In the prologue to Walid Raad’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (2001), the speaker asks that his words appear against a grey background. Or, he continues after a pause, ‘use a blue background . . . blue just like the Mediterranean’. Beginning with this colourful riddle, this article investigates the work of the monochrome in the Atlas Group Archive. With this attention to the monochrome as a format, the author’s goal is to move away from the categories of documentary and fiction that dominate discussions of Raad and parafictional work more generally, towards the formal infrastructure through which such works command belief and emotion. This attention to the aesthetic form of the archive not only brings into focus the constituent role of design in the construction of knowledge, but it also reveals the transformation of the monochrome in its encounters with the archive, technical media, and the chromatics of affective capitalism.

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Focusing on Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photographs of the Zollverein colliery, this essay investigates the tension between the clarity of Renger-Patzsch’s aesthetic and the physical reality of the industrial environment in which he worked. In doing so, it offers an account of New Objectivity photography that is attentive to both the environment from which it emerged and the way in which photography, in turn, acted upon this environment. Placing particular stress on the clear contours and white backgrounds of these photographs, as well as their material and technical prerequisites, it argues that the radical clarity of Renger-Patzsch’s photographs is best regarded as an active intervention into a compromised environment, in which the photographer was called upon to bring forth clarity from the dust and smoke of industrial extraction.

Over the last decade, 3D projection mapping has flourished around the world under the auspices of corporate publicity firms, arts organizations, and urban-branding initiatives. In the popular press, this work has been hailed at once as fulfilling the ambitions of expanded cinema (freeing the moving image from the screen) and as performative architecture (liberating architecture from stasis). However, this emphasis on the freedom of the moving image, on the one hand, and on movement itself, on the other, has caused neglect toward the way that such projections interact with their architectural support. Indeed, in its short history, projection mapping has already developed favoured idioms, whose repetition across the globe draws into question its site-specificity. Whereas unapologetically commercial projects have tended toward figurative motifs, projects aspiring to the artistic have tended to systematically favour the language of abstraction. This latter group is the concern of this essay, in which, drawing on the critical framework provided by earlier inter-war debates surrounding light architecture, the author investigates the potential and limitations of such luminous abstractions in engendering new forms of spatial experience. Do these high-tech projections encourage the spectator to engage with architecture in a new way, or do they instead efface their architectural setting beneath an ornamental visual spectacle?Durant la dernière décennie, la « projection mapping » en trois dimensions a connu un épanouissement international sous les auspices de films publicitaires corporatifs, d’organisations artistiques et d’initiatives de valorisation de marques urbaines. Selon la presse populaire, ces oeuvres sont regardées comme une réponse aux ambitions du cinéma élargi (pour permettre à l’image en mouvement de se dégager de l’écran) et de l’architecture performative (pour libérer l’architecture de son état statique). Cependant, l’accent mis sur la liberté de l’image en mouvement d’une part, et sur le mouvement lui-même d’autre part, néglige la façon selon laquelle ces projections interagissent avec leur support architectural. Effectivement, dans sa courte histoire, la projection illusionniste a déjà développé ses expressions idiomatiques préférées et la répétition de celles-ci à travers le monde permet de remettre en question son concept in situ. Alors que les projets manifestement commerciaux favorisent des motifs figuratifs, les projets aspirant à l’artistique favorisent le langage abstrait. C’est ce dernier groupe qui est le sujet de cet essai qui va retourner aux débats autour de l’architecture lumineuse de la période de l’entre-deux-guerres et en reprendre le cadre théorique pour mener une enquête sur le potentiel et les limites de ces abstractions lumineuses à engendrer de nouvelles formes d’expériences spatiales. Est-ce que ces projections de haute technologie favorisent l’engagement du spectateur envers l’architecture d’une nouvelle façon, ou est-ce qu’elles effacent plutôt le site architectural au profit d’un s...

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