Screenspaces

Page 1

Delft School of Design Series on Architecture and Urbanism

Editors Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich

Series Editor Arie Graafland

With contributions by Andreas Angelidakis, Lisa Blackman, Ina Blom,

Editorial Board K. Michael Hays (Harvard University, USA) | Ákos Moravánszky (ETH Zürich, Switzerland)

Felicity Callard, Suparna Choudhury, Jordan Crandall, Elie During,

Michael Müller (Bremen University, Germany) | Frank R. Werner (University of Wuppertal, Germany) Gerd Zimmermann (Bauhaus University, Germany)

Keller Easterling, Lukas Ebensperger, Boris Groys, Janet Harbord,

Cognitive Architecture.

Deborah Hauptmann, Patrick Healy, Maurizio Lazzarato, Daniel Margulies,

From Biopolitics to Noopolitics. Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information

Markus Miessen, Yann Moulier Boutang, Warren Neidich, John Protevi, Steven Quartz, Andrej Radman, Philippe Rahm, John Rajchman, Patricia Reed, Gabriel Rockhill, J.A. Scott Kelso, Terrence Sejnowski, Elizabeth Sikiaridi, Jan Slaby, Paolo Virno, Frans Vogelaar, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Bruce Wexler, Charles T. Wolfe

010 Publishers Rotterdam 2010


ScreenSpaces Can Architecture Save You from Facebook Fatigue? Andreas Angelidakis

Are you suffering from Facebook fatigue? Do you scroll through Facebook more than three times a day? Do you find it hard to concentrate at work while contacts instant message you and collabo­ rators e-mail you and friends tag you and so forth? These conditions would not be a prerequisite for you reading this text, though they somewhat describe the contemporary situation. It is a situation where our typewriters have also become our phones, mailboxes, libraries, sound systems, televisions, and even our public spaces, the places where we socialize, meet people, exchange ideas, and some­ times even have sex. All this is a lot to ask from a single piece of hardware, but even more to ask from a person trying to do their ‘job’ while all this is going on. And if this is a snapshot of con­ temporary life, where exactly does architecture fit in the picture? Is a media-friendly architecture enough to respond to this situation, or is it time for a major paradigm shift? If the needs and habits of the contemporary citizen are changing, should architecture change to accommodate them or should it come to the rescue of our attention deficit society? Finding an answer to some­ thing like that is obviously impossible, since life just happens, but it’s interesting to see in how many ways the question can be posed.

OffScreen  One of the ways that the contemporary citizen has changed over the last few

decades is that their attention span has diminished. Internet users are so used to clicking away from non-catchy information that does not grab their fleeting attention; it is only logical to assume that the way they view theirs screens is also the way they view their off-screen environ­ ments. Of course, away from their screens and into a ‘real space,’ they cannot click away so easily, but the question is would they if they could? And should architecture do something about this? At the conference organized at the Delft School of Design (DSD), which was the first step in the development of this volume, I tried to answer sections of this question via examples from my own practice, but transferring a lecture onto a piece of text is like describing the experience of a building you visited with plan and section drawings, which is to say the information might still be there but it’s really not the same thing. A building usually contains life, or it contains light, smells and maybe sounds. These imprint themselves onto your subconscious and you remember them, even if at that moment you were paying no attention. The drawings of a building contain none of the above information, though they are alive, indeed infested with the architects’ ambitions, his/her thoughts on how the build­ ing will be perceived, the hopes and anxieties, the speculations on how the real building will turn out. On the other hand, when we read a drawing of a building, we often remember spaces we have already visited, or imagine the spaces we see on the paper as buildings we have been to, so it’s not a clear plate, everything is layered with our previous information. Being ‘there’ and imagining the ‘there’ are two different conditions. Today, we experience the second condition more often than

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the first: We talk to people via phone, Skype and instant messengers, we look at buildings in magazines and on blogs, we meet people online. We are not there, but neither are we here. Our screens have become the portal for experiencing life in the second degree. What makes architects different in this, is that their brains are full of experi­ encing buildings in their second degree, design-stage versions of reality, as drawings, models, and various other representations. Quite often their struggle consists of making the actual building as similar as possible to the imagined building, making reality resemble their screens.

