C o n t en t A c k n o w l e d g e me n t
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C o n t en t
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I n t r o d u c t io n
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I Cy C y be b er s p a c e
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I.1 INTRODUCTION
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I.2 DESCRIPTION DESCRIPTIO N OF A NEW WORLD
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I.3 ORIGINS I.3.1 Invention I.3.2 Conception
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I.4 SIGNIFICANCE
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I.5 VIRTUAL REALITY
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I.6 MEANING I.6.1 Internet Cyberspace I.6.2 Misunderstandings Misunderstandings of Internet Cyberspace I.6.3 Benediktine Cyberspace I.6.4 Threads I.6.5 Conclusion
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I.7 CYBERSPACE CITY
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I.8 CONCLUSION
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I I I n t e r n et e t C y b e r s pa pac e
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II.1 INTRODUCTION
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II.2 HISTORY OF THE INTERNET II.2.1 The Mother of All Networks II.2.2 The Web II.2.3 Facts and Numbers II.2.4 Bandwidth II.2.5 Network Protocol
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II.3 HYPERTEXT II.3.1 Navigating through Cyberspace II.3.2 Consequences
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II.4 VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES II.4.1 Cybercity II.4.2 Places in Cyber-‘Space’ Cyber-‘Space’ II.4.3 MUD II.4.4 Origin II.4.5 Habitat
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II.5 CYBERSPACE URBANISED? II.5.1 Virtual Cities II.5.2 Digitale Stad Amsterdam
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II.6 CONSEQUENCES
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II.7 CONCLUSION
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I II I I C y b e r s pa p a c e A r c h it i t ec t u r e
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III.1 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION
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III.2 III. 2 VIRTUAL ARCHITECTURE III.2.1 Introduction III.2.2 Urban Design III.2.3 Cyberspace Architects III.2.4 Critical Approach III.2.5 The Representation Representation of Space
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III.3 DIGITISED ARCHITECTURE ARCHITECTURE III.3.1 Data Field Architecture III.3.2 Applied Software III.3.3 Time-Space Relationship Relationship III.3.4 Virtual House
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III.4 LIQUID ARCHITECTURE ARCHITECTURE III.4.1 Introduction III.4.2 Virtual Poetics III.4.3 Transmitting Architecture III.4.4 Conclusion
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III.5 III. 5 EVOLUTIONARY ARCHITECTURE III.5.1 Nature III.5.2 History III.5.3 Generative Systems III.5.4 The Tools III.5.5 The Evolutionary Model III.5.6 Conclusion
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III.6 CONCLUSION
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I V I n f o r ma t i o n A r c h it it ec t u r e
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IV.1 INTRODUCTION
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IV.2 THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION IV.2.1 Cyberspace as an Information Tool Tool IV.2.2 The Value Value of Online Information IV.2.3 Search Engines
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IV.3 3D INFORMATION INFORMATION VISUALISATION IV.3.1 Information Quantity IV.3.2 Visualisation Visualisation Techniques IV.3.3 Overview IV.3.4 Spatial Arrangement of Data Data IV.3.5 Examples
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IV.4 VR/SEARCH IV.4.1 CGI IV.4.2 PERL IV.4.3 VRML
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IV.5 MAPPING INFORMATION INFORMATION IN CYBERSPACE CYBERSPACE IV.5.1 Dimensionality IV.5.2 Continuity IV.5.3 Limits IV.5.4 Density IV.5.5 The Remaining Principles IV.5.6 Conclusion
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IV.6 CONCLUSION
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C o n c l u s io io n
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R e f e r e n c es es
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I n t r o d u c t io n What is cyberspace ? What is, in fact, the meaning of this space ? And if cyberspace can really be understood as space , what is the resultant role of architecture in this still largely unknown realm? Is all reality then necessarily becoming virtual reality? Who are the architects of cyberspace, and which designing principles should they follow? And if there are really architects involved, why are the contemporary examples of virtual reality environments nowadays then still characterised as banal ? Moreover, what does it actually mean to design cyberspace? Which urban metaphors are implemented in the virtual realm, so that in some way familiar notions become apparent in this abstract and technological world? Is cyberspace a novel departure or an extension – perhaps the final extension – of the trajectory of abstraction and dematerialization that has characterised so much modern art, architecture and human experience? Or sh Or shortly, ortly, to 1 put it in the summarising words of Ole Bouman: “Can architecture go digit-all ?” ?” The impressive influence that both information and digitalisation, two phenomena that undeniably are revolutionising society and culture at every level as well, had and still have on the notion of architecture itself is more than fascinating. Certainly, this inspiration already conquered much of the development of western knowledge and has apparently drawn many multidisciplinary authors further away from their traditional fields of research. Consequently, in this very attempt to answer the questions mentioned above as correct as possible, it is in fact their work that will be used intensively. First, the significance of the term cyberspace itself is thoroughly analysed. The context of its literary origin is hereby explained, as well as some of the many social consequences it has caused and the various important meanings it has gathered in history. In the second chapter, the concrete visualisation of virtual environments is compared to the promising chances architectural form could possess in a pure digital realm. Furthermore, the commonly recognised characteristics of the city, which are used intensively in these socially inspired applications, are pursued and analysed in greater depth. This investigation is based on some two-dimensional community worlds now existent in the so-called Internet cyberspace , although it should be noted that naturally, this field is developing in an unbelievable rapid pace and consequently threedimensional and immersive environments will certainly emerge soon. In the third chapter, some of the possibilities the process of digitalisation brought along in the field of the architectural generation of form are clarified by describing specific personal investigations of visionary architects and researchers. They are in fact convinced of the originating power contemporary computers now are able to produce and base their entire architectural discourse on the dynamic perception of abstract information, which is mapped unto the construction and surfaces of their digitally generated forms. Finally, in the last chapter, the more specific field of information visualisation is illustrated with several specific examples of virtual spaces that are uploaded with various architectural concepts. Furthermore, a VRML-application called VR / search search that also has been programmed as part of this work is explained by some of the cyberspace design-principles proposed by the author Michael Benedikt.
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BOUMAN, OLE, RealSpace in QuickTimes: Architecture and Digitization , Rosbeek, Nuth, 1996, p.23
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“The realm of pure information, filling like a lake, siphoning the jangle of messages transfiguring the physical world, decontaminating the natural and urban landscape, redeeming them, saving them from the chain-dragging bulldozers of the paper industry, from the diesel smoke of courier and post office trucks, from jet fuels fumes and clogged airports, from billboards, thrashy and pretentious architecture, hour-long freeway commutes, ticket lines, and choked subways… from all the inefficiencies, pollutions (chemical and informational), and corruptions attendant to the process of moving information attached to things – from paper to brains – across, over, and under the vast and bumpy surface of the earth rather than letting it fly free in the soft hail of electrons that is cyberspace.” (BENEDIKT, MICHAEL - Cyberspace: First Steps - p.3 )
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C y be Cy b er s p a c e « We are witnesses to an extraordinary era that will no doubt be remembered in history as an appropriately revolutionary development to accompany a new millennium. I hope, by the time you finish this book, that that last sentence will be regarded as mild understatement rather than wild, wide-eyed hyperbole. » (WHITTLE, DAVID - Cyberspace: The Human Dimension - p.4 )
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I .1
I n t r o d u c t io n The Content In this chapter, the phenomenon of cyberspace will be thoroughly investigated. First, its roots will be explained by the description of the movement called cyberpunk and its most important figure William Gibson. As this word received many meanings out of several human fields of research through the years of its existence, the actual significance it had (and has) and two main theoretical streams of thoughts about the content of the term will be withheld. At last, the context of its origin is clarified by an analysis of the urban environments literally described in Gibson’s books. How it all begun…
“Cyberspace, a consensual hallucination, experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding...” 2
I .2 .2
D es es c r i p t i o n o f a N ew e w Wo r l d Welcome to a new world, seen through the eyes of its inventor: Willia William Gibson. Appare Apparently ntly describ describing ing the openin opening g sequen sequence ce of a film like like Blade Runner 3, this literal description resulted in a lot more than any other paragraph in the famous science fiction novel entitled Neuromancer , a book of which of which the significance is sometimes compared to futuristic legends as 1984 , or Brave New World . What first only seems to represent a dizzying trip in some space vessel above a metropolitan city in the dark and uncertain future will hopefully get another interpretation throughout this chapter.
Figure I-1 Two stills taken out of the film Blade Runner (1982) (http://us.imdb.com/Title?Blade+Runner+(1982))
A silent silent and slowly slowly changing changing panora panorama ma by night, night, containin containing g uncountab uncountable le light light patterns patterns of unknown source, only disturbed and enlightened by sudden and loud pulses of huge vertical flames coming from…nowhere. Chaotic endless clusters of moving, meaningless objects shifting in an impressive view, almost showing the vast amount of yet undiscovered human knowledge. This dramatic visualisation taken out of the beginning of Blade Runner can be considered as a simplistic personal expression of the visionary thoughts about cyberspace. Michael Heim described in his essay how the fictional characters of Neuromancer experience the ‘Matrix’ –- cyberspace - as a place of rapture, erotic intensity and powerful desire, a phenomenon where objects attain a 2 3
GIBSON, WILLIAM, Neuromancer , HarperCollinsPublishers, London, 1995, p.67 RIDLEY, SCOTT, Blade Runner , USA, 1982
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supervivid hyper-reality4. In this view, ordinary experience seems dull and unreal by comparison. Gibson in turn tries to clarify his first and rather abstract description to the reader in his later books. This ‘abstract representation’ seems to have the capability to take any form, ranging from pure geometric colour-coded copyrighted shapes or architectural representations signifying corporate ownership to photo-realistic illusions. In short, Gibsonian cyberspace can be seen as a rather spectacular representation of a global information economy, international and essentially computer-based. This immersive environment is hereby articulated as a metropolis of bright data constructs, able to stimulate all the organic senses of any human spectator by a consensual hallucination. ‘Consensual’ is then the result of some well-known, commonly shared protocols and agents5 for encoding and exchanging information. Moreover, cyberspace can then be considered as a ‘hallucination’ when simulation software is able to create a three-dimensional environment out of the information itself. With this early and imaginable definition in mind, we first investigate the origins and importance of the word after which we can step deeper into the very meaning it obtained in more than ten years of research and development in many, not only academic, communities.
I .3
Or ig in s I .3 .1
I n v en t io n
Although the science fiction writer William Gibson is credited with introducing this word in one of his first science fiction stories and later in his book Neuromancer (1984), Gibson himself does credit John Brunner 6, author of Shockwave Rider (1975) with inventing the concept. Brunner in turn refers the original origin to the futurist Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock (1970). In Toffler’s visionary work several pages are devoted to a section entitled “The Cyborgs Among Us”, in which he describes the possibilities of human-machine integration and even of human brains functioning independent of their bodies. This latter concept also returned, although a little adapted, in many of Gibson’s novels. In an ironic twist of fate, George Orwell’s vision of an invasive cyberspace presence called ‘Big Brother’ in the book 1984 takes place in the same year as the title, which is also the year Neuromancer was first published. Cyberspace, now often used to describe an infinite electronic world filled with promise and interaction, came thus originally out of the dark visions of a, then rather unknown, science fiction genius. This inventor, William Gibson, is the author of Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Burning Chrome, The Difference Engine (with Bruce Sterling) and Virtual Light . His first book Neuromancer won all three major and most prestigious American science fiction prizes: the Hugo , the Nebula as well as the Philip K. Dick award. Although born in the United States, Gibson lives and works in Vancouver, Canada since 1972. He is recognised as the leading writer of a new kind of science fiction called ‘cyberpunk’, extrapolating contemporary technology into a future of urban decay and its consequences on the lives of underclass characters. Some other writers followed this movement, of which Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling, and John Stirley are only a few. In Gibson’s novels, everyone, even punks and street gangs, has access to technology, while huge multinational corporations battle each other illegally, as each of them is holding more power and wealth than world governments. Warfare, as well as normal criminal acts are executed through pure electronic communication, often using 4
HEIM, MICHAEL, The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace, in BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace : First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, p.62 5 For further explanation about communication protocols and electronic agents, see Chapter II: Internet Cyberspace. 6 WHITTLE, B. DAVID, Cyberspace : The Human Dimension , W.H. Freeman Co., New York, 1996, p.4
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programs like artificial intelligent viruses, so smart and human-like that some even received a real human citizenship. Being more than a literary genre, cyberpunk may also be applied to other forms and media, including film, comics, music, and fashion. Sometimes it is interpreted as a critique of capitalism or as the disembodied style or ‘hacker chic’ that is best fit to represent social interaction in cyberspace. Cyberpunks are people who explore the digital landscapes of electronic space and the term is often used to describe the outlaws and hackers on the computer frontier 7, people who are involved in illegal computer activities such as breaking into networks. It should be noted that not all forms of science fiction that deal with cyberspace are considered forms of cyberpunk. Popular as well as specialised press hailed Gibson the unchallenged guru, prophet, and voice of the new cybernetic world order and virtual reality. Curiously enough, although he has become an authority in the highly technological issues of the virtual realm, not many of his readers know that Gibson actually wrote Neuromancer on a simple 1927 Hermes typewriter.
I .3 .2
C o n c ept io n
Cyberspace. The actual term is technically unimportant, as other phrases are often used synonymously: Cyberia, Cyburbia, virtual space, virtual worlds, dataspace, the Matrix, the digital domain, the electronic realm, the information sphere, Electropolis, Netropolis, Virtual Reality, computer networking, the Internet… Nevertheless, it can be noticed that Cyberspace™ (trademark!) was almost a historical fact. As the word obviously seemed very attractive for commercial use, Autodesk Inc. tried seriously to protect it for one of its VR-projects8. Such a rush to lay claim to intellectual property rights was a clear sign that the forces of commerce were firmly charging at the economical richness of the expression. William Gibson, helped by Michael Benedikt, a man whose importance will be clarified later, succeeded to stop this proposal legally in order to keep the term in the ‘Public Domain’. But what does it mean literally? ‘Cyber’ connotes automation, artificial control, and computerisation.9 In the context of artificially generated imaginable environments, ‘space’ , of course, means a multidimensional place, most often used in relation with electronic spaces created by computer-based media.10 The word that results is as futuristic as the concept. Although regularly criticised in its early existence as representing a temporary hype phenomenon or typified as ‘only for nerds’, the word ‘cyberspace’ continued to increase rapidly in popular usage and meaning. But when the same critics still could not invent a better expression to replace the old one, it was concluded that this already commonly accepted word had become a necessary permanent fixture in many western languages, among which not only the English. Purists also complained that ‘cyberspace’, pronounced as “c ī -bûr-spās” actually is derived from the expression ‘cybernetics’, meaning the study of control mechanisms, indicating control through interactivity. Cyberspace could thus be understood as a place capable of controlling information, as a way that enables people to control certain devices through computers that give them a feeling of some kind of feedback. The expression cybernetics in turn is derived from the Greek “kubernetes”, and thus, critics argue, should be pronounced “k ī -bûr-spās”. But obviously, they lost the battle. 7
Ref.: HAFNER KATIE & MARKOFF JOHN, Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, 1992 8 SALA, LUC & BARLOW, JOHN P., Virtual Reality: De Metafysische Kermisattractie , SALA Communications, Amsterdam, 1990, p.50 9 ‘Cyber-‘ has actually become the prefix of the 1990s: cyberspace, cyberdeck, cyberpunk, cybernaut, cyberart, cybergames, cybersex, cybertalk, cyberbody, cyberworld, … 10 Other non-electronic ‘spaces’ are able to emerge when, for instance, people read books, listen to radio, etc.
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Etymologically ‘cyber’ means “steersman”, and that is what they are, the ‘console cowboys’ or ‘jockeys’ in Gibson’s books, when they ‘jack’ into the infinite ‘Matrix’ (a term that actually originates from the Latin for the mother). Connected through a neurological implant, they ride their cardinal brainwaves retrieved from an electronic controlling cyberdeck , experiencing the digital sensations of every requested command or program-run by some kind of perceptible representation. The physical world becomes hereby replaced by a symbolic media-generated landscape. “She slid the trodes on over the orange silk headscarf and smoothed the contacts against her forehead. “Let’s go,” she said. Now and ever was, fast forward, Jammer’s deck jacked up so high above the neon hotcores, a topography of data he didn’t know. Big stuff, mountain-high, sharp and corporate in the non-place that was cyberspace.” (William Gibson, Count Zero )
I .4
S ig n i f ic a n c e In this paragraph, several reasons will be mentioned why the term cyberspace received so much attention and importance until today. How did a word that science fiction writer Gibson had thrown into his work almost casually and with unconscious irony, acquire such value within only a few years time? It is strange to notice that, with the dark nature of Gibson’s view in Neuromancer in mind, this term transformed in the everyday use into a dynamic and positive representation of concepts and applications that the visionary writer himself could not have foreseen or predict. The word broke out of the domain of the synergetic techno-visionary world of ‘cyberpunk literature’ and engaged even the creative imaginations of a narrow spectrum of government, corporate, and academic researchers from various disciplines. Although cyberspace is popularised by Gibson’s books, it passed the phase of trendy phenomenon rather easily and is now considered as a powerful, collective mnemonic technology that promises to have an important, if not revolutionary, impact on the future compositions of human identities and cultures. In the view of anthropologist David Tomas, Gibson has devoted considerable attention to the chilling socio-economic implications of this space and its post-industrial context. Describing and extrapolating the lives of the lower social level of society, he tries to show the possible consequences of the future information age, and this instead of dry speculation. In fact, Tomas is convinced that Gibson delivers us the most sophisticated and detailed ‘anthropological’ vision of cyberspace to date: its social and economic facets and the outlines of its advanced post-industrial form. In this view, Gibson’s anthropological description is significant in three different ways.11
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DAVID, TOMAS, Old Rituals for New Space : Rites de Passage and William Gibson’s Cultural Model of Cyberspace, in BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace : First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, p.32 David Tomas is an artist and anthropologist teaching in the Departement of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa in Ontario. He has published numerous articles on ritual and photography, including one on the technicity in William Gibson’s novels.
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1. Science fiction is considered as an important tool that allows us to make sense of a rapidly emerging post-industrial culture. It acts like a ‘spatial operator’ connecting pasts and futures by way of the present. 2. It allows us to interpret an advanced information technology that has the potential to overthrow the sensorial architecture of the human body by reformatting its organic borders in powerful, computer-generated, digital spaces. 3. Advanced digital technologies , such as those who generate cyberspace, can act as a testing ground for ‘post-ritual’ theories and practices, as conceptualised by a post-industrial anthropology. So obviously some authors argue that the success of Gibson’s powerful vision of cyberspace was actually not for the merits of signalising some kind of technological development, but actually because he tried to describe a new social fascinating community. For social researcher Allucquére Stone, Neuromancer reached the hackers and also the technologically literate and socially disaffected who were searching for social forms that could transform the fragmented anomie that characterised life in Silicon Valley and all other electronic ghettos.12 This book provided them the imaginable public sphere and refigured community that was able to establish the grounding of a new kind of social interaction. In this way, the publication in 1984 resulted into a massive inter-textual presence not only in other literary productions of the 1980s, but also in technical publications, conference topics, hardware design, and scientific and technological discourses. Other merits might be more related to the ‘right time, right place’-phenomenon of the book, in which the fascinating way technology was described grasped the attention of more than one person personally involved in the field of computer research. In this context, the next fragment can be most clarifying. Question: How does cyberspace relate to ‘virtual reality (VR)’, ‘data visualisation’, ‘graphic user interfaces (GUIs)’, ‘networks’, ‘multimedia’, ‘hyper-graphics’ and many other catchy words introduced by the computer technology industry? Answer: Cyberspace relates to all of them. More than this, in some sense ‘cyberspace’ includes them all and much of the work being done under their rubrics.13
So cyberspace as a project and as a concept has collected these separate projects into one and focused them on a common target. The dream and fascinating dynamic force the concept incorporates, draws many studies and companies into the track of its own realisation. Although the visionary description provided by Gibson can be characterised as dark and dangerous, it had (and has still) a great influence on the way virtual reality and cyberspace researchers were (and are) structuring their research agenda. Nevertheless, more critical people still dare to doubt the real value of Gibson’s visionary contribution. They do agree that the disturbing and dark vision of fictional cyberspace might have contributed to the initial views of cyberpunks, criminals, anarchists, politicians, and of course businessmen and capitalists. But they also dare to argue that the fictional cyberspace no more depicts the real cyberspace than did Dante’s Inferno paint a picture of the real world in which he lived.
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STONE, R. ALLUCQUERE, Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures, in BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps , MIT Press, London, 1991, p.95 13 BENEDIKT, MICHAEL, Cyberspace: Some Proposals, in Cyberspace: First Steps , MIT Press, London, 1991, p.122
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I .5
Vir t u al Real it y Gibson’s definition can also be considered as a fictional translation of Ivan Sutherland’s original concept of the ‘Ultimate Display’, a special form of display that presented information to all the senses in a form of total immersion. Maybe inventing virtual reality in human history, Sutherland14 published an academic paper at the MIT Draper Lab in Cambridge in 1968 entitled ‘A head-mounted three dimensional display’, specifying one of the key technologies still being developed for virtual reality experiments. This system used television screens and half-silvered mirrors, so that the environment was visible through the TV displays. In these early days of computing, computers still being more like machines, huge and expensive, Sutherland dreamed about a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter, and concluding that, with appropriate programming, such a display could literally be the Wonderland in which Alice walked.15 Later work at NASA and by the American Department of Defence led to some prototypes for space exploration and military applications. These early applications of VR seemed particularly well suited for tank and submarine trainers, as the ‘real’ experience had people looking into low resolution and small binoculars anyway. More than 15 years later, Gibson extended this idea of ‘looking into a mathematical wonderland’ to embrace all the human senses being experienced to the entire universe of information existing in all electronic resources in the human system. And this might be the very difference with another, and easily confused, phenomenon, namely ‘Virtual Reality’. This term was coined in 1989 by Jaron Lanier, founder of the first commercial VR-based company called VPL Research, in an attempt to encompass all of the ‘virtual’ projects then being investigated. Although many writers and researchers in the domain of virtual applications still use both words, cyberspace and VR, with interchangeable meanings, the following paragraph can be a possible interpretation for virtual reality exclusively. Virtual Reality A sound, smell, and tactility-enhanced total video environment constructed of elaborate, flexible, interactive architectures that one may not only inhabit but actually move through, alter and invent. One inhabits virtual reality in real time, along with any numbers of others, by means of an electronic analog or deputy self through which all interactions are mediated. VR is not a simulated environment, but a new space altogether, made possible by telephone banks, computer graphics, and television.16
First experimentally explored by Ivan Sutherland (1968), the technology of virtual reality stands nowadays at the edge of practicality. By mounting a pair of small video monitors with the appropriate optics directly to the head, a stereoscopic image is formed before the user’s eyes. This image is continuously updated and adjusted by a computer to respond to head movements. This results in the first important characteristic of virtual reality: total immersion . The user thus finds himself totally surrounded by a stable and three-dimensional world, which he is able to explore. Wherever the user looks, his eyes are sensing what he otherwise would see if this world would be real and existing around 14
One of the most influential figures in the history of computing, computer graphics, and computer simulation. Founder of Evans & Sutherland, a developer of military aircraft and vehicle simulators. He refused talking to the press about himself or about his work. All this makes him an excellent candidate for the role of inventor and hero of virtual reality. 15 WOOLLEY, BENJAMIN, Virtual Worlds : a Journey in Hype and Hyperreality , Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1992, p.41 (à he refers to : SUTHERLAND, IVAN, A head-mounted threedimensional display , Proceedings of the International Federation of Information Processing Congress, 1965, p.507) 16 SANFORD, KWINTER, in Newsline, May 1991, in KOOLHAAS REM, S,M,L,XL, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1995, p.1278
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him. Sherman and Judkins describe the critical characteristics of virtual reality as “VR’s five i’s”. Virtual Reality’s Five i’s17 Immersive: virtual reality should deeply involve or absorb the user. Interactive: in virtual reality, necessary techniques should be implemented that offer both the user and the computer the capability to act reciprocally via the computer interface. Intensive: in virtual reality, the user should be concentrating on vital information of multiple sources, to which the user will respond. Illustrative: virtual reality should offer information in a clear, descriptive and illuminating way. Intuitive: virtual reality should be easily perceived and virtual tools should be used in a ‘human’ understandable way. § §
§
§
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The first characteristic, immersion , can be tested by Myron Krueger’s so-called ‘duck test’: if someone ducks away from a ‘virtual stone’ aimed at his or her head, even while knowing the stone is not real, then that world is believable. This ‘virtual’ world can be generated in one of the following three ways. Either is it calculated in real time by the computer, or it can be pre-processed and stored, or it exists physically elsewhere and is ‘video-graphed’ and transmitted in stereo, digital form. In the last two cases, the technique is also named ‘tele-presence ’ rather than virtual reality.18 “And here things could be counted, each one. He knew the number of grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number coded in a mathematical system that existed nowhere outside the mind that was Neuromancer). He knew the number of yellow food packets in the canisters in the bunker (four hundred and seven). He knew the number of brass teeth in the left half of the open zipper of the salt crushed leather jacket… (two hundred and two)” (William Gibson – Neuromancer )
In addition, the user might wear stereo headphones, which would deliver an acoustic sensorium added to the previous visual one. Accomplishing the second most important characteristic of virtual reality, interactivity , are the special gloves the user might be wearing, or even a whole body suit, that then would add an extra human sense to the experience. This equipment tracks the motion and position variations, which are transmitted to the computer or to other users to represent the shape and activity of the user’s body. Research is done to provide an additional form of force-feedback to the glove or the suit so that the user will actually feel the presence of virtual ‘solid’ objects by their weight, texture and even temperature. This physical extension makes it possible to introduce interactive actions to the otherwise static virtual world. Ultimately, science fiction and creative people are imagining devices as the ‘Holodeck’ in television series as Star Trek, the Next Generation or even direct neural connections to the human nerve system, spoken of in Gibson’s novels. Before technology will develop that far, three main areas are requiring the most research: sensory perception interfaces, hardware development and 3D graphic displays. This research then results in a spectrum that can be split into four broad categories. 17
referred to: SHERMAN AND JUDKINS, Glimpses of Heaven, p.122 (in McMILLAN KATE, Virtual Reality, Architecture and the Broader Community , http://www.arch.unsw.edu.au/subjects/arch/specres2/mcmillan/futworld.htm, May 1994) 18 BENEDIKT, MICHAEL, Introduction, in Cyberspace: First Steps , MIT Press, London, 1991, p.11
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VR’s four Categories of Interface desktop systems: navigating through 3D on a monitor partial immersion: navigating through 3D on a monitor with enhancements such as gloves and 3D goggles full-immersion systems: head gear, gloves, and bodysuits environmental systems: externally generated 3D, but with little or no body paraphernalia
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In short, virtual reality is most often used to simulate some kind of believable actuality through the manipulation of sensory feedback using electronic and digital technologies. It acts like a technological tool that provides a more intimate ‘interface’ between humans and computer imagery. It is about simulating the full ensemble of sense data that make up ‘real’ experience. With this description of virtual reality, it is only logic that some people confuse it with the mental state and visual images of cyberspace. Although the worlds created by virtual reality overlap with cyberspace, cyberspace itself extends beyond virtual reality to encompass a much broader range of human communications and interactions. Certainly, virtual reality will be found in cyberspace, but the two concepts are as dissimilar as the spoken word is to the radio.19 Further investigation and clarifying explanations of cyberspace can be found in the next paragraph. However, making a clear distinction between the two separate phenomena throughout all the streams of thoughts of the many authors will prove to be a rather difficult task.
I.6
Meaning Cyberspace. What does it mean to you? Gibson once said: “Cyberspace has a nice buzz to it, it’s something that an advertising man might of thought up, and when I got it, I knew that it was slick and essentially hollow and that I’d have to fill it up with meaning.”20 What first was only meant as a description of today’s post-modern culture, has already proved to have changed rapidly and drastically. Not only Gibson tried in his succeeding books to manipulate the content of cyberspace in his fiction though, also many researchers attempted in many of their publications to deliver the most suitable interpretation. Unfortunately, not all of the produced texts seemed to have a unanimous or uniform view on this subject. For example, Gibson’s own interpretation came from watching children playing video arcade games. He actually observed that these kids and also many computer users seemed “to develop a belief that there’s some kind of actual space behind the screen, some place you can’t see but you know is there”.21 Random searches throughout opinions of people result in examples showing the vast pool of possible interpretations in which the essential meaning should be found. As the explanation of John Perry Barlow for instance, once lyricist for the Grateful Dead and an important hyped cyberspace pioneer after he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation , put it: “…that place you are in when you are talking on the telephone”. Or again, phrasing Howard Rheingold in his book Virtual Communities : “Cyberspace…is the name some people use for the conceptual space where word, human relationships, data, wealth, and power are manifested by people using computer-mediated communications”. No, the most architectural three-dimensional cyberspace world is then imagined by Michael Heim, in his book The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality : 19
WHITTLE, B. DAVID, Cyberspace : The Human Dimension , W.H. Freeman Co., New York, 1996, p.12 WOOLLEY, BENJAMIN, Virtual Worlds: a Journey in Hype and Hyperreality , Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1992, p.122. (à in fact, he does refer to: Interview with the author, Late Show , BBC2, 26 September 1990.) 21 SUE BARNES, Creating Paradoxes for the Ecology of Self, in STRATE LANCE, JACOBSON RONALD & GIBSON B. STEPHANIE (Ed.), Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment , Hampton Press, New Jersey, 1996, p.195 20
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“The juncture of digital information and human perception, the ‘matrix’ of civilisation where banks exchange money (credit) and information seekers navigate layers of data stored and represented in virtual space. Buildings in cyberspace may have more dimensions than physical buildings do, and cyberspace may reflect different laws of existence. It has been said that cyberspace is where you are having a phone conversation or where your money exists. It is where electronic mail travels, and it resembles ‘Toontown’ in the movie Roger Rabbit .” Obviously, this last definition is implying that we have already entered the cyberspace age, while it also tries to bring together Gibson’s notion of visualisation of abstract data and the more common conceptions of virtual reality. This abstract border, already blurred in the last description, has to change its transparency more drastically if a final and clear distinction has to be searched. In the next paragraphs two different definitions will therefore be investigated. Each point of view represents one of the main interpretations that can be found in most of the publications about cyberspace.
I .6 .1
I n t er n et Cyb er s pac e
What is cyberspace? To this rather easy question, many answers are possible. It would seem that this is a word that either defies definition, or is one of those intuitive words that can be understood without a definition. However, some key characteristics of this phenomenon can be found, of which all have to be included in any possible interpretation that will be formulated later. Characteristics of Cyberspace 22 It is a virtual space, like a state of mind, a place simultaneously real and artificial, and thus by definition not a physical location. It can be easily compared to a trance-like state we human beings enter when we are absorbed in visual or verbal communication, such as reading, writing, observing and examining pictures, watching video or art, or listening carefully to music or speech. In this way, cyberspace can be considered as a digital complement of our atomic world. It can be entered only by means of some sort of physical access device with an artificial processing mechanism, such as digital computing power and/or software that is joined with other access devices on a network of physical connections. Whether this physical assistant is a computer screen, a telephone, a terminal, a Holodeck or a neurological organic chip is considered irrelevant. Without an access device, there is no distinction between cyberspace and communications in the real world. Whatever tool people want to use, it defines the nature of the experience in cyberspace and may be considered as the border of cyberspace or the window (cf. Sutherland’s ‘Ultimate Display’) into cyberspace. It enables interaction and communication between individuals and groups of individuals and their creative output, largely independent of time and space. Cyberspace is understood as incomplete without any interaction. This interaction is different from what normally would be expected in the sense that it may often be somewhat indirect, delayed in time or separated in distance. The sense of immediacy that apparently results from the interactions in cyberspace is in fact artificial at best, since these human communications almost always lack similarity of place, and usually also happen in a shifted and different time. §
§
§
22
WHITTLE, B. DAVID, Cyberspace : The Human Dimension , W.H. Freeman Co., New York, 1996, p.7
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Most often can we distinguish the computer screen as the physical access device, acting as a window into the new electronic world of today, where physical connections, both human and hardware, are coupled to create an alternative reality or, in other words, a virtual space. Most of the connections of today however are based upon the spoken and written word, which are still most easily transmitted and represented artificially, given the state of technology today and its ever-present limits. The explosive growth of the World Wide Web (WWW)23, however, is rapidly adding pictures, sound, and even video to the cyberspace experience. Looking at the research done by the computer companies, it can certainly be expected that the future connections will become more and more realistic, more like ‘being there’ and thus more like ‘virtual reality’. Ultimately, technological development might be ending somewhere close to the futuristic fantasies that today exist only in the imaginations of visionaries. There are numerous manifestations of cyberspace, and although they have some things in common, each can be distinguished by the nuances of its purpose and origin. The following list is a quick overview of some manifestations happening in what we define as Internet cyberspace . Further specific explanation of the most important applications will be given in the next chapter, entitled “I n t er n et Cy ber s pac e”. Online Phenomena24 telephone conversations electronic mail (e-mail) telephone mail and answering machines newsgroups and forums mailing lists chat rooms Telnet destinations web sites electronic libraries, such as FTP sites electronic conferencing conference calls MUD (Multi-User Domains) virtual reality Interactive TV of all forms, including visual telephones § § § § § § § § § § § § § §
Reading this list, many people find themselves surprised by the fact that they have lived in cyberspace more in their life than they imagined without fully knowing about it, even if they have never touched a computer. Other cyberspace experiences which many people are familiar with, is for instance watching a movie ‘on demand’, obtained by ordering from a pay-per-view cable box, submitting an order for merchandise or a game-subscription via a special commercial number, or taking money out of a Automated Teller Machine (ATM).25 The former method of clarification, which uses a collection of examples and applications to make a definition more clear and understandable, has the disadvantage however of confusing some people with some other phenomena they already know or have heard of. David Whittle tried to avoid this, by analysing the most common misunderstandings of what cyberspace might be, but actually is not.
