What? & How? to build to build & organize the young cities and unbuilt territories of America, was based on their mental images, those of the land they left behind. An instinctive memory of the thousands of years of culture and architecture constructed by their ancestors’, a ghost-image that somehow they felt capable of reproducing, that would permit them to thrive in their new home. [continue>Metaverse Territories]

[continue reading@ Metaverse Territories]

[Photo taken from the excellent inworld Second Life art installation, NMConnect on the NMC campus]

If this blog’s principle focus has been an attempt to:

1. disrupt the ostensible but wrong-headed efforts to find connections between real world architectural practices and the conception of virtual world space from Metaverse, the media (I think that it is a logical, intellectual and sensible contridication to try to connect the two);
2. construct a platform from which inworld physical and social patterns can generate the symbology of immaterial architecture; and,
3. lay the foundations from which a unique expressive media can emerge from the collective intelligence of social platforms whose material is 3-D space.

…then its logical line of questioning, when sensing a real world example of radical materiality such as HypoSurface is: How can it form and inform the conception of inworld space and help provoke the emergence of a singular expressive language?

The review by ngel Kalenberg of the book MediaArtHistories at network_performance elaborates on the subject of my post, What Can’t Be Seen, Must Be Shown:

Art’s mission, maintained Paul Klee, is to make the invisible visible. Rilke added that “we are the bees of the invisible.” Normally, art is composed of a material that an artist works, armed with a technique to achieve a form. Thus, Robert Klein held that Alberti, Brunelleschi, Leonardo, and Durer sought to render the idea intelligible in and through the palpable form.

continue reading=>> metaverseterritories.com

continue reading=>> metaverseterritories.com

New site address–> METAVERSETERRITORIES.COM

1. Jerry Paffendorf showed a web app that created links between a build in Second Life (SL) and a real world, mapped location on which it is based. Why do this? Is there anything actually being created by doing this? Even though it was just another feature of the metaverse space Jerry was showing off, I think the details and implications of this is essential, and deserves much more attention. In fact, it was alluded to several times in other presentations without enough elaboration.
2. The discussion between Prokofy Neva and Mark Wallace provided the sound byte of the evening. Prokofy identified “World” as the “force” fighting the integration of virtual & WWW spaces. World, she explained, is a “time machine” whose role is to provide the context for shared experience through the creation of succinct atmospheres. (It was actually a quite poetic moment). Wouldn’t we have been better served, if the equivocal nature of world was replaced by space? World is a potentiallity, whereby space is a tangible, modifiable material, a medium.
3. Sibley Verbeck of Electric Sheep described a recent event in SL for baseball’s All Star Game, created for Major League Baseball. But beyond the ostensible entrepreneurial and marketing ploy, how will the simultaneous representations of an original event actually change our experience of it? Or, sticking with the example of baseball, we know how its media space representations (TV, radio, press…) augment and intensify the game. How will virtual worlds play out as trans-media simulacrum?
4. The great Tony Parisi produced the best graphic-byte of the evening, showing his vision of the metaverse that seems to thrive on a multiplicity of local, discontinuous worlds connecting through the existing infrastructure of the web itself (web 2.0, that is). But for me, Second Life’s global physics, consistent atmosphere and spatial continuity was a revelation. It showed me that coherent space can lead to persistent shared experience. Space is the fabric and the medium of consensual experience. Can this be sustained throughout Parisi’s discontinuous spaces?

Between the thunder storm and torrential rains that leaked through the Chelsea warehouse roof on a warm New York night, and the enthusiastic exchanges that animated the event, much more deserves to be said. I’m not doing it justice here, what I’ve written is incomplete. I’ll try to support my questions by filling in the cracks with my notes of the event. But my plane was just called, so I’ve gotta run. Thanks Jerry, and to everyone involved.

While I’m sure that the solution will somehow be based on a topologically complex structure that is inherently related to the worlds it is trying to represent, I have a hunch that ultimately, it will be a multi-sensory experience that will be closer to art than to cartography.

Although this may, in some way, imply the use of a map as we know it, the end result will hardly be a mere graphic abstraction, but rather an experience where space and mapping will converge. And while we’ve been told that “the map is not the territory,” I think this adage will be reversed in our attempt to be oriented when we jack into a metaverse –the map and the territory will become reversible.

