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Visual Communication
DOI: 10.1177/1470357206065527
2006; 5; 219Visual Communication
Lev Manovich
The poetics of augmented space
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A R T I C L E
The poetics of augmented space
L E V M A N O V I C H
University of California, San Diego
A B S T R A C T
This article discusses how people experience spatial forms when they are
filled in with dynamic and rich multimedia information; spaces such as
shopping or entertainment areas or other spaces where various
information can be accessed wirelessly. The author calls such spaces
‘augmented space’: the physical space overlaid with dynamically changing
information, multimedia in form and localized for each user. The article asks
whether this form becomes irrelevant and ‘invisible’ or if people end up
with a new experience in which the spatial and information layers are
equally important. The author also discusses the general dynamic between
spatial form and information and how this might function differently in
today’s computer culture. Throughout the article, augmentation is reconceptualized
as an idea and cultural and aesthetic practice rather than as
technology. Various practices in professional and vernacular architecture
and built environments, cinema, 20th-century art and media art are
discussed in terms of augmentation.
K E Y W O R D S
augmentation • information • space • technology
How is our experience of a spatial form affected when the form is filled in
with dynamic and rich multimedia information? (The examples of such
environments are particular urban spaces such as shopping and entertainment
areas of Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Seoul where the walls of the buildings
are completely covered with electronic screens and signs; convention and
trade show halls; department stores, etc.; and at the same time, any humanconstructed
space where subjects can access various information wirelessly on
their cell phones, personal digital assistants [PDAs], or laptops.) Does the
form become irrelevant, being reduced to functional and ultimately invisible
support for information flows? Or do we end up with a new experience in
which the spatial and information layers are equally important? In this case,
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Vol 5(2): 219–240 [1470-3572(200606)5:2; 219–240]
v i s u a l c o m m u n i c a t i o n
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do these layers add up to a single phenomenological gestalt or are they
processed as separate layers?
Although historically built environments were almost always covered
with ornament, texts (for instance, shop signs), and images (fresco paintings,
icons, sculptures, etc. – think of churches in most cultures), the phenomenon
of the dynamic multimedia information in these environments is new. Also
new is the delivery of such information to a small personal device such as a
cell phone, which space dwellers can carry around with them.
Therefore, this article will discuss how the general dynamic between
spatial form and information which has been with us for a long time and
which I outlined earlier functions differently in the computer culture of
today. Since the kinds of environments I offered as earlier examples do not
have a recognizable name yet, I will give them a new name – an augmented
space. The term will be explained in more detail later, but here is the brief
definition: augmented space is the physical space overlaid with dynamically
changing information. This information is likely to be in multimedia form
and is often localized for each user.
I want to focus on the experience of the human subject in augmented
space as opposed to particular electronic, computer, and network technologies
through which the augmentation is achieved. I also want to reconceptualize
augmentation as an idea and cultural and aesthetic practice
rather than as technology. To do this, I will discuss how various practices in
professional and vernacular architecture and built environments, cinema,
20th-century art, and media art can be understood in terms of
augmentation. I hope that this will firmly position the concept of augmented
space in the historical and cultural, as opposed to purely technological,
sphere.
A U G M E N TA T I O N A N D M O N I T O R I N G
The 1990s were about the virtual. We were fascinated by the new virtual
spaces made possible by computer technologies. Images of an escape into a
virtual space that leaves physical space useless, and of cyberspace – a virtual
world that exists in parallel to our world – dominated the decade. This
phenomenon started with the media obsession with Virtual Reality (VR). In
the middle of the decade, graphical browsers for the world wide web made
cyberspace a reality for millions of users. During the second part of the
1990s, yet another virtual phenomenon – dot coms – rose to prominence,
only to crash in the real-world laws of economics. By the end of the decade,
the daily dose of cyberspace (using the internet to make plane reservations,
check email using a Hotmail account, or download MP3 files) became so
much the norm that the original wonder of cyberspace – so present in the
early cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s and still evident in the original
manifestos of VRML evangelists of the early 1990s – was almost completely
lost.1 The virtual became domesticated. Filled with advertisements and
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controlled by big brands, it was rendered harmless. In short, to use Norman
Klein’s expression, it became an ‘electronic suburb’.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the research agendas, media
attention, and practical applications have come to focus on a new agenda –
the physical – that is, physical space filled with electronic and visual
information. The previous icon of the computer era – a VR user traveling in
virtual space – has been replaced by a new image: a person checking his or
her email or making a phone call using a PDA/cell phone combo while at the
airport, on the street, in a car, or any other actually existing space. But this is
just one example of what I see as a larger trend. Here are a few more
examples of the technological applications that dynamically deliver dynamic
data to, or extract data from, physical space – and which already are widely
employed at the time of this writing:2
1. Video surveillance is becoming ubiquitous. No longer employed only by
governments, the military and businesses but also by individuals; cheap,
tiny, wireless, and net-enabled, video cameras can now be placed almost
anywhere. (For instance, by 2002, many taxis already had video cameras
continuously recording the inside of the cab.)
2. If video and other types of surveillance technologies translate the
physical space and its dwellers into data, cellspace technologies (also
referred to as mobile media, wireless media, or location-based media)
work in the opposite direction: delivering data to the mobile physical
space dwellers. Cellspace is physical space that is ‘filled’ with data, which
can be retrieved by a user via a personal communication device.3 Some
data may come from global networks such as the internet; some may be
embedded in objects located in the space around the user. Moreover,
while some data may be available regardless of where the user is in the
space, it can also be location specific. Examples of the cellspace
applications which are not localized are using a global positioning
system (GPS) to determine your coordinates, or surfing and checking
email using a cell phone. Examples of location specific applications are
using a cell phone to check in at the airport, pay for a road toll, or
retrieve information about a product in a store.4
3. While we can think of cellspace as the invisible layer of information that
is laid over physical space and is customized by an individual user,
publicly located computer/video displays present the same visible
information to passers-by. These displays are gradually becoming larger
and thinner; they are no longer confined to flat surfaces; they no longer
require darkness to be visible. In the short term, we may expect large
thin displays to become more pervasive in both private and public spaces
(perhaps using technology such as e-ink). In the longer term, every
object may become a screen connected to the net with the whole of built
space eventually becoming a set of display surfaces.5 Of course, physical
space has long been augmented by images, graphics, and type; but
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replacing all of these with electronic displays makes it possible to present
dynamic images, to mix images, graphics, and type, and to change the
content at any time.
