* [Doors of Perception] *

@ Home with Jeffrey Shaw
JEFFREY SHAW

Architecture is both an existential and ideological enclosure. In the latter half of the 20thC we have witnessed the progressive dematerialisation of architecture motivated by a search for singular lightness and mutability. This lightness and mutability expresses the desire of every person to become architect of his/her own surroundings. The scale of such a fulfillment is best identified as the home-- the inner sanctum of that urban theater where we enact our lives. A paradoxical oscillation in this development comes from the desire to also find conjunctions between the personal and the social enclosure-- between privacy and engagement, between detachment and immersion.

An idiosynchratic curriculum of architecture's transformations in the last 40 years could be the following:

- Responsive soft architecture in the 60's

- Kinetic luminous sculpture in the 70's

- Virtual architecture in the 80's

- Televirtual architecture in the 90's

In responsive soft architecture in the late 60's and early 70's, the specially interesting architectural properties of these inflatable structures are that they are built up from air-thin skinned-transparent-lightweight-compact yet large scale-easy to make-inexpensive-mobile-popular-responsive-personal and sensuous.

E n c l o s u r e , T r a n s p a r e n c y , D i s s o l u t i o n

A second stage of development of these inflatable structure was the incorporation of other media-light, slide projection, film sound. Architecture becomes event structure-- the projection surface becomes expanded cinema-- the viewer jumps into the screen and into the image. Here then is a literal immersion in the pictorial/ cinematic space-- the architectural surface becomes deconstructed by a density of mediated images which constitute a new and indeterminate environment.

This path from enclosure, to transparency, to dissolution, reached a further stage of development in the 70's in a kinetic luminous architecture that abandonned even its thin skin. Now there were just the support structures that were the carriers of light-- the rock & roll lightshow and laser technology were for a while the ostensible avatars of a new total architecture of light.

The implication of this freedom from an architecture of compulsive materialism opened the way in the 80's for the discovery of the new domain of computational virtual architecture. This was signalled by the radical development of Ivan Sutherland's head mount display research done many years before, together with the arrival of computer graphics simulation capabilities that could begin to evoke a fully articulated virtual landscape.

Now in the 90's, the virtual landscape becomes a networked cosmography which mirrors the real world into a televirtual imaginative and social space. Tele-virtual-reality is the oppropriate domain of our architectonic desires today. Space, time and interaction become the design paramaters of this bouyant ambiance where we deconstruct the literal, circumvent the constraints of identity, and evoke a fluid poetics of space, person and intimate experience. And home is the hearth of this Newfoundland-- the proof of both its ubiquity and immediacy. Referring to certain art installations I have made over the last few years, I'd like to use them to discuss some prefigurations of this new domestic environment.

T h e . A r t . E x p e r i e n c e . @ H o m e

The familiar practice of art is bound to traditional structures of exhibition, publication, consumption and economics. Telematic networks and distributed virtual environments allow artworks to now be mounted in cyberspace and explored from the comfort of home. In the televirtual ether there is the opportunity for the development of completely new forms of propagation and dissemination of creative activity which in turn can bring the practice of art out from the periphery into the center of all social discourse. Such an internationalisation and mass access to artistic activity will transform its aesthetic, social and economic identity.

My installation The Virtual Museum embodies the idea of a single-room museum whose quantity of virtual exhibition rooms can be infinitely extended. The work prefigures the immanent telematic living room, where as sedentary travellers in a simulated world, we would have acces to any number of virtual museums, galleries, exhibition spaces, etc.

The Virtual Museum is a three dimensional computer generated museum constituted by an immaterial constellation of rooms and exhibits. Its apparatuses are a round rotating platform on which is located a large video projection monitor, a computer, and a chair on which the viewer can sit. From this chair the viewer interactively controls his/her movement through The Virtual Museum. Forwards and backwards movement of the chair causes forwards and backwards movement of the viewer in the museum space represented on the screen. Turning the chair causes a rotation of this virtual image space, and also a synchronous physical rotation of the platform. Thus the viewer moves (and is moved) simultaneously in both the virtual and real environments.

The Virtual Museum is constituted by five rooms, all of which are simulations of the real museum room. In the second virtual room, a moving text is positioned around the walls as if it were an arrangment of paintings. In the third virtual room, words are made into sculptural forms. In the the fourth room, images of male and female figures taken from Muybridge`s studies of the human body in motion are attached to the surface of a Japanese haiku which moves in two lines from wall to wall across the room, crossing in the center. The movement of these letters appears to cinematically animate the Muybridge figures-- a visual effect equivalent to a zoetrope animation.