23
see next chapter WHITTLE, B. DAVID, Cyberspace : The Human Dimension , W.H. Freeman Co., New York, 1996, p.8 25 Some authors, of whom William Mitchell is only one, actually argue that the graphic surface of the automated teller machine is a more important public representation of a bank than the façade of any of its remnant buildings. 24
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I .6 .2
Mis u n d er s t an d in g s o f I n t er n et C yb er s pac e
“’Try it,’ Case said. Aerol took the band, put in on, and Case adjusted the trodes. He closed his eyes. Case hit the power stud. Aerol shuddered. Case jacked him back out. ‘What did you see, man?’ ‘Babylon,’ Aerol said, sadly, handing him the trodes and kicking off down the corridor.” (William Gibson – Neuromancer )
1. Virtual Reality The first that comes in mind is the improper comparison with ‘virtual reality’ that already has been described and clarified earlier, and quickly fails when used to conceptualise cyberspace itself. A clear distinction can be made between on the one hand the whole group of electronic-human communication manifestations, cyberspace, and on the other hand only one of its many members, namely virtual reality. 2. Information Superhighway Metaphors and analogies are perhaps the most powerful way to convince people. But this technique is also the first originator of much confusion, certainly when people try to present new ideas by building on the foundation of familiar concepts to represent the very unfamiliar. Another example, the ‘Information (Super)Highway’ or ‘Infobahn’, is a good description of the backbone of a global network, but is obviously an abused metaphor for cyberspace. For David Whittle, an information superhighway can be perfectly applied to describe the physical infrastructure that constitutes the standards and bandwidth of the networks and connections upon which cyberspace is being built. However, it is entirely inappropriate to represent the entire set of online phenomena because it raises a variety of impressions that do not apply well to the concept of cyberspace, as the following part tries to prove. Information Superhighway26 is used to travel along wide, well maintained paths, funded, owned and controlled by the (American) federal government. à cyberspace : a network of highways, avenues, streets, and roads covering the whole world, funded by government and private enterprise and owned and controlled by no one. is often used to travel from a known beginning to a known end, for a known purpose. à cyberspace : the ‘journey’ is represented by seconds of delay and is actually pointless, while the destination is everything and often unknown before arriving. is a part of a finite number of broad high-traffic connections between only the most important cities. à cyberspace : every size of connection and every size of node is present and available. §
§
§
As the last point of the list is only a general comparison, the precise technique of transmitting data through communication networks like the Internet will be explained later. Only then will also become evident that the corresponding illusion of traffic jams and speed limits is an elementary misunderstanding, as speed is hardly a problem on the digital network, but in fact the notion of bandwidth is. 26
WHITTLE, B. DAVID, Cyberspace : The Human Dimension , W.H. Freeman Co., New York, 1996, p.10
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3. Electronic Frontier Even the mental image of an ‘electronic frontier’ will not be appropriate forever. Many of the ‘pioneers’ already feel as if the frontier is given away to the hordes of ‘newbies’. It is already a fact that the former vast, unexplored online land is victim to crude commercialisation and consequently is changing into an easy victim of banality. So, it can be argued that also this metaphorical pioneer imagery will become lost forever. 4. Feeling of Fear Another problem arises when people start to believe the misleading pictures and visions represented by the largest part of the entertainment industry, starting from Hollywood to the ordinary sci-fi comics. We can already agree that we are indebted to Gibson for the word and to numerous science fiction writers for the conceptual foundation of cyberspace. However, there is little value in accepting any of those views as a simple fact, and a critical attitude is needed when the consumer market is continuously massaged with promises of a ‘sci-fi becomes reality’ technology, or with the fears of the unbelievable power of electronic crimes.
I .6 .3
B en e d ik t i n e C yb er s p a c e 2 7
The description of Internet cyberspace can be classified as very specific, precise and easy to understand. However, this view seems not very powerful comparing to the visionary thoughts some people are formulating about, for instance, the future relation between architecture and cyberspace. It may be regrettable, but obviously a more visionary definition is needed in order to be able to grasp the kind of representation researchers as well as some of the science fiction writers are referring to. An interesting and more academic definition and discourse in this matter is given by Michael Benedikt’s28 article Cyberspace: Some Proposals , where he tries to answer the important question: What is cyberspace? “Cyberspace is a globally networked, computer-sustained, computer-accessed, and computer-generated, multi-dimensional, artificial, or ‘virtual’ reality. In this reality, to which every computer is a window, seen or heard objects are neither physical nor, necessarily, representations of physical objects but are, rather, in form, character and action, made up of data, of pure information. This information derives in part from the operations of the natural, physical world, but for the most part it derives from the immense traffic of information that constitute human enterprise in science, art, business and culture.”29
This definition is somewhat different, although not very clearly, from that of virtual reality. VR actually only tries to describe the digital simulation of a general environment and the total immersion plus the possibility of interaction of the inhabitant, the human user. While with the view of cyberspace, the perspective is broadening up to encompass the larger spectrum of visual and information based representations, which is much closer towards Gibson’s first concept as well. In agreement with the principles of Internet cyberspace, Benediktine cyberspace should thus be seen as a global, coherent virtual world, independent of how it is accessed and navigated. There may be several ways to 27
This term is in fact not used by Michael Benedikt himself, but has been found in an essay of YOUNG, PETER, Three Dimensional Information Visualisation , 1996, (which is also published in Computer Science Technical Report, No. 12/96), http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dcs3py/pages/work/documents/lit—survey/IV-Survey/ 28 Michael Benedikt is Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and he is also President and CEO of Mental Technology Inc., of Austin, Texas, which is actually a software design consultancy 29 BENEDIKT, MICHAEL, Cyberspace: Some Proposals, in Cyberspace: First Steps , MIT Press, London, 1991, p.122
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enter cyberspace, from mouse-controlled animation of video monitor images, through a completely developed virtual reality technology. Many ways should be possible to navigate around, act or manipulate the environment. In other words, cyberspace should even act like a city , making possible all kinds of activities happen as they may. Therefore, although it depends on them technically, the global concept of cyberspace itself is neither a hardware system, nor a simulation or sensorium production system, nor a software graphics program. It is a place , and a mode of being. While generally is agreed that any physical access device is permitted, Marcos Novak foresees that a certain well-defined application will emerge out of the characteristics of a shared, digital, and virtual world. For Novak30, visualisation is the task of a cyberspace desk , or more precisely, a cyberspace synthesiser . This device receives a minimal, coded and compressed, description of the cyberspace, and is able to generate a visualisation of that space for the user to navigate within. The quality of the rendition is then only dependent from the technology and parameters used by the user. For transmitting this data, a cyberspace protocol is used, which includes a description language for virtual reality, a user-configurable interface standard, a list of primitives and the valid relations among them, and operations upon these. The overriding principle in every case is that of minimal restriction. What is remarkable, is the fact that rendering cyberspace is different from synthesising it. The cyberspace decks are primarily responsible for virtual reality synthesis, while the actual rendering is being processed by current graphic supercomputer workstations.31 Benedikt as well as Novak seek to bridge the gap between science fiction and reality, and situate their cyberspace in the future. Therefore, some critical voices diminish the importance of their view in their own personal research, arguing that this concept remains hypothetical, unrealised and unreal.32 Nevertheless, it is definitely interesting to comment the hypothetical view of Benedikt, who is not accidentally an architect of profession, and his proposed elementary principles to load space with threedimensional objects of information. Furthermore, concluded out of Benedikt’s definition of cyberspace, it is possible that dimensions, axes as well as coordinates existing in this digital world, are not necessarily equivalent with the physical ones of our natural, gravitational environment. These dimensions themselves can be loaded with informational values, which are appropriate for optimal orientation and navigation in the accessed data. To be capable of a threedimensionally representation of all kinds of abstract information, some translation has to be done from certain known variables to visual distinguishable characteristics. In this way, many searchable variables can be shown to the user in very different ways. Position, colour, size, action, texture, etc. can all be dependent on that information and are even able to change according to time or the user’s commands.
30
NOVAK, MARCOS, Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace, in BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps , MIT Press, London, 1991, p.233 31 the term ‘cyberspace synthesis’ refers to the reconciliation of different kinds of information into a coherent image, while ‘cyberspace rendition’ refers to the production of high-quality graphic presentation of that image. 32 STRATE, LANCE, JACOBSON, RONALD & GIBSON, B. STEPHANIE, Surveying the Electronic Landscape: An Introduction, in Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment , Hampton Press, New Jersey, 1996, p.2
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Rules and principles that should be followed designing this sort of cyberspace will be investigated in chapter ‘ IV. I n f o r ma t io n A r c h it ec t u r e’ . Then will be analysed as well how cyberspace can represent useable information in a meaningful way, and which rules from the physical world should be implemented in this virtual realm. After all, this cyberspace should be designed like an another-life world, a parallel universe, like a dream thousands of years old: the dream of transcending the physical world.33 “’Christ,’ Case said, awestruck, as the virus twisted and banked above the horizonless fields of the Tessier-Ashpool cores, an endless neon cityscape, complexity that cut the eye, jewel bright, sharp as razors. ‘Hey, shit,’ the construct said, ‘those things are the RCA Building. You know the old RCA Building?’ The program dived past the gleaming spires of a dozen identical towers of data, each one a blue neon replica of the Manhattan skyscraper.” (William Gibson, Neuromancer )
Furthermore, Benedikt’s definition tells us that information-intensive institutions and businesses all have a form, identity, and working reality, in one word, an ‘architecture’. This ‘architecture’ is considered to be counterpart of and different from the form, identity, and working reality of the physical world. The ordinary physical reality of these institutions and businesses are seen as surface phenomena, as husks, their true energy coursing in ‘architectures’ unseen except in cyberspace. This applies as well to individuals. In cyberspace, egos, roles, and functions are no longer dependent of physical appearance, location, or circumstances. In this new existence of the individual, virtue is replaced and new associations are possible, for both non-economic and economic reasons, and new levels of truly interpersonal communication can be developed. Benedikt is well aware that this completely mature kind of cyberspace does not yet exist outside of science fiction and the imagination of a few thousand people. Nevertheless, it can be argued that the efforts the computer industry is taking nowadays are only actions of a temporary expensive but patient ‘under construction’ stage. Benedikt tries to list the most important of these efforts as follows. § § § § § § §
development and access to three-dimensionalised data effecting real-time animation implementing ISDN and enhancing other electronic information networks providing scientific visualisations of dynamic systems developing multimedia software devising virtual reality interface systems linking to digital interactive television
33
Michael Benedikt is aware that it is probably best not to use grandiose terms like these, which in fact easily can be criticised. It can be noticed though, how enthusiastically people are greeting every little step the computer industry takes closer to this vision. It can be examined how hype is created, or which names are chosen for computer companies and products. And then, it can be argued that the whole industry creativity to convince its customers is drawn by dreams such as cyberspace.
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I .6 .4
Th r ea d s
In search of the fundaments of this Benediktine cyberspace, Michael Benedikt himself distinguishes some threads that all try to prove the logical development of the phenomenon through stages of human evolution. Each story is able to intertwine with another, and it is certainly not so that these four are the only explanations that can be found. But it is certain that these impressionistic points of view, seen through the eyes of Michael Benedikt, are intriguing in the way they try to seek the right place for the more utopian cyberspace in some important historical developments. 1. The Myth The first and oldest narrative begins in language, and perhaps before language, with a ‘commonness-of-mind’ among members of a tribe or a social group. Beliefs about the environment, the dangers, the meanings of things, the earth, the sky, and far beyond were shared in the mind and the behaviour of a group. With language and pictorial representation, these ideas began to elaborate at a rapid pace. Variations develop on the common themes of life and death, resulting in many different ‘whys’ and ‘wherefores’… Less coherent systems of narratives, characters, scenes, laws and lessons, even myths, began to play an important role in sharing these values through time and succeeding generations. It can be said with great certainty that these mythological themes are still vital in our western, advanced technological cultures. They inform us about the way we understand each other and test ourselves, how we shape our lives. In this way, myths both reflect the ‘human condition’ and create it. The segment of our population most able to be influenced by this collective unconsciousness is the group of young people, whose boundaries between fiction and fact, between wish and reality, are not yet determined. Pure and ideal archetypes, delivered to them by their education as well by the entertainment industry, become magnified and twisted in their struggle towards adulthood.
It is no surprise then, that adolescents, and in particular adolescent males, almost solely support the comic book, science fiction, and video-game industries, which are filled and in fact alive with dynamically adapted myth representations. These young males are so convinced that their personal ‘mission’ consists of mastering the newest technologies, that they actually populate most of the online communities and newsgroups. Indeed, like cyberspace was announced in a science fiction novel, so have these programmers and hackers, mostly working day and night in the world’s best computer laboratories, created cyberspace by their very activity. In this cultural-anthropological view, cyberspace can be seen as an extension and a most tempting stage for those ‘gateway’-media that are by definition, like theatre, books or paintings, somehow less themselves than what they actually reach for. Comment It is a complex discussion when cyberspace is considered as the result of the hard work and the sole invention of the imagination of many young, ambitious males. Arguments can differ from the mythical version Benedikt is giving, for instance, when the social approved lives and hyped conventions of the high- technological industries’ (male) workforce would be objectively investigated. It can also be noted though, that even when statistics show the majority of the virtual communities (more th an 90%) consists of males, the online part of the opposite sex is quickly rising.34
34
Different authors give many reasons for the fact of female absence in online manifestations. Many blame the primarily fixed gender relation in most electronic games.
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2. The History of Communication Media Close-by related to the thread of the myth is the history of media technology: the history of the technical means by which absent or abstract entities, like events, experiences and ideas, become symbolically represented. We could start with the undeliberate spoors and tracks human beings left in the surrounding vegetation, signs which later developed to be intentional and ‘produced’: markings on sand, wood, bone, stone, the human body, later on tablets, papyrus and so on. As society grew and the need to keep records and to educate became apparent, writing advanced into more efficient small and conventional symbols. In this time already, the movement towards the dematerialization of media and reification of meanings became clearly visible. To underestimate the traffic of information then would be wrong, as it was a period filled with social activity, when even objects were loaded with meaningful stories of its maker, its use and its ownership.
Centuries later, the invention of the printing press changed the ‘records’ into easily duplicable and transportable goods, and social and scientific life would never be the same. The introduction of the telephone changed physical information into an electrically transportable fact, fast and without delay, which even was able to be ‘stored’ electromagnetically. The medium was again further being dematerialised, and finally also space and time were conquered. Parallel development of wireless broadcasting started to saturate world’s invisible airwaves with a huge amount of encoded information, available everywhere and at any time. Television and cellular phones turned humans into nomads who are always in touch. With the upcoming digital television, fast personal computers, and high-bandwidth cable, the so-called postindustrial societies stand ready for a deeper voyage into the individuals needs. Online communities are increasing in number as well as in users. Cyberspace is then seen as a public, consistent, and democratic ‘virtual world’. When people will intensively experience multimedia computing or fully developed virtual reality, the first historical movement of physical doing to a developed symbolic doing will loop back. In this era, communication through language-bound descriptions of information is due to decrease in favour of a possibility to transmit information as events in a both immersive and interactive manner. “In future computer-mediated environments whether or not this kind of literal, experiential sharing of worlds will supersede the symbolic, ideational, and implicit sharing of worlds embodied in the traditional mechanisms of text and representation remains to be seen. While pure virtual reality will find its unique uses, it seems likely that cyberspace, in full flower, will employ all modes.”35 3. History of Architecture The next narrative will try to explain the principal theme driving architecture’s selfdematerialization. This phenomenon might contradict the general view of architecture, which can be explained as the art of creating durable physical worlds, able to withstand generations of men, women, and children. Architecture begun with the creative response to climatic stress, with the choosing of advantageous sites for settlements, and the internal development of social structures to meet population and resource pressure, such as: the mechanics of privacy, property, legitimisation, task specialisation, ceremony and so on. All this had to be carried out with constraints of time, materials, convention and design and construction expertise then available.
35
BENEDIKT, MICHAEL, Introduction, in Cyberspace: First Steps , MIT Press, London, 1991, p.13
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Reality is death… “If only we could, we would wander the earth and never leave home; we would enjoy triumphs without risks, eat of the Tree and not be punished, consort daily with angels, enter heaven now and not die. “36
Pursuing these dreams, we build gravity-defying cathedrals, create paradise gardens, huge sport-stadia for games or magnificent libraries, reaching beyond nature’s grip in the ‘here and now’. Meanwhile, in counterpart to the earthly garden of Eden, floats the image of the Heavenly City , the new Jerusalem of the book of Revelation. Furthermore, it can be noted that all the images of the Heavenly City, in East and West, have common features. Benedikt listed parts of it as follows: weightlessness, radiance, numerological complexity, palaces upon palaces, peace and harmony accomplished by ruling ‘good and wise’, utter cleanliness, transcendence of nature and of crude beginnings, and the availability of all things pleasurable and cultured. Still nowadays, again, these descriptions, originated in the time of medieval monks, continue in many science fiction novels and films. In almost all cultures in history, buildings and projects have begun in serious pursuit of realising the dream of the Heavenly City. If the history of architecture is filled with visionary projects of this kind, these should be considered physical realisations of a symbolic, cultural archetype, standing for enlightened human interaction, form, and information. Thus, while the original biblical Eden may be imaginary, the Heavenly City is considered as twice as ‘imaginary’. Once, in the very conventional sense, because it is not real , but once again because even it became actual, it could come into existence only as a virtual reality, only ‘in the imagination’. And thus only as a religious vision of… cyberspace. Returning to the history of architecture, Michael Benedikt as well as Marcos Novak37, use visionary architectural examples to prove and clarify their professional point of view in this matter. They argue that visionary architecture, like poetry, seeks an extreme: beauty, awe, structure, or the lack of structure, enormous weight, lightness, expense, economy, detail, complexity, universality, uniqueness. These projects, which carry more meaning than good proportions or structural engineering alone, are often well beyond what can be built. This should not be seen as a weakness, as this the very essence of ‘a vision’. In art, early modern artists like Malevich, Kandinsky, Klee or Mondrian, prefigure cyberspace in turning away from representing known nature. The paintings of Max Enst or Bosch create mysterious new worlds. But this can also be recognised in the history of architecture. Piranesi’s series of etchings entitled Carceri , or Prisons, marks the beginning of an architectural discourse of purposefully unbuildable visions. Against the increasing constriction of architectural practice, Piranesi drew an imagined world of complex, evocative architecture. Ledoux emphasised une architecture parlante, architecture as poetry. Boullée tried to search for a way to express the sublime potential of architecture. And the production of visionary architecture even continues to the present. The ability to imagine architecture obviously outstrips the ability to build it. In many other disciplines this marks the difference between applied and pure research, and the value of pure research has always been undisputed. The theoretical laboratory in architecture is still the Studio, but is only accessible for architects, so that the world cannot share the inventions produced there. Cyberspace architecture can then be seen as a vast virtual laboratory for the invention of new architectural visions, while it is also returning architecture to a public realm.
36
BENEDIKT, MICHAEL, Introduction, in Cyberspace: First Steps , MIT Press, London, 1991, p.14 NOVAK, MARCOS, Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace, in BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps , MIT Press, London, 1991, p.244 37
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In another line of reasoning, the message , carried by any architectural representation is investigated. The invention of high-tensile steels, steel-reinforced concrete and highstrength glass together with the economic pressure steered the architect to celebrate a new vocabulary of lightness. In 1924, Le Corbusier designed his own Heavenly City or La Ville Radieuse , the Radiant City, an exercise in soaring geometry, rationality, and enlightened planning. The whole forceful notion that architecture is about the experiential modulation of space and time, buildings carrying symbolic content, shaping information of meaning in their anatomy, captivated architectural theory between the 1920s and the 1960s. But it seems that this architectural ‘message system’ has taken a life of its own. In some movements, architecture shifted in a peculiar way more to the field of illustrated conceptual art. Sometimes buildings themselves have begun to be considered as inhabitable arguments, propositions, or narratives in an architectural discourse. In the movement called ‘Deconstructivism’, for instance, the building is considered not (only) as an object of beauty or inhabitation, but as an object of information to be ‘read’ as a collection of junctions, reversals and iterations, metaphorical meanings, and so on, becoming a pure demonstration of an intellectual process. Then, logically, there is a limit to how far these notions of dematerialization and abstraction can reach and still produce interesting and useful, real architecture. To some, this limit is already reached, although the search for the Heavenly City remains. And yes, indeed, the solution is apparent: this inducement can usefully flourish further and even far beyond, in… cyberspace. Comment Questions can be raised of which other scientific laboratories are accessible for the public, and whether the public really cares for it to be open. Furthermore, it is remarkable in what extent Benedikt and Novak believe in the force of the avant- garde. Referring to Aaron Betsky’s Violated Perfection (1990), Benedikt is almost sure that: “…we should remember that, as a rule, today’s avant-garde informs tomorrow’s practice.” It is the practice and force that the avant-garde had (and still has) in the architectural discourse, which both authors use to clarify the role of future architecture in the field of the virtual. But, it can also be noted that some examples are known of creative movements whose influences were, after all, not that important on the architectural discourse and history as a whole. Let alone the whole discussion that can be started of what can be considered as avant-garde and what not. It seems thus that both of these architectural minded researchers are trying to create a well-defined specific field of virtual design practice, which has clearly an equal importance, but actually stands next to the physical architecture. Also the concept of dematerialization of architecture and the concept of the Heavenly City is not equally obvious or provable in the wide range of opinions and creative associations architecture provokes. Moreover, it is obvious that even nowadays, some architects are, on the contrary, very engaged in producing the qualities of matter and sensuality rather than the dynamic flows of contemporary feelings and technologies.
4. History of Mathematics This thread can be conceived as a line of arguments and insights that revolve around three different thoughts. § § §
the propositions of geometry and space the spatialisation of arithmetical or algebraic operations reconsideration of the nature of space in the light of the second point
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Reasoning with shape, in fact deductive geometry, began in ancient Greece. Developed through time since, the results had many uses in building and road construction, mechanical engineering and even in the field of astrology. From the late nineteenth century on, with the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, the science and art of geometry has developed sporadically. Moreover, with the concept of consistent geometries of higher dimensionality than three, suddenly all statements of visual geometrical insight could be studied more generally and accurately in the symbolic/algebraic language of analytical mathematics. But this linkage between geometry and algebra, space and symbol, form and argument, actually works in two ways. Descartes’ invention, the Cartesian coordinate system, resulted in an ‘algebraised’ geometry as well as a ‘geometrised’ algebra. This strong concept should not only be considered as the proof that space itself is non-physical, but also that space is able to contain all different kinds of information in one. We can think of beautiful forms that emerge from simple recursive equations into the rendered and surprisingly symmetric complex chaos called ‘fractals’. Or we can investigate the more common art of diagrams and charts, which mixes histories, geographies, the physical and the abstract and many other variables into simple interval or continuous scales. All of them, from simple bar charts through complex matrices and ‘spreadsheets’ to represent multi-dimensional, computer-generated visualisations of invisible physical processes, seem to exist in some kind of identical geography. This space resembles and is borrowed from the same piece of paper or computer-screen on which we see them, although it is certainly not the same. These pictures of the natural, phenomenal world represent the first border of a continent filled with sign language and will act ultimately as the engine to produce cyberspace.
I .6 .5
Co n c l u s io n
On one hand, cyberspace can be seen as a fact of today , an efficient term grouping a collection of online phenomena that already exist but are still developing. All the different manifestations do need a strong and clear set of underlying definitions that avoid to intertwine. In this way, ‘virtual reality‘ is then only one of the possible applications although with a large importance since it has to represent the wide range of experiences existing in the three-dimensional realm. On the other side, visionary thoughts try to scale deeper and discover that something formless and undefined is rapidly developing. This form of cyberspace is still an elusive and future thing that actually hardly can be described sufficiently in this early stage. What if information is that element of 3D-space and time, and it got manufactured and transferred to thousands of locations? What would the implications be when almost all existing traditional two-dimensional representations would get some kind of competing application that is able to represent itself one or two dimensions higher? What is the role of architecture if this space has to be designed? Who knows, but: like one said: “…today intellectual, tomorrow practical, one can only guess at the implications…”.
I .7
Cy ber s p ac e Cit y 3 8 As will be noticed in the next chapter as well, the metaphor of the city is very powerful to use in the hybrid structure of the electronic realm. To clarify the very notion and conception of cyberspace more clearly, it can still be useful to illustrate the fictional images that Gibson himself uses in most of his books more thoroughly. As the concept of cyberspace is deeply interrelated with the overall environments plus powerful atmosphere of his imaginable world, the city has an important role in Gibson’s utopian view as well. This has been recognised also by Richard Skeates, who tries to explain
38
SKEATES, RICHARD, The Infinite City, in CITY , Nr.8, December 1997, pp.6-21
21
the ‘future alternatives of the physical city’, using the highly imaginable representations in the work of William Gibson. Primarily, in search of the urban non-places of post-modernity, he considers the future city to be lost, finding no signs of the former identity, form or structure. Gibson in turn describes a totally man-made, constructed world, although it can certainly not be considered as a ‘thing’ that is the outcome of an ‘urbanisation’-process in time. On the contrary, the temporal, spatial and cultural identification becomes increasingly difficult in the context of a globally homogenised culture that is defined by consumption and which is deprived of any external reference. In these continuous non-places where no one is at ‘home’ at any moment, urbanisation manifests itself by the overwhelming experiences of communications and data technologies, in one word: cyberspace. As habitable and pleasant spaces become rare and individual needs increasingly emerge, the search for new territories to urbanise is forced to shift to the digital realm. Remarkably, as it can be noticed that this dark and negative view of the city leads directly back to the beginning of this chapter and the strong and staggering view visualised in the film Blade Runner . It is no surprise then that cyberspace itself is defined as ‘non-space’ and imaged as a cityscape, for the three concepts are ultimately linked. “The more the old ordered world of modernity is represented as having changed into a turbulent and dangerous post-modern place, the more attractive the ‘new world’, represented as the virtual space of cyberspace, becomes an attractive option.”39 But cyberspace is the ultimate anti-city : the city without streets, without crowds, without polluted air, without history and without particular geography. However, the myth of cyberspace seems to offer a solution to a number of urban problems. It promises an alternative to an almost inhabitable ‘real’ world. At the same time, it revives the old notions of community in the creation of democratic global networks. In its most accomplished form, it delivers the possibility to a consciousness that can roam free of its biological chains. This is obviously a realm that is far greater and richer than the physical one, even far more human-friendly than nature can offer. However, it may not be forgotten that the claims are formulated in the context of the myth and, moreover, the metaphor . The essence of cyberspace is sole privacy: a removal of life – social, economical as well as political – from the public to the private needs. In short, the substitution and retreat of public space for private space.
“There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City tolerated the Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea that the Yakuza might be preserving the place as a kind of historical park, a reminder of humble origins. But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.” (William Gibson, Neuromancer )
39
SKEATES, RICHARD, The Infinite City, in CITY , Nr.8, December 1997, p.15
22
On the other hand, idealistic and optimistic micro-spaces of opposition do try to emerge.40 These spontaneous, unplanned and organic-grown manifestations of community are able to reconstitute themselves outside the surveyed and controlled urban landscape. As alternative and experimental spaces, they offer notions of refuge and escape from a world of institutional oppression and brutality. Conclusively, they can be considered as the new frontier of cyberspace, where spaces have become places and both the social and the physical were able to combine. Here are thus two opposite views of the city: as a place where destructive forces erase the marks of the past, and as a place where signs of history, place and identity are still apparent.
I .8
Co n c l u s io n Unfortunately, it can be noticed that almost all the definitions of cyberspace were purely literal and fictional, while available images or immersive experiences might be more suitable for describing this sort of phenomenon. This is the result, of course, of the unknown future of the concept itself. Nevertheless, out of more than a dozen different definitions, two important streams of thoughts have been recognised. Globally, cyberspace could be described as any space that is a field for human effects through environmental interaction, restricted to that type of human effect field that is computermediated and has an electronic tele-effect of symbolic exchange. The phenomenon of Cyberspace is not unlike technology in that respect41. Technology refers to any organisation of tool use, from the first firestones in caves to CAD-microchips in Silicon Valley. But, it is almost always presumed to mean ‘high’ technology of recent vintage. And also like technology, cyberspace represents a shared space of common goals, for the human world requires both collaboration and competition. It is not surprising then, that most researchers do not want to wait the fully developed implementation to give their visionary opinion and most promising view of this phenomenon. So it has to be noted that many cyberspaces, and not only the two mentioned above, still are in the phase of full development. Some have already generated some interesting examples of architecturally influenced information handling, examples that will be investigated in the next chapters. However, in future, cyberspace will probably have a specific and certain range of applications. How far this strong influence will reach, exactly will have to be further awaited, but possibly the next fragment is able to ease some minds for now: “But only a fraction of most people’s lives is spent engaging in electronically mediated communication. The sights and sounds and, therefore, the architecture if the r eal world dominate consciousness, and will do so in the foreseeable future.”42 40
In Gibson books, these are the ultimate symbols of the accidental and chaotic re-ordering of modernity, have names such as the Projects, the Bridge, the Ninsei enclave,… and are often situated within forgotten en unusable spaces throughout the city. 41 PHELAN, JOHN M., CyberWalden: The Inner Face of Interface, in STRATE LANCE, JACOBSON RONALD & GIBSON B. STEPHANIE (Ed.), Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment , Hampton Press, New Jersey, 1996, p.42 42 BENEDIKT MICHAEL, Unreal Estates, in: ANY, Electrotecture: Architecture and the Electronic Future , Nr.3, November/December 1993, p.56
23
“Evening in the ACTLab finds bunches of young, computer-savvy men (and increasingly, women) batting the keys with abandon. As I watch them, or rather their bodies (since their selves are off in the net, simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, living out fragmentation, multiplicity, and playfulness faster than I can theorise it), I remind myself that these are the people who are writing the descriptors right here in front of me – writing the computer code that makes the phantamastic structures of prosthetic sociality. Then they will inhabit the structures they write. These people, not the big system designers, are the architects of virtual community.” (Allucquére Rosanne Stone - Sex, Death and Architecture, in Any , No.3, Nov/Dec, p.38)
II
I n t er n et Cyber s pac e “The implications of digital technology for a broad range of contemporary experiences, and certainly for architecture, needs certainly to be considered.” (Mark C. Taylor - Electrotecture, in Any, No.3, Nov/Dec, p.14)
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I I .1 I n t r o d uc t io n In this chapter, the ‘architecture’ that is being implemented in various examples of online social environments is investigated. Furthermore, some of the urban metaphors being used on the Internet are described, since these cognitive notions have proved to be an effective way to clarify the chaotic structure that is now undeniably present in the digital realm. Therefore, architecture and urbanism used in this chapter are re-imagined in the context of many observations such as: the digital communications revolution, the ongoing miniaturisation of electronics, the commodification of bits, and the growing domination of software over materialised form. Arguments are given that the task of the future does not consist out of digital plumbing of communications links and associated electronic applications, nor the production of electronically deliverable content. Rather it is asked to imagine and create digitally mediated environments for the kinds of lives that all want to lead in the sort of communities that all want to have. Why? Why should this new kind of architectural and urban design be investigated? Because the emerging digital networking structures affect the access to economic opportunities and public services, the character and content of public discourse, the forms of cultural activity, the inaction of power, and the experiences that give shape to the daily routines. It is necessary to understand what is under way, so that organised and intervening alternatives can be explored, that developments can be planned, in fact be ‘designed’. It is in this view, that some social as well as architectural important online digital manifestations will be investigated. Meantime, In the Real World… The question can be asked of why the social communication applications existing on the Internet are nowadays so commonly accepted and so increasingly successful. Next to the specific characteristics that these environments possess, and which in fact will be described further in this chapter, another reason can be found in the remarkable shift in contemporary western society. The transition from an industrial age to a post-industrial or information age has been discussed for so much and for so long, that some might not have noticed that humankind is actually passing into a post-information 1 age. In the industrial age, the concept of mass production was introduced, manufacturing with uniform and repetitious methods in any one given space and time. The same economies of scale were used in the information age, the age of the computers, but with less regard for time and space. The manufacturing could happen anywhere, at any time, moving and following the strong, global economical laws. Mass media and many industries got bigger and smaller at the same time: large international conglomerations are reaching larger audiences, while at the same time niche, narrow specialised services catered small, specific groups. But, in the post-information age, the audience often only consists out of one, as information and its use got extremely personalised.
The only way to satisfy the individual needs of a large number of users is by the concept of the network . This is, of course, not the only reason for the huge success this communication technology is experiencing today. But it can certainly be one of the important economical and motive-driven reasons why the actual implementation of, for instance, the online communities described in this chapter is developing so fast. However, before many of the intrinsic aspects possessed by the online manifestations can be understood, some of the underlying technological techniques which are characteristic to the concept of Internet cyberspace should first be described.
1
This line of arguments is taken from NEGROPONTE, NICHOLAS, Being Digital , Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1995, pp.243
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I I .2 H is t o r y o f t h e I n t er n et “As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village.” It took more then 20 years after Marshall McLuhan spoke these words in 1964, before the image of the seductive ‘global village’ became fashionable again. The technology that makes this possible is the network .2 It is the technology of communication that enables information of any type to be carried from one place to another, regardless of their distance. To accomplish this task, it uses electronic messages, carried by wire, optical fibre, by radio and microwave.