TripleSpace  In the situation of a person sitting in front of a screen, look­

ing at drawings of a building, we have three spaces to pass through before we enter that building for real. The first space is somewhere inside the skull of the person sitting in front of the computer. That space is imaginary, distorted by memories, subconscious information, needs, frustrations, neurons exploding left and right. That is the space we inhabit more than any other space, and it is a space we never leave, it is a window to all other spaces, it is our mental space. Everything we see is through this space. The second space is the place where our screen is located. No matter how nerdy and attached to our computer we are, the space where the sitting-in-front-of-the-screen takes place matters, the hardware we are using matters too, even the software matters. That space, the space between the citizen and the screen, extends all the way to the surface of that screen. One could argue that that space ends inside the graphic interface of the operating system, or maybe it even extends to the software you are using to view whatever it is you are viewing. All the hardware and the software you are using is part of your room, it affects everything that comes on to your screen, it is part of the distance your gaze needs to travel from your eyes to the space that exists inside the computer repre­ sentation, the space where a lot of your social life takes place nowadays, the third space.

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Let’s say you are an architect, working on a design for a house. The third space in question is that house, represented in the drawings on your screen; it is a space you are imagining or in the process of devising. To get to that house we have to pass through the other two spaces, the mental space and the room space. Through these three different spaces we experience the building inside the screen. In these three spaces stuff will distract us from the experience of that house, one might argue that they will make our experience of that house richer, since it is filtered by so much other stuff. As you imagine yourself walking down corridors in your imagined house, memories of last nights’ dinner pop up, a window blinks at the bottom of your screen – somebody wants to talk to you, maybe the little red light on your handheld device says ‘you have a new message’ and while all this is going on you are also listening to the rain fall outside your window, and maybe even to

music. Can you really take so much information, and still say you are inside the building-drawinghouse?

ScreenDisorder  So this text could never be the same as the lecture at the DSD, though it might attempt to shed light on similar issues. If you read this text closely, some information will stay with you, but if you sort of scan it diagonally, you will miss a lot of stuff. If you had been in the room at Delft, even nodding off half asleep, something from the lecture would have stayed with you if only subconsciously, because all you ever remember from lectures is what you saw and not so much what you heard. A couple of years ago I was at a conferences and had the chance to hear researcher Linda Stone talk about her concept of Continuous Partial Attention and how contemporary life is so full of distractions that we have lost the ability to fully concentrate on anything (www.lindastone.net). I really paid attention to that lecture because it seemed to ring so many bells, she spoke about conditions I had described many times but had never heard it so clearly stated, and somehow it all made sense. Even if you are not an architect, even when you are not working, you tend to be in front of a screen, which invariably contains your job, your friends, your library, but also your phone, your television and even your newspaper. How to even try to write a text amid all this chaos? Visiting a building is of course different than writing a text, or even reading one. You don’t need to pay too much attention, because all your senses are working together. You can be thinking of your mother or talking on the phone to your boyfriend and still you will remember what it was like to visit that building. Or you will remember what that building felt like while you were thinking of your mother and talking to your boyfriend. On top of all that, the building you are walking through might remind you of other places you’ve been to or seen in movies, so the experience of walking through can never be a virgin experience. As Baudrillard has said over and over, there is no more real, all is simulation. I guess reality is never one-dimensional.