The Virtual Museum`s five rooms are consecutively entered just by passing though their permeable walls. The exhibit in this fifth describes the particularity of a wholly computer generated environment-- three moving signs ('A', '2', 'Z') are primary red green and blue light sources that themselves constitute the whole phenomenology of the room. The Virtual Museum locates the virtual space in a contiguous relationship with the real space, and establishes a discourse in that fine zone that exists between the real and the virtual-- something that Marcel Duchamp called the 'infra- mince'.The Virtual Museum deconstructs the literal mueum, and proclaims the total evanescence of form, and the ascendancy of those digital techniques that now can illuminate the A to Z of virtual figurations.

K e e p i n g . F i t . ( M i n d & B o d y ) @ Home

One paradox of life in cyberspace is the loss of the real body conjoined with the gain of virtual bodie(s). While journeying the expanses of the televirtual Newfoundland, our sedentary bodies are indolently logged into the enabling machineries.The real body needs to be artificially maintained-- a spurious effort is needed to maintain the integrity of our bodies in an environment which no longer makes a natural demand on its exertion.

So exersise machines become the necessary counterpart of virtual reality machines. The apparatuses for televirtual travel are ready to be hybridised with the apparatuses of fitness center. In the design process, the one can be directly linked with the other-- for example in my installation The Legible City where the interface to the virtual world is a bicycle.

In The Legible City the visitor is able to bicycle in a simulated representation of a city. This virtual city is constituted by computer generated three dimensional letters which form words and sentences along the sides of the streets.Using the ground plans of actual cities, Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe, the existing architecture of these cities has been completely replaced by a new architecture of letters and text written by Dirk Groeneveld.

The bicyclist controls his direction by turning the bicycle handle, and his speed by pedalling. He may also pedal and move backwards. Bicycling through these cities of words is a journey of reading. Choosing the path one takes is a choice of certain texts and their spontaneous juxtapositions. The identity of these new cities thus becomes the conjunction of the meanings these words generate as one travels freely around in this virtual urban space. In front of the bicycle there is a small flat monitor on which the bicyclist can see the ground plan of the actual city-- and a moving dot shows his position there. A push button enables the bicyclist to instantly switch between the three cities: Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe.

In the AMSTERDAM VERSION the area represented is the old inner city as far as its 19th century boundary. In this version all the letters are exactly scaled so that they have the same proportions and location as the actual buildings which they replace. This results in a transformed representation of the real architectural contours and features of this city. The letter colours match the brick and stone tones of the real buildings. The texts are factual and are derived from archive documents which record actual events in Amsterdam from the 15th to the 19th centuries. These texts are located in those areas of Amsterdam to which they refer. Also the original vocabulary and spelling found in those old texts is respected. The mediated urban landscape is simultaneously a tangible arrangment of forms and an immaterial pattern of experiences. Its underlying identity is a psycho-geographic network of information-- a labyrinth of narratives secreted within its urban framework. The Legible City mirrors the objective world into this virtual imaginative space. Simulation deconstructs the material structures and evokes a fluid poetics of space, of person and of intimate experience.

H o m e l y . G a m e s & H o m e l y . S m a l l t a l k

Networking technologies have already made us all familiar with the wide range of possible comunications modalities in cyberspace. As disembodied and reconstructed identities we freely meet and talk to others in this virtual social environment. But not having a natural geography, the dimensionality of cyberspace has to be first elaborated as a fictional environment wherein we can locate ourselves and each other. This opens an almost infinite landscape of forms,-- for example the sober directness of the printed page, the audio visual sensuousness of multimedia, the adventurousness of the MUD environment. In fact all the possible meta-architectures and meta-worlds that can be constructed in an algorithmic space become the design parameters of networked hyper- reality.

As the whole of cyberspace is essentially a ludic construct, then game playing' becomes one of its basic operational modalities, wherein one can configure a hybridisation of the architectures of game and conversation. A recent work of mine Televirtual Chit Chat evokes elements of some familiar games-- Scrabble, Monopoly and Chess-- to set up its telematic conversational playing field between distant partners.

Televirtual Chit Chat was an interactive televirtual installation between two sites-- the IMAGINA in Monte Carlo and the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe. Two players who were geographically distant from each other shared a virtual image space. Letters could be chosen from a simulated computer keyboard. The position, size and shape of these letters could then be interactively manipulated over a three dimensional game board whose surface was divided into the familier grid of 64 squares. A map on the surface of the game board showed Europe between Monte Carlo and Karlsruhe-- representing the geography that separated the two players.

In Televirtual Chit Chat these two players face each other in a televirtual space of alphabetic forms, so that their formal interaction became at the same time a tentative exchange of letters, syllables, and words. Here text has detached itself from the surface of the page and assummes an autonomous existance, taking on the status of a ficticious ur language which at the same time constitutes the shared virtual environment where this communication takes place-- a telematic grafitti which becomes itself the architecture of an interactive and evanescent televirtual meeting place.