If we consider the effect of these three technological applications
(surveillance, cellspace, electronic displays) on our concept of space and,
consequently, on our lives as far as they are lived in various spaces, I believe
that they very much belong together. They make physical space into a dataspace:
extracting data from it (surveillance) or augmenting it with data
(cellspace, computer displays).
It also makes sense to conceptually connect the surveillance/
monitoring of physical space and its dwellers, and the augmentation of this
space with additional data because, technologically, these two applications
are in a symbiotic relationship. For instance, if you know the location of a
person equipped with a cell phone, you can send them particular
information relevant to that specific location via their cell phone. A similar
relationship exists in the case of software agents, affective computing, and
similar interfaces, which take a more active role in assisting the user than the
standard Graphical User Interface (GUI). By tracking the users – their mood,
pattern of work, focus of attention, interests, and so on – these interfaces
acquire information about the users, which they then use to automatically
perform the tasks for them.
The close connection between surveillance/monitoring and assistance/
augmentation is one of the key characteristics of the high-tech society. This is
how such technologies are made to work, and this is why I am discussing
data flows from physical space (surveillance, monitoring, tracking) and into
physical space (cellspace applications, computer screens, and other examples
below) together.
P A N O P T I C O N A N D I N F O R M A T I O N T H E O R Y
Let us now add to these three examples of the technologies that are already at
work by citing a number of the research paradigms that are being actively
conducted in university and industry labs. Note that many of them overlap,
mining the same territory but with a somewhat different emphasis:
4. Ubiquitous Computing: the shift away from computing which centered
on desktop machines towards smaller multiple devices distributed
throughout the space (Weiser, 1991).
5. Augmented Reality: a paradigm that originated around the same time as
ubiquitous computing (1990) – the laying of dynamic and contextspecific
information over the visual field of a user (see later for more
details).6
6. Tangible Interfaces: treating the whole of physical space around the user as
part of a human–computer interface (HCI) by employing physical objects
as carriers of information (see the Tangible Bits project website).7
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7. Wearable Computers: embedding computing and telecommunication
devices into clothing.
8. Intelligent Buildings (or Intelligent Architecture): buildings wired to
provide cellspace applications.
9. Intelligent Spaces: spaces that monitor users’ interaction with them via
multiple channels and provide assistance for information retrieval,
collaboration, and other tasks (think of Hal in the film 2001) (see Guido
Appenzeller, Intelligent Space Project website; Intelligent Room Projects,
AI Lab, MIT website).8
10. Context-Aware Computing: an umbrella term used to refer to all or some
of the developments above, signaling a new paradigm in the computer
science and HCI fields (Moran and Dourish, 2001).
11. Ambient Intelligence: alternative term, which also refers to all or some of
the paradigms summarized earlier.
12. Smart Objects: objects connected to the net; objects that can sense their
users and display ‘smart’ behavior.
13. Wireless Location Services: delivery of location-specific data and services
to portable wireless devices such as cell phones (i.e. similar to cellspace).
14. Sensor Networks: networks of small sensors that can be used for surveillance
and enviromental monitoring to create intelligent spaces, and
similar applications.
15. E-paper (or e-ink): a very thin electronic display on a sheet of plastic,
which can be flexed in to different shapes and which displays information
that is received wirelessly (Noble, 2001).
While the technologies imagined by these research paradigms
accomplish their intentions in a number of different ways, the end result is
the same: overlaying the physical space with the dynamic data. I will use the
term ‘augmented space’ to refer to this new kind of physical space. As I have
already mentioned, this overlaying is often made possible by the tracking and
monitoring of users. In other words, the delivery of information to users in
space and the extraction of information about those users are closely
connected. Thus, augmented space is also monitored space.
Augemented space is the physical space which is ‘data dense’, as every
point now potentially contains various information which is being delivered
to it from elsewhere. At the same time, video surveillance, monitoring, and
various sensors can also extract information from any point in space,
recording the face movements, gestures and other human activity, temperature,
light levels, and so on. Thus we can say that various augmentation and
monitoring technologies add new dimensions to a 3-D physical space, making
it multidimensional. As a result, the physical space now contains many more
dimensions than before, and while from the phenomenological perspective of
the human subject, the ‘old’ geometric dimensions may still have the priority,
from the perspective of technology and its social, political, and economic uses,
they are no longer more important than any other dimension.
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This demise in importance of geometry as seen in augmented spaces
can be understood as a part of a larger paradigm shift. If modern society as
summed up in Michel Foucault’s metaphor of the Panopticon was organized
around the straight lines of human sight, i.e. the geometry of the visible, this
is no longer the case for our society. While some technologies such as video
surveillance and infrared communication still require a line of sight, most do
not. The examples are cellular and Bluetooth communication, radar, and
environmental sensors. Instead of the binary logic of visible/invisible, the
new spatial logic can be described using such terms as functions or fields,
since from the point of view of these new technologies, every point in space
has a particular value on a possible continuum. (Think for instance of the
strength of your cellular signal which varies depending how close you are to a
cell or whether you are outside or inside.) In the case of information delivery
into space, these values determine how much, how quickly and how
successfully this information can be delivered – in other words, it
corresponds to communication bandwidth. In the case of monitoring or
surveillance, these values similarly affect how much and how successfully
information can be extracted from a point or region in space. In either case,
if the old binary logic of visible/invisible (or present/absent) had still applied
in this case, we would either register a signal or not. Instead we witness a new
logic, which is described by the key intellectual paradigm of information
society – mathematical theory of communication developed by Claude
Shannon and others in the 1940s. According to this theory, communication
is always accompanied by noise, and therefore a received signal always has
some noise mixed in.9 In practical terms, this means that any information
delivered to or extracted from augmented space always occupies some
position on the continuous dimension whose poles form a perfect signal and
complete noise. In a typical situation, we are usually somewhere in between:
our cell phone conversation is accompanied by some background noise; a
surveillance system delivers blurry or low-res images, which need to be
interpreted, i.e. a decision needs to be made by somebody about the nature of
the signal being presented. Thus, along with providing a theoretical framework
to describe all electronic communication, Shannon’s mathematical
theory of communication also managed to perfectly capture the practical
reality of our communications, at least up until now. That is, in the majority
of cases, the signals we receive are accompanied by noise recognizable to us.
