ALIEN SPACE: THE SHOCK OF THE VIEW


Marcos Novak: from Alien Space ;
courtesy the artist

Marcos Novak expands the definition of architecture to include electronic space, music, virtual worlds, and more.

Between September 1998 and March 1999, the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, held an exhibition entitled The Shock of the View. This exhibition was divided in four parts: OBJECT , SPACE , PERFORMANCE, and HYBRID. I was invited to be a respondent to the SPACE component, which included The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly , by Atelier Van Lieshout, and Mitologies , by Hisham Bizri and Maria Roussou. My response consisted of a critical text and a critical space (in the form of a small VRML world). My text can be found on the Walker Art Center website ¹ so I will not repeat it here. The present article discusses elements of Alien Space , the critical world I created in response to the exhibition.

Alien Space is related to the theoretical and critical position I have been articulating in my recent work and writings, the main points of which are as follows:

*?under the pressure of technologically driven, globally active exponential change, modernity shifts into a condition insistent on plurality and characterized by the cluster of meanings surrounding the prefix 'trans~'.

*?because the fundamental discipline of an information era is the replacement of the constant with the variable, we are witnessing a deep shift from the static not simply to the dynamic but to the 'liquid', with implications not only of agility and continuity across previous conceptual divides, but also of incompressibility and rigorous, algorithmic 'hardness'.

*?the familiar idea of 'immersion' into information space is finding a natural complement in what I have termed 'eversion', suggesting that phenomena encountered in immersive virtuality will become everted into physical but interactivated and intelligent space.

'Trans~', 'liquid', 'eversion'--these three ideas conspire to create the cultural condition I have termed 'transmodernities', whose signature operation is what I call 'the production of the Alien'.

The notion of the Alien is the corollary of the rise of the Global. In its largest sense, it signifies not only the Other, the monstrous, the hybrid, the cyborg, or even the clone and the transgenic, but that which does not follow from its roots, or, indeed, that whose roots can no longer be traced, or have become irrelevant, or are unknown, or follow from principles outside previous understanding. The Alien is not merely the extraterrestrial, but also the alien-within, not simply the geopolitical alien, but also the alienated. The root of the word 'alien' is 'allos', also the root for the word 'else'. Modernity is characterized by change intaking the conditional form 'if-then'. Transmodernity is characterized by change intaking the exceptional form 'if-then-else'--'if-then-allos'--'if-then-alien'--with distinct emphasis on the 'else'/'allos'/'alien'.

Our vernacular intuitions about disciplines and media have already embraced the idea of 'trans~': the disciplinary moves to the multidisciplinary, the interdisciplinary, and finally the transdisciplinary. Media become multimedia, intermedia and, finally, transmedia. Discourse becomes multicourse, intercourse, transcourse. Achieving the state of 'trans~' is tantamount to saying that a discipline, medium, or discourse has reached a stage of autonomy from its roots such that it has become alien to those very same roots. The production of the Alien, as a cultural condition, implies the habitual production of the exceptional, far beyond the shock of the new. This paradoxical figure, the bringing together of apparently contradictory terms, such as habitual/exceptional, and the eventual productive overcoming of that contradiction, not through Hegelian synthesis but through positing of constructs on a previously unattainable level, is the signature operation of transmodernities. It can be argued that the popular fascination with stereotypical 'aliens' is an attempt to give expression to the pervasiveness of this condition, a condition that is far from fantastic and that is having profound effects on the lives of billions of people around the world.

In a more restricted sense, these ideas apply to particular modes of artistic conception, practice, and production. In my work, coming as it does from a background of architecture, music, and computation, this has meant a trajectory of increasing indirection with respect to the production of space. My anticipation of 'liquid architectures in cyberspace' led to experimentation with the algorithmic evolution of constructs in parametric space, n-dimensional space, non-Euclidean curved space, and transEuclidean virtual space. Concern for the convergence of space (and, hence, architecture) and time (hence, music) into spacetime led to experimentation with 'navigable music' and 'archimusic'. Still, these efforts produced form, and were thus still on the side of the familiar.

Alien Space is about a non-retinal, relational understanding of space, where form ceases to be solid and becomes stochastic and cloud-like, rendered not in pixels but is 'sensels', elements of sensing space. Floating in virtual space one encounters vestiges of a broken Cartesian system. An indeterminate cloud of small, left-over coordinate systems turns into numerals suspended in space that soon reveal themselves to be active indices of the distance of the viewer to each of them. This simple device instantiates a space become intelligent, a space in which every point knows who we are, where we are, what the history of our journey has been.

Embedded in this space are words in brackets. They act as materials for the formation of spatialized sentences and poems, poems whose sense is dependent on the viewer's position and trajectory. On approach, they reveal a second nature: they form a database of phrases and quotations about virtuality, arranged so that they can be both 'read across' and 'read into'. Their relationship to the viewer is initially frontal, but as one approaches them they twist aside to avoid being read, requiring, indeed forcing, a more willful and active engagement on the part of the reader. If one persists, they unfold into full phrases, word by word. Otherwise, they allow one to construct recombinant meanings through acts of attentive navigation.

Alien Space is a space poem; like a tone poem it is a concise exploration of a few simple ideas. What is perhaps most interesting about it is that it comes from architecture but no longer bears allegiance to it, it speaks of poetry but is no longer beholden to it, it forms a database but is no longer based on it. At times this space becomes host to other users as a multiuser virtual environment, hinting at the convergence of the futures of architecture, music, cinema, theater, databases, information visualization, and games. At other times, I have used it, all of it, as my avatar in other multiuser virtual environments, as a form of permeable, centerless, stochastic self. Scattered throughout the space, a third set of coordinate axes spin like pinwheels when approached. Sometimes they carry sound, at other times, resisting closure, they form one-way links to spaces outside the museum, punctures in the institution--their name: 'alien abductions'.

My work after Alien Space has been to evert its insights onto physical space and to construct passages between interactive local, remote, and virtual space. For the Künstlerhaus in Vienna and for the Brasmitte project in São Paulo, I prepared complex, algorithmic forms built by rapid prototyping. These forms will be surrounded by sensor fields that define a distinct, active, but invisible second architecture occupied by avatars everted into n -dimensional communication 'angels'. Interaction with these invisible forms will trigger sounds--processed voices from myriad live telephone conversations between global megacities--and projections: navigable music and liquid architectures. What manner of art is this? It is alien.

Marcos Novak [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] is visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. He is a transarchitect: an architect, artist, composer, and theorist who employs algorithmic techniques to design actual, virtual and hybrid intelligent environments. Novak originated the concept of "liquid architectures in cyberspace" and the study of a dematerialized architecture for the new, virtual public domain.