Deferred Heritage: digital renderings of sites of future knowledge production.

In visualising the heritage of the future, photo-realistic digital renderings of university developments serve a productive role in bringing their depicted content into being. Representing intended locations for the production of knowledge and the reproduction of social realities, such images possess a semiotic and affective role in relation to planning, promotion and the generation of capital and political will, and appear to accelerate past the messy but necessary processes of negotiation, construction, maintenance and even post-occupancy to represent a state of idealized completion before the fact. In borrowing the appearance of the photographic but also elements of its truth function (Tagg, 1988), photorealistic architectural media assist in the manifestation of ‘truths to be’ via the agency of production processes characterised by the convergence of imaging, construction, and economic functions on networked platforms (Cheshire, 2017). If for K Michael Hays, architecture is now ‘just part of the smooth media mix’ (Hays, 2001), this could be argued to be an outcome of developments described by Tafuri which reduce it to a ‘moment in the chain of technological production’ (Tafuri 1998). The effects of the participation of the university in the industrialisation of the production of spectacular space has wider epistemological repercussions: heritage, amongst other forms of knowledge, is deferred, forever yet to be produced. This paper explores the agency of images that attempt to portray locations in which the future production of knowledge take place, in order to bring them into being.