Computer World elaborates on this after a first hand demo @ Siggraph 2006:

“Apparently, players will soon be able to pose their online avatars by moving and manipulating body parts through a very intuitive, point-and-click interface. Not long afterwards, they’ll be able to create personalized animations using the technology, saving them for hotkey-use in future sessions. While it’s certainly not the most original technology being shown off at the show — and there is sure to be an uproar in congressional districts when folks realize that groping will be as easy to do in game as swinging a mouse to and fro — it’s sure to have a lot of impact on the hordes of people and companies that make real money off of the virtual world.”

Mutating material objects with light, as if they were video, with Morphovision [New Scientist].

Croquet-Bento, from the post “Robots/Animatronic Avatars/NPCs for Croquet,” proposes video capturing an avatar’s POV and playing it back to simulate presence, content and interaction separate and apart from its actual occurrence. Virtual worlds will be able to resonate with both sentient and non-sentient content so as to increase the frequency and density of stimulus and interaction, while not putting too much pressure on server-side load (lag). But, aside from the graphic, artistic and technical requirements to pull this off, the world must also be socially prepared for the active presence of robots and cyborgs.

At issue with the proposed method of video play-back bots, will be the the world’s sense of temporal continuity. In metaverse environments like Second Life (SL), time seems to advance in a linear, progressive and regular manner. This is ostensibly similar to real life (RL) experience, but is not a necessary quality of all media based environments. Cinema, for example, uses devices to either accelerate, slow-down or jump-cut the temporal continuity of a situation. Acceleration is used to augment the amount of information (action, story-line…) contained within a specific duration; slowing-down time is so that a scene can be spatially deconstructed to better visually orient the relationships of objects and context; and, jump-cutting is to juxtapose to seemingly discontinuous scenes (flashbacks, dreams, simultaneous events..) so that the narrative thread of a story can be constructed. While these devices seem obvious to us now, early film going audiences were quite disoriented by these techniques that were first employed early in the last century.

“The architecture of Croquet makes it straightforward to capture all the messages for a given avatar as you drive the avatar around the space, and then later inject those messages into a robot avatar to do the playback of what happened.”

In order to insert a simulated presence based on a specific, past tense event, it will be necessary to incorporate the idea of elastic time as a component of the world’s media. Time will have to be able to move both forward and backward, be paused, accelerated and put in slow motion. And this will have to be seamless, integrated into its very fabric.

The world must also be capable of capturing not just the sensory information, sound, images, but also the parametric data, “…motion and gesture,” that is the language of these transformations. As discussed in my post “Rezzing Procedural Space,” this information can integrate the logical structure of a scene and account for its composition in terms of the objects and their transformations. This becomes another way of recording it, and eventually playing it back.

Can this help get fragments of Second Life into a browser? Will this open up ways to replay scenes from SL in real 3-D, instead of having to capture video? Can this lead to a real mashup between

In Second Life (SL), spatial complexity emerges from the deliberate accumulation and modification of geometric primitives based on an idea or ideas about space. Although there are countless ways to proceed so as to realize a specific building, it is always the result of specific decisions unfolding over a linear or non-linear period of time; this can be thought of as a kind-of recipe. For example, a build (ABC) has three objects (a, b & c) that followed the recipe (a-> b-> c) for its fabrication, the order in which the objects were composed. Using the same three objects (a, b & c), but this time following the recipe (c-> b-> a), we now have constructed a build (CBA). While the two builds might have common attributes (quantities, size, scale, colors, distances etc…), the overall quality of space differs.

GenerativeComponents, taking this into account, integrates the designer’s intentions to the composition of the scene until it becomes both the build AND the tool, the concept and its fabrication. In fact, makes the idea and the object reversible.

Users of 3-D modellers or CAD software work graphically, applying intuition and experience to establish a specific workflow. It is this workflow –the commands, decisions and modifications of objects, that is captured and encoded by a GenerativeComponents program. A recipe is created from this mix of geometry with the decisions that transform it. The proceedure is captured, analyzed and made reusable as the logic, memory, process, context and content of the project.

