Publication Reference: Bermudez, Julio (1995) "Aesthetics of Information: Cyberizing the Architectural Artifact"; in Proceeding of the 5th. Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology. Connecticut College Center for the Arts and Technology. New London, Connecticut, pp.200-216

Aesthetics of Information: Cyberizing the Architectural Artifact * Julio Bermudez

Graduate School of Architecture University of Utah

Premise

One of the basic tenets of humanistic inquiry is that intellectual and artistic production should be aimed at understanding, exploring, and building a society's zeitgeist. In this view, it is the pro-active making and critique of culture and not a re-active posture which ought to occupy committed people. In architecture, this issue increasingly dominates contemporary reflections (Eisenman 1992, Nouvel 1993, Tschumi 1994, Venturi 1994). What is the architecture of and for the information revolution / age / society ? Is it possible to honestly maintain a material and traditional understanding of architecture in a world increasingly dominated by disembodied, electronic information ? Can we approach architecture from an informational paradigm ? Although architecture possesses an informational nature,1 there is a big gap between this fact and seeing architecture as an information construct. Further still is trying to transform buildings into artifacts fully responsive to (driven by) information flows. The major problem lies in the stable nature of matter once it has been formed. The act of building freezes certain kinds of information in time which then preclude the displays of other, new information. In other words, constructions neither have nor respond to the fluid nature of information. Or do they? If one cannot deny the material stability of constructions, one may argue against their representational stability. After all electronic technologies provide us with artifacts that defy the representational stability of matter. Television sets and computers are good examples. The screen makes these artifacts' presence (i.e., their materiality, fixed information) far less important than what they present (i.e., representations, fluid information). At issue is not what happen behind or around but on their screens. Quite simply, the function of TVs and computers is not to be pieces of furniture or machinery but windows to virtual worlds of information. The true power of these constructions is not their technological might but their ability to sustain media events. Considering that mediated (i.e. fabricated) reality is the foundation of post-industrial life, it seems natural to surrender material stability to the power of fleeting, foreign representations. Virtual events although generated and supported by actual constructs (i.e., reality) transcend and define them.

* Copyright © 1995 Julio Bermudez. All rights reserved. 1 The semiotic movement has provided solid evidences that architecture is ultimately explained by semantic and syntactic codes founded on information systems. First, architectural artifacts by virtue of its cultural origin, purpose, and use already are and b roadcast cultural information. Second, the articulation of architectural elements refers t o informational systems such as architectural language, building technology, etc.

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Nor surprising, architects find it hard to articulate let alone realize a vision of architecture that goes beyond stability and materiality. Tschumi summarizes it:

"How can architecture, whose historical role was to generate the appearance of stable images (monuments, order, etc.) deal with today's culture of the disappearance of unstable images (twenty-four-images-per-second cinema, video and computer-generated images)?" (1994, p.367)

In other words,

"The electronic paradigm directs a powerful challenge to architecture because it defines reality in terms of media and simulation; it values appearance over existence, what can be seen over what is." (Eisenman, 1992, p.88)

This paper proposes that solutions may be inspired by the electronic artifacts already generating, distributing, and sustaining contemporary media, information. For if Modernity used the machine as the metaphor to guide its quest for an architecture of and for the industrial age, can't we use the prime technologies and media of the information revolution as ours?

An Architecture of Screens

Using television and computers as exemplars for developing an architecture of/for the information-age leads to the key concept of 'screen'. First, as argued, it is the screen which practically and theoretically defines the most powerful cultural artifacts of our time. Second the screen can be architecturally construed as a plane, that is, an essential compositional element able to generate complete architectural orders. There are excellent examples of architectures developed solely on the basis of planes (e.g. Mies van der Rohe's work in Europe, Van Doesburg's theoretical studies, some of Richard Neutra's houses, etc.). In other words, the couple screen-plane may act as the conceptual and concrete device that, while making the architectural artifact sensitive to the pulses and nature of information, can be used to deliver credible architectural orders. I will call this type of construction "architecture of screens".

