Reflective Architecture contributes less to an avatar’s experience than buildings that give good camera, in Prokofy Neva’s view, who recently outed me as part of the thumb-sucking set who have perhaps spent too much time ‘gazing’ and not enough time worrying about buildings that people can really live in:
People readily adapt to immersive virtuality and live in it as if it is real, in a very simple way, and the lower the level of education, they easier they do this, without thumb-sucking about reflexivity.
The architecture needs to have a comfort level that avatars can really live in, and not just gaze at, as art. The camera angles have to be good!
I also think there isn’t anything terribly fascinating or insightful about tracking avatars around on a sim, they’re like people, only a little clunkier until the technology gets better.
Virtuality and artificial intelligence are human artifacts, and bear all the markings of any human tool. (Neva)
I feel I’ve somehow misled or been misled on the power of virtual worlds. As Neva pointed out, “people readily adopt to immersive virtuality…and the lower the level of education, (the) easier they do this.”As someone without any post-secondary education, I’m not sure whether I fall in the ‘easily immersed’ group or whether he’s referring to high school drop outs - I suppose like everything, there’s an implied continuum.
Guides like Neva and Keystone Bouchard help me to realize that there’s probably a lot of stuff that an uneducated sap like myself can’t grasp, so I can only give amateur observations. Because I don’t have the nuanced framework that Neva does for really ‘getting it’ so I’m just throwing random bits into the conversational soup.
Immersive Virtuality and Why We Need Buildings that Function
I agree with Neva. Have a look at my own builds - camera angle is everything to the point where I’ve gone so far overboard that the scale is distorted, the ceilings are 5 floors high, and you could cam around the living room from 100 meters and never hit a wall. May not make the coziest living space, but you sure can see everything!
Form and function, I think architects call it (if they still do, no idea what shores modernism have washed up on lately).What about stores where you actually have to open a door to get in? Are they trying to keep the cold air out?
There’s a club in SL I went to twice and then boycotted (actually, I don’t actually get out much at all, I spend a lot of time gazing and thumb sucking) because it had a door to get in which, for whatever reason, had the highest resolution texture on the sim and was always the last thing to load. Everything would rez EXCEPT the ability to enter the club (without resorting to cam’d poseball hopping, hardly something a newbie like me would have known about).Same thing with roofs and second floors.
Taking an escalator up to the second floor of a mall? Insane. Why not just rip most of the flooring out so you can fly up in 1.25 seconds? Or rip the roof out as well so you can drop in from 200 meters where you and your flight feather were taking a tour of the nearby skyboxes (all of them, of course, with blackened windows and, um, locked doors).
And you can do all of these things without sacrificing style or the experience of venue.So from the perspective of immersive virtuality, reflective architecture doesn’t seem to add much to a community that might have more interest in ensuring maximum store traffic or cuddle space on a sim, so it’s merely an interesting diversion.
While I agree with Neva (or think I agree, I can be both indecisive and uncomprehending) that SL should be thought of as nothing much more than a domain for human activity, with all the implied utilitarian needs such as good camera angles, good governance, and a robust real estate market, I can’t help wondering whether my attention span is too limited for immersive virtuality and that maybe I should switch back to lower-realm pursuits like Warcraft where I can spend countless hours being bemused by farming for herbs and gazing at the awesome sky.Because to me there’s something about reflective architecture that’s not about gazing or tracking avatars on a sim.
And Neva cunningly both derided me and the thumb-sucking crowd and pointed us in the right direction with his comment that virtuality is a human artifact. So it got me thinking about whether reflective architecture might hint at something different about how human artifacts are created in virtual worlds.
Reflective Architecture as Visual Rhetoric
With a nod to Ian Bogost, perhaps Reflective Architecture is an exploration of how virtuality can be used as a medium for rhetoric and persuasion, and not just an exploration of how to track avatars through a sim, or how to get prims to move when you get close to them.The scripts are tools in a larger exploration of how a procedural medium can be used to persuade.
Bogost talks about procedural rhetoric as an extension of the reasonably well understood approach to verbal rhetoric, and the growing understanding of the use of visual rhetoric to persuade with images. Procedural rhetoric extends this further, because although virtual worlds and games can include verbal (voice, text) and visual elements, and further create platforms for social and personal interactions that can be themselves persuasive, he also argues that the foundation for persuasion in virtual worlds is procedural - it’s in the ‘code’, the product of which are things with which we feel we can interact and with which we are limited by the process of the platform.
