Novak, Marcos; Trans-architecture; 1994

Body, cyborg, avatar: To see through a multiplexed kaleidoscope; to read and speak thoughts in parallel, bifurcating sentences to the limits of chaos and still to understand and be understood. When I am multiple, an ensemble of particle selves, who are we? Where are we? How are we embodied? How are we empowered to act in the cities of the spaces of consciousness? Ladders of indirection in the history of thought: Object, number, variable, function, derivative, integral, observable, operator. Scalar, vector, tensor, spinor. Eigenvector, eigenvalue, eigenstate. In the ladder of abstractions, each higher rung is seen to contain the previous as a mere special case, an instance of a more powerful thought. The understanding of finite creatures in an infinite universe is necessarily bounded; consequently, in any given era and under any given philosophical, scientific, artistic, religious or ideological outlook, there is always an edge of thought, a boundary between the known and the abyss. Some live within that boundary, some perambulate it. A few cross it and attempt to build and inhabit the abyss. Stepping outside the known world, building past the edge of thought, they enlarge the world for all. These I call architects, though they may as well be poets of all sorts: scientists, philosophers, engineers, dancers, directors, writers, actors,or musicians. Here then is an alternation of voices. Hear them. A Proliferation of Spaces In The Decline Of The West, Oswald Spengler discusses the fundamental role spatial conceptions play in characterizing civilizations. Driven by the technologies of virtuality, we are witnessing a massive worldwide shift that is perhaps not so much an apocalyptic sign of the decline of Western civilization as an indication of the end of its dominance and the parallel rise of a richly and instantaneously interwoven global culture. A proliferation of spatial conceptions accompanies this shift. Space, in all its flavors and species, is undergoing radical reevaluations: physical space, electronic space, scientific space, narrative, semantic and stochastic space, social, economic and political space, smooth and striated space, discrete and continuous space, cellular space, mediated and augmented space, broadcast, narrowcast and pointcast space, spectral space, inner and outer space, dreamspace and spacetime, flat space and curved space, Euclidean, non-Euclidean, post-Euclidean and trans-Euclidean space, Hilbert space, n-space and phase space, musical space and kinaesthetic space, endo-, eso-, and exo-space, micro-, meso-, and macro-space, genetic space, first, second, and third space, cyberspace, all are jostling together and creating the infinity of permutations that we live with but about which we are not sufficiently conscious or articulate. Augmented reality follows from augmented space. If architecture is the art whose medium is space, and if our understanding of space is itself changing, must not architecture change? Must we not change? Late Two centuries have passed since Gausss initial recognition of the shortcomings of Euclids geometry and the beginning of a series of fundamental reevaluations of the nature of space and time. We are almost two centuries late in finding an architectural expression for the post-Euclidean world. Now, for the first time in two hundred years, electronic spaces allow architects to investigate spatial conceptions that, until this moment, have been impossible to explore, let alone share, in anything other than the languages of mathematics and poetry. Simultaneously, media technologies are enabling the formation of a new public realm in search of an appropriate and relevant architecture. As the tools by which to create non-physical spaces finally become available, architects face the double challenge to create works that both express the rich strangeness of our scientific spatial conceptions and address an emerging distributed, non-local virtual culture. Increasingly, facing this challenge means three things: first, designing liquid architectures in cyberspace; second, blending the physical and virtual worlds into transarchitecture, the radical hybrid of the two; and, third, accepting the task of designing the constitutions and identities of avatars, the inhabitants of these new environments, as part of the evolution of the discipline of architecture, all the while striving to give form to the edge of thought. Task The process of change we are presently experiencing began almost two hundred years ago, when the advent of non-Euclidean geometries led to a fundamental reconsideration of the meaning of space and time, matter and energy, information and noise. Ideas were introduced that architecture could no longer give form to. Consequently, a rupture followed that led to a growing marginalization of the art of architecture. Let us call the Newtonian and

