ENVIRONMENTS AND ORGANIZATIONS
UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCK, INSTITUTE OF DESIGN, STUDIO1 WINTER 1011 GRADUATE PROGRAMM WITH STEFANO DE MARTINO, ALEX PFANZELT.
HTTP://WWW.UIBK.AC.AT/GESTALTUNG/STUDIO1/
According to our last post we looked at the difference between behaviour in real life or second life.
The following graphic shows the comparison of visiting Alexanderplatz in real world and second life.
Especially, the timeline looks rather different - but also to consider the experiences during travelling.
We do not only differ in real and virtual, in the last years social networks got more and more important.
The differences can be found in the behaviour of people and in the way they look.
We consider the real life as real identity, where people act as human beings.
The virtual reality could be found in second life, where avatars take over the place of humans.
In social networks, each person has an account, which reflects his or her personality.
Like we mentioned at the end of our last presentation, we try to understand platforms like ‘Second Life’, generally speaking such virtual worlds. What kind of satisfaction the Second Life users get? The virtual platforms are directly linked to the reality. One link, for example, is the possibility to change real money in Linden Dollars, the currency in the world of Second Life. Talking in general the links to the reality are often connected with the obtaining of a personal advantage.
Gottfried Helnwein museum in Second Life
virtual museum from MOMA exhibition Andreas Gursky
But what advantage has Adobe with it’s virtual/digital museum?
Is it just a marketing gadget for the company itself?
Why does it have to look as realistic as it is?
The description sounds like the one of a real building. Should it just hit us emotionally, or is there another aim?
We think we found the answer in one thesis of Appadurai, which is also mentioned in the source text.
He differenciate in terms of “place” and “locality”. A place is a real point. But Berlin, for example, is not only one place, it consists of thousand different places.
Locality is a social constructed site, which is a result of everyone’s own experience.
We think, the design was made so realistic because of the locality of each person.
Adobe designers wanted to built a museum which people could identify as museum, even if its just virtual.
Also the Stoffwechseltheorie of Gottfried Semper could be an explanation for the realistic design of the Adobe Museum. In his thesis he describes that although the media changes, the techniques remain the same. (greek temple; wood techniques applied to stone architecture)
An example for the change of media would could be found in the first cars, which looked like carriage drawn by horses.
The terms small/big optics by P. Virilio and the terms smooth/striated space by Deleuze/Guattari leads us to the question where the border between real and virtual could be drawn in today's society. This should be our topic for the next time.
The graphic above shows different types of the so called mixed reality.
Change of society - according to the terms of the striated and smooth space from Guattari and Deleuze in Mille Plateaus.
Striated space as the territorial and clearly borderd space. Smooth space as deterritorial space, where space is just configured through connections between nomadic points.
There was a new perception in the 16th century. It was Pieter Bruegel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" which turned the balance to more and more scientific atlases and maps.
He brought a new plural view into being, a synthesis of "site" and "non-site" (cf. Robert Smithson)
It was a real alternative to the idea of Leonardo Battista Alberti, which says that a picture allegorise "a window opened onto the world", a construction of a plateau. Standing on it, you got a typ of an nomadic view.
At one hand the map is the territory, like Jorges Louis Borges descripes in his short stories "Del rigor en la ciencia" 1946, at the other hand it is only an alternate.
The idea of the blank map, by Lewis Caroll is another utopia, the map as a model of an "in-between".
Current the view changed to a model of the virtual, a new typ of picture, an image-flux, which detaches the modernist, crystal image.
From medieval times to the present, the content of cartography changed. Whereas in medieval maps the whole world was centered around Jerusalem, in the 16th and 17th century, maps seized the real and became a mere artefact.
From then on, maps became diagrams with different possibilities of reading it. The diagram shows a Rhizome structure in which the reader get the chance to explore the diagram continuously and to evolve new thoughts beyond it.
Paul Klee - Siebzehn
Thus the diagram connects two different space times developed by Deleuze and Guattari in Mille Plateaux. The striated space (as the city, metric, with a hierarchic tree structure) and the infinite smooth space (as the sea, an open surface with no bounderies, just with connections and a rhizome structure).
These diagrams with their rhizom structure and multiple possibilities of reading them, are an appropriate instrument to represent or analyze todays interconnected social structure.
3. «Folie du Voir»
The text defines the passage from a culture of stabilities and objects, with its Fordism and its industrial standards, to a culture of instabilities and of flux with its cyberspace and its instantaneous communication...
We consider the part in the text where the comparison of the crystal-image in the 20th century and the flux - image is mentioned.
The crystal, with its sharp edges and its coalescences of the present and the past, the allegory of the entire culture of glass of the 20th century.
Examples from Marcel Duchamp, Bruno Taut and Mies van der Rohe.
1. The Icarian view & the cartographic view, an accord:
We looked at different arguments about icarian eye & cartographic eye and try to connect them. We pose the question if it's possible or not. Not only Christian Jakob claims in 'L'Empire des cartes' the intimate complexity of the two views.
We consider the change from the past glass culture in the 20th century (crystal-image) into the flux - image. The allegory of the present with its virtual paradigm. In reference to the flux-image as a example for the processing of architecture on the basis of virtual diagrammes. (Greg Lynn; NOX)
3. The diagramme during the change from an hierarchic tree structure to a Rhizom:
As Deleuze differs in Mille Plateaux in the striated space and the smooth infinite space we got to the differentiation of the social structure in a past hierachic structure and the present Rhizom structure. During this social change, the cartography changed. We consider the diagram in terms of this Rhizom structure.
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