A project about: ...a [digital cemetary]...
a [virtual church]...some [scattered monuments] and an [unfamiliar livingroom]...at the urban VR ...

VR Project Proposal:
 		===>> On Escape
page updated January 2004
project due May 2004 
   

 

 

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 Links

* Concept

* Environment

* Technical Aspects

* References

* Timeline

* Presentations

 
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The Concept

  
This project is an exploration with social places within the immersive virtual reality environment. It is intended to build a geography (real/ imaginary/ abstract/ virtual) where different places, social structures (religious places, cemetaries, museums, monuments..etc.) are questioned with their symbolic meanings as well as their roles in everyday life.

This realt-time immersive playground is dynamicly constructed with the interaction of a user. The user experiments with his/her individual interpretation of the geography, reads, inhabits and traverses it. This environment doesn't intend to refer to a simulation, a modal of a real world within the computer graphics vocabulary but instead suggests to observe how outside world values are translated, transformed and interpreted in an entirely illusionary space.

The places within this geography are made of "type". This is intended to de-habitualize the user, and to prevent him/her referring to the real world appearences of these places rather than what he/she encounters in the virtual reality set-up. This psycho-typographic space is where everything is made of text, and the resemblance with the outside world is merely focusing on the functions and values of the places rather than copying their appearences in a mimetic relation. Unlike the feeling of navigating in a city of letters, the user orients to an unfamiliar environment, and make meaning out of it when he/she reads the text, navigates through it and contributes to the creation of the structure.
This project focuses on questioning the relationship between VR space and urban architecture. During this interplay within a labyrinthine of networked places, the user will be able to introduce his/her individual understanding of the environment, make dynamic changes,and have the chance to experiment with the existing/ imposed rules and the ones that he/she really introduces to those places.
After all, the urban geography in the VR environment will have cemetaries, monuments, religious places(churches, mosques.. etc.), museums... While this geography will introduce new conditions, new perceptions, new psychologies and new social behaviors that may raise curious questions about our existing beliefs, values and thoughts about social places, the idea is to show the interaction with places, how places transform us, and how we become with them. As the existing values and meanings of these social places can not be traced very accurately and therefore always put into question. One can wonder how a digital cemetary act in the work of mourning...
The typography in the project suggests the user the meaning of the place (it transforms the space into place) and on the other hand still presents something that is left abstract and undetermined enough so that the geometry is not built in a figurative/inscriptive manner. Computer generated graphics are often evaluated with their accuracy to resemble the real world, and therefore VR environments are often conditioned with a fidelity to what they resemble. However, the visual vocabulary in the project is intentionally left limited in itself to express the differences, nuances of of spaces within the environment. After all, all are tunnels. The user has to read the text, contribute to the production of the meaning and guess where he/she is, and be aware what he/she is doing.. Or, just in the contrary, don't understand and act in an entirely different manner. The project lets the user to make mistakes, get lost, misinterpret things, to follow misleading paths, build new ones, and become disoriented in the environment. As the environment soon complicates enough, the user won't be able to find where he/she began and decide where the experience ends. Just wanders and wanders more....

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The Environment

  

The Map

On the screen, the user has a map of the space, a simplified rendering of the geography which shows the current position of the user in the envrionment. This map displays the history of the places visited, act as a memory for the tunnels created, and an archive of the traces that are left behind.

However this archive continuosly grows and incorporates other tunnels, other relations created within the text files.

Unlike a traditional conception of map making which is based on measures of proximity, absolute position, and distinct properties, the map of this geograhy becomes an exploration in "relations, distinctions, and traces." Therefore it visualizes a territory that indeterminate and subjective depending on different navigation habits, reading experiences, and hypertext selections.

The Architecture/ Places / Events

The user encounters with different architectures/ places/ events. The difference between these abstract geometries are expressed by the text and the sound that implicates where the user might be at that time. The wanderer will understand the use and meaning of this place mostly from the meaning of the text and how the space is expressed with the design of the typographical elements.

1. Religious Places--places of wish/pray, holly and sublime.

2. Museums--artifact collection places, cultural memories, reservoirs of meaning and metamorphosis.

3. Cemeteries--places of virtual deaths and mourning.

4. Monuments/ Statues--sculptures of ghosts and remembered people.

5. Terminals--inside/outside exchange places

6. Living rooms/bathrooms--everyday interiors.

The number of architectures to be built can be increased or reduced depending to on the different contexts and different installations of the work.

At its current set-up, the environment has correspondance with real, imaginary places from different timelines in Istanbul/Turkey.

However as the project evolves it is intended to set-up different versions of the environment for different places. It is especially desired to make this experience networked so that different users can traverse and inhabit the same environment.






The buildings and the structures within the environment will be constructed by a code that will generate 3D forms out of text files. However, this will not intend to achieve a visual look with the same as modeling the constructs in a modeling environment and then mapping typograpic elements on it. The idea is to design special algorithms that will build abstract structures that have no one to one resemblance with the real world structures and instead build geometries that are made from type, by actually reading text files, and try to create the feeling of the space, not the appearence of it.