The idea of an object is reinvented, geometry is fused with the seeds of its generation.
Experimentation, through the development of evolving design scenarios, can proceed without having to manually re-build a detail design model for each alternative.
And finally, since the interface of GenerativeComponents applications is a mixture of graphic manipulation and a dataflow scripting interface, there is a natural convergence of the two generative models. Builds employing SL as a media rely on LSL, the Linden Scripting Language, to complete the deployment of complex space, thus a platform permitting their coming together is a welcome advancement of the buliding/programming environment.

1. the body, while perhaps an individual entity, is not, in terms of a society, a private one;
2. the body is not a finished object, but rather a public fabrication;
3. one is not alone in his or her body. We are constantly elaborating a relationship with something that is not a part of us and that varies from culture to culture. It is an important differentiating element between cultures and societies, whose differences can be traced to this significant other. [More detail after split]
   

B) In Second Life (SL), “I” am composed of three distinct mechanisms [taken from the LSLWiki]:

1. an agent, the “client’s presence within a simulator“;
2. an avatar, the “visual representation of an agent”; and,
3. a camera, through which “an agent sees” the world.

These 3 elements permit me to perceive, interact and communicate in the SL spatial, natural and social environments. But taken together, these otherwise local, simple and omni-functioning elements have one essential, global ambition: to represent Me, and to make tangible my POV. It is thanks to the fundemental engagement between agent (individual) and simulator (context), that I exist.

C) In SL, I am not alone inside of my avatar. I share it, like in the anthropological body, with something that is not a part of me. The contemporary body is defined by the tension between its individual limits and its shared, common evolutionary and biological structures (as represented by a strand of DNA). This conflict is played out by man thought the creation of symbolic imagery, projected by his technologies of cultural and communication.
The body in SL is the result of the tension between the individual agent and the world’s simulator; where, if we substitute the term simulator (or sim) with territory, then “I” am defined by the tension between the sensory limits of my SL agent and the territories that I occupy at any given moment. My agent becomes both my reactive and receptive nervous system to capture external stimuli, and my connection to the consensual, communal spaces of this virtual territory. It is this territory (via the simulator) that lets me possess the essential cultural capacities of memory (of ideas and things, shared and individual), media (think, make and do; ideas, material, action) and space (personnel and public).

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“The doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ is central to the traditional Christian faith … the belief that the Second Person of the Christian Godhead, “became flesh” when he was miraculously conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary. In the Incarnation, the divine nature of the Son was perfectly united with human nature in one divine Person.” [Wikipedia]

In Christian Europe, incarnation takes form through the body of Christ. Man was created in the image of God and his body, the physical extents of his spiritual, individual existence, is the medium for transcendence. But, according to this exhibition, modern, de-Christianized man has found new symbolic form through the biological: the internal corporeal organism, the new ideal of beauty, for whom transcendence is the expression of this internal biological structure through the form of an image. Through the creation of image(s), this internal biology is materialized and expressed outside the body, and is the space of confrontation between the divine and the corporeal. The tension between these elements, the divine and the material, the image and the real, that both inhabit the body, give rise to the rituals, codes, artistic and spatial expressions that permeate and define a culture.

The representation of the body shows often degraded or deformed images, floating commonplace, symbols in space.

“As I watched that crowd of swaying avatars on stage, I couldn’t help but feel like a dinosaur. I was a little scared of this medium, in that it seemed so foreign to me and would require so much work to get a firm grasp of. I know SL is experiencing tremendous amounts of growth right now, and the people immersed seemed so comfortable flying around (literally) and building worlds and friendships that I had to ask myself “who are these people and where do they find the time to spend in Second Life?” These same questions, mind you, are the same ones I asked about bloggers two years ago. Although blogging may have been a niche activity then, it’s not now. I guess I just reacted how lots of people do to new ideas they can’t wrap their head around. Will SL become the new blogging, a medium which is cheap or free and any NGO would be foolhardy to ignore as a means of raising awareness or money?”

