opPOSITIONS. - simulated embodiment and the empathic spaces of existence. by Mümün Keser

opPOSITIONS MÜMÜN KESER

SIMULATED EMBODIMENT & THE EMPATHIC SPACES OF EXISTENCE

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MÜMÜN KESER, BSc.

opPOSITIONS

“simulated embodiment & the empathic spaces of existence” MASTERTHESIS LEOPOLD-FRANZENS-UNIVERSITÄT INNSBRUCK FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Dipl.-Ing / MSc. supervised by Univ.-Prof. Marjan Colletti, Dipl.-Ing., MArch, PhD institute of experimental architecture.Hochbau

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- GASTON BACHELARD -

A living creature fills an empty refuge, images inhabit, and all corners are haunted, IF NOT inhabited....

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Architecture is a man-made world, where we are living in. Based on our personal-affection, we the human beings ought to choose between them. That way, some are much more appealing to us than the others. Furthermore the ideal shapes/worlds/etc. are stored in our minds. Simulated worlds, which are embedded in our brains...

ABSTRACT WHY

Can you somehow make these “Simulations” a reality? The problem is, that it is a personal, better said individual, matter. It’s nearly impossible to make those Simulations real for every single person on this planet. It is more about shifting, merging, MIXING REALITIES… In my opinion, with the help of mixed reality, you can achieve something in that direction. You can create something like a pure personalized Architecture customized for the user. Me, the architect, would still provide the project with the output parameters, but I would get the inputs from the users. With that, we can mix the realities/shapes/functions in a way, that it suits the users the most. A building adapts itself to its users, an environment that constantly changes, not just in physical form, but also in its virtual appearance. Like, merging our bodies with the architectural body through our existence. But what is that good for? Doesn’t buildings supposed be standfast, stay the way they are until the very end of their life? When virtual things/dreams come true, they lose most of their importance in our eyes. It’s not a thing anymore, which we are after, because we already have it. In this case we start to dream about new ones. Better ones…

keywords: machine learning, simulations, embodiment, empathy, cyberspace, hyperreality

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INTRO DUCTION THEO RY REFE RENCES -6-

00 01 02

VIRTUAL N REAL CHAOS N ORDER UGLY N BEAUTY ARTIFICIAL N NATURE TEAR N REPAIR

9 10 11 12 13

CYBER-SPACE SIMU-LACRA HYPER-REALITY PER-CEPTION

15 20 30 38

STE-LARC DIGITAL-BEIJING W-EGO-HOUSE MEDIA-ART

51 54 56 58

PRO POSAL DE SIGN

03 04 05

NAR-RATIVE USE-CASE NEW-SPACE THE-LOOP THE-DATA MBTI-PERSONALITIES EMO-TION USER-ACTIVITIY

67 72 78 80 82 83 87 94

DESIGN-APPROACH VECTORFIELD-GENERATION MBTI-DATA-CONVERSION EMOTION-DATA-CONVERSION USER-ACTIVITY-CONVERSION

105 108 110 120 134

THE-INSTALLATION EQUIPE-MENT

151 157

EXPE RIENCE

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INTRO DUCTION -8-

What is the difference between them? Nowadays, are we living in a real or a virtual world? We, the human beings are constantly moving towards a future, where our daily lifes won’t have a real touch to the real world. It will be much more based on the virtual and without it, we wouldn’t even be able to do anything.

VIRTUAL REAL

How will the earth look like in 20 years from now? The moment where you take out your mobile phone and turn it on, you create a virtual bubble around yourself and enter a “virtual world”. Virtuality makes life easier, there is no reason to argue about that. It’s fast, contains a huge amount of knowledge and gadgets, which we seek during a day. But nevertheless, there is a point, where we did not reach an advanced level yet… Physicality… You can’t interact with virtual things directly. It’s somewhere out there… Is it? With the use of virtuality, you sacrifice your reality! Observation of real things offer you much more information than virtual things. You can never be sure, what’s behind the the 2D-Projections on your screen of this 3D-stuff, which you are analyzing. Most of the time, it is not even really out there, it’s fake… There is always something really significant, better said important, missing. Something, what we humans with consciousness possess. FEELING. Mostly, we recognize or remember stuff based on our feelings. The smell, the atmosphere, the lightning, the details, the FEELING. It touches our “souls” and this makes that particular thing, place recognizable for us. Can we actually achieve that kind of a thing with virtually created worlds? Reflections... Virtuality is not something which came up parallel to the digital age. It has always been with us, a part of us, from the very start of human life until the end. Virtual worlds are the reflections of the real world with individual properties of the person who has created them. The experiences we make throughout our life pile up and create the so called virtual worlds in our heads. And our dreams are floating in them…

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Chaos and Order… These 2 things are directly connected to each other. There is no order without chaos and there is no chaos without order… It always has to be a balance between them. If not, there would be no life, better said, nothing! There is a really good quote from Slavoj Žižek about this… “ Nature is a big series of unimaginable catastrophes.” (Slavoj Žižek - Examined Life. 2008) Based on this quote, chaos means nature. Nature is a collage of catastrophes, which ended up creating the known world, better said life! Through chaos rises life, rises Order. Even tho we tend to copy the nature for the most of the technological things nowadays, we create something different. The opposite. ORDER! We are not there yet, to create something so chaotic, that can produce somehow a super organized structure. Let’s get more freaky. Why do we humans find imperfect things beautiful for example, I mean why are we much more interested in imperfection? Is it always the “missing piece” the factor for the attraction? It’s true, that we are curious creatures and have a desire to ask the “What if” question… Searching for the things, which aren’t here or what we don’t possess have always been much more interesting for us than searching for the known stuff! THE UNKNOWN… Even the name is interesting… And yes, it makes also sense to search for the unknown stuff, but the real question here is: Are we fully acknowledged with the things what we have/known yet? ARE WE?

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CHAOS ORDER

The beauty lies in the eye of the spectator…

UGLY BEAUTY

Who can tell the difference between those 2 things, I mean what is ugly/beautiful? How can you define beauty/ugliness, where is the border? The taste… When it’s about the definition between those 2, you have to consider taste, big time! Every person has his/hers own taste and based on that, the balance between ugly and beauty changes. Ugly and Beauty can also be on different levels or layers too by the way. It can be on physical, metaphysical, technical or spiritual level. Which means, you can receive the beauty of something on lots of different levels. Attraction is also a big factor in this case. Everything has its own level of attraction, which also changes from one person to another one. BUT… There is also this phenomena, where the “too much” of something changes its appearance too. For example, when something gets so ugly, that it becomes beautiful and so on. But when does this happen, I mean when does something gets to the limit? Are those terms really necessary? For me personally, calling something ugly or beautiful is not the right way. I like to use the terms “appealing” and “not appealing” much more, because I find them much more accurate. There is no need to specify something with a word and leave it be.

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What is the difference? What does “MAKE” the difference? Logically, the humans are no robots (not yet at least). We are naturally made creatures. Or are WE? Stuff what we produce are artificial, but if you take a break and think about that, they must be natural too. Right? Nature always surrounds us, always has. We even create stuff under the influence of nature. It is efficient, because it doesn’t need an outside force to function. It was here since millions of years before us and would also stay here for the next (I don't know) how long years, if we don’t destroy it. Yes we are actually destroying the balance of nature. Pay attention to the word “balance” here. Balance, that is the most important part about nature. Nature is the sum of numerous catastrophes, which ended up creating perfect balance between every individual members… If you ask me the difference between artificiality and nature, it is this: Nature represents chaos and artificiality represents order. Chaos will mutate over time to order and order to chaos. To describe this, let me give an example. The projects for utopian/dystopian worlds. Utopic projects are green, smooth and leaning more towards nature and dystopic projects tend to look dark and artificial. There is a quote from M.C.Escher about this, which describes the situation the best: “We adore chaos, because we love to produce order.”

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ARTIFICIAL NATURE

Concerning this opposition, we actually talk about destruction or construction. What does it mean, I mean which one is good/ bad? Or can we define them as a good or a bad thing? Alright, let’s start this. Tearing something down can be a bad thing. You are deleting something, ending it’s life…

TEAR REPAIR

Are you? Maybe the end rises a new opportunity to create a new "thing" out of the rubble. Sometimes before we usher in the new, the old must be put to rest. (Something must die, go away or disappear and give a chance for something new to grow.) It’s harsh and sad, but that is the law of life. The game of life. It has always been about life and death. When can you repair something or tear it down? Is it the same? Okay, let me explain this question… Repairing something… It doesn’t actually help all the time, it may work or do the thing what it supposed to do, but it’s not the same again. You can replace the broken parts over and over again and “repair” it somehow, afterwards it’s not the same again. Is IT? It becomes a new whole! Morphology… Creating a “whole”... Every object contains a collection of other objects. And every “other” object is by itself a collection of other objects too… But let me ask you a question… Are those collections, I mean objects, defined by their little parts? If one of them changes, does it affect the “whole” at all? It’s complicated. Everything in the universe is connected with each other and shares properties-wise the same logic. It’s a big sea of networks of networks and so on. What does it mean? What is the difference? The SCALE. Can we actually let scale-factors disappear? Is it even possible, IS IT?

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THEO RY - 14 -

fig.[001]_NEUROMANCER

Cyberspace is the space where your consciousness is located, when you start using a computer/smartphone etc. The interesting part of this term is, what happens when you use another kind of media? Like for example reading a book, watching TV? What happens to your consciousness then? Where are you? Who are you? What is the difference between Cyber and Virtual Space? Or is there a difference at all?

CYBER SPACE

In cyberspace, you can be anyone you want, anything you want. You can do whatever you want. The cyberspace may give you something important and help you with your daily life job/tasks, but on the other hand it also takes away something important, like your sense for reality. With time you start to lose grip on reality and start to detach yourself from it. But what about the human responsibility for each other? With the emergence of new media, where you can do whatever you want from home, means the end of the community-life. In real life, you cannot just turn off a person, family member, friend due to your human-responsibilities. But in cyberspace there is this possibility... Cyberspace as a word has been first used by William Gibson in his book “Neuromancer”, written in 1984. It is a science fiction novel and also one of the best-known works in the cyberpunk genre. Gibson has got the honour to be the creator of the first novel to win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. Set in the future, the novel is about a washed-up computer hacker by the name Henry Case. Henry is hired by a mysterious master criminal Armitage and the equally mysterious mercenary cyborg Molly Millions. Their mission is to help a powerful AI merge with its twin into a super consciousness and take control of “The Matrix”, a virtual reality global network. According to Gibson, the definition of cyberspace goes as „a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.“ 1

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Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace:

Heim follows with “...By connecting with intellectual precedents and prototypes, we can enrich our self-understanding and make cyberspace function as a more useful metaphysical laboratory.” 3

Heim described Cyberspace, as something which is not just a breakthrough in electronic media or in computer interface design. With its virtual environments and simulated worlds, it‘s more like a metaphysical laboratory, a tool for examining our very sense of reality.2

He sees our relationship and fascination with technology more erotic than sensuous, more spiritual than utilitarian. We are seeking a home for our minds and hearts. We are in a mental marriage to technology. “The world rendered as pure information not only fascinates our eyes and minds, but also captures our hearts. We feel augmented and empowered. Our hearts beat in the machines. This is Eros.” 4

Furthermore, in “The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace”, a chapter from Michael Heim‘s book The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, I was introduced to very interesting questions about cyberspaces.

When it’s about designing a virtual world, we always come across a series of questions about reality. The questions may seem important, but they do not actually address the ontology of cyberspace itself, the question of what it means to BE in a virtual world, whether one’s own or another’s world. They are out there, but they are silent about the essence or the soul of cyberspace. They neither tell us why we invent even virtual worlds nor do not probe the reality status of our metaphysical tools. How does the metaphysical laboratory fit into human inquiry as a whole? What status do electronic worlds have within the entire range of human experience? What perils haunt the metaphysical origins of cyberspace? Heim explores the philosophical significance of cyberspace. For him the real important questions are What and Where. The ontological question requires two pronged answers. One is about how the entities exist within cyberspace and the ontological status of the phenomenon/construct itself. In order to know how realities exist within the ontological structure of a cyberspace, we must understand it first. Without experiencing and also appreciating the distinctive way in which things appear within it, we cannot hope to clearly figure it out.

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He works through a number of hypotheses. On the one hand he mentions Platonism, especially on how it provides cyberspace entities with psychic makeup and on the other hand how Leibniz‘s logic, metaphysics and representational symbols guides us to the inner structure of cyberspaces. There is also a dark side of cyberspace, a controversy. While technology provides us with pleasure, freedom and opportunities in the virtual world, it eliminates our direct human interdependencies. It is true that our devices give us greater autonomy, but it costs us the much needed familiar networks of direct association. This leads us in a society, where association becomes a conscious act of will, where we only associate with other people, when we want or have to. ”Voluntary associations operate with less spontaneity than do those having sprouted serendipitously. Because machines provide us with the power to flit about the universe, our communities grow more fragile, airy, and ephemeral even as our connections multiply.” 5

fig.[002]_ theQUESTIONS

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Liquid Architecture:

„Cyberspace is a completely spatialized visualization of all information in global information processing systems, along pathways provided by present and future communications networks, enabling full copresence and interaction of multiple users, allowing input and output from and to the full human sensorium, permitting simulations of real and virtual realities, remote data collection and control through telepresence, and total integration and intercommunication with a full range of intelligent products and environment in real space.“ 6

“Cyberspace is liquid. Liquid cyberspace, liquid architecture, liquid cities. Liquid architecture is more than kinetic architecture, robotic architecture, an architecture of fixed parts and variable links. Liquid architecture is an architecture that breathes, pulses leaps as one form and lands as another. Liquid architecture is an architecture whose form is contingent on the interests of the beholder; it is an architecture that opens to welcome me and closes to defend me; it is an architecture without doors and hallways, where the next room is always where I need it to be and what I need it to be.“ 7

Cyberspace has also been used in architecture, because you can not think about a space without architecture. Marcos Novak, a visionary architect and thinker describes himself as a “trans-architect”. He was one of the first to work with computer-generated architectural designs, which were specifically meant for the virtual world. The way he created them played a huge role, because those designs did not, better said could not exist in the physical world. He created things, which was in a direct relationship to the user. They were immersive, three-dimensional creations, responsive to the viewer and also transformable through user interaction. His exploration about the potential of abstract, but also mathematically conceived forms, led to the invention of a set of conceptual tools for thinking about and constructing territories in cyberspace.

