ABSTRACT
Modalities of architectural seeing are mutually complicit with the ways architects represent and hence provoke change in the city. The confounding of technology and built form—the expansion of ubiquitous computing—leads inevitably to the inseparability of inhabiting the city and engaging in the real-time purchase of products and services. The cultivated accident, though intended as a means of productively unsettling, disturbing, or displacing, can problematically become an object of art or the source of an exercise in pure form generation. The cultivated accident has the effect of breaking those preconceived relationships between a thing’s physical reality and its codified representation. Cultivated accident differs markedly from technologies that engage ever-higher resolution in pursuit of complete transparency. Cultivated accident introduces an artificial friction to aid the possibility of seeing; it introduces deliberate opacity, not ultimate clarity. The chapter describes a coupling between rapidly changing urban environments and rapid changes in representation technology.
