Digital/Physical: Subjective Reality

“Architecture is the thoughtful making of spaces. The continual renewal of architecture comes from the changing concepts of space.” – Louis Kahn

This project provides the grounds for discussion on how architects design for space(s). The current modern method has architects using computers to design physical spaces out of 3D digital spaces. Architects are designing physical space through digital space. This project shows that the boundary between the two is a wavering line. The importance of an architect is based around an ability to design useful space be it aesthetic, functional, or ideally both. There was never a necessary distinction between physical and digital given that digital didn’t exist until 1937 with the creation of the “Model K.”

Now with full implementation of computers being used to help us visualize and create new physical spaces, the architect and their place as a designer of space is changing. Our concept of space and spaces is changing and as architects, the key designers of space, there is a need to embrace both the physical and digital spaces architects are designing in. By studying them and finding out what makes each a valuable asset for design and how they are affecting people and their relationships to the spaces they inhabit both physical and digital, architects can reclaim a role in the forefront of the public’s mind as the key prime designers of space with the same respect and prestige architects deserve.

Wireframe Model Projection Board MediaScapes Final

Plane – Origin early 17th cent.: from Latin planum ‘flat surface,’ neuter of the adjective planus ‘plain.’ The adjective was suggested by French plan(e) ‘flat.’ The word was introduced to differentiate the geometric senses, previously expressed by plain, from the latter’s other meanings

Tagline:

Your axle (position): Moving space one plane at a time. (A play on concepts (and all words included).)

(Extended) Description:

The planes move and the player has the ability to sit still and watch as the world changes around them. This can be a passive experience where you merely sit/stand and watch as lighting, space, and all surroundings change and the space changes and is dynamic around you. Or the person can move and explore and discover new spaces at will while the space is changing or remains static during certain moments where the person can “freeze everything” or once standing it a certain place the world will “freeze” itself.

Concepts for the “game.”

• This can be something that fully rotates.

• This could be something where the person operates on horizontal and vertical axes and the pieces/space changes by moving along the x, y, and z axes.
• The floor could change by proximity and reveals water as the floor slides away. (Similar to idea shown in gizmag 03.12.10.)

Imagine a space you could be in where the walls, the floors, the paintings, the pictures, the lighting was all dynamic, moving, changing, at your will or on your presets. This space could maximize your space, your experience, your views, your perceptions, your life. This could manifest countless iterations, version, concepts, and ideas of user-generated (or computer-generated) space. No longer confined to a dying vision of 20+ years from the past. Constraints are thrown off, shackles undone, current vision springing forth to match new prospective worlds for its inhabitants desires and imaginations.

Displacement

Deterritorialization

Experience

Find theoretical core

California Flying Adventure

How does this technology change the individual, why repurpose a space to be another space?

Theory is base knowledge/the platform

Varying inputs

Why weather data, why weather data set type, any works

Video game/virtual theory

Spatial and temporal when using environmental data sets

What does it mean to bring data into an environment and represent abstract environments (Santa Monica)

What do I need to learn from this?

Supplemental architectural discourse

What is the importance of using data physically and digitally and being able to interact with it?

Setting up the installation as a question. It’s a prototype. It’s an experiment that provides the content for an architectural discussion.

What does it provide when using a physical interface to change digital geography and vice versa. Data is digital and it changes physical space in the installation.

Question of use and how you use data. For this we use it to shape space.

We’re using data to shape space.

Cause/Effect. Spatial cause and effect.

Installation should provide understanding that data is existing. Game should provide that data is useable and manipulable for an achievable purpose. The entire installation is to provide a platform for figuring out what is important about the ability to manipulate data spatially in physical and digital environments and how they translate to our psychological experience.

Game to figure out what data is what and where it is going, or moving physical spaces, digital information physically and back to digitally.

Game moves and translates physical space and digital space through the interface of data/information.

Abstraction of information and understand the impact whatever it is and how it translates in the basis of why information is important, necessary, and constantly under study.