ScreenBuildings  Somewhere at this point in the presentation at DSD, I showed a project from 1997, and maybe it fits this part of the discussion. That project was a design for an online community on the Active Worlds platform, which I put together with artist Miltos Manetas. Initially it started as a copy of Miltos’ exhibition at Postmasters gallery in New York, the space for which I was asked to design. We had just discovered Active Worlds so we decided to copy the exhibition onto Active Worlds and to bring this new and exciting technology to a contemporary art gallery setting. The Internet was just beginning to expand as a popular medium, and it seemed that people were getting rich quick, so expanding this exhibition project into a fully blown busi­

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ness venture seemed like the logical next step: we would make this a world for art and architecture, give away free gallery spaces and artist studios where our friends could host ‘virtual’ copies of their exhibitions, and eventually we would charge money for these ‘virtual’ spaces. The only problem was that most of the people involved in contemporary art at that time saw the computer solely as a communi­ cation device, a fancy version of a fax machine, and nothing they saw on a compu­ ter screen seemed like art to them. This was of course before the Internet became personal, before Facebook and MySpace transferred their social networks onto their screens and they realized that the Internet was not technology, it was just life. We went ahead with the launch of our project, named it Chelsea after the then new New York area for contemporary art, and even if it did not make a ton of money, it was successful as a media project and as a revelation: You could design buildings online really cheaply, you didn’t need clients, didn’t need construction crews, and didn’t have too many limitations. Suddenly your drawing tools became your construction tools, too. There was no gravity, no rain, and at that point no money, it was close to free to build a building and you could invite your friends for a walkthrough. The real attraction of Active Worlds was not money but archi­ tecture: you could design and build buildings on the spot, use readily available libraries of objects such as construction yards, copy-paste walls and windows, and assemble your own fabulous structures. If they didn’t turn out too fabulous you could just tear them down with a few clicks. And the real revelation was that sud­ denly, while you were submerged in your screen focusing on a design for a ‘Pink and Black’ pavilion, a friend would pop into your drawing, walk around the space of your design and give you feedback or just chat; everything was happening online, and you were designing on the world wide public space of the web, so you had visitors to a building you were just beginning to sketch. Building and drawing collapsed into one, construction and design became one too, and people could live inside your drawings! And you could keep adjusting and changing stuff around even after they moved in! This excitement resulted in an endless array of ‘buildings’ popping out of my studio, some of them documented, some lost forever in the depths of a tricky Internet server. The only funny side effect was enormous phone bills, because this was before Broadband and Internet cost money by the minute. We didn’t care, because we were hooked to these instant ‘screenbuildings,’ and all we ever wanted to do was be connected all the time, and forever build buildings online.

Citizen of the Screen  Designing buildings without dealing with people

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can be fun but it gets boring after a while, so we started to treat all our friends as potential clients for these electronic buildings, these homes away from home. There, another revelation came along by studying the reaction of these clients to our endless stream of buildings. Like us, they were basically scatterbrain Internet nerds, and so it was clear: Internet people got bored way more easily than regular people. Buildings that were not easy to describe would not catch their attention,

and besides, if you had to type too much explanation into the chat window, you yourself became bored of typing. This new Internet architecture was all about abbreviation; visual abbreviation and conceptual abbreviation, even structural abbreviation. If to build something you had to copy-paste too many different 3D objects from the online ‘material yard’ then the building became too hard to build, and maybe you even got bored in the process. Plus Internet was charging by the minute, so the longer you took to build something, the more it cost, which made the Internet like real life after all. Looking back at all the buildings we constructed in Chelsea World, it becomes clear that as time progressed, the descriptions for the designs went from something like ‘an adaptation of a modernist exhibition space into an Internet era video game type of space where your perspective constantly changes’ to the much shorter ‘pink and black building’ or ‘shadow building’ (Figure 1). The buildings we produced had to be ‘short-attention-span friendly,’ they had to have short names, short descriptions and a clear visual impact; they had to work like logos, had to be simple and complex at the same time and they had to convey the idea immediately if not ever at all. You had to remember them even if you were not paying any attention. And the reason for all this abbreviation was simple. Walking around this 3D space in this Internet community was like walk­ ing through a space full of links to other spaces, you were not obliged to stay in one place too long; if you got bored you could just click away and teleport to another world, or even be entirely bored and click on one of the other softwares running on your screen and read the news or watch TV. And if all this was of no interest at all, you might even, god-forbid, get up off your chair and leave the computer altogether. You would be a user that we had no chance of attracting again. The same can happen in an actual constructed building, where most of the time you are allowed to leave if you are bored, though it takes time and it involves exiting physically, which can also be an architectural experience. Exiting a building in an online community takes nothing more than a click! And a blink! You’re somewhere else. Immediately I realized that this was some sort of oblique paradigm shift for architecture, because these nerdy scatterbrained early Internet adopters would be you and me in a few years. This was the society of the Attention Deficit Syndrome citizen. I was sure that the Internet was going to be massive, and that the Internet user of the late 1990s would come to represent the new world citizen, and by extension all the users of all buildings. So, buildings had to start understand­ ing this new attention span issue, otherwise they would be boring to people. Somebody might even invent real-life teleportation, and then things would get really tough. And even if not, every­ body’s attention span would one day be like those speedy Internet users, and everybody would only be able to pay attention to a space in between reading messages on their blackberry, talking on the phone and listening to other people talking on the phone and even looking at screens and maybe even talking to somebody physically next to them. The space had to overcome these obsta­ cles and win the attention space war.