Its integration with metaverse networks like Second Life ( SL) suggests yet another example of one reality augmenting another; whether it’s material reality augment an immaterial one, or vice versa. Essentially, the two realities are reversible as far as augmentation is concerned. From being able to control and monitor real spaces from a distance, like turning off the stove in your home, or seeing who’s at work in your studio by jacking-in to SL when you’re cross town, someday SL –the simulacra, will be put to work accessing your real life, and not just feeding off of its metaphor(s).

The Tour de France passing me by..

• “…a new generation: games that immerse people in the real world, full of real-time political crises. And the games’ designers aren’t just selling a voyeuristic thrill. Games, they argue, can be more than just mindless fun, they can be a medium for change.

• Video games, serious-games advocates say, also possess a persuasive element that is missing from books or movies: They let the player become a different person (at least for an hour or two), and see the world from a new perspective… most (people are) interested in playing as their own “side.” But when he pushed them to switch positions they developed a more nuanced sense of why the other side acted as it did.

• Ultimately, a video game is just another medium for artistic expression…”

[The View from Jerusalem @ New World Notes, 18 July 2006]

• “The “SL Israel” group is several dozen strong, primarily comprised of Israeli Residents, and when their country’s conflict with Hezbollah reached a savage apex over the weekend, I sought them out, to get their perspectives– on the situation in particular, and how it’s impacted their Second Life.

• “So for awhile me alone working on this ‘temporary Temple’, and hope to enter ‘Jerusalem’ sim.”"

What I want to figure out is how, when and why this:

… can be, act and look more like this (click to zoom):

Augmentation: As far as the augmentation argument is concerned, there are 3 nuances to consider:
a) augmenting RL with SL; and,
b) augmenting SL with RL; but also,
c) enhancing other metaverses with SL.
Maybe this distinction comes from an a priori bias of seeing neither SL or RL in a vacuum, but rather as 2 very intricate pieces of the other’s puzzle. Another bias I have is to consider SL a platform rather than just a game. This somehow necessitates reading usefulness into what we do with it and how we use it. Thus, if we can define SL as an interface, filter or conduit between content & container, between information & its communication, we can begin to understand SL as a part of this framework.

Anyway, deconstructing the plural, reversible nature of the transactions between SL and its’ siblings and cousins, recognizes their common effort to decode and inform the world(s) around them. This being said, the fact remains that metaverses are a specific and unique kind of container because of their dominant expressive material (media) : immersive Space (but I digress, (or do I?)).

Immersion: The idea of immersion in SL being defined as “…not be(ing) contaminated by anything from the outside…” is misconstrued. As I’m attempting to articulate through my work on this site (a bit laborious, perhaps, but I’ll find a way to be more succinct…) most of SL’s content is conceived by establishing a direct or indirect semantic link between a RL artifact and a SL reference. Thus, in order to access the meaning, atmosphere or usages of a build in SL –its signification, prior knowledge or experience of the RL artifact is necessary. In this scenario, the immersive purity becomes necessarily ruptured by having to access, at the very least, a mental image of the reference, or worse, a Google search, in order to understand what’s going on. In the example below…
can this be an “immersive” or even meaningful experience…

…without this reference?
For total, non “-contaminated” immersion to occur the signification system must turn to SL itself, a self-referential system, and tap into the SL deep structure, to arrive at true immersive expression.

I think that SL is the perfect platform to achieve this. The world’s content is user generated and people take what they do here pretty seriously. Even though most content is built by non –architects, artists, graphist, new-media artists, sculptors, animators etc… there is a substantial and engaged community of people educated and experienced at building; the synergy and interaction between trained-artists-builders and user-builders is fascinating (and merits further study in and of itself). Also, there is a sufficient density and variety of SL built environments to stay busy with this project.

I know from experience that the time, effort and perseverance necessary to build something meaningful is enormous. My intention is not to be critical of the builds, but rather to use them to critically to construct and inspire my proper ideas through their example.

The first project I use is the Hipcast conference and exposition center located on the Shalida sim [direct SL link, or SLurl]. My main goal for this first post is to learn how to show something from Second Life, to someone else in real life (RL). And as I recently found out, this is no small feat. So anyway, I’ll proceed slowly and methodically, and probably come back and do some up-dates until I’m happy with it …

There are discussions about the inevitable evolution of Google Earth-type spaces towards 3-dimensional interactive metaverses, similar to the SL model. The idea is compelling, but what are the protocols of this convergence? Where is the connective tissue that will mediate the spatial transformations between the geospatial “mirror world” logic of GE, to the hyperbolic virtual geometries of SL.

