The Pantopicon: Centrifuge
of Noise Centrifug(u)e: the shift from the society of the centripetal
panopticon to the society of the centrifugal pantopicon is already well
underway. Until today, Jeremy Bentham's panopticon expressed the now obsolete
desire to see everything from one place, to focus the world on an axis mundi,
or, better yet, a punctum mundi. It revealed an archaic impulse to enhance
presence by choosing a special vantage point from which to survey the horizon,
like the Dauphin, a will to assert power and singularity in the concentration of
being-here, an urge to bring the mountain to Mohammad. A new condition is upon
us, or, perhaps, a new desire has overtaken us. That desire is manifest in the
construction, everywhere, of the pantopicon.
I coin the word pantopicon,
pan+topos, to describe the condition of being in all places at one time, as
opposed to seeing all places from one place. The pantopicon can only be achieved
through disembodiment, and so, though it too speaks of being, it is being via
dis-integration, via subatomization of the consciousness, rather than by
concentration or condensation.
What were once centers are now sources.
Centrifugal vectors, vectors of dispersal and diaspora propagating spherically,
like sound, are everywhere multiplied. Inevitable collisions of concepts and
percepts amplify dispersion into diffraction, as each point of collision becomes
a new front, a new contribution to noise.
Disembodied
Proximities: The Random Access Self While the panopticon describes a
condition that is one-to-many, the conditions brought about by the pantopicon
are both many-to-many, and one-as-many-to-many. We have reached a stage where
all synchronic and diachronic knowledge is equally accessible. Distance in
space-time is collapsing, and everything and everyone can enjoy an unparalleled,
if disincarnate, proximity.
This collapse of distance is not limited to
what we immediately experience as ordinary space and time, but includes complex
arrangements of knowledge, behavior, values. and social structures. A massive
worldwide effort is being invested in encapsulating knowledge in hardware and
software, diminishing the distance between expertise and ignorance. It is no
longer necessary to understand the complex operations of, say, stereometry, it
suffices to access the required knowledge in the form of a command on a menu. If
anyone solves a difficult problem, everyone thereafter can, in principle, have
access to the methods of its solution, with little added effort.
Behavior is likewise expanded, the full spectrum of possible lives
becoming both more accessible and more acceptable under increasing display.
'Random access' becomes a way of life characterized by precise and instantaneous
affiliation, coupled with the once pathologic 'rapid cycling' of traits and
moods, appearance and roles. Previously disaffected values are in turn
encouraged. Thousands of virtual communities are forming on networks everywhere,
united by common, if often obscure, fascinations. Explicit advice on the
piercing of body parts once considered private can be found as easily as
detailed information on the edge of inquiry in dynamic systems research. Under
the assumption of common interest, and the mask of indirect contact, a new sense
of trust has developed that paradoxically contains both doubt and indifference
concerning the identity of those whom one trusts.
Disembodied proximity
implies the extension of random access to progressively larger parts of our
experience, until the clusters we call reality and self are themselves rendered
discontinuous. Discontinuity, however, is only the naive evaluation of surface
appearances. Deep structures, twice hidden because reconfigurable, hold together
what seems discontinuous. The evanescent threads of links and pointers that
string each temporarily autonomous pattern together can at will restore a
static, solid self, but to do so for any time longer than an instant is to
negate the advantages of random presence, random access, noise.
The Loss of Inscription Disembodiment is the loss of
inscription; dis/embodiment is the agile shedding of one inscription in favor of
another.
To inscribe is to write in, to place the mark of one thing
within the fabric of another. Carving is the prototypical kind of inscription,
though every other kind of writing partakes in this modification of one
substance by another: the particles of ink lodge themselves within the roughness
of the paper and will not leave without a trace. Even invisible ink enters the
pores of the paper upon which secrets are trusted. Visibility itself is not a
measure of inscription, modification of the substratum is.
Digital
writing celebrates the loss of inscription by removing the trace from acts of
erasure. What is undone is as if not ever done. Thus digital inscription is of
another order than any previous inscription, closer to speaking to another
without the presence of a third as witness, than, even, to the passing of a
ciphered note.
