Datum:
19.11.2007
Talk
Architecture on the meta-level
Doesi Beck
Stephan Doesinger |
Initiator Architecture und Design Competiton in Second Life
Uhrzeit:
13:30 - 14:15
13:30 - 14:15
Vortragstyp:
Session
Session
Sprache:
Description
Why are there so many people who are fascinated and alienated of the virtual world in Second Life? Does SL suggest an illusive option for the physical reality? What will happen if this metaverse SL is a sinister reflection of reality? Is it possible that a comment in 1929 by Walter Benjamin has become the central metaphor of our cultural situation? "If two mirrors look into each other, the devil plays his favourite game and opens the perspective into the infinite." In Second Life we are watching a space, that is more than a metaphor of reality. It is both: metaphor and reality. Besides self-exposure through avatars and buildings, the focus is on communication and the ability to adapt socially. The link between fiction and reality is confusing and leads to questions, which are fundamental for contemporary architecture: where are you, if you talk on you mobile? In which reality are you, while listening to music on your iPod, when the acustic space is disconnected from physical space? In which space are you, while playing a computer game, surfing through the internet or in SL or using a 3D telephone? It seems that new rooms emerge where physical and medial rooms come together. These rooms can be absent or present, but mostly they are moving through continents with different speed until they burst as a bubble - at the end of a long distance telephone call on an expressway. Let's call these rooms bastard spaces! Even the so-called public space is a bastard space. It is more or less a medial construction, based on radial economics, focused on purchasing power, circulation number, audience ratings. Human being becoming consumers, target groups and eyeballs in this space. Some people try now to self-expose multi-medially through MySpace, YouTube and SL in order to win back their right to exist as an individual. This leads to kinds of stage settings as in absurd theater reminding one of Robbe-Grillet's "Last Year at Marienbad". You can experience self-exposure, constructions of desire and "dream houses" if you travel through landscape which are esthetically somewhere between Bob Ross and "The Sims", just like Jeff Bridges in "The Big Lebowsky". The first time you are getting awake in the architecture of the virtual exile, you a reminded of a surreal scenario as in David Lynch's "Lost Highway". On the other side of Benjamin's mirror you see the contemporary architecture, that is described by the French theorist Anthony Vidler leading to an eerily feeling, restlessness, not being able to create a home, but being a manifestation of the alientation in modernity. What we see is an architecture that installs the shelves of the social super market as it is critizised by Michel Houllebecq.
Speaker
Name
Stephan Doesinger
Stephan Doesinger
Title
Company
Initiator Architecture und Design Competiton in Second Life
Initiator Architecture und Design Competiton in Second Life
Avatar name
Doesi Beck
Doesi Beck
Introduction
Stephan Doesinger is a conceptual artist and architect who lives and works in Munich. He used to be a university teacher at the University for Applied Arts in Vienna and at the Architectural Association in London. He has been in charge of various magazines as art and creative director. His second book "Learning from Sim City" will be published soon. Stephan Doesinger is initiator or the 1st Architecture and Design Competition in Second Life.