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ScreenSpaces. Can Architecture Save You from Facebook Fatigue?

‘While writing this text, I take short breaks to upload videos on YouTube using the neighboring laptop. They say multitasking is not really efficient, but I have no choice anymore. I started using two computers at the same time, in the hope that I would keep one of my screens free of the Internet and thus free of distractions, and that like that I would have a serene ‘work’ computer and all the other stuff would be delegated to the laptop. Certainly I broke down and the communica­ tion stuff crept onto the work screen, and now its distraction times two: stuff blinking and popping on the laptop and stuff beeping on the work screen. So while writing this and uploading on YouTube, I felt like I had not updated my status on Facebook in quite a while, so I skip over between sentences to do that, and on my friend Octavio Zaya’s status, I see a brief sentence that reads: ‘Arriving at a destination before leaving? We have broken the speed of light?’ I just glance at the first lines of the text about some scientists’ discovery regarding speed and I guess time travel, but I can’t read too much because I have to get back to the text. Does this mean that time will be faster than us? That reality will happen so fast that we won’t be able to experience it? Will we have to look at things so fast that we won’t even have time to look at them? Is there any point in even trying to assemble all this information about attention span when reality is about to go ‘speedscreen’ on us? I read no further and continue the text; I guess I have to just stay focused, stay out of Facebook, out of gaydar, out of a million other social net­ working pages, out of news, out of phone. And it is Saturday afternoon; I’m not even supposed to be working.’

the readymade diner booths and banquettes we found in the object libraries online, we put together a diner, roughly configured like the space in Stockholm. That diner had webcam links and teleports all over and we advertised it both in Stockholm and New York. Creative Time in New York came on as a partner in the project and slowly people started hanging out in the online diner, which Miltos Manetas dubbed TeleportDiner (Figures 2 and 3). When it came time to build an actual something in Stockholm, instead of copying or translating or remaking an Ameri­ can diner, we copied the TeleportDiner. What was for a few weeks a real Internet space was used as a drawing for a space that was not real anymore but rather a representation. The built space became the drawing, because the real space had been the online space. The space in Stockholm actually even looked like a drawing because when you copy Internet furniture into furniture made of wood, you realize how crudely and simply they are designed, with no detailing whatsoever. I guess on the Internet nobody has time for details. I called this the JPG Minimalism Manifesto. Other projects followed: Pause was another space inside Fargfabriken, this time built to resemble a computer rendering (Figure 4). After we photographed the space it was demolished, and what remained was photographs of a building made to look like it was never built. Tetris Mountain was a design for a portable amphitheater made as a pile of soft modules connected with Velcro. You could ‘play Tetris’ in the space and each time end up with a space for watching projections and hanging out. We realized that Tetris was the oldest and simplest architecture software (Figures 5 and 6). Other projects, like My Anchorage, Mavala and Future Paris examined the relationship of what we call ‘real’ and what we call ‘virtual’ (Figures 7, 8 and 9). Electronic Orphanage studied the ways a storefront can become a screen and a navigation menu can become a workspace (Figures 10 and 11).