Liquid architecture, understood as principle and not just
as artifact, is to structural inscription as variable is to number, or better
still, as variable function is to variable. Throughout the history of things we
can see the gradual substitution of liquid patterns of change for structures of
stillness. If liquid architecture were mathematics, it would search for families
of functions whose very form was themselves would be functions of time, open to
change, interactive.
Hence, liquid architecture is the tectonics of
behavior, affiliated with perpetual becoming, emergence, life, artificial and
otherwise. Like a creature leaving tracks on the sand, it will readily erase its
engraved tracks for the sake of continuing to write its life's course. Digital
spaces offer a natural habitat, but not the only one. Perhaps more than anything
else, liquid architecture is a habit, a way of life, a liberating and confident
openness to discontinuity.
Architectures Beyond
Inscription Computers as we know them, and consequently the liquidity
they support, are presently based on photolithographic printing processes,
permanent inscription. Everything that is written and transmitted via electronic
media is erasable and ephemeral unless stored or reinscribed, but the microchips
that enable this liquidity are still just immensely compactified books, active
yet permanent, carved enduringly in silicon. In recognizing the need for an
architecture that learns from the variability of software, we come to the
conclusion that the architecture of computers themselves must absorb the same
lesson: they must eventually abandon their reliance on permanent inscriptions
within silicon or other material substrates, and reach for erasable, liquid
materializations. Steps in this direction are already visible:
erasable-programmable memory chips, hardware implementations of neural network
algorithms, parallel distributed processing, optical and biological computing.
These are all attempts to arrive at configurations of hardware that are less and
less 'hardwired' and that can modify themselves as needed. Clearly, at the far
end of the path we have taken are computers whose own architecture will learn to
dance, like that of the brain, only faster; clearly at the end of that path are
interfaces that perceive nuance, the liquidity of intonation in expression in
the rewarding conversations of old friends, only much faster; clearly, at end of
the path, there are communications as liquid as the global chatter of cities,
only much, much faster. Leibniz would be pleased. Compactification, reduction of
instruction-set complexity, emphasis on an awareness of qualitative difference,
space made entirely of relations and perceptions, all this constitutes a
technological construction of an immense transterritorial Monadology.
Marcos Novak,
"Voice3=4Maze.Blue"
TransTerraFirma: After
Territory Territory: an area of limited political rights; contested
ground of animal altruism and animal agression, but also a device for limiting
aggression; play ground, mating ground, holy ground; area of jurisdiction, vital
interest, prized resource. Terrestrials as we are, we find the notion of
territory embedded within every concept we can utter, and in every concept
territory figures ominously large.
Our understanding of territory is
undergoing rapid and fundemantal changes: within the scope of pragmatic
experience both space and community are rapidly becoming non-local. At the level
of advanced theories concerning the nature of space and time, we already live in
an astonishingly different place than any other culture on earth has imagined.
In either case, what Virilio calls the 'big optics' of media communications at
the speed of light result in a collapse of the horizon, divider of earth and
heaven, or, to be more literal, demarcator of the borderline between the
concrete and the abstract.
Another horizon, this one less evident, has
fallen: in the creation of a navigable electronic non-place that nonetheless can
be experienced as a fully dimensional space, we have breeched a new frontier
with a new instrument: we have opened our inner worlds to ourselves and to each
other through architecture as interface to the imagination. We have invented the
esoscope.
As our horizons shatter, new spaces open within their
fractured razor's edges: the places of neither here not there, or both, or other
than both: the hybrid territories. Into these territories we will now bring all
our social instincts, animal and human, for better or worse.
Hybrid
territory and hybrid territoriality: hybrid terror to reality, territoReality.
TransterritoReality. Extreme Intermedia Under the condition
on the pantopicon, and the changes brought forth by technology, a series of
unprecedented new opportunities arise. Combining a known medium with its
opposite in ways that do not compromise either, but that heightens both, we
arrive from the familiar medium to the extreme intermedium, into realities of
supreme challenge to our existing conventions.