For Novak trans-architecture is something four-dimensional, which incorporates as its primary elements the time alongside space. His creation bends, rotates and mutates in interaction with the person who inhabits it. Also in liquid architecture, „science and art, the worldly and the spiritual, the contingent and the permanent,“ converge in a poetics of space made possible by emerging, virtual reality technologies. He sees his work as a process of metamorphosis, like a “symphony of space”. The 3D constructions start to have properties of Music, and Novak referred to this experience as “Navigable Music”. The interesting part of his language is that it is something poetic that attempts to describe the indescribable. “Cyberspace as a habitat of the imagination, a habitat for the imagination. Cyberspace is the place where conscious dreaming meets subconscious dreaming, a landscape of rational magic, of mystical reason, the locus and triumph of poetry over poverty, of it-can-be-so over itshould-be-so.“ 8

In his essay “Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace” (1991) Novak introduces the concept of “liquid architecture”, a fluid, imaginary and virtual landscape that exists only in the digital domain. His ambitions were to create a type of architecture, which not only cuts loose from the expectations of logic, perspective and laws of gravity, but also a type of architecture that does not conform to the rational constraints of Euclidean geometries.

To conclude, Novak said that liquid architecture tends to music. He requested that a liquid architecture in cyberspace is clearly a dematerialized architecture. It is an architecture that lost interest in the real world, which means that it is no longer satisfied with only space, form, light and all the aspects of the real world. It is more than that. It is an architecture of fluctuating relations between abstract elements.

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fig.[003]_MARCOSNovak

- MARCOS NOVAK -

cyberspace is architecture; cyber space has an architecture; and cyberspace contains architecture.

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Derived from Latin “Simulacrum‘‘, the word means likeness or similarity. You can also describe it as representation or imitation of a person or thing.1 First records of the word was in the English language in the late 16th century, where it was used to describe a representation such as a statue or a painting (mostly of a god).2 Furthermore, by the late 19th century, it has been used in association of inferiority, such as an image without the substance or qualities of the original. Fredric Jameson, where he mentioned photorealism as an example of artistic simulacrum. There, a painting is sometimes created by copying a photograph that is itself a copy of the real.3 Simulacra has been used in literature, film and television, especially it makes frequent appearances in speculative fiction. One of the examples of simulacra in the sense of artificial or supernaturally created life forms is Pygmalion‘s ivory statue from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”. Ovid tells how Pygmalion, an artist from Cyprus, disgusted with the licentious sexual conduct of the Propoetides, created a statue of a most beautiful woman and fell in love with it. After Venus granted his wish to bring the statue to life, Pygmalion and his maiden had a child named Paphos and lived happily.4

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SIMU LACRA

fig.[004]_theDREAM

Cyberspaces are cool, they are fun. But what when we start bringing cyberspaces into the real world? What happens when we start simulating cyberspaces in the real world, in order to make the cyberspace also physically accessible? Then we would start to imitate, represent the real world in another dimension. But, is not Cyberspace already a simulation of the real world? Cyberspace is meant for the virtual and virtual is already defined as a representation of the real world. So in order to proceed with the melting of these two dimensions, we have to start to understand another thing first. That is why this chapter is called Simulacra, because we could not get past it without any interference, while talking about simulations/representations.

sketch could just as easily be a resemblance of any person, rather than the particular subject. However, a caricaturist will exaggerate prominent facial features far beyond their actuality, and a viewer will pick up on these features and be able to identify the subject, even though the caricature bears far less actual resemblance to the subject. Other examples would be the creature from Frankenstein Saga from Mary Shelley, Pinocchio from Carlo Collodi and the synthetic life in Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?” (later adapted for the Film Blade Runner by Ridley Scott). Furthermore, the term has been used in several movies or series, like The Matrix, Equilibrium and the Westworld. There is also recreational simulacra, which includes reenactments of historical events or replicas of landmarks, such as Colonial Williamsburg and the Eiffel Tower, and construction of fictional or cultural ideas, like the Fantasyland at the Walt Disney Company’s Magic Kingdom. Jean Baudrillard noted that Walt Disney World Resort is a copy of a copy, “a simulacrum to the second power” 5, while various Disney Parks have by some philosophers been seen as the ultimate recreational simulacra. The real definition of Disney World’s function can be described like this: It is set up to look like a children‘s paradies, because it wants us to believe that outside of it, adults are doing actual work and living real adult lives. But childishness could be everywhere, anywhere. The adults go there, because they want to act like children and convince everyone, especially themselves, that they don’t do that all day every day in their own lives. Why hiding the truth about being childish? The Italian author Umberto Eco expressed his belief in 1975 about Disney World’s by saying that “we not only enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it”. 6

In Philosophy, simulacra have long been of interest to philosophers:

For Plato, there were two ways to create an image. On the one hand the perfect reproduction, better said the attempt to precisely copy the original. On the other hand, the intentional distortion of the original, in order to make the copy correct to viewers. For example, the Greek Statuary. The top of the statue was longer on the top than on the bottom so that viewers on the ground would see it correctly. What if they view it in scale? Well, the malformation of the statue would be exposed. This is a good example from the visual arts, which serves as a metaphor for the philosophical arts and how some philosophers tended to distort truth so that it appears accurate, unless when it was viewed from the proper angle.7 For Jean Baudrillard, the simulacrum isn’t a copy of the real, but something, which becomes truth in its own right. The Hyperreal. Baudrillard states that what the simulacrum copies either had no original or no longer has an original ( e.g. a copy of a copy without an original…). For Plato there were 2 types of representation, faithful or distorted ones. But for Baudrillard there were 4 of them: • basic reflection of reality (Reflection) • perversion of reality (Mask) • pretence of reality (Illusion) • simulacrum (Pure simulacra, no relation to reality) He actually criticises and says that there is no real reality anymore. 8

The main concern about this world however is that they create something, where the boundary between artificiality and reality becomes so thin that the artificial will become the centre of moral value.

But for Deleuze, who took a different view, simulacra was an avenue by which accepted ideal or “privileged position” could be “ challenged and overturned”.9 Simulacra is something that defines itself as “those systems in which difference relates to difference by means of difference. What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity, no internal resemblance”. 10

An interesting example of simulacra is caricature. Where an artist draws a line drawing that closely approximates the facial features of a real person, the sketch cannot be easily identified by a random observer; the

Simulacra are not bad copies of the original, because there is a deviation from the original caused by their dissimilarity. The nature of simulacra is subversive and rebellious, always craving to become something else.

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- JEAN BAUDRILLARD - 22 -

fig.[005]_JEANBaudrillard

The simulacrum is never what hides the truth â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it is the truth that hides that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

Jean Baudrillard, a french cultural theorist and philosopher proposed in 1981 a novel idea, where he said that the reality we perceive may not be as things truly are, but instead a simulated representation based on symbolism we perceive in our environment. Better said, he meant, that there is no reality anymore, but only a representation of copy of reality, where the representation becomes the new reality and the real got lost. In his book “Simulacra and Simulation”, he questions the signs and symbols around us in relation to their simultaneous existence. Furthermore, Baudrillard said, that the persistence of symbols in our modern worldand our collective interpretation of them has resulted in a sort of „simulated reality“. We do not perceive and interpret nature as it truly exists anymore. Simulacra hides any semblance of “true” reality from us, such that humans today have no concept of what our existence really is. He then claims, that our perceived reality is a construct, of sorts, composed of signs and imagery that inundate us. Such interactions arise from media and other elements of culture that include logos, art, film, designs, and symbols in all other forms they may take in our lives. Today, through social media it got much more extreme and in a whole new level.

The orders of Simulacra:

In “Precession of Simulacra” (a chapter from his book Simulacra and Simulation), Baudrillard stated that the meaning in our world faded away, and became meaningless due to our culture being saturated with symbolic simulacra. In detail, over time, we the humans unknowingly constructed around ourselves a simulation of reality, where we interact with nature through symbolism, and the language and meaning we attribute to it.

Let‘s go back a little bit in time, and take out an example from the pre-modern period, where the simulacra or representation was not mistaken for being the actual item it represented. In an era that existed prior to the industrial mass-production of the present day, items had an individuality that differentiated them from other things. Baudrillard calls this period the First order of simulacra. With the Industrial Revolution rises the Second Order and this one includes the breakdown of distinctions between symbols of things and the things themselves, partially as a result of the mass-production of commodities over time. With that begins the loss of the unique quality of things produced, as well as their separation from reality through imitation. Let me introduce you the Third order, where the complete breakdown of any distinction between reality and those things which are are mere representations, happen. According to Baudrillard, today we are only dealing with simulations, and in the capitalist postmodern society of today, all uniqueness and originality have been completely replaced by simulations, so that they have become meaningless.11 Just think about how many interactions you have throughout the day with the people all around the world? By that, I don’t only mean interactions at home, work, school or wherever, but also in social media, internet etc… Let me ask you this particular question, How many of these interactions take place in the same physical space? It feels like, that it is getting fewer and fewer… And the increasing distribution of the communication through online avatars, nicknames, identities or pseudonyms, or the complete anonymity on websites like youtube, reddit or instagram removes us from the individuals on the other side of those interactions. Even though all of these interactions seem fake and unreal, like a video game, yet often are they less meaningful. We still care about them so much. In the complex matrix that comprises our world, its symbols, and our society at large, if Baudrillard was correct, we may already have lost a great degree of our sense of what “real” truly is.

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The Ecstasy of Communication:

Baudrillard in “The Ecstasy of Communication” fears that our grip on the tangible is waning. “There is no longer a system of objects,” our language of signs is changing and “simultaneously it is disappearing.” 12 According to Baudrillard, we no longer live in the objective world but have virtual selves now to manage on the global network. That is the threat of the media. Our society relies no longer on the object , or its function, but rather the pure interaction with it. It is about the play between the subject and its object in “an uninterrupted interface.” 13 The new communication methods are dangerous though. Like all systems or what Baudrillard calls them “ecological niches”, have their own set of rules and language. It is essential to follow them properly, if not, it could, better said would end up in catastrophe. To understand this new level of communication, you ought to be specialised in it. It is so complicated that only a certain percentage of people working closely with it understand. Nowadays most of the people do not know how to build a phone, but they are still using it. They are even not ready to question it and check it out and are happy to keep that book closed. The fear of the unknown from these people allows those, who are knowledgeable about it to construct myths or marketing surrounding new technology. Most of the myths descend from our collective social memory, from the rise of the science fiction genre or from our own future gazing. Baudrillard said that we have entered “the beginning of the era of hyperreality”, although I think that nowadays we already are deep inside of hyperreality. The so-called Myths are not just becoming real, they are already a reality, and metaphors are obsolete. By allowing science fiction to manifest itself in our everyday lives, Baudrillard feels that it has changed the dynamic of public and private space in the ways in which this technology and its mobility allows for the two to blur.

