Being There

Some Notes on a Cybereal Architecture

Cybereal architecture will not replace real architecture any more than virtual reality will supplant our own. Technology affects everything but replaces nothing. When the telephone was invented people worried that personal contact would be obviated by phone conversations. It didn't happen. Instead, another channel was opened for people to communicate. Our present society would be inconceivable without the telephone. Cyberspace will become as indispensable. It may become the next best thing to being there.

Cyberspace...a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding ...

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Ironically, while popular culture has embraced this new interpretation of electronic space, architects are slow to realize the cultural impact of computing. Most, even those trained on computers, think of them as drafting machines. CAD models are considered merely proposals for future buildings. Unlike the product of a conventional drawing board, however, the object within the computer has a life of its own. A liberating one, at that.

It may have three or more dimensions. It may be endlessly questioned and modified. The object may embody something else or be part of a group which interact in unprecedented ways. In fact, the many dimensions of meaning in cyberspace has led to a cybereal architecture which will have dramatic consequences for the profession.

For example, imagine a library taking shape within a computer. Every detail is rendered precisely using conventional CAD techniques. This time, however, every book and film that the library is to contain has been included in the model. Moving through the modeled stacks, we see every volume of the intended library arranged on the shelves. If we pause to open a book, we see the entire text along with illustrations, possibly catching a whiff of musty paper. Would the actual construction of this library be redundant? Could our model outperform the physical building?

Let's say the book we opened was an illustrated text on the work of Carlo Mollino. When we opened it and examined the illustrations, they may have been windows onto a world where Mollino's works could be visited, his designs built and former buildings reconstructed. The experience would be difficult, if not impossible, to realize physically. Further, our library could be visited by anyone online, not just the local community.

Our model,then, helps us navigate the information housed in a real library. In fact any building type which serves information work could be transformed this way: schools, offices, even museums. The spatial metaphor validates the designer's work without the need for physical construction.

New Design Strategies

Spatial metaphors help users unfamiliar with a computer system orient themselves. For example, the desktop metaphor used in many PCs represents a data file with an icon resembling a paper document. Learning to operate within a space is one of the first things we learn as children. Navigation within it teaches us about relationships and hierarchy. This is the underlying logic of spatial metaphors in computing. Routes and strategies are not rationalized so much as intuited. A strictly rational approach to the design of this interface can be a liability. Gottfried Meyer-Kress, working at the Center for Complex Systems at Champagne-Urbana has been part of a team designing virtual reality interfaces for computer systems. In one model, a featureless room houses four boxes, each labeled with a different topic. Upon entering one of the boxes, one finds four more identical to the first. Within each of these lie four more, and so on.

While this nesting of volumes seems rational, the user gets lost within the first few iterations. Meyer-Kress believes that another level of orientation must be developed in order to make this system work, perhaps something based on urban form or architecture.

The model of the city is appropriate since there is usually enough variety and detail to distinguish one space from another. Landmarks also help to locate ourselves in the open, while windows and doorways maintain our link to spaces outside the ones we occupy. It is the formal structure of architecture which makes urban space navigable. Without it we would have to relearn our actions every time in a new, unmarked environment.

Some work using the CAD paradigm is intended to evoke experiences and fluidity possible in cyberspace. Steve Perella, an architect, has created a number of proposals for a dramatic architecture of shifting images and fleeting forms. He describes his work as being about the surfaces of objects and the volatility of their meaning. While the proposals are inspired by the ephemera of cyberspace, they stop at the screen, needing to be realized in physical space.

Once on the other side of the screen, cybereal architecture breaks down into three categories: buildings as artifacts, buildings as operating systems and synaesthetic architecture.

The first is the creation of architectural forms within the space, perhaps the closest to our present conception of architecture. The building, here, would be an environment to be explored and not built. Among those working in this area is Edward Keller. Keller, a sometime collaborator with Perella, has produced a number of works which are freed from physical constraints. Although they often have specific programs their energy is in the dramatic rush of forms issuing from the screen.

