1. Critical analysis of visualisation
Primarily, visualisation aims to express the ideas behind an architectural design in a way accessible to the general public. Hence, the most important task is to develop a functional model for architecture which, growing out of a coherent logical and theoretical basis, will serve as a universal carrier of abstract meanings.
We analyzed the visualisations of the Central Communication Port (CPK) through the lens of collective fantasies, aesthetics, and sensibilities shaped within the framework of the “economy of images,” and by their instrumental use by authorities on the periphery of globalised capitalism. Experience to date shows how visualisations often diverge from reality when, upon project completion, designers deliberately sacrifice certain elements to achieve the desired visual effect.
Observing successive visions of CPK prompts us to trace the political process hidden behind the presentations of megaprojects, in which the visualisation stage lays the foundation for the further development of the social imaginary.
2.
“Contemporaries christened the operation ‘strategic embellishment’”
Technology refinement through aesthetic means serves to suspend the political. The subliminal message of visualisation is that there is more at stake than local disputes and politics. Such embellishment can play the role of a fetish. It masks real functions, especially those related to the control of social emotions or the alienation of audiences and employees from the actual game of interests. In this sense, the technology aestheticization can fuel our interest and desire for technology, concealing its instrumental, repetitive nature while giving it an aura of uniqueness.
By imposing a tangible shape on the future, one that people can invest in and bet on, visualisation gains its strategic power. It constitutes an attempt to present the future as a simple extension of the present, devoid of any unpredictability. Notably, visualisations, or rather the viewer’s encounter with them, express both anxieties and hopes, as well as prefigurations of the assumptions one makes when imagining the future. Visualisations allow us to spin scenarios, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they spin scenarios about themselves and about us.
However, we cannot limit their function to illustrating the future. They are representations of a large airport to be built near Baranów and Teresin. Their significance in the present lies in how they help us cope with shocking changes by guiding our imagination along predetermined paths.
3. Megaproject as sustaining desire
Regardless of whether we are talking about Elon Musk’s Hyperloop visualisations or Neom in the Saudi Arabian desert, we must acknowledge that they are a medium that is separate and autonomous from the completed project. This concerns primarily the financing method, in which the image plays the most important role as an object that arouses patrons’ desire. The visualisation does not refer to the future, i.e., the moment of implementation. It is completely devoid of agency, and yet everything revolves around it. It is solely a self-presentation, in which the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciated align perfectly. Visualisation sells an object that is already here. A completed megaproject does not become more real than its visualisation, nor does it attract more attention.
4. Flat/carved space, between the figurative and figurativeness
Every image emerges by extracting certain elements from the indeterminacy of space. However, visualisation lulls us into complacency. It leaves only those elements that are already familiar, arranged in an equally familiar configuration. All activity remains in an order external to visualisation. This is not a typical way of manifesting an image, but a deliberate tactic of using flat space. Any attempt to find a reference pattern to something external in the visualisation itself proves futile; its role lies solely in its presence. Meanings, references to the manner of implementation, and the envisioned technical solutions overlap in layers, creating various combinations.
5.
Visualisation presents itself as the limit of our social cognition. It shows elements that are so commonplace that they are almost meaningless. It is as if we are in a shop where we expect to find certain products on the shelves, but we do not know where they are or what label they have. The architects presented six identical design concepts to the CPK investors. How were they supposed to choose the Foster+Partners design, which was indistinguishable from the others? This brings to mind a passage from *Anti-Oedipus*, which says that large numbers (mole formations) already presuppose selection that the multitude of molecular interactions make possible. Looking at the visualisation, a viewer may read some meaning from it, whether associated with the idea of a great Poland or with progress leading to a specific vision of the future. We may compare this situation to making a political choice, the selection of random elements. The framework in which the viewer and the voter find themselves is the same zero degree, the “nothing special” of visualisation. Interestingly, investors chose a design whose distinctive feature was being the least distinctive. Additionally, at the implementation stage this project has allowed the least decisive action.
6.
“Friction-free capitalism”
Sometimes, the CPK projects are works of organizational imagination, drawing inspiration from ideas accompanying the emergence of cyberspace and the Internet. A Communication Port is nothing more than a point of pure flow of services and goods, an ethereal medium of exchange with any traces of “friction” removed. The disturbances that set the exchange processes in motion, as well as social conflicts and inequalities, disappear. On the other hand, visualisations allow us to believe in the concept of society as an organic whole, integrated by the cooperative forces. An impersonal, immaterial Mind replaces direct interactions. An almost incorporeal life, detached from discomfort and contradictions, does not tolerate ambivalence. Therefore, the Port is a total space, a closed world taken out of context, a system resembling a miniature city. However, its centre is not a place but a function, a central hub for the flow of information, which could be located far beyond the airport. Just as we sometimes define peace in opposition to war, as its absence or opposite, the aseptic order of an organized monopoly contrasts with the idea of a polluted, chaotic material life.
7.
“The human being no longer has any history: or rather, since he speaks, works, and lives, he finds himself interwoven in his own being with histories that are neither subordinate to him nor homogeneous with him”
Human being is an invention, the outcome of a certain convention. S/he is defined by speech, work, and lifestyle, rather than their *raison d'être*. S/he becomes a function, subordinate to a project. Technologies and devices mediate relationships between people, gaining the ability to model them, to produce a certain type of regulatory subjectivity. This is how visualisations work. They serve to discipline subjectivities, narrowing their room for manoeuvre.