Extreme Intermedium
One =3D Liquid Architecture First step: "What is liquid architecture? A
liquid architecture is an architecture whose form is contingent on the interests
of the beholder; it is an architecture that opens to welcome you and closes to
defend you; it is an ar chitecture without doors and hallways, where the next
room is always where it needs to be and what it needs to be. It is an
architecture that dances or pulsates, becomes tranquil or agitated. Liquid
architecture makes liquid cities, cities that change at the shift of a value,
where visitors with different backgrounds see different landmarks, where
neighborhoods vary with ideas held in common, and evolve as the ideas mature or
dissolve."1
Extreme Intermedium Two = 3D Navigable
Music Second Step: What is navigable music? Music has exceeded
both sound and time, and it has been permanently altered by the introduction of
space and inhabitation into its range of speculation. Music has been previously
understood as something that occurs in linear time, that can be understood as a
single object in time. It has a beginning it has an end, you can graph it, as a
score does, and you can draw its plan or section as you might with architecture.
While there are a few examples of twentieth century works that approach music
combinatorially, even these compositions are performed so as to give a large
number of people the same experience. For any performance, the music remains a
singular object in time. This observation leads me to think that it is possible
to stop seeing music as singular, as a street between point a and point b, and
to start seeing music as multiple, as landscape, as atmosphere, as an
n-dimensional field of opportunities. If music is a landscape then it is
possible to extract as many types of conventional music as there are
trajectories through that landscape. The new problem for composition is to
create that landscape. Navigable music is not an organization of sounds
in time, it is the organization of a matrix of sonic, visual, behavioral, and
other possibilities. Actions within that matrix may contain every aspect of
conventional music, because what is experienced within this landscape depends
entirely upon the user's individually selected, unforeseen, interest-driven
trajectory. If I prefer a beat, I remain within the part of the landscape where
I first encountered a certain rhythmic pattern. If I leave a phrase, I can
always return to it. I can choose extreme monotony, by remaining in one place,
or extreme variety, never returning to the same place.
Extreme
Intermedium Three =3D Habitable Cinema Third Step: What is habitable
cinema? Several of the world's most respected filmmakers have spoken against
the notion that a film leads to a climax, and tells a single story. When Kubrick
spoke of wanting to 'explode the narrative structure of film' in 'Full Metal
Jacket,' I think he anticipated the new creative problems implied in the idea of
Habitable Cinema. Tarkovsky makes a similar point. Compared to theater, cinema
allows artificial and discontinuous environments to be woven into a single,
linear experience. Image, sound, and several other cues for understanding are
intertwined into one object in time. This multimodal weaving is good, but the
singularity in time is something we have exceeded. Habitable cinema dislocates
cinema in the same way that navigable music dislocates music. It states that the
cinema of the future will be a landscape or matrix or n-dimensional manifold of
opportunity. The filmmaker of the future will be a worldmaker. His or her role
will be to invent matrices of opportunity which will combine liquid architecture
and navigable music and other dislocated and extended media into situations we
can inhabit.
Extreme Intermedia : Assessment: The changes described
above establish a trend in the media I have examined: each medium is being
driven to the opposite extreme of its traditional understanding: architecture,
heaviest of the arts, is becoming liquid; music, the art of composed, as thus,
so far, fixed intervals in time, the art which has so far required us to listen
in stillness and silence, now invites us to navigate through a sonic landscape;
and beyond even that, is being transformed into an art of time beyond sound; and
cinema, like music, a medium fixed in sequence, once closest to program music,
having shaken its ties to the plot and narrative structure in the works of
Kubrick, Tarkovsky, and others, now becomes interactive, habitable, a world to
enter that has no plot, only potentials for chance encounters. The same
explosion can be seen in each nameable art form: no longer is painting
'painting;' no longer is sculpture 'sculpture.' The form of a poem is no longer
something given, and a play is not a 'play.' Perhaps the most vivid change is
coming in the art that is the closest to the human body: dance. If dance is the
art that is the most embodied, dependent intimately on the state of the body,
and if the thesis I am proposing is at all true, and each artform is heading for
its opposite, then the future of dance must be found in disembodiment.
