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Visions of the Virtual: Architectural Probings

JULIO BERMUDEZ (Video Designer, Project Director)

University of Utah

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Verl Adams, Assistant Designer. Rainer Bürck & Eric Lyon Soundtrack

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Published in: Proceeding of the 6th. Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology. Connecticut College Center for the Arts and Technology. New London, Connecticut, pp.10-13 (1997)

© copyright 1997 Julio Bermudez. All rights reserved.

Note: This work was made possible by a University of Utah Faculty Research/Creative Grant.



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Artwork Description

The submitted video shows artwork investigating the design and aesthetic potential of 3D virtual environments. For the premises behind this work, please click here.

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The video is a 28 minute long simulation of a 3D virtual universe composed of 3 interdependent levels of complexities. Each of these related worlds has a different architecture/landscape: the fieldscape, the datascape, and the informationscape.

The fieldscape expresses the nature and fluid limits of emptiness and unity (images 1-4). The visualization shows spaces of texture and light without focus, an environment of great aesthetic quality that comprehends the largest scale of all, the beginning and end of the virtual ontologies. The simulation starts with a totally homogeneous field of black: the closest thing to nothingness we can imagine. This undisturbed field is a seamless oneness that in its total perfection is totally empty, it has nothing except itself. It is the landscape of nothingness, emptiness, oneness. Discrimination within the field begins to be possible only when the field changes itself by some kind of activities (images 1-2). There is still an oneness, a disturbed oneness (e.g., like creating turbulence in water) wherein one can begin to recognize differences. The clamping of "stuff" due to action (e.g., the waves) breaks down the whole into parts and makes possible the virtual world.

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By shifting its attention from the solid to the void, the fieldscape examines design issues largely inaccessible in the object oriented real world. Data fluxes and constructions seen from afar appear as fields engaged in a sensual dance. They are pulsing, fleeting, and changing without ever repeating themselves twice. The behavior of the field creates the multifold, the many -- in our case, the datascape (see below). Conversely, it is the databases and their interactions that generate the field. The result looks like weather patterns driven by the tension between huge data centers. Visual thunderstorms collide in audio rains within a mediasphere in continuous, unstoppable flow. This architecture captures and conveys the "atmospheric" ambiance and mood of cyberspace.

The datascape presents the metadimensional fabrics of structured information (images 5-10). Forms and spaces holding and expressing organized data generate constructions of high order. The security and clarity of this order is paradoxically undermined by its maze-like qualities (images 5-7). In a place of (supposedly) total unconstrained movement and clarity, we find grided layers of data constraining mobility and comprehension despite "their" will to be in order. In a way, what orders is what confuses, what reveals is what conceals. The labyrinth with its loaded mythical-psychological-typological connotations, its eternal recurrences, and infinite recesses is a wonderful metaphor and place to hold information. The labyrinth may be thought not so much as the result of a top-bottom organization of information but as the macroscopic effect of uncountable microscopic data events. In other words, the interactions of these information events generate the layered and folding place of the datascape . . .

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The informationscape looks at the microstructure or "cellular level" of the virtual world (images 11-14). In antithesis to the database in which everything is ordered and the world of fields in which peace and serenity prevail, the realm of information presents the schizophrenia of today's media world. At this level cyberspace appears to be a dynamic digital collage of diverse media (TV, telephone, video, computers, the Internet, photography, radio, painting, electronic games, fax, cinema). This simulation probes into the plastic qualities of the electronic ether where anything and everything may be 'mediatized' and thus made (virtually) real. This realm bridges the virtual and the real worlds and thus possesses environmental qualities of the hybrid and simulacrum.

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The three places are considered to be expressions at different scale of a same virtual universe. The fieldscape stands in sharp contrast to the datascape that is characterized by clear, dense, and stable structures and an emphasis of the solid over the void. The gaseous and light world of fields is about atmosphere, emotions, and the aesthetic whereas the database world is about organization, rationality, and functionality. In the empty environment of fleeting and pulsing fields, the datascape offers a deceptively secure cognitive and emotional foothold -- the labyrinth. The simple, rational, and solid geometry of fabric upon fabric of data allows the visitor to find and loose their whereabouts. The environment coalesces, freezes the fluid media of the fields into rational layers of structured data. At the information level, an evocative and intriguingly "noisy" kaleidoscope reminds us of what the powerful digital hums of our civilization might look and feel like in their milieu.

Although the three virtual places form a continuum, they may be accessed disjointedly. As one gets closer and closer to a field, it becomes increasingly dense, thick, and textured revealing a crystal-like structure of great order (image 4). This a "materialization" out of apparent emptiness, a solidification of the void . . . As one dives further into the complex fabric of the database, the multidimensional grid gives way in another quantum leap (through its microscopic structure -- images 6-7) to a busy spectacle of hypermedia events that lacks stability. Like our reality, the micro and macro scales of the virtual are largely fluid and empty whereas the middle scale appears as largely stable and solid. Unlike our reality, the visual worlds are new visual realms full of aesthetic and design potential for realizing the virtual.

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