[ISEA2011] Panel: Mar­cos Novak – P(l)aying (with) At­ten­tion: Dis­tracted Re­al­ity ver­sus Aug­mented Place

Panel Statement

Panel: Hybrid Spatial Experiences

Loca­tive media use our co­or­di­nates in space as keys into our in­for­ma­tion, os­ten­si­bly to bring that in­for­ma­tion to us where we need it. Aug­mented Re­al­ity os­ten­si­bly aug­ments the re­al­ity we are in by over­lay­ing this in­for­ma­tion on our per­cep­tual field, the bet­ter to serve us. But do these tech­nolo­gies re­ally serve to con­nect us to the places we find our­selves in, or, to the con­trary, do they serve to fur­ther re­move us from them? This paper will dis­cuss the promises and prob­lems of our ever-chang­ing re­la­tion to space, me­di­ated and oth­er­wise, and will pro­pose var­i­ous re­sponses and strate­gies for ad­dress­ing them.

  • Pro­fes­sor Mar­cos Novak di­rects the transLAB at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He is re­searcher, artist, the­o­rist, and transar­chi­tect. In 2008, “Trans­mit­ting Ar­chi­tec­ture”, the title of his sem­i­nal 1995 essay, be­came the theme of the XXIII World Con­gress of the UIA (Union In­ter­na­tionale Des Ar­chi­tectes), the largest ar­chi­tec­tural or­ga­ni­za­tion in the world. His pro­jects, the­o­ret­i­cal es­says, and in­ter­views have been trans­lated into over twenty lan­guages and have ap­peared in over 70 coun­tries, and he lec­tures, teaches, and ex­hibits world­wide. Draw­ing upon ar­chi­tec­ture, music, and com­pu­ta­tion, and in­tro­duc­ing nu­mer­ous ad­di­tional in­flu­ences from art, sci­ence, and tech­nol­ogy, his work in­ten­tion­ally de­fies cat­e­go­riza­tion. He is uni­ver­sally rec­og­nized as the pi­o­neer of ar­chi­tec­ture in cy­ber­space, of the crit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tion of vir­tual space as ar­chi­tec­tural and urban place, and of the use of gen­er­a­tive com­pu­ta­tional com­po­si­tion in ar­chi­tec­ture and de­sign. He is a Pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Santa Bar­bara, where he is af­fil­i­ated with CNSI (the Cal­i­for­nia NanoSys­tems In­sti­tute), MAT (Media Art and Tech­nol­ogy), and Art. He named and was in­stru­men­tal in the de­sign of the UCSB Al­loS­phere (the three-story high sphere for the cre­ation of im­mer­sive vir­tual en­vi­ron­ments, the largest such fa­cil­ity in the world) and cre­ated its in­au­gural pro­ject, the AlloBrain@AlloSphere,  using fMRI scans of his own brain. He is cur­rently work­ing on a new Al­lo­topes pro­ject for the Al­loS­phere. In 2004, he was hon­ored to be­come a Fel­low of the World Tech­nol­ogy Net­work.  translab.mat.ucsb.edu