The contemporary condition is just that. A screen engulfs us even when we are not working, a million time-sucks lurking behind each link. You are casually drafting on a 3D program, and endless links and endless updated blogs await, with endless buildings just built and just Photoshopped to briefly demand your attention, and then vanish in the depths of the blogs. It used to be that buildings were to last forever, now buildings need to last about as long as it takes to scroll down the pages of a blog.

ScreenSpaces  All these examples find us just outside the space that we are talking about. Looking at the graphic interface of a screen and interacting with information still finds us sitting on our desk twitching with excitement and boredom, trying to work and not work at the same time. But in reality, we cannot inhabit the screen until a part of us lives inside it; until we have sent our avatar to live there, we cannot claim to have been there. The function that most generously allows us to experience the space inside the screen is gaming. So called video games are the pro­ grams that give us an avatar body and let us navigate through an onscreen architecture. We get to run, crouch, shoot, stab, and tip-toe around enemies, just like in Real Life. We get to walk through doors, and even walk through walls. We get to enter large spaces and be awed by their proportions, run up staircases, crawl through tunnels or just simply enjoy a room with a great view. All those ways that architecture can orchestrate and draw emotional and intellectual responses from its users exist in the space and the graphic interface of a video game. Well, perhaps all apart from temperature, tactility and smell, though one is surprised how far visuals go in awakening those

ScreenProjects  In the late 1990s and early 2000s I worked on a series of projects that studied and played around with some of these Internet and atten­ tion span revelations. The talk at DSD consisted of talking through these projects, but this is not a transcript so I will just run through them as examples.

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TeleportDiner was originally meant to be a social space installed inside Fargfab­ riken center for art and architecture in Stockholm. I had visited a diner run by artists in Brooklyn, together with FF director Jan Aman, and he asked me to ‘take this diner to Stockholm.’ The American diner is a retro-typology about which I was not too crazy and I thought it was too hard to try and update it. So instead of building the diner in Stockholm, I first built the diner in Active Worlds. Using

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senses too. Hell, you can even die playing video games, as the recent example of Lee Seung Seop proves. Lee Seung collapsed of fatigue and died after playing the video game StarCraft online in an Internet café for almost 50 consecutive hours. He just played too much, and he died of a combination of exhaustion and a sus­ tained adrenalin rush, presumably after shooting dead too many of his online enemies. All his ‘screenspaces’ collapsed.

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Of course, complex onscreen representation has existed forever in cinema, and architectural space in cinema is a well-trodden area of analysis, but experiencing a space in a movie is like visiting a building through the pages of a magazine. You can never say you’ve been there, until you’ve really been there. Also, the ‘There’ in question has evolved greatly through the years. The first video games were merely an animated drawing, at first a floor plan where two walls literally acted as tennis racquets, as in the game Pong. Later, we experienced space in a sectional drawing (Donkey Kong, Berzerk) but we still inhabited a drawing. It was not until the first driving simulator Night Driver that we could finally experience space in real perspective. Then in the 1990s the first First Person Shooters like Marathon came along with the added bonus of being played over a Local Area Network. This meant that you could enter and navigate the space of the game, and in there you could meet your boring co-workers or fellow students and shoot them to death. Thus the video game as spatial and architectural experi­ ence was almost complete in its development. The long dark corridors of Mara­ thon became a cathedral for young students of architecture at Columbia University, enrolled in the first ever paperless studios of the mid 1990s where, for the first time, you had to drop your pencils and design and present your ideas using only the computer. Simplistic as it sounds today, that first semester of paperless studios was a daunting experience. Designing a building on the screen was a direct extension of designing a building on a piece of paper, but getting to know the tools was tricky. So we were forever glued to our screens to catch up on all the possibilities of computer aided design, but every Friday afternoon we would all quit our design software and go to the school-wide shootout in the Marathon game. Each player was located on a different computer, and these com­ puters were scattered all over Avery Hall, anywhere with a LAN terminal and an available PC. To an outsider it might have looked like the building was trans­ formed into a typical 1980s video game arcade with fancy computers instead of clunky wooden consoles, but the experience was vastly different and in retrospect strangely eerie. We were not just sitting in front of our screens, we had become avatars and we were all meeting, experiencing and killing each other in a new space, a screenspace. As we sat crouched in front of our respective screens, locked up in the endless rooms of the late-nineteenth-century building, our avatars met each other and fought in a parallel space. That parallel space of the Marathon complex was somehow comparable to Avery Hall though it was rendered as an