A U G M E N TA T I O N A N D I M M E R S I O N
I derived the term ‘augmented space’ from the already established term
‘augmented reality’ (AR).10 Coined around 1990, the concept of ‘augmented
reality’ is normally opposed to ‘virtual reality’ (VR).11 In the case of VR, the
user works on a virtual simulation; in the case of AR, the user works on
actual things in actual space. Because of this, a typical VR system presents a
user with a virtual space that has nothing to do with that user’s immediate
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physical space. In contrast, a typical AR system adds information that is
directly related to the user’s immediate physical space.
But we do not necessarily have to think of immersion in the virtual
and augmentation of the physical as opposites. On one level, whether we
think of a particular situation as immersion or augmentation is simply a
matter of scale – i.e. the relative size of a display. When you are watching a
movie in a movie theatre or on a large TV monitor, or when you are playing a
computer game on a game console that is connected to the TV, you are
hardly aware of your physical surroundings. Practically speaking, you are
immersed in virtual reality. But when you watch the same movie, or play the
same game, on the small display of a cell phone or PDA that fits in your
hand, then the experience is different. You are still largely present in physical
space, and while the display adds to your overall phenomenological
experience, it does not take over. So, whether we should understand a
particular situation in terms of immersion or augmentation depends on how
we understand the idea of addition: we may add new information to our
experience – or we may add an altogether different experience.
Augmented space may bring associations with one of the founding
ideas of computer culture: Douglas Engelbart’s concept of a computer
augmenting human intellect that was articulated 40 years ago (Bush, 1945;
Engelbart, 1962). The association is appropriate, but we also need to be aware
of the differences. For the vision of Engelbart, and the related visions of
Vannevar Bush and J.C.R. Licklider, assumed stationary users – scientists or
engineers at work in their office. Revolutionary for the time, these ideas
anticipated the paradigm of desktop computing. Today, however, we are
gradually moving into the next paradigm, one in which computing and
telecommunication capacities are delivered to a mobile user.12 Thus,
augmenting the human also comes to mean augmenting the whole space in
which someone lives, or through which someone passes.
A U G M E N TA T I O N A S A N I D E A
Having analyzed at some length the concept of augmented space, we are now
ready to move to the key questions of this article. What is the
phenomenological experience of being in a new augmented space? What can
be the new cultural applications of new computer- and network-enabled
augmented spaces? What are the possible poetics and aesthetics of an
augmented space?
One way to start thinking about these questions is to approach the
design of augmented space as an architectural problem. Augmented space
provides a challenge and an opportunity for many architects to rethink their
practice since architecture will have to take into account the fact that virtual
layers of contextual information will overlay the built space.
But is this a completely new challenge for architecture? If we assume
that the overlaying of different spaces is a conceptual problem that is not
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connected to any particular technology, we may start to think about which
architects and artists have already been working on this problem. To put it
another way, the layering of dynamic and contextual data over physical space
is a particular case of a general aesthetic paradigm: how to combine different
spaces together. Of course, electronically augmented space is unique – since
the information is personalized for every user, it can change dynamically over
time, and it is delivered through an interactive multimedia interface, etc. Yet
it is crucial to see this as a conceptual rather than just a technological issue –
and therefore as something that in part has already been an element of other
architectural and artistic paradigms.
Augmented space research gives us new terms with which to think
about previous spatial practices. If previously we thought of an architect, a
fresco painter, or a display designer working to combine architecture and
images, or architecture and text, or to incorporate different symbolic systems
into one spatial construction, we can now say that all of them were working
on the problem of augmented space – the problem, that is, of how to overlay
physical space with layers of data. Therefore, in order to imagine what can be
done culturally with augmented spaces, we may begin by combing cultural
history for useful precedents.
To make my argument more accessible, I have chosen two well-known
contemporary figures as my examples. Janet Cardiff is a Canadian artist who
became famous for her ‘audio walks’. She creates her pieces by following a
trajectory through a space and narrating an audio track that combines
instructions to the user (‘go down the stairs’; ‘look in the window’; ‘go
through the door on the right’) with narrative fragments, sound effects, and
other aural ‘data’. To experience the piece, the user dons earphones connected
to a CD player and follows Cardiff’s instructions.13 In my view – even though
Cardiff does not use any sophisticated computer, networking, or projection
technologies – her ‘walks’ represent the best realization of the augmented
space paradigm so far. They demonstrate the aesthetic potential of laying
new information over a physical space. Their power lies in the interactions
between the two spaces – between vision and hearing (what users are seeing
and hearing), and between present and past (the time of the user’s walk
versus the audio narration, which, like any media recording, belongs to some
undefined time in the past).
The Jewish Museum Berlin designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind
can be thought of as another example of augmented space research. For, if
Cardiff lays a new dataspace over the existing architecture and/or landscape,
then Libeskind uses the existing dataspace to drive the new architecture that
he constructs. After putting together a map that showed the addresses of Jews
who were living in the neighborhood of the museum site before the Second
World War, Libeskind connected different points on the map and then
projected the resulting net onto the surfaces of the building. The intersections
of the projected net and the Museum walls gave rise to multiple
irregular windows. Cutting through the walls and the ceilings at different
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angles, these windows evoke many visual references: the narrow eyepiece of a
tank; the windows of a medieval cathedral; the exploded forms of the
cubist/abstract/suprematist paintings of the 1910s–1920s. Just as in the case
of Cardiff’s audio walks, here the virtual becomes a powerful force that reshapes
the physical. In the Jewish Museum Berlin the past literally cuts into
the present. Rather than something ephemeral, an immaterial layer over the
real space, here dataspace is materialized to become a sort of monumental
sculpture.
W H I T E C U B E A S C E L L S P A C E
While we may interpret the practices of selected architects and artists as
having particular relevance to thinking about the ways in which augmented
space can be used culturally and artistically, there is another way to link the
augmented space paradigm with modern culture. Here is how it works.