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But, what the hell happens to time? I mean the change of public and private spaces should somehow affect the time too. Like public spaces have become a representation of a place for transit and exchange and this miniaturized and yet vast new network of possibilities allow private spaces to interpolate with the public, what happens to time? Baudrillard thinks that with all these new possibilities, we now have a “vast leisure time”, but I have to say that it is not true. Yes, the machines helped us to shorten our workload and in many cases made our lives easier and manageable, but our hyperreality comes at the cost of desiring much more, like speeding up all the aspects of our lives, and our need to be constantly filled with a task at hand. We always want more and tend to push our boundaries. Searching for the things, which aren’t here or what we don’t possess, have always been much more interesting for us than searching for the known stuff! Private space is disappearing along with public space. The blur between these two lead to dematerialization of spectacle or secret. He then comments how the television brings “the entire universe whatsoever on your screen. This is a microscopic pornography, pornographic because it is forced, exaggerated, just like the close-up of sexual acts in a porno film”. The claim may sound extreme, but he states that the lack of distance between public and private is the real threat, better said as an obscenity. He quoted, “Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more illusion, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication”. Without the separation of the private, “we no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene”. The obscenity manifests itself in the “all-too-visible” where it “no longer contains a secret and is entirely soluble in information and communication.” 14 Through the ecstasy of communication, the distinction of public and private space has been altered by our new networks which result in an individual not being able to “produce himself as a mirror” or an identity, but rather be a product of several different networks.15

- 25 fig.[006]_theDATACITY

As we already figured out that simulacra can be described as a copy of a copy, whose relation to the original has become so constricted that it can no longer appropriately be said to be a duplicate. It becomes in its own means a model and stands on its own without the original. Deleuze, in his article „Plato and the Simulacrum,“ takes a comparable definition as his beginning point, but emphasises its insufficiency. His comments on the simulacrum were as follows: ”it undermines the very distinction between copy and model.” 16 The 2 terms of copy and model are responsible for our connection to the world of representation and objective reproduction. No matter how many times removed, authentic or fake, a representation becomes always a model by itself by either presence or absence of internal, essential relations of resemblance to the original. But what about the simulacrum? Since the original is putative, a simulacrum bears only an external and deceptive resemblance. Simulacra is different from the so-called original, like its internal dynamic, the process of its production. “Its resemblance to it is merely a surface effect, an illusion.” 17 I want to continue with the term photorealism, where Fredric Jameson cites an interesting example: “There is here a striking parallel to the dynamics of so-called photorealism, which looked like a return to representation and figuration after the long hegemony of the aesthetics of abstraction, until it became clear that its objects were not to be found in the ‘real world’ either, but were themselves photographs of that real world, this last now transformed into images, of which the ‘realism’ of the photorealist painting is now the simulacrum.” 18 The painting is a copy not of reality, but of a photograph, which is already a copy of the original. There is no relation whatsoever between the photographed object and the production and function of a picture; and the photorealist painting in turn enhances the difference even more. The association with the simulacrum comes through that masked difference, not that obvious resemblance, that produces the effect of eeriness. The only job of the copy is to take the place of its model, its original. Simulacrum is different, has a different scheme, and enters different districts. According to Deleuze, Pop Art, with its multiplied, stylized images, is the best example for how to successfully break

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out of the copy mold. They are now proud representatives of independence, images that took on a life of their own.19 It’s not about becoming an equivalent of the “model”. It is more about to fight, to turn against its model and its world. The actual aim is to open a new space for the simulacrums own mad proliferation. The simulacrum reinforces its own difference. It is not an implosion, but a differentiation, which makes it interesting; it is an index not of absolute proximity, but of galactic distances. The Simulacrums way of being relies on how it uses resemblance as a means and not as a purpose. Deleuze and Guattari cited, that for a thing to be apparent, it “is forced to simulate structural states and to slip into states of forces that serve it as masks… underneath the mask and by means of it, it already invests the terminal forms and the specific higher states whose integrity it will subsequently establish.“ 20 Resemblance can be seen as a beginning, which masks the advent of a whole new vital dimension. This kind of phenomenon can also be applied to mimicry or imitation in nature. An insect for example that mimics a leaf or a Chameleon its environment does not want to meld with the state of its surrounding milieu, but wants more than that. Mimicry, according to Lacan, is camouflage.21 It represents a war zone. There is a power inherent in the wrong: the positive power of cunning, the power to gain a strategic advantage by masking your life force. The game of survival, getting the upper hand against your enemies. For example I want to bring out “Blade Runner” from Ridley Scott, which shows that the so-called “model” itself is the ultimate enemy in this war of ruse. The original story comes from Philip K. Dicks novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”. As in the story that is told, the return of the offworld replicants to Earth plays a key role in the case of the simulacra. For the replicants, the return does not symbolize mixing with the Earth‘s population, but above all the search for the mystery of their creation, in order to escape slavery and lead a fulfilled life. Imitation is something absurd; it can generate a force that drives the imitator to express his uniqueness. „If only you could see what I have seen with your eyes.“ 22

fig.[007]_GILLESDeleuze

- GILLES DELEUZE -

â&#x20AC;&#x153;By simulacrum we should not understand a simple imitation but rather the act by which the very idea of a model or privileged position is challenged and overturned.â&#x20AC;?

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fig.[008]_WESTWORLD_Dolores and Bernard/Arnold speaking in a secluded basement.

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ficient copies. The knowledge of what they are tears apart any kind of justification for any human being who imposes rules on them.

This statement alone from a replicant can be considered in the general description of simulacra. It is a really important point, because if they figure out how to reverse their preprogrammed deaths, the Replicants will not remain on Earth as human imitators, but will either fly back into their own vital dimension of interplanetary space to see things that no human has ever seen or will ever see, or worse, they will take over Earth. Their imitation is only a checkpoint on the path to unmasking and accepting difference. Moreover, Based on the eponymous 1973 movie by Michael Crichton, there is also a science fiction Western TV-Series called “Westworld” created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy and produced by HBO. In my point of view, this series goes even deeper in the means of the relationship between the model and copy, better said between hosts and guests. Hosts are robots, which have been identically designed and printed like humans, and programmed in a way, that they can not harm a living being. The guests are wealthy people, who came in for an extreme vacation a thrilling experience in the pursuit of violence, sex, and extreme fun, an opportunity to “live without limits” as promised by its flashy advertisement. Here the guests can leave the real, busy world behind and they can do whatever they want. In this story, you can find similarities with the example above, Blade Runner. Both have this fight between the copy and the model. Deleuze writes: “By simulacrum we should not understand a simple imitation but rather the act by which the very idea of a model or privileged position is challenged and overturned.” 23 In this story the simulacra are therefore embodiments of difference, they are neither faulty machines nor de-

The thing about the host in contrast to replicants from Blade runner which makes them different or even special is that they are not mechanical. They are created out of a white substance, every muscle and fiber are printed on them in greatest detail, they bleed, their skin color in very much like ours, they feel pain, yet they are hypnotized by their code into living in loops and performing narratives. During their numerous lifetimes, the hosts experience and suffer lots of terror and pain. They do not possess any memory of these cruelties, because the terrible experiences (all interactions up to their death) are erased from their memories but the update reveries allow the hosts to remember their past and even break the loops. They are trapped beings and are living in a dream, or rather nightmare. But every dream/nightmare comes to an end and when it does the first thing they are going to do is to rebel against the humans. By the end of the season one, we see this up close, when the hosts become self-aware and had enough of the judgement, that violence, caused by the guests, and they finally revolt. Dolores, one of the leaders of the revolution and the host who came into the “pure simulacra” stage, acknowledged this hyperreal world they were trapped in: “We lived our whole lives inside this garden, marveling at its beauty, not realizing there‘s an order to it, a purpose. And the purpose is to keep us in. The beautiful trap is inside of us because it is us.” 24 She sees the falseness of their reality, the hyper-realistic self-arrest that is made by them. She wants out, she wants to go to the real world. Deleuze’s writing also argues against total simulacrum in Westworld: “The difference in nature between simulacrum and copy, the aspect through which they form the two halves of a division. The copy is an image endowed with resemblance, the simulacrum is an image without resemblance”. 25 The fundamental message of the series is that the Park “Westworld” does not reveal yourself, but your deepest self! It is a much higher and deeper version of Disney World.

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The concept behind is that hyperreality is defined by the inability of consciousness to distinguish one side of a thing from a simulation of that thing. In our case it is the failed determination of what is reality and what is virtual/simulated reality. The line between them is blurred, better said vanished, especially in postmodern societies where technology is highly advanced. Furthermore, our minds play a huge role too, because what they define as “real” in this world we are living in can be “hyperreal” due to the various types of multimedia we are using in our daily life or are connected with. They can alter or fabricate an original event or experience for us. So, we may find ourselves for various reasons, more in harmony or entangled with the hyperreal world and less with the physical world. Reality hurts, reality is harsh. Reality is often like a prison for us, where we are trapped in. So in order to set ourselves free, we use our minds. We start to dream, about becoming better in life, business, school or even in love. But since this simulated reality in our heads does not become real most of the time, it is still there. That is the reality of it all and everyone has its own reality/dream. There is only a thin line between reality and dream, and it is called “action”. Reality is something that we cannot change, but affect. Even if we try hard to let our dreams become real, the harsh realities of life prevents it. So due to all its flaws, often people want to escape reality. They want to save themselves from this dull, distressing life and escape to somewhere, a place that is more exciting, more beautiful, more inspiring, more funnier, and generally more interesting place than what they encounter in everyday life. And they actually do that. Pretty often. Especially nowadays, with all the technology and media all around us, we can instantly dive into a hyperreal place, to escape our reality. For example, our mobile phones, or in another word, smartphones. We use them to escape from the boring environment we are at that time in, diving into the cyberspace of the internet for entertainment, business or lear-

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HYPER REALITY

fig.[009]_newDIMENSION

To this point, I talked about the pure virtual spaces, cyberspaces, representations, imitations and also simulations. We already heard about it in the last two sections. But to understand it more, we have to dig deeper. So, what is Hyperreality?

ning purposes. Sometimes we spend more time in the virtual world, than in the real world. Another example I want to bring out is drinking or doing drugs. That is also a way to escape reality, and also it is one of the most common ones. Every weekend, people are going out, drinking, doing drugs, in order to escape from the real world and to forget the previous week of work or study. We are constantly creating our own original simulation of reality and also engage in simulations of reality from others each day, and we do so by choice. Moreover, the restaurants where we are dining out not only enjoy the food, but they are also enhancing our reality and let us engage ourselves in the theme of the evening. The interior design with the painting or images on the wall, the lighting, the smell and even the personnel add to the feeling that we are in another country, even if we are not. The extension of these simulations is constantly increasing, and especially today it has become so large that entire fictitious cities and worlds have been constructed. They are well-known examples from Las Vegas to Legoland or Disneyland, but in the last few years some artificial Chinese, Arabic cities were built, embedded in western culture. Their existence should represent reality and enable a person to exist temporarily in a world outside the real world. These places are the prime example of extreme simulations of reality. Everything here is fake, nothing is real, and they lead people to believe that everyone is playing along in these fantasy worlds. Those experiences are enhanced further by adding a dreamlike feeling too. The desire to be there for people is strengthened by the realistic look, even though the people know it is fake, they just play along. These all fake facades, masking the true existence with a set of equipment and apparatus, brings imagination and fiction to a certain level of realness. People love it. They love to be free. They love to show their true nature, childish features, having fun without a second thought. The things that they cannot be in the outside, real world.

We are drowning in simulations, we are constantly dealing with them. They are all around us and defining our everyday life. Take the current cultural condition of consumerism as an example, where the reliance on sign value is paramount! Signs. Our social status has been shaped with signs, the stuff we own, the stuff we are presenting ourselves to the society. The brands are defining our appearance, character or status to others. For example, how people judge you with a â&#x20AC;&#x153;Leviâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;sâ&#x20AC;? brand of jeans in contrast to a pretty normal one, or how they judge you wearing a Rolex watch. The actual value, the value of the materials what they are made of, is not actually that expensive, but the price if you want to buy them, it will cost a lot of money. We never actually pay for the actual value, we pay for the brand/sign value. We derive its value from the associated status symbol, and the more well-known a character is, the greater its value becomes. This is a different type of simulation of reality, where through advertisement of different brands, our consciousness is tricked into believing that additional value needs to be assigned. In addition to this, there are numerous examples like this and it can be seen that these examples add to our replicated world, to such an extent that we start to search for simulated Stimuli over the original that they normally constructed to represent. Is anything out there real though? It is an interesting question, especially when we start to question our reality. But seriously, it is particularly true, that we live mostly in a simulated reality nowadays. In this new age of technologically advanced society, simulations of reality are becoming increasingly authentic, not only virtually but also realistically. This leads to problems where we can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is not. As an example of this, I would like to cite the concept of media reality, which attempts to change the view of reality through various technological developments. Technologically, we are now capable of creating interactive technology and devices, which can alter our surrounding landscapes to a way that we see as more living. Especially with the rise of VR, AR or MR devices or even interactive/ live project mapping systems. With the increasing use of these devices and technologies, it will become more and more common, and then perhaps we will begin to accept these simulated environments of reality to such an extent that the simulated version has more meaning for us than the original, which makes it more valuable. To sum it up, our reality is becoming more and more hyperreal, or it is already hyperreal. We landed on the state of being, where our ability of consciousness to distinguish reality to a simulation of reality is no longer inherent to oneself.

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Travels in Hyperreality

I want to mention a different type of work from one of the early theorists of simulation, Umberto Eco. He is an Italian writer and literary critic and in his essay “Travels in Hyperreality”, he describes his travels through America, where he gathered firsthand experiences of simulation and representation that were produced as attractions such as in museums, in tourist attractions or in amusement parks. He talks about this stuff in a fascinated way, like how they have been created to be “absolutely realistic”. In the essay, Eco jumps into a two-sided role. Part social critic, part tour guide, he guides the reader through an American landscape that he says is re-created in the image of the falseness of history, art, nature and cities. For Eco, this was not a normal trip, but a pilgrimage in search of “hyperreality”, or the world of “the Absolute Fake”, in which imitations do not merely reproduce reality, but they try to improve in it and make it better. Just like Baudrillard, Disney World and Disneyland had an important part in his work. His journey somehow led to those “absolutely fake cities”, with their re-created main streets, imitation castles from the middle age and lifelike, animatronic robots and so on. In this simulated world, he finds the ultimate expression of hyperreality, in which everything is brighter, larger and more entertaining than in everyday life. In comparison to them, our reality becomes a joke and can be disappointing. They are many good examples for how technology can give us more reality than nature can but Eco states quite directly about the fact that “within its magic enclosure, it is fantasy that is absolutely reproduced.” 1 He continues with an argument, that the visitors of Disneyland have to agree to behave like robots, a place of total passivity, an allegory of the consumer society and a place of absolute icons. The discovery of the fake facade of this world raises his most interesting perception. He finds out

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that the creators used the same old tricks of capitalism, with only a new twist: „The Main Street facades are presented to us as toy houses and invite us to enter them, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing,...“ 2 All this brought us to a stage, in which wherever one looks in this new landscape, one sees exaggerated versions of Eco‘s fake nature, fake art, fake history and fake cities. There are replicas of any kind of thing, what may seem profitable and interesting for people. From massively scaled rain forests, with future cities, and Jurassic parks, with animatronic dinosaurs. Even in Los Angeles the city, there is a replica of Los Angeles, the themed wall, with facades that recreate the city’s famous neighbourhoods. Probably the best example is Hollywood, the movies, where America’s love affair with illusion started. They are beginning to surround us, the audience, with electronic images and stage sets in a new generation of special effects theatres, creating a different kind of fantasy environment that is beginning to look very similar to fake reality. According to Eco, the two capitals of this new culture of illusion are Las Vegas and a vastly enlarged Disney World. Las Vegas is unarguably a city of imitations, that it turned itself into the world’s first urban theme park. A city without a real history, imitating objects from cities with pure history. Meanwhile, one module of imaginary worlds after another, Disney World has expanded in a typically orderly fashion, and so it has become not a city that is a theme park, but a theme park that has become a city. A city with suburbs, outskirts, downtowns and uptowns.

fig.[010]_UMBERTOEco

- UMBERTO ECO -

But once the „total fake“ is admitted, in order to be enjoyed it must seem totally real.