Architectural programs are less a concern to the team of Constantinos Terzidis and Emmanuel-George Vakalo. Working at the University of Michigan, they have been studying algorithmic objects within cyberspace. While most of their forms are abstract, verging on a deconstructive splintering of volumes, they also reveal a possible area of exploration. One project, a hovering cloud of dark cube-like objects evokes the awe of some of Magritte's paintings: the impossible becoming real. The use of cultural reference is rare among those working in cybereal architecture. This could be a way of incorporating culture within what is presently an abstract, intellectual space.

Program, for both design and computer, forms the core of work done by Jim Leftwich and Clayton Graham. Working in the Bay Area in California, they have collaborated to develop computer operation systems using spatial metaphors. They realize that the strength of these metaphors is our intuitive grasp of objects and volumes. If they are applied to the operation of a computer, the device would be less like a machine, more like the environment imagined by Gibson.

Leftwich,trained as an industrial designer, has done considerable work in developing devices and graphics for computer interfaces. His interest in virtual reality has lead him to explore cyberspatial operating systems which would be accessed using goggles and gloves.

Recently, he has developed an interface for a major medical supplier which employs imagery taken from a standard office environment. While the present result could be employed using a PC, it could also be used in immersive virtual environments. This could eventually be a format for telecommuters' connection to their employers' offices.

Clayton Graham, an architect by training, has proposed several ways in which computer systems might be represented in cyberspace. Among them are modular building/machines which have rooms for specific computer applications. "After all,"says Graham," you don't cook a meal in your bathroom. Why shouldn't you be in a different place when you are doing a drawing than when you are working a spreadsheet?"

In Leftwich and Graham's design of cyberspace objects, interaction is the reason for the object. Those familiar with MacIntosh or Windows operating systems understand that the menus offered by the screen are displayed in 2d rectangles. These rectangles may be prodded by a tool, usually a mouse, to open files and begin applications. If the display of files were enhanced using 3D imagery, the user could see the contents of files, view their size and linkages with other information.

Yet another approach to cybereal architecture is being explored by Marcos Novak in Austin, Texas. If Leftwich and Graham's architecture is based upon function, Novak's is based on materials. Form in cyberspace is made of information. It may be expressed in many ways, as music, as art or mathematical theorems. In fact, it may be translated from one form to another in a kind of high-tech synaesthesia.

The volatility of meaning lies at the heart of Novak's work. His projects for a Liquid Architecture describe form which is subject to its information content. As a file gets larger, so does its iconic representation. Graphic files may display images of their content, their massing may represent supporting information and subfiles. All is in flux, changing form as the content changes.

Some of this work has had an acknowledged influence on Clayton Graham's more recent projects. A crucial difference however, is Novak's understanding of form. If Graham's architecture is analogous to real world objects, Novak's objects are digital. Their form shifts with their content and with the viewers perception. His is a world of nuance and fleeting moments.

Among Novak's projects for cyberspace are Navigable Music and Disembodied Dance. Both efforts are designed to express the relativity between the project and the participant. For instance, the movement across a data-landscape, in Navigable Music , produces a specific melody of sounds according to where the participant goes. Another path would play a different tune since each route is unique.

Novak's research places him in the avant garde of cyberspace. His images are beguiling, sometimes forbidding. A sense of vertigo pervades some of his visions of this new space since most of the keys we use to orient our bodies are missing. More troubling is the idea that everything we see may be unique, formed to our particular viewpoint.

This extreme of contingency may prove limiting, however. If everything is subject to such relativism, how would a consensus develop within cyberspace? What would become common values in an electronic community? Who would be the occupant of cyberspace?

Architecture can't supply all the answers to these questions. Cyberspace is still under construction and the user of cybereal architecture is still being defined. We have to look elsewhere for guidance.

Perils of Cyburbia

Cybereal communities already exist. Already considerable work is going into building and analyzing cyberspace. The precurser to Gibson's Matrix is today's Internet, the mother of all networks. Before that were the military's ARPAnet and numerous electronic bulletin board services.

While bulletin boards and the Internet act as basic structures for communication, another form of electronic environment has been developed called a Multi-User Dungeon, or MUD. In the early 80's a British student created a computer program which simulated in text form the settings for the game Dungeons and Dragons. This game was played out by participants who had assumed specific roles. One could become a wizard or a damsel and play the role in a medieval setting complete with castles and perilous countryside.