For myself, this causes no end of confusion and dissonance. On the one hand, a world like Second Life is scripted, in many ways, to look like and act like real life - albeit with lax building codes, the ability to fly, and the nuisance of remembering to set your perms right before you hand in your homework. I suppose this is the immersive virtuality that Neva refers to.
And in a libertarian “your world/imagination” place like SL, the idea seems to be to make the code as invisible as possible. There is an advocacy to keep the coding authorities out of our everyday Second Lives as much as possible, remove the friction caused by rogue code and grid instability, and let us all pursue freedom, happiness, and appreciating real estate values while we build a more just society.
However, just as it’s incumbent on us (or someone, anyways) to deconstruct visual media so that we understand how advertising, for example, uses images to persuade us to buy things we don’t need, or go places we don’t need to see, so too does it become incumbent on us to explore how virtual worlds and the objects within them can create a new rhetorical language the purpose of which is not to just make it easier to get into a shop or to maximize camera angles, but to persuade for other purposes as well.
Reflective architecture (and virtual world architecture in general when it abandons notions that the more “real” it is the better) is one front in deepening our understanding of how virtual worlds might both entertain (the gazers like myself anyways, I won’t speak for those who are more educated) but also persuade. It helps to bring clarity to the the procedurality of synthetic environments and through this to therefore persuade, create cognitive dissonance, teach, change behaviors, and influence.By doing this, it can remind us that objects, including objects for which we typically impart specific meanings through our “real world” symbols, can be manipulated to create interactions in which the environment, in adapting to us, can also adapt towards persuading us.
These strike me as valuable and thought-provoking questions for which we’re surely picking up only the first threads from those dreaming, ivory-towered, overly-educated gazers.
But then again, so long as they keep making shiny objects that move and rotate, I’ll likely be entranced anyways.
(sticks thumb in mouth and happily wanders off.)
Aw, now that picture must be worth another peck on the cheek. Just to make for a little blush to compliment the happy picture.
I certainly hope Prokofy is wrong, and the virtual interface is more than just a clunky version of real life. yick!
Those who believe their avatar is a human being will always see the differences between the real and the virtual as a stumbling block on the path toward seamless replication of real life. But, those who can get beyond mere physical replication might begin to see those differences as opportunities.
If you could fly in real life, as easily as you can walk, wouldn’t you do it? If your body had an invisible camera you could place anywhere without moving your body, wouldn’t you use it? But, more importantly, wouldn’t you expect your built environment to evolve accordingly? If architects could easily program bricks or walls to be more intelligent and respond to our presence, wouldn’t we take advantage of that feature? Wouldn’t a new kind of architecture evolve, based on those new characteristics?
All we’re doing is designing within context. The context, in this case, happens to be a bit different than physical reality. I think its actually irresponsible to ignore that context and go on placating the lowest common denominator and mindlessly replicating physical reality - just because its easier, or more ‘comfortable’ in the short term. I appreciate traditional design and appropriate applications of physical replication in Second Life as much as anyone, but I also believe we’re all on a collective learning curve, and that there is enough room in the vast grid of Second Life for a few people to try out their ideas, and for others to write out their thoughts and observations about that work. There is nothing wrong with that.
But I really don’t think its appropriate to chase down and argue against those who try to understand or explore these new opportunities, calling them out as thumb-suckers. Granted, innovation isn’t for everyone - especially those who feel threatened by it, or don’t understand it, or don’t like it. That dichotomy is as old as time. But if anyone is sucking their thumbs - wouldn’t it be those who fear innovation, and go around demanding status quo?
Thanks Keystone. We’re having fun with the scripts by the way, can’t wait to show you some of the results.
In the meantime, please take note regarding thumb sucking, as I fear being pulled into a wider debate. I have nothing wrong with thumb sucking, and in fact some of my best friends are thumb suckers. Kind thanks.
I think you need a more subtle understanding of what it means to be “educated”. It’s not literally about the number of grades you completed in school. It’s about what level of sophistication you have in reflecting upon yourself in an environment, in taking a meta-level take.
The average joe with a high school education or some community college or trade school happily immerses in SL and finds a partner, a sex bed, a home, and goes happily at it. More intelligent, thoughtful, reflective types will write on their profiles that they aren’t available for such casual liasons; and they laughingly tell you that they’d never do anything so ridiculous as cavort on the pose balls. So I’m literally talking about the mediated architecture of sex furniture here, Dusan, if you will — where my point becomes graphic.