This game will provide a method for importing data one way from another physical space. This will change things physically and digitally in their respective spaces. This information can then be further manipulated physically. This manipulation manifest into information again and is re-represented digitally in another way.

The physical project will have space that you move and connect. This will then change things in the digital world to move and connect, but it will reinterpret the information to take place differently.

If you connect board A with block B and C in the physical space. This connection might turn something on in the digital world, or it might make something push out and knock a standing object over that then becomes a platform to walk across.

This translation is also representative of how the information taken from Santa Monica’s physical environment is being represented in the physical space at SCI-Arc. It isn’t and can’t be completely accurate so the translation is understood to change relationships. This change is manifested in different ways all the time with translation of information. This translation of information has an architectural effect.

Santa Monica is physically moving objects which are being translated digitally into data, this information is then translated and fed into another environment and moves things physically inside it. Digital information is translated into physical information. This digital information is changed into physical space. These physical objects are then manipulated and translated back into data again and shown digitally as an environment to simulate the fact that you can take this information and manipulate it at will.

This provides the question that once we start to manipulate information and data in a data age such as this, what are the potentials for – that it has on our environments whether they be physical or digital? We inhabit both now. We inhabit them both architecturally as well in every other sense.

What are the potentials for data changing.

Data now is something to be translated in architectural terms. In an information age we have to understand how this information impacts us spatially. We exist in two realms now.

The question is:

What are we using to manipulate these realms?

Why are these things important?

How do they impact our experience?

Why are these methods of data importation and information interfacing important?

What are they doing to the way we think?

Diagram/principle of operation

Intention/criticality (discussion) (text)

Visualization/Design of experience (video clips, images, representations)

Narration (storyboard)/(text)

interpretation of information

connecting and disconnecting information with other information – networking

it’s the fact that you are moving things in another environment

Architectural Education provides:

Conception of skills

think politically

technical skills

educated in philosophy, culture, material, space, technology

incorporates contemporary questions of media

the ability to think critically and do

understand agenda and performance

Outside which is reality

Enter a threshold that reminds you of the reality came from and the environment you’re entering.

introduction and change into digital environment(s)

realize the transfer of environments

threshold/car acts as change between home and work, one environment to the next

Q: How do you understand why you are in different spaces?

A: Understanding the transfer of spaces relies on body data interpretation.

How: Physical Data corresponds with:

1. Auditory

2. Visual

3. Sensory/Touch (Hard/Soft/Sharp/Dull/Windy)/Temperature (Hot/Cold)

Q: What makes a space physical/real vs. digital/not real?

A: The ability to decipher physical information with the body. The concept behind virtual reality is the interaction of the digital body with the physical digital objects in an environment.

Q: What is the purpose of creating an environmentally immersive space?

A: To evoke an intelligent emotional response reflecting of the understanding of your bodily impact on the space you inhabit. How and why it happens, or just the mere fact that it is happening.

Q: What does the project do?

A: Transfers you between your daily space you impact without potentially realizing it to a space where your interactions with a particular environment can be immediately seen, deciphered, and understood.

Project Statement

(1st paragraph: what is intended; 2nd paragraph: why)

Taking inspiration from game developer thatgamecompany, most notably their games Flower and flOw.

input mic from space that measures noise level and corresponds with an increase in red shown through LED lights. This represents the activity level and if there is too much the structure will start to lose air and die unless those people present act upon the structure to try and help it.

Moral decision.

The project is about archiving impact through the measurement of our interaction within environments. This project creates the ability to be aware of the responsibilities we have towards our environment.

By creating a space where a user (of a particular simulated space) can interact with an environment and register their impact through visual display and auditory awareness the user is able to read, comprehend, and then manipulate their environment by actively acting within it responding to the complexities that arise from their presence within it.

The archiving process is the process of collecting the knowledge of the user’s space and time and processing the information acquired and becoming more knowledgeable of the impacts we have short and long term and what we have to do to maintain balance and the energy required to harm and help these environments.

The constitution of a game provides this medium for understanding through individual and group moral decision making. This simulates a large and small scale real world response.

