Mirko Zardini Archaeologists of the Digital —Some Field Notes Where to Begin?
The obvious would have been to start from the intense debate over the digital in architecture that coalesced during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s — a debate that has accompanied most of the production and discussion in the field ever since — that has been well documented in periodicals, books and websites and assessed by countless authors and commentators. We decided, however, to suspend this natural instinct and start instead from a handful of ground-breaking projects. Our task, in line with recent works in media archaeology, focused on investigating concrete ideas and results of these foundational digital works. We inspected a series of layers — authors, machines, software, companies, related disciplines, institutions, etc. — not only to articulate a historical account but, more importantly, to better understand the context that allowed these projects (and technologies) to achieve prominence. Archaeology of the Digital is a project envisioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), curated by Greg Lynn, based on the acquisition and collection of approximately twentyfive projects. These works were produced between the late 1980s and the early 2000s and embody inventive ways of engaging the digital. This first phase — entitled Archaeology of the Digital, comprising an exhibition and this publication presents four pioneering works by Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Chuck Hoberman, and Shoei Yoh. In all fairness, a fifth actor should be added to this list; an inanimate actor who takes different forms and names: machine, computer, manual, software, code, script, etc. This technological constituent — sought, found, tested, modified and even invented by the architects themselves in order to realize their ultimate vision — attained a life of its own and made the production of these projects possible.
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Archaeologists of the Digital