serial consign

[CAD space / banal but efficient]

As an intern architect, I spend more than my fair share of time constructing and administrating digital drawings. My relationship with the drafting board is quite similar to my understanding of the chemical darkroom. I think of it as a tangible space for abstraction, one which demands rigor and expertise with a number of precise and increasingly esoteric tools. It would be naive to think that the digital domain is more advanced than the paper space on which graphite expresses ambition. In fact, when closely considered, the vast majority of digital technical drawing completely emulates historical modes of production. It is only recently that building intelligence modeling (BIM) and parametric modeling are challenging conceptions of workflow and fabrication across a variety of design disciplines.

I can't help but notice the irony that I am now spending my formative years as a designer in the same space that I spent my formative years - within the realm of vector graphics. In Ways of Seeing (Digital Space) I schematized some connections between architectural representation and the spatial possibilities offered by gaming. I'd like to extend that commentary into a brief discussion about the history of vector games.

For the uninitiated, vector graphics model through geometry, the pure mathematical language of points, lines and polygons rather than the pixel building blocks that comprise raster graphics (please note the wikipedia visual aid).

[major havoc / 1983]

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, vector graphics provided an alternative to emerging bitmap imaging - they were a more accurate representation of the 3D modeling technology of the time, one which championed edge over surface. Space Wars (1962), Asteroids (1979), Battlezone (1980), Tempest (1980), Star Wars (1983) and the dungeons from the early Ultima titles are popular examples from this movement in gaming. When revisited after the fact, it is quite clear how distinct that these and other key vector based gaming experiences were from other major titles of this period.

In Steven Poole's Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution, Poole describes the aesthetics of Battlezone, the seminal Atari tank simulator as:

...evincing contempt for color, for material, for substance itself. Such qualities, it murmurs seductively, are illusory anyway. The edge is everything: the frontier where one plane meets another, where turret joins body, where missile meets flank... It was as if high school mathematics lessons had come to life...

While revisiting this passage in Poole's text I couldn't help but remember a comment made by Cecil Balmond at a 2006 roundtable when he identified form as "the tension between volume and surface.” These reflections on form and geometry are useful in contextualizing the abstract quality of vector graphics. This mode of representation deals in absolutes, rendering volume through void and delineating only the outermost boundaries of objects.

The latest installment of Gamasutra's ongoing documentation of early gaming systems was dedicated to the Vectrex, a console released by GCE in 1982. The Vectrex was a bit of an odd duck when considered in relation to the emerging standards in home gaming of the era. The Vectrex's display technology rendered images as monochromatic vector graphics which were supplemented by game-specific transparent overlays that were mounted on top of the screen to provide colour and gameplay instructions. The system was designed to attempt to define a middle ground between arcade and console gaming, providing an almost-portable gaming experience. Both of these innovations did not appeal to consumer expectations of the time and a lackluster launch coupled with the video game crash of 1984 led to the system being discontinued.

To bring this discussion full circle, it should be noted that GCE released a stylus device for the Vectrex in early 1984. This "light pen" could be plugged into the system in lieu of a second controller and allow the user to draw directly on the screen and take advantage of the crisp display resolution of the system. Given the fact that vector graphics would ultimately amount to an asterisk in the margins of gaming history, but figure quite prominently into drafting and illustration, perhaps the Vectrex should be considered as a successful drawing-machine prototype rather than a failed gaming system.

[preston scott cohen / torus house study]

Vector gaming is not completely forgotten. Over the past several years titles such as the synaesthetic rail-shooter Rez and the Wargames referencing DEFCON have tipped their cap at vector aesthetics. Meanwhile, the interface of computer aided design lumbers forward while the representational space remains more or less the same, forever stuck in the 1980s.

I'll be cataloguing a variety of contemporary strategies for architectural representation this year, and quite possibly be building more bridges to various left-of-centre destinations in visual culture from throughout the 20th century.