Intermediation : The Dual The extreme intermedium, the medium
between two media, equally far from both, is precisely neither one nor the
other. If we were to draw a network of familiar media, connecting every one to
every other, we would have a depiction of the conventional relational structure
of media. If now we placed,at the center of each region between media a new
medium, located equally far from its neighbors, and we did this for all the
spaces in the network, we would have a good rendition of the state of affairs we
face. It would still be incomplete, however, since, no sooner had we drawn this
new arrangement, than we would be compelled to apply the same operation to it,
transformaing all the locations once again, and inventing ever more hybrid arts.
Extreme Intermedium Four =3D Disembodied Dance A dancer loses
physical agility long before s/he loses mental agility. It takes years of
training to create an all too narrow window of dance opportunity. Within this
slim aperture, the body seems to overcome difficulty and achieves a grace that
defies its meat-origin. Sooner or later a dancer must become a choreographer,
relinquishing the actual performance to other, younger bodies.
Liquid
architecture, navigable music and habitable theater are all grouped together
under the umbrella of 'worldmaking,' but the odd one out is disembodied dance.
Consider this: a world has been created where everything is synthetic, and into
which it is possible to project one's self. Since it is a defining
characteristic of this world that everything can be changed, the Self itself
becomes subject to alteration. Liquid architecture, navigable music and
habitable theater are about that world. Dance is about the being in the world.
Disembodied dance is about becoming in the world. The Body Without Organs.
Identity now becomes liquid and navigable and habitable. Not only that, identity
becomes possibly multiple and distributed. I can begin to have the sense that by
distributing processes that modify my perceptions of the world, I can actually
distribute my being. In the end the sum becomes not a single thing but a cluster
which is scattered that can return sense information from distant locations. I
can be at many places at one time, or at many times in one place.
Action: The Dervish Dances, And the World Spins What to do?
Dance with the Virtual Dervish. "Dancing With The Virtual Dervish: Worlds in
Progress" is a multimedia/multiworld cyberspace project I recently created at
the Banff Centre For The Arts . It began with the observation that virtual
reality allows us to share visions. Consider the image of a 'whirling dervish':
a sufi mystic blind to the world but spinning in a secret vision. We can see the
person, we can see the spinning, but we cannot enter the mental universe within
which she dances. Now, compare the image of the dervish to that of a person
donning the late-twentieth century's version of the mystic's robe: the
head-mounted display, the dataglove, and a tangle of wires. Confined to the
narrow radius of sensor-reach, joined to the ceiling by an umbilical connecting
brain to computer, eyes blind to the world, this spinning person is also lost in
a vision. The parallel is strong, but there is a key difference: this vision is
constructed, and can thus be shared.
'Dancing with the Virtual Dervish'
involves several concurrent interactive performances at remote sites. Numerous
different 'worlds' are intertwined: first, the 'stage' world where dancers and a
performers in VR gear interact with projections of a virtual reality and with
the audience; second, the 'tele' world of remote performance spaces (in Paris,
Tokyo, Los Angeles, Austin, Banff, Delphi...), where parallel, interconnected
events are taking place, affecting each other via optical data transmissions
that alter the course of events in each site; third, the 'virtual' world within
the computer, accessible through head-mounted displays and video projections,
and consisting of interactive architectural spaces that become increasingly
liquid, and occupied by intelligent agents and objects that correspond to the
themes of body, book, and architecture; fourth, the 'cyber' world, existing as a
kind of 'nature' to the virtual world, much in the same relationship to it as
what we consider the 'outdoors' compared to the 'indoors.' Fifth, from within
the cyberworlds, as video windows open back out on to immediate and remote
physical worlds and reintroduce them into cyberspace and projectors colorize
reality with an externalized cyberspace, 'video worlds' are created that combine
all the threads of wordmaking into an animated fabric of multipresent
transterritorealities. Everything in these worlds forms a visual and spatial
music: ArchiMusic.