One trajectory that can be traced in 20th-century art runs from the
dominance of a two-dimensional object placed on a wall, towards the use of
the whole 3-D space of a gallery. (Like all other cultural trajectories in the
20th century, this one is not a linear development; rather, it consists of steps
forward and steps back that occur in rhythm with the general cultural and
political rhythm of the century: the highest peak of creativity took place in
the 1910s–1920s, followed by a second peak in the 1960s.) Already in the
1910s, Tatlin’s reliefs broke the two-dimensional picture plane and exploded
a painting into the third dimension. In the 1920s, Lissitzky, Rodchenko, and
other pioneering exhibition designers moved further away from an individual
painting or sculpture towards using all surfaces of an exhibition space – yet
their exhibitions activate only the walls rather than the whole space.
In the mid-1950s, assemblage legitimized the idea of an art object as a
three-dimensional construction (The Art of Assemblage, MOMA, 1961). In
the 1960s, minimalist sculptors (Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Robert Morris)
and other artists (Eva Hesse, the Arte Povera group) finally started to deal
with the whole of the 3-D space of a white cube. Beginning in the 1970s,
installation (Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman) grew in importance to become,
in the 1980s, the most common form of artistic practice of our times – and
the only thing that all installations share is that they engage with 3-D space.
Finally, the white cube becomes a cube – rather than just a collection of 2-D
surfaces.
If we follow this logic, augmented space can be thought of as the next
step in the trajectory from a flat wall to a 3-D space which has animated
modern art for the last hundred years. For a few decades now, artists have
already dealt with the entire space of a gallery: rather than creating an object
that a viewer would look at, they placed the viewer inside the object. Now the
artists have a new challenge: placing a user inside a space filled with dynamic,
contextual data with which the user can interact. Alternatively, if we want to
be more modest, we can say that the arrival of augmented space in the 1980s
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and 1990s as deployed in urban sphere was paralleled by the development of
a similar concept of space by installation artists. If previously 3-D space was
reduced in practice to a set of surfaces – walls in the case of the built
environment, flat paintings or gallery walls in an art environment – now it is
finally used as 3-D space.
W H I T E C U B E V E R S U S B L A C K B O X
Before we rush to conclude that the new technologies do not add anything
substantially new to the old aesthetic paradigm of overlaying different spaces
together, let me note that – in addition to their ability to deliver dynamic and
interactive information – the new technologically implemented augmented
spaces also differ in one important aspect from Cardiff’s walks, Libeskind’s
Jewish Museum, and other similar works. Rather than laying a new 3-D
virtual dataspace over the physical space, Cardiff and Libeskind overlay only
a 2-D plane, or a 3-D path, at best. Indeed, Cardiff’s walks are new 3-D paths
placed over an existing space, rather than complete spaces. Similarly, in the
Jewish Museum Berlin, Libeskind projects 2-D maps onto the 3-D shapes of
his architecture.14
In contrast, GPS, wireless location services, surveillance technologies,
and other augmented space technologies all define dataspace – if not in
practice, then at least in theory – as a continuous field that completely extends
over, and fills in, all of physical space. Every point in space has a GPS
coordinate that can be obtained using a GPS receiver. Similarly, in the
cellspace paradigm, every point in physical space can be said to contain some
information that can be retrieved using a PDA or similar device. With
surveillance, while in practice video cameras, satellites, Echelon (the set of
monitoring stations that are used by the US to monitor all kinds of electronic
communications globally), and other technologies, can so far only reach some
regions and layers of data but not others, the ultimate goal of the modern
surveillance paradigm is to be able to observe every point at every time. To use
the terms of Borges’ famous story, all of these technologies want to make the
map equal to the territory. And if, in accord with Foucault’s famous argument
in Discipline and Punish, the modern subject internalizes surveillance and
thereby removes the need for anybody to be actually present in the center of
the Panopticon to watch him or her, modern institutions of surveillance insist
that prisoners should be watched and tracked everywhere all the time.
It is important, however, that, in practice, dataspaces are almost never
continuous: surveillance cameras look at some spaces but not others, wireless
signals are stronger in some areas and non-existent in others, and so on. As
Matt Locke eloquently describes:
Mobile networks have to negotiate the architecture of spaces that they
attempt to inhabit. Although the interfaces have removed themselves
from physical architectures, the radio waves that connect cell spaces
are refracted and reflected by the same obstacles, creating not a
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seamless network but a series of ebbs and flows. The supposedly flat
space of the network is in fact not flat, pulled into troughs and peaks
by the gravity of architecture and the users themselves. (Lovink and
Gerritzen, 2002: 111)
The contrast between the continuity of cellspace in theory and its
discontinuity in practice should not be dismissed. Rather, the contrast itself
can be the source of interesting aesthetic strategies.
My third example of already existing augmented space – electronic
displays mounted in shops, streets, lobbies, train stations, and apartments –
follows a different logic. Rather than overlaying all of the physical space, here
dataspace occupies a well-defined part of the physical space. This is the
tradition of Alberti’s window, and, consequently, of post-Renaissance
painting, the cinema screen, the TV screen, and the computer monitor.
However, if the screen has, until recently, most usually acted as a window into
a virtual 3-D space, in the last two decades of the 20th century it turned into
a shallow surface in which 3-D images co-exist with 2-D design and
typography. Live-action footage shares space with motion graphics
(animated type), scrolling data (for instance, stock prices or weather), and 2D
design elements. In short, the Renaissance painting became an animated
medieval illustrated book.
My starting point for the discussion of the poetics of this type of
augmented space is the current practice of video installation, which came to
dominate the art world in the 1990s. Typically, these installations use video
or data projectors. They turn a whole wall or even a whole room into a
display or a set of displays, thus previewing and investigating (willingly or
not) the soon-to-come future of our apartments and cities when large and
thin displays covering most surfaces may become the norm. At the same
time, these laboratories of the future are rooted in the past: in the different
traditions of ‘image within a space’ of 20th-century culture.
What are these traditions? Among the different oppositions that have
structured the culture of the 20th century, and which we have inherited, has
been the opposition between the art gallery and the movie theatre. One was
high culture; the other was low culture. One was a white cube; the other was
a black box.
