A4006 Advanced Studio VI (Mixed Media Studio)
INSTRUCTOR: Rashidwww:interactive.architecture.com
The nineteenth century witnessed a series of stages in the thrusting progress of a vast aspiration which emerges as the quintessence of the bourgeois ideology of representation. From Daguerre's Diorama to Edison's first Kinetophonograph, each state of the pre-history of the cinema was intended by its initiators and seen by its publicists as representatives of their class, as another step toward the re-creation of reality, toward a perfect illusion of the perceptual world.
Noel Burch Charles Baudelaire versus Doctor Frankenstein Afterimage 8/9 1981
As the Internet and other public domain applications reaped from advanced technologies become exceedingly pervasive and accessible, promises of fluid interactive environments filled with endless streams of information are imminent. The space of interactivity coupled with the prospects of multi-media are inevitably opening the way for architects to operate within the folds of information space developing and devising as of yet unforeseen territories for human interaction and dwelling. Presently the world wide web is indicative of such potential where within its tedious and clumsy structure one is able to navigate through vast arrays of information images and data. New modeling languages and interfaces are promising improved maneuverability, real time capabilities and infinite possibilities for retrieval and dissemination of limitless information.
Architecture is at a critical juncture where the discipline might resist the digital onslaught claiming to be immune to the phenomenology of virtuality and relegating each new technology to furthering the entrenched perceptual nature of architectural representation as perfect illusion. Another claim might be put forward; that architectural representation as we have known it is under siege and that potentially both space and representation is now a single action of which the architect is capable of making evident and engaging.
This design studio will explore such a ground, where as architects we might posit virtual worlds for public and private occupancy within the domain of information access. Each student will develop programs, scenarios and spatialities for such inhabitation and the resultant architectural environments will be disseminated into the public realm as an architectural beta test.