The people in the visualisations are inscribed in a super-modern aesthetic, in which movement and flow come to the fore, preventing the materiality of the passengers’ journey from coming to the fore. Visualisations erase sweat, fatigue, and all the “physical” experiences of travel. A vision of a progressive, mobile, flexible, and unrestricted individual comes to mind. This interacts with the compulsion of hypermobility, which individuals are trained to undergo daily. Visualisations remove from the margin of visibility the necessity of ensuring biological survival, searching for strategies to “cope,” or the uncertainty of tomorrow. But who can become such a traveller?
8. Non-place
Supermodernity is characterized by an excess of events and space, as well as the references’ individualization. The presented places are reduced to their function alone and are also subject to strict rules and regulations, preventing spontaneity from occurring. In visualisations, the CPK becomes a non-place where the individuals experience themselves as spectators, which contrasts with the use of such places, where people create sociability and establish relationships with each other. Visualisation erases this dimension of coexistence, preventing self-reference. When experiencing the visualisations of the CPK, one experiences oneself as part of a crowd of similar people; a spectator difficult to distinguish from the spectacle. The normalized practices of individuals who create the myth of the impossibility of the outside constitute the functioning of the non-place, thus legitimizing it. The visualisation of the non-place has no integrative or community-building function. It emerges through the existence of individuality, mediating relationships between people and then sucking them dry to continue functioning. The pairs or groups of people presented seem to be modelled, sterile, as if their activity were reduced to strictly following a ready-made script. The non-place is a space of flow; only the moment of entry and exit matters. There is an acceleration, a densification of place and time; it seems that more and more is happening, that the present is becoming longer and longer.
9. Temporality
According to Marxist theory, the capitalist system never ceases to produce ever newer technological “innovations,” as it operates in a cycle of recurring primitive accumulation, constantly reproducing itself and annexing the achievements of labor (the common intellect). Moreover, it is a movement of universalization, or reterritorialization, flattening all other counter-temporalities, such as voices of protest or disagreement with megaprojects. This translation of multiple times into a single time of capital is never complete. The capitalist system needs “striations” (which it produces itself), i.e., territories that provide resources that can be integrated later, i.e., different, unintegrated times, inconsistencies, and disturbances. Visualisations are part of this endless movement, including counter-temporality, which is human relations. Cooperation is instrumentalized into figure-actors advertising the CPK megaproject.
With the increase in fixed capital (machines), Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of machine surplus value and machine time. Within these temporalities, human and non-human become indistinguishable. However, this is not a positive phenomenon. We cannot measure these temporalities or attribute them to anything. In capitalism, production always takes place in a collective system that includes various machines, protocols, affects, pre-individual relations, etc. Bojana Kunst also describes this production of a new temporality, in which humans interact with visualisation, using the term “project temporality.” It opens up new possibilities, but in reality, the horizon of work is always the completion of the project itself, and it limits the possibility of movement, which in this case is the vision of using the CPK. Paradoxically, the increased possibility of mobility becomes rigid. The promise of satisfaction that the completion of a project or task (the process of travel) would provide cannot be fulfilled. The more a project promises in the future, the less remains of the present, which makes it impossible to create something permanent. Planning or predicting becomes breakneck.
10. Interior/exterior of the present
The visualisations of CPK constitute an excellent example of postmodernism, which has dominated architecture for the last half-century. We are interested in a specific feature of this style, which, through its characteristic architectural solutions, encourages us to perceive buildings as closed and complex systems.
One of the most important stylistic devices of architectural postmodernism is the internal differentiation of elements. Architects achieve the effects of distortion through the excessive use of glass and one-way mirrors – blurring the interior of the building, the dynamics of exposed technical installations and communication routes – the morphological exposure of lifts and escalators, as well as the selection of an appropriate scale and, directly, the design of new practices aimed at changing the perspective of space perception. The dynamics specific to the style are associated with the need to present it in constant motion. Designs draw attention to the simultaneous tension between the environment and the object, with the assumption that the object itself is to constitute a total space, a closed and finite world, a system resembling a miniature city in its structure.
The impact of postmodernism is also evident in the perception of time associated with the interference of objects in the environment, described metaphorically as “a kind of antigravity … utterly different in spirit from the law of falling bodies of the modern, which sought to agglomerate and combine by attraction (Freud’s Eros).” Thus, architecture invalidates the temporality of the accompanying spatial context (in this case, the pastures and fields of central Poland), disrupting order and chronology by introducing its own system of meaning. Therefore, the visualisations of the CPK elude unambiguous classification and create a kind of “hyperspace” for the implementation of new social practices.
11. Modernisation and megalomania
“For years, Poland practiced the pedagogy of shame and national micromania”
“We should create a new vision of the Central Industrial Region”
Between the visualisation and the discussions surrounding them, a certain vision emerges that the designers condense in their description of the Port as “one of the most important transport hubs in Central and Eastern Europe.” The alternative of “modernization or megalomania” plays out at the heart of this description. Stimulated by the CPK scenario, the vision of a Polish megalopolis, the largest and most prosperous agglomerations connected by high-speed rail and multi-lane motorways, is a clear call to mobilize social forces, a call for modernization. Observers who adopt this perspective may interpret the CPK infrastructure as a response to the region’s wasted resources. On the other hand, the ambivalence and hesitation that arise in response to this promise point, among other things, to the semi-peripheral position of a country forced to face the challenge of reconciling a foreign, albeit impressive and attractive, “modernity” with its own local culture and traditions. Is this not indicated by the fact that, among the transparent metal and concrete structures dominating all CPK projects, it is the wooden finishes that, according to the winning architectural studio, are supposed to “refer to traditional Polish architecture,” and the interior of the modern terminal, filled with natural trees, is supposed to evoke images of a “Polish forest?”