Advanced Studio V: Fall 1997 Instructor: Hani Rashid Informing Interiorities: Prototypical Investigations in VRML "Out of similar symptoms McLuhan arrives at a different diagnosis. As in the spectacle of Debord, so in "the global village" of McLuhan: distance, spatial as well as critical, is eclipsed. But rather than separation , McLuhan sees 'retribalization', and rather than criticality lost, he sees distraction transvalued. Oblivious to Benjamin, McLuhan develops related ideas, often only to invert them. For McLuhan new technologies do not penetrate the body 'surgical' as much as they extend it 'electrically.' Yet like Benjamin he sees this operation as double: technology is both an excessive stimulus, a shock to the body, and a protective shield against such stimulus-shock, with the stimulus converted into the shield (which then invites more stimulus, and so on) . . . . . McLuhan sees this extension as an ecstatic body become electric, wired to the world, and sometimes as a 'suicidal auto-amputation, as if the central nervous system could no long depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism'. Hal Foster 'The Return of the Real' MIT Press 1996, pp.220 The appropriation and celebration of the transmutability and dispensing of three dimensional entities across the electro-sphere is a fundamental extension of McLuhan's notion that global village will be formed symptomatically of and by 'retribalization'. The presence and proliferation of VRML throughout the Internet, for example, marks a moment in history where communication technology is meeting spatial manufacture head on. Information and space are now fusing as disembodied circumstances that are mutable, transformational, temporal and mnemonic. Architects today have at their disposal this tool: Virtual Reality Mark-Up Language. Its significance and importance however is not its potential for re-representation of built space as we know it nor is it the technology to merely entertain us with virtual visits. Instead what might intrigues us as architects is the revisiting of the problematic of perception, formation of meaning, perspective certainty, plasticity, and form coupled with the procedures of dislocation, disembodiment, illusion and distraction. VRML experiments now found throughout the web seem to be conspicuously devoid of architectural 'content' and for the most part are essentially disembodied presence's. How then does the 'architect' engage this tool? Can the production of simultaneously 'occupied' and transformational space reveal a new spatiality? Does the aspect of record , memory and mutation afford any spatial possibilities for architecture. Is the transmission of spatiality of form of information exchange particular to our time? The projects will not only utilize VRML in their manufacture and implementation and form a theoretical foundation from such action, they should also determine the precise moments of dissonance and rupture with the so called 'first-reality' space.