The virtual and cyber worlds form a continuum. A ever
growing series worldchambers, appearing most solid and familiar at the entry to
the virtual world, rapidly become less and less material and static, until they
dissolve into a cyberspace of interactive spatial music : ArchiMusic. The
chambers themselves, and the objects within them, are algorithmically
controlled. Some are completely autonomous while others respond to the user's
actions. The chambers and objects are derived from aspects of 'body' become
'architecture', aspects of 'book' become 'passage,' and aspects of
'architecture' become 'liquid,' as the piece explores issues of disembodied
experience. The space itself contains 'warped' regions that simulate
hyperspheres and other higher-dimensional phenomena, making chambers at once
finite and infinite, depending on the manner in which they are approached.
What is the difference between 'virtual reality' and 'cyberspace'? One
description is that virtual reality is the enabling technology and cyberspace
the 'content.' This description gives an adequate initial sense of the
differences, but suffers the same weaknesses that any view that tries to divide
the world into form and substance is prone to: in the end it is impossible to
maintain the distinction between body and spirit in any kind of rigorous way.
There is something of what we call cyberspace in virtual reality and something
of what we call virtual reality in cyberspace. Once this is understood, the
distinctions can be seen to be distinctions of emphasis and quality, locations
along a continuum that runs along several dimensions. At the one end of the
continuum are those worlds that are most similar to the world we are familiar
with: examples would include virtual environments such as architectural
walkthroughs or flight simulators. Buildings and vehicles are subject to
constraints we are familiar with, and they represent situations that can, and
perhaps may, be realized. Their scale is already familiar to us, and we can draw
on our associations directly, in order to comprehend them. Someplace near the
middle of the continuum are those environments that are still within the laws of
our physics but that are inaccesible to us for one reason or another.
Microscopic or macroscopic environments, the interior of the body, the surface
of Mars, the Chernobyl nuclear plant, are examples of virtual environments that
are still of this world, but which are inaccessibe to our full sensorium without
virtual reality technologies. Farther toward the cyberspace end of the continuum
are those environments that are at the juncture of theory and fact: the Big
Bang, black holes, wormholes, the worlds of quantum mechanics or of higher
dimensions. These worlds are at the cusp between the actual and the imaginary,
and their constraint is an allegiance to the world as we know it; they are
subject to empirical validation using other technologies that extend our senses:
scanning-tunneling microscopes, particle accelerators, carbon dating, satellites
and space probes. At the far end of the continuum are the worlds of cyberspace.
These are the 'possible worlds,' the worlds of our invention. They are no less
rigorous than any of the previously mentioned worlds, but like the most abstract
mathematics, or the most expansive view of the study of artifical life, they ask
what it is that makes a world in the first place, what kinds of worlds can there
be, where does this world fit in the scheme of possible worlds, how would this
world appear from the viewpoint of another world? Here the physics are invented,
the singular can be replaced by the multiple, the solid by the fragmented, the
insular by the permeable, the closed by the open. Time, space, energy, and
consciousness may not be the fundamental or only organizational principles for
all possible (whether conceivable and inconcveivable) worlds. Cyberspace is thus
always the 'exterior' of virtual reality, because it always reserves the
additional space of possibility, in contrast to actuality. Possibility is the
fundamental characteristic of everything that is 'other,' since possibility
always contains the unknown.
The sound of the dervish worlds are a music
composition conceived as a landscape: the actual sound heard depend on the
trajectory taken through an invisible musical terrain, realizing my concept of
'navigable music.' All interactive music posits a 'space' of possible sequences
of sounds, only a few of which are realized by each manifestation. Navigable
music takes this idea to its limit and attempts to reconsider musical
composition as the making of a world into which the audience can be invited to
enter. Coupled with virtual reality and cyberspace, as described above, this
world becomes one that can be literally inhabited and shared in numerous ways.
Every traversal by every visitor through the parallel landscapes explicit and
implicit in the piece is another sequence of sonic and visual events, and the
music created by these traversals can be heard concurrently, for example, as the
music of a virtual city, or in sequence, by reenactment of actions of someone
else.
Visually, sonically, and behaviorally, 'Dancing With The Virtual
Dervish' is textured to create reminiscences of the body, of skin, of
materiality, growth, and decay. Central to it are two related ideas, immersion
and interactivity, that reverse the core assumptions of several art forms.
