Semantic 3D models: surveying and drawing the virtual city

The themes examined in this essay are situated at the barycentre between the surveying and drawing of the contemporary virtual city. The text presents a selection of experiments with a particular form of representation the so-called "semantic 3D model" - that, above all for didactic purposes, would seem to represent an important medium for the expansion of knowledge, the discretization of heuristic processes, for triggering hybrids of dialectic couples and exercising the imagination; actions propaedeutic to the representation of cyberspace in all of its various declinations. As a conceptual form of drawing it consents the elaboration of ideas through visual expression structured similar to a map-manifesto-index, with a strong identity and open to successive developments aimed at the creation of inhabitable online sensible environments. The model of representation described in the text was developed as part of a educational project examining the aesthetic-spatial characteristics that shape the architecture of Virtual Worlds, elaborated through visual-conceptual syntheses derived from interdisciplinary processes of hybridisation. The principal objective of this type of drawing is not to expose an a priori form, but instead to test, in a unique sphere of operation, the "substances" identified for each project: selected references; preceding ideas; possible forms; consequent results based on a logic of forecasting. Not a predefined form-project, but instead "fluid objects" to be selected by our intellect from consequential series of coherent transformations triggered by the process of representation.