SI and the current city Summer 2006: Grant and I were apartment hunting, driving down every weekend from San Francisco, without a place to stay in Los Angeles. We sniffed someone's personal WiFi at the corner of Washington and 9th and though homeless, we found a home base in an unfamiliar city, returning to that location throughout the day. That corner of 'public' space morphed temporarily into 'our' space, creating an invisible home for our home-searching activity. Similar to VR, a random urban space gained significance through our use of a communication technology, and what I find central to my case for a new architecture, a technology that is immaterial. The manner of use and definition of space through technology raises questions of what architecture is? Our activities define architecture; architecture facilitates our activities; a space to rest, a space to cook, a space to love, a space to learn. Must all spaces be built? Why can we not define our lives to open space (other than the obvious response of 'privacy'... we all do the same things anyway)? Whether in real or virtual space, architecture is what grounds us (physically speaking). At its most primitive, it is a shelter providing us with a place to gather, rest, focus, and develop. At its height, architecture is an agent of change in our experience of the world, in our interactions with each other, in our use of physical senses. Time, movement and spatial perception are senses that architecture extends. All media have time-space relationships: speech is the change and movement of words over time; light is the movement of electrons over time; cinema is the change of movement within space over time. Yet architecture is static. Our movement over time, through space, implies a change in architecture. But that change in architecture is merely a shift in our perception. Can architecture shift in real-space, and to our needs and movements? Looking back at VR, there is the common concept of the immaterial technology creating spaces one wants to occupy when normally undesirable, thus creating a space of meaning. Without the collective audio-visual experience, gathering in those spaces would be out of place, or out of character. In New Babylon, where the nature and structure of space changes frequently, one will make much more intensive use of global space. The volume of social space and of social activity in space has two consequences: the space available for individual use is greater than in a society with a sedentary population; yet there is no more empty space, space unused even for a brief time, and, as one makes creative use of it, its aspect changes so much and so often that a relatively small surface offers as many variations as a trip around the world. Distance covered, speed, are no longer the yardsticks of movement; and space, lived more intensely, seem to dilate. But this intensification of space is only possible due to the creative use of technical means - a use that we, who live in a society where use has a finality, can hardly imagine. From these experiences I have gathered that any point in space has the potential of defining a new architecture. Likewise, architecture - material or immaterial - has the potential of lending significance to any point in space. This is the first rule of what I call tentative architecture, an architecture that by means of immaterial or intangible technologies can happen at any point in space. This is what VJing has offered to architecture, transforming it into a constantly shifting organism, which defines space and which itself is defined by our interactions within it. The height of tentative architecture is a hyper-evolution of our society returning to nature by means of immaterial technologies (i.e. WiFi, cellular, infra-red, electro-magnetism, etc.) brought on by a paradigm shift of our perception of space, architecture and the urban landscape. It is an architecture that is mind/body/nature/technology centric. Our ultimate freedom lies in breaking away from definitions and associations tied to static spaces. To succeed in life is to create and re-create it incessantly. Man can only have a life worthy of himself if he himself creates. When the struggle for existence is no more than a memory, he will be able, for the first time in history, to freely dispose of the whole of his life. He will be able, in complete freedom, to give his existence the form of his desires. Far from remaining passive toward a world in which he is content to adapt himself, for better or worse, to external circumstances, he would aspire to creating another one in which his liberty is realized. In order that he may create his life, it is incumbent on him to create that world. And that creation, like the other, entails the same uninterrupted succession of re-creations. |
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