Back to the routine today. I’m hoping that some of the better habits I’ve clung to over the last few weeks don’t get washed away in the churn; ‘like water’s wet and sky is up.’
I submitted 7000 words to the Yale architecture journal last week just in time for this in-depth analysis of the whole Revit fun factory controversy to appear. Thanks Alan Warburton for sending it my way. The short version of this whole debacle is that Revit – Autodesk’s flagship Building Information Management (BIM) software – dominates the software market for architecture firms and the world’s leading architects think it’s crap basically. It’s over-priced and lacks basic features and so a bunch of superstar architecture firms wrote an open letter threatening to pull out of the subscription model they’ve now been trapped in and demanding change. However, because it is the standard, it dominates the market and the article does a really good job of anecdata-ly explaining the monopoly Autodesk have built:
Earlier this year [2020! – me], Autodesk released an update that allowed designers to create walls that weren’t vertical. Previously, architects could either draw slanted walls using cumbersome workarounds or avoid designing them all together. Such is Autodesk’s power: It can dictate not only the effort required to design a slanted wall but perhaps whether a designer will create one at all.
This is such a wonderfully innocuous anecdote that perfectly surmises the article I wrote and a big piece of my own thinking. The politics and economics of software development’s role in future and near-future aesthetics. Now, in the article I wrote I’m keen to stress that software constraints also constrain imaginable possibilities, not just practice. In this case, it’s not like architect’s hadn’t designed, built and imagined slanted walls before, it’s just that (by their account) they are particularly put out in doing so in Revit. It’s also slanted walls, so who cares? But if it’s a pain in the neck for the world’s leading architecture firms to slightly slope a wall, what are the unimaginable facilities of the software they don’t even know to complain about?
Further down the article is an even more telling quote about how the standardisation of Revit has crept into the finances of business working with each other. As an aside, I remember reading Alexander Galloway’s Protocol for the first time and truly grasping the extent of the role of standardisation and formatting in technology and the consequent socio-political landscape that standardisation creates through the power it choses to secure. (Actually, I probably should have dug it out for this article, oh well, nvm.) So, in the article, out of frustration, an unnamed but apparently significant technologist at an unnamed but apparently significant architecture firm tried to move the company out or Revit, citing the amount of money they would save but:
…when their firm started getting serious about the deal, the tech leader began reading through past contracts with clients and realized that many required projects either to use Revit or to deliver data using Autodesk’s proprietary .rvt file format. Their firm couldn’t afford to lose this work so they stayed with Revit—and with Autodesk.
File formats are counter-revolutionary folks. The article ends with the bleak prophecy that Autodesk probably don’t have to do anything. They’ve so monopolised the market that architecture firms can moan all they want, and they can still crank out under-performing, over-priced software. Anyway, the world is currently busy dealing with a much bigger technology market monopolisation controversy and whether you like it or not, you bougie intellectual you, the video games studios have significantly more cultural and financial heft than ZHA and the architectural elite.
What else?
AWE was released last week, the latest DLC addition to Control – definitely the best non-Indie game I’ve played over the last year or so (have you played Disco Elysium? Well, what are you doing?) I’ve only spent a few hours in the dark technocratic Narnia that is The Oldest House over the last week but I’m once again entranced by the incredible concrete artistry of the place. I never played Alan Wake – the game that this new expansion ties into – so some of the references are a bit lost on me, still I hope they make another expansion. I hope they never stop giving me more space and time to explore the world of Control, to be honest. For now I’m inching my way through The Oldest House again, making sure to make the most of every moment.
I popped over to Game Art Engines on Saturday afternoon after my friend Sarah Brin reminded me that I am really into art, games and software. Sarah hosted a session with Joseph DeLappe and they discussed a load of stuff including DeLappe’s project using the game Grand Theft Auto V (which we have talked about before) to visualise gun deaths in the US – Elegy. It was also nice to hear more about Luke Caspar Pearson and Sandra Youkhana’s work with Videogame Urbanism which I’ve been following for a little bit. There were some interesting ideas and practices in the presentations but there are still problems with the format of these online things. The event got a bit… janky due to connection issues and trying to operate in a virtual space that only a few folks controlled. Limiting control over the virtual space was a way to stop trolling but it made some of the presentations unintelligible because of the format of being a stream-in-a-stream and some very dense, dry, text-based academic presentations. Look, it’s still a great event with some great folks. This Saturday is the next one, you can find more info through the link at the top there.
Recents
I’m going to be putting my cycling miles to work for British Red Cross this month for Miles for Refugees. I’m going to do at least 555 miles (893 km to normal people) and try and raise lots of money to keep people alive. Yes, I would probably ride 893 km in a month anyway but again, I want to try and stop people dying and if I can use my paltry platform to do that, great. You can donate here. As always I’ll be updating gleeful followers on the Instagram.
Short Stuff:
- I shared an article a few weeks back in 002 on the interesting debate going on right now in maths about what the nature of proof is in the context of computation and artificial intelligence. This great little article furthers that with an overview of computation and mathematical reasoning: If something can only be proved by computer because of it’s complexity and the time required, what does that do to human-oriented versions of proof? Complexity and comprehensibility become significant issues in proving pure mathematical truths and it’s causing some super interesting turmoil.
- I started taking the time to read Venkatesh Rao’s Ribbonfarm newsletter again. His writing was really influential on me when I was doing my MA and I’ve been a subscriber ever since but have sort of not felt smart enough to engage with it until recently. His writing is as interesting now as ever.
- I don’t know much about simulators or the Flight Simulator series but I’m intrigued by the advances in the latest release. Microsoft have managed to wire it into other parts of the ecosystem – streaming in Bing maps and ‘smart’ simulating cars on roads, using live weather data in-game. It’s just interesting watching technologies strive for realism and in doing so having to write their own definition of what realism even is: What are the boundaries of realism within the specific affordances of this world we’re making? O’Reilly’s Everything is a stringent critique of this, of course.
Ok, that’s it. There are 7 billion notifications over there → right now on my screen and I need a bunch more coffee. I love you, never forget. Speak to you next week.