industrial space texture-mapped with readymade grime and scary atmospherics. As time went by and you got lost in the game, you could hear screams of death down the corridors of this industrial complex but also screams of victory down the corridors of Avery Hall, responses to events that took place in the Marathon complex. Slowly the respected Ivy League hall blended with the generic Bladerunner inspired dystopia, and as the two buildings became one, you could imagine the game taking place not on the screen but spilling out into real space, merging the two realities into one. Death could await you even if you were just getting a Xerox in the library or a coffee from the basement. A few years later, as I learned about the Columbine High School Massacre, and the alleged news that video games had spawned this violence, I could only wonder what would have happened if Marathon had become reality in Avery Hall.

RealityScreen  So, even though for the architecture student designing on a screen was an extension of imagining buildings on a white page, existing in a screenspace was a totally new experience both from a physical and a social point of view. These three conditions, designing, shooting, and socializing, came to become what would shape screenspaces in the coming years. In the late 1990s games were divided into first person shooters and strategy games. In the shooters, like Marathon, Quake and Doom, it was you inside the screen and sometimes you could see parts of, or the entirety of your avatar body. You got to walk around ‘cinematic’ spaces, navigate on your own into mazes and labyrinths, where you could shoot and kill whoever you pleased. Later on, in the ‘roam’ subcategory of first person games like Grand Theft Auto, your path was not limited to the maze, and the point of the game was not to exterminate the enemy, but rather to roam around town, and waste time in a curious onscreen situationist dérive. That dérive took place in cities called Liberty and Vice, which were eerily identical to Los Angeles and Las Vegas. You were in a really real place. Strategy games were an entirely different experience, in that you were not really inside the space of the game, because the game took place in an axonometric space. Here your viewpoint was the all-controlling overview of designer or god. In strategy games you invariably had a city to arrange and to develop, an army to lead and a people to protect. If you developed your city cun­ ningly, your suburbs would become rich, earning you further points and further money; if your suburbs did not catch on, they would become inner city ghettos, poor and in trouble. This would cause land prices to fall, at which point in the game you would of course get a chance to buy back buildings cheaply. Then you would lure artists and other such creative types with the promise of low rents, and this would start redeveloping your inner city ghetto into a wonderfully gentrified yuppieland where frapuccinos were the thing and rents where just getting higher and higher. Strategy games were really a cynical architectural and urban design tool, even though the experi­ ence was decidedly more financial than spatial. Later on, popular games like Word of Warcraft

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managed to blend the shooter and the strategy game into a faux axonometric fairytale bird’s-eye-view perspective where the experience was partly experiential and partly organizational, and all you had to do was to interact with your fellow WOW citizens and become better than them (Figures 12 and 13). Further development in shooters came when cinema studios merged with gaming companies to push each other’s products, and suddenly your avatar was not just a guy who looked like a monster or a thug, but a celebrity guy who looked like a monster or a thug. Chronicles of Riddick had such advanced graphics that when you played you really felt like you were Vin Diesel, and Vin Diesel was you.

