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Re-thinking metaphor,
experience and aesthetic
awareness
1196
Joanna Wlaszyn
Kybernetes
Vol. 40 No. 7/8, 2011
pp. 1196-1206
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0368-492X
DOI 10.1108/03684921111160421
Metaphor,
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awareness
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2. Interactivity of metaphor(s)
Gordon Pask defined cybernetics as the art and science of manipulating defensible
metaphors. In the architectural field metaphor is usually employed as instruments for
descriptions which convey over the creative ideas and poetic involvement. Metaphor(s)
have also an essential role of creating knowledge as an explanatory device, which, by the
way, has to be distinguished from analogy or comparison. Metaphor is a poetic
counter-concept to the materiality of built architecture, like a dream image of a space that
has been liberated from physical limitations (Vrachliotis, 2008). The term metaphor is
etymologically related to the Greek metapherein, which means, transfer and carrying
over. As the French historian of architecture Antoine Picon observed, since antiquity,
the sciences have served as a source of images and metaphors for architecture and have
had a direct influence on the shaping of built space. Metaphor represents one of the three
regimes of scientific inspiration for architecture after knowledge and method (Picon,
2008). In cybernetic science, metaphor was used as a concept to understand natural
phenomena. For Weiner for example, mathematics was a vast metaphor, a huge
interchange to close or overlapping phenomena of logical-mathematical sequences
(Bougnoux, 1993). Thanks to these processes of metaphoricization concepts such as
communication and feedback advanced to the status of productive and effective
guiding ideas in the architecture of succeeding decades (Vrachliotis, 2008). This is
consistent with the most persistent ideas in current architectural explorations such as:
interactivity and simulation. Both permit architecture to be extended from static to
dynamic object through the simultaneity of variations like real-time changes. In this
paper, we will not examine interactivity of kinetic research such as robotic installations
where the interactive experience is augmented by the effects exuded from the imposing
presence of form and movement. In order to discuss the aesthetics awareness we will
focus on the interactivity based on spatial experience of sensory perception and a mental
registration of a sensory environmental stimulus.
Interactivity, as artists and theorists Usman Hauqe, Ruairi Glynn and
Ranulph Glanville explain, cannot be reduced to the simple act of reacting as a fixed
transfer of predetermined functions (Haque, 2005, 2007). The concept of interactivity in
terms of performance a response to the stimulus in action/reaction mode becomes a
simple trick (Glanville, 2001) that trivialised the meaning of interaction to the point that
it no longer holds conceptual value (Glynn and Shafiei, 2009). A truly interactive system
is one that offers conversation, based on continual and constructive information
exchange. It makes clear that architecture is not simply interactive because it is
embodied by computation and communication technologies premised merely to
actuating. Interactivity is neither about control nor behavioural simulations. The
driving force of interactivity is rather about creating the possibilities for participation
(Eidner and Heinrich, 2009).
This approach to interactivity allows us to think about architecture as an open
system which offers possibilities to new kinds of experience. Since then, technology
has become the metaphorical generator of space as an integrative and formative
element of architectural interactivity. Even so, to bring a metaphor into a physical
world, as American architects Elisabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio did with their
Blur Building, nevertheless, they clearly reject any metaphoric associations for
their project, certainly not to reduce the whole concept of the building to merely a fog
(Figure 1).
Metaphor,
experience and
awareness
1199
The primary building material is water, which is pumped from the lake, filtered, and
shot as a fine mist through 31,500 high-pressure mist nozzles. A smart weather
system reads the shifting climatic conditions of temperature, humidity, wind speed
and direction, and processes the data in a central computer that regulates water
pressure; controls fog output in response to shifting climatic conditions such as
temperature, humidity and direction wind speed. Inside, the visitors participate in the
new experience of fog sensing accompanied by the crushing noise of high-pressure
nozzles. Blur Building exemplifies perception capacities by focusing on space
experience. Here, the technology goes beyond the visual aspect of simulation. Blur
Building offers not a metaphor but a real-time transfer of immateriality based on
interactive interdependence: technology-nature. This is an example of interactivity
without any aspect of control, as the weather cannot be controlled, or 100 percent
predicted. A building becomes here an interactive machine, a defensible (in)formal
metaphor of dematerialised (in)visible architectural form. Metaphor as a poetic
counter-concept to the materiality of built architecture becomes its tangible
representation.
Another counter-concept to the representation of architectural materiality is
simulation. Usually, the term simulation is understood as visualisation based on
computer modelling, but here we will discuss simulation as a representation of spatial
behaviour.
Figure 1.
Diller and Scofidio
architects: Blur Building,
Yverdon-les-Bains,
Switzerland, 2002
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1200
Language interface
Physio:
Blood sample
Lobotomy
Psychosurgery
Nano absorption
Micro needle
EEG
Inhabitants
Physio biochemical
Invasive
Pulse-heart beat
Skin sample
Sweat
DNA
Medical imagery scanner
X Ray
MRI
Non invasive
Physio psychological
Figure 2.
Explanatory diagram of
the project Architecture
of humeurs
Figure 3.
Physiological room for
physiological data
collection for the project
Architecture of humeurs
Behavioral survey
Voice recognition
Psychoanalysis
Hypnosis
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experience and
awareness
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[. . .] technology has taken into itself all the illusion it has caused us to lose, what we have in
return for the loss of illusion is the emergence of an objective irony of the world, irony as the
universal form of disillusionment in a world which hides behind the radical illusion of
technology.
