Peter Anders – Cyberspace Interview

Peter Anders has been involved with work at the Institute of Digital Art and Technology at Plymouth University, in particular Arch-OS and discussing its potential. Here’s an interview discussing the similarity of imaginary or virtual space and physical space.

Listen to it here or Read Below

Sabine Breitsameter:
Peter Anders, in your publications and your lectures, you always refer to the similarity of imaginary or virtual space and physical space. What’s the advantage of bringing these quite different concepts of space together?

Peter Anders:
People don’t realize that it’s actually a very old thing. There’s a lot of innovation that’s going on in the technologies right now, but few of us understand why that technology is being driven forward the way it is, and why it’s had the success that it’s had in the media. I think all of us grew up with fairytales and myths, and … sort of narrative spaces that merge physical reality and imagined spaces, and imagined people together. And I think that virtual reality, or augmented reality, which is what my topic is, merges physical and non-physical in a similar sort of way.

Sabine Breitsameter:
Could you give a description: How does this experience work?

Peter Anders:
There’s a book, actually, that I wrote, called “Envisioning Cyberspace”, and my topic of research in that book was the way we use space to think, and how that would influence the design of information environments. And from my standpoint, and of course I’m bringing along the baggage of architecture, as well, but we use space to think, in the sense that we construct the space that we see. We think that we are in a room, in this case a fairly confined recording studio, but in fact, all we really have to prove that is our sensory input, and everything from the senses is processed and used as this illusion. And of that course, makes mute that there is a reality, versus a not-reality or virtuality. And that’s kind of the point of departure about this merging of abstract and concrete spaces in the same mind.

… continued at Audio Hyperspace

Add comment July 9th, 2005

Interactive Architecture – Only way is Up

Here’s a nice quote from Column Network about the growth of Interactive Architecture.

“In the next few years, emerging practices in interactive architecture are set to transform the built environment. “Smart” design was once regarded as the preserve of museum exhibits or Jumbotrom advertising screens, but ‘multi-mediated’ interactive design has started entering into every domain of public and private life as a spatial medium, interactive architecture is revolutionising and reinventing our work, leisure and domestic spaces.

Fast-changing social contexts are dominated by the blurring of boundaries between work and play, information retrieval and use. Pliable and responsive digital environments raise the haptic and intuitive threshold of public and private space by harnessing physical and mental responses. Will interactive architecture embrace a wider scope of functions and experiences – from sensing mechanisms, to the info-lounge, to the ambient home environment and the holistic hospital – through customisable design possibilities?”

Add comment July 9th, 2005