The ultra sophisticated will usually tell you that they “don’t need land to have fun” or “don’t understand why people have houses” or “why they have roofs when it’s not raining,” etc. etc. Ok, we got it, guys. Now dig deeper. So I’m glad you *are* digging deeper.
Ian Bogost isn’t really a persuasive reference for me, not to make a pun of it. I find his appallingly politically-correct game narrative a total bore, and frankly oppressive. The one on the fat Americans oppressing the rest of the starving world that he put out recently was especially atrocious. His art of persuasive is more of an orthodox ideological sect, that lock-steps you into coming to the same politically-correct views. These aren’t games; they aren’t even homilies; they are re-education camps. I loathe that.
Keystone, the minute you can stop making your living from Second Life, you will have a more sanguine view of all this. Until then, sure, you can dine out on the sheer aesthetics of it all.
Thumb-sucking isn’t about being infantile; the term “a thumbsucker” is newspaper newsroom jargon for “a long piece in which someone has a deep thought”. That’s all. You need not read into it some terrible dramatic commentary.
I find it fascistic that Keystone is now kow-towing to the Mau-Mauers and insisting that we aestheticize — or else! Or else we are *gasp* playing to the lowest common denominator!
As a rental agent, I can only *serve* my customers. And what they want is versimilitude, a comfort level for avatars, a certain kind of aesthetic, that will hardly be the politically-correct aesthetic that Keystone, as a professional architect would want, especially one trying to carve out some sort of whole neo-geo field with all this.
Keystone, what’s awful about what you write is that you imagine that if I serve the pedestrian customers’ need for low-brow builds and prefab architecture and date destinations, that I’m oppressing you with some imagined majority. But in Second Life, that is sheer and utter bullshit, because anyone can buy an island, and do what the hell they want on their island or continent –as you have done — and never fly around and see the tacky McMansions and Goth Castles of Second Life if they don’t wish to harm their eyeballs.
Nobody is stopping you from your “few ideas”. And your few ideas are…what? Recreating the Capitol Building of the US Congress *exactly as it is in real life*? Hello?
This stateement is truly beneath you, Keystone, as you know perfectly well that I give these issues a great deal of thought and do a great deal of reading on the subject:
“Granted, innovation isn’t for everyone - especially those who feel threatened by it, or don’t understand it, or don’t like it. That dichotomy is as old as time. But if anyone is sucking their thumbs - wouldn’t it be those who fear innovation, and go around demanding status quo?”
I don’t feel threatened by innovation — please cut the bullshit. What I *will* do is call innovation that is just as tacky and facile and reiterative as any kid’s fractal art exactly what it is. I don’t see that plains of blinking lights or geometric sculptures are even good art, let alone architecture. THAT is the debate. Frankly, it’s a debate I had about the winners of that contest — and I was surprised and pleased to see that Lordfly, whom surely you can respect as “one of your own,” even if a junior variety, had the exact same problems with: pretentiousness, overmathematical solutions, showy discomfort in the name of edginess, etc.
Nobody is demanding the Status Quo, Keystone, give it a break (um, Capitol Hill, anyone?!). I’m challenging pretentiousness, and facile crap, that’s all.
For example, this sort of hortatory lecture, from an anti-consumerist, pastoral, anti-capitalist sort of leftist ideology:
“to deconstruct visual media so that we understand how advertising, for example, uses images to persuade us to buy things we don’t need, or go places we don’t need to see, so too does it become incumbent on us to explore how virtual worlds and the objects within them can create a new rhetorical language the purpose of which is not to just make it easier to get into a shop or to maximize camera angles, but to persuade for other purposes as well.”
Um, why? Why do we have to ‘deconstruct” an ad and find this political evil underneath? Couldn’t we just interpret it as a company with a brand, that we may or may not click through, may or may not enjoy? Must we always play the victim of the leftwing view of the world, suppressed by evil corporations pinning us down with ads? couldn’t we just *like to shop* ???
Some new sort of virtual architecture inspires. It doesn’t have to have medieval or Cape Cod or quaint versimilitude to be comfortable; it can question cliches. There are great architects in SL who soar, who use the tools to the maximum, who create interesting spaces. But so often, even these very good ones, are making sculptural monuments to their own fanciful notion of themselves as being edgy, and it becomes very unpleasant after awhile to actually try to live in these artifacts.
Good trail of thought, and good original post.