Euclidean world World A; let us call the post-Euclidean world that replaced it and that extends into the present World B; and let us call the electronic, telematic world we are creating World C. As global culture is rapidly moving into World C, architects are finally beginning to contemplate World B, taking a giant step forward but still falling behind the times. This lag does not have to be perpetuated: it is up to us to accept the present and invent the future. transArchitectures The term transArchitectures describes a transformation or transmutation of architecture that is intended to break down the polar opposition of physical to virtual and propose in its stead a continuum ranging from physical architecture to architecture energized by technological augmentation to the architecture of cyberspace. It is offered as a way to expand and enhance the scope and relevance of architecture in an information age, and to allow the consideration of alteratives beyond the confines of narrow disciplinary boundaries. transArchitecture examines aspects of the technological and theoretical augmentation of space and their relation to the exploration of diverse spatial modalities that have been previously impossible to pursue. Computers must be seen as both tools by which to investigate these spatial modalities and instantiators of a new species of architectonic space. Ideas are the invisible scaffolds upon which the real is constructed. The history of architecture is a history of the increasing elaboration of invisible scaffolds. There are literal scaffolds, such as those that hold up arches and vaults as they are being constructed; there are scaffolds of industry, such as the factories that persuade raw materials to combine, harden and form into the structures and skins of our cities; and there are information scaffolds that connect human interests and activities across the vastness of distance and knowledge. transArchitecture, architecture beyond architecure, is an architecture of invisible scaffolds. Avatara Avatara: incarnations of Vishnu from age to age, descents of the deity into the world to correct imbalances. Inherently multiple versions of self; toolbox identities to get the job done; compromised bodies with purposes in lesser worlds. Designs by which to inhabit designs. Ten embodiment-versions like wishes, the last one requesting ten more wishes: Meta-meat. Design: Miniaturization has destroyed all excuses of form following anything but the needs of the body and its hallucinations of self and other. Most of design consists of splendid variations on the theme of containers. As these sophisticated containers shrink to the nearly invisible microchip, it becomes clear that what design provides is not a question of true expressions but one of heightened sensual interfaces between bodies, possessions, and obsessions. Myth after fallen myth later, we stand at the brink of a precipice, and we are falling. Every day virtuality advances more boldly, taking some things, breaking others, changing all. Physical space, already post-Euclidean, is now completely contaminated by the virtual: no cure is in sight. We are the making animal: we design, therefore we are. When we dissolve into virtuality, what is left of design? What then is left of us? What used to be designed in physical space is now being absorbed into the insatiable virtual. Initially there are no senses in virtual space. As we move into virtuality, future designs role becomes clear: to sensualize the virtual as present design sensualizes the physical. But senses belong to bodies, so to sensualize the virtual is to first invent virtual bodies imbued with virtual senses. This involves new operations: limb-switching is not collage but warpage, not mechanics, not even alchemy, but the curving of the underlying spatial matrix itself. Future design is avatar design: both the design of avatars and design for an avatar sensorium, all within spaces that are equally artificial, even when they are physical. The techniques by which to design the space, the avatar, and the tools and adornments of the avatar collapse upon themselves into one notion: avatarchitecture. Architecture bursts into three: liquid architecture in cyberspace, transarchitecture at the hybrid linkage of physical and virtual space, and avatarchitecture, the design of self and other in augmented space. Between them, these three aspects of architecture encompass all design. There is an infinity of avatars of Vishnu, though ten are best known. From these we learn that avatars are multiple, that they have special senses, skill and capabilities, that they appear and disappear at will; that they can be killed, though not easily; that, from time to time, they can coexist, overlapping in time and space; that they can exhibit both wisdom and folly, both virtue and vice; that transspecies interactions exist, as do multiple channels of communication; that avatars affect the fate of the world, or, in other words, come from a meta-world; that entering the familiar world always means leaving powers behind and choosing partial but effective tools and weapons by which to prevail in the chosen subcontext they have entered. All of this is directly applicable to future design, both in physical and virtual spaces. New design must now address several multiplicities: the multiplicity of the user and the other, the multiplicity of the task, the multiplicity of the space, the multiplicity of the senses.

