Things take on meaning or are given meaning or are loaded from the start. All seem possible ways of describing encounters with things that have importance in our lives. The correct formulation is as yet unclear. Perhaps they are all correct. Whatever the case, it is clear that meaning is linguistic, temporal or historical, and attentional. It is not truth-based in the scientific sense of being applicable to all people or even to a single individual at all times. Meaning is narrative-based insofar as stories are conveyances of what is at stake in a culture, a history, a life. Its value is relativistic. Its truth-value, to the extent that such a phrase is applicable, comes and goes across time and varies from person to person.
We live in a world of cause and effect. Objectively speaking, there is no magic, no wizard behind the curtains, no spirit smiling from the ether, no trolls under bridges casting spells. This objective world, however, can mislead. Or as Jean-Paul Sartre argued, we project and challenge identities and as a result call the objective world into question.
We are attentional animals operating, not in the world of physical reality, but in the world of ecological reality, to borrow Gibson’s language. When operating normally, our attention gravitates to the anomalous. The anomalous elicits fear or hope or both, and these largely hard-wired responses trigger an exploratory mode that either resolves the anomaly by discovering our initial perception was mistaken or, failing to resolve the mystery, renders the unexplainable remainder as magic or mystery or the otherworldly work of ghosts or demons.[i] Herein lies the secret of architectural effect.
Magic tricks, the enchantment of novels and other such powerful events, including architecture and possibly consciousness itself, are results of disconnects between conception and perception – that is, between what we understand or expect and what we actually think we see/hear/feel/smell/taste. Magicians are the masters of this. In fact, it is fair to say that the art of magic is nothing other than creating a mismatch between conceptual understanding and perceptual intake.
I refer to magic often in these posts because magic is more self-aware of its status as fiction than some creative disciplines, and architecture in particular. In magic, the issue is managing information – some information is hidden or camouflaged in physical ways; some information is highlighted to draw attention away from what cannot be hidden. This latter technique is called misdirection.
Misdirection is about modifying attention – turning people’s attention from the methods (the cause and effect) and toward a discordant effect.[ii] Well done, it has the quality of great literature insofar as it can render the world weightless or the weightlessness of daily trivia heavy. Misdirection involves a manipulation of information legible to the witness or reader or, in architectural terms, occupant.
In architecture and other visual arts, information is primarily communicated by light – although all the senses can and arguably most should be engaged. The materials utilized for communicating via light are mostly illuminated surfaces, though luminous ones are growing more common. The next several posts will endeavor to bridge Gibson’s insights into the ecological perception of surfaces in light with notions of information and misdirection: the goal being the emergence of anomalous experiences for the birth of meaning.
[i] Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 56-7.
[ii] Kuhn, Experiencing the Impossible, 40.
Architecture is Fiction 