Since then hundreds of MUDs have sprung up on the networks, mostly for playing games. The trouble with MUDs is that they become electronic theme parks. Based on the original role-playing notion of D&D, others include fantasy adventures,science fiction, even Star Trek itself. Still, the role-playing and staged quality of the MUD remains. What would a MUD be like without the theme?

MIT's Amy Bruckman and Xerox PARC's Pavel Curtis have anwered this by creating professional MUDs for media scientists. Curtis' LambdaMOO is a cyberspace overlay onto the physical buildings at Xerox PARC. Many people who log onto their system and move around in Lambda MOO are surprised at how realistic it is. Real visitors who have used the MUD actually can navigate the building by recognizing landmarks and features found online. Although LambdaMOO includes the roads used to access the real building, Curtis says that most users bypass these and flash into the facility directly. Once oriented, they begin to move about within the MUD.

Amy Bruckman's MediaMOO at MIT's Media Lab also incorporates the architecture of a host building. Some of the rooms, like the ballroom on the sixth floor are cybereal fabrications: the building has only four floors. Since cyberspace has no features inherently, MUD designers sometimes adopt existing architecture as a point of departure. The purpose of these building extensions is to help orient the new user by employing spatial clues.

Until recently, the interface with the user has been text based. This was due to the limited capacity of lines to carry graphic information. This has been resolved by having on-board environments within the user's computer. In this case, only the changes in an environment are transmitted, vastly reducing the processing required. While the technology is interesting, the spaces described can be astonishingly banal.

Some of these environments were discussed recently at a symposium entitled "Electrotecture" sponsored by ANY and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Alluquere Stone, a sociologist specializing in electronic culture presented a few slides of Fujitsu's Habitat, a corporate MUD operating in Japan.

A moderate-sized city laid out under a sunlit sky, Habitat has all the features of an ideal city as envisioned by Walt Disney. It has everything from harbors to misty mountains; its axis of symmetry is capped by a wizard's mountain with temple. The effect is like a VanEyck rendered by the Care Bears. Bosch might be a better source given the recent spate of crimes in this town.

When a new member joins Habitat, they can assemble their character from a menu of body parts. Heads are prized possessions since they connote status as well as being the primary mask of the user. Recently, a band of thieves has been stealing heads. They approach a novice, and swindle him into lending them his head only to disappear with it. Despite the inconvenience to the novice, it is almost a relief that mischief has a role in paradise as well.

Identity Crises

The theft of heads illustrates the importance of the user's screen identity. The role of masks in cyberspace is crucial to understanding its society. Since most information on the Internet is conveyed textually, users rely on descriptions or names to identify one another. Some citizens go by several names since they operate several accounts on the Internet services, or because they want to play various roles on the Internet. Conversely, someone sharing another's account ID may masquerade as that person. In fact, several may take on the same persona as a mask.

According to Brenda Laurel of Interval Research, Cyberspace is a kind of psychological theater in which participants are free to play any role they wish. Several instances of gender-swapping have been reported. Experiments in role playing are inspiring considerable sociological and psychological research. Shirley Turkel at MIT, for instance, has written on the potentially therapeutic role MUDs can play in personality development. Amy Bruckman, also at MIT, is studying the use of MUDs in education.

If the volatility of identity weren't disorienting enough, some masks have no persons behind them at all. Already there are several programs running on the Internet which act as agents for users. Some, like Gopher and Veronica, are used to find information in the data banks of Internet's computers. Operating independently, they search the Internet and return with the goods. The future is likely to bring more agents, known variously as rodents and knowbots, which will serve other specialized functions. While they presently have no personalities, they may attain them simply by way of becoming user-friendly.

Most community activity presently happens in the MUDs or on the Bulletin Board Services. In contrast to the ambiguity of individual identity on the Net, BBSs and MUDs often have very specific agendas. Special interest groups sometimes run MUDs as a common turf for a dispersed community. There are electronic communities for women, gays, the elderly and various ethnic groups. There are wayward BBSs focusing on body piercing and arcane sexual practices. There are even BBSs for hate groups representing Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

Unlike the real world, most of these communities have only a single theme, making them havens and ghettos at the same time. If they are seen in the same role-playing light as the fantasy MUDs, however, they become areas of experimentation for the users, not only personally but societally.