Given the economy of art production – one-of-a-kind objects created
by individual artists – 20th-century artists expended lots of energy experimenting
with what could be placed inside the neutral setting of a white cube
by breaking away from a flat and rectangular frame and going into the third
dimension: covering a whole floor; suspending objects from the ceiling; and
so on. In other words, if we are to make an analogy between an art object and
a digital computer, we can say that, in modern art, both the ‘physical
interface’ and the ‘software interface’ of an art object were not fixed but open
for experimentation. Put differently, both the physical appearance of an
object and the proposed mode of interaction with an object were open for
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experimentation. Artists also experimented with the identity of a gallery:
from a traditional space of aesthetic contemplation to a place for play,
performance, public discussion, lectures, and so on.
In contrast, since cinema was an industrial system of mass production
and mass distribution, the physical interface of a movie theatre and the
software interface of a film itself were pretty much fixed: a 35-mm image of
fixed dimensions projected on a screen with the same frame ratio, dark space
where viewers were positioned in rows, and the fixed time of a movie itself.
Not accidentally, when the experimental filmmakers of the 1960s started to
systematically attack the conventions of traditional cinema, these attacks
were aimed at both its physical and its software interfaces. Robert Breer, for
example, projected his movies on a board that he would hold above his head
as he walked through a movie theatre towards the projector; Stan VanderBeck
constructed semi-circular tents for the projection of his films, etc.
The gallery was the space of refined high taste while the cinema
served to provide entertainment for the masses, and this difference was also
signified by what was deemed to be acceptable in the two kinds of spaces.
Despite all the experimentation with its ‘interface’, until recently the gallery
space was primarily reserved for static images; to see moving images, the
public had to go a movie theatre. Thus, until at least the 1980s, moving
images in a gallery were indeed an exception (Duchamp’s rotoscopes,
Acconci’s masturbating performance, which can be thought of as a kind of
animation within the gallery).
Given this history, the 1990s’ phenomena of omni-present video
installations taking over the gallery space goes against the whole paradigm of
modern art – and not only because installations bring moving images into
the gallery. Most video installations adopt the same physical interface: a dark
enclosed or semi-enclosed rectangular space with a video projector at one
end and the projected image appearing on the opposite wall. Therefore, from
a space of constant innovation in relation to the physical and software
interface of an art object, a gallery space has turned into what was, for almost
a century, its ideological enemy – a movie theatre that is characterized by the
rigidity of its interface.
Since the early days of computer culture in the 1960s, many software
designers and software artists – from Ted Nelson and Alan Kay to Perry
Hoberman and IOD – have revolted against the hegemony of mainstream
computer interfaces, such as the keyboard and mouse, GUI, or commercial
web browsers. Similarly, the best of video or, more generally, moving image
installation artists go beyond the standard video installation interface – a
dark room with an image on one wall. Examples of such artists include
Diana Thater, Gary Hill, and Doug Aitken, as well as the very first ‘video
artist’ – Nam June Paik. The founding moment of what would come to be
called ‘video art’ was Paik’s attack on the physical interface of a commercial
moving image – his first show consisted of televisions with magnets attached
to them, and TV monitors ripped out of their enclosures.
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T H E E L E C T R O N I C V E R N A C U L A R
When we look at what visual artists are doing with a moving image in a
gallery setting in comparison with other contemporary fields, we can see that
the white gallery box still functions as a space of contemplation – quite
different from the aggressive, surprising, overwhelming spaces of a boutique,
trade-show floor, airport, or retail/entertainment area of a major metropolis.15
While a number of video artists continue the explorations of the
1960s’ ‘expanded cinema’ movement by pushing moving image interfaces in
many interesting directions, outside of a gallery space we can find much
richer fields of experimentation. I can single out four areas. First, contemporary
urban architecture – in particular, many proposals of the last decade
that incorporate large projection screens into architecture and project the
activity inside onto these screens. Examples include Rem Koolhaas’
unrealized 1992 project for the new ZKM building in Karlsruhe; a number of
projects, again so far mostly unrealized, by Robert Venturi to create what he
calls ‘architecture as communication’ (buildings covered with electronic
displays); realized architectural/media installations by Diller + Scofilio such
as Jump Cuts and Facsimile,16 the highly concentrated use of video screens
and information displays in certain cities such as Seoul, Hong Kong and
Tokyo, or in Times Square, NYC; and, finally, imaginary future architecture
as seen in movies from Blade Runner (1982) to Minority Report (2002),
which use electronic screens on a scale that is not yet possible. Second is the
use of video displays in certain kinds of contemporary spaces where
communication of information to the public is the key function: trade-show
design, such as the annual SIGGRAPH and E3 conventions; company
showrooms; airports and train stations. The third is the best of retail
environments: these range from small high-end boutiques (I will discuss this
type of space in more detail shortly) to mega-size shopping centers/eating/
entertainment complexes which incorporate projection screens, dynamic
lighting systems, mirrors, transparent and translucent surfaces to create an
experience of an animated and dynamic space. The fourth is the multi-media
design of music performances, from the concerts of the brand name pop
stars, to the numerous VJs performing nightly in clubs in most major cities
on earth, to ‘hybrid’ groups which situate themselves between club and art
culture, such as the brilliant collective Light Surgeons based in London.
While at this moment they are still imagined and implemented by the
practitioners from different fields, slowly we start to see the different species
of augmented spaces being combined into one. A shopping complex leads to
an interior shopping street which leads to a multiplex; or an airport complex
combines information displays about airline departures and arrival and
shopping areas with their own promotions playing on LCD screens, and so
on. Although at present the small electronic screens are usually distributed
throughout these spaces (for instance, small LCD monitors mounted in
elevators of new hi-rise buildings in Hong Kong and China such as CITIC
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Plaza in Guangzhou), the single larger screen (or other method for large
image creation) has a potential to unite them all, offering a a kind of
symbolic unity to a typically heterogeneous urban program: a shopping
center + entertainment center + hotel + residential units. As as an example,
consider Langham Place (Mongkok, Hong Kong, opened November 2004)
developed by the Jerde Partnership, the pioneers of the urban version of
‘experience design’ they refer to as ‘placemaking’. An entertainment complex
with an area of 1.8 million square feet, it combines a 15-storey shopping mall
with 300 shops, a 59-level Grade A office tower and the 5-star Langham Place
Hotel. The focal point of the complex is Digital Sky, which spans the entire
roof of the mall. Showing continuous visuals, this giant ‘screen’ is made
possible by 200 projectors, PCs, speakers, and special effects lights (Wang,
2004). No longer a square superimposed on a facade or a wall, here an image
envelops the whole space as an ambient ‘elevator music’ sky to shop under.