Figure 1. Mies van der Rohe: Project for a Figure 2. Theo Van Doesburg: Relation of brick house (from Norberg-Schulz, horizontal and vertical planes c. 1965, illustration 56) 1920 (from Giedion, 1941, p.89)

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Figure 3: Mies van der Rohe: Pavilion, Barcelona Exposition (1929). Interior Views. (From Zevi, 1993, p.181) In order for an architecture of screens to work, we need to make a theoretical and technological leap from screen to wall. This requires a significant extension in our architectural understanding of the wall. Here is the hinge point to move from a material to an informational conceptualization of architecture. Two new interpretations of wall are required:

1. walls need to be considered as opaque windows to other worlds. By being able to display/broadcast video-electronic productions of any kind (e.g. art work, cinema, daily news, environmental scenes, video-games, virtual worlds, etc.) the screen-wall would become a window to the real and/or virtual world at large. Although the wall may still retain its traditional architectural properties of bearing loads and opacity, its most important function would be now to offer representations of other real or unreal places, events, etc.

2. walls need to be considered as planes under continuous superficial metamorphosis. If screens mutate their appearance, character, role, etc. by displaying different 'programming' (e.g., textures, light shades, shapes, materials, colors, etc.), they would be able to change the architectural quality of the wall. Considering that walls are the background against which space and activity unfold, implementing this concept would significantly affect the function and experience of architecture.

An architecture of screens is thus an architecture of smart, sensual, and metamorphous walls. It is a creature of multiple, changing faces able to switch masks upon informational demands of many types (e.g., data/media, activity, aesthetics, context). Now it is a window to a real or virtual world. Now it is (i.e., looks like) a sandstone wall. An architecture of screens is therefore a media event, a 3-dimensional installation, a hyper-stage set justified in so far as it supports fluid representations and transformations based on information. An architecture of screens takes Venturi's assertion that architecture is the wall/screen to its ultimate implications.

Implications

The implications involved in pursuing an architecture of screens are far reaching. First it implies the dematerialization of architecture. Increasing the information broadcasting capacity of a medium (i.e., the wall) requires making that medium informationally neutral (to avoid the interference with the delivery of new information). It follows that the wall must lose its formal and material specificity in order to become a screen, that is, it must change into a physically blank plane able to display fleeting representations. An architecture of screens thus demands a

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geometric and material order of neutrality and abstract purity (i.e., a dematerialization). This should not be confused with a return to the a-historical, syntax focused project of Modernity. Quite to the contrary, the dematerialization of the wall is (over)compensated by its becoming a hyper-field supporting multiple and changing (not one) postmodern representations (see below). Second, an architecture of screens challenges our traditional sense of space and subverts the place-making function of architecture. Screens make space subservient by letting the user engage in the events occurring on the 'performing' plane. As in movie theaters, the space between the spectator and the screen is irrelevant as long as it is not obstructed. Space is forgotten for the sake of what goes on the surface. So much so that whatever the screen displays displaces the real world from attention. The actual here is supplanted by the virtual there, reality by representation, materiality and embodiment by information and detachment. Hence, the traditional fixed 'whereness' of architecture is transfixed to changing virtual localities. The fact that an architecture of screens is placeless only reflects the nature of place in today's civilization: an unstable, global, relative, mediated, informational and therefore artificial location. This loss does not come at a great price though. After all, in our era of mediated reality, simulation has a higher epistemological status than reality for the simple reason of having been fabricated for intersubjective consumption. Postmodern reality is just too complex, lacks continuous social validation, requires 'excessive' subjective work, and seldom has the 'sleek' touch of media events. Living in a culture of the simulacrum means to leave substance and depth behind for the sake of appearance and surface (Taylor & Saarinen 1994). An architecture of screens offers exactly that: an experiential field in continuous flux that delivers a captivating 'look and feel' but with no real space or place.

Figure 4: An Architecture of Screens. Walls disappear under the 'weight' of virtual imagery (From Bermudez 1994)