De la multitude la l Algorithme(s)
Du malentendu la computation physio morphologique
Physio
morphologique
Physiologie des
humeurs
Multitude
Les
malentendus
De la physiologic des humeurs
aux malentendus
Bio-cement weaving
De la computation
physio-morphologique la multitude
Mathematical operators
for structural optimization
Robotic process
Physicalit bio-tricote
Algorithme(s)
Figure 4.
Process of evolution: from
physiology to physicality
through the algorithms
project Architecture of
humeurs
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Figure 5.
Project Touchable
Holography by Takayuki
Hoshi and Masafumi
Takahashi, University of
Tokyo (2008)
Note: It is possible to feel the appearance of the raindrops falling on the hand
His wishful postulate was to go back to the appearance in the world of illusions rather
than disappearing in the world of simulations. The simulation can be also
metaphorically extended to a concept defined by the French social and literary critic
Roland Barthes as the reality effect. For Barthes, simulation can be the narration of the
real in a desire seen as verisimilitude as a referential illusion, which produces the
reality effect. In the narrative representation the real is nothing but an unformulated
concept, sheltering what is being referred to (Barthes, 1984). Simulation becomes here
an interactive metaphor of appearances, a real-time, physical experience of illusion.
Anyway, the fact is that the human emotions and sensory perceptions can now be
produced by virtual simulacra in the material world of immaterial projections.
Then, we can ask if this complex calculation-based research about interaction,
real-time simulation or feedback is not in fact another quest for new kinds of aesthetic
experience?
4. Aesthetics awareness of real-time experience
As Frank Popper, a historian of art and technology observed, perception is a
primordial factor of intelligibility about cybernetics creations (Popper, 1975). It goes
through the exploration of the aesthetic experience far beyond the aesthetic
appearances such as pre-programmed simulation of interactivity. This approach is
explored by Usman Haque Josephine Pletts and Dr Luca Turin in their project Scents
of Space (Figure 6). The project is an interactive smell system installation that
Metaphor,
experience and
awareness
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Source: Haque Design + Research, Josephine Pletts and Dr Luca Turin (2006)
This example of interactive space reflects the physical environment in the dynamic
relationship of real-time changes. In such a kind of creative research, the goal is to go
towards the natural phenomena through the technological experimentation and not to
simulate it. Architecture becomes a space of sensory input/output experience and sensitive
process of interactive creation. Moreover, the possibilities brought by the emerging
technologies (sensing systems, software programming, forms of artificial intelligence,
robotic design and communication systems for new forms of knowledge, etc.) amplify the
creative aspect of the interactivity. Experience becomes a sensitive process of feedback in
the logic of instantaneity based on human-technology relations, which redefines the
Figure 6.
Scents of Space
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concept of aesthetic awareness. Clearly, aesthetic awareness becomes today the inquiry
about the emotional alienation from and accommodation with technology.
5. Conclusion
The current connections between art and architecture, nowadays more than ever are
manifested by the common interest in fields related to the computer sciences and its
conceptual background: cybernetic sciences. The notion of an interactive architecture
emerged from cyberneticists concepts brought to ideas the interactive environments
and spaces able to sense, converse, and participate with their users. Since, the process
of interaction re-designs the abilities of sensing as a new kind of generating experience
dialogue. So, the externalisation of cybernetic conceptual models of interactivity, as
well as technological progress, influences the explorations of the (in)formal and
(in)visible nature of architectural space and its representation. It is related to the
cross-over process of making, contesting and designing space from non-normative
viewpoints of immaterial representation. In this context, metaphor embraces the
emotive and sensorial aspect of the design process and then, sensitivity becomes the
primary expressions of spatial reality. Re-definition of the nature of aesthetics as a
non-predicted space experience is seeking to liberate the perceptible potentiality of
architecture rather than be encased as new technological standards of design and
production. Such a concept of aesthetics reflects a permanent dialogue between the
technological world and human behaviours, between systems and metaphors as well
as limits and delimitations of creativity. Then, the most important point is to
understand better the creative possibilities and limits that the ubiquity and
multi-functionality of technology offer. In other words: to be aware of the technological
reality effects is to remember the true conceptual value of any artistic production.
Finally, to re-think the current aspects of aesthetics awareness, experience and
metaphor is to accept the existence of the new possibilities in understanding the space
immateriality as a system of permanent interactions. And, according to the
cybernetician Humberto Maturana:
Understanding a system requires both intuition as a gestaltic grasping of the systemic
coherences of the system under consideration, and the seeing of the structural (causal)
coherences of the locality where the observer stands. Understanding further involves relating
these two different operational perspectives in a manner that, although not deductive, shows
the dynamic connectedness of any part of the system to the dynamic totality that the
system is.
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Further reading
Beesley, P., Sachiko, H. and Ruxton, J. (2006), Toward Responsive Architectures in Responsive
Architecture: Subtle Technologies 06, Riverside Architectural Press, Toronto.
Frazer, J.H. (1995), An Evolutionary Architecture, Architectural Association Publications,
London.
Pask, G. (1975), Conversation Cognition and Learning, Elsevier, Amsterdam.
Pask, G. (1976), Conversation Theory: Applications in Education and Epistemology, Elsevier,
Amsterdam.
Pask, G. (1995), Foreword, in Frazer, J.H. (Ed.), An Evolutionary Architecture, Architectural
Association Publications, London.
Picon, A., Ponte, A. and Lerner, R. (2003), Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors,
Princeton Architectural Press, New York, NY.
Wiener, N. (1950), Cybernetique et societe, in Bougnoux, D. (Ed.), Sciences de lInformation et de
la Communication, Larousse, Paris, pp. 442-54 (1993), available at: www.nedelcu.net/
documents/Wiener-Theo-de-la-communication.pdf
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