Society. Spaces. Screens

Abstract

In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-8, Davies and McGoey examined the productive role of non-knowledge in financial markets, observing that ‘the only thing more valuable than the illusion of perfect knowledge is the ability to profess perfect ignorance.’ (2012) Preceding the crisis, ignorance of risk was mobilised productively – and in its aftermath, profitable exoneration was available to those able to plausibly demonstrate non-knowledge. The notion of the ‘illusion of knowledge’ suggests that it is enough to project an appearance of omniscient technology and smart production methods to achieve inward investment and the marshalling of political assent. Focussing on the networked architectural image as a productive element of the ‘shared data sets’ of fauxtomated construction methods such as BIM, this paper explores a typology of renderings of commercial premises linked to organisations trading in information, and how mythologies of progress, adaptation and rights of access to data are reflected in discourse and its embodiment in architecture. The persistence of the photorealistic perspectival image and its coded reception sustain both anxiety and confidence in a lucrative condition of cognitive dissonance. The architectural image emerges as simultaneously ‘pitch’ or ‘disclaimer,’ representing future certainties in spectacular form, while implying catastrophic risks for the ‘left behind.’ The subject or ‘observer’ (Crary, 1990) – possessed of unbending faith in the possibility of scientific translation of all immanent phenomena – is, through the convergence of imaging and production, forcibly produced as an anxious speculator for whom the framing of reality in terms favourable to desired outcomes becomes an existential issue.