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Third, when the idea of place goes so does the age-old concept of a separation between inside and outside, the private and the public. In an age when all our moves leave data traces that can be publicly monitored, searched, accessed, and recorded the idea of privacy becomes questionable. In addition, we eagerly allow the outside world to penetrate our most sacred private, interior spaces: our homes, family and mind. The inside has long ceased to be the refuge from the outside/public world to become the chosen platform from where to watch it. In letting the media enter our living rooms we have accepted the colonization of the private by the public.2 At the same time, as the level of social intercourse keeps diminishing to historical lows, what is considered 'public' is in the process of being privatized, thus becoming an inaccessible place, an interior. The public is succumbing under the power of the private. In other words, the old categories of inside and outside, private and public upon which traditional architecture depends are now under siege. An architecture of screens would only expose this state of affairs and invite reflection. By making internal partitions display the outside world and external walls become electronic billboards portraying the events of the inside, an architecture of screens would challenge the distinction between the public and the private, the inside and the outside. Fourth, an architecture of screens pays little attention to either its context or its program. Function and site are somewhat unknown and irrelevant. Only the flesh, the surface, the fleeting images in display count. In this sense, an architecture of screens disappears behind relentlessly fleeting layers of representations. Like the frame in a painting, architecture becomes a scaffold for information flows that, in the act of framing, vanishes from experience. Quite simply, the building cannot compete with what is being showed. For this reason many may argue that an architecture of screens could not be considered 'art' and should be relegated to the status of 'artifact' or utilitarian tool (see for example Heidegger 1971). However, such position is questionable. For shouldn't we call the design and experience of media/information events and installations architecture ? Can't formal performance, however superficial (i.e., on the surface of walls), be still considered art, indeed architecture ? Couldn't it just be that in architecture, a true aesthetics of information implies an aesthetic of invisibility ? We should not forget that unlike knowledge, information is exhausted once it has been used up. Not that information disappears, but that its relevancy is subverted by its becoming (out)dated and by the continuously growing layers of new information. In other words, the life and value of information is measured under the light of consumption. Fleetingness is required for information to survive. Information persists by virtue of continuously changing, thus avoiding final consumption, death.3 It is from this ever present threat of obsolescence that an architecture of screens

2 The growing demand of 'media rooms' in new upper and middle class homes is a clear evidence of an accentuation in this trend. Plugging our homes into the information superhighway (for on-line computer services and interactive TV) will blur the difference between the private and the public to the limit. The surrendering of privacy to the public at its core is perhaps an unconscious compensation for the increasing lack of social contact, life and responsibility among our citizenry. 3 Here is where the information age has inherited the goods and evils of a consumer society. As much as raw materials and eager consumption were the foundation of late industrial society, the post-industrial world cannot exist without renewed doses of information. In terms of production/consumption these two types of societies (i.e., industrial and information) are not that far apart except that (a) today's cycles of production-consumption have been reduced to nil proportions, and (b) the commodities in most demand are now virtual, that is, have no materiality.

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draws its signification and utility. First, an architecture of screens provides a stable skeleton that gives structure to the otherwise rough and amorphous sea of information. Second, the articulation of screens creates a system of juxtapositions that might be of great impact in how diverse information is received, related and remembered. Fifth, an architecture of screens makes it inescapable to consider information as an essential issue in architectural production and products. If the (idealistically conceived and enforced) stable, and concensual nature of Modernity allowed us to remain unaware of (or chose to ignore) information matters, the conditions of Postmodernity has made this impossible and unethical. The sexy and volatile information filling up the neutral screens of our TVs and computers is nothing other than the blood and consciousness of our age. Avoiding or denying access to information is a sure condemnation to personal and social dependence. Without doubt information/media is power today (Druker 1992, Cleveland 1985, Toffler 1980, 1990). Architectural thought and production cannot ignore this fact. From this perspective the crisis of Modernism was due to its information exhaustion, which was amplified by the rising of the information/media age Ñ in the late 50's, early 1960's (Toffler 1980). An information analysis may also explain the origin and success of Postmodernism and Deconstructivism. Whereas Postmodernism addressed the semantic dimension of the information crisis of Modernism (by utilizing a language of historical references), Deconstructivism focused in its syntactic dimension (criticizing the structure of the Modern information system). Yet both movements have so far failed to fully realize the implications of an informational understanding of architecture. On one hand Postmodernism has approached the requirements of a media culture via what might be called "static screens" (i.e., public facades, inside and outside). However, by maintaining a material interpretation of architecture, its built screens are unchangeable and soon become obsolete, thus undermining the very information principle for which they were created in the first place. On the other hand, Deconstructivism avoids this obsolescence by invoking a self- referential information system that keeps neutrality regarding any semantic connotation. The price that the deconstructivist pays is similar to that of Modernism: an information vacuum. Although the post-structuralist argument claims to express the informational chaos of today's zeitgeist, the fact is that its architectural vision is at best one of 'architecture as frozen, Gibsonian cyberspace'.4 By insisting on a material and syntactic understanding of architecture, Deconstructivists fail to convey the diachronic, semantic, and transforming nature of information. In comparison, an architecture of screens offers multiple and continuously changing interfaces that transcend the static nature of the Postmodern facades while addressing the information concept behind them. At the same time, the syntax of an architecture of screens brings the Deconstructivist insight into play but transcends it by offering many possible architectural organizations. Finally, an architecture of screens transcends its own physicality by offering buildings of a multi-dimensional character. Interfacing an architecture of screens means accessing a hyper- environment because there are many more (virtual) environments available than the one physicall