What do you care what Prokofy Neva thinks?
Your own experiences cannot be denied. Your thoughts cannot be denied, your perspective cannot be denied. This you know. Prokofy Neva vacillates according to what her mood is and she is never kind except to those she adores (how few they are). She rarely has an original thought and likes to tear into the thoughts of others who dare look at things differently.
Keep looking, observing and writing. What you do has value - if this were not true, Prokofy Neva wouldn’t be trying to tear you down.
I find it humorous that the Dispeptic Penguin has to stalk me here to a debate about aesthetics. I’m not the one who titled a post after some individual whose perfectly-normal comments about over-pontificating about art in SL were seized by Dusan and put into a whole blog post title. My word, such drama lol.
I don’t deny Dusan’s experiences, but I’m merely eager to affirm my own, so that we don’t get smothered under the horridly politically-correct aesthetics of the hour that we suffer under in real life.
I hardly think I’m a vacillater; I don’t play Second Life stock markets like Nobody.
Dusan writes snarkily, that I supposedly think SL is “nothing much more than a domain for human activity, with all the implied utilitarian needs such as good camera angles, good governance, and a robust real estate market, I can’t help wondering whether my attention span is too limited for immersive virtuality and that maybe I should switch back to lower-realm pursuits like Warcraft”
Uhmmm “a domain for human activity” is a very, very large canvas. What, there is something inhuman, or something ethereal about ourselves online? But I take the human being to be an ensouled body, I don’t create any sort of Manichean dissection between the meat-world typist and the meta-world consciousness invested in the avatar — they are integrated, and on a continuum.
Perhaps Dusan really does feel it differently, and that’s fine, but that’s hardly a reason to accuse me of attempting to dumb down SL to utilitarian needs for cybersex in suburban box houses.
Good governance, good camera angles, and a robust real estate market may seem like horribly mundane, tasteless, even philistine goals, but they are merely the substrate for the higher things in life to which Dusan aspires.
I don’t understand why we need to be *bludgeoned* by art or *sliced to ribbons* by architecture. Can’t we go on a sim, have an aesthetic experience like holding hands and singing and listening and watching Dizzy Banjo’s thingie, or the Twitter fountain, or whatever, and then *go home to our Frank Lloyd Wright prefabs on our landscaped sims?* I mean, must we live the life of a Bohemian, or even a starving artist living out of a trashcan with the hobos in Calletta, in order to appreciate art?
I don’t *substitute* good camera angles, good governance, and a robust real estate market (which drives the SL economy, like it or not, or I wouldn’t care; if it were widgets, I’d care about widgets but it’s not widgets) for art. I say “and this, too”. I say “and don’t impose the harshness of your cerebral aesthetic on my simulation”. And that’s more than fine. I’m allowed to do that and not be hopelessly cast down to the cheap seats with the hot buttery popcorn because in real life, I can appreciate art in museums; I can take part in artistic mashups and happenings and installations, but then I can *go home*.
And I don’t see why I can’t *go home* in a virtual world. In fact, as it happens, I don’t have a home. I’m actually one of those people who doesn’t feel any burning need for my flying avian avatar to have a human-like home with a roof over its head.
But I appreciate the creature needs of others who *do* want the roof. I think my thoughts here in fact are rather original. Dusan is joining the throngs of aesthetes who always take the edgy noveau thing and become enraptured by the sheer non-normalcy of it — Keystone, too, is entranced with spinning lights and prims — shiny!. I appreciate it but I don’t wish to be stampeded by it, just as they don’t wish to be stampeded by things they don’t have a comfort level with.
Thanks for the stimulating thoughts. In the interests of full disclosure, I did intend to sound snarky but it was really meant in a respectful way. And I mean that in the sense that I was hoping to draw attention to the continuum of meaning that we can draw from architecture in SL, and reflective architecture in particular.
In my original post, I made the point that a lot of building design in SL is crap. Doors on stores, closed roofs where maybe we don’t need one (a mall, for example), and “bad camera” highlight that at its most basic level there’s still lots of room for talent and effort in creating buildings we can live in. Also in the interests of full disclosure I’m an amateur builder myself - I make those houses that people *go home* to.
