|
|
Background
In the spring of 1994 I attended a conference, Cyberconf 3, in Austin, Texas. 1 As an architect I was interested in virtual reality and computer modeling of space. Architecture, a driving force in 3D imaging, uses virtual reality as part of its toolkit for building documentation. I thought the meeting in Austin would confirm what I already knew.
I was wrong.
I recall Bob Jacobson, a developer of virtual environments, declaring virtual reality to be passé – the Internet was what was hot. I didn’t recognize half the terms he used: email, MUDs, MOOs. Feeling a little lost, I looked around the room.
The audience was made up of artists, engineers, philosophers, and academicians. Cyberspace seemed to be a hybrid subject drawing from various disciplines. Though the program was sponsored by the School of Architecture at the University of Texas, architects were in a minority. Just as I was beginning to wonder if I was in the right place, I heard something that radically changed my world view.
Amy Bruckman, then a Ph.D. student at MIT’s MediaLab, presented a paper on a multi-user domain, MediaMOO, that she had created for the conference (fig.1). Multi-user domains, or MUDs, are on-line social environments in which players use text to chat and experience the MUD itself. Unlike the electronic bulletin boards they resemble, MUDs use spatial references to create a social setting. While some are situated in castles or space colonies, Ms. Bruckman’s MediaMOO was set in the Wiesner Building, the site of MIT’s MediaLab. The five-story building comprises labs, offices and work areas. But it lacks social spaces for the events that the domain’s designer had in mind.
Up to this point I was on familiar ground. The building was an easy reference for the MUD’s structure. It was no surprise that a lab building wouldn’t accommodate large gatherings – there was a mismatch between the metaphor of the building and its intended use. Fortunately, Bruckman was no architect.
MUD visitors who make it to the “roof” of MediaMOO sense a space above them. This surprise sixth floor is the site of the MUD’s ballroom – complete with changing rooms (with costumes!) and dance floor. The ballroom is a fiction hovering over the Wiesner Building. It is a mental space that extends the physical building beyond its original use.
MediaMOO’s ballroom jolted any prejudices I had brought to Austin. It opened the door into a world where fictional spaces took the status and purpose of physical buildings. Architecture here was symbolic, yet still orienting and situating the actions of its users.
In the years since I have tried to reconcile the spatial issues surrounding cyberspace. This book is the product of research in the areas of design, psychology, anthropology and human-computer interface design as well as contributions from many fields of state-of-the-art cyberspace design. This is fitting as cyberspace is a collaborative environment – the mixed audience in Austin exemplified a cultural convergence on cyberspace. In the following pages I will present ideas culled from this on-going interdisciplinary discussion.
What This Book Is About
This book describes the spatialization of cyberspace and its social and cultural consequences. It proposes an information environment that can be managed through relational means – native to how we think and live with space. I will illustrate its underlying principles with work done by artists, designers, scientists and technologists in visualizing these environments.
Images of cyberspace found in movies and television are as baffling as the cyber-jargon we read in magazines. They illustrate the confusion surrounding cyberspace. While the design of purposeful on-line environments is to orient rather than confuse, what we see now in popular media expresses information chaos – uncontrolled, unmanaged information.2
Many of these images indulge in the excitement of a new medium. The illegible graphics that arrived with desktop publishing were expressions of short-term novelty. But cyberspace, a cognitive, social environment, can transcend fashion and become an important force in our information-based culture. Cyberspace, as I will use the term, refers to the emulation of space in electronic environments, particularly those of networked computing. It is present in computer graphics, on-line social spaces and video games. As we will see it resembles and yet differs from perceived space in many important ways.
The subject of this book is the spatialization of cyberspace, and as such addresses the nature of space itself. What is space and how do we perceive it? Is space external or internal to us? How do objects in space relate to our language and thought? What distinguishes simulation from real space? This book is intended to provoke as well as inform, and with it we begin a discussion of how we use space and its electronic equivalents.
Overview of Book
The following pages describe themes covered in the book. I will present cyberspace in a way that is native to spatial thought. I will also present cyberspace as a cultural phenomenon, a point of convergence for many disciplines.
Space: A Tool for Cognition
We use space as a tool for managing information, thought and memories. Without it we wouldn’t be able to effect the most primitive actions. It is the medium of thought. Metaphors taken from the physical world use our shared reality of space for communication.3 We share internal and external space much as we share our language and our common physiology.4
Relating objects to one another creates in our minds the space that contains them. Each of us forms internally our own idea of what that space is. The space of a child, for instance, is quite different from that of an adult. As we mature we create spaces of memory and cognition. I will later refer to the relationships between those spaces and ourselves, as they form the matrix of our awareness.
Space: A Medium for Managing External Relationships
We surround ourselves with tools to help us think.5 We use files, books, paper and pencils to extend our thoughts beyond our bodies. The more tools we place in our environment, the more resourceful we become in solving problems. It is as if the objects become extensions of our minds. Richard Dawkins, the biologist, would say they are our phenotypes – as much a part of being human as our own extremities. Arguably, computers are also phenotypical extensions of our thought processes.
Space is itself a tool for thought. Our language is rich with metaphors and spatial terminology – ideas build upon one another, this concept connects to that, we see the structure of an argument. We frame, overlay, link, and lay out ideas just as we do objects.