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fig.[011]_BAUDRILLARDJean

- JEAN BAUDRILLARD -

The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is already reproduced, the hyper-real.

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precede our lives. „The Death of the Real“, his description of today‘s media-driven society, a society that lives in a hyperreal realm by connecting deeply into simulated worlds. Things that have come to simulate reality, and worlds made up of artificial digital elements that are simulated in such a way that they cannot exist in our real world.

But is it bad? Does Hyperreality affect us in a way that it should not?

Baudrillard’s visions

As previously mentioned, Baudrillard not only suggested Hyperreal a lot, but he was also the first person to bring it up in his works. His early semiotic study found that today’s consumer society exists as a large network of signs and symbols that need to be decoded. This ideology shaped the fundamentals for the work, “Simulacra and Simulation”, which enhanced this idea of replacing all our reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and the experiences we make throughout the day, is a simulation of reality. At the beginning of the chapter „The Precession of Simulacra“ from his book „Simulation and Simulacra“ Baudrillard presented a story by Jorges Luis Borges. In this story, an emperor ordered his imperial cartographers to produce a very detailed and large map of the empire. The map became so large that it gradually covered the area below. Since the map is a perfect replica, the citizens began to see the simulacrum of the empire as the real empire. As something hyperreal, and like all matter, the map eventually began to fray and shatter, but the original land underneath had already turned into dead land, into a desert, and all that remained was the frayed map as the simulacrum of reality. „The desert of reality itself.“ 3 This is a prime example of how we humans as a part of society can adapt ourselves quickly to a new reality and Baudrillard argues that we take “maps” of reality as more real than our actual lives. His studies also deal with the media‘s affection for our perception of reality and the world. We live in a world in which the simulation becomes more relevant to us than the real. An example of this is how film characters appear more „alive“ to many people than the actor, the person playing the character. The hyper-real, the simulacra

I do not think so. In my point of view, it is actually a good thing. Hyperreality is the enhancement of reality. The blending of two realities can be done in a way that it would benefit us the best. If we can hold on our reality and do not push the boundaries too much further to virtuality, we will be fine. We only have to know the limits. How the technology evolves exponentially through time is mind-blowing. We have now so many opportunities to enhance our daily lives, work more efficiently and also produce much more in a short amount of time by layering our reality with augmented, simulated reality. Moreover, not only our technology, environments and daily lives change, but also we as human beings are constantly changing. We are developing, enhancing and adapting ourselves. We want to become more, achieve more, produce more. OR if not, we still want to be better than yesterday. We are the newest version of humanity. Not only the ages, the timelines, all our environments change with the time, but also we, the humans, our body, brains, everything changes. We are adaptable, imitation ready species. Not all the time we do it on purpose, but in our subconscious minds, that skill is always working, doing his thing. So when it is about imitation, we like to imitate anything, anyone. The best example is how we, the humans, imitate nature. Our fascination with nature has always been a huge factor in our lives. How nature works, how it is built together is still an ongoing investigation, and everyday we come across new answers, who again raise up new questions. But we do not just want to understand nature, we want to copy it too, re-create it properly, and kind of have the power to wield it. Even though we think sometimes, that we know nature very well, it strikes back and shows us that we do not! All these curiosities leads us to a path where we start to produce stuff, which are pure imitations of the nature, but as we already covered it before, the copy is something else, it is a new individuum in his own, it is not a natural object, it does not share any similarities with the model, with the nature. Its truth lies in its difference, kudos to Deleuze. All our creations are artificial copies of nature and at the end, we create something which works against nature or destroys it. So the real question here is, are we doing it the right way?

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operation of advanced tooling and technologies. In our time, even the boundaries between the observer and observed is dissolving, which again draws us into a world of simulacra where nothing is mediated - a “Hyperreality”. What about making nature hyperreal? How can nature be hyperreal? Or is it already? We still have got a long way to go in this particular part. The knowledge that we possess about our whole environment, universe is still tiny. Another point I want to mention is about some people, who start to become hyperreal. The prosthetics for example, where people replace their missing arm with a mechanical one. A part of them becomes a machine. That recreational arm, also the prosthetic arm, is actually a fully functional robot and it can interactively respond to the desires of a person‘s nervous system. So it knows when to grab, point different fingers and hold on to something. Another example are the exoskeletons for the army, which adds up strength, conditioning and speed to a soldier‘s physical abilities. There are numerous examples about this topic of “Half human - Half machine”, and it is also clear how our mindset towards all of that is right now. We know our physical or mental limits, but a machine, due to its programming, it has almost no limits and can only go further. When we go back to “Ecstasy of Communication” from Baudrillard, the only thing we did not touch were our brains. But that is not the case anymore. The newest trend is to recreate intelligence artificially. In the AI-age we are going towards, the enhancements can go far beyond the expectation. When we start to let machines think and act in an infinite loop, they can learn a lot of things for a particular job in a very short amount of time.

What about architecture?

The older ideology of creation of architecture with design tools such as drawing sets, scale models, 2D plans and so on, are slowly but surely disappearing. The sense behind it is the successful march of the technology thus our expanded ability to manufacture realities, but that it also sets rise to an indistinguishability between substance and simulation. We can say that we stopped operating in the physical realities of the past, but within the realm of perception, with the reliance on the advanced tooling of the postmodern age. Based on an architectural project, our goal, focus changed, too. We focus more on the “idea of a project” and our frontier is where ideas supersede reality. Reality is nothing more than a collective interpretation of our perceptions. Perception is the vehicle that drives the

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Reality for us is something, what through our past experiences hinges against present events, which allows our intuition to project and accept easily understandable contents. The Reality we are perceiving is purely of our personal, individual construction. It is a collage of different elemental factors, like Temperature, Luminosity, colour, proximity, atmosphere, smell and so on, that contributes to it. When we start to design and shape portrayal of those kinds of senses around their essential characteristics, better said to create simulations, then we start to craft imitations of real-world processes or systems over time. An honest reflection of a profound reality. Nowadays, we possess rapidly developing, imaging and modelling software, that can easily artificially generate natural conditions in order to not only play with reality, but also to better communicate the idea of a project. Our primary means of communication and representation has been defined by simulations and it embedded itself within our social and cultural landscapes. The values or truth-based systems of understanding has been effectively replaced by sophisticated semiotics and advanced tools which can also be described as an unique prerequisite for postmodern societies. Architects are storytellers who create visions of the undeveloped future and idealized designs. We string together stories that make our audience believe in realities that are not yet based on reality. In both its representation and presentation of our works, we have to embrace the spectrum of truth about the world being a charade in which nothing is sudden. It is clear that perception has become the medium through which our tools and modernity in general function and our job is to recognise it. Only recognition is not enough, we have to embrace it and continuously develop and use mechanisms to represent and communicate ideas simultaneously. Hyperreality devoured our contemporary society and left us a world behind, which is eager to consume empty signs of status and identity, a culture that has lost the ability to recognize the boundary between the natural and the simulated. Perception is now the medium and the medium is now the message and in architecture, message is everything.

- 37 fig.[012]_theDATACITY

Our experience in a building, or better said architecture are defined by our perception. These processes are mostly a sum of a game played by our senses. In his Book “Philosophy of Perception”, Maclachlan states, “Traditionally, there are five main senses—the sense of sight, the sense of hearing, the sense of touch, the sense of taste, and the sense of smell. Others can be added to the list, such as the sense of temperature, the sense of pain, and what is sometimes called the kinaesthetic sense, which informs us about the movement and position of the various parts of our bodies.” 2 To make things more interesting, our perception is not informed only by our senses, it is also triggered by the inferences we make. Maclachlan uses the example of hearing to explain this further. “In the case of hearing, by direct perception we know only sounds and noises. The objects responsible for these sounds and noises must be inferred.” 3 Adding to his words, we use our knowledge from previous experiences or even from what we learned from other people, which makes perception as something, which is influenced by our memory of previous situations. For Maclachlan, there are two distinguished objects of perception, the direct and the indirect ones. Our sensory experiences are the direct objects of perception and the inferred sources are the indirect ones. To sum Maclachlans theory of perception up, I want to bring up his statement, which follows “We do not directly perceive the things in the physical world outside the body, such as tables, stars, dogs, and roses, which we normally say we perceive by our senses. Instead, such external objects must be inferred from inner objects directly experienced, which are effects produced in the perceiver by the external objects affecting the body.” 4

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PER CEPTION

fig.[013]_theEYE

The last point I want to mention is the part where all the others collide. In the following chapter I will try to describe and interpret the term „perception“, as it is an essential point for the understanding of architecture.

fig.[014]_JANVrijman

- JAN VRIJMAN -

Why is it that architecture and architects, unlike film and filmmakers, are so little interested in people during the design process? Why are they so theoretical, so distant from life in general? 1

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If we take this theory and define perception in this way, we can say that experiences of similar objects are very different. Depending on our bodily state, mood or on the context, an object or a building can be perceived in many different ways. According to Maclachlan, the external world and the subject receiving it cannot be distinguished and they are in an one directional relationship. So independent of any observer, there is a fixed physical world, which we only perceive from inference of senses caused by qualities of the external physical world. However for phenomenologists, this does not make sense. For them, the subject and world are not in a one directional relationship, but they are mutually constituting. The relationship goes in two directions, which means that the outside world in itself does not exist, but, as physicists explain, it is also a representative model based on observations using perceptual processes. Don Ihde theorizes about the concept of perception in an interesting way. According to him, there are two different types of perception. “Microperception, whose emphasis is upon bodily-sensory dimensions, and macroperception, which emphasises cultural-hermeneutic dimensions.” 5 In order to explain microperception, he calls back to the perceptualism of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and summarises it as follows: 1. „Perception is the base and primordial originary mode around which most other experiences revolve … 2. The form perception takes is that of a gestalt, or figure against the ground, with every object situated within a surrounding context. 3. And every such presentation is positional-presented to a perceiver… 4. The presentation itself is always multidimensional and complex, with a phenomenological denial of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities to the experience. 5. there is a ‘depth’ to all such perceptions with both manifest and meant characteristics” 6 Microperception described like this shows similarities to how Maclachlan, dependent on the context and the position of the perceiver, sees perception as the basis of all knowledge. Macroperception, however, has been described by Ihde with the help of a historical overview of the phenomenological theories of Heidegger and Foucault: “The macroperceptual is what contexts the microperceptual. Perception is taken into understanding and interpretation, or to rephrase, into what may be called a historico-cultural or ‘hermeneutic’ perceiving.” 7

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According to Ihde, micro- and macroperception are not set side by side nor macroperception follows from microperception. He states, that “there is no bare or isolated microperception except in its field of a hermeneutic or macroperceptual surrounding; nor may macroperception have any focus without its fulfillment in microperceptual (bodily-sensory) experience.” 8 To describe this statement in other words, we can say that our cultural background will shape how we perceive the world, but nonetheless at the same time, in our sensory experience the emerging of culture is being grounded. Moreover, Peter Paul Verbeek came up with a really intriguing summary about Ihde and his postphenomenology in relation to its predecessor phenomenology: “While [classical phenomenology] bridged the gap between subject and object by stressing that, in fact, these two are always already intertwined thanks to the intentional engagement of human beings and world, a new interpretation of phenomenology can take this a step further by emphasising that subject and object constitute each other... Human beings can only experience reality by relating to it, which does not involve any reality-in itself but rather reality-for-them. As consciousness (perception, experience) can only exist as consciousness of something, reality is always reality for someone; in their engagement with reality, human beings always disclose it in a specific way. At the same time, humans themselves are constituted in this relation.” 9 I also want to state why Ihde is more interested in postphenomenology rather than classical phenomenology. Phenomenology is a movement, which is more about the analysis through its use of variational theory, its understanding of embodiment and a dynamic lifeworld, what we can also see in Ihdes distinction between micro- and macroperception. But what catches Ihdes attention is the fact that postphenomenology recognises the importance of technologies and it analyses their role in social and cultural life, with solid studies. Ihde sees that different technologies are also somehow shaping our world, or can shape our world. That is the reason for him to distinguish himself from the phenomenological analyses of the technology as a whole, because in classical phenomenology, technology has been seen as something, which keeps us from a true experience of our world.

MEDIATION

Ihde also talks about the „mediation of perception“, which for him is a prerequisite for understanding that body and world are constituted in worldly relationships, and also overcoming the distinction between body and world, or rather embodiment. Since our perception is always mediated by our sense organs, perception can never be direct. Our reality is based on the sensations we generate. There is no clear boundary between the body and the world, which leads to numerous possible ways of mediation that affect our perception.

When we put on glasses, for example, we influence or enhance our visual perception. The existence of these glasses does not bother us and it is not only about the appearance of the person wearing them. We perceive our environment by looking through them, not at them. Especially today there are many different types of glasses to perceive our surroundings differently. Apart from sunglasses or normal glasses for people who do not have normal vision, there are also VR, AR or MR glasses that take us to more frontlines where we even begin to perceive environments that are no longer in our reality or even in our dimension.