So it strikes me as odd that I’d be painted as having merely an interest in shiny prims, although I realize that in my post this is how I may have portrayed myself. Look - the stuff I make is all labeled “beach house” and “loft” and “prefab” and the ads include things like “menu-driven bed included”. Really, it’s not particularly good, but then I’m not an architect or a designer, I just like moving prims around. I make it because I like the idea of people being able to go home at night to something that maybe feels right for them, they have a roof over their head, they can click a button and the windows black out - good, practical, let’s live our SL lives well kind of stuff.
So on one end of the spectrum is the Neva Thumb Sucking test - and take that as a tribute: are we looking at buildings and architecture and drooling over it because it’s shiny looking or moves in neat ways, i.e. are we thumb sucking, or are we looking at whether we can live in it, be practical, and ‘get good camera’. Prok - goodness knows you have a wider range than just one end of this spectrum, but my deeper point about reflective architecture isn’t that the other end of the spectrum is art, but rather that it may be a conceptual form rather than a aesthetic one.
Maybe that’s my projection onto forms that are really nothing more than fancy math, ‘art for art’s sake’, or designed for the aesthetes. But I’m proposing that reflective architecture may be an early indicator not of its use as a form for building design, but rather its use in conceptual and procedural mapping.
Bogost is one of the driest, most irritating reads I’ve had in a long time, but I was still struck by his idea that 3D spaces may be a new rhetorical vehicle, adding to verbal and visual rhetoric. Agreed, we can create a “room” in RL that does neat stuff, attend artistic mash-ups, but it’s very difficult to pull off procedural exhibits in the real world…they tend to end up on kiosks or computer screens, don’t they?
(I also think this is why for all our talk about immersive virtuality that things will really start getting interesting when we see more and more augmented reality and the ability to integrate real and virtual spaces).
To give a corny, simple example of reflective architecture. In Project Bluegrass by IBM you’re assigned a “hut” (let’s face it, a crappy digital version of an office cubicle). Depending how much work you have on your plate, the grass around your hut is either short, or long. If it’s long and weedy, other people can see that you’re jammed up, if it’s short people can see that maybe you can take on more work.
Now, there’s no question this visual indication of work load can be accomplished in a lot of different ways. But as reflective architecture is starting to show us, 3D forms offer different approaches to how we can participate by presenting it in a space that’s constructed like we’re used to - namely 3D.
Here’s what I imagine: reflective architecture (and I would LOVE to insert the word “information” there, because I am NOT talking about building design) leads to a better understanding of how our avatar presence can be reacted to by information objects - objects that have their own procedural commands, which may imply its own procedural rhetoric.
This understanding leads to someone thinking about reflective (information) architecture as something that could apply, say, to generating cloud tags of the Second Life geography. These cloud tags are sim wide, 3D conceptual maps - intuitive, and responsive.
Users come and the cloud tag has words like Education, Sex, Scripting, Real Estate, Community - and as the user approaches the terms of interest, the cloud tag responds, and the words splice out, changing to REFLECT the user’s interest (indicated by their movement through the space). The user can click on one of the tag items and be teleported to, say, Midian City, or Caledon, or NASA.
Just one example - cloud tags, semantic Webs, project tasks, collaborative 3D Wikis…that’s what I mean by reflective architecture as being an eye-opener, not on whether it improves how we relate to “buildings”.
So if reflective architecture commands our ability to project future conceptual architectures, then I’d also say that in its current uses as a form of art it doesn’t merely entertain, but also highlights that it may be an indication of new forms of persuasion, and that from this vantage we should use it as a way to begin a discussion about whether immersive virtuality actually is a new persuasive media, or whether all of this is merely thumb-sucking.
Prok, your point is well taken that there’s no particular divide between meat world and meta world. And yeah, there’s enough ivory tower types deconstructing media as it is - frankly, I generally know when I’m being manipulated by media, and do so with consent sometimes when it’s done well (hello, Apple!) and don’t need a scholarly journal to tell me that.
I spend a lot of time telling people not IN virtual worlds that it’s the SAME thing - tell them not to think of it as somewhere else, or a different domain, or having different symbols or meanings.
On the other hand, I think that virtual worlds add a dimension (sorry) to the Web in the sense that they’re media where code allows us to interact with objects, and that in the hands of knowledgeable and talented creators, these objects can persuade us in ways that a TV ad can’t.
I may not want to LIVE in reflective architecture because it wouldn’t pass the thumb-sucking test. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to look at it, because when I do I start to visualize new ways of presenting and interacting with information, the ability for this to be persuasive, and the potential that it won’t lead to a top selling beach house but it may be the source of new tools for conceptualization and information manipulation.
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