Peter Burr’s multi-channel video installation Pattern Language was shown at Three Legged Dog Art and Technology Center in New York City. The work is a collaboration between Porpentine, Mark Fingerhut, and Brenna Murphy, with music composed by John Also Bennett.
Visitors to Pattern Language walked down a staircase into a dark theater, and joined other viewers on a platform to watch a video loop. At some points during the loop, silhouettes of the human form wandered around an abstract landscape that reminded me of a shopping mall. At other times, the human form disappeared completely, and all three screens were filled with moiré patterns and cellular automata. The effect was both whimsical and unsettling, a mood echoed by the installation’s music, which helped bind the video’s segments into a hypnotic whole.
I initially had a hard time connecting the the installation’s glitchy, procedural visuals with the namesake of its title, Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language. Alexander’s A Pattern Language is a 1970’s reaction against Brutalism, and is about places with “the quality without a name,” places that make us feel especially human and alive. Alexander gives concrete examples: the sunny corner of dozy garden with a peach tree, the concourse of a train station. Because Alexander urges his readers to avoid precise, modular patterns, Burr’s procedural Pattern Language seems like a perversion of Alexander’s agenda.
A small display with didactic text at the entrance to the installation helped to clarify Burr’s intentions. The display cycled through a series of architectural patterns for an underground city, all taking their names from Christopher Alexander’s work. These patterns are preliminary work for a video game called “Aria End”, which will be set in an underground megastructure, a classic inverted utopia. The game will use patterns like “Half-Hidden Garden”, which stipulates that “cavities and interstices where people fear darkness and dead ends must turn out to actually contain verdant space, re-training [people’s] subterranean fear-sense and bringing positive associations to underground space”.
This theme of “re-training” seems central to the work of Burr and his peers. It makes sense that artists who spend a lot of time with old dungeon crawl video games would naturally recalibrate their aesthetic sense around rendering artifacts and noise. Similarly, the lore around computer and video games helps to transform static spaces into living worlds, even if the underlying system remains fundamentally dead. It’s not so different from falling in love with an old garden or home, by choice or by necessity. There’s a similar sort of belief required, the belief that certain places and patterns can be more ‘real’ than others.
In many ways, this re-adaptation of Christopher Alexander’s ideas is fitting. I first encountered Christopher Alexander’s work in a list of books that every programmer should read: his thoughts on architectural patterns eventually inspired software builders to think of their work in terms of patterns. These patterns were eventually codified in 1994’s “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software”. The authors of this text, a group of four computer scientists, became known as “The Gang of Four”.
The Gang of Four’s design patterns were incredibly influential throughout the nineties and early aughts, and, according to many in the field, incredibly damaging. Where Christopher Alexander hoped that patterns would democratize the process of building, the Gang of Four’s patterns became a codex that transformed simple programs into factories full of observers, flyweights, and momentos.
Design patterns became associated with “enterprise bloat”, the software equivalent of the dead spaces that Christopher Alexander hated. Software engineers adopted modular design that sacrificed the needs and wants of people in favor of abstract ideals, and re-trained themselves to believe that this was the only way to build good software. And, in many ways, Burr’s “Pattern Language” is also full of these patterns of death, patterns that make us want to burrow into labyrinths and never come out.