I I .2 . 1 Th e Mo t h er o f A l l N et wo r k s “There is little doubt that the Internet, for all its faults, is perhaps the most fascinating and explosive technological and social development of the twentieth century.“3 It all started in 1969 quite harmlessly with the completion of several projects of the American Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA in short. The American government decided to fund an experimental electronic network that should allow information to be exchanged between (at that time huge, rare and very expensive) remote computers. The ARPANET was originally designed to allow ARPA researchers to share data, but was increasingly used to exchange messages, an event that actually should be considered as the first ‘virtual’ community. During the 1970s, ARPA wanted to encourage the educational community to take advantage of their network and some university research groups began to use its applications. Next to the typical communication standard tools we still know today, such as file transfer protocol (ftp) and remote login technologies (TELNET), an inter-computer electronic mail system (e-mail) was being implemented. One of the other main development efforts was to design the whole system in such way that the exchange of information would not be endangered if physical sections of the network were lost. This resulted in the still existing network protocol that will be explained further on. So in fact, because its electronic underpinnings are so modular, geographically dispersed, and redundant, this electronic network can be considered as essentially ‘indestructible’.4 Consequently, this particular characteristic had the immediate interest and priority from the military services. So by 1975, the control was being transferred to the American Department of Defence that wanted to use the characteristics of these non-hierarchical networks to serve their military computer communications. Implementing this technology would mean that communications would always be fully operational, also when considerable parts of it would be damaged, even by nuclear attack. However, soon enough the military (MILNET) and the civilian (ARPANET) networks had to be split as traffic was growing beyond the existing capability of telephone lines. It would take until the 1980s when all the networks were converted to a single standard network protocol that ARPANET finally became the backbone of what is now called the Internet .5
2
WOOLLEY, BENJAMIN, Virtual Worlds: a Journey in Hype and Hyperreality , Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1992, p.125 3 WHITTLE, DAVID B., Cyberspace: The Human Dimension , W.H. Freeman Co., New York, 1996, p.10 4 MITCHELL, WILLIAM J., City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn , MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1995, p.110 5 TOLHURST W., PIKE M., BLANTON K., Using the Internet, Special Edition , Que Corp., Indianapolis, 1994, p.33
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II.2 .2 Th e Web The World Wide Web (WWW), also known as ‘the Web’ or ‘the Net’, has become the leading information retrieval service (also called ‘byte and packet mover’) for the Internet. This system uses the concept of ‘Hypertext’ or ‘Hypermedia Links’ to easily retrieve and access documents in the increasing vast amount of information present in the digital memories of the many ‘servers’ or ‘hosts’ connected to the Internet. Hyperlinks are electronic connections that allow a user to select a word or picture from a two-dimensional web page in order to access additional information that is related to that originally requested – ‘clicked’ - object. In this way, links can lead to other documents, images, sounds, animations, movies, and three-dimensional worlds. A hypertext document is usually written in a certain standardised and simple HyperText Markup Language (HTML). HTML defines the standard look and feel of information published on the Web, when it is interpreted by the Web browser. The remarkable power of this concept lies in the fact that these hyperlinks are able to direct the user to other host computers, regardless of their true location, making the reach of the Internet effectively transparent. To make this possible, each online document can be electronically retrieved by its assigned unique online address called Uniform Resource Locator (URL). The development of the World Wide Web began in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at the European Particle Physics Laboratory called CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. These researchers created the HTTP protocol, which is a standard communications protocol needed for transmission between computers, and programmed a text-based Web browser in January 1992 as well. In conclusion, the whole concept of the Internet can be written in one, powerful formula.
WWW
= URL + HTTP + HTML
Uniform Resource Locator
The unique Internet address. To be understandable for the user, combinations of words are used instead of numbers. URL E.g. ‘http://www.machine.edu/subdir/file.html’ HyperTex The standard communication protocol. Short messages are HTTP t Transfer sent instead of using a dedicated connection the whole time. E.g. ‘get in touch’, ‘send data’,… Protocol Text based description of data documents. Standard tags are HyperText embedded in the text for effects and links. HTM Markup E.g.
click me!! L Language
However, the huge success of the Internet only came after the r elease of Mosaic in September 1993. This program, developed by Marc Andreessen6 and others at the National Centre of Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, was a graphic Web browser that used the same sort of ‘point-and-click‘ manipulations that had been available in personal computers for some time.7.
6
Andreessen would later leave the institute and co-found Netscape Communications Corp., whose Netscape Navigator became rapidly the dominant Web browser soon after its release in December 1994. 7 KURMANN, DAVID, 3D and the Web , CAAD Programmierkurs ‘97/’98, ETH-Zürich
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I I .2 .3 Fa c t s an d N u mb er s “ Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta…” (William Gibson – Neuromancer )
Yea r 1971 1974 1977 1991 1994 1995 1996 1998 2000
8
Hosts
23 62 111 700.000 2.000.000 4.000.000 10.000.000 30.000.000
Users
Comment ARPANET
US-wide connections 4 million Universities + Email + File Transfer. 15 million HTML + Mosaic + WWW 25 million 50 million 50% is commercial use 300 million Sounds + Dynamic HTML + VRML + … 1 billion
Tele-presence + Web TV + Shopping + …
The prediction of the year 2000 was published in 1995 by Nicholas Negroponte, director of MIT Media Lab, who points out that: “The Internet is not North American any more. Thirty-f ive percent of the hosts are in the rest of the world, and that is the fast-growing part.”9 Facts of today actually show that chances are still considerable that he foresaw his remarkable number correctly. Nevertheless, these numbers should still be read carefully, as no true way is existent to be sure of the exact value of users on this ‘network of networks’ and as it should be noted that most surveys are commercialmarket inspired. It is no surprise then, that numbers can vary between different sources, even putting the number of American users twice has high as the number world-wide. The general methods certain services and companies use to calculate the growth of the Internet are definitely open for easy critic. Until now, two different approaches can be recognised. First, surveys can be sent to as much online-system administrators as possible. Doubts are then raised whether how reliable difficult questions as “How many network people does your organisation count?” are answered, next to the low general response of around 15%. Another method consists of counting the reachable (or ‘ping’able) computers on the Internet in a fixed period, a task that easily can be processed by programmed software browser robots. Not only protected sites are then skipped, but only servers are counted as well, neglecting the actual people online. For instance, one host could incidentally be the online server of American Online (AOL), acting as the gateway for more than 8 million subscribers. The true density of Internet accesses is different as well and for instance higher in affluent, computer-literate places such as university areas or near computer research parks. Nevertheless most online services on
8
Hosts or servers are computers that store and transmit documents to other computers, which in turn are generally called clients . Severs perform these actions whenever they have been asked by transmittable commands that are standardised by the principles described in the network protocol. 9 NEGROPONTE, NICHOLAS, Being Digital , Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1995, p.182
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the Internet itself use the following simple and still rather truthful rule: ‘The Internet is doubling every year, beginning with 3.5 million users in October 1984.’ A survey in 1995 investigated the population of the Internet. The conclusion was very explicit and is already confirmed by many other Internet researchers. The Internet public tended overwhelmingly to be “exactly the sort of people that companies want to talk to: 30-ish, well-educated and often in exactly the sorts of high paying jobs that keep a steady flow of spendable cash sloshing into their bank accounts”. This cyberspace, in short, looked “remarkably white, middle class and well educated”, only a third of the users were women; over 2/3 had at least a university degree; and average incomes were well above average (55.000$).10
I I .2 .4 B a n d w id t h “As bandwidth burgeons and computing muscle continues to grow, cyberspace places will present themselves in increasingly multi-sensory and engaging ways… We will not just look at them, we will feel present in them. We can expect them to evolve into the elements of cyberspace construction – constituents of a new architecture without tectonics and a new urbanism freed from the constraints of physical space.”11 The number of bits that can be transmitted per second through a given channel (like copper wire, radio spectrum, or optical fibre) is the bandwidth of that channel. But bandwidth actually is not well understood, especially now that fibre optics makes almost infinite bandwidth possible. So, when bandwidth is the capacity to move information down a given channel, most people compare it to the diameter of a pipe or to the number of lanes on a highway. By doing so, they ignore the technological ability to put more or fewer bits per second down the very same pipe. What stays constant, however, is the speed of the transmitted electronic messages, which can be expressed by the technical term bps or baud.12 Research results indicate that contemporary fibre and laser technology should be able to deliver 1.000 billion bits per second, while today 1.2 to 6.0 million bps is still well suited for most existing and powerful multimedia. Meanwhile, a ‘fancy’ 38.400 baud is generally used by modem owners of today.13 “If the value of real estate in traditional urban form is determined by location, location, location, then the value of a network connection is determined by bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth.”14 For William Mitchell, no network connection at all, zero bandwidth, makes a person an outcast from cyberspace. The digital network creates new opportunities, but exclusion from it becomes a new form of marginalisation. Accessibility is redefined. Tapping into a broadband data link is like being on ‘Main Street’, making intense interactions and fast connections. The ‘tyranny of distance’ is replaced by that of bandwidth, which is now considered the new economy of land use and transportation. Since the actual cost of high-bandwidth cable connection grows with the distance, certain information-intensive 10
GRAHAM, STEPHEN & AURIGI ALESSANDRO, Urbanising Cyberspace? The Nature and Potential of the Virtual Cities Movement, in CITY , Nr.7, May 1997, p.22 (àthey refer to BROWNING, J., Who’s what on the Web, Wired , August, pp.33-35) 11 MITCHELL, WILLIAM J., City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn , MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1995, p. 114 12 Bits per second, bps, and baud actually mean the same thing. The latter is named after Emile Baudot, the ‘Morse’ of telex. 13 NEGROPONTE, NICHOLAS, Being Digital , Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1995, p.16 14 MITCHELL, WILLIAM J., City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn , MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1995, p. 17
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areas are developing around high-capacity data sources. Universities and so-called tele-ports or tele-cottages, which all try to concentrate powerful communications equipment, are recognised as one of the new growing poles of many economical important industries.
I I .2 .5 N et wo r k Pr o t o c o l One major application that resulted from the electronic network development was a new and revolutionary type of communication protocol. Network protocol is a formal set of rules that computers connected to the network use to ‘talk’ to one another. In the case of the Internet, computers use the technology of packet switching . Rather than send a large block of data over a dedicated line directly to the destination computer, this system breaks the data into small chunks. Each chunk is then sent along a common transmission line in a ‘packet’ that also contains source and destination information. Each packet finds its own separate way through the network, passing many different ‘routing’-computers at the network’s nodes. It will keep seeking its destination until the destination computer is reached, and is able to re-route itself around damaged parts. Moreover, since copies of digital data are absolutely exact replicas of the originals, originals are ‘allowed’ to get lost or destroyed. At arrival, the packet information is stripped, and all the data from the chunks are reassembled into the original data.15 This protocol has the advantage that any number of computers can share the same communication network, while this system can contain different connection types and different transmission capacities. The standard Internet protocol of today is called TCP/IP or ‘Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol’.
I I.3 H y per t ex t Asked about the original use of the word cyberspace, William Gibson once answered he actually meant to suggest: “The point at which media (flow) together and surround us. It’s the ultimate extension of the exclusion of daily life. With cyberspace as I describe it you can liter ally wrap yourself in media and not have to see what’s really going on around you.”16 The media are continuously developing in an unbelievable rapid race, but the one that is growing most rapidly is definitely the cyberspace of the Internet. ‘Internet cyberspace’ or ‘pre-cyberspace’ is the name often given to the now existing large group of online phenomena. It is obviously a less ‘physical’ spatiality than other cyberspaces, which will be investigated later, at least pretend to be17. Furthermore, the first term ‘cyber’ in the word ‘cyberspace’ would seem to imply a controlled space, and yet the contemporary electronic landscape is commonly characterised as decentralised, bottom-up, and anarchistic. In the investigation of some cyberspace environments, this essential denial of any hierarchic structure will definitely result in important design characteristics and constraints.
I I.3 .1 N a v ig at in g t h r o u g h Cy ber s pac e In cyberspace, physical paths are replaced by logical links. Sometimes, looking at the contemporary graphic interfaces, the requested places are nested to form a strict hierarchy: you go down a level by clicking a folder icon, which opens another ‘window’ with a ‘view‘ into that place. Alternatively, the circulation system may be more freeform: when wandering through a sort of three-dimensional labyrinth, symbols – not
15
TOLHURST W., PIKE M., BLANTON K., Using the Internet, Special Edition , Que Corp., Indianapolis, 1994, p.31 16 WOOLLEY BENJAMIN, Virtual Worlds : a Journey in Hype and Hyperreality , Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1992, p.122. (à he refers to : Interview with the author, Late Show , BBC2, 26 September 1990.) 17 This refers back to the visionary Benediktine cyberspace and other immersive applications.
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necessarily doors or gateways – may provide clickable entry points to any number of other places. “Click, click through cyberspace; this is the new architectural promenade.”18 Despite the fact that the system in essence is uncontrolled, still some forms of structure within the Internet can be recognised. The electronic information space consists of an incredible amount of free-text or structured databases, hypertext documents, and knowledge bases. Exploring and retrieving useful and meaningful information in this resulting chaotic field can thus be considered as quite a task, incomparable by its very nature. To fully understand the concept of hypertext , though which most of the navigating on the Internet cyberspace is still being done, seven concepts are proposed that are commonly used when hypermedia documents of all kind are made. In this way, they can be considered as important design principles as well for presenting and structuring online information. They try to cover a broad range of navigation tools and techniques from appropr appropr iate iate structuring of information to the application of artificial 19 intelligence techniques.
Description
Example
1. Linking
Global linking structure of a document
Hyperlink
2. Searching
Mechanisms for full-text search
Full-text search
3. Sequentialisation
Mechanism for sequentially visiting selected locations within the hyper-documents
Path
4. Hierarchy
Hierarchical table of contents
Table of contents
5. Similarity
Connection between not-yet-linked but semantically related nodes
Index
6. Mapping
Graphical visualisation of contents of Overview map hyper-document
7. Agents
Mechanisms to execute complex tasks on behalf of the user
Shopping agent
1. The linking structure is the most known and remarkable feature of a hypertext document. Links allow direct access to a designated location within the very information space through markers that are embedded within the documents. Two types can be distinguished: normal static links and program generated dynamic links, which are automatically created upon a certain action.
18
MITCHELL, WILLIAM J., City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn , MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1995, p. 24 19 The table is based on GLOOR, PETER, Elements of Hypermedia Design: Techniques for Navigation and Visualisation in Cyberspace, Birckhäuser, Berlin
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2. Searching capabilities imply locating information in a specific range of stored possibilities. Generally, only full-text searches are processed, but systems exist that provide additional databases. Most known examples examples of this principle are so-called 20 search-engines such as ‘Yahoo!’ or ‘Lycos’. 3. N-dimensional hypertext documents can be reduced to one sequential path for a guided tour or a developing story when the user is not allowed to skip information or persist a personal approach throughout the structure. 4. Most well understood by humans are documents that possess a hierarchical structure. Almost all books are organised this way. wa y. On some sites on the Internet, this structure is made visible to the users so that they can use it as their principal navigation aid. 5. Similarity links connect nodes that have similar contents but might not yet be linked. An index is a very simple example of this concept as the same entries might prove some sort of equality. More complex tools are based upon the assumption that a system has knowledge not only about the document structure, but also about the – semantic - contents of the information contained in the document. It is not surprising that the systems of this category have not developed beyond the state of early prototypes. 6. Mapping is a simple and strong technology to visually structure webs of information. Similar to real maps, these graphic maps show overall context so the users know where they are and where they can go from f rom there. Mapping is orthogonal to the previous concepts, which means that maps can be used to visualise them. 7. Guides and agents are not only popular for navigation, but also for many other electronic areas. The system incorporates some form of artificial intelligence so that it can help the human user in any of the other six concepts to retrieve information. Agents can be implemented in several forms ranging from simple, hardwired guides to rule-based systems that are able to react in a flexible way to different needs of different users.
II.3.2 Consequences A hyperte hypertext xt is not a closed closed work work but an open open fabric fabric of hetero heterogen geneou eous s trace traces and associations that are in process of constant revision and supplementation.21 The structure of a hypertext is thus certainly not fixed, but shifting and always mobile, even dependent in time. Branching options multiply, menus reproduce, windows open other windows, and screens display other screens leaving and following heterogeneous traces and associations. Instead of an organic whole, a hypertext is like collage and texture whose meaning is unstable and whose boundaries are constantly changing. There is no clearly defined pre-established path through the layers of a hypertext. And although the network is shared, the course each individual follows is different. Thus, no hypertext is the product of a single author who is its creative origin or architect. architect. All authorship becomes joint authorship, and all production becomes co-production. co-production.22 In conclusion, hypertextual space displays and evokes an alternative architecture.23 The Internet cyberspace is a complicated and evolving structure. To overcome these essential drawbacks with eventually could hold further development, some voices
20
See next chapters for more nformation about search-engines TAYLOR, MARK C., De-signing the Simcit, in: ANY, Electrotecture: Architecture and the Electronic Future, Nr.3, November/December November/Decem ber 1993, p.16 22 The problem of perfect duplication and authorship cannot be neglected, and much research is now being developed for the protection of digital data available on the Internet. 23 TAYLOR C. MARK & SAARINEN ESA, Imagologies: Media Philosophy , Routledge, London, 1994, p.’Telewriting 6’ 21
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foresee some kind of overall structure that is able to translate machine space into cognitively understandable physical space in the near future.
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I I .4 Vir t u a l Co mmu n i t ies I I.4 .1 C yb er c it y It should not be forgotten that the conceptualisation of cyberspace was purely fictional. However, it should be noted as well that science fiction is a genre that has long participated in the representation of the city. Consequently, some people do not see cyberspace only as a new social world or as a way to design multiple possibilities of immersive data representations. These visionary authors are actually able to converge William Gibson’s original imaginable structures, skyscrapers, colourful grids, and geometric forms into a form of future urban environment, considering navigation through the ‘hyper’-context of cyberspace as ‘going across a city’.24 Some authors in fact predict that in this city many of the human activities will be replaced or augmented by the existing and upcoming electronic technologies. Although not all foresee necessarily the future to change very drastically. “I would hardly expect cyberspace to replace or even revolutionise the very human aspects of such ‘meatspace ’ (the human dimension outside cyberspace) activities as dating, partying, going to a dentist or doctor, taking a vacation, churchgoing, engaging in team sports, socialising, gardening, offering charitable service, dining out, farming, sharing the holiday season with family, shopping at malls, and so on. Cyberspace is instead, suitable for communicating, finding information, learning, sharing, purchasing, researching, reading, writing, publishing, and so on.”25 “The network is the urban site before us, an invitation to design and construct Cybercity , capital of the 21st century,” William Mitchell points out. Classical categories will turn inside out and change the discourse in which architects have engaged from classical times until now. The city awaiting us will be ‘unrooted’ to any spot on the surface of the earth. It will rather be shaped by connectivity and bandwidth constraints than by accessibility and land values. “Its places will be constructed virtually by software instead of physically from stones and timbers, and they will be connected not by doors, passageways, and streets, but by logical linkages.”26 “Is the net a city without walls or do walls merely take new forms?” (Mark C. Taylor/Esa Saarinen - Imagologies )
For Mitchell, physical, spatial cities are not only the materialised results of processes that cause maximum accessibility and promote face-to-face interaction. Their subdivisions as districts and neighbourhoods are legal parts that control and organise access and in doing so, define a place . People entering this place - as an owner, guest, visitor, tourist, trespasser, intruder, or invader – are making a symbolic, social, and legal act. This concept can be recognised on the Web as well, but then ‘the game’ gets a new set of rules. Structures of access and exclusion are reconstructed in entirely nonarchitectural27 terms, and places can be entered and exited not by physical travel, but by simply establishing and breaking logical linkages.
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BUKATMAN, SCOTT, at the IN ANY Event, published in: ANY, Electrotecture: Architecture and the Electronic Future , Nr.3, November/December 1993, p.48 25 WHITTLE, B. DAVID, Cyberspace : The Human Dimension , W.H. Freeman Co., New York, 1996, p.316 26 MITCHELL, WILLIAM, The Electronic Agora, in: ANY, Electrotecture: Architecture and the Electronic Future , Nr.3, November/December 1993, p.33 27 If architecture is considered as materially constructed form.
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I I .4 .2 P l a c es in C yb er -‘ S p ac e ’ Places in cyberspace are actually always software constructions. It can be argued that these pieces of software create environments of interaction, virtual realms that humans can enter. Basic examples of this point of view can be surprisingly simple and well known: a text window provided by a word processor, the drawing surface or space within a CAAD system. Even the ‘desktops’ and ‘file folders’ used by most contemporary operating systems, the ‘mailboxes’ and the ‘bulletin boards’ can be considered as the representation of a certain space. Just like architectural and urban places, all these manifestations have characteristic appearances, and the interactions within are controlled by certain rules. In short, software can represent a onedimensional place in a screen-displayed text, a two-dimensional place to put things on a ‘desktop’ surface’, a three-dimensional virtual room, library, museum, and so on, even a N-dimensional place in an abstract data structure. Sharing a virtual space is of course not necessarily equal to sharing physical space. Some electronic applications are meant to be occupied by one person, other by groups or even whole communities. Think of shared electronic calendars, simultaneous accessed CAD files or virtual chat and conference rooms. Crucial factor is almost always the simultaneous access to the same information, regardless of physical place where this action is being done. Shared places can be represented in several ways ranging from simple text-based interfaces to immersive, multi-sensory virtual reality. Most shared places on the Internet are still in the phase of chat boxes, generally announcing themselves by descriptive or allusive names. People search their personal interests between the Teen Chat , Thirtysomething , Pet Chat , Starfleet Academy , Gay and Lesbian , and enter and leave these ‘rooms’ whenever they are pleased to. In opposite to more traditional meeting places, the point is not just to ‘be there’, but to ‘present’ yourself and to interact with others. This is usually done by typing text or coded symbols, or even by activating standard computer-animated ‘body doubles’. Many places on the Internet are public, and offer uncontrolled access, just like streets and squares. Other are private, like real houses, and need a key, generally a password, to prove your identity. And sometimes, as in cinemas, you even have to pay to get in.
II.4.3 MUD Throughout time, architecture has been the creative response to the internal developments of social structures to meet population and resource pressure. In this context it might be interesting to compare the social and technological structure of today’s virtual communities with the possibilities of an architectural language relevant to cyberspace. Whether sitting at a keyboard or mounting a headset and bodysuit, entering cyberspace is an involving experience. Many different experiences are possible in the electronic realm, and one of them is the MUD or Multi-User Dungeon , derived from the role-play ‘ Dragons and Dungeons’ . Roy Trubshaw programmed the first MUD, back in 1979.28 Next to the original meaning, MUDs are now also often referred to using more general terms, as Multi-User Dimensions, Multi-User Simulated Environments (MUSE), or MUDs, but then Object Oriented (MOO). Of all the cyberspaces currently available online, none try harder to generate a sense of space than the concept of the MUD. MUDs are computer-based role-playing games in which the players are confronted with a certain well-defined multi-user space. In this space, players create and constantly redefine the fundamental reality in which they interact, which is contrary to the entirely pre-programmed environments known from normal computer games. Currently, most MUDs are text-based and thus rely solely on a written interface to describe and interact in the world. In this way, also demonstrated 28
Maia Engeli refers to: http://www.utopia.com/talent/lpb/muddex/ (outdated link)
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by graphic-based MUDs as the one called ‘Habitat’ , cyberspace can be more defined by interactions than by the actual technology that is implemented. Even text-based MUDs with their ‘primitive’ interface, have proven to be very addictive for some people.29
I I .4 .4 O r ig i n Physically, MUDs exist as lines of codes on computer hard drives. They can be accessed via modem over the Internet or through private online services. Newcomers, the so-called “newbies ”, can login, select a name for their character, provide a description, and wander off to explore. Many architectural components are present, as normal MUD environments are lived from inside out.30 The user’s walk normally begins from a certain central space, out of which the further and slow representation of the different rooms starts. Players can move around by typing commands like “go east” or “climb stairs”. Whenever they enter a room, a written description is given that mentions the existing prominent features and the obvious exits. Sometimes, users have to ask present fantasy characters, often disguised as ‘software robots’, for certain objects or important information. These actions are possible by typing a command like “Go southwards”, or “Wave at Mouse and tell him hello”. When a player enters a room or performs any action, this event is announced to all the others players present, so that the screen might read: “Matilda enters the room and winks happily to Flupper”. Most games allow players to ‘talk’, which can be heard by everyone in the room, and to ‘whisper’, so that two players can converse only with each other more privately. There are currently more then 300 MUDs existent in the world (numbers are of 1993), with a regular base of players in the tens of thousands. Most early MUDs are designed upon fantasy themes, although the connection with Internet has caused an important diversification. MUDs can thus be based upon existent buildings, animals, promote collaborative work between children, or, more recently, be intended for professionals in a certain field and act like a place where social interaction and informational work go hand in hand. Examples are known from that of virtual research centres for the international astronomy community to imaginary adventure games set in post-nuclear holocaust. The appeal of MUDs as a form of entertainment and a forum of interaction can be traced to three characteristics. The Appeal of MUDs31 The game involves multiple players who interact directly. The concept of role -playing promotes free and creative expression. MUDs are computer mediated, which creates a dynamic, responsive, and immersive space in which to play.
§ § §
To fully understand the concept of MUDs, one has to understand the crucial role that the medium in which the environment is created actually plays: the technical possibilities of the computer and the immersive cyberspace it establishes. The more experience a player gets, the more power will be drawn to his character. By these technological means, players that have gradually grown into ‘builders’ are able to perform some degree of computer programming by themselves within the game. This makes it possible to change the game, the functioning as well as the design during the play itself. This can be considered as an essential difference from that of a high-context 29
BEAUBIEN, P. MICHAEL, Playing at Community: Multi-User Dungeons and Social Interaction in Cyberspace, in STRATE LANCE, JACOBSON RONALD & GIBSON B. STEPHANIE (Ed.), Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment , Hampton Press, New Jersey, 1996, p.180 30 ENGELI, MAIA, MUD: Text als Baumaterial, in SCHMITT, GERHARD, Architektur mit dem Computer , Vieweg, Wiesbaden, 1996, p.42 31 BEAUBIEN, P. MICHAEL, Playing at Community: Multi-User Dungeons and Social Interaction in Cyberspace, in STRATE LANCE, JACOBSON RONALD & GIBSON B. STEPHANIE (Ed.), Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment , Hampton Press, New Jersey, 1996, p.181
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gaming environment, in which rules can only be changed after a consensual agreement, and often only after the approval of some kind of organisational body. This characteristic of possible change implemented by the users themselves results in many and very different kinds of unpredictable events and virtual conflicts. It is obvious that knowing the programming language actually means possessing power as well, while not all of the possible programmable applications of a play are foreseeable. Examples are known in which characters robbed money, textually ‘raped’ other individuals (who were hundreds of kilometres away) or steeled parts of virtual bodies of other non-aware users. These events resulted logically in some sort of democratic decision making in the cyberspace community, after which collectively rejecting this kind of characters and actions was possible if necessary. Regular players put a lot of time into building their game characters, and thus put a lot of themselves into the characters as well. So it is only understandable that the more skilled they become, the larger the personal stake they have in maintaining the character, even if the world they exist in is made up by text. Deep personal and emotional involvement in the game makes therefore the situation more confusing, as players start to confuse the boundary between the game and reality. Meanwhile they do not want to violate the unwritten rules of the virtual world, which they compare to the real, physical ones. All this facts result in a rather inexperienced collective world, which is sometimes not armed against some of the sudden negative events that occur. Moreover, these manifestations show the importance of programming as the privileged language of cyberspace, which is able to construct reality rather then reflecting it. This is the difference between creation and utilisation . And it is the tension between these two levels that is the root of many social problems in the MUDs. “Cyberspace architects will benefit from the study of the principles of sociology and economics as much as from the principles of computer science. We advocate an agoric, evolutionary approach to world building rather than a centralised, socialistic one.”32
Figure II-1 A typical walk through a MUD-environment. (http://www.lysator.liu.se/nanny/misc/enterpage.html)
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MORNINGSTAR, CHIP & FARMER, R. RANDALL, The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat , in BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, p.298
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Comment As the appearance of space is only represented by text, it is obvious that design is replaced by programming. After obtaining certain objectives, experience points and essential objects, the users’ characters receive gradually higher levels of power and control. The highest level in any normal MUD is generally called ‘the Wizard’. Many Wizards can be apparent in a MUD, all able to program new and yet unexplored areas to the world. Good design is replaced by good coding skills in LPC – a C-like computer language - and the avoidance of the use of standard available templates. Normal MUDs can contain over 20.000 different rooms or areas, wh ere the continuous presence of 40 to 80 characters is considered as normal.33
I I .4 .5 H a bit a t
3 4
It is important to know that the following ‘Habitat’ example was actually a commercial application, and consequently customers had to pay to use its services. This should explain the fact that the basic code was kept beyond the reach of non-authorised people resulting in the fact that additional programming on the part of the players was entirely impossible. Lucasfilm’s Habitat project (1986) was one of the first attempts to create a very largescale, commercial, many-user, graphical virtual environment. It first struggled with questions of how to represent space and social interactions, and the developers had no clue in the beginning what the structure of the result would become. The project was so ambitious that it had to contain and support a population of thousands of users in a single shared cyberspace. In this online simulated world users could interact and communicate in real-time with other users, which would make many social, electronically translated activities possible. Some of the experiences the designers had during the development and implementation of the Habitat system are considered to be useful for the so-called “cyberspace architects ” of the future. Many of the learned ‘lessons’ that the developers wanted to share, are based upon the interactions among the users rather than the many technological facts that were used. It has to be noted that although this environment was clearly low context and relatively open, it proved to be sufficient enough to create an almost fully involved experience. Instead of concentrating on the upcoming interface technologies – such as DataGloves, head-mounted displays and special-purpose rendering engines – the core of Habitat’s vision is actually the idea that cyberspace is necessarily a many-participant environment . So, as the concept of Habitat is meant as a ‘many-player online virtual environment’ and its purpose was to be an entertainment medium, users will be called ‘players’. Like the following paragraphs will clearly indicate, the Habitat concept was mainly inspired by role-playing games, but it undoubtedly included influences of cyberpunk and early forms of object-oriented programming as well. What is Habitat? A very restricting, but also remarkable fact is that Habitat could be played with a Commodore 6435 computer. When logged on, the computer display shows a graphical and animated representation of the environment. The view shows next to the various objects also the user himself. This animated figure is called an ‘Avatar’, and they are 33
Online interview with a Wizard called ‘Reece’ inside a Swedish NannyMUD (http://www.lysator.liu.se/nanny/misc/enterpage.html) 34 MORNINGSTAR, CHIP & FARMER, R. RANDALL, The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat, in BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, p. 273 35 This was, of course, driven by a commercial fact: the Commodore 64 was the leader of the recreational computing market on that moment.
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generally humanoid in appearance.36 Avatars can move around and have the ability to manipulate objects, while talking to another avatar is accomplished by typing on the keyboard. The typed text appears over the avatar’s head in a cartoon styled wordballoon. The whole Habitat world is geographically made up by 20.000 different discrete locations called ‘regions’. These regions can be accessed by means of doors, while avatars are also able to carry all kinds of different objects that some the regions contain. In 1991, this system was successfully in operation for over three years, sustaining a population of over 15.000 participants. It has already developed to a technically more advanced version, called ‘Fujitsu Habitat’, which primarily works with the graphical and computable higher capabilities of the Fujitsu FM Towns personal computer. In 1993, this community had approximately a million and a half people in it.37 Meanwhile the company has transformed into W or ldsAway , which claims to be specialised in designing all kinds of graphic virtual worlds.38
Figure II-2 Overall map and screenshot from Habitat’s daughter Dreamscape (note the inspiration of the Chapel of Notre Dame at Ronchamp of Le Corbusier, in the building that stands in the middle and lower part of the map). (http://www.worldsaway.com/home.shtml)
The Lessons Some of the lessons the first Habitat developers have learned are interesting in the light of future designing and programming of virtual environments, resulting in the implementation of various kinds of cyberspaces. 1. The idea of a many-user environment is central to cyberspace. The Habitat-programmers deeply believe people seek richness, complexity, and depth in any virtual world. It is obvious that with application of the science and technology of today, no automation can be built that approaches the complexity of a human being, let alone a whole society. Instead of trying to artificially create this kind of environment, the goal was changed to use the computational medium itself to augment the communications channels between people, taking into account the next principle.
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The developers actually were first not ‘really happy’ with only two genders. But apart from the problem how to represent these other non-binary genders, the programmers’ rather conservative client was not interested in this. On the other side, changing ones own gender in this world is no problem at all. In short, for anthropologists this world obviously is a real treasure for numerous social experiments. 37 These numbers come from IN ANY event, words of STONE, ALLUCQUERE, in: Any, Electrotecture: Architecture and the Electronic Future , No.3, November/December 1993, p.44 38 As the Habitat II (http://gmsnet.or.jp/habitat2) is obviously entirely presented in the Japanese language, the Dreamscape example is taken for the graphic figure in this paragraph (http://www.worldsaway.com/home.shtml).
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2. Communications bandwidth bandwidth is a scarce resource. Althou Although gh being being in full develo developme pment nt at this this moment moment,, this this is still still a most difficu difficult lt technological constraint. The underlying logic is that of economical law of supply and demand. The communication technology advances simultaneously with the computational technology, resulting in an absolutely non-winnable race, meanwhile continuously feeding the ‘hot research’ of sophisticated data compression techniques. At the time of the Habitat Habitat implem implementa entatio tion, n, the design design had to delive deliverr a satisfac satisfactor tory y experience to the player over a 300-baud serial telephone connection. To overcome this data transmission problem, computer scientists normally organise the system in terms of primitive elements that can be easily manipulated within the context of a simple formal model. Typically, they adopt a very small variety of different simple and compact primitives, which are then used and combined in many numbers to represent an intended complex object.
For a graphics-oriented cyberspace environment, the temptation of the overwhelming display technology to use images, polygons or other graphic primitives for representation and interaction is considerable. This data-intensive technique is however surely an open invitation to a huge programming disaster. Consequently, in case of the Habitat environment a relatively abstract and high-level description was chosen. This concept could be represented compactly as it only dealt with the communication of human behaviours. This fundamental choice leads to the third principle. 3. An object-oriented data representation representation is essential. Object-oriented models of, for instance, polygons would surely be possible. But to avoid any fundamental problem, the basic objects from which the system is built should actually correspond more or less to the objects in the user’s conceptual model of the virtual world, that is, people , places , and artefacts . This approach should enable the communications between machines to take place at the behavioural level (what people and things are doing), rather than at the presentation level (how the scene is changing). Consequently, description of a place should be in terms of what there is instead of how it looks like, while interactions should be translated in functional models instead of physical ones. The interpretation of this high-level and conceptual representation is then necessarily being calculated locally at the user’s computer. All this results in the fourth principle. 4. The implementation implementation platform is relatively unimportant. Defining a cyberspace in terms of the configuration and behaviour of the objects enabled the project to span the vast range of computational and display capabilities among the participants in a system. For instance, a tree might be represented to one player as “There is a tree here”, which is very resembling with most text adventure games and conventional MUDs. At another user who possesses a powerful processor, the tree could be generated by rendering a three-dimensional fractal model in high resolution, including an animated view of the branches waving softly in the wind. And, of course, these two players might be looking at the same tree in the same place and actually even be talking to each other.
This design approach has two consequences. First, it means that effective cyberspaces can be built today. Secondly, with all these previous principles in mind, systems can be made for today’s technology and be easily adapted when tomorrow’s technology further develops.
