Rendering
2018 Graduate Student Conference
Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University
April 6-7, 2018
https://www.vesgrad.com/conference

Rendering is an operation and an object, the production of imagery through technical means as well as the imagery produced. From the photorealistic images of as-yet-unrealized buildings used for real estate marketing, to simulation programs used in military environments, rendering is both an instrument and logic of different institutional and commercial endeavors, investigative practices, and aesthetic experiments. At once prescriptive and descriptive, computer-generated models are predictive and managerial instruments that visualize different scenarios and assess their risks. Tracing the histories of rendering entails questioning these representations. What do these images do? What roles do software development companies, research hubs, artists, and programmers play in shaping, weaponizing, and democratizing access to these imagistic tools?

As architectural historian Lucia Allais has recently argued, “when architects learn to render, they are not only vested with a drawing skill, but also implicated in a vast epistemic scheme.” To render is to project schemes of knowledge onto the perception and representation of the world.

How do configurations of a technical apparatus afford new conditions of sense-making? How is an image inscribed with the technical operations and disciplinary epistemologies that produce it? How is form a function of process, and process an assemblage of agencies – of hands, materials, and tools? What ontological transformations does rendering entail? What economies of labor does it engender? In what ways is rendering a procedure not only delimited by computers and their effects, but also encompassing and impacting extended lineages of training, skill, and expertise?

Rendering is a process that operates across disciplinary and historical contexts. In Beaux Arts architecture, the “rendered project” (le projet rendu), a finalized, hand-drawn solution to a design problem, was considered the standard medium of presenting an architectural work in an academic setting. In contemporary digital architecture, modeling and rendering software make it possible to generate an infinite number of permutations of any given design by manipulating a set of variables. In cinema, rendering acquires relevance alongside the rise of digital modes of filmmaking, necessitating the assembly of “render farms,” powerful computer systems dedicated to the processing of computer-generated imagery.

Taking cue from these practices, can we think of specific turns in the history of rendering as ushering in new regimes of narrative and aesthetic production? This conference seeks to address these questions that pertain to the modes of production, usage, and circulation of rendering, and aims to foster an environment of exchange and discussion amongst a diverse set of participants across fields that include, but are not limited to, the history of art and architecture, film and media studies, as well as the histories of science, technology, and computing.

We invite proposals for audiovisual presentations, exploratory writing, performances, and scholarly papers that engage with, as well as extend beyond, the following areas:

• Processing: scanning, animation, sensing
• Image factories and render farms
• Labor: time, expenditure, professionalization, tedium
• Machine intelligence and human expertise
• Pedagogy, training, skill
• Orthographic projection; descriptive geometry
• Line
• Shadow
• Computation, data, algorithms
• Technique as an epistemic operation
• Technical instruments and images
• Tools and software
• Post-production in filmmaking
• CGI
• Technicity of experience: phenomenology, perception, space
• Rendering reality: fantasy, marketing, visualizing desire
• Realism: unrealistic, antirealistic, hyperrealistic
• Cultural techniques of drafting
• Models, prototypes, diagrams
• Graphics

Please send an abstract of 250-300 words and short bio along with institutional/departmental affiliation, if any, to fvsconference@gmail.com by Jan 15, 2018. Questions can be directed to the email address above. Participants will be notified of acceptance by mid-February.