FullScreen  Video games and movies will doubtless keep advancing, and this years’ Avatar movie will bring even more ‘virtual reality’ in front of our eyes. Objects and spaces in movies and games will keep getting better and better, or maybe trends will shift towards simplified graphics, or even images that look handmade, because by then we will be fed up with too much graphic perfection. I guess reality is never goal oriented and you just have to go with the flow. In simi­ lar ways, a lot of the computer generated blob architecture of the past decade has been replaced by a lot of simplistic diagrammatic Japanese architecture where life is what’s important and technology is our pet, not our reality. I have stopped play­ ing video games, maybe because Facebook and blogging and working takes up too much time. But as an afterthought, and a tribute to my past gaming life, I load up a copy of Half Life II, one of the roaming shooter games of the mid 2000s famous for being so realistic. As I start to walk around the abandoned post-apocalyptic cliché dystopia, I realize that something had escaped me, even if it is the rule in almost all video games: when a game loads on your screen, it leaves room for nothing else. The software is programmed to operate ‘fullscreen,’ its hunger for graphic processing power does now allow other programs to run at the same time. The game knows that in order to succeed it has to demand your full attention.

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[1]

1  The ‘Pink and Black’ building, constructed inside Chelsea World, in 1998. The building is made by tiltin a coloring a pane of glass.


[2]

[3]

[4]

2, 3  TeleportDiner was a space originally designed and built inside the online community Active Worlds. Later, a copy of the online space was constructed inside Fargfabriken center for art and architecture in Stockholm, for the exhibition ‘Teleport Diner: From real to virtual to somewhere in-between’ in 2000. 4  Pause was a pavilion built to be photographed. On the photos, it was meant to appear as a ‘real’ computer rendering, therefore a space not actually constructed. It was a space built to look as if it were never built, and subsequently demolished at the end of the exhibition.


5, 6  Tetris Mountain is a 4-sided mobile amphitheater made up from soft modules that Velcro together in a Tetris pile. 7  My Anchorage was a video work presented at Creative Time’s Massless Medium exhibition at the Brooklyn Anchorage, curated by Carol Stakenas. The work presents a space derived from the actual Anchorage space, but presented as a pristine desert landscape, a surrealist sequence of spaces. 8  Mavala was a traditional 19th century industrial building in Geneva. We proposed to paint it bright reflective white, to turn it into a virtual building right in the middle of town, to erase it’s reality. 9  Future Paris was a version of Paris imagined as a city of light and reflections. It was produced for the 34th edition of Visionaire, edited by Dior Homme designed Hedi Slimane. [5]

[6]

[8]

[7]

[9]


[10]

[12]

[11]

10, 11  Electronic Orphanage was a storefront organized as a screen, a work-exhibition space that transformed as a pop-up menu. 12, 13  A spoof of the popular ‘World of Warcraft’ video game. The video presents the ‘The World of World of Warcraft’, a fictional game where the user controls an avatar that plays World of Warcraft. The spoof video appears on the Onion website.

[13]


Credits Delft School of Design Series on Architecture and Urbanism Series Editor Arie Graafland Editorial Board K. Michael Hayes (Harvard University, USA) Ákos Moravánszky (ETH Zürich, Switzerland) Michael Müller (Bremen University, Germany) Frank R. Werner (University of Wuppertal, Germany) Gerd Zimmermann (Bauhaus University, Germany) Also published in this series: 1 Crossover. Architecture Urbanism Technology ISBN 978 90 6450 609 3 2 The Body in Architecture ISBN 978 90 6450 568 3 3 De-/signing the Urban. Technogenesis and the urban image ISBN 978 90 6450 611 6 4 The Model and its Architecture ISBN 978 90 6450 684 0 5 Urban Asymmetries. Studies and projects on neoliberal urbanization ISBN 978 90 6450 724 3 (to be published in 2011) 6 Cognitive Architecture. From biopolitics to noopolitics Editors Deborah Hauptmann, Warren Neidich Text editing D’Laine Camp Book design by Piet Gerards Ontwerpers (Piet Gerards and Maud van Rossum), Amsterdam Printed by DeckersSnoeck, Antwerp On the cover: Virgil Grotfeldt, ‘Fantastic Garden’, 2002, coal dust and acrylic on paper, superimposed on Stephen J. Dvorak, ‘Competition drawing’, 1985, ink on paper. ©2010 The authors / 010 Publishers, Rotterdam www.010.nl ISBN 978 90 6450 725 0

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