Screen Grabs from the environment ( 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7)

The Experience

The computer environment will provide the user with a space that builds:

Paths <--->Tunnels, Corridors

Trajectories <---> Streets

Volumes <---> Arcades, Plazas

Structures <---> Places

The user traverses this environment through the tunnels and reach certain openings or volumes where he/she reaches certain bifurcations. The user will be able to construct other tunnels by clicking on certain highlighted words on the tunnels, and will be free to construct his/her own trajectories while visiting the places visited in the environmnet. No user will create the exact same textscape as the choices of links selected by users will eventually differ from one user to another.

Contrasting to the wandering of the fleneur, or the drifting derive of the city, the inhabitant of this urban environment strolls not in a pre-built geography where meanings, relations and the social contracts are set before, but instead traverses an indetermined space where places, stripped from their visual and tangible qualities, become curiosities, questios in which associations are re-created and played by individual interpretations.

- Just like reading the pages of a found diary which depicts scenes, events and places, the wanderer reads, hears and imagines...The difference between imagining oneself in somebody's living room, in a diary or in a chapel suddenly blurs into each other and reaches for different meanings. And the geography of the imagined becomes a product of the psyche, the reading experience and the built architecture of the tunnelscape. The formerly known function and symbolic values of places become at stake as they are left for the interpretation of the reader who can simply think of them entirely different (either on purpose or by simply mistaken them with somewhere else). The less determined, slippery nature of text introduces the imagined to the belived, accepted, or inscripted.

   
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TECHNICAL ASPECTS

  

Visual Vocabulary:

The effect of the tunnels is achieved by writing code that actually reads among a database of text files and with certain trigonometric transformations create the effect of 3D volumes.

The programming phase of the project is still in progress.

-The first version of the code(which can build a single tunnel) is written in Python with OpenGL.

-The current version is designed in C++, OpenGL and EVL Cave Libraries.

The environment runs in Linux, under the Low-cost VR set-up at the Department of Media Study at University at Buffalo(SUNY)

Interaction
The user will interact with the environments and contribute to its development. The tunnels will have hypertext links that trigger the construction of other tunnels

This is again planned to be achieved by triggers that respond to the user. For example when a user approaches a certain path the volumes may extend and condense, or just have openings into other paths. There is also the possibility to have the user interact with the text, like clicking on it (the possibility to type-in something is to be explored) and dynamicly define new paths, corridors, rooms within the structure.

- It is also planned to depict scenes in certain places. Like, there can be a ceremony in the religious place(represented by both sound and text). The aim is to show how these abstract spaces can also be transformed to one another by the scenes occurring in them.

-This environment, through its tunnels can show certain behaviors. The geography can contract, expand(the distance between the text lines can increase or decrease), and have a certain rythm (can rotate depending the speed of the user).


Sound

The use of sound is to be incorporated to the scenes within the places. For exampe: The user may hear a number of whispers making confessions , or he/she can encounter a tunnel filled with wishes which can be interpreted with being in a religious place(chapel, mosque... etc) or somewhere else depending on her imagination.

Sound is to used for simply giving abstract clues about the environment, not in a prescriptive manner, revealing a determinate meaning about the everything, it may act as a complimentay to the reading experience of the text about the place and aspiring a meaning for it.


Networking

For a later stage of the project, it's also planned to network the experience for multiple users with similar VR set-up.

Groups like "socialfiction.org" are working on a mark-up language PML (Psychogeographical Markup Language) to communicate the experience of different social places.

In the future, through a web based system PML can be parsed and converted into text files and incorporated to the existing text database.


 

REFERENCES

  


Visual, Conceptual and Theorethical References

 - Ben Fry's (MIT) study Tendril. This work provides an inspiration for incorporating the type element into the vocaculary of computational space.

- Dietmar Offenhuber's ( Futurelab, AEC) study Wegzeit. This study is important for exploring the possibilities of a different conception of urban geography (LA) which is contingent to computer environment.

- The theories on psychogeography developed by Guy Debord (Situationiste Internationale) and Henry Lefevbre . These provide the conceptual background to my work in exploring the cultural, social and individual 'Production of Space" by the experimental interplay of the user to their environment. Debord and Lefevbre's theory provides different understandings for individual's emotion and behaviors in urban space. Their theories on urban architecture and their suggestions to rage against the existing meanings of existing places is explored in the computer graphics environment.

- This project also finds inspirations from Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, where this work, being a compilation of fragments of texts (excerps, quotes...etc), have both literary, visual and architectural reflections. The work itself is regarded as an exploration of a form rather than being simply a book, or a literary construct which respatializes itself with the different interpretations of its fragments.

 

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Timeline
    


The project is on pogress.

January 2004
It is currently at user-test stage for testing readability and navigation aspects for a certain synopsis of interaction.

February 2004
 It is aimed to complete the navigation and user interaction code(wand, collision detection, memory management). Test the environment for more hypertext links and to start writing the code for the map feature. Beginning sound recordings and testing them in the scene. Preparing a walk through in the environment and record it as quicktime movie file.

March-April 2004
 Testing the environment, observe how tunnels created by text database and see how things work with sound. Calculate an average experience time for user

May 2004
Setting the experience for it's first public access.
Presentations    


"On Escape" has been briefly presented in the following venues for critical feedback.

- at "Documentary Intentions Online and Off"
November 14/15, 2003 - Hunter College,
New York.

- Hallwalls Contemporay Art Center
November 22, 2003 - Buffalo, New York

- at Interaccess Electronic Media Arts Centre
December 11, 2003 - Toronto

The presentation file can be viewed from the following link: On Escape