One iteration of this might be noise sensors that monitor levels and to “fix” the problem when there is too much noise there might be poles in the room that X amount of people must hold onto and squeeze thereby preventing further movement and committing them to solving the problem through direct action. The solution otherwise is to leave the room of quiet the room down minimizing the impact upon the environment in the room.

Physical

Game

Interaction

Social Fabric

Communities

Gaming Culture

Gaming Influence

Technology

Interface (User Interface)

Environment (Physical, Digital)

Consumption (Reversible)

Media

Archive/Cataloging/Documentation (of Digital Architecture)

Time Input vs. Value Output

Limitations vs. Possibilities

Journey (Physical, Digital)

Method

Trend

Information

Player

Impact/Influence

Entertainment

Film

Current

Future

Filter

Relevance/Value

Sustainability

Casual

Hardcore

History

Experience

Intention

Evolution

Would this solidify video games as part of this newly evolved art? Are they art and if they aren’t art then what are they and what is their place in our society currently and in the future as games continue to evolve and influence the entertainment industry?

Answer: [summarized] Art itself is so large that almost if not everything qualifies as it. Video games are not excluded and by the current definition of what art is video games since their conception up until now would never have been excluded from being labeled as art. Currently art or art forms are all encompassing. If something has a process, that process itself can be considered an art form given the right light.

Honestly, not exactly what I was hoping to hear. Basically what that means is that art itself is so broad that it almost doesn’t matter if video games are art or not. Art has eaten itself. Art exists, but everything is art or a process that is constructed in specific ways and turned into an art form, thereby being art.

There are a lot of artists that wouldn’t like to think that they aren’t creating meaningful art. Or that their art itself is so specific to a direct type of art that it can only be gauged by its specific type as to its validity as art. Art is so broad that there is no way to give a value of one type of art over the other. Art types rely on other different art types. The only way to give a value possibly is the amount of effect in their own specific field of art and the impact it has there. That impact gauged against the impact of art of another different type would then be the only way to gauge the overall value of art. A well known process but seldom identified as being only meaningful on a grand scale. The immediate value of art is only given through personal value. Collective values of specific art types give credence of valuable art.

To summarize: Video games are an art form but whether or not video games have any value relies specifically on the collective values of the specific community of people directly affected by the video games (players and the creators) that the specific type of art within the video game encompasses give immediate value to video games. Their collective value judgement of video games can then go on to a more broad area of art and then be gauged against other art types to find a higher community value (bigger scale). The value of art lies within a hierarchy system. Similar to a tree. It starts at the roots as many different types of things that make the trunk. The roots being the different processes (also art forms) collecting and coming together to make the product itself (video games). This then produces branches that can reach out and affect other areas. This represents the influence of the video game(s). Whether or not these branches bear fruit or create flowers that bloom and pollinate other flowers (other fields being influenced) is the final test of if the game has value or not.

Henry Jenkins

What Game Designers Need to Know About Transmedia Entertainment

February 11, 2010, 6:00 pm

Increasingly, convergence culture is giving rise to a still emerging mode of entertainment which links experiences and infor mation together across multiple media platforms, enabling multiple ways of engaging with the content. Each medium makes its own distinctive contribution to the transmedia experience while each also provides a point of entry into the franchise as a whole.

In this talk, Henry will introduce some core concepts which are central to understanding transmedia entertainment, including notions of seriality and world building, and will explore the specific contributions which games (including traditional video games and alternate reality games) are making to the larger realm of transmedia franchises. In doing so, he will draw examples from a wide range of transmedia projects, including The Matrix, Harry Potter, Lost, Star Wars, and Heroes.

Henry Jenkins joins USC from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was Peter de Florez Professor in the Humanities. He directed MIT’s Comparative Media Studies graduate degree program from 1993-2009, setting an innovative research agenda during a time of fundamental change in communication, journalism and entertainment.

EDA  (Map) Broad Art Center 240 Charles E. Young Drive, Room 1250 Los Angeles, CA 90095

http://www.design.ucla.edu/events/calendar.php?viewDate=2010-02-11