Future devices must operate as physical, ergonomic devices, status and identity symbols, masks and mirrors, telecommunicators, global positioning systems, and cyberspace browsers and vehicles, all at once. Their interfaces must allow the user not only to enter information, but also to puppeteer avatars within spaces that may well be non-Euclidean or post -Euclidean. They must allow the user-Vishnu to sense impossible spaces, and, to the greatest extent possible, raise these alien sensations into high design, all the while maintaining a tangible presence in physical space. Fashioning is giving form to the formless. For every Vishnu there is an infinity of avatars to be fashioned. Avatarchitecture The history of the body is inextricably tied to technological advance. In quite a literal sense the body is already the technology of life. In our times the technological and the bodily have become enmeshed into what I call the body/cyborg/avatar continuum. We have long understood that our identities are dependent on our bodies. Current biological and psychophysiological research continues to come across fresh discoveries that reveal new intricacies in the twisting dance of chemistry and personality. The cybernetic revolution has brought upon us the cyborg as a second stage of the formation of the self through technological augmentation. A third stage has now appeared in cyberspace proper: the completely virtual embodiment, the avatar. The biochemical, electromechanical, and televirtual form a continuum in the construction of identity. The design disciplines, what Herbert Simon termed the sciences of the artificial find themselves faced with the unprecedented prospect of designing at each and all of these levels. In the past architects designed the space within which identity was formed and acted. Now, in worlds of total artifice, architects are called upon to design not only the space but also the inhabitant, not only the appearance of inhabitant, but the senses and faculties of the inhabitant. The taxonomic and literal frames that kept modes of expression distinct slid, fell , shattered, and finally became mirrors and windows. The painter must design the eyes of the viewer, the composer must compose the ears of the listener. The operation of warping is singularly important in the design of avatars. When limbs are borrowed to create an avatar, the resulting design is neither a collage nor a morph. A collage would imply using something from another context in the place of a limb: for example using a branch in the place of an arm. Morphing would imply finding two arms and fusing them into a new, intermediate one. The operation of borrowing has both collage and morphing elements but differs from both: a limb is borrowed from another body but is generally still used as a limb, often (but not necessarily) in the same topological relation to the new body as it had to its original body: thus it is not like collage: the context remains the same (though it bears some resemblance to Magrittes usage of elective affinities) . It is not like morphing, either, since there is no necessity for fusing. A lobster arm replaces a human arm: it remains an arm in the position of an arm and retains its lobster-nature at the same time. In this sense the avatar and the cyborg share the same underlying logic. The space of limbness has warped and a wormhole has formed at the site of the limb, bringing human-limb and lobster-limb into proximity and exchange. The Transmodern Collage: object; Morph: field; Warp: spacetime. Modernism was characterized by the mechanical operations of collage and its related techniques: montage, assemblage, bricollage. Juxtapositions of context were created by acts of cutting and replacement. Deleuze draws on Leibniz to discuss the fold as an operation that draws on a baroque sensibility that is more in keeping with a non-Euclidean worldview than with modernist collage, but most contemporary uses of the idea of the fold are literal, and thus mechanical, and still modernist in spirit. In the meantime, however, advances over the mechanical mindset of the collage and the literal fold have developed. For a brief period, morphing replaced collage as the characteristic operation of recent times. Morphing is no longer about the mechanical juxtaposition of different objects, but rather about the alchemical admixture of different but similar fields. Whereas collage operates at the level of surface adjacencies, morphing operates through its materials, in depth rather than on the surface. Collage establishes new adjacencies; morphing pulls similarities into novelties Like a political revolution, collage replaces the root but maintains the hierarchy: it operates in striated space. Morphing literally modifies degrees of intensity and is thus firmly situated in Deleuzean smooth space. Warping is still different: while morphing effects a fusion of preexisting elements, warping modifies the very nature of spacetime within which those elements exist. Curved spacetime is almost imperceptible to those who live in it. Its evidences can only be witnessed at large scales or through high artifice. If spacetime were toroidal, for example, it would be possible to advance in certain directions only to return to the same location or event; the scales involved would make the effect almost impossible to encounter, and thus extremely subtle and difficult to detect, and yet, so deep that if it were to be detected, the effect would be devastating. The condition of morphing characterizes our present and goes farther than collage in expressing the world view we have constructed, but it still falls quite short of accounting for all the features of our present conception of spacetime. Space after Gauss, Bolyai, Lobachevsky, Reimann and the other mathematicians and, eventually, physicists is not only curved but also n-dimensional. The distinctions between space and time collapsed into spacetime; mass and energy were also interwoven. For the most part, the present theoretical interest in the idea of topology in architectural discourse is merely translated into curved surfaces and other superficial devices. Much more interesting and difficult are the problems posed in conceiving an architecture of warped n-dimensional spacetime. This would be an architecture that does not restrict itself to the manipulation of shapes but to the manipulation of events and relationships. It would modify not just the forms of buildings but the very modes of inhabitation of space and

the very nature of the inhabitant, and it would be a radical rather than a reactionary critique of conventional forms of architectural practice. What we could never witness directly in familiar reality, we can construct in virtual environments. We can make architectonic proposals for alternative conceptions of space, and, in so doing, allow people to develop native intuitions about the worlds of mathematics and physics, mythology or language. What one generation fights for, another takes for granted. What one generation takes for granted, another builds with: developing intuitions about inhabiting alternative spaces - provided by an architecture that embraces the future -- will help us ask deeper questions about the constitution of the world around us and about ourselves.