A Purple Architecture

Design in the Age of the Physical-Virtual Continuum

A Purple Architecture is an edited collection of essays and projects investigating Purpleness, as a quality independent from the virtual and physical, the material and immaterial, and mundane and exotic.

Imprint
ETC Press
Release Date
January 24, 2024
Pages
346
ISBN
978-1-304-79179-5
Language
English
DOI / Citations
10.57862/9j25-e207
Product Dimensions
8.5 x 11
Cover Design
Ebrahim Poustinchi
Total Downloads: 2185

A Purple Architecture is an edited collection of essays and projects investigating Purpleness as a quality independent from the assumed virtual/physical, material/immaterial, mediated/immediate dualities. Purpleness thus serves as a theoretical framework to investigate the impacts of technological mediation in developing possible spatial scenarios through storytelling.

The centuries-old topic of how to represent reality, and subsequently how to supplant it, was catapulted into Western popular culture through the 1999 film, The Matrix, in which the protagonist is faced with a choice between taking a blue pill or the red pill. One keeps him in simulation, and the other confronts him with reality. A Purple Architecture questions the assumption that these two parallel conditions are mutually exclusive. In the context of this volume, the purple pill is not reduced to an in-between hybrid liminal condition. Purpleness is also as ontologically autonomous (and gradient) as any other color on or off the electromagnetic spectrum of light.

Library Category
ETC Press
Publications Category
Books