Objects in SL can easily represent tangible information –semantic references, topological data, relative location coordinates, and can suggest intangible architectural information — atmosphere, usage or spatial expression. But in addition, is there a way to exploit the information space opened-up by CityGML so that new, unexpected spatial or informational dimensions can unfold ?

2/ External references (as opposed to the inWorld references as explained in pt.1) will be culled from relevant examples of the spaces, atmospheres and materials developed for the built environment by other cultures who are (or were) in the throes of understanding their proper orientation in space, time and substance, in relation to their capacity to meaningfully qualify, quantify and represent this information. Paramount is the relationship between technological adequation, spatial invention and material expression.

1/ In-world architecture will evolve from a referential system based on the local and global physical qualities of the world… its forces.

• The local qualities can be understood as the build’s context –the geological, topological, textural and proximate characteristics that directly influence the planning and building process, and;
• the global qualities, the environmental, consensual and infrastructural elements, are defined by the world’s ubiquitous computational engines. These qualities determine the world’s ontological structure, and are equally shared by all builds.

This world, in the case of Second Life (SL), is produced by simultaneous calculations of multiple but simple physical algorithms that determine its physical, atmospheric and qualitative-material states. These states, in order to be operational, must be represented, and will necessitate the development of tools that are both sensitive to these forces and capable of producing analytical models of them.

There are relatively few builds in SL that “succeed” (in my mind anyway) that aren’t plausible in RL. [Comment by Eloise Pasteur]

…to which I respond –>

I believe the exact opposite: For a build to “succeed” in SL, it is necessarily impossible for it to be plausible in RL.

By asserting a radically opposing view, I was, among other things, using this stance to frame a polemic that calls into question what I perceive to be widely accepted approach to the conception and creation of SL’s built environment through direct real life (RL) reference.

Creating complex spaces in SL by simply establishing a reference between a SL object and a RL semantic code, obfuscates the unique physical, social and (im)material qualities of a 3-dimensional immersive metaverse.
An example of building by semantic reference is using a texture that mimics a brick or stone wall set between wood cross-beams to imply a house from Normandy (or a castle, a chic boutique, a baseball park, a shopping mall, whatever…) By pasting the image of a Norman constructive system to a specific form, size, shape, and proportion, we project a cognitive image of a functional intention… my home, for example. While this may, in fact, say something about the builder’s idea concerning the meaning of a home, it pre-supposes that home in SL is in fact, analogous to home in RL, and that my understanding of the sign, home, is the same as the builder’s. If not, its usage will not be consistent, the message not passed. What I’m advocating is that the meaning of the build, its usage and contextual significance, is induced from formal, atmospheric and socially driven experience with the space, rather than from a semantically referential one.

While reference to RL architecture might work for some people, it begs the question for others : Architecture has always first and foremost offered shelter and security to its human inhabitants by partitioning the exterior, aggressive world by the creation of a safe, interior one, is and always has been, a medium for decoding the world around us. Through its basic, primeval role of defining the world between that which is secure or dangerous, human scale or vast, under control or savage, architecture has been a materialization of the passage from one state to the other, a device from which we could measure the world around us and a filter from which we could safely observe that which lies outside of its material capacity to enclose. Most importantly, this was accomplished using space as its substance. Architecture has always expressed as much about the life of its inhabitants, their ways of life –the interior of the edifice, as it has about their relationship to the world outside those walls –the exterior.

Using semantic references to RL to build in SL does not, by its very essence, allow us to express anything about SL, thus help decode it. What needs to be expressed using the materials at hand, the materials that we invent from being in-world, are its unique physiques, its ability to create community and communication, the forces and the physics of the SL computation engines.

