05-07-2012, 09:41 AM
The Liability of the Datascape: Breathtaking Lapses of Logic
The Liability of the Datascape.pdf (Size: 2.18 MB / Downloads: 37)
The Abuse of Data: Map/Territory Confusion
... Under pressure to justify themselves, the datascapists lapse into the error of false
concreteness and thus confuse process with product. To suggest that the data that
informs, for instance, a diagram of weather dynamics is relevant to the structural diagram
of the roof of a weather station, simply by virtue of their mutual but conventional
association to weather, is an unfortunate consequence of design in the semantic mode.
Atypical misuse of the datascape is as a form-generating device. Essentially, the content
that is being graphed justifies the use of the graph's form as a means of producing
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architectural form. In fact, the graph bears only a conventional relationship to the
content that it is graphing and could take any number of forms, none of which would
have any necessary formal relationship with the architecture. Such lapses in logic derive
from anxiety to provide thematic justification for the use of form.