An Orthographic Projection
of a Still Life
image/signal
"The following project draws extensively on the theoretical frameworks of John May and Zeina Khoritium."
initial composition study
An Orthographic Projection of a Still Life Electronic Image / Signal
This work approaches the still life as both kitsch—in Clement Greenberg’s sense of “mechanical art”—and as an investigation into the status of the electronic image. For Greenberg, kitsch was mechanical because it did not require the artist or viewer to wrestle with form; it offered ready-made meanings and pleasing surfaces. Many still life’s—especially those made for decoration or market appeal—could be seen this way: polished exercises in realism, valued for craft more than for critical thought. Within painting, the still life has often functioned as an arena for technical mastery: arranging objects, modelling light, and testing control. Even when layered with symbolic meaning, it frequently remains a technical rendering of things rather than a challenge to the medium itself.
Digital image-making, by contrast, no longer relies on a physical imprint of light. It is a process of capturing, storing, and manipulating signals electrons or by other words ones and zeros , closer to data sets than to photography which originated as chemical process that is always 'a form of heliography,' or 'the writing of the sun. photography involved the "organized exposure of a chemical 'first substance' to the action of light," making it a "chemo mechanical" visual format. This process captures images without the need for drawing, relying instead on chemical reactions to record visual scenes. . Image-making is an unavoidable technical reality, yet nothing technical is ever merely technical: each choice of tool, protocol, or workflow carries aesthetic, cultural, and speculative implications. Rendering introduces a structure familiar to all forms of image production—pre-production, production, and post-production—yet here it operates with unprecedented plasticity. For this still life, ray tracing serves as the main production technique: Platonic shapes are rendered on a singular plane to achieve a range of optical and chromatic effects. Pre-production involved 3D modelling the chosen objects; while production focused on composition, lighting, and surface qualities; post-production allowed for image editing , refinement and further manipulation . Because each phase is open-ended, the medium invites speculation on all future possibilities: materials, light, or spatial relations can always be re-imagined.
Images are composed of pixels, each with precise spatial coordinates (X, Y). Yet despite this apparent exactness, a persistent tension arises from differences in pixel density between output devices—monitors, scanners, and printers. This tension means that an image, produced and stored as a data set, may differ subtly between input and output. The digital representation is never entirely fixed; the materiality of its display mediates perception, emphasizing that even in a seemingly precise system, variability and discrepancy are inherent to the medium. Still, once fixed, the image is consumed as a photograph, sustained by the viewer’s mental association with photographic truth. Within architectural culture, rendering often functions as a form of science-fiction speculation—an invitation to inhabit what could exist, often combined with what already does, like a building rendering placed within an existing urban context.
Choosing orthographic projection over the conventions of the traditional perspectival still life disrupts the expectation of linear perspective or atmospheric depth. By refusing convergence and foreshortening, the scene becomes a diagram: a network of relations—size, adjacency, rhythm—rather than an illusionistic window. Orthography displaces the subjective eye that governs perspective, yet through the digital medium it remains open to manipulation—much like a lens capable of distortion or elongation—while replacing that subjectivity with an abstract, impersonal field where objects are held in suspension. In this mode, foreground and background are compressed into deliberate rhythmic patterns. Rather than drawing the viewer into an illusory space, the immersive illusion of traditional still life gives way to a precise choreography of forms, rhythms, and spatial intervals.
Applied to the still-life genre, this approach invites speculation on a form often regarded as a highly technical painting exercise or mechanical craft. It draws an association with the architectural practice of rendering—another medium that is deeply technical, yet devoted to presenting a reality still to come, if it ever does. What once invited immersion becomes instead a structured exploration of formal and spatial relations with in a highly controlled and staged frame .