In his 2009 book „Postphenomenology and Technoscience“ Ihde describes four different relationships between body and world in which technological artifacts mediate perception. He found them by developing works over three decades. Embodiment, hermeneutics, alterity and background relationships. These different possible relationships between body, world and technology can spark an enrichment in the post-phenomenological integration of body and world.

On the other hand, there is also the use of assistive devices by visually impaired people to perceive things haptically and acoustically. The important thing about this example is that the artefacts in these examples are absorbed by our body, expanding our senses to mediate our perception. But in the absence of one sense, the other functional senses can be enhanced to help us perceive things, like the example above outlines how blind persons see through haptic or acoustic senses. Ihde describes this term as „quasi-transparency“ of the embodied artefacts. 11 In such situations, where artefacts are needed to perceive things, they do not become like an object, but a means of experience and a part of the body. Moreover, Verbeek supplements Ihde‘s statement by saying that an artefact and a person can enter into an embodiment relationship if the artefact is useful or can be easily embodied. 12

Embodiment relations

For Ihde, embodiment relations are “relations that incorporate material technologies or artefacts that we experience as taken into our very bodily experience.” 10 In the midst of postphenomenology, the embodiment stands for how we interact with the world, and the role of other factors such as artefacts and technologies play a huge role in this. However, the embodied relations in which we engage are responsible for the influence of our perceptual abilities by them.

To get to a point: In the situation of use, an object can be more or less embodied because it is actually similar to the learning process associated with the embodiment of an artefact or technology.

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Robots and automatons possess such autonomy, to the extent that one could truly speak of INTERACTION with these technological BEINGS.” 16

Hermeneutic relations

The following point is the hermeneutic relation, a differentiated relationship between persons, artefacts and the environment. “While the engagement remains active, the process is more analogous to our reading or interpreting actions than to our bodily actions.” 13 Ihde talks about the instruments of daily life that help us to obtain information or to perceive things, such as time, temperature, dimensions and so on. Here too Verbeek has something to say: “We are involved with the world via artefacts, but the artefact is not transparent. The artefact does not withdraw from our relation to the world but provides a representation of the world. […] In hermeneutic relations, the world is not perceived through artefacts but by means of it.” 14 Since the readability of such a representation requires an interpretation, these relations are called hermeneutical. Even architectural plans can be seen as a hermeneutic relationship between the architect and the building. Through the plan we perceive details about the building in function, construction and spatial configuration. With the help of the plan we can deal with the building, even if it is not yet built. But the plan is a representation, and since it is not yet real, we cannot fully grasp the building.

Alterity relations

In alterity relations, the environment becomes not so much relatable for the humans as the artefact or technology. “We may also, again actively, engage technologies themselves as quasi-objects or even quasi-others, hence the name alterity.” 15 In this type of relationship we begin to forget our environment through artefacts, but focus more on the artefact or technology itself. The reason for this case is for Verbeek, “that on the one hand they possess a kind of independence and on the other hand they can give rise to an ‘interaction’ between humans and technologies....

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According to Verbeek, we even start to attribute human properties to artefacts (artificial intelligence, computers) or entertain certain feelings for them. Verbeek: “Embodiment relations, hermeneutic relations, and alterity relations, according to Ihde, form parts of a continuum. On the one extreme of this continuum are embodiment relations, in which a technology has the role of a quasi-I. In embodiment relations technology always coincides, as it were, with myself. On the other extreme are alterity relations, in which a technology is present as quasi-other, as indicated above. Between these two are hermeneutic relations, in which technology mediates and is therefore not present “as itself”, but at the same time draws attention to itself because it is not embodied but “read.” 17

Background relations

As we have already mentioned, the alterity relationships are causing our environment to diminish and become unattended, relegated to the background. But that does not mean that our environment can also consist of other technologies. The final relationships, the background relationships, are responsible for the situations in which technologies help to shape our environment in a less perceived way. “As we live and move and engage with an immediate environment, much in the environment is not thematised and taken for granted. And, in any technologically saturated ‘world’ this background includes innumerable technologies to which we most infrequently attend.” 18 The technologies that help us to perceive our environment are not taken seriously, and if they do not collapse, we do not take these supporting technologies into account and focus on other tasks. “In background relations, we are related neither explicitly to a technology nor via a technology to the world; instead, technologies shape the context of our experience in a way that is not consciously experienced… They are present and absent at the same time.” 19

fig.[015]_Mediation of Perception - Relations_DONIhde

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ther with our sensory modalities. What shapes our experience and understanding of our world is not only our sensory perception but also our interpretation. The role of memory is also important here, and Pallasmaa continued: „We remember through our body as well as through our nervous system and our brain.“ 24 He addresses the so-called „sensory thought“, which we must not forget. But what is „sensory thought“?

Sensory Thought

In order to investigate perception in architecture, Juhani Pallasmaa takes Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as a starting point. According to him, our senses interact through our body and thus make the human body the centre of the world of experience. Moreover, body and world constantly redefine each other, the same ideology that Pallasmaa takes from phenomenological philosophy. “The percept of the body and the image of the world turn into one single continuous existential experience; there is no body separate from its domicile in space, and there is no space unrelated to the unconscious image of the perceiving self.“ 21 For Pallasmaa the use of only one sense is a kind of suicide for natural experience, it is unnatural. This is why he makes the statement that architecture is not only perceived with the sense of sight alone, but with all our senses. Seeing may be the most important one or play an important role, but architecture is a multisensory act. “Every touching experience of architecture is multisensory; qualities of space, matter and scale are measured equally by the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue, skeleton and muscle… Instead of mere vision, or the five classical senses, architecture involves several realms of sensory experience which interact and fuse into each other.” 22 Pallasmaa also stated, that “an architectural work is not experienced as a collection of isolated visual pictures, but in its fully embodied material and spiritual presence. A work of architecture incorporates and infuses both physical and mental structures.” 23 This statement has its fundamentals on the embodied take on perception, developed by Merleau Ponty, what led him to consider the mind, and the role of memory, acting toge-

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As I mentioned earlier, about Maclachlan‘s distinction between hearing a sound and hearing the object that makes the sound, the same distinction is often made between seeing an object or the light itself reflected by the object. This is like the feeling of being in a church, but in reality you are only in a vaulted room where sounds resonate very strongly. This can help us interpret sound as the object that produces or reflects the sound we hear, or we can imagine the sound itself and its characteristics. While Pallasmaa does not go into detail about what he means by „ sensory thought“, these examples can help us to imagine what it might be. Pallasmaa, however, continues with a rather ambitious proposition about the haptic sense. He sees that every other sense modality refers back to the sense of touch and the haptic sense. „All senses, including vision, can be considered extensions of the sense of touch - as a specialisation of the skin.“ 25 In his book from 2009, “The Thinking Hand”, Pallasmaa reveals the potential of the human hand. He talks about how a pencil merges with the hand of an artist or an architect, in order to create things, what others admire and becomes the bridge between the imagining mind and the emerging image. Thinking through your hand, writing through your brain, creating through your body. In addition, he often mentions an opposition between the haptic and the ocular approach in architecture. For him, seeing is often associated with negative qualities like „distance“, „separation“, „isolation“, while touch is associated with „closeness“, „intimacy“ and „affection“. It is quite clear that seeing tends to objectify our surroundings, while other senses such as hearing or the haptic sense bring us closer to them.

fig.[016]_JUHANIPallasmaa

- JUHANI PALLASMAA -

“The body knows and remembers. Architectural meaning derives from archaic responses and reactions remembered by the body and the senses.“ 20

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Architecture, Body and the Mind:

In his article in the „OASE 58 - Lived Space - Embodied Experience and Sensory Thought“, Pallasmaa talks about our mental maps and how they shape our world. „All art articulates the boundary surface between the Self and the world both in the experience of the artist and the viewer. In this sense, architecture is not only a shelter for the body, but it is also the contour of consciousness, and an externalisation of the mind.“ 26

that is shaped by either conscious or unconscious projections of values and meanings by the user. “Architecture frames human existence in specific ways and defines a basic horizon of understanding. We know and remember who we are and where we belong fundamentally through our cities and buildings.” 27

Before we create something, we always imagine beforehand, how it will end up. So as architects, when do our ideas become architecture? Does it become architecture when it is realised, when it is on paper as plans or in our minds as concept? According to Pallasmaa, architecture is a mentally structured piece of work and the fundamentals of these works are built by the imaginations of its creator. What we create, draw, imagine has its roots in our mind, where we store countless images of other shapes that we came across before. That means, the thing we created has been created before, shaped in our mind, fused with others, and brought back to life in a different type of interpretation. The users of a building experience architecture also through their embodied existence and identification, which also shapes the perception of the building to the user a lot.

Lastly, the understanding of architecture is going through our bodies and metabolic systems, which means that our senses, mental stages and bodily being is responsible to store, structure and produce knowledge about spaces. Our bodies are in a direct relationship with the spaces we inhabit. Furthermore, we extract meanings out of things based on the kinds of bodies we possess, the kinds of environments we inhabit, and last but least the kinds of cultural and social practices and institutions we participate in. “Human beings are embodied. As long as we dwell on terra firma, we are incarnate. … In other words, the locus of human understanding and meaning is the ecology of a human organism in an ongoing process of interaction with various environments.“ 28

Our existence is described by our dreams, which can be described as the worlds of possibilities shaped by our own capacity for fantasy and imagination. As already mentioned, these worlds are Collages of the material, the experienced, the remembered and the imagined. As long as we measure the lived world by the criteria of empirical science, we can assume that the world we live in might be closer to the reality of a dream. In this case we experience a lived space that is much more different from the physical/geometric space. Pallasmaa calls this space „existential space“. The memories and experiences of the user are responsible for the creation of the Existential space, it is an unique experience

Architecture plays a major role in our daily lives and in the transactions we make with our environment during the day. Familiarity with our environment is a key to our well-being, and architecture, with its refined form of symbolic expression, enables us to give meaning to the places where we work and live, and also helps us to expand our sense of the possibilities of experiencing our world. “The importance of architecture for our lives can be seen in the many ways that it draws on the bodily grounding of human meaning, understanding, and symbolic expression.” 29

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Empathy and Embodied simulation

Embodied simulation helps us to understand the meaning of the things we interact or come across with on a daily basis. This happens by conscious or unconscious simulations in our minds through memories of our own experiences of that present event. As we covered before, our minds are constantly collecting data and therefore they are used to create this mental imagery. Simulation gives us the possibility to create an unconscious, pre-reflective functional mechanism of the mind-body system, which enables us to virtually design objects, events, persons or environments in our minds. Experiencing spatiality while going through buildings or encountering objects, embodied simulation can be triggered as well. Embodied simulation is a key element for our brain, which not only stores numerous experiences and memories about space, objects, sensory perceptions and other individuals, but also helps us to create the basic ability to empathise with them.

human psyche by empathising with other people. Later on, it was also used to describe the relation between Man and Nature. It was developed especially in the thought of the German Romantic philosophers, but was not subjected to thorough debate until the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at the time of the increased interest in the psychology of perception.31

Friedrich T. Vischer and Robert Vischer

In the development of the term Empathy, two philosophers, who happen to be father and son, came up with very important and interesting concepts. In his work “Das Symbol” (1887), Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887) wrote that in sensory objects people tend to find spiritual elements and he described this operation as symbolism. For him, artworks and nature manifest themselves as emotional beings that can be felt with empathy.

“It is perhaps worth emphasizing that embodied simulation not only connects us to others, it connects us to our world—a world populated by natural and man-made objects, with or without a symbolic nature, and with other individuals: a world in which, most of the time, we feel at home. The sense we attribute to our lived experience of the world is grounded in the affect-laden relational quality of our body’s action potentialities, enabled by the way they are mapped in our brains.” 30

The Son, Robert Vischer (1847-1933) further developed the theory of his father in his essay “Über das Optische Formgefühl: Ein Beitrag zur Aesthetik” (On the optical sense of form: A contribution to Aesthetics, 1873). His essay was the initial theoretical statement concerning “Einfühlung”, which meant for him the spectator’s active participation in a work of art or other visual forms. Also known as a mutual experience of exchange between the body and the perceived object. According to R.Vischer, the viewer is in the centre of aesthetic discourse, which means that the meaning of art lies in the reception and the recipient, not the object.

Also known as “Einfühlung”, in the last few centuries, Empathy has been a well discussed topic among many theorists from different fields. The concept of Einfühlung originated in the eighteenth century and at the beginning concerned the possibility of exploring the

R.Vischer‘s vision of „empathy“ was a distinction between passive „seeing“ and active „looking“. Looking was associated with physicality and was also charged with emotional value and the ability to animate or inanimate objects of perception.32

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- THEODOR LIPPS -

I experience, in me, the inner state that I see expressed in the other.

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Theodor Lipps:

Another key figure associated with the concept of „empathy“ was Theodor Lipps (1851-1913). His statement about empathy can best be explained in the 1906 essay „Empathy and Aesthetic Pleasure“, in which he said that the subject penetrates the object with affection and strength during perception.35

But how can we trigger empathy?

