The Digital Imperative
The Digital Imperative (1996) is a text Derrick de Kerckhove wrote on occasion of DEAF96.
A city is a typical form of human concentration. It
brings together at close range a great number of human bodies
and minds in action. It multiplies the chances and the points
of contact of people, that is, of exchange of pertinent
and contextualized information. Some cities are faster,
more integrated than others, but all exude a different aura
of human energy. Via networks, from the time of the telegraph
to that of the web, the population of the world has never
ceased to increase the density of its connections. Concentrations
of human energy happen on-line too and they do not necessarily
coincide with the space of the cities. What kinds of energy
can be found in virtual communities?
Much
experimentation is going on right now into digitizing (read
virtual-izing) everything within sight, sound or touch,
including cities. Ancient cities such as Pompeii, Monte
Alban, Çatal Huyuc, Karnak and others, rise ghostly,
from their foundations up in Virtual Reality. Virtual malls
are opening up at different websites, URLs with walls to
make you feel better about virtual (Virtual Polis) or real
shopping. Very soon, just as many "virtual offices" will
have dispensed with most of their material equivalents,
communities will learn to dispense with the trappings of
real estate. Just-in-time communities such as MUDs and MOOs
can configure and reconfigure just as quickly as currency
in the stock exchanges of the world. Could "the city" ever
be displaced -- like a "displaced person" -- from the centre
of reality by its own virtual networks?
By
a nice turn of events, cities are recovering some of their
status on the Net itself, first by positioning themselves
on it, often to their best advantage, and second, by throwing
their image in the Net as metaphors (De Digitale Stad, Telepolis,
Virtual Polis, Internationale Stadt Berlin, etc...). Such
metaphors as the city and the highway allow for a quick
technology transfer for the masses and have both been used
successfully to introduce millions to the complexities of
cyberspace. The metaphors work in spite of the fact that
there is neither place nor transportation in cyberspace
which is truly a cognitive environment.
All
software for virtual environments is half-way between the
material and the mental, partaking of both and creating,
not only a new occupiable space, but a new psychophysical
zone, a hybrid between thinking and acting. Just as humans
and other animals have to plan gestures in their minds and
body before executing them, VR is the planning stage of
materialized or actualized action. But even before the software
kicks in, there is the mindware, the thoughts and images
that develop in the minds of people. Mindware works by building
images out of metaphors. By externalizing the contents of
our imagination on screens, computers turn the similes of
our mental images into acting interfaces. If the shape and
model of a city is provided to sort processed data, that
metaphor will dominate both the structuring of the data
and the thinking of the user. People find "navigating" the
I-way a lot easier when they can see their conventional
bearings on screen, hence the success of Virtual Tourist,
Digitale Stad, T-Vision, alphaworlds and a growing number
of mapping and city simulations on the Internet.
In
alphaworlds, there are virtual cities on-line, complete
with stable architecture, reliable news report and weather
services, rules of behavior and new or old forms of misconduct
such as dog droppings and virtual vandalism. Sherwood Towne
is a virtual city accessible to most anybody on-line. It
has a population of 75,000 "immigrants". To be precise,
it only has a few hundred buildings so far, but at least,
they are approximately three-dimensional and can be built
and/or visited from anywhere in the world. What"s more,
you can share a chat line conversation with another person
or more with or without the support of an avatar. Alphaworlds
are more than "graphic MUDs", the are another level of networking,
within but also beyond the web altogether. They are like
concretions or precipitates of immateriality. They create
a sense of space, of continuous, unbroken space across the
screens of the visitors and residents. They are pockets
of objective imagination in the networked synergy of tens
of thousands of people. They propose a new form of "common
space", one that people never had the chance to share before
except perhaps during the times of legend and magic hallucinations.