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5. Data communication standards are vital. Rather than concentrating on the mechanisms of data transportation protocols, this principle puts the attention more on the aspect of the data itself that is being transported. More precisely, this protocol should be able to communicate behaviour rather than representation between different objects and from one system to another. In a future more dynamic and developed model, this problem will become more important as well, as it is considered impractical to distribute a new release of the system every time one wants to add a new class of object.
Next to the technological field of the Habitat implementation, the developers encountered many problems concerning the creation and management of the world, which after all consists mainly out of a group of digitally interacting human beings. More precisely, the design of Habitat’s world itself, as it tries to effectively represent ‘space’, seems interesting to investigate from an architectural point of view. The authors now try to clarify their choices of design under the following, maybe controversial assertion. 6. Detailed central planning is impossible; don’t even try. The original specification for Habitat asked to create a world capable of supporting a population of 20.000 avatars, with a possible expansion to 50.000. For all these characters, it was needed to organise 20.000 ‘houses’, situated into towns and cities with associated traffic arteries and shopping and recreational areas. Wilderness areas were placed so that everyone would not be jammed together into the same place. Most of all, all these people had to do some kind of activities. And they needed interesting places to visit and things to do at these places as well. But it is obvious that, since it was not possible that all the avatars were present all in one place at the same time, that number of interesting places had to be sufficient. It is also clear that each one of those places like houses, towns, roads, shops, forests, theatres, arenas, and many others all had to be designed separately as a distinct entity.
To solve this problem, the programmers made a set of tools to aid the generation of areas that naturally possess a high degree of regularity and structure, such as apartment buildings and road networks. But places like forests whose value lie more in their uniqueness, or at least in their differentiation from the places around them, needed a different approach. These areas actually needed to be crafted by hand, which is inevitably an incredibly labour-intensive and time-consuming process. Furthermore, Lucasfilm’s Habitat developers (although experienced in creating original, graphical entertainment) emphasise that “even very imaginative people are limited in the range of variation that they can produce, especially if they are worki working ng in a virgin environment 39 uninfluenced by the works and reactions of other designs.” Comment Following Allucquére Stone’s description, the Fujitsu version wanted to provide “a little bit of some part of culture, from all over the word”. The overall design varies from a standardised European village to a typical resort park. When looked more in detail, the world also exists of magical forests, Easter Island statues, pyramids, ruins, shrines, and cactuses, complete d d with dinosaurs and penguins. There is also night and day in the Habitat world. 40 It is remarkable that these architectural spaces are rather a nostalgic creation. No sign has been noticed that the designers even have thought of other aspects of architecture that are possible in the virtual environment. 39
MORNINGSTAR, CHIP & FARMER, R. RANDALL, The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat, in BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, p. 287 40 STONE, ALLUCQUERE, at the IN ANY Event, published in: Any, Electrotecture: Architecture and the Electronic Future , Nr.3, November/December 1993, p.44
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These design shortcomings would be more visible and noticeable if not all the participants had different goals, interests, motivations, and types of behaviour. Normal computer adventure games, although interactive and often containing a multi-player mode, are actually experienced individually. They have the characteristic to be repeated innumerable times at different moments over a population consisting out of thousands of players, while actions are restricted to the goals the programmers have provided. This is an important distinction with the concept of cyberspace worlds as Habitat, which are conceived as open-ended and get a great deal of their appeal out of the interaction of simultaneous manifestations of other numerous colleague-players. The Habitat programmers foresaw the possibilities of various experiences, ranging from events with established rules and goals (like a treasure hunt) to activities driven by the players’ personal motivations (starting a business, running the newspaper) to completely freeform, purely existential activities (going out and conversing with friends). As the programmers themselves had to provide some degree of planning and set-up to make all this possible, they were still much thinking like ordinary game designers. However, many unexpected experiences revealed the programmers that they never could predict the outcome of their ‘controlling’ actions, which were almost always initially based on certain predicting assumptions. One of the examples demonstrated a certain labour-intensive treasure hunt of which only one person had a wonderful experience (the person who won the price in an incredible short time) and a dozen of others left bewildered (which were the persons who did not even got the chance to get into the game). In short, however hard they tried, the designers obviously were not skilled in the inexact science of ‘social engineering’ . Due to the many hours of programming time and work efforts becoming useless, they were almost forced to instead let the players themselves drive the direction of the design. The designers finally became facilitators in design and implementation, as they now built parts that almost always were used and appreciated. Instead of having the illusion of controlling the whole system, they now still had the chance of considerably influencing the implementations that matched the people’s desires and needs. Finally, the Habitat developers mentioned two other cautions in designing virtual communities. 1. You can’t trust anyone. This actually implies that no leakage is allowed between the two so-called levels of ‘virtuality’: the ‘infrastructure level’, the level of the physics, the invisible laws and the implementation, and the ‘experiential level’, which is what the users see and interact with. As experience proved, people were prepared to perform a huge and incredible (programming) effort to be able to ‘cheat’ with some of the features provided by the Habitat system, however no direct personal benefit resulted out of it for these ‘hackers’. 2. Work within the system. It has to be noted that the temptation to break the two levels of virtuality subjected the system operators as well. Therefore, wherever possible, actions should only be done within the framework of the experiential level. This principle should be applied to both the technical and sociological aspects of the system. It means that system administrators should not abuse their power and control in the world (threaten a player to kick him of the system), but instead should solve possible conflicts with the rules already existent in the world itself (arrange a satisfactory deal in public presence).
In future, the developers promise to eliminate the central planning concept. Obviously, the processing and communications would become too complex when the world’s
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number of users would grow too drastically. A possible solution is considered in the form of a fully distributed system, while public-key cryptographic techniques protect the operating system. Secondly, possibilities are investigated to let the user configure the world by him or herself. But this desire in turn does require an abstract representation of regions and objects to let the user do the design and creation.
I I .5 Cy ber s p ac e U r b an i s ed ? 4 1 To many authors, of which has to be noted that the most write from an American point of view, it is a fact that current urban trends threaten the concept of the original urban public realm. Main reasons have proved to be the privatisation of urban public spaces, the rising fear of crime and the ‘other’ in the post modern city, the erosion of urban social cohesion and spatial splintering of the contemporary metropolis. Also increasingly apparent in the European context, city centres have become packaged, ‘themed’, and exist mainly of facilities for consumption and leisure. Meanwhile, the access is based on the ability to pay rather than some universal notion of the rights of citizens. Enclosed malls, which subtly exclude socially undesirable groups, have emerged rapidly, while middle classes cocoon themselves in houses and gated communities, relying on cars and communications infrastructures to integrate their lives. In parallel with these trends, multiplying layers of technological media are diffusing to under-grid and interlace cities and urban systems. From TV, radio and the telephone to new computer networks like the Internet, all are offering alternative channels for social expression, complementing and threatening real collective face-to-face exchanges. It has to be noted that these technical media too, are increasingly diversified and fragmented, as they are being pushed to support specialised media over constantly widening distances. It is only logic that in such context, debates are encouraged to investigate the potential of digital computer networks for supporting new types of public social and cultural exchange. In fact, a growing group of optimists are urging that cyberspace will act as the ‘new public realm’. People like Michael Benedikt hope that this ‘realm of pure information’ is “transfiguring the physical world, decontaminating the natural and urban landscape, redeeming them, saving them… from clogged airports, from billboards, trashy and pretentious architecture, hour-long freeway commutes, ticket lines, and choked subways… from all the inefficiencies, pollution…”42 It can thus be argued that much of the current hype surrounding the Internet rests on the utopian assumption that such networks will inevitably emerge to be dominated by a democratic culture of public space. Consequently, face-to-face contact will be substituted for computer-mediated communications, as part of a shift to tele-mediated work, service access, health and education networks, and media flows. Safe, nonthreatening and space transcending ‘Virtual communities’ and the culture of ‘real virtuality’ seem to become the solutions for the repressive character of contemporary urban life. Or, in the words of Graham and Aurigi: “One of the explanations for the virtual community phenomenon is the hunger for community that grows in the breasts of people around the world as more and more informal public spaces disappear from our real lives.” The new cyber-based communities, organised ‘by the community, for the community’, do offer the possibility of new interactive, discourse-driven ‘public’ arenas. This promise should be especially important for the most marginalised groups, being hardest hit by the individualistic ways of social organising in cities. But then, at the very least, the 41
This title is based upon GRAHAM, STEPHEN & AURIGI, ALESSANDRO, Urbanising Cyberspace? The Nature and Potential of the Virtual Cities Movement, in CITY , Nr.7, May 1997 42 BENEDIKT, MICHAEL, Introduction, in Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, p.3, see also the introduction-phrasing of the first chapter.
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Internet would need to shift from its public of elite, professional groups to become a near-universal medium. Costly infrastructure needs – skills, finance, a telephone line, a modem, computer software, a service subscription, and electricity supply – should be easily accessible for the majority of urban populations. Much development is thus needed, as it can be easily proved that access to electronic networks is currently a domain of the well-off and privileged. But these differences are also more than complex, as having access does not imply that the use has any meaning, or that it necessarily brings any power and advantage to the users. Heavy users may simply undertake routine and underpaid tele-work, which has clearly no relation to their intensive use of technology. Thus, in contradiction with the idea of a single, unifying cyberspace, it seems likely that different topologies of networks use will emerge, with different degrees of power and control of the users. In this view, three different positions of groups can be recognised within the emerging urban social architecture of cyberspace.43
1. Information users: The elite, the trans-national corporate class, used to operating the global economy, relying on intense mobility and accessing computer networks to ‘command space’. 2. The information used: In fact the less affluent and mobile wage earners, experiencing the consequences of a narrow, passive consumption system, limited to control the ‘press now to purchase’buttons. Global alliances between TV, Internet, cable, telecom, film, publishing, advertising, and newspaper industries must be seen in the context of this commercial consumption-driven market. 3. The off-line: Disadvantaged groups living in poverty and structural unemployment, financially excluded from electronic networks. Moreover, even the actual relevance of Internet access for these social groups is questioned by Graham and Aurigi: “Just giving someone time at a terminal with Internet capabilities or, by extension, at a kiosk in a public space – will not benefit anyone who feels confronted with a seemingly insurmountable problem, or who has no idea to begin”
I I.5 .1 Vir t u al Cit ies Meanwhile largely ignoring these urban social inequalities in Internet-access and the different social architectures of emerging networks, city authorities across the world have recently constructed hundreds of experimental ‘virtual cities’. These onlinephenomena are meant to operate as electronic analogies for the real, material, urban areas that generally host them. Over 5.000 (2.000 in 1997) virtual cities are collected together on the City.Net network44 , ranging from comprehensive web spaces, which try to integrate all online activities in a city, to single promotional web pages. These virtual cities are, in fact, many different attempts to use the potential of the Internet for supporting local democracy and discourse development, urban marketing and ‘regeneration’, new types of electronic municipal service delivery, local inter-firm networking and social and community development within cities. Early research at the Centre for Urban Technology, with the aim of building up a typology of digital cities in the EU, shows that two main types of web cities are emerging. 1. Non-grounded web cities: These sites use the interface of (most often a map of) a ‘city’ as a familiar metaphor to group together wide ranges of 43
GRAHAM, STEPHEN & AURIGI, ALESSANDRO, Urbanising Cyberspace? The Nature and Potential of the Virtual Cities Movement, in CITY , Nr.7, May 1997, p.24 44 Located at http://www.city.net
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Internet services located across the world in a comprehensive and straightforward manner. 2. Grounded web cities: These are developed by urban agencies to help the development of specific cities by coherently relating all the electronic possibilities in context of the subjected city. Two sorts are further recognised: the more promotional oriented sites, where little space is left for information for residents, in opposition to the ‘public’ electronic spaces, which support political, social, and cultural discourses about the city itself.
Figure II-3 The Iperbole initiative in Bologna: a three-dimensional interface based on a urban metaphor. (http://www.nettuno.it/bologna/MappaWelcome.html) Accessibility to these cities seems certainly to be wide because Internet-global, but the sites are mainly configured for passive use. Although these services are thus ‘public’ for sure, they can hardly be considered as a ‘public space’. Most grounded web cities are constructed as nothing more than urban databases, showing information about residents, about political processes and decisions in town management, as well as transport information, leisure opportunities, cultural events, accommodation and restaurants for tourists. ‘Urban design’ is often limited to pure simulation, idealisation, and even parody, of the perfect post-modern city, containing different exciting ‘zones’ and ‘climates’. Nevertheless, the concept of virtual cities is still very young as it obviously needs time for serious development. In spite of some bad examples, much is still expected from these virtual initiatives. Many hope that their dynamic potential will overcome the geographical, social and cultural fragmentation of the contemporary cities and help to bind the urban fragments back together. But then surely, the population should broaden to include also the socially marginalised. Furthermore, one-way applications should be avoided, since many private virtual cities are little more than consumer spaces that use city metaphors to distinguish themselves from the chaotic mass of ‘placeless’ Internet sites. Meanwhile city authorities still avoid to recognise the potential of the digital, and keep using their sites as post-modern urban promotion, offering a collection of advertisements of private, local firms, clearly tempted by the rich population of local Internet users. But, despite the dangers associated with virtual cities, it could be argued that these initiatives are at least beginning to create an articulation between placebased and electronically mediated realms. It is clear that the best hope for virtual cities will come with local strategies driven by partnerships between public, private and community sectors, combined with the shift towards true mass diffusion for Internet
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access. In the future, ‘urban cyberspace planning’ should construct meaningful urban ‘enclosures’ within the fragmenting effects of globalisation, reviving collective notions of urban identity and democratic, discourse-driven spaces.
I I.5 .2 D ig it al e S t ad Ams t er d am One of the most ambitious virtual cities examples in Europe at this time, is definitely ‘The Digital City’ of Amsterdam45 , which claims to be socially inclusive and discourse driven. Since the creation of ‘De Digitale Stad’ (DDS) in January 1994, this private initiative has always been subsidised by the municipality of Amsterdam. From the first rather closed text-based interface, it developed rapidly into a complex web-based site with a rather appealing graphic interface. In so far this spatial metaphor of a city meanwhile stands as an example for many other digital cities. It seems thus evident that the entire organisation of DDS is represented as a global ‘town’. This interface consists out of 33 thematic squares, covering issues as diverse as books, transport, new technology, gay issues, politics, health and medicine, local government services, planning, and sport. Each ‘square’ represents home pages of up to eight relevant information providers, which can be originated out of the private, public or voluntary sector. Each ‘square’ is in turn surrounded by residential ‘homes’. These boxlike links are, in turn, used by the city’s own residents to provide their personal information, free of charge. Each square also has a ‘virtual cafe’, an area for archived, online debate on its theme. Additionally, a genuine environment was developed called ‘The Metro’, the place where the global virtual community exists.
Figure II-4 The Virtual City and a ‘Square’ of De Digitale Stad Amsterdam . (http://www.dds.nl/)
The question arises as to whether DDS really can be considered as a public space for the city of Amsterdam. And two objections to this claim of DDS can be founded. First, despite the existence of public terminals and some use by marginalised groups, it is a fact that the young, white, male, well-educated groups, which are also present at the Internet as a whole, still dominate the system. And as DDS is gradually introducing more commercially driven content, such inequalities seem unlikely to reduce. Second, the nature of the electronic network makes it questionable how much of the population, debates and discourses on DDS genuinely represent the citizens of Amsterdam as opposed to the wider Internet population. Next to the fact that DDS can be used by anyone with a connection to the Internet, it is also noticed that many other themes are more visited than the ones on the level of democracy within the Digital City itself. Also here, with the pressure of the increasing marketing funds in mind, this link probably only will deteriorate in future.
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Located at http://www.dds.nl , another interesting example of a virtual city is the Iperbole initiative in Bologna, at http://www.nettuno.it/bologna/MappaWelcome.html
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II.6 Consequences These examples have proved that cyberspace designers of all kinds actually do possess a great deal of power in creating the digital constraints and variables of cyberspace. Furthermore, it can sometimes be noticed the fact that most writings about the existing and future of the electronic realm use a simple form of naive and enthusiastic persuasion, which not always could be proved with objective arguments. Thus, it might be more than useful to formulate also some critical voice to the phenomenon of Internet cyberspace. Like most new technologies, cyberspace did not appear from no-where as a mystical spark of inspiration from the mind of one individual. It is a conscious reflection of the deepest desires, aspirations, experiential yearning and spiritual dreams of Western man. In this view, cyberspace can be considered as a new territory that Western civilisation has to conquer. In human history, this inevitable obsession followed a rather basic and linear pattern. The temptation always lied in the desire to acquire new wealth that in turn provided impetus for the development of new technologies, which were in turn necessary to bring these new territories under the power of the West. When these were finally colonised, they were handed over to business interests at last, giving way to the so-called ‘progress’, ‘globalisation’, and ‘modernisation’. It is this very thought that inspired Ziauddin Sardar in a flaming critical essay about the digital dreams and applications in general. One of his many arguments raises the question about the information electronically available nowadays. As a product of a culture where individual and common goals have lost all their significance and meanings, most actions are based on the phenomenon of boredom . In such a culture, one needs something different to do, to see, have a new excitement and spectacle every other moment, and this in a time span that is no longer than a single frame of a MTV video: five seconds. “Netsurfing provides just that: the exhilaration of a joyride, the spectacle of visual and audio inputs, a r elief from boredom and an illusion of God-like omniscience as an added extra.”46 For this author, the individual’s self is reduced to discrete bits of binary code: humanity digested by cyberspace. Meanwhile, virgin land is waiting passively to be dominated by the latest territory controlled by the West. Cyberspace, then, is the ‘American dream’, as the obvious remark of the dawn of a new ‘American civilisation’. Parts of this argument can be visually recognised in the representation of virtual worlds like Habitat. On the other side, this community itself can hardly be recognised as one, as communities are shaped by a sense of belonging to a place, a geographical location, by shared values, by common struggles, by tradition and history of a location. And certainly not by joining a group of people with common interests. A cyberspace community has no context and self-selecting, exactly what a real community is not. People can be banned while in reality the essence is to help them because they are always there. In this view, cyberspace communities are only the protection from the race and gender mix of reality, from the contamination of pluralism. Furthermore, the problem of the power and authority of the programmer or administrator can be questioned. This however, will certainly be a subject when the role of the architect as programmer will be investigated. 46
SARDAR, ZIAUDDIN, alt.civilisations.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West, in SARDAR, ZIAUDDIN & RAVETZ, JEROME R.(Ed.), Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway , Pluto Press, London, 1996, p.27
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I I.7 Co n c l u s io n The digital environment is definitely changing social, economic, and political systems. The concept of architecture is still not a hot topic in this huge and rapid process. Nevertheless, three propositions can be argued in relation to the importance of the network in relation to architecture.47 Digital information is Ambient. Major economical shifts in the global telecommunication business prove the great (market) importance of this technology. While still developing at a rapid race, digital information spurts out of the wall sockets everywhere in the developed countries. A condition is reached in which essentially any information is available in any quantity, at any time. This has to result in important implications. As the bandwidth increases, as the digital information environment does truly become ambient, the conditions that have been very familiar to humankind will fundamentally change. Being somewhere physically will only deliver a few more ‘bits’ and modalities instead of electronic communication. Human interaction will definitely change. Digital information is solvent. It is a solvent by eliminating or radically reducing the need for contiguity of architecture. It dissolves the social glue that holds buildings and cities together, leaving only a residue of recombinable fragments. Banks, for example, were formerly recognised as powerful institutions with an important representational role in society. The buildings had a powerful floor plan, with spaces and relationships between them that were carefully mapped. Contemporary banks are much more a network of automated teller machines and some nodes in the almost infinite international money transfer. All this could be controlled in a normal house, acting as a power centre of enormous importance, but having no architectural representation at all. Banking is a good example of recombination as well as the new signs of the institutions, the ATM machines, shifted gradually. First these were still well attached to the bank building, while in many countries they have now moved to the busy places where people really want them: big supermarkets, airports, …at home. The task of future architecture is difficult to foresee, as facades and surfaces will become infinitely complex. The capital of the 21st century will be a virtual city. This proposition can also be recognised as a consequence of the solvent power of digital information. Looking at the phenomenon today, the growing digital urban and public spaces of the future will probably be the virtual communities spoken of earlier. They have some kind of powerful attraction and addiction, which are - and will be investigated by many social researchers for a long time. However, it should be noted that more social activities could be processed in a simple computer box somewhere completely invisible and unknown, than on Time Square, New York, right now. The important difference is actually the architectural translation, as no design or theory had any authority to shape these social manifestations in any way. Meanwhile, many urban metaphors are used to describe the navigation of the network. Even so, glimpses are being recognised of how the web can be very different. As cyberspace will be explored thoroughly in the future, some of the obvious metaphors will disappear, other will emerge.
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MITCHELL, WILLIAM, at the IN ANY Event, published in: Any, Electrotecture: Architecture and the Electronic Future , Nr.3, November/December 1993, p.47
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Looking at the situation of today, it can easily be argued that architecture certainly has no great role in the design or conception of contemporary virtual environments. Although some critical voices emphasise that the urban, public realm is radically overhyped, the force and success of this open movement cannot be neglected. Most of these worlds are socially driven, and are based on human characteristics of interaction instead of significant representation of the surrounding environment and its relations as such. It has to be noted though, that bandwidth limitations and technological development still are fundamentally based on two-dimensional communication and interaction, and will be for a considerable time. In this way, these worlds, even when graphically designed, still show a remarkable banal and peaceful style of architecture that resembles, at the most, fine coloured expensive children books. It can then be asked whether this conservative spatiality that is seen, suggest that the impact may not be as earth-shattering as some would have think. Why is the space that ones inhabits so banal? Is it because it is the sole possible representation of the very metaphor, the Cybercity where people want to interact? The banalities of the architectures and the imitations of visible architectures that are showing up in graphical virtual environments maybe suggest that spatiality is not the best analogy to be working with. Furthermore, many foresee the theoretical evaporation of architecture in the face of the electronic power. They argue that the role of architecture is one of dematerialization, reduced to the lightweight, the banal. Why should architecture not be able to displace, reorient or even resist this line of thinking? Meanwhile, some authors did not wait until these remarkable manifestations are implemented and have already formulated some thoughts and theories of the future digital architecture. It is also expected that the role of architecture will thus become more important when the third, and even the fourth, dimension will be included in the electronic realm of the future. These subjects in particular will be further investigated in the next two chapters.
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The overall structure of virtual architecture can be placed in a certain theoretical frame. One of the themes within this structure is primarily concerned with the phenomenon of the Internet, while another explains the electronic social spaces based upon communication protocols, which in fact are already in place and are being used intensively. It should be noted that these both phenomena were explained in the former chapters. Furthermore, it can be argued that the overall frame of these theoretical points of view also represents a certain architectural theory, whether this is thought of in traditional terms or not. Difficulties arise as some parts of the electronic realm that should be theorised are in fact already working and thus constraining the investigated elements for thorough evaluation. However, some other authors are meanwhile investigating possible structures that actually do not have anything to do with pre-existing architectonics. In contrary, these architectural researchers try to inject the notion of architecture with innovative ideas and concepts, and are largely influenced by biological and physical reactions that are translated in a digital format. In this chapter, some of these rather revolutionary concepts will be described.
I II Cyb er s pac e A r c h it ec t u r e “When speed reaches a certain point, time and space collapse and distance seems to disappear. The very conditions of spatio- temporal experience are radically transformed. At this point, does architecture finally become immaterial?” (Mark Taylor - Electrotecture, in Any, No.3, Nov/Dec 1993, p.9)
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I I I .1 I n t r o d u c t io n “At present architectural software is still based on a primitive form of building. The programmers still use rigid, static traditional elements, like window posts, vertical walls, level floors, columns, in short the classical composing parts, which are made into a building by means of the archaic technique of putting one element on top of the other. The software available on other fields offers considerably, more and better modelling facilities, like the programmes for industrial design and mechanical engineering. Architects discovering these possibilities, will no doubt start using the available space. Architecture will become much more complex, as far as form and calculation concerned, so complex even that apparent chaos can only be controlled by means of the computer.” (Kas Oosterhuis, Artificial Intuition, in Wiederhall: The Open Volume , No.12, 1990, p.50)
Throughout history, architectural practice has been directly influenced by the technological advancements of design media. Design realised through drawing and drafting has become the standard method since the period of the Renaissance. The entire industry of drafting industry in fact defined intensively the practice in the architectural office until the late twentieth century. Then the introduction of the computer technically advanced the design process more than drastically. Computer-Aided Architectural Design tools allowed architects greater control, more efficiency and a huge amount of accessible information all at the same time. As these programs have begun to offer designers a fast and accurate medium for three-dimensional modelling, they have at the same time also started to reorganise and redefine the nature of architectural design itself. Today, virtual reality technologies could be the next evolutionary step in the evolution of design. Without the two-dimensional interfaces such as the mouse, keyboard, and monitor, architects now have the opportunity to design in a more intuitive manner in the virtual realm itself. In opposition to the notion of virtual ‘walkthroughs’, VR offers architects a new, fast, controlling, and accurate tool for three-dimensional modelling. Conceptual sketches could now finally be shifted into the virtual space, in which any point of view, collaboratively, or within a very specific and accurate context, is technically possible. Architecture cannot be separated from the concept of creating meaning out of form. It is this remarkable starting point that will determinate the next architectures that now will be described. Many different approaches can be distinguished, and the next paragraphs should thus be considered as an incomplete view out of the vast horizon of relationships between architecture and the digital realm.
I I I .2 Vir t u al A r c h it ec t u r e As stated earlier, virtual architecture, the design of three-dimensional environments for inhabitation in cyberspace and conceptualised by virtual reality, will most probably soon be realised on a world-wide scale. When fully implemented, these virtual worlds may even come to replace much of what we know as the architectural types of today.
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I II .2 .1 I n t r o d uc t io n “In the netropolis , architecture becomes electrotecture . Electrotecture surpasses the techniques of computer-aided design by actually taking responsibility for fashioning cyberspace. If we increasingly dwell in cyberspace, the architect must find ways to design the electronic environment. There is no clear line separating the electrotect from either the imagologist or the computer programmer. In the netropolis, images and programs are no longer preliminary models that are the prelude to ‘real’ building but constitute the living space for global villagers.” (Mark C. Taylor/Esa Saarinen- Imagologies )
Although many notions of virtual architecture will be taken from lessons of traditional design professions, it is noted that the virtual realm consists of completely different conditions and characteristics. As the concept of the virtual environment is considered as a universal and infinite space and not one of pl ac e , some authors argue the fact that this concept is in fact essentially non-architectural.1 However, still these authors foresee the virtual realm and its virtual communities as the ultimate forces that will pulse development of buildings and social spaces, and will thrive on the exchange of information. The typical seduction that these manifestations of social electronic communities possess has already been investigated in chapter II, in which also an increasing importance and growth of this phenomenon has been predicted. Notably, it may not be forgotten that it is the consumer and entertainment-based industry in which most western people live, that will be the platform upon which the infrastructure of the virtual will be built. This leads to the conclusion that architecture, understood as the expression of society in physical form, firstly will have to adapt to, for example, an electronic, virtual society. The virtual communities will have similar needs and as the communities that exist in the physical world, maybe even more.2 It are these predicted ‘high expectations’ of a complete ‘new’ architecture, that ultimately predict an entirely new realm of design that should develop as a sister profession to architecture, that of virtual architecture .
I I I.2 .2 U r b an D es i g n As the network connections are becoming as important to people as their bodily locations, it can be stated that the notion of human habitat becomes reinvented. In this field of virtual architecture, some authors concentrate themselves not on the generation of form and objects, but on the organisation of the electronic applications available in an increasing amount on the electronic networks of tomorrow, called virtual urban design . “And the new urban design task is not one of configuring buildings, streets, and public spaces to meet the needs and aspirations of the civitas , but one of writing computer code and deploying software objects to create virtual places and electronics between them. Within these places, social contacts will be made, economic transactions will be carried out, cultural life will unfold, surveillance will be enacted, and power will be exerted.”3
1
See paragraph ”Cyber space Ar chit ect s ”. CAMPBELL, A. DACE, Vers une Architecture Virtuelle..., 1994, http://www.hitl.washington.edu/people/dace/portfoli/arch560.html 3 MITCHELL, WILLIAM J., City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn , MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1995, p.160 2
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In Cyberspace Of course, these designers should not exclusively consider the actual urban design the places and interconnections provided and their look and feel - but also the civic character, in which these communities are able to work in a just, equitable, and satisfying way. For William Mitchell, the upcoming task is revolutionary and huge. He points out that the task of the twenty-first century’s designers and planners will consist out of building the bit-sphere , which is a world-wide, electronically mediated environment in which networks are everywhere. Furthermore, most of the artefacts that function within will then have intelligence and telecommunications capabilities. This should result into an electronic world that “will overlay and eventually succeed the agricultural and industrial landscapes that humankind has inhabited for so long.”
But Mitchell’s evolutionary way is long, as this hyper-extended dense and widespread habitat transcending national boundaries is unprecedented. Architects should then design the upcoming virtual gathering places, exchanges, and entertainment places for its plugged-in population. Moreover, just as architects foresaw in the needs of many traditional social service institutions and functions, bit-sphere planners now have to structure the channels, resources, and interfaces of educational and medical delivery systems for much more extended purposes. In the Physical World Questions can then easily be raised of whether the existing cities will be able to resist the shift of social and economic activity to cyberspace. And Mitchell thinks he knows the right answer. He points out that great cities always had the intrinsic capability to adapt to most of the challenges of industrialisation and the rather radical inventions such as for instance the automobile. Furthermore, it is noted that future applications of immersive tele-presence most probably will reduce the reliance on bodily presence and material exchange, hereby progressively changing the ways public spaces will be used and also weakening many of the linkages that hold large urban agglomerations together. But this is no reason for Mitchell to think that this necessarily will lead to the elimination of human desire for face-to-face contact. In fact, he foresees the opportunity of a radical reorganisation of the cities into small-scale neighbourhoods that are nourished by strong electronic links to the wider world, but at the same time have the unique quality of being different of the majority of other places. The danger is then that these wellconnected, well-serviced enclaves would start to offer economic opportunities while “the poor could be left with the obsolete and decaying ur ban remnants and isolated rural settlements that the more privileged no longer need.”4
Hereby, the challenge of building the bit-sphere would thus largely consist of deploying the principles of social equity. While pre-industrial buildings were routinely equipped with the necessary comfort systems of today (heating, air-conditioning, water supply,…), they now are getting electronic nervous systems connected to all possible networks and information appliances. Ultimately, the distinction between smart electronics and dumb connection could no longer be made, turning the architectural works of the bit-sphere into ‘robots with foundations’. In short, for Mitchell the future task of the architects is clearly one of relying on both the bodily presence and the technique of tele-presence. New ways will thus be found to recombine transformed fragments of traditional buildings in the matrix of digital communications systems.
4
MITCHELL, WILLIAM J., City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn , MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1995, p.171
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I II .2 .3 Cy ber s p ac e A r c h i t ec t s “The door to cyberspace is open, and I believe that poetically and scientifically minded architects can and will step through it in significant numbers. For cyberspace will require constant planning and organisation. The structures proliferating within it will require design and the people who design these structures will be called cyberspace architects . Schooled in computer science and programming (the equivalent of “construction”), in graphics, and in abstract design, schooled also along with their brethren “real-space” architects, cyberspace architects will design electronic edifices that are fully as complex, functional, unique, involving, and beautiful as their physical counterparts, if not more so. … And all the while such designers will be re-realising in a virtual world many vital aspects of the physical world, in particular those orderings and pleasures that have always belonged to architecture.“5 The Principles “To move on, architecture must give up its devotion of the book and must dare to become hypertextual,” is the opinion of Mark C. Taylor.6 He points out that the potential importance of electronic technology for architectural practice and theory is not a novel insight, as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown have proved in their book Learning from Las Vegas . He states furthermore that postmodern architecture not really showed much of the so-called innovations and changes of the past 25 years and that it is, “in fact, an extension of the aesthetic principles and philosophical presuppositions of modernism.” So, while electricity concentrates and electronics disperse, a new architecture has to arise. Many other authors concerned with the architectural future in cyberspace foresee the emergence of quite a new profession as well. They argue that, despite the differences from architecture of the physical world, the designs of virtual architecture will require the expertise of traditional three-dimensional designers. In this way, certain basic lessons of architectural design will inevitably be carried over to the virtual realm. Dave Campbell for instance, is convinced that formal characteristics such as rhythm, scale, balance, and unity will be part of the virtual design as well.7 Other important lessons of which environment behaviour principles, way-finding principles, and territoriality are only a few should be used as basis for creating inhabitable, understandable spaces in the virtual context. The Constraints Cyberspace is a blank, black void until an artificial context is introduced. Before that, it is fundamentally nothing, even placeless and indescribable. Doubts can then be raised about how three-dimensional design will able to react when its space becomes infinite and unboundable, and how the so-called cyberspace architects will design this nature of anti-architectural placelessness .
In physical space, objects and people exist in relation to all objects around them. But in cyberspace, despite their three-dimensionality, objects do not take up space, except in the computer's memory. They have no place in relationship to other objects, except in the abstraction of the electronic program. It would thus seem as whether there are no constraints in the design of virtual environments. Most known architectural constraints (climate, wind, gravity, water, building codes, property lines,…) just do not exist in the nature of cyberspace. 5
BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, p.18 TAYLOR, MARK C., De-signing the Simcit, in Any , Electrotecture: Architecture and the Electronic Future, No.3, November/December 1993, p.16 7 CAMPBELL, A. DACE, Vers une Architecture Virtuelle..., 1994, http://www.hitl.washington.edu/people/dace/portfoli/arch560.html 6
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“When bricks become pixels, the tectonics of architecture become informational. City planning becomes data structure design, construction costs become computational costs, accessibility becomes transmissibility, proximity is measured in numbers of required links and available bandwidth. Everything changes, but architecture remains.”8 Indeed, there are constraints in the virtual realm, but unlike the physical ones. Limitations on polygons (the building block of virtual worlds), pixels (which render the polygons with colour or texture), as well as restrictions like bandwidth, disk space, and memory will become the budgets and materials of the cyberspace architects.9 Problems of how to express enclosed space, needed for structural reasons of privacy and separation of function, in fact still remain. For Campbell, privacy and separation of function should be established by ignoring other inhabitants and functions in the computer’s calculation of the environment. Walls could then become necessary for perceptual comfort and orientation, but their form could also be dependent from all sorts of triggered variables. This easy introduction of some possible cyberspatial design principles will be broadened out in the next chapter, in which the ideas of Michael Benedikt will be thoroughly investigated.