Using a semantic system of historical or RL reference also forces a misreading of the very idea of those references. In the example of the Norman house, the building techniques that were being expressed by the organization of brick and wood cross beams, the unique social and economic situations that inspired the creative or utilitarian forces of a Norman house, its society, culture and the individuals that fabricated it, are perverted. We end up just building more suburbs, with their MacMansions. In short, the idea of context, that which precedes an edifice, is non-existent in this semantic, post-post-modern formula.

While it certainly is possible to use reference systems to convey certain layers of information in SL, I want to exploit a more powerful paradigm of expression in 3-D environments –Space, and, more specifically, the forces, materials and forms that express the location, proportion and usages of complex objects.

I think that this position is somehow analogous to the early modernists and their radical positions concerning the expression of space and form (ie; Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, Italian Futurism etc etc…) The artists and architects involved in these movements forced a conscious rupture to the prevailing way of making things… painting, sculpture, architecture etc… Regardless of what opinions we might hold concerning modernism and its deployment and effects on cities and the built environment, its engagement to the scientific, industrial and social innovations of its time was responsible for the language of graphic and spatial expression to evolve beyond its’ medieval roots. The role played by the arts and architecture as a “sometimes” equal partner to their contemporary, rather weighty, world changing disciplines, is an important example for the new world that we are building.

I’m not even going to try and defend each “RL plausible” building is a good build, there are loads of dire ones out there. But saying they’re all bad, that I struggle with too… [comment by Eloise Pasteur]

I don’t want to judge Second Life (SL) builds and I certainly did not say that “they’re all bad…” What I am trying to do, though, is to create a polemic so as to measure the dominant tendencies of SL spatial planning, conception and execution, against a) how I hope things will be built in SL, and b) what I think will eventually emerge from SL, ie: a singular, expressive metaverse media.

“Broadly, SL is an attempt to reproduce the real world, basically… it’s physical aspects, its social and economic aspects as well… making that simulation, that replica, better and more capable… making the graphics look literally like your walking through the screen into a movie.” [Philip Rosedale, Founder and CEO, Linden Lab, quoted from an interview]Isn’t this confusing reproduction and representation?

Is a film a reproduction of real life (RL), or is it a representation of a specific reality? The two are fundamentally different. Is a film, a poem, or any other expression using a representational medium, necessarily striving for realism, as Philip Rosedale implies? Or, is it trying to create its own real-ity? Perhaps Rosedale was describing what the underlying technology of SL was attempting to do. But is it possible, or even wise, to even consider SL, the technology, void of its social, economic and expressive capacities? It would be like trying to sell an iPod by tauting it as a hard drive. Sure, there is storage media in there somewhere, cloaked beneath layers of social and marketing acumen.

But SL, while supported and structured by an underlying technology to which it is very dependent, is something quite different than just its technological infrastructure. SL very well might be described at times as a parallel reality, at times an abstract reality, at times a realistic one, a fictive one, a replacement for someone’s reality… but it is not a replica of RL.

As Lev Manovich summarizes in The Language of New Media,

“…computer generated imagery
is not an inferior representation of our reality,
but a realistic representation of a different reality.”

we (in general terms) seem happier if there’s something we can believe keeps it up. [Comment thanks to Eloise Pasteur]

We need to believe that the roof won’t fall in on our heads (both realistically and symbolically) in order to have a stress free, spatial experience. Humans have become psycho-spatially cabled this way through their collective, evolved experiences with material, physics, cities and structures over the past 10.000 years. But this is more complicated than simply putting a column under a slab to create the illusion or symbol that signals “this roof won’t fall in.” Our psycho-spatial receptors have come to accept something as stable (safe, secure) based on compositional relationships that are dependent on weight, equilibrium and relative position, more so than unsubstantiated symbolism. Thus, spatial expression in SL, from this perspective, is constructed from the precise proportion, static equilibrium (or lack of it), weight and orientation of objects, more so than symbolic or historical reference.

By basing complex spatial environments on RL constructive techniques, linking them through whimsical inference, spaces whose usages, physics and material properties could not be any more antonymic to builds in SL , is inconsistent and counter-productive.