These communities may, in fact, play for society the role that CAD plays for architecture. They diagram a possible physical society according to the ideals of specific groups. Along with telecommuting and remote shopping, they could lead to dramatic changes in physical cities. Concurrently, these disembodied communities might merge with each other in larger MUDs, say something like the present Cybercity. This would lead to a form of cybereal urbanism with unforseeable consequences.

The Body in Question

Form in Cyberspace is unfettered by the constraints of reality. It has no sun or horizon, no gravity or resistance of objects. It lacks the very qualities of real space that our bodies use to navigate it. Architects in cyberspace can take nothing for granted.

Radical form, for instance, does not have the same meaning in cyberspace as it does in reality. A deconstructivist strategy casually applied in cyberspace has no meaning. The drama of opposing site and gravity is lost in an environment lacking either.

Without a nature to guide or contrast the architecture, we must rely upon cultural conventions to situate ourselves. The abstract concepts of architecture can have very real consequences here. Rituals of entry, primary views and faces, axes and edges all become vital for bodily orientation. A lack of these keys could result in discomfort for the user, vertigo and nausea.

One strategy may be taken from theater and the fine arts. In painting the frame is a mediator between the occupied and the perceived universes. In theater, it is a proscenium. Both are gateways to the artificial. The virtual consoles and dashboards seen in popular video games would be examples of this form of frame. Although what is seen through the windshield is dynamic, the body is grounded in the virtual vehicle.

Other forms of orientation might not be so abstract. If anything might be salvaged from postmodernism, it is the role that memory plays in defining form. There might be monuments erected in this space which are recreations of buildings torn down or never built. As a building is completed in the real world, say Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona, it would slowly disappear from cyberspace. Mies' Barcelona Pavillion would have entered cyberspace when it was first demolished, only to disappear upon its reconstruction a few years ago.

This overlap between real and cybereal architecture might lead to a hybridization of both. An embodied virtual reality would allow points where the cybereal touches upon the real, grounding one while enriching the other. One could imagine walking the streets of Rome and have the buildings reveal their history upon inquiry. Possible cybereal annexes to museums and libraries might enhance the use of a building by extension into information space.

Motion and States

A crucial difference between real and cybereal space concerns motion and time. While physical space requires us to pass from one position to another in sequence, it is possible in cyberspace to go from state to state instantaneously. In reality, a cross-country trip would necessitate moving over long stretches of landscape. Cybereality allows you to jump from New York to LA without a layover in Denver, for instance.

This is one of the curious facts of computer space which can easily be misunderstood. In the recent Electrotecture conference in New York, some participants stressed the concept of speed in this space. An architect's slides of illuminated buildings blurred by the motion of the camera served to illustrate both his presentation and that of the philosopher on the panel.

In architecture this preference for speed underlies an aesthetic agenda based upon tension between material inertia and a longing for motion. In real space, it may be suited to the dynamic forms of recent architecture, particularly the stylings of deconstructivism. Rushing about in cyberspace has little meaning, however.

The trouble with the spatial metaphor in computers is that it can limit our understanding of cyberspace. Motion there best serves those looking for something, whether it's a piece of information or a particular view of an object. Speed, a necessity in real space, is simply a blurred condition between states. The users don't engage the information until things slow up and they can examine the destination.

If all existing CAD documents were stored in cyberspace, we would find that the point of origin (0,0,0) to be incredibly dense. This is because designers usually begin their drawings/models somewhere near the origin to orient their work. The projects of most industrial designers might exist within a radius of, say, one or two meters from the origin. Architects' work generally fits within a 100 meter radius, urban and regional planners within 100 kilometers. Beyond this radius our existing cyberspace becomes very sparse.

If we were to move between these documents, it might be a motion between states of (0,0,0), along a fourth axis. Going from (0,0,0,0) to (0,0,0,1) would be instantaneous, a simple change of state. A preference for this over the conventional motion has already been demonstrated in the aforementioned LambdaMOO. Users, given the choice between traveling cybereal highways to the MUD and flashing into the facility, usually do the latter. Once they are used to accessing the MUD, the illusion of speed becomes superfluous and discarded. Once in the MUD, however, motion is used to browse the space as needed.

