New Image of Home

New Image of Home investigates architectural drawings through dots, point and pixel. What is the point? To try and develop a new mode of drawing, one that critiques the predominance of the line, render and photograph to see if an alternative can be considered. The images are based on visual and spatial research examining the Canadian home from 1956-2017.

New Image of Home lecture - March 2020

What I like about the dot is that I can manipulate each one in the computer, vary its shape, or size to get an image from far away that dissolves as you step too close. This is new, to find a magic spot where the drawing materializes. Using dots suggests a number of compelling realizations. The white space between the dots is very different from the white space in a line drawing or a render. It seems that the white space between dots is where all the information, all the fidelity likes to hide. To engage this limitation, you have to add a lot more dots - hundreds of thousands of dots - to get a perfect image. Yet the closer that you get to the perfect image the more the unique dots turn to pixels and they lose all of their unique attributes.

I became interested in the home as represented in design magazines and sought to convey domestic space as an expression of daily life. The background image for a series of drawings is the same to demonstrate the exploration of my ideas. The house is unique enough to be published in an architectural journal but generic enough to be anywhere and belong to anyone. What is important however, is that the drawings challenge the idea of the perfect, curated image. In this home there are cups left on the coffee table, toys under the television stand, laptops and other devices strewn around. The drawings simultaneously support and subverts conventional representations of contemporary living space. The image has an ambiguous relationship to the occupant, visible but never present. The house has generous windows to the outside, but all the light comes from media devices, the new windows of the home that let the outside in.

These drawings are an investigation. In technical drawing every line is consequential. They detail how something is to be built. In a render every pixel is illustrative of what something should look like. Here the image is intentionally mundane, and yet I hope that it asks the imagination to produce far richer reading of contemporary domestic space. In the panoramic images below the context, elevation, structure and interior oscillate between different CMYK color, dot geometries, and layers to produce a blurring, a point cloud-like spectral image of a house. 

This last set of drawings shows the RGB pixels of media devices such as televisions, laptops, cellphones and tablets in perspective as the CYMK dot of image publishing is flattened on the page. These images reflect the space of inhabitation onto the media devices setting up a reciprocal relationship of viewing the space in which we live through the mediating effects of the screen.