Page 67 - META

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ISSN 2309-0103 www.archidoct.net
Vol. 7 (2) / February 2020
1 Definitions of meta-representation
The etymology of the prefix “meta” finds its origin in the word μετά which is taken to mean after, beyond) means more comprehensive or transcending. We could argue that a material could be analogue and yet an immaterial representation , in the broader sense, constitute an intentional mental representation of the thing which is a lot different than a random representation of a thing which could be more closely connected to the notion of the trace, a fragment of a whole. According to Barbara Von Eckardt Peirce’s mental representations have four important aspects (Eckardt, 1999); they are realized by a representation bearer, they have a content, its represen- tation relations are “grounded” somehow, and as a result it is interpretable by some interpreter. Therefore, in the case of design a representation demands; A designer, content (literal or fictional, objective or subjective, literal or abstract etc), a discipline or a method, a competent reader / re- ceiver to whom the information is communicated. In this path representation covers the ability to think about something and believe in something and communicate these thoughts to some- one else (correctly or incorrectly it does not matter). According to Dennett (Stanovich, 2004) a metarepresentation is a higher – order representation of some kind, or what Sam Scott would define as a representation of a representation (Scott, 2001). It is also implied that the information that is communicated to someone through representation is method-relation sensitive, which means that metarepresentations are enabled by design thinking as a method. Design thinking constitutes a shift of focus from method to changing values (Spiridonidis,2009), feedback incor- poration, experimentation, and engagement through making and fabrication (Voyatzaki, 2010) and thus it negates notions of classical top-down cognitive thinking.
We could decipher two stratas of metarepresentations depending on their performance; Those higher order representations that perform a task of selfreferentially returning the representa- tions action in itself, and those metarepresentations that allow relational thinking on relations that refer to an individual’s mental capacity to reason about the mental states of others and their social role and status, and the condition of the common ground that they share (Horton, 2016).
Returning to Eckardt’s classification we could say that the former kind of metarepresentations emphasizes content, while the latter relations. By repeating intrinsically these actions the way of thinking is affected as the first strata is of a more automatic, fractal looking nature emphasizing encoding and belief in the method, that resembles a couple of early period Magritte paintings with the same title but similar content “the human condition” (figure 1), while the second one assumes a thinking that oversees the object level operations that resemble monitoring, that is evident in the use of Trompe-l’œil in Sala a Crociera, in Palladios Villa Barbaro (c1560). Magritte’s description of one of the paintings is characteristic “In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting. Thus, the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape (Magritte, 1977).“ The ambiguity created through the repetition of the content is enabled by the realistic portrayal of an object that is represented twice in the same medium, the painting. This could be described as contentual self-awareness (Wildgen, 2009). The absence of a frame in the canvas literally (in the context of the painting) merges the landscape with the canvas and the center of the theme, the tree is repeated as an object between different states (painting – painting of a painting) inside a room that is signified by the presence of a window paired by curtains. In Palladio’s Villa Barbaro the emphasis shifts from the repetition of the content to the experience of looking. The use of Trompe-l’œil in Sala a Crociera (figure 2) uses the frame of the windows, the balusters in order
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Meta(re)presentations
Antonis Moras