So, the metaphor of physical space has limitations. A better model might be based on our memory of space. Remember, for example, a time in your childhood when you were sick, lying in bed under the covers. Now,imagine removing the covers, getting up and closing the bedroom door. This example shows two methods of motion within a mental space. The first placed you in your childhood bed by moving between states. The second allowed you to navigate and manipulate the space/state you were in. The first motion was static, the second dynamic.

Motion between memories is usually not continuous and there is often no distance involved. Using this model for cyberspace would have distinct advantages. Getting lost there would be less a problem than in reality, since you could simply revert to a previous state. A real space example would the recovery of lost keys by remembering the events that followed their last use. Examining the memory states reveals the physical location of the keyring.

Towards an Augmented Reality

This linkage between a physical object and a state could be a potent area for design exploration. Souvenirs are physical landmarks for the navigation of memory states. Examination of a souvenir can release a host of memories. This could be a model for the way in which cyberspace and real space might interact. The manipulation of enchanted objects in real space might affect events in cyberspace resulting in motion or revelation.

This connection between realities is being discussed by computer experts in terms of an augmented reality or an embodied virtual reality. It is clear that the influence of work in cyberspace will be felt in the physical world. As it already is in architecture.

Although our virtual library may be a few years off, the dissolution of certain building types is augured by the popularity of automated bank tellers. William Mitchell, dean at MIT's architecture school, sees a recombinant architecture resulting from this. When we can find an ATM in an airport, student union or shopping mall, it is time for us to reconsider the role of building types in our society.

Building types hosting information-related programs would be subject to this decentralization and hybridization. Examples would be office buildings, museums, theaters, schools and, as mentioned, libraries. A type might simply become a symbol in the way graphic icons are used in a computer.

Another way that the cybereal will manifest itself was recently described by Glenn Goldman and Steve Sdepski at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. They feel that the interactivity and entertainment value of cybereal environments will up the ante for physical design. "People used to the real-time responsiveness of cyberspace will be impatient with architecture as we know it,"says Goldman. "If architects don't catch on to this in time, it will be the special effects houses in Hollywood that will be setting the expectations of future clients."

If architecture becomes a division of the entertainment industry it will be no surprise to those who have contemplated the future of theme parks and entertainment malls. To them, the change must seem inevitable, although there is no reason to assume it will be total. Technological revolutions have a way of being absorbed by our culture.

Cybereal architecture will not replace real architecture any more than virtual reality will supplant our own. Technology affects everything but replaces nothing. When the telephone was invented people worried that personal contact would be obviated by phone conversations. It didn't happen. Instead, another channel was opened for people to communicate. Our present society would be inconceivable without the telephone. Cyberspace will become as indispensable. It may become the next best thing to being there.

Perrella.tga: Stephen Perrella and Edward Keller have proposed a floating media membrane showing urban scale projections of information on the Web. While the surface is intended to be physical, the visual environment it offers is not.

Leftwich.tga: In this design for a computer interface, the designer of a house views his work through a virtual sphere. The designers, James Leftwich and Max Sims, created the sphere to hold applications and tools used in the design process. Unlike the house beyond, the sphere is not intended for construction. Instead, it is a cybereal object which acts autonomously on behalf of the user.

Graham.tga: Operating systems may be presented as physical objects. Here, Clayton Graham has designed a "machine" within which a user might do work. The faceted configuration of the object is intended to minimize the polygons required for rendering. This would speed up interaction time during operations.

Terzides.tga: Constantine Terzides and Emmanuel Vakalo have used algorithms to generate designs. While the selection of algorithm may be intentional, the result is often surprising. Spaces on the Web might be generated spontaneously using this method.

Novak.tga: A view into cyberspace by Marcos Novak. Objects here are embodiments of information. Some may be files or directories, others algorithmic plots. Their presentation is variable and dependent on the viewer, offering a new universe for each user. Novak's work has been influential in early work on cyberspace design.

Keller.tga This cyberspace workstation by Edward Keller has a vehicular quality since it is intended as a craft for cyberspace navigation. The design would symbolize the user's physical workspace in presentation on the Web.