cyberplace Ward Egan
I t is clear that as physically manifest beings, we occupy, and live in space, but as human beings, we know particular, significant places. Space and place are different, space being a physical condition of extension in a multidimensional world while place is a human con- struction. Place is a manifestation of our umwelt, our experiential environment, and as such has all the psychological and subjective char- acteristics of a phenomenological analysis of perception and a subjec- tivity incapable of trans-subjective validation. In philosophical realism we believe space to be characteristic of the world, while place exists only in the phenomenological experience of our world. Space and place are not only different, they are ontologi- cally independent. The significance of this is that we can build place independent of space. The art of making place for ritual is the essence of architecture. Ritual is always metaphysical: underlying the act is the search for something beyond the explanation. Most of what we do is simply habit, but to do because it has a clarity that transcends description is the essence of ritual. Sometimes, some of the things that we do, have this clarity and in this experience, ourselves, the place, the things in the place, are no longer separate and distinct but have a unified purpose.A Japanese teahouse is designed fundamentally to support the ritual of the tea ceremony.The architecture of the teahouse, the building as building, is a device to manifest that ritual. And it is clear that when one experi- ences a teahouse, even causally, that something sunspoken is going on. Art is a process of integrating our world and our environment. It is a catharsis for the artist in creation, and a catharsis for the user in recreation and culture grows. By using personal images to create our story, we explore meaning in our world. By pushing the convention of language in the telling of our story others can appropriate the tale.The
narrative arch, with its beginning, middle, and end, grabber, climax, and kicker, invite, through universal and archetypal form, our participation. Cinematic conventions such as montage, close-up, establishing shot, speak to us in a language we all know. Expectation generates immer- sion. Movement causes transformation.And as always we point to the horizon through metaphor and metonymy. Poetics is the study of how meaning is manifest in texts. In New Media, meaning comes from the inter-play of many voices. Some- times there is a lead with backup singers, but often there is a strug- gle for ‘voice’, a battle between Roger Daltry and Pete Townsend, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Great works come from this cycle of friction, and cautious harmony. In New Media, this intertextuality of voices produces a terra incognita that we are only beginning to explore. The dominant features of this landscape are interactivity, a networked community, and the intertextuality of voices, and there is no conventional language adequate to its mapping. Modernity celebrates the value of innovation as supreme: Post Moder- nity is driven by difference, and both inscribe an arc of isolation.The exploration of our personal places requires a boldness and an inven- tion to go where no one has gone. To become manifest as art in a communal sense, we need to communicate that journey.We require a language by definition, a system of convention, to become enhanced, extended, pushed, into a new language. In order for new media to be this new language, we need to define its limits so that we can go beyond its limits.This is the paradox:We need enough convention to communicate our individual explorations beyond convention, and we need to do this collectively in order to make sense of our world(s).
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ON SITE review 6: BEAUTY
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