I II .2 .4 Cr it ic al A ppr o a ch In the former chapter, the phenomenon of virtual communities has been investigated. As it was concluded that this field could not be considered the new ‘frontier’ filled with revolutionary architectural notions and new conceptual spatial thinking, the research will be continued in the more abstract theories of generating form by electronic-based tools. Both applications however can only be represented in the imaginary space with the sole effort of people with advanced skills in programming. These designers of either architectural or community space do consequently possess a great deal of power. Ziauddin Sardar describes this fact, in his article Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West in the next, more generalising terms. “The romantic, liberating notion of information technologies draws our attention away from its more real potential: to enslave us in its totality. Beyond the rapture of free access to unlimited information and the dream of controlling all human knowledge, lies the reciprocal threat of total organisation .”10 ‘Everything’ in cyberspace is managed by so-called invisible system operators (sysops), who ensure that the electronic networked system runs smoothly and efficiently. Meanwhile, they hold unrestricted power to deny entry, cut, delete or censor any communication, and observe all that is going on their system. On bigger networks, Big Sysops cannot only monitor what is going on but also have the ability to intercept communications, read them and re-route them in different directions. Several legal cases in the VS already have proved that elecronic applications such as private email actually cannot really be considered as all that private. And since many take-overs occur in the business of electronic communication, this power will most certainly not decrease. Furthermore, these large multinational providers have the economical, technical and political power to control the whole network system. Moreover, since they have free access to everything on the system, they are even able to act like all-knowing, all-seeing central network operators. As the use of the Internet network technology 8
NOVAK, MARCOS, Trans Terra Form, http://www.t0.or.at/~krcf/nlonline/nonMarcos.html CAMPBELL, A. DACE, Vers une Architecture Virtuelle..., 1994, http://www.hitl.washington.edu/people/dace/portfoli/arch560.html 10 SARDAR, ZIAUDDIN, alt.civilisations.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker side of the West, in SARDAR, ZIAUDDIN & RAVETZ, JEROME R. (Ed.), Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway , Pluto Press, London, 1996, p.32 9
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applied as a social communication tool will continuously and exponentially increase like commonly expected, this very issue should definitely not be neglected by its potential users. Even William Mitchell foresees some problems with this potentially dangerous power. To enter most electronic spaces, people have to undergo a personal examination. Not only are they giving up parts of their privacy, but they run the risk to get excluded and marginalised as well, without any arguments or discretion in some cases. “So control of code is power. For citizens of cyberspace, computer code –… typically accessible to only a few privileged high-priests- is the medium in which intentions are enacted and designs are realised, and it is becoming a crucial focus of political contest.”11 In the case of the digital generation of spatial form, architects in their education as well as in their profession do already have the ability to ‘control’ the space to shape it to their own creativity. This power will consequently depend upon the individual knowledge of any form generating computer language, hereby creating two different levels and kinds of designers. On the other hand, the conceptual use of the computer cannot be implemented without any dangers. It has to be noted that, if utilised unimaginatively, computers have a tendency to dull critical faculties, as they induce a false sense of optimised design. Moreover, they sometimes create an atmosphere where any utterance of the computer is regarded as having divine significance, and they are able to distort the design process to fit the limitations of the most easily available program as well.
I II .2 .5 Th e R epr es en t a t io n o f S pa c e Maybe, the influence of the electronic realm could be explained otherwise than the still rather futuristic view of educating the new profession of cyberspace architects, and implementing them rather drastically in the new field of design. The next approach takes another point of view, and starts hereby at the observation of some architectural projects that are highly influenced by the interpretation of the contemporary information age.
“In light of the existence of a new architecture that allows the representation of contents, it is not surprising that many architects began to use drawings as a medium for the development of a representational sphere extending beyond building. Those who derided drawings created in this vein as impractical and unrealisable were missing the point that such drawings were better suited than realisable ones to the expression of far-reaching ideas. With the advent of a new ‘architecture of drawings’, architecture was freed from its restriction to the practically realisable. Now it was again an avenue for the manifestations of visions and dreams.” (Heinrich Klotz, The History of Postmodern Architecture, 1988, p.398)
11
MITCHELL, WILLIAM J., City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn , MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1995, p.112
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The Experience of Space
“Space: a boundless, three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction.“ (The New Encyclopaedia Britannica)
By abstracting a space, one generally understands conceptualising a physical accommodation for a particular function. Space becomes then activated by its own construction or the presence of certain objects and persons. Fundamentally inserted perceptible metaphors (like public-private, exteriority-interiority, surface-depth, verticality-horizontality,…) then help defining the human, spatial experience of the characteristics possessed by the surrounding space. In this view, it can easily be argued that the human notion of contemporary architectural space is nowadays more and more subject of a rapid developing technological process of fundamental change. For instance, an increasing number of examples of buildings as well as design proposals do emerge in which the emotional pressure of movement and congestion becomes augmented by fundamental architectural decisions. Elements like catwalks, elevators, traffic-regulators and ramps explicitly penetrate the overall space, providing dynamic connections between society’s newest technological frontier and the enclosed architectural expression. The overwhelming sensation of huge numbers non-aware moving persons becomes a spectacle on its own, as the distinction between spectator and actor vanishes between the settings of this architectural stage. Groups of people are continuously enduring shiny liquid-crystal screens, watching everchanging facade-projections or walking through sweeping coloured light beams. As victims of the inventions of the new era-multimedia, they are undergoing rapidly changing images combined with those of the uncountable reflections on the surrounding transparent physical borders. These invisible walls are then transformed into the new infinite landscapes, able to project any panorama the project’s function desires at any time. In some proposals12, people were able to walk in a huge Japanese garden, shop in the small streets of a typical urban city or run through the new Kevin Costner movie while waiting for their cruise-ship inside the sea-terminal of Yokohama. Numerous spatial fractions of typologies in one single designed room, collectively capable to vary in time, technology makes it all possible. Furthermore, congestion of crowds and voids of groups consisting out of people in such designed spaces in fact appear as a kind of programmable result of certain technical manifestations. Or reverse, these differences in density are discovered by several sensors, which then successively trigger, process and execute other events. A whole system of invisible algorithms tries to manipulate the very thing of which it was designed to perceive as well: the overall spatial experience. Therefore, the relation between the screened and the screen is finally complete. This architecture offers the means to reveal emerging structures of all kinds, as it generates unpredictable patterns instead of representing a certain predefined semantic value. All these events are, in addition, combined with the various effects generated by Koolhaas’ notion of ‘Bigness’, the consequences of the exaggerated scale of a project. Deliberately or not, it is then only logical that these dynamic electronically steered activities are converted into the final ‘event’, into the main ‘Big’ program out of which the actual perceived space is merged.
12
I refer hereby to the projects like the Yokohoma Terminal proposal of architect Königs
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The Representation of Space Consequently, the characteristics of this architecture cannot be seized by any traditional static presentation technique. This structural inability to rely on the presented plans, drawings or pictures forced some competition commissions to complain that they were almost unable to judge the fundamental qualities of proposals inspired by this experimental approach. Even the fixed traditional notion of an ordinary plan is subject to change, as it is noted that these architectural representations are almost developing into minimalistic pointillistic schemes. Forced to adapt the required program of dynamic organisation, many of these projects are able to change function-place relationships in a considerable short time as well. The architectural value of fixed objects hereby decreases while the traditional notion of matter starts to loose its importance. Ultimately, the Cartesian order of erect walls, coming vertically out of the architectural plans, get important competitors in the form of so-called blobs13 and organic roofs, able to cover all possible functions under, and on top of, one single, huge surface. This sometimes even results into an extreme plan representation that has almost no fixed content besides the overall covering membrane. It is hereby noticed that movement of objects and people plus the change of various functions in time are rendered into an almost bigger aesthetic value then the only fixed element, the construction, of the building itself.
Questions can then easily be raised as for how the architect can be fully aware of the spatial and perceptible implications of most design decisions, as much is planned to be dependent of its dynamic and unpredictable use itself. Many of the project’s qualities will consequently rely on the applied information technology. This technical packet of hardand software will finally determine how the space becomes animated and activated. Time as the fourth dimension becomes thus a very significant factor as well, as the perception of the building’s environment can change at each megahertz-cycle decision of the computer’s processor. In such projects, space and time are forced into one single ultimate embraced movement.
Figure III-1 Left: architectural work of Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos , right: the Water Pavilion of NOX-Architecture The Technology of Space Representation. This architectural movement should obviously not be separated from that of the development of the actual building technology. Some authors have noticed that in the history of architecture, there is a general impulse is to shift from the material to the immaterial . From the heavy stones of the Egyptians, to Roman vaults, to Gothic arches, to iron construction, to the curtain wall, to structural glass, to holograms, to...virtual reality. And it is this last phenomenon that could be the very representational tool this experimental architecture is seeking for. In this way, next to the objects physically realised, the drawing and the scale model, the cyberspatial model could be the most appropriate form of expression.
With the application of virtual reality, dynamic representations of the designed information processing mechanisms could be implemented, while the spatial simulation takes place in an immersive and convincing manner. These architectural experiences 13
For more information, see paragraph entitled ‘ t h e B l o b ’ .
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could be shared by numerous interested people at any time, checking the effects and events that were programmed by the (cyberspatial?) architect. Furthermore, it would be only logical if the design would then be steered out of these explorations, and done inside the digital environment itself. Even the fundamental question whether the simulated space is meant to be built in the physical world or not, could then be considered as redundant. But even nowadays, architectural suitable software is hard to find. Most sophisticated CAAD-software programs have already reached the border of their efficiency and some architects’ personal creativity. Contemporary architects like Frank O. Gehry, Greg Lynn or Peter Eisenmann14 (have to) use several non-architectural computer programs nowadays, to be able to generate their ideas into some kind of acceptable representation. Even the contemporary virtual reality tools are still inadequate for truely renewing designing purposes, as the VR-technique in principle is a representation of a certain defined mental projection. It is dependent of the mind of its program writers and developers, and to date, this has clearly been of an almost exclusively analytic, Cartesian order. Therefore, creating VR oriented architectural software-applications is the technological part where spatial experienced persons such as architects are able to propose many innovations and ideas in future. Because now at last the power of imagination is virtually free, the concept of space, first defined by the materialisation of design, is turning its attention to the process of generation as architectural representation . The Future of Architectural Space Inevitably, the identity of space has transformed in a period of hundreds of years of changing technology and spatial awareness. In the future, some architectural experiences in a certain space, physical or not, will change continuously, even every computable nanosecond if necessary, out of the designed concept of its architect. Virtual reality as a representation technique is able to represent and explore these ideas of time dependence, changing form and the sensorial environment that is uploaded by space. By most optimistic views, imagination, architecture, and virtuality should be able to create places similar to the major historical architectural types we know today. For Mark C. Taylor, “…the possibilities of the computer would not be used to design buildings, but space would be designed by developing programs. The materials of the future architect would than be transformed from concrete, steel or glass, to become code, programs, and images.” 15
The electronic environment offers much more than the universal design principles which reflect old building technology or traditional representation methods. Architects of the future should attempt to find ways of fashioning this new space in ways that take advantage of its extraordinarily rich potential. In this way, computer-generated spaces should not be the sum of endless calculations, but should use the power of the computer to produce something unforeseen. And this is the very area that is yet largely unexplored. „Architecture is geared to the future, but has had plenty of experience with eternity.“ (Ole Bouman, RealSpace in QuickTimes: Architecture and Digitization , 1996)
14
Some principles and approaches these three architects utilise in their work will be explained in the next paragraphs. 15 TAYLOR, MARK C., De-signing the Simcit, in Any , Electrotecture: Architecture and the Electronic Future, No.3, November/December 1993, p.17
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I II .3 D ig it is ed A r c h it ec t u r e Greg Lynn teaches architecture at Columbia University in New York, the University of California in Los Angeles, and is the principle of the office called FORM in New Jersey and Los Angeles. His most known works until today still consists of competition design proposals such as the Cardiff Bay Opera House and the Yokohoma International Port Terminal . Nevertheless, he can certainly be considered as an important voice in the architectural discussion about cyberspace, as most of his projects are dealing intensively with the investigation of dynamic, computer-generated models in the generation of architectural form.
I II .3 .1 D at a Fiel d A r c h it ec t u r e In this discourse, he persuasively criticises most contemporary architecture as being static, since they embrace the classical models of pure and timeless form. Lynn does not use the term ‘static’ in opposite to ‘moving’, but tries in this way to explain the fact that this traditional architecture is based on reducing whole ideal numbers r eaching a certain calculable equilibrium, instead of some sort of non-static mathematics.16
Figure III-2 Studies for a single-family house residence on Long Island, N.Y. (tran sform, No.2, 1998, p.66)
The Generation of Form In opposition to the scientific approach that merely investigates procedures and processes, Greg Lynn tries to explain the concept of form with logic based on timerelated growth or development. Illustrating the fundaments of his theory, he refers to the metaphor of a rock, of which the form can only be understood as a certain result of its history. This phenomenon based on Henri Bergson’s17 theory of readable and defined history embedded even in any form, can be characterised by the term energy . One of the approaches to design is to build a history into form, rather than reducing the form to some ideal state. In the same way the energy is captured into the rock, Lynn is trying to store motion in the form itself by generating it in a time-based environment. This does not have to mean that Lynn’s buildings move, but that the perception of its users contains the unfolding of a stored pathway into its forms and surfaces. In his view, 16
DUISBERG, CHRISTOPHER, & GUIHAND, MARC, …growing buildings out of data fields?, in transForm , No.2, January 1998, pp.65-69 17 Greg Lynn bases this notion on the book: BERGSON, HENRI, Matter and Memory , New York, Zone Books, 1988
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forces can be built into any designed building just by the way it is formed. Initially, these fundamental principles of perceptible forces did reach that far, that he even deliberately refused to investigate the experiential components of a project.
Later, he started to accept the concept of a defined perceptible model, although the recognition of its form varied very strongly and dynamically by the way, place, and direction in which it was observed. In the research of his projects, a primarily design procedure and a whole set of parameters are established that will generate the architectural form. For example, Lynn showed that a building could be designed out of a certain data field, a diagram that acts like a kind of deformed typology. For this project, the notion of typology was used to provide certain internal constrained limits to the model. This was combined with external constraints of the surrounding environment mapped on a data field, which finally resulted in a computer generated single-family house on Long Island. The Blob
“Or should I say blobs. Many blobs, of all different sizes and shapes and irreducible typological essences. Blobs that thr eaten to overrun a terrorised and deterritorialised tectonics like a bad B-movie.”18 To prove the rather original point of view with which Greg Lynn approaches the architectural theory of form, one of his radical and new architectural elements will now be explained more thoroughly. In a rather theoretical essay in ANY , Greg Lynn introduces a revolutionary new formal typology, called ‘the blob’, which should drastically enrich the architectural discourse of tectonics. These elements seem most promising, as the concept suggests fundamental alternative strategies of structural organisation and construction. Its characteristics should provide complex architectural relations, as they try to fill the metaphorical gaps of traditional representation with their remarkable ‘sticky surfaces’. Blobs cannot be reduced to a typological essence, as no two blobs are the identical. Furthermore, the form and organisation of any given blob is contextually intensive and therefore dependent on strict conditions for internal organisation. Most importantly, blobs can be considered as alien and detached from any place while they possess simultaneously the capability of melding with their surrounding context.
Figure III-3 Two of Greg Lynn’s diagrams of blobs.
18
LYNN, GREGG, Blobs, or why Tectonics is Square and Topology is Groovy, in ANY , No.14, 1996, pp. 59-61
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What exactly can be recognised as a ‘blob’? The image, the morphology, and behaviour of the blob present a sticky, viscous, mobile composite entity capable of incorporating disparate external elements into itself. Lynn himself identifies three different approaches to clarify the former characteristics of the idea of ‘blobbiness’. 1. The images of science fiction horror films. The blobs that appear in these typical B-movies can be understood as organisms that are topologically inverted. While these alien structures move through the city absorbing materials, each of them acts like a digestive system but then turned inside out. Such a B-film blob is a gelatinous surface of which its interior and exterior are continuous.19 Gelatinous organisms, like fluids, have no internally regulated shape but depend on contextual constraints or containment for their form. Although they have minor shaping forces such as surface tensions and viscosity, they posses neither a global form nor a single identity. Three principles of this movement and spatiality are characteristic for all blobs. First, blobs possess the ability to move through space as if space were aqueous, thus determining its form by the environment as well as the movement itself. Secondly, it is noticed that blobs can absorb objects as if they were liquefied. And in conclusion, the term blob seems to connote a kind of intelligence, neither singular nor multiple, that behaves as if it is networked, multiplied, and distributed. 2. The physical definition of viscous composite entities. These fluid entities are described as being ‘quasi-solid’, incomplete beings whose symbolisation has been ignored due to ‘specific dynamics’ characteristic of real fluids. In search of a theoretical abstract model of essential diversification within the discipline of architecture, an alternative system of complexity of form seems required. Meanwhile, a typology of topological geometries for modelling complex aggregates has been scientifically developed. The most interesting example in this field is the concept of ‘isomorphic surfaces’, also referred to as ‘meta-balls’, or ‘blobs’. These elements can only be organised in relation to other objects, as their centre, surface area, and mass are determined by various other fields of influence. The inner volume defines a fusion zone within, which is able to connect to other meta-ball objects to form a single surface. The outer inflection zone defines a region within which other meta-balls objects can influence and inflect the surface. There is no fundamental difference between these elements and a spherical formation, as the latter is merely the index of a low level of interactions and blobs possess a high degree of information in the form of differentiation between components in time. 3. Contemporary construction techniques. Many construction and architectural minds argue that following the fact that humans always structured themselves as ‘standing upright’, by extension buildings should do also. Nevertheless, it can be noted that structural dynamics are far more complicated than the transmission of perpendicular loads to the earth’s surface, as the interaction of multiple loadings of all kinds should be considered as well. In this way, many architects retreated the primarily Cartesian model of simple gravity and have begun to investigate the alternative possibilities of topological surface organisations. First it must be acknowledged that blob construction is still in its early stages of development
19
The shock effect in such movies are often generated by displaying partially digested victims suspended within a gelatinous ‘ooze’.
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in the contemporary architectural culture. Nevertheless, an increasing number of projects do emerge in design competitions as well as in a built form.
Figure III-4 The Yokohoma Port Terminal of Alejandro Zaera Polo and Farshid Mousavi, now known as Foreign Architecture Office (FAO). The most known and documented example of today is certainly that of the winning design proposal of the Yokohoma Port Terminal of Alejandro Zaera Polo and Farshid Moussavi. Here, flexible surfaces are treated as slabs, a precedent established by Koolhaas in some of his proposed designs of which the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris is only one. Instead of aligning programmatic diversity with fluctuations and punctures in flexing slabs, the Yokohoma proposal chose radically for a different approach. The overall plan and sections are kept very symmetric in the deployment of spaces and programs, resulting in a monolithic typology that is nevertheless locally flexible in its transitions from slab to slab. The roof structure on the other hand, is treated as an individual volume that can be packed with certain activities, as the flexible thickness adapts itself to the various locations of programs below. A Critical Approach It is certain that although Gregg Lynn’s own sort of architecture produces an organic image, the technique is certainly not more ‘natural’ than for instance conceptually building a cube. In this way, Lynn does not consider the philosophical side of his theories as a clarification of how a project should look like or what it should represent or symbolise. Quite the opposite, these metaphors of images and signs are largely denied as his interest does much more rely on what architecture actually does, and how it can act in terms of performance, function and spatial organisation. In this way, the priority is always on the diagram. How the diagram is manifested into built form becomes much more an aesthetic issue, and is thus not considered as a primary element. Some other authors, of whom Rem Koolhaas is only one, point out that Lynn would solely be interested in a form of data-automation design. This critical approach is concentrating on the fact that the building surfaces are modelled out of fixed numerical data derived from the surrounding context, and thus blaming it to be a kind of hyper-functionalism .
But on the other side of arguments, Lynn’s design approach could be considered as an exploration of a system that consists out of a creative and artistic medium in which the intuition is still very important. The architectural set of tools, continuous surfaces and vectors, are hereby translated into shapes, which contain an underlying structure and geometry just like a Cartesian geometry. Consequently, this approach makes the design still unpredictable as the set of constraints and information can be arbitrarily chosen. Various versions of such diagrams can interact, so that the end result is never anticipated. The computer is thus not considered as an automatic designer, but is facilitator of calculating unforeseen connections, generating surfaces out of elements like traffic flows and sun-paths. Certain design pathways are followed to determine what the project will become rather than pre-determining the result and hereby constraining the process. This is the exact opposite of some conceptual thoughts such as in the movement of minimalism . Minimalist architects, like disciplinarians, argue that one must to have a clear initial idea and every subsequent decision must follow from that original
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idea. As a result, in minimising formal effects every effort is made to state one simple reduced moment.
I II .3 .2 Appl ied S o f t war e The use and importance of CAAD-software is undeniably increasing in the architectural design practices of today. But while it nowadays merely is used as a fast and accurate representation tool, some architects rely their entire process of design decisions on the digital application of various computer programs. Two of the most controversial and sophisticated software packets meanwhile possess a special place in the architectural contemporary discourse about the creation of form. FORM-Z In the view of Greg Lynn, the choice of software is one of the most significant choices he makes within a project. It can be considered as evenly important as the decision whether to build the scale model in clay or in cardboard, as this choice primarily depends on the proper ties of the medium that has to be used. For instance, Lynn uses the program Form-Z 20, which is a polygon-based modeller able to generate objects by calculating triangulated surfaces. Some critics even argue that this program presents Lynn’s projects in such way that the formal language resembles much of that of Peter Eisenman’s newest folding projects, which are modelled with the same software as well. CATIA Meanwhile, another software packet is being intensively discussed in the architectural worlds following the opening of the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which was designed by Frank O. Gehry and Associates. After testing many other CAAD-tools applied by projects such as the steel Barcelona Fish sculpture, the Hanover Bus Stop, the Disney Concer t Hall and the Prague office building, finally the advanced threedimensional CATIA21 software was chosen. This software was developed by the French aerospace manufacturer Dassault Systems and released to the public some twelve years ago. As many publications about this building already proved, Gehry’s solely technically inspired decision would become most controversial.
“Almost incomprehensible in its scale and three-dimensional complexity, the Bilbao Guggenheim goes far beyond of what was formerly understood to be possible in architecture both aesthetically and technically”, points the Architectural Review 22. This is the result of Gehry’s original approach of computers, of which the primary purpose is not to design, but to rationalise and make buildable highly intuitive formal concepts. Most architectural and rendering software is based on grids of various sorts of polygons. By contrast, CATIA uses a complete numerical control mechanism, able to define surfaces by descriptive geometrical mathematical formulas. Three-dimensional manually made models were digitised by identifying the control surfaces or setting out common defined points. By offsetting the surfaces, a construction zone was identified and used for the structural concept of the building. A prefabricated and rather straightforward frame, of which all members were straight sections, received its geometrical complexity purely in the connections. While the structural engineer calculated the overall dimensions, the final precise positioning of the members was undertaken by CATIA’s wire frame at the architect’s office. This software is able to provide the precise location of any point on a surface, so that certain formulas could be offered to the steel and stone contractors to build the structure in a still economical manner. As this technique proved to be so accurate, the 20
More information about the Form-Z software can be found at: http://www.autodessys.com More information can be found at http://www.catia.ibm.com/catmain.html 22 LECUYER, ANNETTE, Building Bilbao, in The Architectural Review , No.12, December 1997, p.42-45 21
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need for field cutting and welding was virtually eliminated. Hereby each structural element had to be bar-coded as well, so that the coordinates could be revealed on site by electronically referring to the stored CATIA model. This is common practise in the aerospace industry, but relatively new to building. However, as the erection itself caused some problems in pulling the structural steel into place, in future the CAADsoftware should also be used for montage-rehearsal and improvement of the various sequential actions needed during construction. In short, this software provides a very high degree of accuracy in replicating the surfaces as well as estimating various building costs. Moreover, as this software encourages the creativity of the architect, Gehry believes that curved forms in buildings will become more feasible. “I’m excited about them because I like the sense of movement. They feel genuine, accessible, and joyful. If I do a lot of buildings with curves, and people enjoy them, then clients will begin demanding them, and more architects may follow.” 23
I I I .3 . 3 Ti me-S p a c e R el a t i o n s h i p Peter Eisenman, architect and Professor at the Cooper Union in New York, is best known for the remarkable architectural style of his projects, which are often characterised as examples of the theories of formal ‘deconstruction’. Its conceptual foundation is the result of his many theoretical and philosophical thoughts, which are strictly and creatively translated into original architectural principles and formal consequences. In a guest lecture at the Federal University in Zürich24, Peter Eisenman explained his opinion of one remarkable aspect of the future of architecture. Hereby, he tried to interpret the phenomenon of time, and its ultimate influence on the perception of space. Peculiarly enough, while following his lines of arguments, many names and theoretical insights were mentioned that already are explained in the former paragraphs. In his discourse, Eisenman used the example of a certain art project of Richard Serra called Torqued Ellipses 25 to clarify his arguments in an understandable manner. Serra, helped by Frank Gehry’s engineer Rick Smith, invented and made a kind of object which is made of a flat, thick, solid steel template. This element became torqued in such way that two imagined, enclosed, and overlapping ovals with reversed axes and identical geometrical centre, were gradually rotated in the elevation of the object itself. Only CATIA-software seemed capable to determine the lines of the bending patterns according to which the actual steel templates would be rolled. The final object, which was actually the result of a long, international search to find a suitable rolling mill, possesses such strange and remarkable characteristics, that it drew the immediate attention of the famous American architect.
23
For more information, see: The Success Story between Gehry and Dassaults Systèmes Software Program CATIA, http://www.catia.ibm.com/custsucc/sufran.html 24 th EISENMAN, PETER, Utilitas in der heutigen Architektur , Guest-lecture at ETHZ, 5 November 1997, (much of Eisenman’s line of arguments could later be traced back in his own article: The Time of Serra’s Space: Torquing Vision, in ANY, How the Critic See , No.21, pp.56-62) 25 Project : Torqued Ellipses by Richard Serra, at the Dia Centre for the Arts, New York city, from September 1997 through June 1998
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Figure III-5 Two views of Richard Serra’s sculptural art installation ‘Torqued Ellipses’ . (ANY: How the Critic See , No.21, p.60)
In his view, Serra’s objects are the opposite of many examples of classical architecture, generally concerned with relating the axis of the upright human figure to the symmetrical axis of a building. This displacement however, still took place in a narrative, classical time. It was only until Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory that the possibility of difference between ‘the time of the object’ and ‘the time of experience of the subject’ was proposed. Bergson suggested that there were two different kinds of time: chronological time, concerning a difference in degree, and the time of duration , proposing a difference in kind. Architecture is usually experienced in chronological time, as the subjects walk in and around the space and understand its structure through a process and sequence of individual perceptions. This is fundamentally different from that of Richard Serra’s work, which draws the energy to a certain disjunction in time. The way in which apparently these static objects seem to have a certain duration in time is accomplished by just this difference between understanding and experiencing its space. Consequently, this sculptural installation is an early example of an architectural phenomenon that requires the individual to experience the space of the object in time. Although people can walk around these pieces, one can never say to be inside that space. Moreover, due to the effect of torquing the steel plates combined with its overall scale and height, the plan of the form cannot be seen, nor can it be conceptualised by a subject walking in and around the object. One cannot ‘see’ the top plane or even draw its plan. Time is condensed and spun fast. The torquing raises another issue, as the vertical axis of the human body and that of the architectural enclosure becomes separated. Furthermore, parts of the perceived lack of stability comes from the absence of conventional structure and the extremely thin size of the steel plates in comparison to their height. In conlusion, it is such an architecture that possesses the characteristic of realising a time of duration by the separation of understanding and experience, that Eisenman foresees to emerge by the architects of the future. Meanwhile, it is certain that he himself will apply this principle in his future projects, as he is already convinced that it is apparent in some of the projects of Rem Koolhaas (Kunsthal, Rotterdam) and Frank O. Gehry (Guggenheim, Bilbao).
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I II .3 .4 Vir t u al H o u s e The German design competition held in 1996, took the conceptual notion of using computers in the architectur al practice much further, as it was asked to design an inhabitable ‘virtual house’26. Many famous architects participated, but Eisenman’s proposal contained some architectural related notions that remarkably enough will return in a more sophisticated form in many other approaches in the field of the cyberspatial and electronic realm, of which some are mentioned throughout this chapter. In his theoretical view of this project, the form is a becoming expression of the virtual.
Figure III-6 The Virtual House, Eisenman Architects, Berlin, Germany, 1996-1997 (Dialogue , No.9, November 1997, p.60)
First, the program of the virtual house consisted of the spatial concept of an earlier designed house by Eisenman. This particular project was then abstracted into nine cubes, in which a potential field of relations and conditions of interconnectivity was expressed by means of vectors . These vectors were then visualised by showing the effect they have on lines within their (arbitrary) range of influence. Each vector hereby produces movements and interrelations that are considered as constraints which influence its location, direction, and repetition. The condition of each vector is in addition recorded, either unconstrained or constrained, within the space as a series of traces . Consequently, each element of the system has the additional potential to be affecting as well as effecting, thus respectively acting as constraint or effect. “The manifestation becomes effectuation; it has an effect on something, becomes an active participant within the process. In this regard, the virtual carries the idea of multiple potentials for new connections or unseen relations.”27
I I I .4 L iq u id A r c h it ec t u r e In fact, the term ‘liquid architecture’ was coined by Marcos Novak. He is the founder of RealityLab 28, the Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments, at the Advanced Design Research Program (ADRP) at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. This is in fact the first faculty devoted to the study virtual space as autonomous architectural space. Novak is an architect, artist, composer, and theorist investigating actual, virtual and mutant intelligent environments. Furthermore, his personal research is situated in the field of algorithmic compositions, cyberspace, and the relationship of architecture to music. 26
Herzog and de Meuron’s entry consists out of an electronic space inspired by the notion of the MUD, and was developed in collaboration with the CAAD Department of ETH-Zürich. The resulting project can still be found at: http://virtualhouse.ch 27 EISENMAN ARCHITECTS, The Virtual House, in Dialogue , No.9, November 1997, pp.56-60 28 More information about this lab can be found at http://ww.aud.ucla.edu/~marcos/marcos.html.
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I II .4 .1 I n t r o d uc t io n In the view of Novak, cyberspace is the ideal realm in which the benefits of digitally separating data, information, and form can be intensively maximised. The core of its arguments leads back to the possibility that by reducing selves, forms, objects and processes, new and unsuspected phenomena can be investigated. This representation reduced to primarily binary streams, could thus permit the discovery of previously invisible relations in this data, simply by modifying the applied mapping techniques. Cyberspace Consequently, Marcos Novak refers to cyberspace as a habitat for the imagination, as well as a habitat of the imagination. Furthermore, he investigates the consequences that arise when cyberspace is considered to be an inevitable development in the interaction of humans with computers. Then, the image of the relationship of human to information will be inverted, as humans will now be placed within the information space itself. But then also, these manifestations of ‘landscapes’ and scattered ‘objects’ are considered as an architectural problem. In short, throughout his arguments Novak proves to be convinced that conceptually, cyberspace is architecture, cyberspace has architecture and cyberspace contains architecture. Hereby, the traditional conception of these terms changes considerably. Architecture, which is normally understood in the context of the city and all its implied metaphors, shifts towards the abstract structure of relationships, connections and associations of appearances and accommodations. Liquid Novak uses the term ‘liquid’ to mean animistic, animated, metamorphic, as well as the crossing of many categorical boundaries. Animism suggests that entities have a ‘spirit’ that tries to guide their own behaviour. Animation in turn means the capability to change the location through time. Metamorphosis adds the change of form, through time or space.29 In an interview30, he tries to clarify this concept further as follows: “It can take different forms. Its essence is not invested in a particular form. It can ‘adjust’.”
Furthermore, the nature of this virtual world is considered to be information, and the art of the world is consequently the investigation of the data. In this space, the boundaries of ‘how’ information can be perceived are thoroughly investigated in an architectural manner. Therefore, various different types of media are processed and combined through an electronic algorithmic translator, generating form towards as much human sensorial modalities as possible. This lead to the fact that for the first time in history, the architect is called to design not the object, but the principles by which the object is generated and varied in time. And Novak expectations of this abstract definition are huge. His liquid architecture requires much more than just variations of a theme, as it calls for the invention of ‘something’ equivalent to a ‘grand tradition’ of architecture. This should then lead to: “a continuum of edifices, smoothly evolving in both space and time. Judgements of a building’s ‘performance’ become akin to the evaluation of dance and theatre.” Even the comparison to ‘a symphony in space’ seems not to be sufficient, as liquid architecture never can be repeated but instead continues to develop.
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NOVAK, MARCOS, Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace, in BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, p.250 30 Cyber23 (real author unknown), Virtual Architecture: Liquid Architectures, Interview with Marcos Novak , http://www.best.com/~cyber23/virarch/novak.htm
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I II .4 .2 Vir t u al Po et ic s “…and we can in our Thought and Imagination contrive perfect Forms of Buildings entirely separate from Matter, by settling and regulating in a certain Order, the Disposition and conjunction of the Lines and Angles.” (Leon Battista Alberti - The Ten Books of Architecture )
Poetics Novak thinks it is possible that a poetic composition could be the structuring system for the generation of form. Poetic systems such as music, dance, or lyrics are taken and transformed into the generators of form in a synthesised virtual world. In this way, poetics is not only seen as an application to words, but is understood as some sort of structuring that evolves the ways in which works of art can be made. Ultimately, the generation of meaning can then be investigated in relation to those items by which the meaning was manifested. Furthermore, the existing and concepts of traditional artefacts can be questioned. Structures and primitives of the communicated representation of many different media types could thus be ‘morphed’ and transformed into a single space and place, as a sort of immersive symbolic database. Music and Cinema As extension to these theories of interchangeable media, the generation of form is also applied to music and cinema, resulting into the phenomena of navigable music and habitable theatre . The structuring of a certain database can be influenced by themes in music so that forms can visually abstract their originating composition. Several characteristics of sounds can be mapped, out of which functions and variables can be created which subsequently produce simple more dimensional figures. Such a conception of architectural space has the advantage of being extremely compact, since a single mathematical expression can be expanded to become a fully formed chamber. Music is then understood as a single object in time: it has a beginning and an end, a plan or a section can be sorted out, and it even can be graphed out. This leads to the idea that a whole musical composition can be seen as a landscape, capable to allow and extract many unique trajectories through it. The whole organisation is then based on a matrix of infinite possibilities and is promised to evoke any sort emotion that conventional music could, because it is based on the discovery of interesting nodes in the matrix. First, architecture existed as a separate category, known as the art of space. Time was also considered as a category, and music was the art of time. The two combined by the former principle results thus in a new art of space-time, which can be called archiMusic .