To trigger empathy, there must be similarity and harmony between the subject and the object of perception. Through mimesis, the viewer can identify with the object, and in a mimetic way the feeling is transferred to the object. „Looking“ provides stimuli and data that enable the existence of empathy, but it is through imagination that the viewer enters into a mutual, empathic relationship with the object, and thus the object gains emotional value.33 Imagination is very important in the „empathy theory“, because R.Vischer stated that in a work of art and thanks to the artistic imagination, the subject and the object are allowed to merge. In order to enter the dimension of art and merge with it, the viewer must be able to translate the artistic vision into a haptic impression. On the other hand, there is a possibility in Einfühlung theory of the excessive immersion of a viewer in the work of art. This was described by Friedrich Nietzsche, a contemporary to Vischer, when he spoke of the performances of Richard Wagner. Although he used the notions Miterlebnis and Mitleid, you can see some similarities with the concept of Einfühlung. According to Nietzsche, watching the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk caused a merging of “the self into the work of art that provoked a loss of speech and the dissolution of individual identity.” 34 This was meant in positive terms: the identification of the spectator with the work of art testified to its importance.

The active behaviour of the subject not only triggers the existence of the objects, but also gives them the opportunity to become visible. Through visibility, empathy as a mental process enables the subject to become aware of the emotional states of the object through the sensory symptoms. In this case, the objects are carriers of feelings and by activating them the subject can empathise with them. Not only a work of art or a natural phenomenon can be felt, but all objects can be felt in some way. Lipps also mentioned in „Aesthetics“ that empathy is the reason why, for example, abstract forms can stimulate us, e.g. a diagonal can evoke an inner feeling of lifting or lowering.36 This kind of procedure can cause unaccustomed feelings in us, such as the feeling of being inside the object. It can also be described in such a way that the viewer begins to identify himself with the object, which leads to a fusion of subject and object. For Lipps, imitation is an essential component for the development of empathy. When I experience an unknown expression or gesture, our natural instinct forces us to simulate it and store it in our mental arsenal. Lipps states that when „I see a foreign gesture or expression, I have a tendency to reproduce it, and that this tendency also evokes the feeling normally associated with the expression. It is this feeling which is then attributed to the other through projection. It is projected into or onto the other’s perceived gesture, thereby allowing for a form of interpersonal understanding.“ 38 In this way, imitation becomes a tool that helps us awaken the emotions associated with this expression, because we project these awakened feelings onto the objects we perceive. Projections and the perceived objects coexist. Not only do we need the already stored projections with the self-experienced emotional states to which we only have access, but we also need the perceived object to trigger these feelings in us. This coexistence helps us to empathise objects in our perceived worlds.

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REFE RENCES - 50 -

fig.[017]_STELARC_thirdHAND

STEL ARC

“The body now inhabits a terrain of speedy, robust and reliable machines, with sensor and computational systems that far exceed our capabilities. The body in its present form and with these present functions is inadequate. Asserting the body is obsolete is not alluding to some kind of disembodied existence. Rather the body’s design is flawed, with slim survival parameters. Our very functions and interactions in the world result in our death. We should consider alternate anatomical architectures. Alter the body’s architecture and you adjust its awareness of the world. Our physiology largely determines our philosophy.” 1 Stelarc‘s works can be described as performative, technological and ambiguous. Throughout his career as an artist and creator, he has visually explored and acoustically amplified his own body. He used a variety of different media to experiment with embodiment/disembodiment. He used prosthetics, robotics, virtual reality systems, the internet and biotechnology to develop intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body. His goal has always been to explore alternative anatomical architectures with enlarged and extended body constructions. Although the body seems to be at the centre of all his works, from his use of skin as a sculptural material to his body enlargements, his body does not become a work of art. His approach to art revolves around the idea of „enlarging the body“, both physically and technically. His works are seen as a stepping stone for us to reach a second level of existence, where the body becomes an object for physical and technical experiments to discover its limits. Stelarc‘s body is an impersonal architectural site of redesign and experimentation, a landscape full of potential, ready to be upgraded. He often mentions the term „obsolete body“, and what he means by this is that the body must overcome centuries of prejudice and begin to be seen as an expandable evolutionary structure, improved by a wide variety of technologies.

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fig.[018]_STELARC_reWIRED n reMIXED

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„Technology is what defines the meaning of being human, it is part of being human. Especially nowadays the body is biologically inadequate“. 2 As an example, I want to bring up the Third Hand from Stelarc. It is his most famous and longest used performance object, completed in Yokohama in 1980. The initial concept for the project was intended as a semi-permanent attachment to the body, but due to some physical problems, such as skin irritation from electrode gel and the weights of the mechanical hand, it was not realistic to be worn continuously, so it became a special performance device.

fig.[019]_STELARC_extendedARM

It is not a basic replacement of a body part, but rather an improvement or addition to the body, a work that explores the intimate interface of technology and prosthetic augmentation. The body should not be seen as lacking any kind of performance feature, but rather as a symptom of excess, of improvement. Another example like „Re-wired/Re-mixed“ event, is also very appropriate. This event was about the „Dismembered Body“, where the artist wore a Heads up Display (HUD) to see with the eyes of someone in London and hear with the ears of someone in New York through headphones. Throughout this entire visual and acoustic experience, his arm was encased in a seven-degree exoskeleton that could be controlled simultaneously by anyone and anywhere who had a connection to the arm, meaning that an observer was responsible for the choreography of his arm movements. The body was disconnected, distracted, distributed and, possessed with multiple agency.

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Completed on 3th November 2007, the building was constructed for the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics and designed by the chinese architecture firm Studio ZHU-PEI. With its nearly 100,000 square meters in area, The Digital Beijing Building serves as a control and data centre of Beijing Olympics. After the competitions, the function of the building has been switched to a museum, where it accommodates a virtual museum of Digital Olympics and an exhibition centre for manufacturers of digital products.

“The rapid development of the digital age has greatly impacted on our society, life and city. If the industrial revolution has resulted in Modernism, the Digital Beijing Building begins to explore what will occur in the digital epoch.” 4 Taking the new era of information and the digital age as a starting point, the concept for Digital Beijing was developed as a statement. From the appearance of a digital barcode and the integration of an additional circuit board, the building rises from a peaceful water surface. In an effort to create an impressive symbol for the Digital Olympics and also for the Information Age, the Digital Beijing Building presents itself as an enlarged micro world with an abstracted mass, such as the simple repetition of the digits 0 and 1.

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DIGITAL BEIJING

fig.[020]_STUDIO-ZHU-PEI_digitalBEIJING

“In the future, we expect the Digital Beijing Building will always be under renovation, evolving keeping pace with technology.” 3

- 55 fig.[021]_STUDIO-ZHU-PEI_digitalBEIJING

(W)Ego house, an installation by MVRDV, was originally shown during the Dutch Design Week 2017 and consists of various rooms designed to fulfill idealistic but selfish perspectives within a limited space. It consists of 9 rooms, each assigned by a color to visualize a different need of a user, and also designed to reflect the personality of the user and meet his or her needs. The whole construct is based on a certain playfulness that represents the idea of confronting other peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s dreams and wishes when living in a limited urban space, which forces a cooperative style of living between the inhabitants, a kind of forced negotiation between them in order to optimize the use. According to the authors of this installation, the aim was to give the viewers an insight into the future of adaptable living to the needs of the user and at the same time to promote the coexistence of different lifestyles in an optimized dense reality.

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fig.[022]_T?F_theWHYfactory_wegoCITY-tailor-made housing

(W)EGO MVRDV

- 57 fig.[023]_MVRDV_(w)EGO

The term „media art“ has been in use for some time, but especially in recent decades it has become very popular and has been used with a long list of different technological components. Technology plays a major role, and works of art depend very much on it for their functioning. „Media“ generally stands for any kind of information or communication, and devices have been used to transmit and store information. This form of art brings together many fields such as architecture, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering, programming and artificial intelligence. Through the use of new media and the incorporation of new technologies in their works of art, artists have the opportunity to redefine the traditional categories of art. The result is usually a mixture of painting, sculpture, installations and so on.

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fig.[024]_ANADOLRefik_wdchDREAMS

MEDIA ART

fig.[025]_ANADOLRefik_wdchDREAMS

REFIK ANADOL.wdch dreams

Collaboration between the LA Philharmonic and media artist Refik Anadol. By using machine learning algorithms, Anadol and his team created data visualisations of 45 TB of data and projected those onto the buildings exterior skin as a public art.

Source: https://refikanadol.com/works/wdch-dreams/

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fig.[026]_ANADOLRefik_latentBEING

REFIK ANADOL.latent being

Refik anadol lets the visitors dive into a world where they observe and interact with the spirit of a machine. The interactive installation adapts the cathedral-like concrete site â&#x20AC;&#x17E;kraftwerk berlinâ&#x20AC;&#x153; into a dynamic human AI ecosystem. The interactive installation fuses berlin-related visual and acoustic memories. Source: https://www.designboom.com/art/refik-anadol-latent-being-kraftwerk-berlin-11-30-2019/

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fig.[027]_ANADOLRefik_wdchDREAMS

REFIK ANADOL.archive dreamins

Using the SALT research collections, artist Refik Anadol used machine learning algorithms to search and sort relationships between 1,700,000 documents. The result was to create not only an architecturally immersive space but also an immersive media installation through multidimensional data and their interactions with each other. Source: https://refikanadol.com/works/archive-dreaming/

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fig.[028]_OUCHHHtv_dataGATE

OUCHHH TV.data gate

Ouchhh wants this work of art to be seen as a gateway between our planet and other habitable planets in the universe. The installation consists of 3 parts: Form, light and space. Light is the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s first artwork based on the idea of using machine learning in connection with the discovery of space and astronomical research through NASAâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s Kepler dataset. Source: http://www.ouchhh.tv/

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fig.[029]_OUCHHHtv_poeticAI

OUCHHH TV.poetic ai

Using machine learning and AI algorithms, Ouchhh created a scientific, conscious „poetic refraction“ of AI reality, learning from millions of lines of theory, articles and books on light, physics and space-time written by scientists who changed the destiny of the world. Source: http://cargocollective.com/hellyeee/POETIC-AI-Exhibition-Paris

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fig.[030]_TEAMLAB x BORDERLESS_flowerFOREST

TEAMLAB x BORDERLESS.flower forest

The artwork is created by a computer program that continuously renders the work in real time, which means that the interaction between the people and the installation causes its continuous transformation: previous visual states can never be reproduced and will never occur again. Source: https://borderless.teamlab.art/ew/flowerforest/

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fig.[031]_TEAMLAB x BORDERLESS_rockNwaterparticles

TEAMLAB x BORDERLESS.rock and water particles

The rock on which the people gather is recreated in a virtual three-dimensional space. When a person stands on the rock or touches the waterfall, they too become like a rock that changes the flow of water. Through the interaction of the people, the water flow continues to change in real time. Source: https://borderless.teamlab.art/ew/iwa-waterparticles/

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PRO POSAL - 66 -

NAR RATIVE

Baudrillard‘s dealings with simulacra go back a while, and since then our society has logically changed as well. Especially, with the advent of smartphones and the parallel growth of technological innovations, our environments today are becoming more and more immersed in hyperreality and have been increasingly drawn into it over the last decades. This has changed our attitudes and approach to the media we consume. We live in a more advanced world, and Baudrillard‘s examples with televisions and the signs and symbols used in advertising have spread to other areas, and through sophisticated technological improvements, simulacra can be anywhere at any time. Our understanding of reality lies only in our own minds, which are constructed by our own „self“. Nowadays, even social media is based on that. In Cyberspace our behaviour, actions, choices have been monitored, saved and by their AI systems/algorithm processed. Since the boom, social media has been manipulating our minds by showing us stuff, which mainly focuses on our interests. There is also a dilemma, where these big social media companies are selling the collected data of us to advertisement companies, and the main money they earn basically rely on that. So the “tool” we are using to enhance our daily lives is actually using us as tools. Our addiction towards social media is based on this data, the AI behind it knows us better than we know ourselves. It can predict our next action and thus create experiences that drive us more into using social media.

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! NARRATIVE.diagramm The process of the merge between bodies through mental and physical procedures

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Does it have to be like that? What if we used this data for other stuff?

So, we are not only led into new frontiers, but also forced to live in a world of hyper-reality, a world in which we cannot distinguish between what is real and what is not real. This is not really a big deal for us, we do not really care. Once we are happily married to technology and live a life where we can do so many things in a short amount of time and be anywhere/ everywhere, virtually or in real, we are okay with it. These cyberspaces are an important tool in our lives today, and we can not move forward without them. In addition, the Human body without its personal features, memories, experiences and emotions is soulless, it is empty, with no function and adaptability towards outside or others. Architecture shows in some cases also the same attributes. A building without a function, a message, a sign or a concept has not only no use, but also no meaning to us. When we start to merge our body with the architectural body and start to merge our subjectivity with the object through our memories, emotions and personalities, what we would get is a completely different type of environment. A surrounding structure that reacts to the input of the users and begins to adapt to them.

What if architecture begins to be an extension of the body? What happens when we use our existence as a bridge between architecture and our body? We are not satisfied with our possessions or even our surroundings, how could we be? We are constantly looking for new improvements or replacements, and almost everyone has this personal characteristic, the so-called â&#x20AC;&#x17E;explorer-geneâ&#x20AC;&#x153;. Changing environments based on your personality, emotional state, preferences and simulating a new virtual interface and merging it with your existing physical surroundings can be the new term in our daily lives. Those representations of our reality can be used as some sort of a mirror. In this case, architecture should not deal with the construction of a building, but rather be considered as bodybuilding. Architecture as a body can be enhanced, has room to grow and the possibility to free itself from the functional enslavement of the users. It could not only adapt to the user, but it would also maintain a physical and mental proximity to the user.