To discuss the use of electronic images in architecture further, let us
turn to Robert Venturi. His projects and theories deserve special consideration
here since, for him, an electronic display is not an optional addition but
the very center of architecture in the information age. Since the 1960s,
Venturi continuously argued that architecture should learn from vernacular
and commercial culture (billboards, Las Vegas, strip malls, architecture of the
past). Appropriately, his books Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
and Learning from Las Vegas are often referred to as the founding documents
of post-modern aesthetics. Venturi proposed that we should refuse the
modernist desire to impose minimalist ornament-free spaces, and instead
embrace complexity, contradiction, heterogeneity, and iconography in our
built environments (Venturi, 1966). In the 1990s, he articulated the new
vision of ‘architecture as communication for the Information Age (rather
than as space for the Industrial Age)’ (Venturi et al., 1972). Venturi wants us
to think of ‘architecture as an iconographic representation emitting
electronic imagery from its surfaces day and night’. Pointing to some of the
already mentioned examples of the aggressive incorporation of electronic
displays in contemporary environments, such as Times Square in NYC, and
arguing that traditional architecture always included ornament, iconography,
and visual narratives (for instance, a medieval cathedral with its narrative
window mosaics, narrative sculpture covering the facade, and narrative
paintings), Venturi proposed that architecture should return to its traditional
definition as iconography, i.e. as information surface.17 Of course, if the
messages communicated by traditional architecture were static and reflected
the dominant ideology, today’s electronic dynamic interactive displays make
it possible for these messages to change continuously, making the
information surface a potential space of contestation and dialog, which
functions as the material manifestation of the often invisible public sphere.
Although this has not been a part of Venturi’s core vision, it is
relevant to mention here a growing number of projects in which the large
publicly mounted screen is open for programming by the public who can
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send images via the internet or information being displayed via their cell
phones. Even more suggestive is the project Vectorial Elevation, Relational
Architecture #4 by artist Raffael Lozano-Hemmer.18 This project made it
possible for people from all over the world to control a mutant electronic
architecture made from search lights in Mexico City’s Zócalo Square. To
quote from the statement of the 2002 Prix Ars Electronica jury, which
awarded this project the Golden Nica in the Interactive Art category:
Vectorial Elevation was a large scale interactive installation that
transformed Mexico City’s historic centre using robotic searchlights
controlled over the Internet. Visitors to the project website at
<http://www.alzado.net> could design ephemeral light sculptures
over the National Palace, City Hall, the Cathedral and the Templo
Mayor Aztec ruins. The sculptures, made by 18 xenon searchlights
located around the Zócalo Square, could be seen from a 10-mile
radius and were sequentially rendered as they arrived over the Net.
The website featured a 3D-java interface that allowed participants to
make a vectorial design over the city and see it virtually from any
point of view. When the project server in Mexico received a
submission, it was numbered and entered into a queue. Every six
seconds the searchlights would orient themselves automatically and
three webcams would take pictures to document a participant’s
design. 19
Venturi’s vision of ‘architecture as iconographic representation’ is not
without its problems. If we focus completely on the idea of architecture as
information surface, we may forget that traditional architecture communicated
messages and narratives not only through flat narrative surfaces but
also through the particular articulation of space. To use the same example of
a medieval cathedral, it communicated Christian narratives not only through
the images covering its surfaces but also through its whole spatial structure.
In the case of modernist architecture, it similarly communicated its own
narratives (the themes of progress, technology, efficiency, and rationality)
through new spaces constructed from simple geometric forms – and also
through its bare, industrial-looking surfaces. (Thus, the absence of
information from the surface, articulated in the famous ‘ornament is crime’
slogan of Adolf Loos, itself became a powerful communication technique of
modern architecture.)
An important design problem of our own time is how to combine the
new functioning of a surface as an electronic display with the new kind of
spaces and forms being imagined by contemporary architects.20 While
Venturi fits electronic displays onto his buildings, which closely follow
traditional vernacular architecture, this is obviously not the only possible
strategy. The well-known Freshwater Pavilion by NOX/Lars Spuybroek
(Neeltje Jans, The Netherlands, 1996) follows a much more radical approach.
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To emphasize that the interior of the space constantly mutates, Spuybroek
eliminates all straight surfaces and straight angles; he makes the shapes
defining the space appear to move; and he introduces computer-controlled
lights that change the illumination of the interior.21 As described by Ineke
Schwartz:
There is no distinction between horizontal and vertical, between
floors, walls and ceilings. Building and exhibition have fused: mist
blows around your ears, a geyser erupts, water gleams and splatters all
around you, projections fall directly onto the building and its visitors,
the air is filled with waves of electronic sound.22
I think that Spuybroek’s building is a successful symbol for the
Information Age. Its continuously changing surfaces illustrate the key effect
of the computer revolution: the substitution of every constant by a variable.
In other words, the space that symbolizes the Information Age is not the
symmetrical and ornamental space of traditional architecture, the rectangular
volumes of modernism, nor the broken and blown-up volumes of
deconstruction. Rather, it is space whose shapes are inherently mutable and
whose soft contours act as a metaphor for the key quality of computer-driven
representations and systems: variability.
L E A R N I N G F R O M P R A D A
Venturi wants to put rich electronic ornamentation and iconography on
traditional buildings. In contrast, in his Freshwater Pavilion, Lars Spuybroek
constructs a new kind of space which he then fills with information – but
information reduced to abstract color fields and sound. In other words, in
the Freshwater Pavilion, the information surface functions in a very
particular way, displaying color fields rather than text, images, or numbers.
Where can we find today interesting architectural spaces combined with
electronic displays that show the whole range of information, from ambient
color fields to figurative images and numerical data?