As any media can be mapped in this way, the meaning of it can be multiplied, compressed in one single representation. Another possible example is the media of cinema that possesses the same sort of linearity as music does. Inhabitable cinema in turn implies the possibility of artificial and discontinuous environments, turning the cinema of the future into a landscape of opportunity. Furthermore, the same could be done with dance, by digitally recording movement after which this data could be morphed into a definable construct. All this should then lead into the notion that the landscape of data is an abstraction that makes the information much more comprehensible.
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I II .4 .3 Tr an s mit t in g A r c h it ec t u r e In an essay called Transmitting Architecture: The Transphysical City 31, Novak investigates deeper the consequences of his liquid architecture definition. Time He considers hereby architecture as transmittable , now finally habitable and interactive spaces and places can be distributed by electronic means. This leads to the direct conclusion that theory, practice, as well as education are confronted with questions without any precedent within the discipline itself, as ”Learning from software supersedes learning from Las Vegas, the Bauhaus or Vitruvius…”
Hereby he points out that the architect is not only obliged to take interest in the motion of the user through the environment, but he has to pay attention into the structure itself as well, as it now is able to change its position, attitude, or attribute. Ultimately it is even considered capable to breathe and transform. This means that the design of mechanisms and algorithms of animation and interactivity for every act of architecture is required. Consequently, the concept of time must mathematically be added to the list of active parameters of which architecture is a function. This notion brings Novak back to the already mentioned theory of Bergson, in which objects out of place, time, or plot are able to colour a scene with their probable histories or futures. Sampling For Novak, the world is until today solely understood through the process of sampling , as even the cognitive mechanisms of the body’s nervous system have to translate raw input of numerous sources into some kind of recognisable and meaningful pattern. ‘Reality’ becomes thus segmented into intervals and then back reconstituted to fit a human understanding, creating in fact a continuous illusion. The concept of sampling implies furthermore the existence of a field to be sampled, a sample rate or frequency , and a sampling resolution or sensitivity . Looking at the world as a field is completely different from understanding it in terms of dialectic, solids, or voids.
Here, the distinction of existence is not considered as binary, but made by the concept of degree. Capturing an object’s boundary is then simply the reconstructed contour of an arbitrarily chosen value out of the collection of all possible data points. As an essential characteristic, changing the three features of the sampling-mechanism or the source of the data replaces the shaped and perceived world with complete new ones. The concept plan is furthermore considered as dead and inappropriate to capture the dynamic flows of the new trajectories, waves, and holes. It is then even so, that we already inhabit an invisible world of shapes, an architecture of latent information, ready to be seen, captured, and creatively visualised. Transmission The astonishing capacity of the electronic net surrounding the planet to carry information is just being grasped. Meanwhile however, its potential is still being restricted by the present limits of bandwidth. It is thus unlikely and against the insights of distributed computing, to implement a central computer system to manufacture one reality for many participants. The concept that will emerge is quite the opposite: each user will receive an electronic and compressed description of the world and information about the state and actions of all other participants. Each participant’s local machine will then synthesise a version of the shared reality that is similar to, but not necessarily identical with, the one the others perceive. Each location is thus considered independent, and yet necessary to make a larger reality possible. Obviously, to 31
NOVAK, MARCOS, Transmitting Architecture , http://www.ctheory.com/a34-transmitting_arch.html
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accomplish this task the technique of simple compression is insufficient, since it imposes the same limit of resolution for all participants, regardless of their computational and communicational resources. Instead, it is not the object itself, but its genetic code that will be transmitted, as it possesses all information for its generation regardless of neither location nor resources.
I II .4 .4 C o n c l u s io n Marcos Novak’s liquid architecture is clearly a dematerialised architecture, an architecture designed as much in time as in space, changing interactively as a function of duration, use, and external influence, and it is described in a compact coded notation. He sees architecture deliberately much further than the process of building alone in his long search for architectural sign systems that should both be spatial and encompassing. Finally, this technique should lead to the application of architectural typologies that will influence the notion of how people will use future virtual spaces. In almost the same line of reasoning can the theories of John Frazer be situated, described in the next paragraph. He is also able to generate architectural form out of separate observed phenomena, although he still strongly emphasises the notion of electronically building structures that are still meaningful and useful in the physical world. For this purpose, he is obliged to struggle with the technique of inserting knowledge and formal constraints into the growing construction itself. His evolutionary architecture is consequently not founded out of the characteristics of abstracted art, but uses many concepts that are derived from nature.
I I I .5 Ev o l u t io n ar y Ar c h it ec t u r e “Modern builders need a classification of architectural factors irrespective of time and country, a classification by essential variation. Some day we shall get a morphology of the art by some architectural Darwin, who will start from the simple cell and relate to it the most complex structures.” (William Lethaby, Architecture: an Introduction to the History and Theory of the Art of Building , 1911)
John Frazer is unit master of Diploma unit 11 at the Architectural Association in London. He was also lecturer at the University of Cambridge and was awarded a personal chair at the University of Ulster in 1984. He investigates in his book An Evolutionary Architecture some fundamental computer-based form generating processes in architecture. He proposes the model of nature as the generating force for architectural form, as the concept of architecture here is primarily considered as a form of artificial life, subject to principles of morphogenesis, genetic coding, replication and selection.32
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FRAZER, JOHN, An Evolutionary Architecture , E.G.Bond Ltd., London, 1995, pp.117, http://www.gold.net/ellipsis/evolutionary/evolutionary.html
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I II .5 .1 N at u r e The next paragraph will describe some of Frazer’s metaphors and arguments in which he recognises many characteristics of nature as important and instructive phenomena in the concept of architecture. §
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Analogy. In history, architectural form and structure are frequently inspired by many concepts of nature. For instance, Sullivan, Wright and Le Corbusier all employed some kind of biological analogies, although in the case of Frazer, the primary inspiration is not that of the image. In his case, nature is the generator and instructive example of fundamental formative processes and information systems. Intentionality. It can be argued that the system of evolution operates without any pre-knowledge of what is to come, which means it has no notion of design . In case of Frazer, the architect is very clear of his or her intentions, but is meanwhile considered to be ‘blind’ to the eventual outcome of the process that is being created. Inspiration. The perfect and balanced variety of natural forms is the result of the continuous experimentation of evolution. Although vernacular architecture might occasionally share this characteristic, the vast majority of buildings of today most certainly do not. Consequently not only the concept of natural selection should hereby be taken over into architectural development, because other aspects of evolution, such as the tendency to self-organisation, are equally or even more significant. Generation. In Frazer’s view, the technique of ‘shape grammars’ or elemental combinatorial systems to generate architectural design has to many limitations. This approach not only requires a syntax and grammar of a particular formal language in advance. This ‘kit of parts’-approach, influenced by general problem-solving processes, seems also to be too complex as a suitable description of architectural terms, while an almost unmanageable quantity of permutations should be created as well. Environment. John Frazer promises that his approach of architectural design will reflect much more the changing demands of society, the realities of the construction industry and the pressing need for environmentally responsible buildings. In his view, buildings would act much more like natural ecosystems do: they recycle their materials, permit change and adaptation, and make efficient use of ambient energy. Hereby the design is drawn ‘beyond the object’, as it focuses on user-experiences rather than on physical form. Economics. By designing the artificial generating system, clear and economical concepts on the individual logical operations had to be used. Furthermore, just like in natural forms of codes such as DNA, information had to be compressed in an extreme manner. Just like the natural ecosystem these principles resulted, in both hardware and software, into a complex hierarchy built up from the simplest functions.
I II .5 .2 H i s t o r y It is no coincidence that the development of computing has been shaped by the building of computer models for simulating natural processes. For instance, Alan Turing, an important figure in the development of the concept of the computer, was interested in morphology and its simulation by computer-based mathematical processes. Von Neumann on the other hand, another significant key personage, was explicitly searching a theory that would encompass both natural and artificial biologies, with the notion that the basis of life was information.
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The Turing Machine In the year 1935, Alan Turing already thought about an abstract experiment in which for the first time in history, a universal computing machine 33 was being conceived. This reprogrammable and digital machine worked with an endless paper tape and a head that could move freely along the tape, reading, writing, or erasing symbols. The then revolutionary idea consisted out of the fact that any computable process could thus be performed by following a set of logical instructions on the tape. It would take until the Second World War before Turing’s designs were built and these machines were used to break the German Enigma code. By this time, Turing had moved on and already proposed the notion of artificial intelligence. Later, Turing would mainly use the computer for modelling morpho-genetic processes, a research which would occupy him for the rest of his life. The von Neumann Machine Starting from Turing’s concept of the universal computing machine, John von Neumann developed the foundation of the serial computer, defining three basic elements of central processor, memory, and control unit. Although he went on building the first American computers, his work on self-replicating automata would be more significant. In this field, he considered the Turing machine to represent a class of universal automa that could solve all infinite logical problems. Furthermore, he began to investigate the possibility of one automation taking some raw materials and building another automation. Hereby, the feasibility of such automation physically replicating itself into more complex forms was examined.
Ultimately, this important investigation of a self-building, evolving automation resulted in an immensely complicated and essentially unbuildable project, requiring some 200.000 cells in any one of twenty-nine states. Logically, this remained a paper exercise that was part cellular automation, part robot, having only a conceptual robot arm. It was thus von Neumann who recognised that life depends upon reaching the critical and complex level in which items are able to self-organise and self-reproduce into more complicated objects. Furthermore, it seems that life exists on the edge of chaos, and in fact, this is the point of departure for Frazer’s new model of architecture.
I I I.5 .3 G en er a t iv e S y s t ems In this paragraph, some of the techniques that are described in An Evolutionary Architecture are further investigated. Although Frazer himself does not mention the phenomenon of cyberspace, it can easily be imagined that these techniques would be used in the electronically transmittable realm, as it will be proven that a maximum impact of materialised form can be created out of a strict minimum of computer code. The role of the Computer
“A digital computer is, essentially, the same as a huge army of clerks, equipped with rule books, pencil and paper, all stupid and entirely without initiative, but able to follow exactly millions of precisely defined operations… In asking how the computer might be applied to architectural design, we must, therefore, ask ourselves what problems we know of in design that could be solved by such an army of clerks… At the moment, there are few such problems.” (Christopher Alexander, The Question of Computers in Design , 1967)
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John Frazer refers to TURING, A.M, On Computable numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem , Proceedings of the London Mathematical society, 1937
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But actually the evolutionary approach is ‘exactly’ the sort of problem that could be given to such army of clerks, as the difficulty lies much more in developing and prescribing the ‘rule book’. It is furthermore noticed that the use of a computer is not without any dangers. ‘Imaginative use’ is translated into ‘using the computer’ to compress information in such way that complex architectural form is able to develop. This is reflected by a rather radical change of the applied human intuition, perception, and imagination, although the first step still relies on the human skills of its creator. Or like Frazer himself puts it: ”The prototyping, modelling, testing, evaluation and evolution all use the formidable power of the computer, but the initial spark comes from human creativity.” The Concepts Throughout the following projects, it was more than necessary to develop and design new essential tools: computer software, computer languages and even prototype computer hardware, as there was a clear shortage of suitable and efficient sources in these fields. The following list sums up the most important efforts being done by Frazer’s research team. §
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Data-structures are important to contain the graphic representation and the results of the various transformations. Commonly this is in the form of a matrix, which can be multiplied by the matrices of the transformations. Transformations such as scaling, translating, reflecting, differential scaling, rotation and shearing in the three dimensions were programmed. Furthermore, orthographic, axonometric, isometric and perspective projections were added. Symmetry operations are extensively used in design and architecture, although only the simplest procedures such as reflection and rotation are generally available. Instead of implementing the seventeen 2D possibilities, a tool was created that made all 230 symmetry operations in three dimensions possible. Shape processing graphical programs had to be defined, of which the interface offers the user the capability to transmit the required commands for computable evaluation.
I I I.5 .4 Th e To o l s In the earliest phase, solar-geometry programs were being developed, capable to evaluate environmental performance and showing the related shadow and sun-path movement on the associated architectural projects. They were not only able to perform analysis, but assisted with the processes of design as well. It was only later that the research in the generation of architectural form was emphasised. Hereby Frazer tried to imagine a model, in which architecture exhibits the characteristics of metabolism, selfproduction, and mutability, all elements that can be considered as essential requirements of life as well. The Generator In 1979, the first working model of a self-replicating computer was built. It consisted out of a collection of three-dimensional cubes, able to explore their neighbouring sides. After the development of communication, this thus resulted into electronic processes of self-inspection and transmission of various messages. All this work was then concentrated on the so-called Generator project. It was thought to be possible to physically build a certain ‘intelligent structure’, which was able to “learn from the alterations it made to its own organisation, and coach itself to make better suggestions.”
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This environmental control system would evenly register ‘boredom’ if the building would not be changed enough, and ultimately possess a kind of artificial consciousness. The Universal Constructor This early idea was further investigated in the Universal Constructor project developed in 1990. The cubes now additionally received the capability to output messages by means of illuminating a combination of eight LED-lights to the surrounding environment. This enabled finally modifying actions as ‘take me away’ or ‘add a cube on top’, which now could be performed by the physically present participator. The model as a whole possessed also a certain common computer program for interrogation, messagepassing, and screen display, which permitted the mapping of different codes in the physically flat base into height in the computer model of the virtual contoured landscape. A problem could thus be implemented by adding some environmental features with the coded cubes. The application program would then respond by the addition or removal of cubes representing its coded and diagrammatic response.
The range of possible applications included three-dimensional cellular automata responding to a complex site problem, a Fibonacci curve-fitting program, and an encoding of a suitable landscape for a particular dance-performance. This application can thus clearly be understood as a powerful tool for the explanation and demonstration of a radically new design process able to represent an expression of logic in space. Polyautoma “Polyautomata is a branch of computational theory concerned with a multitude of interconnected automata acting in parallel to form to form a larger automation,” points John Frazer. These systems were investigated out of their potential as generative devices and from their simplicity that makes them appropriate for exploring rule-based systems. Out of this theoretical field, the technique of the genetic algorithm was chosen for communicating the compressed information, necessary for the generation and optimisation of form. Genetic algorithms are a class of highly parallel, evolutionary, adaptive search procedures, characterised by string-like structure equivalent to the chromosomes of nature. They actually consist out of a coded form of parameters, and are considered as highly parallel because they search using populations of potential solutions rather than performing this task randomly. Furthermore, they are described as adaptive for reaching optimal solutions through gradual changes within the population over several generations.
I II .5 .5 Th e E v o l u t io n a r y M o d el In nature, the genetically coded information consists of manufacturing instructions, but its precise expression is environmentally dependent. Frazer’s model of architecture which started already in 1968, was initially considered as a form of artificial life and contained such a code-script, which was in fact the sole element that was able to ‘evolve’. But much more conceptual elements were needed to achieve an ideal evolutionary model. § § § § §
A genetic code script Rules for the development of the code The mapping of the code to a virtual model The nature of the environment for the development of the model The criteria for selection
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Figure III-7 The different evolution levels of a materialised genetic code script. (http://www.gold.net/ellipsis/evolutionary/evolutionary.html)
Architectural Style In order to create a genetic description, it was considered as important to develop and code a certain architectural concept in a generic and universal form. This approach should then be capable of being expressed in a variety of structures and spatial configurations in response to different environments, a strategy which is also followed when specific individual architects apply their generally immediately recognisable, personal formal language in all of their projects.
“What we are now proposing is a technique applicable to a wide range of architectural concepts and geometries, all conceived as generative systems susceptible to development and evolution, all possessing that quality characterised by Viollet-le-Duc as ‘style’: ‘the manifestation of an ideal established upon a principle ’.”34 This style should then represent the alternative approach of most existing CAADsoftware, in which intensive modelling and simulation are rather difficult to perform during the designing phase itself, and where objective evaluation of different alternative approaches are still not being widely implemented yet. The model should thus become adapted iteratively in the computer in response to the feedback from the applied evaluation. The genetic algorithms act as seed out of which then abstract representations of structure, spaces, and surfaces are being calculated. Two kinds of information have to be stored in the overall framework: the coded, conceptual model of the building information, and a description of the actual components and details for the output stage. This information is different from the information derived by the seeds themselves and is thus necessary when the generative technique is started. Then the resulting seed is compared to the user’s database of requirements for a particular building, after which the seed is grown and stretched until it conforms to these requirements. These modifications are processed in two ways. First, optimisation routines search and evaluate alternative strategies, after which the program adjusts itself to the most successful ones. Secondly, the user evaluates a series of solutions in terms of nonquantifiable criteria, including aesthetic judgements.
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FRAZER, JOHN, An Evolutionary Architecture , E.G.Bond Ltd., London, 1995, p.67
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The Universal Interactor The main structure of this program developed in 1992 contained a possible solution to the problem of providing suitable environmental factors for computable evaluation. Experimental antennae were developed which were either transmitters or receivers of information. The receivers used different technical means to sense several kinds of movement, sound, colour, wind patterns, and touch. The transmitters were able to send out sound, light, and even movement, which in fact represented the emotional state of the system, hereby encouraging human participation by experimenting with the notions of conflict and co-operation. Here the form of the data-structure is based on a direct analogy with DNA, and is derived by measuring properties on the sides of the cubes. In this technique, environmental cues and internal rules determined the seed’s response, which resulted in a proportional evaluation that was then passed to the genetic algorithm to select the cells for the next stage. Unfortunately, the drawback of the system was the limitation to the three-dimensional geometry of the specific components on which it was based. The Universal State Space Modeller The computer environment for this developed model, also described as the ‘architectural genetic search space’, was called the Universal State Space Modeller . This technique was capable to model any structure or space, as both the environment and the structures itself were evaluated in exactly the same way. Each point carries all possible information of its identity and of its neighbours (properties, history, location and much more), plus a complete copy of the architectural genetic code and the instructions needed for the generation of forms. Hereby, the data-structure itself is the program in the sense that “only the whole knows about the whole”.
In this way, information travels through the groupings of cells concentrically in the form of logic fields. This means that the form of the model thus can evolve in response to the environment, and that it is able to learn which rules are successful in developing and modifying form. In this instance, both the conceptual model as well as the structure itself can consequently be called intelligent . It is even discovered that individual cells gradually take on specialist functions in the generation of the structure. Consequently, the visible form itself of the process-driven virtual model can be considered as a byproduct of cellular activity, hereby in fact representing both in-form -ation. Furthermore, the model has greater proximity to generate buildable forms than ordinary CAADmodels since it understands the process of manufacture and construction, and because most environmental components (including site, climate, users, cultural context,…) are here viewed as simple logical states in the data-structure.
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I II .5 .6 C o n c l u s io n Naturally, this approach implies drastic changes in some of the architects’ working methods. Architects now have to determine the criteria for evaluating an idea, and even have to be prepared to accept the concept of client- and user-participation in the process. The design responsibility hereby changes radically to one of overall concept and embedded detail, as Frazer is convinced that the role of the architect will enhance. In his view, it becomes possible to seed far more complex generations of new designs than could be individually supervised, possessing a complexity that would be impossible otherwise. Architects would now be transformed into the creators of rich genetic ideas, while “the role of the mass of imitators would be more efficiently accomplished by the machine.” Furthermore, the building process could be incorporated into the model by the application of various nature-based scientific insights of biological and physical construction. Many socio-economic advantages could arise, as this evolutionary technique is primarily based on the equilibrium of the architectural concept and influences of the environment. Ultimately, Frazer foresees the unpredictable future of the evolution of the seeds themselves as well. Taking the example of natural selection, which has ‘superb tactics but no strategy’, architectural life could then emerge out of nothing , with no preconceptions, even with no design at all. This should even lead to the application of self-constructing physical buildings, already imagined by many other authors. “Our new architecture will emerge on the very edge of chaos, where all living things emerge, and it will inevitably share some characteristics of primitive life form. And from this chaos will emerge order: order not particular, peculiar, odd, or contrived, but order generic, typical, natural, fundamental and inevitable – the order of life.”35
I II .6 Co n c l u s io n Discussions about the relationships between the actual and the virtual have proven to be polarised very easily. Nevertheless, it seems that the city of the future will be intensively filled with forms of intelligence. Sensors and effectors will be considered as normal and will be linked everywhere with information utilities just as running water. Following Marcos Novak, it is a certainty that urbanism will alter, since cities will become the alternative interfaces to the net. This non-local urbanism, freed from a fixed geometry, will not be the post-physical city, but it will be a trans mutation of the known, and stand alongside as well as be interwoven into the contemporary reality of the city. Architecture itself is already being influenced by the newest insights of those architects who are already exploring the electronical borders of programmable form-generating techniques. However the spatial effects of the dynamic and digital society becomes more clear in some of the emerging contemporary architectural projects, much still can be done in the development and invention of new principles and applications in this field. It may furthermore not be forgotten that it has never been stated that the whole field of architecture should be devoted to the phenomenon of the virtual. Moreover, many other formal recognisable movements are now emerging as well, such as for example minimalism, which in fact stand for quite opposite views than the principles mentioned in this chapter. It is thus clear that the notion of cyberspace architecture should not be interpreted as the new surveyor of architecture. 35
FRAZER, JOHN, An Evolutionary Architecture , E.G.Bond Ltd., London, 1995, p.103
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In this last chapter, the attention will be much more focused on one particular aspect of the relationship between cyberspace and architecture. In fact, the field of information visualisation can be seen as an important and rapidly developing scientific field on its own. It is thus certainly not the intention to examine the technical aspects or detailed concepts of the applications based on the insights of cognitive perception and efficient programming thoroughly. In the contrary, it is much more interesting, perhaps, to pursue the future possibilities architecture could create when cyberspace is understood as a primarily informational tool. Furthermore, it is noticed that many authors mention or are convinced that cyberspace also possesses some valid rules and principles which its designers should follow. However, it is remarkable that not many dare or are able to theorise them and write them down. In this view, the principles Michael Benedikt himself has proposed, are considered more then challenging, certainly out of the point of view that a part of the future of architecture is foreseen to be built in the virtual realm.
I V I n f o r mat io n A r c h it ec t u r e “In cyberspace, the real is hyper-real and reality becomes virtual. In this space that is no place and yet is not everywhere, what does it mean to build?” (Mark C. Taylor – in Any, No.3, Nov/Dec 1993, p.24)
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I V.1 I n t r o d u c t io n “Cyberspace is an invented world. As a world, it requires ‘physics’, ‘subjects’, ‘objects’, and ‘processes’, a whole ecosystem. This is made possible by the representation techniques and calculation power of contemporary electronic technology. This digital technology has implemented dissociation between data, information, form, and appearance. Form seems now to be governed by representation, while data is a binary stream, and information is pattern perceived in the data after the data has been seen through the expectations of a general representation scheme or code.”1 Until today, cyberspace is already motivating research projects in science, art, business, and architecture. For Michael Benedikt, the ‘cyberspace program’ should begin experimentally, probably by first creating ‘crude’ and ‘fragile’ cyberspaces with a limited number of users, out of which the most essential lessons should be learned. He foresees this process taking decades of time, meanwhile offering various spin-offs into many areas in the field of computing, such as hardware, software, telecommunications, and interface design. Furthermore, thousands of engineers, programmers, designers, and managers will be working to make this visionary cyberspace a fact of reality, investigating and exploring this tool meant to increase the productivity of many companies and agencies. “Because the design, institution, and management of cyberspace will be a task of immense scale and complexity, it can simply be argued that ‘it is never too soon to begin’” 2
I V.2 Th e I n f o r mat io n Rev o l u t io n “The information sector of our economy is enormous – including mass media (newspapers, magazines, books, online services, movies, radio, and television), information systems, educational institutions, and more. No industry or enterprise is untouched by the persuasive influence of the information revolution. Understanding this revolution requires an examination of the determinants and sources of the value of information and the impact of that value on the organisational infrastructure of business and commerce.”3
I V.2 .1 C yb er s p ac e as a n I n f o r ma t io n To o l David Whittle is convinced that the right information (on the right time) can have an enormous value that consequently could command a high price. In that aspect, information is anything but a commodity, as its value varies from person to person and its price often has little to do with its value. But as the supply of information exceeds drastically the actual demand, and since the cost of sharing is very low, the price quickly approaches zero. It is a fact that information available on the Internet is characterised by its immediacy and sheer breadth and scope. For today, there are databases of all kinds, varying from high-priced and real-time financial and stock market information to more hidden but free collections of high-school students’ papers. Already today, this electronic network can deliver any digital good imaginable, although illegal copying of electronic content is still a serious problem. 1
NOVAK, MARCOS, Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace, , in BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.),Cyberspace: First Steps , MIT Press, London, 1991, p.234 2 BENEDIKT, MICHAEL, Cyberspace: Some Proposals, in Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, p.189 3 WHITTLE, DAVID B., Cyberspace: The Human Dimension , W.H. Freeman Co., New York, 1996, p. 306
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Furthermore, the primarily known disadvantages of Internet cyberspace as a commercial tool, which in fact are based upon the thoughts of David Whittle, are listed and shortly explained below. §
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Difficulty of access. Most users often bump on a stubborn and overcomplicated, sometimes even over-designed user-interface, which is often characterised by a great amount of text and links asking for immediate attention or a search-button on the first web page. Of course, the extreme opposite design should be considered as not really user-friendly as well. Bandwidth constraints. As the technology itself is still in a phase of fast and radical development, high-bandwidth fibre wires are still not a common good for normal modem users. Consequently, telephone and coaxial wire will probably still be used in most homes for the next decade. Wide disparity in the quality and applicability of information . The amount of similar information present is often astonishing. Serious efforts are being undertaken to implement various techniques of filtering and searching, which should adapt to the users needs over a period of time. Much is expected from the technology of agents 4 in this matter. These latter should be able to perform delegated standard tasks and even make simple decisions on the user’s behalf. For instance, actions should be made possible such as screening and removing junk-emails, searching and negotiating the cheapest air-travel, scanning news services, picking items that the user has proved to be interested in, and so on. Lack of real security . As the most economical oriented problem, this lack of privacy has received a technical solution quite fast. The technology used for this matter is known as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). In short, based on the characteristic of very large prime numbers, it offers the possibility of encrypting messages with a so-called unique public key of a certain individual user, which is then the only person able to decrypt it after arrival by means of his own, complementary, secret private key .
I V.2 .2 Th e Val u e o f O n l in e In f o r ma t io n To clarify the role and the characteristics of cyberspace as a delivery mechanism of information, six different key factors in this matter have been recognised and will be explained. Convenience Netsurfing is more convenient for quick access to a huge amount of knowledge, while printed media is better suited for portability, content, and permanence. This is a fact as cyberspace certainly can be considered as being in a constant state of flux. Although it can be argued that this is an easy way to keep the information current, it is also an important factor at the expense of history and uncertainty. For instance, it is likely that by the time you read this text, some of the cyberspace sources will have disappeared. Quality With the millions of pages on the World Wide Web currently in existence, the novelty of looking at Web pages will surely give way to demand for quality content. Often, only raw material of ideas is found in cyberspace, while reviewed, useful, stimulated and well reasoned writings would be more appropriate.
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The concept of agent embodies a help tool for humans where expertise is mixed with knowledge of the user. This idea can easily be compared to the intrinsic characteristics of travel agents, real estate agents and so on.
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Granularity Granularity stands for the concept involving the size of the pieces of information that are still of great value for the consumer. For instance, when a user requires a certain series of magazine articles, he generally needs to take a subscription for a whole year, which can be considered as a rough granularity of the offered information. With traditional, physically limited information, the finer the granularity, the more expensive that information is to deliver and the more narrow the market. But now, cyberspace promises targeting and delivery technologies a big step forward as the granularity increases drastically. Imagine the opportunity of an Internet subscription of your favourite newspaper-cartoon, for one cartoon a day: the individual member price should be about one cent a day, while the cartoonist himself with a public of 100.000 online users earns over $250.000 a year. 5 In short, the granularity phenomenon should result in a more efficient information flow, while the time and effort being spent for gathering it will either decrease or become more productive. The impacts will be far reaching, if not immediate. Accessibility Accessibility is the ease with which information can be obtained and understood. As dramatic as the total growth of the Internet phenomenon may be, and no matter how great its potential is understood, it will not become an everyday part of most lives until it becomes as accessible as for instance cable TV. Furthermore, questions about the universal access of cyberspace can be raised again, as not all social classes possess the opportunity to ‘go online’. Suitability Information is more valuable when it is suited to the needs of the consumer. This presents a challenge because advantages of convenience and granularity should not be lost in lack of quality and suitability. In an attempt to solve this very problem, socalled search engines with filtering capabilities have been created. What can be noted is the remarkable lack of good, well-known, reputable catalogues, critics, commentary, and best-seller lists for the Internet. In short, finding the information that is best suited for a certain well-defined target is often more than a challenge, although once found, it has the advantage to being continuously available.6 Scarcity Scarcity affects the economic value of information. As more and more information will be available at lower cost, people will become more educated, which is considered of great value in any society. As the value of such information itself is inherent and thus not based on its price, it can be argued that this phenomenon could trigger growth of the economy as a whole, as information and knowledge increase productivity and the effective use of other forms of capital.7
“We commonly mistake data for information. Information starts data, but data is not information. It is a source of information.” (Ramesh Jain, in Elements of Hypermedia Design, 1995)
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NEGROPONTE, NICHOLAS, Being Digital , Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1995, p.152 Comment: This should obviously be interpreted very carefully, as web pages have the characteristic to disappear rapidly and without any notice, leaving the user behind with a ‘File Not Found’-notice. 7 It should be noted, of course, that this is a typical American point of view, a country in which the development of the Internet is intensively supported by the federal government. 6
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I V.2 .3 S e ar c h E n g i n es As the aspect of retrieving information is a rather important issue when vast electronic networks such as the Internet are used, some of the most known and used searchengines will be further investigated. As some aspects will be used later, it might be interesting as well to know how the digital techniques of these online applications actually work. It should be noted that the following list8 is only an indication of the general characteristics of the used techniques, as this technology could also be considered as a substantial researchable informational field of its own. Alta Vista ( http://www.altavista.digital.com) is developed by Digital Corp. and is one of the most powerful and flexible search engines on the Web today. Each day, database entries are gathered by a web crawler which enters a WWW-site and thoroughly indexes the page contents. The frequencies and proximities of significant words are tallied and form the basis of the order of display in the search results provided by the engine. Furthermore, an objective investigation presented in March ’98 at the 7th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW7), stated that AltaVista was in fact the biggest search engine at that time, having indexed an estimated forty percent of the available pages on the Web (which in turn would consist of 275 million distinct pages). Excite! ( http://www.excite.com ) is developed by Excite Inc. It uses an artificial intelligence technology to establish relationships among the terms that the web crawler finds on indexed pages. The search engine handles entered phrases and finds the closest matches using fuzzy logic 9, while a relative relevance is established for closeness of fit to the query. HotBot ( http://www.hotbot.com ) was developed by Inktomi Corp., which in fact does not exist any more, and was formerly part of the Network of Workstations Project at the University of Berkeley. The power of this engine lies in its ability to use artificial intelligence to record geographic information, URLs and domain names as well as file names and types, such as JavaScript, VRML, embedding features, etc. InfoSeek ( http://www.infoseek.com ) is produced by the Infoseek Corp. and shares most characteristics of the other engines. One advanced feature is considered as special, as terms can be defined to be required or excluded. Lycos ( http://www.lycos.com ) was developed at Carnegie Mellon University but is now independent. A certain feature allows the users to define the closeness of fit (distance, number of times, etc.) among the terms entered. WebCrawler ( http://www.webcrawler.com) started its existence at the Department of computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington and was later purchased by Excite Corp. It was the very first full text search engine available on the Internet. User submissions as well as the input of the web crawler are used to build the database. Yahoo! ( http://www.yahoo.com) The search indexes are built primarily by user submissions. It presents a highly structured, hierarchical subject directory as it is the outgrowth of one of the earliest attempts at categorizing information found on the Internet at Stanford University and is still considered a superb starting point. §
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Much of the information is retrieved from an intensive investigation and comparison of the most used search engines done by : RALPH, D. RANDY, Search Engines: Indexes, Directories and Libraries, http://www.netstrider.com/search/directory.html, April 1997 9 This is particularly easy for novice users as the technique compensates the input of poorly formed queries.
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Figure IV-1 The information which can be retrieved out of a typical search result . (search result is retrieved from http://www.lycos.com )
I V.3 3 D I n f o r mat io n Vis u al is a t io n I V.3 .1 In f o r mat io n Qu an t it y It has already been noted that computer networks as the World Wide Web are growing in a rapid, almost true exponential manner. Coupled with the increasing processing power and storage capacity of contemporary computer systems and the decreasing price of this high performance computing hardware for the general public, it is only logical that this results in an ‘information big-bang’. Although it can easily be argued that information is maybe not the right word to describe these huge mass of meaningless ‘noise’. Some critical researchers, Ziuaddin Zardar for instance, describe the situation of the Internet of today as follows. “The net, in fact, provides us with a grotesque soup of information: statistics, data and chatter from the military, academia, research institutions, purveyors of pornography, addicts of Western pop music and culture, right-wings extremists, lunatics who go on about aliens, paedophiles and all those contemplating sex with a donkey. A great deal of this stuff is obscene; much of it is local; most of it is deafening noise.”10 In this chaotic pile of information, of which the increasing part is becoming purely commercial, it is a fact that although the amount of data has grown, the amount of information has certainly not. Meanwhile, the problems of finding relevant information have shifted thoroughly. First, information was not easily accessible or searchable, although this has changed since the emergence of so-called search-agents and searchengines. However, these possess the characteristic of most ordinary software, namely to overthrow any possible context or question in which the information is being asked. Now, the problem thus no longer lies in getting the information as such, but more in finding it and sorting out the one useful record from the more than hundred similar items. Researchers are investigating various tools and techniques to deliver the user various comfortable and economical applications to pass this problem. Algorithms and methods for intelligent data evaluation are being developed to automate information filtering, able to recognise for the user relevant elements and records. On the other hand, research into visualisation techniques is receiving much attention. This concept puts the task of retrieving relevant data more to the side of the users themselves. They even allow the users to make use of their cognitive, perceptual and intuitive skills to find data, which may be of interest but could be missed by search algorithms, for instance because they are not directly relevant to the query. Before some principles and examples of the architectural inspired techniques in this area will be closer and more thoroughly 10
SARDAR, ZIAUDDIN, alt.civilisations.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker side of the West, in SARDAR, ZIAUDDIN & RAVETZ, JEROME R. (Ed.), Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway, Pluto Press , London, 1996
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investigated, it can be useful to describe the variety of the now existing 3D information visualisation techniques.