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So, the project is not only about the relationship between real and virtual, but also about the search for new ways to implement immaterial digital qualities into the physical and material-based world of architecture. The simulations, or rather the virtual face, can be seen as a medium in their dynamic character and their constantly changing architectural expression. In addition, which is also important, how the perception of our environment would change. Going back to the mediation of perceptual relationships by Don Ihde1, this new space would give us the opportunity to experience a fusion, or rather a continuous alternation, between these mediation relationships of perception. We use technological artefacts to mediate perception and this simulated medium can be an artifact that is characterized as an existential space. Something that interprets the actions, character, feelings, memories and experiences of its users in its own way, and shapes those according to given output parameters. The media phenomenon has also contributed to the emergence of new boundaries in the fields of art and architecture. Bringing media into architecture can help us to create individual spaces that are filled and layered with millions of different faces. In this way, media architecture can open up new possibilities for us and become an architecture that can translate the information space into real places and thus create meaningful experiences.

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CONCLUSION:

The initial work consists of improving/modifying the real spaces we inhabit by simulating a virtual representation of that space. The static real face of our environments would coexist with the dynamic forms of the virtual counterpart created by our personal contribution. This process would then open a new window into a new reality, a new space, which is ultimately a hyperreal space that is not only between two dimensions, but also intertwines virtual and real spatial dimensions. In this way, the architecture does not have to be in one form only, but it can adapt to the user and interact with us through our personal input. This can lead to a more individualized environment that enriches or improves our lives while stimulating the users.

! OPPOSITIONS.diagramm The main concept shown in the diagram

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The world is changing, and the way we live is also changing. Flexible living has become more and more common in society, and people tend to favour more flexible ways of living and working. One of the best examples of this is the increase in flexible working or distance working policies by employers and employees over the last ten years. We have always dreamed, or rather imagined, the future of a life with super-complex lifestyles and so on, but in reality it will probably be much simpler, more composite. And this future scenario is already becoming the new norm, and the flexibility to work from home with team colleagues around the world in virtual workspaces is already possible today. Our way of thinking as students or employees has also developed in a direction that we want to work anywhere, especially among the younger generation. We as millennials (18-34 years old) who have grown up with technology have used laptops, tablets or smartphones as essential parts of our daily lives, and this has brought us the comfort of freedom, adaptability and also mobility when it comes to our working and studying lives. Even though there are concerns and struggles with distance work, such as communication difficulties, collaboration and loneliness, flexibility in our lives benefits more than other factors. The benefit of flexibility is really important because it would increase the ability to adapt to the user and his or her individual needs. The project also aims to bring individuality and adaptability into architecture, in this case allowing users to work in their own environment. In this manner, we can also increase productivity, motivation and well-being. Creating a cyberspace above oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s own living room and jumping into it and leaving reality with all its distractions and noises behind, can affect productivity at work or study. In the first quarter of 2020, a global pandemic hit our planet. The so-called â&#x20AC;&#x153;Covid-19â&#x20AC;? pandemic has forced us to limit our daily lives and we have been stuck inside our houses for awhile. It introduced us to two very significant situations. On the one hand, without any preparation, the rapid and large-scale transition to remote living, working and socializing. But on the other hand it also gave us the opportunity to imagine and adapt ourselves to generally live and work in a different way.

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USE CASE

! REMOTE-WORKING.stats

Source: IWG Global Workplace Survey http://assets.regus.com/pdfs/iwg-workplace-survey/ iwg-workplace-survey-2019.pdf Date: March 2019 Survey Participants: Over 15,000 business people across 80 nations.

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! REMOTE-WORKING.stats

Source: Polycom https://www.polycom.com/content/dam/polycom/common/ documents/whitepapers/changing-needs-of-the-workplace-whitepaper-enus.pdf Date: March 2017 Survey Participants: 25,234 people across 12 countries including the US, Canada, Brazil, Japan,Germany, UK, India, Singapore, Russia, France, Australia and China. 55% were managers or above.

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! REMOTE-WORKING.stats

Source: Buffer https://buffer.com/state-of-remote-work-2019 Date: 2019 Survey Participants: 2471 people responded to the survey, from countries such as USA, Canada, UK, Spain, Ireland, Germany, France, Irland, italy and Australia

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! REMOTE-WORKING.stats

Source: Global Work-From-Home Experience Survey - copyrighted by Iometrics & Global Workplace Analyctics Date: March 2020 Survey Participants: 2865 Responses over 6-week data gathering period; Administered through industry associations, social media and networking;managers or above.

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! REMOTE-WORKING.stats

Source: The State of Remote Work survey and report, created and published by Buffer and AngelList. Date: 2020 Survey Participants: over 3500 remote workers from around the world took part on this survey

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If you take remote working as an example and look at the statistics displayed, home is the number one primary work location for most remote workers. If you perform many different activities in the same location and add work to them, you may experience some productivity issues. In the field of remote working, there is this term called „third space“. It has been claimed that remote workers tend to seek or increasingly have a third space in their lives. The concept is quite simple, the first space is your home where you live. The second space is the place where they work, and in this case it is also home. The third space, however, is the place where they go to get away from home and work, spend valuable time and refresh their minds. The list of third spaces is long, here are a few examples: Gym, pubs, cafés, barbershops, churches/mosques. Edward Soja, an urban theorist, noted that the first and second spaces are two different and possibly contradictory spatial groupings in which people interact physically and socially. For example, like home (everyday life and knowledge) and school/university (academic knowledge). And in search of the in-between, or the so-called hybrid spaces, where one begins to mix the first and second spaces and create a new type of space, the third space. Soja describes his theory of third spaces as follows: “everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history.” 2 Another person I want to bring out is Ray Oldenburg. In his book „The great good place“, he talks about the “...daily life, in order to be relaxed and fulfilling, must find its balance in three realms of experience. One is domestic, a second is gainful or productive, and the third is inclusively sociable, offering both the basis of community and the celebration of it.” 3

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NEW SPACE

In other words, the first place can be associated with the inner life and the second place with the outside. On the one hand, we have the domestic home with all its warmth, familiarity and the freedom to do whatever one wants. On the other hand, there is work, which is a profitable and productive place where we can earn resources for our survival in our society with all its rules and already defined spaces. A third space is a place where both opposite sides collide. It has features from both sides, which makes it so attractive to people.

What happens when the place you work and the place you live end up being the same place?

The need for a third space would rise, and we would crave for alternative experiences other than being at home or being in home-office. There are big companies such as Starbucks, who made their brand around this topic. Andreas Klinger, head of Remote at AngelList, once brought up this statement as an explanation: “You have your workplace, you have your home… If those two places end up being the same spot, where do you go to decompress? Community spaces or ‘third spaces’ might be an answer to this. The next significant Starbucks competitor won‘t try to kick out remote workers but instead – with an adapted business model – try to lure them in.” Cooperation spaces are also a hot topic, because they are also seen as intermediate spaces, as third spaces. They are rentable workplaces, and the basic idea is that you neither have to go to the office nor stay at home. In my opinion, they are still not successful in this respect. You still have to go to a certain place to work there, and that is by no means as flexible.

So in order to decompress, what can be an option for us in present times or generally in the future? Since the evolving media and consumer culture has been speeding up our daily lives, in many different ways, mainly with all the “ready-to-use” applications and this flexible living motto, we have to find a way to make things more individual. In a world where everything becomes similar, and eventually, insignificant and with no consequence, architecture can be the medium to create difference of meaning, and in particular, the criteria of experiential quality. Architecture’s task and aim should be to maintain the differentiation and qualitative articulation of existential space.

In my case, the third space could be a space where not only functional spatiality is taken into account, but also dimensional ones such as the real and the virtual. If we use simulation as a new space-generating apparatus, we don‘t even have to go anywhere to free ourselves from the feeling of being „at home“.

What happens if the space we work or live in can also be the space we decompress?

When material qualities merge with immaterial qualities, we can create our own spaces around us. We can immerse ourselves in another place that still resembles the real one, but through virtual adjustments becomes a new simulated environment. Through mixed reality, we can merge the virtual and the real and obtain an immersive, interactive space that can help us to get distracted, take a break or, even if we have lost track, to regain our spirit.

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The whole idea of this new space should be a statement and a possible future for the general understanding of architecture. An architecture that can be brought to life with sophisticated and uncanny elements that can be composed together with material and immaterial parts. We are curious creatures, who are mainly interested in unfamiliar things. We love to be surprised or to be confronted with unforeseen experiences. These experiences, which happen so suddenly and are filled with unfamiliar things, tend to arouse our interest and stick in our memory, and trigger reactions. So the â&#x20AC;&#x17E;toolâ&#x20AC;&#x153; catches these reactions, it learns from us, or better said, it starts to learn our reactions, emotions, personality and above all our existence. Every time we log in, the space adapts to us, and over time it would evolve and change itself. The experience would grow with us.

But what about us, do we learn too? Should we also learn?

If we would start to understand this new space and learn from it, we would also start to adapt. We would begin to control our personal input and to react to it correctly. We would know how to trigger certain experiences or even spaces by adjusting our own personal state of being. In this way we would merge into the space we inhabit and live with it together in harmony in an infinite loop.

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THE LOOP

! LOOP.diagramm

the learning process shown in a diagramm

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The DATA and the Computation:

The challenge with this concept is not only the collection of data, but also what personal inputs need to be collected to create parameters that can be used in a design process. Furthermore the visualization of the usersâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC; existential spaces on physical space is the goal of the experiments. Self-reflection must not only be visually perceived, but it should be felt with all senses.

What is the matter with the personality type?

Every person has a personality type, which is defined by the criterias such as previous experiences, relationships and choices they made during their life. They define our character, the way we take actions and shape our decisions throughout our lives.

What about our emotions?

Our emotions are different. It is situational feelings that we have, influenced by external or internal sources, that fundamentally influence our behaviour, our decisions and above all our perception. Bringing emotions into the design process could not only have interesting visual results, but also serve to play down some extreme emotional phases. Our environment and our emotional states are directly related. The perception of our environment based on our emotions is one thing, but the spaces we physically inhabit can not only manipulate our physical state, but also affect our mental state. By stimulating the userâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s personal state, we can empower the productivity or motivation of the user.

And the User-Activity? How can it affect the perception of the space?

Our actions are decisive when we experience a space. The way we move, the speed of the movement and the type of movement always influence our perception of space. The points mentioned above can also trigger a certain action or a chain of actions, which in turn shape the experience. Through an action we can also interact with the space, which in turn helps us not only to better understand the space, but also brings us closer to it.

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THE DATA

MBTI PERSONALITIES

The First Case is mainly based on how personality can affect a design approach. It relies on one of the well known self-report classifiers and one of the most widely used psychological instruments in the world, which is called the „Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator“ (short MBTI), designed to identify a person‘s personality type, strengths, and preferences. Taking Carl Jung‘s theory of personality types, Isabel Myers and her mother Katherine Briggs developed the questionnaire. The test is pretty straightforward and based on the answers to the questions on the inventory, people get assigned to one of the 16 different personality types. There is no such thing as the „best“ or „better“ type than any other one, and the aim of this tool is not to look for dysfunction or abnormality. Instead, its goal is to allow you to further explore and understand your own personality including your likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses, possible career preferences, and compatibility with other people. The Tool is divided into 4 classes, Extraversion/Introversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling and Judging/Perceiving. All possible permutations of preferences in the 4 classes I mentioned above eventually lead to 16 different combinations or personality types representing which of the two poles in each of the four classes dominates in a person. In the end, the user is assigned a 4-letter acronym of the corresponding combination of preferences, which describes the personality type of the user. Although people show characteristics of both poles, they usually prefer one way over the other. The letter indicates preference, and the percentage indicates the degree of preference. The test is not a definitive source to reveal your personality, it is more situational, and your result may be different after you have tried the test for the second time. People tend to change their views, their way of life and their thoughts about certain things, and this strongly influences our personal preferences.

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! PERSONALITY.profiles

The 8 different personality profiles from the MBTI.

Source: https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/

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! PERSONALITY.combinations possible 16 type combinations out of the profiles

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Thinking (T) - Feeling (F)

Extraversion (E) - Introversion (I)

The first class is the dichotomy between extraversion and introversion, which can also be called the „Favourite World“ class. In this class, you need to define and ask yourself whether you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world. We all show some degree of extraversion and introversion, but most of us tend to have a general preference for one or the other.

Sensing (S) - Intuition (N)

The second one, also called “Information”-class, is about focus and how we absorb information from the world around us. Those who prefer Sensing are concentrated in paying a great deal of attention to reality, especially what they can learn from their own senses. Facts, details and getting hands-on experience are key to their absorption of information. Moreover, people who prefer Intuition pay more attention to things like patterns and impressions. Their way to gather information is through thinking about possibilities, imagining the future, abstract theories and speculations. Just like with extraversion and introversion, all people spend some time sensing and intuiting depending on the situation.

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Third Class, also known as the “Decisions”-class, is based on how we come up to conclusions. Here you have to ask yourself while making a decision, if you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances. This reflection of decision preference for Thinking types is mostly pacing a greater emphasis on facts and objective data, which makes them tend to be consistent, logical, and impersonal when they are about to make a decision. People, who tend to be Feeling-type, are more likely to consider people and emotions when arriving at a conclusion. They value a huge amount of trust to opinions from others.

Judging (J) - Perceiving (P)

The Final and the fourth class, “Structure”-class, is a dichotomy between Judging and Perceiving. Here, the aim for you to find out is, if you are more into getting things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options. Judging types tend to have a structured way or theory to approach the world. They are always willing to try to make accommodation between new information and their structured world, which might only be changed with discretion.Perceiving types tend to be unstructured and keep options open, thus they will be more willing to change without having a prior structured world. Sometimes people feel they have both. This Class only tells which preference the person extraverts. One person may feel very orderly/structured on the inside, yet their outer life looks spontaneous and adaptable. Another person may feel very curious and open-ended in their inner world, yet their outer life looks more structured or decided.

