Review: KAYWA and Kooaba

Abstract

KAYWA ; www.kaywa.com Kooaba ; www.kooaba.com If architecture is a kind of hardware, it may seem surprising that in recent months these pages have been filled, at least in part, with reviews of software. In particular, those programs and institutions that offer graphic interface-based models of space (e.g., Google Earth, ARTstor, etc.) have rightfully received attention as current or potential tools of the art and architectural historian. These reviews have offered insights into the ways in which our discipline is changing——augmented and perhaps impoverished——by the inevitable onrush of these technologies. However, a crucial aspect of all of these programs or tools, which has been consistently elided (and architectural historians are by no means alone in perpetrating this elision), is their primary status as advertising. If this claim strikes the reader as strange, a quick visual analysis of any Google site, ARTstor metadata page, or Twitter feed should set you at an appropriate level of unease. To the serious historian of art and architecture, advertising is something of a beete noire. To caricature the debate, there remains a profound tension between those in our disciplines who, on the one hand, would prefer to exclude advertising from the realm of true art, and on the other, those who would expand the disciplines' boundaries to include advertising, folk art, propaganda, institutional ephemera, industrial or commercial illustration, commodities, and so on, within a revised canon of visual culture.1 This debate has concealed from most historians of art and architecture the technical, aesthetic, and spatial aspects of advertising, and forestalled the serious study and critique that only our disciplines are prepared to provide. The advertising image acts as an index. Its primary function is to point away from itself, and in its most effective forms, it actually redirects our attention to from the image to the referent. Yet the advertising …