On digital materiality 

Misconceptions about the value and labor of digital textures

Seeking well-made digital materials for photorealistic renderings can be a very delicate process. There are many parameters to take into consideration. Digital materiality in this context is the digital version mimicking its physical, tangible materials. Digital materiality is made of digital materials that are themselves made of textures. The value of physical materials is based on their geographical location, their raw presence in nature, the cost of their fabrication, their dimensions and thickness, transportation cost, installation labor price, among other factors. For digital materials though, depending on their use of texturing techniques, the labor and value inherent to them is understood differently than for physical materials. How can we think of digital materiality’s value in relation to its production labor?



Labor of fake texturing in the Bavarian Rococo

Digital materiality is not a direct translation of physical materiality, it operates within a different logic. Digital materiality is most closely comparable to physical fresco texture in that sense. Let us take a surprising detour through Bavarian Rococo frescos to understand this better through a more tangible example. We are looking specifically at the Bavarian Rococo because it was a period in which newly discovered stucco techniques were abundantly used to trick visitors by mimicking materials like marble, both as texture and three-dimensional sculptures. Let us say you have a 19th century library building in the south of Germany, and you want to have its interior walls painted. If you were to ask Bavarian Rococo craftsperson to paint the interior walls – using the same fresco paint quality – in shiny yellowish-orange color to mimic gold materiality or ask them to paint the walls in pastel pink, white, and black to mimic marble material, they would definitely charge you more for the second one. This means that having the interior painted gold is less labor intensive than having it painted as a marble texture. The fresco painting that would be made in marble is more expensive than the golden fresco because it is not a matter of raw material price, transportation, installation time, or weight of materials as it is the case in physical materials, but a question of craftship. It takes better craftship to make believable the intricate marble texture than to produce a reflective gold texture. This logic is applicable to digital materiality. Craftship becomes skills and expertise in the digital realm; gold is also cheaper than marble, and they are both far cheaper than dirt. One needs better technical expertise to make dirt appear realistic digitally.

Defining Digital Materiality

Materiality is defined as the property of being material, but there is a small nuance to be considered. Material –by being composed of matter– is a tangible artifact. Materiality, on the other hand, is inclusive of tangible and intangible matter. Materiality is a state, so it moves away from artifacts and defined properties. Digital materiality is composed of data in the form of binary digits. It is representation by definition since it is presenting something other. Following this logic, digital materiality is the state of representation of physical materials, whether they are tangible or not. Digital material is the digital representation of a physical material through texturing techniques. Digital materiality’s value is thus directly linked to its digital craftship labor value.

There are two main craftship techniques for making digital textures. The oldest one is procedurally generated, made through manufactured textured only, and results in a simulation of the actual physical material. The second technique –which is more recent– is called PBR, which stands for physically based rendering. This technique is highly realistic and has an extremely accurate light rendering. These PBR materials are at their highest quality when they are made from photo-scanned physical material. How are these two different types of material valued in relation to the craftship labor?

Digital materiality as a simulation of physical materials

There is a technique for making textures from scratch, meaning that the texture is generated completely digitally; it is a simulation of a physical material. A digital material, as we have already established, is made of texture maps. There are numerous types of texture maps, and each of them serves a different purpose. Here though we will only address two main texture maps: the Albedo map (or Diffuse map) and the Normal map (or Bump map). Their names differ depending on the format of the software that is used, meaning if the material is a non-PBR material or a PBR material. These two maps are made from pixel-mimicking the actual material. Let us take brick: if you want to make a brick texture, you would need to draw rectangles aligned in rows and columns with gaps between them. Then, use the colors that you want the brick and the gaps to be depicted in and make a black and white version of this image to use as a Bump map. Numerous parameters can be added and controlled to create variations of that initial texture. This entire process is made using only software.

This technique is time consuming and the cost of the resulting materials depends on the number of customizable parameters, on the size of the texture image (better quality is more costly), and on the degrees to which it looks like the actual physical material it is mimicking. This effect is achieved through the addition of randomized messy details that break the rigidity and neatness of the digitally produced material. This addition of messiness is crucial to trick us into believing that digital materiality is depicting actual physical material. The messier and dirtier the material looks, the more labor it demands and the more value it will have on the digital market. This is contradictory to the logic of physical materiality. A large, patterned piece of marble would tend to cost more than broken smaller pieces of the same marble in the physical material.



Digital Materiality in actual physical materials

Another technique for producing textures is generated from actual physical materials, meaning that the texture is based on photogrammetry or photographic data. A material, as we have already established, is made of texture maps. Here though, we will only talk about two main texture maps, the Albedo map, and the Normal map.