Though still crude and limited by bandwidth capacity and
processing power, the world"s chatlines already show the
promise of a lot more to come. People, assisted by avatars
carrying borrowed or real personality traits, equipped,
for example, with Cortex"s "sense:less" touchy-feelies,
will soon be able to do a lot more than appear and play
a part in a 2D sitcom.
The City as "Antique"
It
is no possible to predict the development of many fully
navigable virtual versions of real cities. Just as the Olympics
count among the most prominent rituals of TV, the public
opening of digital versions of real cities may be among
the first virtual rituals in culture. What will happen to
the city if we begin to spend more time on line than in
the streets? The virtual can replace or bypass the city
altogether but cannot eliminate it. If anything the more
virtuality they have access to, the more attention most
people will pay to the actual just the way they go to the
museum to see the "real thing". As cities reduplicate themselves
in virtuality, their physical presence will become the object
of much caring attention. New York is already beginning
to clean itself up. Singapore is getting gemütlich
and every city will want soon to distinguish itself by its
highlighted "real-life" character, like these reconstituted
pioneer forts and villages which proffer a clean fantasy
vision of the past. As James Joyce suggested, past times
are pastimes.
The Law of Minimal Materiality
Forms
of concentration of human energy differ. Cities and networks
both put people in closer contact with each other. But cities
are perhaps more complex than networks because they involve
bodies. For example, face-to-face conventions and conference
groups on-line both share professional or interest-based
information. However, as if they were instant cities, conventions
bring normally distant humans in close contact and in touch
with each other. Literally. They give to participants a
strong sense of their collective body and of the body of
knowledge or expertise they all share. The human body is
a great information system, the best verifying device available.
Physical locations are rife with complex tactile pressures,
visual cues and auditory strata that inform people, more
often than not unconsciously, about what to expect or to
make of the situation they are in.
After the
end of an interview, professional sound technicians usually
record a few minutes of silence. They call it "the room
tone". It is used as reference for editing purposes, but
it is qualified by a unique identity. There is a room-tone
to cities, which could be seen to behave like the brain
containing, channeling and supporting all the human connecting,
gathering, communicating that is happening there. Likewise,
because there is a real human presence behind its avatars,
there is a silent room tone in Sherwood Towne. It works
because it adds to the flexibility and ease of access of
the virtual a kind of persistence and durability generally
associated only with hardware and the reality effect associated
with real-time communication between people. On the other
hand, while on-line virtual cities may forever lack real
bodies, the effect of virtual cities or of digital multimedia
maps on-line is much more powerful when they refer to and
extend real places.
Augmented Reality
When
the virtual serves to augment rather than to replace the
actual, it becomes a form of "augmented reality", especially
when it is endowed with real-time telepresence. Videoconferencing
is a sort of degree zero augmented reality (AR). It adds
more than visual cues to the voice on the phone; it extends
space. The sense of the reality of the space at the other
end of the compressed signal is very strong, almost as exacting
as face-to-face presence. For that reason, videoconferencing
could add something essential to any navigating system,
say Virtual Tourist on the Web or T-Vision, ART+COM"s geographical
information system which has featured at Siggraph last year
and shown again in an improved, less expensive version this
year. T-Vision is an interface which allows users to travel
from outer space all the way down to the street level of
a city, say Berlin, and connect seamlessly with data coming
in real time from satellites, or from film archives. Thus
you can travel in time or space via recorded or simulated
data. But it is only when you experience the continuity
from the virtual to real (real-time, real space) via videoconferencing
that you begin to seize the new power of the system. This
impressive interface puts the world in your hand, so to
speak.
Thus, AR also performs a metaphorical
function, but it is a new kind of metaphor, in fact a very
different figure than anything classical rhetoric ever devised.
Because it is a simulation and a real-time rendering of
real data at once, augmented reality is both metonymic and
metaphoric at once, both a simile and connected to the very
real object it simulates. AR generates an active link between
perception, technology and world. As a significant and reliable
extension of our sensory access to the world, AR may very
well end up becoming the true destiny of VR.