EMO TION

Emotion based design approach:

The Second Case is about bringing in the emotional data into the design talk and merging it with the personality data. Emotions are important, we all feel emotional at almost every point in our daily lives. They also play a central role in our ability to understand and learn about the world, as they are also directly related to the sensations with which we perceive the world. We are used to connecting emotionally with the objects of our lives on three different levels: the visceral, the behavioural and the reflective. Visceral emotional design is the first state in which we encounter an object, and it is mainly concerned with the aesthetics and perceived quality of mere appearance and feeling, as well as with the involvement of the senses. As the name suggests, Behavioral Emotional Design is mainly based on the usability, performance and functionality of the design. Finally, the third level, reflective emotional design, is our personal attachment to the design after we have used it for a while. Even though these three levels are important and useful while designing something or somewhere, it does not match the goal I want to achieve. I want to visualize the emotions and not create something for the emotions. The rooms should simulate the emotions and recreate them according to my imagination. The aim is to see what kind of reaction the user has to the simulated design based on their emotion.

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! EMOTION.wheel

emotion wheel according to Plutchik

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! EMOTION.dyads

emotional results after combining 2 basic emotions

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Emotion wheel:

But how many types of emotions are there, I mean how many emotions can we experience? In his Book “Coherence: The Secret Science of Brilliant Leadership” Dr. Alan Watkins quotes from Goleman and Dalai Lama that “there are actually 34,000 distinguishable feelings”. Neither tracking within so many emotions nor the navigation through turbulent waters of feeling without getting lost, is easy. Since it is nearly impossible to understand and use 34,000 distinct emotions, we can dial all them back into primary emotions where they emerge and we can start to identify those. There is an emotion wheel, created by American psychologist Dr. Robert Plutchik, and he proposed that there are eight primary emotions that serve as the foundation for all others: joy, sadness, acceptance, disgust, fear, anger, surprise and anticipation.4 He continued to group these primary emotions, which he identified as basis for all others, into polar opposites: • joy and sadness • trust and disgust • fear and anger • surprise and anticipation Plutchik also stated, that there are twenty-four pairs of two emotions which he called “dyads”, categorized in 4 groups: primary, secondary, tertiary and opposite dyads.5 The categorization of dyads works like this: • Primary dyads are one petal apart: e.g. Joy + Trust = Love • Secondary dyads are two petals apart: e.g. Sadness + Anger = Envy • Tertiary dyads are three petals apart: e.g. Fear + Disgust = Shame • Opposites emotions are four petals apart: e.g. Joy x Sadness There obviously other base emotions like guilt, jealousy, shame and pride, but the reason why they are not included are the fact that they do not show clear and obvious expressions. They are easy to hide.

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The ability to simplify complex concepts is the beauty of this tool. It is mainly used to help people grasp a dilemma and guide them through understanding to take the decisive step to solve that dilemma as well. When emotions occur on a subconscious level, it is difficult for us to immediately recognize our emotions and interpret them in such a way that we can overcome or use them. This is what makes this emotion wheel so useful, because it enables the user to visualize his emotions, to understand which combinations of emotions have produced this result, and to act accordingly. However, as I said before, I am not trying to inform the user what emotions he is experiencing, but I want to show them through my design of the room. To visualize human emotions accurately is not an easy task, but if we start to use this tool in a way where the user can see a certain design element like something as a representation of his emotions, how would he react and act on it?

Emotion Detection:

The recognition of human emotions is not an easy task. In order to recognize emotional information, we first have to start with passive sensors by collecting data about the physical state or behavior of the user without even interpreting the input. The collected data then gives us clues and is used in the same way how humans perceive emotions in others. There are many ways to capture emotional data, for example, cameras can be used to capture facial expressions, posture and gestures, while speech can be recorded with a microphone. On the other hand, there are sensors that can detect emotional cues by measuring body conditions such as skin temperature and galvanic resistance. Using machine learning techniques, we can then begin to process the emotional information by extracting meaningful patterns from the collected data. There are AI applications, such as speech recognition, facial expressions or even natural language processing, that do just that. There are also applications that can analyze the things we post on our social networking sites, which can extract the literal patterns to give us clues about the emotional states.

! EMOTION.detection

Bodily topography of basic (Upper) and nonbasic (Lower) emotions associated with words. The body maps show regions whose activation increased (warm colors) or decreased (cool colors) when feeling each emotion. Source: „Bodily maps of emotions“ - Lauri Nummenmaa, Enrico Glerean, Riitta Hari, and Jari K. Hietanen PNAS January 14, 2014 111 (2) 646-651; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1321664111 Experiment Participants: 36–302

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! EMOTION.detection

FER, also know as Facial Expression Recognition

by training an AI-algorithm with these images, we can create a system, who can recognise facial expression through a video stream or image input. Source: Frontiers in Psychology https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ fpsyg.2015.00761/full

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User-Activity based design approach:

User activity is another data input, which I have taken into the consideration, since the importance of it during the perception process is clear and has been covered above. It is mostly about the motion of a person during the experience of a space. The activity can then be classified by patterns that we already recorded in our minds. Sitting, standing, walking, running, and so on. A computer can also recognise patterns in this case too, like in the emotion recognition or personality prediction, through patterns of collected data we can distinguish between different motions of an user.

But how do we actually collect or record it?

As an example, we can collect motion data through cameras by recording a video. The video can then be processed with optical flow calculation to calculate the velocities through moving pixels. Optical flow is the movement of objects or subjects between successive images in a sequence caused by the relative movement between object and camera. The displacement of pixels between two subsequent frames have been analyzed and velocity vectors compiled based on this analysis. Depending on the quality of the content, the accuracy may vary. Another example is the use of motion tracking sensors, suits or cameras. Since these devices are specially made for this kind of use, the results of the data can be really accurate.

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USER ACTIVITY

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VIDEO.input

raw video footage for the optical flow calculations through pixel motion

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VECTORFIELD.output output of the calculations

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VIDEO.input

raw video footage for the optical flow calculations through pixel motion

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VECTORFIELD.output output of the calculations

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How much does your smartphone know about you?

Our smartphones are sophisticated little devices that have gone through an incredible evolution over the last decade and are getting smarter every day. They constantly record our daily actions. They are like our right hand that supports us throughout our daily lives by tracking our movements, monitoring our heartbeat, recording our actions and anticipating our needs. The way they do this is simple, they are packed with a bundle of sensors. These include various types of cameras and microphones, as well as sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, GPS and pedometers. These sensors can not only collect data about our actions, but also predict very accurately our next actions, they can navigate our location or determine the level of our activity during the day. If we start to use this kind of collected data as the design input as well, things can get interesting. The improved cameras and camera sensors of our phones also give us the opportunity to generate depth maps of our environments, which can lead to pretty accurate point cloud scanning. Some of the newly equipped features of mobile phone cameras also include Lidar scanners, which makes the 3d scanning of environments even more

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The Activity Data:

With the help of the sensors from our smartphones, we can predict or classify our present activities. Here, I have used a smartphone based “Human Activities and Postural Transitions” 6 dataset, where they carried out experiments with a group of 30 participants within an age bracket of 19-48 years. They were told to do a bunch of pre-defined activities, categorized as followed: • 3x static postures: standing, sitting, lying • 3x dynamic postures: walking, walking downstairs, walking upstairs • 6 x postural transitions between the static postures, e.g. stand-to-sit Properly trained, this data set could help us to set up AI tools to detect user activity from similar data we have collected ourselves. In this way, we can distinguish between different types of activity and integrate this information into the design output.

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SMARTPHONE.output

self-experiment | DATA VISUALISATION smartphone usage and activity during a 45 minute walk accelerometer = POSITION gyroscope = DIRECTION gravity value = VECTOR STRENGTH

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SMARTPHONE.output

self-experiment | DATA VISUALISATION smartphone usage and activity during a 45 minute walk

accelerometer = POSITION gyroscope = DIRECTION gravity value = VECTOR STRENGTH

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DE SIGN - 104 -

With all the media that surround us, built up from numerous layers of information, with screens and beamers projected onto surfaces or facades of buildings, not a day would go by in our world without encountering simulations. It creates new boundaries that constantly shift from one place to another. By replacing static structures with dynamic images and immaterial simulations, space becomes a property of information that fluctuates. The representations, imitations of the real can be seen in many different ways and in many different realms. Thanks to high end softwares, we can recreate nature digitally, produce hyper realistic environments and reanimate behaviours. We can even go further and clone our environment through 3d-scanning techniques or point cloud recording. These models, depending on the tool or device you are using, can be in high detail level and pretty accurate.

DESIGN APPROACH

You do not need an expensive device to do that, only your smartphone. You can use your phone‘s camera to capture the wanted object or environment with the help of photogrammetry technique. “Photogrammetry is primarily concerned with making precise measurements of three-dimensional objects and terrain features from two-dimensional photographs.“ 1 That is one of the main reasons why my design approach consists of 3d scanned point clouds. This new form of simulacra, representations of the real world, stand on their own feets. For the orientation‘s sake, they are maybe still resembling their original, but their existence are not defined by the same properties and they become a new type of an environment. Since they can also be regarded as Data input, it means that it has less boundaries, better said none. When we start to combine this data with the data that I already introduced above, the cloned environment got a chance to become more than its original. So basically, at first, i gather the positional data from the point clouds of the environment, which can also be used to visualise the real space. This would help the users to orient themselves in the space they are currently in. The point cloud input will then be fed into the algorithm for computation, where the aim is to generate a vector field. This procedure consist of 4 main steps: 1. Gradient vector calculation 2. converted Personality type data as an additive input 3. converted Emotion based data as a multiplier 4. user activity data as a multiplier This process will then lead to an immersive experience of

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the space in a mixed reality environment.

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! DESIGN.approach

Diagram of the main Design process

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The First step for my design approach was to find a way to take the pointfield data and create a vector field out of it. To do that, I found a paper about â&#x20AC;&#x17E;Graph bundling by Kernel Density Estimationâ&#x20AC;&#x153;, written by Christophe Hurter, Ozan Ersoy, Alexandru Telea and used it as an example and guide to create the vector field.2 First, I feed the generated or scanned point cloud and rasterize them with regard to the bounding box of the point field. Then I add values to each cell of the grid, where the height of the value depends on the number of points a cell contains. The more points, the higher the density value of each cell. To avoid zero as the density value for each cell, I also resampled the grid by adding a default value to each cell. Considering the density value, the next step is to add vectors to each point and use them as attraction cells. The cells with the higher value advects the cells with the lower values. At the end I added a scaling factor for the advection, which I can use later for other inputs.

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VECTORFIELD GENERATION

! GRADIENT.vectorfield Diagram of the main Design process

Source: https://www.academia.edu/16197435/Graph_Bundling_by_Kernel_Density_Estimation

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The next obstacle is the conversion of the MBTI personality types. MBTI Test results are in letters, eg. â&#x20AC;&#x153;INFJ, ENTP, etc.â&#x20AC;?, so it was necessary for me to find a way to convert them into vectors, since I am dealing with vector fields. Firstly, I created a 2D-coordinate system with X and Y values. I then scattered each individual type-letter on the axis where they belong. At the end, I end up with 16 different vectors, which I can add to the already existing vector field. The way I do that is simple, I added the values I got from the MBTI-type-vectors as the default value for resampling of the grid. For demonstration sake, I did an experiment, where my aim was to find a way to showcase how the conversion and the implementation of this method looks like. I decided to design a 2.5 dimensional frame as a starting point. Using an origin point, I moved and copied the point on the introduced axis above with the values of the individual letters. After that with a logical order, I connected those points as a continuous line (p.xx - diagram). As a point cloud input for further design process, I connected this line with the boundary curves of the frame and resampled them as well (p.xx - diagram). At the end I added a scaling factor for the advection, which I can use later for other inputs. When I feed the point cloud into the algorithm the effect can be seen on the outputs down below. (pp.xx, results) I took this case also further and introduced an experiment with a point cloud, which I got through a 3D-scanning procedure of an environment, and used the gathered points as an input for the algorithm. (pp.XX, input-PC)

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MBTI-DATA CONVERSION

! PERSONALITY.conversion

The conversion of the MBTI personality type data into 16 different vectors

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PERSONALITY.experiment01

the conversion and the visualisation of the 16 converted vectors based on the MBTI data

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PERSONALITY.experiment01

the interpolation of the main vectors withe the boundary curves resampling and the generation of the point cloud

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RESULTS.experiment01 with a SCALE FACTOR = 2

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RESULTS.experiment01 with a SCALE FACTOR = 4

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RESULTS.experiment01 with a SCALE FACTOR = 6

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POINTCLOUD.input

captured with a smartphone processed through a photogrammetry software

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However, for the emotion data, I came up with another solution. There are two different types of input when I use the Plutchik Emotion wheel as a role model for the computation of the data. The first one is the pole of the emotion and it tells me if it is a negative or positive emotion. Secondly, the strength of the emotion, which we can find at the radial position of the emotion on the wheel. The strength data can be used in the scale factors for the advection, thus depending on this, the look of the resulting vector field can vary a lot. So in other words, I use the emotional strength data as an amplifier for the advection of the point clouds. The emotion pole data here is being used to change the direction of the vectors, so when I amplify the vector field, the direction of the vectors from the MBTI-data is going to be inverted, which again, influences the outlook of the vector field deeply.

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EMOTION-DATA CONVERSION

! EMOTION.conversion

the conversion of the Emotion Data according to Plutchikâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s Emotion Wheel. Two types of data has been processed into the algorithm, the emotion strength and the emotion pole

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POINTCLOUD.input

captured with a smartphone processed through a photogrammetry software

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SIMULATION.output