is just a necessity that cannot be ruled out. Although the other techniques would help in creating objects of design but the idea of space however would might have to remain in control of the mind based design approaches which take into account the human scale, structure, methodology and other perception of senses in consideration.
Here we have a situation today with a constant conflict between which of the tracks to move on....technology .....or the strokes of the mind based designs. Being on the edge is a critical condition in which the decision on that point of time could affect changes and history for a period of time, although one would argue that over a longer period (1000 yrs) of time the consequences of the performance is irrelevant of decisions. However, design has been achieved in both terms but the concern of architecture is the scale that cannot and should not be altered. Computer aided design does have an immense potential in object design however which do not comply with cost effectiveness and sometimes as decorative pieces like the screensaver and sculptural. But the stroke of the brush of a painter .... indeed cannot be replaced.
-Subharthi Guha
2 January 2009
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