Riassunto
If architecture is the construction of space between people, what happens when that space exists in a virtual world? That question is the starting point for this collection of revolutionary projects by a new generation of designers. The book begins by examining the important issues that have emerged as technology reshapes our idea of place and proceeds to present the four winning projects from the first architecture competition held within the explosively popular Internet community known as Second Life. Chosen for their inventiveness and aesthetic excellence, these structures - a cloud that can be inhabited; a meta-museum; an interactive sound scape; and a "snow palace" of discarded objects - illustrate the mindbending possibilities of digital design. In the book's final section, media artists share their real-time experiences conceptualizing and creating projects for the virtual world.
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ON INTERACTIVE COMPUTER GAMES
In 1997 we were invited to produce an art project in a well-known "techno" club in Munich in connection with a symposium on electronic music. We decided to recreate the premises of the club - including all the works of other artists exhibited there - in the 3D-modelling program of the Ego shooter game Marathon. We installed numerous monitors and projectors on the spot in the real room, and allowed anyone to play who wanted to. The aim of this LAN (local area network) game was to kill aliens and other opponents with an arsenal of martial weapons. The aggressive situation required maximum alertness. Any distraction could mean your own virtual death. Real space merged into virtual space in front of our eyes. After the game, no one could go round the corner in the real room without some palpitations...
"Somehow I managed to escape the realm of the Ego-shooter Marathon..."
Even if LAN games are different from MMOG (massive multiplayer online games) such as Second Life in having other players simultaneously present in the room, while you remain anonymous and singular, the experiences we had are applicable to virtual worlds such as Second Life:
1) In the club there was a double floor that led to the loss of the genius loci, and gave rise to a new mental map.
2) Our whole spatial perception was reduced to audiovisual elements. All other senses of spatial perception were largely blotted out. We realised that the success of AV "spatial creations" lies in them being easily controllable in comparison with the physical architecture.
3) The interaction generated an undertow that affected our thinking. As in driving a car, it gave us a restricted field of action that required total concentration and instinctive thinking. Associative thinking was replaced by instinct and quick reactions. Daydreaming when driving causes accidents.
We soon realised that its a myth to think that interactive spaces necessarily lead to more creativity. Quite the contrary - our experiment showed that the capacity for personal spatial ideas and intuition was inhibited. This is incidentally how interactive environments also differ from the classic cinema experience. Films create freedom for your own associations and memories by what they don't show and by what, like editing techniques, separates and links time and space. Here, the difference between gaming and playing is discernible. Playing has to do with inventing and is less rule-bound than gaming. In other words, you can only imagine what is not there. The more you show, the less the rest has to be imagined. The less you have to imagine, the easier you are to control.
ARCHITECTURE'S SECOND LIFE
What was missing from Second Life was the storyline. Unlike in Marathon, there was not even a target, a high score. No one understood what the game was about. So why all the media hype about Second Life? What s the plot in Second Life?
The answer is obvious - the narrative element of Second Life is reality itself. In Second Life, we look at a scene which is more than a metaphor for reality. It is both - reality and metaphor at the same time! Alongside the self-dramatisation by means of avatars and buildings as alter egos, it is about social adaptation. Put more precisely, Second Life is not about producing architecture or chatting about important things but about "playing at architecture" and "playing at communication".
In Second Life, stage sets are produced for an absurd theatre reminiscent of Robbe-Grillet's Last Year in Marienbad. Three-dimensional self-portraits and dream houses come up if, like Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, you fly over a landscape that oscillates aesthetically between Bob Ross and The Sims. Anyone who wakes up for the first time in the architecture of virtual exile is inevitably reminded of David Lynch's surreal scenario in Lost Highway.
Gaudy though the world in it seems, it is nevertheless affirmative. That is why most of the avatars look like Pamela Anderson and Brad Pitt, gestures are standardised, most of the buildings are ordinary suburban houses or fair stalls, and the whole space is a mimetic doll's house. Moreover, everything is there to play a role - as with a doll at the psychiatrist s. It is as if the architecture itself is lying on Freud's couch because in reality it is undergoing a serious identity crisis provoked by media-based spatial awareness. That is sufficient reason to examine the results of the first Architecture and Design Competition in Second Life.
As part of Ars Electronica in Linz, an international jury selected four winning projects from 126 submissions, and after a public vote prizes were awarded at the Zeche Zollverein in Essen. All the works came from professional architects and designers. The jury (Pascal Schöning and Shumon Basar from the London-based Architectural Association, Melinda Rackham of the Australian Network for Art and Technology, Tor Lindstrand from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and architectural curator Mathieu Wellner) focused on projects that were formally largely abstract, invited other users to get involved or were simply more exciting than reality.
So what reality might that be? What sort of reality is it where terms such as "mixed realities", "augmented realities", "virtual spaces", "hybrid spaces" or "the metaverse"3 have become commonplace? In what form do these amorphous concepts reveal their importance for our reality and our awareness of space? What role does the aesthetic aspect have?
"... I feel as if my creator has abandoned me...
... but even worse -I think I'm lost."
Numerous projects succumbed to the lure of a formal "anything goes", and let rip an orgy of forms. Unencumbered by static and commercial constraints, Sullivan's dictum that "form is follows function" seems to have degenerated into farce. What function could that be, anyway? What are the functions and effects of designs in virtual space?
By definition, virtuality specifies an imaginary entity or one made specific via its characteristics.
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