Panel Statement

Panel: Emerging Architectures

Abstract

The invention of technologies that transmit signal, image, letter, sound, moving image, live sound, live image, sense and action, intersense and interaction, presence, interpresence, telepresence, underscores our desire to transcend the narrow here-and-now. However, until this moment, the technologies that would allow the transmission of space have been unimaginable. A barrier has broken: not only have we created virtual communities within nonlocal, transphysical, public realms, we are now able to exercise the most radical gesture: distributing space, transmitting architecture.

Intro

Techno Chronology                                                                                                                                    May 20-24, 1994. 4CyberConf: At the Banff Centre For the Arts in Alberta, Canada, under the auspices of the Art and Virtual Environments Project, the last virtual chamber created for “Dancing With The Virtual Dervish: Worlds in Progress” affords viewers the world’s first immersive experience of phenomena involving a fourth spatial dimension.                                     9 February 3-4, 1995. The transTerraFirma project is launched. Two Silicon Graphics Onyx/RealityEngine2 graphics supercomputers, one at the University of Texas at Austin and the other at the Electronic Cafe in Santa Monica, connected to one another via ethernet, give audiences the opportunity to navigate through and interact within shared virtual architecture. Even though the two sites can communicate via live audio and video ISDN connections, people prefer interacting in the virtual worlds to simply seeing and speaking to one another directly.  April 3, 1995. ‘Webspace”, a three dimensionai browser for the worldwide web (WWW), is announced by Silicon Graphics and Template Graphics Software. Built around the VRML
(virtual reality modeling language) and OpenInventor graphics formats, designed to work on all the major computer platforms, and integrated into the functioning of Netscape, the most widely
used WWW browser, Webspace creates the first widespread opportunity for the transmission and exchange of virtual environmenls.                                                                                                       l May 20-28, 1995. At the Tidsvag No11 ~2.0 (Timewave Zero) art and technology exhibition in Gbtheborg, Sweden, the transTerraFitma project continues. A series of worlds are construtted that can be transmitted over the web and visited by anyone with intemet access and a VRML browser. URL http://www.ar.utexas.edu/centrifuge/ttf.html                                                                  l July 1995: RealityLab, the Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments is established within the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. It is the first facility devoted to the study of virtual space as autonomous architectural space.

• Marcos Novak,  (USA) is architect, artist, composer, and theorist investigating actual, virtual and hybrid intelligent environments. He originated the study of liquid architectures in cyberspace, and is founding director of the RealityLab and the Advanced Design Research Program at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.

Full text p.219-225