Space lets us relate to objects, translating them from abstract to physical states and back again.6 Sometimes posing questions spatially and experientially clarifies the way to an answer. The diagrams of Richard Feynman that graphically present subatomic, almost sub-physical interactions show how space is used in problem solving. Einstein’s thought experiment of travelling on a beam of light eventually led to his general and special theories of relativity.
Space Shapes Identity
Tied with our use of space is our position within it – objects relate to us as well as to each other. Our position within the space sets our relationship to its contents. It gives us the Big Picture.7,8 We are also surrounded by personal spaces, comfort zones and territories that are defined internally. In cyberspace these exist at the same level as physical spaces – as creations of the mind. This book will include a discussion of those spaces, their uses and cultural differences and how, ultimately, they apply to a cyberspace setting.
Cyberspace – A Cultural Phenomenon
The conference in Texas that introduced me to cyberspace had people from a variety of professions and backgrounds. At the break-out sessions, I found artists talking with programmers, dancers with entrepreneurs, engineers with philosophers. Everyone was excited. Suddenly, it seemed, there were no barriers – you could see walls coming down. Cyberspace was a subject all could gather around, share points of view, contribute.
My enthusiasm for cyberspace stems from this confluence of ideas. Cyberspace already has computer scientists, perfor-mance artists, psychologists, artists, game designers – even monks – among its developers. The results are disorienting but unified by conviction and enthusiasm – a movement toward an unseen goal.
The development of cyberspace is, at heart, a cultural project. Though its engine, the computer, is clearly a technical triumph, the computer’s work is not of a physical nature. It is a cultural machine, an extension of our being. As such, cyberspace can become as rich a means of expression as any other art form, as rich a subject of research as any science.
This space is a mediated extension of traditional arts, technologies and professions. As a spatial art form it is in the same category as theater, performance arts, fine arts, sculpture and architecture. Each creates immersive, symbolic environments using spatial expression (fig. 2).
As yet, cyberspace has no innate principles. Current work extends various existing disciplines. Graphic artists do home pages, copy writers produce text. Artists and designers interpret the medium to best present their work – all in the terms of their training. Workers in conventional media and business also affect the content and form of cyberspace. The military uses cyberspace for surveillance, briefing its staff, as well as training its pilots. Games manufacturers have placed their bets on networked computing, letting remote players fight it out on the Web. Traditional disciplines and arts will continue to form cyberspace, bringing their values to bear.
Designers of cyberspace must create a strategy of transition to distinguish the principles of various disciplines at work. Dialog between these fields is crucial if they are to create interdisciplinary criteria for design and evaluation. By isolating principles of traditional media, we can recognize concepts innate to cyberspace.9 These design principles can then be developed into strategies for developing cyberspace environments.
These new principles may come from surprising sources. For instance, the concepts underlying the design of a space might come into play along with the principles of choreography. We could imagine spaces changing shape or position on the basis of dance. Rather than our moving from one space to another, the environment could reshape itself around us, gracefully.
Principles are almost always about relationships. They may involve proportion or aspects of composition, but they always concern the conceptual connection between objects or ideas. For example, designers and architects must constantly be aware of relationships. It is the nature of design. Whether the discussion is about forms, colors or materials, no issue is isolated. The selection of any material or form can affect all ensuing decisions.
Space, the primary medium of architecture, demands this attention – the selections are all part of the same composition. Yet space also reveals the correct decisions to best effect, for each reinforces the other within space’s continuity. Space, being a medium, is about connection. Ultimately, the creation of cyberspace ties into our understanding space as a medium for thought – an extension beyond ourselves to others.
Structure of This Book
This book is divided into three major sections. In the first I will discuss anthropological and psychological considerations for developing principles of cyberspace. Here we will look at work done by designers and artists in spatializing cyberspace environments ranging from the most abstract to the most concrete. I will refer also to conventional artifacts of daily life, discuss their cultural role 10 and compare them to those of cyberspace. This portion of the book will conclude with a more detailed look at the psychology of spatial thought, discussing cyberspace as a sensory and cognitive environment.11
The second section of the book is about society, and our presence (and immersion) in on-line environments. This section extends the concerns of the first section, describing avatars, representations of users in cyberspace, and agents that represent the computer itself. Finally this section will take the discussion beyond individual presence to that of a human/non-human society.
The final section of the book returns us to the physical world by presenting projects that span physical and cyberspaces. Cyberspace will have unforeseen effects on our work, social environment and physical world. William Mitchell, dean of the School of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has written about the cross-pollination of building types, banks’ automated teller machines being installed in shopping malls and airports.12 And this is only the beginning. Cyberspace may let us add functions to physical structures – as utilities – or supplant them entirely as organizations opt for distributed collaborative networks, office hoteling, and telecommuting. These are among the many ways we will see the integration of physical and cyberspaces into new, useful hybrid entities.
The works presented in this book come from individuals in many fields. Though the images reflect the text, they are not illustrations per se. Instead, they present an archipelago of world views – their designers speak of dream spaces and new realities. Cyberspace is linked to our understanding of the world, ourselves and our connection with others. It is a psychological, social and cultural space.
Yet cyberspace is presently inconsistent, ill-defined. To some, it is utopian, to others it is fraught with conflict and doubt. This book is a start at placing it in a broad enough cultural context so that the variety of people and talents needed will participate in its realization.
|
|
|
|
|