Beginning in the mid 1990s, the avant-garde wing of the retail
industry began to produce rich and intriguing spaces, many of which
incorporate moving images. Leading architects and designers such as
Droog/NL, Marc Newson, Herzog & de Meuron, Renzo Piano, and Rem
Koolhaas created stores for Prada, Mandarina Duck, Hermes, Comme des
Garcons, and other high-end brands; while architect Richard Glucksman
collaborated with artist Jenny Holzer to create Helmut Lang’s stunning New
York parfumerie, which incorporates Holzer’s signature use of LCD displays.
A store featuring dramatic architecture and design, and the mixing of a
restaurant, fashion, design, and art gallery, became a new paradigm for highend
brands. Otto Riewoldt describes this paradigm using the term
‘brandscaping’ – promoting the brand by creating unique spaces. According
to Riewoldt: ‘Brandscaping is the hot issue. The site at which goods are
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promoted and sold has to reinvent itself by developing unique and
unmistakable qualities’ (Hooper, 2001).
OMA/Rem Koolhaas’ Prada store in New York (2002) pushes
brandscaping to a new level. Koolhaas seems to achieve the impossible by
creating a flagship store for the Prada brand – and at the same time an ironic
statement about the functioning of brands as new religions.23 The imaginative
use of electronic displays designed by Reed Kram of Kramdesign is an
important part of this statement. On entering the store, the visitor discovers
glass cages hanging from the ceiling throughout the space. Just as a church
would present the relics of saints in special displays, here the glass cages
contain the new objects of worship – Prada clothes. The special status of
Prada clothing is further enhanced by the placement of small flat electronic
screens throughout the store on horizontal shelves right alongside the
merchandise. The clothes are equated with the ephemeral images playing on
the screens, and vice versa; the images acquire a certain materiality, as though
they are themselves objects. By positioning screens showing moving images
right next to the clothes, the designers ironically refer to what everybody
today already knows: we buy objects not for themselves but in order to
emulate the specific images and narratives that are presented by the
advertisements of these objects. Finally, on the basement level of the store, you
discover a screen displaying the Prada Atlas. Designed by Kram, the Atlas may
be mistaken for an interactive multimedia presentation of OMA (Office for
Metropolitan Architecture, the name of Koolhaas’ studio) research for its
Prada commission. It looks like the kind of information that brands normally
communicate to their investors but not to their consumers. In designing the
Atlas, as well as the whole media of the store, Kram’s goal was to make ‘Prada
reveal itself, make it completely transparent to the visitors’.24 The Atlas helps
you to list all the Prada stores throughout the world by square footage, look at
an analysis of optimal locations for store placement, and study other data sets
that underlie Prada’s brandscaping. This ‘unveiling’ of Prada does not break
our emotional attachment with the brand; on the contrary, it seems to have
the opposite result. Koolhaas and Kram masterfully engage the ‘I know it is an
illusion but nevertheless I believe it’ effect: we know that Prada is a business
that is governed by economic rationality and yet we still feel that we are not
simply in a store but in a modern church.
It is symbolic that Prada NYC has opened in the space that was
previously occupied by a branch of the Guggenheim Museum. The strategies
of brandscaping are directly relevant to museums and galleries which, like all
other physical spaces, now have to compete with that new information,
entertainment, and retail space: a computer or a cell-phone screen connected
to the net. Although museums in the 1990s have similarly expanded their
functionality, often combining galleries, a store, film series, lectures, and
concerts, design-wise they can learn from retail design, which, as Riewoldt
points out,
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has learnt two lessons from the entertainment industry. First: forget
the goods, sell thrilling experience to the people. And secondly: beat
the computer screen at its own game by staging real objects of desire –
and by adding some spice to the space with maybe some audio-visual
interactive gadgetry. (Hooper, 2001)
In a high-tech society, cultural institutions usually follow the technology
industry. A new technology is developed for military, business, or
consumer use, and after a while cultural institutions notice that some artists
are experimenting with that technology and so they start to incorporate it in
their programming. Because they have the function of collecting and
preserving artworks, the art museums today often look like historical
collections of media technologies from previous decades. Thus one may well
mistake a contemporary art museum for a museum of obsolete technology.
Today, while outside one finds LCDs and PDAs, data projectors, and High
Definition TV (HDTV) cameras, inside a museum we may expect to find
slide projectors, 16-mm film equipment, and 3⁄4-inch video decks.
Can this situation be reversed? Can cultural institutions play an
active, even a leading, role, acting as laboratories where alternative futures are
tested? Augmented space – which is slowly becoming a reality – is one
opportunity for these institutions to take a more active role. While many
video installations already function as laboratories for developing new
configurations of images within space, museums and galleries as a whole
could use their own unique asset – a physical space – to encourage the
development of distinct new spatial forms of art and new spatial forms of the
moving image. In this way, they can take a lead in testing out one part of the
augmented space future.
Having stepped outside the picture frame into the white cube walls,
floor, and the whole space, artists and curators should feel at home taking
yet another step: treating this space as layers of data. This does not mean that
the physical space becomes irrelevant; on the contrary, as the practice of
Cardiff and Libeskind shows, it is through the interaction of the physical
space and the data that some of the most amazing art of our time is being
created.
Augmented space also represents an important challenge and an
opportunity for contemporary architecture. As the examples discussed in this
article demonstrate, while many architects and interior designers have
actively embraced electronic media, they typically think of it in a limited
way: as a screen, i.e. as something that is attached to the ‘real’ stuff of
architecture – surfaces defining volumes. Venturi’s concept of architecture as
‘information surface’ is only the most extreme expression of this general
paradigm. While Venturi logically connects the idea of surface as electronic
screen to the traditional use of ornament in architecture and to such features
of vernacular architecture as billboards and window product displays, this
historical analogy also limits our visions of how architecture can use new
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media. For, in this analogy, an electronic screen becomes simply a moving
billboard or a moving ornament.
Going beyond the ‘surface as electronic screen paradigm’, architects
now have the opportunity to think of the material architecture that most
usually preoccupies them and the new immaterial architecture of information
flows within the physical structure as a whole. In short, I suggest that
the design of electronically augmented space can be approached as an
architectural problem. In other words, architects along with artists can take
the next logical step to consider the ‘invisible’ space of electronic data flows
as substance rather than just as void – something that needs a structure, a
politics, and a poetics.