Architecture becomes liquid, music becomes navigable, cinema becomes habitable,
dance becomes disembodied. As distant as these new options seem from their
origins and from each other, they are related to one another by what can only be
called 'worldmaking.' Worldmaking is, in my estimation, the key metaphor of the
new arts.
Circumnavigations: Worlds in Progress How is it that
our imaginations can so easily oustrip the real and the pragmatic? Why are we
not limited to straightforward foresight and anticipation? How is it that we can
shift our attention and concentration from the pressing questions of the
ever-burning, inevitable present, and focus instead on the chimerical future?
What mechanisms allow us to enlarge the scope of our concerns beyond the narrow
confines of our needs and times?
'Dancing With The Virtual Dervish:
Worlds In Progress,' in its present disincarnation, consists of a series of
interconnected cyberspace 'chambers.' Each chamber is a world unto itself, but
each chamber has portals to every other chamber, forming a fully connected
lattice. As a work, it is non-hierachical, non-teleological, and inherently
open-ended. A person navigating through these chambers is free to explore a
series of landscapes and to discover their apparent or hidden features. It is
unlikey that anyone, myself included, will ever exhaust the variety of subtle
algorithmic wonders that may be encountered, since they are intimately related
not only to the logic of their programs, but to the unforeseeable circumstances
and patterns of each person's passage through the spaces.
The
architecture of these worlds spans the continuum between the solid and the
ethereal. Each architectonic manifestation has been algorithmically composed,
and all have been chosen to be unbuildable in the physical world. At one end are
spaces whose boundaries are solid and whose forms are constant; farther along
the continuum are spaces and forms that have been 'grown,' using a combination
of 'L-systems,' algorithms that simulate the growth of plants, and musical
algorithms; beyond these are forms, still static, that are 'isosurfaces, ' three
dimensional contour-surfaces of sculpturally considered mathematical functions.
All these 'architectures' challenge what we understand as architeture, and how
we proceed in conceiving and making spaces, but they are just the beginning.
Beyond these are architectonic manifestations that are no longer static, but
that move interactively or autonomously. Here the architecture becomes a field
of elements. One such field, consisting of a constellation of hundreds of
rotating octahedra, remains calm when the viewer is near the center of the
world, within the eye of the storm, but rotates increasingly rapidly as the
viewer loses touch with that center. Another field, this one consisting of a
cubic grid of diagonal lines whose lengths grow and diminish, comes in and out
of existence, like the spatial heartbeat of subatomic particles. More subtle
still is the the intelligent fog that changes color and density according to the
viewer's orientation. Farther still is the 'navigable music,' the invisible but
audible interactive soundscape that creates music according to the viewer's
trajectory in space.
One chamber stands out: it is, to the best of my
knowledge, the world's first immersive experience of the fourth dimension. By
this I do not mean time as the fourth dimension, but a fourth spatial dimension.
A series of proto-architectonic four dimensional objects rotate (in the fourth
dimension, of course) around a vestige of the cartesian coordinate system. All
their vertices have four coordinates, all that would appear to us as planes are,
topologically, cubes, all that would be cubes, hypercubes. Projected into
three-space, their shadoows are three-dimensional objects that enjoy a complex
but graceful transformational dance. Walls advance gently toward the viewer,
pass right through, and continue. With time, one learns to read the shapes, and
when they are aligned correctly, can actually see recognizable
'proto-architeconic' figures. One who has lived in the desert may not at first
appreciate the advantages of living in a more hospitable climate; one living in
a temperate zone may not compehend the richness of life in a harsher clime. It
is hard to know, harder still to communicate what we may make of these worlds.
For now, envisioning these worlds is enough; we are at the beginning of a long
journey, and these spaces are to what will come as biplanes are to
spacestations. Still, I am heartened when I read, in science after science, ways
of understanding the world that rely increasingly on spatial conceptions of more
than three dimensions. Perhaps, without forgetting the body, architects can
return to housing the mind. Bibliography