In SL things change, move, rotate all the time. Even most shops that have been there for a while tend to evolve and change over time… my dream home is probably not yours. [comment thanks to Eloise Pasteur from the SLED list]

The built environment, whether in real life (RL) or in Second Life (SL), has a context. Cities, suburbs, geography, nature, even atmosphere are the substance of this context. For an architectural project, in this case, one whose intention is primarily pedagogic, the student comes to understand this context through analysis, so as to intelligently decide whether to :

1/ directly respond to this context by incorporating it into the process of creating new space… ie. form and space “emerge” from the textures, forces and the built surroundings of the build. They can be thought of as a continuation or an act of putting the site in “tension” through the newly built spaces. The great Frank Lloyd Wright could be thought of as working kind of like this (to use an obvious reference) ; or,

2/ conceive the spaces independently of this context, and then haphazardly, algorithmically, voluntarily or slyly “juxtapose” the two. In this case, the engagement of the project is to be found in the articulation between usages, the form and the context. A good, contemporary RL example of this can be found in the work of Zaha Hadid (amongst many others).

Of course, an architectural project is never simply defined by choosing (a) or (b), but rather is a complex melange of the 2 approaches.

But either way, both elements must be made to exist, first by the invention of a space and its material expression; and, the context is made to exist when it is identified, qualified, quantified, and incorporated into the representational medium of the project. What I am describing are specific acts of the architectural inventive process, and they must somehow be taught.

Which brings me back to SL, where accelerating change is obviously the rule. This will be a feature of the RL-2-SL School of Architecture, where we can analytically and sensibly perceive this change, and be forced to react to it in real-time. It is exactly this radicalization of state and transformation that I think SL can crystallize in a pedagogic setting.

Teaching a specific inventive process, in this case an architectural one, involves learning how to accompany a project from an idea in architecture, towards a spatial expression through force and materials. This does not imply space in general, but architectural space, to distinguish it from cinematographic, sculptural, photographic… spaces. These exercises invert the common architectural workflow that normally proceeds from program to plan, from material to architectural form;, in favor of the formula force> material> space.

Anyway, I’ve been teaching for a lot longer than I’ve been in SL and what will change is especially the communication, the interaction and the material, and these things are not negligible. SL will allow me to approach other types of experiences based on this change of context.

The main ideas behind this studio, and the reasons for it taking place in real life (RL) and SL are to :

1. explore the thesis that SL (as well as other metaverse type 3-D environments) has the potential to develop singular, expressive spatial media;
2. optimize and focus intended goals of the studio course by radicalizing its pedagogic content;
3. innovate upon the formal, material and perceptive information conveyed by space (in both SL and RL) through precise exercises that concern the invention of architectural space.

A rough sketch of the planning organizes the semester into 3 parts…

1. the analysis of a “territory.” [philosophy+territory] Students will develop tools that facilitate the extraction of both qualitative and quantitative information to evaluate land settlement, circulation and growth patterns in specific SL territories. The tools will also help generate graphic, expressive “language” to represent these patterns of growth and density, and generate spatial maps to facilitate an understanding of SL territories and contrast them to a RL reference (abetted by tools like Google Earth as a portal between RL + SL). The maps resulting from this analysis will be made to be experienced inworld, and will be graphical and animated (not spread sheets) ;
2. a series of exercises begin by teaching how to build in the SL, progressively generate a complex network interior/exterior spaces. These spaces insist on spatial (scale and proportion), material, textural (density) and formal coherence (force) as it applies to SL’s (tweak-able) physics engine, and its existing social and economic structure.From these emergent spaces, usages will be deduced that are adapted to SL’s spatial, physical and social environments. This will be in direct opposition to the present, overriding and largely unquestioned assumption, that “if it looks like a house in RL, it can actually be used as a house in SL. ” Why does this assumption go unquestioned?What are the logical, intuitive and pedagogic mechanisms that can be put into place to allow new spatial archetypes to emerge, that are specific to SL-the-medium? ;
   and finally,
3. Architecture students usually work alone or in small groups. The dynamic between student and teacher is based on frank, semi-public criticism of the student’s work, which he/she tries to defend, and then corrects based on that criticism, only to be re-criticized and re-corrected etc, etc… But still, the student essentially works alone.In SL, on the other hand, one builds in public. I personally have found this to be a formative experience. I’m not yet sure how to incorporate this into the idea of the project, but for me, this is essential.