4 See for example Zaha Hadid's work in the context of Gibson's vision of cyberspace (1989,1987)

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y present.5 The immediateness and multiplicity of environments challenge the traditional concepts of presence, distance, and time and delivers an architecture of singular simultaneity, that is an architectural version of Borges' aleph: a non-place where anything and everything is (re)present(ed) at least in theory. An architecture of screens is a hypermedia holder that creates an anomaly in the urban universe. Clearly, an architecture of screens demands an upheaval of the solid, stable, enclosing, and semiotic nature of the wall and architecture as we have understood them for millennia.

Actualizations

Concretizing an architecture of screens may prove less difficult than it might seem. Existing technologies would allow the actual construction and existence of this type of architecture by "augmenting" or "cyberizing" (Kellogg, Carroll & Richards 1991) the artifact, that is, by incorporating information technologies within the material matrix of architecture.6 This is the 'natural' technological evolution from the composite and curtain walls of Modernism, to the thin layer of 'style' on top of the fake, hollow walls of Postmodernism, to the smart screen-wall of the information age.

Figure 5. Jean Nouvel: The Meeting Line, Berlin (from Papadakis, A., G.Broadbent & M.Toy, 1992, p.204) Cyberizing the architectural artifact means nothing less than animating matter, turning it into a reacting organism which responds to and reflects the world of information and media. In fact, an architecture of screens may be designed so that it also works as a regulatory skin between internal 5 For example, existing technologies make possible the creation of Virtual Reality rooms, that is, chambers in which at least 3 walls act as screens presenting a totally different, immersive and interactive reality (Jacobson 1994). 6 This refers to Krueger's work on artificial reality (1983)

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and external environments (Battle & McCarthy 1993). This would allow us to move from a view of buildings as mechanic, non-living systems to a view of buildings as smart, 'living' systems. In this sense, an architecture of screens can be seen as a 'cyborg' because its body is where the technologies of the living and non-living, the real and the virtual flirt and mix. An architecture of screens does have precedents. The work of the Archigram is probably the earliest example of architecture trying to deal with technological issues associated with media and information. However, it has not been until the last 10 years that the issues of information and information technology began to (pre)occupy architectural minds. The work of Jean Nouvel and Bernard Tschumi provide us with early examples of architectures of screens. However the results are still somewhat disappointing. The reasons are twofold. On one hand, architectural practice is heavily affected by all types of real-world pressures that discourage experimentation: clients, program, economy, social context, material technology, etc. On the other hand, the idea of an architecture of/for information is still quite new and require further theoretical and practical development. In this sense, three-dimensional virtual (i.e., electronic) environments are beginning to play an increasingly important role as open studios where the new ideas can be advanced and tested.

Figure 6. Jean Nouvel: Mediapark Complex, Figure 7. Bernard Tschumi: Glass Video Gallery, Germany (Nouvel, 1994, p.265) Groningen (from Papadakis, Broadbent & Toy,

1992, p.8)