I V.3 .2 Vi s u a l is a t io n Tec h n i q u e s The growth of specially designed graphic user interfaces (GUIs) started at Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in 1971. This photocopying technology-daughter of IBM still put much research in the future of the so-called ‘paperless’ office, the natural opposite of the actual goal of the company.11 The approach that the PARC researchers adopted was to show the computer’s resources graphically, so that the user could explore to discover everything what could be done with the application of the computer. Most known application developed in this laboratory is the comfortable, user-friendly Apple Macintosh graphical desktop, which still receives much merit even until today.12 Within the concept of cyberspace, these GUI-technologies enable the user to experience control (‘cyber -‘) as a projection of self, out of the own centre, the own will, into a field of activity, which can be characterised as space . This space is real because it is independent from the potential user, it is even more real because it is able to respond and interact. In this view, the challenge of the future computer industry is not to deliver better and faster hardware technology, but to develop a completely other concept of a kind of real user interface, one that recognise the presence and needs from its user not only by the keyboard. Still, while some part of this research is concentrating on the communications level of this task –such as speech recognition and other artificial agents capable to learn the user’s preferences out of a certain experience-, much work is still being done to visualise and offer all kinds of information on a more intuitive and human-friendly manner. Most efforts in this matter are focusing intensely on the possibilities of three-dimensional representation techniques, resulting in some applications that will be explained in the next paragraph. Most example techniques described can be classified as belonging to one of the following three groups. Classification of 3D Visualisation Techniques Mapping techniques : use some aspect, property, or value of the dataelements to produce a mapping onto objects within the visualisation. Presentation techniques : do concentrate on the appearance, accessibility, and usability of the data, which then should result in a user-friendly and intuitive interface. Dynamic techniques : enrich the visualisation with behaviour and dynamic properties, able to respond automatically to changes in the data or actions by the user. §
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The next classification is largely taken from the book Elements of Hypermedia Design 13 and an investigation of three-dimensional information visualisation done by Peter Young14, which was found on the Internet. Of course, this classification is merely conceptual and a degree of overlap can easily be noticed in some of the following cases. 11
WOOLLEY, BENJAMIN, Virtual Worlds: a Journey in Hype and Hyperreality , Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1992, p.147 12 In order to get hold of 100.000 Apple shares, Xerox offered Apple the access to PARC’s research achievements. This deal has proved expensive, when Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs took one particular project (for free), and developed it into Apple Lisa , a technology which meanwhile has proved to be worth millions of dollars. 13 GLOOR, PETER, Elements of Hypermedia Design: Techniques for Navigation and Visualisation in Cyberspace, Birckhäuser, Berlin 14 14 YOUNG, PETER, Three Dimensional Information Visualisation , 1996, (also published in Computer Science Technical Report, No. 12/96), http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dcs3py/pages/work/documents/lit—survey/IVSurvey/
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1. Surface Plots Surface plots can be considered as the most familiar extension of the standard 2D graphs. These visualisations are constructed by plotting data triples: X and Z axes usually contain standard sets with regular structure, while the height represents variable data in the Y-axis. After the resulting points are netted and coloured, the visualisation resembles a landscape with relative easily detectable patterns or irregularities. 2. Cityscapes Cityscapes are created in a similar way as surface plots by mapping scalar data values onto the height of 3D vertical bars or blocks, which are placed on a uniform 2D horizontal plane. Several actions and features can be implemented on this visualisation to search and clarify certain perceivable patterns. 3. Fish-eye Views The name is taken from a similar resulting view produced by a very wide-angle ‘fisheye’ lens. This technique results in a view in which objects with greatest detail and magnification appear in the middle of the view, whereas other objects on the periphery are distorted in a way that show lesser detail. This allows a detailed study of objects of interest, while maintaining a view of context or position with respect to the other objects. This technique has already received a widespread implementation, and proved to be very useful in visualising large graphs containing many interconnected nodes. 4. Benediktine Space The term ‘Benediktine space’ can be traced back to Michael Benedikt’s research of the structure of cyberspace. He has investigated intensively the possibilities to map attributes of an object onto certain intrinsic and extrinsic spatial values, based on the two principles of exclusion and maximal exclusion . This very concept will be the subject of a thorough investigation and will be further explained in this chapter. 5. Perspective Walls Perspective walls are able to represent large, linearly structured information, allowing the user to view and navigate freely while maintaining some degree of location or context. They fold the linear structure in a 3D space, for example forming a cylindrical shell with the data mapped onto the interior surface. 6. Cone Trees and Cam Trees The aim of both techniques is to display a larger amount of information that can be navigated in an intuitive manner. To accomplish this task, more cognitive and comprehending load of the represented information has to be shifted to the human perceptual system. In this way, child nodes are placed at equal distances along the base of their mother’s node cone. This process is repeated for every node in the hierarchy, while the base diameter of the cones is reduced at each descending level. It has to be noted as well that cam trees are identical to cone trees except that they grow horizontally as opposed to vertically.
Originally produced at Xerox PARC, these trees could be rotated smoothly and bring any particular node into focus. The smooth animation was found to be critical in relation to the cognitive capabilities of the human senses, as sudden changes in the orientation caused severe disorientation of the user.
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Figure IV-2 Picture of a cone tree visualisation, representing a UNIX-file store. (http://www.crg.cs.nott.ac.uk/research/applications/cones/)
7. Sphere Visualisation Informational objects are mapped onto the surface of a sphere. Highly related objects are placed close to a pre-selected object of interest (OOI). This results in a fish-eye view wherein unrelated objects become less emphasised and move round to the opposite side of the sphere. The overall view consists of a number of nested spheres, each representing a different level of information. Navigation is accomplished by rotating the main sphere to bring objects of interest into view and traversing several possible links to lower level, darkener spheres. 8. Rooms Xerox PARC’s so-called ‘room’ concept is a powerful three-dimensional extension of the common known desktop metaphor that is encountered in computing today. In this specific technique, several rooms and the navigation in between are used to organise and structure several kinds of documents and applications. Within each room, information sources such as 3D-objects or wall projections may be present, while a floor plan is used for overall economical navigation and comfortable cognitive orientation. To be able to ‘carry’ information, objects or important items while working in this environment, a helpful pockets -metaphor was created. 9. Emotional Icons Emotional icons are objects that can perform certain actions related to the presence of a user or other icons. For instance, icons may come closer, retreat, grow, change colour, or get animated dependent on the user’s proximity and pre-defined interests in the data they represent. Icons with a similar nature might also move together when they sense each other’s presence. In short, this concept could provide an important development towards a so-called ‘living’ data environment. 10. Self Organising Graphs Conventional layout techniques generally possess some sort of function or routine that tries to fulfil certain aesthetic criteria or heuristics on a given graph to represent a suitable layout. Self-organising graphs however, model the layout as an unstable physical system that tries to reach a state of equilibrium. Objects can be represented as rings and springs. The springs contain a repulsive or attractive force, dependent on whether the string is compressed or extended. The whole network of these objects and
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forces starts with a high-energy state. Consequently, this system will attempt to reach equilibrium over a number of iterations, after which the layout is complete. 11. The Information Cube The information cube technique extends two-dimensional tree maps into the threedimensional realm. In this concept, nested, semi-transparent cubes represent hierarchical information. Transparency and shading are used to manipulate the depth and amount of information being visualised, as they control the degree of visibility of the cube’s content and its children. This reduction in amount of presented information makes the model much more intuitively understandable for the user, while other 3D visualisations or information can be represented within the cubes.
Figure IV-3 On the left: the Information Cube ; on the right: the Sphere Visualisation . (http://ww.dur.ac.uk/~dcs3py/pages/work/documents/lit-survey/IV-Survey/ )
I V.3 .3 O v er v i ew Mapping techniques Surface plots Cityscapes Benediktine space Spatial arrangement
Presentation techniques Perspective walls Cone trees & cam trees Rooms
Dynamic techniques Fish-eye views Emotional icons Self-organising graphs
While concentrating on the different techniques and approaches, the original relation with cyberspace may not be forgotten. In this way, visualisation techniques are very dependent from the applied technology. But ultimately, it has to be noted that some visionary thoughts foresee these applications of information visualisation to become the core of what cyberspace is about: offering a narrow union between users and their virtual representation as a true state of human-machine ‘symbiosis’ . In their view, these future environments will become accessible as for ‘real’, making the user interface ultimately disappear as the user is immersed in the universe of information. And like noticed earlier, the promises of this universe are great, as a realm is envisaged that is far richer than the physical one, still only dimly perceived through some imaginations.
I V.3 .4 S pat ial A r r an g emen t o f D at a When a three-dimensional information environment is created, generally a certain mapping concept has to be followed. These rules should translate the abstract data into a corresponding recognisable representation and also in a certain location of the object within the information terrain. The resulting spatial configuration is then interpretable and properties of data items can be read out of the relative position and unique
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presentation of the objects. Within the research of these mapping techniques, four different approaches can be recognised. 1. Benediktine Cyberspace In the concept of the electronic cyberspace, the concept of mapping is a strong and already widespread technique. A stream of bits, which are initially formless, is given form by a representation scheme, and information emerges through the interaction of data with the representation. Ultimately, appearance can then be considered as a late after-effect, simply a consequence of many sunken layers of patterns acting upon patterns, some behaving as code, some as data. It should be noted that this theory can be useful for both two-dimensional (e.g. hypertext) as well as three-dimensional representations, and thus for both forms of cyberspace spoken of earlier, although, of course, different accents can be noticed. Although the three-dimensional consequences of Michael Benedikt’s technique will be further explained later, it is probably more than useful to be aware of the existence of other mapping techniques. 2. Statistical Clustering and Proximity Measures Statistical methods are applied to analyse large database contents. In this way, items are being grouped according to their semantic closeness to the searched item. A common known and widespread application in this matter is the concept of searchengines which automatically group results according the matching of user-definable key words. Further analysis results in ‘scores’ of the separate items, which then can be used to create a suitable mapping into Benediktine space. Systems that adopt this approach include VIBE, further extended into three dimensions to produce VR-VIBE.15 3. Hyper-Structures Hyper-structures are created from an amount of information consisting of a number of data objects with any number or arrangement of explicit relationships between them. The most known example is of course the hypertext structure of documents used in the World Wide Web, which was more thoroughly explained in Chapter II. 4. Human Centred Approaches This approach is normally used to create abstract real-world metaphors such as cities, buildings and rooms, in which the user is able to manipulate the data in more familiar surroundings. The main problem of this approach is that the generation is difficult and time-consuming, because it is still not suitable for automatic computable processes. Furthermore, creating such an abstract model, which matches the real-world environment plus the appropriate structure and representation of the data itself, can certainly be considered as a difficult and time-consuming task.
I V.3 . 5 E x a mp l es Most examples are built on the premises that navigation through an information space can be very effecting when applied to retrieve useful information. Analogies and familiar concepts such as location and motion are used for human intuitive comprehension of abstract facts. Although there are many examples in the field of three-dimensional information visualisation, some are picked out in this paragraph to show some of the creative and convincing possibilities of these techniques known until today. Furthermore, they demonstrate a part of the inspiration that was used when an own program was being designed.
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See paragraph ‘Exampl es ’ for more information.
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VR-VIBE The example of the three-dimensional VR-VIBE can be considered as part of the concept called ‘Populated Information Terrain’ (PIT). In a PIT-environment, multiple users can inhabit and work simultaneously and thus co-operatively within the data as opposed to merely with the data. This means that users are aware of each other’s presence and actions, resulting in a true sharing of information.
Figure IV-4 Two screenshots of the VR-VIBE system visualising a bibliography with 1081 entries and five keywords. (http://www/crg.nott.ac.uk/research/technologies/visualisation/vrvibe/)
The visualisations in VIBE are constructed by a primarily defined set of ‘Points of Interest’ (POIs) containing certain keywords which are then used in a query. A full text search is performed on a number of documents after which each one receives a relevance score to each POI. With these results, the visualisation is then calculated and the representing objects are placed inside the space. Two separate methods are possible within the concept of VR-VIBE. First nodes are placed on a 2D-plane with respect to the proportion of relevance attributed to each POI. For instance, with two POIs A and B, one document may have a score of 4 to POI A and 3 to POI B. This document is then placed at 4/7 of the distance along the line joining A and B. A vertical displacement is then introduced to each object to represent the degree of relevance. The second method allows the objects to be placed freely at any point in the threedimensional space, but within the confines of the POIs. Intrinsic dimensions such as shape and colour indicate the selection when two separate documents might have the same set of scores. Users are able to navigate freely through the structure. Meanwhile they can select documents, perform queries, apply filtering, or request additional information. The interactive force of the model is proved by the possibility to add or remove certain POIs, thus trying different configurations, and even to move POIs to see which documents get pulled after them. Vineta Vineta is a visualisation system that can be compared with 3D-visualisations like VRVIBE, although it has one fundamental distinction, namely the number of dimensions or terms this model is able to present. Within this technique, the objects’ position in the navigation space is dependent of the semantic relevance between documents, terms, and the user’s interests. Furthermore, multidimensional analysis and numerical linear algebra for mapping documents and terms into the three-dimensional space are used as well. All this results in the concept of spatial proximity (close together/far apart) to represent semantic meaning (similarity/distinction) of the elements.
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Figure IV-5 Vineta: On the left, the landscape and on the right the galaxy metaphor. (http://www.crg.cs.nott.ac.uk/research/technologies/visualisation/vineta/)
Two metaphors were programmed for producing the visualisations. First, the galaxy metaphor represents the space as a collection of stars , in which documents are fixed stars and terms are being represented by ‘shooting stars’. Also here, semantic similarity is encoded in the proximity of the stars. The other implemented concept, the landscape metaphor, has proved to be more intuitive and was easier to comprehend. The space is represented as a flat, textured surface containing flowers with stems and petals. The surface itself is a useful feature that offers the user an indication of depth and distance of the many objects. It is even so that “the inclusion of the ground plane was encouraged by the study of ecological optics which emphasises that perception of objects should never be considered apart from a textured ground surface.”16 Furthermore, flowers nearer to the user are of more relevance, while the stems aid the perception of the actual location onto the ground plane. Finally, the directions as well as the colours of petals on the flowers represent the search terms and their relevance to each document. Informationslandschaften CAAD I: Informational Landscapes 17 is the name of a CAAD-course being taught in the first semester at the Architectural Department of the Federal University in Zürich. The course starts with a large blank electronic surface that is divided by a number of equal rectangles. Each of these smaller rectangles is assigned to a couple of students, who are asked to draw certain signs, representing all kinds of information or unique ideas, within this ‘domain’.
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YOUNG, PETER, Three Dimensional Information Visualisation , 1996, (also published in Computer Science Technical Report, No. 12/96), http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dcs3py/pages/work/documents/lit—survey/IVSurvey/ 17 http://alterego.arch.ethz.ch/informationslandschaft/
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Figure IV-6 The final end result of the abstract data field representation after months of individual creative adapting processes by the students. (http://www.alterego.arch.ethz.ch/infomationslandschaft/)
In the second phase, students are required to take the already visible manifestations of the eight neighbouring rectangles (four orthogonal, four diagonal) into consideration. This means that a kind of graphical communication-form is being established between the related groups in particular and the collection of groups globally, to exchange meaningful and thus informational elements. Some elements might be taken over, continued, stopped, or ignored, dependent on the characteristics and the concepts of the groups. In the next phase, a higher level of communication was implemented as the groups were now allowed to use email for expressing and sharing their intentions with the others. After the whole abstract surface was grown and finally had adapted itself to its own intrinsic elements, another layer of information was added, as the most remarkable signs now had to carry links, searched and chosen by the students. The resulting surface was now not only the result of many processes in time, but became a navigable map of links. Ultimately, this map can be used as a three-dimensional texture or surface in a virtual reality environment, or can simply be represented as a kind of mental map by a navigable two-dimensional web page. The following list summarises the things implemented and learned by the students when they designed this original digital information visualisation. § §
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Software: PhotoShop, Netscape, UNIX, etc. Interface: the communication mechanism between the hierarchical educational levels and the global underlying and shared structure of the course. Communication: email, talk-command, tele-presence, abstract representations, etc. Search techniques on the Internet: online search engines. Information architecture: the concept and its potential future. Designing: creatively working in a group while visualising abstract ideas.
ZIP-CUBE ZIP-CUBE18, developed in VRML language by Paul Meyer at ETHZ, is a convincing example of the visualisation of a building as an important shared information source. It tries to clarify the huge amount of information available when a project under development, while offering its content to several potential users. The three axes represent conceptual variables dependent of domains , functions and phases of a certain building project. Although this objective is certainly not considered as 18
SCHMITT, GERHARD, Architektur mit dem Computer , Vieweg, Wiesbaden, 1996, p.82 information can also be found on: http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/research/ZIPBau/ or http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/visits/zipbau.html
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revolutionary, the implementation as an interactive, three-dimensional computer model widely accessible on the Internet however obviously is.
Figure IV-7 Two views of the ZIPCube . Two orthogonal surfaces divide the cube’s axes and data-objects for further investigation, while documents open up when approached . (http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/research/ZIPBau/)
In this model, information is represented by box-like volumes, each of them able to show gradually more detailed data, whenever the user approaches its surroundings. When the symbols are clicked, dynamic presentations are transmitted and displayed which can vary from simple linear HTML-documents until three-dimensional interactive models. For instance, different schemes of the projects can be seen when successive points are chosen on the phase-axis, resulting in time-based navigating. In short, it can be noted that this technique is a powerful aid for navigation in the building process and for representation of different shared objects in a databank. Archaeology of the Future City: TRACE TRACE19 is the title of an exhibition held in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo in July 1996. This project uses the similarity between the concept of an urban city and the new unexplored realm of information as its primarily goal. In this way, it can be noticed that the relation between natural systems, such as a city, and virtual systems, such as the Internet, is certainly not well defined yet. For this reason, virtual environments as such should take the role of intermediate elements, able to create a common language of understanding.
TRACE, programmed by Florian Wenz at ETH-Zürich, tries to accomplish this by building the model out of a number of spaces, in which activities of users get registered, interpreted, and then in turn represented back into the environment. This means that, like in a physical city, the environment is actually generated by the users themselves. They explore the surroundings and by doing so leave ‘traces’ behind them, while reading the traces left by other former visitors in this world. The rooms receive their representation by the narrow relation between a certain database that continuously stores all the traces, and a so-called geometry generator, which translates the traces into specific forms. In this way, the global space is dynamic and thus able to change constantly as visitors use it.
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SCHMITT, GERHARD, Architektur mit dem Computer , Vieweg, Wiesbaden, 1996, p.177 and the project can be found at http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/trace
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Figure IV-8 Left image presents a view of the public_out.world, on the right: the private_in.world (http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/trace/) Conceived out of the concept of an urban surrounding, a public as well as a private zone is being created: a so-called ‘public_out.world’ and a ‘private_in.world’ . Furthermore, it can be noticed that TRACE is represented in a rather abstract architectural syntax, which is only dependent of these two complementary immersive situations. The user enters TRACE in the out.world, a navigation-space containing closed volumes (Blobs) and some so-called NURBS-surfaces (Non-Uniform Rational BSpline). The user is able to move on top of and around these objects, which are created out of equilibrium of certain imaginable forces that symbolise Internet sites. The containers and interwoven network of the private_in.worlds on the contrary, which actually represent the traces of former users, received a more simple and specific design. The user is strictly captured in this labyrinth where he finds his own movements to be bounded, but where the access to some presently multimedia files and links seems to be completely free. Legibility for Abstract Data Spaces: LEADS This last interesting example, developed at Nottingham University, manipulates the concept of the more physical city planning to design the overall model. It tries to prove the notion that the legibility of urban environments can be improved greatly by a careful design of certain key features. In this view, Kevin Lynch’s theory is introduced from his book ‘The image of the City’ , in which he identifies five major elements in constructing cognitive models of an urban environment. Habitants of various cities were questioned about the city they lived in. These interviews, written descriptions of routes through the city and drawing maps resulted in these five features; which were in turn implemented by a number of algorithms to structure the data in the LEADS-model. §
Districts: are distinct areas, characterised by some form of commonality or character, and generally identifiable by the nature of buildings within them, such as residential or commercial areas. The creation of districts in an abstract space is accomplished by primarily determining similarity between data items, after which the results are grouped together and placed in a particular area. The appearance of such area can be fairly distinct as objects are displayed in different colours or shapes.
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IV.4
Edges: provide distinctive borders to districts, such as rivers and motorways. Edges are positioned by finding intersections between districts, which can be done by three different methods. The first method is to identify the two nearest data items between districts and place the edge between them. Secondly, a hull or bounding box could be determined that encloses a district after which it can act as an edge. In the third and last method a common hull of two surroundings should be found in which an edge can be calculated by interpolating points along joining edges of the districts. It is noted that the latter two methods were not chosen due to the fact that they are computable expensive and rather time demanding. Landmarks: are static and easily recognisable features, giving a sense of location, such as distinctive buildings or structures . Here as well, three methods have been recognised. Landmarks can be placed in the centre of districts, although this method ignores the size or density of the surrounding area, which could make them almost invisible or useless. Otherwise, landmarks could be placed at intersections between three or more districts. Finally, landmarks can be placed by a triangulation between the centres of any three adjacent districts. Nodes and Paths: are the lowest level of elements, more individual and dynamic and interchangeable in time. In the abstract model, paths are proposed to be links between nodes, which in turn represent individual informational objects within the visualisation. Usage information of the model is stored and used for complementary visualisation. Metrics such as the frequency of access could be used to identify and create new nodes, whereas frequent successive accesses could be defining new paths, while old ones fade over time.
VR
/ s ea r c h
The next paragraphs are based on a virtual reality application that was programmed to demonstrate some aspects and problems that are characteristic when a cyberspace environment is being designed. Introduction The VR / search -program here described is meant to clarify and three-dimensionally visualise the information provided when an Internet search result is offered. This VRMLrepresentation should utilise the intuitive cognitive capabilities of the users in their process of finding the most suitable link that meets most of their individual requirements. It is hereby assumed that the user wants immediate visible access to some parts of the data such as the title, size, date, number of ordering, and relevance of the provided links, and wants to use this information cognitively when decisions are made. In this virtual application, a surface is laid out on which links are represented by box-like objects unto which the necessary data is mapped. First, the technical side of the program will be explained, while the process of mapping will be described soon in the next paragraph.
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Figure IV-9 Two visualisations of the same information. The left image shows the standard result page of the search engine Lycos , on the right the three-dimensional world of VR/search. Tools In order to understand the application, the three main programming tools being used will now shortly be explained. The principles of CGI are applied to run an executable application on the server after the user (client) has entered a certain personal chosen query inside an embedded HTML-form on a web page. Then, a Perl program on the server reads the input values and submits this query to a search engine (in this case the search engine called Lycos was chosen). It waits for the returned results and retrieves them, after which the Perl -program starts to scan the text of the provided HTML-page. During this scan, useable information is stored in variables that will be passed to related values in the structure of a VRML-program. It is only when all this is accomplished and the whole structure is assembled that the VRML-file, which contains all the requested values in the form of heights, coordinates, texts, etc, is finally sent back to the user. On this so-called client side of the connection, the type of file is sequentially recognised and interpreted by the user’s browser as a VRML-content, after which the three-dimensional world is displayed.
Figure IV-10 Simplified scheme of the in VR/search applied techniques after a certain user requests an item to be searched, here for example the term ‘asro’ .
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IV.4 .1 CGI It should be noted that the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is not a computer programming language, but a standard protocol along the lines of TCP/IP and HTTP. In this view, CGI is a standard for incorporating executable programs into Web documents by way of the server. In other words, it is a way of providing dynamic output as opposed to the static output of a normal HTML document. When an URL-request for a CGIprogram is sent, the server where the program is physically located will execute it in real time, after which its output will be sent back directly to the user who has requested it. The server as well as the client knows how to interpret the transmitted data (in HTML, VRML, GIF, MPG,…) by extra information that is included in the beginning of the messages being exchanged at both the input as well as output levels. A CGI application can be written in any computer language that is available on the server’s system. There are two categories of CGI-languages. The first consists of scripting , or interpreted languages like Perl, TCL, the UNIX scripting language, and Python. Compiled languages like C and C++ comprise the second. The difference between the two sorts lies in the fact that the latter category of programs needs to be compiled into machine code before it can be made available to the web.
IV.4 .2 PERL The Practical Extension and Report Language (Perl) is an interpreted language that is well-suited for scanning texts files, extracting information from them, and printing reports based on that information. It is in fact designed to be easy to use and efficient, and combines elements of C and UNIX scripting languages. Several reasons are mentioned in the book Using VRML20 that should explain the relative popularity of Perl as the programming language of most of the CGI-applications on the Web. §
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Perl is derived from existing languages so that people with some programming knowledge are familiar with many aspects of it. Potential programmers do not have to know everything about Perl in order to use it. Only a small part of the language must be learned for an efficient and practical use. Perl uses a sophisticated pattern-matching system that is very quick and efficient and is able to scan a large amount of text.
IV.4 .3 VRML The Virtual Reality Modelling Language is a portable, open scene- and objectdescription language. Its development is greatly influenced by the characteristics of Internet and the force of some highly specialised newsgroups it contains. The Origin The combination of three different threads would become the ultimate force that created the foundation on which the VRML language was built. First, the visionary thoughts about William Gibson’s cyberspace were still apparent in the minds of many researchers and programmers. From that point, the graphics target was set to create a shared realistic simulated environment, based on virtual reality and the interaction between users over a certain network. The second development started in 1992, with the introduction of the Inventor graphics toolkit from Silicon Graphics. Inventor allows programmers to develop quickly interactive 3D graphics programs of all sorts, based on concepts of scene structure and object description. But although Inventor had nothing to do in particular with networks, it would become the technical basis for VRML. 20
MATSUBA, STEPHEN & ROEHL, BERNIE, Using VRML, Que Corp., Indianapolis, 1996
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The last spark brought everything together rapidly. At the first annual World Wide Web conference in 1994 in Geneva, Mark Pesce and Tony Parisi proposed their idea of a standard scene-description virtual reality interface that could be used in conjunction to the Web.21 The term VRML stood then for ‘Virtual Reality Markup Language’, based on the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) already spoken of, although the word ‘Markup’ was later changed to become the more specific and accurate ‘Modelling’. The Development Within a week, the mailing list about the development of a specification for VRML grew to include over a thousand members. As most participants proposed to adapt an existing modelling language, it was then agreed that a draft specification should be proposed within five months. Several proposals were contemplated and discussed on the email list, and the Silicon Graphics proposal won the general vote. This meant that VRML would be based on the Open Inventor file format (the meanwhile non-proprietary development of Inventor), after which in 1994 the VRML 1.0 specification was set. Many browsers were written that were able to interpret and display all specifications of VRML, such as QvLib and WebSpace Navigator . In 1996, the VRML community read and discussed a number of proposals for the next VRML 2.0 version, including the Moving Worlds project from Silicon Graphics, HoloWeb from Sun Microsystems, ActiveVRML from Microsoft, Out of This World from Apple and others. After much revision and reshaping done by the community itself, 70 percent of the overall votes pointed Moving Worlds as the next specification of VRML 2.0. While VRML 1.0 allowed only creating static worlds containing hyper-linked objects, the new VRML 2.0 offered four new features.22 VRML 2.0 New Features 4. Enhanced static worlds . New objects were added like the elevation grid, extrusion, background, fog and many others nodes. Also, some multimedia standards as audio and movie applications were included to be mapped unto the objects. 5. Interaction sensors are specified to wait until a particular event occurs and then to do something in response to that event. 6. Animation and behaviour scripting is now supported. This consists on the one hand of so–called interpolators, which allow keyframe animation between two or more pre-defined situations. On the other hand, scripts offer the ability to perform simple logic or complex analyses of user and environmental events in the scene and respond to that in some intelligent way. 7. Prototyping . This feature allows the creation of a user-defined node, which can consist of many complex objects. This single object can easily be reused by the programmer, who is then able to change certain characteristics of these objects when desired.
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MATSUBA, STEPHEN & ROEHL, BERNIE, Using VRML, Que Corp., Indianapolis, 1996, p. 142 HARTMAN J. & WERNECKE J., The VRML 2.0 Handbook: Building Moving Worlds on the Web , Addison-Wesley, Amsterdam, 1996, p.8 22
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Characteristics of VRML Worlds Immersion. Generally, the user enters the three-dimensional built-up world on the computer screen and explores it as an almost real inhabitant of it. This means that each person can choose a different and unique course through the model. User-Control. The local browser allows the user to explore the VRML world in a personal manner. Thus the computer does not provide a fixed set of choices or paths, although the original author of the world could have suggested some recommendations. Consequently, the possibilities are certainly unlimited. Interactivity. Objects have the capability of responding to one another and to external events caused by the user. The user can ‘reach in’ to the scene and change the characteristics of the elements. Blending. A VRML is considered to blend 2D and 3D objects, animation, and multimedia effects into a single medium. §
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I V.5 M appin g I n f o r ma t io n in Cy ber s p ac e Some of the techniques and principles explained by Michael Benedikt in his book Cyberspace: First Steps.23 now will be investigated. It should be remembered that these rules are in fact meant to be applied by the so-called cyberspace architects of the future. In this Benediktine cyberspace, both the space as well as the geometry carry meaning. This means actually that this cyberspace is built in a way that some spatial metaphors like up or down, left or right, closeness or distance have all some sort of informational and interpretable significance. To accomplish such a virtual realm, Benedikt defines seven principles in relation to those of natural, physical space, and classifies these under four, essentially topological rubrics: dimensionality , continuity , limits , and density . Furthermore, to demonstrate and clarify the VR/search-program already mentioned, some of Benedikt’s principles will be shortly compared to the concepts of this visualisation.
I V.5 .1 D i men s io n a l it y The rubric of dimensionality describes the possible solutions that could be used when more than three dimensions have to be visualised in a certain designed, immersive, virtual world. Extrinsic and Intrinsic Values First, it is assumed that a set of N different kinds of measurements should be visualised. Benedikt describes then how problems can be solved when more than three variables have to be presented. Two different approaches can be followed to describe the state of the system. First, of course, the designer can simply decide which dimensions to work with and drop the others, so that many different non-complete representations of the system can be produced. Secondly, certain dimensions, called extrinsic , can be assigned to perform ‘coordinate duty’, while the others, called intrinsic , are assigned to describe the character of a point in the coordinate space. Thus, unlike an Euclidean point, a point-object might have a colour, a shape, a weight, a size, a spin, etc., all some intrinsic qualities that are logically independent of its position in space. In this way, any N-dimensional state of a system can be represented in the data space of point-objects having n spatio-temporally locating, extrinsic dimensions and m intrinsic dimensions. N=n+m
(N > 0, 0 < n < 5)
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BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: Some Proposals, inCyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, pp.119-224
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This technique makes the conception of certain animated actions possible. Since intrinsic dimension data in fact only exist at address points, it is for instance possible that an object changes its size and shape as it moves, revealing the data embedded in each address in the data space. It should also be noted that there is in fact some freedom in how the partition and combination of m intrinsic and n extrinsic dimensions are chosen. Provided that no information is lost, such representations are mathematically equivalent, but not necessarily functionally equivalent. It is certainly not obvious to create a three-dimensional view containing mapped data that is immediately understandable by the user, and in this sense, a ‘good’ visualisation is considered to have more information.
Figure IV-11 Two legends represent the size and date values which are mapped on the X and -
Extrinsic Dimensions in VR/search The size and the date of a linked web page, provided by the search engine, determine the X- respectively Z-coordinate of any presented threedimensional object. It should be noted that in this text, the Y-axis is placed vertically, and the Z-axis comes ‘out of the screen’, like it is specified by the VRML-code. §
Intrinsic Dimensions in VR/search The main intrinsic dimension is the relevance or the rating of a provided link, which determines the height (Y-dimension) of any link object. §
Other (Intrinsic) Variables in VR/search The title of the link. The abstract or comment of the link. The provided number by which the links are ordered; varying between one and ten. The URL-address of the link. Again, the date and size of the web page, but now interpreted as a text-string instead of a real value. § § §
§ §
It should be noted that the so-called ‘other variables’ could also be understood as potential intrinsic dimensions, as they determine the generally perceived view and character of the object as well. For instance, the lengths of the vertically placed titles are suitable for additional visual interpretation (similarity, effectiveness,…) if the user finds this issue important, and are particularly well suited for finding similar links which exist on different servers. Then, for instance, size and title will appear the same, while the date can be a little shifted.
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1. Principle of Exclusion (PE) First, Benedikt tries to define the following three terms to describe the situation of any two objects existent in his data space. These objects are said to be identical if they have the same values on the same intrinsic dimensions, similar if they have different values on the same intrinsic dimensions and different if they do not have the same intrinsic dimensions24. Logically, some unpredictable problems arise when two non-identical objects have, at some time, the same extrinsic dimensions. Then, the Principle of Exclusion 25 , commonly understood as “you cannot have two things in the same place at the same time” clearly states that this is, in fact, forbidden.
