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Session 3: Communication, Space
and Beyond
Chair: Artur Matuck
From Visiophone to Cyberculture: The Impacts
of the Communicational and Spatial Changes in Contemporary Culture
Gul Kacmaz Erk
Department of Architectural Design, Istanbul Technical University,
Istanbul, Turkey
Imagine a man in his early thirties who is an agoraphobe;
he cannot stand open space, or any kind of human contact. He has not
left his apartment for eight years. An insurance company called Globale
takes care of all his needs. This man communicates with the world through
the screen of his computer. His “visiophone” – as
it is called – is connected to an advanced version of the Internet.
Through this border/threshold between real space and cyberspace, he
answers his mother’s never-ending calls, and talks to his insurance
agent and therapist. He visits the site of an online dating club called “Catch-a-Heart,” and
the website of Madam Zoe, a government-funded prostitute service for
the disabled. He even wears a body suit to have sex with a cyberwoman
in a site called “Sextoon.” There is a stylized world outside,
with facial symbols for identification, video poetry, sweating clubs
and colour exchange tribes. This man’s name is Thomas.
In this
presentation, I will talk about the relation of man, communication,
space and culture through Pierre-Paul Renders’ science fiction
film Thomas in Love (2000). Man will be explored as body+mind,
communication as (mediated) computational communication, space as real
space versus cyberspace, and contemporary culture as a phenomenon generated
by bodies+minds influenced by mediated communication in real space
and cyberspace simultaneously. To do so, I will set forth spatial concepts
like (dis)continuity, depth(lessness), temporariness, (im)materiality,
mobility, and look for the parallelities between these spatial concepts
and cybercultural concepts. For instance, can the two-dimentionality
of cyberspace be a tool to understand the cybercultural depthlessness?
Similarly, can the discontinuity of cyberspace help us to explain the
discontinuous character of contemporary human relations? Exploring
these spatial concepts in Thomas’ example, I will question my
musings about mediated communication, social alienation and cultural
transformation.
‘Events’ of The Interactive Documents
As The Temporal and Spatial Decisions
Simge Göksoy
İstanbul, Turkey
The process of interaction on the computer is
a series of predetermined actions, events. Even though the events
are predetermined, the interactive document has a loose structure letting
personal independency on how to perform these actions which are realized
basically by using the keyboard and the mouse. The keyboard and the
mouse are two tools, through which we interact with the interface before
us.
The graphical interface on the computer, which consists of textual
and visual elements, is designed to guide us through the route that
leads us to our target. Tracing the graphical representations of a
series of events, the user gives shape to the document. Within the
interactive interface on the computer there is no definite time and
space.
Following M. Merleau-Ponty, in the 'objective world' temporal
and spatial relations are set in reference to a 'subjective position'
- 'here' and 'now'. On the computer, there are alternative definitions
of time and space that can be formed by the specific user via the elements
of interface. In montage, every fragment, element is a ‘here’ and ‘now’,
thus is the standing point in reference to which spatial and temporal
relations are defined.
Lev Manovich defines two kinds of montage; temporal
as 'moments' in sequence and spatial as 'parts of a single image'.
Here the keyboard and the mouse are our tools we use to make our own
temporal and spatial decisions. There has been constructed a set of
conventions on how to react to the interface before us by using these
tools. The computer user who is familiar and accustomed to these conventions
of use can instinctively hover around the links and get to the target.
These conventions of use are necessary for a wide range of communication
among people but they also cause the use of keyboard and mouse become
automatic and reflexive. Every physical action creates the personal
time and space of the user but – most of the time - without the
user's (full) awareness.
I will present my thesis project 'Taksim'N Square' which
I am planning to finish by early July 2004. It is an interactive flash
document which, at the basic level, questions the conventions of the
use of keyboard and especially mouse. Causing the alienation of the
user to the keyboard and mouse could be a re-enlightenment of the user
of these tools of interaction, while making the user aware of the temporal
and spatial positions taken in reference to the document interface.
The project aims to put the user before the computer screen where the
user realizes that he/she is not only thinking, or reading, or watching;
or even not only doing these three simultaneously; but most important
of all making temporal and spatial decisions.
Performative Space – Architecture Beyond
Media?
Hanne-Louise Johannesen
Amanuensis,
Institut for Kunst- og Kulturvidenskab,
Visuel Kultur www.hum.ku.dk/visuelkultur, Københavns Universitet, Copenhagen
When
the space of architecture becomes interactive it becomes performative –
you have to perform to use the potential of the space. The performative
act is a
real time activity that is pointing at the border between representation
and
presentation and is thereby dragging the media beyond the screen
of
representation or Baudrillard’s simulacra. When you present you
have to
immerse your body and spirit, and the media goes post-medium in danger
of
blurring the balance of will, power and possession.
This paper aims at the tendency to create space that fosters and
supports
communication, emotion and experience. Traditionally, architecture
has been a
static, physical solution for often vivid concepts, but with new
technology you
could propose supple solutions that recognize architecture as the
setting for the
events of experience. Contemporary architecture is a meta-space residing
almost any thinkable field, striving to blur the boundary between
art,
architecture, design and urbanity and break down the distinction
between the
material and the viewer. Space becomes organized information and
intuitive
experience within contemporary culture. Communication through technology
delivers a tangible concept of time and a new sensibility of space
through
collection, creation and distribution of data.
Performative space offers a symbiotic state between inhabitant and
environment
in an experience of flow. In this post-medium state the opportunity
to step back
and become a viewer disappears and leaves the inhabitant inside a
network of
media, emotion, appearance, control and possession. I order to sustain
the
balance of reality and free will emotion, technology and design has
to go hand
in hand.