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Conclusions

As the powershift from material culture to media culture accelerates, architectural theory and practice are pulled and pushed in all directions. Moving forward requires a realization that a physical/material interpretation of architecture proves limiting at a time when information environments are the major drivers of culture. It means to incorporate the emerging issues of virtuality into our architectural work. It demands us to engage in an exploration of alternative architectural ontologies and technologies. An architecture of screens offers design and experiential opportunities to respond to and exploit the nature of information and media. At the same time, it surely elicits several critiques: can't we deal with information in cyberspace without having to export the media world onto the city ? Isn't human existence corporeal, real and thus requiring some degree of stability, tectonic quality, etc.? What about social and environmental issues ? A short elaboration on these matters is in order. The addition of architectures of screens to the urban fabric would only legitimate and prove the huge and ever growing influence of media and information in ordinary life. By importing, sustaining, and 'splashing' virtuality (e.g. art work, cinema, daily news, environmental scenes, video-games, virtual worlds, etc.) onto the real world, architectures of screens would make unavoidable to recognize the power of information and cyberspace over matter and reality at the end of 20th Century. Such concrete yet symbolic a statement is necessary because of the difficulty that ordinary citizens find in realizing, believing, and visualizing the abstract and immaterial world shaping society's institutions and personal lives.7 An architecture of screens can be seen as both the celebration and critique of the media/information society. From a complementary perspective, an architecture of screens is nothing but the natural extension of what Christensen calls the "mediascape" of our urban environment.

"Here we are in Robert Venturi's [post]modern city, not just Las Vegas but any [post]modern city, a mediascape of office buildings and stores transformed by their corporate identities into the new language of consciousness: the sign molded in glass and light, splashed over with the insignia or characters of logos . . . Buildings are no longer mass and weight, stone and iron, but an array of sentences spelling out the consciousness of a city, what a city means when we enter it and use its services, consume its goods. The city's language of buildings and streets, of glass and light, is a declaration of ideals . . . which the city achieves by transforming things into words, objects into signs, the dark of nature into neon abstraction and codes. . . the mediascape devours the literal materiality around it." (1993, p.9-10)

There are striking commonalties between Christensen's description of the contemporary city and Gibson's vision of cyberspace as:

". . . all the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway . . . Iconics, Gentry called that." (1989, p.16)

7 The increasing 'informatization'/'virtualization' of society's basic structures has been discussed extensively (Drucker 1992, Kennedy 1993, Naisbitt & Aburdene 1990, Taylor & Saarinen 1994, Toffler 1990, 1980). A good example is the economy. Today the ratio between the real part of the economy (i.e., concrete goods and services) and the virtual part of the economy (i.e., information-based exchanges such as financial transactions, stock markets, etc.) is 1 to 10 (in a volume of 1 trillion dollars per day). Another example is that at least 60% of the American economy is run by what have been defined as information/ knowledge industries, in comparison to about 20% of manufacturing and 3% of agriculture. The implication is obvious: virtual events run and therefore are more important than 'real' events.

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It seems that from different evolutionary paths we have arrived to a same destination: some hybrid interface between electronic media (broadcast or wired) and built media (encoded in the urban environment). An architecture of screens is the natural symbiotic result of the new material and information needs of our environments, be they cyberspace or the city.

Figure 7: Dowtown Tokyo: arguably the best Figure 8: Simulation of a Gibsonian's vision of exemplar of a 'mediascape' (from cyberspace (Bermudez 1994) Venturi, 1994, p.51)

Finally, building an architecture of screens could also explain the limitations of an aesthetics of information. For once the initial electronic glamour has subsided, it will become increasingly clear that no synthetic sensorium or hypermedia environment can compete with the sharpness and thickness of reality. Although media may conjure up almost anything into presence, the show is only skin deep and, in its virtuality, ultimately inaccessible. The very technology that bestows accessibility denies its. In other words, the sciences, architecture, and arts of the virtual can only displace but not replace the real As this realization grows, an antithesis to the architecture of screens may surge seeking to reaffirm the true meaning of being embodied. In turn, this will invite a refocusing of architectural work so that it brings together the material and the informational, the tectonic and the abstract, the real and the virtual, hence permitting the happy marriage between the two major forces that promise to occupy the minds of architects well into the next century: information and ecology.

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Bermudez, J. (1994). Architectural Visions: Non-Verbal Essays on Cyberspace. Work presented at Fourth International Conference on Cyberspace. The Banff Centre for the Arts. Banff, Canada

Christensen, E. (1993). Mediation and Return: Ambigous Identity of the City's Edge; in M.Quantrill and B.Webb (eds.): Urban Forms, Suburban Dreams. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, pp.9-14

Cleveland, H. (1985). The Knowledge Executive: Leadership in an Information Society. New York: Truman Talley Books

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