At the same time, it should be noted that this first principle already is denied by the other architectural voice in the book, Marcos Novak. He states that although in physical space two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time, this restriction is not necessary in cyberspace. He motivates this statement with two arguments: “to allow a poetic merging of objects into evocative composites, and second, to keep the implementation of cyberspaces as simple as possible.”26 Hereby no decisions should be taken by the programmer to follow this principle, as he foresees this to be the characteristic task of his cyberspace desk that visualises the two objects, to resolve this conflicting situation according to its computable capabilities and the representations chosen. VR
/search At the implementation-level of the program, the Principle of Exclusion is not added for the same reasons Novak already has described. There is no way to equip VRML-objects with some kind of programmable sensor that triggers the proximity of other VRML-objects so that they could perform certain actions. However, it should be noted that on the specialised newsgroups, some authors foresee this feature in one of the next versions of VRML.
2. Principle of Maximal Exclusion (PME) Given any N-dimensional state or phenomenon, and all the values (actual and possible) on those N dimensions, a designer has to choose that set of extrinsic dimensions that will minimise the number of violations of the Principle of Exclusion. This ‘fundamental’ principle is meant to be a helpful rule to be used when a cyberspace designer has to decide which dimensional partition he wants to implement on the offered data. The table underneath summarises the possible relations of two data objects.
Extrinsic
c i s n i r t n I
same dimensions + same values same dimensions + different values
same dimensions + same values
same dimensions + different values
self-same
identical
PE and PME excluded
similar
24
Actually, Benedikt goes much deeper when he investigates objects that have different extrinsic dimensions, and thus in fact are existent in ‘different spaces’. To decribe this phenomenon, the terms super- identical , super-similar, and wholly different are respectively defined. 25 This principle is named after a similar postulate in quantum mechanics that says that no two electrons belonging to the same atom can have the same quantum numbers. 26 NOVAK, MARCOS, Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace, in BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, p. 239
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VR
/search Since the program contradicts the first principle, it is in fact in direct conflict to the second one as well. Hereby the question arises whether the visualisation would carry a more significant and interpretable information if one of the next approaches would be followed. §
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Approach 1.The number by which the links are ordered by the search engine could be used as an extrinsic dimension, but is in fact already partly incorporated by the order of the relevance percentages. Approach 2. The values of the extrinsic dimensions could be sorted and then, instead of being linearly interpolated, be placed unto the fixed squares of a divided grid. No overlapping would then be possible as each row and column would possess one single object. It should be noted that then also a large part of the perceived relationships (closeness, proximity,…) would be lost, as these would be replaced by very arbitrary and interchanging, very difficulty perceivable connections.
Both PE and PME are considered as very effective when, in the future, cyberspace will increase in complexity and content, as the representations have the capability to adapt to this new situation. In this case, each controllable aspect of the world, such as its overall size, the amount of dimensions and mapped information, could be increased until the new situation and the visible representation find some kind of new equilibrium. Size and Shape Benedikt is convinced that object size is not generally a good variable because an extreme largeness of a certain item might crowd out other objects, while simultaneously some sub-features of the shape (like corners, edges,…) might be misinterpreted as having some significance. Moreover, it should be noted that not all the surfaces of an object are visible at all time. However, just zooming in by the user could solve many of these problems. The enlarged object then becomes isolated from the overall context while some of the intrinsic dimensions expand in inner detail and behave more like extrinsic dimensions.
Figure IV-12 A link-object (here possessing the information of the first link) first viewed from further away, and on the right image, the change of behaviour by displaying more detailed information when it becomes closer examined. Another possible technique is that of unfolding. When an object unfolds, its intrinsic dimensions open up to form a new coordinate system, in fact resulting in a new threedimensional space.27
27
This hierarchical scheme is the same technique that for instance the Windows operating system uses when a small icon is clicked which opens into a larger-dimensional window or data-field including new icons.
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VR
/search In case of the VR/search-program, ‘clicking’ the top part of a link-object could be interpreted in the same ‘unfolding’ way. This action causes a new browserwindow to appear which however does not contain a new virtual world, but in fact the requested linked web page represented and ‘possessed’ by the clicked object.
Figure IV-13 The top part of the link-object is ‘clicked’ by the user: the requested website appears in a new browser window, ready for approval by the user. The linkobject then gradually changes its colour, making visible the occurrence of this user-
I V.5 .2 C o n t in u it y The X, Y, Z (and T) axes of any ordinary rectangular coordinate system are understood each to have the character of the real number line : they have to be infinitely divisible and are monotonic, and have to support ordinary arithmetic operations. This numberline character generally forms the intuitive and functional basis for any representational mapping technique. But it must not be forgotten that in order to determine the values of the mapped coordinates of any object, most of the available data first have to be ordered so that these variables can be treated as spatial interpretable number-line dimensions. The applied ordering techniques can be arbitrary, although the three most known naturally consist of the alphabetical , geographical and chronological classification systems. These more or less ‘arbitrary’ sets of aspects should be arranged skilfully, if the cyberspace designer wants to create a comfortable, active and navigable three-dimensional database. VR
/search Like already mentioned, the values of file size and file date determine the twodimensional coordinates of each link-object. First, the two extreme maximum (coordinate 100) and minimum (coordinate 0) size and date values of the whole collection are searched, after which the remaining eight others are interpolated between these values. The ten sizes and dates are thus respectively ordered by the classification of chronology and magnitude. This approach results then in logic and spatial relationships between the final locations of the objects, instead of
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arbitrary ones, when for instance sorted values would be mapped unto the intersections of a fixed, regular grid (coordinates 0-10-20-30-…).
I V.5 . 3 L i mi t s “Will cyberspace have edges to blackness, walls of final data? Or will it be endless? If the latter, how? … Might it be possible to present cyberspace phenomenally as a four-dimensional sphere, were striking out in any (threedimensional), direction brings one eventually back to where one started?” 28 Benedikt himself proposes the conceptualisation of cyberspace into an abstractly glued two-torus . This is a rather difficult term to describe the fact that: first, the vertical dimension is seen as open-ended, and secondly, that any continuous movement in the horizontal plane will ultimately return to the initial start position. The user however, never sees the torus itself but perceives instead a terrestrial geometry of a plain, a horizon, and a sky. VR
/search The language of VRML is fundamentally specified to represent an infinite space. This means that any traveller is able to move everywhere and thus endlessly without any standard pre-programmed restriction of the application. On the other side, certain programmable nodes can be specified to represent a (never reachable) background that can be seen above an abstract ground-surface, which in fact also constitutes the horizon. The data-space built by the VR/searchprogram however is understood as representing a very little part of the unimaginable collection of possible Internet-links, and the user has thus the freedom to wander infinitely far and away from the visualisation. Furthermore, the size of the underlying created surface is conceptualised a little bigger than the floating data-grids in between which the link-objects are allowed to be placed. Although this feature is not implemented in the program, it is designed in this way for the fact that then additional search-requests could be represented as well, next to or within the first visualisation. In this way, a whole landscape of data-grids containing personally preferred links could be made, and each surface could then represent certain subjects and personal interests.
I V.5 .4 D en s it y How much space is there in space? Benedikt uses a certain theoretical insight to be able to clarify and quantify this particular problem. First, he defines spaceo (space-over), the space of varying amount, and spaceu (space-under or space-uniformly ), which is a certain underlying, absolute and homogenous space. The density of a threedimensional ‘space-in-space’ can then be written as: D(3) = spaceo / spaceu
When cyberspace would become more and more complex, the range of scales at which a user can operate could be increased, so that the density of information per volume unit of (cyber)space would expand as well. Increasing density however, cannot be accomplished without some technical difficulties, which nearly all experienced virtual reality users most probably have noticed before. For instance, any dense virtual environment is surrounded by some strange phenomenon that could effectively be described as a ’reverse gravity field’. This means that when any user approaches a group of complex objects, the speed of his or her motion becomes gradually slower. 28
BENEDIKT, MICHAEL, Cyberspace: Some Proposals , in Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, p. 152
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The explanation can naturally be found in the finite computational speed that is dependent of the rate of a new-frame display, of the level of detail displayed, and of the amount of the ‘increase of information ‘ with each frame. When a maximum of smoothness and imitation of nature has to be achieved, the solution of adaptive refinement is chosen. This means that the level of detail of an approached object automatically and gradually increases. However, applying this technique as a norm would violate the next principle. 3. Principle of Indifference (PI) The felt realness of any world depends on the degree of it s i ndifference to the presence of a particular ‘user’ and on its resistance to his/her desire .29 This principle is primarily based on a simple observation of situations in reality, where mysterious complexity often is characterised by ignorance and indifference of the actions of its perceiver. Moreover, it can be described as a characteristic that commonly is known under ‘life goes on whether or not you are there’. It is, in fact, one of the powers of everyday reality, in which people become curious about certain developments and have to adapt themselves to the flow of data, transactions, and situations. Ultimately, it is the argument for the independent existence of virtual worlds as in the thoughts of William Gibson, in which the user finally is able to believe the relevance and continuity of the witnessed actions and events. Nevertheless, this principle should be used with care, and a balance must be found to design cyberspaces both indifferent and responsive, both beyond and for the individual.
Figure IV-14 Left image: a dark surface cuts the link-object. This view offers the user an idea of the relevance this object possesses (which is obviously a little higher than the corresponding number that appears in the lower left corner of the screen, here 50%). On the right, the user moves underneath the surface, and is now able to conclude that link 8 and 9 have a lower relevance than the actual number on which the surface is set on 70% while link 1 obviousl VR
/search Most importantly, the user is able to request any desired combination of search items so that, in fact, the resulting VR/search-world becomes individually determined. But even a certain unchanged input does not necessarily has to produce one single defined world, as the resulting links obtained by the search engine are not fixed in time themselves. In the world itself, some little or continuous actions are taking place without any triggering of the user. On the other hand, the user has the capability to control parts of the world by means of a provided user-interface. Moreover, the user is able to move a horizontal flat surface in the environment, which visually tries to clarify the relationship between the vertical dimension and the relevance of the represented links.
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BENEDIKT, MICHAEL, Cyberspace: Some Proposals , in Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, p. 160
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Questions can be raised about what solution would prove to be most suitable when the user wants to govern the level of detail instead of the system’s sensors, or when the movement velocity would be held constant, hereby releasing it from the so-called gravitational grip. Then, limiting the amount of new object information per frame could result in a consistent realm where ‘phenomenal immensity follows information density’, and where certain laws of information begin to create a new spatio-temporal physics. This last solution is stated in the next principle. 4. Principle of Scale The maximum (space 0 ) velocity of user motion in c yb erspace is an inverse, monotonic function of the complexity of the world visible to him.30 Benedikt compares this principle with the characteristics of a traditional Japanese garden, in which miniaturised elements reveal their detail only from very close. Partial views direct the offering of new information, while various spatial elements (bridges, stones, obstructions,…) slow the movement of the viewer down. Nevertheless, the user feels himself powerful as the motion itself makes a difference to what can be seen. This in contrast to, for instance, the enormous, empty halls favoured by the Romans, which in fact represent, with their visual simplicity and no visual change, a near zero gain of information. VR
/search In this program, some precautions are taken to avoid that too many moving objects, complex textures, proximity-sensors, touch-buttons, and other elements would appear at the same time, an event that in fact would ask a very large amount of computing time. For instance, the user-interface, which actually contains many sensors, is only existent (and thus computable) in the programmed scene structure when the user has touched a certain button. Furthermore, the link-objects reveal only an extra amount of more detailed information when the user approaches them close enough to perceive it. Meanwhile other informational elements that become too large in size to be understood correctly, disappear from the user’s view. This technique is conceptualised for two reasons: to decrease the number of objects to be calculated by the computer, and to avoid any oversupply or overlapping of data seen by the user. On the other hand, it should be noted that standard VRMLnodes (such as Box, Sphere, ElevationGrid, IndexedLine,…) were used as much as possible, this instead of certain complex geometries that can only be generated and programmed via uneconomic, large data-files derived from nonintelligent data-translators.31
I V.5 .5 Th e R e ma in i n g P r i n c i p l es 5. Principle of Transit (PT) Travel between two points in cyberspace should occur phenomenally through all intervening points, no matter how fast , and should incur costs to the traveller proportional to some measure of distance.32 The concept of ‘cost’ in this context is left open to some interpretation (for example loss of resolution, loss of range of view, of smoothness of motion,…), although it seems reasonable to identify it with the notion of time. Then this Principle of Transit may seem rather unnecessary, as one of the main advantages of network computing is certainly 30
BENEDIKT, MICHAEL, Cyberspace: Some Proposals , in Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, p. 162 31 For instance, AutoCAD à VRML translators change a rather simple file-structure into a very high amount of abstract and inefficient numerical data. 32 BENEDIKT, MICHAEL, Cyberspace: Some Proposals , in Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, p. 168
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the almost instant access possible to every file, document, and program one is interested in. However, Benedikt offers four different considerations to argument the validity of this principle. §
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Access is never really instant. It always takes some time to search and locate information and send it to the distant user. These delays could thus made proportional to a determinate ‘distance’ in cyberspace, and evenly be used to show/experience the route between. Navigating around file structures, selecting paths, accessing different and distant computers, and so on constitutes a good deal of the pleasure of computing. This action in fact demands human imagining, and creates ultimately a kind of (for computer fans) addictive ‘environment’, of which various mental geographies can be designed and physically managed. Benedikt thus clearly wants to preserve the orienting, world-building tendency possessed by human beings, and preserve the fundamental concepts of distance and velocity. These techniques should then be implemented as opposed to abstract structures such as menus, hierarchies and graphs, while users have to remember codes and manuals to be able to ‘hop’ (instead of a ‘slide’) from one location to another. Being in transit for significant periods of time in relatively public areas can be considered as useful. Benedikt is convinced that in between tasks both spatially and temporally, a person is open for ‘accident’ and ‘incident’. He refers hereby to coincidental meetings varying from hallways to airports, which can be considered as essential when an interpersonal network is being formed. The process of progressive revelation inherent in closing distance between self and object, and the narrative of travel are important. Destinations would all be ‘certain’, and notions as time and history and the unfolding of situations would collapse, hereby existing in the physical world only.
Figure IV-15 Two alternative representations of links inside the
VR/ search world.
On the other hand, Benedikt proposes certain regions in cyberspace that might have a number of designated transfer stations . These elements should offer the users a very quick, blind and easy transportation, in which the last principle is ignored. When such a cyberspace is entered, the user should appear in a so-called port of entry, which should resemble its real-world counterpart such as an airport, a train station and so on. These ports should function as geographic, cultural, and economic landmarks, offering users an orientation point in their exploration of the virtual world. For Benedikt, there should also be a special kind of ports, namely gateways , which have the capability to connect users to parallel, perhaps proprietary, cyberspaces. The three mentioned systems contain own sets of protocols and are able to overlap, coincide, grow, and connect as required. Finally, leaving cyberspace could be accomplished more or less instantly or by means of a kind of ‘autopilot’, which offers the user a quick view on the logic of cyberspace on the way back to the port of entry.
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Navigation Data and Destination Data Navigation data is that class of information that orients the users in time and space, in location and direction, by means of addresses, instructions, or warnings, in fact the tool that organises users in spatio-temporal terms. Destination data , is that class of information that in some sense satisfies , as it answers some kind of questions or promises. It may take the form of text, an image, a face to speak to, a piece of music or code, a diagram and so on, as it is that information which has to be judged by the user. Navigation and destination data always appear together, and it is even so that they can be transformed in one another. The amount of available information of each category varies in time and by the user’s actions. For instance, continuously choosing items on a menu-driven interface generally decreases the amount of displayed navigation data, until destination data fills the screen.
Figure IV-16 In the left image, the user has to judge a large amount of navigation data. When a certain object is finally reached, a majority of destination data is offered, as it ‘waits’ for or ‘expects’ further actions of the user. VR §
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/search Navigation data: the X- and Z-axis are clarified by means of a clickable legend on ground surface, so that an object-link’s coordinates (and thus its size and date) can be roughly estimated. Furthermore, an always-visible text informs the user about the vertical position of the adaptable cutting horizontal surface so that the object-link’s height (and thus its relevance) can be spatially read out of these both relationships. It should also be noted that the conceptual ground-surface was chosen for a better orientation and cognitive estimation of distances between the objects, as users seemed to encounter some difficulties when doing this in a complete black and empty space. Destination Data: when the user approaches an object-link close enough, or when he moves with his pointer over the object, detailed information appears respectively on its surface and on the VRML-interface. This information is then completely available to be judged by the user’s requirements.
6. Principle of Personal Visibility (PVV) (1) individual users in/of cyberspace should be visible, in some non-trivial form, and at all times, to all other users in the vicinity, and (2) individual users may choose for their own reasons wheth er or not, and to what extent, to see/display any or all of the other users in the vicinity.33 Although this principle seems a direct threat to the notion of privacy, Benedikt is convinced this is certainly not, because he thinks about a very minimal amount of visibility. For instance, small coloured spheres might represent persons in cyberspace, each indicating alone its position, its movement and, of course, its presence . No restrictions are mentioned about the channel that should be used for interpersonal contact, such as voice, video, text, gesture, VR-touch, etc. User-identity information 33
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obviously is not an essential part of the minimal presence, and anonymity is thus considered as acceptable. The first rule of the principle is not only meant for potential hackers and dangerous ‘sys-ops’, but is actually based on the assumption of democracy and accountability, or in Benedikt’s words “to be there, in some deep sense, for others.” Other, less hypothetical reasons are also mentioned. The possible social phenomenon called grouping behaviour for instance, or how the appearance of groups of many little spheres might draw the attention of many other users. A good part of the information available in cyberspace becomes then apparent in people, and even is people. The second rule of this principle is meant to add the user’s capability to work and feel alone, when other persons would behave in some distracting manner. The user even might possess the power to select who should be turned visible by criteria such as proximity, task orientation, sex, origin, interest, and so on. VR
/search As this program is completely built up by VRML-objects, it is also bound to its restrictions. Not only does this mean that the programmer had to deal with some instabilities of this new programming language, but this resulted also in the fact that a VRML-world shared by multiple users is still impossible in the available standard. However, it should be noted that this field of research is developing at a rapid race and that some commercial applications are existent that overcome this problem. Most probably, this will be a technical issue for the next VRMLspecification.
7. Principle of Commonality Virtual p laces should be ‘objective’ in a circumscribed way for a defined community of users.34 In other words, this principle requires that all users in a certain domain and at a given time see and hear largely the same things, or at least subsets of them. Obstructions (think of shadows for example) might be different in separate views of two viewers, and it is allowed to bring other features into the world as well, dependent from the feeling, experience, and knowledge that is brought into the situation. For instance, one might reach for a cigarette that is in an other’s world in fact a pen, one might sit in a leather chair which is for another user an ordinary wooden bench. Thus, in short, two worlds of the users A and B only have to be subsets of an overall domain D. The things that are experienced by both the users are then called common and happen through the intersection of the world perceived by A and B only.
Figure IV-17 A simple representation to clarify the Principle of Commonality.
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BENEDIKT, MICHAEL, Cyberspace: Some Proposals , in Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, p. 180
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Benedikt broadens this theoretical principle to encompass the possibility of various users and the technical sides of the possible communication between them, individually or in group. Furthermore, he theoretically investigates the consequences if users would not be allowed to see those worlds of which they are not part, hereby creating the capability to make some ‘private’ worlds, in opposition to the always visible and commonly shared public worlds. Moreover, he recommends a monotonic relationship between the relative volume of space commonly visible to any two users and the bandwidth of possible communication between them.
I V.5 .6 Co n c l u s i o n It becomes now obvious that, even when the rules of Benedikt would have been strictly followed, many different solutions could be possible to solve a given visualisation problem. Benedikt clearly imagines a peaceful and commonly shared cyberspace in which all the users possess the same protocols. It seems that Benedikt believes in all the positive chances that future cyberspaces will offer to its users and its designers, although it can certainly be considered remarkable how he continuously avoids to mention most of the drawbacks that would result if his principles would be integrally implemented. It should thus consequently be noticed, that most probably not all of Benedikt’s recommendations will be realised in the cyberspaces of the future, as most of these rules need some common controlling protocol that everyone has to agree upon. For instance, it would be more than valuable if the positive or negative consequences would be investigated that could arise when some other cyberspace travellers would use different principles in this vast and shared realm. Nevertheless, most of his insights were more than interesting, mainly because he is one of the first persons who dared to write down the initial cyberspace designing rules in a very straight manner.
I V.6 C o n c l u s i o n Many different approaches and original ideas of how information could threedimensionally be visualised were mentioned. It is obvious that if architecture would be further applied in this field, indeed, the new materials of the cyberspace architect would consist of code, bandwidth, and many other electronical tools. In this view, also the VR /search –program was an important argument to prove both Benedikt’s cyberspatial principles and the still rather visionary character of this statement. For instance, as the computation speed of the program was gradually and considerably raising during the development of the program, the first, and maybe most important, designing constraint was almost being reached: that of usability of the cyberspace application when the technical developments of today are applied. “Architects of the twenty-first century will shape, arrange, and connect spaces (both real and virtual) to satisfy human needs. They will still care about the qualities of visual and ambient environment. They will still seek commodity, firmness, and delight. But commodity will be as much a matter of software functions and interface design as it is of floor plans and construction materials. Firmness will entail not only the physical integrity of structural systems, but also the logical integrity of computer systems. And delight? Delight will have unimagined new dimensions.”35
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MITCHELL, WILLIAM J., City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn , MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1995, p.105
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Co n c l u s io n And indeed, we could certainly be considered as “witnesses to an extraordinary era that will no doubt be remembered in history as an appropriately revolutionary development to accompany the new millennium”, like already was promised before in one of the very first quotes of this text. And hopefully, this statement has gained at least some credibility while its wide-ranging content was being read. Program The proposed VR/search-program should certainly not be considered as a final statement of a three-dimensional search-result visualisation. In the contrary, many different approaches are possible to represent the various layers possessed by the offered information. Furthermore, this program was more conceptualised as an intuitive exploration than a really ‘workable’ application. Some of VR’s characteristics were found remarkable, like for instance the fact that the spatial implications of certain digitised design decisions could be experienced almost immediately. As the used platform consisting of VRML and Netscape Communicator 4.04 certainly could not be considered as ‘stable’, other criteria next to the aesthetic one, such as the workability, user-speed, and computing effort had to be strictly evaluated as well. Moreover, this program proves in a way also the importance of coding knowledge (in a certain degree), when a design has to be made in a virtual environment and, for instance, dynamic actions have to be included. This means that, despite the existence of user-friendly form-generating VRML-applications such as CGI’s Cosmoworlds , the implementation of animated and triggered behaviour plus the objects themselves had to be programmed ‘by hand’, which required a complete understanding of the scene-hierarchy and objectfeatures. Thus, despite the fact that these ‘interactive user interface development’programs certainly will further develop in more sophisticated versions, it cannot be ignored that most probably understanding programming code will always be an advantage to some architectural inspired minds concerned with the design of cyberspace. Future It seems only logic that the future of cyberspace cannot be predicted with great certainty. As it is almost completely build up out of the notion of dynamic information, the input as well as its interrelated output will continuously change. Cyberspace is then that resulting ‘hyper-dimensional’ framework left behind as a fluid, floating, and unstable representation of numerous abstract thoughts of in fact those people who try to conceptualise, imagine, and visualise it. Undeniably, in the whole shift towards the notion of the informational and cyberspatial realm, architecture plays an essential role. Although it is bound to the laws of the marketplace and the principles of its history and theory, still it retains the capacity to provide innovation within a margin of action that is free from standardisation and regulation. The aim of this text was thus to show a part of the wide range of opportunities architectural practice and theory could both grasp when the traditional notion of architecture would be broadened up to include now also the structures and expectations of the digital future. Ultimately, this new movement could then provide and inspire society with a new sort of imagination, of which at least the spirit was meant to exist in this text.
“ARCHITECTS OF ALL DIMENSIONS, THERE IS AN IMMENSE AMOUNT OF WORK TO BE DONE!” (Ole Bouman - RealSpace in QuickTimes , p.55)
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Ref er en c es Books BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Introduction & Cyberspace: Some Pr oposals , in Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, pp.1-25 & pp.119-224 BEAUBIEN, P. MICHAEL, Playing at Community: Multi-User Dungeons and Social Interpretation in Cyberspace, in STRATE LANCE, JACOBSON RONALD & GIBSON B. STEPHANIE (Ed.), Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment , Hampton Press, New Jersey, 1996, pp.179-188 BOUMAN, OLE, RealSpace in QuickTimes: Architecture and Digitization, Rosbeek, Nuth, 1996, pp.61, http://www.nai.nl/www_riq/RiQ_essay.html BOUMAN, OLE, Quick Space in Real Time, in Archis, No.4 1998, pp.52-55 BRICKEN, MEREDITH , Virtual Worlds: No Interface to Design , in BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991pp.363-381 DAVID, TOMAS, Old Rituals for New Space: Rites de Passage and William Gibson’s Cultural Model of Cyberspace, in BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 199, pp.31-47 DUISBERG, CHRISTOPHER & GUIHAND, MARC, …growing Buildings out of Data Fields?, in transForm, No.2, January 1998, pp.65-69 EISENMAN ARCHITECTS, The Virtual House, in Dialogue, No.9, November 1997, pp.56-60 EISENMAN, PETER, The Time of Serra’s Space: Torquing Vision, in ANY, How the Critic See, No.21, pp.56-62 ESCOBAR, ARTURO, Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture, in SARDAR, ZIAUDDIN & RAVETZ, JEROME R. (Ed.), Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway, Pluto Press, London, 1996, pp.111-137 FRAZER, JOHN, An Evolutionary Architecture, E.G.Bond Ltd., London, 1995, pp.117, http://www.gold.net/ellipsis/evolutionary/evolutionary.html GIBSON, WILLIAM, Biochips, (Dutch translation of Count Zero, 1986), in De Cyberpunkromans, Meulenhoff-*M, Amsterdam, 1994, pp.277-542 GIBSON, WILLIAM, Neuromancer , (first published: Victor Gollanecz Ltd., London, 1984), HarperCollinsPublishers, London, 1995, pp.320 GIBSON, WILLIAM, Virtueel Licht , (Dutch translation of Virtual Light ), Meulenhoff-*M, Amsterdam, 1994, pp.318 GIBSON, WILLIAM, Academy Leader, BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, in pp.27-29 GLOOR, PETER, Elements of Hypermedia Design: Techniques for Navigation and Visualisation in Cyberspace, Birckhäuser, Berlin GRAHAM, STEPHEN & AURIGI, ALESSANDRO, Urbanising Cyberspace? The Nature and Potential of the Virtual Cities Movement, in CITY , Nr.7, May 1997, pp.18-39
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HARTMAN J. & WERNECKE J., The VRML 2.0 Handbook: Building Moving Worlds on the Web, Addison-Wesley, Amsterdam, 1996, pp.412, http://vrml.sgi.com/handbook HEIM, MICHAEL, The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace, BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, in pp. 59-80 IEEE 1997, Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium, IEE computer Society Press, Brussels, 1997 KINNEY, JAY, Is There a New Political Paradigm Lurking in Cyberspace?, in SARDAR, ZIAUDDIN & RAVETZ, JEROME R. (Ed.), Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway, Pluto Press, London, 1996, pp.138-153 KOEKEBAKKER, OLOF, Gevormde Ruimte en Bewegende Huid, in Items, No.5, 1996, pp.50-54 KOOLHAAS, REM, SMLXL, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1995 LECUYER, ANNETTE, Building Bilbao, in Architectural Review, No.12, December 197, pp.42-45 LYNN, GREG, Blobs, or why Tectonics is Square and Topology is Groovy, in ANY , No.14, 1996, pp. 59-61 MATSUBA, STEPHEN & ROEHL, BERNIE, Using VRML, Que Corp., Indianapolis, 1996 MITCHELL, WILLIAM J., City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn , MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1995, http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/ MORNINGSTAR, CHIP & FARMER, R. RANDALL, The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat, in BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, pp.273-300 NEGROPONTE, NICHOLAS, Being Digital, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1995, pp.243 NOVAK, MARCOS, Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace, in BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, pp.225-254 PHELAN, JOHN M., CyberWalden: The Inner of Interface, in STRATE LANCE, JACOBSON RONALD & GIBSON B. STEPHANIE (Ed.), Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment , Hampton Press, New Jersey, 1996, pp.39-48 SANDERS, KEN, The Digital Architect: a common-sense Guide to Using Computer Technology in Design Practice, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1996 SALA, LUC & BARLOW, JOHN P., Virtual Reality: De Metafysische Kermisattractie , SALA Communications, Amsterdam, 1990 SARDAR, ZIAUDDIN, alt.civilisations.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker side of the West, in SARDAR, ZIAUDDIN & RAVETZ, JEROME R. (Ed.), Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway, Pluto Press, London, 1996, pp.14-41 SCHMITT, GERHARD, Architectura et Machina : Computer Aided Architectural Design und Virtuelle Architektur , Vieweg, Wiesbaden, 1993 SCHMITT, GERHARD, Architektur mit dem Computer , Vieweg, Wiesbaden, 1996, http://caad.arc.ethz.ch/projects/acm SKEATES, RICHARD, The Infinite City, in CITY , Nr.8, December 1997, pp.6-21 STONE, ALLUCQUERE ROSANNE, Sex, Death and Architecture, in Any, No.3, Nov/Dec, 1993, pp.34-40
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STONE, ALLUCQUERE ROSANNE, Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures, in BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, pp.81-118 STRATE LANCE, JACOBSON RONALD & GIBSON B. STEPHANIE (Ed.), Surveying the Electronic Landscape: An Introduction to Communication and Cyberspace, in Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment , Hampton Press, New Jersey, 1996, pp.1-22 TAYLOR, C. MARK & SAARINEN, ESA, Imagologies: Media Philosophy, Routledge, London, 1994 TAYLOR, C. MARK, De-signing the Simcit, in Any, No.3, Nov/Dec, 1993, pp.10-18 TOLHURST W., PIKE M., BLANTON K., Using the Internet, Special Edition, Que Corp., Indianapolis, 1994 TSCHUMI, BERNARD, Ten Points, Ten Examples, in Any, No.3, Nov/Dec, 1993, pp.40-44 TUFTE, EDWARD R., Envisioning Information, Graphics Press, Cheshire, 1990 VACCA, R. JOHN, VRML: Bringing Virtual Reality to the Internet, AP Professional, London VAN BERKEL, BEN & BOS, CAROLINE, Mobile Forces, Monograph, Ernst & Sohn, Berlin 1994 WEXELBLATT, ALAN, Giving Meaning to Place: Semantic Spaces, in BENEDIKT, MICHAEL (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, London, 1991, pp.255-271 WHITTLE, DAVID B., Cyberspace: The Human Dimension, W.H. Freeman Co., New York, 1996 WOOLLEY, BENJAMIN, Virtual Worlds: a Journey in Hype and Hyperreality , Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1992, pp.255 ZAMPI, GIULIANO & MORGAN, LLOYD CONWAY, Virtual Architecture, McGraw-Hill, London, 1995
WWW BELL, JONATHAN, Communication Technology and Architecture, 1996, http://ctiweb.cf.ac.uk/dissertations/virtual_architecture/contents.html BOYER, M CHRISTINE, Cybercities, http://kubrick.ethz.ch/fake_space/reader/cybercities1.html CAMPBELL, A. DACE • Vers une Architecture Virtuelle... , 1994, http://www.hitl.washington.edu/people/dace/portfoli/arch560.html • Design in Virtual Environments using Architectural Metaphor, http://ftp.hitl.washington.edu/publications/campbell/document/ CASPERSEN, TORBJOERN, Architecture of Cyberspace, 1995, http://kit.trdkunst.no/~casper/diplom/thesisindex.html CHANG, TERRENCE, A Model for Organizing Architectural Design Information, 1995, http://www.caad.ed.ac.uk/~salih/thesis/thesis.htm
ETHZ • •
Babylon S M L XL, http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/~wenz/babylon TRACE , http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/trace
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• • • • • • •
http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/projects/aquamicans rojects/aquamicans AQUAMICANS , http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/p !hello_world?, http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/hello_world Informationslandschaft, http://alterego.arch.ethz.ch/infotmationslandschaft Raumgeschichten: http://alterego.arch.ethz.ch/raumgeschicht Virtual House, http://virtualhouse.ch ZIPBau, http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/visits/zipbau.html ZIPBau, http://caad.arch.ethz/research/ZIPBau/
JUN, TANAKA, From (im)possible to Virtual Architecture , http://ziggy.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/files/Virtual.html McMILLAN KATE, Architecture and the Broader Community, May 1994, http://www.arch.unsw.edu.au/subjects/arch/specres2/mcmillan/ NOVAK, MARCOS • Transmitting Architecture, http://www.ctheory.com/a34-transmitting_arch.html • Trans Terra Form, http://www.t0.or.at/~krcf/nlonline/nonMarcos.html, http://flux.carleton.ca/SITES/PROJECTS/LIQUID/Novak1.html OFLUOGLU, SALIH, Cyberspace Architecture: Slouching towards Babylon , 1995, http://www.accentgrave.com/thesis.html RALPH, D. RANDY, Search Engines: Indexes, Directories and Libraries , April 1997, http://www.netstrider.com/search/directory.html YOUNG, PETER, Three Dimensional Information Visualisation, 1996, (also published in Computer Science Technical Report, No. 12/96), http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dcs3py/pages/work/documents/lit— survey/IV-Survey/ AUTHOR UNKNOWN • The Success Story between Gehry and Dassaults Systèmes Software Program CATIA , http://www.catia.ibm.com/custsucc/sufran.html • Cyberspace: the new Jerusalem, http://marlowe.winsey.com/~rshand/streams/gnosis/cyber.htm • Cyber23: Virtual Architecture: Liquid Architectures, Interview with Marcos Novak , http://www.best.com/~cyber23/virarch/novak.htm
Recommended Sites Architecture and Technology, http://www.archi.org ETHZ CAAD Research Group, http://caad.arch.ethz.ch Javascript Tutorial, http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/~stouffs/javascript/ Marcos Novak, http://www.aud.ucla.edu/~marcos/marcos.html MIT MediaLab, http://www.media.mit.edu/ Nederlands Architectuur Instituut (Nai), http://www.nai.nl Post-Graduate Projects at ETHZ, http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/teaching/nds SGI’s Cosmoworlds, http://www.cosmo.sgi.com Phase(x), http://space.arch.ethz.ch/ws97/ VRML Specification, http://webspace.sgi.com/moving-worlds/spec/ VRML Repository, http://www.sdsc.edu/vrml_repository/ VRML Version of a MUD, http://www.cybertown.com and much more…
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