N O T E S
1. VRML stands for the Virtual Reality Modeling Language. In the first
part of the 1990s, the inventors of this language designed it to
model and access 3-D interactive virtual worlds over the internet,
and promoted it as the material realization of the idea of cyberspace
(see, for instance, Pesce, 1995). At the time of writing (May 2002),
internet-based 3-D virtual worlds have failed to become popular.
2. This text was originally written in May 2002; see Acknowledgements.
3. Coined in 1998 by David S. Bennahum, the term ‘cellspace’
originally referred to the then new ability to access email or the
internet wirelessly. Here I am using the term in a broader sense.
4. It is interesting to think of GPS as a particular case of cellspace.
Rather than being tied to an object or a building, here the
information is a property of the Earth as a whole. A user equipped
with a GPS receiver can retrieve a particular type of information
relative to their location – the coordinates of this location. GPS
systems are gradually being integrated into various telecommunication
and transportation technologies, from cell phones, to
PDAs, to cars.
5. Recall the opening scene of Blade Runner (1982) in which the whole
side of a high-rise building acts as a screen.
6. See MacKay et al. (1993); also Kevin Bonsor, ‘How Augmented
Reality Will Work’ [http://www.howstuffworks.com/augmented-
reality.htm].
7. ‘Tangible Bits’ project at the MIT Media Lab [http://tangible.
media.mit.edu/projects/Tangible_Bits/projects.htm].
8. Guido Appenzeller, Intelligent Space Project [http://gunpowder.
Stanford.EDU/~appenz/ISpace/]; Intelligent Room Projects, AI Lab,
MIT [http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iroom/projects.shtml].
9. If the noise falls below a certain threshold, we are able to
reconstruct the send signal perfectly; conversely, if noise is above a
particular threshold, the signal disappears. These thresholds are
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never absolute; they are specific to a particular communication
situation, influenced by the bandwidth of a communication channel
and also the content of a message.
10. For AR research sites and conferences, see [http://www.augmented-
reality.org].
11. With a typical VR system, all work is done in a virtual space;
physical space becomes unnecessary, and the user’s visual
perception of physical space is completely blocked. In contrast, an
AR system helps the user to work in a physical space by augmenting
that space with additional information. This end is achieved by
laying information over the user’s visual field. An early scenario of a
possible AR application that was developed at XeroxPARC involved
a wearable display for copier repairmen, which overlaid a wireframe
image of the copier’s insides over the actual copier as it was being
repaired.
Today, additional scenarios for everyday use can be imagined: for
instance, AR glasses for tourists that layer dynamically changing
information about the sites in a city over their visual field. Military
and artistic applications are also being developed, as presented for
instance in the exhibition showcasing AR projects developed by Ars
Electronica FutureLab (Ars Electronica Festival, 2003). In this new
iteration, AR becomes conceptually similar to wireless location
services. The idea shared by both is that when the user is in the
vicinity of particular objects, buildings, or people, then information
about them is delivered to the user. But while this information is
displayed, in cellspace, on a cell phone or PDA, in AR the
information is laid over the user’s visual field.
The decrease in the popularity of VR in mass media and a slow
but steady rise in AR-related research in the last five years is one
example of the ways in which the augmented space paradigm is now
overtaking the virtual space paradigm. Interestingly, this reversal
can be said to be anticipated in the very origins of VR. In the late
1960s, Ivan Sutherland developed what we came to know as the first
VR system. The user of the system saw a simple wireframe cube
whose perspectival view would change as the user moved his or her
head. The wireframe cube appeared overlaid over whatever the user
was seeing. Because the idea of a 3-D computer graphics display
whose perspective changes in real time according to the position of
the user became associated with subsequent VR systems, Sutherland
is credited with inventing the first VR system. But it can be also
argued that this was not a VR but rather an AR system because the
virtual display was overlaid over the user’s field of vision without
blocking it. In other words, in Sutherland’s system, new information
was added to the physical environment: a virtual cube.
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12. And while it it may still be more efficient to run, say, CAD, 3-D
modeling, or web design software while sitting comfortably in front
of a 30-inch LCD display, there are many other types of computing
and telecommunication activities that do not require or encourage
stationary use.
13. I only experienced one of her ‘walks’ that she created for P.S.1 in
New York in 2001.
14. For those readers familiar with these concepts, the artistic
augmented spaces I have evoked can be thought of as 2-D texture
maps, while technologically augmented spaces can be compared to a
solid texture.
15. This passive and melancholic quality of video art was brilliantly
staged in a recent exhibition design by LO/TEK, ‘Making Time:
Considering Time as a Material in Contemporary Video & Film’, in
the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (4 February–29 April 2001).
As Norman Klein pointed out to me, LO/TEK designed a kind of
collective tomb – a cemetery for video art.
16. An overview of Diller + Scofilio projects can be found at
[http://www.labiennaledivenezia.net/it/archi/7mostra/architetti/
diller/open.htm].
17. Robert Venturi in a dialog with George Legrady at the
Entertainment and Value Conference, University of California,
Santa Barbara, 4 May 2002. The term ‘information surface’ is mine.
18. See [http://prixars.aec.at/history/interactive/2000/E00int_01.htm].
19. See note 18.
20. See [http://www.manovich.net/IA].
21. See Ineke Schwartz website, ‘Testing Ground for Interactivity: The
Water Pavilions by Lars Spuybroek and Kas Oosterhuis’
[http://synworld.t0.or.at/level3/text_archive/testing_ground.htm].
22. See note 21.
23. For an insightful analysis of the branding phenomenon, see Klein
(2000).
24. Reed Kram, personal communication with the author, 5 June 2002.
For more Kram projects, see [www.kramdesign.com/].
A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S
This article is an updated version of ‘Poetics of Augmented Space’, originally
written in 2002.
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B I O G R A P H I C A L N O T E
LEV MANOVICH is Professor of New Media, Visual Arts Department, and
Director of The Lab for Cultural Analysis, CAL-IT2, at the University of
California, San Diego.
Address: Visual Arts Department, University of California, San Diego, 9500
Gilman Drive, #0084, La Jolla, CA 92093-0084, USA. [email:
lev@manovich.net]
V i s u a l C o m m u n i c a t i o n 5 ( 2 )240
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