Impossible Real is a book project by me, Carl Lostritto with contributions by Viola Ago, Julie Kress and Hans Tursack. The book addresses how and why architects, artists and designers manipulate reality.

Front and center in this discourse is the role of rendering. Most often, to render is to engage a thick software interface, to accept a photographic framework of variables and effects, and to assume an unquestioned posture of articulating material, mass, and color. But like drawing, rendering is an interdisciplinary, algorithmic, historically rooted cultural practice as much as it is a digital vocation. Its digitality is itself rich with conflict and contradiction. For example, rendering consumes and produces digital images. Likewise, rendering requires mastery of the digital to subvert digital aesthetics.

The element is the other essential ingredient in this discourse. Elements exist behind the scenes and in the scenes. Elements are essential for but can also essentially disrupt a conception of reality. The nature of elements invites a convergent conversation between matters of topology, technology, and theory.

The book is written for the reader who wants to make and theorize at the same time. In that spirit, the guest contributors and I aim to provoke and demystify at the same time. We write from the perspective of practice—as creators who want to influence and enable others to create—but we offer something different than tutorials. Instead, we set the stage for discourse with a series of elements that have a slippery way of existing in new or varied forms of reality. Because these elements are intertwined with (and sometimes created wholly through) the representational media that convey them, the act of unpacking, explaining, and sharing these elements is itself a project. Our methods are exposed including (and especially) those that are strange, weird, messy, extravagant and obscene. We posit that representation is speculative, and that speculation is more than a matter of what to build, but how we see and affect the world.

I teach at RISD and practice in a speculative experimental manner. I started this site in January 2021 to coincide with the start of the project and with the understanding that a digital counterpart would be a necessary companion to a printed book. I try to share ongoing experiments (related to this and other work) on Instagram @lostritto.

Impossible Real is part of the Applied Research and Design editorial line, which is an imprint of ORO Editions. (The same publisher as my other book, Computational Drawing.) This project is supported by the RISD Faculty Professional Development Fund.