As in Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities where the literary multiformities of Venice are evoked, now a superfluity of new cities can be constructed in Cyberspace, boundaried only by.the limits of our imagination. And then even at that boundary, we can then create algorithmic self generating architectures that will autonomously take us even further.

@ H o m e . i n . t h e . ( V i r t u a l ) . W o r l d

So we see that in this new landscape, traditional boundaries all come into question-- inside outside, reality fiction, I the other, and specifically in the context of this conference, the boundary of what constitutes the home. I'd like to suggest that the new home is essentially a structure that is an envelope that maintains the privacy of its inhabitants, and at the same time is a social memrane that carries the representations of the televirtual worlds that surround these home loving people.

A recent work of mine-- EVE -- can be seen to describe the possible design and functionality of such a domestic and mediated membrane. EVE -- the Extended Virtual Environment-- is a new space of simulation developed recently at the ZKM in Karlsruhe. A prototype of EVE was presented for the first time in November 1993 in Karlsruhe at the MULITIMEDIALE 3

In its present configuration EVE is constituted by the following components:

Shaw-09 (illustratie)--->

1. An air inflated dome, 9 meters high and 12 meters wide. This dome has a revolving door for entry and exit. The fabric of the dome is a PVC coated polyester textile. The interior surface of the dome is silver, making it suitable for polarised stereoscopic projection

2. An industrial robot is located in the center of the dome. This robot arm supports the video projection apparatus at the focal center of the dome, and by rapid movements is able to move the projected image anywhere over the inside surface of the dome.

3. Two LCD video projectors generate a polarised stereo pair of images which are projected on the dome. This rectangular image is approx. 300cm wide. The visitors inside the dome use polarising spectacles to view the stereoscopic image.

4. One of the visitors to EVE wears a special helmet on which a three dimensional spatial tracking device is mounted. This tracker indentifies the position and angle of the viewer's head in relation to the dome surface, i.e. it identifies where the viewer is looking. This information is transmitted to the robot arm which positions the projected image accordingly.

5. The projected imagery is generated by a Silicon Graphics high speed graphics workstation with a multi-channel option that generates two video outputs (the stereoscopic pair). Two user inputs define the real time image transformations. Firstly the tracking device on the viewer's head identify his/her point of view, and secondly a joystick in that viewer's hand controls forwards and backwards movement in the data space.

The inflatable dome provides a surrounding and immersive space wherein the interactive movement of the image window reveals a virtual environment. In this way EVE constitutes a unique strategy for the visualisation of virtual scenographies-- on its mediated surface, space and time can be reproduced as a surrogate experience allowing a vicarious immersion of the viewer in the telematic environment. Considered as a domestic enclosure, EVE would thus constitute the firmament of a boundless tele-virtual-space which the user could configure at each moment to suit his/her needs and desires.

I'd like to use two specific examples. Firstly The Virtual Museum. As I indicated earlier, the modalities of telematic networking allow us to access and experience virtual museums and exhibitions from the comfort of home. EVE here functions as a membrane of representation for such a museum exhibition-- the surface of the dome becomes an osmotic aperture for the virtual scenography, allowing the viewer's point of view to explore the museum space as a telepresent extention of the domestic space.

In EVE, the conjunction of interior and exterior worlds would also allow the domestic environment to wholly transform its architectural identity. For instance Catal Huyuk, located in Anatolia in Turkey, is a virtual recreation from archeological data of one of the oldest (6500BC) excavated settlements. A historically extinct environment has here been reconstructed and thus can also constitute a telepresent extention of the domestic environment.

EVE hybridises the functionality of a head mounted display with the spatiality of an OMNIMAX cinema theater. With a good economy of technological means EVE allows virtual environments and personal visual interactivity to be projected into a large space A model of the new home is thus suggested where the pleasures of exploration and of social discourse in the televirtual domain can be shared by the whole family.

@ T h e . N e w . H o m e . A l t a r

Spiritual observances in the new domestic ambiance can also benefit from televirtual instrumentality. The age old tension between transcendental and material truths which problematizes any physical embodiment as a potential idolotary, could be resolved in the realm of immaterial representation. My recent work The Golden Calf, allows a worshipful object-- in this case a golden calf-- to renounce its iconoclastic corporeal form, and so become an appropriate empyrean archetype in the televirtual ether. And this dance around the naked pedestal proclaims that the emperor without clothes has arrived-- he is the great gun of our time and we exult in the promiscuous heterogeneous fineries of his cyber-attire.